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have traditional app menus. Before you file a bug about missing menus in your favourite app be sure to check whether they should be there in the first place!We all know Samsung make smart phones and tablets in all shapes and sizes. For this coming Christmas season, they have created a short holiday tale that uses 74 different screens ranging from Gear smart watches to larger curved UHD TVs. The video is quite epic as the main character jumps across the synchronised screens. No doubt such production requires a lot of coordination particularly the props and video playback for each screen. Some of the devices spotted include a Samsung Galaxy Note 4, Samsung Galaxy Note Edge, Samsung Gear S and Samsung Galaxy Tab S. Check out the actual video and making of it after the break. If you love watching stuff like this, check out Nokia’s Smallest and Biggest stop motion animation video from 4 years ago. [ VIA ]Three months in the running and we now have our final 2 acts in Armenia’s national selection for the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, Depi Evratesil. Four acts remained in semi-final 2 of Depi Evratesil, in which each act performed to the public and jury once again for the chance to compete in next week’s Grand Final. Unlike last week where a national jury was used, this week saw the introduction of an international jury which, along with the televote, decided which 2 acts would qualify and compete in the Grand Final of the selection. Arstvik and Marta have qualified for the Grand Final and will battle for the golden ticket to Kyiv next week. One of them will fly the Armenian flag at the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest next May. Semi-final 2 results Syuzanna Melqonyan 24 30 54 Egine 19 24 43 Grand final next week! [table width =”100%” style =”” responsive =”false”] [table_head] [th_column]Artist[/th_column] [th_column]Televote[/th_column] [th_column]Jury[/th_column] [th_column]Total[/th_column] [/table_head] [table_body] [table_row] [row_column][/row_column] [row_column]27[/row_column] [row_column]35[/row_column] [row_column]62[/row_column] [/table_row] [table_row] [row_column][/row_column] [row_column]40[/row_column] [row_column]21[/row_column] [row_column]61[/row_column] [/table_row] [table_row] [row_column][/row_column] [row_column][/row_column] [row_column][/row_column] [row_column][/row_column] [/table_row] [table_row] [row_column][/row_column] [row_column][/row_column] [row_column][/row_column] [row_column][/row_column] [/table_row] [/table_body] [/table] Next Saturday sees the Grand Final of Depi Evratesil, in which the final 2 acts will compete for the right to represent Armenia at the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest in Kyiv next May. The winner and Armenian representative will be determined via a combined 50/50 jury/public vote, however the song entry for the Eurovision event will be revealed in due course. AMPTV has decided to opt for a national selection in order to select Armenia’s act for the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, the last time being in 2013. The nation has received successful results over the years since their Eurovision debut in 2006, placing in the top 10 of the Grand Final a total of 7 times to date.by Photos by Marc Fong // Written by Mike Frash & Kevin Quandt // Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival // Golden Gate Park – San Francisco August 8th-10th, 2014 // The lineup for the seventh annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival, taking place August 8th-10th in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, was announced Tuesday. Headliners Kanye West, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and The Killers were the focus of the many knee-jerk reactions, but what does the lineup say as a whole? Here are five trends we’ve spotted. Three-day passes for the festival go on sale Thursday, April 10th at 10 a.m. 1. RAP IS REPRESENTED MORE THAN EVER Outside Lands missed out on the OutKast nostalgia sweepstakes, but the far more controversial (and relevant), Yeezus has been crowned as the first rap headliner in the festival’s history (see below). Beastie Boys were slotted to headline the festival in 2009, and they sadly had to pull out due to Adam Yauch’s cancer diagnosis. Tenacious D ultimately became the headliner over M.I.A. The Bay Area doesn’t attract an abundance of hip-hop or rap in general, yet many in the SF music community have wondered when Outside Lands, now a top national festival, would get into the game. El-P and Killer Mike, one of most dynamic music duos in years, are working on a follow-up to their incredible Run the Jewels debut and are sure get Golden Gate Park pumped. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis performed at noon in 2011 at Outside Lands, and since then, they own four major singles and seemingly sell out every show they perform. But they are dangerously within the range of overexposure, and since winning “Best Rap Album” at the Grammys over Kendrick Lamar (and Macklemore felt the need to text-apologize to Lamar), some music fans are out for vitriolic blood. That said, Macklemore’s impact on the popular music landscape is undeniable. Atmosphere, Aer and Watsky, also successful suburban-oriented spitters in their own right, are also on the bill this year. 2. KANYE WEST IS AS DIVISIVE A FIGURE AS EVER Reaction to Kanye West as the top headliner was distinctively negative Tuesday, at least from the loudest people. West is at the peak of his career, releasing two of the most essential albums of the past five years with Yeezus and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The mega-narcissistic artist of a generation is already busy working on a follow-up to be produced by Q-Tip and Rick Rubin, and it may be out before Outside Lands in August. Odds are Yeezus will pull back from minimalist trap production and go back to his soul-sampling roots to cast a wider net. West has won over music critics with his recent boundary-pushing efforts, but the question becomes, can he avoid a Kardashian-enhanced mainstream backlash bigger than the “Swifting” he pulled at the MTV Video Music Awards? Our money is on ‘Ye. 3. THE FIRST REPEAT HEADLINER Now in its seventh year, Outside Lands has finally reached the point when we see our first repeat headliner in the form of classic rock demigod, Tom Petty and his band the Heartbreakers. Having played on the second day of the inaugural year to a healthy-sized crowd, Petty worked through some technical errors with a set heavy on his standout hits from the past decades. A new release and tour recently announced lead us to think that Mr. Charlie T. Wilbury is primed to have a big second half of 2014. 4. A SLIGHT SHIFT IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC CURATION One thing that Showbams noticed when culling through the lineup was the inclusion of slightly more progressive EDM. What was once a genre more reserved for Treasure Island Music Festival is making its way to Golden Gate Park, hoping to turn some folks onto a newer style of electronic production. This new shift is mainly represented by Disclosure, Flume, SBTRKT and Gold Panda. Each act brings a quality that is slightly out of the “dance music” box, whether it’s Disclosure’s 2-step-garage sound or Gold Panda’s experimental beat production. Even after all these years, Another Planet and Superfly keeps us on our toes. 5. THE MOST ECLECTIC LINEUP YET Outside Lands has always basked in musical diversity, and this notion is true now more than ever. As our collective access to music becomes easier and more plentiful, so does our acceptance of a greater variety of genres. In one weekend, festivalgoers will bounce to Big Freedia, get rural with Kacey Musgraves and dance with Duck Sauce. Whether it’s folk, EDM, hip-hop, indie rock, country or soul, Outside Lands’ eclectic lineup suits the integrity and character of SF and the Bay Area. Follow our Outside Lands 2014 playlist on Spotify. AdvertisementsPosted 02 March 2015 - 12:44 PM New thread for 2016 Recent Updates 1/1 - Games with Gold 12/30 - Deals with Gold, Early Adopter: Electronic Super Joy preorder, Spotlight: Rise of the Tomb Raider, GTA V 12/24 - Misc Markdowns - DOA5 DLC 12/23 - Misc Markdowns 12/23 - Deals with Gold, Early Adopter - Lovely Planet preorder, Escapists 360, Spotlight Polychromatic Please note: You cannot currently buy any Xbox 360 content on xbox.com using your account balance, you can only use an active credit card or PayPal. To use your balance, you must make purchases on your console. Unfortunately, even "purchasing" free content through the web site like trials requires an alternative method of payment tied to your account, though adding an empty MasterCard / Visa gift card that is registered for online purchases will work. Xbox One games can be purchased on the web site with your account balance, but DLC cannot. Xbox One games can be purchased on the web site with your account balance, but DLC cannot. Some sales are intended for Gold subscribers only, as noted within each section. On Xbox One, Gold trials of any length work for sales and Games with Gold. You must be an active Gold subscriber (paid or trial) to play Games with Gold purchases. On Xbox 360, you must have at least a 1 month Gold subscription for sales and Games with Gold. Neither 48 hour trials, 14 day trials nor free weekends qualify. subscribers only, as noted within each section. All known sales and information on sales should make their way into the OP. Major Nelson usually updates his blog with new sales information every other Tuesday. Major Nelson usually updates his blog with new sales information every other Tuesday. ALL OFFERS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE! No information within this thread can or should be construed as accurate (or still valid), therefore... Always verify Xbox Live Marketplace prices before your purchase! Spend wisely, have fun, and enjoy! ________________________________________________________________________ Deals with Gold Gold subscription required 12/29 - 1/4 12/22 - 12/28 _______________________________________________________________________ Games with Gold Gold subscription required, Xbox One games are only playable while Gold is active, but can be added to your account with a Gold trial Current Upcoming Jan 16 - Feb 15 - Zheros Jan 16 - Feb 15 - Zheros Jan 16-31 - Deus Ex: Human Revolution Ended ________________________________________________________________________ Preorder / Early Adopter Sales ________________________________________________________________________ Sales & Specials If the start & end dates are not well-defined, ACT FAST! since these "sales" could end anytime. However, they may also be permanent markdowns. Spotlight Rise of the Tomb Raider - 12/29 - 1/4 Spotlight GTA V - 12/29 - 1/4 Countdown to 2016 - Dec 22 - Jan 7 Major Nelson blog post Weekly Deals - 12/29 - 1/7 - Silver discounts forthcoming Daily Deals - 12/22 Daily Deals - 12/23 Daily Deals - 12/24 Daily Deals - 12/25 Daily Deals - 12/26 Daily Deals - 12/27 Daily Deals - 12/28 Daily Deals - 12/29 Daily Deals - 12/30 Daily Deals - 12/31 - Last daily deal per Major Nelson Weekly Deals - 12/22 - 12/28 Spotlight Polychromatic - 12/22 - 12/28 Polychromatic - $2.50 - 50% off Spoiler Spotlight Game of Thrones -? -? Game of Thrones - Episode 1: Iron from Ice - FREE - Originally free on 6/15 Skullgirls characters ________________________________________________________________________ Misc. Markdowns / Recently Reduced May be permanent mark downs, may be temporary pricing errors. Items marked with a * have been confirmed as permanent reductions either on the console dashboard, on Xbox.com's Recently Reduced page or corroborated from other sources (PSN, dev/pub, etc) December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 ________________________________________________________________________ Misc. Promotions ________________________________________________________________________ Xbox Live Rewards August 2015 New survey is up Games with Gold Purchase $10 worth of add-ons for a GwG title during the first 14 days of its free period to earn 2,000 credits ($2). ________________________________________________________________________ Cross Buy / Upgrade Promotions Between Xbox 360 and Xbox One : ________________________________________________________________________ Microtransaction Deals Not tracked by xbldb, use playXBLA for blog updates for these deals. ________________________________________________________________________ Delisting / Server Shutdown Watch Spoiler World Series of Poker : Full House Pro Already removed from xbox.com Online servers scheduled to shutdown on Mar 4, 2015 Applies to both 360 and Windows 8 versions Rock Band delistings - expected Mar 31 Alien Ant Farm - "Smooth Criminal" Avatar outfits Bob Marley shirts The Doors shirts Jimi Hendrix shirts Spinal Tap shirts The Who shirts Official forums announcement ________________________________________________________________________ Thanks to reddjoey, tylerh1701, BobbyTastic and Necrozilla for maintaining prior versions of this thread, and to all those who have posted deals and made Wiki edits. This thread is truly a collaborative effort built from the contributions of the community.What is pie? The first pies were very simple and generally of the savory (meat and cheese) kind. Flaky pastry fruit-filled turnovers appeared in the early 19th century. Some pie-type foods are made for individual consumption. These portable pies... pasties, turnovers, empanadas, pierogi, calzones...were enjoyed by working classes and sold by street vendors. Pie variations (cobblers, slumps, grunts, etc.) are endless! How old is "pie?" The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the word "pie" as it relates to food to 1303, noting the word was well-known and popular by 1362. Why call it "pie?" "Pie...a word whose meaning has evolved in the course of many centuries and which varies to some extent according to the country or even to region....The derivation of the word may be from magpie, shortened to pie. The explanation offered in favour or this is that the magpie collects a variety of things, and that it was an essential feature of early pies that they contained a variety of ingredients." ---The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson, 2nd edition, Tom Jaine editor [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2006 (p. 603) First pies Food historians confirm ancient people made pastry. Recipes, cooking techniques, meal presence and presentations varied according to culture and cuisine. In the cradles of civilization (Mediterranean region including Ancient Rome, Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Arabia) the primary fat was olive oil. When combined with ground grains, it produced a rudimentary type of pastry. The challenging part of researching these early pies is most of us rely on translators of original texts. These can vary according to scholarly proficiency and educated interpretation. Moreover, there are several editions of ancient texts and recipe numbers/titles do not always match. Food historians confirm the ancients crafted foods approximating pie. Modern pie, as we Americans know it today, descends from Medieval European ingredients (fat=suet, lard, butter) and technology (pie plates, freestanding pies, tiny tarts). "The idea of enclosing meat inside a sort of pastry made from flour and oil originated in ancient Rome, but it was the northern European use of lard and butter to make a pastry shell that could be rolled out and moulded that led to the advent of true pie." ---An A-Z of Food & Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 254) "If the basic concept of 'a pie' is taken to mean a mixture of ingredients encased and cooked in pastry, then proto-pies were made in the classical world and pies certainly figured in early Arab cookery. But those were flat affairs, since olive oil was used as the fat in the pastry and will not produce upstanding pies; pastry made with olive oil is 'weak' and readily slumps." ---Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson, 2nd edition, Tom Jaine editor [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2006 (p. 603) Ancient Roman recipes "[287] [Baked picnic] Ham [Pork Shoulder, fresh or cured] Pernam The hams should be braised with a good number of figs and some three laurel leaves; the skin is then pulled off and cut into square pieces; these are macerated with honey. Thereupon make dough crumbs of flour and oil. [1] Lay the dough over or around the ham, stud the top with the pieces of the skin so that they will be baked with the dough [bake slowly] and when done, retire from the oven and serve. [2]" ---Apicius, Book VII, IX, Apicius: Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, edited and translated by Joseph Dommers Vehling, facsimile 1936 edition [Dover Publications:Mineola NY] 1977 (p. 169) [NOTES (appended to this recipe: [1] Ordinary pie or pastry dough, or perhaps a preparation similar to streusel, unsweetened. [2] Experimenting with this formula, we have adhered to the instructions as closely as possible, using regular pie dough to envelope the parboiled meat. The figs were retired from the sauce pan long before the meat was done and they were served around the ham as a garnish.] Compare with this Latin text, English translation and modern instructions: "Pernam, ubi eam cum caricis plurimis elixa veris et tribus lauri foliis, detracta cute tessellatim indicis et melle complebis. Deinde farinam oleo subactam contexes et ei corium reddis et cum farina cocta fuerit, eximas furno ut est et inferes." Boil the ham with a large number of dried figs and 3 bay leaves. Remove the skin and make diagonal incisions into the meat. Pour in honey. Then make a dough of oil and flour and wrap the ham in it. Take it out of the oven when the dough is cooked and serve. (Ap. 393)... "Cover the base of a pan, large enough to take the ham, with figs and lay the ham, stuffed with figs, on top. Fill the pan with water, and add 3 bay leaves. Cover, and boil the ham for 1 hour over a low heat. In the meantime make the pastry...When the ham is cooked, dry it well and make incisions all over the flesh. Baste it with honey while it cooks. Then wrap it in the dough and decorate it. Preheat the oven to 200 C/400 F/Gas 6, and bake for 30 minutes until the crust is golden. leave to cool." (p. 268) "Pastry dough: Roman pastry dough was made with lard or olive oil rather than butter. Use double the weight of fat in flour. Spelt flour needs rather less fat than wheat flour. Rub the fat into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Pour in a little salted water and press the crumbs into a ball. Leave in a cool place for several hours. Then roll it into a sheet on a marble surface dusted with flour, and use as the recipe requires." (p. 195) ---Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome, Patrick Faas [Palgrave MacMillan:New York] 2003? Cato's Layered cheesecake has pastry bottom crust. Mesopotamia "Mersu (Date and Pistachio Pastry). Mersu was a widely known pastry. Different inventories list different ingredients for mersu, so there were many recipes. mersu always seemed to contain first-quality dates and butter; beyond that, different records list pistachios, garlic, onion seed, and other seemingly incongruous ingredients. Bakers who specialized in this treat were known as the episat mersi, so mersu-making was probably an involved and respected process." ---Cooking in Ancient Civilizations, Cathy K. Kaufman [Greenwood Press:Westport CT] 2006 (p. 31) [NOTE: Modernized recipe follows (p. 31-32). Finished product wraps dough around filling, free form, not in a pie dish.] Medieval European pies There is some controversy whether the pastry crust used in Medieval times was meant for eating or as a cooking receptacle. The answer is both. A careful examination of these early recipes reveals crust purpose. "Originally pies contained various assortments of meat and fish, and fruit pies do not appear until the late sixteenth century...pies could be open as well as having a crust on top." ---An A-Z of Food and Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 254) American pies "As a favored dish of the English, pies were baked in America as soon as the early settlers set up housekeeping on dry land. Beyond mere preference, howevers, there was a practical reason for making pies, especially in the harsh and primitive conditions endured by the first colonists. A piecrust used less flour than bread and did not require anything as complicated as a brick oven for baking. More important, though, was how pies could stretch even the most meager provisions into sustaining a few more hungry mouths...No one, least of all the early settlers, would probably proclaim their early pies as masterpieces of culinary delight. The crusts were often heavy, composed of some form of rough flour mixed with suet." ---Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Andrew F. Smith editor [Oxford University Press:New York] 2004 (p. 272) Pastry pie crust puff paste "Small sweet cakes eaten by the ancient Egyptians may well have included types using pastry. With their fine flour, oils, and honey they had the materials, and with their professional bakers they had the skills. In the plays of Aristophenes (5th century BC) there are mentions of sweetmeats including small pastries filled with fruit. Nothing is known of the actual pastry used, but the Greeks certainly recognized the trade of pastry-cook as distinct from that of baker. The Romans made a plain pastry of flour, oil, and water to cover meats and fowls which were baked, thus keeping in the juices. (The covering was not meant to be eaten; it filled the role of what was later called puff paste') A richer pastry, intended to be eaten, was used to make small pasties containing eggs or little birds which were among the minor items served at banquets....In Medieval Northern Europe the usual cooking fats were lard and butter, which--especially lard--were conducive to making stiff pastry and permitted development of the solid, upright case of the raised pie...No medieval cookery books give detailed instructions on how to make pastry; they assume the necessary knowledge...Not all Medieval pastry was coarse. Small tarts would be made with a rich pastry of fine white flour, butter, sugar, saffron, and other good things, certainly meant to be eaten. From the middle of the 16th century on, actual recipes for pastry begin to appear...The first recipe for something recognizable as puff pastry is in Dawson [The Good Housewife's Jewell, London]...1596." ---Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 586-7). "Greek pistores had mastered the art of giving their bread the most extravagant forms, shaping it like mushrooms, braids, crescents, and so on...thus illustrating in advance Careme's observation a thousand years later: "The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music and architecture, the principal branch of the latter being pastry." And since it is not possible for us to discuss flour without dealing with cakes, the moment has come to pose the question of what pastry consisted of in antiquity, what it looked like and how it was made. The regrettable loss of the great Treatise on Baking, by Chrysippus of Tyranus, which included detailed reicpes for more than thirty cakes, each entirely different, leaves us somewhat short of information on this important subject. But various cross-checks (not to mention the consulation of Apicius) nonetheless give us a rather good idea of what the ancient Greeks and Romans confected in this domain...the makers of Greco-Roman pastry had no knowledge of the subleties of dough, and thus having nothing like our present-day babas, doughnuts, bioches, savarins, creampuffs, millefeuille pastry, pastry made from raised dough or shortbreads...as a general rule, Greek pastry closely resembled the sort that is still found today in North Africa, the Near East, and the Balkans: the basic mixture was honey, oil, and flour, plus various aromatic substances, notably pepper. The most frequent method of cooking was frying, but pastry was also cooked beneath coals. Other ingredients included pine nuts, walnuts, dates, almonds, and poppy seeds. This mixture was mainly baked in the form of thin round cakes and in the form doughnuts and fritters...Roman pastry does not appear to have included many innovations over and above what the Greeks had already invented." ---Culture and Cuisine: A Journey Through the History of Food, Jean-Francois Revel [Doubleday:Garden City] 1979 (p. 68-9) Professional pastry guilds & chefs "Patissiere...Prehistoric man made sweet foods based on maple or birch syrup, wild honey, fruits, and seeds. It is thought that the idea of cooking a cereal paste on a stone in the sun to make pancakes began as far back in time as the Neolithic age...In the Middle Ages in France, the work of bakers overlapped with that of the pastrycooks; bakers made gingerbread and meat, cheese, and vegetable pies...However, it was the Crusaders who gave a decisive impetus to patisseries, by discovering sugar cane and puff pastry in the East. This lead to pastrycooks, bakers, and restauranteurs all claiming the same products as their own specialties, and various disputes arose when one trade encroached upon the other...Another order, in 1440, gave the sole rights for meat, fish, and cheese pies to patisseries, this being the first time that the word appeared. Their rights and duties were also defined, and certain rules were established...In the 16th century, patissier products were still quite different from the ones we know today. Choux pastry is said to have been invented in 1540 by Popelini, Catherine de' Medici's chef, but the pastrycook's art only truly began to develop in the 17th century and greatest innovator at the beginning of the 19th century was indubitably [Antonin] Careme...There were about a hundred pastrycooks in Paris at the end of the 18th century. In 1986 the count for the whole of France was over 40,000 baker-pastrycooks and 12,5000 pastrycooks." ---Larousse Gastronomique, Jenifer Harvey Lang, editor [Crown:New York] 1988 (p. 777-8) "The bakers of France made cakes too until one day in 1440 when a specialist corporation, the corporation of pastrycooks, deprived them of the right to do so. The pastrycooks had begun by making pies--meat pies, fish pies...Romans had known how to make a kind flaky pastry sheet by sheet, like modern filo pastry, but the new method of adding butter, folding and rolling meant that the pastry would rise and form sheets as it did so. Louis XI's favourite marzipan turnovers were made with flaky pastry...From the sixteenth century onwards convents made biscuits and fritters to be sold in the aid of good works...Missionary nuns took their talents as pastrycooks to the French colonies..." ---History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat [Barnes & Noble Books:New York] 1992 (p. 242-244) "Although the Paris pastry guild did not record its first constitution until 1440, there may well have been pastry specialties before that date. Once their guild was recognized, they began to expand the range of their production: in addition to meat pastries and tarts, they also created pastries out of milk, eggs, and cream, usually sweetened, such as darioles, flans, and dauphins. In order to become a master pastry maker in Le Mans in the early sixteenth century, one had to be able to use sugar loaves to make hypocras, a sweet, spiced wine used as an aperitif and after-dinner drink. It was not until 1566 that the king joined the Paris cookie makers guild to that of the pastry makers, and the two would be wedded frequently thereafter." ---Food: A Culinary History, Jean-Louis Flandrin & Massimo Montanari [Columbia University:New York] 1999 (p.281-2) See also: cakes. Frozen pie crusts? Food historians laud Clarence Birdseye for launching the American frozen food industry. Fruits, veggies, fish were first offerings. Other foods followed in swift progression. Swanson and Morton pioneered the frozen pie market; concentrating savory selections [Chicken, Turkey, Beef]. The earliest reference we find for frozen pie crust, as a stand-alone consumer retail product, appears in the mid-1950s. In 1955, a process for making frozen pie crust (rolled) was patented. This item was packaged in roll from; not as ready-to-bake tinned shells. This USA patent. was filed by Billie Hamilton Armstrong [TN] on June 4, 1954 and published December 6, 1955. Subsequent USA period ads do not describe frozen pie crusts. We have no way to know how the first frozen crusts were packaged: rolled & destined for homemaker's own pie pans or pre-shelled "ready to fill" in disposable tins. In 1963 newspapers across America heralded a "new" frozen pie crust sold in 9-inch tins; without referencing brand or company. The year before, two companies rolled out new frozen pie crust products. Both were marketed to consumers in super markets. Pet-Ritz is generally credited for introducing shelled frozen pie crust products to the American public. Oronoque Orchards [Stratford CT], a local farm stand famous for its pies, may have actually eclipsed Pet-Ritz by a couple of months. Pet-Ritz took marketed their product nationally; Oronoque Orchards remained local. By the mid-'60s, frozen pie shells were ubiquitous. [1955] "Pillsbury's Frozen Pie Crust, 2 pkgs., 35 cents."---Vidette-Messenger [Valparisio IN], February 15, 1955 (p. 16) "Puncture-Free Pie Crust. Frozen pie crust has to be compounded carefully so as to resist tearing and puncturing between the time it is rolled and the time the housewife spreads it in the baking tin. Billie Hamilton Armstrong of Hohenwald, Tenn., has found a good proportion to be about two parts "soft" flour from summer-ripening wheat and one part "hard" flour from the winter vareity. She divides the batch into pats of about one pound each and then subdivides these into smaller bits, rolling them by hand to sheet form. This preliminary sheet is returned to pat form and rolled in a machine into pre-formed pie crusts about twelve to sixteen inches one-sixteenth of an inch thick. They got to the supermarket frozen, rolled in waxed paper and packed in light cardboard. Pie crusts prepared from dough made by her method, which is protected by Patent 2,726,156, "have uniformly superiour characteristics," Mrs. Hamilton says, "combining the essential factors for exceptional flakiness and delactable taste." ---"Patent on Lev Single-Cap Hatbox Brings Inquiry by Senate Group," Stacy V. Jones, New York Times, December 10, 1955 (p. 28) [1956] "King's 2 in Pkg. Frozen Pie Crust, 35 cents." ---Blytheville Courier News [AR], December 13, 1956 (p. 20) [1957] "Pet-Ritz Fruit Pies, frozen, ready to bake. Now you can bake your family a real fruit-country pie--a Pet-Ritz Pie with juicy, sun-sweet fruit heaped high in a delicately tender crust, fir shiw golden butter! This very day, see why so many people say no pies compare with Pet-Ritz Apple, cherry, peach...6 delicious fruit or berry favorites...made the traditional fruit-country way, baked by you the new easy way!. Pet-Ritz brings the country's best to you." ---display ad, Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1957 (p. A6) [NOTE: these pies were complete, no indication crust were also sold separately.] [1958] "Frozen Pie Crust, pgk. 29 cents." ---Panola Watchman [Carthage TX], November 20, 1958 (p. 44) [1961] "You! Enjoy the revolutionary new frozen product! Oronoque Frozen Pie crust 69 cents, 2-crust-3 pie pans. Victory [supermarket] will supply free of charge...your choice of any two Jell-O pie fillings." ---Fitchburg Sentinel [MA], December 6, 1961 (p. 34) [1962] "Pet-Ritz Frozen Pie Crusts and are introduced by Pet Milk, which has created an entirely new product category." ---The Food Chronology, James Trager [Henry Holt:New York] 1997 (p. 570) About Pet-Ritz: "Pet-Ritz Pie Co. was started by the Petritz family. The family originally operated a roadside stand, selling cherry pies to Michigan tourists. The success of the tourist business prompted the family to freeze pies and sell them. With the advent of modern mass production and freezing capabilities, Pet-Ritz Fruit Pies became one of the midwest's leading brands of frozen fruit pies...Because of consumer acceptance of frozen convenience products in the early 1960s, the Frozen Foods Division expanded into other product areas. One frozen product that has been very successful is Pet-Ritz Pie Crust Shells. Pet's expertize in making pie crust for fruit pies made pie crust shells a natural line extension." ---"Petritz family treats now shared by millions," Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1980 (p. S8) "Betty Winton says: Now You Can Make Perfect Pies No Foolin---No Failin' with Oronoque Orchards Frozen Pie Crusts. They're perfct when you buy them. They're perfect when you make them. At King Cole, Smirnoff's and other fine super markets." ---Bridgeport Post [CT], March 5, 1962 (p. 20) [1963] "New-Frozen Crusts. Easy as pie, the newest in pie crusts. There are frozen pie crust shells, each the 9-inch size, packed in foil pans, all rolled and ready for a favorite filling. Tins serve as the baking pans." ---Redlands Daily Facts [CA], January 8, 1963 (p. 8) "Pet-Ritz...Frozen Pie Crust Shells, pkg of 2, 39 cents." ---Daily News, Huntingdon and Mount Union [PA], January 23, 1963 (p. 12) [1965] "Pillsbury Frozen Pie Crusts, pkg of two 9 inch shells, 29 cents." ---display ad, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1965 (p. E18) Pie crust sticks Both Pillsbury and Betty Crocker (General Mills) offered Pie Crust Sticks to the American public in the 1950s-1970s. These were natural iterations of pie crust baking mixes. The innovation factor was these sticks, packaged & wrapped like sticks of butter, only required rolling. Pillsbury pie sticks package. "Pie crust in a rectangular block--it is all ready to roll out or pat into a pan, fill and bake--is a time-saving innovation. Called Continental-style instant pie crust, it is available for about 50 cents at the New York Exchange for Women's Work, 541 Madison Avenue. The term 'Continental' is appropriately used for this product because the baked crust is much more crumbly and finer in consistency than the usual pastry made in this country. And that is not surprising, for the reicpe originated in Poland. Like many another enterprising good cook, Mrs. Olgierd Langer has decided to merchandise this specialty, the recipe for which she obtained from relatives in her native Poland. There is just enough pastry in the foil-wrapped package fora single eight-or-nine-inch pie crust. The package can be kept in the refrigerator for several weeks." ---"Food: New Products," June Owen, New York Times, April 21, 1958 (p. 27) About puff paste Food historians generally agree puff paste was
DANNY CASTELLANO (Chris Messina, “Damages”) is a hothead and guys’ guy who has a habit of stealing Mindy’s patients. Danny criticizes her for everything, including her struggling love life and her lack of professionalism – even though it’s obvious to everyone except Mindy that he secretly admires her work. His blue-collar childhood gives him a big chip on his shoulder, but he is a dedicated physician, which Mindy can’t stand to admit because he’s always getting on her case. Rounding out the office staff are the receptionists – BETSY PUTCH (Zoe Jarman, “Huge”), young, earnest and easily excitable, who thinks the world of Mindy and is always trying to impress her; and SHAUNA DICANIO (newcomer Dana DeLorenzo), a self-assured Jersey Girl who is indifferent to Mindy, always knows where the cool party is and carries a poorly concealed torch for Danny. Mindy is in constant communication with her beloved best friend from college, GWEN GRANDY (Anna Camp, “The Good Wife”), who also happens to be the governor’s daughter. Gwen is a hilarious, sometimes too-blunt friend, and secretly a former carefree party girl (which only Mindy seems to remember). Although Gwen is now happily married to a financial analyst, with a six-year-old daughter, this lawyer-turned-Pilates mom remains squarely in Mindy’s corner. As Mindy attempts to get her career off the ground and meet a guy who passes her red flag test (no drug habits, no skinny jeans and no secret families, among others), only time will tell if she gets her romantic comedy ending. PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Universal Television, 3 Arts Entertainment CREATOR/WRITER/EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Mindy Kaling EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Howard Klein, B.J. Novak (pilot) EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: Charles McDougall (pilot) CAST: Mindy Kaling as Mindy, Chris Messina as Danny, Ed Weeks as Jeremy, Anna Camp as Gwen, Zoe Jarman as Betsy, Dana DeLorenzo as Shauna The following new drama will debut this fall on FOX: THE MOB DOCTOR For most physicians, the Hippocratic oath is sacred. But for one Chicago doctor, who is indebted to the mafia, saving lives isn’t her only concern. THE MOB DOCTOR is a fast-paced medical drama featuring a brilliant young female cardiothoracic surgeon who is split between two distinct worlds as she juggles her promising medical career with her lifelong debt as a doctor to Chicago’s Southside mob. DR. GRACE DEVLIN (Jordana Spiro, “My Boys”) is a top resident at Chicago’s Roosevelt Medical Center. Smart and self-assured, she’s heralded as one of the country’s most promising young surgeons. But family ties keep her glued to her Southside roots. To pay off her brother’s life-threatening gambling debt, she makes a deal with the devil and agrees to work “off book” for the mafia men she once despised. During the day, Grace must deal with the emotionally compelling cases at Roosevelt Medical – a toddler in need of a heart transplant, an elderly man desperate to donate a lung to his sick wife, the mass chaos in the wake of a two-train collision on the ‘L.’ But in her other vastly different world, she must juggle an onslaught of mob-related demands, including operating in mob-sanctioned locations, removing bullets from dead bodies to hide incriminating evidence, saving a juiced-up race horse and covertly helping an aging mobster with his erectile dysfunction. All the while, Grace must keep her dual life a secret from everyone: her protective best friend, NURSE ROBERTA “RO” ANGELI (Floriana Lima, “Glory Daze”); her handsome, blue-blooded boyfriend, DR. BRETT ROBINSON (Zach Gilford, “Off The Map,” “Friday Night Lights”); her boss at Roosevelt Medical and Chief of Surgery, DR. STAFFORD WHITE (Zeljko Ivanek, “The Event,” “Damages”); her rival, DR. OLIVIA WATSON (Jaime Lee Kirchner, “Necessary Roughness,” “Mercy”); even her well-meaning screw-up brother, NATE (Jesse Lee Soffer, “As the World Turns”), and her overly dramatic mother, DANIELLA (Wendy Makkena, “NCIS”). The only one who knows the true scope of Grace’s activities is the man to whom Grace owes her debt: the charming and diabolical Southside mob boss CONSTANTINE ALEXANDER (William Forsythe, “Boardwalk Empire”), an oddly compassionate killer whose relationship with Grace is more than it seems. Recently released from prison, the former head of the Chicago mob looks to reclaim his place in the organization, with the help of his right-hand associate – and Grace’s ex-boyfriend – FRANCO (James Carpinello, “The Good Wife”). As Grace tries to heed the demands of these two conflicting worlds – not to mention the needs of her own slightly dysfunctional family – her moral center comes into direct conflict with the very immoral things she’s asked to do. But with nerves of steel and a tough-as-nails exterior, she somehow manages to make it all work – at least for now. PRODUCTION COMPANY: Sony Pictures Television CREATORS/WRITERS/EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Josh Berman, Rob Wright EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: Michael Dinner CAST: Jordana Spiro as Dr. Grace Devlin, William Forsythe as Constantine Alexander, Floriana Lima as Nurse “Ro” Angeli, Zach Gilford as Dr. Brett Robinson, Jaime Lee Kirchner as Dr. Olivia Watson, Zeljko Ivanek as Dr. Stafford White, James Carpinello as Franco, Jesse Lee Soffer as Nate Devlin, Wendy Makkena as Daniella Devlin The new drama set to debut midseason is: THE FOLLOWING THE FBI estimates there are currently over 300 active serial killers in the United States. What would happen if these killers had a way of communicating and connecting with each other? What if they were able to work together and form alliances across the country? What if one brilliant psychotic serial killer was able to bring them all together and activate a following? Welcome to THE FOLLOWING, the terrifying new thriller from creator/executive producer Kevin Williamson (“The Vampire Diaries,” “Dawson’s Creek,” the “Scream” franchise). When notorious serial killer JOE CARROLL (James Purefoy, “Rome”) escapes from death row and embarks on a new killing spree, the FBI calls former agent RYAN HARDY (Emmy-nominated actor Kevin Bacon, “X-Men: First Class”) to consult on the case. Having since withdrawn from the public eye, Hardy was responsible for Carroll’s capture nine years ago, after Carroll murdered 14 female students on the Virginia college campus where he taught literature. Hardy is a walking textbook of all-things Carroll. He knows him better than anyone; he is perhaps Carroll’s only psychological and intellectual match. But the Ryan Hardy who broke the Carroll case years ago isn’t the same man today. Wounded both physically and mentally by his previous pursuit of this serial killer, it’s been a long time since Hardy has been in the field. This investigation is his redemption, his call to action. In contrast to nine years ago, Hardy isn’t calling the shots on this case. He works closely with an FBI team, which includes all-business and tough-as-nails JENNIFER MASON (Jeananne Goossen, “The Vow,” ALCATRAZ) and young, razor-sharp MIKE WESTON (Shawn Ashmore, “X-Men”). The team considers Hardy to be more of a liability than an asset. But Hardy proves his worth when he uncovers that Carroll was covertly communicating with a network of killers in the outside world. It quickly becomes obvious that he has more planned than just a prison escape, and there’s no telling how many additional killers are out there. The FBI’s investigation leads Hardy to CLAIRE MATTHEWS (Natalie Zea, “Justified”), Carroll’s ex-wife and mother of the criminal’s 10-year-old son, JOEY (newcomer Kyle Catlett). Close during Hardy’s initial investigation, Hardy turns to Claire for insight into Carroll’s next move. The tension rises when Carroll’s accomplices kidnap his intended last victim from nine years ago. Hardy becomes ever more determined to end Carroll’s game when he realizes that this psychopath intends to finish what he started. The thriller will follow Hardy and the FBI as they are challenged with the ever-growing web of murder around them, masterminded by the devious Carroll, who dreams of writing a novel with Hardy as his protagonist. The reinvigorated Hardy will get a second chance to capture Carroll, as he’s faced with not one but a cult of serial killers. PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Warner Bros. Television, Outerbanks Entertainment, Bonanza Productions Inc. CREATOR/WRITER/EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Kevin Williamson EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: Marcos Siega CAST: Kevin Bacon as Ryan Hardy, James Purefoy as Joe Carroll, Jeananne Goossen as Agent Jennifer Mason, Natalie Zea as Claire Matthews, Kyle Catlett as Joey Matthews, Shawn Ashmore as Agent Weston, Valorie Curry as Denise, Adan Canto as Billy Thomas, Nico Tortorella as Will Wilson The new comedy slated for midseason is: THE GOODWIN GAMES Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And when that will’s worth more than 20 million dollars, you can bet someone’s going to find a way to get the cash. From the executive producers of “How I Met Your Mother,” THE GOODWIN GAMES is a single-camera comedy that tells the story of three grown siblings who return home after their father’s death, and unexpectedly find themselves poised to inherit a vast fortune – if they adhere to their late father’s wishes. If any of the Goodwin kids feel like they deserve the money, then it’s HENRY (Scott Foley, “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Felicity”), the eldest child and an overachieving surgeon. He sees himself as a role model for his less successful siblings – and reminds them every chance he gets. Returning home will force Henry to question the choices he’s made, especially as he reconnects with his first love and true soulmate, LUCINDA (Felisha Terrell, “Days of Our Lives”). Middle sibling CHLOE (Becki Newton, “Ugly Betty”) was a child prodigy in math, and her unofficial role as “the smart one” of the family still sends Henry into fits of jealousy. But long ago, Chloe gave up academics in favor of being the popular girl. Now, through a series of hidden messages, her late father will lead Chloe back to her old love of numbers – and back to the person she’s meant to be. Of the three siblings, the youngest, JIMMY (Jake Lacy, “Better With You”), could use the inheritance the most. A small-time ex-con and dull-witted guitarist who’s deep in debt to a loan shark, Jimmy may be the family screw-up, but he has more heart than anyone. Like his siblings, Jimmy’s also returning to something in this town: his eight-year-old daughter. Pulling the strings from beyond the grave is the children’s late father, BENJAMIN (guest star Beau Bridges, “The Descendants”), a college math professor. Guilty over not parenting his kids better, Benjamin has left behind a series of unique challenges – administered by his estate attorney APRIL (newcomer Melissa Tang). Through these tasks, Benjamin hopes he can get his children to rediscover their true selves and learn the lessons he failed to instill in them while he was alive. Their potential reward? More than 20 million dollars – a fortune that they never knew their father had – and the chance to become the people their father wanted them to be. So let THE GOODWIN GAMES begin! PRODUCTION COMPANY: 20th Century Fox Television CREATORS/WRITERS/EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Carter Bays, Craig Thomas, Chris Harris EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: Peyton Reed (pilot) CAST: Scott Foley as Henry, Becki Newton as Chloe, Jake Lacy as Jimmy, Felisha Terrell as Lucinda, Melissa Tang as AprilNews Release 510-486-4019 • Soils could release much more CO 2 than expected into the atmosphere as the climate warms, according to new research by scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Their findings are based on a field experiment that, for the first time, explored what happens to organic carbon trapped in soil when all soil layers are warmed, which in this case extend to a depth of 100 centimeters. The scientists discovered that warming both the surface and deeper soil layers at three experimental plots increased the plots’ annual release of CO 2 by 34 to 37 percent over non-warmed soil. Much of the CO 2 originated from deeper layers, indicating that deeper stores of carbon are more sensitive to warming than previously thought. They report their work online March 9 in the journal Science. The results shed light on what is potentially a big source of uncertainty in climate projections. Soil organic carbon harbors three times as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere. In addition, warming is expected to increase the rate at which microbes break down soil organic carbon, releasing more CO 2 into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. But, until now, the majority of field-based soil warming experiments only focused on the top five to 20 centimeters of soil—which leaves a lot of carbon unaccounted for. Experts estimate soils below 20 centimeters in depth contain more than 50 percent of the planet’s stock of soil organic carbon. The big questions have been: to what extent do the deeper soil layers respond to warming? And what does this mean for the release of CO 2 into the atmosphere? “We found the response is quite significant,” says Caitlin Hicks Pries, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division. She conducted the research with co-corresponding author Margaret Torn, and Christina Castahna and Rachel Porras, who are also Berkeley Lab scientists. “If our findings are applied to soils around the globe that are similar to what we studied, meaning soils that are not frozen or saturated, our calculations suggest that by 2100 the warming of deeper soil layers could cause a release of carbon to the atmosphere at a rate that is significantly higher than today, perhaps even as high as 30 percent of today’s human-caused annual carbon emissions depending on the assumptions on which the estimate is based,” adds Hicks Pries. The need to better understand the response of all soil depths to warming is underscored by projections that, over the next century, deeper soils will warm at roughly the same rate as surface soils and the air. In addition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change simulations of global average soil temperature, using a “business-as-usual” scenario in which carbon emissions rise in the decades ahead, predict that soil will warm 4° Celsius by 2100. To study the potential impacts of this scenario, the Berkeley Lab scientists pioneered an innovative experimental setup at the University of California’s Blodgett Forest Research Station, which is located in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The soil at the research station is representative of temperate forest soils, that in turn account for about 13.5 percent of soil area worldwide. The scientists built their experiment around six soil plots that measure three meters in diameter. The perimeter of each plot was ringed with 22 heating cables that were vertically sunk more than two meters underground. They warmed three of the plots 4° Celsius for more than two years, leaving the other three plots unheated to serve as controls. They monitored soil respiration three different ways over the course of the experiment. Each plot had an automated chamber that measured the flux of carbon at the surface every half hour. In addition, one day each month, Hicks Pries and the team measured surface carbon fluxes at seven different locations at each plot. A third method probed the all-important underground realm. A set of stainless steel “straws” was installed below the surface at each plot. The scientists used the straws to measure CO 2 concentrations once a month at five depths between 15 and 90 centimeters. By knowing these CO 2 concentrations and other soil properties, they could model the extent to which each depth contributed to the amount of CO 2 released at the surface. They discovered that, of the 34 to 37 percent increase in CO 2 released at the three warmed plots, 40 percent of this increase was due to CO 2 that came from below 15 centimeters. They also found the sensitivity of soil to warming was similar across the five depths. The scientists say these findings suggest the degree to which soil organic carbon influences climate change may be currently underestimated. “There’s an assumption that carbon in the subsoil is more stable and not as responsive to warming as in the topsoil, but we’ve learned that’s not the case,” says Torn. “Deeper soil layers contain a lot of carbon, and our work indicates it’s a key missing component in our understanding of the potential feedback of soils to the planet’s climate.” The research was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel Prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov. Additional information:BERLIN (Reuters) - Europe’s aviation safety authorities have proposed rules for operating small drones that include requirements for geo-fencing technology to prevent them from straying into banned areas and a “dos and don’ts” leaflet to be inserted in retail packaging. A drone flies as Belgian police officers showcase the use of drones deployed over traffic accidents occurring on highways, in Ranst near Antwerp, Belgium, January 18, 2017. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir With demand booming, both for hobby and commercial use, European regulators have been looking for ways to ensure drones can be safely operated, while allowing the industry to grow. Fears have been raised over the use of drones near airports in particular, with a number of pilots reporting near collisions with drones, and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has set up a task force to look into the risk of drone strikes. EASA’s proposals include requirements for drones to be remotely identifiable, to be fitted with geo-fencing technology to prevent them from entering prohibited zones such as airports and nuclear sites, and a requirement for people operating drones weighing more than 250 grams to register themselves. EASA hopes such measures will address privacy concerns, as well as safety risks. The design requirements for small drones will be implemented using the CE product legislation commonly used across Europe. Along with the CE marking, drones will be identified according to their class, and a “dos and don’ts” leaflet will be in all product boxes. “Based on the drone class, an operator will know in which area he can operate and what competence is required,” EASA said in a statement. The proposal is now open for comment from May 12 until Aug. 12 and EASA will submit its final opinion to the European Commission at the end of 2017. The regulation of drones weighing less than 150 kg is currently up to individual EU member states, resulting in a fragmented regulatory framework. Makers of commercial drones include China’s DJI and France’s Parrot (PARRO.PA).Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. An independent review into a fatal 2006 Nimrod crash, which killed 14 service personnel, has accused the MoD of sacrificing safety to cut costs. The highly critical report, by Charles Haddon-Cave QC, said the Afghanistan crash occurred because of a "systemic breach" of the military covenant. A safety review of the Nimrod MR2 carried out by the MoD, BAE Systems and QinetiQ was branded a "lamentable job". Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth apologised to victims' families. Fourteen crewmen, based at RAF Kinloss in Moray, died when the aircraft - XV230 - blew up after air-to-air refuelling over Afghanistan when leaking fuel made contact with a hot air pipe. Graham Knight, whose son Ben died in the explosion, said his son and all the other servicemen "doing their job" in Afghanistan "a hundred per cent" had been let down by "those people who are behind them". Joe Windall, whose son, also Joe, died on board the Nimrod, said the findings had been astonishing. ANALYSIS Caroline Wyatt, BBC defence correspondent The Nimrod review is the most devastating attack on the MoD and the defence industry in living memory. Its language is direct, its criticisms unsparing. Charles Haddon-Cave describes "deep organisational trauma" at the MoD as resulting from the strategic defence review of 1998. Internal promotion resulted not from being on top of safety but from being on top of a budget. He recommends a host of solutions, including a new military airworthiness authority that is independent of the MoD. However, the alarming insights offered by the Nimrod Review will lead many to wonder if if such whole-scale change to the culture can be achieved - not least at a time when financial pressures are even greater than they were in 1998. Nimrod report individuals criticised "The inefficiencies of someone caused me to lose my son," he said. Mr Haddon-Cave condemned the change of organisational culture within the MoD between 1998 and 2006, when financial targets came to distract from safety. He quoted a former senior RAF officer who told his inquiry: "There was no doubt that the culture of the time had switched. "In the days of the RAF chief engineer in the 1990s, you had to be on top of airworthiness. "By 2004 you had to be on top of your budget if you wanted to get ahead." Mr Haddon-Cave's report also criticised two RAF officers - Air Commodore George Baber, who was a group captain at the time, and Wing Commander Michael Eagles. Air Comdr Baber led the MoD integrated project team responsible for a safety review of the RAF's Nimrods, which took place between 2001 and 2005. The report's author accused him of a "fundamental failure of leadership" in drawing up the "safety case" into potential dangers in the fleet. Mr Haddon-Cave wrote: "He failed to give the NSC (Nimrod safety case) the priority it deserved. In doing so, he failed, in truth, to make safety his first priority." Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. As head of air vehicle for the Nimrod, Wing Cdr Michael Eagles was supposed to be in charge of managing production of the safety review. The report found that he delegated the project "wholesale" to an MoD civilian worker who was too inexperienced and not competent enough to manage it. It stated: "Michael Eagles failed to give adequate priority, care and personal attention to the NSC task. "He failed properly to utilise the resources available to him within the Nimrod IPT to ensure the airworthiness of the Nimrod fleet." Mr Ainsworth told the Commons the two officers had been moved to staff posts which held no responsibility for safety and the RAF would now consider if any "further action" would be taken against them. He also said Mr Haddon-Cave, one of Britain's leading aviation law barristers, had been critical of both the MoD and its industrial partners at both organisational and individual levels. Mr Haddon-Cave said he had criticised 10 individuals in the report - five at the MoD, three at BAE Systems and two at QinetiQ - while throughout the review BAE Systems had been a company "in denial". NIMROD REPORT Independent review into broader issues surrounding loss of RAF Nimrod in Afghanistan in 2006 [4.62 MB] Most computers will open this document automatically, but you may need Adobe Reader Download the reader here A safety review of the ageing Nimrod MR2 a year before the crash, carried out by the MoD, BAE and QinetiQ, was a "lamentable job" which failed to identify "key dangers", he said. "Its production is a story of incompetence, complacency and cynicism. The best opportunity to prevent the accident to XV230 was tragically lost," he said. Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said the report was a "formidable indictment" and "genuinely shocking", containing information that previous incidents and warning signs had been ignored. Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Nick Harvey said: "This is a tragic case of an accident that could have been avoided." The Ministry of Defence has grounded all Nimrods whose engine-bay hot air ducts had not been replaced. However, Mr Haddon-Cave found no reason to recommend the grounding of the entire Nimrod MR2 fleet. He has written to the families of the servicemen who died. Mr Ainsworth said the "rigorous" report would make distressing reading for the relatives of those who died. HOW THE NIMROD CRASHED 1. Nimrod refuels in mid-air 2. Possible fuel over-flow from number one tank 3.Second possible source of leak is pipe couplings behind number seven tank 4. Leaked fuel contacts hot pipe and ignites 5. Fire and smoke alarms triggered in bomb bay and underfloor by sensitive wiring Nimrod crash review raises hopes Reaction to Nimrod crash report "On behalf of the MoD and the Royal Air Force, I would like again to say sorry to all the families who lost loved ones," he said. "I am sorry for the mistakes that have been made and the lives that have been lost as a result of our failure. Nothing I can say or do will bring these men back." Mr Ainsworth said the MoD had already implemented measures to improve safety and airworthiness of the Nimrod fleet, insisting the department had not been "idle" while Mr Haddon-Cave's review was being carried out. This included the ending of air-to-air refuelling. The MoD has since admitted negligence in relation to the explosion. BBC defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt said the review, which began in January, had a broad remit. It has looked at the airworthiness of the Nimrod MR2 fleet since its introduction into service in 1979. The 14 men killed on the Nimrod were: Flt Lt Steven Johnson, 38, from Collingham, Nottinghamshire, Flt Lt Leigh Anthony Mitchelmore, 28, from Bournemouth, Dorset, Flt Lt Gareth Rodney Nicholas, 40, from Redruth, Cornwall, Flt Lt Allan James Squires, 39, from Clatterbridge, Merseyside and Flt Lt Steven Swarbrick, 28, from Liverpool. Flt Sgt Gary Wayne Andrews, 48, from Tankerton, Kent, Flt Sgt Stephen Beattie, 42, from Dundee, Flt Sgt Gerard Martin Bell, 48, from Newport, Shropshire, and Flt Sgt Adrian Davies, 49, from Amersham, Buckinghamshire, Sgt Benjamin James Knight, 25, from Bridgwater, Sgt John Joseph Langton, 29,from Liverpool and Sgt Gary Paul Quilliam, 42, from Manchester. L/Cpl Oliver Simon Dicketts, of the Parachute Regiment, from Wadhurst and Royal Marine Joseph David Windall, 22, from Hazlemere. Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionA couple of days ago on Twitter, Brian Cox asked the Twitter historians, “Did Galileo know that he would annoy the Church when he published The Starry Messenger?” The very simple answer to this question is, no but a lengthy discussion of the situation developed on Twitter. It was suggested that somebody should produce a short temperate answer to the question as a reference source and after some hesitation I have acquiesced. This will be a relative short presentation of the various stages of this historical process with a minimum of explanation and justification, as Joe Friday used to say, “the facts ma’am, just the facts!” This is of course my interpretation but it is based on a fairly good knowledge of the most recent principal secondary literature on the subject and it is one that I think would find fairly general agreement amongst those who have seriously studied the subject. Those who disagree are welcome, as always, to air their views in the comments but I expect those who choose to do so to base those views on historical facts and not on prejudice. The first thing to make clear is the situation in terms of astronomy, cosmology and the Church in the first decade of the seventeenth-century before Galileo, Marius, Harriot, Lembo and others changed our view of the cosmos forever with the recently invented telescope. Astronomy and cosmology were not very high up on the Church’s agenda between 1600 and 1610. The vast majority of people, including the experts, still believed in a geocentric cosmos in the form developed by Ptolemaeus, the most modern version being basically that of Peuerbach and Regiomontanus. A very small handful believed in the Copernican heliocentric model, and believed is the right word because it lacked any real form of empirical proof and was burdened by all the physical problems engendered by a moving earth. A probably equally small number favoured a Tychonic geo-heliocentric model with or without a rotating earth and another small number were finding favour with Gilbert’s geocentric model with a rotating earth. All of the discussions were very academic and nothing that could or would threaten the dominance of a solid Bible conform geocentricity, so nothing for the Church to get its knickers in a twist about. The telescopic discoveries were brand new empirical evidence and the biggest shake up in astronomy since mankind first cast its little beady eyes on the heavens. When he started to make his discoveries, late in 1609, Galileo was very much aware of the fact that he was sitting on the Renaissance equivalent of a Nobel prize, a knighthood and the keys to the treasure chest all in one and also very aware that he almost certainly wasn’t the only person making or about to make these discoveries. In the last point he was of course completely right, Harriot was ahead of him and Marius was breathing down his neck. Galileo was fully aware that if his wished to cash in then he had to get his priority claim in tout suite. To understand this one needs to look at Galileo’s situation. In 1610 he was a forty-six year old professor of mathematics, stuck in the same rather lowly position for the last eighteen years. He was on the down hill slope to ill health, death and anonymity. He had already done his ground-breaking work on dynamics but hadn’t published it. If he were to die tomorrow nobody would remember him beyond a few close friends and his family. Now he had hit the jackpot and needed to cash in fast. He bunged his principal discoveries together in book form, in what was more a press release than a scientific report, the Sidereus Nuncius, and had it printed and published as fast as possible. The last thing the Galileo wanted to do at this point was to annoy anybody; he wanted fame and fortune not infamy. He spent as much effort on getting permission to dedicate his small book to Cosimo Medici, the ruler of the Duchy of Florence, his home province, and his sometime private pupil, as he did on his telescopic observations. He also made very sure that the Medici would approve of the name he gave to the newly discovered moons of Jupiter; he was after preferment, which he got as a result of his clever tactical manoeuvring. He would have been mortified if his publication had caused problems with the Church in Rome because that would almost certainly have cost him any chance of an appointment to the Medici court, his main aim at the time. The Medici did in fact drop him when he finally collided with the Church in the 1620s. The telescopic discoveries, which Galileo was the first to publish, shook up the whole of Europe and not just the Catholic Church. However the contents of Sidereus Nuncius neither disproved Ptolemaeus/Peuerbach nor did they prove Copernicus, as I’ve already explained here. Of course at first they did nothing at all because like all new scientific discoveries they needed to be confirmed by other astronomers. This proved to be somewhat difficult, as the available telescopes were very poor quality and Galileo was an exceptional telescopic observer. In the end it was the Church’s own official astronomers, the members of Clavius’ mathematical research group at the Collegio Romano, who with the active assistance of Galileo delivered the necessary confirmation of all of Galileo’s discoveries. Hailed now as the greatest astronomer in Europe Galileo travelled in triumph to Rome where he was feted by the mathematicians of the Collegio Romano, who threw a banquet in his honour, had an audience with the Pope and was appointed a member of the Accademia dei Lincei who also threw a banquet in his honour. No signs of annoyance here. Galileo was appointed philosophicus and mathematicus to the Medici court in Florence, as well as professor for mathematics without teaching obligations at the University in Pisa. The humble insignificant mathematician had become a renowned social figure, almost overnight, feted and praised throughout Europe. High Church officials flocked to make his acquaintance and win his friendship, one of these, the Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, became a close friend and the cause of Galileo’s downfall later in his life. Although nothing in the Sidereus Nuncius disproved the geocentric model of Ptolemaeus the discovery of the phases of Venus a short time later, by Galileo, Lembo, Harriot and Marius, did. The basic geocentric model was dead in the water and the Church had a problem because Holy Scripture clearly implied a geocentric cosmos. Riding on the wave of his fame Galileo wanted to go for the big one. He wanted to go down in history as the man who proved that the cosmos was heliocentric. Unfortunately he lacked a genuine proof. He had evidence that the cosmos was not geocentric and not homocentric but all the available empirical evidence satisfied both a heliocentric cosmos and a geo-heliocentric Tychonic one and it was the latter that most astronomers, still worried about the physical problems of a moving earth, tended to favour. Around 1613, despite his lack of genuine proof Galileo began to canvas his newly won influential friends in Rome in an attempt to convince them to give their support to a call for the acceptance of a heliocentric cosmos, a dangerous move. The Church was a vast structure set in its ways and like a large ocean liner getting it to stop in full motion and reverse its direction was something that required a lot of time and space, Galileo eager to make his mark in history lacked the necessary patience to wait for the Church to accept the inevitable and was trying to force the pace. Several of his friends including Maffeo Barbarini advised him to calm down and not to force the Church into a corner, but Galileo, his ego inflated by his recent successes failed to heed this sound advice. In the next couple of years both Galileo and the Carmelite father Paolo Antonio Foscarini tried to tell the Church how to reinterpret those passages of the Bible that contradict a heliocentric interpretation of the cosmos. This was a fundamental failure and guaranteed to annoy the Church extremely, which it did. One should remember that all of this was taking place in the middle of the Counter Reformation and on the eve of the Thirty Years War, which would kill off between one third and two thirds of the entire population of Middle Europe in what was basically an argument about who had the right to interpret the Bible. The Church set up a commission to investigate Foscarini’s book on the subject and the commission came down very hard on heliocentricity, calling it both philosophically (read scientifically) absurd and heretical. The accusation of heresy was not confirmed by the Pope and so was never official Church doctrine, but the damage was done. Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino was instructed to inform Galileo of the commission’s judgement. In a friendly chat Bellarmino did just this, informing Galileo that he could neither hold nor teach the theory that the cosmos was heliocentric. It is important to note that the theory was banned not the hypothesis. One could continue to discuss a hypothetical heliocentric cosmos, one could not, however, claim it to be fact. As many people have pointed out over the centuries this restriction was actually in line with the known empirical facts. The books of Kepler and other Protestants claiming that the cosmos was heliocentric were placed on the Index and Copernicus’ De revolutionibus was placed on the Index until corrected. Interestingly the Inquisition did just that. They removed the handful of passages from De revolutionibus that claimed the heliocentric cosmos to be fact and then gave the book free to be read, already in 1621. We still have Galileo’s personal censored copy of the book. This censorship was only really effective in Italy the rest of Europe not taking much notice of the Church’s efforts to suppress heliocentricity. This setback did very little to slow down Galileo’s rise to fame and he became a very favoured celebrity throughout Northern Italy. Symptomatic for this is his notorious dispute with the Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grassi over the nature of comets that peaked in the publication of Galileo’s Il Saggiatore, in 1623. A dispute in which Grassi was scientifically right and Galileo wrong, but in which Galileo carried the laurels thanks to his superior polemic and the sycophantic cheers of his high powered fan club, which included the newly elected Pope, Urban VIII, Galileo’s old friend Maffeo Barberini. Barberini’s elevation to the Holy Throne gave Galileo the chance he had been
, but at a certain point in the next several decades, the company should have repaid its obligations to the Government and be making substantial revenues and profits of its own. Turnbull also appeared to be somewhat misleading in another portion of the interview with the ABC, in which he stated that the Coalition would “complete the NBN” if elected, and “complete it much sooner than the Government would and at much less cost”. Under the Coalition’s current telecommunications policy as publicised through several speeches and media releases Turnbull has made over the past several years, the Coalition would retain much of the structure of the current NBN project, but focus on using fibre to node technology rather than fibre to the premise. Because this model differs markedly from Labor’s FTTP NBN build, there exists significant debate in the telecommunications industry as to whether the Coalition could be said to be “completing” the NBN, as it uses a completely different technology than under the Labor plan. It is possible that the Coalition’s FTTN build could be upgraded later to support FTTP infrastructure, but Turnbull has not committed to this kind of upgrade. In addition, the Coalition has not yet released the financial details of its own rival NBN policy. An analysis by Citigroup published in November 2011 found that the Coalition’s policy would cost $16.7 billion. In addition, unlike the Government’s NBN plan, the Citigroup report didn’t mention what financial return, if any, the Coalition’s proposal was slated to bring in on its own investment, meaning that there is a possibility it may not make a profit and may instead cost the Government money. opinion/analysis We’ve been through this before. Current analysis shows that the NBN will not cost the Government money; it will make the Government money in the long term. Current NBN uptake shows higher than expected demand for the NBN and for higher speeds on the NBN, meaning that the NBN will very likely pay for itself sooner than expected. In comparison, the Coalition has not released any financial details of its own proposal; not what it will cost, whether it will make a return on investment or how the Government’s current NBN project would be modified under a Coalition Government. Turnbull’s statements are just not verifiable at this point. Malcolm Turnbull may hold the opinion that the Government’s financial analysis of NBN Co’s economics and future return on investment is flawed. He wouldn’t be the only one, although it’s not the mainstream opinion. But if so, the onus is on the Shadow Communications Minister to provide evidence that this is the case; and not just sound bites. We’re talking about a national telecommunications policy which will guide Australia’s broadband needs for the next half-century. We need more than pithy quotes from the Member for Wentworth in order to make decisions about the future of that project; we need hard data. The Government and NBN Co has provided that hard data (with a few exceptions). Let Turnbull and the Coalition do the same. Image credit: Office of Malcolm TurnbullIn March 2013, Mike Salk replaced fired Boston radio legend Glenn Ordway on WEEI’s afternoon drive program. A year later, Salk is moving on. The Sudbury native announced at the end of Wednesday’s “Salk and Holley” program he is resigning from the station. He said on his Twitter account (changed to @TheMikeSalk yesterday afternoon) that he would have more details on his future Thursday. An industry source said he believed Salk was returning to Seattle, where he co-hosted the “Brock and Salk Show” along with former NFL quarterback Brock Huard for three years on ESPN 710 before leaving for WEEI. Salk is expected to have a more prominent role than he had when he left. Advertisement Michael Holley, Salk’s co-host for the past year, will be paired with a former co-host of his own Thursday. Dale Arnold, who worked with Holley on WEEI’s midday show before they were broken up in a reshuffling in February 2011, will fill in Friday, just as he has for a couple of days this week while Salk was on vacation. A spokesman at WEEI’s parent company Entercom Communications said the station will use a rotating cast of hosts alongside Holley in the immediate future while searching for Salk’s permanent replacement. Salk’s short-lived run at WEEI was in part due to challenging circumstances and in part his own fault. He was hired and emboldened by then-Entercom Boston vice president/market manager Jeff Brown. But when Brown departed unexpectedly in September, replaced by Phil Zachary, Salk lost his chief advocate at the station. The difficult task of replacing Ordway, who maintained a loyal following, became even more challenging after Brown left. But it quickly became evident that he he was not the right fit. Salk was somewhat familiar to Boston sports radio listeners, having previously been on the air at WWZN 1510 and the now-defunct ESPN 890 in the Boston market. Advertisement But even though he grew up here, his homogenized style, honed during his time at ESPN radio, made him seem like an outsider.A deceptively beautiful stretch of the Gowanus Photo by Anna Merlan Sometime very soon, the Environmental Protection Agency will release its final plan on how to clean up the incredibly polluted Gowanus Canal, a process that’s expected to take years and cost $550 million. In the meantime, stop fishing there. No, seriously, that’s something that people are still doing. Fishing. In a canal that’s bright green and smells overwhelmingly like an army of demonically-possessed feet. After designating Brooklyn’s smelliest waterway as a Superfund site back in 2010, the feds began talking about how to actually clean it up. The main issue is that people have been dumping contaminants and various other things in there for 144 years, including, we are not kidding, at least four shipwrecks. And the practice of using the canal like an enormous, watery trash can continues to this very day. The Gowanus has been used as an industrial waterway since the 1860s, with ink and paint factories, cement mixers, oil refineries, and tanneries all making their home by the water’s edge. A recent report by the New York Times visited some of the scrap metal and concrete companies still operating there, and still, it appears, throwing stuff in the water. Environmental group Riverkeeper recently filed suit against three companies, accusing them of letting dirty storm water run off their sites and right into the canal. As the NYT notes, one of the companies, Benson Metal, was also fined $85,000 last year for dropping some of their scrap metal directly into the water. Dirty water and jagged metal are two of the tamer things the feds will have to deal with in their cleanup of the site. According to a proposed cleanup plan released by the EPA in December 2012, the canal contains pesticides, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are atmospheric pollutants caused by burning fuel, and polychlorinated biphenyls, also known as PCBs, which were once used in old electrical equipment and are now banned in the U.S. as being hazardous to human health. There’s some evidence that they cause cancer, neurotoxicity, and other things you don’t want contaminating your fish dinner. There’s also layer upon layer of contaminated sediment at the canal’s bottom, 307,000 cubic yards or so, which the EPA calls ‘highly contaminated.” And then, of course, there are the shipwrecks, “at least” four of them, according to the cleanup plan, “and a high likelihood that several other ship hulls have survived within the fill of the 1st Street basin.” And despite both the smell of the canal and warnings posted nearby, the EPA found, “the canal is regularly used for fishing, particularly subsistence fishing by several separate environmental justice communities surrounding the canal.” An “environmental justice community” means lower-income people who are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards. Like, say, consuming fish from the Gowanus in order to survive, despite the fact they’ll likely never be particularly safe to eat. Nor should you swim there, something the EPA found people don’t seem to do very often, for some reason. The proposed cleanup plan involves dredging up the contaminated sediment, stabilizing it with concrete, and then covering it with layers of clean material, including a type of clay that will remove any polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that might well up. Layers of sand and gravel would be placed over all that, to keep everything contained, with a final layer of clean sand intended to “restore the canal bottom as a habitat.” The whole thing will take at least ten years, with regular maintenance lasting forever. All this is according to the most recent plan proposal, released in February. But it’s possible the forthcoming new plan will have some different ideas, like, say, throwing our hands up and running away at top speed. The full EPA report on everything that’s wrong with the Gowanus is below. EPA Gowanus Cleanup ReportAprilia Racing boss Romano Albesiano is convinced that the new breed of MotoGP fairings with 'integrated winglets' offer a performance advantage, as the factory works on its remaining update for the 2017 season. With external wings now banned, manufacturers have been forced to incorporate downforce devices within a 'normal' fairing profile. An initial design was allowed alongside a standard fairing for the start of the season, with one further upgrade available. Aprilia, Suzuki, Yamaha and KTM (exempt from the upgrade limit) have already used a special fairing during a grand prix weekend, but the reception from the riders has generally been lukewarm at best. Maverick Vinales took victory with the Yamaha device at Le Mans, but the other races have all been won with standard fairings. Honda and Ducati are yet to even homologate a 'downforce' design for use in a GP. "It looks like now the fairing is not of so much interest to anybody. But from a theoretical point of view, it's surely a good point. An advantage," said Albesiano, who worked as a aerodynamicist earlier in his career. "So we have to make this thing accepted by the riders, like [the wings] were last year. I believe in this concept and we will keep working on it." Of the RS-GP riders, only rookie Sam Lowes has put in serious track time with Aprilia's special fairing. Team leader Aleix Espargaro is yet to be convinced the extra stability is worth a potential loss of top speed (which canned Ducati's radical design) and 'heavier' feeling. Asked if the Aprilia upgrade would be an evolution of the current design or a step in a different direction, now that other manufacturers have unveiled their concepts, Albesiano replied: "We believe [our] concept is very good. The results in the wind tunnel are very good, also when Sam tested back-to-back this device he always wanted to keep it. "So we need to work. Of course the priority has been reduced because only one rider of the two uses it, so we push less, but we have something to test [in Catalunya] in order to understand more about the concept and we will keep working on it." "I've used it since Jerez at every track," Lowes confirmed. "Maybe we will have something to try at the test, the same principle, but not affect the top speed as much. It's only maybe 1-1.5km/h anyway. "I feel the benefit on the exit of corners, especially long corners. It's a little bit heavier to enter the corners, which is what Aleix doesn't like. But Mugello you need to get into all the corners and it wasn't too bad. I think that shows we can use it everywhere. Maybe not Phillip Island, with the wind. We'll see. It might look a lot different by [October] anyway..." Albesiano also confirmed that creating efficient downforce is much more complicated under the new rules. "Before you could just design a couple of winglets, wing profiles, and once you had understood a little bit the flow in the front of the fairing... it was cheap and easy. Now you have to make CFD [Computational Fluid Dynamics, software that simulates air flow] calculations in a quite complicated way," he said. "Honestly the wings that we had last year were quite dangerous. I agree. Because it was so easy to 'hang' another bike. That could have been fixed in another way. But anyway..." Aprilia has a best finish of sixth so far this season, but the team felt Espargaro had the pace to fight Lorenzo for fourth (the RS-GP's best ever result) without an engine failure in the Catalunya race. It was a bitter disappointment to both team and rider, but Albesiano managed some humour when asked what had gone wrong: "It was an electrical problem! You know the story? Many years ago when the conrod exited the crankcase and cut the wire, it was an 'electrical problem'! "No, it was a problem with the pneumatic system for the valve spring. We've had this problem a couple of times before so we have to fix it definitely. "It's not a matter of re-designing, it's a matter of small points in the valve train that we have to maybe re-consider. These parts have worked for a long time, so now something new is happening that we have to understand. "The system is the same as last year and we never had this problem."What started out as the dream of a small Catholic High School class in Beloit, Kansas, has turned into a national pro-life event aimed at activating youth to stand against abortion. This Friday will mark the first Catholic School for Life Rally. Students from St. John’s Catholic High School in Beliot will travel 2½ hours to Wichita for a rally and prayer outside South Wind Women’s Center, the closest abortion clinic to Beliot as a means of education on the reality of abortion. They will be joined by other Catholic High Schools, including Sacred Heart Catholic School in Salina and Kapaun High School in Wichita. Even Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp, who is a pro-life champion in Washington, D.C., has confirmed that he will attend the Wichita event and will be speaking at the rally. But the Catholic School for Life Rallies are not confined to Kansas. St. John’s faculty organizer, Andrew Neiwald, has received confirmations that Catholic high schools in Colorado, Nebraska, and South Carolina, will be participating by rallying at abortion clinics in their communities. Some will include prayer, the reading of Bible verses, and even the singing of Christmas Carols at their local abortion sites. The event has received blessings from Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York and Neiwald has been told that prayers are being offered for the event from as far away as Brazil. The students hope that this event will spread and become a yearly tradition that will also include students from Protestant schools in the future. Students in Beloit emphasize that everyone, not just students, are invited to participate in the December 6 event. “We encourage everyone to turn out for a rally and prayer at their local abortion clinics to show support for what these amazing high school students are doing,” said Troy Newman President of Operation Rescue. “These students will get up early, drive far, and brave a cold Kansas winter morning to offer prayer for women seeking abortions. They are an example of sacrifice we can all applaud and emulate.” CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE! The Catholic School for Life Rally in Wichita will be held at 9:30 am on December 6, 2013, at South Wind Women’s Center, 5107 E. Kellogg, Wichita, KS. Operation Rescue staff will attend in support. Participants are encouraged to send photos of their December 6 events to St. John’s students at [email protected]. For more information, please visit the Catholic School for Life Rally 2013 Facebook page.(PhysOrg.com) -- Floating ash plumes from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano have caused massive disruption to the world's air traffic, highlighting the danger that volcanic ash plumes pose to aircraft. The threat from volcanoes has become more severe as the world's air traffic has increased, and as more people settle closer to volcanoes, says SMU vulcanologist James Quick, a professor in the Southern Methodist University Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. Quick previously served as program coordinator for the USGS Volcano Hazards Program. One of the most infamous encounters between a commercial jetliner and a volcano ash plume took place in 1989. KLM Flight 867, carrying 231 passengers in a Boeing 747, flew into an ash plume after the eruption of Redoubt volcano in Alaska. According to USGS reports, the volcano spewed enormous clouds of ash thousands of miles into the air and nearly caused the airliner to crash. Captured on audio was the frantic conversation between KLM's pilot and the Anchorage control tower as the aircraft's engines began flameout. Hear the cockpit audio in this video, as well as Quick's comments on the danger. Volcanic ash plumes can rise to cruise altitudes in a matter of minutes after an eruption, Quick says. Winds carry plumes thousands of miles from the volcanoes and then the plumes are difficult or impossible to distinguish from normal atmospheric clouds. Worldwide from 1970 to 2000 more than 90 commercial jets have flown into clouds of volcanic ash, causing damage to those aircraft, most notably engine failure, according to airplane maker Boeing. Volcano monitoring by remote sensing allows USGS scientists to alert the International Civil Aviation Organization's nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers as part of ICAO's International Airways Volcano Watch program. The centers then can issue early warnings of volcanic ash clouds to pilots. uick and other scientists from Southern Methodist University and the U.S. Geological Survey are pioneering technology designed to detect nuclear explosions and enforce the world's nuclear test-ban treaty to monitor active volcanoes in the Northern Mariana Islands. The islands are near Guam, which soon will be the primary base for forward deployment of U.S. military forces in the Western Pacific. The two-year, $250,000 project will use infrasound — in addition to more conventional seismic monitoring — to "listen" for signs a volcano is about to blow. The plan is to beef up monitoring of lava and ash hazards in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth. Explore further: Volcano monitoring will target hazard threat to Marianas, US military and commercial jets More information: Read more about the project - blog.smu.edu/research/2010/02/ … sound_pilot_pro.htmlOscar winner Morgan Freeman took on the tea party right last week, pointing directly to the corporate-based movement’s racist intentions when attacking President Obama. Appearing on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight on Sept. 23, the generally easygoing actor said, “Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What underlines that? Screw the country. We are going to do … whatever we can to get this black man outta here.” He continued, “It is a racist thing … It just shows the weak, dark underside of America. We’re supposed to be better than that. That’s why all those people were in tears when he was elected.” Freeman began the interview by indicating that racism, instead of lessening, had become worse since Obama’s election. He predicted however that the Republican effort would fail. “They’re not going to get rid of Obama either,” he said. “I think they’re shooting themselves in the head.” GOP hopeful Herman Cain, who won a Florida straw poll after last week’s debate, took issue with Freeman, saying he was “shortsighted.” Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, on the other hand, when asked about tea party racism, said, “One of the curses of racism in this country is that you’re always asking yourself if the stuff that goes wrong is on account of racism. I hope it’s not.” He went on to say that the GOP’s unrelenting opposition to the president’s policies might be “seditious.” The governor then said, “The notion that the singular focus of the hard right today is to defeat this president, even if there’s an idea he puts forward to help – that they used to support – is incredibly worrisome to me and a very different political climate, I think, than we’ve been dealing with for a long time.” A 2010 report by the NAACP links the tea party to giving “platforms to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.” John Wojcik, writing for peoplesworld.org, says, “The NAACP study finds … that among the tea party ranks are many who are obsessed with issues of race, national identity and a host of other social issues.” Photo: www.revelationsent.comIt's been 50 years since Isaac Asimov devised his famous Three Laws of Robotics — a set of rules designed to ensure friendly robot behavior. Though intended as a literary device, these laws are heralded by some as a ready-made prescription for avoiding the robopocalypse. We spoke to the experts to find out if Asimov's safeguards have stood the test of time — and they haven't. Advertisement First, a quick overview of the Three Laws. As stated by Asimov in his 1942 short story "Runaround": 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Advertisement Later, Asimov added a fourth, or zeroth law, that preceded the others in terms of priority: 0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. In Asimov's fictional universe, these laws were incorporated into nearly all of his "positronic" robots. They were not mere suggestions or guidelines — they were embedded into the software that governs their behavior. What's more, the rules could not be bypassed, over-written, or revised. Advertisement Invariably, and as as demonstrated in so many of Asimov's novels, the imperfections, loopholes, and ambiguities enshrined within these laws often resulted in strange and counterintuitive robot behaviors. The laws were too vague, for example, by failing to properly define and distinguish "humans" and "robots." Additionally, robots could unknowingly breach the laws if information was kept from them. What's more, a robot or AI endowed with super-human intelligence would be hard-pressed to not figure out how to access and revise its core programming. Scifi aside, and as many people are apt to point out, these Laws were meant as a literary device. But as late as 1981, Asimov himself believed that they could actually work. Writing in Compute!, he noted that, I have my answer ready whenever someone asks me if I think that my Three Laws of Robotics will actually be used to govern the behavior of robots, once they become versatile and flexible enough to able to choose among different courses of behavior. My answer is, "Yes, the Three Laws are the only way in which rational human beings can deal with robots — or with anything else. Advertisement Now, some three decades later, we are inching closer to the day when we'll have robots — or more accurately, the AI that runs them — that are versatile and flexible enough to choose different courses of behavior. Indeed, it'll only be a matter of time before machine intelligence explodes beyond human capacities in all the ways imaginable, including power, speed, and even physical reach. Advertisement Frighteningly, the margin for error will be exceedingly small. If super artificial intelligence (ASI) is poorly programmed or ambivalent to human needs, it could lead to a catastrophe. We need to ensure that AI is safe if we're to survive its advent. To learn if Asimov's Three Laws could help, we contacted two AI theorists who have given this subject considerable thought: Ben Goertzel — an AI theorist and chief scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings — and Louie Helm — the Deputy Director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and Executive Editor of Rockstar Research Magazine. After speaking to them, it was clear that Asimov's Laws are wholly inadequate for the task — and that if we're to guarantee the safety of SAI, we're going to have to devise something entirely different. Advertisement An Asimovian Future? I started the conversation by asking Goertzel and Helm about the ways in which Asimov's future vision was accurate, and the ways in which it wasn't. "I think the kind of robots that Asimov envisioned will be possible before too long," responded Goertzel. "However, in most of his fictional worlds, it seems that human-level robots were the apex of robotics and AI engineering. This seems unlikely to be the case. Shortly after achieving Asimov-style human-like robots, it seems that massively superhuman AIs and robots will also be possible." Advertisement So the typical future world in Asimov's robot stories, he says, is where most of life is similar to how it is today — but with humanoid intelligent robots walking around. "It seems unlikely to come about — or if it does exist it will be short-lived," he says. Advertisement For Helm, the robots are completely beside the point. "The main issue I expect to be important for humanity is not the moral regulation of a large number of semi-smart humanoid robots, but the eventual development of advanced forms of artificial intelligence (whether embodied or not) that function at far greater than human levels," Helm told io9. "This development of superintelligence is a filter that humanity has to pass through eventually. That's why developing a safety strategy for this transition is so important. I guess I see it as largely irrelevant that robots, androids, or 'emulations' may exists for a decade or two before humans have to deal with the real problem of developing machine ethics for superintelligence." Advertisement A Good Starting Point? Given that Asimov's Three Laws were the first genuine attempt to address a very serious problem — that of ensuring the safe behavior of machines imbued with greater-than-human intelligence —I wanted to know the various ways in which the Laws might still be deemed effective (or inspirational at the very least). Advertisement "I honestly don't find any inspiration in the three laws of robotics," said Helm. "The consensus in machine ethics is that they're an unsatisfactory basis for machine ethics." The Three Laws may be widely known, he says, but they're not really being used to guide or inform actual AI safety researchers or even machine ethicists. "One reason is that rule-abiding systems of ethics — referred to as 'deontology' — are known to be a broken foundation for ethics. There are still a few philosophers trying to fix systems of deontology — but these are mostly the same people trying to shore up 'intelligent design' and 'divine command theory'," says Helm. "No one takes them seriously." He summarizes the inadequacy of the Three Laws accordingly: Inherently adversarial Based on a known flawed ethical framework (deontology) Rejected by researchers Fails even in fiction Goertzel agrees. "The point of the Three Laws was to fail in interesting ways; that's what made most of the stories involving them interesting," he says. "So the Three Laws were instructive in terms of teaching us how any attempt to legislate ethics in terms of specific rules is bound to fall apart and have various loopholes." Advertisement Goertzel doesn't believe they would work in reality, arguing that the terms involved are ambiguous and subject to interpretation — meaning that they're dependent on the mind doing the interpreting in various obvious and subtle ways. A Prejudice Against Robots? Another aspect (and potential shortcoming) of the Three Laws is its apparent substrate chauvinism — the suggestion that robots should, despite their capacities, be kept in a subservient role relative to human needs and priorities. Advertisement "Absolutely," says Goetzel. "The future societies Asimov was depicting were explicitly substrate chauvinist; they gave humans more rights than humanoid robots. The Three Laws were intended to enforce and maintain that kind of social order." Helm sees it a bit differently, arguing that if we ever find ourselves in such a situation we've already gone too far. Advertisement "I think it would be unwise to design artificial intelligence systems or robots to be self-aware or conscious," says Helm. "And unlike movies or books where AI developers 'accidentally' get conscious machines by magic, I don't expect that could happen in real life. People won't just bungle into consciousness by accident — it would take lots of effort and knowledge to hit that target. And most AI developers are ethical people, so they will avoid creating what philosophers would refer to as a 'beings of moral significance.' Especially when they could just as easily create advanced thinking machines that don't have that inherent ethical liability." Accordingly, Helm isn't particularly concerned about the need to develop asymmetric laws governing the value of robots versus people, arguing (and hoping) that future AI developers will use some small amount of ethical restraint. Advertisement "That said, I think people are made of atoms, and so it would be possible in theory to engineer a synthetic form of life or a robot with moral significance," says Helm. "I'd like to think no one would do this. And I expect most people will not. But there may inevitably be some showboating fool seeking notoriety for being the first to do something — anything — even something this unethical and stupid." Three Laws 2.0? Given the obvious inadequacies of Asimov's Three Laws, I was curious to know if they could still be salvaged by a few tweaks or patches. And indeed, many scifi writers have tried to do just these, adding various add-ons over the years (more about this here). Advertisement "No," says Helm, "There isn't going to be a 'patch' to the Three Laws. It doesn't exist." In addition to being too inconsistent to be implementable, Helm says the Laws are inherently adversarial. "I favor machine ethics approaches that are more cooperative, more reflectively consistent, and are specified with enough indirect normativity that the system can recover from early misunderstandings or mis-programmings of its ethics and still arrive at a sound set of ethical principles anyway," says Helm. Advertisement Goertzel echos Helm's concerns. "Defining some set of ethical precepts, as the core of an approach to machine ethics, is probably hopeless if the machines in question are flexible minded AGIs [artificial general intelligences]," he told io9. "If an AGI is created to have an intuitive, flexible, adaptive sense of ethics — then, in this context, ethical precepts can be useful to that AGI as a rough guide to applying its own ethical intuition. But in that case the precepts are not the core of the AGI's ethical system, they're just one aspect. This is how it works in humans — the ethical rules we learn work, insofar as they do work, mainly as guidance for nudging the ethical instincts and intuitions we have — and that we would have independently of being taught ethical rules." How To Build Safe AI? Given the inadequacies of a law-based approach, I asked both Goertzel and Helm to describe current approaches to the "safe AI" problem. Advertisement "Very few AGI researchers believe that it would be possible to engineer AGI systems that could be guaranteed totally safe," says Goertzel. "But this doesn't bother most of them because, in the end, there are no guarantees in this life." Goertzel believes that, once we have built early-stage AGI systems or proto-AGI systems much more powerful than what we have now, we will be able to carry out studies and experiments that will tell us much more about AGI ethics than we now know. "Hopefully in that way we will be able to formulate good theories of AGI ethics, which will enable us to understand the topic better," he says, "But right now, theorizing about AGI ethics is pretty difficult, because we don't have any good theories of ethics nor any really good theories of AGI." Advertisement He also added: "And to the folks who have watched Terminator too many times, it may seem scary to proceed with building AGIs, under the assumption that solid AGI theories will likely only emerge after we've experimented with some primitive AGI systems. But that is how most radical advances have happened." Think about it, he says: "When a group of clever cavemen invented language, did they wait to do so until after they'd developed a solid formal theory of language, which they could use to predict the future implications of the introduction of language into their society?" Advertisement Again, Goertzel and Helm are on the same page. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute has spent a lot of time thinking about this — and the short answer is that it's not yet an engineering problem. Much more research is needed. "What do I mean by this? Well, my MIRI colleague Luke Muehlhauser summarized it well when he said that problems often move from philosophy, to math, to engineering," Helm says. "Philosophy often asks useful questions, but usually in such an imprecise way that no one can ever know whether or not a new contribution to an answer represents progress. If we can reformulate the important philosophical problems related to intelligence, identity, and value into precise enough math that it can be wrong or not, then I think we can build models that will be able to be successfully built on, and one day be useful as input for real world engineering." Helm calls it a true hard problem of science and philosophy, but that progress is still possible right now: "I'm skeptical that philosophy can solve it alone though since it seems to have failed for 3,000 years to make significant progress on its own. But we also can't just start attempting to program and engineer our way out of things with the sparse understanding we have now. Lots of additional theoretical research is still required." Advertisement IMAGE: MICHAEL WHELEN/ROBOTS OF DAWN. Follow me on Twitter: @dvorskyWallet service Blockchain has registered its 10 millionth bitcoin wallet. Data shows that, as of today, 10,053,518 wallets have been created by users of the service. That’s 7m more than Blockchain reported in February of last year, a significant jump in the roughly 20 months since that time. The service reported just under 9.4m wallets late last month. Announcing the 10 millionth wallet on its blog, Blockchain cited factors such as the US presidential election, the devaluation of the Chinese yuan and the vote by the UK to leave the European Union as key drivers of interest in bitcoin. The company said of the milestone: “While there’s still a lot to do, we can’t help but pause this week to give thanks for the millions of users who are helping us build an open, fair and accessible financial future. We are excited and honored to be on this path with you all.” Earlier this month, Blockchain said that it was working with payments startup Coinify to create a new in-wallet bitcoin buying option. Currently in beta, the option is expected to see a wider European release in the weeks ahead, followed by a global rollout sometime next year. Blockchain has raised $30m in venture funding to date from a single Series A round in 2014. Image via ShutterstockLooking at photographs of highways entirely eaten by vines and destroyed shops filled with trash and cobwebs, it’s easy to downplay their tragedy by comparing them to the set of a post-apocalyptic film. All of these images of Fukushima, Japan, taken four years after the earthquake and tsunami that caused the local nuclear power plant to melt down, almost seem too shocking to be real. But they are, and photographer Arkadiusz Podniesinski doesn’t want you to forget it. Within the exclusion zone, contaminated by radiation, lies a haunting ghost town with signs of its abrupt abandonment strewn everywhere you look. If this all sounds reminiscent of another nuclear disaster, that’s part of the point of Podniesinski’s photo series. The photographer has visited Chernobyl a number of times over the past seven years, documenting its deterioration and subsequent reclamation by nature in the hopes that he could help remind the world that it’s human error that keeps causing these events to occur. “It is not earthquakes or tsunami that are to blame for the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, but humans. The report produced by the Japanese parliamentary committee investigating the disaster leaves no doubt about this. The disaster could have been foreseen and prevented. As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster.” “I came to Fukushima as a photographer and a filmmaker, trying above all to put together a story using pictures. I was convinced that seeing the effects of the disaster with my own eyes would mean I could assess the effects of the power station failure and understand the scale of the tragedy, especially the tragedy of the evacuated residents, in a better way. This was a way of drawing my own conclusions without being influenced by any media sensation, government propaganda, or nuclear lobbyists who are trying to play down the effects of the disaster, and pass on the information obtained to as wider a public as possible.” See dozens more incredible images and read the accompanying story of Podniesinski’s journey through the Fukushima Exclusion Zone on the photographer’s website.The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) has been hosting a series of talks that has enthusiastically been praising ‘benefits’ of cow urine and dung, aeronautics in ancient India and ‘distortion’ of Indian history. The sessions reportedly began on Saturday under the title “Knowledge System in Ancient India” and will continue till Friday. They were organised by some students and at least one faculty member from IIT-B. While the organisers said that the purpose of the talks was to find solutions for modern-day scientific questions in the ancient India, some students and faculty members have criticised the seminars, calling it a propagation of ‘right-wing agenda’ and ‘pseudo-science’ at the institute. The talks, apparently delivered by a seer from a ‘vedic’ institute in Sabarkantha, Gujarat, a person who runs a cow shelter and a gurukul in Ahmedabad, a retired professor from the University of Mumbai (MU) and a scientist from Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), among others, are reminiscent of dubious claims about aircraft technology in ancient India made at the 2015 Indian Science Congress, held
born with microcephaly, a brain-damaging disorder. "I understand a lot of people disagree with my view, but I believe that all human life is worthy of protection of our laws. And when you present it in the context of Zika or any prenatal condition, it’s a difficult question and a hard one," Rubio told Politico. "But if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life." Rubio’s stance puts him out of step with the majority of Americans, and even among Republicans, according to a poll last week. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans believe a woman with the Zika virus should have the right to obtain a late-term abortion if the fetus is very likely to have a severe birth defect, according to a poll by Stat News and Harvard University. Forty-eight percent of Republicans said they support access to abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy if the fetus is expected to have a birth defect. A separate poll by Stat/Harvard found that only 12 percent of Republicans said they supported late-term abortions when Zika was not a factor. Rubio, who is facing a tough reelection battle in Florida this fall, made clear his strong anti-abortion stance during his failed bid for the GOP presidential nomination. Rubio drew fire in February when he said he opposed a woman’s right to an abortion even if she is a victim of incest or rape. The rapid spread of Zika in the U.S. — with 900 new cases over the past week — is likely to spur a larger national debate about abortion. The disease is spread by mosquitoes and through sexual contact. Nearly 500 pregnant women in the U.S. and its territories have contracted Zika. More than a dozen women have given birth to babies with birth defects, and another six women have miscarried because of the virus.ES Football Newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account Chelsea have added their former left-back Ryan Bertrand to their list of summer transfer targets. Antonio Conte wants to strengthen in both full-back positions and increase the competition for first-choice duo Marcos Alonso and Victor Moses. Conte is a huge admirer of Bertrand, who Chelsea sold to Southampton for only £10million in 2015. Bertrand made just 27 League starts in nine years at Stamford Bridge having joined the academy from Gillingham. The 27-year-old became the first player in Champions League history to make his debut in the final when Chelsea beat Bayern Munich in 2012. But the arrival of Jose Mourinho as manager in 2013 ended his chances of regular first-team football. After being sent to Southampton, for what was his ninth loan spell from Chelsea, the deal was made permanent two years ago. Bertrand has thrived at St Mary’s Stadium, becoming a regular member of the England squad and played at Euro 2016. Chelsea are keen to increase their home-grown quota. Bertrand’s style of play as an attacking wingback is regarded as a perfect fit for Conte’s 3-4-3 formation. Chelsea have shown no hesitation in buying back players they have sold in recent years. They re-signed both Nemanja Matic and David Luiz, while Everton striker Romelu Lukaku was subject of a bid during the last close season and is on their wish-list again for the end of this campaign. However, Chelsea face a tough task to prise Bertrand away from Southampton, who agreed a new five-year contract with him last summer and value the England international in excess of £25m. Manchester City have also earmarked the former Gillingham trainee as a possible replacement for Gael Clichy. Chelsea’s interest in Bertrand is further complicated by their desire to sign Southampton centre-half Virgil van Dijk. Standard Sport first revealed in December the Dutchman was a key target to strengthen central defence. Liverpool and City have emerged as strong competition for the 25-year-old, who is struggling to play again this season after suffering an ankle injury in January. But Chelsea are confident they will win the race, despite Southampton insisting he is not for sale. The Blues look certain to win the title this season and return to the Champions League as one of the eight seeds in pot one next term. They go into the home game against Crystal Palace tomorrow with a 10-point lead and are looking to secure their 14th consecutive win at Stamford Bridge in all competitions. Eden Hazard (calf) and Thibaut Courtois (hip) are available for selection following minor injuries.Archaeologists in Mexico have catalogued thousands of etchings carved into stones that they believe were made by hunter-gatherers 6,000 years ago. The carvings, known as petroglyphs, mostly consist of wavy lines and concentric circles, with some images representing deer tracks. Some 8,000 images were found at the site in Narigua in northern Mexico. Experts say the etchings may be part of hunter-gatherer initiation rites, or representations of stars. The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) says it is now preparing to allow tourists into the site, some 100km (60 miles) west of the city of Monterrey. INAH archaeologist Gerardo Rivas said there was evidence of hunter-gatherer tribes having lived in the area. He said many of their settlements were temporary, but evidence of cooking implements and stoves still remained. He said the petroglyphs may reveal clues as to the level of sophistication of the tribes, and the kinds of tools they were able to manufacture.The Kickstarter campaign to revive Reading Rainbow brought in over $5.4 million from more than 105,000 backers last summer. But Reading Rainbow and Ouya have broken a promise to 155 of those individuals: Those backers won't be receiving the limited-edition blue Ouya consoles they paid for, Polygon has learned. Late in the 36-day funding drive, Reading Rainbow teamed up with the people behind what were, at that point, the four highest-grossing Kickstarter campaigns of all time. (By then, Reading Rainbow had reached No. 5 on that list; it now sits at No. 7.) Ouya was one of those organizations, and the company pledged to create a limited run of 500 Ouya consoles in "Butterfly-in-the-Sky Blue," autographed by LeVar Burton himself, exclusively for backers who chipped in at the $250 level. "To keep this reward special, this will be a ONE-TIME LIMITED EDITION, so if you don't order one through this Kickstarter campaign, this version — and this color — will never be available again," said Reading Rainbow in a Kickstarter update on June 27, 2014. The Kickstarter page currently says that only half the stated amount, 250 units instead of 500, were ever up for grabs. Either way, it turns out that the color will never be available at all. According to a Polygon reader, the Reading Rainbow team sent out an email Feb. 5 to the 155 Kickstarter backers who selected the "Ouya + RR Game Console Package," in which the organization indicated that it will be unavailable to fulfill the orders. "Unfortunately, Ouya will not be able to provide the sky blue console as described during the campaign," the email reads. "Here's what we've worked together to come up with: Ouya will be able to provide Reading Rainbow backers with the current grey Ouya console PLUS LeVar will personally sign each console PLUS Ouya will provide a FREE $10 game card for your personal use." The companies later added an extra Ouya controller to the package. We reached out to Ouya and Reading Rainbow to ask why this is the case. A Reading Rainbow representative said, "Ouya and Reading Rainbow are working together on a solution that we hope our backers will love." An Ouya spokesperson offered more details, saying, "The only way to produce a small batch of blue reward units in time was to do it before the end of the summer. Unfortunately, given the need to ensure that all the Kickstarter reward surveys were accounted for, the final tally of orders wasn't completed before the deadline. In lieu of the blue units, Reading Rainbow and Ouya are working together on a solution that they hope the backers will be satisfied with." We followed up with Ouya and Reading Rainbow to ask why, when the deadline in question passed more than four and a half months ago, Reading Rainbow only let backers know last week. We'll update this article with any information we receive. It's perhaps unsurprising that Ouya would decide against building a special edition of its console, since the company could be looking to shift focus away from hardware production. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba reportedly invested $10 million in Ouya last month. According to the report, Alibaba is interested in integrating Ouya's software and game lineup into Alibaba's own set-top boxes, as opposed to bringing Ouya consoles to China. Reading Rainbow's email has left many backers of the Ouya reward tier unsatisfied, according to our tipster, who added, "I know I wouldn't have pledged anything had I known there wasn't going to be a sky blue version of the Ouya as the backer reward." The individual told Polygon that they have asked for a refund and are waiting to hear back. Disclosure: The author is a backer of the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter. Update: Representatives for Ouya and Reading Rainbow clarified that the organizations revised the original replacement package to include an additional Ouya controller, alongside the autographed Ouya console and its controller. "Reading Rainbow supports Ouya 100% and we are all trying our very best to work together to satisfy our backers with the best solution possible. Ouya and Reading Rainbow have no ill feelings toward one another," reads the updated email that Reading Rainbow sent to backers. The Reading Rainbow rep noted, "We have seen positive responses with the additional communication with our backers." Update 2: "Not shipping the blue units boiled down to a scheduling issue and we all feel awful about it. Ouya shares our desire to make our community happy," Reading Rainbow representatives followed up to add. "We truly want to help our backers more than anything. Our mission remains the same...bringing Reading Rainbow to every child everywhere and we want our backers to share in that journey."Step five: Get some scraps from your local butcher or fishmonger. Almost anything will do, but the best bait is an oily fish head or skeleton. A chicken carcass is OK, and easy to tie on. Meat bones, fat and bacon are fine: you can use any carrion which can be tied onto a piece of string. Pack the bait, the nets, a penknife, some cloth bags (or better still a hessian sack), some string and some stout cord or rope (or old washing line or telephone cable). Get to the river an hour before dusk. Peak fishing is an hour either side. Tie a short piece of string to each side of the rim, then use the two lengths to tie on the bait, which should be positioned in the middle of the net. Tie the rope to the fixed loop with a bowline, sheepshank or half-bloodknot, and lower the net into the water beside the bank (vertically if possible). If you've made more than one net, drop them a few metres apart. If you're clever and are next to a pub, grab yourself a pint Photograph: George Monbiot/GuardianFor the villager, who asks to be identified only as Bernadette, life is a running battle. On tiny plots of corn, millet and sweet potatoes next to Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she and her neighbors scrape a bare subsistence for themselves and their children. Her sweet potatoes, she told us last year, are under constant attack from baboons and elephants that stray from the park in search of food. Deep agrarian poverty of this kind is hard on nature, too. Virunga is home to half of the world's fewer than 900 remaining mountain gorillas, as well as endangered elephants and antelope. The park's forests are under pressure from the charcoal trade, and in 2007 the local charcoal mafia assassinated seven of the park's gorillas in retaliation for a crackdown on illegal logging. Poachers have killed 250 of Virunga's 300 elephants in recent years, probably with the acquiescence of residents fed up with crop raiding by the animals. Rising affluence over the past several centuries has, overall, been hard on the environment. But on the front lines of conservation, where people live intimately with primary forests, biodiversity hotspots and endangered species, it is often grinding poverty that drives the destruction. Improvements in productivity, as exemplified by Shigeharu Shimamura's farm in Japan, could hold the key for conservation in the 21st century. Shimamura oversees a 25,000-square-foot farm at the site of a former Sony microchip factory. Everything grows safely indoors. With a combination of water, plant food and 17,500 LEDs, he harvests as much as 10,000 heads of lettuce a day—100 times more per square foot than an ordinary farm—using 90 percent less water and producing 80 percent less waste. Humans use about half the world's ice-free surface, mostly for food production. Yet with continuing technological improvements, population and its impact on the environment could peak and then decline within the next few decades. This phenomenon, called decoupling, means that people can increase their standard of living while doing less damage to the environment. Protecting remaining wilderness in the face of escalating demand for food, resources and energy will require accelerating decoupling—in other words, speeding up urbanization and intensifying modern agriculture. The idea may seem counterintuitive, but especially in the developed world, much of the harm that people inflict on the land has begun to flatten and even decline. Today, for example, humans require just half of the farmland per capita that they did 50 years ago. As a result, across much of the U.S. and Europe, marginal farmlands are reverting to forest. Social changes will amplify these trends. More than half of humanity now lives in cities, and that figure could reach 70 percent by midcentury. When rural populations move to cities, birth rates tend to fall dramatically. That is why many demographers expect human population to peak and then decline before 2100. The rural exodus drives other, mutually reinforcing efficiencies as well, increasing both economic and resource productivity. The implications for 21st-century conservation efforts are clear. Parks and protected lands remain part of the solution. But without tackling the demand side of the equation, real habitat protection will be difficult if not impossible. Success will require substituting human technology for natural resources. It will also require modern energy. Nearly three billion people still rely on solid fuels such as wood and dung. Moving all of humanity to energy technologies that are cheap, clean and abundant will improve their well-being without harming the environment. Tools for shrinking our environmental footprint are in plain sight. Seizing those opportunities will require conservationists to focus on infrastructure and technology policies that traditionally fall outside their purview. Without accelerated decoupling, protected areas can't resist growing human demand for food and energy, and the elephants and gorillas of Virunga may face doom.First Screenshots Of Dekamori Senran Kagura Are Here By Ishaan. January 8, 2014. 4:30pm During last night’s Senran Kagura stream, we also got a look at the spinoff cooking and rhythm title, Dekamori Senran Kagura. While the teaser didn’t share any gameplay details, this week’s Famitsu shows that it’s a game where you can control the lady ninjas cooking in a rhythm game. Your goal is to to defeat opponents by making bigger mounds of food to score more points, which can be done by matching the rhythm and pressing the buttons. Missing will cause your character’s clothing to tear off. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but hey, it’s Senran Kagura. Dekamori Senran Kagura will be coming out for PlayStation Vita on March 20th. Meanwhile, Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson is scheduled for release on August 7th for Nintendo 3DS.Less than a week after the U.S. noted an absence of "provocative acts" by North Korea, Kim Jong Un's regime fired a ballistic missile over Japan. Coming soon after the launch of shorter-range missiles over the weekend, Tuesday's move increases the likelihood of more sanctions on North Korea's foreign trade, experts say. "This latest provocation will increase support in the U.S. and among its allies to take further steps to squeeze Pyongyang and the governments and firms that do business with it," Scott Seaman, a director at the Eurasia Group, wrote in an analysis note. Related: Markets rattled by North Korean missile launch Just last week, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he was pleased Kim's regime had "demonstrated restraint" since the U.N. Security Council passed its latest round of sanctions on August 5. Those measures aimed to kill a billion dollars' worth of North Korean exports by hitting major industries such as coal, iron ore and seafood. But analysts warned at the time that the latest sanctions were unlikely to be enough to make Kim back down on North Korea's rapidly advancing nuclear weapons program. So what's left for President Trump to go after? Related: New North Korea sanctions are unlikely to make Kim blink Textiles China is estimated to account for about 90% of North Korea's foreign trade, providing a vital link between Kim's regime and the global economy. The latest U.N. sanctions have already banned three of the top five product categories that China buys from its smaller, poorer neighbor. The remaining two involve textiles and apparel. What's not clear is how well North Korea's textile industries are doing. Analysts say some trade data indicates exports for those sectors fell last year. Related: North Korea's economy grew fast last year but slowdown looms But a recent in-depth report by Reuters from near the Chinese-North Korean border suggested Chinese companies are stepping up their use of North Korean factories to make clothes that are then labeled as "Made in China" and exported overseas. The apparent size of the North Korean textiles business makes it a potential target for future sanctions, experts say. "I can't help thinking if I were some kind of Chinese entrepreneur, I wouldn't want to be sinking more money into North Korea right now," Kent Boydston, a research analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told CNNMoney last week. Oil North Korean exports to China provide the regime in Pyongyang with an important source of income. And Chinese exports to North Korea include goods that the isolated country needs to keep functioning. High on that list is crude oil, which some experts have argued should have been included in previous U.N. sanctions. Related: China is squeezing North Korea - but not too hard But it's become impossible to accurately keep tabs on how much crude China sells to North Korea since Beijing stopped including it in customs data a few years ago. "With no data being reported, oil might be a way to either squeeze -- or support -- the regime without any outsiders being able to scrutinize what they are doing," Boydston said in a recent blog post. That kind of lack of transparency fuels the skepticism of experts, who dispute China's claims that it rigorously implements U.N. sanctions against North Korea. Related: More North Korea sanctions? They haven't worked so far Chinese banks Doubts about the willingness of China and Russia to really put the squeeze on North Korea has prompted calls for the U.S. to crack down harder on companies from those countries that do illicit business with Kim's regime. The Trump administration has already taken some action on that front, including sanctioning a bunch of Chinese and Russian entities last week over their alleged North Korean dealings. In June, the Treasury Department blocked a regional Chinese bank accused of having illicit North Korea ties from accessing the U.S. financial system. But former Treasury official Anthony Ruggiero said that much stronger action could be taken against Chinese banks, including major fines. Related: U.S. targets Chinese, Russian entities linked to North Korea "Chinese banks are integral to the operation of these illicit networks and the Trump administration will need to target them to move its pressure campaign to the next level," Ruggiero, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said in an opinion article for Fox News. But other experts say that China will never push North Korea far enough toward the economic brink to make Kim change course on nuclear weapons. Chinese leaders want to preserve the regime in Pyongyang as a strategic buffer against U.S. influence in East Asia and avoid the chaotic collapse of a neighboring country. By ramping up the pressure on Beijing, some experts warn, Trump could provoke a Chinese backlash against U.S. businesses in the region.While they had plenty of other culinary talents, the Native Americans were not a cheese-making people. It was the pilgrims who brought cheese and cows with them on the Mayflower and got the whole thing started this side of the pond. Most early American cheeses were made at home, to be eaten at home, or sold in local markets. And while a variety of European styles persisted in non-commercial cheesemaking, American industry soon honed in on a single type: cheddar. It was uniquely sturdy and adaptable, and it proved manageable in colonial conditions. It also tasted great despite the seasonal extremes in temperature and humidity that other European cheeses couldn't endure. So Americans got serious about cheddar; by 1790 they were exporting wheels back to England, the original motherland of the breed. The trade grew, and revolutionary patriots became proud of their "American cheese." British connoisseurs looked down on it, though, judging "Yankee cheese" inferior to traditional cheddars. The poor reputation made American cheese cheap, and what the aristocrats snubbed the British commoners quickly bought up. The Craft of Kraft Cheesemaking was transformed forever when Jesse Williams created the first American cheese factory in 1851, in New York. It started as a father-son venture -- conceived, in part, to cover for his son's poor cheesemaking skills. By buying up milk from surrounding herds and pooling it to make cheese at one location, Williams made commercial cheesemaking more viable and American cheese more reliably decent. From New York outwards, cheese factories spread like smallpox. Generic, factory cheddar became so common that Americans simply called it "store cheese," or "yellow cheese." Then came James L. Kraft, who in 1903 moved from Canada to Chicago with $65, bought a horse and wagon, and started wholeselling cheese. To reduce waste, Kraft tried packaging cheese in jars, and then began experimenting with cheese canning -- an idea the Swiss had been tinkering with already. Then he tried something completely different. By shredding refuse cheddar, re-pasteurizing it, and mixing in some sodium phosphate, Kraft produced the strange wonder we now know as American process cheese (patented in 1916). It was an immediate commercial success, and a boon to American soldiers in the World Wars. By 1930 over 40% of cheese consumed in the U.S. was Kraft's -- and that was in spite of its relatively high price. Thanks to clever advertising, Kraft was able to charge more in exchange for a promise of safety and consistency, even though the product was derived from inferior cheese. Some Fantastic Plastic Meanwhile, "natural" cheesemakers lobbied to have Kraft's product formally distinguished from real cheese; the government acquiesced and established guidelines for labeling cheese-like products. Of the "pasteurized process" family: "American cheese" is a mild, meltable, and stable concoction of natural cheese bits mixed with emulsifying agents to make, in the language of the law, "a homogeneous plastic mass." "Cheese foods" and "cheese product" are similar, but each have less "natural" cheese content than American cheese -- and, therefore, longer shelf lives. Over a hundred and fifty years, what was known as "American cheese" moved from farmhouse to factory to laboratory, from wheels to waxed blocks to single-serving packets. In the last few decades we've started importing more cheeses of more varieties; and a new wave of "artisanal" cheesemakers promise to revamp the image of American dairy. Still, it's hard to believe that the generic title, "American cheese," will ever be wrenched from the most generic of all cheeses, the topping on Big Macs and grilled cheese sandwiches. What other product could epitomize with such grace this essential tendency in culinary history and the American identity? Cheese expert David Clark is guest blogging with us all week! Be sure to check out his previous posts: 'Big Political Cheeses and the Riots They Caused' and 'The Maggot Cheese of the Mediterranean.'Prodrive Racing Australia team principal Tim Edwards believes Chaz Mostert came of age during the 2017 Virgin Australia Supercars Championship. Mostert led the way for the Ford squad during the campaign, taking three wins and remaining in title contention until the Coates Hire Newcastle 500. In addition to finishing fifth in the drivers’ championship, he also won Prodrive’s maiden PIRTEK Enduro Cup with Steve Owen. The 25-year-old was reunited with Adam De Borre - the pair having won Bathurst together in 2014 during De Borre’s previous Prodrive stint - but Edwards believes that was only part of the equation. A visibly fitter Mostert fronted for the 2017 season, having gone winless on his way to seventh in ’16 as he returned from serious injuries sustained in a qualifying crash at Bathurst the previous October. “With Chaz, you’ve only got to look at him physically,” Edwards told Supercars.com. “I think the Chaz of 2017, he’s really come of age. “Obviously having that relationship back with Adam as his engineer was part of the Chaz we see today, but also the effort that he's also put in behind the scenes. “He's fitter and more mentally focused and happier in himself than he’s ever been. “The engineer was just one element of that improvement we saw in Chaz this year.” Alongside his Supercars commitments, Mostert established a relationship with BMW this year following his star turn in February’s Bathurst 12 Hour in a privately-entered M6 GT3. That led to Mostert getting a call-up for races in Asia, including a run to fifth in the FIA GT World Cup in Macau and a partial Asian Le Mans program. From two races in the slender GT class in the ALMS, Mostert and his team-mates have a victory and a second place, with the next round in Thailand in mid-January. Between his Prodrive and BMW campaigns, Mostert contested five events in seven weekends across the end of the season. Edwards says he’s “absolutely” happy for Mostert to branch out into sportscars with the German manufacturer. “I’ve always been supportive of all my drivers doing other things and you’ve seen Frosty [Mark Winterbottom] do Brazilian Touring Cars, Cam [Waters] driving speedway cars and stuff like that," he said. “For me, having your bum in a car, seat time is seat time. And, yes, the cars are different but seat time is seat time. “And in Chaz’s case he just loves racing cars. You see him race a production [Ford] Focus at Bathurst and Winton and places like that, he just loves racing cars. “When he's not doing that, he's in a go-kart. So you’ve got to understand the nature of the person you’re dealing with. “He wants to do it, so I’m supportive of him doing it.”Background During my recent trip to Cyprus it occurred to me that recent generations, including mine, were brought up with the ever-present backdrop of violence. My generation, born during the 1974 conflict, had as its soundtrack the sirens and the sound of tanks in the background. I seem to remember child art from my time in nursery and early primary school depicting bombers, bombs, tanks, soldiers and death. We were, as children, fascinated by (our) soldiers, their helmets, weapons, bayonets and anything associated with them (and we were terrified by the ‘other’ soldiers). We played ‘war’ in the back yard and empty building plots in my neighbourhood. We made rifles out of bits of wood, helmets out of chicken wire, re-enacting conflict as leisure. We grew up with the ubiquitous military parades, hollow displays of power and bravado against the enemy. These still take place today, as a promise that ‘next time we’ll be better prepared’. I’d always known of this of course: Cyprus had experienced conflict and violence, political, ethnic and (let’s not forget) that caused by organised crime during most of the twentieth century. These different kinds of violence were of course not mutually exclusive, and recent research suggests an overlap between them at times. Violence was experienced in terms of the nationalist movements of EOKA and TMT from the 1950s onwards; during the labour movement in the 1940s, where unionists and strike-breakers (and their families) were the victims of violence; during the periods of ethnic tensions and conflict, from the 1950s until the forced partition and population exchange in 1974; during the violent suppression of a communist movement by the British, EOKA and TMT, and the state and its affiliated paramilitary groups; during the period of ethnic conflict between the Greek Cypriot National Guard and other paramilitary groups against Turkish Cypriot enclaves; finally, the violence experienced during the 1974 Greek/Cypriot coup d’etat against President Makarios and the subsequent Turkish invasion, which affected most of the population of Cyprus. This violence, experienced first hand by children and adults, has since been propagated and re-experienced in a number of ways. Here I will touch upon two: the education system and mass media. In terms of the education system, I can speak mostly for the Greek Cypriot case. The education system had until recently as its core mission to indoctrinate children with a nationalist-driven truth. The dominant narrative exposed children regularly to instances and examples of violence, offering vivid and often visual evidence to promote a message of victimhood and injustice against ‘our’ nation, endemic in our relationship with the ‘other’, but most notably the Turks. The need to pitch our ‘nation’ in a timeless struggle against the other has found the imagery of violence extremely useful in causing shock and horror. From the descriptions of Athanasios Diakos‘ impalement, to the executions of Cypriot higher clergy (both in 1821) and a long series of pictorial representations of violence hence, have been utilised in education from early years to drive home the dominant narrative of suffering. Other notable examples for the Greek Cypriot side include: images from the deaths of EOKA fighters, such as Gregoris Afxentiou, Kyriakos Matsis and others. I remember vividly as a child being exposed to such imagery. Afxentiou’s charred remains, Matsis’ bloody body after the battle in which his hideout was blown up, the bloody remains of the four fighters at a stable in Liopetri. Such images, clearly unsuitable for children, were freely utilised to shock and horrify, and ultimately calcify the dominant narrative. A visit to the Mouseion Agonos (the museum for EOKA’s anti-colonial struggle) was a must, and exposed young children to images and physical remains of violence. These were followed up with visits to the state prison where the bodies of 9 EOKA fighters who were executed by the British were buried. Visits to these graves were part of the primary school curriculum when I was growing up, as was a visit to the room where the gallows stood, accompanied by a description of how a hanging actually worked, levers and trapdoors included.* Needless to say, EOKA’s other violence, against Greek and Turkish Cypriots, had until recently been conveniently neglected. In fact, EOKA murdered more Greek Cypriots (148) than British soldiers (105) during its four-year anti-British struggle. The former were mostly communists. Such violence came to be complemented with that of the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and in particular their respective armed groups. The period between 1967 and 1974 were on the whole downplayed in terms of dominant message, as ‘our’ side had a plethora of imagery from the 1974 Turkish invasion which helped its narrative. We have imagery from the fighting and bombing, including the photo of a dead man hanging out of a ruined Famagusta building. Such imagery was utilised throughout education as a lesson about ‘barbarism’ (associated with the quality of ‘other’). Alongside these examples from state education, mass media has also reproduced such images throughout the last half century. The state-owned channels (CyBC and Bayrak), as well as other, privately-owned channels, have produced and broadcast a series of documentaries on the Cyprus conflict, especially the 1974 events. Some of these are broadcast annually in July and August, when the anniversaries of the 1974 war occur.* More recently we have had the brutal killings of two men (Tasos Isaak and Solomos Solomou) during anti-occupation protests in Dherynia (1996), which produced fresh media depicting violence and death which has since been utilised in a similar manner. The impact What impact has this systematic exposure to first- or second-hand violence had on Cypriots? Apart from the generations of people (especially children)**** involved directly in acts of violence or displacement, we also have generations of people for whom the violence is systematically repeated through education or media. This has potentially the ability to cause similar trauma as to those who have experienced violence first-hand. What impact does seeing the gallows and hearing the descriptions of hangings have on an 8-10 year old child? The violence plays out again in front of their eyes, and must have a similar impact to witnessing or being a victim of such violence themselves. The images and videos of Afxentiou’s death (burnt to death in his hideout in 1957), cannot but reproduce the violence once again for the children to witness afresh. Considering the dozens of thousands of children who underwent this systematic exposure to violence, how can we analyse and interpret Cypriot society today, when those generations have reached maturity? One gets the sense that in Cyprus we live as if suspended in a relative period of calm likely to be disrupted by outbreaks of violence. The combined effect of the violent trauma in all of us and the continuing political limbo of the Cyprus Problem render our present situation, no matter how peaceful, temporary. It is as if we are not allowed to relax and take peace for granted. Outbreaks of violence are always likely, and we may (or not) be prepared for such eventuality. How does our society, ‘westernised’ and ‘civilised’ today, enhanced by modern technological advances, exist with the underlying truth of violence? Is our modernity but a veneer over a dark, violent past and present? Is there always some violence threatening to surface, be it at a football match, night club or-in fact-a queue at Lidl on a Thursday morning? Is violence a shared skeleton in our closet, a common relation nobody wants to acknowledge? It would make for a fascinating research project for someone, to carry out psychological and anthropological research among the Cypriot population to help define our attitudes to a wide range of ‘everyday’ topics, and our propensity to see violence as a potential solution. I wonder how we compare versus, say, the Maltese? Although scholars such as Papadakis and Bryant have explored the anthropological aspects of the Cyprus problem, it would be interesting to see the psychological impact of the conflict and the re-play of violence in the lives of the children of Cyprus. The challenge for the teacher of today The challenge for the teacher today is multiple. Firstly, to resist the exposure of children to such imagery and narratives of violence and hatred. Perhaps to a degree this is happening, but I am not convinced that we have denounced the reproduction of violence to those too young not to be traumatised by it. Secondly, teachers, and society more widely, must resist the utilisation of education-as-nationalist-narrative (or any dominant narrative in fact) in favour of a more relevant, pupil-centred approach which allows children to explore and shape their own truths based on their own social, economic and ethnic backgrounds. This is not far from a Freirean educational ideal, but let’s face it, it’s not happening any time soon. Such a shift would most likely be the result of the activity of individual teachers rather than an organised, top-down initiative. States are not likely to encourage a pedagogy which in turn encourages critical thinking and emancipation from sociopolitical and religious shackles. It is possible to teach history not as a politically-driven dominant narrative, but as a shared endeavour to better understand the past based on evidence. Emotive (and traumatic) imagery and discourse only serves to distort such truths in the service of the elites. And it has so far succeeded. ______________________ * I have deliberately chosen not to include such imagery here. If you really want to find it, Google is your friend. However, for the Turkish Cypriots who were often on the receiving end of Greek-Cypriot state-sponsored violence against their enclaves and communities, there are other horrifying images which served their purpose. One such example is that of a mother and her three children, murdered in the bathtub in their house in 1963, and used as an example of Greek Cypriot barbarism, which formed the basis for the Museum of Barbarism. * Such broadcasts have also been used for education purposes. **** See Rosenblatt’s Children of WarGet Yourself Speedrunning: A Series of 3 Weekly Post-AGDQ Races At this point, everyone is familiar with Awesome Games Done Quick. Every successive year, the marathon brings in not only more money for charity, but also more viewers who have never seen speedrunning before. It's almost tradition that following the event, speedrunning forums, chat servers, and twitch channels are swarmed by users all asking the same question: "Hey this speedrunning thing looks fun, how can I get involved too?" We want to provide this opportunity. Every Saturday from Jan. 17th - Jan. 31st, we are going to host a race of a competitive yet newbie-friendly game. Each race is open to anyone who'd like to enter, whether they are the record holder or have never touched a controller before. For those that can't join, we are going to be re-streaming some of the top runners of the game on our twitch channel, featuring commentary by some of our favorite hosts in the community. Details
there are no guarantees. We’re willing to take that chance. For us, freedom is what matters. That’s why we favor a total dismantling of the welfare-state, regulatory economy way of life and an end to the evil, immoral, and destructive drug war. We also believe that many of the threats that the government supposedly protects us against, such as anti-U.S. terrorism, are produced by the imperialistic and militarist overseas policies and programs of the military and the CIA. That’s one reason we stand with the Founding Fathers in their antipathy toward standing armies and agencies like the CIA and NSA. They are antithetical to a free society and should be dismantled, not reformed. But even given the terrorist threat (or the threat of communism, drug lords, illegal aliens, etc.), we libertarians are willing to take our chances. We don’t want to give up one single bit of our freedom, even if by doing so the government is able to keep us safe and secure (from the threats that its very own policies produce). Moreover, as our American ancestors understood so well, the greatest threat to people’s freedom and well-being lies not with communists, terrorists, drug dealers, or illegal aliens. Instead, it lies with one’s very own government. That’s why there is a Constitution and a Bill of Rights — to protect us from the federal government. History has shown that those societies in which people surrender their freedom for the sake of security end up losing both of them. People who trade their freedom for the siren’s song of safety and security ultimately learn that they have done nothing more than put the fox in charge of watching over the chickens and keeping them safe. “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery?” Patrick Henry asked? “Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!”THE Irish Foreign Affairs Minister has told Sinn Féin that Ireland has warned Israel that there should be no repeat of its secret agent assassins using Irish passports to carry out state terrorist operations against Palestinian opponents. Sinn Féin TD Seán Crowe (Foreign Affairs) wrote to Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan to ask if his attention had been drawn to comments made by the Israeli Ambassador to Ireland in an interview with the Irish Examiner on 10 October in which the Tel Aviv Government representative said that he could not guarantee that Irish passports would not be forged again by the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Mossad agents used forged Irish passports six years ago to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Palestinian activist, in the United Arab Emirates. Six forged Irish passports were used, some with real numbers. An Israeli Embassy official in Dublin was consequently expelled for the diplomatic violation and putting Irish citizens at risk. But when Israeli Ambassador Zeev Boker was asked by the Irish Examiner if he would guarantee there would be no repetition, he replied: “We cannot guarantee about everything. What has been discussed in the past has been discussed. “I cannot guarantee. I’m a diplomat. I work in the Foreign Ministry.” Sinn Féin TD Seán Crowe (pictured) subsequently asked Ireland’s Foreign Minister in a written Parliamentary Question if he had discussed the issue with the Israeli Ambassador, and the action he will take to ensure that Mossad (or other foreign secret service agencies) cannot forge Irish passports. Minister Flanagan replied to Seán Crowe: “I am aware of the interview referred to by the deputy and of the 2010 episode to which he also refers. “The use of forged Irish passports by Israel was firmly dealt with by the Government of the day. “Following the murder in Dubai of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in 2010, a strong protest and condemnation was conveyed to the Israeli authorities, and an officer of their embassy in Dublin was expelled. This information is already on the record of the House. “At my request, my officials have been in contact with the Ambassador following the publication of the interview in question to make clear that an incident such as that which took place in 2010 should never again occur. “Any abuse of Irish passports is a matter which I view with the utmost seriousness as it could affect the safety and security of Irish citizens when they travel. “I am determined to maintain the integrity and strong international reputation of the Irish passport as one of the most secure in the world. Significant investment is being made as part of the passport reform programme in enhanced facial recognition technology along with other measures to minimise the potential for fraud, forgery or identity theft.”Michael Mermel, chief of the criminal division for the Lake County, Illinois state's attorney's office, is rather unimpressed by the value of exonerating DNA evidence, especially when it conflicts with good ol' eyewitness testimony, confessions, even bite-mark evidence. For example, six years ago, Mermel dismissed DNA tests showing that the semen found in the underwear of a 68-year rape victim didn't belong to the man convicted of the crime. Bernie Starks had been serving time for the rape since 1986. Now if the DNA had come from the woman's vagina, Mermel argued at the time, "I would be standing over there advocating the side that the defense has in the case." Actually, no he wouldn't. Three years later, a missing rape kit from the case turned up. It included a vaginal swab containing semen, and a DNA test on the semen again excluded the man convicted of the crime. Mermel again refused to concede, this time arguing that the woman must have had consensual sex with another man at about the same time of the rape. When DNA testing on an 11-year-old rape and murder victim excluded his suspect, Mermel said the more likely explanation there too was that the girl had been sexually active—not that he could possibly be charging the wrong guy. But this one beats all: And, just recently, when lawyers for the man charged in the killing of his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend said in court that DNA evidence from semen excluded him as the perpetrator, the Lake prosecutor had another explanation. Mermel said DNA may have gotten inside the 8-year-old's body as she played in the woods at what became the crime scene—a place where Mermel said some couples go to have sex. The girl was found fully clothed. That's some mighty potent semen.Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) is facing a tougher-than-expected reelection fight (John Hanna/AP) Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), fighting growing perceptions that he faces a difficult reelection battle amid unrest within his own party, barely outraised his little-known Democratic opponent in the first half of the year — but only with the help of his well-heeled running mate. Brownback’s campaign raised $1,244,281 during the first six and a half months of the year, according to reports [pdf] filed with the Governmental Ethics Commission in Topeka. His opponent, state House Majority Leader Paul Davis (D), pulled in [pdf] $1,121,979 over the same time frame. But Brownback’s haul includes a $500,000 loan from Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer (R), a plastic surgeon and former state legislator. Without the loan, made last week, just a day before the reporting period ended, Brownback would have raised $370,000 less than Davis. It’s not the first time Colyer has opened his checkbook for the ticket. Last year, he loaned the campaign another half million dollars, which the campaign repaid at the beginning of January, the Kansas City Star reported. Brownback still maintains a million-dollar cash-on-hand advantage over Davis, with $2.3 million left in the bank. But the last-minute loan suggests Brownback needs help to keep up with Davis. Recent automated polls have showed Davis leading Brownback, and drawing a significant amount of Republican support along the way. More than 100 prominent Republicans, angered over tax cuts spearheaded by the Brownback administration, endorsed Davis earlier this month. Brownback also helped defeat six incumbent Republican state senators in primary elections in 2012, as conservatives ousted moderates who controlled the Senate.Less than a decade after being blamed for fueling the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, banks are winning again in Washington. The rebound for the lenders has been so remarkable that Republicans and Democrats in Congress are pushing to scale back financial regulations imposed in the wake of the meltdown — one of the few areas where the two parties agree. Story Continued Below President Donald Trump, who once vowed not to let Wall Street “get away with murder,” has dropped the demonizing campaign rhetoric and recruited industry veterans to his administration. His Treasury Department has drawn up a series of recommendations for trimming the post-crisis rule book. Even the Federal Reserve, the top banking regulator, is working to relax safeguards. Lawmakers and regulators are rethinking policies including loosening mortgage protections, curtailing so-called stress tests that gauge how banks would fare during economic turmoil, and simplifying capital requirements for smaller lenders. Many of the proposals are targeted rollbacks rather than a wholesale repeal of regulations, but they would have a meaningful impact on the industry. Behind the shift is the intense focus by the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers on boosting economic growth, a centerpiece of the campaign to enact the massive tax reform legislation. Trump said lightening up on the banks will spur lending and allow businesses to grow, an argument that some analysts question but that the banking lobby has eagerly embraced. "Banks aren't the winners," American Bankers Association President and CEO Rob Nichols said of the new dynamic. "The winners are the economies, clients, communities and American families buoyed by additional economic growth that can be created through the banking system." The deregulation drive comes as the U.S. nears the 10-year anniversary of the crisis, when the federal government committed hundreds of billions of dollars to shore up the financial system. Congress then passed the landmark Dodd-Frank law in 2010, the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules in seven decades. Morning Money Political intelligence on Washington and Wall Street — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said banking legislation that's moving through Congress showed there is a "collective amnesia" about the crisis. "People are going to look back, whether it's five years, 10 years or 15 years and say, 'This was the beginning of a massive deregulation scheme,'" Brown said. Bank lobbyists say the government overreached. "The pendulum swung way too far out of line because of the crisis,” Independent Community Bankers of America President and CEO Cam Fine said. "The agencies became much too harsh and much too closed to banker concerns, and I think you’re going to see the pendulum swing back.” Republican and Democratic lawmakers are echoing the sentiment that the post-crisis rules need to reflect today’s risks. Senators from both parties have joined forces to deliver a bill that would streamline mortgage and capital rules for small banks while also relaxing regulatory oversight of several large, regional lenders. The Senate Banking Committee approved the legislation earlier this month, and it probably has enough support to become law next year. One of the bill's co -sponsors, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), said he wasn't surprised that so many Democrats were signing on to the legislation, viewing it as a way to boost smaller banks. "They see what's going on in their communities and understand that Wall Street was the reason we passed Dodd-Frank and it bled down to community banks” and regional banks, he said. Tester is among several moderate Democrats pressing ahead with the bill despite warnings from Brown and others in their party that the rollbacks could endanger consumers. At least 11 Senate Democrats are backing the bill, ensuring that it will not be obstructed by a filibuster. “It's past time," said Tester, one of a number of Democrats up for reelection in red states next November. "It's too bad we didn't get this done four or five years ago. But everything has its moment in time.” Bankers credit a handful of top officials in the Trump administration for establishing a friendlier tone with the industry. The list includes White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, himself a Goldman alum and a co-founder of California's OneWest Bank. Staff working for them include Andrew Olmem, who lobbied on behalf of financial institutions before joining Cohn's White House team, and Craig Phillips, who was an executive at asset manager BlackRock before becoming a counselor to Mnuchin at Treasury. Nichols of the American Bankers Association praised Cohn and Mnuchin for bringing “a thoughtful perspective on banking issues and for demonstrating leadership in the public policy debate." One Trump administration official who asked not to be named said the debate had shifted thanks to the president's personnel picks at regulatory agencies. The official also cited the momentum of the bipartisan Senate bill and the White House's handling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where Trump installed his conservative budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, after bureau director Richard Cordray abruptly resigned. "We've had an onslaught of new regulations, one after another for the last eight years," the official said. "There has not been a thorough review and reflection of how it all fits together." Trump's choices to head key regulatory agencies are pledging to do their part to make rules more flexible and "tailored" — an effort that has the blessing of some lingering Obama appointees as well. Federal Reserve officials are rethinking stress tests of banks — a safeguard they enacted after the 2008 meltdown. “I don’t think what we’re talking about here amounts to deregulation or broad deregulation,” Fed Go vernor Jerome Powell told lawmakers in June, before Trump nominated him to chair the central bank. “It amounts to making regulation more efficient, protecting the important gains that we’ve made. We’re not really talking about some massive program.” Greg Baer, who represents large banks as president of The Clearing House Association, described the process being undertaken by the Fed as "the thousand tiny Band-Aids approach." "They’re really trying to find areas where there seem to be some clear policy errors, but not anything terribly dramatic," he said. "That's the smart way to go. It runs against the caricature of the Trump administration wanting to gut Dodd-Frank." The piecemeal approach has fallen short of what many conservatives, including senior House Republicans, were hoping to see under GOP control of Washington. Yet because of their narrow majority in Congress, Republicans are limited in how far they can undo Dodd-Frank. There is widespread support among Democrats for key pillars of the law, and even some in the GOP have been uneasy with gutting its consumer protection and financial stability rules. In October, Senate Republicans had to lean on Vice President Mike Pence to pass a resolution blocking a regulation intended to give consumers a better shot at taking banks and credit card companies to court. "There’s at least a chance some things get done," said Norbert Michel of T he Heritage Foundation. "There are a lot of good people in the administration and a lot of good people at Treasury who do want to make changes. It’s just unclear how and when some of those really big changes would ever come true.” Congress and the regulators are “working on the edges of Dodd-Frank” and the core of its framework will remain in place, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Washington policy analyst Brian Gardner said. “It's not going away,” he said. “It's really the permanent way of banking regulation for the foreseeable future."If you saw a drowning squirrel in a pool would you attempt what this man did? VIDEO: Pool repairman saves squirrel with CPR Find Your Forecast Search for a location Cheryl Santa Maria Digital Reporter Thursday, June 5, 2014, 7:38 PM - When pool repairman Rick Gruber saw a ground squirrel drowning in a pool in Phoenix, Arizona, he went into rescue mode. Gruber scooped the squirrel out of the pool, placed him over a pipe and attempted to resuscitate the little guy with CPR. "I just gently pushed on his rib cage then squeezed his sides, thinking at some point I'm gonna find his lungs," he told CNN. It only took a couple of minutes to get the squirrel breathing again. Gruber then transferred his patient to a soft kneepad while it gathered its bearings. WATCH: Mother elephant rescues calf from river Eventually the ground squirrel -- which, according to CNN, is like a miniature prairie dog -- opened his eyes and then scurried off into the wilderness. Gruber says he filmed the clip so he could show the rescue to his friends. In the process, he revealed that he has a heart of gold. "I would do it for anybody: a rodent, a dog, a cat, anything," he says of the rescue.CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela will make all pending debt payments despite “a series of difficulties” that have arisen as a result of financial sanctions by the United States, Economy Vice President Ramon Lobo said on Thursday. Ramon Lobo, Venezuela's Economy Vice President speaks during a press briefing at the Venezuelan Central Bank in Caracas, Venezuela May 23, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria The United States in August prohibited dealings in new debt from Venezuela and state oil company PDVSA in response to the creation of a new legislative superbody that critics call the consolidation of a dictatorship. The sanctions did not block banks from serving as intermediaries in debt payments, but the government of President Nicolas Maduro has said they are interfering with the country’s finances and threatening to lead it toward default. “We are going to meet our commitments. We have come across a series of difficulties, but that will not stop us,” Lobo said in a news conference. “There is an order to impose a financial blockade so as to put us in a situation of insolvency, which is completely out of the question.” He did not offer details. Financial institutions have in recent years grown wary of doing business with Venezuela even before recent sanctions, due to concern that Venezuelan funds might be associated with money laundering and drug trafficking, and a growing risk of debt default. PDVSA and its U.S. unit Citgo Petroleum are facing difficulties in obtaining the letters of credit needed to export and import oil cargoes on the spot market. Even though banks have maintained some existing contracts to provide paying agent services on Venezuela and PDVSA bonds, the company has switched to other banks to secure debt service payments for certain bonds. Asked about media reports that PDVSA is selling oil in euros rather than dollars in response to sanctions, Lobo said the company “has been working on that for some time.” PDVSA has asked some partners in joint ventures to change the preferred currency for routine transactions to euros instead of dollars, two traders from companies operating in Venezuela said on Thursday. The talks have not yet led to modifications in the contracts. In 2008 PDVSA said it had started using the euro for some sales. But its impact was very limited as most long-term contracts signed by the company use the dollar, even in the price formulas. The country’s deep economic crisis and flailing socialist economy have spurred concerns about default, leaving its bonds heavily discounted. Maduro said that Venezuela has never missed a debt payment under the ruling party.PoliZette Trump: ‘We’re Living Through the Greatest Jobs Theft’ in History President-elect lays out plans for robust military rebuild and economic growth in North Carolina President-Elect Donald Trump officially announced his nomination of retired Gen. James Mattis to be secretary of the Defense Department on Tuesday, at a “thank you” rally held near Fort Bragg in North Carolina. It was Trump’s second thank-you visit since he shocked the world and won the White House on Nov. 8. “Mattis will get that waiver, right? Oh, if he didn’t get that waiver, there would be a lot of angry people.” Advertisement Mattis spoke briefly and humbly, acknowledging he would need congressional approval to take the job because he has been retired from the military for fewer than seven years. He also acknowledged the Senate would then have to give official consent after hearings. The crowd roared as Mattis left. Trump then suggested Congress better give Mattis a fair shot. “He’ll get that waiver, right?” Trump asked the crowd. “Oh, if he didn’t get that waiver, there would be a lot of angry people.” [lz_third_party align=center includes=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNNLOOP9dpk] But Trump’s speech wasn’t just about talking military issues in the city of Fayetteville, home of the Army’s 82nd Airborne. Advertisement Trump relived winning Iowa, Florida, and North Carolina — states where he was heavily contested by Democrat Hillary Clinton. “That’s why we are here tonight; we want to thank you,” Trump said. Trump then launched into his domestic policy agenda, and took yet another victory lap after his recent win in getting Carrier Corp. to keep more than 1,000 jobs in Indiana. He promised a more “massive” tax cut for the middle class than President Ronald Reagan delivered in the 1980s. He also promised to cut the top corporate tax rate to 15 percent. Trump promised to jump-start economic development in urban centers. [lz_related_box id=”256370″] Advertisement Trump said he wanted to promote not just a “Buy American” belief but “Hire American” policies. He said 70,000 U.S. factories have closed since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. Much of his speech was aimed at trade policies, a platform that helped him ride to victory in unlikely states in the Midwest. “Our trade deficit is … almost $800 billion a year,” said Trump. “In the month of October alone, our nation racked up more than $40 billion in trade deficit … including more than a $30 billion trade deficit with China alone.” Trump said North Carolina has lost about half of its manufacturing jobs since NAFTA passed in 1993. “We’re living through the greatest jobs theft in the history of the world,” said Trump.Earlier today Hawaii’s State Representative Chris Lee held a press conference in response to the controversy surrounding loot boxes and microtransactions in video games. Lee announced that he would be looking to introduce legislation to combat predatory practices by companies like EA. Singling out Star Wars: Battlefront II, Lee called it an “online casino specifically designed to lure kids into spending money.” He added that he wants to “protect kids who are underage, not psychologically or emotionally mature enough to be able to gamble which is why gambling is prohibited under 21.” Lee’s press conference follows the news from Belgium that loot boxes are considered gambling in that country. Lee announced that his proposed legislation would attempt to prohibit games with loot box content to anyone under 21. He also stated that the legislation would attempt “prohibiting different kinds of mechanisms in those games.” Another State Representative, Sean Quinlan joined Lee and claimed that Star Wars is one of the world’s most popular IPs and that the game is clearly marketed to children. “We shouldn’t allow Star Wars to encourage your kids to gamble,” he added. The pressure on loot boxes in video games is continuing to mount with each passing day. After EA temporarily removed the ability to purchase crystals in Star Wars: Battlefront II, it was revealed that sales of the sequel were down 60% on the first title. With the announcement of Belgium’s Gaming Commission calling loot boxes gambling and now the announcement from Hawaii, it looks like loot boxes might have had their day.Microsoft only has a few key Windows Phone partners under its belt, but it may be expanding the ecosystem very shortly -- The Information hears from sources that Redmond is once again in talks to launch a Sony-made Windows Phone. While there's no guarantee of a deal, the partnership could introduce a handset as soon as mid-2014. The device may even carry the VAIO badge, and it could serve as a vehicle for Sony's Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited services. Even if the discussions fall apart, Microsoft may have more hardware manufacturers lined up. Tipsters claim that the company wants to renew ZTE's interest in Windows Phone, and it could be willing to cut or even waive the OS licensing fees that frequently drive potential allies toward Android. Neither side has confirmed the talks, and Sony will only say that it "continues to assess" Windows when it's relevant. Still, there's now a chance that the Xperia X2 will finally get a sequel.Hey, some feel-good, positive news: University of Louisville men's basketball senior Wayne Blackshear was named a second team Capital One Academic All-America Division I basketball teams by the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) on Thursday afternoon. The Chicago, Ill., native earned the 2013 NCAA Elite 89 Award, presented to the student-athlete with the highest cumulative grade-point average participating at the finals site for each of the NCAA's championships. Blackshear, who is majoring in communications, boasts a 3.4 cumulative grade-point average. He was a member of the 2014 UofL Athletic Director's Honor Roll while helping the men's basketball team produced a 3.33 combined GPA for the 2014 fall semester, the second-highest ever for the Cardinals and the highest among Louisville's nine men's sports programs. Through 28 games this season, the forward is averaging a career-best 10.5 points and 4.5 rebounds per game. He has 33 steals and just 27 turnovers in 839 minutes played. Blackshear scored a career-high 31 points against Cal State Northridge, adding six rebounds and four steals while burying a career-high 6-of-11 three-pointers. He ranks second on the team in free throw percentage, connecting on 74.4 percent from the line. The team captain has scored in double figures in 42 career games and ranks fourth on the team in scoring this season. Blackshear is one of two players to represent the ACC. North Carolina's Marcus Paige was also named a second team selection. The Capital One Academic All-America® program is being financially supported by the NCAA Division I national governance structure to assist CoSIDA with handling the awards fulfillment aspects for the 2014-15 D-I Academic All-America teams program. Capital One 2014-15 Academic All-America ® Men's Basketball Team Division I FIRST TEAM Tyler Harvey, Eastern Washington Chasson Randle, Stanford Shavon Shields, Nebraska Matt Townsend, Yale Thomas van der Mars, Portland SECOND TEAM Alex Barlow, Butler Canyon Barry, Charleston Wayne Blackshear, Louisville Marcus Paige, North Carolina Levi Randolph, Alabama THIRD TEAM Craig Bradshaw, Belmont Johnny Dee, San Diego Mike Gesell, Iowa Jordan Gregory, Montana John Kopriva, George Washington Nigel Williams-Goss, WashingtonNational Republicans have called on Alabama Senate nominee Roy Moore to step aside after allegations of child molestation. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell even upped his call for Moore to quit the race, ditching the if-the-allegations-are-true qualifier and saying he may also support a write-in campaign. Moore doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. And he doesn’t seem particularly worried about McConnell’s opposition. Do McConnell and the national GOP establishment really have so little influence in Alabama? At first glance: Absolutely. McConnell is unpopular among Republicans nationally and probably more so in Alabama. At almost any other time in modern U.S. political history, a congressional leader would likely have had more leverage with his or her party’s voters than McConnell has. Case in point: I tried to find the worst net approval or net favorable ratings in live-interview polls for every speaker of the House and Senate majority leader since 1981. I then looked only at how members of their own party viewed these leaders. In the table, I’ve taken an average of McConnell’s ratings in the latest survey across all pollsters (i.e. not just live interviews) over the past three months and McConnell’s ratings among Trump voters in an Alabama survey taken this past week. Trump voters in Alabama really dislike Mitch McConnell How approval of Mitch McConnell among Republicans nationally and Trump voters in Alabama compares with previous congressional leaders’ lowest net approval rating among members of their own party Mitch McConnell’s current approval rating DATE POSITIVE NEGATIVE NET National (all Republicans) Aug. 14 – Nov. 14, 2017 30% 41% -12 Alabama (Trump voters) November 2017 18 66 -48 Previous congressional leaders’ lowest net approval among their own party DATE POSITIVE NEGATIVE NET Tip O’Neill May 1985 61% 18% +43 Bill Frist October 2006 50 13 +37 Howard Baker July 1985 45 11 +34 Tom Foley October 1994 42 14 +28 Bob Dole February 1996 41 20 +21 Nancy Pelosi October 2010 53 35 +18 Paul Ryan May 2016 33 18 +15 Newt Gingrich October 1998 38 25 +13 Thomas Daschle January 2002 17 5 +12 Dennis Hastert October 2006 16 7 +9 Trent Lott January 1999 14 8 +6 Harry Reid October 2014 25 25 0 George Mitchell April 1992 13 14 -1 John Boehner August 2015 37 42 -5 Jim Wright May 1989 20 43 -23 All polls taken when leaders were holding their position as leader. All polls with the exception of McConnell’s were conducted via live interview. Numbers may not add up because of rounding. Sources: Roper Center, Change Research McConnell’s -12 percentage point net favorable rating among his party nationally is the second worst since 1981. Only Jim Wright, who had to resign from Congress because of ethics problems, scored worse, at a -23 percentage point net favorable rating with Democrats in a Gallup survey conducted in May 1989, just before he left Congress. Former House Speaker John Boehner, who felt tremendous pressure from conservatives to resign, had a -5 percentage point net favorability rating among Republicans in a Gallup survey just before he stepped down. Newt Gingrich actually had a positive net favorable rating among Republicans, at +13, in a CBS News poll before he was forced out. In Alabama, McConnell looks like he’s in even worse shape. A survey by Change Research, an internet pollster, from late last week asked voters to rate McConnell’s job as majority leader on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being very poor and 10 being excellent. Just 12 percent of all voters gave McConnell a positive score (6 or above). On the other hand, 76 percent of voters disapproved of McConnell (4 or below). That translates to a net approval score of -64 points. McConnell’s numbers are nearly as bad among Moore backers. Only 16 percent approve of McConnell’s job performance in the Change Research survey; 71 percent disapprove. He gets an 18 percent to 66 percent split among Trump voters for a net approval score of -48 percentage points. I suspect those numbers may somewhat exaggerate how many Republicans in Alabama dislike McConnell, but they mostly fit with other data we have. A JMC Analytics survey taken during the Republican Senate primary runoff found that a minuscule 10 percent of Republican voters in Alabama said McConnell’s support made them more likely to vote for Sen. Luther Strange, whom McConnell had endorsed. A near majority, 45 percent, said McConnell’s support made them less likely to vote for Strange. Remember: These are Republicans. So Alabama voters, even Republicans, don’t like McConnell. He could, however, still affect the race. The general election polls are so close at this point that even the smallest movement away from Moore could make a decisive difference. In five surveys conducted since the allegations became public, Moore is averaging 46 percent to Jones’s 44 percent. If just 5 percent of Moore’s current backers — that would be about one-third of the Moore backers who approve of McConnell — switch their vote to Jones, the race flips to Jones being ahead 46 to 44 percent. Then again, it’s possible that many Moore supporters will only become more entrenched in Moore’s camp given their dislike of McConnell. This whole situation with McConnell is unusual. Moore might join the Senate despite an explicit condemnation from his party’s majority leader, perhaps with McConnell backing a write-in Republican. And if Moore wins, it seems like national Republicans may be willing to team up with Democrats to expel Moore from the Senate. The fact that national Republicans led by McConnell have to contemplate such drastic measures stems directly from how little influence they have with their party’s voters — as documented by the fact that Moore is the nominee in the first place. Dhrumil Mehta contributed research.Whether you're brand new to playing the guitar or just want to brush up on the basics these guitar lessons are the best place to start. Beginner Guitar Quick-Start Series Welcome to the Beginner Guitar Quick-Start Series. The lessons in this series were created specifically for students that are brand new to the guitar. You don’t need any previous knowledge to get started with this guitar tutorial. All of the basics are covered for both acoustic and electric guitars. It’s recommended that you start with the first video and go through each video in the order they are presented. The first video will help you learn how to play guitar by providing an overview of the series. From there you will learn how to hold the guitar, the numbering systems of the guitar, the parts of the guitar, the guitar string names, how to tune your guitar, how to strum the guitar, your first guitar chords, two more guitar chords, how to play your first song, musical strumming tips, and where to go from here. If you already have some previous experience playing the guitar this tutorial may still be worthwhile. The lessons will give you an opportunity to review the basics before jumping into another series. If you feel you are ready to move on – check out our lessons on guitar chords, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, or blues guitar. If you want to accelerate your progress we recommend you join Guitareo.com. As a member you'll get access to all of our step-by-step videos, fun play-along songs, live broadcasts, and community support. You can find out more by watching the video here.SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc and Time Warner Inc are “closing in” on a deal where Yahoo would merge with Time Warner’s AOL Internet unit, brushing aside Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo, a source familiar with the talks said on Wednesday. The source confirmed a Wall Street Journal story saying Yahoo would receive a cash investment from Time Warner in exchange for a 20 percent stake in the combined Yahoo-AOL business. The deal would exclude AOL’s fading dial-up Internet access business and value AOL at about $10 billion. A deal with Time Warner and AOL would be part of a multi-pronged strategy by Yahoo in which it would outsource Web search advertising operations to Google Inc, the source said. Separately, The New York Times reported that Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are in negotiations on making a joint bid for Yahoo. That merger would join Yahoo, Microsoft Corp’s MSN and News Corp’s MySpace, the paper said.This article is from the archive of our partner. For Republicans, there is no shame in an AOL e-mail address. Poll Position surveyed over 1,000 registered voters about their email habits and found that partisan divide extends to e-mail service providers. About 20 percent of Republicans preferred AOL to both Google (19 percent) and Yahoo (16 percent), according to the survey. Those numbers are almost flipped when it comes to Democrats, as they tapped Google (27 percent) as their favorite over Yahoo (25 percent) with only 5 percent choosing to go with AOL. The survey calls to mind Politico's Ben Smith's take on AOL e-mail addresses slowly becoming a status symbol: With the help of some friends on Twitter, here's a list of people who have fairly recently been reachable, often with quirky handles, on their old AOL accounts: POLITICS: David Axelrod, Jim Messina, John Weaver, Joe Trippi, Mandy Grunwald, Dick Morris (a recent defector to gmail), Frank Luntz, Ed Rollins, Guy Cecil, Tad Devine, Al Franken, Aaron Schock MEDIA: Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington (who was holding onto an AOL account long before AOL bought her company), David Brooks, David Corn, Robert Draper, Rick Perlstein, Ann Coulter, Tina Brown, Lawrence O'Donnell And from just chatting around The Atlantic Wire office, we can vouch for Huffington's AOL address but also found more outliers. Specifically Chris Matthews, Al Franken, (and Kelly Bensimon who has to be Democrat, if she has a political party, right?) buck the trend of Democrats opting for Gmail or Yahoo, while Peggy Noonan and Michelle Malkin have been known to use Gchat or Gmail. This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.CELEBRITIES Ironically, I've recently been imagining what the super sexy Selena Gomez must look like South of the Border, I mean, while alone, in my private Fortress of Fapitude, then, along comes these amazing pictures of Selena Gomez, the covergirl from the August edition of Elle Mexico, and now the imagination is really taken off. Having just turned the ripe old age of 19, this ripe young beauty and self-described pop music singer really is getting all kinds of mature and advanced sextastic. It's nearly almost time for our little sexy fledgling to leave the nest, ditch the Devil's Midget boyfriend of hers, and fly toward her ultimate destiny of super hot nekkid pictorial awesomeness. On that day, the angels shall sing. Enjoy. Photo credit:Steven Gomillion and Dennis Leupold for Elle MexicoRights lawyer and activist Rajia Omran confirms to Ahram Online from the Heliopolis Hospital morgue that 23-year-old protester Mohamed Hussein Korani was killed during Friday’s clashes near the Presidential Palace. According to hospital officials, the slain protester sustained gunshot wounds to the neck and chest. An official announcement has yet to be made regarding Korani’s death. 21:25 Ahram Online’s Bel Trew reports seeing a waiter at a cafe located on Heliopolis’ Khalifa Mamoun Street being shot at close range by shotgun-wielding security forces. He was later dragged into the cafe before being taken away in an ambulance. 21:06 April 6 co-founder Ahmed Maher tells Al-Ahram’s Arabic-language news website that violent protests would “eventually backfire” against the revolution. “I condemn the violence in front of the Presidential Palace,” Maher said. “Those who think violence will bring down the regime are delusional, as this will only raise sympathy for Morsi on the Egyptian street.” He added: “The revolution’s main point of strength
thing is branded events, could this mean the return of Sonic Boom for the US and Summer of Sonic for the UK? Or even the day Sonic decided to go to Mercedes Benz World a few years ago. We’ll keep you upto date with more news as we get it. Source: ToyWorld MagRideshare driver carjacked at gunpoint, forced to drive to Richmond In this file photo, three Uber cars in a row are seen in San Francisco. A rideshare driver was allegedly carjacked at gunpoint and forced to drive from San Francisco to Richmond. In this file photo, three Uber cars in a row are seen in San Francisco. A rideshare driver was allegedly carjacked at gunpoint and forced to drive from San Francisco to Richmond. Photo: Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 45 Caption Close Rideshare driver carjacked at gunpoint, forced to drive to Richmond 1 / 45 Back to Gallery SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A driver for a rideshare company was allegedly carjacked at gunpoint on Saturday and forced to drive from San Francisco to Richmond, police said Tuesday. The incident occurred around 6:40 p.m. when the driver, a 26-year-old man, was in San Francisco's Richmond District at 21st Avenue and Anza Street. Two suspects, a man and a woman, got into the car and asked for a ride. The man then brandished a gun and ordered the driver to drive to Richmond. When they arrived in Richmond, the suspect ordered the driver out of the car. The suspects fled in the victim's car and the victim fled the area on foot, according to police. No arrest had been reported as of this morning.Plunging oil prices are set to hit the electric car industry hard, but Tesla vehicles won't be the worst affected, says CEO Elon Musk. "[The] industry as a whole, I think, will definitely suffer from lower oil prices," Musk told CNN's Kristie Lu Stout on Monday. "It just makes economic sense." The drop in the cost of fuel has already filtered through into the U.S. auto market, where sales of gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs rose last year. Oil has continued its steep descent this year, sinking last week to its lowest level in more than 12 years. Musk, a prominent advocate for alternative energy, says Tesla's high-end vehicles are better placed to weather the effects of the oil slump than cheaper rivals. "It probably affects us a little less because we have quite significant product differentiation," he told CNN, warning that lower priced electric vehicles will "take a pretty big hit." Related: Low gas prices boost SUV and pickup sales Tesla is pitching its planned Model 3 as more of a mass market car than its two predecessors, with an expected starting price of $34,000. But Musk said he was bullish about its prospects. "Even if the economics of oil favor gasoline, I think the Model 3 still does well," he said. "It's more cases where there is little to no differentiation between the gasoline version of something and the electric version. If they're about the same, and the electric version doesn't have a compelling economic proposition, then you've got a real issue in the market." Musk, who also owns a significant stake in Solar City, a solar panel maker, said he would welcome a strong push from rivals, including GM (GM)'s Chevrolet Bolt. Related: OPEC bashes prospects for electric cars "I think if GM or any other companies come out with compelling electric cars, that's good for the world and we would applaud that," he told CNN. Speaking in Hong Kong, he said the electric vehicle market in China was just beginning to grow but moving in the right direction. Some Chinese companies are getting "good traction" towards creating good electric cars, he said, giving a nod to automaker BYD, which is backed by Warren Buffett. Tesla is still trying to figure out how to set up production of its vehicles in China, a challenging market for the company where its sales have disappointed. Related: Tesla vows to ramp up deliveries in 2016 "Right now our cars in China are coming in with quite high import duty and we're not eligible for local incentives," he said "All our sales in China are effectively at quite a high penalty but that will be alleviated when we move to local production." Musk said the Model 3 "will eventually be made in China" but estimated it would be "close to three years" before that's likely to happen. Related: New taxes threaten Tesla sales in key European markets Government policies in China, the world's largest polluter, are inevitably moving toward reducing emissions, favoring electric vehicles, he said. "I think there is an understanding by the Chinese government that [electric vehicles] are important to the future," Musk said. "In order to have clean air in cities, you have to go electric."Despite best intentions, organic farming is harming, not helping, the environment. An organic milk brand recently acquired by Danone. (Photo: Brennan Linsley, AP) The food at your supermarket is changing. The biggest food giants are investing more in organic produce. French multinational Danone just spent $10 billion buying WhiteWave Foods, an American producer of dairy alternatives and organic foods. Stressing the importance of organics, the Danone CEO says: “The reality has changed on the shelf.” Organic food has become the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. food industry, with sales that increase by double digits annually. That’s a lot of kale flying off the shelves. Buying it makes us feel like we’re helping ourselves and the planet. But here’s the truth: There are no health benefits from eating organic food. And it is likely worse for the environment. An organic label sends our skepticism and good sense out the window. Consumers in one study were given two sets of absolutely identical food items, with one set marked “organic” and one not. They declared the food they believed to be “organic” to be lower in calories and more nutritious, and were willing to pay 16% to 23% more. It’s called the “health halo” effect. Back in 2012, Stanford University’s Center for Health Policy did the largest comparison of four decades worth of research comparing organic and regular food. They expected to find evidence that organics were nutritionally superior. Their conclusion: “Despite the widespread perception that organically produced foods are more nutritious than conventional alternatives, we did not find robust evidence to support this perception.” A brand new review this year shows the same thing: “Results of scientific studies do not show that organic products are more nutritious and safer than conventional foods.” That’s fine, many people will say. I don’t eat organics because of the health benefits but because I care about the planet. But this is even more misguided. Yes, organic farming will mean that in one field, a farmer will use less energy, create fewer greenhouse gases and have less nitrogen leaking. But consider the bigger picture. Organic farming is much, much less efficient than regular old farming. Our farmer needs more fields to grow the same amount of produce. Not just because going organic means less fertilizer and more bugs and pests, but also because the land needs to lie empty or be planted with legumes to rebuild fertility between crop cycles. A big study in Europe found that to produce the same gallon of milk organically, you need 59% more land. To produce meat, you need 82% more land, and for crops, it is more than 200%. That adds up to a lot of forest and nature being turned into farms for people in Portland, Ore., or Providence, R.I., to feel better about their choices at the supermarket. If U.S. agricultural production were entirely organic, it would mean we'd need to convert an area bigger than the size of California to farmland. It is the same as eradicating all parklands and wild lands in the lower 48 states. Moreover, by eating something organic, you are actually responsible for about as many greenhouse gas emissions as if you had chosen a regular product. Those are the gases that cause global warming. And organic products mean more of some other bad environmental things: about 10% more nitrous oxide, ammonia and acidification, while contributing almost 50% more to nitrogen leaching. POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media At least going organic means that we avoid nasty pesticides, right? Wrong. Organic farming can use any so-called natural pesticide. This even includes copper sulfate, which Cornell University describes as “highly toxic to fish” even at recommended rates, and which has caused liver disease in France. Or Pyrethrin, which is “extremely toxic to fish," “highly toxic to bees”, and has been linked to an increase in leukemia among farmers. Of course, conventional, non-organic foods carry a higher risk of pesticide contamination. Rough calculations suggest that all the pesticides used in America could cause about 20 extra cancer deaths per year. You have a similar chance each year of being mauled to death by a cow. Compare this with the deaths from going organic. If the entire USA were fed on organic produce, it would cost $200 billion more annually. This is money we couldn’t spend on things that matter. When a nation becomes $15 million poorer, research shows that it costs one statistical life. For example, people who are worse off are less likely to pay for a doctor’s visit. What this means is that going fully organic would kill more than 13,000 people each year. Think about organics beyond the USA. The world’s poorest inhabitants need cheaper food, which means more efficient farming. Better access to regulated fertilizers and pesticides is needed, not less. Organics are not better for your health, worse for nature and the planet, and terrible for the world’s poor. What it boils down to is the world’s richest people spending their cash to support less efficient farming practices, to feel better about their choices. An organic label should inspire a dose of healthy skepticism. Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School. Follow him on Twitter: @BjornLomborg In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page and follow us on Twitter @USATOpinion. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2b8WqOUBy Ron Cowen of Nature magazine A chemical analysis of lunar rocks may force scientists to revise the leading theory for the Moon's formation: that the satellite was born when a Mars-sized body smacked into the infant Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. If that were the case, the Moon ought to bear the chemical signature of both Earth and its proposed'second' parent. But a study published today in Nature Geoscience suggests that the Moon's isotopic composition reflects only Earth's contribution. Junjun Zhang at the University of Chicago in Illinois and her colleagues used a mass spectrometer to make the most precise measurement so far of the relative abundance of titanium-50 and titanium-47 in Moon rocks gathered by the Apollo missions in the 1970s. The authors report that the lunar ratio of the two isotopes is identical to that found in Earth's mantle, within about 4 parts per million. This presents a conundrum for the lunar-formation model, Zhang says, because any Mars-sized body that might have collided with the fledgling Earth is believed to have been chemically distinct. Studies of meteorites -- the modern stand-ins for planet-sized bodies that once roamed the Solar System -- indicate that such objects had an isotopic titanium abundance that could have deviated from the terrestrial value by as much as 600 parts per million. And because simulations suggest that the second body contributed more than 40% of the Moon's bulk, the lunar isotopic ratio shouldn't mirror the terrestrial value so closely. Vapor trail Zhang and colleagues' chemical analysis is not the first to challenge the theory. Researchers have long known that the isotopic ratio of oxygen in Moon rocks bears the same signature as Earth's mantle. But because oxygen is easily vaporized in a collision, it could have been readily exchanged between Earth and the cloud of vapor and magma that was produced by the impact and coalesced to form the moon, allowing both bodies to reach the same isotopic abundance. Titanium does not vaporize as easily and it would have been more difficult -- although not impossible -- for both bodies to have reached the same ratio, notes Zhang. "That's why this is not just another similarity between Earth and the Moon," but a finding to be reckoned with, notes planetary scientist Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Other models that merit consideration, Zhang says, include the fission model, according to which the Moon was spun out of Earth's mantle early on, when the planet's centrifugal force might have exceeded its gravitational force. But Canup says that although the collision model may need revision, it need not be abandoned. She has modeled a collision between Earth and a renegade protoplanet about twice the mass of Mars -- heavier than previously considered. A more massive second body would have substantially altered Earth's original isotopic composition, leading to a newborn Moon and evolving Earth that are more similar than in previous simulations. Zhang agrees there are still ways for the collision model to work. If the fledgling Moon had cooled more slowly than assumed, there could have been enough time for an exchange of titanium isotopes between the cloud of vapor and magma and the Earth. In their most recent simulation of the moon's formation after a giant impact, Canup and her colleague Julien Salmon found evidence of a longer formation time. They presented the findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, on 22 March. "Our study cannot provide a definite answer to the origin of the Moon yet," says Zhang. "The message we hope to convey is that isotopic homogeneity between the Earth and Moon is a fundamental new constraint on the evolution of the Earth-Moon system." This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on March 25, 2012.If you have seen someone dressed as a clown walking around Huntingdon County the state police want to hear from you. READ MORE: Spooky clown sightings unsettle Pa. towns: Why we're afraid A news release issued on Wednesday morning referred to "clown sightings" at "various locations" in the county. Police did not say exactly where or when the clown was spotted. Police said that no threats have been made by the individual. Anyone who sees an individual dressed as a clown on their property or walking along county roads is asked to immediately call troopers and not interact with the person, police said. "The public is advised to use restraint and allow the police to handle the situation," according to a news release. The state police in Huntingdon can be reached at 814-627-3161. Police did not provide a description of the clown. Further information was not immediately available. Authorities in the Carolinas have recently received at least a dozen reports of someone dress as a clown acting strangely. A woman in Cambria County said she saw someone dressed a clown looking through her window on Monday, according to a report in the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat.Every day, people who are dating or in relationships where there’s unavailability or other issues, come up against hinting, you know indirectly or slightly indicating something. In essence, we receive feedback and signals from the actions and words of our partners that let’s us know what’s up…if we’re listening and watching. You always know you’re up against hinting when: – You’re making excuses for their behaviour or are even making excuses for their excuses. – You make a lot of assumptions that you don’t sanity check and adjust accordingly. – You deny, rationalise, and minimise which then means that hints become a blank canvas for your overactive imagination. – Certain things have been said that you don’t like or want to believe, which you then spend copious amounts of time and energy analysing and ruminating over. – You’ve decided that until they spell it out, loud and clear and even get a whole heap of nasty on you, that not only are you still in with a chance, but that you don’t fully believe what they’ve been ‘hinting’ at because they haven’t said it. Hinting is a clue. Actions and words (or the lack of them) give a clue, as do certain situations. Where there’s one clue there are other clues, but the truth is, often just one clue alone is giving you vital information. We used to love the British game show Catchphrase. Contestants were presented with a hidden image of a catchphrase and the computer would remove jigsaw like pieces one at a time, and they’d have to try and guess what the image said. The less pieces revealed, the more money you won. We’d be killing ourselves laughing when the host Roy Walker would get distinctly impatient when practically the whole image was there and they were still struggling. “Say what you see, say what you see!” he’d say tersely in his Northern Irish accent. Well hinting in dating and relationships is very much like Catchphrase – the more clues you have to collect before you take the hint, the less of a relationship you have and the deeper you are into an unhealthy situation, either because they’re at best taking advantage of and at worst abusing you, or because by refusing to take the hints, you’ve ended up acting without self-love, care, trust, and respect towards yourself. It’s your job as the person in charge of navigating your own life and setting and knowing your own boundaries, to be listening, watching, and acting upon those clues. The most popular argument that people who won’t take the hint make, is that they believe that if someone for example wants to communicate “I don’t want a relationship” or “I’m not ready” or “I’m not interested” or “I’m not leaving my partner” or “I only want you for a shag, an ego stroke, or a shoulder to lean on”, that they should say this directly. Stop bullshitting yourself. Putting it all on someone else to spell it out, is major avoidance of responsibility and accountability. You’re also saying that you don’t trust yourself to take the hint. When you’re dealing with someone who is either conflict avoidant and/or afraid of endangering a shag/ego stroke/shoulder to lean on/money/ or even a job, they’re going to hint. Expecting a direct statement is like saying “I know they’ve not been calling, failing to show up, pissing me around, telling lies, and all sorts of Future Faking, but what if I have it wrong? Yeah I’ll just wait for them to tell me that they don’t want to be with me or that they’re not going to commit.” What the frickin what now? They’re already showing you and possibly even telling you in their own airy, fairy rinky dink way that they don’t want to be with you and that they’re not going to commit! When someone isn’t calling you, it’s a clue that…yeah, they’re not calling you, which means they’re not making the effort communication wise and are actually being disrespectful. When someone only calls you when they want to hook up, it’s a clue that they only contact you to pave the way for a shag. When someone doesn’t show up, unless they’re in a coma, it shows disrespect and disinterest. When someone disappears, it is a clue that they’re a coward. If they try to come back and press the Reset Button, it’s a sign they’re manipulative coward. When someone is married/attached and is trying to shag you or you’re already in an affair with them, it’s a clue that not only are they avoiding commitment, but that when they experience problems, whether it’s within themselves or their relationship, that they avoid them. When they’re always drunk whenever you’re together or they’ve admitted that they have an addiction of some sort, or are clearly negatively impacted by their reliance on something, it’s a clue to get the hell out of dodge and that this person solves internal issues with external solutions. When they’re telling you lies, it’s a clue that they’re dishonest. When they’ve recently broken up with their ex, it’s a clue that they’re likely not over their ex which means you should be alert for subsequent clues. When your partner hints that they’re gay or you even see them hitting on someone of the same sex or know that they’ve actually been sleeping with them, it’s a clue that you need to bounce unless you’re OK with this type of relationship. It shouldn’t take you having to find them literally having sex for you to take the hint! When someone Future Fakes you and the future arrives without them making good on all of their grand talk, it’s a sign that this person is full of hot air. Instead of wondering what you did to scare away plans that were never going to happen, you should be taking the clue that that this person is all shirt no trousers. When they’re being nasty, controlling, manipulative, abusive etc, it’s a clue that you’re in danger and need to exit, fast. You shouldn’t be waiting for them to put you in serious danger before you take them seriously. When they act like a jackass to try to get you to finish it, it’s a clue that they want to end it, they just want you to do the dirty work. Either way, you have a relationship on your hands that needs to end. When someone keeps breaking the relationship, it’s a clue that they don’t value you and that they also feel free to leave and return. Stop waiting for them to be nasty and say it’s definitively over – you end it! When they say: “I can’t give you what you want” “I love you but I’m not in love with you.” “I’m bad news.” “I don’t want to hurt you.” “I’m really busy.” “I need more time.” “What’s a nice girl like you doing with a guy like me?” “I don’t have time for a relationship.” “Let’s be friends.” “You know my situation.” “You deserve better.” “I just want to keep it casual” and other such guff, it’s a clue that they’re unavailable for an available relationship and have commitment issues. It’s important that you listen, watch, and process the clues in your relationship because what hinters do is give you what they feel is a heads up about who they really are. It may be what you perceive to be a ‘weak’ hint, but it’s a hint and lo and behold, when you get medieval on them about messing you around, they’ll remind you that they said “I’m not in a good place right now” or that surely with all of their dodgy behaviour, you should have ‘known’ that they weren’t committing or even decent kind. Listen to the feedback from your relationship and take the hint so that you stop selling yourself short. Trust the hint, trust your judgement. Your thoughts? Check out my book and ebook Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl in my bookshop.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. June 29, 2016, 7:27 PM GMT / Updated June 29, 2016, 11:50 PM GMT By William M. Arkin and Robert Windrem Senior U.S. intelligence officials tell NBC News that there are a half-dozen pressing reasons why ISIS would choose to send three suicide bombers to attack the Istanbul airport. They say that the terror group, which has recently lost territory from its caliphate in Syria and Iraq, is sending a signal to its northern neighbor because: A Turkish offensive against ISIS that started last July and accelerated in October, after an ISIS bombing killed more than 100 civilians in Turkey’s capital city of Ankara, the deadliest terrorist attack in Turkey’s history. Turkish bombers also began taking part in the international coalition airstrikes against ISIS targets. Earlier this month, Turkish courts sentenced three ISIS terrorists to 10 life sentences for a March 2014 attack in Turkey. The prison sentences were the first imposed on ISIS members by Turkey. A recent agreement between Turkey and Israel to reinvigorate relations, which had been damaged by a 2010 Israeli raid on a Gaza aid ship that killed 10 Turkish activists. The Iraqi offensive against ISIS forces in Fallujah, which portends an even larger battle in the near future to retake a much larger prize, the city of Mosul, Gaps in Turkish law that make it hard for the country to crack down on ISIS fighters inside its borders. The 1000 Turkish nationals who are fighting for ISIS in Iraq and Syria, who are angry at their own government and are available for missions inside Turkish borders. Though the Ankara government faces two active internal terrorist groups — the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C), a leftist anti-NATO group that seeks the overthrow of the Turkish state — the U.S. analysts point out that ISIS activity is not only the largest threat but the most pervasive threat. The U.S. officials, who spoke to NBC News on a not-for-attribution basis, stressed that there is an ongoing Turkish-ISIS battle inside Turkey that is occurring largely out of public sight. Firefighters try to extinguish the flames at the scene of a car bomb detonation close to buildings of the Turkish military, in Ankara, capital of Turkey, on Feb. 17 2016. STR / EPA Turkey has increased its surveillance and apprehension of possible fighters attempting movement or operations in the country. Turkey, U.S. officials say, is the most important chokepoint in the flow of both indigenous ISIS and foreign terrorist fighters. ISIS itself, U.S. intelligence assesses, has aggressively increased its activity and attacks on Turkish soil in an effort to protect its most important external line of communication through the country to the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. According to U.S. intelligence, more than 1,300 ISIS suspects have been detained by Turkish police in the past year, some 350 of whom were arrested. Nearly all were Turkish nationals. And since the July offensive began, Turkish military units along the Syrian border have apprehended more than 150,000 individuals, mostly refugees, attempting to cross illegally. Of the 150,000, most were refugees, but about 1.6 percent were deemed terror suspects. Some were arrested and some were not allowed to cross. Turkey also deported 2,337 suspected foreign terrorist fighters from 85 countries caught at the border in 2015, according to the U.S. State Department. The Istanbul airport attacks, U.S. officials stress, are not just tied to the domestic battle between Ankara and the so-called Islamic state, but also need to be understood in terms of internal Turkish politics. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last year that the PKK and its Kurdish affiliates in Syria were more of a threat to Turkey than the Islamic State, an opinion shared by the Turkish Army. But other Turkish officials, U.S. sources say, strongly disagree with Erdogan’s assessment. U.S. intelligence officials estimate that there are approximately 4,000 to 5,000 PKK members, most located in northern Iraq, while ISIS fighters and sympathizers number in the tens of thousands. Turkey also faces some difficult internal legal impediments to international counter-terrorism, according to U.S. sources. Legislation defines terrorism narrowly as a crime targeting the Turkish state or citizens, and not all courts have interpreted the term more to include all activities associated with foreign terrorist fighters transiting Turkey, including ISIS facilitation networks. Turkish rescue services outside Ataturk International airport on Tuesday night. Emrah Gurel / AP Some are even invoking the specter of Pakistan in Turkey’s tendency to deport ISIS fighters from other countries while tolerating the terror group’s support networks on its own soil. A senior U.S. military official who has been involved in the anti-ISIS campaign since its beginning in 2014 warns that the lesson from Istanbul might be that the American press and political leaders not digest their own propaganda about success against ISIS. “The conventional wisdom is always that attacks are staged in an effort to assert a narrative of victory in the face of losses of territory in Iraq and Syria,” the official says. “Meanwhile, our self-congratulating pats on the back ignore that this global insurgency consistently gains strength and sophistication.”When does Ebola look like a gift? Apparently, when you are a Republican candidate for the Senate who sees it as a handy pretext for bringing up immigration politics while scaring people into voting for you. Thom Tillis, in a campaign debate in North Carolina with Senator Kay Hagan, put it this way: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got an Ebola outbreak. We have bad actors that can come across the border. We need to seal the border.” In New Hampshire, Scott Brown started off by conjuring up ISIS fighters slipping through spongy borders, then casually switched to Ebola-sickened hordes. “One of the reasons why I have been so adamant about closing our border,” he said, “is because if people are coming through normal channels—can you imagine what they can do through a porous border?” Both ISIS and Ebola provoke enough anxiety for most people to contemplate them without being goaded. There are, however, no reported instances of Ebola-infected immigrants crossing illegally from Mexico, and, with ISIS fighters busy in Iraq and Syria, it’s possible but not likely that they’re hanging out in Ciudad Juárez, planning a raid on Arizona, as Representative Trent Franks maintains. But, as Franks and his fellow-Republicans demonstrated, you don’t need to construct a plausible or even a coherent scenario to deploy such threats for political ends. The Democrats were not entirely immune from such temptation. Campaign ads and a few candidates—including Senator Mark Udall, of Colorado—implied that Ebola surveillance would have been better coördinated if the Republicans hadn’t managed to cut the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That apportionment of blame wasn’t strictly accurate. Funding for the N.I.H. and the C.D.C. hasn’t always kept pace with inflation in recent years, but, in some budgets, Congress allocated them more money than the Obama Administration had requested. Still, at least such tactics centered on the agencies responsible, and didn’t engage in the old practice of conflating disease and foreignness. The medical historian Howard Markel notes that “Chinese immigrants were once linked to bubonic plague and hookworm, Mexicans were thought to be infested with lice, and Russian Jews were seen as somehow especially vulnerable to tuberculosis and—a favorite wastebasket diagnosis of nativists in the early 1900s—‘poor physique.’ ” Taking advantage of such associations, which were almost never based on legitimate science, nativists helped pass the Immigration Act of 1924, the racist law that imposed quotas on the basis of national origin—Asians were completely excluded—and governed U.S. immigration until 1965. Senator Patrick McCarran, of Nevada, a co-sponsor of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which, among other provisions, made it easier to bar immigrants who had chronic diseases, offered a metaphor that made explicit immigration law’s preoccupation with purity. Immigration was a stream, he said, adding that if it “is healthy, the impact on our society is salutary; but if that stream is polluted our institutions and our way of life become infected.” Politicians now know better than to talk openly about immigration in terms of purity and contagion, but they still make the connection. This summer, as unaccompanied minors from Central America began arriving in large numbers at the border, Representative Phil Gingrey, of Georgia—a doctor, as it happens—wrote a letter to the C.D.C. in which he said that the influx “poses many risks, including grave public health threats,” and claimed that many of the children lacked basic vaccinations such as those for measles. In fact, the vaccination rates for measles in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico are around ninety per cent, which means that children from those countries are about as likely to be vaccinated as children in the United States are. Undoubtedly, some of the kids were sick, or suffering from malnutrition and other ailments associated with poverty, but they were not an invading army of germ warriors. President Obama tried to keep immigration politics out of the midterm elections; in September, the Washington Post reported that he had decided not to take the executive action on immigration reform which he had promised—protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation—until after the midterms, “acquiescing to Democrats’ fears that such a move would damage their prospects for maintaining control of the U.S. Senate.” Meanwhile, the Administration announced plans to build an enormous detention camp for women and children who enter the country from Mexico without documentation. It will be situated in South Texas and operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company with a controversial record. In 2009, the Administration stopped housing families in a similar facility that the company ran in Texas, the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, following widespread criticism and a lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U. which asserted that harsh, prisonlike conditions were harming the mental health of the children held there. Federal immigration officials found many “deficiencies,” including inadequate sanitation and an over-all attitude of “disinterest and complacency.” But somehow we’re back in a political moment when the privately contracted detention of children seems like good immigration policy. While fears of Ebola—a disease from which one person in the United States has died—clouded the campaign like one of those imaginary miasmas to which doctors once attributed illness, real dangers seemed to slip from view. The latest school shooting, on October 24th, in Washington State, generated almost no discussion on the campaign trail, especially not of gun control. Just a week earlier, researchers affiliated with the Harvard School of Public Health had published findings showing that mass shootings in the United States—those in which the shooter did not generally know the victims, and in which at least four people were killed—have tripled since 2011. Over the past three years, a mass shooting has occurred, on average, every sixty-four days; over the previous twenty-nine years, one occurred every two hundred days. Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman, who became a gun-control advocate after she was wounded in a shooting in which six people died, toured the country in the run-up to the elections, calling for tighter legislation in order to help save lives. Not a single candidate joined her. ♦Canada's new defence minister is warning against haste in coming to a decision to replace six CF-18 warplanes with new military trainers. In an interview with CBC News, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said Canada must be cautious in assigning troops to a new training mission and carefully select its partners, both on the ground in Iraq and in the allied coalition. "When we make this decision, it's going to have a meaningful impact and not create other problem for us," he said, warning against a negative "ripple effect." Sajjan said the role is important — crucial even — and must not be dismissed as an inconsequential military effort. "It's going to be a meaningful contribution to the fight against ISIS," said Sajjan. "And in our opinion, the training mission is the one to do it." Sajjan said training was a perhaps overlooked effort, one that has the potential to be a game-changer in Iraq. The ability of ISIS fighters to take ground came as a result of Iraqi military failures, Sajjan said. The force simply crumbled in the face of the extremist forces. "So if we do not focus on the training mission, imagine where are we going to be? The end result has to be with them, not only regaining the ground, but also then holding it as well," Sajjan said. Re-tooling Canada's mission Canada currently has 69 special forces trainers based in the northern part of Iraq on what is known as an advise-and-assist mission with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. The Kurdish region is semi-autonomous inside Iraq, but the central government, such as it is, has not let go of its claim to that territory. Any expanded Canadian effort in the Kurdish region risks inflaming tensions in Baghdad and in Ankara, the capital of neighbouring Turkey, which has for decades had its own trouble with Kurdish national ambitions. Harjit Sajjan talks to the CBC's James Cudmore about the expansion of Canada's training mission in northern Iraq 1:15 There are other potential partners in Iraq, but they're also problematic. The national army is a largely Shia force whose own alleged excesses against Sunni Iraqi civilians are said to have contributed to early support in Iraq for the forces of the Islamic State. There are Shia forces, but some are deeply allied with the Iranian regime and are trained and supported by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Sunni militias are also active in Iraq, but it too is a force with its own agenda, one that might align today with Canada's but perhaps not tomorrow. Sajjan says the government is aware of this challenge and looking at ways to best ensure its forces contribute to the defeat of ISIS and without fomenting sectarian tensions. "We're very mindful of the political dynamics that are at play," the defence minister said. "But we want to make it very clear: Our contribution that we're doing is to take the fight to ISIS … making sure that when we make this decision, it's going to have that meaningful impact and not create other problems for us," Sajjan said. Canada's impact The former soldier and police officer said his own experiences, including fighting gangs in Vancouver and the Taliban in Afghanistan, have led him to understand the importance of tribalism and sectarianism and its role in insurgency and violence. "We have to understand that it's not just one issue, everything is interconnected and we have to understand those linkages," Sajjan said. "If we don't, we're not going to be able to assess when we do something, is it going to create the positive impact that we want? "Because the last thing we want to do is do something that's going to think we're going to create a positive impact, but it actually creates a negative one." The minister offered no new information about the size or composition of the new training force. All the options are still on the table, Sajjan said. But the prime minister has hinted broadly the training effort would resemble the 800-strong force deployed to Afghanistan following the end of combat for Canada there in July 2011. Canada's contribution there was part of a much larger NATO-led training mission in Afghanistan comprising soldiers from more than 40 nations. Sajjan says he expects a similar coalition-style training mission will eventually be cobbled together to support anti-ISIS efforts in Iraq. "I trust in the entire military leadership with all the countries involved, that they've already been seized on this and looking at the wider picture," Sajjan said.Over at Popehat, Ken has posted
the European Court of Justice, Koen Lenaerts, explains how the top court of the European Union works and its role in deepening EU integration. He discusses why the court’s decision to annul Safe Harbor data transfer agreement between the EU and the U.S. “is not about judging the U.S. system,” but about upholding fundamental rights that “Europe should not be ashamed of.” As was the case with the eurozone crisis, which led to new legislation which was then challenged in court, Mr. Lenaerts expects more cases coming up to challenge the decisions taken to address Europe’s ongoing migration crisis. “Whatever people might think at first glance, the process of European integration is deepening at a remarkable speed,” he said. Our story from the interview is here. Over the jump, an edited transcript of the interviewGRIDLOCK in urban areas is costing car-commuting households £4.4bn a year, according to a report which analysed traffic jams in Yorkshire’s four biggest cities. The study, published today, looks at the impact of congestion in the UK’s largest 18 urban areas, including Bradford and Leeds, Hull and Sheffield. Gridlock in urban areas is said to be costing car-commuting households �4.4 billion a year It found the average driver in these areas spends 40 hours a year stuck in traffic jams while in London the figure was twice as high. Congestion in the capital accounted for £2bn of the overall annual £4.4bn cost, according to the report by traffic information company Inrix and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr). The overall national cost was made up from three different figures – first, the cost of fuel wasted, which was £441m or £53 per household; secondly, the direct cost to the economy of commuter time wasted in traffic jams, which was said to be £2.79bn; and, finally, the indirect cost to household through higher bills, which was said to be £1.19bn, or £108 per household. The household bills figure was compiled from higher freight and business fees as a result of company vehicles being stuck in traffic, with the additional costs being passed on to households. The report says: “In the UK more than 70 per cent of the workforce commutes to work by car during peak times, with the average British driver spending 40 hours stuck in gridlock annually. “This congestion has both a direct and indirect impact on car commuting households. “The time spent idling in traffic rather than being productive at work, as well as the fuel burned, can weigh heavily on the driver’s wallet. “Indirectly, higher freighting and business fees as a result of company vehicles being stuck in traffic can pass on additional costs to household bills.” As well as London, the urban areas in the study included Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford-Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The rest of the areas were Hull, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Nottingham, Portsmouth, Sheffield and Stoke-on-Trent. Inrix’s European director, Matt Simmons, said: “Millions commute to work by car every day and these findings expose the significant economic impact gridlock is having on the UK economy. “Congestion is reducing productivity, leaving commuters with higher bills and less time, as well as damaging the environment. “With debates around HS2 and the UK’s transport infrastructure, it is time to take action. By utilising ‘big data’ to make sense of traffic intelligence on vehicle movement, bottlenecks and congestion, Britain can address the challenges facing its road network and the millions that depend upon it.” The report attempts to measure the environmental cost of congestion and reveals that every year vehicles idling in traffic in the UK, France and Germany release 1,894 kilotons of CO2, the equivalent to the carbon footprint of 120 thousand households. Offsetting this pollution would require planting 189 million broad leaf trees covering 767 thousand square metres, equivalent to an area half the size of Greater London. Mr Simmons said: “These findings demonstrate a clear economic and environmental case for the UK to harness the use of traffic data to plan, manage and tackle the problem of congestion, which is not only putting pressure on individual households who are struggling to make ends meet, but also costing billions to the economy. “Looking at these challenges in a more intelligent way to tackle the issue of congestion could help to trigger growth in the UK economy.Get the biggest Chelsea 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 Chelsea are ready to offer David Luiz as part of a swap deal to land Bayern Munich striker Mario Mandzukic. As Mirror Sport reported last month, Jose Mourinho is prepared to sell Luiz, and Bayern believe they can see off boss Pep Guardiola's former club Barcelona to grab the £30million-rated Brazil defender. But Mourinho, who will land Atletico Madrid hitman Diego Costa after next weekend's Champions League Final, wants Mandzukic included in any deal. The 27-year-old Croatian is being rendered surplus to requirements at the Allianz Arena by the summer arrival of Borussia Dortmund's Robert Lewandowski. And with Mourinho seeking two top-class front options after bewailing his lack of a "real striker" this term, the Blues' boss sees the former Dinamo Zagreb and Wolfsburg man as the ideal option. Despite scoring 33 Bundesliga goals in 54 appearance since his £11m move to Bavaria two years ago, Mandzukic does not fit with Guardiola's model. His instincts, though, very much fit Mourinho's preferred blueprint and Chelsea have been tracking him throughout most of the season. Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now The west Londoners had expected an asking price of up to £25m for the striker, but Bayern's move for Luiz - who had been expected to move to Barca - allowed them to make their counter-offer. This would see Bayern paying an adjusted fee of around £15m plus Mandzukic in exchange for the Brazilian, who wants to play in his preferred central defensive position, rather than in the heart of the midfield as he has through much of this season. Mandzukic has two years left on his current £3m per season contract and could look to double his salary on a five-year deal. Getting him in as part of a deal for Luiz would help Chelsea in their Financial Fair Play calculations. Mourinho is under orders to balance any spending over and above the Costa deal with outgoings.From Dwarf Fortress Wiki This article is about an older version of DF. More Info A medium-sized reptile with a large shell. It can retreat into its shell to escape predators. Giant tortoises are the "mundane" version of gigantic tortoises. They appear in groups of 5-10 in tropical areas, and can live up to 200 years. When fully grown, male giant tortoises are roughly as large as a common donkey, and twice the size of female giant tortoises. All giant tortoises are equally slow, moving at less than a third of the default speed. Giant tortoises can be tamed and kept as low-value pets, farmed for eggs, or bred for a meat industry. They produce a moderate amount of meat without tying up your pastureland, and their shells can prove valuable for fulfilling strange mood requests. Note, however, that giant tortoises require five years to reach full adult size. Interestingly, only males seem to produce nose cartilage when butchered (which currently has no real use, and there are far better ways to determine gender).The yacht of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, the Eclipse, is seen moored on Sept. 4, 2013, near the French riviera. One of the world’s most expensive yachts, owned by a Russian billionaire with close ties to the Kremlin, sailed into Palm Beach days ahead of President Trump’s arrival. The 533-foot Eclipse comes equipped with a pool, helipad, submarine and room for a crew of 92. The mega-yacht, owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and worth between $400 million to $500 million, arrived in Florida on Friday, according to the Palm Beach Post. It’s expected to spend two weeks docked about 8 miles from the President’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where Trump is expected to spend Thanksgiving. Trump implores ‘loser’ Hillary Clinton to challenge him in 2020 Earlier this year, Trump, who frequently travels to his own properties, hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the seaside mansion. Abramovich, 51, is considered a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Roman Abramovich. Image by: Clive Mason/Getty Images He has met several times socially with Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Their wives are good friends, according to security clearance forms filled out by Kushner and Ivanka Trump. In 2014, Kushner and Ivanka Trump spent four days in Russia at the invitation of Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova, according to Bloomberg News. Sessions mocks investigation into meetings with Russian officials “There’s no oligarch among those still accepted in the West who’s closer and more trusted by Putin than Abramovich,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil magnate, told Bloomberg. Kushner and others involved in the Trump campaign are under scrutiny as special counsel Robert Mueller investigates the possibility of collusion between the campaign and Moscow during the presidential election.WASHINGTON — President Trump picked a new leader for the Office of Government Ethics on Friday, naming the agency’s general counsel, David J. Apol, as the acting director. By making the appointment temporary and avoiding Senate confirmation hearings, Mr. Trump is able, at least for now, to avoid an extended public debate before lawmakers about the role of the ethics office during the Trump administration. Mr. Apol will replace Walter M. Shaub Jr., who resigned Tuesday six months short of the end of his five-year term as the agency’s executive director. His resignation followed a period of intense criticism by Mr. Shaub of Mr. Trump and the administration’s approach to managing government ethics. Mr. Apol, who has worked on ethics issues in the federal government in various posts for three decades, said in a brief interview Friday that he looked forward to the new assignment, in which he will be overseeing the agency charged with monitoring ethics compliance at federal agencies across the government, including the White House.Like a lot of girls, I spend a good amount of my prep time in the morning putting on makeup and doing my hair. Making sure my clothes “Flatter me correctly”. Making sure my hair and makeup is “Perfect”. I HATE doing this, but I have to. I have to make sure that I’m “socially acceptable”. And every morning, my fiance’, the man who thinks I’m beautiful no matter WHAT just stares on in total and utter confusion. “Why are you putting on makeup? We’re just going to the store” I simply reply; “I honestly don’t feel like getting into a fight. I don’t feel like provoking superficial assholes. Today, I’d like to AVOID the trolls, thank you”. Why? Because me leaving the house without makeup starts FIGHTS. People yell at me, tell me to kill myself, and even try to beat me up just because of my size. People are openly rude to me, and if I’m not having the best of days, I could end up retaliating, which you know would result in jail time and having to go to a court that’s NOT ruling in my favor. I have to ignore the fact that the only person I need to impress is already impressed regardless of my weight, what I wear, or ANYTHING. He thinks I’m beautiful because he loves me, and I’m forced to completely ignore that FOR MY OWN SAFETY (And his freedom, since he’s willing to start a fist fight with any man who trash talks me). Not to mention, I, too, think I’m pretty… But I’ve been fat shamed and bullied to the point where I simply say; “You gotta turn them on to survive out there”. Which should NOT be true; but it is. I think I look just fine without the makeup or the “fashionable” clothes, but without dressing up, I’m treated like shit. The shirt I wear can determine whether or not I’m verbally or psychically abused, and even then, it doesn’t always help. At best, when I try my best, I get a “At least she tries”. Like, they feel sorry for the fact that NO MATTER WHAT I DO, I’ll NEVER be “Beautiful” DESPITE THE FACT THAT I KNOW I ALREADY AM. Thin privilege is being ALLOWED by society to leave your house to a casual situation without having to dress up to hide your “flaws”. You can leave without makeup and still be considered attractive, even if you’re currently undergoing an acne breakout. Oh, and you can wear whatever the heck you want, too. Thin privilege is not having an every day fear that somebody will verbally and/or psychically abuse you due to your looks. Thin privilege is being able to feel safe because you KNOW you’re not a target to trolls, bullies, and bigots. You can COUNT on everyone being nice to you. Meanwhile, girls like me really have to just pray we don’t run into the wrong person. Thin privilege is knowing that you’re beautiful, and having the world respect your self esteem (Or tell you you’re beautiful if you DON’T have that self-esteem). But girls like me aren’t allowed to love ourselves because we’re NOT “Beautiful”, and thus LOVABLE to everyone else. We have to try hard to impress people, anyway, even if we don’t want to. Even if we know our worth. Even if we don’t NEED their validation in our own minds, we still need their validation just to live a “Normal” LIFE and to get the basic respect we ALL deserve! Girls with thin privilege wear makeup to stand out and receive attention. But I? I wear makeup to fit in, and to NOT receive ANY attention.It’s summer — a time to catch up on missed readings, turn back to old favorites, and discover new ones. A time to sit with an easy read on the beach, or read something darker on the porch late at night. For the best summer reads, we turned to two authors who own independent bookstores and their book-loving staff. Louise Erdrich, who is the author of 15 novels, including “Roundhouse” and “LaRose,” along with nonfiction and poetry, owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, while Emma Straub, whose novels include “Modern Lovers” and the “Vacationers,” recently opened Books are Magic with her husband in Brooklyn. In the summer, Erdrich says, she often goes to the lake in Minneapolis, “and I bring a load of books, and I sink into them… It’s reading on the docks. It’s reading if you’re floating in the lake. It’s reading if it rains.” For Straub, summer is also about endless reading. “I’ve always thought of summer reading as the stack of books I would bring with me to summer camp… You’ll have to bring as many as you’ll think you’ll read. And then, when you read all of those books in three days, you have your parents send you another box.” Here are Erdrich and Straub’s essential summer books, along with more recommendations from their staff. In their words: “Do Not Become Alarmed” by Maile Meloy It feels almost cruel to recommend this for summertime vacation reading, because it is a vacation gone extremely, horribly, horribly wrong. It’s about two families who go on a cruise together and they decide to disembark the boat one day and go and have a little adventure. And then the children are separated from their parents and a lot of things go really, really badly. It’s an incredibly gripping thriller, one of those books that you will stay up late to read and say: “Oh, I’ll just read one more chapter, I’ll just read one more chapter.” It’s so delicious when you get one of those books and this is definitely one of them. –Emma Straub The Donna Leon crime mysteries There are actually 25 of these mysteries, and they are set in Venice. Venice itself becomes a character in these books. They center on Commissario Guido Brunetti, his entire family, and the people he works with. You become so wrapped up in these compelling characters that I think you could go through all 25 this summer. Each one is better than the last. –Louise Erdrich “Somebody With A Little Hammer,” by Mary Gaitskill Is it her breadth of experience? Range of interest? Depth of intelligence? All of these. She cuts through the malarkey like nobody. Her prose is like a diamond drill. And charming as always. –Christien Shangraw, manager, Books are Magic “The Answers,” by Catherine Lacey Lacey has a style-spiraling narration that makes you feel like you’re falling down a rabbit hole. Her latest novel is about a woman who, when ridden by inexplicable pain, seeks out a way to pay for treatments. She finds work as an “emotional girlfriend” to an actor on a quest to perfect love. Naturally, things go sideways. This is a bizarre tale of a woman and what she’d do to save herself. –Ikwo Ntekim, bookseller, Books are Magic “Too Much and Not the Mood,” by Durga Chew-Bose There are two essay collections we can’t keep on our shelves, and this is one of them. It’s an FSG paperback original that looks like a work of art — and is a work of art. It is about identity, and family, and becoming an adult, and personhood. The essays are so smart and so well-written. It’s a really perfect gift. –Emma Straub “Sunshine State,” by Sarah Gerard The second essay collection is about Florida, which is where the author is from. It’s a deep dive into identity, and weirdness and location, and family. Together, these books point toward a really exciting and fresh new corner of American essays in particular. What I’ve noticed that people have been buying a lot at Bookstore Magic over the past couple of weeks are things like this that come in small packages. –Emma Straub “When My Brother Was An Aztec,” by Natalie Diaz I don’t think people usually take poetry to the beach, but this is different than your normal poetry book. Diaz is a powerhouse of a writer and this book is a wild ride. It has headlong rushes of ecstatic beautiful language, small details about life on Mahovi reservation. Diaz is Mohavi, one of the tribes of the Colorado river. And this is set in Arizona, but it’s also of course set in her heart and her head. There’s a sensibility that is so dark but so funny. It’s a rich, compelling piece of literature. And I would take it to the dock, put it down, and read it again. It’s the kind of book that you want to live with each poem for awhile. –Louise Erdrich “The Love Interest,” by Cale Dietrich This sci-fi young adult novel is the answer to all of our cliché love triangle woes. Caden, the kindhearted boy-next-door, and Dylan, a brooding bad boy complete with dark poetry and a leather jacket, are in competition for the genius Juliet’s heart. The winner gets the girl, and gets to live out his life in peace. The loser gets incinerated. This fight to the death gets upended, however, when the boys start developing genuine feelings — not for Juliet, but for each other. If you’re looking for something funny, action-packed, and romantic this summer, then this is your next read. –Abigail Rauscher, kids specialist, Books are Magic “The Hate U Give,” by Angie Thomas This book blew me away in the three short days it took me to devour it. It is narrated by a teenage black girl living between the privileged and stifling world of her private prep school and the harsh yet vital neighborhood she comes from. She has witnessed police brutality, gang violence and one specific incident that becomes a catalyst for her own growth and education. The protagonist is likable, smart and funny; the story is both timely and universally important. This book does not fall prey to tropes of tragedy. It rises above. A must read for any teen or adult. –Aza, Birchbark Books “What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky,” by Lesley Nneka Arimah This new collection of short stories just came out a couple of weeks ago. It’s about family and relationships. And it’s got a gorgeous cover and it’s been sitting there and I keep walking past and fondling it, and picking up and waiting for the right time to read it. So I’m really excited to read this one. –Emma Straub Lorrie Moore’s books I’m rereading her books, because it was such a pleasure to read them the first time and I wanted to re-experience them the way I did before. So I started “Bark” again, and “Birds of America,” and I have “Who will run the frog hospital?” They are funny, sharp, of course she’s known for her extremely sharp wit, sharp observations, and her tremendous ability to capture the moments between couples where they grate against each other, or where they come together. Those are beautiful moments in the book and sometimes they’re very poignant. –Louise Erdrich “A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan It’s one of those books that when I read it I felt kind of like I’d been hit over the head with a frying pan. Stars were twirling around my head like a cartoon character. I was gobsmacked. It’s such an inventive, astonishing book. And every time I have dipped my toe back in I am delighted all over again. So I’m looking forward to rereading that. –Emma Straub “Chemistry,” by Weike Wang It’s a great (she calls it) “late coming-of-age” story. The protagonist is a first-generation Chinese immigrant and college student majoring in chemistry, though failing, and thus the occasion for her self-probing. She’s grappling with immigration, family, love, and chemistry in all its forms. It’s wry and witty, but tender and philosophical—searching. The narrative moves swiftly, as does the prose, which never lags, and even edges into poetry at times. It is a profound meditation on self and humanity. —Sarah Gerard, author of Sunshine State, and bookseller, “Books are Magic” “Difficult Women,” by Roxane Gay The short story collection I never knew I needed until I picked it up and began reading. The women Gay highlights in her first story collection are wild, wicked, and completely difficult — depending on who’s looking. I stumbled upon “North Country,” a story in the collection, for a class and it has remained one of the very best stories I have ever read. Each anecdote follows suit in that you’ll never forget the women you come across because they’re your sisters, mothers, and friends. –Ikwo Ntekim – Receiving/Bookseller, Books are Magic This collection of short stories artfully pulls you in and keeps you hooked. The lives of the women remind readers of the diverse and complicated lives of women everywhere. –Sasha, Birchbark Books “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” by Lizzy Goodman Just like every other twenty-something, I moved to New York right around the time all these bands were getting their start. Despite their annoying attitudes, it was pretty magical and electric feeling. Maybe it was the music? Maybe it was just that I was living in the greatest city in the world at 24? I don’t know. Either way, I feel like there are some interesting stories and lots of nostalgia in these pages. –Michael Fusco-Straub, owner, Books are Magic “Give a Girl a Knife: A Memoir,” by Amy Thielen Don’t miss this memoir or the author’s James Beard award-winning “The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes.” This book reveals the real life of line-cooking for New York’s best chefs and tells of the author’s life in rural Minnesota before and after New York. Awesome for foodies, this book should also be read by fans of literary memoir. –Martha, Birchbark Books “I Am Where I Come From,” edited by Andrew Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, and Melanie Benson Taylor When I first saw this book I immediately felt called to read it. Within just 10 pages, I laughed and cried (twice). Though this book exemplifies the incredible diversity of Indian country, the memoirs are united by common themes of perseverance and adaptiveness on majority non-Native campuses. These fascinating, hilarious, and heartfelt stories of unbelievable pain and struggle are contrasted by the strength that the authors draw from their families, their communities, and their ancestors–strength that has led them to defy the odds. A+. –Jack, Birchbark Books “The Master and Margarita,” by Mikhail Bulgakov This wonderfully strange masterpiece is a biting satire of 20th century Muscovite high society under Stalin’s regime in the form of an absurd, magical, hilarious fantasy. The devil and his colorful band of cohorts (including a large talking cat) sow gleeful havoc on the streets of Moscow, with special interest in Margarita, whose paramour, known only as the Master, has re-visioned the story of Jesus and Judas Iscariot in a manuscript that may or may not be lost forever. Bulgakov himself is The Master, with language that weaves seamlessly between tragedy and farce, visiting the profound and surreal, laughing all the way. Really one of my favorite books ever. ~ Nate, Birchbark Books “The Wonder,” by Emma Donoghue Set in Ireland, a Florence Nightingale-trained nurse is hired to monitor a young girl who is proclaimed not to have eaten in four months. This a completely engrossing read–you will barely be able to tear yourself away from it. I want to tell you more, but I don’t want to give anything away! ~ Carolyn, Birchbark Books The above recommendations have been edited lightly for length and clarity.A QUARTER of the money fuelling Guatemalan politics comes from criminal organisations, primarily drug traffickers, according to a report released by a United Nations commission. The UN’s International Commission Against Impunity also said in the report that government contractors contribute slightly more than 50 per cent of political campaign financing. The commission concluded that the country’s elections are rife with illegal money and corruption is the glue holding the system together. Political parties consistently spend far more money than they report taking in and several regularly exceed spending limits without consequence. “Corruption is the unifying element of the Guatemalan political system based on an amalgam of interests that include politicians, officials, public entities, businessmen, non-governmental organisations and criminal groups,” Ivan Velasquez, head of the commission, said. The report recommended campaign finance reforms – for example, setting private campaign financing at 20 per cent. “It is a reflection on everyone, it affects all of us,” said Javier Zepeda, executive director of the Chamber of Industry. “We believe that today more than ever we have to sit down, unite and think of a country in the future.” The report was released one day after the same commission and Guatemalan prosecutors petitioned to have a candidate for vice-president stripped of his immunity for allegedly laundering funds that were later used to finance political activities. Prosecutors accused Edgar Barquin, vice-presidential candidate of the Renewed Democratic Liberty party, and his brother Manuel Barquin, one of the most influential federal politicians from the same party, of a variety crimes. Guatemalan law gives lawmakers and candidates immunity from prosecution. The Renewed Democratic Liberty party is an opposition party, but leads in the polls for the September national elections. Edgar Barquin is the former head of Guatemala’s central bank. Velasquez said on Wednesday that Barquin used his influence to protect businesses that were making suspicious financial transactions. Those funds were later used for illicit campaign finance. In response, his brother, Manuel Barquin, said they only ask for “due process and that the principle of innocence that people have is respected”. The commission’s investigation found money was laundered abroad then used to finance the Great National Alliance party in 2011 elections. Velasquez said the commission, which has been operating in Guatemala since 2007, could assert that “many of these funds come from drug trafficking”.Iran's foreign minister Javad Zarif speaks at a public lecture "Paradigm Shift from a Zero-Sum Game to a Win-Win Situation" in Singapore March 8, 2016. REUTERS/Edgar Su ANKARA (Reuters) - Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will visit Istanbul on Saturday and meet with President Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign ministry said on Friday. The foreign ministry said in a statement “current regional and international developments” as well as bilateral relations between the two countries would be discussed. Iran and Turkey back opposing sides in the wars in Syria and Yemen, but their economic interdependence has kept relations broadly on track. Meeting in Tehran earlier this month, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Davutoglu agreed they must cooperate to end sectarian strife, including support for a fragile Syrian ceasefire.Historical monochrome photos of ancient sites have always fascinated me. I could admire for hours the serenity of the white stones, their bright and creamy look in the greyish background of the old pictures. Then a thought strikes me: I know! All those columns, statues and buildings of the ancient Greco-Roman world were actually far more colorful than we presume. Did you know that? The white, clean, minimalistic concept of the art of the Antiquity has been formed in the 18th century by Johann Winckelmann, a German scientist, considered the first European art historian. His pioneering book "The History of Art in Antiquity" established the idea of the pure, monochrome characteristics of the Greco-Roman creative work and that view prevailed for centuries over the scientific world. Today, in the 21st century, this is still a predominant conception, although there are enough indications for the opposite. I guess our perceptions have their strong roots in the legacy of the past; even the Renaissance art canons and aesthetic views were built on the ancient artworks’ basis. It is true though that in the paintings from the 15th century and after, Antiquity was presented in more colors, especially in some clothes details. Scientific research has shown that Greeks and Romans wore different types of garments and were pretty skillful in their dyeing. Raphael, School of Athens, 1505 Depending on the way of producing the dye, the color (and not just the material) of a dress could suggest a social status in the ancient world. Different shades of purple and red were reserved for the nobles as their manufacturing was an expensive process (from sea snail’s secretion!) The lower classes could afford something plainer, like ochre or brown. Anyway, all had their colors around. Tyran purple (from Tyre, Phoenician city), made of Murex, Courtesy of Wikipedia & Boonekamp So, how could ancient people, who made such an effort in coloring their clothing, have surrounded themselves with the colorless environment of pale statues? The German scientists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann had probably asked similar questions when in 1980’s started to research the colors of the ancient Greek sculptures. They used various scientific methods and managed to prove that, in fact, the statues that adorned the antique buildings were everything but just clean white pieces of art! The first discoveries were made through an old mean for analyzing art objects – a raking light. This is a kind of a spot lamp that is positioned very closely, almost parallel to the surface of a marble, so the angle of the light could reveal the paths of the used chisel. On paintings, the raking light displays the brushstrokes, on statues, shows the tint layers. As different paints (depending on their substance) wear off at different rates, this method can demonstrate the presence of pigments on the stone; some parts of the stone have left more elevated, some have lowered. The scientists could determine the exact nature of those pigments with further techniques such as UV light (often used for checking original artworks). Ultraviolet detects organic compounds – an old paint source – and make them fluoresce, proving their ancient nature by contrast with the modern paints that contain little natural elements. The original material of those parts could be discovered with more sophisticated research, like using infrared and X-ray spectroscopy. The waves and the way they are absorbed show the precise nature of the material: the infrared detects organic compounds and X-ray reveals heavier elements, like minerals and rocks. With the knowledge of what plant or mineral what color gives (azurite – blue, malachite – green etc.) the scientists could recreate the real colors of the statues. Using all those research methods, Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann made a striking reveal about the civilizations of the Antiquity and their color aesthetics: They have not carved the pure, white statues we are so used to see in the museums! Instead, they have created colorful, bright images, very close to the real life. Trojan Archer from the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, Marble original: Greek, c. 490 BC, Courtesy of Wiki Commons & Marsyas Sphinx' head, Courtesy of Wiki Commons & Carole Raddato Vase-shaped tombstone from Athens, c. 330 BC, Courtesy of Wiki Commons & Carole Raddato "Peplos" Kore, Marble original: Greek, c. 530 BC,Courtesy of Wiki Commons &Bgbel Stunning, isn’t it? After that unexpected discovery, we might need to reconsider our concepts (all based on the misleading ideas on Antiquity’s art mentioned above) about what a good taste in art and sculpture is. Statues What took us as long as it did to realize the truth and SEE the colours in all those statues? Rains, winds and heavy weather for more than 2000 years have done their work and have worn out the brightness of the ancient marbles. But a close examination of the classical literature tradition could expose an abundant evidence of the colouring practices among Greeks and Romans. In the Euripides’ tragedy "Helen" (5th century BC), Helen of Troy, tormented with remorse said: “If only I could be wiped out like a statue, assuming an uglier form rather than a beautiful one”. The words of the tragic character confirm the old custom of using colours on statues. They also express the ancient idea that bare, uncoloured sculptures were, in fact, considered unpleasant and unsightly. The tinting of statues is expressively shown in Plato’s "Republic" (5th century BC). While giving an example of what an ideal state would be, Plato mentioned: “It is as if we were colouring a statue and someone blamed us, saying that we did not apply the most beautiful pigments to the most beautiful parts…” Romans followed that tradition, as the Roman writer Vitruvius (1st century BC) informed us in his work "On Architecture". He advised that a Pontic wax should be used for preserving colours; it would prevent them from fading out caused by strong sun or moon light. This technique, the author said precisely, was applied both to walls and sculptures. A statue of an Amazon warrior, dating from 1st century BC, reveals very evident traces of paint. It was found in Herculaneum, an unfortunate city in Italy that shared the ill destiny of the famous Pompeii – it was buried under the ash of the Mount Vesuvius volcano that erupted in 79 BC. Archaeologists at the University of Southampton and the Herculaneum Conservation Project had the chance to conduct an extensive study of the statue. Since it was covered under the volcanic mass, the sculpture retained its original painted surface that is quite visible today. A red-brownish hair in a special hairdo adorns the face of an Amazon while soft green-brown eyes look sadly under delicate copper-color eyebrows. A head of an Amazon warrior's statue, Courtesy of WMG, Academic department of the University of Warwick, UK Vivifying sculptures with colors was not restricted only to the marbles. Bronze statues were also decorated with paints, inlaid with copper, gilt or silver folio. It is really impressive how ancient artists used various methods to emphasizing parts of their works. For instance, sculptures’ eyes were made of different materials to give more impressive effect. Just like that pair below! Head of a Youth, Bronze original: Roman, early 1st century AD, Courtesy of Wiki Commons & MatthiasKabel 5th century BC, Metmuseum, Purchase: Mr. and Mrs. Lewis B. Cullman Gift and Norbert Schimmel Bequest, 1991, Accession Number: 1991.11.3a, b Wall decoration The regrettable eruption of the Mount Vesuvius volcano in 1st century BC has proved beneficial for the science of the Antiquity. Under layers of dust and cinder, ancient Roman houses have preserved, 2000 years later, their original look for us. The archaeological excavations put into light the extraordinary painted walls of Pompeii’s and Herculaneum’s residences and once again confirmed that ancient people loved to be surrounded by colours. Their skills of using paints and shades have even given a name to one particular colour, often seen on Pompeii’s walls. It is called "Pompeian red" and represents a red dye tinted with orange that gives a bit orange-brownish nuance of the red. Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries Architecture It would be wrong to think that the coloured Greek and Roman statues were an exclusive phenomenon. In fact, they were part of a larger mise-en-scène, as intense and colourful as themselves. The public buildings that formed the ancient city’s appearance were equally painted. Anyone who has spent even a day in Greece has inevitably made a picture of themselves on some gleaming white background of old ruins. The truth is that image is far from the one that in reality was in the Antiquity. The clean, pale look of the remains is a product of adverse weather that has left its mark causing progressive deterioration of the constructions. A considerable number of buildings have lost their integrity and what can we expect for an organ
takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) has promised to revoke funding from Planned Parenthood through the same bill that would repeal ObamaCare. Specifically, the language in the draft would block Planned Parenthood, and other health organizations that provide abortions, from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for a year. There would be exceptions for rape, incest and cases where a woman's life is in danger. According to Planned Parenthood, more than half of its patients are Medicaid recipients who need preventive healthcare services. Defunding Planned Parenthood has long been a goal of Republicans because it provides abortions, even though they are legally prohibited from using federal funds for the procedure. But including the provision in the ObamaCare repeal bill could make passage more difficult, particularly in the Senate, where Republicans have a narrow 52-48 majority. Sen. Lisa Murkowsi said this week she would not vote for any repeal bill that also defunds Planned Parenthood. "I, for one, do not believe that Planned Parenthood has any place in our deliberations on the Affordable Care Act," she said. "Taxpayer dollars should not be used to pay for abortions, but I will not vote to deny Alaskans access to the health services that Planned Parenthood provides." Murkowski joined another Republican moderate, Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), and former Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) in 2015 to try to strip a provision defunding Planned Parenthood from the Senate's ObamaCare repeal bill. Collins also has not yet said if she would vote against the repeal bill this year if includes the Planned Parenthood language. If Senate Republicans lost three votes in their caucus, and Democrats were united in opposition, they would not be able to pass an ObamaCare repeal bill. Meanwhile, leaked audio from the GOP retreat last month showed some rank-and-file members in the House were worried about including the defunding language in a repeal bill. “We are just walking into a gigantic political trap if we go down this path of sticking Planned Parenthood in the health insurance bill,” said Rep. John Faso (R-N.Y.). “If you want to do it somewhere else, I have no problem, but I think we are creating a political minefield for ourselves — House and Senate.” Planned Parenthood said Friday that if the draft were passed, it would have a "devastating impact on healthcare in America." "An estimated one in five women in America will rely on Planned Parenthood for care at some point in her life. Access to basic women's health care shouldn’t get caught up in congressional Republicans' extreme agenda," said Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens.Jimmy CARTER has called Nov. 4 “a date I will never forget.” Other Americans may not remember the date, but as a nation we are still captive to the humiliating trauma that began unfolding precisely 35 years ago during Carter’s presidency. At 10:30 on the morning of Nov. 4, 1979, several hundred young Iranians climbed the walls of the American embassy in Tehran and stormed inside. By early afternoon, they had captured, blindfolded, and handcuffed dozens of American citizens and diplomats, including 52 who would remain in their hands for 444 days. Thus began a crisis that may now be seen as one of the crucial events in the modern history of both the United States and the Middle East. Plenty has happened in the intervening decades to give Iran and the United States reason to mistrust each other. Each country has blamed the other for fomenting terror in the Middle East, and each has violently attacked the other’s vital interests. Yet when I recently asked one lifelong Washington insider to explain why the American political class remains so obsessed with isolating and punishing Iran, he immediately replied, “It all goes back to the hostage crisis.” The emotional legacy of that episode has proven astonishingly long-lasting. Because the invasion of our embassy violated every law of God and man, it naturally outraged Americans. The most deplorable aspect of this crime was that it seemed to have been committed for no reason other than nihilistic hatred. This, coupled with searing images of helpless hostages, shaped the image of Iranians that many American politicians still cherish: hateful terrorists permanently outside the rational world order. Advertisement Years later, several of the hostage-takers wrote accounts that make clear how completely we misunderstood their motive. It turns out that they did not seize the embassy out of fanatic passion, but for a clear and rational reason. The deposed shah of Iran had just been admitted to the United States for medical treatment, and Iranians feared that this was the beginning of a CIA plot to re-install him on his Peacock Throne. This was hardly far-fetched, since the CIA had done it before. The shah had been forced to flee in 1953, but CIA officers working in the basement of the US embassy organized a coup and brought him back. That consigned Iran to a quarter-century of royal dictatorship. Get Today in Opinion in your inbox: Globe Opinion's must-reads, delivered to you every Sunday-Friday. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Few Americans had any idea that Iranian democracy had been crushed in 1953. Even fewer knew that the United States was mainly responsible for the operation. These truths have dribbled out slowly, and have not penetrated our national consciousness. Carter decided to admit the shah under heavy pressure from three of the shah’s most powerful American allies: David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and John McCloy. He rejected pleas from American diplomats in Tehran, who sent him a cable warning that admitting the shah “would almost certainly meet with immediate and violent reaction.” When those diplomats were told that their appeal had been ignored, one of them later recalled, “faces literally went white.” Eerily, Carter himself seemed to have some idea of what might lie ahead. At one White House meeting, he rhetorically asked his aides, “What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?” AFP/Getty Images A blindfolded hostage was paraded by his captors in the US Embassy Compound on Nov. 8, 1979, as an Iranian crowd of thousands reportedly chanted, “death to Carter — Yankee go home.” One lesson of this crisis is that presidents should listen to their diplomats, not to self-interested outsiders. The more important one is that powerful images can hold entire nations captive for long periods. The humiliating theater of hostage-taking, stretched out over more than 14 months, aroused American emotions so intensely that they have still not calmed down. We readily believe that Iranians are devious terrorists eager to wreak havoc in the world because that fits the image of Iran we ignorantly embraced 35 years ago. The hostage crisis had far-reaching effects. It stirred patriotic sentiment in Iran that allowed the Islamic government to consolidate its power, and drove the United States into the arms of Saddam Hussein, who we supported in the Iran-Iraq war because we were so angry at Iran. Perhaps the worst effect was that it created passions in both countries that blind us to the deep interests we share in the Middle East and beyond. No episode in living memory shows so clearly that self-defeating emotion can grotesquely misshape global politics. Related: Advertisement • Stephen Kinzer: Let go of grudges against Cuba, Iran • Michael Cohen: How midterm elections may affect Iran nuclear talks Stephen Kinzer is a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Follow him on Twitter @stephenkinzerPresentation at Wikimania about Duolingo Duolingo ( DEW-oh-LING-goh) is a free language-learning platform that includes a language-learning website and app, as well as a digital language proficiency assessment exam. As of January 2019, the language-learning website and app offer 85 different language courses in 24 languages. The app has about 300 million registered users across the world.[1][6][7][8][9] History [ edit ] The project was started at the end of 2009 in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn (creator of reCAPTCHA) and his graduate student Severin Hacker, and then developed along with Antonio Navas, Vicki Cheung, Marcel Uekermann, Brendan Meeder, Hector Villafuerte, and Jose Fuentes.[10][11] Inspiration for Duolingo came from two places. Luis Von Ahn wanted to create another program that served two purposes in one, what he calls a "twofer".[12] Duolingo originally did this by teaching its users a foreign language while having them translate simple phrases in documents, though the translation feature has since been removed.[13] Von Ahn was born in Guatemala and saw how expensive it was for people in his community to learn English. Severin Hacker (born in Zug, Switzerland), co-founder of Duolingo, and Von Ahn believe that "free education will really change the world"[14] and wanted to supply the people an outlet to do so. The project was originally sponsored by Luis von Ahn's MacArthur fellowship and a National Science Foundation grant.[15][16] Additional funding was later received in the form of investments from Union Square Ventures and actor Ashton Kutcher's firm, A-Grade Investments.[17][18] Duolingo started its private beta on November 30, 2011, and accumulated a waiting list of more than 300,000 users.[19] On June 19, 2012, Duolingo launched for the general public. Due to popular interest, Duolingo has received many investments including a $20 million Series C round of investment led by Kleiner Caufield & Byers and a $45 million Series D round of investment led by Google Capital.[20] Duolingo has 95 staff members, of whom many were Google employees,[21] and operates from an office in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of East Liberty.[22][23][24] On November 13, 2012, Duolingo released their iOS app through the iTunes App Store.[25] The application is a free download and is compatible with most iPhone, iPod and iPad devices.[26] On May 29, 2013, Duolingo released their Android app, which was downloaded about a million times in the first three weeks and quickly became the #1 education app in the Google Play store.[27] As of 2017, the company had a total funding of US$108.3 million.[28] Duolingo received a fifth-round $25 million in July 2017 from Drive Capital, with the funds directed toward creating initiatives such as TinyCards and Duolingo Labs.[29] Business model [ edit ] All language-learning features in Duolingo are free of charge, but it uses periodic advertising in both its mobile and web browser applications,[30][31] which users can remove by paying a subscription fee. Duolingo originally employed a crowd sourced business model, where the content came from organizations (such as CNN and BuzzFeed) that paid Duolingo to translate it.[32] Language courses [ edit ] Courses for English speakers [ edit ] As of January 31, 2019, 32 courses are available to the public in English, three of which are constructed languages (including two fictional languages).[33][34][35] In this list, the courses are ordered by number of active learners. Complete Beta Languages in beta are usually not available to mobile app users. However, Hawaiian, Navajo, and Hungarian are courses released in beta that are available on the app(s). Alpha Four courses for English speakers are currently in development (ordered by progression percentage towards completion):[38][39] Courses unavailable in English [ edit ] Duolingo offers language courses for speakers of languages other than English, but all available languages offer at least English as a course. The Catalan and Guarani courses are exclusive to Spanish speakers. Courses available in other languages [ edit ] As of November 18, 2018, the following languages are available to speakers of languages other than English:[41] Arabic : English, French, German, Swedish, Spanish(#) : English, French, German, Swedish, Spanish(#) Bengali : English(#) : English(#) Chinese : English, Spanish, French(#), German(#), Italian(#), Japanese(#), Korean(#) : English, Spanish, French(#), German(#), Italian(#), Japanese(#), Korean(#) Czech : English : English Dutch : English : English French : English, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese : English, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese German : English, Spanish, French : English, Spanish, French Greek : English : English Hindi : English : English Hungarian : English : English Indonesian : English : English Italian : English, French, German, Spanish(β) : English, French, German, Spanish(β) Japanese : English : English Korean: English English Polish : English : English Portuguese : English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Esperanto(β) : English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Esperanto(β) Punjabi : English(#) : English(#) Romanian : English : English Russian : English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish# : English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish# Spanish : English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Catalan, Guarani, Esperanto, Russian : English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Catalan, Guarani, Esperanto, Russian Tagalog : English(#) : English(#) Tamil : English(#) : English(#) Telugu : English(#) : English(#) Thai : English : English Turkish : English, German, Russian, French(#) : English, German, Russian, French(#) Ukrainian : English : English Vietnamese: English (#) = course still in development (β) = Course still in beta version Number of languages available for speakers of: On app On website German 3 3 Turkish 2 4 Spanish 8 9 Greek 1 1 Dutch 1 1 French 5 5 Hungarian 1 1 Czech 1 1 Italian 3 4 Arabic 4 5 Indonesian 1 1 Korean 1 1 Ukrainian 1 1 Vietnamese 1 1 Japanese 1 1 Russian 4 5 Thai 1 1 Hindi 1 1 Chinese 2 2 Portuguese 4 6 Polish 1 1 Romanian 1 1 Bengali - 2 Punjabi - 1 Tagalog - 1 Tamil - 1 Telugu - 1 Infrastructure [ edit ] Duolingo uses many services in the Amazon Web Services suite of products, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, nearly 200 virtual instances in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).[42] The server backend is written in the programming language Python.[43] A component called the Session Generator was rewritten in Scala by 2017.[5] The frontend was written in Backbone.js and Mustache but is now primarily in React and Redux. Duolingo provides a single-page web application for desktop computer users and also smart phone applications on Android (both Google Play Store and Amazon Appstore), iOS App Store and Windows Phone platforms. 20% of traffic comes from desktop users and 80% from mobile app users.[42] Investors [ edit ] Duolingo is funded by Union Square Venture Partners ($3.3 million in 2011), New Enterprise Associates ($15 million), Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers ($20 million), Google Capital ($45 million), Ashton Kutcher's A-Grade Investments, and Tim Ferriss.[44][45][46] Game elements [ edit ] Duolingo mimics the structure of video games in several ways in order to engage its users. There is a reward system in which users acquire "lingots", an in-game currency that can be spent on features such as character customizations or bonus levels (both available on the mobile app only). There are public leaderboards in which people can compete against their friends or see how they stack up against the rest of the world. The level system that Duolingo uses is XP (experience points), a numerical system that represents a user's skill level. Badges in Duolingo represent achievements that are earned from completing specific objectives or challenges.[47] School use [ edit ] Duolingo provides "Duolingo for Schools" with features designed to allow teachers to track their students. In 2012, an effectiveness study of Duolingo was published with the authors concluding that Duolingo usage for Spanish study was more effective than classroom language learning alone, but that this effect was less for more advanced learners.[48] One proposed reason for this is that the direct-translation method that Duolingo primarily uses is more applicable to simpler words and phrases than to complex ones; simpler ones can be translated in a more exact manner from one language to another and thus are more conducive to Duolingo's direct-translation method.[49] Recognition and awards [ edit ] In 2013, Apple chose Duolingo as its iPhone App of the Year, the first time this honor had been awarded to an educational application.[50] Also, Duolingo won Best Education Startup at the 2014 Crunchies,[22] and was the most downloaded app in the Education category in Google Play in 2013 and 2014.[51] In 2015, Duolingo was announced the 2015 award winner in Play & Learning category by Design to Improve Life.[52] In 2018, Duolingo was named to Fast Company's list of the Most Innovative Companies[53] to CNBC's Disruptor 50 list[54] and one of TIME Magazine's 50 Genius Companies.[55] Duolingo Clubs [ edit ] Duolingo Clubs was launched on December 20, 2016, with the intention of promoting competitiveness and relations between users, adding more "fun" to the course, which increases learning motivation. In Duolingo Clubs there is a weekly ranking of the experience acquired in the lessons, there are badges (achievements) to acquire, among other implements. Duolingo Clubs are available on the mobile versions of iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Although it has a very similar system, it is not completely identical to the website. See also [ edit ]Putting things into space is a tricky art—and what goes up just might come down if it crashes into something else while it’s in orbit. Take NASA’s MAVEN, a spacecraft that’s been orbiting Mars for years. As Space.com’s Sarah Lewin reports, the craft was in danger of colliding with one of Mars’ moons until officials recently whisked it out of harm’s way. The moon, Phobos, is one of two that circle the red planet. Larger than its counterpart, Deimos, it’s a lumpy, crater-pocked celestial body that revolves around Mars three times a day. Phobos also happens to be spiraling toward to Mars some six feet each century—in fact, scientists predict it will one day crash into the planet or be torn into rubble. While it'll take an estimated 50 million years for Phobos to be no more, Phobos' nearness is the reason the trouble with MAVEN began. The spacecraft (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) circles close to Mars’ surface, too, in a bid to learn more about its upper atmosphere and the ways it’s affected by solar weather. The craft has an elliptical orbit around Mars that coincides with both Phobos’ orbit and those of some other spacecraft multiple times a year. Usually, there’s no danger of collision, since objects are on different parts of their orbit at different times. But in this case, it looked like MAVEN and Phobos were on a crash course. Since there’s not exactly a good way to push an entire moon out of orbit or slow it down, there was only one solution—speed MAVEN up. And that’s just what NASA did, boosting its speed slightly—less than a mile per hour—with a rocket motor burn. In a release, the agency says that the craft will now miss Phobos by a scant 2.5 minutes. That seems like a close shave, but it will ensure the schoolbus-sized craft won't collide with a moon 10x14x11 miles in diameter. Eventually, Phobos will get the last laugh. MAVEN will one day burn up in Mars’ atmosphere after its fuel is gone. But, of course, the Potato-shaped moon won’t be able to gloat forever. Scientists have already documented the first stages in Phobos’ slow disintegration—long grooves that are harbingers of the day when Phobos either tumbles into Mars or breaks apart. For now, though, it looks like the two can coexist…until their orbits put them in the same neighborhood once more.A harsh stance on divers and embellishers. That’s what the NHL was bringing to the table this season.They announced a cat’s nine lives worth of fines for players who chose to be the outlaws – the amounts barely even denting the outside of the players’ wallets let alone what’s in them.The league also makes calls to the players with warnings, though they don’t release who they’re tattling on.The result? 56 embellishment calls on 54 different players (including two San Jose Sharks) and a fine for three players heading into the All-Star break.The three players’ that were fined were:James Neal (NSH): $2,000Gustav Nyquist (DET): $2,000Vincent Trochek (FLA): $2,000There are 52 embellishers that weren’t fined – including two repeat offenders – but what’s most interesting about those who were fined is that Trochek has yet to receive a minor penalty for embellishment. The league’s supplementary discipline for Rule 64 has the $2,000 fine as the “second incident” with the first getting a warning. I guess the minors that Brad Marchand and Evgeni Malkin – who have two minors for embellishment each – don’t count as incidents, since they were never fined.The Western Conference and the Eastern Conference have each accumulated 28 embellishment calls from the start of the season to the All-Star break. Since the Conferences aren’t even it means the embellishment share isn’t either. The West dives at a rate of 2.00 calls per team, the East at 1.75.The Atlantic Division, led by Montreal and Ottawa, have 17 embellishment calls to tarnish their reputation to lead the East (Metro has 11). The Pacific Division, led by Anaheim and Calgary, is the most dramatic on the Western side, receiving 16 of the Wests 28 calls (Central – 12). Again, we have to turn to the uneven amount of teams to determine which division features more actors per team. That title goes to the Pacific with 2.29 embellishments per team.1. Pittsburgh Penguins (5)T-2. Ottawa Senators (4)T-2. Montreal Canadiens (4)T-3. Anaheim Ducks (3)T-3. Calgary Flames (3)T-3. Boston Bruins (3)T-3. Minnesota Wild (3)T-3. St Louis Blues (3)Sami Vatanen, Corey Perry, Ryan GetzlafKyle Chipchura, Martin EratBrad Marchand (2), Rielly SmithZemgus GirgensonsMark Giordano, Markus Granlund, Paul ByronVictor RaskAndrew Shaw, Bryan BickellZEROScott HartnellRyan GarbuttJustin Abdelkader, Gustav NyquistDavid Perron, Jeff PetryJussi Jokinen, Jonathan HuberdeauJarret Stoll, Jordan NolanNicklas Backstrom, Stephane Veilleux, Keith BallardPK Subban, Max Pacioretty, Mike Weaver, Brandon PrustFilip Forsberg, James NealMichael RyderMatt MartinZEROBobby Ryan, Curtis Lazar, Clarke MacArthur, Kyle TurrisBrayden Schenn, Zac RinaldoEvgeni Malkin (2), Steve Downie, Chris Kunitz, Blake ComeauMatt Irwin, Logan CoutureVladimir Tarasenko, Steve Ott, TJ OshieTyler JohnsonZERODerek Dorsett, Zack KassianZEROJim Slater- Evgeni Malkin and Brad Marchand are the only two repeat offenders. Neither have been fined.- Nicklas Backstrom is the only goaltender to get a flop call.- Four teams (Col, NYR, Tor, Wsh) have no embellishment calls against them.- The West is the most dramatic Conference, the Pacific the most dramatic Division.- David Perron was a member of the Oilers when he was convicted of his crime, so Edmonton gets the credit.Is the league really deterring embellishment with this nonsense? Here’s a chart of the calls per game for each month.The calls are declining, but are the embellishers simply stopping their antics or are they just honing their acting skills to avoid the calls?This list is only the players that have received calls for embellishment. I’m sure we can all think of a few Oscar-worthy nominees that didn’t make the list. Let it be known in the comment section.Shame on the Sharks for contributing to this list.Thanks for reading.Mayor Lee, Jane Kim and the public backed the Mid-Market tax incentive that some progressives opposed. In his August 21 SF Examiner column, labor activist Nato Green offered a popular left analysis of who runs San Francisco: it is “the Realtors, Airbnb and sundry like-minded oligarchs who govern San Francisco through their avatar Mayor Ed Lee.” I’ve heard similar sentiments on the left, with many including Ron Conway and Willie Brown among those allegedly pulling Lee’s strings. Like Trump backers who blame his declining poll numbers on a “rigged” election, Green’s focus on oligarchs ignores that Lee’s policies are simply more popular with San Francisco voters than those many progressives espouse. Ed Lee’s Political Base Mayor Ed Lee easily won election in 2011 because he had the overwhelming support of the Chinese-American electorate. Mark Leno and other potential candidates did not challenge Lee in 2015 because polls showed that Lee’s huge support among this constituency and other moderate voters made an election challenge to the mayor unwinnable. Chinese-American voters are roughly a third of San Francisco’s electorate. No candidate can win a contested citywide race without winning a good share of this powerful voter base. This has been true at least since Art Agnos won in 1987. In the 1995 mayoral election people marveled at how Willie Brown secured the support of fiercely rival factions in the Chinese-American community; he did so because he recognized the importance of these votes. Nato Green is a very smart guy who understands city voting patterns. Yet it is easier to blame a cabal of “realtors, Airbnb and oligarchs” for city policies than for progressives to accept that San Francisco voters favor Ed Lee’s policies on key issues over their own. Notwithstanding the electoral evidence, progressives remain convinced that their staunchly anti- development views and skepticism about economic growth are backed by a majority of the voters. They believe this even though in every San Francisco mayoral election since 1967 voters elected a candidate who favored development and economic growth more than the progressive left (Agnos’ 1987 victory was seen as a progressive win but he soon ran afoul of the city’s left over his support for a new Giants stadium, Underwater World at Pier 39 and other development issues). Many San Francisco progressives are as immune to the electorate’s positions on development and economic growth as national Republicans are to majority public support for comprehensive immigration reform. It’s not a small cabal to whom Mayor Lee is beholden, it’s to the majority of voters. These voters gave the mayor the two easiest back to back mayoral election wins any San Francisco mayor has enjoyed since George Christopher in 1955 and 1959. Matt Gonzalez and Jane Kim If you want to understand how progressives can win citywide races, check the approach of Matt Gonzalez and Jane Kim. They are San Francisco’s two most successful progressive candidates in high-level citywide races over the past 25 years. Gonzalez narrowly lost to Gavin Newsom in 2003 despite being outspent 10-1 and having the daily newspapers become campaign literature for Newsom’s campaign (we started Beyond Chron in response to the Chronicle’s one-sided coverage of that race). It likely took visits by Bill Clinton and Al Gore to give Newsom his winning margin. Why did Gonzalez do so well? He avoided the typical left weakness of being perceived as anti-development and anti-economic growth. He did that by building alliances with the Residential Builders Association, Walter Wong and other development-oriented interests, which refuted the Newsom camps claims that Gonzalez was anti-business. Unlike many progressives, Gonzalez staked out his own views rather than merely espousing a progressive party-line (Chris Daly did the same, and Aaron Peskin often still does). How did Jane Kim defeat Scott Wiener in San Francisco in the June State Senate primary? A race nobody gave her a chance to win? Kim is immune from attack as anti-development by her support of 5M and other projects. Nor can she fairly be portrayed as anti-business, as she was a sponsor of the Mid-Market tax incentive strategy that has helped revive the entire Central City area. In contrast to Kim and Gonzalez, David Campos’s opposition to the Mid-Market deal left him vulnerable in his race against David Chiu for the State Assembly. That Campos could not win in a district that excludes most of the city’s moderate-conservative voting neighborhoods should have alerted progressives that they were out of touch with voters on development and economic issues. But it did not. Instead of accepting that the electorate rejected their views, it proved easier to blame a cabal of oligarchs for circumventing the popular will. Green’s belief that realtors control Mayor Lee is especially wrong. The real estate industry certainly doesn’t think the mayor is on their side. After all, Lee aggressively pushed for state Ellis Act reform, signed every pro-tenant legislation passed by the Board, and has stopped the Ellis eviction of dozens of longterm tenants through spending millions on his Small Sites Acquisition Program and funding Ellis Act eviction legal defense. Lee was also the driving force behind the voter’s backing of a 1.3 billion Housing Trust Fund and a $310 million affordable housing bond. Mayor Lee has the strongest pro-tenant record of any mayor in San Francisco history. Progressives should see the mayor’s electoral success as confirming that voters back this pro-tenant agenda. As we head into San Francisco’s November elections, progressives are backing some ballot initiatives and candidates that are unlikely to win. I certainly hope we do not hear progressives claim post-election that these races were “rigged” by a cabal of oligarchs who they believe run the city. Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron. He discusses George Christopher’s San Francisco in The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco Randy Shaw Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw is the author of four books on activism, including The Activist's Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. His new book is The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco More Posts Filed under: San Francisco NewsCONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD Walt Whitman (18191892). Leaves of Grass. 1900. 183. Passage to India 1 S INGING my days, Singing the great achievements of the present, Singing the strong, light works of engineers, Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,) In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal, 5 The New by its mighty railroad spannd, The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires, I sound, to commence, the cry, with thee, O soul, The Past! the Past! the Past! The Past! the dark, unfathomd retrospect! 10 The teeming gulf! the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past? (As a projectile, formd, impelld, passing a certain line, still keeps on, So the present, utterly formd, impelld by the past.) 15 2 Passage, O soul, to India! Eclaircise the myths Asiaticthe primitive fables. Not you alone, proud truths of the world! Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science! But myths and fables of eldAsias, Africas fables! 20 The far-darting beams of the spirit!the unloosd dreams! The deep diving bibles and legends; The daring plots of the poetsthe elder religions; O you temples fairer than lilies, pourd over by the rising sun! O you fables, spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven! 25 You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnishd with gold! Towers of fables immortal, fashiond from mortal dreams! You too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest; You too with joy I sing. 3 Passage to India! 30 Lo, soul! seest thou not Gods purpose from the first? The earth to be spannd, connected by net-work, The people to become brothers and sisters, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be crossd, the distant brought near, 35 The lands to be welded together. (A worship new, I sing; You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours! You engineers! you architects, machinists, your! You, not for trade or transportation only, 40 But in Gods name, and for thy sake, O soul.) 4 Passage to India! Lo, soul, for thee, of tableaus twain, I see, in one, the Suez canal initiated, opend, I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Eugenies leading the van; 45 I mark, from on deck, the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level sand in the distance; I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gatherd, The gigantic dredging machines. In one, again, different, (yet thine, all thine, O soul, the same,) I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier; 50 I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte, carrying freight and passengers; I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle, I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world; I cross the Laramie plainsI note the rocks in grotesque shapesthe buttes; I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onionsthe barren, colorless, sage-deserts; 55 I see in glimpses afar, or towering immediately above me, the great mountainsI see the Wind River and the Wahsatch mountains; I see the Monument mountain and the Eagles NestI pass the PromontoryI ascend the Nevadas; I scan the noble Elk mountain, and wind around its base; I see the Humboldt rangeI thread the valley and cross the river, I see the clear waters of Lake TahoeI see forests of majestic pines, 60 Or, crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold enchanting mirages of waters and meadows; Marking through these, and after all, in duplicate slender lines, Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel, Tying the Eastern to the Western sea, The road between Europe and Asia. 65 (Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream! Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave, The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream!) 5 Passage to India! Struggles of many a captaintales of many a sailor dead! 70 Over my mood, stealing and spreading they come, Like clouds and cloudlets in the unreachd sky. Along all history, down the slopes, As a rivulet running, sinking now, and now again to the surface rising, A ceaseless thought, a varied trainLo, soul! to thee, thy sight, they rise, 75 The plans, the voyages again, the expeditions: Again Vasco de Gama sails forth; Again the knowledge gaind, the mariners compass, Lands found, and nations bornthou born, America, (a hemisphere unborn,) For purpose vast, mans long probation filld, 80 Thou, rondure of the world, at last accomplishd. 6 O, vast Rondure, swimming in space! Coverd all over with visible power and beauty! Alternate light and day, and the teeming, spiritual darkness; Unspeakable, high processions of sun and moon, and countless stars, above; 85 Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees; With inscrutable purposesome hidden, prophetic intention; Now, first, it seems, my thought begins to span thee. Down from the gardens of Asia, descending, radiating, Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them, 90 Wandering, yearning, curiouswith restless explorations, With questionings, baffled, formless, feverishwith never-happy hearts, With that sad, incessant refrain, Wherefore, unsatisfied Soul? and Whither, O mocking Life? Ah, who shall soothe these feverish children? Who justify these restless explorations? 95 Who speak the secret of impassive Earth? Who bind it to us? What is this separate Nature, so unnatural? What is this Earth, to our affections? (unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours; Cold earth, the place of graves.) Yet, soul, be sure the first intent remainsand shall be carried out; 100 (Perhaps even now the time has arrived.) After the seas are all crossd, (as they seem already crossd,) After the great captains and engineers have accomplishd their work, After the noble inventorsafter the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist, Finally shall come the Poet, worthy that name; 105 The true Son of God shall come, singing his songs. Then, not your deeds only, O voyagers, O scientists and inventors, shall be justified, All these hearts, as of fretted children, shall
Straight razor See the previous section for details on the straight razor. Shave brushes The shave brush is an important part of the shaving process that has been left behind by many in recent times, but it is a wonderful tool for preparing the face for shaving. The best quality shave brushes are made from 100% badger hair. Badger hair is very fibrous and retains a large volume of water, which is key to producing a warm, rich, and lubricating lather for an exceptional shave. Shave brushes are also made from synthetic fibers (the least expensive and least effective), boar bristle (better than synthetic, not as good as badger), or synthetic/natural blends, but badger hair works the best of them all. Badger hair brushes are then graded into three categories: Pure badger (least expensive of the badgers), Best badger (more expensive than Pure badger), and Silvertip badger or "Super badger" (most expensive of all). If cared for properly, shave brushes should last many years, so it may be wise to invest in a Pure badger brush ($20-$80) as it will perform well for some time. If your budget constrains you from being able to go with a badger brush, Boar bristle brushes tend to be comparable in price to synthetic brushes, but usually far outperform them. Shave brushes are typically used in combination with a glycerin-based shave soap and a shave mug (see below), though you can use them with shave creams as well. To work a shave soap into a lather inside your shave mug, first drench the brush bristles with warm water. Brush the shave soap in a circular, whisking motion with the shave brush until a rich lather forms. Do not press down on the bristles, as this may damage the brush-- simply move in quick circular motions. The lather you create with a shave brush and shave soap will not be thick like the foam that comes out of a shaving cream can. It will be a thinner, yet rich lather. If you seem to be getting what looks like bubble water, you either haven't worked the lather enough, or you added a bit too much water. Experiment until you produce a good lather. Use the brush to apply the lather to your beard in small, gentle, circular motions, or in gentle painting motions. Do not press the bristles hard against your face, as this could damage the brush. The action of the brush helps lift the hairs while laying down a slippery barrier of lather. This barrier reduces razor drag and skippage. You can renew the lather on your face while shaving by simply reworking the lather with the shave brush. Always rinse your brush well under warm water after each use and gently flick out the excess water. Stand the brush upright in a dry environment or place it on a shave brush stand, allowing it to air dry fully after each use. Never put a wet shave brush in an enclosed place. A very basic brush stand costs about $4-5, and will keep your brush in good condition for years to come. Shave soaps A good shave soap can used along with a shave brush make a difference in the feel and closeness of your shave. A basic, glycerin-based shave soap will generate a rich, slippery lather for a close shave, and has a few other virtues as well: it is biodegradeable and there is no canister to discard nor propellants released into the air. Shave soaps also tend to be inexpensive. Shave soaps look like ordinary soap (white or colored) in the shape of a hockey puck. Some shave soaps come in their own special bowl-like containers, but it is usually less messy to use a shave soap and brush with a shave mug. Shave mugs Shave mugs look like ordinary mugs except they are larger overall, and wider at their opening than at the bottom. This allows for room to put the shave soap in the bottom of the mug, as well as room to whip the soap into a lather with your shave brush. back to the top Shaving-Related Links Sites with excellent shaving information, in addtion to selling shaving products: www.classicshaving.com premiumknives.com/ShopSite/Shaving_Razors_and_stropes_and_Shaving_Accessories.html www.gentlemans-shop.com www.vintagebladesllc.com Extensive information on straight razors and wet shaving: www.en.NassRasur.com/razorcentral/index.html (this one has really extensive instructions) www.classicshaving.citymax.com premiumknives.com/ShopSite/Shaving_Razors_and_stropes_and_Shaving_Accessories.html (click on the "Straight Razors" section) www.gentlemans-shop.com www.knifecenter.com/knifecenter/sharpen/instrazor.html The following is a link to a yahoo groups site for straight razor users: health.groups.yahoo.com/group/straightrazorplace Site with numerous hard-to-find men's classic toiletries and shaving supplies: www.e-barbershop.com Sites selling classic and contemporary shaving products: www.coolshaving.com www.amazingshaving.com www.shaveshop.com www.shavingsupplies.com www.nashvilleknifeshop.com Was this page helpful to you? Please consider donating to ftmguide.org! back to the top Back to Hudson's FTM Resource Guide main page Copyright, disclaimer, and privacy informationHenrik Ojamaa is returning to Motherwell in a six-month loan deal from Legia Warsaw. The Estonia forward, 23, spent 18 months at Fir Park before moving to Poland last summer. Ojamaa has also played in England, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands and has been capped 16 times. We hope he can hit the ground running Stuart McCall Motherwell manager "I am absolutely delighted that we've managed to pull this deal off," manager Stuart McCall told the Motherwell website. "It has involved a lot of hard work by people at the club over a period of time, as well as the support of the board, of which I am very appreciative. "He is exactly what we need at this present moment. He is not only quick and carries a goal threat; he had more assists than anyone in the league in his last full season in Scotland. "He will provide real competition and add a different dynamic to what we have. We kept saying we need a 'Henrik Ojamaa' type player then thought, we might as well see if we can try and get him back. "He knows the place well, he'll be familiar to most of the people and players at the club so we hope he can hit the ground running." Motherwell face Inverness Caledonian Thistle on Saturday having one won and lost one of their opening Scottish Premiership fixtures.Yesterday Forbes blogger Paul Tassi urged Google and Facebook and other opponents of SOPA to bring their servers down in opposition to the SOPA. I agreed - a blackout of major search engines and social media sites would get a big point across and at the very least force the conversation over SOPA/PIPA. Today, Paul is admitting that this scenario is very unlikely, and urging SOPA opponents to take matters into their own hands. He wants Facebook users to start posting this image (or one like it) to their accounts to spread the word: I think it's a good idea. It certainly can't hurt. But I have to say, unless something major happens like a major internet black out I doubt most people will pay attention. Enough voices added at once can make a difference, but these big companies like Google and Facebook who do oppose the legislation have a responsibility to make their voices heard as well. Follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Read my Forbes blog here.Neo Price Prediction December 24th Uptrend forming! Neo Price Prediction December 24th Uptrend forming! Above is the 4 hour chart showing a 4 hour uptrend getting huge support at $50. Major resistance at $65. Parabolic Sar is in a uptrend look for a 24 hour buying window before any downswing occurs. Stochastic RSI is in an uptrend very bullish. With CME future closed nothing is holding back Bitcoin and will help ALTS. Limit ups might push it higher after Xmas. Fantastic news NEO hodlers!! KuCoin exchange have officially announced the listing of DRGN/NEO, DENT/NEO and PRL/NEO trading pairs to users on December 25 00.00 UTC+8! Happy Christmas All!!! This makes it even easier for us NEO hodlers to trade in some fantastic new projects and really increases NEO’s standing to be considered up there with BTC and ETH!! I’ve been really impressed with KuCoin, its a fast growing exchange, it’s incredibly easy to use and has been very active in getting a lot of the higher profile newly listed / post ICO coins on their exchange before others (e.g. Red Pulse, DRGN, Request, HST) so there’s a better chance of catching that moonshot early! KuCoin offers rewards for holding their token KCS and for inviting new users. Here is a graphic explaining what that means, how the 20% trading fee bonuses work and the benefits offered – KuCoin Benefits I hope you find this information useful, if you did I hope you’ll be kind enough to sign up using my invitation code below! 🙂 KuCoin link is – www.kucoin.comAn amazing surprise for anti nuclear groups Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama The Dalai Lama, a revered spiritual leader whose influence is felt far beyond the boundaries of Tibetan Buddhism, startled his followers and the anti-nuclear community this week. In an interview with the news media in Tokyo, he said that there is a role for nuclear energy in the development process. His comments follow a tour of the earthquake and tsunami devastated areas in Japan about 40 miles from Fukushima. He said that he is in support of nuclear energy for peaceful means as a way to bridge the socioeconomic gap in developing nations and in the absence of more efficient alternative energy sources. “There are still many developing countries with a huge gap between rich and poor … millions of people’s live remain under the poverty level.” He added that energy sources like wind and solar are too inefficient to put into realistic practice to meet the needs of developing nations. The Dalai Lama’s influence extends to many new age communities and even into the philosophical underpinnings of some American environmental groups. So it must come as a profound shock for them to find that he is urging both opponents and proponents to look at the issue “holistically.” The Dalai Lama also addressed some of the emotion laden communication that has been in the forefront of opposition to nuclear energy. In a statement that could just as easily come from an expert on probabilistic risk assessment, the Dalai Lama said that no amount of preparation can completely rule out danger.It’s easy to think of what could have been. Bullpen depth is all the rage these days among contenders, so Jeffrey Loria tried to get in on the action by making an aggressive pursuit of Kenley Jansen. A last-minute change of heart ultimately took Jansen back to Los Angeles, so the Marlins were left without a shutdown closer. And then there was last summer’s misguided trade for Andrew Cashner that robbed the Marlins of — among other players — Carter Capps. Capps is healthy now, still throwing the way he threw, and there’s nobody else quite like him. Jansen and Capps — those are two sexy names. The Marlins have neither. So I’m not here to say the Marlins have done everything right. I’m not here to say they have baseball’s best bullpen. You don’t draw big bold headlines by signing Brad Ziegler and Junichi Tazawa. Yet, wouldn’t you know it, but the team has sort of succeeded in accomplishing its goal. Although by name value alone the Marlins relievers are something less than a super-group, there’s an awful lot to like here; all that will matter is performance, and this unit ought to perform. Dave already discussed the larger state of the Marlins pitching staff a month and a half ago. They’re short on ace starters but long on versatility, so you could see the team be creative. Everything in here is related to everything in there, but I want to focus on the bullpen itself, in isolation. And by our own projections, the bullpen isn’t great. Click here on the RP header. The Marlins bullpen ranks 17th, between the Blue Jays and the White Sox. One shouldn’t make a habit of arguing with the math. Yet within the Marlins bullpen, we find two players who cause the projections some difficulty. Two players crucial to the Marlins’ greater hopes. In Ziegler, we have an exotic bird, a guy who’s never followed the usual rules. Ziegler’s projected for a 3.51 ERA, where his lifetime mark is 2.44. And then there’s David Phelps, a 2016 bullpen-conversion success story. As the projections care, Phelps doesn’t have enough of a track record. But, until last year, he had a different job. You couldn’t blame the Marlins for being optimistic. Ziegler, yes, is 37. Ziegler, yes, throws what’s on paper a Jered Weaver fastball. At this point, though, there’s nothing left for him to prove. His unconventional arm slot has clearly allowed him to succeed through deception, and his three-year ERA is a match for names like Ken Giles, Roberto Osuna, and Craig Kimbrel. Among all pitchers who’ve thrown at least 500 innings over the past two decades, Ziegler has the second-greatest (good) difference between his ERA and his FIP. He’s a peripheral-beater, basically. Always has been, because he’s always avoided hard contact. His most recent ERA was 2.25. At some point, he’s going to stop being good, but he’s highly effective until proven otherwise. He’s a reliable reliever with a platoon split. As for Phelps, he’d relieved in the majors before. He’s actually relieved in parts of all five years he’s been up, but he never relieved as much as he did in 2016. And that’s not all — his previous best fastball as a reliever was 91.4 miles per hour. Last year his season average was 93.7, up more than a couple of ticks. It followed that Phelps reached new levels in all of the major statistics. He was, fairly quietly, an outstanding high-leverage bullpen arm, generating the same strikeout rate as Cody Allen. Whether it was cleaner mechanics or just greater arm strength, Phelps broke out, and in cases like his, projections tend to be too cautious. When you see Ziegler and Phelps for what they appear to be, the rest of the bullpen falls into place, and it’s easier to picture how the unit could be among the better ones. Another important reliever is going to be Kyle Barraclough, and he just posted Craig Kimbrel’s strikeout rate and Seung Hwan Oh’s adjusted FIP. Barraclough allowed a few too many walks, but that was largely a function of his deep counts, because he’s so very difficult to hit. He just had about the same contact rate as Aroldis Chapman. A.J. Ramos has been a regular reliever for four straight years, and his highest ERA is 3.15. That was four years ago. Like Barraclough, he walks too many folks, but he’s succeeded in avoiding home runs, and he’s always been able to miss bats. And while Tazawa’s reliability fluctuated as a member of the Red Sox, he’s long been good for a strikeout an inning. He hasn’t run into walk trouble, and his fastball still gets into the mid-90s. He’s useful, and he’s maybe the fifth piece. About that — here’s a very simple and simplistic table. I’ve included the Marlins, and some other teams expected to have fantastic 2017 bullpens. I took the top five relievers and averaged their numbers from last season. I know this isn’t the best way to project, but, for your consideration: Average of Top 5 Relievers, 2016 Team ERA- FIP- Indians 56 67 Orioles 62 79 Marlins 68 74 Dodgers 68 79 Cubs 73 73 Yankees 77 77 By those measures, the Marlins belong. They’re not the Indians, but, who are? A problem here is that the best projections consider more than just a single year of data, but what I want to demonstrate is how good the Marlins can look if you give Ziegler and Phelps their proper due. If you figure they’re better than what the current projections give them credit for, then the Marlins bullpen becomes both strong and deep. Now, every bullpen needs more than five pitchers. Current rumors suggest the Marlins are planning to open with eight. You might also notice that the five relievers I’ve highlighted all throw with their right arms. The best southpaw out there might be Hunter Cervenka. That is, at present, one potential vulnerability, and it’s something I’m sure the Marlins would like to resolve. Yet overall talent is the most important thing, and I should say the unit does go more than five deep. Dustin McGowan just had a healthy season with whiffs, grounders, and a fastball at 95. Nick Wittgren was all over the strike zone as a rookie. Brian Ellington is around, and his average fastball last year came in at 98. He threw strikes while simultaneously missing bats in the zone. I’m not sure if the Marlins are good enough to contend, at least for six months. The starting rotation is legitimately weak, and it’s not yet clear just how the team is going to try to compensate for that. And even among the relievers, you wonder if not having a good lefty will pose a significant problem. The Marlins are the third-best team in their own division, and they know hanging around is going to be a struggle. But a good bullpen can tip the run-differential game when the innings matter the most. The Marlins seem to have a strength out there, even if it’s short on statistical sex appeal. They missed on Jansen, and they’ll probably miss Capps. You yourself shouldn’t miss what the Marlins still have.Senator Al Franken (D-MN) is a very funny guy. Many people remember Franken as a brilliant comedian on Saturday Night Live, who was best known for his neurotic character Stewart Smalley. However, Franken took to the Senate floor recently to shame Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans for their brazen, shameless cowardice and disservice to the Constitution. McConnell and Senate Republicans made it clear just hours after former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s body went cold, that they would not “move forward” on nominating a replacement while President Obama was sill in office. In fact, that was the first statement McConnell sent via Twitter after he learned of Scalia’s death. The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. #Scalia https://t.co/QXHfOpEY6G — Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) February 14, 2016 Using the American people as cover, Republicans have vowed to desert their constitutional duties, in hopes of gaining political leverage by 2017. Frankin and other Senate Democrats made it clear that they would not stand by and let the Republicans make a mockery of the constitution. Here is a partial transcript followed by the YouTube video of Frankin’s speech before the Senate. ‘It is our duty to move forward. We must fulfill our constitutional obligation to ensure that the highest court in the land has a full complement of justices. Unfortunately, it would seem that some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle do not agree—and they wasted no time in making known their objections. Less than an hour after news of Justice Scalia’s death became public, the Majority Leader announced that the Senate would not take up the business of considering a replacement until after the presidential election. Quote, “[t]he American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice,” he said. The only problem with the Majority Leader’s reasoning, Mr. PRESIDENT, is that the American people have spoken. Twice. President Barack Obama was elected and reelected by a solid majority of the American people who correctly understood that elections have consequences, not the least of which is that when a vacancy occurs, the President of United States has the constitutional responsibility to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court. The Constitution does not set a time limit on the President’s ability to fulfill this duty. Nor, by my reading, does the Constitution set a date after which the President is no longer able to fulfill his duties as Commander in Chief, or to exercise his authority to, say, grant pardons or make treaties. It merely states that the President shall hold office for a term of four years. And by my count, there are in the neighborhood of 11 months left. If we were to truly subscribe to the Majority Leader’s logic and extend it to the legislative branch, it would yield an absurd result. Senators would become ineffective in the last year of their term. The 28 senators who are now in the midst of their reelection campaigns and the 6 senators who are stepping down should be precluded from casting votes in committee or on the Senate floor. Ten committee chairs and 19 subcommittee chairs should pass the gavel to a colleague who is not currently running for reelection or preparing for retirement. Bill introduction, and indeed the cosponsorship of bills, should be limited to those senators who are not yet serving in the sixth year of their terms. If the Majority Leader sincerely believes that the only way to ensure that the voice of the American people is heard is to lop off the last year of an elected official’s term, I trust he will make these changes. But I suspect he does not. Rather, it seems to me that the Majority Leader believes that the term of just one elected official in particular should be cut short. Which begs the question, M. PRESIDENT, just how short should it be cut? As I said, by my count, approximately 11 months remain in Barack Obama’s presidency. 11. Now, 11 months is a considerable amount of time. Sizable. It has heft, to be sure, but I wouldn’t call it vast. Then again, there’s a certain arbitrariness to settling on 11 months. After all, it’s just shy of a full year. Perhaps, in order to simplify matters, an entire year would be preferable. Or maybe just six months—half a year. It’s a difficult decision, M. PRESIDENT. If only the American people had a voice in selecting precisely how much time we should shave off the President’s term.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KvQ1zOYrJk Not only will McConnell and Senate Republicans not vote for any nominee President Obama puts forward, regardless of qualifications, but McConnell has also made it very clear that Republicans will not even meet with the President’s nominee. ‘I don’t know how many times we need to keep saying this: The Judiciary Committee has unanimously recommended to me that there be no hearing. I’ve said repeatedly and I’m now confident that my conference agrees that this decision ought to be made by the next president, whoever is elected,’ Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday. When asked if he would meet with President Obama’s nominee, he said: ‘I don’t know the purpose of such a visit I would not be inclined to take it myself.’ Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) accidentally exposed the true nature of his party when he said: ‘I don’t see the point in going through the motions, if we know what the outcome is going to be. I don’t see the point in going through the motions and creating a misleading impression.’ Well, there you have it, folks. Senate Republicans simply don’t want to give the American people the “misleading impression” that they plan to fulfill their constitutional obligations in good faith. Republicans are flat out refusing to do their jobs, in hopes of a political return come November. During the Iraq War, if a soldier refused to deploy during George W. Bush’s last year in office and gave that excuse, he or she would probably be in serving time in Leavenworth. The Founding Fathers of this country would probably have had traitors like the Senate Republicans imprisoned or worse, for what they are doing to this country. Featured Image Screengrab from YouTubeAs an undergraduate, my interest in cell biology was spurred by a curiosity about the origins of life. I was particularly fascinated by the theory of endosymbiotic evolution, which holds that mitochondria and chloroplasts arose when a bacterium established a symbiotic relationship by taking up residence in a larger host cell. I naturally gravitated to this idea of cooperation leading to innovation and evolution. In contrast, I viewed Darwinism as all about competition and survival—all red in tooth and claw. Some time ago, I visited Lester Park near Saratoga Springs, New York, where I stood on the fossilized remains of the mats of cyanobacteria (also called stromatolites) that grew on the bottom of the sea that covered much of North America 490 million years ago. This got me thinking about the idea of symbiogenesis again, so I decided to check the literature to see how things have developed. Endosymbiotic theory was controversial when it was first proposed by Konstantin Mereschkowski and later championed by Lynn Margulis. Subsequent sequencing of the genome of mitochondria and chloroplasts confirmed the presence of the vestiges of the endosymbiont in the organellar genome. These evolutionary leftovers have given scientists enough information to understand what the bacterial endosymbiont may have looked like, but the nature of the archaeal host, sometimes called the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA), is unknown. DNA sequencing is getting cheaper, easier, and faster, which allows sampling and sequencing of very diverse and complex environments (as evidenced by the increase in microbiome studies). Such metagenomics approaches permit the identification of new species of prokaryotes, even if they can't be cultured in the lab. An analysis of samples from Loki's Castle deep sea vents revealed the sequence of a new archaeal species that has a surprising number of homologs to proteins that are typically only found in eukaryotes. The species was named Candidatus Lokiarchaeum (a.k.a. Loki), and it is thought to be the closest living relative of LECA. Subsequent research has extended the species related to Loki to include Thor, Odin, and Heimdall as part of the aptly named Asgard superphylum of archaea. A fascinating Opinion piece in Trends in Cell Biology imagines what this organism, which we've never actually seen and can't culture in the lab, could look like. Perhaps the most notable feature of the Asgard superphylum is the homology to GTPases, including a few that are similar to Rab- and Arf-type GTPases that are involved in intracellular membrane traffic. These results suggest that Loki and his clan express proteins that would allow them to develop the complex cellular features present in eukaryotes. The authors suggest that, by combining these components from the archaeal genome with a few genes and lipids from the bacteria, you could imagine the slow evolution of membrane trafficking and intracellular membrane compartments. Although the Asgard archaea may help explain the evolution of parts of the endomembrane system, we’ve yet to discover intermediate species that could explain the complexity of the eukaryotic membrane system. An opinion in Trends in Microbiology suggests that secretion of outer membrane vesicles by the endosymbiont, rather than endocytosis by the host, led to the advent of the endomembrane system. This review includes an excellent Video Abstract where the authors explain their hypothesis clearly and with beautiful animations. The two models could both contribute, given that the complexity of the endomembrane system in eukaryotes likely requires elements that came from the host as well as the endosymbiont. Although I always thought of the relationship of the early endosymbiont and host as beneficial for both parties (mutualistic), we don't really know if the relationship was mutualistic or exploitive. A recent paper in Current Biology (covered in a Dispatch) took advantage of a tractable, facultative (i.e., each can live with or without the other) microbial endosymbiosis between a ciliate and a green alga to perform a cost-benefit analysis of their relationship by comparing the growth of the two organisms in different levels of light for the alga and varying amounts of food for the bacteria. Interestingly, when light is plentiful, the host will cast off or digest the symbiont; when light is limited, the symbiont can escape the host, but the conditions are not ideal for it to survive on its own. Thus, stable endosymbiotic interactions may result from exploitive not mutualistic relationships. This result surprised me as it suggests that cooperation is not the only pressure at the heart of eukaryogenesis. I'm sure there are more surprises in store. For example, a recent paper in Current Biology (covered in a Dispatch) performed a phylogenomic analysis of cyanobacterial genes in the nuclear and plastid genomes in a large number of algae and plants. The authors found that a freshwater cyanobacterium named Gloeomargartia lithophora is the closest living relative of the plastid ancestor. This result suggests that the first photosynthetic eukaryote evolved in freshwater biofilms or microbial mats, similar to the fossilized mats that I saw in Lester Park. I look forward to seeing what scientists uncover next as they aim to unravel one of the biggest mysteries in evolution.Segment Transcript IRA FLATOW: And now, we’re going to move on to something totally different. We’re going to talk about the ocean. With each splash of a wave in the ocean, the ocean makes a froth of bubbles. But what happens next is complicated. With each of these bubbles, when they pop, stuff from the ocean’s surface can be released as particles into the air. And some of these particles can even get swept up into the upper atmosphere. Yeah, where they can interact with other chemicals and potentially, they can travel for thousands of miles. My next guest studies the chemistry of these aerosols and how they form and interact with the environment. She’s written about plankton and bacteria and the aerosol process and she’s published her work this week in the Journal Chem. Vicki Grassian is Co-Director of the Center for Aerosol Impact on Climate and the Environment. Professor also at University of San Diego, UC San Diego. She joins me from the campus there. Welcome to Science Friday. VICKI GRASSIAN: Thank you, I– thank you for having me. IRA FLATOW: You’re quite welcome. So let’s talk about the particles. What kinds of particles are we talking about that get thrown up into the air? VICKI GRASSIAN: So mainly, we’re talking about sea spray aerosol. So these are aerosols produced from wave action, from these bursting bubbles, as you just mentioned a moment ago. And they actually consist of a wide range of different compositions and different sizes. So one of the things that we wanted to do in this paper that just came out this week in the Journal Chem was look at the detail– in detail at the molecules coming out of the water within these particles. And tried to say something about how that changed during the course of a phytoplankton bloom. And so, in general, I just want to add that what gets out of the ocean are things like salts. Typically, that’s what people think about. But also organic compounds and biological components, even whole bacteria. IRA FLATOW: Tell us what happens when the bubble– are we talking about the waves crashing on the shore? Or are we talking about foam out in the ocean? What kind of bubbles are we talking about here? VICKI GRASSIAN: In this study, we basically looked at when we had waves and we have bubble bursting during that wave process. And we captured the aerosols and looked at them individually to see what they were made up as. And what was unique about this experiment is that we did this in an ocean atmosphere facility, where we can cut off and close off all other influences and just look at that sea spray forming from– mainly from that wave action. IRA FLATOW: So you brought them inside, into a big tank, and created the waves and watched the bubbles– created the foam and watched the bubbles burst. And how does a bubble burst? I mean, in slow motion, if you watch a bubble in your wave action, what do you see happening? VICKI GRASSIAN: So the bubble-bursting process is something that I’ve learned quite a lot about from my physical oceanography friends here at the University of California San Diego. And basically what you have is you have the bubble bursts so that the film bursts. And then, that forms film drops. And then subsequent to that, you get the jet drops from underneath. And so, whether you get the film rupture that forms very small particles– which have a lot of organic compounds associated with them– versus the jet drops, which tend to form the larger particles. Although we’re questioning that understanding right now within our center as well. But that’s what we’re interested in looking at is the different mechanisms and what molecules come out of the water because of these different mechanisms. IRA FLATOW: You got to tell me what a jet drop is. It’s not a 747 hitting anything, right? VICKI GRASSIAN: No, it’s basically– that’s a good point. So basically, when you have the film rupture, there’s some energy left over. And so, what you end up getting is from the bottom of that drop some additional– if you were to look at that with a microscope– you’d see another small droplet of water coming out of the ocean from the middle after that bubble-bursting process, from the top. So the film drops versus the jet drops. And one is bigger than the other. And so, that’s what we’re looking at is the differences in the composition of each of these. Because how they get out there is very, very different. IRA FLATOW: And so, once the stuff– once you have your film drop and your jet drop, now we have droplets all through the air. Where do they go? VICKI GRASSIAN: So these aerosols get into the air. And then, they– from their formation, they undergo long range transport. And so, then they start interacting with gases and other particles in the atmosphere. And so, as they move out from the ocean, they can really change in terms of their composition, in terms of what they’re associated with. Whether they’re associated with other particles that were in the atmosphere from other sources as well. IRA FLATOW: So when all these particles are traveling and you’ve now got the particles in the air and you– if you capture them in your lab and you look at them under the microscope, what do you see there? VICKI GRASSIAN: So that’s what this study focuses on, is basically us capturing and then we capture them onto a substrate. So we just put them on a piece of glass, a glass slide, if you will. And then, we look at them in great detail, in terms of their composition, using a variety of different state of the art techniques in order to get that information about their composition. So we use a lot of what we call spectroscopy in our lab– or mass spectrometry– in order to see what the composition of each of these individual particles are, what they’re made up of. IRA FLATOW: And what are they– what do you see? VICKI GRASSIAN: So very interestingly, we see things like fatty acids. We see sugars. We see simple sugars like glucose. We see more complex sugars like what we call polysaccharides. So we see a wide range of different types of compounds coming out of the ocean. They also– these particles can contain both salt– so sodium chloride– plus these organic compounds. And so, what we were able to really do in our paper was look at individual particles and say something about their individual compositions. IRA FLATOW: Wow. It’s fascinating by– first, you’ve described two ways of the bubble, when the bubble bursts. I had no idea there’s a compound action going off in the membrane and then the jet at the bottom. And then, once you get these particles in the air. Now, I understand from reading stuff that for storms, for example, for it to rain, you need to have nuclei, little bits of stuff. Could the stuff coming out of the ocean form the nuclei that creates some of the showers, thunderstorms, or something like that? VICKI GRASSIAN: So, that’s right. And so, these particles can nucleate clouds, they can nucleate ice crystals in the atmosphere. And so, yes, very much so. They can be part of how we think about precipitation and cloud formation. And so, that’s a big component of what our center studies. And so, what we provide is information on what these particles are made of. And then others provide information on, how can they nucleate a cloud? How can they nucleate ice crystals? IRA FLATOW: So you study a lot of particles. Do you study dust? Just plain dust, too, in the air? VICKI GRASSIAN: You know, I’m the dust queen. And what I mean by– IRA FLATOW: I’m glad you said that and not me, because I’d get in trouble if I said it. Is that what they call you around the office, the lab? The dust queen? VICKI GRASSIAN: I’ve been called the dust queen. And the reason why is that a lot of my work has also focused on mineral dust and trying to understand mineral dust in the atmosphere. And mineral dust comes from a different source, doesn’t come– it comes from desert regions. And they, too, can undergo long range transport, these dust particles. And very similar to sea spray, each individual particle is a bit different. And so, what we do is we study the composition of these particles. We study how they react in the atmosphere. And we study how they can nucleate clouds. IRA FLATOW: Can dust– thinking about the water, can there be dust in the water, too? You said that they’re from dry places. But could you have dust being spread by the waves and the bubbles bursting? VICKI GRASSIAN: Oh, so now you’re asking sort of another interesting question. Because
him stay in St Kitts. On his return to Britain, he was well placed to inspire and inform the nascent anti-slavery movement that was taking shape in the 1780s. His Essay was published in 1784; and though probably more understated than its author wanted, it had a long- lasting effect. The plantation owners may have made a second mistake in attacking him and his book so vituperatively in newspaper articles and pamphlets. He himself noted that their invective was counter-productive. After some temporary notoriety, his Essay, he said, was ready to be "swallowed up in the gulf of oblivion, when a host of foes were providentially raised up to force it on the public, and cause the subject to be agitated". One planter had even challenged him twice to a duel. He died five years after his Essay made him briefly famous. But on St Kittts and Nevis, he is entirely forgotten. Sugar cane, the source of so much wealth and cruelty, is no longer cultivated. The islands are full of relics of slavery and the sugar industry in the shape of tumble-down brick chimneys, half-ruined mills and plantation houses. Some of the latter have been converted to luxury hotels. The emphasis today is on the romantic allure of the Caribbean rather than the hideous brutality of slavery. Cane fields have reverted to scrubland interspersed with holiday villas. On Nevis, troops of chattering green vervet monkeys scamper everywhere, to the amusement of tourists and the anger of farmers whose fruit they eat. In a fine display of insensitivity, the government at one point suggested adopting the sugar mill, where so many slaves lost their limbs, as the national emblem. Local people may feel ambivalent about, or indifferent to, the enslavement of their ancestors, but this was too much. After vigorous protests, the mill was replaced as an emblem by the monkey. 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 nowThe Commission published Gazprom’s commitments on Monday (13 March) to end a five-year antitrust case and avoid heavy fines. As part of the package, Gazprom agreed not to seek any damages from its Bulgarian partners following the termination of South Stream. In what appears to be a huge deal reached behind closed doors, the Commission agreed with the Russian gas export monopoly to remove restrictions for EU countries from Southern and Eastern Europe to re-sell Russian gas across borders. Until now, bilateral contracts didn’t allow such trade, and in the case of Bulgaria, the implementation of the gas interconnector with Greece was hampered by certain provisions of the Gazprom contracts with both countries. Five offers made for use of Greece-Bulgaria gas interconnector Five binding offers have been submitted for the use of the natural gas pipeline between Bulgaria and Greece, the joint venture building the link said in a statement. The deal needs to be approved in seven weeks’ time, and all interested parties – governments and companies – are invited to submit comments. Only then is the executive prepared to make the agreement binding. If Gazprom breaks its commitments, it can be fined up to 10% of its global turnover. On a visit to Turkey on 1 December 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin said South Stream was over, and that the 63 billion cubic metres per year of gas would be shipped to Turkey instead of Bulgaria, which according to the Russian leader, had blocked the project. Russia says South Stream project is over Russia scrapped the South Stream pipeline project to supply gas to southern Europe, without crossing Ukraine, on Monday (December 1), citing EU objections, and instead named Turkey as its preferred partner for an alternative pipeline, with a promise of hefty discounts. South Stream was a Russian-sponsored project. As initially planned, the pipeline would run under the Black Sea to Bulgaria, and continue through Serbia with two branches to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to Croatia. The European Commission put pressure on Bulgaria to freeze South Stream, citing breaches of EU law in the intergovernmental agreement for the construction of the pipeline. Barroso warns Bulgaria on South Stream Speaking after the EU summit held yesterday (27 May), Commission President José Manuel Barroso made it plain that the EU executive would impose infringements on Bulgaria regarding the Gazprom-favoured South Stream pipeline, the construction of which is about to begin in breach with EU laws. In the meantime, Russia replaced South Stream with Turkish Stream (also known as Turk Stream), intended to bring Russian gas to the European territory of Turkey, under the Black Sea. It is unclear what route the gas would take beyond Turkey, but Gazprom has indicated it plans to use the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), part of the Southern Gas Corridor, to transport its gas to Southern Italy via Greece and Albania, under the Adriatic Sea. EU gets wake-up call as Gazprom eyes rival TAP pipeline Gazprom’s bid to tap into a pipeline meant to wean Europe off Russian gas threatens to undermine a pillar of European energy policy and slow plans to develop rival deposits in the eastern Mediterranean. Bulgaria seems to regret having lost the South Stream project and the income from the transit fees. Russia keeps floating the idea of a “second pipe” reaching the Bulgarian Black Sea shore, but nothing has been decided yet. euractiv.com asked the Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager if the decision to clear Bulgaria from cancellation claims could be interpreted to mean that the Commission is giving approval to a new version of the project. “That’s another issue,” Vestager replied, adding that the agreement was not about the future of South Stream. Experts told EURACTIV that the agreement between Gazprom and the Bulgarian Energy Holding (BEH) to set up the South Stream joint venture company contained the commitment that there could be a $70-million claim in case of cancellation. “The commitment clearly specifies that the Russian side cannot claim back those 70 million, but also that it cannot it cannot claim any other damages relating to the cancellation of the South Stream project,” the expert said. EURACTIV asked what was going to happen to the pipes destined for the offshore section of South Stream, which are stored in the Bulgarian ports of Burgas and Varna. Pipes for South Stream keep arriving in Bulgaria A ship flying the Bahamas flag, loaded with pipes for the South Stream gas pipeline, was stuck on Saturday (3 January) in shallow water, maneuvering in the Bulgarian port of Burgas, reports Dnevnik, the EURACTIV partner in Bulgaria. The proposal doesn’t deal with the ownership of the pipes, according to the expert.In the year 2004 when I was 17 years old I developed my first online transportation system. The company INTEL invited me to a trade fair INTEL ISEF in the USA, which was the impulse to start my business in transportation. There came a big crises in the year 2008 and business could barely maintain my living expenses. Our customers searched for a cheap option as how to deliver small packages from Germany. I myself was putting my mountain bike together and I bought the components on eBay.de. The tranportation to Czech republic was expensive and slow. One day I went to Germany to try to change that. Today through our warehouses we handle up to 100 000 shipments annually for 50 000 customers. Ondrej Krabs CEO Read our story Warehouses Mailboxde.com GmbH in Germany645 SHARES Share Tweet The North has become a “laughing stock” after a cyclist beat a train in a “race” between Derry and Belfast, a Derry MLA has claimed. The feat by John Madden is all the more remarkable given the fact he was unable to use the motorway. As a result, Sinn Fein East Derry MLA Cathal Ó hOisín has has called for the rail link to be upgraded “before the North becomes a laughing stock across Europe.” Speaking after congratulating John, Mr Ó hOisín said the fact John was able to beat the train highlighted the need to upgrade the track as “soon as possible.” Mr Ó hOisín said: “I would like to congratulate local man John Madden for breaking the record of travelling between Derry and Belfast by bike and also beating the train in the process. “This is even more remarkable given John was unable to use the motorway or he would have been even faster. “While John is a remarkably fit athlete the fact that a bike was able to beat the local train service in any circumstance makes us a laughing stock across Europe. It highlights the need to upgrade the track as soon as possible. “If the minister is serious about promoting and expanding the rail network he needs to begin with the existing infrastructure and bring it up to a proper standard.” Mr Ó hOisín concluded: “I am now calling on Danny Kennedy to bring the second phase of the upgrade of the Derry-Belfast line forward so that passengers can travel along the line faster than on a bicycle.” NORTH A “LAUGHING STOCK” AFTER CYCLIST BEATS TRAIN IN DERRY-BELFAST RACE was last modified: by Tags:The Nova Scotia Barristers Society’s (NSBS) role is to approve articling law students, not law schools, a federal Justice Department lawyer told a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge Dec 17. Jessica Harris was presenting arguments on the second day of a judicial review that Trinity Western University (TWU) sought against an NSBS decision to refuse to approve the BC university’s proposed law school. In April, the NSBS’s council said TWU must drop its community covenant prohibiting same-sex intimacy before its graduates would be allowed to enroll in the province’s bar admission program. For admission to the evangelical Christian school, students must sign a covenant agreeing to uphold Christian biblical teachings, including no premarital sex and no homosexuality. In its brief to the court, the NSBS argued that while the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of religion and association, it does not require the society to support conduct that discriminates against others. But Harris told Justice Jamie Campbell the society’s decision was unreasonable. “It didn’t take into account actual evidence of discrimination of students who were to attend Trinity Western.” Harris said the 2001 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Trinity Western University v British Columbia College of Teachers is the best guidance for a resolution in the case. There, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that TWU’s teacher program graduates are entitled to hold “sexist, racist or homophobic beliefs” as long as they don’t act on them in the public school classrooms to which they might be assigned. “The attorney general does not see any difference in the case before you,” Harris said. Harris’s argument echoes one that TWU lawyer Brian Casey put forward Dec 16: that the issue is not whether the university discriminates against members of the LGBT community, but rather if a TWU graduate is qualified to practise law in the province. A brief from Harris to the court said Nova Scotia’s Legal Profession Act does not provide the society with statutory authority to approve law schools. The court also heard from the Canadian Council of Christian Charities (CCCC), the Catholic Civil Rights League (CCRL), the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada, the Christian Legal Fellowship (CLF), the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) and Christian Higher Education Canada (CHEC). CCCC lawyer Barry Bussey told Campbell it is harmful to diversity in Canada for the NSBS to favour one view of marriage over another. “The barristers’ society simply doesn’t like, doesn’t agree with, Trinity Western’s position on marriage,” Bussey said. “It rejects the right of religious communities to have autonomy in their internal affairs.” He said sexuality remains an issue of misunderstanding, adding that there will be dissonance. The 2004 same-sex marriage reference at the Supreme Court of Canada gave clergy as agents of the state the right to opt out of solemnizing marriages, and the same leeway should be given to degree-granting institutions, Bussey said. The barristers’ society decision moves the situation from “Trinity Western is not for everyone to Trinity Western is not for anyone,” he told the court. CCRL lawyer Philip Horgan said the covenant is a personal commitment to self-discipline, love of God and loving one’s neighbour. “It is the crucial command given by Jesus Christ,” he said. When Horgan addressed the emergence of a widespread discussion of rape culture and said that parents might want their children at a school with a commitment to certain behaviour, Campbell countered by saying some parents might not want their children to be at a school that was unwelcoming to LGBT people. “Bringing up this whole rape culture thing isn’t getting you very far,” he said. JCCG lawyer John Carpay told Campbell the NSBS does not regulate members’ beliefs about marriage, nor does it stop them from forming associations where members might be required to abstain from sex outside marriage. “This decision is a direct assault on freedom of association,” he said of the NSBS’s refusal to accredit TWU students. ARPA lawyer André Schutten argued that the NSBS would have to discriminate against lawyers produced by all-women law schools, gay law schools or Jewish law schools if it followed through on the same reasoning it has applied to TWU. CLF lawyer Deina Warren said the NSBS decision creates two classes of lawyers entering the province. While a TWU articling lawyer can be refused, they could conceivably go to another province and article and then return to the province and practise, she pointed out. “Why is it contrary to the public interest to allow me to article here?” she asked. “What’s the difference between articling and practising?” EFC and CHEC lawyer Albertos Polizogopoulos told the court the covenant is a pledge to live by Christian principles. He said it is inappropriate for anyone to proscribe behaviour and said the Supreme Court of Canada ruling “is still good law.” “The principles that came out of the BC teachers’ case haven’t changed,” Polizogopoulos said, adding that the court ruled the covenant is not in a legal sense discriminatory. “Why are we here?” he asked. “This issue has been settled. If society has changed, the fundamental issues set out in the Charter have not.” The NSBS is expected to present its arguments later in the week. An NSBS brief to the court said that in seeking regulatory approval, TWU had moved from the private sphere, where some discrimination may be permitted on religious grounds, to the public sphere, where different rules and obligations exist. The case continues through Dec 19. British Columbia’s minister of advanced education, Amrik Virk, revoked his approval of the law school Dec 11 following a reversal of the Law Society of British Columbia’s approval Oct 31. That revocation led to the end of a case brought by prospective Vancouver law student Trevor Loke against the ministry. It remains to be seen if TWU will file suit against the BC law society and the ministry.Two arrested in robbery, deadly shooting on Plank Road BATON ROUGE - Police say two people were arrested Friday in connection with the Dec. 29 shooting. Baton Rouge police say 20-year-old Jordale Carter and 22-year-old Denver Carter are both accused of robbing and fatally shooting Carl Moore Jr. According to arrest records, BRPD officers were called to the 3200 block of Plank Road just before 3 p.m. in reference to a male with a gunshot wound. Upon arrival, officers located Moore in the parking lot of Prestige Beauty Salon suffering from a gunshot wound to his abdomen. A witness inside the barber shop told authorities that three black males fled the scene after the shooting, according to arrest records. Detectives canvassed the area for the suspects and reviewed surveillance video from a nearby store. The surveillance video confirmed three black males were running northbound on Huron Street after the shooting. Two of the three males that previously entered the barber shop were identified as Jordale Carter and Denver Carter, after descriptions of two of the suspects matched both men. Photos and videos posted on social media also helped identify the two suspects, according to arrest records. The witness told authorities the victim was also in possession of firearms himself. Surveillance video from the barber shop shows the men were meeting there to sell and purchase firearms contained in a black messenger bag belonging to the victim, according to arrest records. A recorded phone call, that included Denver Carter in the conversation, also revealed information surrounding the shooting, including that it happened in "the spur of the moment," according to arrest records. The two were apprehended by EBRSO SWAT on Friday and charged with second-degree murder and armed robbery. This marks the 120th homicide in East Baton Rouge Parish this year. If classified a murder, marks the 100th murder in East Baton Rouge Parish. View WBRZ's updated East Baton Rouge homicide map here. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.VIENNA, Austria (AFP) – Tens of thousands of Europeans paid tribute in Gay Pride marches on Saturday to the 49 people massacred in a gay nightclub in Orlando last weekend in a defiantly festive atmosphere. At the largest, Vienna’s “Rainbow Parade” involving around 130,000 people according to organizers, a minute’s silence was held during the 20th annual anything-goes parade. Leading the march was a black-clad group called “Victims of Hate Crimes – Marching for those who can’t,” holding a rope around a space where normally a float full of dancers would be. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up The “ghost float” represented “those lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender and inter-sex people who lost their lives in Orlando and who can’t be marching with us,” organizers said. The deadliest mass shooting in US history saw gunman Omar Mateen murder 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in the early hours of Sunday morning with a legally purchased assault rifle and pistol. Mateen was killed when police stormed the club. Officials say he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group. Witnesses said he had frequented Pulse in the past and used gay dating apps. Not scared Lui Fidelsberger, co-head of the Vienna Homosexual Initiative (HOSI), Austria’s oldest lesbian and gay organization, said the best answer was to be even louder and prouder. “The response must be more visibility and pride. And so despite the great sadness… this year’s Rainbow Parade will again celebrate loudly and stridently a big festival of diversity,” Fidelsberger said. Security in the Austrian capital was tighter, however, with several hundred police on duty — more than last year because of the Orlando attacks, police spokesman Roman Hahslinger told AFP. In Italy, tens of thousands of people took part in Gay Pride events nationwide, with 30,000 in Florence, 5,000 in Genoa and thousands more in Palermo, Treviso and Varese, organizers said. In Genoa, the first procession float sported a large rainbow flag crossed with a black banner reading: “We are Orlando.” The Palermo event’s organizer, Massimo Milani, appeared at the parade in a white wedding dress splattered in fake blood and with a ribbon reading: “We will survive.” In Lisbon, a parade of more than 5,000 people paid tribute to the Orlando victims, according to organizers, but with pumping music and extravagant costumes they still managed to have fun. A large black banner at the head of the procession in the Portuguese capital carried the photos of the victims in Florida. “This massacre has affected us all,” said gay rights campaigner Paulo Corte Real. “We are here to show our strength and to refuse all this hatred that we are still confronted with.” Around 2,000 revelers, police said, took part in a Gay Pride event in Metz in eastern France. Local reports said a memorial was set up with the inscription “Solidarity with Orlando.” Around the same number gathered in Vilnius while around 1,000 held a minute’s silence at the Soviet Army monument in downtown Sofia, waving flags, some of them with the #weareorlando hashtag. The Bulgarian crowd chanted “Stop Homophobia!” and “Happy Pride!” and was addressed by several foreign ambassadors, although numbers were significantly smaller than last year. “There are fewer people this year but I would like to think that it’s the scorching heat that is to blame and not fear after the Orlando tragedy,” said participant Ria Naydenova, 24.23-year-old Syed Khadar Basha of Ballari, a tea vendor, struck upon this idea to ensure more customers for his business. All he did was get a router and milk ’emAs a data war brews among telecom companies, a tea seller from a remote town in Karnataka has found a unique way to attract his customers.He is offering free data for 30 minutes for those customers who buy a cup of tea priced at Rs 5!The answer to whether his data gimmick is working can be had from the long queue that forms at the shop of 23-year-old Syed Khadar Basha from morning till evening.In fact, the scheme has worked so wonderfully for this tea seller in a town called Siruguppa in Ballari district that his sales have zoomed by four times since he started the ‘scheme’ in September.When he came up with the scheme, Basha purchased a wi-fi router and unlimited data plan offer from a local cable operator. Anyone who buys a tea gets a coupon with a wi-fi password. The system works in such a way that the customer who logs on can access the Internet for the next 30 minutes before it automatically gets disconnected.The tea seller also follows the policy that a particular customer can access internet only once in a day.Basha says that before he kick-started the data tea offer, he would sell around 100 cups in a day but now it has gone up to 400 cups.“Offering free data in cities like Bengaluru may not be a big thing especially when we have free wi-fi zones and also a few mobile operators offering free data. But, when we think of a remote town like Siruguppa, internet penetration is pretty low. These days, many people are buying smartphones as they are getting addicted to social media or they want to access their mails,” he says.Basha observed that most of his customers were college students who had come from remote villages near Siruguppa.“During my interaction, I found that these students would get a pocket money of Rs 100 per month and they couldn’t afford to buy a data pack. So, I asked myself, why not go for a technique which will not only help these students but also boost my revenue. Following a series of discussions with my friends, I thought of offering free wi-fi,” Basha says. So Basha spent around Rs 3,000 in buying a router and other accessories and another Rs 1,700 every month on buying an unlimited data pack for a month. “As the internet speed hovers around 1 to 2 mbbps, this is sufficient for me to connect to 10 to 15 customers at one go. Now, I see that many of my student customers are enjoying reading their mails or accessing Facebook,” says Basha.The tea seller says that despite studying only till the tenth standard, he is happy to help students, and at the same time taking his business in the right direction.Basha’s tea stall would see around 10 to 15 customers in a day earlier; but now he is serving around 100 customers each day.Basha also says that the internet revolution is such that it is not just students; even the poorest of the poor are now buying smartphones to get internet access at his tea shop. Naveen Kumar, one of the customers at Basha’s tea stall said, “I would need to access my email and it would not happen earlier but this data sharing at tea stall is really helping me. I think this idea has really clicked.”Awesome pictures from around the world Someone sent me these in a chain email, it was horribly formatted. I also do not know who made the comments, or how accurate they are. I take zero credit in the pictures, I just wanted to compile them nicely for all to see. The world’s highest chained carousel, located in Vienna, the height of... Trip to Europe – England, Italy, and a roat trip through Croatia. I have been to Europe twice before, once in the winter of 2007 (England, Brussels, France), and another in the winter of 2008 (Germany, Czech Republic, Amsterdam, England). I actually proposed to my girlfriend in London last time around! Not to leave out the many trips throughout the USA, and down to Central America/Mediterranean Sea....DreamHack Winter 2016 - Day 1 recap DreamHack Winter 2016 has started with the opening and winners' matches in the group stage. The first day of DH Winter included the opening and winners' matches of both groups. After six best-of-one matches, two group winners have been determined. The elimination and decider matches will be played during day two but before that, we present a brief recap of the opening day at DreamHack Winter 2016. Group A dignitas vs. Kinguin 9:6, 6:9, 5:7 (20:22) Winner: Kinguin Map: de_Mirage MVP: Mikołaj "mouz" Karolewski Group A kicked off with the clash between Team Dignitas and Team Kinguin where the Polish side grabbed the pistol round and two anti-ecos following it as Counter-Terrorists. The first gun round went Dignitas' way thanks to René "cajunb" Borg's 1v2 clutch. The Danes managed to win three more rounds before Michał "MICHU" Müller killed four to even the things at 4-4. Starting from 9th round, a different player stepped up each round and neither team won back to back rounds to establish a comfortable lead. In the last few rounds of the first half, Dignitas seemed to be finding weak spots on Kinguin defence as they were able to enter the halftime with a three round lead. Kinguin started the second half by winning the second pistol round. Now playing as the T side, the Poles didn't allow Dignitas to stabilise their economy and won six more rounds after the pistol round to make the score 13-9. The CT side finally woke up after the 22nd round and proceeded to close the gap slowly but steadily. Despite Dignitas' efforts, the team was unable to close, as Kinguin won the 29th round to take it to the map point. In the 30th round, Emil "Magiskb0Y" Reif starred as he grabbed a triple kill to take the map to overtime. The first overtime saw both teams getting two round while they were Terrorists, making the map go to the second overtime. The first match of DH Winter nearly saw a third overtime but Mikołaj "mouz" Karolewski clutched the last round of the second overtime on a 1v2 situation to close out the map. GODSENT vs. FlipSid3 Tactics 7:8, 9:1 (16:9) Winner: GODSENT Map: de_Train MVP: Jesper "JW" Wecksell Jesper "JW" Wecksell's triple-kill won the pistol round for the T side. After winning the second round, the Swedish team lost the third round against much weaker weapons. Despite their broken economy, GODSENT didn't let FlipSid3 build a fair lead. After the GODSENT victory in 12th round, the score was 7-5 in favour of the Swedish team but FlipSid3 won all three of the remaining rounds of the first half to end the half with a single round lead. GODSENT won the second pistol round and thanks to Wecksell's impressive plays they had little trouble before eventually closing out the map 16-9. Kinguin vs. GODSENT 8:7, 4:9 (12:16) Winner: GODSENT Map: de_Mirage MVP: Jonas "Lekr0" Olofsson The winners' match of Group A started with Markus "pronax" Wallsten grabbing three kills in the first pistol round for the T side. Kinguin responded instantly with a successful force-buy round. The Polish team held their ground solidly in the following rounds and all of a sudden it was 8-2 in favour of Kinguin. Then everything stopped working for them as GODSENT won five rounds in a row to make the score 8-7 at the halftime. GODSENT won the first four rounds of the second half to continue their run before Kinguin finally grabbed a round to make the score 11-9. The Swedes didn't let Kinguin build on that round victory and continued playing impressive CS to win the map 16-12. With these results, GODSENT advanced to the semi-finals from Group A where dignitas and FlipSid3 are going to clash in the elimination match. The survivor of the elimination match will face Team Kinguin in the decider match. Group B Cloud9 vs. Renegades 4:11, 10:5 (14:16) Winner: Renegades Map: de_Dust2 MVP: Karlo "USTILO" Pivac Cloud9 were the heavy favourites going into Group B's first match. The North American team grabbed the first pistol round as Counter-Terrorists to be the first team to take the lead but they were bested by Renegades in the next round, particularly as a result of Justin "jks" Savage's triple-kill. Karlo "USTILO" Pivac and co. won five rounds in a row to make the score 6-1 before Jake "Stewie2K" Yip clutched a 1v2 situation. Fortunately for Renegades, Cloud9 weren't able to build on that round. Renegades continued their domination until halftime, where the score was 11-4 favouring them. After halftime Cloud9 switched to the CT side and then it was their turn to dominate by winning six rounds in a row; however before they could make the score 11-11, Aaron "AZR" Ward stepped up and won the round for Renegades with three kills. The Australian team won one more round after Ward's triple kill to make the score 13-10. Cloud9 managed to melt the three-round gap as they won three back to back rounds, the latter of which was thanks to Timothy "autimatic" Ta's triple-kill. Renegades didn't let their opponenets take the lead and won two rounds to take it to a double match point. After failing to close out the map in the 29th round, Renegades managed to grab the victory on their second attempt and won the map 16-14. OpTic Gaming vs. Gambit 4:11, 6:5 (10:16) Winner: Gambit Map: de_Cobblestone MVP: Rustem "mou" Telepov OpTic took on Gambit in the second opening match of Group B. Starting the match as Counter-Terrorists Gambit picked up the first pistol round but lost the following two rounds. Despite the low economy, Danylo "Zeus" Teslenko and his team managed to win the 4th round and by successfully preventing Terrorists from build a decent economy they increased the round difference to three at 5-2. In the 8th round, Dauren "AdreN" Kystaubayev grabbed an ace while defending a tec9-armor rush on B. In the remainder of the half, Gambit continued to be the better side as they entered the halftime leading by 7. In the second half, OpTic performed better but the margin was too much for them and eventually Gambit grabbed the victory with a 16-10 scoreline. Renegades vs. Gambit 9:6, 7:2 (16:8) Winner: Renegades Map: de_Cache MVP: Justin "jks" Savage Group B winners' match saw another upset as Renegades beat Gambit to advance to the semi-finals. Renegades started the map by winning four rounds in a row. After losing two rounds, the Australian team won four more rounds to make the score 8-2. Gambit took a timeout and the break worked as they won four rounds against Renegades' one in the remainder of the half. Starting from the very first round of the second half, Renegades won every single round until Gambit finally won their first round in the 21st round when it was 14-6. Gambit managed to make it 14-7 by winning another round but before they could start hoping for a comeback, Renegades won two in a row to win the map 16-7 and advance to the semi-finals. QUICKPOLL Are you surprised with Renegades' impressive display? Yes, I never thought they could reach the semi-finals Thank you for voting! No, they've always had the potential Thank you for voting!“Feel a little better but have the diarrhea very bad,” Corporal Henry Keiser wrote in his diary on June 2, 1862. Keiser and the 96th Pennsylvania were deep in the bottom lands of the Virginia Peninsula, just a few miles southeast of the Confederate capital at Richmond. They were among the 100,000 soldiers of the famed Army of the Potomac. Disease was rife in this important Union Army. Outbreaks of illness were common as men lived, fought, and died in the mosquito-infested swamps of Virginia. Something known among the soldiers as “Chickahominy Fever” also wracked the army as it attempted to lay siege to the enemy’s capital. “The sick reports were sometimes large than we cared to have them,” reported the Army of the Potomac’s medical director, remembering the time period leading up to the Seven Days’ battles in June 1862. “My recollection is that the whole sick report never exceeded 8 percent of the force, and this included all sorts of cases, the trivial as well as the severe.” This provided little comfort to men like Corporal Henry Keiser, who spent the months of June and July 1862 suffering from chronic diarrhea. Keiser’s daily diary entries provide us with a day-by-day accounting of the experience of a sick soldier in the Army of the Potomac. Through the month of June, Corporal Keiser suffered as the 96th Pennsylvania and the Union Army inched closer to the Confederate capital at Richmond. “I got sick but would not go to the hospital,” he wrote on June 18. “I had my knapsack hauled and held onto the feed trough of the wagon.” Five days later, he was suffering yet again and called on the regimental doctor for assistance. “I got two pills and a dose of oil from the doctor which made me very sick all day,” he reported. The regiment was out making corduroy roads the greater part of the day. I was not able to go with the regiment.” The pills and oil referred to by Keiser were likely mercury and castor oil. These two poisonous compounds were often prescribed for diarrhea and dysentery in this age before germ theory. It’s no wonder that this soldier felt very sick that day. Military events were about to overtake Keiser and the 96th Pennsylvania as they lingered with the Army of the Potomac little more than 10 miles east of Richmond. The Pennsylvanians assisted in digging new rifle pits near their encampment. Keiser remained in the regiment’s hospital. Here’s how Henry Keiser experienced the bloodiest series of battles in the Civil War to date: Wednesday, June 25, 1862. Our company is in guard today, I being excused from duty. Bought liver for which I paid 25 cents. Heard firing to the left this forenoon. Thursday, June 26, 1862. Received a letter from Brother William dated Springfield, Tennessee, May 5. Our regiment went to the front to dig rifle pits and did not return today. Friday, June 27, 1862. The regiment came to camp his morning but had to leave immediately in light marching orders. The regiment went to our right to Gaines Mills where they had a severe fight. I was in camp which was shelled by the Rebs during the day. There was cannonading along the whole line. About five o’clock the following members of our company came to camp wounded: our 2nd Lieutenant Souerbree, wounded in the heel; Louis Romick, in the head just grazing scalp; William Strausser, wounded in the leg; and George Nester, wounded in both feet. The regiment came to camp at ten o’clock tonight. [Battle of Gaines Mill] Saturday, June 28, 1862. I feel pretty well today. We packed up and marched about one mile and pitched tents. We were barely through with our tents when the Rebels opened on us with a battery at short range and made us “git.” We had no time to take our knapsacks. We went back a short distance and then a small squad went over at intervals and brought our knapsacks. The Rebels shelled but no harm was done. After we all had our knapsacks we marched around all day. After night came on we had to fell trees and block up roads. Sunday, June 29, 1862. About two this morning we stopped felling trees and started toward the James. The regiment encamped about six this evening having marched about fifteen miles. Owing to my sickness I could not keep up with the regiment and I had a great time until I found it, which I did after dark. We were all tired and needed rest. Monday, June 30, 1862. We got up this morning pretty well rested. We marched back to Charles City Crossroads to cover the retreat. Our division had the centre. Our brigade (5th Maine Infantry, 16th New York Infantry, 27th New York Infantry, and our regiment) supported a battery of 18 guns on the edge of the woods. Our batteries kept the rebels in check all day in our front, but had hard work. The rebel’s batteries were mowed down like grass with grape and canister. We, as infantry, did not fire a shot. The rebel batteries shelled us severely but done no harm with the exception of knocking off limbs of trees on us. Before dark we were run to the left but had no engagement. Heavy fighting right and left. Tuesday, July 1,
figure is up from 3.02 percent in 2015 and 2.76 percent in 2014. Gun dealers don’t have to notify the FBI when they proceed with a sale after the three-business-day deadline, so it’s unclear how many of those default proceeds resulted in an actual sale without a background check. Government data also shows that many of these cases are associated with misdemeanor domestic violence charges. States do not always share related records, and often domestic violence charges aren’t easily identifiable in FBI databases. That raises concerns that firearms could get into the hands of convicted abusers. The process Federal law requires a background check for all gun sales by licensed dealers —private sales are, controversially, exempt from background checks in most states—to make sure the buyer isn’t prohibited from owning a weapon. Twelve states do their own background checks for all sales by licensed dealers. For the rest, some or all checks go through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS. Advertisement The FBI gave an immediate yes or no to 88.64 percent of background checks it conducted last year, according to data the agency shared with ThinkProgress. When the agency can’t immediately tell if a gun buyer is prohibited — for example, if its databases have an arrest record but no record of a conviction — FBI examiners delay the sale to do more research. After three business days, however, the gun dealer can proceed with the sale whether or not the FBI has completed its background check. The agency calls these sales “default proceeds,” but many gun-safety advocates call it the “Charleston loophole.” If the FBI determines the buyer is prohibited from owning a firearm after the three-business-day deadline passes, it contacts the dealer to see if it sold the weapon. If so, it transfers the case to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or ATF, which attempts to retrieve the weapon. After 89 days, Department of Justice regulations require the FBI to stop work on open background checks and purge them from NICS. That happened around 1.3 million times from fiscal year 2003 to May 2013, according to a 2016 audit of NICS by the Department of Justice inspector general’s office. A growing problem, linked to domestic violence The FBI processed 9.3 million background checks last year, according to data it shared with ThinkProgress. It delayed more than 1 million of those, and there were 303,146 default proceeds. Those numbers are all up from 2015, when the FBI processed 8.9 million background checks and delayed 900,567, with 271,359 default proceeds. Advertisement By comparison, NICS had just 84,520 default proceeds in 2003–1.93 percent of all background checks that year, according to a 2004 report by the DOJ inspector general. Default proceeds are more than eight times as likely to involve a prohibited purchaser than background checks completed within the three-business-day deadline, according to FBI data released to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2008 and cited in a 2009 report by the advocacy group Mayors Against Illegal Guns. (ThinkProgress has not been able to obtain a copy of the letter to independently verify it.) Default proceed sales are also disproportionately associated with domestic violence. Federal law prohibits people convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence from buying or possessing a firearm. In 2003, domestic violence conviction was the top reason that the FBI had to refer gun purchases to ATF for retrieval, according to a 2004 report by the DOJ inspector general. Combined with referrals because of a domestic violence restraining order, it accounted for 34.1 percent of all referrals that year — 1,227 individual cases in which a gun got into the hands of a convicted or accused abuser. “There are four and a half million women alive in America right now who’ve been threatened with a gun by their intimate partner.” A report by the Government Accountability Office last year backed up those findings. The report found that it takes the FBI longer to complete background checks for domestic violence convictions than for other prohibitors. Delayed denials put firearms in the hands of about 6,700 people convicted of domestic violence from FY 2006–2015, the report found. Those numbers declined sharply from FY 2006–2008, according to the report. Since then, there have been between 520 and 670 transfers to convicted domestic abusers a year due to a delayed denial. For victims facing abuse, those guns can have terrible consequences. Aside from homicide, abusers often use a firearm to threaten, terrorize, and injure, according to Cecily Wallman-Stokes, deputy research director at the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. “There is just an overwhelming body of evidence showing how important it is to keep firearms out of the hands of abusers,” Wallman-Stokes told ThinkProgress. “There are four and a half million women alive in America right now who’ve been threatened with a gun by their intimate partner.” The FBI has known about these problems for a long time Default proceed sales have been part of NICS since the system launched in late 1998, and FBI records suggest they’ve been a problem from the very beginning. In its first operations report for the newly launched system, the FBI listed “more time to complete checks when records are not electronically available” as the first of five changes it could make to help keep weapons away from prohibited people. The report also argued against shortening the deadline from three business days to 24 or 48 hours. (The Brady Bill amendment that created the three-day deadline originally set it at just one business day.) “Reducing the time limit for checks from three business days to lesser periods, such as 48 hours or 24 hours, would mean a corresponding decrease in the ability of the NICS to prevent unlawful purchases,” the report said. In an audit of the NICS system published last year, the DOJ inspector general found ongoing problems with processing background checks within the three-business-day deadline, among other issues. “Although we found the overall FBI error rate was exceedingly low, even an isolated NICS process breakdown can have tragic consequences, as evidenced by the June 2015 fatal shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina church, where the NICS process, with timely and accurate data from local agencies, could have prevented the alleged shooter from purchasing the gun he allegedly used,” the report said. Clawing back guns that shouldn’t have been sold in the first place The problems haven’t been limited to the FBI. In NICS’s first year, ATF received 3,353 referrals from the FBI for “delayed denial” cases, according to a 2000 report by the Government Accountability Office. In those cases, ATF is tasked with retrieving the weapon from the purchaser if the dealer proceeded with the sale. But the agency had only retrieved 442 weapons as of Sept. 30, 1999, and an inter-agency task force had to work through the backlog. “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives remains incredibly understaffed, with fewer agents than the Broward County sheriff’s office.” A DOJ inspector general’s report in 2004 and a GAO report in 2014 highlighted continued problems with ATF’s recovery of guns sold to prohibited buyers after the three-day deadline, including cases where it took months to recover a weapon and technical problems that kept ATF from tracking the timeliness and outcome of recovery operations. ATF has solved many of those issues, changing its computer systems to allow managers to more closely monitor delayed denial investigations, for example, and implementing recommendations from a 2004 DOJ inspector general’s report, according to an audit of the NICS system by the DOJ inspector general last year. But the increasing number of delayed denials — from 3,353 in 1998–1999 to 6,610 in 2014, according to data the FBI shared with ThinkProgress — still threatens to strain agency resources, according to former ATF Special Agent David Chipman, now a senior policy advisor at the advocacy group Americans for Responsible Solutions. “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives remains incredibly understaffed, with fewer agents than the Broward County sheriff’s office,” Chipman told ThinkProgress in an email. “Instead of spending valuable ATF resources on recovering weapons from prohibited individuals, Congress should give our federal law enforcement agencies the resources and tools they need to proactively stop these dangerous individuals from getting guns in the first place.” The FBI does not know how many delayed denials NICS had in 2015 and 2016, spokesperson Stephen Fischer Jr. told ThinkProgress, because of a change in its computer systems. Department of Justice spokesperson Amanda Hils declined to say how many times the FBI referred a delayed denial to ATF for recovery of the weapon from 2014 to 2016, saying ThinkProgress would have to file a public records request for the data. Reforms are slow—and increasingly politicized After the Charleston shooting, former FBI Director James Comey ordered a review of what went wrong with Dylann Roof’s background check. The agency declined ThinkProgress’s request to voluntarily release that review, but it did share a partial transcript of a meeting with reporters in October 2015 during which Comey summarized its findings. The FBI needed to automate parts of the NICS process and better deploy staff to reduce the number of delayed background checks, he explained, and work with state and local agencies to get more records in the NICS databases. ThinkProgress has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the full review. The DOJ inspector general’s audit of NICS last year echoed its recommendations and gave more details on its findings. The review largely attributed the delay in Roof’s background to “untimely responses and incomplete records” from local and state agencies, according to the DOJ audit. It also suggested that FBI give NICS staff access to a broader FBI database that had more complete records on Roof. However, the FBI told the inspector general’s office that would require special approval and a change in DOJ regulations. In its own findings, the inspector general pressed the FBI to take three broad steps: (1) develop a follow-up process to make sure delayed background checks move through the system, (2) look into connecting NICS to more databases, and (3) find ways to encourage states to provide more complete records. The FBI agreed with those recommendations, but it hasn’t given the inspector general’s office evidence that it completed them. In FY 2012, an outside contractor began developing “New NICS” for the FBI — updated software and hardware designed to provide quicker background checks 24/7. The agency implemented the first phase in August 2016, according to spokesperson Stephen Fischer Jr. It includes the ability to automatically follow up with state and local agencies that don’t respond to the FBI’s first request for records — as in the case of Dylann Roof. “The New NICS, initially implemented in August 2016, delivered capabilities that allow the system to quickly know when information a.) has been received from an external agency so that it may be prioritized and handled in a timely manner and b.) has not been received from an external agency within a designated period of time for the system to automatically resend a request,” Fischer told ThinkProgress in an email. Despite the technology upgrades, the FBI has largely relied on “significant amounts of overtime” to keep up with the growing number of gun background checks, according to its FY 2018 budget request to Congress. To fix that, the agency is requesting $8.9 million to keep 85 full-time examiners. “Without these personnel, the FBI’s ability to effectively conduct the statutorily mandated firearm background checks conducted by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Section within the mandated three day timeframe could be compromised,” the budget request said. While the FBI has worked to make NICS more efficient, several Democratic lawmakers want to rewrite the Brady Bill to stop dealers from selling a firearm without a completed background check. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced legislation in 2015 that he plans to re-introduce this year. Reps. James Clyburn (D-SC) and Kelly Robin (D-IL) introduced two similar bills in the House last session. Seventeen states also have legislation that either extends the three-business-day federal deadline or requires a completed check before a dealer can sell a weapon, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. Last year, for example, Delaware passed a bill that extends the deadline for a background check to 25 days. Still, gun-safety advocates continue to press for federal action that would close the loophole nationwide. “No background check, no gun, is a rule that can help save lives,” Blumenthal told ThinkProgress in a statement. “Congress should act to close the Charleston Loophole, and my legislation does just that,” Clyburn told ThinkProgress through a spokesperson. The National Rifle Association declined to comment on the record for this story, but the organization praised default proceeds in a July 2015 blog post responding to Clyburn’s bill. “This provision ensures that Americans’ rights to acquire firearms are not arbitrarily denied because of bureaucratic delays, inefficiencies, or mistakes in identity,” the organization wrote. The NRA called default proceeds “a critical safety valve in federal law.” Gun-safety advocates have also tried to change individual store policies. In a deal with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Walmart voluntarily agreed in 2008 not to sell firearms without a definitive yes from a background check. However, many large retailers and small, local dealers continue to sell firearms to customers without a completed background check. In 2015, Blumenthal and fellow Connecticut Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy, joined by 11 other senators, sent a letter to Cabela’s, EZ Pawn, and Bass Pro Shops—three major gun dealers that engage in default proceed sales—asking them to voluntarily stop the practice. They never got any response from those companies, according to Blumenthal’s office. Since Charleston, however, at least one gun dealer has adopted a policy of not making a sale without a completed background check. Reached by phone, an employee at Shooter’s Choice, where Roof bought his weapon, told ThinkProgress the store adopted the new policy after the shooting. “We didn’t [have that policy then],” said the employee, who declined to give his name, “but we do now.”Alpha 13 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post. Steam Cloud support is currently only available on the Experimental branch to make sure it’s all working as expected before we release it to everyone. If you want to give it a try, right-click Parkitect in the Steam library and select Properties -> Betas -> Experimental. Devlog There’s a new tool available in the scenario editor for marking objects as indestructible: This can be useful for custom-built structures such as park entrance buildings, but can also be used for creating scenarios with some unique restrictions. Changelog - added Submarines ride - added Calm River Ride - added random events - added Steam Cloud support (on Experimental branch) - added brush tool for changing existing path types - added guests stop and watch rides - added bamboo path objects - added terrain textures - added closing shops - added hold Alt to change terrain painting mode - added hotkey for pipette tool (“P”) - added countdown timer for fulfilling scenario goals - added objects can be marked as indestructible in scenario editor - improved behaviour of water when terraforming near it - improved performance when hiding scenery some more - improved path dragging to better work on uneven terrain - improved behaviour when quicksaving a new park - improved how scenario goal rewards work - improved balance of flat ride costs and capacities - fixed issue with Inverted Double Swing seats - fixed a case where Transformer was in wrong animation position after loading savegame - fixed grasses showing across tunnels through vertical terrain cliffs - fixed vandalism visualization not being applied properly to some objects - fixed walls sometimes getting misplaced when building next to sloped terrain - fixed a rare case where the camera would freak out when switching into top-down view (“M”) - fixed high wage costs when starting a new scenario - fixed an error message when adjusting UI scaleBurge answers questions posed by the author in a February 2015 deposition, repeating his intention to take the Fifth Amendment after every question about an alleged torture case. A human rights attorney looks back at his nearly three decades going after Chicago’s notorious torturer of African-American men. After the tense four-hour interrogation with Burge concluded, I told the press, "We feel that we have finally in some way brought to the stand and brought to public questioning a police criminal, a criminal we felt we had to hunt down, not unlike a Nazi war criminal." On February 13, 2015, former Chicago Police Commander Jon G. Burge was released from Federal custody, having served a little less than four years of his four-and-a-half year sentence for lying under oath about whether he tortured scores of African-American men during his time as commander. Less than a week before, I sat across from him in a small room in Tampa, Florida, questioning him, pursuant to a court order, yet again about his role in a torture case—this time, the case of Alonzo Smith, who was repeatedly suffocated with a plastic bag and beaten with a rubber nightstick in the basement of the Area 2 police station by two of Burge’s most violent henchmen after Burge informed him that they “would get him to talk, one way or another.” Reading from a prepared script, the 67-year-old Burge, weakened by several physical ailments but nonetheless exhibiting a hostility that has marked our many encounters over the years, responded to my first question by once again invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. He then stood up, informed me that he would not respond to any further questions, and started to leave the room. After I told him that he would be in violation of the judge’s order if he left before I had finished my questioning, he reluctantly returned, and asserted the Fifth Amendment to each and every subsequent question, including to the most damning one: Was the torture of Smith part of a pattern and practice of systemic and racist torture and abuse against African-American men which he orchestrated? After a contentious concluding exchange between us, a look of smug self-satisfaction came across his face as he answered my final question by stating, “I exercise my Fifth Amendment rights—even though I would like to say you are a liar.” Of course the answer to that question of the systemic and racist nature of Burge’s torture is now well established by a mountain of evidence that has been assembled over nearly three decades in the teeth of an unremitting official cover-up that has implicated a series of police superintendents, numerous prosecutors, more than 30 police detectives and supervisors, and, most notably, Richard M. Daley, first as the State’s Attorney of Cook County, then as Chicago’s long-serving Mayor, in a police torture scandal that had spanned the more than 40 years that I had been a lawyer at the People’s Law Office. A torturer in blue My law partners, Jeffrey Haas and John Stainthorp, and I first became aware of Jon Burge and his connection to police torture in 1987 when Andrew Wilson, a convicted cop killer, called us from death row and asked us to represent him in the pro se lawsuit that he had filed against Burge and several of his associates at Area 2 Detective headquarters. Wilson’s allegations were chilling: suffocation with a bag, burns from a cigarette, beatings, and, most frightening, repeated electric shocks from a black shock box to his genitals, ears and fingers that caused him to be badly burned on a steam radiator across which he was handcuffed at the time he was shocked. With some trepidation, we took the case, and I was soon sitting across from Burge in a small conference room confronting him about his torture of Wilson. At that time, Burge was at the height of his powers, having recently been promoted from Lieutenant to Commander, completing a meteoric rise in rank in the Chicago Police Department. Burly, red-faced and supremely arrogant, Burge had used his clout with the city to retain, at taxpayer’s expense, a former Deputy to then-State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley to represent him. Posturing as a hero for capturing Wilson and obtaining his confession, Burge vehemently denied any wrongdoing and scoffed at my persistent attempts to expose his lies. In the winter of 1989, the Wilson civil case went to trial before a Judge, Brian Duff, who referred to Wilson in an off-the-record comment as the “scum of the earth.” Burge took the stand and I was once again thrust into the role of his interrogator. After the first day of my cross examination, we received a voicemail at our office from an anonymous source. This source, whom we later dubbed “Deep Badge,” worked with Burge at Area 2 and supplied us with information which began the process of blowing the lid off the cover-up. Deep Badge informed us of another Burge electric shock victim, Melvin Jones; the names of Burge’s co-conspirators; and claimed that State’s Attorney Daley and Mayor Jane Byrne were aware of Wilson’s torture. We sought to confront Burge before the jury with this newly discovered evidence, but the judge, while recognizing that this evidence was “explosive,” would not let me do so. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury, unaware of the unravelling cover-up, hung, necessitating a second trial. While we awaited the re-trial, we pursued the leads given to us by “Deep Badge” and found a number of other torture victims who were serving time based on confessions tortured from them by Burge and his confederates. One of them was Anthony Holmes, who was tortured with electric shock by Burge just after he became a detective in 1973. Armed with this information, I again deposed Burge, who brazenly denied any misconduct in each and every one of the newly discovered cases. At the re-trial, Judge Duff denied us the right to confront Burge with these newly discovered cases, and when I tried to do so, the judge, egged on by Burge’s lawyer, repeatedly held me and my co-counsel in contempt. As a result of the judge’s unremitting bias in favor of Burge and his lawyers, after an eight-week second trial, the all-white jury absolved Burge. We appealed the decision, and the evidence that we had uncovered compelled the Chicago Police Department to reopen its investigation into the Wilson case and to pursue the question of whether the torture was systemic. The investigation produced two determinations: that Burge should be fired for his torture of Wilson, and that the torture at Area 2 was “systematic” and implicated command personnel. The Department moved to fire Burge—while suppressing the findings of systematic torture. Targeted by Burge During this period, the reality of personal risk became more apparent. Burge publicly called me an “idiot” in response to my testimony before the Chicago City Council, and his defense committee and the Fraternal Order of Police repeatedly mounted personal attacks against me and my law partners. A friendly police employee told us of an alleged threat that Burge had made to “blow us away.” I spoke with another unnamed Burge associate on the phone who asserted that Burge had tortured innocent suspects and women, and an African-American former detective who worked in Area 2 clandestinely came to our office and told me about a Burge torture scene he had witnessed in 1973. Unknown to us at the time, Burge had enlisted one of his former associates to comb the Area 2 files in an attempt to discover the identity of Deep Badge. (I also learned from a neighbor that Burge had a boat. The neighbor had seen Burge cruising in Chicago’s Monroe Street Harbor; the boat was aptly named “The Vigilante.”) Burge was brought to trial before the Chicago Police Board in the winter of 1992, amid a local furor that was occasioned by our successfully obtaining the public release of the CPD’s finding of systematic torture, a rally for Burge which attracted 3,000 cops and prosecutors and a boisterous counter rally that the Task Force to Confront Police Violence organized. Jeff Haas, who was a moving force in the Task Force, and I often attended the six-week Police Board hearing, at which Wilson, Jones and a third Burge victim all testified. Burge took the stand and denied that he tortured these men, and we suffered Burge’s wrath when we publicly commented on the evidence. Nearly a year later, the Police Board issued its decision to fire Burge, and I was quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times as saying that “the person in charge of the systematic torture had been fired,” and that the department should “implement” the findings of systematic torture by “clean[ing] house.” On the heels of the Police Board decision, the Fraternal Order of Police unsuccessfully attempted to honor Burge with a float in the St. Patrick Day’s Parade; a few weeks later, the Federal Appeals Court, citing Judge Duff’s refusal to permit the questioning of Burge before the jury about the other cases of torture, granted us a new trial in the Wilson case. Burge relocated to Florida, the City of Chicago quietly permitting him to resign after his firing became final. As a result, in 1997, he began to collect his police pension. That same year, after a second appeal, we obtained a $1.1 million dollar settlement in the Wilson case. Justice reform beyond police torture At about this time, the struggle against police torture joined with the movement against the death penalty that was spearheaded by a group of death row prisoners who had been tortured by Burge and his men. These men, who called themselves the Death Row Ten, joined with lawyers, activists, and other foes of the death penalty and police torture in a unified effort that resulted in a death penalty moratorium, the appointment of a Cook County Special Prosecutor to investigate Burge’s crimes and, in 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan’s commutation of all Illinois death sentences and pardon of four of the Death Row Ten—Leroy Orange, Madison Hobley, Aaron Patterson and Stanley Howard—on the basis of innocence. The innocence pardons permitted the four men to file law suits, and my law partner Joey Mogul and I became lead lawyers for two of them. This gave us an avenue to further investigate Burge and his confederates’ crimes. I journeyed to Florida, Arizona, Tennessee and several Illinois prisons to track down and to record the statements of numerous Burge torture survivors. Accompanied by an investigator and a court reporter, I also convinced several retired African American Area 2 detectives to give sworn statements. In these statements, the detectives, who were excluded from the actual torture sessions, told of seeing Burge’s electric shock box, hearing the torture victims’ screams and participating in discussions about the torture which was sometimes referred to as the “Vietnam treatment.” They also recounted how Burge’s threats of violence and their fear of retribution—the police code of silence at work—kept them from coming forward until they had retired. In the early stages of these four lawsuits, a still-arrogant Burge, with the blessing of a new generation of taxpayer funded private lawyers, answered under oath a series of written questions by again denying that he participated in, witnessed, or otherwise had knowledge of any acts of torture. Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 2004, I travelled to Tampa with an investigator (who also served as a de facto bodyguard) to obtain an order from a Florida judge (whose nickname, I soon learned, was “Dirty Harry”) to compel Burge to appear at torture survivor Darrell Cannon’s parole revocation hearing. Outside of the courtroom, Burge, referencing the $1.1 million dollar Andrew Wilson settlement, which we had earned many times over after 10 years of intense legal struggle, told a Chicago Tribune reporter who had journeyed from Chicago that “you would think Taylor would retire after getting a million from the city,” implying that the principal aim of the cases exposing decades’ worth of racist torture by the police department of the third largest city in America was for some human rights attorneys to get rich. After the court session, we traveled south to Apollo Beach in search of Burge’s house and a picture of The Vigilante. Our efforts alerted the local St. Petersburg newspaper to run a feature article about the alleged police torturer living quietly in their midst under the cloud of “accusations [that] are like something out of a wartime prison: electric shock and cattle prods; near suffocation with a typewriter bag; mock executions with a pistol.” “Not unlike a Nazi war criminal” On September 1, 2004, Burge appeared in Chicago to answer questions in a consolidated deposition in the four lawsuits and Cannon’s parole revocation hearing. The videotaped deposition was held in a mock courtroom in his lawyers’ downtown offices, and they smuggled Burge in through a back entrance to avoid an angry demonstration, the media and three process servers who were attempting to subpoena Burge to testify before the Special Prosecutors’ grand jury. I questioned Burge for nearly four hours. Having received some prudently revised legal advice, he repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment to each and every question. After the tense interrogation concluded, I was quoted in the Sun-Times as saying, “We feel that we have finally in some way brought to the stand and brought to public questioning a police criminal, a criminal we felt we had to hunt down, not unlike a Nazi war criminal.” Four years later, on October 21, 2008, I received an early morning phone call from the Assistant U.S. Attorney who was heading up the investigation into allegations that Burge committed perjury and obstructed justice when he denied under oath five years earlier that he had committed torture. He told me that Federal Agents had a warrant for Burge’s arrest on those charges and he would be arrested later that morning in Florida. After 20 years of pursuit, our efforts had finally hit paydirt. Burge’s arrest was the culmination of decades of work that had intensified since Burge’s 2004 deposition. In 2005, Joey Mogul had journeyed to Geneva to present our case to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (CAT), and, in May 2006, the CAT issued findings that called for U.S. prosecutions of Burge and his men. In summer 2006, the Special Prosecutor had refused to bring state charges of perjury and conspiracy against Burge and had instead issued what many considered to be a cover-up report. In response, 250 organizations and individuals signed a shadow report that exposed the whitewash and renewed the call for criminal charges. In summer 2007, hearings were held before the Chicago City Council and the Cook County Board of Commissioners at which torture survivors testified and the deposition videotape of Burge taking the Fifth Amendment was played. In the aftermath of the hearings, both bodies called for Federal prosecutions. Early in 2008, the City paid a $19.8 million settlement to the four torture survivors whom Governor Ryan had pardoned in 2003. In 2009, while Burge awaited trial on the perjury and obstruction charges, I found myself again in Dirty Harry’s Tampa courtroom, face-to-face with Burge, seeking his return to testify in a post-conviction case where it was alleged that he supervised the torture of a murder suspect. Burge, after telling the judge that he was heavily medicated for a back problem and intended to take the Fifth Amendment if returned to Chicago to testify, stated, “Your Honor, Mr. Taylor has been suing me and members of the Chicago Police Department, for over thirty (30) years. My personal feeling is this is strictly for harassment.” After the court session concluded with the judge opining that he would not require Burge to return to Chicago, I packed up my briefcase and opened one of the heavy wooden double doors to leave the empty courtroom. At that instant, Burge, coming back into the courtroom, opened the other door, our eyes met. He said nothing, but I felt a chill run up my spine before he pushed past me. A torturer, finally, in jail In May and June 2010, Burge went on trial in Federal Judge Joan Lefkow’s Chicago courtroom. The prosecution presented evidence that included testimony from Anthony Holmes, Melvin Jones and Andrew Wilson, from a reluctant white detective who testified, under a grant of immunity, about witnessing one of Burge’s torture sessions, and from two of the black detectives who had first told their stories to me. Other prosecution witnesses included several to whom Burge had bragged about his racially motivated torture, including a woman lawyer who had previously revealed to me her troubling tale that Burge, while drinking at a local bar, had articulated an utter disdain for criminal defendants’ constitutional rights while making sexually explicit comments to her and admitting to abusing Andrew Wilson. Burge took the stand and broke his silence to deny each and every allegation of torture, and in another chance encounter after closing arguments concluded, he cursed me out. Burge then retired to a bar across the street from the courthouse to await the jury’s verdict. According to a former prosecutor who had made Burge’s acquaintance while attending the six week trial, Burge called him over and asked him whether he thought that the jury would “believe that bunch of niggers,” referring to the African-American torture survivors who had testified against him. The jury did believe the survivors and found Burge guilty. In January 2011, Burge was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison, and in March, he began to serve his sentence at the Federal Correctional Center in Butner, North Carolina, alongside other high profile white-collar criminals including Bernie Madoff. Since Burge’s indictment, several of Burge’s victims had been exonerated, including Michael Tillman and Ronald Kitchen, for whom we filed civil suits. After obtaining a court order in Tillman’s case Joey Mogul and I travelled to North Carolina to again depose Burge in May of 2011. While it was not unusual for us to enter prisons to talk to clients, this passage through the metal detectors with Burge’s lawyers was decidedly different. Burge, dressed in brown prison garb, complained of the food and medical care, then proceeded to assert his Fifth Amendment right to all questions that I posed. The deposition was videotaped, and his “testimony” was featured in videos that we made to recount Tillman and Kitchen’s horrific stories of torture and wrongful convictions. Bearing witness to Burge’s imprisonment, albeit not for his systemic torture, and capturing it on videotape, was an important event, one which I have often cited when speaking about police torture in Chicago. Burge was behind bars, while victims like Tillman and Kitchen and the torture survivors who courageously testified against Burge were all free. But this victory, while both symbolic and real, and grounded on decades of struggle by an anti-racist movement, did not end the battle to bring a modicum of final justice to the survivors of police torture and healing to the African American community. That struggle continues to this day, seeking reparations for the survivors and new hearings for the men still imprisoned as a result of confessions tortured from them. Meanwhile, a broken but still unrepentant Jon G. Burge wears the well-deserved mantle of former Chicago Police commander and notorious torturer.Dropping in from Costa Rica to give you guys an abbreviated rundown of what Independence looks like—its Bryce Harper hitting a rocket into the bullpen with THE MOST AMERICAN BAT EVER SWUNG. (We don’t know who made it yet.) Advertisement The best of the best comes first. True Blue Customs‘ 4040v2s for Phillies OF Darin Ruf. These are RUFFFFFFF. If you get on base with these and don’t steal every base in front of you then you’re doing it wrong. Tape Kings does great work if you are willing to ship your bat to them. I’m all about these jerseys but how are you gonna go with a green belt there? Nomad Customs did the bottom Nike Air MVP Pro II MCS for Shane Victorino. Unsure on the top pair. Jonathan Lucroy’s All Star Sporting Goods gear was outrageous. Every catcher in America should have this on the 4th and it should be mandatory dress. UA.com selling 4th of July Limited Edition Deceptions. Mizuno‘s BG’s complimented the Stars & Stripes authentics. Franklin and Robbie Cano showed their patriotism, as did Cutter—check our Instagram for their entry in the batting glove category today. Dexter Fowler wins the award for Most Patriotic (and Conveniently Cubs-Oriented) Nike SHA/DO Trap.1963 studio album by The Beach Boys 1963 studio album by The Beach Boys Little Deuce Coupe is the fourth album by American rock band the Beach Boys, and their third album release in 1963. It reached number four in the United States during a 46-week chart stay, and was eventually certified platinum by the RIAA. It is considered to be one of the earliest examples of a rock concept album.[3] The album was released three weeks after Surfer Girl. Four of the tracks from Little Deuce Coupe ("Shut Down", "409", "Our Car Club" and "Little Deuce Coupe") had already appeared on previous albums, and discounting an alternate recording of "Be True to Your School", no tracks from the album were issued as an A-sided single. Background [ edit ] In the summer of 1963, Capitol Records compiled a "hot rod" compilation album called Shut Down, including the Beach Boys' song of the same name and "409"—without their approval or involvement. Brian Wilson promptly readied several songs he had already been working on (mainly with radio DJ Roger Christian) and the band hastily went through recording sessions to put Little Deuce Coupe on the record shop racks, remarkably, one month after Surfer Girl had come out. Eight of the tracks were new, while "Little Deuce Coupe", "Our Car Club", "Shut Down" and "409" had all come out on one of their previous three albums. Production [ edit ] Although Nick Venet was listed as producer for "Shut Down" and Murry Wilson for "409", the official producer's credit for the entire Little Deuce Coupe album cites only Brian Wilson. Despite the rushed nature of the album's sessions, Brian Wilson's song arrangements were notably becoming more complex, specifically songs like "No-Go Showboat" and "Custom Machine". After its recording, Brian Wilson re-recorded "Be True to Your School" for single release, resulting in another top 10 hit. An original Christmas-themed composition, "Little Saint Nick" was also recorded, produced and issued as a Christmas single.[citation needed] This was the last Beach Boys album to officially include rhythm guitarist David Marks until 2012's That's Why God Made the Radio. Original member Al Jardine made his permanent return preceding this album's sessions, and Marks departed shortly thereafter.[citation needed] As with the preceding Surfer Girl album, the date assigned for recording all
at the corner of Del Paso Boulevard and Arden Way in Old North Sacramento to protest the killing of Joseph Mann by Sacramento police in July and other officer-involved shootings of black men. Police and surveillance videos were made public this week that showed Mann, who was mentally ill and armed with a knife, running from officers and yelling at them before two patrolmen killed him in a barrage of gunfire. The Sacramento chapter of Black Lives Matter organized Wednesday night’s protest, which was rowdy but peaceful as of 8 p.m. with protesters waving signs at passing cars and chanting slogans such as “Whose streets? Our streets!” Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Sacramento Bee SHARE COPY LINK The family of Joseph Mann, shot by police officers on July 11, criticize the Sacramento Police Department during a press conference on Del Paso Blvd. on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016 in Sacramento, California. SHARE COPY LINK "We need to start tackling these issues," says Mayor Kevin Johnson, after Sacramento City Council members viewed the footage released by police in closed session Tuesday night. During the public portion of the meeting, Mayor Kevin Johnson promised SHARE COPY LINK The Sacramento Police Department Tuesday released dashcam video from patrol cars that pursued Joseph Mann on July 11, the day he was shot dead by two officers on Del Paso Boulevard in Sacramento. SHARE COPY LINK The Sacramento Police Department Tuesday released dashcam video from patrol cars that pursued Joseph Mann on July 11, the day he was shot dead by two officers on Del Paso Boulevard in Sacramento. SHARE COPY LINK The Sacramento Police Department Tuesday released dashcam video from patrol cars that pursued Joseph Mann on July 11, the day he was shot dead by two officers on Del Paso Boulevard in Sacramento.Wayne Rooney has missed United's last four games with a knee problem Photo: TSR Wayne Rooney has been ruled out of Manchester United’s clash with Liverpool on Sunday with a knee injury, but Nani and Anderson are set to be in Sir Alex Ferguson’s squad. Rooney has missed the last four games with a knee problem but is expected to return to training imminently and could be fit for Wednesday’s FA Cup replay against West Ham United. “Wayne Rooney is still out,” Ferguson said on Friday. “I am hoping he will start training today actually, in which case he won’t be far away. “I don’t think it is an issue, but we need to guide him along. In terms of the injury he had, it’s quite straightforward so if he starts today, I assume he will be available for Wednesday’s replay. “Nani is back in training and will be included in the squad for Sunday. Phil Jones is back although Wednesday is more likely for Wednesday. “Anderson has been back training for 10 days now so he will be in the squad for Sunday. All in all it is quite a positive situation. It’s good to have them back.” Looking ahead to Sunday’s clash with their rivals, Ferguson added: “The derby game against Liverpool never changes. It’s always an immensely important game – intense, emotional. We are going into the game in reasonable form.”These Waters Run Deep The Chicago River is being reborn. To journey along it is to see the city’s future—and feel the undertow of its past. Work on the 28-mile Sanitary and Ship Canal, the largest municipal project in the United States at the time, began in 1892. It’s difficult to exaggerate its scale. As Solzman notes in his book, more rock, soil, and clay were excavated than would be for the Panama Canal. In fact, Chicago’s canal became a model for Panama’s. In 1900, the gates were opened, gravity did its work, and the flow of the river was reversed. Now the epic stink of Chicago’s disease-causing waste and toxic factory ooze could make its way into the Mississippi. Even before the canal was finished, Missouri—and honestly, who couldn’t have seen this coming?—sued Illinois, but an awkward fact undercut its legal standing: Missourians, too, sent their raw sewage and industrial pollutants down the Mississippi to other states. City leaders, betting on a short-term solution, at first moved the drinking-water intake farther out into the lake. Disease found people anyway. Cholera, typhoid, and other waterborne illnesses tormented residents. A particularly deadly outbreak of cholera in 1849 spurred the establishment of many orphanages, some with Dickensian names, such as St. Joseph’s Home for the Friendless. In 1885, less than a decade before it hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago was deluged by a huge rainstorm, and the resulting contamination of the lake killed 518 people and forced the city to take drastic measures. As most Chicagoans know, at the turn of the 20th century, the flow of the river was miraculously reversed. Its end became its beginning. It seems almost biblical, the reversal of a river, what with the legions of immigrant workers driven by the pharaohs of industry and engineering. Originally, the river and its foul contents flowed into Lake Michigan, the source of the city’s drinking water—a catastrophic circumstance given that, as David Solzman writes in The Chicago River: An Illustrated History and Guide to the River and Its Waterways, “Chicago’s production of waste was as prodigious as its growth.” Who were the poor immigrants to complain? Were the farms going to hire them? As for the wealthy industrialists, they held their noses and made plans for moving to the suburbs. Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily. … Every now and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put it out. Chicagoans believe in industry, even if it creates hazards that we’ll live to regret. Or even regret at the time. The river was subjected to this ferocious expediency. Human waste flowed directly into its waters. So did the effluent from tanneries, meatpacking plants, soap factories, metal forges, and gasworks. Upton Sinclair, in his 1906 novel The Jungle, which I remember reading wide-eyed as a college freshman, gives us, in all its wonder, Bubbly Creek, a miserable tributary near the Chicago stockyards that gurgles with the gases of decomposing entrails: Early Chicagoans, like most Americans in the 19th century, were brutal pragmatists. They valued progress at any cost. In 1835, city dwellers shed few tears over the scattering of the area’s original inhabitants, the Potawatomi, despite the Potawatomi’s own lamentations—800 warriors marched across Chicago’s early wooden bridges in a ceremonial leaving of the lakeshore. Their native fishing and hunting grounds having been overtaken, they’d accepted a brokered agreement to move beyond the Mississippi River into what is now Iowa. It was a deal they couldn’t refuse. It felt like a good time to take stock of what ran beneath the bridges, so I decided to come back and see the Chicago River with new eyes. Over several days, I wandered along its banks, paddled it in a kayak, cruised it in a motorboat, took an architectural boat tour, and had long—you might say meandering—conversations with advocates, enthusiasts, nostalgic riverside residents, and a homeless man who has lived near the banks for many years. Among the things I learned is this: The river is alive. And like all living things, it carries with it vestiges of the past while continually remaking itself. And the only way to truly know it is to be on it. I moved away from Chicago two years ago, and the river largely fell out of mind. Until I read about the 760-acre North Branch development project that is slated to bring apartments, hotels, offices, and playing fields to a stretch of the river once shunned as a blind alley. It was described as an undertaking of a cost, scale, and ambition to rival the creation of Millennium Park, with an impact that might prove even greater. The project struck me as a symbolic pivot point, an immense commitment that seemed to say Chicagoans had stopped thinking of the river as an eyesore and starting thinking of it as an asset. The river is alive. And like all living things, it carries with it vestiges of the past while continually remaking itself. For years, in winter, riding the Brown Line, I’d rattle over the river, to and from my office. Below, dark water, pale ice scrims. I knew the river as a passing-over moment at the end of the day, an innocuous something that intrigued me but which I understood only in a piecemeal way. I’d heard the river was the reason Chicago existed. I’d heard it had long been polluted. I’d heard, too, that massive investment in it was underway, a transformation—led by environmental advocates, City Hall, developers—that would revive the downtown waterfront promenades and bring native flora and fauna back to the river and its banks. The South Branch, once called the River of Portage because it connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi, has also been much changed from its original winding self—its bends unbent, its shallows scoured. It flows southwest from the downtown confluence of the North Branch and Main Stem as far as South Damen Avenue, where it merges with the manmade Sanitary and Ship Canal. Not much about the modern Chicago River can be considered natural. Maybe that only adds to its mystique. The North Branch, whose headwaters lie some 25 miles from the mouth, was originally considered a separate river entirely—named Guare, after an early settler. Lengths of the shallow, winding North Branch were eventually deepened and straightened to accommodate industry, and the North Shore Channel was dug to pump in Lake Michigan water and push things—there was much in the river in those days that needed pushing—southward. The river, of course, is not the lake, which orients everyone in Chicago (Walk east toward the lake, you can’t miss it) and is a source of yearning during the long winter, a first lover you just can’t quit. There’s a real sense of there there on the shoreline, where in the distance sky meets watery horizon. The river? It’s everywhere and nowhere. It snakes along for a seemingly unknowable 156 miles, north to south. Maybe, if we’re honest, we only really see the river when we’ve been away for a while and return, tired, a little out of sorts, and notice something of its everyday grandeur. Had it been there all along? The river begins—as all things do in Chicago—at the lake. It moves sluggishly through downtown, passes beneath Beaux Arts–style drawbridges. On sunny days, its green mirror reflects sky and metal and glass. We’ve seen the river hundreds of times. Walked above it. In summer, the architectural-tour boats ply its waters. The guide’s voice over the loudspeaker bounces off the surrounding concrete. Yachts—decks knotted with partyers, drinks in hand—come and go. The air here smells of sunscreen, algae, and diesel. Above, bridge crossers in Cubs gear with kids in tow, downtown office workers in suits and slacks scissor-legging to the Red Line or Union Station, thinking already of later. We float beneath a decommissioned railroad swing bridge, past a couple of abandoned shopping carts stuck in the muddy bank. As we round a point south of Cortland Street, a high grinding sound fills the air. I notice a silvery film on the surface of the river and a hot metallic smell. Just beyond an embankment, an immense machine heaves into view: a scrap metal shredder with a spout gushing fragments of things that once meant something to people—lawn chairs, charcoal grills, swing sets. Seamus has been kayaking the North Branch since the early 1990s, when the area was mostly an industrial backwater. “I’d paddle down here some mornings,” he recalls, “and used condoms would be floating everywhere.” He wondered how they’d gotten there until he noticed the gentlemen’s club and pay-by-the-hour motels amid the old factories. “Prostitutes walked up and down North Avenue openly soliciting.” Everything found its way into the river. We’re heading north, paddling under the North Avenue Bridge. Seamus tells me his great-grandfather found a woman in the river once. Rescued her from drowning. This was sometime in the 1870s. Recently arrived from Ireland, he was walking near the downtown docks. Imagine: black smoke spewing from smokestacks and shrouding the sky, steamers crowding the waterway. Seamus’s great-grandfather heard shouting. Saw a young woman flailing in the river. She seemed to be drowning. He took off his coat and handed it to a bystander, then jumped in to pull the woman out of the paths of the steamers. He and others most likely revived her on the shore, maybe wrapped her in a blanket. When Seamus’s great-grandfather looked around for the man he’d given his coat to, he was gone, and so was the coat. A city on the make, even then. Early-morning sunlight diffuses over the water and warms the dark wood pilings that rise from the shallows near the banks. Seamus says he’s found vegetables, coconuts, and soccerballs—lots of soccerballs—in the river. My finds so far: a waterlogged baseball and an acorn squash with a price sticker still affixed. “You find a lot of interesting things floating in the river,” Seamus Ford tells me. “I found a bowling pin once.” I’m kayaking with him and his 8-year-old daughter, Charlotte, on the North Branch near Goose Island. Seamus, who is 51 and grew up in Rogers Park, has a salt-and-pepper goatee and gets an intense look of concentration when he talks. His day job is doing PR for a consulting company, but his passion is the river. Mostly, though, the remnants of the North Branch’s industrial past are gone. Blocks from where we’re paddling, a sleek Apple Store and a Whole Foods, among other businesses, have taken the factories’ places. A Jeanne Gang–designed rowing facility now stands near Belmont Avenue. Buildings that once housed tanneries and shipping companies have been converted to condos and fitted with large banks of windows, the river these days being something to gaze at rather than turn away from. The condos are connected to the water by walkways, which lead to piers. Many of these changes seem long overdue, but when I think of the cost of land near here and the expediency with which the river has been treated in the past, I think it’s fair to ask, Whose river will it be? On one of the piers, we find a collection of cracked-open crayfish shells, likely the remains of a heron’s feast. We paddle on, and a family of mallard ducks parts to let us pass, then rejoins behind us. Charlotte laughs and slaps the water with the paddle, getting Seamus wet. At the base of another pier, she picks some flowering chives to nibble on. Beyond those, a grove of tall grasses, reeds, and yellow flowers. By the end of the day, we’ll have seen blue herons, hawk-like ospreys, and two good-size beavers, which will scurry away as we approach but remain hidden in plain sight, one just below the river’s surface, its eyes and snout peeking out, the other lurking behind some more wood pilings, knocking soil and branches into the water. Here and there, we see fish jumping. In the 1970s, the river was home to only seven species. Now it’s home to 70. Margaret Frisbie, the executive director of Friends of the Chicago River, a 38-year-old environmental advocacy group, told me that the long-fought-for implementation of new water quality standards in 2011—including a requirement that treatment plants disinfect all wastewater released into the river—has yielded results. So have oxygen-boosting aeration plants—Seamus, Charlotte, and I pass one, bubbling away, at Webster Avenue. But Margaret said the biggest boon to the life of the river has been a storm-water containment system—more than four decades in the making—known as the Deep Tunnel. Begun in 1975 and still years from completion, it’s the largest such reservoir system in the world, catching billions of gallons of runoff from major rains before all that dirty water—laden with road salt, sewage backup, and other kinds of detritus—hits the river. Not all of the flora and fauna returning to these waters are welcome. At one point on our kayak journey, a huge carp leaps from the middle of the river, and I’m reminded that a cousin of this fish—the Asian carp, a voracious invasive species that could decimate the food sources of other aquatic animals—has been caught in nearby waters. A short while later, we spot a pair of native painted turtles, each eight or so inches long, resting on a half-submerged log. The turtles, I later learn, represent both a success story and a cautionary tale. Success because cleaner water has allowed them to thrive. Cautionary because the proliferation of invasive plants at the river’s edge has forced the females, who like to lay their eggs in sunny spots, to leave the safety of the riverbank and cross the path of passing cars and bikes. Seamus says we’re witnessing a river in transition. A transmutation. Alchemy. A great blue heron. III. Survivorman In 2004, a homeless man named Richard Dorsay was found living inside the infrastructure of the Lake Shore Drive bascule bridge. He’d built a three-room wooden shack among the girders and camouflaged it with blankets. He had a microwave, space heater, television, and PlayStation, all connected by an extension cord to one of the bridge houses. He said he’d been living there three years when the police found him. Sometimes, he later told the Associated Press, he’d be minding his own business and the bells would go off and the bridge would start to rise. He’d hang on to the beams. “The first time it was scary,” he said. “After that, it was almost like riding a Ferris wheel.” The river and its environs have long attracted people with nowhere else to go, people who don’t want to be seen. Perhaps they come because, for so long, no one ever thought to really look at the river. My second day out, on a motorboat excursion with a 32-year-old river guide for Kayak Chicago named Brian Westrick, we pass what appears to be an encampment under the Cortland Street Bridge: coolers, blankets, jugs of water. A little farther on, near an industrial area off Kingsbury Street, there’s another one: plywood, blue plastic sheeting, a tent, storage containers, and, sticking their heads above the tall grasses, four ghost-like figures that turn out to be blankets and clothes on posts, drying out from a recent rain. Does a family live here? How many might there be? I remember Seamus telling me about seeing a camp farther up the North Branch: two large couches and a lamp with an extension cord. A furnished apartment under a river bridge. “They even had an Oriental rug,” Seamus said. There’s no end to human ingenuity, it seems. The river has long attracted people who don’t want to be seen. Perhaps that’s because, for so long, no one ever thought to really look at the river. As Brian and I pass the second encampment, I notice a man moving among the drying clothes. I wave to him. To my surprise, he waves back and calls out to us. Brian pulls the boat alongside the six-foot concrete retaining wall that separates the river from the camp above. The man looks down at us. He is bearded, dressed in a red T-shirt, shorts, a red bandanna. Looking to be in his early 50s, he’s tan, muscled. He seems to be healthy. He tells us his name is Robinson—a fake name I’ve coined at his request—and asks what kind of license you need to pilot a boat like ours on the river. He’s very interested in public waterways, he says, and quotes a series of what sound like court decisions related to public river access, rattling off the legalese so fast it’s hard to tell if it’s truth or nonsense. Robinson speaks without pausing, like someone who hasn’t talked with anyone in a while. At length, Brian tells him that you need to have a license for certain kinds of boats. Robinson considers this and then, as if momentarily caught up in a dream, says, “I would really like to be on the river.” Our curious conversation continues, with Robinson talking down at us from the top of the wall and Brian making a comical effort to keep the boat stationary in the wind, flaring the engine and occasionally circling the craft around. Robinson tells me he’s been living on the river for seven years. “I’m trying to get as many people as possible to be self-sustaining. Off the grid. Lots of us will be living this way in the near future.” I ask where he goes in the winter. Is there a shelter close by? “I stay here along the river,” Robinson says matter-of-factly. “Winter of 2014 probably took two years off my life.” I’m remembering that winter, nearly three weeks of subzero temperatures. The lakefront turned into hills of ice. I ask him how he manages the cold. “Wool and plastic,” he says. “Trapping body heat is the thing. But it has to contour to the body. No air pockets. Have to strap your hands inside so they don’t slip out. Les Stroud, Survivorman stuff.” Brian and I look at each other in disbelief. “No bugs and no rain in the winter is a real advantage,” Robinson says. Advertisement He tells us he chooses to live outside because he doesn’t want to take handouts, that he believes in self-sufficiency and thinks it would be a better world if everyone did. He says he has animal companions at night. Coyotes that howl in unison at passing police sirens. A marmot that tore up his camp looking for food. “One time a raccoon woke me up with his paws on my forehead.” He also says that he sleeps with his head in a Coleman cooler. This isn’t because of the weather. According to Robinson, it’s fairly common for the homeless on the river to be attacked. At night, mentally ill people, sometimes addicts, will sneak up on you when you’re sleeping, he says, and “smash your head with a rock,” steal your possessions. In Robinson’s case, those include a phone and a laptop, which he plugs in at a nearby shop and uses to keep in touch with friends and family. Finally, Brian and I continue upriver, but Robinson and I will later resume our conversation over email. I find out that he became homeless a decade or so ago after losing his job with a trucking company. I also learn that his favorite works of American literature are Mark Twain’s river writings: Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I think of how the King and the Duke, those hucksters from Huck Finn, are always on the make, always twisting feeling for gain, and find themselves up against Huck and Jim’s unschooled, pure goodness. A simple dichotomy. Our eyes tell us so little. Would it surprise you that—as I learned from family members I got in touch with—Robinson graduated from a prestigious Catholic university in the 1980s? That he maintains a membership at a local gym, where he showers, works out, and attends meditation classes? That he has two sisters, one a police detective in another city, who worry over him? That he could be sitting next to you—even now—in a café along the North Branch in his clean shirt and red bandanna? A homeless man whom the author dubbed Robinson, shown holding a book on constitutional law. He says he’s lived year-round at an encampment on the North Branch for seven years. IV. Something Elemental Brian and I push considerably farther up the North Branch than I went the day before with Seamus. Soon, in Ravenswood, we’re seeing small fishing and recreational boats tied to docks, the postindustrial giving way to the bucolic. The river feels wilder here, more aboriginal, remote. Trees—cottonwoods, elms—overhang the banks, creating patterns of light and shadow on the water in the late afternoon. Two-flats line the river to the east, larger and more opulent houses to the west. Two sculls come toward us, likely high school rowers from nearby Lane Tech. Brian slows the boat to a crawl to cut down the wake. I wave to them, but they don’t wave back. They seem tired, their faces pinched. As we’re letting them pass, I ask Brian how he got started in the river guide business. He tells me he was an account manager for a steel company and also used to work as a software sales rep. “Good pay, trips to Europe even, staying in nice hotels,” he says. But he was gritting his teeth all the while. So he quit both jobs. Returned to what he loved. “My back used to hurt from sitting at my desk in front of a screen so long. Those jobs were just disconnected from the physical world. I missed that. It feels good to be outside.” He punches the engine. We continue north. Eventually, we reach the confluence of the North Branch and the North Shore Channel. Here, we encounter a small four-foot dam. A group of adults and kids are fishing from a concrete promenade. “Most people want to go downtown on tours, so I don’t get up this way very often,” Brian says. “But I really should.” On the way back south, we pass beneath the Lawrence Avenue Bridge, and I think about Terri Zupanc, a visual artist I talked to a few days before. She and her husband bought a two-flat along this very stretch of the river in 1994 and embraced its elusive charms long before kayaks and sculls regularly glided along it. She took inspiration from the river for her drawings and photographs. “It was just lawless on the river then,” she told me. “There was a real sense of freedom there, a haven within the city.” In the mid-1990s, she’d see houseboats tied up at the docks. The boaters paid a nominal fee to the property owners to plug in an extension cord. Lots of artists, actors, and musicians lived in those houseboats and two-flats, and they didn’t take the river for granted: “They saw it as something elemental.” Music could be heard coming from the boats and the back porches, and folks would light communal bonfires at night on the riverbank and hang Christmas lights on the bridges, no planning committee needed. Even then, the river seemed to be bristling with wildlife. “Oh my God, the animals!” Terri exclaimed, her voice suddenly childlike. Deer, foxes, muskrat, turtles. Beavers that chewed up the cottonwood trees until the residents wrapped the trunks in wire fencing. Terri would pilot a small motorboat to her art studio above a horse stable near a zinc smelter off North Avenue, not far from the gentlemen’s club. She might have crossed wakes with Seamus back then, a lonely kayaker amid the floating condoms. Sometimes on Friday afternoons, Terri would take her boat all the way downtown, picking up her friends alongside the tour boat docks for a floating happy hour, not far from where Seamus’s great-grandfather had rescued the woman near the mouth of the river. No doubt the light would’ve been perfect. A south-facing view of the North Avenue Bridge V. Bridges The sun is out the next day as I paddle, this time alone, along the Main Stem in the heart of downtown, though I can’t help noticing the clouds gathering in a far corner of the sky. The Centennial Fountain, which every hour sends a spray of water arcing across the river near its mouth, douses me, a portent of what’s to come. If you pass close enough to the busy patios of the restaurants and hotels lining the north bank, someone will eventually lift a glass to you or wave or smile. It’s a long holiday weekend, 70 degrees and sunny (for now), so why not smile? Along the Chicago Riverwalk—the immaculate 1.3-mile waterfront promenade completed in 2016 with the help of a $98 million federal loan and no small amount of arm-twisting by Rahm Emanuel—gleaming steel awnings emerge from the bridge anchorages to protect pedestrians like cupped hands. Crowds flow along the walkway and fill the cafés and bars. Pleasure craft weave among the double-decker tour boats. If any spot can open your eyes to the lucrative possibilities of the river, it’s this one. I wait until there’s a big enough break between the tour boats and paddle across to the opposite bank. At Dearborn Street, I see a man fishing under the bridge—muttonchop sideburns, red-and-blue baseball cap. I ask him if the fishing’s good. He reaches into a bucket and pulls up a line with four perch on it. “It’s OK to fish in the river now,” he says. “This is my favorite spot for perch right here.” He glances sideways, perhaps worrying he’s said too much. Then he leans over the rail and takes a conspiratorial tone. “I catch catfish sometimes the length of my arm,” he says, measuring it out. I say that’s something, considering the way the river used to be. I paddle up to one of the Riverwalk landings near a coffee shop so new its sign isn’t up yet and strike up a conversation with an employee named Tim Gibson, who moved to Chicago from Detroit a year and a half ago and just graduated from Le Cordon Bleu. He’s trained in French gastronomy and wants to open his own restaurant. Tim has a round face and an easy smile. We talk about the South Side, where he lives, and the differences between Detroit and Chicago. “I love that Chicago is a hub,” he says. “It’s a good place for people from somewhere else.” From inside the shop, we watch kayaks, yachts, water taxis, and tour boats pass, joggers dodge pedestrians, office workers stride across the bridges above. Everything in motion. Nothing still. Advertisement Back on the river, I paddle under the La Salle Street Bridge and, given the crowds, hope to catch a glimpse of Suit Guy, the bridge dancer who wears flamboyant attire—powder blue and shocking pink one day, gold lamé another—and performs a kind of mechanical burlesque, propellering his jacket over his head, when the tourist boats pass. I think of a documentary I saw about him. As with so many people and things associated with the river, Suit Guy—known to some as Riverace, as in Liberace—has a story that runs deeper than you might think. His name is Vincent P. Falk. He was born in 1949 and orphaned as a baby, abandoned by his mother at a now-shuttered hospital not far from the river—found in a basket in the rushes, you might be tempted to think—and raised at none other than St. Joseph’s Home for the Friendless, the orphanage that got its start after the cholera epidemic of 1849. I wonder if he’s drawn to the river, if he feels compelled to bring joy to people there, because of these connections. Today, though, Suit Guy is nowhere to be seen. I’m rounding Wolf Point, the colossus of the Merchandise Mart looming above me, when the wind picks up. The tour boats appear to be moving faster now. I’m out past the Congress Parkway Bridge when the rain starts. I make for the east bank, where I notice some willows and elms sheltering a collection of about 10 tents, which I realize are visible only from the water. South of the camp I can see rubble-strewn vacant lots—a vast emptiness that stretches all the way to the high-rise condos in the distance. It feels lonely here. Forgotten. But it likely won’t be for much longer. I haven’t seen any other craft on the South Branch since I left downtown. I paddle on. Lightning farther off. I find protection south of Roosevelt Road, underneath one of the rusting rail bridges, which casts a rain shadow on the water. A ghost of the bridge. The rain lets up enough for me to push on. Just beyond Ping Tom Memorial Park, near Chinatown, the giant Canal Street Bridge appears before me. When it was built in 1915, it was the heaviest lift bridge in the country. Its towers are 195 feet tall. Amtrak trains cross it regularly now. Back in the bridge’s heyday, the lift had to rise frequently to let oceangoing vessels from the Atlantic continue on their way to the Mississippi. A siren goes off. I hear clanking metal. The bridge begins to move. It takes three or four minutes for it to rise to its full height, directly above me. Rainwater is pouring off the trusses. Blood thuds in my ears. It’s one of those moments when the past seems very present. I twist around in my kayak, half expecting to see a cargo ship bearing down on me. But nothing’s there. It’s only a test run. Later, after the rain stops and the sun comes back out, I tie up at the dock at Lawrence’s Fish & Shrimp, a modest lunch counter that opened in the early 1950s. I order fried cod and a beer and take my lunch back to the dock. I gaze downriver, past the Cermak Road Bridge, at one of the many buildings erected along this stretch of the river in the early 20th century to serve the industrial behemoth of Chicago. Now derelict, its windows are broken and its walls are covered in graffiti. Near the top, someone has painted a message in large blue and white letters: “Memories Are Sacred.” Whose memories and of what? I wonder. And what of the river’s future? Some say it might be clean enough to swim in before long. Polluted by expediency, reversed out of necessity, flowing through a city of wonders and deprivations, the river has more stories yet to tell.After nine seasons, the Chicago Bears have parted ways with head coach Lovie Smith. Article continues below... As first reported by NFL Network, Smith was fired Monday morning by general manager Phil Emery. The Bears scheduled a news conference Tuesday to discuss the move. Despite posting a 10-6 record, the Bears failed to reach the playoffs for the fifth time in six seasons when eliminated Sunday after the Minnesota Vikings clinched a wild-card berth by defeating Green Bay. Smith led Chicago into the 2010 NFC Championship game and an appearance in Super Bowl XLI during the 2006 season. The Bears lost both contests. ”He earned even more respect from me, if it was possible,” quarterback Jay Cutler said. ”He handled it the right way. A lot of character in that man, and it showed up.” Smith, 54, was 84-66 overall during his time in Chicago. His record ranks third on the Bears’ all-time list, behind George Halas and Mike Ditka. Smith, though, wasn’t hired by Emery, who became the team’s general manager last year after the firing of Jerry Angelo. While Angelo took the fall after last season, Smith was not without blame in the personnel issues over the years. He pushed to bring in former Rams offensive lineman Orlando Pace and safety Adam Archuleta, players who succeeded in St. Louis when Smith was the defensive coordinator there but were busts with the Bears. He had no bigger supporter than team matriarch Virginia McCaskey, but the fans seemed split on him. To some, he was a picture of calm, a coach who never lost his composure and never criticized his players in public, the anti-Ditka if you will. History suggests fans who are clamoring for a high-profile replacement such as Bill Cowher or Jon Gruden might be disappointed. The last time the Bears went with an experienced NFL head coach was when Halas returned to the sideline in 1958. However, they might go with an offensive-minded coach for the first time since Mike Ditka was fired after the 1992 season, given the issues in that area. While the Bears fielded some of the NFL’s best defensive and special teams units during his tenure, Chicago’s offense struggled through most of the past nine seasons. The Bears ranked 24th in total yardage this season. Smith joined the Bears following a three-year stint as defensive coordinator in St. Louis. FOXSports.com NFL insider Jay Glazer reported that the Bears already have requested to interview Denver Broncos offensive coordinator Mike McCoy to replace Smith. A finalist for the Miami Dolphins head coaching job last season, the 40-year-old McCoy is a hot commodity for his work in recent seasons with quarterbacks Peyton Manning, Tim Tebow and Kyle Orton. ”I think we’re going to get the best available coordinator, head coach, assistant coaches,” Cutler said. ”(I’m not going) to speculate where they’re going to go. I have no idea. But I trust Phil and everyone involved in the search, and they’re going to make the best decisions they can make.” Dismissing Smith was the first move in what looks like a busy offseason. Urlacher has an expiring contract and was limited by knee and hamstring injuries this year. The Bears might have a decision to make on Cutler, who has one more year left on his contract. ”I think, first and foremost, their concern is going to be with finding coaches, and we’ll address it from there,” he said. Smith was not available for comment, but talked to the team after he was fired. Smith ranks third on the Bears’ wins list behind George Halas and Mike Ditka. The highlight of his tenure was the run to the title game that ended with a loss to the Indianapolis Colts. It was the first time two black coaches met for the championship, with Smith going against his mentor Tony Dungy. The 2010 team lost to Green Bay in the NFC title game, but the Bears made the playoffs just three times and won three postseason games under Smith. There was speculation he would be let go following the 2011
. Now drains 1% of their maximum life per second; AoE of 200/400/600/800 -Changed projectile graphic Phantom Assassin -Changed "Coup de Gras" to "Coup de Grâce" -Blink Strike `re-triggered` (thank you Wikidme) -Modified -refresh a little Omniknight -Added a 75/100/140 mana cost to Guardian Angel -Degen Aura reduced to 7/14/21/28% slow, but increased in area from 220 to 300. -Purification no longer hits wards Zeus -Increased mana cost of Arc Lightning by 15 at all levels -Static Field no longer affects sleeping units -Reduced Str/level from 2 to 1.4 Lich -Fixed Dark Ritual learning hotkey Vengeful Spirit -Added duration of Terror into tooltip -Replaced Terror with Disentangle Furion -Fixed Sprout bug/abuse and made it fully `multi-instancible` (thanks Wikid) Tidehunter -Reworked Gush a little (Wikid, no gameplay effects) Night Stalker -Added attack sound Panda -Lowered Str/level from 3.1 to 2.9 Venomancer -`Re-triggered` Poison Nova. Should `multi-instance`, hit all units within range, and be less buggy overall. Downsides are that it will probably hit a little further than the graphics may indicate, and it no longer slows. (Wikid) Visage -Entirely reworked Visage. Removed Frenzy, Blink, and Mana Burn; replaced with Grave Chill, Soul Assumption, and Anonymous Dead. Revamped Progenerate Gargoyles a little; now called Raise Revenants. Revenants are the same as Gargoyles except that they have an Incinerate variant that lends 1/2/3 bonus damage per attack. Queen of Pain -Reduced attack range from 650 to 600 -`Re-skinned` Fan of Knives to Scream of Pain (no gameplay changes) Syllabear -Fixed tooltip (Cottontop) Stealth Assassin -Replaced Blink with Blink Strike -Replaced Critical with Backstab -Made Permanent Invisibility his ultimate -Removed Death Ward -Added Smoke Screen Pugna -Can now attack Banished units, but has a longer cooldown on the attack `Anti-Mage` -Shield now reduced attack speed by 20% at all levels and gives 30/40/50/60% magic reduction Ogre Magi -`Multi-cast` reworked so that it reduces the cooldown of Fireblast by 3 seconds and Bloodlust by 5 seconds at each level. -Lightning Shield replaced with Ignite, Multicast causes Ignite to deal damage in an area Dragon Knight -replaced Dragon Tail with Stone Form -replaced Dragon's Blood with Roar New Heroes: -Sentinel: Raigor Stonehoof the Earthshaker, Tiny the Mountain Giant, Chen 2.0, Stealth Assassin 2.0, Azwraith the Phantom Lancer, Aiushtha the Enchantress, God of Wind -Scourge: Darchrow the Enigma, Mogul Kahn the Axe, Nevermore the Shadow Fiend, Visage 2.0, Anub’seran the Nerubian Weaver, Strygwyr the Bloodseeker, Shadow Priest Heroes that Received Significant changes: -Visage, Chen, and SA got complete overhauls -Dragon Knight: replaced Dragon Tail and Dragon Blood with Stone Form and Roar -Medusa: Mana Shield now base skill that blocks 50% of incoming damage, Split Shot is now an activated skill that causes Medusa to deal less damage while firing multiple arrows, removed Purge, ultimate is now Gaze -Ogre Magi: replaced Lightning Shield with Ignite, a damage over time slowing skill. Ultimate now reduces the cooldown on Bloodlust and Fireblast each level, and increases the area of Ignite. New Recipes: -Wraith Band: the “Agility” Null, that gives +6 to Agi and +3 to other stats. -Bracer: the “Strength” Null, that gives +6 to Str and +3 to other stats. -Hand of Midas: has active Transmute, allowing you to convert enemy units into pure gold. -Blade Mail: gives armor and damage return against melee -Guardian Mail: gives armor and magic resist -Linken's Mirror Shield: gives magic resist and the chance to reflect a spell back on its caster -Mekansm: combines the three “Nulls” and an orb for bonus stats. Gives a chance to become Invulnerable if attacked. -Sange: gives %chance to Maim an opponent causing him or her to attack more slowly (orb). -Yasha: increases attack and movement speed -Sange and Yasha: combines the two previous items and their effects, giving boosts to them. -Necromicon: summons 2 skellie warriors and 2 skellie archers Major Changes in Old Items: -Manta: now chargless with a completely new recipe/more expensive -Satanic: now incorporates a Messer in place of Demon Edge -Headdress of Regeneration: now has the ability to `self-heal` for 200 HP (100 mana cost) Notable Bugs Fixed: -`Double-sprout` bug -Sand King lost Dust Trail, so no more `Sent-side` glitches -`Perma-invis` bug on Broodmother Other Major Things: -New Terrain -New consumable shop; Chimera Roost for Sent, Graveyard for Scourge -Items bought in the consumables shops will fuse their charges so that only 1 slot is required per type of item. -Items now have their icons in the shops -Item recipes now include a description of what they do -Tried to make it easier to learn the `Arrow-Orb` system -Barracks have been made less important, other buildings more -Capture the Flag mode See also [ edit ]SUV What's the meaning of this nonsense? We're much obliged to explain why Jeremy the African elephant replaces Jeremy Clarkson in the last episode of the current Top Gear season. After the punch-up incident, Clarkson's contract to present Top Gear was not renewed by the BBC. Still, he did some voiceovers to wrap up the final cut of Top Gear Series 22 Episode 8.It will be Jeremy Clarkson that will be featured in the 75-minute special episode's cheapand old school roadsters challenges, with Jeremy the elephant to fill the studio bits Clarkson couldn't do. According to an exclusive material published by the Hull Daily Mail, commercial design consultant Andrew Fenton got a call from the production team."At first, I thought they just wanted a baby one, but when I told them I also had a life-sized African elephant, they virtually snapped my hand off," declared Fenton. The life-sized model is made from fibre-glass and was transported to the Top Gear hangar studio at the Dunsfold Aerodrome on the day Richard and James filmed the studio bits for the final episode of the show's Clarkson era without Jeremy.Fenton adds that he doesn't know how much of the screening time will feature Jeremy the elephant because there's a lot of secrecy surrounding this ludicrous commission. And on that bombshell, this thing gives a whole new meaning to "there's an elephant in the room."It is only fitting for the Top Gear production team to end the show's current format with an idiom for an obvious truth that can't be ignored – with Jeremy ousted from Top Gear, Clarkson, Hammond, and May are within weeks of announcing theirIran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has warned that US is "not trustworthy", after former US officials and legislators urged diplomacy with Iran’s incoming president Hassan Rowhani. “I said at the beginning of the [Iranian] year that I am not optimistic about negotiations with the US, though in the past years I did not forbid negotiating [with US] about certain issues like Iraq,” he said on Sunday during an Iftar meal that breaks the daily fast during the Muslim month of Ramadan. “The Americans are not trustworthy and they are not honest in their encounters. The stance of American officials over past months once again confirms that one should not be optimistic," he said at the Iftar, attended by Rowhani and outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The comments from Khamenei, who has the final say in the regime's macro policy issues, came less than a week after former US officials and dozens of American legislators called for President Barack Obama to pursue diplomacy with Rowhani. In a letter to Obama, the ex-policymakers and some legislators had insisted that election of Rowhani, who takes office on August 3, “presents a major potential opportunity” and that “Rowhani should be tested”. US legislators Republican Charles Dent and Democrat David Price have led a call for Obama to “utilise all diplomatic tools” with new Iranian president. Ever since his election, Rowhani has vowed to engage constructively with the international community and to ease tensions over the country’s nuclear programme. The US has not had relations with Iran since 1979 Islamic revolution which overthrew the pro-Western government even as US has led a drive to cut off Iran's oil exports, its key source of revenues, as a way to pressure Tehran to give up its nuclear programme. US and its allies believe the programme is being used to develop an atomic bomb, a claim Iran denies.SALT LAKE CITY -- Family members say Roger Miller, the son of the late Utah Jazz owner Larry H. Miller, has died. Roger Miller was "a gentle soul" who will be missed, said family members in a statement released late Sunday. He died Sunday at age 44. The statement did not detail the circumstances of his death. The Miller family is one of the most influential in Salt Lake City. In addition to owning the NBA team, the family owns the Salt Lake Bees Triple-A baseball team; the Tour of Utah bike race; Miller Motorsports Park; Megaplex Theaters; Fanzz sports apparel store; and several car dealerships. Roger Miller was married to Cheri Light Miller and had five daughters, four sons and three grandchildren. He was the second oldest of five children born to Larry and Gail Miller. Larry H. Miller died in 2009 at the age of 64. His son, Greg Miller, now runs the family business. Roger Miller worked in the family business for 28 years in different positions, said Linda Luchetti, a spokeswoman for the Larry H. Miller Group of Companies. He worked mainly in technology, serving for many years as the chief technology officer. He developed the ticket kiosks at the Megaplex Theaters. Luchetti said Roger Miller phased himself out of the day-to-day operations of the company in the last year to focus more on his passion of car racing. In January, he and a co-driver finished 10th in the Grand-Am Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge Series at the Daytona International Speedway. Family members say he also enjoyed camping, riding ATVs, scuba diving and skiing. Information about a memorial has not yet been finalized, Luchetti said.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption President Erdogan is pursuing alleged opponents both in Turkey and abroad Germany says it has received 136 asylum requests from Turks holding diplomatic passports since the July coup attempt against the Turkish president. The figure is a total for the period August 2016 to January 2017, German media report. Turkey has urged Germany not to grant asylum to any military officers. Some posted to Nato bases in Germany are thought to be among the group. In Greece, two more Turkish soldiers have requested asylum. The pair - reported to be commandos - are believed to have taken part in the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They are in Greek police custody, having applied for asylum last week in Orestiada, a small border town near Turkey. Last month a Greek court rejected Turkey's request to extradite eight other Turkish soldiers who fled after the coup attempt. Turkey is appealing against that ruling. The German interior ministry did not identify the 136 Turks who requested asylum. Not only diplomats but also their spouses and children hold diplomatic passports. It is not clear if any of them have been granted asylum yet. Turkey's attempted coup Image copyright AFP Who are the Gulenists? Who was behind coup attempt? Brief guide to Turkey's coup ''Open, police!' The day a Turkish writer's life changed Soldiers who fled after the coup attempt fear that they will not get a fair trial in Turkey. The Turkish authorities have dismissed at least 100,000 public servants, including teachers, police and members of the judiciary. About 43,000 suspects are in detention. The crackdown is targeting suspected supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in the US. Mr Erdogan's ruling AK Party has also shut down more than 130 media outlets, during a continuing state of emergency, and arrested about 150 journalists. Political tensions Several prominent German politicians have spoken out against a possible campaign visit by Mr Erdogan. Turks will vote in a referendum on 16 April to decide whether Mr Erdogan should have sweeping new presidential powers. The referendum will ask Turks if they agree to constitutional changes to make Turkey a presidential state, reducing parliament's powers. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim addressed a rally in Oberhausen, north-western Germany, on Saturday and said Mr Erdogan had plans to visit the region in March. But it has not been officially confirmed. Image copyright EPA Image caption Cologne Central Mosque: Ditib, which runs it, is suspected of spying on behalf of Turkey About 1.4 million Turks living in Germany are on Turkey's electoral register. Oberhausen is in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where state interior minister Ralf Jaeger warned that "we must prevent Turkish internal conflicts being played out here". The Social Democrat (SPD) politician said Turkey's controversial referendum would lead to "restricted fundamental rights and a return of the death penalty". German-Turkish relations have been severely strained by the AKP's post-coup crackdown. Recently German police searched the homes of four imams amid reports that Ditib, a Muslim organisation funded by the Turkish state, was spying on suspected Gulen supporters in Germany. Ditib is short for the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs. North Rhine-Westphalia is also investigating claims that Turkish diplomats asked school pupils and teachers in some schools to report any criticism of Mr Erdogan to them. Turkey has accused German officials of conducting a "witch-hunt", telling them to focus instead on "terror organisations" such as the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Political tensions are already running high in Germany ahead of crucial parliamentary elections in September.It sounds like something from the old "Saturday Night Live" sketch with the ominous "Jaws" music and a candygram delivery, but a Miami Marlins fan is suing the club over an alleged shark attack. Beth Fedornak claims she was injured by Bob the Shark, one of the costumed mascots — the others are Spike the Sea Dragon, Julio the Octopus and Angel the Stone Crab — who race around the warning track at Marlins games. Her injuries allegedly occurred at a 2013 game, according to a lawsuit filed last month. As Bob left the field after the race — it’s not clear whether or not he won — he pretended to bite off Fedornak’s head, the suit says. Fedornak, who was sitting just a few rows from the field, "felt immediate pain in her neck after the impact of the shark head down on the top of her skull," her suit claims. Article continues below... She is still suffering pain two years later, unable to work and stuck with medical expenses, Fedornak says. Carl Reynolds, Fedornak’s attorney, told the Miami New Times: "This is a case where a mascot hopped up to a person in the stands and … there was a battery. … They need to just do the right thing and accept responsibility for a fan interaction that just got a little bit out of control." Where was Ian Ziering when she needed him? (h/t Deadspin) And just in case you don’t remember (or never saw it), here’s how an "SNL" land shark attack looked:About It is with great regret we have to suspend this Kickstarter, primarily due to projections of this Kickstarter being 2/3rd short of its goal...however we offer a revised goal foobar2000 is developed by accomplished coder Peter Pawlowski, the story behind foobar2000's rise to prominence is a simple one, having previously worked on core components for Winamp, it became apparent that there was a demand for a more complete player, the rest is history. foobar2000 has enjoyed meteoric success and is the most used audio player outside of iTunes. foobar on the PC, one player, many faces Joining the foobar2000 mobile team is Steve 'Spoon-' Elkins, founder of dBpoweramp, which started out as an audio player fifteen years ago, a player with a number of world firsts, such as first player to add star ratings to an audio library, first player to have smart playlists aka Genius playlists. dBpoweramp evolved over the years into a Music Converter and CD Ripper. Our third developer to join the team is Chris 'kode54' Moeller, programming since the 1990s, starting with an Apple II+ and Basic/6502 assembly. Chris has been Influential in a number of projects over the years, including a number of console emulators, and most notably, has made a sizable contribution to foobar2000 PC. The combined user base of foobar2000 and dBpoweramp numbers over 70 million. Rest assured the foobar2000 mobile development team is proven and more select'star' developers will be added using the proceeds of this kickstarter. Where do contributions go? equipping developers with the necessary hardware required to develop on the respective platforms and paying the developers a living salary. A graphics designer will also be brought into the project to help design the UI. foobar2000 mobile will be built from the ground up specifically for mobile devices, giving the opportunity to adapt specifically to the strengths of the mobile platform. Our first funding goal is the development of an iOS & Android foobar2000. Design for mobile foobar2000 has commenced and will continue during the kickstarter. £60,000 iPhone, iPad, iPod & Android Funding Goal £120,000 Social Funding Goal £180,000 Cloud Management Check out these rewards on offer for backing foobar2000: All backers receive access to the private mobile foobar2000 forum, engage in a hot bed of discussion, perhaps your great ideas can be incorporated into the final design! A foobar2000 T-Shirt (design subject to change), for Kool Cats, Prime Movers, Founders, or Skin Designers. RHA MA750 earphones for all Early Bird Testers, Kool Cats and Founders. foobar2000 has partnered with RHA to bring these award winning MA 750 earphones: precise, balanced and articulate sound reproduction with a great depth of soundstage. iOS backers receive the MA 750i version with inline remote. Bowers & Wilkins P5 headphones, for Prime Movers, Founders & Skin Designers. The P5 stands for pure luxury. Using only the finest of materials, everything is understated yet imbued with a sense of style. foobar2000 was created to playback audio in its purest form, partnering with B&W, the P5 will ensure the finest of all playback from your portable player. foobar2000 framed artwork (design subject to change), signed by the development team, exclusive for Founders and Skin Designers. Reward Delivery Schedule The first foobar2000 alpha for iOS is expected three months after the kickstarter ends, with the android alpha two months later. Beta versions will appear three months after the respective alpha versions. Full release when we feel foobar2000 is ready for prime-time, certain features might not make the initial v1 release. Headphones, earphones and T-Shirts will ship 60 days after the end of the kickstarter, the framed artwork should ship shortly after this. This section will be expanded throughout this kickstarter campaign, check back often for news and updates, The initial design brief is to stay true to foobar2000's current ethos, pure playback, with advanced features pioneered by foobar many years ago such as bit perfect playback, replaygain and gapless playback. Track indexing will use a proven powerful SQL database design, specifically designed for low powered devices. There will be two versions of foobar2000 mobile, a free and fully featured premium version. The elements Cloud and Social may, or may not have subscription fees attached. Targeted at iPhone, iPod, iPad (including Air) running iOS 6 or later. Android runs on a vast choice of devices, foobar2000 will target Android v4 or newer, specifically tailored to main form factors on offer. Cloud foobar2000 would offer all management of your music from a single central web location. Your music is securely backed up online, and is collected from multiple sources (computers, NASes, Dropbox, Google Drive, compatible web stores). Whilst online the collection can be managed, album art added and tags corrected. Specific tracks can be synchronized, or the whole collection, in your chosen format. For example a tablet in the home might receive Apple Lossless tracks, whilst your iPhone has efficient AAC encoded tracks. Synchronization happens automatically, and will tie in also with the 'What's in Store' goal. A social foobar2000 is about interacting with your friends, finding out tracks they most listen to, be alerted to new albums & inform friends about new albums you have discovered. Let friends browse your collection, and preview tracks you choose for a limited time.: There's almost always some hesitation and growing pains when it comes to a new title in an established franchise, how has the community received KOF14?: It's actually a bit rough with the community, since the mechanics are not the same as the previous game in the series. A lot of people love KOF13, and I actually love that game because it gave me so many friends and good times, but I still have to go through the transitions and some of the mechanics take time to adjust to.For that reason -- the mechanics not being easy to adapt to -- there has been somewhat of a community divide. Players outside of Japan were complaining about the KOF World Championship being a FT1 set up, but I ended up accepting it since Japan's scene comes out to EVO and accepts our rule set.After these recent events and King of Fighters 14's latest patches, the community is starting to agree on things more and we are recovering players, making the KOF scene stronger step-by-step. The KOF World Championship was really healthy for the game, and the content SNK revealed at the end was the best way to close out the event! Specifically the DLC characters.The game's graphics look nice, and as you know King of Fighters 14 is a hard game that will bring international competition to any tournament. I can't wait for the EVO 2017 finals, and I hope my KOF friends and I will get the chance to go to more events and show the hype that the US scene needs. Hopefully we can attract some eSports teams soon.: Which players should I watch (besides yourself, of course) to get a good idea of how the game should be played?: Hmm, I'll say Juice Box and KCO\|Pedro.Romance shared the following video of his top 8 performance at SoCal Regionials 2016. He and Reynald kick off the final bracket, and then he plays again at the 57:00 mark:Source: LevelUpSeries : There's been a lot of discussion about current generation fighting games reaching both casual and competitive audiences. Do you think KOF 14 appeals to both? Or does it lean in one direction too heavily?: To me, 14 is for both, but slightly more competitive simply because some parts of the game are not super easy and you have to put effort and time. I also think that stronger players really need to step in and help newcomers with this title.I think about one third of the community are still hung up on the newer mechanics, but complaining instead of adapting is not helping anything.I'm trying to stream and share my knowledge as much as I can. When I was learning Street Fighter 4, it was the SoCal players' help and guidance that made all the difference. I want to offer that same guidance to any new KOF players.: Why should I, (someone who doesn't play much) pick up the game in your opinion?: The time you put in really shows in your play. King of Fighters 14 is an honest game, and will help you with almost all the individual aspects of fighting game play like defense, execution and reactions.This game is legit and can help a lot of players. Transition from KOF to other games is especially easy because you have to learn fundamentals really well to be good at it.I always love discussions about R release names and their origin. I have been working on this list for a while – with the release of “Short Summer” today, I thought it’d be a good time to post! All of the release names are references to Peanuts strips/films. I think this is just so delightful! A few months ago, I attempted to get permission to embed the strips on our blog, but unfortunately it was denied (unless with a limited audience and password protection 🤷‍♀), so I’ve just linked to the comics – Enjoy! r-devel (unreleased development version) Unsuffered Consequences Reference: Peanuts August 17, 1967 2.14.0 (2011-10-31) Great Pumpkin Reference: Peanuts October 29, 1973 2.14.1 (2011-12-22) December Snowflakes Reference: A Charlie Brown Christmas This is very close to the Peanuts January 5, 1960, however they mention January snowflakes rather than December. The “December Snowflakes” quote is from A Charlie Brown Christmas. 2.14.2 (2012-02-29) Gift-Getting Season Reference: This is a line Lucy says in the short film It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown! – referring to Easter as the “gift-getting season”. 2.15.1 (2012-06-22) Roasted Marshmallows Reference: Peanuts June 6, 1987 2.15.2 (2012-10-26) Trick or Treat Reference: Peanuts October 31, 1969 2.15.3 (2013-03-01) Security Blanket Reference: Peanuts October 23, 1965 3.0.1 (2013-05-16) Good Sport Reference: You’re a Good Sport, Charlie Brown This is likely from the film You’re a Good Sport Charlie Brown, however there Peanuts November 22, 1953 does refer to being a “Good Sport” as well! 3.0.2 (2013-09-25) Frisbee Sailing Reference: Peanuts September 3, 1971 3.0.3 (2014-03-06) Warm Puppy ⊕ There is also a book titled Happiness is a Warm Puppy. Reference: Peanuts January 11, 1965 3.1.1 (2014-07-10) Sock it to Me Reference: This seems to be referring to a mini jigsaw puzzle, available on ebay! Source MoviesAfterMidnight 3.1.3 (2015-03-09) Smooth Sidewalk Reference: This is a page from the Happiness is a Warm Puppy book. 3.2.0 (2015-04-16) Full of Ingredients Reference: Peanuts April 7, 1966 3.2.2 (2015-08-14) Fire Safety Reference: It seems that MetLife created a Peanuts themed Fire Saftey Brochure coloring and activity book. 3.2.3 (2015-12-10) Wooden Christmas-Tree Reference: This is a line from A Charlie Brown Christmas – Linus says “Gee, I didn’t know they still made wooden Christmas trees”. 3.2.4 (2016-03-11) Very Secure Dishes Reference: Peanuts February 20, 1964 3.2.5 (2016-04-11) Very, Very Secure Dishes (a rebadged 3.2.4-revised) I assume this is still a reference to Peanuts February 20, 1964 3.3.0 (2016-05-03) Supposedly Educational Reference: Peanuts May 7, 1971 3.3.1 (2016-06-21) Bug in Your Hair Reference: Peanuts June 15, 1967 3.3.2 (2016-10-31) Sincere Pumpkin Patch Reference: Peanuts Oct 30, 1968 3.3.3 (2017-03-06) Another Canoe Reference: Peanuts June 29, 1966 3.4.0 (2017-04-21) You Stupid Darkness Reference: Peanuts September 9, 1965 3.4.1 (2017-06-30) Single Candle Reference: Peanuts September 9, 1965 3.4.2 (2017-09-28) Short Summer Reference: It was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown 3.4.4 (2018-03-15) Someone to Lean On Reference: Peanuts Figurine (1971). There are a couple of different versions of this, some with Charlie Brown and Snoopy, one with Linus and Snoopy, and one with Woodstock and Snoopy. Many of them were Hallmark cards, but there was also a badge and this figurine. The oldest (dated) one I could find was this one from 1971, so we went with that! 3.5.0 (2018-04-23) Joy in Playing Reference: Peanuts January 27, 1973Image zoom Rob Kim/Landov Stephen Fishbach was the runner-up on Survivor: Tocantins and has been blogging about Survivor strategy for PEOPLE.com since 2009. Follow him on Twitter @stephenfishbach. Erik Reichenbach is a Survivor fan-turned-favorite, a comic book author and artist. He placed fifth on both Survivor: Micronesia and Survivor: Caramoan. Follow him on Twitter @BloodyAmer1can “In this game or out of this game, that’s all I’ve got. It’s who I am.” – Rupert Boneham, Survivor: All Stars Are Caleb and Colton the most polar opposite couple in Survivor: Blood vs. Water? In the universe? Stoic, hard-working Caleb shut his mouth and slipped into Culpeppper’s “5 Guys” alliance. Meanwhile Colton, after a half-hearted attempt to sell America on his story of redemption and growth, pouts and plots. While the Returnees give each other massages, Colton frets that camp is too peaceful. “I can rule in chaos,” he says. Colton does his best to stir up trouble – but trouble just doesn’t want to be stirred. He tells Gervase that Laura Morett is a threat. He whispers to Monica that she’s the next target. He warns Tina that Gervase is targeting Aras. The Returnees roll their eyes. Colton’s not playing against the doofy dudes of One World anymore. Gone are the heady days of Bill Posley and Mike Jefferson. Tina and Aras have both won Survivor. This is Tyson’s third time playing. “He’s going to end up overthinking himself out of the game,” says Tyson, who knows a thing or two about that subject. Aras, Tyson, Monica, Tina and Gervase don’t have to strategize with Colton partially because they already have the numbers. They formalize their bond as the “Don’t Say Anything” alliance. They also institute a rule to fact-check any rumor Colton tries to spread. To be a great Survivor player, you must be able to adapt to any situation, but Colton operates on only one speed. When he sees things aren’t going his way, he stomps his feet. His only ally, Kat, tries to give him the heads up that he’s alienated everybody, but he’s spinning too fast down the whirlpool of his own dysfunction to see the lifeline she’s throwing. Instead, he just tries to inflame another confrontation. Colton is like the classic boyfriend or girlfriend who thrives on drama, who’s always trying to pick a fight to prove you still care. And you know – maybe he’s right. The other Returnees don’t care about Colton. They’re ready to break up. Good Bye-Dye At Redemption Island, Candice wins, Marissa stays, and Rupert loses. Rupert becomes an interesting Survivor statistic, eliminated (but not medevacced) without a vote against him. “I love Survivor,” he says, “but I love my wife more.” Aras and Tyson may be spooning at Galang, but Aras’s brother Vytas targets Tyson’s girlfriend Rachel. Marvel at the criss-crossed plottings of the Baskauski! Image zoom Courtesy Erik Reichenbach Vytas wins his second Fishy for his maneuvering. While the rest of the contestants are struggling with the emotional demands of playing against their family, Vytas has figured out how to use the Blood vs. Water twist to his advantage. Vytas theorizes that if the guys vote out Rachel, there’s a chance that Tyson might take her place at Redemption Island, seriously weakening the Returnees. Even if the gambit doesn’t work, Vytas will take out John’s “secret” ally. Moreover, if Candice is eliminated by either Tyson or Rachel, John’s commitment to the 5 Guys will be reaffirmed. (You want your allies to be solo players, so they don’t have divided loyalties.) Meanwhile, poor benighted John just can’t do anything right. First he ruined his marriage to Candice. Now he’s mishandling the idol. There’s a long-standing debate over the best way to use an idol clue. Do you share it with your allies to build trust? Or do you keep it secret? John manages to discover a third, unimpeachably worst way. His allies know he has a clue, but he doesn’t share it. The target is on his back; he decides to make it bigger. For now, John is protected by his alliance. He could be in big trouble at a swap.A day at Seattle’s Anarchist Book Fair brought literature, lectures, lots of people helping each other, a little girl shooting a crossbow — and only one person willing to speak on the record. The typical media stereotype of a Seattle anarchist is a young person wearing black, smashing windows at a May Day march and screaming at nearby journalists and police officers. But the Anarchist Book Fair at Washington Hall last Saturday felt more like being among hundreds of Quakers, most of whom just happened to be wearing black. The fair brought a convivial atmosphere to the 1908 building on 14th Avenue and Fir Street in the Central District, with trays of rice and beans for attendees; tables stacked with books for sale; and talks by scholars and activists about anarchist history, radical-left movements in Syria and Bolivia, and protests against animal-research labs. There was a surprising amount of hugging. When boxes of books needed to be carried, people jumped up to volunteer. The same happened when somebody suggested moving chairs to a cooler room for a talk about prisons. The upstairs balcony hosted a child-care center where a young boy cruised around on sneakers with wheels and a young girl, watched over by a young woman, shot arrows from a tiny wooden crossbow at a pink target taped to the back of a black folding chair. Almost a decade old, the fair was held for several years at the Vera Project in Seattle Center. This was the first year at Washington Hall, which one participant said seemed like a better fit, with more visibility and proximity to economically diverse parts of the city. Almost nobody at the fair would speak on the record, saying they either mistrusted mainstream newspapers like The Seattle Times or worried about putting themselves on the law-enforcement map. “Oh,” one participant groused, “I bet some people think: ‘Anarchists aren’t organized enough to read a book, and they think they’re going to pull off a book fair?’ ” The one exception was Mark Cook, who doesn’t call himself an anarchist. Cook is a former Black Panther and member of the George Jackson Brigade, which bombed supermarkets, robbed banks and engineered jailbreaks for far-left causes in the 1970s. Cook co-founded the first incarcerated chapter of the Black Panther Party and was at the fair to talk about prisons in a panel discussion. He said he’d recently returned from Hong Kong, where he was invited to talk with former (and maybe future) political prisoners about how to organize behind bars. “I don’t consider myself an anarchist,” he said and smiled, “but I seem to hang out with them a lot.” The people who wouldn’t share their names said they came from a broad swath of anarchist traditions. Some are more interested in ecology, others in economics. “Anarchism,” one young woman said, “doesn’t mean ‘no rules.’ It means ‘no rulers.’ ” Jesus Christ, another attendee said, was one of the first famous anarchists, “because he said the people are more important than the state.” In the Bible, she added, Jesus smashed money-changers’ tables in a temple — which she compared to the infamous Seattle May Day of 2012, when an anarchist march smashed the windows of banks and businesses downtown. The event highlighted the history of anarchism in the U.S. and the Northwest, from the Industrial Workers of the World, which had a stronghold among Scandinavian immigrants working in the timber industry during the early 1900s, to Dorothy Day, a famous Catholic anarchist. (A residence for homeless women in the Leschi neighborhood is named after her.) These days, anarchist (or anarch-ish) organizations are all over the place — Left Bank Books is a 43-year-old, anarchist-run bookstore at Pike Place Market, Food Not Bombs has been cooking meals for anyone who wants food for decades and several anarchist-oriented housing cooperatives exist across the city, like the Emma Goldman Finishing School on Beacon Hill, where tenants share wages from their day jobs. On the main floor of Washington Hall, dozens of publishers from around the country sold literature: a pamphlet by late novelist Roberto Bolaño titled “Leave Everything, Again,” for example, and a book of poetry titled “We Are Nothing and So Can You,”
Fico marcado pelo pelo gol que perdi, mas ninguém se lembra do gols que fiz. Mas muita gente me apoia, a torcida e o treinador sabem o tanto que eu posso ajudar o Cruzeiro. Agora é trabalhar, fico muito feliz pelo gol.” ANDERSON LOPES: “Chegamaos num momento que se tropeçar a gente cai. Sinal de alerta já está ligado pra sair desta situação. Estávamos atentos, mas em uma bola o Leandro Damião foi feliz.” Vídeos Gols Rádio Rasteiro Atuações TORCIDA CELESTE compareceu em bom número, consideradas as dificuldades impostas pela chuvarada, e cantou bastante em apoio ao time (Síndico) FÁBIO não teve culpa no gol, nem foi muito exigido. Fez intervenções pontuais. (Naldo Morato) CEARÁ jogou futebol de areia, levantando a bola, como a ocasião exigia. (Síndico) FABIANO foi bem na marcação e ainda arriscou umas estocadas ofensivas, sem brilho, mas com disposição. (Síndico) MANOEL jogou bem, mas teve a infelicidade de perder a bola que resultou no gol avaiano. No mais, esteve perfeito. (Naldo Morato) BRUNO RODRIGO foi o melhor da defesa. Não perdeu nenhuma jogada e limpou a área sempre que a bola caiu pelo seu lado. Foi o melhor do jogo. (Naldo Morato) FABRÍCIO começou passando aperto com Everton Silva, escalado especialmente pra correr em seu setor explorando sua pouca velocidade. Se virou bem, Quando o primeiro velocista saiu, entrou outro chato, Tinga, ele soube contornar bem a situação. Pra coroar sua boa atuação, fez um belo lançamento pra Willian servir Damião no gol de empate. (Síndico) CHARLES adaptou-se bem ao gramado encharcado e usou a raça de sempre pra vencer as divididas. (Síndico) HENRIQUE marcou, ajudou a defesa, distribuiu bolas, fez outra boa partida. Sua regularidade é incrível. (Naldo Morato) CABRAL utilizou a inteligência pra criar jogadas, apesar das péssimas condições do campo. Ele deixou o atacante Willian na cara do gol no 1º tempo, mas o Bigode errou na finalização. Participou ainda de outros lances importantes no campo de defesa. (Uol Esporte) MARCOS VINÍCIUS cumpriu ben o papel tático de armar e recompor, mas quando finalizou só deu vexame, com chutes de amargar! (Síndico) ARRASCAETA esteve na cara do gol uma vez, mas foi desarmado por uma poça d’água. Como armar naquele charco era impossível, o técnico o retirou antes do fim pra aumentar a altura do ataque e tentar resolver o jogo nos cruzamentos. (Síndico) WILLIAN, sempre ligado, deu a assistência pro gol do Damião e finalizou algumas vezes com certo perigo. Errou uma finalização na bola que Damião foi buscar na linha de fundo e passou a ele. Se faz o gol seria o melhor do jogo. (Naldo Morato) LEANDRO DAMIÃO entrou mais ligado do que nas últimas vezes, perdeu uma chance de gol, acreditou num bola que saía pela linha de fundo, criando uma oportunidade desperdiçada por Willian e fez o gol da vitória aproveitando passe de Willian. (Naldo Morato) MANO MENEZES escalou certo, mexeu bem e foi escolhido o melhor da partida pelos internautas que votaram no GloboEsporte. (Síndico) CRUZEIRO foi um time sem ambição, visto que derrota ou empate não ameaçariam o Maior de Minas na luta contra o rebaixamento. Aos 85, Fábio bateu tiro de meta como se estivesse cozinhando um galo, mostrando acomodação com o resultado, quando era hora de partir pra cima e arriscar buscando a vitória a qualquer custo. (Rosan Amaral) AVAÍ jogou com tremenda disposição, conseguiu um gol improvável, fez Fábio trabalhar no finalzim pra evitar o desempate, mas acabou tropeçando em suas limitações técnicas. Marquinhos II, o talento do time, jogou pouco temo, mas muito bem. Rômulo marcou um belo gole e deu trabalho à defesa celeste. A bequeira esteve em tarde quase perfeita. E Gílson Kleina, um dos três únicos treinadores sobreviventes no torneio, mostrou competência armando um time sólido, com poucos recursos. (Síndico) ÁRBITROS desempenharam-se bem. Claus cometeu um único erro ao interpretar uma cama de gato aplicada por André Lima, como falta Damião, invertendo a marcação, num lance potencialmente perigoso contra o arco celeste. (Síndico)I O que foi dito MANO MENEZES, técnico do Cruzeiro : O Cruzeiro criou mais oportunidades, mesmo em condições difíceis. Faltou aquela segurança pra chutar e o gramado também não permitia isso. Foi mais um empate em que produzimos mais que o adversário. Se as condições do gramado fossem melhores, acredito que nós venceríamos. A equipe está jogando com segurança, está difícil nos vencer em qualquer lugar. O ano está terminando com o time em crescimento e o torcedor está gostando do que vê. : O Cruzeiro criou mais oportunidades, mesmo em condições difíceis. Faltou aquela segurança pra chutar e o gramado também não permitia isso. Foi mais um empate em que produzimos mais que o adversário. Se as condições do gramado fossem melhores, acredito que nós venceríamos. A equipe está jogando com segurança, está difícil nos vencer em qualquer lugar. O ano está terminando com o time em crescimento e o torcedor está gostando do que vê. LEANDRO DAMIÃO : Confiança eu sempre tive. Fiquei marcado pelo pelo gol que perdi, mas ninguém se lembra dos gols que fiz. Mas muita gente me apoia, a torcida e o treinador sabem o tanto que eu posso ajudar o Cruzeiro. Agora é trabalhar, fico muito feliz pelo gol. : Confiança eu sempre tive. Fiquei marcado pelo pelo gol que perdi, mas ninguém se lembra dos gols que fiz. Mas muita gente me apoia, a torcida e o treinador sabem o tanto que eu posso ajudar o Cruzeiro. Agora é trabalhar, fico muito feliz pelo gol. GILSON KLEINA, técnico do Avaí : O Avaí teve uma boa postura. Foi um jogo igual, entramos sabendo que seria pegado, de segunda bola. Quem pegasse essa bola, criava as jogadas. Fomos melhorando isso dentro do jogo. Fizemos com que o Cruzeiro tentasse a ligação direta e estávamos bem posicionados. No 2º tempo, fizemos um gol espetacular. Eu pedi pra chutar, chutamos e fomos felizes. Tomamos o gol de empate numa infelicidade, quando perdemos a passada e Willian, inteligente, conseguiu fazer a jogada. : O Avaí teve uma boa postura. Foi um jogo igual, entramos sabendo que seria pegado, de segunda bola. Quem pegasse essa bola, criava as jogadas. Fomos melhorando isso dentro do jogo. Fizemos com que o Cruzeiro tentasse a ligação direta e estávamos bem posicionados. No 2º tempo, fizemos um gol espetacular. Eu pedi pra chutar, chutamos e fomos felizes. Tomamos o gol de empate numa infelicidade, quando perdemos a passada e Willian, inteligente, conseguiu fazer a jogada. MIGUEL LIVRAMENTO, no Diário Catarinense : Faltou o dedo do treinador, a começar por ter escalado mal. Tanto que quando o Everton Silva saiu machucado, Kleina botou o Tinga, quando a opção de velocidade e poder ofensivo era o Anderson Lopes. Outra coisa, se o Marquinhos II começou no banco também por conta do gramado ruim, quando ele entrou, aos 65, o campo estava detonado por conta da chuva. Vale elogiar a garra e a vontade dos jogadores do Avaí. Me surpreenderam positivamente. : Faltou o dedo do treinador, a começar por ter escalado mal. Tanto que quando o Everton Silva saiu machucado, Kleina botou o Tinga, quando a opção de velocidade e poder ofensivo era o Anderson Lopes. Outra coisa, se o Marquinhos II começou no banco também por conta do gramado ruim, quando ele entrou, aos 65, o campo estava detonado por conta da chuva. Vale elogiar a garra e a vontade dos jogadores do Avaí. Me surpreenderam positivamente. DANIEL CARVALHO, no PHD : Cada jogo, uma história. O Maior de Minas jogou bem diante de um adversário desesperado, num campo pesado, próprio pra futebol pouco trabalhado. : Cada jogo, uma história. O Maior de Minas jogou bem diante de um adversário desesperado, num campo pesado, próprio pra futebol pouco trabalhado. JR GALVÃO, no PHD : O jogo foi bom pra mostrar a utilidade de Fabricio, Charles, Damião, e Julião. Marcos Vinícius é promissor, mas tem que treinar até apreender chutar direito. A esperança pelo 4º lugar ainda está viva, mas encontra0se no CTI Mas eu fico satisfeito até com um 6º lugar. : O jogo foi bom pra mostrar a utilidade de Fabricio, Charles, Damião, e Julião. Marcos Vinícius é promissor, mas tem que treinar até apreender chutar direito. A esperança pelo 4º lugar ainda está viva, mas encontra0se no CTI Mas eu fico satisfeito até com um 6º lugar. CARPEDIM, no PHD : Cota 45 atingida. Era a meta. Satisfeito. Gramado impraticável. Cruzeiro fez o que dava pra fazer, embora tenha perdido chances claras. : Cota 45 atingida. Era a meta. Satisfeito. Gramado impraticável. Cruzeiro fez o que dava pra fazer, embora tenha perdido chances claras. TOMAS PEDERSOLI, no PHD : Difícil avaliar o jogo e os jogadores, pois o gramado estava ridículo. Mas não há motivos pra tristeza. Libertadores era sonho impossível. Melhor se contentar com Sulamericana, que não é difícil e se preparar pra levantar algum caneco ano que vem. : Difícil avaliar o jogo e os jogadores, pois o gramado estava ridículo. Mas não há motivos pra tristeza. Libertadores era sonho impossível. Melhor se contentar com Sulamericana, que não é difícil e se preparar pra levantar algum caneco ano que vem. ROSAN AMARAL, no PHD : O Cruzeiro foi um time sem ambição, visto que derrota ou empate não ameaçariam o Maior de Minas na luta contra o rebaixamento. Aos 85, Fábio bateu tiro de meta como se estivesse cozinhando um galo, mostrando acomodação com o resultado, quando era hora de partir pra cima e arriscar buscando a vitória a qualquer custo. : O Cruzeiro foi um time sem ambição, visto que derrota ou empate não ameaçariam o Maior de Minas na luta contra o rebaixamento. Aos 85, Fábio bateu tiro de meta como se estivesse cozinhando um galo, mostrando acomodação com o resultado, quando era hora de partir pra cima e arriscar buscando a vitória a qualquer custo. ZULOOBAS, no PHD: William deu passe pra um gol, que nem o Damião perderia… kkkk... Fontes Transmissão SportvThe annual Mystery Writers Conference held at Book Passage's Corte Madera, Calif., store always features genre superstars who serve on its faculty--Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Ridley Pearson and Elizabeth George have all taken part. But at this year's event, held over the past weekend, a debut novelist stepped into that spotlight: Marcia Clark. Yes, that Marcia Clark. (Her new Twitter address is @thatmarciaclark, because @marciaclark was already taken.) Channeling his best James Lipton, Tony Broadbent, author of The Smoke and Spectres in the Smoke, who just signed with MP Publishing for the third in the series, presided over an event Book Passage called "Inside the Writers Loft with Marcia Clark." Her debut novel, Guilt by Association, published by Mulholland Books in April, features Rachel Knight, a workaholic district attorney who lives in Los Angeles's famed Biltmore Hotel. Why the hotel? "Because I don't like to do dishes," explained Clark. Clark, who was raised on Nancy Drew and is still an avid reader in suspense fiction, gave one reason for taking the dive into writing novels: "Through the cover of fiction you can say much more about the truth." After asking a litany of questions that delved into details of Clark's life--causing her to call it "the scariest interview of her life"--Broadbent got the Berkeley-born Clark to talk about starring in her Staten Island high school's production of The Man Who Came to Dinner (as the temptress) and learning Hebrew, French and a little Arabic to apply for a position at the State Department (which promptly asked about her typing). Then he approached the "elephant thundering into the room." Obviously, O.J. "You're part of the American story," said Broadbent. "You've danced, you've waited tables," he continued, brushing quickly past her two marriages to ask about her two sons, who are 21 and 19. Clark drew a gasp from the audience when she shared that they were "five and two during the trial." Broadbent asked the former D.A., who won 19 out of 20 homicide trials, to address the assessment of her mentor in the D.A. office, Harvey Giss, that celebrity and money can buy impunity from the law. Clark said such a cloud started with Rodney King. "It's all connected," she said. "Simpson came along not long after that." In her O.J. summation, Clark told the jury that this was not payback time; Johnny Cochran stressed that their verdict went far beyond the courtroom. Clark said she learned about a year ago--from an unnamed person who interviewed the jurors and is writing a book Clark said she cannot wait to read--that the first straw vote in the O.J. Simpson case was 10-2. "I had always assumed the two not guilty votes were by white women," said Clark. Turns out, one was black, and she told the unnamed author that the other jurors impressed upon her what dire ramifications her vote could bring. "She said, 'this is not going to be on me,' " Clark recounted. A la Lipton, Broadbent closed the session with the "questionnaire." Favorite word? "Guilty." Least favorite word? "Moist and ointment; nothing good's following those words." What gets her going? "Justice." Makes her happy? "Love." Favorite curse word? "Douchenozzle; it's in the second book." Sound she loves? "Laughter." Sound she hates? "Phone ringing at 2 a.m." Profession other than her own she'd like? "Probably actress." Profession she'd least like? "Politician." What she wants to hear at the Pearly Gates? "Aaaaall, right." Clark's next Rachel Knight novel will be titled Guilty by Degrees. --Bridget KinsellaThe Fed’s pumping will now pick up from the reduced pace of the past two holiday weeks. That will coincide with another Treasury paydown this Thursday that will add even more cash to the system. New notes settling on January 18 will absorb some of that, but for the coming week conditions will be favorable for both stock and bond prices to increase. An additional bullish factor is that both the commercial banks and foreign central banks appear to be entering the upside of their buying cycle. A normal cyclical uptrend in those forces at this point could be bullish influences for a month or two. At the same time, individuals appear to have stopped their run on stock mutual funds for the time being. All of that creates a bullish brew for stocks. The issue is whether it will be sustainable. I have my doubts. Bernanke’s printing press seems to be adding about 10 cents a gallon per month to the price of gasoline. Food prices are also rising. The negative feedback mechanism of Fed pumping is running full blast. It is boosting economic activity thanks to government deficit spending but it is primarily stimulating non core food and energy inflation—the kind of inflation that the Fed pays no attention to. Bernanke’s policies are decimating the middle class thanks to soaring prices for necessities, and sending senior citizens to the poorhouse by the millions thanks to zero interest rates. This Fed policy is beyond just stupid. On top of being doomed to massive failure, it is a crime against humanity. While impoverishing the middle class and the elderly, the policy is enriching the oil barons, speculators, and Wall Street financiers. When criminals are rewarded instead of punished what you get is more criminals and more criminal behavior. The system rots until it collapses completely. A house built on fraud cannot long stand. As more millions are forced to rely on government handouts to feed themselves, economic growth will again stall. The top 1% cannot carry the increasing load of those falling out of the economic system. The total number of employed persons fell by 250,000-300,000 in December, bringing the decline in the total employed to nearly 1 million since July according to the BLS household survey. The Fed began printing money in August with the QL1.5 program. When the Fed was printing money from November 2008 to March 2010, the economy lost 6.6 million jobs. So naturally Bernanke’s solution to the employment problem was to print more money. Doing more and more of what doesn’t work is a sign of insanity. Bernanke is clearly insane and his cohorts at the Fed are sycophants and fools. Meanwhile, as the foundations of the economy crumble, the printed cash flows through Wall Street and the markets levitate. The conditions look favorable for more of that in the weeks ahead but we’ll keep a close watch on the FCBs, the banks, and fund flows for any sign that the gig is up. An early stall in these cyclical buying patterns would be the signal that the Fed’s con is failing. Keep an eye on those gas prices too. When you cringe at the pump, that’s a sign. The Fed may be forced to stop pumping sooner than we think. Click here to download complete report in pdf format (Professional Edition Subscribers). Try the Professional Edition risk free for thirty days. If, within that time, you don’t find the information useful, I will give you a full refund. It’s that simple. Click here for more information. 3 month subscription to the Wall Street Examiner Professional Edition, Money-Liquidity-Real Estate package, renewing automatically unless canceled. Price: $89.00 By clicking this button, I agree to the Wall Street Examiner’s Terms of Use.Scott Maxwell demonstrates mental rover driving 1 of 9 Glenn Fleishman FOR the past nine years Scott Maxwell has worked on Mars. Or at least as close to it as is possible on Earth. This, it turns out, is Pasadena, California, home to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages many probes, rovers and satellites for America's space agency. From there Mr Maxwell has driven three Mars vehicles: Spirit and Opportunity, twins dispatched in 2004 as part of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, and, more recently, Curiosity, which touched down on the planet last August carrying Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Of course, you don't just take Curiosity out for a spin. Mr Maxwell, who helped develop the driving software for the MERs and later became their principal pilot before moving on to direct the newer set of wheels, explains that you need to put yourself in the rover's head. This lets you picture and plot moves before typing the computer code that is then beamed to the vehicle. On February 8th, he announced a few days ago, he plans to shed the robot suit and resume his human life, but not before having trained other chauffeurs in the same mental gymnastics. The MSL driving team comprises 16 operators, divvied up into groups specialising in mobility, moving the arm (to blast rocks with a laser to study their chemical composition and to take close-up photos) and managing the turret on the arm that houses a percussive drill. They drive the rover and deploy its instruments as instructed by the mission team, which meets each Earth day to decide, through consensus, where it should go on the following Mars day, or sol, and what science it should perform there. Mr Maxwell, a member of the mobility team, demonstrates to your correspondent how he might move his hand in sympathy with the rover's multi-jointed wheels to think through the physical sequence. A computer scientist, Mr Maxwell then plots the route in software he developed that translates the driving sequence into commands that the on-board computer understands. But before instructions are beamed to one of two NASA satellites orbiting Mars, and thence to Curiosity, Mr Maxwell and his colleagues feed them into a simulator. Curiosity's several pairs of cameras—Mr Maxwell jokes that it has "more eyes than a potato"—provide stereoscopic images that let the boffins at JPL get a feel for the Martian landscape. This makes it easier to plan and test movements on a computer. In particularly tricky situations when computer models fall short, JPL turns to another sort of in silico simulator. Its "sandbox", a pit of gravel and other materials mimicking the Martian regolith, can be used painstakingly to test how an identical copy of Curiosity would fare. JPL also has a full-scale but stripped-down model, adjusted for the difference in Earth's and Mars's gravitational fields. Both versions test less tricky manoeuvres in a large outdoor space called the Mars Yard. (A simulacrum of Opportunity also sits in the sandbox's corner, waiting to be deployed as needed in either arena.) In MSL's early days last summer, recalls Michael Watkins, the mission manager, his team was protective of the rover and chary of doing too much, too fast. Increasingly though, scientists leave Curiosity to its own devices. It is more autonomous than Opportunity, now nine years into its 90-day mission, and growing more so as roboticists figure out new ways to let it roam without direct supervision. The human drivers need not fear for their jobs just yet. Dr Watkins says the team balances exploring more territory and geology, where increased autonomy allows greater range, with scientists' desire not to miss anything important, where human discretion continues to be paramount. As for Mr Maxwell, he has yet to decide where to go next, though he admits that "driving on Mars" will be tough to top. But his face brightens when talk turns to manned missions to the fourth planet. Should the venture materialise in his lifetime—and this is far from assured—Mr Maxwell says he would vie for a place. Even if it were just a one-way trip.The year 2017 is certainly proving to be a fertile one for the discovery of potentially habitable exoplanets. Just a year ago there were maybe five exoplanets identified as having genuinely good prospects of being potentially habitable (see “Top Five Known Potentially Habitable Planets”) and only one of them, Proxima Centauri b discovered in 2016, was relatively nearby (see “Proxima Centauri b: The Search for More Exoplanets Continue”). Over the last several months, that list has expanded significantly as a result of a number of ongoing surveys taking place around the globe and in space. New additions to the list of nearby potentially exoplanets from 2017 include possibly three out of the seven exoplanets found orbiting TRAPPIST-1 along with individual exoplanets found orbiting GJ 273 and LHS-1140 (see “Habitable Planet Reality Check: The Seven Planets of TRAPPIST-1”, “Habitable Planet Reality Check: The Nearby GJ 273 or Luyten’s Star” and “Habitable Planet Reality Check: A Super-Earth Orbiting the Nearby LHS 1140”). While still far too distant to reach with today’s technology, these nearby exoplanets would be potential targets of exploration if interstellar travel proves to be practical in the future. Now the European team of astronomers operating the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Search) spectrograph attached to the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) 3.6-meter telescope in La Silla, Chile have announced the discovery of yet another potentially habitable exoplanet as a result of their long-term survey of nearby stars. In a paper to be published in the peer-reviewed European astronomical journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, with Xavier Bonfils (currently at Université Grenoble Alpes) as the lead author, the HARPS team describes their latest find – a temperate, roughly Earth-mass object found orbiting the nearby star commonly known as Ross 128. So what are the prospects for the potential habitability of this new exoplanet given what we now know about it? Background The star Ross 128 is an V magnitude 11.1 star located in the constellation of Virgo – The Virgin. Its common name is derived from being the 128th star cataloged by American astronomer Frank E. Ross (1874-1960) during his early work at the Yerkes Observatory while searching for and characterizing dim variable stars. First appearing as part of the fourth installment of Ross’ catalog published in 1926, subsequent work showed it to be an intrinsically dim, nearby red dwarf star with a distance currently pegged at 11.02±0.02 light years based on the initial astrometric measurements from the ESA Gaia mission. This makes Ross 128 the 12th closest known star system to the Sun. Because of its closeness, Ross 128 was included in the first edition of the Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars in 1957 earning it the designation of GJ 477 after the creator of the catalog, German astronomer Wilhelm Gliese (1915-1993), and his long time collaborator on later editions, Hartmut Jahreiß. According to the best data available on Ross 128 compiled by Bonfils et al., this spectral type M4V red dwarf has a radius of 0.197±0.008 times that of the Sun and a surface temperature 3192±60 K. The luminosity is calculated to be 0.0036±0004 times that of the Sun and the mass is estimated to be 0.17±0.02 times. Occasional flares have been noted for this star over the decades which can dramatically increase its brightness for periods of several minutes earning it the variable star designation of FI Virginis. But based on a detailed analysis of its activity compared to other red dwarf stars, Ross 128 seems to be among the least magnetically active red dwarfs currently known suggesting that it is a fairly evolved object. This low level of activity combined with its Sun-like metallicity, its orbit around the galaxy and its long rotation period estimated to be about 121 days all suggest an age well in excess of five billion years. Like many nearby stars, Ross 128 has been the target of exoplanet searches for decades. The most sensitive search results previously published were from an analysis of HARPS radial velocity (RV) measurements published in 2013 again with Xavier Bonfils (then with Observatoire de Genève) as the lead author. With only a half dozen measurements available at the time, the star’s RV seemed to vary on the order of a meter per second suggesting that the reflex motion of an exoplanet orbiting Ross 128 was being observed although it was impossible to claim a definitive exoplanet detection or characterize its properties with so little data. With this promising start, additional precision RV measurements were made by the HARPS team over the following years. For their most recent work, Bonfils et al. started with a total of 157 precision RV measurements made of Ross 128 using HARPS between July 2, 2005 and April 26, 2016. Because of an upgrade to the HARPS spectrograph’s fiber optic feed introduced in May 2015 which significantly altered the line spread function (as well as improve the instrument measurement stability), the two parts of the RV data were processed separately using the team’s proven set of data reduction tools to find a clear signal with a period of about 9.9 days. Detailed modelling of the data assuming various sources of natural and instrument noise found a well-sampled periodic signal in the RV measurements with a semiamplitude of 1.7 meters per second consistent with the presence of an exoplanet in a circular orbit with a period of 9.86 days. Plugging in the properties of the star itself yields a mean orbital radius of 0.049 AU (just 7.3 million kilometers) and a M P sini of 1.35 times that of the Earth (or M E ) for the exoplanet. Since the inclination of its orbit to the plane of the sky, i, is not currently known, the actual mass, M P, of what is now designated Ross 128b will almost surely be larger. The amount of energy Ross 128b receives from its host star, the effective stellar flux of S eff, is about 1.38 times that of the Earth based on these derived properties. In order to help eliminate the possibility that the observed variations in RV were not some form of stellar activity mimicking a planetary signature, Bonfils et al. also analyzed two sets of photometric data for Ross 128. They secured over nine years of ground-based V-band brightness measurements made by the All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) and 82 days of almost continuous precision photometry obtained by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft as part of Campaign 1 of its extended K2 mission running from June to August 2014 (see “The First Year of Kepler’s K2 Mission”). There was no hint of any photometric variability corresponding to the ten-day period of Ross 128b strengthening the case that this is a planet. After taking into account the effects of Ross 128b on the precision RV measurements, the only other significant signals were found to have periods of about 123 and 52 days. The ASAS photometry of Ross 128 clearly displays regular variations with a period of 121 days corresponding to the rotation of the star (the K2 photometry could not used in this assessment since it did not cover a complete rotation). The 123-day periodicity in the RV data is clearly associated with stellar activity modulated by the rotation of the star with the slight variance with 121-day period found in the photometry probably being due to differential rotation. The 52-day periodicity is explained as aliasing of half the 123-day signal caused by the annual gaps in the HARPS data set. While no other convincing exoplanet candidates can be identified in the current set of RV measurements, there could easily be additional members of this system awaiting discovery. Potential Habitability A thorough assessment of the habitability of any extrasolar planet would require a lot of detailed data on the properties of that planet, its atmosphere, its spin state, the evolution of its volatile content and so on. Unfortunately, at this very early stage, the only information typically available to scientists about extrasolar planets are basic orbit parameters, a rough measure of its size and/or mass and some important properties of its sun. Combined with theoretical extrapolations of the factors that have kept the Earth habitable over billions of years (not to mention why our neighbors are not habitable today), the best we can hope to do at this time is to compare the known properties of extrasolar planets to our current understanding of planetary habitability to determine if an extrasolar planet is “potentially habitable”. And by “habitable”, I mean in an Earth-like sense where the surface conditions allow for the existence of liquid water – one of the presumed prerequisites for the development of life as we know it. While there may be other worlds that might possess environments that could support life, these would not be Earth-like habitable worlds of the sort being considered here. The first step in assessing the potential habitability of Ross 128b is to determine what sort of world it is: is it a rocky planet like the Earth or is it a volatile-rich mini-Neptune possessing a deep hot atmosphere dominated by hydrogen overlaying layers of exotic high temperature ices with little prospect of being habitable in an Earth-like sense? Unfortunately, the only information currently available about this new exoplanet that could help make such an assessment is its M p sini or minimum mass value. The actual mass and the radius of Ross 128b are needed to calculate this exoplanet’s density and help constrain its bulk composition. With such a tight orbit around its sun, Ross 128b has about a 2% probability that the plane of its orbit is oriented by random chance to produce transits observable from Earth. Such transits could be used to pin down the orbit inclination, i, allowing the actual planet mass to be determined as well as measure the exoplanet’s radius. Unfortunately, there were no hints of such transits found in Kepler’s K2 photometry from 2014. Any transiting exoplanet passing directly in front of Ross 128 as viewed from our solar system with a radius larger than 0.19 times that of the Earth would have been detected to a 99% confidence level. Grazing transits of exoplanets closer to Earth in size have also been excluded to high confidence. Bonfils et al. openly discuss the possibility of using the 39-meter European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) currently under construction for ESO on top of Cerro Armazones in northern Chile to observe Ross 128b after it is commissioned in 2024. The large size of this telescope combined with the latest adaptive optics technology (no to mention the superb seeing in Chile’s Atacama Desert) should allow Ross 128b to be resolved at its maximum elongation distance of just 15 milliarc seconds from its host star. Combined with an appropriately designed high spectral dispersion instrument which allows selection of bands to improve the contrast ratio (i.e. the ratio of the apparent brightness of the host star and its orbiting planet) and ease detection through the glare of the host star, Bonfils et al. believe that Ross 128b could be directly detected almost as easily as Proxima Centauri b (an exoplanet that has already been studied in detail as a prospective future E-ELT target). In addition to providing vital spectral information about the world, the orbit inclination could be determined using E-ELT observations. If E-ELT proves incapable of making the required observations, 10+ meter-class space-based telescope built with features specifically to support exoplanet detection should be able to make the required observations in the next decade. While these sort of observations can be used to help constrain the radius of Ross 128b, direct measurements of its size will likely require a space-based interferometer of the sort that will probably not be available until mid-century. While we wait until measurements such as these come from E-ELT or other proposed instruments in the next decade, statistical arguments can be made about the probability this new exoplanet has a rocky composition. An analysis of the mass-radius relationship for extrasolar planets smaller than Neptune performed by Rogers strongly suggests that the population of known exoplanets transitions from being predominantly rocky planets like the Earth to predominantly volatile-rich worlds like Neptune at radii no greater than 1.6 times that of the Earth or R E but more likely at 1.5 R E (see “Habitable Planet Reality Check: Terrestrial Planet Size Limit”). While rocky planets larger than this are possible, they become more uncommon with increasing radius. A planet with a radius of 1.6 R E and an Earth
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But to Major Jim Kean and Ambassador Graham Martin, the moment represented something else: the final opportunity to uphold promises and obligations to the people of South Vietnam. AGENCY: Verve AGENTS: Parker Davis, Adam Weinstein PRODUCER: Cota Films 7 FREE AGENT by Sam Regnier A female NBA executive for the Golden State Warriors pursues the biggest free agent of her career while managing a messy divorce and a complicated relationship with a younger colleague and his teenage sister. AGENCY: Paradigm AGENTS: David Boxerbaum, Scott Henderson MANAGEMENT: Management SGC MANAGER: Scott Carr PRODUCER: 21 Laps FINANCIER: CBS FILMS 7 HOMEGROWN by Jacques Edeline A teenage boy, raised in total seclusion and indoctrinated by his enigmatic father, is sent to live with a foster family and enrolled in a public high school when his father is incarcerated, threatening their relationship and causing the boy to question everything he’s learned. AGENCY: APA AGENTS: Debbie Deuble, Adam Perry MANAGEMENT: Affirmative Entertainment MANAGERS: Nicholas Bogner PRODUCER: Cota Films 7 THE BOY by Owen Egerton Sixteen years after stabbing a classmate to appease a legendary phantom known as the Boy, a repentant woman returns to her hometown to live with her sister and nephew, but as the Boy continues to haunt her she must face her deepest terror and discover the truth about the Boy before he claims her nephew. AGENCY: UTA AGENTS: Jason Burns, Aaron Hart MANAGEMENT: Epicenter MANAGERS: Allard Cantor, Jarrod Murray 6 CARNIVAL by Matias Caruso A deadly carnival knife-thrower hunts down the members of a powerful crime syndicate who murdered his sister. AGENCY: CAA AGENTS: Trevor Astbury, Jon Cassir MANAGEMENT: Untitled Entertainment MANAGER: Jen Au PRODUCERS: Anonymous Content, Mitchell Peck 6 CROOK COUNTY by Gita Pullapilly, Aron Gaudet A whistleblower’s harrowing journey into an undercover FBI operation in 1980’s Cook County, Illinois, sending him toe-to-toe with corrupt judges, hustling defense attorneys, and Chicago mobsters; and ultimately resulting in the largest number of convictions of government officials in the history of the United States. AGENCY: UTA AGENTS: Max Mitchell, Carolyn Sivitz MANAGEMENT: Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment MANAGER: Taylor Benzie PRODUCER: Linda McDonough 6 DAMSEL by Bryan McMullin After first being locked in a tower and then hidden deep in the forest to prevent a prince from rescuing her, long-haired Rapunzel vows to get revenge. AGENCY: UTA AGENTS: Charles Ferraro, Aaron Hart, David Park MANAGEMENT: Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment MANAGERS: Tobin Babst, Michael Wilson PRODUCER: Josephson Entertainment 6 FRANCIS AND THE GODFATHER by Andrew Farotte Facing financial ruin, auteur filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola is forced to direct the adaptation of Mario Puzo’s pulp novel The Godfather, pitting him against legendary mega-producer Robert Evans. AGENCY: CAA AGENTS: Jon Levin, Elizabeth Newman MANAGEMENT: Zero Gravity Management MANAGERS: Jeff Belkin PRODUCER: Echo Lake Entertainment 6 GREEN RIVER KILLER by Michael Sheen Based on the Eisner Award winning graphic novel of the same name. Detectives in the Green River Killer case attempt to unravel both the facts behind the gruesome murders that plagued the Pacific North West for over a decade and the psychosis of the killer they find themselves face to face with. AGENCY: ICM Partners AGENTS: Doug MacLaren MANAGEMENT: Sanders Armstrong Caserta MANAGERS: Tammy Rosen PRODUCERS: Dark Horse Entertainment 6 LANDSLIDE by Will Staples, Tony Camerino Based on the book How to Break a Terrorist by Tony Camerino. The story of America’s search for terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the man who played a key role in tracking him down by using psychological warfare. AGENCY: WME (Staples)/CAA (Camerino) AGENTS: Phil D’Amecourt (Staples)/Jon Levin (Camerino) MANAGEMENT: Management 360 (Staples)/BE Management (Camerino) MANAGERS: Darin Friedman (Staples)/Brett Etre (Camerino) PRODUCERS: Marc Butan 6 RESURFACE by Pete Bridges An underwater earthquake decimates a research crew working at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, leaving two survivors with limited resources to ascend 35,000 feet and reach the surface before their life support runs out. AGENCY: Verve AGENTS: Adam Levine, Adam Weinstein MANAGEMENT: Madhouse Entertainment MANAGER: Adam Kolbrenner PRODUCERS: Broken Road Productions 6 SONG OF TREBLINKA by Viorica Baln Based on a true story. A renowned Jewish conductor plots a revolt with fellow prisoners as he attracts the respect of his Nazi captors in Germany-occupied Poland’s most notorious death camp. AGENCY: WME AGENTS: Ryan Feldman MANAGEMENT: Madhouse Entertainment MANAGER: Adam Kolbrenner 6 THE CANYON by Alex Koplow When parents reunite with their grown children for a road trip to hike the Grand Canyon, the family conflicts on the way prove far more grueling than the twenty mile hike. 6 THREE MONTHS by Jared Frieder After being exposed to HIV the weekend of his high school graduation in 2011, a punk gay teenager from Miami attempts to start a new relationship with a someone from his support group as they try to endure the three months it takes to get accurately tested. AGENCY: Paradigm AGENTS: Valarie Phillips, Ellie Schiff MANAGEMENT: Haven Entertainment MANAGERS: Brendan Bragg, Jesse Hara, Jordana Mollick 6 WISH UPON by Barbara Marshall When Claire, a sixteen year old misfit, finds a magic box that promises a chance at the life she has always wanted, she never could have guessed that each wish would demand a deadly payment. AGENCY: APA AGENTS: Debbie Deuble MANAGEMENT: Industry Entertainment MANAGER: Ava Jamshidi PRODUCER: Busted Shark FINANCIER: Broad Green PicturesFor all the tales of gilded startup parties and billion-dollar valuations, tech workers are often the most overworked, misunderstood and undervalued employees. Others struggle as freelancers or attempt to launch their own businesses. In the face of all that hardship, developers like me are turning more and more to collectives. advertisement advertisement I’ve been a part of the cooperative movement for eight years. During that time, I’ve visited conferences and cities all over the country to promote the worker-owned co-op I founded, The Toolbox for Education and Social Action, or TESA. (You might recognize the game I created there, Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives.) While traveling the country, I’ve watched as the number of people launching co-ops has exploded, especially in tech world. And while they might be flying under the radar in the mainstream, they’re poised to shake up the way things are done. Just last month, eighteen of these cooperatives launched the Tech Co-op Network. Here’s how technology co-ops work, and why you might want to join one. The Cooperative Difference Tech worker co-ops come in all shapes and sizes and operate across a wide variety of industries. From web development to graphic design, web hosting, engineering, manufacturing, and more–technology workers anywhere can band together to accomplish what they couldn’t do alone. What makes cooperatives an exciting alternative is their structure: they are democratic businesses owned and operated equally by a specific membership. Some co-ops have memberships composed of only workers, some of consumers, some of producers. Each owner only has one share and one vote in the organization. During the good times, these co-op members share the benefits equally; and in the hard times, they share the burdens equitably. This makes them more sustainable in low-income communities as well as economic downturns. There are cooperative art galleries, cafes, print shops, farms, grocery stores, and much more. To be clear, this is not like being offered a stock option in the company you work for. As an example, if a tech business earns five million dollars in profits, all of that money is typically controlled by one person, a small private group, or unevenly distributed amongst shareholders. In a worker co-op, however, each worker owns an equal share of the company’s finances. One worker, one share, one vote. advertisement How Tech Co-ops Are Changing The Game Sassafras Tech Collective is a young worker co-op, launched only six months ago, that focuses on web and app design and development for social justice orgs, non-profits, academics, artists, and others. The two founding members, Jill Dimond and Tom Smyth, began Sassafras after completing their PhDs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Both of their studies focused around issues of social change and technology. Dimond and Smyth, wanting to continue this work outside of academia, decided to launch a business that would make a difference in the world. “In having a democratic workplace where everyone is a worker and an owner, we thought that we could help bring about social change by starting with ourselves,” Dimond says. “As a woman in technology, I have long been concerned about diversity issues in computing. By creating a more egalitarian workplace, we hope to also create a safe space for those who are underrepresented in tech such as women and people of color.” This is an important point. The democratic nature of worker-owned businesses means they must be responsive to the needs of their membership, thus making them better suited to address issues of diversity. Historically, the tech world has not been a friendly space for women, and Dimond has firsthand experience with that issue. “I still deal with stereotypes and issues as a woman when I go to various tech events and talk to prospective clients,” she says. “In a former job, I experienced sexual harassment from a client but I was not in a situation where I could do much about it. Being a worker-owner gives me agency about what kind of clients we take on and ensures that my voice will be heard.” While both Dimond and Smyth have worked for major corporations–Dimond for Google and Smyth for Microsoft Research–they’re happy to be in a small co-op. “We have more agency to determine what types of projects and work we want to do,” says Dimond. advertisement Gaia Host Collective, another worker-owned entity, offers internet hosting services with an environmentally and socially sustainable business model. Gaia began when two neighbors purchased a fledgling web hosting service, starting them off with two servers and fifty monthly customers. Today, Gaia has grown all of those numbers: the servers, the worker-owners, and the clients. It hasn’t all been rosy, however. The first several years were a constant struggle, with members working long hours and barely scraping by financially. And even though their employees (the worker-owners) aren’t making a killing just yet, the benefits they see from sharing the responsibilities of ownership go much deeper. “We have a stable and growing financial outlook that we manage collectively as worker-owners,” says Charles Strader, one of the founding members. “Being a cooperative has benefited our workers with working flexible schedules, the ability to have passion and time for things outside of work, the ability to be supportive of social justice and environmental organizations and business allies as part of our regular for-profit work, to be able to have some freedom of geography in where we choose to live, to be able to work from home or from a coworking space,” says Strader. “There’s also a lot of intangible benefits to the camaraderie of being a co-owner in a worker cooperative that aren’t easily expressed as benefits.” Gaia Host has been so pleased with the cooperative model that they and several other worker co-ops teamed up to produce “A Technology Freelancer’s Guide to Starting a Worker Collective” (PDF). Isthmus, which began in 1980, is an engineering and manufacturing cooperative based in Madison, Wisconsin. Before starting the co-op, the four founding members left another company that treated them poorly and broke numerous promises. After trying to figure out how to make it on their own, the disgruntled, out-of-work employees settled on cooperation. To them, a co-op was the best structure that would ensure the business operated fairly, preventing repeats of the outrages that caused them to leave their former jobs. Over the years, Isthmus has had great success with the model, and the democratic structure has given worker-owners the room to grow in ways that likely wouldn’t be the reality in typical workplaces. advertisement “Most people are used to just being employees at other companies,” says Ole Olson, an engineer and worker-owner at Isthmus. “When given the responsibility and power to make their own decisions, it is amazing how some people change.” “We work with several fortune 500 companies,” Olson adds. “When they first learn of us they don’t understand (or aren’t willing to accept) how our structure works. Once we have them as a customer—they are hooked.” The Movement Grows: Launch Of The Tech Co-op Network The cooperative model is much more than just another business structure that tech workers can consider when launching their ventures. It’s a growing movement. On in late October, 18 worker co-ops joined together to launch the Tech Co-op Network. The Network’s purpose is to take cooperation in the tech world to the next level by fostering collaboration and mutual aid amongst worker-owned technology businesses. In the short time since its launch, the Network has already grown to a total of 23 members. “Our members are small businesses, most with 3-10 worker-owners,” says Brent Emerson, a worker-owner with the Electric Embers Cooperative and coordinator of the new initiative. “The Network helps us market our services and collaborate on large projects that we wouldn’t be able to take on alone; to refer work to each other when we’re too busy and benefit from those referrals when we’re not; and to ask for
's because the brand known still for its handlebar toy scooters says its the only company legally allowed to sell hoverboards in the US thanks to an exclusive licensing agreement it inked earlier this year. Luckily, Razor's version seems pretty good — and relatively cheap at $599.99 compared with the many $1,200 to $1,500 models out there. Also, the company wants you to know its model won't spontaneously combust under your feet. Razor says its Hovertrax won't burn your house down We gave the Hovertrax DLX a quick try in a corner of a Wynn hotel ballroom that was thankfully carpeted. The DLX differs from Razor's standard hoverboard because of a "high-tech smoke chrome finish" and blue LED lights. While it's hard to discern the nuances of hoverboard quality, the company claims its product is among the best, even if it is suing competitors to keep them from selling their own. Research and development chief Bob Hadley says Razor clearly copied what was in the market, but then had its supply chain experts carefully vet every component choice. The company sourced batteries from Samsung, and made sure all the wiring wouldn't result in some catastrophic meltdown. "A lot of those hastily assembled ones don't have that," he adds. Hadley says Razor's licensing of inventor Shane Chen's hoverboard patent ensures it has access to the best design schematics. "We're trying to take an item and fine tune the supply chain to make it reliable," he says. Of course, take that with a grain of salt. Hoverboard safety is a legitimate worry. Seemingly overnight, the vehicle went from a viral celebrity-endorsed phenomenon into an easy way to burn your house down. An influx of cheap hoverboards with questionable components tried to cash in on the trend, and their lithium-ion batteries started catching fire when plugged in or even while riding the hoverboard down the sidewalk. Amazon began pulling nearly every hoverboard model from its online store, and they were shortly thereafter banned from every major US airline and shipping company for safety reasons. So even if you can easily get your hands on a Razor Hovertrax, it's still illegal to take it basically anywhere — even here at CES.If you had to rely on one zero, what would it be? For a long time, the mantra has been that the 50 / 200 yard zero is the most useful zero for the AR15 platform as it offers a flat trajectory for the 5.56 cartridge. It is good advice and I have a few rifles zero’ed for 50 myself, but it’s not the “best zero”. The 50 yard zero is a vanilla standard, as it suits almost everyone well… but each rifle or carbine is a unique combination of barrel length / velocity, bullet weight, and shooter. If each rifle setup is unique, then can we do better than a “vanilla” zero for each rig? Yes. Many of you might have heard of the maximum point blank range method of zeroing. MPBR is a zero scheme that is unique to your rifle and loading. It maximizes the “point blank range” where you have to remember a single hold to get hits out to the end of the point blank range, hence “maximum point blank range.” As an example, imagine a disk six inches in diameter and I want to hit that disk as far out as possible with one zero. How would I do that? I would zero the rifle so that the trajectory of my bullet will arch 3 inches high and where the bullet would fall 3 inches below my line of sight, that would mark the end of my MPBR zero. That disk could be at 25, 100, 212, or 274.5 yards and a single center hold would allow me to hit it with no need for holdover. Hunters have used this method for a while, but with the popularity of the bullet drop reticle, it has fallen by the wayside in recent years. So why not just use the bullet drop marks? Because time. Your target, be it defensive or hunting, will present you with an opportune shot for only a few seconds. Ranging and doping the target, even with a BDC reticle, may not happen fast enough and / or you may miscalculate. That 18 inch shoulder-width ACOG ranging system isn’t so useful if the target is standing sideways or presents only for a split second. We want to put rounds on target, with the highest probability to intersect the target, without having to try and estimate range. Anything inside of my MPBR I want to aim at and hit without worrying about hold over, hold under, or BDC stadia. That’s the beauty of the MPBR method, it allows you to tune your trajectory to tailor suit your rifle, your loading, and your target diameter. So how do we zero with this wunder method? Let’s start by expanding upon why we want to ditch the 50/200 zero mantra and see how things go with a 3 inch diameter MPBR: Point. Click. Hit. You need a ballistic calculator and some load data. I recommend Strelok on the itunes or android store. Strelok has a wonderful tool built in that lets you calculate the maximum point blank range right in the app and is a powerful tool. Let’s proceed with some more examples as to why MPBR is worth the trouble over a standard 50 yard zero. With a 50 yard zero in a 20 inch rifle, shooting XM193, you can expect a bullet apex (aka maximum ordinate) of flight to be close to 2 inches (by my calculations) and then it falls back to cross your line of sight again at 225 yards. Wait, it’s not over yet. As the bullet continues to fall, it will fall 2 inches below your line of sight at 259 yards. The maximum point blank zero here is 259 yards meaning you should be able to hit a 4 inch disk from 0-259 yards with a dead center hold. Think of the MPBR as the acceptable vertical resolution where the bullet’s trajectory stays inside the defined size of the target. Now let’s bring it out a new MPBR zero which allows us to stretch that useful range out a bit more. Let’s zero so the maximum ordinate of our XM193 is 3 inches above the line of sight. So if I am shooting a 20 inch AR15 with XM193 and a maximum bullet rise of 3 inches over my line of sight, then I just extended my MPBR to 300 yards where at that point the bullet would dip 3 inches below the line of sight. That has effectively changed our “resolution” to 6 inches where the bullet would stay in the defined target zone. A 6 inch resolution easily fits in the space occupied by a human head out to 300 yards! That means a dead hold to the middle of the face will potentially score head-shots out to darn near 300 yards! Remember, this sighting method is target size defined and shooter-rifle-projectile unique. Each rifle and loading will need to be entered in Strelok (or other ballistic calculator) to determine the best zero for your desired target diameter. Why does this apply to a defensive rifle / carbine? In a self defense setup, we need to maximize the distance where we will hit our target without shot correction. If the target is inside our point blank range… we want the rifle to be a simple “point and click” interface. Bam. Hit. We want the highest probability of hitting a head, torso, or half exposed limb. Point. Click. Hit. We want to maximize bullet “hang time” to increase the probability our projectile will hit the target at unknown distances. Click. Boom. Hit. So why not 4.5 inches up and down if the average head is 9 inches tall for a MPBR of 349 yards!? Why not a 3.5 inch zero for a 7 inch diameter vital zone!? Sure, you can do that. It’s all up to you and it all depends on your expectations of precision vs the diameter of the target. Remember that standard zero’s are made for shooter convenience and not what’s best for your rifle and projectile combo. Ranges come in known distance increments and we pick a set distance to zero out of convenience. That 50 or 100 yard zero for your setup doesn’t stretch out the rifle or carbines maximum useful trajectory. So what should be our goal when we zero? Goal: increase the probability that the projectile will intersect the target without calculations. Factors: Rifle and bullet accuracy, shooter accuracy, target size, and environment. A defensive target, once engaged, will not stand up waiting to be shot. They will be hiding, returning fire, and they will present a small target for the shooter. Three inches of rise and fall (for a total of 6 inches of vital zone) gives us a great starting point for hitting hiding, peeking, or partially exposed targets. So instead of estimating range in a quick, violent engagement, I want to hold dead on and know that if my target is inside of 300 yards, that target is gonna get hit. This simplify’s ranging immensely. No holdovers. No hold unders either. My only quesiton “is the target inside of 300 yards?” Yes? Then just a dead hold. Six inches of total vertical resolution seems like a logical choice for a MPBR setup and extends us past our 50 yard / 200 yard zero a bit and is still a fine resolution for engaging defensive targets. I can’t think of anything I would shoot at that would be missed because my trajectory apex is three inches high. Look at your knee. It likely has a targetable area of at least six inches. Torso? This 6 inch resolution is easily inside the vital zone of a center of mass hold. So next I whipped up a basic chart to get an idea of what zero at 100 yards I would need to get a MPBR which targets a 6 inch radius. XM193 and Mk 262: Sight in at 100 yards X inches high in blue for a bullet apex of 3 inches; the MPBR is in red for each barrel and projectile. The XM855 would benefit at similar zeros as it will be in between the MPBR of the 77 grain and 55 grain ammo. Barrel Length 10.5 14.5 16 18 20 xm193 2.6 2.4 2.5 2.2 2.0 MPBR 262 281 289 300 303 Mk 262 2.8 2.6 2.6 2.5 2.4 MPBR 242 261 270 279 284 So you can see there is a bit of difference in the MPBR between rifle, carbine, and bullet. At one end we have the longer point blank range of the 55 grain XM193 and at the other end the heavier 77 Mk 262 at the other. With modern ballistic calculators such as Strelok, you can simply zero at 100 yards, input the maximum target diameter, take the recommended zero for your new MPBR and Strelok will tell you how many clicks up from 100 yards to achieve that zero goal. This method of sighting in gives you some excellent hit probability. If the target is near, a dead hold will hit anything in your maximum point blank range. If you estimate the target is at 300-400 yards, holding on the head will ensure rounds drop into the mid torso. If you were incorrect and your target was closer than you estimated, your projectile would still likely hit the head. It appears that M193 or, even better, a quality defensive 5.56 equivalent such as Hornady 55gr TAP would make the best choice because of the high velocity achieved by 55 grain loadings… but when wind is thrown into the equation the 55 grain stuff makes it more difficult to hit the small targets at the end of its MPBR. So let’s look at heavier match bullets, what benefit do they offer? Increased accuracy and increased wind resistance. Adding the Variables; wind, accuracy, and MPBR Typically M193 is considered a 1.5 to 2 MOA load and the 77 grain Mk 262 is considered a sub MOA load. Think of each bullet as a probability to hit an area based on its accuracy. Groupings are the defining measure of whether a MPBR zero will be effective as inaccurate ammo could possibly land too far away from our target radius to remain useful. If your gun cannot keep groups inside the defined zone, then the distance you have chosen won’t work very well since trying to keep the bullets in a 6 inch diameter target zone out to 300 yards won’t work if your rifle is shooting minute of barn. Ideally you should start with an accurate, free floated barrel, and use the best ammunition available to you. A rifle shooting terrible groups at (Say 4 inches at 100 yards) will not benefit from MPBR, as we must consider that at 200 yards the groupings would double to 8 inches, and at 300 the groupings would run around 12 inches. This eliminates the gains of our MPBR since many of these shots will escape our defined target zone due to simple inaccuracy. A match projectile on the other hand, which shoots 1 inch or less at 100 yards, 2 inches at 200, and 3 inches at 300 will remain useful inside our maximum point blank range. Wind can cause us horizontal shift away from our intended goal of hitting the target. With our example of a 6 inch diameter target and a MPBR of 300 yards, I still want to be able to hit the target in a slight wind. The benefits of match ammo are two fold: better wind resistance and tighter groupings. Both of these characteristics are just what we want when setting up our rifle or carbine. In the 20 inch gun, the Mk262 gives us a MPBR for our six inch diameter target of 284 yards which sacrifices 16 yards from XM193… but the gains in accuracy and wind deflection make it the logical choice for a shooter who wants statistically significant gains on hit probability. As long as you do your part and shoot well, the higher accuracy and better wind resistance will reduce flyers which could land outside our intended target. Wrapping Up: So ultimately, your shooting goals should play into the rifle and its associated setup and upgrades. A red dot or BUIS set up with a MPBR zero will assist you in hitting targets of opportunity and at any distance inside your MPBR “box”. Since we cannot effectively range estimate every shot on fleeting targets, best practice would be to utilize MPBR to ensure hits by maximizing projectile trajectory as it relates to the size of our target. This method may be off-putting to those with a ACOG or similar rifle optic since it negates the benefit of the bullet drop stadia. We don’t need no BDC stadia to be riflemen. We need knowledge and best practice methodology to ensure hits at any distance. Best practice appears to be a heavy match bullet out of a rifle length platform to maximize the flat trajectory of the projectile and to take advantage of better accuracy and wind deflection. This should increase your success in hitting targets with less correction. The true value of this setup is that it helps free you from thinking about your target distance in hundreds of yard increments, and instead it allows you to estimate either near or far. Is the target inside of my MPBR? Yes? Point. Squeeze. Hit. Integrating this into my setup… I foresee finalizing my optic equipped rifle with two loadings: XM193 for practice, and Hornady 75 gr HPBT for longer range work. The Hornady is considerably cheaper than the 69 grain SMK I have been shooting, and switching back and forth between the two loadings is as simple as uncapping the dial and rotating in a few clicks of elevation and windage. I think these loading’s can cover all shooting I can ever realistically do. I really like this method as it increases the probability of intersecting the target at x range inside my MPBR zone. It’s important to get away from the 100-200-300 yard paradigm and examine a zero which allows a more fluid approach to hitting a target at unknown ranges… because remember this, if nothing else; every field target will present at an unknown range. The goal of a marksman is to study the platform and integrate the best practice findings into his or her shooting. I think it is safe to say that for work inside of a MPBR of 300 yards, the 77 grain Mk 262 offers the best probability of hitting the target if shot out of a rifle length system, and its excellent characteristics make it best for environmental conditions. XM193 makes a good substitute as your holds would be the same, but wind may knock you off target without some very light wind correction.Fitness gadget Fitbit was a hit at last year’s TechCrunch50, where it created a ton of buzz and was a runner-up for the top prize. Of course, we all know that it takes hardware companies longer to launch than software startups and since last September, Fitbit has been working tirelessly to refine the product, establish distributions channels and tweak its online platform. Now we won’t have to wait any longer, since Fitbit will officially open up to the public on Tuesday. The site you see currently is the beta version and will feature a redesign as well on Tuesday. So what does Fitbit do? The sleek little device clips onto your clothing and tracks your movement, sleep and calorie burn throughout the day and night. Fitbit, which costs $99, uses the information it gathers about your movement to help you determine how much exercise you’ve been getting and how many calories you’ve burnt. It can also tell you how many steps you have taken and how well you’ve slept, all based on its internal motion detector. By clicking a little button on the device, you’ll see a small blue LED screen that will alternate between the steps you’ve taken, the calories you’ve burned, your distance, and gives you a gauge of how high your activity level is. This is shown via a small flower that will grow as you exercise more (though I’m told that you will be able to switch your icon). Here’s the really innovative part—the device is wireless so all data gets automatically synchronized to your computer and then the web through a wireless base station, so you don’t even have to plug it in. If you are within 10 feet of the device (it plugs into your computer via a USB cord), the station will sync with your device. In order for the wireless functionality to work you need to install a syncing software that runs on both Macs and PCs. Once synced, you can view your health dashboard online. The dashboard is fairly simple and organized. You input your age, height, weight, and gender and are given basic info of how many steps you’ve made in a day and a breakdown of how active you are within the day, showing the highs and lows of your activity. The site will even break down particular activities and measure the intensity of workout. In terms of caloric burn and intake, Fitbit will calculate how many calories you burn in a given day, and if you log in your nutritional info, will also compare that to how much your intake was, making it ideal for anyone who wants to lose weight. And Fitbit has made it easy to input any type of food by already integrating the nutritional value of most types of food, cuisine and even restaurant chain foods, which cuts out a large amount of work for you. One of the features that I find particularly compelling is the ability to monitor your sleep pattern. If you wear the device while sleeping, it will give you a snapshot of your “sleep health.” As you fall in and out of sleep, the Fitbit tracks the movements that your body makes and can tell you how long it took you to fall asleep, how many times you woke up throughout the night and the actual time you were asleep vs the time you were in bed. You will be able to see all of this detailed information on your dashboard. And to make sure that the device is comfortable for people to wear during the night, you can slide Fitbit onto a wristband that is provided. Fitbit’s co-founder and CEO, James Park, told me that when it comes to running and walking, Fitbit is 99 percent accurate in its reporting of steps and 90 percent accurate for caloric burn. But Fitbit isn’t as accurate for other types of activities, like weight-lifting and biking. To mitigate this problem, the online dashboard lets you input exercise types and times manually and Fitbit will calculate how many calories you burned based on health information it has collected. On Tuesday, the site will be open to the public and all of those individuals who pre-ordered the device over the past year will finally receive their Fitbit. While the site will be the only place you can order the Fitbit, Park says that in Q4 you’ll be able to buy the Fitbit online and in retail stores but declined to name which stores he’s partnered with. Fitbit raised a cool $2 million last October and Park says they are looking to raise more to up manufacturing and distribution channels. Fitbit will also become more social, letting users form groups where they can compare their fitness goals and activities. The site will also take a page out of Mint.com’s book by letting you compare your activity and fitness with other anonymous people who have similar weight, height, and gender. While using the personalized dashboard is free, Fitbit will soon be rolling out premium paid features such as customized fitness coaching and guidance. So what’s the competition? There are similar products on the market that offer the same functionality as Fitbit, such as the Philips Activity Monitor or the BodyBugg or Nike/iPod gear (which doesn’t measure sleep patterns). But the beauty of fitbit is in it’s pricing and in its sleek structure. It fits in any pocket and is so small and unobtrusive that it could be hooked into a bra. Both the Philips and BodyBugg products are bulky, making it difficult to wear 24-hours per day. The advantage of the BodyBugg is that it measures calories burn by heat, which is a more efficient and accurate way of measuring calorie burn. Fitbit counts calories via motion, but that’s also why it’s easy to wear. I wasn’t at TechCrunch50 last year but after seeing a demo, I’m already excited about this product after being frustrated with the limitations of pedometers that I’ve used. The ability to wirelessly connect to the online dashboard takes a lot of the work out of actually making sense of the data. And being able to understand your optimal balance of diet, workouts and sleep is valuable. It seems that Fitbit was worth the wait.By Express News Service BHUBANESWAR: Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation has constituted a negotiation committee to assess availability and utilisation of water of Mahanadi and its tributaries. The committee will also examine existing water sharing agreements on river Mahanadi and will consider claims of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Jharkhand regarding availability and utilisation of waters of these rivers. The committee has been set up after complaint by Odisha Government under section 3 of the Interstate River Water Disputes Act (IRWDA) 1956 regarding utilisation of water of Mahanadi Basin. The committee will be headed by member (Water Planning and Projects), Central Water Commission (CWC) and will have 11 other members comprising representatives from Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Jharkhand, Union Ministries of Agriculture, Environment Forest and Climate Change, Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation, India Meteorological Department and Central Water Commission (CWC). The committee has been asked to submit its report within three months. According to a written reply given by chief minister Naveen Patnaik in the winter session of the assembly in December, 2016 monsoon and non-monsoon flow of water in Mahanadi river has gone down over the years. The monsoon flow in Mahanadi has come down from 26.15 million acre feet in 2005 to 13.24 million acre feet in 2015. Similarly, the non-monsoon flow of water in the river on the Odisha side has come down from 2.15 million acre feet in 2005-06 to 1.21 million acre feet in 2014-15. There are several tributaries of Mahanadi river like Aung, Tel, Jeera, Harihar Jor and Brutang which contribute to monsoon and non-monsoon flow. The monsoon flow of Mahanadi at Munduli has also come down from 41.21 million acre feet in 2005 to 22.91 million acre feet in 2015. Similarly, the non-monsoon flow at Munduli came down from 3.71 million acre feet in 2005 to 2.28 acre feet in 2015. The State Government has filed a statutory complaint before the Centre on November 22 under provisions of the Inter State Water Disputes Act,1956 for constitution of an inter-state tribunal to adjudicate the disputes arising from unilatarally planned utilisation of 27.48 million acre feet of Mahanadi water by the Chhattisgarh Government as against availability of minimum flow of 20.61 million acre feet. The State Government has claimed as a part of its equitable share of a minimum flow of 12.28 million acre feet of Mahanadi water at Hirakud Dam as per the DPR of Hirakud project of 1947 and a further utilisation of 3.67 million acre feet in the surplus flows.Among Bungie's side projects is Bungie.net, the company's website, which includes company information, forums, and statistics-tracking and integration with many of its games. Bungie.net serves as the platform from which Bungie sells company-related merchandise out of the Bungie Store and runs other projects, including Bungie Aerospace, charitable organization the Bungie Foundation, a podcast, and online publications about game topics. The company is known for its informal and dedicated workplace culture. Background and founding (1990–1993) Edit In the early 1990s, Alex Seropian was pursuing a mathematics degree at the University of Chicago, as the university did not offer undergraduate degrees in computer science.[7] Seropian's first video game was a Pong clone called Gnop! (Pong spelled backwards). Seropian released Gnop! free of charge, though a few players paid Seropian for the source code.[8] Living at home shortly before graduation, his father's wishes for him to get a job convinced Seropian to start his own game company instead.[7] Seropian founded Bungie in May 1991 to publish Operation: Desert Storm.[8][9] Seropian culled funding from friends and family, assembling the game boxes and writing the disks himself.[10] Operation: Desert Storm sold 2,500 copies, and Seropian looked for another game to publish.[8] Seropian met programmer Jason Jones in an artificial intelligence course at the University of Chicago.[8] Jones was a longtime programmer who was porting a game he wrote, called Minotaur, from an Apple II to the Apple Macintosh platform.[11] Jones recalled, "I didn't really know [Alex] in the class. I think he actually thought I was a dick because I had a fancy computer".[8] Seropian and Jones partnered to release the role-playing video game as Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete in 1992; while Jones finished the coding, Seropian handled design and publicity.[11] The game relied on then-uncommon internet modems and AppleTalk connections for play and sold around 2,500 copies,[9] and developed a devoted following.[8] The team focused on the Macintosh platform, not Windows-based personal computers, because the Mac market was more open and Jones had been raised on the platform. While Jones was responsible for many of the creative and technical aspects, Seropian was a businessman and marketer.[10] "What I liked about [Seropian] was that he never wasted any money", Jones recalled. With no money to hire other personnel, the two assembled Minotaur boxes by hand in Seropian's apartment.[8] While the pair remained low on funds—Seropian's wife was largely supporting him—the modest success of Minotaur gave the duo enough money to develop another project.[12] Inspired by the shooter game Wolfenstein 3D, Jones wrote a 3D game engine for the Mac.[13] Bungie's next game was intended to be a 3D port of Minotaur, but Jones and Seropian found that Minotaur's top-down perspective gameplay did not translate well to the 3D perspective, and did not want to rely on modems.[11] Instead, they developed a new storyline for the first-person shooter that became Pathways into Darkness, released in 1993. Jones did the coding, with his friend Colin Brent creating the game's art.[14] The game was a critical and commercial success, winning awards including Inside Mac Games' "Adventure Game of the Year" and Macworld's "Best Role-Playing Game".[14] Pathways beat sales expectations and became Bungie's first commercial success.[10][15] Bungie moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a studio in Chicago's South Side on South Halsted Street;[12] Seropian and Jones's first full-time employee, Doug Zartman, joined in May 1994 to provide support for Pathways, but became Bungie's public relations person, honing Bungie's often sophomoric sense of humor and irreverence.[16] Bungie composer Martin O'Donnell remembered that the studio's location, a former girls' school next to a crack house, "smelled like a frat house after a really long weekend" and reminded staff of a locale from the Silent Hill horror video games.[17] Gnop! is a freeware computer game created by Alex Seropian.[18] It is a Pong clone, written and released nearly 20 years after the original. The name Gnop is Pong spelled backwards. The game was created by Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian in 1990, almost a year before Bungie's official incorporation,[19] but bore the Bungie name on itself and was referred to as "Bungie's first game" in official Bungie materials.[18] The game proved reasonably popular among Mac gamers because it was free and user-friendly. Seropian sold the source code for the game for $15.[20] Gnop! was later included in several compilations of early Bungie games, including the Marathon Trilogy Box Set and the Mac Action Sack. Marathon, Myth and Oni (1994–1997) Edit Bungie's next project began as a sequel to Pathways into Darkness, but evolved into a futuristic first person shooter called Marathon. It introduced the rocket jumping mechanic to gamers (then known as "grenade hopping") and was the first control system where players could use the mouse to look up and down as well as pan side-to-side.[21] Pathways had taught Bungie the importance of story in a game,[22] and Marathon featured computer terminals where players could choose to learn more about the game's fiction.[23] The studio became what one employee termed "your stereotypical vision of a small computer-game company—eating a lot of pizza, drinking a lot of Coke" while the development team worked 14 hours every day for nearly six months.[16] After showing the game at the Macworld Expo, Bungie was mobbed with interest and orders for the game. The game was not finished until December 14, 1994; Jones and a few other employees spent a day at a warehouse assembling boxes so that some of the orders could be filled before Christmas.[16] The game was a critical and commercial success,[22] and is regarded as a relatively unknown but important part of gaming history.[24] It served as the Mac alternative to DOS PC-only games like Doom and System Shock.[10] The game's volume of orders was unprecedented for the studio, who found that its old method of mail or phone orders could not scale to the demand and hired another company to handle the tens of thousands of orders. Marathon also brought Bungie attention from press outside the small Mac gaming market.[16] The first game's success led to a sequel, Marathon 2: Durandal. The series introduced several elements, including cooperative mode, which made their way to later Bungie games.[22] The game was released November 24, 1995, and outsold its predecessor. When Bungie announced its intention to port the game to the Windows 95 operating system, however, many Mac players felt betrayed, and Bungie received a flood of negative mail. Seropian saw the value of moving into new markets and partnering with larger supply chains, although he lamented the difficult terms and "sucky" contracts distributors provided.[16] The game released on Windows 95 in September 1996. Marathon Infinity was released the following year. After Marathon, Bungie moved away from first-person shooters to release a strategy game, Myth: The Fallen Lords. The game stressed tactical unit management as opposed to the resource gathering model of other combat strategy titles. The Myth games won several awards and spawned a large and active online community. Myth: The Fallen Lords was the first Bungie game to be released simultaneously for both Mac and Windows platforms.[10][25] The success of Myth enabled Bungie to change Chicago offices and establish a San Jose, California based branch of the studio, Bungie West, in 1997.[10] Bungie West's first and only game would be Oni, an action title for the Mac, PC and PlayStation 2.[26] Halo and buyout (1999–2007) Edit In 1999, Bungie announced its next product, Halo: Combat Evolved, originally intended to be a third-person shooter game for Windows and Macintosh.[27] Halo's public unveiling occurred at the Macworld Expo 1999 keynote address by Apple's then-interim-CEO Steve Jobs (after a closed-door screening at E3 in 1999).[27] On June 19, 2000, on the ninth anniversary of Bungie's founding, Microsoft announced that it had acquired Bungie and that Bungie would become a part of the Microsoft Game Division. Halo would be developed as an exclusive first-person shooter title for the Xbox. The reasons for Bungie accepting Microsoft's offer were varied. Jones stated that "I don't remember the details exactly, it was all a blur. We'd been talking to people for years and years—before we even published Marathon, Activision made a serious offer. But the chance to work on Xbox—the chance to work with a company that took the games seriously. Before that we worried that we'd get bought by someone who just wanted Mac ports or didn't have a clue".[28] Martin O'Donnell, who had joined Bungie as an employee ten days before the merger was announced, remembers that the stability of the Xbox as a development platform was not the only benefit.[17] Shortly before Myth II's release, it was discovered versions of the game could erase a player's hard drive; the glitch led to a massive recall of the games right before they shipped,[10][22] which cost Bungie nearly one million dollars.[10] O'Donnell stated in a Bungie podcast that this recall created some financial uncertainty, although accepting the offer was not something Bungie "had to do".[17] Seropian and Jones had refused to accept Microsoft's offer until the entire studio agreed to the buyout.[10] As a result of the buyout, the rights to Myth and Oni were transferred to Take-Two Interactive (which at the time owned 19.9% of the studio) as part of the three-way deal between Microsoft, Bungie and Take-Two Interactive; most of the original Oni developers were able to continue working on Oni until its release in 2001.[29] Halo: Combat Evolved, meanwhile, went on to become a critically acclaimed hit, selling more than 6.5 million copies,[30] and becoming the Xbox's flagship franchise.[31] Halo's success led to Bungie creating two sequels. Halo 2 was released on November 9, 2004, making more than $125 million on release day and setting a record in the entertainment industry.[32] Halo 3 was released on September 25, 2007 and surpassed Halo 2's records, making $170 million in its first twenty-four hours of release.[33] Independent company (2007–present) Edit On October 1, 2007, Microsoft and Bungie announced that Bungie was splitting off from its parent and becoming a privately held limited liability company named Bungie, LLC.[34][35] As outlined in a deal between the two, Microsoft would retain a minority stake and continue to partner with Bungie on publishing and marketing both Halo and future projects, with the Halo intellectual property belonging to Microsoft.[36] While Bungie planned on revealing a new game at E3 2008, Bungie studio head Harold Ryan announced that the unveiling was canceled.[37] Almost three months later, Bungie announced that the new game was a prequel and expansion to Halo 3 titled Halo 3: Recon.[38] The next month, Bungie changed game's title from Halo 3: Recon to Halo 3: ODST.[39] At E3 2009, Bungie and Microsoft revealed the company was developing another Halo-related game, Halo: Reach, for release in 2010.[40] Reach was the last game in the Halo franchise to be developed by Bungie.[41] Bungie continued expanding, though it did not commit to details about new projects and ship dates.[42] The company grew from roughly 120 employees in May 2008[43] to 165 in June 2009, outgrowing the studio Microsoft developed. Ryan helped redesign a former multiplex movie theater in Bellevue into new Bungie offices, with 80,000 square feet (7,400 m2) replacing the 41,000 square feet (3,800 m2) the company occupied previously.[44] In April 2010, Bungie announced that it was entering into a 10-year publishing agreement with publisher Activision Blizzard.[45][46] Under Bungie's agreement with Activision, new intellectual property developed by Bungie will be owned by Bungie, not Activision, in a deal similar to the EA (Electronic Arts) Partners Program.[46][47] On June 30, 2011, Bungie announced the "Bungie Aerospace" project; its slogan,
out, is to share it via your own social media, such as Twitter and Facebook (you can also share this story, about the lack of reporting on 'that' story as well). You might consider including a message such as, ‘I’ve shared this article because mainstream media are ignoring it, and it’s important that Australians read it – these laws are being carried out in all our names. Please share it on your wall, and encourage others to as well.’ New Matilda has only reported seven pages of several hundred from the leaked Moss review transcripts – we’ll bring you more details on these explosive documents later today, and over the course of the next week. As always, thanks for your help. If the mainstream media won’t do their job, then with your help, we’ll do it for them. Regards Chris Graham New Matilda * This story originally reported 'Not one syllable of the transcripts' has been reported. In fact, ABC Lateline did report a small section of the transcripts, but have declined to report the Cormack revelations. Which begs an Important question: Does Lateline have the Cormack transcripts, and if so, why has it not reported their contents? We'll ask them the question and see what answer we get.Two regions dominate the top ten list of the sunniest places in the world. Half of the ten sunniest places on record are in the American southwest states of Arizona, Nevada and Texas. The other sunny region is in northeast Africa. It spans southern Egypt, northern Sudan and northern Chad, taking in the Nile Valley and deserts to the west. Yuma, located in western Arizona near the borders with Mexico and California, is the only place on earth confirmed to bask in more than 4000 hours of sunshine a year. Altogether 90 percent of the daylight in Yuma is sunny. Year round, Yuma averages 11 hours of sun a day. Yuma's sunniest month is June, when it's sunny for 97 percent of the time between sunrise to sunset. The month gets a total 415 hours of sunshine. The rankings here are based on the sunshine averages for 1961 to 1990 that were provided for 129 countries and territories to the World Meteorological Organization. These come from 1800 weather stations scattered across all the continents, ranging from the Antarctic to the northern tip of North America. Altogether, climate stations around the world average 2334 hours of sun a year, equal to 6 hours and 24 minutes of sunshine a day. Average hours of sunshine for the ten sunniest places on earth Country Place Year Day United States Yuma, Arizona 4015 11.0 United States Phoenix, Arizona 3872 10.6 Egypt Asswan 3863 10.6 United States Las Vegas, Nevada 3825 10.5 Sudan Dongola 3814 10.4 United States Tucson, Arizona 3806 10.4 Chad Faya-Largeau 3792 10.4 Egypt Kharga 3791 10.4 Sudan Abu Hamed 3763 10.3 United States El Paso, Texas 3763 10.3 10 Sunniest Countries on Earth Many of the world's sunniest countries are on the African continent, ranging from Kenya, east to Niger and north to Eqypt. Other countries with sunny places are nearby Madagascar and United Arab Emirates. Only two countries outside of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula make the list of ten sunniest countries. These are Australia and the United States, where dry desert areas get lots of sun. Countries with the most sunshine: average hours of sun Country Place Year Day United States Yuma, Arizona 4015 11.0 Egypt Aswan 3863 10.6 Sudan Dongola 3814 10.4 Chad Faya-Largeau 3792 10.4 South Africa Upington, Northern Cape 3732 10.2 Niger Bilma 3674 10.1 United Arab Emirates Abu Dhabi 3609 9.9 Madagascar Tulear (Toliara) 3597 9.9 Kenya Lodwar, Turkana 3578 9.8 Australia Tennant Creek, Northern Territory 3569 9.8 Places With the Most Sunshine Each Month Despite its unsurpassed annual total of sunny hours, Yuma only tops the list of sunniest places for one month a year. Rather than a spike of sunny weather for a season or two, Yuma's claim to sunniest spot comes from having reliably sunny weather all year long, never dropping below an average eight hours a day in any month. The sunniest month of all worldwide is in May at Eureka in northern Canada. The Arctic outpost on Ellesmere Island, averages 16.5 hours of sun a day for May. That total is just the bright sunshine and doesn't count faint rays skimming across the horizon. Canada's Nunavut Territory is also where the most sunshine happens in April. Alert is the northernmost permanent settlement in the world, located at the northeast end of Ellesmere Island, just 817 kilometres (508 miles) from the North Pole and in April has 377 sunny hours. Being so far north, all those hours of bright sun account for only 55 percent of Alert's daylight. But the land of the midnight sun gets enough cloud during summer for the world's sunniest spot to shift all the way south to Sacramento, California. During July, Sacramento achieves the sunniest month for any city on earth with an average of 14 hours and 12 minutes a day, accounting for 98 percent of its daylight time. During the northern hemisphere's winter, the sunniest places move south of the equator. Uppington, a town in Northern Cape province of South Africa tops the list for sunshine from November through January. During the shoulder seasons, sunny regions in Asia take over. Songkhla, a city on the Malay Peninsula of southern Thailand is the world's sunniest spot in February and Khalkhgol in eastern Mongolia has the most sun for October.The following is based on a translation of a report on a Chinese news site: A report on news.sohu.com expresses China‘s concern that India, the largest country in South Asia, still fails to show any clear interest in China’s Silk Road economic Belt and 21st century maritime Silk Road, despite China’s repeated invitations. The projects, which China refers to as the One Belt, One Road project, is being implemented in an all-round manner in parts of Asia to the west of China, where most countries have joined China in building roads, railways, pipelines and other infrastructure. Due to India’s vital importance for China’s One Belt, One Road project, Xu Yuanrong and Xu Boya of Chinese think tank CBN Research have jointly written an article titled “How Great Is the Chinese-Indian ‘One Belt, One Road’ Cooperation Potential” on the prospects of India joining the project. The article has been published quite extensively in important Chinese media. The article describes the importance of the project to China and India’s indispensable roles and potential in joining the project from the perspectives of economy, politics, geopolitics and China’s rise. China says it hopes to establish an economic area with participant countries through the construction of ports, maritime infrastructures, etc. for export of capital, removal of its manufacturing industries to participant countries to utilise the cheap labour there for maintenance of China’s export competitive edge, to intensify international cooperation in production capacity, to realise its economic restructure and to stimulate domestic economic growth. That will provide investment and industrial development opportunities for India. The report says that the project will establish and improve the transport connections by road, rail and sea among participating countries. That is very important for not only China but also India for trade development with India’s surrounding countries. The establishment of the India-Bangladesh-Myanmar-China economic corridor with high-speed rail link between the four countries will benefit both India and China, especially India if China moves its labour-intensive industries to India. The rail link will provide an alternative route for cheap Indian goods to China to avoid potential problems in the sea route through the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea. The report says that politically, China will get allies and friends through mutual economic benefits and remove surrounding countries’ doubt and concerns about China’s rise and the threat from China’s rise that the US and Japanese media are busily exaggerating. In geopolitics, the maritime Silk Road will enable China to develop in the Indian Ocean and remove surrounding countries’ concerns about China’s presence there. However, that is quite a sensitive issue for India. China has to make great efforts to build mutual trust with India and ease the tension between India and Pakistan through economic cooperation between the two countries. The report concludes that China is giving prominence to its grand strategy of bringing concrete and real benefits to the people in both China and India. Source: news.sohu.com “How Great Is Chinese-Indian ‘One Belt, One Road’ Cooperation Potential” (summary by Chan Kai Yee based on the article in Chinese) Related articles AdvertisementsWe’ve got some news which will bring a twisted smile to the faces of horror gamers everywhere. Friday the 13th: The Game has now sold 1.8 million copies worldwide within the first two months of release, a number which will significantly expand when it receives a physical edition in October. That’s a lot of dead teenagers. This news comes from an interview publisher Gun Media’s Wes Keltner gave to Games Industry.biz, in which he points out that the game had over 100,000 players 20 minutes after it launched, causing the servers to crash. This resulted in the staff working so hard to keep the game online that they didn’t even get to go home and had to sleep at their desks. Aside from the $823,704 raised on Kickstarter, Keltner refused to share the game’s overall budget, although he did say that it was so low that it would only cover half the animation budget for an AAA game. The strong sales combined with the relatively low production costs mean that they were quickly in the black, with the profits going directly into the DLC and server costs. He goes on to discuss how the game appeals to both newcomers and hardcore fans of the franchise, saying: “[And] there does seem to be a large portion of younger players that are experiencing the IP for the first time via our game. They all know ‘Friday the 13th’ as well as Jason. His hockey mask is as recognizable as Mickey Mouse. However, we do get a lot of messages from players that are either watching the films for the first time, or are going back to watch them again. It’s rewarding when they mention how well we nailed the look and feel of those films, especially the first two to three films in the series. What I found most interesting was hearing from hardcore fans of the films, going back to watch them again after playing our game. They watch and enjoy the films in a totally new way thanks to the game. That warms the heart.” I recommend reading the full interview to get the full measure of his experiences working on the game and how the team have kept it going since its launch.ALBANY, N.Y. - ECAC Hockey women’s weekly awards were announced Tuesday, February 16 as Harvard’s Sydney Daniels earned Player of the Week honors; Melissa Samoskevich, Quinnipiac was voted Rookie of the Week; while fellow freshman Lovisa Selander, Rensselaer was tabbed Goaltender of the Week. Player of the Week Sydney Daniels, Harvard University (Junior, Forward - Southwick, Massachusetts) Daniels tallied four goals on the week with a pair of two-goal outings. She notched the game-tying and game-winning goals in the Beanpot consolation against Boston University, including scoring the go-ahead tally with 58 seconds to play. She scored twice at Union, including a shorthanded, unassisted laser to extend Harvard's lead to 3-0. She also recorded the game-winner against the Dutchwomen Saturday afternoon. With her six points on the weekend, Daniels now leads Harvard with 15 goals on the season. She has scored two goals in four of the last seven games. Other nominees: Lindsey Allen, Dartmouth, Brielle Bellerive, Clarkson, Hanna Bunton, Cornell, Kelsey Koelzer, Princeton & Emma Woods, Quinnipiac Rookie of the Week Melissa Samoskevich, Quinnipiac University (Freshman, Forward - Sandy Hook, Connecticut) Samoskevich led all ECAC Hockey freshman this week with two goals and three points, while also leading the league with 1.00 goals per game and 1.50 points per game. She tallied the only power-play goal among freshman while adding her eighth game-winning goal, the most of all skaters in the country. Samoskevich’s 31 points are tied for sixth in ECAC Hockey and second among all freshman. Her 16 goals are third in the conference and most among freshman. Other nominees: Jessie Eldridge, Colgate, Loren Gabel, Clarkson, Micah Hart, Cornell, Kimiko Marinacci, Princeton, Taylor Schwalbe, Rensselaer & Grace Zarzecki, Harvard Goaltender of the Week Lovisa Selander, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Freshman, Goaltender - Sollentuna, Sweden) Selander led the Engineers to a 1-0-1 weekend, stopping 70 of the 72 shots she faced. She recorded 42 saves in a 1-1 tie with Harvard, before turning away 28 in a 2-1 victory over Dartmouth. Her 0.97 goals-against average and.972 save percentage were the best among ECAC Hockey goaltenders who played in more than one game. Other nominees: Marlen Boissonnault, Cornell, Emerance Maschmeyer, Harvard, Kimberly Newell, Princeton, Sydney Rossman, Quinnipiac & Shea Tiley, Clarkson Click here to view complete release.UK MOBILE OPERATOR EE is blocking access to image sharing website Imgur for its 4G LTE customers, news that has not gone down very well. The issue was first reported on EE's support forum on Monday, where user Toliver182 highlighted the fact that the operator is restricting users' access to the Imgur image sharing website, preventing its 4G customers from watching GIFs of pugs and people falling over. Toliver182 went on to point out that only those paying more for EE's 4G services are affected by the block, not those on Orange and T-Mobile. Imgur is a pretty popular website, so it will come as little surprise that the news has not gone down well with EE customers. One irked user wrote, "I will be cancelling my contract at next renewel unless this is stopped," while another added, "Surely they must have made a mistake. Why else would they block a totally legitimate image-sharing site that is used extensively on the internet?" It seems it is not a mistake however, as EE has confirmed that it is blocking Imgur. EE's response is likely to annoy its customers more than the issue itself, however, with a spokesperson for the mobile operator saying, "I confirm access is currently restricted for the imgur web site. "As discussed, I am unable to provide information as to why this is or if this will be reviewed in the future. "All routes have been exhausted in trying to obtain this information on your behalf. Unfortunately, this is a business decision and does not allow you to end your agreement without penalty." Update EE has been in touch to tell us it is "not blocking the website," but that access is instead restricted due to its content lock system, and the fact that Imgur is not moderated. The fact that some, despite removing the content lock, still cannot access Imgur is apparently due to a technical issue, and EE is looking into it. µBruce Jenner I'm Ditching My Adam's Apple Bruce Jenner -- I'm Ditching My Adam's Apple EXCLUSIVE is flattening his Adam's Apple... TMZ has learned.Sources familiar with the situation tell TMZ... the Olympian met with a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon today for a consultation for a procedure called a-- which smooths out the Adam's Apple.The procedure is typically done on patients who are in the first stage of gender reassignment, but Bruce tells TMZ that is NOT the case with him. He says, "I just never liked my trachea."We know this is Bruce's second visit to the office.The doctor took photographs today and sources tell us surgery has been scheduled for early next year, but Bruce insists no surgery has been set yet -- it was just a consultation.We got video (below) of Bruce earlier today leaving the doctor's office.Jenner just called TMZ and wanted to add this... He says he initially went to the plastic surgeon because the basal cell carcinoma that was removed from his nose in September left a large scar that didn't heal well. He wanted plastic surgery for his nose, and says while he was there he consulted the doc on the Laryngeal Shave.On March 24, 1975, a boxer named Chuck Wepner took on legendary fighter Muhammad Ali. It was widely believed Wepner didn't stand a chance, but he pushed through. A brutal 15 rounds later, the fight ended with Wepner's bloody defeat. If that plot sounds familiar, that's because that fight and Wepner's life inspired Sylvester Stallone to write the film "Rocky." "Rocky" went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1976, which created even more attention for Wepner, who wasn't shy to cash in on that fame. Several decades later, he's finally getting a film of his own — this time, with his own name in the spotlight. Liev Schreiber stars as the embattled boxer in "Chuck," which opens in theaters this weekend. He'll be taking questions from the audience at screenings of the film at the ArcLight Hollywood this Friday and Saturday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AQXwOOqNNw Schreiber recently told Alex Cohen on Morning Edition that, as an actor, he understands how fame can mess with your head all too well. Interview highlights: On the effects of being in the limelight: I think I remember early on getting really really good reviews and I remember briefly believing them. And then I would get a really terrible review and I would go “well geez, if the good review is true then the terrible review also has to be true" and that business of separating our own identities from our jobs in show business is really very difficult. I think I was lucky enough to have had a small career as a theater actor before getting into the film world, which prepared me to some degree for that lesson, whereas Chuck, as a professional athlete, was completely unprepared for that. And he found himself suddenly competing with this alter ego that was probably one of the most famous characters in the world at that time. It’s just hard to prepare somebody for something like that, particularly when you feel like you’re getting what feels like great rewards from being that character. It’s very easy to quickly lose touch with who you really are and what the rewards in life are for our accomplishments. Psychologically, it can get very messy. What advice might you give to someone who’s life is going to be the source of a big Hollywood movie? I think the advice that Chuck gives us from his own experiences is to keep the people who are the closest to you, as close to you as you possibly can. Because it’s their love and their wisdom and their familiarity that’s going to help you stay in touch with what’s important in life. I think Chuck is a testament to winning that particular battle with fame, in my mind. His relationship to his wife, Linda, and his daughter is as good as it gets. That, to me, is the real happy ending of our story. Who would you want to play you in the "Liev Schreiber" movie? Oh, gee. Well, that actor hasn’t been born yet, right? Well, anyone! Time machine, it could be any actor, any era but it can’t be you.Prime minister Mohammed Ghannouchi (L) has promised to bring in opposition leaders [AFP] Tunisia is in a state of flux following the ousting of its long-standing president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. After 23 years in office, Ben Ali fled the country amid a mass uprising, giving way to leadership changes that came at a dizzying speed. In the 24 hours after Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, Tunisia saw two different leaders. First, Ben Ali's longtime ally, prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, stepped in to assume power. Observers questioned whether the move was legal, since the constitution calls for the speaker of parliament to be next in line. The country's highest authority on the issue, the Constituional Court, quickly ruled that Fouad Mebazaa, the speaker, should be made president and given 60 days to organise new elections. The Council declared that Ben Ali's departure was permanent, and Mebazaa was sworn in on Saturday under Article 57 of the constitution, which stipulates that when the post of the president falls vacant "due to his demise, resignation or total incapacitation... the speaker of the parliament... shall immediately undertake the presidential duties on temporary basis for not less than 45 days; and not more than 60 days." The piece of legislation states that it is not permissible during the transitional presidential period to amend the constitution or impeach the government. During this period, a new president shall be elected for a term of five years. The newly elected president may dissolve the parliament, and call for premature parliamentary election (in accordance with the provisions of Paragraph Second of Chapter 63). The country's constitution provides the only framework for the interim government and the opposition to negotiate, but it is more suited to leaders personally chosen by the former president. Skepticism Mebazaa promised to create a unity government that could include the long-ignored opposition, but it is not clear how far the 77-year-old Mebazaa, who has been part of Tunisia's ruling class for decades, would truly go to work with the opposition. On Monday, Ghannouchi announced that the new government would retain six ministers from Ben Ali's administration, including those for defence, foreign affairs, interior, and finance. Three members of the opposition were also given positions. That didn't seem to satisfy many Tunisians, though: Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Tunis, the capital, to demand that Ben Ali's Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) party be kept out of power. Though Ghannouchi promised political and economic reforms and the release of all political prisoners, ordinary Tunisians in the capital remained sceptical about the new coalition's promises of reform. History repeats It also remains unclear who will emerge as the country's top political leaders, since Ben Ali utterly dominated politics, placing allies in power and sending opponents into jail or exile. Everything looked to have been choreographed to ensure strict compliance with the constitution. But observing the legal niceties was important, as it sent an important signal to Tunisians that the rules still remain. Back in 1987, Ben Ali, who was then prime minister, became president in much the same way that Ghannouchi did on Friday. Instead of stepping aside, he held on to power. This time, Tunisians don't want to get fooled again, but they remain divided on how things should be done. While some opposition leaders call for the revision of the whole constitution, which they say was tailored to suit Ben Ali and his predecessor Lahbib Bourguiba, others signaled their willingness to form a transitional government with the aim of getting the country out of its crisis situation and to have "real reforms." 'We will be back in the streets' Another stumbling block is the opposition of some Tunisians to the two-month deadline for having a presidential election, which they consider too short. That's not surprising. They have been harassed and marginalised for years, and they want time to register on the consciousness of ordinary Tunisians. And Ghannouchi himself, who is tasked to hammer out a compromise, is persona non grata in many Tunisians' eyes for being too closely aligned with the ousted president. "We will be back on the streets, in Martyrs Square, to continue this civil disobedience until... the regime is gone. The street has spoken," said Fadhel Bel Taher, whose brother was one of dozens of people killed in the protests. Ben Ali's departure is just the beginning for tension across the country to be defused. Tunisia is at the crossroad and the hard work is still ahead for Tunisians to close the chapter of the past and move into a prosperous future.How Nelson Bryant, U.S. Army, 82nd Airborne Division, 508th parachute infantry regiment, lost his standard issue U.S. Army trench knife in combat is quite a story. How he got it back is an even better one. On Sept. 17, 1944, Mr. Bryant was in a pretty tight spot. He was still recovering from a previous gunshot wound to the chest and had taken a little shrapnel in one leg as he parachuted into occupied Holland. With German soldiers firing from an uncomfortably close distance, he couldn’t get out of his parachute harness. Before the jump, it took two men to buckle the ill-fitting harness around his chest. Now he couldn’t get the buckles apart. So he took his trench knife out of its sheath and began to cut the harness off. He finally got free, and scrambled to safety. “There were some Germans shooting at me from about 150 yards away, and they were getting damn close,” said Mr. Bryant, reminiscing this week in the coziness of his West Tisbury home. “As near as I can tell, what happened was I was pretty excited, and a little upset. I remember I cut some of my clothes I was so nervous. I cut out of the harness. What I think I did, I simply forgot my knife and left it there on the ground in its sheath.” Ruth Kirchmeier and Nelson Bryant in their West Tisbury home. — Mark Lovewell More than seven decades later, thanks to some incredible Internet sleuthing by a Dutch man who admires his service in World War II, Mr. Bryant is getting his trench knife back. The former outdoor columnist for the New York Times knows a good story when he hears one. The story begins at Dartmouth College in 1943. The transition from rural and wild West Tisbury to the Ivy League environs of Hanover, New Hampshire left Mr. Bryant restless. “The world is torn apart, guys my age are dying, and I’m sitting here going to Dartmouth,” Mr. Bryant said. “I said the hell with it, and I volunteered for the draft.” His first Army assignment involved handing out clothes to members of an intelligence division in Washington, D.C, and he soon became restless at that, too. He volunteered for the 82nd Airborne, and in the spring of 1944, He was in Nottingham, England for training. He was among the first American soldiers into occupied France, parachuting behind enemy lines the night before Allied forces stormed the beaches at Normandy on D-Day. Four days later, while on a reconnaissance mission, he found himself looking death square in the eye when he was shot in the chest. “I heard machine gun fire, the next thing I know, bam,” said Mr. Bryant. “It went in the front, came out the back, 50 caliber. I thought, is this it? I could here distant gunfire, I could hear cows mooing in the pasture.” Now 94, Mr. Bryant doesn’t see, hear or remember as well as he used to, but he can still sling cuss words around like a soldier, and the sparkle returns to his eyes as he remembers the war stories with a newspaperman’s detail. Some of his fellow soldiers thought he was dead as he lay bleeding in the French countryside, but with the some help, he got to a rear position, where he laid in a hedgerow for four days, before finally getting shipped to a field hospital in Wales. While recuperating there, he began taking short walks and then short runs, trying to get back in shape. When he heard his unit was about to make another jump, he asked the doctors if he could be released. They asked him if he was out of his mind. “When no one was looking I got my clothes and put them on, walked out of the hospital, and thumbed rides on U.S. military vehicles back to Nottingham, England, and got there a week before we made the jump into Holland,” said Mr. Bryant. Earlier this year, some 73 years after the day he parachuted into Groesbeek, Holland, Mr. Bryant picked up the telephone. On the other end of the line was André Duijghuisen, a 56-year-old educator from Holland. Mr. Duijghuisen had been cleaning out his father’s attic in Groesbeek, where the exploits of the U.S. soldiers are still legendary. In the attic, along with other relics of the war, he found a knife. Scratched into the sheath was the name Bryant. “Searching on the name of Bryant, I found he served in the 82nd Airborne division and the 508th regiment,” said Mr. Duijghuisen, speaking by phone from New York on Wednesday. “I searched a little bit further and found some articles he wrote for the New York Times.” A bit more searching and he found Mr, Bryant lived in West Tisbury, and was listed in an Internet phone directory. “I was startled,” said Mr. Bryant, remembering the phone call. “He said bayonet, and I knew something was wrong because I knew the gun I carried you couldn’t use a bayonet. Then I realized I was talking to a civilian and he wouldn’t know a bayonet from a trench knife. When he said there was a leather sheath, that was a clue.” In the months since that first phone call, the two men have exchanged emails frequently. The educator and the newspaperman say they’ve gotten to know each other a bit. One thing led to another, and Mr. Duijghuisen and his wife arranged to travel to New York, and then to Martha’s Vineyard this weekend. The trench knife, in it’s sheath with the name Bryant scratched into it, is tucked safely in his suitcase. He will return it when the two men meet. Mr. Bryant said the return of his knife doesn’t stir up old memories. Those memories never went away. “All of my thoughts, I think about it all the time,” said Mr. Bryant. “My war time service is one of the big events of my life. It obscures everything else, almost.” He saw some terrible things, brushing death several times, but the Allied forces eventually prevailed, and the German forces were driven out of Holland. Mr. Duijghuisen wasn’t even born when Mr. Bryant fell out of the sky that day in 1944. So why expend so much effort to find an old soldier, and travel thousands of miles to see him? “The name on the bayonet, it made, for me, something personal,” said Mr. Duijghuisen. “Because of what he did in 1944, and because we are now living in a free world. I think a lot about that. He fought in Holland for our freedom. I’m very excited about that, it will be nice to see him.”The final episode of SONAMOO‘s reality show SONAMOO’s Pet House has finally aired, and with it, a heartfelt message from the girls to viewers. Aired via SBS MTV, SONAMOO was able to grab viewer’s attention through the program due to its unique concept of viewers following the girls as they transformed into pet sitters. The final episode that aired on April 21st, they were reunited with the very first group of dogs they were responsible for when the season was broadcasted — Bong Gu, Vivian, and Tinkerbell — surprising SONAMOO. The girl group was unable to hide their smiles at the sight of the three adorable dogs and began to play with them by the water, even holding a mini athlete meet. They released their first official statements regarding their feelings towards their program after their surprise fan meet on their 100th day anniversary at their training facility in TS Entertainment on the 12th. Member Nahyun stated that she “promises to become a versatile entertainer. And will show their improved appearances.” Soomin also stated, “I can’t believe this is the last episode. We will become a SONAMOO that continues to grow rapidly so please expect more and continue to love us.” After their debut with their song “Deja Vu,” SONAMOO plans to host their first international showcase at Music Matters 2015 in Singapore in May. The group has already made their first Japanese stage after appearing at the Onitsuka Tiger X Andrea Pompilio FALL/WINTER 2015-16 SHOW in March.link "QUANTUM SHOT" #420 The coolest dude among all animals, and then some. Tamandua (Tamandua tetradactyla) is a smaller species of anteaters, but some would say they are the "perfect" anteaters - just the right size, and just the right amount of attitude. They are most closely related to sloths and armadillos, but seeing these pictures will make you wonder if you aren't related to them by any chance. It seems they know how special they look, and don't mind posing in sweaters and other handmade clothes. (images credit: TamanduaGirl) TamanduaGirl (see Anteater Entertainment) keeps two South American anteaters - tamanduas Pua and Stewie - in her house. See the photo chronicle of their life in this set and videos on this page. Waking up and "yawning" shows the true length of their tongue: The owner says: "Tamanduas are very smart. They know how to open the fridge, open the doors..." "...they know how to open the window, open drawers, open cabinets, open containers, climb the door frame, and respond to their name." "The dogs are scared of their long tails; and some tamanduas may use their long claws on almost anything, including your furniture. They like to tear things up when given the chance like coconuts and logs". To avoid puncturing their palms with their sharp claws, they walk on the outsides of their hands. They can wave their arms at you, and almost say "hello" - Do your homework and be prepared to put with many surprises, if you consider an anteater as a pet. First of all, they don't come cheap (up to $4,500) - and they need a special diet (unless you have an endless supply of ants, but even then, they need a supplement) Tamanduas are very loving, but just like cats, they tend to "let you" love them. However, when they do hug you, it's impossibly cute: Some clothes seem to be a perfect fit for tamandua: Traveling in a car does not seem to faze them, only pique their curiosity: And then, there is love and romance: Soon this anteater couple will star in the upcoming "Dr. Dolittle 4" movie. That is if they will get from under their cozy blankets in the morning: They seem to be well aware of their awesomeness: "OK, ok, no applause is needed" - (images credit: TamanduaGirl) Make sure to check out the frequently-updated blog, documenting the owners' eventful life with TWO anteaters in the house. Are You Talking to Me? When threatened, tamandua will strike a kung-fu pose, showing who is the true master around here: Unrelated to tamandua (but simply AWESOME), here is a picture of baby albino aardvark: - via (image credit: Archivolt) Permanent Link......+StumbleUpon...+Facebook Category: AnimalsThere's two things I love about travel. Exploring new places, and visiting previously undiscovered Starbucks locations. I'll admit it, I'm a bit of a junkie, and regardless of what fantastic local coffee is nearby, I'm still going to search out that familiar green logo. Here's a few of my more memorable trips to Starbucks. Forbidden City Starbucks... Barcelona Starbucks... Starbucks with Stitch... Rockefeller Center Starbucks... Seoul Subway Starbucks... I really want to check-in Starbucks... Confused in Paris because of no Starbucks... With any luck, there will be many more adventures to exotic and far flung Starbucks locations. But wait, there's more.... Lombard Street Starbucks... Coit Tower Starbucks... Monterey Bay Starbucks... French Laundry Starbucks... Oasis of the Seas/Bahamas Starbucks... Starbucks with Old Sport... Whistling Straits Starbucks... Where have you enjoyed your Starbucks? Enjoy Your StayHe's the fastest man in Irish rugby, but it took Barry Daly a long time to get here. He's the fastest man in Irish rugby, but it took Barry Daly a long time to get here. It is easy to describe the 25-year-old as 'living the dream' as he follows up his Aviva Stadium debut against Munster with a European try on his first start for his home province against the giants of Montpellier, but that would do a disservice to the hard work he's put in. Rejected by the Leinster Academy at 19, Daly (right) began a career in accountancy and until June 2016 was an apprentice in KPMG. Rugby was a hobby, one he was very good at. Operating on the wing for UCD, he regularly rubbed shoulders with academy prospects and topped the scoring charts in the All Ireland League. His name was known, but the call never game until Luke Fitzgerald and Niall Morris retired unexpectedly at the end of the 2015/16 season and Leinster were short numbers in the back-three. Flying Academy coach Noel McNamara suggested they have another look at Daly who had been flying for the Ireland sevens team. "A couple of years ago I was watching these guys on the couch, now I'm playing with them every day. It's amazing. I feel like I'm going well, so I'm happy," he said modestly at Leinster's UCD base yesterday. "Saturday was a great day, the week before as well - playing against Munster in the Aviva - it was another big one. I hadn't played in that kind of game before, so I've a bit more confidence I can handle the big games." Physical attributes are not a problem. This season, he clocked a time of 10.5 metres per second when chasing an opponent and that
shop at stores that treat females respectfully in their advertising and products. Speaking up with your pocketbook is one of the most powerful ways you can show retailers what you will and will not put up with. Speak up: When you see a media message that goes against what you believe about girls and women, let your voice be heard. Make a resolution to write to companies that produce and distribute offensive messages, as well as those that you appreciate for showing females as valuable for more than being looked at. We’ve seen major companies pull advertising and products that were offensive because girls and women speak up! If nothing else, slap one of our uplifting sticky notes on that magazine or ad and give somebody else a positive reminder! Go on a media fast: Choose a day, a week, a month or longer to steer clear of as much media as you can. That way, you can see how your life is different without all those messages and images, and when you return to viewing and reading popular media, you will be more sensitive to the messages that hurt you and those that are unrealistic. This post will give you all the info you need. Just say “no”: Set a goal to cancel out any media choices you view or read that tell you lies about what it means to be a female. Cancel subscriptions, throw away crappy things you already own, find a new TV show to love. You’ll thank yourself! Picture perfect: If you are a photographer or like to take pictures, set a goal to steer clear of any Photoshopping or image manipulation that Photoshops those in your pictures out of reality. Signs of life are important and we need to see reality! Mother knows best: If you are a mother, set a goal to never speak negatively about your appearance in front of your children — especially daughters. Your kids are listening whether you like it or not, and they will learn how to view themselves from your example. Mirror, mirror: Critically analyze how much time you spend in front of the mirror. Could any of that time be better spent? This post talks about a woman who didn’t look in a mirror for a month and what she learned. It’s fab. Be an advocate: If you teach or lead a youth group of any sort, set a goal to integrate body-positive messages, media literacy and real health goals into your curriculum. You can do this casually in your everyday life and work/family/church capacities, or in a more formal sense as a teacher or counselor. We offer a Group Leader Kit to guide anyone through in-depth lesson plans, discussion questions, and activities, along with merchandise for participants! Fight for Positive Body Image: Developing positive body image — or feeling positively about your body, regardless of what it looks like at the moment — is key to health, happiness, progress and empowerment. When you’re feeling especially self-conscious, it’s hard to focus on much else or make healthy choices for yourself. With the vast majority of women feeling negatively about their bodies and regularly preoccupied with their appearance, we have some serious work to do on this front. You could tackle hundreds of pages of our doctoral research to gather our findings, or you could read our short summary of more than a decade of body image research right here! Check out our five steps to better body image.By Albaro X. Tutasig Committee on U.S.-Latin American Relations (CUSLAR) Turn to the latest news on U.S. immigration and you often encounter images of politicians scrambling about, fighting and debating over decisions that will determine the future of millions of undocumented immigrants in this country. There are many sides to this debate. Some highlight the economic benefits immigrants bring to the U.S. through their labor and consumption, and others fear the introduction of criminal elements and call for a complete militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border. While these debates are often the core focus of the mainstream media, there is seems to be a lack of awareness regarding the needs and rights of the migrants themselves. Who are these millions of people, and why have they left their homes and families for another country? There are approximately 11.7 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. Most of these individuals migrate to the United States for multiple reasons; search for economic opportunities and safety are among the most prominent. Of course, immigration is not exclusive to the United States. Powerful economies throughout the globe also hold immigration to be a growing global phenomenon. Globally, between 1990 and 2013, the number of international migrants rose by 77 million or by 50 percent. 50 percent is a huge increase, but what has been the cause of this dramatic increase? In her article “Is this the way to go? – The Handling Immigration in a Global Era”, Saskia Sassen, a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, credits the recent boom in migration to the “…sharp growth of government debt, poverty, unemployment, as well as the closing of traditional economic sectors in the global south, party due to neoliberal economic globalization…” As a result, people who choose to cross international borders run the risk of unsafe migration to their destination. To that end, I now turn to the more serious topic. The immigration of different groups of peoples from different eras has, historically, always entailed a journey paved with hardships and brutal struggles. Immigrants who chose to migrate, in spite of these notorious struggles, manifest their unconditional vulnerability, thus willing to undertake treacherous actions that strip them of their values, human dignity, and the chance to socio-economic progress. Going back to her article, Sassen faults globalization for the growing demand of cheap labor, as well as the reestablishment of old local/regional trafficking networks now developed to meet demands on a global scale. With the FIFA World Cup fast approaching and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games only two years away, Brazil has a new global market for criminal organizations to take advantage of. The games will draw a great number of tourists eager for the games, as well as those seeking perverse pleasures. Brazil may soon top Thailand as the top country for trafficked children. Child sex trafficking and prostitution is not a new issue for Brazil. According to the National Forum for the Prevention of Child Labor, in 2012 the number of child sex workers ranged at around half a million—half a million too many. From a globalized perspective, these sporting events also attract criminal networks from other South American countries. The United States is not immune to sex trafficking either. Major sporting events held every year in the United States—Super Bowl—are often accompanied by a growing number of arrests made because of prostitution. Unfortunately, some cases sometimes involve minors. Last February alone, the New York made 45 arrests relating to sex trafficking and other related offenses, while rescuing more than a dozen teen sex workers. The cruel truth is that exploited victims lack a voice. Especially in the United States, victims are simply too scared to inform authorities about their mistreatment and conditions because of their immigration status. Some immigrant families have their papers held by their employers, or are threatened if they talk. In other words, it means the difference between remaining silent and running the risk of deportation. Employers often exploit their workers knowing the dilemma they encounter. Why should people’s values be undermined because of the “undocumented” or “illegal” label placed on them? In the United States alone, some 5,500 immigrants have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since 1998. Why is there not enough media coverage on these trends? Do their deaths seem less significant because they lacked citizenship? Do the other exploitative issues not matter as much because they are not citizens? These victims are human beings. They have feelings. They have families. They have rights. Globalization is supposed to be the emergence of countries working together to build a more prosperous global society. Instead it has boosted the rise of a malignant system that shows no mercy to vulnerable individuals in pursuit of a more promising future for themselves and future generations. Every silenced victim is a crushed dream, the end of that person’s aspirations. But there is hope. Migrants across the globe have stood up for themselves in an effort to advocate for global policy changes. Organizations such as the International Migrants Alliance stand for a several progressive migrant causes, including the establishment of orientation from sending and receiving countries directed at migrants informing them of their rights. The people at the forefront of such organizations are migrants; migrants who should not have to be fighting for basic human rights to begin with, but do so because of the unjust circumstances of our global system. They are intelligent humans that moved to seek a better life and are now combating burdens, thus paving a more safe and just path for future generations of migrants. AdvertisementsThe recession is taking its toll on the conservative movement, and religious right leaders’ intellectual rigidity is helping to put a nail in the coffin of a once-influential constellation of ideas regarding the free market. This was made clear by a recent lecture at the conservative movement’s philosophical mothership, the Heritage Foundation. Jay W. Richards, author of a new book, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem, said nothing new when he addressed the question, “Is the free market moral?” Richards defended unregulated capitalism in the language of evangelical Christianity, reflecting the melding of social and economic conservatism Heritage has pedaled for two generations. What was remarkable about the event was that conservatives felt the need to apologize for such long-established doctrine. To watch Richards’ lecture or read his book is to enter a time warp straight back to the late 1970s, when conservatives were rebelling against “big-government liberalism” which they equated with “godless communism.” But much has changed since then. Many conservatives concede that the eight-year reign of George W. Bush was one of the most disastrous in the nation’s history. Most Americans have come to believe orthodox free-marketism was a false gospel. And even growing numbers of conservative evangelicals are deeply troubled by the vast inequality and environmental degradation created by giving big business free reign. There is still no sign of a mass defection of the evangelical base, but the openness of evangelicals to an alternative economic vision has the social conservative old-guard fearful that their rank and file could walk away from the free-market camp. In response to this fear, leaders such as Gary Bauer of American Values, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family’s James Dobson are hardening their rhetoric, reviving old clichés that simply do not speak to the new economic reality. Just this week Bauer sent an e-mail to members of his group to “Stop the Stimulus!”—legislation that passed four months ago—and to educate Americans on the “economic dangers of the left’s radical socialist agenda.” Bauer’s upcoming Values Voters Summit has one session planned to show how health reform means “rationing your life away” and another to teach activists how to organize antitax “tea parties.” However, not a single session offers solutions for families struggling with health care bills, unemployment, or home foreclosure. Is it any wonder that a movement with so little to offer people who are suffering is nervous? The 5-percent shift of evangelical voters to the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008—with much sharper increases among younger voters—demonstrates that many evangelicals want new solutions, even if they’re still leery of the left. Rice University professor D. Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power, suggests that social conservative leaders may be sticking with the old party line because they still believe it. He points out that many evangelical religious leaders are faith entrepreneurs who built large churches, media ministries, and activist organizations using strategies modeled on the business world. “In the leadership cohort, I would say over the last 30 years they have seen the benefit of the free market in the religious sector work to their advantage,” he said. “Because evangelicals are religious entrepreneurs, they have an affinity for business entrepreneurs, and the downturn has not changed this.” But the religious right’s leadership paralysis may simply be born of fear. “I think that they feel that they need to reinforce the relationship between evangelicals and Republicans,” said Sarah Posner, author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters. As leaders circle the free-market wagons they revert to “pre-welfare reform rhetoric,” Posner said. “There’s no discussion of regulation of Wall Street,” just epistles spreading the good news of the free market. Richard Cizik is one of the high-profile leaders of the Christian right who defected from the movement because of its rigid small-government views. He is convinced that his old allies on the right learned the wrong lessons from history. He describes his former allies as “zealots,” whom he defines by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: “A zealot is someone who won’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” “It’s not as if the antiregulatory DNA of evangelicals can’t be changed,” says Cizik, pointing to the years-long process that convinced him that “the ‘magic’ of free-market economics has shown itself to be snake oil.” Along with his concern about global warming, Cizik says he also lost 30 percent of his 401k in the financial crash. He attributes Obama’s improved margin among evangelicals to this group’s desire for new economic policy and says that openness to Democratic candidates could grow if the president’s policies succeed in turning the economy around. And if evangelical leaders remain more faithful to the Republican Party and business interests than to the interests of their members, they will become similarly irrelevant. “The Bible warns about this,” Cizik says. Scripture should be a caution to leaders who will surrender their remaining independence in the service of free-market forces: “What is the profits of the man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Lester Feder is a freelance journalist covering conservative politics and popular culture.The most commonly prescribed psychiatric drugs are antidepressants. They treat depression and anxiety. The first ones, isoniazid and iproniazid, were discovered by accident. They were developed after the Second World War by a Swiss pharmaceutical company (from leftover German V2 rocket fuel!) as tuberculosis treatments. Some tubercular patients taking the drugs became energetic and even rowdy, and so a few curious doctors tested the drugs on psychiatric patients in 1952. Their potential as ‘psychic energisers’ received press attention. Many doctors began prescribing them to treat depressed patients in mental hospitals even though they were not officially approved for psychiatric use. Pharmaceutical companies quickly became interested in developing drugs targeting depression. They started in the 1950s with the class of drugs called tricyclics. In the mid 1960s brain scientists hypothesised that iproniazid, the anti-tuberculosis drug, improved a patient’s mood by slowing an enzyme that breaks down the neurotransmitter serotonin. The hypothesis led to a second major class of antidepressants called monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) which targeted the same enzyme. Despite justifiable concerns about side effects, both types of antidepressant remained drugs of choice among psychiatrists for over two decades. Their use declined after selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac were introduced. These worked faster with fewer side effects. SSRIs also had a larger market because they treated anxiety (previously the domain of the minor tranquilisers) as well as depression. Prozac's success saw pharmaceutical companies spend more money developing effective antidepressants with fewer side effects. It reflects the huge gloabl market for such drugs, exemplified by the shenjing shuariuo diagnosis in China. It also reflects the close ties between drug development and changes in psychiatric diagnosis.0 Tim Burton may re-team with screenwriter John August for Monsterpocalypse. The movie is based on a strategy board game involving miniatures. Heat Vision reports that DreamWorks is currently in negotiations with August to take the gig, but Burton isn’t officially on board yet either. If the two do team-up again, it will be their fourth collaboration following Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride. The pair are also developing Dark Shadows with Johnny Depp attached to star, as well as a 3D stop-motion animation version of Burton’s 1984 short film, Frankenweenie. Hit the jump for why this Monsterpocalypse reunion is easier said than done. The big issue regarding August, Burton, and Monsterpocalypse is scheduling. According to Heat Vision, Dark Shadows—which is based off the spooky daytime ’60s TV show—could shoot at the end of the year, but Depp may be worn out after shooting the action film The Tourist and then the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie this summer. Furthermore, if Burton takes up Monsterpocalypse, that would push back Dark Shadows and Warner Bros—the studio behind the film—would be less than pleased. As Heat Vision notes, the longer it takes for a project to get into develop, the faster that project loses heat. So where does this all lead? I have no idea. I do know that Burton and August are 1 for 3 at this point, but I love Big Fish so that counts in their favor. But following Alice in Wonderland, Burton is now in this crazy place where he can do any project he wants. That’s what happens when you make the fifth highest grossing (worldwide) movie of all time.As you probably know, if a class needs to handle two mostly unrelated concerns, the class should probably be split into two. This way, your will achieve higher cohesion in your code, which is generally considered a good thing. Though, there are times where you need to address two mostly unrelated concerns in a single class. The Scala programming language has a concept they call traits. Scala traits can be compared to Java interfaces, except that Scala traits may be partially or fully implemented, like abstract classes. As with Java interfaces, you can mixin multiple traits in a class. If any of the traits has colliding method signatures, the last trait mixed in overrides the earlier ones. Just as with regular inheritance and interfaces, the class must implement any methods that has not been implemented by the traits, and may override any methods that already has been implemented. trait Similarity { def isSimilar ( x : Any ) : Boolean def isNotSimilar ( x : Any ) : Boolean =! isSimilar ( x ) } class Point ( xc : Int, yc : Int ) extends Similarity { var x : Int = xc var y : Int = yc def isSimilar ( obj : Any ) = obj. isInstanceOf [ Point ] && obj. asInstanceOf [ Point ]. x == x } Traits as a concept for separating reusable parts of your code is not new. Like most good ideas, someone has been thinking about them previously. According to Wikipedia traits originated in the Self programming language from 1987. Today, multiple programming languages has variants of traits as native constructs in the language. One example being Scala traits, another being module mixins in Ruby. Given almost 25 years of history, one should think traits should be well known by now and more widely used for achieving good and reusable code. My first meeting with traits wasn’t until during an otherwise unrelated course in late 2009 where Jim Coplien introduced me to the DCI architecture during lunch, and then again a bit later when I picked up the Scala language. I ask myself: Why didn’t I learn stuff like this in university? Example: Mixing in the actor life cycle in Mopidy Back to Python. I’m currently introducing Pykka’s actor model implementation in the Mopidy music server as a replacement for Mopidy’s existing thread management and inter-thread communication code. I’m replacing untested application wiring–some reused throughout the application, some custom for specific problems–with a fully tested library. Using the actor model I apply the same simple semantics to all concurrent components in the application, making it simpler to reason about, at least compared to having custom solutions all over the place. As an added bonus, the current git diff --stat is at about -700/+300, leaving 400 fewer lines of code to maintain. Mopidy has several extension points where one can add new components such as music library backends, audio outputs, audio mixers, and frontend servers. When you implement an extension, you must subclass the corresponding base class, e.g. the BaseOutput class, which defines and documents the API that the extension must implement for it to be usable by the rest of the system. Many of these components interface with external libraries or systems, but we can’t block the entire system while waiting for these interactions to complete. We want to be able to respond to requests from MPD clients while we adjust the volume on the NAD amplifier, or queue the next block of audio data for playback. Thus, the extensions need to either run in its own thread, or to dispatch work to a worker thread. Clearly, the components got two separate sets of concerns. First of all, they have some application logic which implements the API. E.g. methods like play_uri() and get_volume(). Secondly, the components got a life cycle, consiting of methods like start() and stop(). An example from Mopidy is the Last.fm scrobbler, which previously was split in two; a main class which implements the frontend API, and a worker class, which is a thread which contains most of the application logic. import multiprocessing from mopidy.frontends.base import BaseFrontend from mopidy.utils.process import BaseThread class LastfmFrontend ( BaseFrontend ): def __init__ ( self, * args, ** kwargs ): super ( LastfmFrontend, self ). __init__ ( * args, kwargs ) ( self. connection, other_end ) = multiprocessing. Pipe () self. thread = LastfmFrontendThread ( self. core_queue, other_end ) def start ( self ): self. thread. start () def destroy ( self ): self. thread. destroy () def process_message ( self, message ): if self. thread. is_alive (): self. connection. send ( message ) class LastfmFrontendThread ( BaseThread ): def __init__ ( self, core_queue, connection ): #... def run_inside_try ( self ): #... def setup ( self ): #... def process_message ( self, message ): #... def started_playing ( self, track ): #... def stopped_playing ( self, track, stop_position ): #... After refactoring the code is down to a single class just implementing core application logic, which no library can replace. The trick? Using multiple inheritance to mix in the actor life cycle. from pykka.actor import ThreadingActor from mopidy.frontends.base import BaseFrontend class LastfmFrontend ( ThreadingActor, BaseFrontend ): def __init__ ( self ): #... def post_start ( self ): #... def react ( self, message ): #... def started_playing ( self, track ): #... def stopped_playing ( self, track, stop_position ): #... I think this is a beautiful way of separating concerns that needs to be part of the same class. I also think the code reads well: The above example is an frontend extension, which has the trait of also being an actor. It has some application logic, but also happens to have an actor life cycle.On April 19, after banning the use of lal batti (red beacon light) by VVIPs on their vehicles, Prime Minister Narendra Modi thundered on Twitter that every Indian is a VIP. He wrote: "Every Indian is special. Every Indian is a VIP." The prime minister also added that "these symbols are out of touch with the spirit of new India", suggesting that it should have done away with long back. While egalitarianism is loved by the common man, the prime minister was seemingly playing to the gallery. But was the Modi government actually practicing what it was preaching? Sample this: On April 7, 2015, the government had given permission to use the reserved lounge at airports across India to a rape and murder accused. Yes, you read it right. Almost a year after coming to power, the BJP-led government had given this special privilege to Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, chief of Dera Sacha Sauda. Ram Rahim Singh, who is in jail now, was a rape and murder accused at that time. This was revealed to me by the Ministry of Civil Aviation in response to a query filed under the Right to Information Act. The prime minister, the president, the head of foreign governments, the cabinet secretary and MPs are among those allowed to use VIP lounges at Indian airports. But why was Ram Rahim Singh accorded the special favour? The Ministry of Civil Aviation's response to query filed under the Right to Information Act. Well, his importance in BJP’s schemes of things can be gauged from the fact that only two other religious or social leaders have been granted this facility on Indian airports - Mata Amritanandamayi Devi and Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Dwarka Peeth. This too was revealed to me in response to the RTI. In fact, spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and yoga guru Ramdev - both with much bigger following than Gurmeet Ram Rahim - too have not been given this facility. And this despite the fact that just like Ram Rahim Singh, both of them have directly or indirectly campaigned for Modi in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. When I asked the Ministry of Civil Aviation to provide me a copy of the last page of the file through which this special favour was granted to Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, I was denied access to the information. They cited a section of the RTI through which this information was exempted. (I couldn't help but assume that the revelation of the information would have been embarrassing for the government.) What is more surprising is that the government continued the special privilege to Ram Rahim even after the April 19 announcement when the PM said every Indian is a VIP. It was finally taken away on September 1, after the chief of Dera Sacha Sauda was sentenced to jail for 20 years by a CBI court for rape. The RTI response clearly shows that Ram Rahim Singh, until his conviction, was "more important" to the BJP and Narendra Modi - perhaps even more than Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Ramdev. But why? This is again something that only the BJP can answer. Also read: Why Ram Rahim Singh really went to jailWhen we think of segregation in Chicago, schools and housing are the most obvious examples. But racial divisions also are apparent when it comes to partying in the greater downtown area. On a recent Friday night, women in stilettos and groups of men enjoying a guy’s night out jam Rush Street. Bars and nightclubs overflow with patrons. This strip is hot for locals and tourists alike. But there’s just a sprinkling of black and brown faces. Those faces certainly belie Chicago’s diverse population. Then again, given that Chicagoans live so separately, this segregation probably shouldn’t be a surprise. But we’re not talking neighborhoods. I’m in the thick of one of the most vibrant nightclub scenes in the city. And the separation has led to sparks, complaints and lawsuits. I stop in front of the club Proof. Earlier this year the owner here fired a bartender for her racist Facebook rants against black customers. Race-tinged incidents are hard to quantify - but they are hardly isolated. Last summer a white general manager was fired from Fuze in Lincoln Park. She sued the owner in federal court, claiming the club used illegal tactics to limit the number of black male customers. According to the attorney for that manager, the lawsuit was settled. The agreement doesn’t allow either party to comment. GILMORE: When that went public, I was like, I’ve been telling you all that for years. It just takes somebody in the inside to say it. Teddy Gilmore is a black party promoter who caters to the African-American, under 30, college-educated set. He cheekily refers to himself as the expert in race and nightlife in Chicago. Stay up-to-date with the latest news, stories and insider events. Please enter a valid email address Oops, something went wrong! Sign Up Try Again You've signed up to receive emails. Please check your email for a welcome confirmation. GILMORE: The black male has the toughest time. I see a lot of people go to a place called Underground here. I watch them outside. They can’t get in and they don’t understand why. But other people are walking straight in. I’ve been in the nightlife for 17 years for me. Doesn’t matter if I’m in the industry, doesn’t matter. It’s not a racial thing, but they have a ratio of how many black people they actually want to come in the club. I can’t tell you what club owners like Billy Dec of the Underground and others think. They never returned my phone calls. In fact, it’s a sensitive subject for anyone in the industry. Chicagoans can tell you about discrimination....so can visitors. In 2009, the owners of Original Mother's nightclub reached a settlement with six out-of-town black college students. The students said the club used a dress code against baggy pants to racially profile them -- when they switched pants with their white friends, the white guys--in those same baggy pants--got in. Baggy attire was also a problem for a black male customer at the upscale sports bar Market in the West Loop. He said he wasn’t admitted because his pants were too baggy. He protested that bouncers allowed white patrons with the same attire in without pause. He took his grievance to the city. According to documents from the Commission on Human Relations obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, there was enough evidence to proceed with a case. But the patron and Market settled this year and, again, neither party can comment. Kenneth Gunn is first deputy commissioner with the city human relations commission. GUNN: If it looks like the rules are targeting one group of people, then that’s what we have trouble with. He says he’s noticed an uptick in club complaints over race matters. Six cases between 2009-10. More than ever before, and those are just the ones with a resolution. GUNN: One of the complainants was denied entry because he had braids. The way the hearing officer looked at the case and our board ultimately decided, who’s going to have braids? Who wears their hair in that style? Primarily African Americans. By having a no-braid rule, you’re going to exclude a group of people. So it has a disparate impact on African Americans. The commission does have the authority to fine establishments if they’re found to discriminate. But Gunn says the commission decided to hand out a flier to nightclubs, reminding them that things like dress codes and admittance policies must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner. * A waiter at NoMi, a rooftop bar on Michigan Avenue explains the summer craft cocktail list. I’m with Audarshia Townsend, known as the 312 Dining Diva. She covers nightlife and hears many complaints. TOWNSEND: Mostly African American, Latin and even Indian promoters have the biggest complaints. They cannot get their own groups into these places, these mainstream places, especially when they’re hot and they’re fresh and they’re brand new. Say five, six years down the line when the club isn’t the hottest thing in the city anymore, that’s when they’ll let them in, basically when the club is on its way out. Townsend insists a downtown club that embraces diversity--is possible and it happened here. TOWNSEND: One of the best places, it was at the forefront of trying to change the diversity and nightlife in Chicago was Funky Buddha Lounge and that was in the late 90s. RUSSO: It was bliss really. I had this idea of creating an upscale environment and being able to play music that was before Funky Buddha was being played in underground spots. Joe Russo, who is white, owned Funky Buddha until 1998. Today he owns The Shrine, a club and live music venue in the South Loop. Its name is homage to late Afro-pop superstar Fela’s Nigerian club. On this Tuesday afternoon, Shrine employees move furniture to prepare for hip-hop group Dead Prez. On many nights, The Shrine boasts a diverse crowd. Russo says other nightclub owners don’t always see the value of diversity. RUSSO: The biggest obstacle in creating a diverse venue is conquering the fears that have been sort of set up in society to keep people divided. A lot of times people, if they don’t know what something’s like, they go on the typical stereotypical opinion of what things should be. Fortunately, again, with The Shrine live music helps conquer those fears. Across town, Joel Barnes is the general manager of Lumen, a nightclub off of west Fulton Street. It’s the middle of the day, lights on, slate-colored couches in full view. They’ll be danced on later. Barnes has worked in the club scene in Chicago for years and says there’s a troubling undercurrent to the racial profiling he’s seen. BARNES: I know that there are racist owners. I know there are racist managers, racist bartenders, racist servers, racist people in Chicago period. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately. Unfortunately, what people don’t understand is that people that are put into the power in these businesses sometimes are just doing what the population of people want. Barnes says he works hard to maintain a coolness factor at Lumen and that brings diversity. Teddy Gilmore, the longtime black promoter, has had his share of run-ins with law enforcement and skittish venue owners. He once picketed a downtown Chicago hotel that reneged on a contract because he says management feared so-called gang activity. Gilmore says he has an easier time when he throws parties across the country and overseas. GILMORE: I’d be a millionaire ten times over if Chicago wasn’t the way it was. But the issue is bigger than money for Gilmore. GILMORE: People say ‘oh, it’s just a party.’ And while that may well be true, there’s more to it than that. Because you have to also be able to see the different things that are going on. How the people are actually looking at you, how people are judging you. Gilmore says some club owners really believe their business will be undermined by having too many African Americans inside. That, he says, is a messed up state of mind.As protests and rioting flare in Ferguson, Missouri, one group known as the "Oath Keepers" has volunteered for armed rooftop patrols to protect local businesses. Although business owners are grateful for the protection, the group - which is made up of military, police and public safety officials - has been told by the St. Louis County Police Department to stop or they will be arrested. Oath Keepers Missouri state leader John Karriman joined "Fox and Friends" this morning and said the Oath Keepers are volunteers that come from first responder backgrounds. "They're the individuals that put themselves in harm's way to keep others safe," he said. Karriman explained that since they are all volunteers and unpaid, the police department's complaint that they did not obtain a license for providing security is unsound. As for the reaction from business owners, Karriman said there were a lot of hugs and tears of appreciation. "They couldn't believe that perfect strangers would come and do that for them." But why do all this? Doocy asked. "That's what we do. While others run from danger, we run into it. It's a part of who we are. That's how we're wired." What if you're forced to stop? Hasselbeck asked. "We won't stop... because no one else is there to stand in the gap. No one else is there to do the job." Watch the clip above.Since the old petition has closed, its time to start a new one! Clementine Ford is the most infamous, man hating feminist in Australia. She has been known to make vile posts promoting genocide of men with “kill all men”. In addition, over the past year or so she has done the following: 1. Had several men fired for things they said to her on social media 2. Had a school boy suspended for something he said to her on Facebook 3. Bullied a disabled man 4. Attacked fathers with their daughters 5. Bullied 15 year old students after giving a speech at their school 6. Attacked a pensioner 7. Attempted to defame Ben Fordham with something that was actually said by her! 8. Made money from selling a book about man bashing 9. Made money from doing stand up talk shows about man bashing 10. Publicly shamed several men on her Facebook page for “vigilante justice”. Quite the list! So despite this why is she still employed by Fairfax media to write article after article on how evil and toxic men are? Is it any surprise that Fairfax are going down the drain when they hire man hating feminists such as Clementine Ford? It is time for Fairfax media to wake up and fire this evil, man hating feminist. Please sign if you agree! Clementine Ford Man Bashing Quotes Comments commentsArthur Waldron is a notable scholar of Chinese history and military affairs whose views are often out of sync with conventional wisdom. In this book review, he argues persuasively against a concept that has become a pillar of establishment thinking on China. Book review: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap, by Graham Allison (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017) Let us start by observing that perhaps the two greatest classicists of the last century, Professor Donald Kagan of Yale and the late Professor Ernst Badian of Harvard, long ago proved that no such thing exists as the “Thucydides Trap,” certainly not in the actual Greek text of the great History of the Peloponnesian War, perhaps the greatest single work of history ever. Astonishingly, even the names of these two towering academic giants are absent from the index of this baffling academic farrago. It was penned by Graham Allison, a Harvard professor — associated with the Kennedy School of Government — to whom questions along the lines of “How did you write about The Iliad without mentioning Homer?” should be addressed. Allison’s argument draws on one sentence of Thucydides’s text: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian Power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” This lapidary summing up of an entire argument is justly celebrated. It introduced to historiography the idea that wars may have “deep causes,” that resident powers are tragically fated to attack rising powers. It is brilliant and important, no question, but is it correct? Clearly not for the Peloponnesian War. Generations of scholars have chewed over Thucydides’s text. Every battlefield has been measured. The quantity of academic literature on the topic is overwhelming, dating as far back as 1629 when Thomas Hobbes produced the first English translation. In the present day, Kagan wrote four volumes in which he modestly but decisively overturned the idea of the Thucydides Trap. Badian did the same. The problem is that although Thucydides presents the war as started by the resident power,
, and rest will take care of itself. 1. Go to Github website. 2. In the latest version of the app section, for example: “Tachiyomi v0.6.3” section, check for a subsection called “downloads”. 3. Now, just check for a hyperlink called “tachiyomi-v0.6.3.apk”. 4. Tap it, and it should start downloading on your phone. I hope this has helped. We will add more information on this page with more research and suggestions from the comment section from users. We will also add a pictorial guide on this post in few days. I will writing a post on the list of problems and solutions to this app in another post. So, please comment and give your valuable inputs to make this post more helpful to readers. There are a list of Manga readers for Android and iOS users out there, but Tachiyomi App is only available for Android. Many Manga Android readers or iOS readers are free and many of them have a nominal cost for purchase. ‘Manga Android Apps’ such as Manga Rock, Manga Reader, Crunchy Roll Manga, Nook, Manga Zone, etc are really good apps to start with, however, Tachiyomi is a notch above the rest – like a different speices of Manga reader.Kenny Jackett: Savours FA Cup victory The Championship side fell behind to Darren Bent goal on 22 minutes but ran out winners thanks to Danny Shittu's equaliser (27) and John Marquis' 89th minute winner. "It was a fantastic night," said Jackett. "The crowd generated a great atmosphere and I'm very appreciative of the way they drove us on. The link between the players and the crowd was a big one. "I thought it was a terrific performance from the whole team tonight. "To a degree, we had some players playing out of position and a slightly imbalanced team. "We persevered after going behind and did well to come back from an early goal. I thought Andreas Weimann's acceleration to go past Shittu was excellent and then (Darren) Bent found the finish. "We got a goal back from a set piece which we've been poor from this season, with the quality of our delivery from James Henry. We should score more goals from corners. "I thought we deserved to win and I was so pleased for John Marquis that he got the winning goal. He has been out for a long time and has worked so hard to get back to fitness."In order to explore the relative contribution of relevance and position, we employed eye tracking as the methodology in the current study. Eye tracking devices are able to record eye movements and reveal subjects’ attention and cognitive process. In areas of cognitive psychology, human‐computer interaction, and marketing, eye tracking methods have been used for decades ( Rayner, 1998 ). We use eye tracking to investigate how users make decisions when confronted with returned Google results following a query. Eye tracking adds meaning to the more traditional log file or click behavior analysis. It allows for a more complete assessment of the information‐seeking process by revealing which query result abstracts users looked at, or were aware of, before selecting a query result or refining their query. This article provides behavioral evidence that sheds light on the influential factors in the evaluation process of search engine uses. Our curiosity regarding this question was piqued by an earlier study conducted by Granka et al. (2004). Their results indicated that most student subjects only view and click the top two results returned by Google. The design of this earlier study did not tease apart whether those choices were the result of the top positions of the two abstracts as influenced by Google’s ranking algorithm, or if those were truly the most relevant results as evaluated by the subjects. We were interested in finding out whether a user’s choice of a particular abstract was based on the position of that abstract, the user’s evaluation of the relevance of that abstract, or a combination of the two. However, how well a Web page actually reflects the users’ search intentions is hard to measure. For example, the ranking algorithm of Google uses a page’s measure of in‐links to help inform its quality and relevance ( Pandey, Roy, Olston, Cho, & Chakrabarti, 2005 ). Some have argued that those algorithms, such as PageRank, simply set up a rich‐get‐richer loop, whereby a relatively few sites dominate the top ranks (Hindman, Tsiotsioliklis, & Johnson, 2003). Retrievability and visibility represent only part of the search process. We wondered what role the user plays in perpetuating this rich‐get‐richer dynamic. Particularly, we wondered how much of the correlation between Web traffic and site popularity ( Hindman et al., 2003 ) is due to the alleged efficiency of these algorithms as opposed to users’ tendency to simply trust the ranked output displayed by a search engine and forego any in‐depth analysis or comparisons of the retrieved results. More importantly, Google’s imperfect algorithm is open to abuses such as Google bombing ( Tatum, 2005 ; see also Bar‐Ilan, this issue). This might deliver erroneous messages to a large population when the searchers trust Google without questioning its underlying ranking mechanism. The information search process is made possible through three parties: Web authors, the search engines themselves, and the users of search engines. The Web authors put their Web pages online with appropriate linking to other pages. The link structure has been used by popular search engine algorithms ( Brin & Page, 1998 ) that can take advantage of this structure to rank relevant Web pages. Users of search engines enter various keywords (sometimes with Boolean commands) according to their understanding of the task and the functionality of the search engine, and they evaluate the results returned by the search engine, making a decision on whether or not to select one of the returned results or reformulate the query. Search engines act as an information intermediary that facilitates the information seeking process. All of the search engines noted above respond to a query with a ranked list of 10 abstracts in their default setting. The ranking reflects the search engines’ estimated relevance of Web pages to the query. Individual search engines vary by both underlying ranking implementation, and also by various characteristics of how they display the ranked results, and any additional support they provide for finding related Web pages. Users can evaluate the abstracts, or other information displayed about a given result, before deciding whether to visit any of the suggested pages by clicking on a hyperlink. In this study, we chose to use Google because of the frequency of its use, the simplicity of its display of query results (which can serve as a common basis when compared to many other search engines), and our prior experience studying Web search on Google ( Granka, Joachims, & Gay, 2004 ). We also confined the study to only one search engine to ensure a constant visual display on which we could analyze and interpret the subjects’ eye movements. Finding online information using search engines has become a part of our everyday lives ( Gordon & Pathak, 1999 ). Currently the search engine serving the largest percentage of queries (at 47.3%) is Google, with an index of around 25 billion Web pages and 250 million queries a day ( Brooks, 2004; Search Engine Watch, 2007 ). Google now provides search functions on handheld devices and smart phones ( Google Inc., 2005a ). With the ubiquitous presence of mobile devices, anytime and anywhere access to the information world has become a reality. Other popular search engines include Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com, and all serve the pervasive need of finding pertinent information within the enormity of the Web. Despite the popularity of search engines, most users are not aware of how they work and know little about the implications of their algorithms ( Gerhart, 2004 ). In Granka et al. (2004), the subjects were given the 10 tasks in random order and asked to start with Google and search for answers with a limit of three minutes for each task. The time constraint allowed for the collection of a substantial amount of eye tracking data for each task and also minimized the total time required of each subject. Most subjects voluntarily stopped the search tasks in the given amount of time. In this earlier study, complete eye tracking data were obtained for 23 subjects. The results showed that the subjects viewed the top two abstracts almost equally often and much more often than any other abstract. However, they clicked the number one ranked abstracts significantly more often than the number two ranked abstract ( Granka et al., 2004 ). This behavior prompted us to ask whether the subjects were simply defaulting to Google’s ranked results, or if their decisions were based on some critical evaluation of the results. In the study conducted by Granka et al. (2004), 10 tasks were devised, ranging from informational tasks such as “Who discovered the first antibiotics?” to navigational tasks such as “Find the homepage of Emeril ‐ the chef who has a TV cooking program.” Informational tasks require finding a particular fact, while navigational tasks involve searching for a particular Web page ( Broder, 2002 ). Among the 10 tasks, some were inspired by popular topics from Google Zeitgeist, while others covered local or specialized topics. Google Zeitgeist ( Google Inc., 2005b ) is a report provided by Google that reveals the most popular queries or other related trends about the queries Google receives. Our resulting mix of popular and specialized topics was an effort to simulate a likely query task situation. In general, knowing how users evaluate result pages through eye tracking methods can help researchers to understand users’ motivations, tasks, and cognitive processes. Understanding this evaluation and decision‐making will enable correct interpretation of Web log files as feedback data and thereby improve search engine performance ( Joachims, 2002 ). As a result, it may be possible to design Web‐based information retrieval systems to better satisfy user needs. Goldberg et al. (2002) used eye tracking methods to test the performance of subjects in completing several tasks on a Web portal page. Their research demonstrated the characteristics of subjects’ eye movements on that portal page. This research gave rise to implications for improving the design of the Web portal. Pan et al. (2004) showed that gender, website types, and the interaction between search sequence and website type all affect Web viewing behavior. For example, female subjects had shorter mean fixation durations than males; the subjects had longer mean fixation durations on the first Web pages viewed than the second ones; and the subjects spent more time gazing on the first pages than on the second ones. In general, as an indicator of information processing, eye movements on Web pages are influenced by both individual variables, such as gender, and the characteristics of the stimuli, such as the layout and content of Web pages. The current study combines eye tracking with clickstream data in order to make inferences regarding the impact of positions versus judged relevance on decision‐making processes involved in information search. By doing so, we gain an in‐depth understanding of how users evaluate search results and the factors that influence their choices. Studies of Eye movements date back to work by Javal in 1879 ( Huey, 1908 ), and over time they have informed fundamental facts about eye movements, behavioral and experimental psychology, and human‐computer interaction, an application that is greatly benefiting from advances in the ease and accuracy of eye trackers. In a typical user study, the subject is calibrated to the eye tracking device by the researcher asking the subject to look at specific targets while the software configures the respective target locations. This is done by sending a weak infrared light to the subject’s eye and measuring the light reflection on the screen. The result is that eye movements on a computer screen can be recorded, with a high degree of accuracy, for the majority of people. The hypertext nature of the Web has changed how people search and access information ( Bilal & Kirby, 2002 ). It is imperative to understand user behavior on the Web in order to design better search engines. This section describes past research on user behavior and search engines. The relevant literature is organized into three parts: past research on user behavior and search engines, past eye tracking research related to Web viewing behavior, and a review of the major results of the first Google eye tracking study the authors conducted, which provided the basis for the current eye tracking study. Research Methods and Design In the present study, rank refers to the original sequence of abstracts returned by Google. Lower ranks indicate that the Web pages are less relevant as judged by Google’s algorithm and thus placed later in the sequence; position represents the actual physical locations of the abstracts on the Google results page, for example, from top to bottom (1 to 10) on the first Google result page; relevance represents the subjective judgments of the likelihood that the information piece is related to the answer of the question or the goal of a search task. In this study, we obtain relevance through human judgments of the abstracts returned by Google (abstract relevance), as well as the pages associated with those abstracts (Web page relevance). Judgment data were important to ensure that all of the 10 results were not equally relevant. Based on the findings from our previous study (Granka et al., 2004), the current work was designed to exploit Google’s ranking function in order to investigate how much the subjects rely on Google’s ranking to make their decisions about relevance. Unbeknown to the subjects, we manipulated the order of Google’s returned results in some cases, such that abstracts of actual lower ranked Web pages appeared higher in position and vice versa. Thus, choosing a lower ranked abstract that is in a higher position in the Google results page but is evaluated to be less relevant by human judges would be evidence that the subjects have assigned priority to Google’s “expertise” over the actual relevance of the abstract. This section introduces eye tracking as a methodology and introduces the details of the research methods and procedures used in the current study. A laboratory setting was necessary to capture all aspects of the search sessions and related eye movements, in order to compare the variables across all subjects systematically. Although some scholars have argued that external validity is compromised in a laboratory setting, previous studies have shown that in laboratory settings and Web settings there are few or no differences in the subjects’ behavior on information search, especially on those tasks using keywords (Epstein, Klinkenberg, Wiley, & McKinley, 2001; Schulte‐Mecklenbeck & Huber, 2003). The Subjects In this study, participants were undergraduate students with various majors (including communication, engineering, and arts and sciences) at Cornell University (U.S.A.). All students were given extra class credit for their participation in the experiment. Twenty‐two subjects were recruited, and 16 complete data sets, including 11 males and 5 females, were obtained. Attrition was due to random recording difficulties and the inability of some subjects to be calibrated precisely.2 The average age of participating subjects was 20 years and 4 months. All subjects reported that they used Google as their primary search engine and had a high familiarity with the Google interface (all scored 10 out of 10); when asked about the levels of trust in Google, they reported an average of 7.9 (out of 10). Thus, our subjects, in general, are savvy users of Google and tend to trust Google to a high degree. Search Tasks Ten search tasks were included in this study, each of which addressed a unique aspect of the information retrieval experience. Half of the searches were navigational in nature, asking subjects to find a specific Web page or homepage. These were definitive searches, meaning that only one correct Web page would provide an acceptable answer. The other five tasks were informational, asking subjects to find a specific bit of information (Broder, 2002). Much of the content for the tasks was generated according to the content of top searches listed on Google Zeitgeist (Google Inc., 2005b). Our purpose was to ensure that the tasks in this experiment represented the various genres of searches that the general population uses on a regular basis, including travel, movies, current events, celebrities, and local issues. These tasks were also pre‐tested to ensure that the most intuitive queries would not always result in top‐ranked results; therefore, the findings should be interpreted in light of the fact that these queries are on average more difficult than a subject’s typical query. The following table is a brief description of the 10 search tasks included in the experiment and the correct answers to these tasks (Table 1). Table 1. The 10 information search tasks Task Type Task Correct Answer Navigational Find the homepage of Michael Jordan, the statistician. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/ Find the page displaying the route map for Greyhound buses. http://www.greyhound.com/maps/ Find the homepage of the 1000 Acres Dude Ranch. http://www.1000acres.com/ Find the homepage for graduate housing at Carnegie Mellon University http://www.housing.cmu.edu/graduatehousing/ Find the homepage of Emeril—the chef who has a television cooking program. http://www.emerils.com/emerilshome.html Informational Where is the tallest mountain in New York located? The Adirondacks OR High Peaks Region With the heavy coverage of the democratic presidential primaries, you are excited to cast your vote for a candidate. When are/were democratic presidential primaries in New York? March 2, 2004 Which actor starred as the main character in the original Time Machine movie? Rod Taylor A friend told you that Mr. Cornell used to live close to campus—near University and Steward Ave. Does anybody live in his house now? If so, who? Members of Llenroc, the Cornell chapter of the Delta Phi Fraternity live in the mansion. What is the name of the researcher who discovered the first modern antibiotic? Alexander Fleming Experimental procedure All participants were required to give informed written consent prior to the start of the experiment. Before the actual experiment, the eye tracker was calibrated using a nine‐point standard calibration procedure for each subject (Duchowski, 2003). Participants were instructed to search for the 10 different tasks through the Google interface. Subjects were told to view the Web pages and search as they typically would under normal conditions, with the opportunity to scroll up and down the page at their leisure.3 The experimenter sat to the right of and behind the subject, where she was able to watch the subject, the subject’s eye, and also the corresponding eye movements on the two control monitors. If the experimenter recognized that the eye tracking system temporarily lost a subject’s eye path due to extreme movements, she could re‐center and if appropriate, perform a quick recalibration fix. This happened rarely and randomly; it did not interrupt the experimental session since the experimenter could perform the quick fix in a few milliseconds. The 10 search tasks were read aloud to the subject by the experimenter to eliminate unnecessary eye movements away from the computer monitor; such eye movements could potentially hinder the accuracy of the ocular calibration. Typically, due to the monitor size, scrolling was required to view abstracts ranked seven and higher on the Google results pages. To eliminate the potential bias from question order effects, all search questions were completely randomized for all subjects. The maximum time for completing each task was restricted to three minutes. As before, the time constraint allowed for a sufficient amount of eye tracking data to be collected for each task and also minimized the total time required of each subject. The most important data for this study come from how each subject responds and interacts with the 10 results following each query and not from the full completion of the task itself. Design Because Google is continuously updating its search algorithms, one specific query will not produce the same exact results on two separate occasions. Because much of the data analyses were to occur after the experimental sessions, it was necessary to cache the Web pages with which the subjects actually interacted. A proxy server was set up to mediate the interaction between the subjects and the Google Web server. The proxy script was run on the subject’s computer and stored every search query typed by the subjects, as well as all links and Web pages that were viewed, along with the corresponding times that they were accessed and viewed. When the subject typed in a query, the query was sent to the proxy server, and the proxy server relayed it to Google. After receiving the results from Google, the proxy server manipulated the results and passed on the modified results to the subject’s Web browser. Results were modified in two ways. First, the proxy server removed the advertisements on the Google results page to avoid distraction and ensure consistent stimulus exposure across all subjects. This also saved the authors from having to filter out eye movements on ads, since the goal of the study was concerned with which query results were viewed and selected. Second, in order to explore the relative contribution of relevance versus position to the decision making process, the results were further manipulated for each subject in one of three ways. In the “Normal” condition, the proxy server returned the results in their original ranked order; in the “Swapped” condition, the proxy server swapped the positions of the first ranked abstract with the second ranked abstract, keeping the rest of the ranking intact; and in the “Reversed” condition, the proxy server reversed the positions of the abstracts on the first result page as follows: The first ranked abstract was swapped with rank 10 abstract, the rank 2 abstract was swapped with rank 9 abstract, and so on. Eye Tracking Indices During an eye tracking experiment, several measurements are typically recorded that are relevant for studying college students’ interactions with search engines. ‘Fixation’ refers to a relatively stable eye‐in‐head position within some threshold of dispersion (typically ∼2°) over some minimum duration and with a velocity below some threshold (typically 15–100 degrees per second). In this study, we set the minimum duration as 50 milliseconds, as suggested in the ASL504 eye tracker manual (Applied Science Laboratories, 2005). Eye fixations are the most relevant metric for evaluating information processing in online search. Fixations represent the instances in which most information acquisition and processing occurs (Rayner, 1998). The total number of fixations is often used as an indicator of processing difficulty, with fixation density related to the complexity and informativeness of the visual stimulus (DeGraef, De Troy, & d’Ydewalle, 1992; Friedman, 1979; Henderson, Weeks, & Hollingsworth, 1999), such that as informativeness increases, so too does the number of fixations in that area. In the current study, we also used measures of the average number of fixations. A higher number of fixations on an abstract will represent intensified information processing. ‘Pupil Dilation’ refers to widening of the pupil. It has long been known that pupils dilate in response to emotion‐evoking stimuli (Beatty, 1982). While it is also the case that pupil size is affected by light, the lighting remained constant in our experiment. As Rayner and others have pointed out (Rayner, 1998), using only a single indicator of processing difficulty may result in an oversimplification of the relationship between the indicator and processing difficulty. Hence, both fixation and pupil dilation measures are frequently used as corroborating measures of cognitive workload (Hess, 1965; Just & Carpenter, 1980; Kahneman, 1973). Last, a ‘scanpath’ is the spatial arrangement of a sequence of fixations, or simply the sequence of LookZones that a subject views, as in the present study. Definition of LookZones In addition to logging the clickstream and Web page data of subjects, the script also constructed ‘LookZones’ around key content regions. The script utilized a feature inherent to the GazeTracker software system that automatically creates LookZones around links and pictures, which the software recognizes within the HTML tags. (For more information on the GazeTracker software system and the eye tracking apparatus itself, see Appendix A.) Thus, the script enabled the creation of distinct LookZone regions around each of the ten displayed results (Figure 1). For the analysis, each of these displayed results on Google—abstracts in rank #1, rank #2, rank #3, to rank #10—is given its own set of LookZones, from which we can then compare eye tracking behaviors across all queries, relative to these zones. LookZones were not visible during the time participants were engaged in the experiment. Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint LookZone division on a Google result page Judged Relevance As stated above, we considered rank, position, and judged relevance in this study. For all queries and results pages that were encountered in the study, we gathered relevance assessments of the abstracts, which allowed us to look at the choices made by subjects as a function of the positions and judged relevance of the page chosen by the subject in case Google’s rank did not reflect what other humans might consider relevant. Five non‐participants were chosen as the judges in the study. For each results page, we randomized the order of the abstracts and asked judges to weakly order the abstracts (ties were allowed) by how promising they looked for leading to relevant. Each of five judges assessed all results pages for two questions, plus 10 results pages from two other questions, for inter‐judge agreement verification. The set of abstracts/pages we asked judges to weakly order were not limited to the (typically 10) hits from the first results page, rather the set included all results encountered by a particular subject for a particular question. The inter‐judge agreement on the abstracts was 82.5%. Furthermore, we also collected relevance judgments for the actual Web pages those abstracts represent. The inter‐judge agreement on the relevance assessment of the pages was 86.4%.London's Yank! Begins Performances July 3 The gay-themed love story set during World War II transfers to Charing Cross Theatre following a Manchester engagement. Yank!, the American musical about the hidden history of gay soldiers during World War II, begins performances July 3 at London's Charing Cross Theatre. The production plays the intimate venue following a spring premiere at the Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester. The production will open officially July 10 and run through August 19. Scott Hunter reprises his role as Stu; he is joined by three new actors. Playing the role of Mitch is Andy Coxon, whose West End credits include Beautiful and Les Misérables. Waylon Jacobs, who has appeared in Chicago, Memphis, and We Will Rock You in the West End, plays Sarge/Scarlet. Bradley Judge takes on the role of Rotelli; his credits include Aladdin, Don’t Run, and Sister Act. The rest of the company is completed by members of the original Manchester production: Benjamin Cupit as Professor, Lee Dillon-Stuart as Tennessee, Chris Kiely as Artie, Kris Marc-Joseph as Czechowski, Mark Paterson as Lieutenant/NCO, Tom Pepper as Cohen/Speedy, and Sarah-Louise Young as Louise. The musical focuses on Stu, who is called to serve in the armed forces in 1943 and becomes a reporter for Yank Magazine, the journal for and by fellow soldiers. Telling the stories of the men in Charlie Company, the musical explores the concept of manhood and what it means to “fall in love and struggle to survive in a time and place where the odds are stacked against you.” Yank! is based on the 2010 Off-Broadway production, with book and lyrics by David Zellnik, with his brother Joseph Zellnik’s score paying homage to the music of the 1940s. The musical, directed by James Baker, is produced by Katy Lipson for Aria Entertainment, Hope Mill Theatre, Ben Millerman with Jim Kierstead and Guy James. Completing the creative team are music director James Cleeve, choreographer Chris Cuming, designer Victoria Hinton, lighting designer Aaron J. Dootson, sound designer Chris Bogg, and casting director Benjamin Newsome. For ticket information, visit CharingCrossTheatre.co.uk. LOVE THEATRE? CHECK OUT THE NEW ARRIVALS AT THE PLAYBILL STORE!Image caption In in both reading and numeracy, NI is the highest-ranked English speaking region in the world Northern Ireland is the best performing education system for primary maths in Europe, and the sixth best in the world, according to a major US study. The region was also highly rated in global rankings for primary reading - being placed fifth in the world and second in Europe, behind Finland. NI also surpassed England, which was placed ninth in global maths and 11th in world primary reading rankings. The NI education minister said the local results were "truly impressive". PRIMARY MATHS TOP 10 Singapore South Korea Hong Kong Taiwan Japan Northern Ireland Belgium (Flemish) Finland England (6th in 2007) Russian Federation Source: TIMSS 2011 The global rankings are the result of two studies - the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The research was carried out by US academics who examined the results of tests taken by 900,000 pupils in over 60 countries. Education superpowers The TIMSS is produced every four years while the PIRLS is published every five years, but this is the first time Northern Ireland has taken part in the test results study. The studies reveal that Asian countries continue to dominate the top of the global tables in maths, science and reading. In global maths, NI took sixth place behind five Asian countries. In reading, NI made the top five group - alongside such education superpowers as Finland and Hong Kong. In terms of the proportion of pupils reaching the highest ability levels in primary reading, Northern Ireland was even more successful, ranked third place in the world. In science, NI was placed 21st in the world, six places behind England which came 15th. 'Exceptional results' PRIMARY READING TOP 10 Hong Kong Russian Federation Finland Singapore Northern Ireland United States Denmark Croatia Taiwan Ireland (England 11th place) Source: PIRLS 2011 The NI Education Minister, John O'Dowd, said the "importance and significance of these findings cannot be overestimated". "This is the first time we have measured our primary level schools against international standards and the results are truly impressive. "In numeracy we rank just behind a group of high-performing Pacific-rim countries, whilst in both reading and numeracy we are the highest-ranked English speaking region in the world," Mr O'Dowd added. The minister said the statistics showed the "exceptional results our system is producing at primary level education" and he paid tribute to staff in the sector for their "hard work and dedication". "Pupils, teachers, all school staff, leaders and governors should be justifiably proud today of what they are achieving."Teri Buhl Responds To Our Story; Still Confused About The Internet And The Law from the let's-try-this-again dept I would like an editor to please call about the story Tim just wrote on me. Like now "Techdirt did not call me for comment about that story you followed this am [in the Morning Report]," writes Teri Buhl.... "I finally reached the reporter early this am who says he is working at his day job and can't update the story until he gets home. Then he won't give me the info to directly reach a techdirt editor." On Record Comment: My tweets were protected for a long time because I always looked at twitter as a conversation with my readers, not quotes, I'm not reporting news there. I can say silly things some times and I'd like to apologized for my knee jerk reaction to Gideon. Of course I can't sue him/her because I don't even know the person's real name. Not publishing my tweets is about a copyright issue for me. I make money off my words, research, and analysis as a journalist. I never print someone's tweet in a story because 1) I didn't get that comment from them directly 2) tweets can be changed and manipulated. I've never had another jurno ignore that request. I think it's ironic that lawyer choose to do it. Twitter says I own my tweets and I'm giving them license to use them but I simply don't think that means I am giving others license. Of course it also depends on what the tweet is to proven I own the copyright. As far as Mark Bennett - I would like to sue him and see how copyright law relating to tweets and photos in tweets wuld be tested. If can afford to do it I will. There is not a lot of case law for this in the U.S. I am not fan of aggregater sites who take journalist original work, screen grab it, and don't link or credit back to the original reporting. It think that's stealing page views and intellectual content. Tim - please publish this in the story and write at the top there is an update. Yesterday, Tim Cushing wrote a post about Teri Buhl, a journalist who claimed via her Twitter profile that her tweets were "not publishable." When questioned on this, she threatened to sue if someone republished her tweets. Some knowledgeable lawyers gave their opinion on this (that it was all hogwash), and at least one had a short email exchange with Buhl. Hilarity ensued. You can read that whole thing for yourself.This is the followup. A little over an hour after the post went live, we received an email from Teri Buhl demanding a "correction" (without explanation) and saying that we needed to call her about Tim's story:We have no obligation to call her, and given her previous engagements with others, we felt that there was no reason to discuss this with her. She later posted a comment on the post itself, asking Tim to contact her. He did, and she sent over a statement, and a series of other emails, partly (declared by her) "on the record" and partly "off the record." To be 100% clear: we have zero obligation to not publish her "off the record" comments. We made no arrangements with her to honor her requests that certain comments be "off the record."Buhl appears to be under the false impression that merely claiming something is "off the record" leads to an obligation that she not be quoted, and that it provides her some sort of legal status, even when others quote her. This applies both to the original story about her tweets and to her follow up emails. Separately, she asked Tim to provide my phone number, and she called our corporate line multiple times this morning, telling him that she "always" calls a subject for comment before publishing a story about them. That may be her decision as a reporter, but there is no such requirement. That's not how freedom of the press or freedom of expression works. Finally, Jim Romenesko picked up on our story in his "Morning Report" on his super popular media blog, leading Teri to send Jim the same basic statement she sent us ("on the record") along with a separate statement suggesting that we had some sort of obligation to contact her before running our story. Let's deal with that one first, and then we'll get into her other claims.Again, to be clear: we have no obligation to contact her before writing a story about information that was made public. For her to imply that we needed to do so is simply incorrect. Tim correctly noted to her that he was not at his computer, but that he had forwarded her emails to me. He did not, as she implies, promise to update the story. He alsosend her to the contact page at Techdirt, which is the best way to reach those of us here.Moving on to the statement. We will break this down, sentence by sentence, leaving typos and grammatical oddities in place.Again, we made no agreement to keep certain comments on or off the record. Yes, it is a journalistic convention that journalists respect suchwhen the people are sources, but it is standard that both sides firstto that convention. It is not a unilateral thing that you can just declare. When talking towe generallyto keep certain comments off the record. Sometimes sources approach us andus to keep certain comments off the record, and we thenand decide whether or not to accept. It isthat the source chooses whether or not to share.In this case, none of that is happening. First off, Teri Buhl is not a "source." She is the subject of the story, and we wrote about her comments and discussions with others that made their way into the public record. We have no obligation to keep anything "off the record" nor did we ever agree to any such thing.Protecting your tweets is a good idea if you want to keep themquiet, but that is no guarantee that others won't share them. It is quite common for people to retweet the "protected" tweets of others, often not realizing that the original person had protected their tweets. That said, Buhl here implies that her tweets have been protected "for a long time," implying that Gideon only saw her tweet as a follower of hers, and that you could make the argument that the tweets were not, in fact, "public." I would have been willing to concede that perhaps her tweets were for followers only... except that there's evidence that this is simply not true at all. If you look at Buhl's Muck Rack page it does not currently show her tweets. Muck Rack is a site for journalists that creates profiles for those journalists and often pulls together their social media presence. Yet, a simple Google cache search for the feed turns up that, as of at least January 23rd, Buhl's tweets were clearly public on MuckRack. Here's a screenshot:Could it be that Muck Rack has a way to display protected tweets? No. The site directly states that it can only accept public Twitter feeds. And, even if Muck Rackmagically reposting her tweets from a "protected" feed, it would still be a case that her tweets were still being made public, thus depriving her of any claim that the tweets were ever private. In other words, despite her suggestion that her Twitter stream was protected for "a long time," there is substantial evidence that this is not true. If she would like to present evidence to the contrary, we are open to reviewing it.: Buhl told Poynter's Jeff Sonderman that she had unprotected her account "a few months ago," directly contradicting her suggestion to us that her tweets were protected during this whole thing.This has nothing to do with whether or not you can sue someone. Has she honestly never heard of a John Doe lawsuit?For Teri Buhl, perhaps, but not for copyright law for the most part. We've actually covered some of the issues about the ability to copyright tweets in the past. There may be some elements that are copyrightable, and many that are not. Even so, whether or not someone then quotes you from your tweets is not likely to be "a copyright issue." If, as is the case, we were quoting statements made by her (and
to defer to the Department of Justice and allow Saipov to be charged criminally for violations of federal law to be adjudicated in a regularly constituted Article III (civilian) court. Now, the commander-in-chief’s tweets regarding Saipov’s future may actually jeopardize the federal case against the attacker. The president followed the Justice Department precedent with Ullah, as he was charged in U.S. District Court on December 12 with providing material support to terrorism and other terrorism related offenses. Steering these cases to the Department of Justice, rather than classifying the accused as enemy combatants, is the correct course of action that should be followed in future cases. While the concept of “unlawful enemy combatants” enjoys substantial legal authority under the laws of armed conflict, routing terrorism suspects into wartime detention is unnecessary. The federal courts are open and functioning well with regard to terrorism prosecutions. Prosecution in regular Article III courts is a low risk proposition that vindicates the rule of law and allows America to claim the moral high ground in the struggle against terrorism. Moreover, interrogating a suspect while classifying him as an “unlawful combatant” yields no advantages over questioning him when holding him as an ordinary criminal law detainee, even when affording him rights under Miranda. Traditionally, individuals who commit harmful uses of force or military-type activities in contravention of U.S. interests or against U.S. persons, including against American troops on the battlefield, generally have been divided into two categories: lawful combatants (members of the armed forces of a state and other militias meeting certain legal conditions qualifying them as combatants) or criminal actors. For example, Russian soldiers in its army, Chinese sailors in its navy, Iranian uniformed missile launch operators, Canadian uniformed lawyers, Brazilian American uniformed special operations commandos, German fighter pilots, and Royal Navy submariners all fall into the category of lawful combatants because they meet four criteria specified in the Third Geneva Convention: being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates, i.e. being in a military unit; having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance (uniforms with distinct, mostly standardized markings); carrying arms openly; and conducting operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. The most important consequences of being classified as a lawful combatant mainly deal with their rights as soldiers at war. First, where a state of international armed conflict exists, and in some cases of non-international armed conflict, the individual combatant may be targeted by enemy forces without provocation, based on his or her status as a combatant alone. If captured, the individual enjoys combatant immunity — that is, he must be treated as a prisoner of war within the meaning of the Fourth Geneva Convention. He may not be tried by foreign courts for his wartime actions, including killing, maiming and destruction of property, assuming his actions were otherwise consistent with the law of armed conflict. This is the traditional foundational principle on which state-on-state warfare is grounded in terms of the rights and responsibilities of individual soldiers. If an individual conducts a warlike act against an American and does not fit these criteria for a lawful combatant, he or she was usually considered a criminal suspect, and the domestic courts had jurisdiction. For example, members of the violent Puerto Rican separatist group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nactional Puertorriqueña were convicted in federal court of terrorist acts in the 1970s and 80s, as were members of the May 19 Communist Organization and the Black Liberation Army. Both sets of attacks used violence to advance political agendas and might have been considered unlawful combatants, yet all the accused were tried in U.S. federal courts. Similarly, a Russian spy in the United States committing espionage would be subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. In such a circumstance, the spy would be considered an unprivileged belligerent, and would be afforded no rights under the Geneva Conventions provided to a lawful combatant. He would be treated as an ordinary criminal conducting an extraordinary act. Over time, “unlawful enemy combatants” has emerged as a third category. This legal classification includes actors who do not fit the legal definition of a lawful combatant, and whose warlike activities exceed those which a society is willing to allow for trial civilian courts — namely, acts of violent terrorism and other “warlike” acts targeting both military personnel and civilian noncombatants. The concept finds its principal U.S. judicial legacy in the case of Ex parte Quirin. This 1942 U.S. Supreme Court case concerned eight German saboteurs captured after their infiltration into the United States, where they planned to attack war industries and weaken America’s ability to mobilize its forces to fight in Europe. They were tried as unlawful enemy combatants by a military tribunal. The Court upheld the government’s decision to do so. Its statement as to why is useful for our purposes and worth quoting at length: [T]he law of war draws a distinction between the armed forces and the peaceful populations of belligerent nations and also between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants. Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals. The language in Ex Parte Quirin set the stage for the rejuvenation of the third category of unlawful combatants and the reinvigoration of the use of military detention and military commissions to address their warlike conduct. Based on this language, on November 13, 2001, President George W. Bush issued a military order pertaining to the “Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism.” The order was grounded in his inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution, as well as the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which focused tightly on the 9/11 perpetrators and groups supporting them. It recognized a category of persons not entitled to prisoner-of-war status or combatant immunity, but also removed them from the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts for purposes of criminal trials. The military order permitted indefinite detention and, in certain cases where trial is appropriate, trial by military commission. The military commission trial authority has evolved beyond the initial military order over a series of court cases and Congressional acts beyond the scope of this paper, but the baseline for who may be detained as an unlawful enemy combatant and tried for their actions in violation of the laws of war has remained relatively constant. The authority of the U.S. government to continue indefinite detentions of al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-associated detainees grounded on the AUMF has been questioned as years pass since 9/11. Indeed, the AUMF itself is now less relevant to current operations globally against terrorists and terrorist organizations, as it was limited in its scope by its very terms. As a result, the authority to add new unlawful enemy combatants to the detention population becomes more tenuous. Theoretically, when the conflict terminates, so does the authority to detain using the AUMF as authority. In fact, some writers have argued the AUMF has already expired grounded on a conditions-based analysis — along with its attendant detention authority. Moreover, the link between Ullah and Saipov and the detention authority under the AUMF is tenuous, at best. Neither suspect is a member of the 9/11 conspiracy (they were children when the attacks took place), al-Qaeda, or an al-Qaeda-affiliated group. While the president certainly has the authority under international law to declare both Ullah and Saipov as enemy combatants, the policy reasons to do so are opaque at best. To classify them, and future attackers, as unlawful enemy combatants, permitting either indefinite “wartime” detention without trial, or detention and trial by military commission, is unwarranted when there is such a capable apparatus at the president’s fingertips to try them as terrorist criminals. Expertise in prosecuting terrorism cases is not in short supply at the Department of Justice, particularly in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the proper venue for prosecuting Saipov. The office boasts convictions against four men convicted of supporting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, along with the mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, four men convicted of the East African embassy bombings, and al-Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, among others. Terrorism prosecutions by the Department of Justice are almost always concluded within a couple years, where the 9/11 codefendants were charged for trial by military commission on May 31, 2011, almost ten years after the offenses were committed. Those cases have been mired in pretrial litigation for over six years, with no realistic trial date in the foreseeable future. There is simply no need to classify Ullah as an enemy combatant for interrogation, or to send an accused such as Saipov to Guantanamo Bay for wartime detention. “Ordinary” criminal interrogation is likely sufficient to obtain useful information and there are capable prosecutors in the United States with an extraordinary track record in terrorism prosecutions. There is no public evidence either attack was directed by any transnational terrorist group, and both Saipov and Ullah were in the United States as lawful permanent residents — a very different situation from the 9/11 case and the facts of Ex Parte Quirin. Moreover, affording a terrorist a criminal status and trial, with all the rights attendant, is a powerful statement that America believes in the rule of law and trusts its law enforcement agents, prosecutors and courts. Prosecution puts the terrorist’s horrific actions on public display not only for the jury to adjudicate, but for all of humanity. If these alleged terrorists are convicted, they will be imprisoned in the U.S. federal prison system, like all other terrorism suspects convicted of their crimes in American courts. If they are acquitted, they could either be deported or then detained as unlawful enemy combatants. Classifying either defendant, or others similarly situated, as an unlawful combatant is unnecessary so long as the Department of Justice continues to hit home runs in terrorism prosecutions. Butch Bracknell is a graduate of the Francis King Carey School of Law at the University of Maryland (JD) and Harvard Law School (LLM). He was a career officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and is a member of the Truman National Security Project’s Defense Counsel and the Carnegie Institute’s Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Image: Shane McCoy via Wikimedia CommonsDolphin887 3rd Party Developer Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Belgrade, Serbia Posts: 386 IMPORTANT MiG-21bis StarForce PATCH - MARCH 2017 Most of you know we have issues with the StarForce protection for the MiG-21Bis module. The primary complaint was that the protection was not flexible enough for the users' hardware and/or software changes. We took this very seriously, and dedicated our time to work on the fix along with the people on the StarForce team. Our Starforce patch will be distributed along Eagle Dynamics next DCS World openBeta patch, which should be released by the end of this week. This is a major patching event for all of us, and it will require your cooperation for a proper and successful execution. In short, in order to save one activation for MiG-21Bis, you will have to deactivate the module BEFORE the DCS 1.5.6 patch is downloaded to your PC. We advise you to do this in next 24 hours. We have created a guide with detailed instructions that will help you prepare for the incoming patch: please find the attached two identical documents written in English and Russian languages. Please feel free to distribute them among your friends that are using the MiG-21Bis module. Note that if you are using DCS World 2.0.5 openAlpha, you do not have to do this at this time. However, when Eagle Dynamics decide to distribute the patch for DCS World 2.0.5 openAlpha, we will distribute the same StarForce patch; thus a simmilar procedure will be required if you do not use any other version. If you patch 1.5.6 openBeta first after doing the procedure, it is not required again for 2.0.5 openAlpha update. If there is a 2.0.5 openAlpha update and you update that first ((doing the procedure) before updating 1.5.6 openBeta), then you do not have to do it for 1.5.6 openBeta. The same as in 1.5.6 stable release. We will do our best to keep you informed in time. We sincerely appologize for this inconvinience. Our ultimate goal is your satisfaction: there are things we have to do to get there, and there are some thing we have to do together. We will provide help along the way and we hope this transition will be sucessful. We also hope you will like the fixes we prepared in the next patch. If you need any help please write us at Your dedicated developers, LNS Dear all,Most of you know we have issues with the StarForce protection for the MiG-21Bis module.The primary complaint was that the protection was not flexible enough for the users' hardware and/or software changes.We took this very seriously, and dedicated our time to work on the fix along with the people on the StarForce team.Our Starforce patch will be distributed along Eagle Dynamics next DCS World openBeta patch, which should be released by the end of this week.This is a major patching event for all of us, and it will require your cooperation for a proper and successful execution. In short, in order to save one activation for MiG-21Bis, you will have to deactivate the module BEFORE the DCS 1.5.6 patch is downloaded to your PC.We have created a guide with detailed instructions that will help you prepare for the incoming patch: please find the attached two identical documents written in English and Russian languages.Please feel free to distribute them among your friends that are using the MiG-21Bis module.Note that if you are using DCS World 2.0.5 openAlpha, you do not have to do this at this time. However, when Eagle Dynamics decide to distribute the patch for DCS World 2.0.5 openAlpha, we will distribute the same StarForce patch; thus a simmilar procedure will be required if you do not use any other version.If you patch 1.5.6 openBeta first after doing the procedure, it is not required again for 2.0.5 openAlpha update.If there is a 2.0.5 openAlpha update and you update that first ((doing the procedure) before updating 1.5.6 openBeta), then you do not have to do it for 1.5.6 openBeta.The same as in 1.5.6 stable release. We will do our best to keep you informed in time.We sincerely appologize for this inconvinience. Our ultimate goal is your satisfaction: there are things we have to do to get there, and there are some thing we have to do together.We will provide help along the way and we hope this transition will be sucessful. We also hope you will like the fixes we prepared in the next patch.If you need any help please write us at [email protected] Your dedicated developers,LNS Attached Files Important MiG-21 StarForce patch MARCH 2017 EN.pdf (1.03 MB, 4125 views) Important MiG-21 StarForce patch MARCH 2017 RU.pdf (1.05 MB, 605 views) Power through superb knowledge, training and teamwork. __________________ Last edited by -Rudel-; 03-30-2017 at 09:44 PM.Washington (CNN) Two US sailors based at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia have died of apparent drug overdoses in the last week, according to a US Navy public affairs officer. Petty Officer First Class Brian Jerrell, a sailor assigned to the Trident Training Facility, was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his off base residence on October 12, Navy Cmdr. Sarah Self-Kyler said. Four days later, Jerrell's roommate, Petty Officer Second Class Ty Bell, a sailor assigned to the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Wyoming was found dead of an apparent overdose as well, according to Self-Kyler. A Navy official said the overdoses were a result of cocaine, but cautioned there is a toxicology report pending. Kingsland Police Department is investigating the incident, with support by the United States Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Read MoreMicrosoft is slamming the door on PC builders and upgraders who might have hoped to use the new Intel Kaby Lake or AMD Zen chips for Windows 7 or Windows 8 PCs. Sorry: Both chips are officially supported only by Microsoft’s Windows 10. Microsoft's mandate is discreet rather than secret. In January, the company tried to shorten its support lifecycle for Intel Skylake PCs running Windows 7 and 8, a policy the company subsequently abandoned after much outcry. But Microsoft’s statements have also consistently included a critical caveat: The latest generations of silicon—specifically Intel’s Kaby Lake chip, Qualcomm’s 8996, and AMD’s Bristol Ridge silicon—will all require Windows 10. “As new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support,” a Microsoft spokeswoman replied, when asked to confirm that that position was still in place. The goal appears to be to move forward with new features, even if it means leaving some users behind. “This enables us to focus on deep integration between Windows and the silicon, while maintaining maximum reliability and compatibility with previous generations of platform and silicon.” Why this matters: Microsoft's push forward, however rational from a technology standpoint, robs PC enthusiasts of their choice of operating systems—a freedom this particular sector of the community has loudly defended in the past. This could have broader implications for the PC market, too: It could be the deciding factor that finally brings about the abandonment of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. (Linux is an option, too, and nothing is precluding Apple from buying the chips for Macs, either.) Gordon Mah Ung Intel’s 7th gen Kaby Lake is built on a similar 14nm process as the previous Skylake CPUs. But a change in Microsoft’s support policy means that it will be only be officially supported by Windows 10. What the mandate means for PC users AMD and Intel, for their part, appear to have had little choice in Microsoft’s decision essentially to limit the customers they can sell to. “We are committed to working with Microsoft and our ecosystem partners to help ensure a smooth transition given these changes to Microsoft’s Windows support policy,” an Intel spokesman said. "No, Intel will not be updating Win 7/8 drivers for 7th Gen Intel Core per Microsoft’s support policy change," he added in an email on Tuesday. An AMD representative was equally neutral. “AMD’s processor roadmap is fully aligned with Microsoft’s software strategy,” AMD chief technical officer Mark Papermaster said, via a company spokeswoman. AMD’s Bristol Ridge chip, the first to be tied to Windows 10, launched in June as its seventh-generation APU. AMD’s first member of its new Zen microprocessor family, dubbed Summit Ridge, will appear in high-end desktop PCs early next year. Neither will be officially supported by the older operating systems. Here's the obvious question: What would happen if a naïve or not-so-naïve user attempted to run Windows 7 or Windows 8 on a Kaby Lake or Zen system? Without actual chips to test, the answer is unknown. One source privately guessed that the processor would boot, though without driver support and security updates the experience would be “a bit glitchy.” Without specific support for a chip’s features—such as the dedicated video processing logic within Kaby Lake, for example—certain apps, if not the OS itself, might crash, another said. Gordon Mah Ung AMD’s Summit Ridge SoC (left), running at 3GHz, can run a Blender render just as fast as a Core i7-6900K (right) also running at 3GHz. But only the Core i7 can run Windows 7. However, processor analyst Dean McCarron of Mercury Research didn’t think running Kaby Lake would necessarily generate many problems, as there’s a long history of instruction set compatibility. “My expectation is...that all the older code will run on it fine,” he said. “Likely...there’d be third party [driver] support that would allow older OSes to run,.inf files, for example. And Intel’s going to make those.” (Editor's Note: Intel said Tuesday that it will not be updating its Windows 7/8 drivers for Kaby Lake, as noted above.) It’s also conceivable that enthusiasts could craft “black box” or modified drivers to help the latest chips run on the older operating systems. But in reality, the scope of the task would require detailed documentation as well as sophisticated testing resources, both of which seem infeasible. What might be an acceptable risk for a consumer, however, might not fly for a business where uptime and total cost of ownership are managed carefully. It’s here, McCarron said, that the transition to Windows 10 will have the most impact. “It’ll turn into [a situation where] ‘if it breaks, it’s not our problem,'’’ he said. “Which is why it’s going to be such a problem for large, multi-thousand-seat deployments” who depend on external support contracts, he said. What’s more likely, McCarron suggested, is that PC makers and customers will commit to buying and stockpiling Skylake components and systems as a hedge against Microsoft’s support gambit. In this way, end customers will know their devices will be supported, he said. Mark Hachman The dialog box that Microsoft presented to users during the upgrade to Windows 10, before its Anniversary Update. Microsoft’s history of pushing users to Windows 10 Microsoft has laid out its rationale for encouraging users to adopt Windows 10: In short, it’s a more manageable, secure operating system with better collaboration across users and devices, the company claims. Nevertheless, a substantial chunk of users can’t see past Microsoft’s attempts to force Windows 10 upon them. Of late, the carrots Microsoft has used to entice Windows 10 adoption—the Insider program, free upgrades from older operating systems, and synergy with Windows phones, the Xbox One, and even iOS and Android phones—have been largely ignored. Instead, Microsoft has come under fire for its ongoing program of forced upgrades, locking down Cortanato exclusively use Bing,and what some users see as a concerted attempt to mine personal data for advertising purposes. We don't know whether terminating support for older operating systems on Kaby Lake and Zen actually means they won’t work. What seems more certain is that Microsoft’s latest strategy will be seen as just another “stick” wielded to force customers to upgrade to Windows 10. Updated at 10:03 AM with additional details about Intel's Kaby Lake drivers. Clarification: Microsoft's support strategy applies to the use of the chips within Windows PCs, not Linux or Apple Macs.YEAR: 1994 \| LENGTH: 1 part (55 minutes) DESCRIPTION: NOVA: Secret Of The Wild Child: Behavioral scientists dream of discovering such a patient as “Genie,” the wild child of Los Angeles. Found in 1970, the 13-year-old girl was raised in complete isolation, producing a case of severe social retardation. Genie was kept in a room, tied to a potty chair for most of her life. She never learned to talk and still wore diapers.When social workers uncovered her, they discovered a rare opportunity to explore the human capacity for language. Could she learn to communicate at such a late stage and would she be able to function normally? Genie became a favorite among social workers who were captivated by her innocence and complete lack of pretense. Nova: Secret of the Wild Child accompanies doctors and analysts as they begin the long process of teaching what it means to be human. – sourceI’m not a pollyanna. Ted Cruz is in a tough fight for the nomination. If he loses on Tuesday in Indiana I think the wind goes out of his campaign and Trump goes to the convention with 1,237 delegates and the momentum necessary to stop any attempt to challenge the credentials of his delegates and, ultimately, ultimately he takes the nomination. The polls have been so wild and erratic this primary season that only an imbecile would rely upon them for even a hint at the direction of the race, much less the actual outcome. We will know Tuesday night whether or not Cruz is able to credibly continue a campaign. The media knows this. They are also heavily invested in the Trump candidacy for a couple of reasons. First, they have donated some two BILLION dollars of free media because Trump is a revenue center for news organizations. Some outlets, like FoxNews, should name their building in his honor. Second, they don’t think Trump can win the White House — their preferred outcome — but if he does they know it will be business as usual in Washington because Trump has made a career off crony capitalism and using the power of government to make money. Hence today’s New York Time headline Donald Trump Doesn’t Need Indiana Anymore. The main reason is Mr. Trump’s success on Tuesday among Pennsylvania’s 54 unpledged delegates. Even though none of them are officially bound to a candidate, 31 of the 54 spots went to delegates preferred by Mr. Trump. And before the election, others had said they would vote for the winner of their district (Mr. Trump won all of the state’s districts). My colleague Jeremy W. Peters reported that Mr. Trump “appeared to have won about 40 of Pennsylvania’s 54 unbound delegates.” This is simply an attempt to spook voters and Cruz supporters and Cruz loyalist who are delegates into thinking the fight is over. The fact is that we really don’t know the loyalties of the Pennsylvania delegates. In the current environment where Trump supporters, incited by the activities of Trump henchman Roger Stone, are sending death threats to delegates who do not support Donald Trump the odds of anyone saying they oppose Trump goes down by a considerable amount. They may vote for Trump. They may not. There is certainly zero reason to raise their head and live through a couple of months of fear and intimidation. And very, very few people know how these people feel because the price of intimating you will not vote for Trump is simply too high. Given the organizational capacity of the Trump campaign, we aren’t even sure that the 31 delegates he preferred will vote for him. This is the campaign, you will recall, that circulated a list of Trump-preferred candidates at the Colorado convention that contained mostly Ted Cruz loyalists. They could be right. They could equally be wrong. And writing this story as if they had actual facts is dishonest. But honest reporting, or even dishonest reporting, is not what is going on here. Think of this as a marketing piece. A trailer, if you will, for the rest of the GOP primary season. For the media to keep Trump’s campaign alive for reasons of revenue generation, they have to create the illusion of a horse race that does not hinge on Indiana. Because if it does hinge on Indiana and Cruz wins that state, then there is no more drama to be had until the GOP convention because nothing that happens until then changes the status quo. With the specious story about Pennsylvania, the story and horse race lives because then Trump still has to win California and the media can chronicle that race: Of course, he would prefer to win most of Indiana’s delegates. Without them, he would probably face some drama on the first ballot at the Republican convention. The Pennsylvania unbound delegates remain free agents, allowed to vote for whomever they want, and the same is true for other unbound delegates that Mr. Trump would try to woo. A win in Indiana would allow him to win with even a narrow victory in California. But the old analysis, based solely on pledged delegates, no longer holds: Winning in Indiana doesn’t seem necessary for him to win the nomination. What they are saying, contra their headline, is that to sew up the nomination, yes, Trump very much needs to win Indiana. But they have created a narrative where if he does win in Indiana and goes on to win California, then we are right back to the horse race and the speculation about Pennsylvania’s delegates can be rolled out again for more horse race. Because, as the reporter well knows, we simply do not know what these unbound delegates will do. This is concern trolling for the sake of revenue generation. It is not news or news analysis.In this tutorial, we will walk through using Filestack’s API to upload avatars for applications. Filestack’s team strive provide more and more sophisticated algorithms to manipulate images: This is not just for filtering or image transformations but rather to provide a complete API for users to ease app development. This is actually not the first time we are working with face recognition, in the past I described the steps for blurring the face of the characters for a Guess game app. Obviously, face recognition opens the door to loads of scenarios where it comes handy so today I am going to show you how to create profile avatars for your next website! The app As usual the app consists of few pages where we first upload and customize the avatar, and then see the result in a simple list: /index.html /add.html To make the app I used Node.js and JQuery + Google MDL, you can always clone/fork it on my github! Create the Avatar So how do we create avatars or profile pictures? Just follow these three steps: Upload the picture. Crop the face. Round the corners. All of these steps can be achieved with few lines of code! To illustrate them let’s start from the second one, then the third and finally we will go back to the first. Crop the face As first step we need to extract the face from a picture. We can do so through the process API of Filestack which allows for image manipulation by sending parameters in the URL along with the file handle. If you take a look at the documentation, one of the image transformations is facial detection which is exactly what we need. That page describes various situations and is rich of example but for our case let’s focus on the crop_faces process: The documentation provides us the syntax in case we set the API key locally in the project or we prefer to send it in the process request. In my case I usually set the key locally so the process URL will be shorter. Here it is the basic syntax: https://process.filestackapi.com/crop_faces=[options]/Filestack_FileLink_Handle We can set a few options listed in the documentation, for the tutorial I decided to set mode:fill as it prioritizes width and height parameters over displaying the whole face object. NB: Filestack_FileLink_Handle is nothing but the file handle we receive back from file upload attached to the CDN link. For instance, consider the following picture: Gandalf would like to crop his face in the picture… Let’s help him. Once we upload the picture through pick function we receive back a Blob object with the CDN link (as well as other pieces of information). https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/06Ki2xTu2hb83EH8DymA Let’s now crop the file handle 06Ki2xTu2hb83EH8DymA and build the new URL: https://process.filestackapi.com/crop_faces=mode:fill/48lbThHGTEOzSCAodc and the result is the following: Exactly what the grey pilgrim was looking for! Round the corner Actually our job is terminated already but sometimes we may prefer rounded corner, not just a boring squared avatar. Well, we can easily achieve this as well. In the border and effects section of the image transformations it is well explained how to do it: https://process.filestackapi.com/rounded_corners=[options]/Filestack_FileLink_Handle Luckily we can concatenate it to the previous transformation crop_faces this way: https://process.filestackapi.com/crop_faces=[options]/rounded_corners=[options]/Filestack_FileLink_Handle There are a few options available but I only use rounded_corners=radius:1 to 10000. Let’s see how the avatar of Gandalf looks like with rounder_courners=radius:10000: In the app I added a slider to allow user to choose in the range of 1 to 10000 as the choice is subjective. Upload the picture The picture upload is something very trivial as I actually cover it in every tutorial. We simply run the pick function with a few parameters in the options object: filepicker.pick ( { mimetype: 'image/*', container:'modal', services: ['COMPUTER', 'FACEBOOK', 'INSTAGRAM', 'URL', 'IMGUR', 'PICASA'], openTo: 'COMPUTER' }, function (Blob) { console.log(JSON.stringify(Blob)); handler = Blob.url.substring(Blob.url.lastIndexOf('/') + 1); $('#profile-pic').attr('src', `https://process.filestackapi.com/crop_faces=mode:fill/rounded_corners=radius:${$('.mdl-js-slider').val()}/${handler}`); }, function (FPError) { console.log(FPError.toString()); } ); The mimetype allows for pictures only. allows for pictures only. The upload interface is contained in a modal. The service to upload from are defined in the services array. Finally, the first choice is the user device. That’s basically all, we cut the handler from the Blob.url property and create the new URL to process the picture. That’s all for this tutorial, congratulations! Conclusions In this tutorial we used Filestack to avoid the hassle of cropping and round the corners of avatars. We used two of the numerous Filestack process APIs to helps us in the task. In addition, we learned the basics of using the process API and now you are ready to integrate it in all of your projects! Read More →Beavers have been making some big changes to the north end of Golden Gardens park. One of our readers, Chris Hellstern, sent us this photo of one of the trees that’s been chewed away by the busy critters. Hellstern writes that he’s seen several downed trees in the area, and that the transformation has been major. “Dozens of trees have been felled and the critter has built a large lodge just east of the path and pond near the railroad tracks,” Hellstern says. “It doesn’t look the same anymore and will probably continue to change.” Last year, the beavers formed a dam, which raised the level of the pond water significantly. The Golden Gardens park staff tried to remove some of the sticks and sediment that made up the dam, because the water was rising to the level of the bridge between the ponds. “Generally what happens is beavers win,” says Dewey Potter with Seattle Parks and Recreation, adding that they try not to interfere too much with the beavers’ habitat."The case comes in, or anyway it comes in to us, on a frozen dawn in the kind of closed-down January that makes you think the sun’s never going to drag itself back above the horizon. Me and my partner are finishing up another night shift, the kind I used to think wouldn’t exist on the Murder Squad: a massive scoop of boring and a bigger one of stupid, topped off with an avalanche of paperwork.” Like that voice? Want to know what else that voice has to say? I did, too, which is why I plowed through The Trespasser by Tana French in a matter of days. French’s latest entry in her "Dublin Murder Squad" series once again dials up the psychological tension while drenching each character in moral ambiguity. Heroes and villains are nonexistent in her novels; everyone is guilty of something. Often, many things. One of the Murder Squad detectives, Antoinette Conway, recounts the investigation of the death of a young, attractive woman. At first glance, this woman, Aislinn Murray, seems to have been left for dead by her nervous boyfriend, a timid man who owns a cash-strapped bookstore and professes his innocence despite evidence to the contrary. Conway and her partner, Steve Moran, figure they wound up with the case because it’s a straightforward domestic spat requiring nothing more than rote questioning and an arrest. How that straightforward assignment twists into an event that scars the entire Murder Squad is what French spends the rest of the novel revealing, parceling out details in just the right amounts. French’s mysteries are really character studies and they’re anything but cozy. (Miss Marple would hyperventilate within five minutes of meeting Antoinette Conway.) The author digs and peels and scrapes at raw wounds, finding the vulnerabilities of almost everyone before her tale is told. Though her books can be enjoyed as stand-alones, they reward the constant reader. Moran, for example, narrated French’s previous book, “The Secret Place.” In that novel, a harrowing dive into adolescent angst and cruelty, Moran helped Conway with a cold-case investigation and introduced her as a detective without friends or allies in the Murder Squad. Conway, who isn’t just a woman in the clubby detectives’ world but also a minority, reinforces that observation – and then some. Her co-workers have, among other unwanted surprises, wiped her computer clean, spread rumors about her drinking habits and sex life and sabotaged some of her investigations. All of this exacerbates Conway’s considerable bitterness and wounded psyche, testing the resilience of Moran, who tries to maintain diplomacy on all sides. Conway stomps through life looking for slights, even in the few places where none exist, and never comes away disappointed. To wit: “A clot of tourists wander past with their heads tipped back and their jaws hanging, staring up at the Castle buildings. One of them points a camera in my direction, but I throw him a stare that almost melts his lens, and he backs off.” Welcome to Dublin and enjoy your visit. Rivalries and subterfuge smother Conway and Moran in their investigation as relentlessly as the dreary Dublin winter siphons every last drop of optimism. There is no black and white, just an endless gray enveloping everyone and everything. Is the popular veteran detective, a smooth-talker named Breslin, lending backup support to help Conway and Moran or is he setting them up to fail? And why does the
held me and told me that everything would be alright. I believed him. Of course. It was Bernie. my Bernie. My only love. The father to my girls. He loved me. I could see it in the relief and the happiness in his face. The love in his eyes and the touches on my skin. We would be married. Nothing mattered other than this. We made love that night like it was the first time, and when it was over, we settled into bed like he’d never left. This was how it was meant to be. In the morning, I asked him to tell me everything. The girls were at home and I had taken a day off work. He sat me down for the story. “Well, when I moved back home, my parents wanted me to take a bride. But I couldn’t. I could stay there and stall until I could figure out what to do, but I couldn’t do that. I dated. I went to parties. I talked to women, for their sakes. But I did nothing else. No commitment. Yes, not a kiss or a touch or anything. I have no way to prove that. You’ll have to trust me, darling love. But after a few years, they grew tired. They were old, I needed to marry. To carry on the legacy. But I already had my legacy. I had my heirs, but they were here where I knew I belonged. Where my heart belonged. I had them wathced. And you too. My heart soared and broke with every picture. But that was not enough. They had a bride for me. They informed me a week before a wedding that they had organised behind my back. A woman named Alison Kenney. She was a truely vile woman, really. And I knew she only wanted my money. She had moved in to my house. The wedding was nearly there and I was giving up. But I found something. A positive pregnancy test in the garbage. I had not topuched her, I swear. The child could not be mine. I confronted her, and dragged her before my parents. I am not proud of my actions, but I did it. She confessed. They said it did not matter. I was lost. But then something amazing happened. My sister came to me…and she sacrificed herself for me. She was going to leave, but she stayed so I could leave. There must always be a Roby in Hidden Springs. And she was going to be that Roby.” I was silent. “Jenna, she knew that I would never be happy there without you. I love you, my darling. I am never leaving you again.” I grabbed him and kissed him. I didn’t need to hear anything else. He would be my husband. I loved him *** The girls were growi9ng older by the second and I was so proud. Bernie settled in. They loved him. He even got them a puppy. And helped Darcy with her university preperations. Soon it was the bachelorette party And Bree helped her imaginary friend become real. Then, it was time for my wedding, at last. We couldn’t afford anywhere other than home, but that was all we needed. I might be older, but my life could start properly at last. The next few days were a blur. It was the girls birthdays Darcy grew into a lovely young woman. But unfortunatly, Bree wanted to flee the nest as soon as possible with Flynn…I hear wedding bells perhaps. Darcy was finding it hard to adjust But they would always be sisters, no matter where they were. My life has started again, now it’s time for Darcy to start hers. I’m going to leave my story for now…it’s time to let go of the fairytale, and start living. No more drama twists or cliffhangers, no more waiting…although a kiss in the rain would be a movie scene I’d be happy to live. No more drama. Hopefully. AdvertisementsCraig Rivet Defense - BUF GOALS: 1 \| ASST: 0 \| PTS: 1 SOG: 1 \| +/-: 0 Five days into hockey's postseason, what more can we ask from the 2010 Stanley Cup Playoffs?Close games? We've had them.Each of the first eight games in this year's playoffs was decided by one goal. The ninth was a one-goal affair until New Jersey scored an empty-netter in the last minute of a game against Philadelphia. Amazingly, every game but one through Saturday was a one-goal affair (excluding empty-netters). Sunday brought two more, a couple of doozies. First, the Flyers beat New Jersey and Martin Brodeur in overtime in Philadelphia on a Dan Carcillo winner. Then No. 8 Colorado beat the top-seeded Western Conference San Jose Sharks 1-0 in overtime in a game that actually ended on Monday on the East Coast.Want more Close Encounters of the NHL Playoffs Kind? There have already been seven OT games in the first five days. The Sharks and Avs have played two OT games already and avoided overtime in the first game only because Colorado scored with less a minute left in regulation. Sunday's OT winner, rapped in less than a minute, was credited to Ryan O'Reilly, who is 19 and this time last year was still waiting to be drafted in the second round of the NHL Entry Draft.With Colorado's win, the No. 7 and No. 8 seeds in the Stanley Cup Playoffs are 8-4 -- and half of those loses came in OT. This is the first time in the 16-team playoff format that all eight series have started with each team registering a win by Game 2 of a series. Chicago assured that record Sunday night with a 2-0 win in Game 2, 48 hours after seventh-seeded Nashville hung a 4-1 loss on the Blackhawks at home."Paper doesn't mean anything. You have to go out and play the games," Pittsburgh defenseman Mark Eaton said after the defending Stanley Cup champs lost their 2010 Stanley Cup opener to the lower-seeded Ottawa Senators While unsung heroes abound (see Carcillo and O'Reilly scoring in OT on Sunday), the game's biggest stars are not missing the chance to shine on the game's biggest stage. This is the Olympics and then some. A lot some. Sidney Crosby made what has to be considered the early candidate for play of the playoffs with his assist on the winning goal by Kris Letang in Game 2 against Ottawa. Crosby danced back and forth behind the net, leaving Jason Spezza flailing in his wake, then was knocked to his knees but still deposited a pass right on Letang's stick for a one-timer that broke a 1-1 tie."I was just trying to get some space," Crosby said to humbly explain away his brilliance. "(Spezza) was on me. It was hard to get space. He was tracking me pretty good. I finally got a step and tried to get to the net but they had a ton guys there and we had some guys there too. I just tried to make the play to ‘Tanger.'"Crosby leads the playoffs with four assists and is tied with Washington's Nicklas Backstrom and Montreal's Andrei Kostitsyn for the points' lead.Backstrom had a hat trick -- finished dramatically in OT -- in the most memorable game so far, an incredible 6-5 overtime win by the Caps over Montreal in Game 2 at the Verizon Center. Backstrom and Alex Ovechkin each had four-point nights in a nationally televised game that saw Washington erase deficits of 2-0, 4-1 and 5-4 before winning in OT and sending the series to Montreal all even at one win apiece. Montreal's Andrei Kostitsyn also had a hat trick in that game.In fact, there is no shortage of scoring, or comebacks, in these playoffs.Role players are wreaking their share of havoc. Consider uber-grinder Carcillo in a supremely noisy Philadelphia overtime win. Or Buffalo's Craig Rivet, a defenseman who had gone more than 100 regular-season games without a goal, notching the winner in Game 1 against Boston Professional pest Jarkko Ruutu was the difference for Ottawa in Game 1 against the Penguins. Maybe you would like to talk about Colorado's Craig Anderson, who got the chance to start this year and has outdueled Evgeni Nabokov so far?In 12 of the first 15 playoff games, the winning team trailed at some point during the game before coming back to win. No longer can teams sit on leads late in the game.Simply, there are too many high-octane offenses in the League today. Eight of the 16 playoff teams have already scored at least five goals in a game.Not surprisingly, fans are packing arenas and viewers are watching in record numbers. The White-Out crowd that packed Jobing.com Arena in Phoenix on Opening Night -- which was Wednesday; was that really only five nights ago -- was nothing short of Loud.Good stories are everywhere. In Canada and the United States, in the East and out West, Veterans and rookies; no one is immune, it seems.Especially the rookies.Seven first-year players have already scored goals, including three of the game's youngest defensemen – Ottawa's Erik Karlsson, Buffalo's Tyler Myers and Washington's John Carlson Karlsson scored in Ottawa's Game 1 upset of Pittsburgh, but Carlson had scored an even bigger goal by beating Jaroslav Halak with just 81 seconds left in regulation on Saturday night to force OT."There's just something about (Carlson)," Washington coach Bruce Boudreau said. "Glory follows him."The best part? We're just getting started on the glory part.This article is over 4 years old App developed by sixth-formers at Canterbury Academy allows players to kick immigrants off white cliffs of Dover A phone app made by school students and featuring a character called Nicholas Fromage kicking immigrants off the white cliffs of Dover has been criticised by the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage. Farage claimed the game, developed by a group of sixth-formers from Canterbury Academy, was “risible and pathetic” and that it had “crossed the line”, despite saying he welcomed the opinions of young people. But the school’s principal, Phil Karnavas, has defended the app, which he says is a bit of fun to celebrate “brilliant, traditional British satire”. He said: “Never has a British political party offered themselves so easily to satire. “It’s a bit rich, bearing in mind some of the things the members of Ukip have said, for their leader to say they have crossed the line. “Mr Farage can’t have it both ways. He cannot expect young people to engage in politics and then criticise what they say when they do.” The Android app, called Ukik, has been developed by 18-year-olds John Brown, James Dupreez, Fraser Richardson, John Hutchinson and Joe Brown, who work under the name FonGames. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigel Farage described the app as ‘risible and pathetic’. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA A letter from Nicholas Fromage, who claims to represent “fruitcakes and loonies everywhere”, to Great Britain on the app’s description page says: “Do foreign voices on trains scare you? Can you handle a European living next door? “Does your wife refuse to clean behind the fridge? Do you think women are too stupid to win a game of chess or have a top-level job? “If you are feeling irrational and want to live in a rightwing hellhole then vote Ukik this May. “These people might improve our economy, contribute to our culture and make Britain great but they are different to us so let’s kick them all out.” FonGames has also published a disclaimer which explains that the game is “based upon controversial news stories for the purposes of entertainment and to encourage political discussion amongst young people”. It continues: “The purpose of this game is to highlight the importance of a diverse culture for our great nation as well as make a mockery of extremist views.” But Farage told Kent Online that while he accepted criticism as a public figure, there were elements of the game, such as the use of the term “racism”, which he found unacceptable. He said: “Those elements are risible and in many ways pathetic. I think I’m quite well known for having a sense of humour. “I’m a public figure and of course people are going to have views. But elements of this game appear to cross the line.”Business news lately has been the same story over and over: The stock market is volatile, politicians hate each other, there aren't enough jobs, and Europe is a mess. Rinse. Repeat. Day after day. But some really interesting developments have taken place recently, many of which haven't received enough attention. Here are three. 1. For the first time since 1949, the U.S. is a net fuel exporter America has been marred with a poor energy policy for decades. The phrase "dependence on foreign oil" is ubiquitous. And make no mistake: We still rely heavily on foreign nations to feed our energy needs. But measured one way -- imports and exports of petroleum products like gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and propane -- the U.S. is actually now a net exporter for the first time in generations: Source: Energy Information Agency. In 2005, the U.S. imported 840 million more barrels of petroleum products than it exported. In 2011, it exported 27 million barrels more than it imported. This is an incredible turnaround that goes against so much conventional wisdom, yet it's received scant media attention. What's behind the shift? Several things. For one, U.S. demand has declined for some petroleum products. U.S. drivers drove about 57 billion fewer miles in 2010 than in 2008, and average gas mileage rose to 23.8 miles per gallon in 2009 from 21.9 MPG in 2000, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Ethanol production is also surging, with capacity rising from 3.1 billion gallons a year in 2004 to 13.5 billion gallons a year in 2011. At the same time, foreign demand for fuel products is rising. Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Singapore are all now major net importers of U.S. fuel products. According to The Wall Street Journal, Singapore's net imports of U.S. fuel products have quadrupled since 2006, while Mexico's have risen by two-thirds. This is far from saying the U.S. is energy independent. We still import roughly half the crude oil we use -- a reliance of about 9 million barrels a day. But even that figure has declined sharply in recent years. In 2005, we imported 60.3% of our oil. In 2010, that figure was 49.2%, and will likely drop further as domestic production in regions like North Dakota continue to surge. 2. Growth in health-care spending is near a record low Health-care costs have ravaged household, business, and government budgets for decades. Along with education, health care is one area that has truly experienced extreme inflation over the last several decades. But the growth rate of health-care spending is actually falling at a shocking rate. According to health policy journal Health Affairs, "The rates of health spending growth in 2009 and 2010 marked the two slowest rates in the 51-year history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts." Here's how this looks over the last half-century: Source: National Health Statistics Group. Health-care spending is still growing, of course. It's just growing at a much slower rate than before. And note that this is health-care spending, not health-care prices. In many cases, health-care prices are rising rapidly (for both treatments and insurance premiums), but overall spending is growing at a slower rate because we're using less of it -- a fact some chalk up to the financial strains of the recession. One example: According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 69% of businesses offered workers health insurance in 2000. By 2009, only 60% did. One thing this chart gets me thinking about is whether we're overly worried about the rising cost of future health-care spending when forecasting the long-term federal budget. The variable that causes the budget deficit to balloon in coming decades is an assumption that health-care costs will rise precipitously. And maybe they will. But the sharp decline in health-care spending growth in recent years shows that health care is just like any other service: If it gets too expensive, we spend less on it. It's interesting to ask what happens if growth in health-care spending comes in much lower than we now expect. A huge portion of future budget deficits could be wiped away. And given the track record of budget forecasts, it's quite likely that what's expected today won't happen tomorrow. (Of course, we could also ask what happens if growth is higher than currently anticipated.) 3. The biggest contributor to the budget deficit over the last decade wasn't stimulus spending, the Bush tax cuts, or two wars. It was tax evasion. Last week, the IRS released a report on the estimated "tax gap," or money that people legally owe in taxes but evade paying. For 2006 (the most recent year calculated), the gap stood at $450 billion, an increase from 2001's estimated tax gap of $345 billion. Keep in mind, this isn't money people legally avoid paying by using tax shelters like an IRA or 401(k). This is tax revenue illegally unpaid thanks to things like offshore bank accounts and unreported cash receipts from businesses. The IRS only issues these reports every five years, and each report details just one year. But let's use some assumptions. Assume 2001's tax gap of $345 billion was reflective of the 2001-2005 period, and 2006's $450 billion gap was reflective of the 2006-2011 period. In total, that's $4.4 trillion in lost tax revenue over the last decade. Now, this is a rough estimate at best. I used the IRS' old data last year to estimate the decade's loss from tax evasion at $3 trillion. The real figure, which is almost impossible to know, is probably somewhere between $3 trillion and $5 trillion. Either way, what I wrote last year holds true: Put that money in perspective. Tax evasion in the last decade cost an amount roughly equivalent to the Bush tax cuts, the Obama stimulus, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan... combined. It's amazing more people aren't outraged about this stuff. Rather, they likely would be if they knew about it. As long as there are taxes, there will be tax evasion. It will never be eradicated. The question is whether the tax gap can reasonably be reduced from current levels. If it can, we're not trying hard enough. As David Cay Johnston recently wrote in Reuters, the IRS' budget is being cut by 5%, which will likely increase tax evasion through fewer enforcement officers. He explained: IRS data show that auditors assigned to the 14,000 or so largest corporations found $9,354 of additional tax owed for every hour spent testing tax returns in the 2009 fiscal year. The highest-paid IRS auditors make $71 an hour. Based on a 2,080-hour work year, that works out to around $19 million of lost revenue annually for every senior corporate auditor position cut from the payroll. It's counterintuitive, but cutting the IRS' funding can be one of the fastest ways to increase the budget deficit. What do you think about these numbers? Share your thoughts in the comments section below. And if you haven't already, check out my e-book, Everyone Believes It, Most Will Be Wrong, on Amazon.com for your Kindle or iPad. Check back every Tuesday and Friday for Morgan Housel's columns on finance and economics.A Kennesaw State University student recorded a short video of his unpleasant interactions with a woman named Abby Dawson, who may be the most unhelpful advisor in history. The student, Kevin Bruce, was waiting in the advising offices of the Georgia university when Dawson accused him of harassing her and ordered him to leave. Bruce replied that he only wished to speak with an advisor, and wasn’t harassing anyone. She responded: “Sitting here until somebody is available is harassing. Would you like for me to call campus security?” We only see 30 seconds of the encounter, and it’s of course possible that Bruce did something off-camera that made Dawson’s accusation of harassment more credible. But the evidence of Bruce’s prior email correspondence with her certainly suggest that she’s an irritable and unhelpful administrator. Bruce later clarified on Twitter that he had hoped to avoid her by going to the office to speak with a different advisor since “he found her unhelpful in the past,” according to The Huffington Post. Bruce isn’t the first student to complain about this particular administrator: One student, Amber Wann, said she had difficulty getting into a couple classes she needed and was worried she would fall behind. When she asked if there was a way to avoid the waitlist, Dawson replied in an email, "I will not continue to answer the same question." Wann tweeted a screenshot of the exchange… Another student, Austin Smith, tweeted about an encounter he had with Dawson during the advisory office's posted open hours. Smith said that he arrived about halfway through the time-slot, but Dawson told him they had finished early and were moving on to a workshop. The surge in tuition prices over the last two decades is in no small part due to the fact that American universities have created vast armies of administrators to fill out purported “student services” and advising positions. Given how much students are paying for these extravagances, one would expect people like Dawson to be a little more customer-focused in the course of their jobs. Also, is the definition of harassment now just “anything that bothers anyone” at university campuses?Last year, veteran developer Richard Garriott -- aka Lord British -- founded his latest developer, Portalarium, to create social games. Like many long-term PC developers, he's come to see the social space as the natural evolution of the platform, and has chosen to embrace it. Recently, the company secured $3.6 million in funding. In this extensive interview, Garriott speaks about his plans to bring an "Ultima Online-like experience" to social gamers, and how he sees a need for this to be platform-agnostic and accessible as well as deep and meaningful -- and how he thinks social gaming audiences have been trained up by Zynga to be ready for deeper, richer experiences. "Even the kinds of games that you might think I would make, I don't generally play, because they're often just too much of a hassle to get into them," says Garriott, of the current crop of MMOs. Instead, he says, he spends his gaming time with the iPhone, and believes that the true evolution of games will be one that allows mainstream gamers to touch the depth of design that he and his compatriots are capable of. What's the state of Portalarium now? Richard Garriott: So we started the company just over a year ago. It's what I'll call my "usual suspects", it's you know... Got my friend David [Swofford] who you just saw, who's our PR/marketing guy, Fred Schmidt who's kind of our business side, and Dallas Snell is running product development. And a bunch of the developers, all of us who have worked together at Origin and NCsoft -- or Destination Games, which became NCsoft -- Origin, EA, Destination Games, NCsoft, now Portalarium. You know, our first year has been largely building infrastructure and technology. Our belief about social media games is that not only do we believe we can create great games, but delivered through free-to-play, pay as you go, and, you know, click on an email link to start playing, which we think is the kind of critical aspect of the new delivery. But also we believe that... one of the key aspects of what is not being done well now that we believe can and should be done much better -- and hopefully we'll lead the charge in this area -- is that if you look at most of the companies making casual or social games right now they... even if you're playing the same companies' games, you're largely siloed from each other. Now if you're playing one Ville-like game and I'm playing a different Ville-like game, we don't know about each other's activities during those games until after I log out and look at my posts on my wall and I go, "Oh, at the same that I was playing, my friend was playing this other game; kind of wish I knew that." And so we've created an infrastructure -- a standardized messaging system between all games -- so that while you're playing a game, I can get notifications of what you've done that I can either ignore, tell you congratulations or whatever else, or click on a link that lets me change games and jump right in and play right alongside you. So we believe that we're trying to deepen the connections between you and your friends across all the games that you play. Portalarium's Port Casino Poker And so that's what we've been building so far. We've shipped two very light games -- just a couple of casino games that we used to test that backbone. We're just about to release our first truly original game, which is still a very light game in a sense of social media type game, but not a farming game, not a café operation game, not a pet management game, but a truly original game; it's still quite light by what people might expect from Lord British standards. That game is called Ultimate Collector. And then we're going to roll into what I call the next, you know, big Lord British virtual world game (Lord British’s New Britannia). Can you tell us a little more about these? RG: Ultimate Collector, set in a contemporary world/theme, will be out sometime this summer and is a unique social media style game which will have some of the same conventions (asynchronous play, sharing accomplishments and information with your friends, etc.) that are part of successful social media games today. I will soon begin development of my new Lord British-style RPG for social media and mobile platforms in the very near future. Lord British's New Britannia, which was mentioned in our SXSW Accelerator presentation in March, is a working title for that product. It sounds like you're doing this outside the confines of Facebook a bit? RG: Well, we're what I call platform agnostic. So far we deliver on Facebook, Hi5, we will do independent web, but it's not out yet. We have the iPad version already in test about to release, iPhone version's underway. So we're going to deliver on all of these kinds of platforms.Islamic Ethics Women’s freedom is the primary slogan shouted in the west. Freedom has a lot of meanings: freedom from captivity, freedom from ethics – because ethical rules are a kind of restriction – freedom from unequal wages for men and women, freedom from regulations which force women to remain devoted to their husband. Freedom can include all of these meanings. Ethics in western liberalism Because the truth and ethical values are relative in western liberalism, freedom is not restricted. Why? Because as a person who believes in a set of ethical values, you do not have the right to criticize somebody who attacks the values you believe in. This is because he may not believe in your set of values. Therefore, there are no limits to freedom – that is to say, there are no spiritual and ethical limits. Logically speaking, freedom is not limited. Why? Because the truth is not fixed and absolute. Because they believe the truth and ethical values are relative. The materialist western world adopts a certain position on beliefs and ethics. But when it comes to power and wealth – which are examples of tangible material interests – it adopts a different position. Whenever the west feels that there is an opportunity to gain power and wealth or whenever it feels there is a rival, it enters the arena in a violent and prejudiced manner and does not show any kind of tolerance or leniency. But they do not have the same attitude when it comes to ethics and ideology. They are very lenient and tolerant in the case of ethical and ideological matters – at least, this is what they claim. That is to say, they do not care who believes in what. Of course in some cases one can see that they have a very prejudiced attitude to certain cultural matters. That is to say, whenever cultural matters are related to economic and political interests, expansionist policies and domination, you see that they enter the arena of culture in a strict, violent and prejudiced manner. But they are basically indifferent to cultural and ideological matters, and they do not adopt any positions. This is what is known as laicism: being impartial and refusing to adopt any positions on ethical and ideological matters. In the west ethical values do not impose any limits on freedom. For example, the gay movement in America is a widespread movement, and they are proud of this. They stage demonstrations. They publish their photos in magazines. They proudly announce that a certain businessman or political figure is a member of this group. Nobody feels ashamed and denies being gay. More importantly, some people who oppose this movement are severely criticized in certain newspapers. This means that ethical values do not impose any limits on freedom. A strange monopolistic attitude dominates the spirits and ethics of Europeans. When you take a look at the past few centuries, you see that Europeans have fought the most violent wars. The worst and the most violent wars have always taken place between European countries – for example, between Germany and France.Daniela Vargas listens at a news conference in Jackson, Miss., on Wednesday. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP) About two weeks ago, Daniela Vargas hid in the bedroom closet of her Jackson, Miss., home after watching immigration officials handcuff her father in the family’s driveway. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained the 22-year-old’s father and brother, Argentines who were living in the country illegally, amid the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation effort that has riled immigrant communities across the country. Although Vargas was in the process of renewing her status as a “dreamer” to remain in the United States legally — a status she had allowed to lapse — she feared that immigration officials would come after her next. But those fears did not stop Vargas from speaking out at a news conference Wednesday at Jackson City Hall, alongside immigrant rights advocates. “Today my father and brother await deportation, she said, “while I continue to fight this battle as a dreamer to help contribute to this country which I feel that is very much my country.” After leaving the news conference with her friend, two law enforcement cars pulled her over. ICE agents reportedly opened the car door, telling Vargas, “you know who we are and you know why we’re here,” her friend, Jordan Sanders, told Univision. Then, they handcuffed her and took her into custody. The Trump administration on Feb. 21 issued guidelines strengthening enforcement against illegal immigration but insisted that it isn't seeking "mass deportations." (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post) Vargas’s detention shocked and angered immigrant rights advocates, who feared ICE officials may have retaliated against her for speaking publicly about her case. It also heightened existing anxieties that “dreamers” registered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program created by President Barack Obama could now be targeted for deportation. [Advocates warn ‘dreamers’ to lie low as Trump ramps up deportation plans] She had been granted the two-year protection under DACA twice before, in December 2012 and in November 2014, Abigail Peterson, one of her attorneys, told the Associated Press. But her DACA status had expired in November 2016, and it was not until mid-February that she was able to come up with the $495 application fee to renew it. Vargas was 7 years old when she came to the United States from Cordoba, Argentina, with her father, mother and brother on a three-month visitor’s visa in 2001. Their visa expired, but the family stayed, establishing a life in Mississippi. Her mother eventually moved out of the state after her parents divorced, she told the Jackson Free Press. Peterson said she told ICE agents over the phone that Vargas had a pending DACA case. However, the agents responded that Vargas was a “visa overstay” and would be detained, the Clarion-Ledger reported. Her lawyers expect she will be detained in Louisiana, where they will try to get her released on her own recognizance, according to the Associated Press. A federal immigration judge will decide whether she is eligible for immigration relief. In a statement, an ICE spokesman confirmed that immigration officials took Vargas, “an unlawfully present Argentinian citizen,” into custody Wednesday “during a targeted immigration enforcement action” after the agency verified that her DACA status had lapsed. “ICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy,” the statement said. “ICE does not conduct sweeps or raids that target aliens indiscriminately.” The hashtag #freedany began to spread on social media Wednesday, and an immigrant rights group, United We Dream, encouraged immigrant youth to sign a petition to Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly demanding Vargas’s release. The group called out President Trump and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who have previously expressed sympathy to DACA immigrants. Trump called DACA an “unconstitutional executive amnesty” in August, but his words on the topic have been more ambiguous since taking office. At a news conference this month, Trump called the program “one of the most difficult subjects I have” and pledged to “show great heart” toward those enrolled in DACA, The Washington Post reported. [Immigration agents illegally detain Obama program ‘dreamer,’ lawsuit says] Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) tweeted that he had been in touch with the Department of Homeland Security to obtain more information about the case. “Disturbing that ICE may have followed her from an immigration news conference,” he added in the tweet. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), tweeted, “Talking publicly about fears of deportation is not a crime and should not get someone detained #ICEraids.” Angela Stuesse, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said she has known Vargas since she was 8 years old. While working through the Mississippi Poultry Workers Center in 2002, Stuesse met Vargas’s parents, who worked in poultry plants. “The fact that she was detained by ICE immediately following her participation in a media event looks an awful lot like retaliation, and it flies in the face of President Trump’s own directives to leave DACA recipients alone,” Stuesse told The Post. “I hope General Kelly will intervene to release Daniela and demonstrate to our nation that DACA remains a strong protection from deportation.” Stuesse also called Vargas a “bright, selfless young woman who spoke out today with the hope that by sharing her story she could help others.” Speaking alongside church leaders and lawyers at the news conference Wednesday — before her detention — Vargas said a path for citizenship is necessary for DACA recipients, “but also for the other 11 million undocumented people with dreams.” “I dream of being a university math professor but now I’m not so sure my dream will continue to develop,” she said, reading off note cards. [‘I can’t take that place.’ An Arizona family struggles with a mother’s deportation.] Vargas told the Jackson Free Press that she was recently studying at the University of Southern Mississippi, but had to take a semester off because she couldn’t keep up with the bills. As a DACA recipient, Vargas was not eligible for scholarships or federal student aid for college, so most of her father’s income went toward her tuition, she said. Now a manager at a small store, Vargas loves skateboarding, writing and playing the trumpet, her friend said in a statement from United We Dream. Before her detention, Vargas told the Jackson Free Press Wednesday that she had made contact with her father and brother, who are in immigration detention facilities in Louisiana. Initially, she did not know where they were being detained. On the morning they were taken into custody, Feb. 15, Vargas’s father had just given her a kiss goodbye before leaving for work, Vargas told the Jackson Free Press. He came back inside a few moments later, waking her with the words, “Dany, immigration is here.” “During that time, I couldn’t even breathe, honestly,” she told the Clarion-Ledger. “I just watched them handcuff my dad and take them. I was scared for my life. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I called my mom and I just let out a cry. I didn’t even get to see my brother leave.” She locked her door and hid in her bedroom closet for hours, until the agents knocked down her door, entering with a search warrant, guns raised. The authorities found a handgun the family kept for protection, she told the Clarion-Ledger. Under federal law, possession of a firearm by an undocumented person is a felony. It is unclear why ICE declined to arrest her on that day. But after the detention of her father and brother, she told the Clarion Ledger she was “terrified.” She did not let her fears show while she spoke to the reporters at the news conference Wednesday. Her friend, Sanders, told Univision, that if she knew this could happen, she would have never let her go to the conference. Being pulled over by ICE agents, Sanders said, was “chilling.” “It was chilling,” Sanders said. “It was like they knew who we were and they were looking for us.” More from Morning Mix: ‘She was demonized’: Nicaraguan woman dies after being thrown into fire in exorcism ritual Scottish teacher told to watch ‘The Big Bang Theory’ as training for pupils with Asperger’s Subway fires back with its own study to prove its chicken is chicken The fight to ‘free Sara’: An asylum seeker with a brain tumor detained by ICEWords and Photos by Craig J. Sandor Good Weather, good vibes, good people, good times and all for a good cause (The 2012 Life is good Festival raised over $1 million to help kids in need) – the 2012 Life is good Festival in Canton, MA certainly lived up to its name! This festival is like no other that I have attended and I have to honestly say, it’s by far the best one I’ve been to. With a crowd made up more of children than adults, it was impossible not to have a smile on your face throughout the whole weekend. This wasn’t all about music though; it was about family fun and family time as well. From BMX stunt jumping, potato sack races, magicians, arts & crafts plus more, the children ruled this festival. There was even music for the little ones featuring such acts as The Fresh Beat Band
a more realistic goal. Kilgore said he’s back to squat-lifting 500 pounds and has had no issues slamming into blocking sleds during his recent rehabilitation work. He’s confident in his left leg, which has required two surgeries and now has a plate and 12 screws in it. However, he acknowledged his first test won’t arrive until he makes his 2015 debut. 49ers center Daniel Kilgore suffered a broken leg last October in a loss in Denver. 49ers center Daniel Kilgore suffered a broken leg last October in a loss in Denver. Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close 49ers’ Kilgore returns to practice, his first in over a year 1 / 9 Back to Gallery “I can do as much as I can against a dummy or a pad,” Kilgore said. “But until I go against somebody that’s breathing and trying to kill me, we’ll see then.” Even if he’s rusty, Kilgore figures to provide a boost for an offensive line that’s struggled in his absence. His replacement, Marcus Martin, 21, a 2014 third-round pick, has been consistently bullied in the run game and has ranked among the bottom of the NFL’s centers throughout the season, according to Pro Football Focus’ grading system. The 49ers have allowed the fifth-most sacks in the NFL (28) and their running backs are averaging 3.5 yards a carry. The issues up front have inspired experimentation. Starting right guard Jordan Devey has split snaps with Andrew Tiller in the past five games, and it’s possible Tiller will make his first career start in Seattle on Sunday. In a 17-16 win over Atlanta on Nov. 8, Tiller came off the bench to play 48 of 57 offensive snaps. In addition, rookie right tackle Trent Brown made his NFL debut in a nine-play series against Atlanta while starter Erik Pears moved inside to right guard. “I’ve said it with the offensive line: It’s the sum of the parts,” head coach Jim Tomsula said. “We’re getting the guys together and working together to see where we can get the best results.” For his part, Kilgore is eager to see results at practice this week, where he’ll renew on-field acquaintances with nose guard Ian Williams. “He and I have always had a friendly, competitive spirit going against each other,“ Kilgore said. “It’s just going to be fun going out there again. Being with the guys, being in the huddle. The only thing I’m not looking forward to is wearing the helmet. That thing is going to hurt like crazy. Been a year since I’ve worn it.” Briefly: Tomsula said running back Carlos Hyde (foot), wide receiver Anquan Boldin (hamstring) and cornerback Tramaine Brock (shin) have yet to run at full speed and remain day to day with their injuries. Hyde and Boldin have missed the past two games, while Brock has missed one. … Rookie wide receiver DeAndre Smelter, who is on the non-football injury list after he tore his ACL in November, also had his three-week practice window opened. … Tomsula reiterated that quarterback Blaine Gabbert would start against Seattle, but he wouldn’t commit to Gabbert making another start after Sunday. Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: @Eric_BranchA Distributed Denial‑of‑Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make a service, usually a website, unavailable by bombarding it with so much traffic from multiple machines that the server providing the service is no longer able to function correctly because of resource exhaustion. Typically, the attacker tries to saturate a system with so many connections and requests that it is no longer able to accept new traffic, or becomes so slow that it is effectively unusable. Application‑Layer DDoS Attack Characteristics Application‑layer (Layer 7/HTTP) DDoS attacks are carried out by software programs (bots) that can be tailored to best exploit the vulnerabilities of specific systems. For example, for systems that don’t handle large numbers of concurrent connections well, merely opening a large number of connections and keeping them active by periodically sending a small amount of traffic can exhaust the system’s capacity for new connections. Other attacks can take the form of sending a large number of requests or very large requests. Because these attacks are carried out by bots rather than actual users, the attacker can easily open large numbers of connections and send large numbers of requests very rapidly. Characteristics of DDoS attacks that can be used to help mitigate against them include the following (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list): The traffic normally originates from a fixed set of IP addresses, belonging to the machines used to carry out the attack. As a result, each IP address is responsible for many more connections and requests than you would expect from a real user. Note: It’s important not to assume that this traffic pattern always represents a DDoS attack. The use of forward proxies can also create this pattern, because the forward proxy server’s IP address is used as the client address for requests from all the real clients it serves. However, the number of connections and requests from a forward proxy is typically much lower than in a DDoS attack. Because the traffic is generated by bots and is meant to overwhelm the server, the rate of traffic is much higher than a human user can generate. The User-Agent header is sometimes set to a non‑standard value. header is sometimes set to a non‑standard value. The Referer header is sometimes set to a value you can associate with the attack. Using NGINX and NGINX Plus to Fight DDoS Attacks NGINX and NGINX Plus have a number of features that – in conjunction with the characteristics of a DDoS attack mentioned above – can make them a valuable part of a DDoS attack mitigation solution. These features address a DDoS attack both by regulating the incoming traffic and by controlling the traffic as it is proxied to backend servers. Inherent Protection of the NGINX Event‑Driven Architecture NGINX is designed to be a “shock absorber” for your site or application. It has a non‑blocking, event‑driven architecture that copes with huge amounts of requests without a noticeable increase in resource utilization. New requests from the network do not interrupt NGINX from processing ongoing requests, which means that NGINX has capacity available to apply the techniques described below which protect your site or application from attack. More information about the underlying architecture is available at Inside NGINX: How We Designed for Performance & Scale. Limiting the Rate of Requests You can limit the rate at which NGINX and NGINX Plus accept incoming requests to a value typical for real users. For example, you might decide that a real user accessing a login page can only make a request every 2 seconds. You can configure NGINX and NGINX Plus to allow a single client IP address to attempt to login only every 2 seconds (equivalent to 30 requests per minute): limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=one:10m rate=30r/m; server { #... location /login.html { limit_req zone=one; #... } } The limit_req_zone directive configures a shared memory zone called one to store the state of requests for the specified key, in this case the client IP address ( $binary_remote_addr ). The limit_req directive in the location block for /login.html references the shared memory zone. For a detailed discussion of rate limiting, see Rate Limiting with NGINX and NGINX Plus on our blog. Limiting the Number of Connections You can limit the number of connections that can be opened by a single client IP address, again to a value appropriate for real users. For example, you can allow each client IP address to open no more than 10 connections to the /store area of your website: limit_conn_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=addr:10m; server { #... location /store/ { limit_conn addr 10; #... } } The limit_conn_zone directive configures a shared memory zone called addr to store requests for the specified key, in this case (as in the previous example) the client IP address, $binary_remote_addr. The limit_conn directive in the location block for /store references the shared memory zone and sets a maximum of 10 connections from each client IP address. Closing Slow Connections You can close connections that are writing data too infrequently, which can represent an attempt to keep connections open as long as possible (thus reducing the server’s ability to accept new connections). Slowloris is an example of this type of attack. The client_body_timeout directive controls how long NGINX waits between writes of the client body, and the client_header_timeout directive controls how long NGINX waits between writes of client headers. The default for both directives is 60 seconds. This example configures NGINX to wait no more than 5 seconds between writes from the client for either headers or body: server { client_body_timeout 5s; client_header_timeout 5s; #... } Blacklisting IP Addresses If you can identify the client IP addresses being used for an attack, you can blacklist them with the deny directive so that NGINX and NGINX Plus do not accept their connections or requests. For example, if you have determined that the attacks are coming from the address range 123.123.123.1 through 123.123.123.16: location / { deny 123.123.123.0/28; #... } Or if you have determined that an attack is coming from client IP addresses 123.123.123.3, 123.123.123.5, and 123.123.123.7: location / { deny 123.123.123.3; deny 123.123.123.5; deny 123.123.123.7; #... } Whitelisting IP Addresses If access to your website or application is allowed only from one or more specific sets or ranges of client IP addresses, you can use the allow and deny directives together to allow only those addresses to access the site or application. For example, you can restrict access to only addresses in a specific local network: location / { allow 192.168.1.0/24; deny all; #... } Here, the deny all directive blocks all client IP addresses that are not in the range specified by the allow directive. Using Caching to Smooth Traffic Spikes You can configure NGINX and NGINX Plus to absorb much of the traffic spike that results from an attack, by enabling caching and setting certain caching parameters to offload requests from the backend. Some of the helpful settings are: The updating parameter to the proxy_cache_use_stale directive tells NGINX that when it needs to fetch an update of a stale cached object, it should send just one request for the update, and continue to serve the stale object to clients who request it during the time it takes to receive the update from the backend server. When repeated requests for a certain file are part of an attack, this dramatically reduces the number of requests to the backend servers. parameter to the directive tells NGINX that when it needs to fetch an update of a stale cached object, it should send just one request for the update, and continue to serve the stale object to clients who request it during the time it takes to receive the update from the backend server. When repeated requests for a certain file are part of an attack, this dramatically reduces the number of requests to the backend servers. The key defined by the proxy_cache_key directive usually consists of embedded variables (the default key, $scheme$proxy_host$request_uri, has three variables). If the value includes the $query_string variable, then an attack that sends random query strings can cause excessive caching. We recommend that you don’t include the $query_string variable in the key unless you have a particular reason to do so. Blocking Requests You can configure NGINX or NGINX Plus to block several kinds of requests: Requests to a specific URL that seems to be targeted Requests in which the User-Agent header is set to a value that does not correspond to normal client traffic header is set to a value that does not correspond to normal client traffic Requests in which the Referer header is set to a value that can be associated with an attack header is set to a value that can be associated with an attack Requests in which other headers have values that can be associated with an attack For example, if you determine that a DDoS attack is targeting the URL /foo.php you can block all requests for the page: location /foo.php { deny all; } Or if you discover that DDoS attack requests have a User-Agent header value of foo or bar, you can block those requests. location / { if ($http_user_agent ~* foo\|bar) { return 403; } #... } The http_name variable references a request header, in the above example the User-Agent header. A similar approach can be used with other headers that have values that can be used to identify an attack. Limiting the Connections to Backend Servers An NGINX or NGINX Plus instance can usually handle many more simultaneous connections than the backend servers it is load balancing. With NGINX Plus, you can limit the number of connections to each backend server. For example, if you want to limit NGINX Plus to establishing no more than 200 connections to each of the two backend servers in the website upstream group: upstream website { server 192.168.100.1:80 max_conns=200; server 192.168.100.2:80 max_conns=200; queue 10 timeout=30s; } The max_conns parameter applied to each server specifies the maximum number of connections that NGINX Plus opens to it. The queue directive limits the number of requests queued when all the servers in the upstream group have reached their connection limit, and the timeout parameter specifies how long to retain a request in the queue. Dealing with Range‑Based Attacks One method of attack is to send a Range header with a very large value, which can cause a buffer overflow. For an discussion of how to use NGINX and NGINX Plus to mitigate this type of attack in a sample case, see Using NGINX and NGINX Plus to Protect Against CVE‑2015‑1635. Handling High Loads DDoS attacks usually result in a high traffic load. For tips on tuning NGINX or NGINX Plus and the operating system to allow the system to handle higher loads, see Tuning NGINX for Performance. Identifying a DDoS Attack So far we have focused on what you can use NGINX and NGINX Plus to help alleviate the effects of a DDoS attack. But how can NGINX or NGINX Plus help you spot a DDoS attack? The NGINX Plus Status module provides detailed metrics about the traffic that is being load balanced to backend servers, which you can use to spot unusual traffic patterns. NGINX Plus comes with a status dashboard web page that graphically depicts the current state of the NGINX Plus system (see the example at demo.nginx.com). The same metrics are also available through an API, which you can use to feed the metrics into custom or third‑party monitoring systems where you can do historical trend analysis to spot abnormal patterns and enable alerting. Summary NGINX and NGINX Plus can be used as a valuable part of a DDoS mitigation solution, and NGINX Plus provides additional features for protecting against DDoS attacks and helping to identify when they are occurring. To try NGINX Plus, start your free 30‑day trial today or contact us for a live demo.French scientists say it might be Europe's best set of dinosaur tracks French fossil hunters have discovered huge dinosaur footprints, said to be among the biggest in the world. The footprints were made about 150 million years ago by sauropods - long-necked herbivores - in chalky sediment in the Jura plateau of eastern France. The depressions are about 1.5m (4.9ft) wide, corresponding to animals that were more than 25m long and weighed about 30 tonnes. French experts say the find at Plagne, near Switzerland, is "exceptional". "The tracks formed by the footprints extend over dozens, even hundreds, of metres," the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said. The 30-tonne dinosaurs may have looked like this "Further digs will be carried out in the coming years and they may reveal that the site at Plagne is one of the biggest of its kind in the world." The footprints, from the Upper Jurassic era, were found in April this year by a pair of amateur fossil hunters, but have only now been authenticated by scientists. Another layer of sediment, now rock-hard, had preserved the footprints. They were revealed when local tree-felling exposed the earth underneath, French media report. The region was near a shallow, warm sea at the time the sauropods lived there.Buchbinder Legionaere 001 000 201 4 15 0 Solingen Alligators 001 000 103 5 7 0 The Buchbinder Legionaere Regensburg out-hit the Solingen Alligators 15-4 midway through the ninth inning of game three of the best of five final series in the German Baseball-Bundesliga on Saturday. But in the end the Alligators celebrated a 5-4 comeback win. Solingen erased a 2-4 deficit in the process and won thanks a two-run walk off single by Dustin Hughes. They are now one win away from winning their second title since 2006. Game four is scheduled for Sunday at 2pm CET. You can watch it live at www.legionaere.de/tv. In a tight ball game Mike Bolsenbroek (8 IP, 5 H, 4 R, 3 ER, 2 BB, 10 SO) out-pitched Andre Hughes (15 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 3 BB, 3 SO), who was heavily helped by a stellar defense to keep his team in the game. Regensburg broke a 1-1 tie with a wild pitch and a RBI single by Evan LeBlanc in the seventh and even though Dustin Hughes answered with a solo home run seemed to be en route to the victory. The Buchbinder Legionaere added an insurance run in the top of the ninth through LeBlanc’s sac fly and only needed three more outs to defend a 4-2 lead. But getting these last three outs proved to be too difficult. The Alligators opened the bottom half of the ninth with a walk by Tanner Leighton and a single by Travis Bass chasing Bolsenbroek from the game. Boris Bokaj came in and got surprised by Kai Gronauer’s bunt, who reached first to load the bases. The Czech right-hander didn’t recover. With Dustin Hughes at the plate he first threw a 0-2 pitch in the dirt for a wild pitch, allowing Leighton to score from third base. Hughes drove the next pitch into left field for the decisive game-ending two-run single. Photo: Gregor Eisenhuth, www.eisenhuth-photographie.deOn this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume made the case that there could indeed be evidence that the Department of Justice is involved in a cover-up of operation-turned-scandal Fast and Furious. Hume questioned the Obama administration’s use of executive privilege to withhold documents pertaining to the program. “I think the scent of a cover-up is pretty strong,” Hume said. “The documents are being withheld — I don’t think there is any evidence that this is not executive privilege made because of presidential communications, which is where the strongest privilege lies, are involved here. This is internal Justice Department deliberations that, so far as we know, don’t involve the president or the White House. And what the Justice Department is saying is we got to have confidentiality here and not have Congress snooping in our internal deliberations. Well, the courts recognized some privilege in that area but not much, and I think it is basically a frivolous claim.” According to Hume, Congress has acted legitimately during its investigation of Fast and Furious, despite the several criticisms of overreach. “There was a false letter sent here and evidence of cover-up,” he continued. “The committee is trying to get to the bottom of it and see who said what to whom and when and what the process was. This is the kind of things that investigating committees in Congress are entitled to, where executive agencies which are creatures of Congress by the way — they’re part of the executive and created by Congress and funded by Congress, are supposed to investigate. But the effect of it will be to delay matters until probably after the election. That I think satisfies the Obama White House and the Holder Justice Department’s purpose here, which is to put this off.” Later, Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers and Hume sparred over the of the legitimacy of the investigation. Transcript as follows: WALLACE: Don’t you think in the scrambling around in the months after there might be interesting information that comes out? “Well, wait a minute, I told you about that. I told Lanny Breuer or head of the criminal division. You know, Holder got that memo on that day.” POWERS: It is interesting, but how is it going to change anything? HUME: But Kirsten, the Congress is manifestly entitled to investigate these processes that led to a false letter and the aftermath of. They are investigating two things. What happened that led to the agent’s death and what happened in the aftermath. POWERS: We know what happened in regards to the agent’s death. HUME: Are they not entitled to investigate the aftermath? POWERS: It was the program. What they are trying to do is pin it on Eric Holder. That’s all they’re trying to do. It is not whether the program was good or bad. That program was bad. It was stupid. It has been shut down and investigated. HUME: A false letter was written. How did that come about? Follow Jeff on TwitterImage caption Rick Astley shot to fame in the 1980s but is now out of the public eye The White House has lightened the tone of the debt ceiling debate by joining an online craze known as "Rickrolling". Responding to criticism during a Twitter chat, the White House offered users a link to "something more fun". The link pointed to a YouTube video of UK pop singer Rick Astley's 1987 number one hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Years of "Rickrolling", or duping web users into clicking a link to that song, has seen almost 36.5 million people watch Astley's YouTube video. The White House was conducting an online chat it labelled "Office Hours" in an effort to connect to web users about the often dry issue of the debt and budget negotiations. Brian Deese, deputy director of the National Economic Council, was taking questions from Twitter users via the official White House Twitter feed - followed by 2.3 million users. After earnest discussion of the state of the economy, of the fate of the US budget and of the continuing negotiations to raise the debt ceiling, one contributor voiced concern over the tone of the tweets. "This WHO correspondence briefing isn't nearly as entertaining as yesterday's. #SCOT #WHchat" wrote one user, David Wiggs, using popular hashtags at the end of his message to make sure his tweet was read by the White House. Image caption The White House's tweet sent those following the conversation to Astley's video His observation prompted the White House's exhortation to do "something more fun". Rick Astley rose to prominence in the UK in 1987 when Never Gonna Give You Up spent weeks at the top of the UK singles charts. He enjoyed a period of success before fading from public view, only to re-emerge in 2008 as the craze for "Rickrolling" spread through the internet. He has been reported to be happy and bemused by the adoption of his song by the web, but now refuses to give interviews or comment on the subject.Volley is the new Swiss Army Knife of Android Developers, it provides some nice utilities which makes the networking for Android apps easier and faster. The good thing about Volley is that it abstracts away the low level details of what HTTP client library is being used under the hood and helps you focus on writing nice and clean RESTful HTTP requests. Additionally all requests in Volley are executed asynchronously on a different thread without blocking your “main thread”. What are the features that Volley provides? Important features of the Volley library: A high level API to make asynchronous RESTful HTTP requests An elegant and robust Request queue An extensible architecture which allows developers to implement custom request and response handling mechanism Ability to use external HTTP client library Robust request caching policy Custom views to load and cache images from Network ( NetworkImageView, ImageLoader etc) Why use asynchronous HTTP requests? In Android it is always a good practice to make HTTP requests asynchronously, in fact from HoneyComb onwards it is no longer just a “good practice”, you must make HTTP requests asynchronously off the main thread or else you’ll get this nasty exception android.os.NetworkOnMainThreadException. Blocking the main thread has some serious consequences, it hampers UI rendering, harmful to smooth user experience and above all it can cause dreaded ANR (Application Not Responding). To avoid all these pitfalls you as a developer should always ensure that your HTTP requests are on a different thread. How to use Volley We are going to cover the following items in this blog post, by the end of it you should be able to have a clear understanding of Volley and how to use it in your application. Installing and using Volley as a library project Using Request Queue Making asynchronous JSON and String HTTP requests Cancelling requests Retrying failed requests, customizing request Timeout Setting Request Headers (HTTP headers) Using cookies Error Handling Installing and using Volley as a library project Volley is part of AOSP and right now it is not being distributed as a JAR, the easiest way to include Volley to your project is to clone the Volley repository and set it as a library project. Using as a library project Git clone the repository using the following command and then import it as Android library project: 1 $ git clone https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/volley Using as a JAR Clone the repository as shown above and then run the following commands to export it as JAR and after that add the JAR file to your project’s /libs folder: 1 2 3 4 # in Volley project root (ensure the `android` executable is in your path) $ android update project -p. # the following command will create a JAR file and put it in./bin $ ant jar Using Request Queue All requests in Volley are placed in a queue first and then processed, here is how you will be creating a request queue: RequestQueue 1 RequestQueue mRequestQueue = Volley. newRequestQueue ( this ); // 'this' is Context Ideally you should have one centralized place for your Queue, and the best place to initialize queue is in your Application class. Here is how this can be done: ApplicationController.java 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 public class ApplicationController extends Application { /** * Log or request TAG / public static final String TAG = "VolleyPatterns" ; /* * Global request queue for Volley / private RequestQueue mRequestQueue ; /* * A singleton instance of the application class for easy access in other places / private static ApplicationController sInstance ; @Override public void onCreate () { super. onCreate (); // initialize the singleton sInstance = this ; } /* * @return ApplicationController singleton instance / public static synchronized ApplicationController getInstance () { return sInstance ; } /* * @return The Volley Request queue, the queue will be created if it is null / public RequestQueue getRequestQueue () { // lazy initialize the request queue, the queue instance will be // created when it is accessed for the first time if ( mRequestQueue == null ) { mRequestQueue = Volley. newRequestQueue ( getApplicationContext ()); } return mRequestQueue ; } /* * Adds the specified request to the global queue, if tag is specified * then it is used else Default TAG is used. * * @param req * @param tag / public < T > void addToRequestQueue ( Request < T > req, String tag ) { // set the default tag if tag is empty req. setTag ( TextUtils. isEmpty ( tag )? TAG : tag ); VolleyLog. d ( "Adding request to queue: %s", req. getUrl ()); getRequestQueue (). add ( req ); } /* * Adds the specified request to the global queue using the Default TAG. * * @param req * @param tag / public < T > void addToRequestQueue ( Request < T > req ) { // set the default tag if tag is empty req. setTag ( TAG ); getRequestQueue (). add ( req ); } /* * Cancels all pending requests by the specified TAG, it is important * to specify a TAG so that the pending/ongoing requests can be cancelled. * * @param tag / public void cancelPendingRequests ( Object tag ) { if ( mRequestQueue!= null ) { mRequestQueue. cancelAll ( tag ); } } } Making asynchronous HTTP requests Volley provides the following utility classes which you can use to make asynchronous HTTP requests: JsonObjectRequest — To send and receive JSON Object from the Server JsonArrayRequest — To receive JSON Array from the Server StringRequest — To retrieve response body as String (ideally if you intend to parse the response by yourself) Note: To send parameters in request body you need to override either getParams() or getBody() method of the request classes (as required) described below. JsonObjectRequest This class can be used to send and receive JSON object. An overloaded constructor of this class allows to set appropriate request method (DELETE, GET, POST and PUT). This is the class which you should be using frequently if you are working with a RESTful backend. The following examples show how to make GET and POST requests. Using HTTP GET method: JsonObjectRequest 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 final String URL = "/volley/resource/12" ; // pass second argument as "null" for GET requests JsonObjectRequest req = new JsonObjectRequest ( URL, null, new Response. Listener < JSONObject >() { @Override public void onResponse ( JSONObject response ) { try { VolleyLog. v ( "Response:%n %s", response. toString ( 4 )); } catch ( JSONException e ) { e. printStackTrace (); } } }, new Response. ErrorListener () { @Override public void onErrorResponse ( VolleyError error ) { VolleyLog. e ( "Error: ", error. getMessage ()); } }); // add the request object to the queue to be executed ApplicationController. getInstance (). addToRequestQueue ( req ); Using HTTP POST method: JsonObjectRequest 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 final String URL = "/volley/resource/12" ; // Post params to be sent to the server HashMap < String, String > params = new HashMap < String, String >(); params. put ( "token", "AbCdEfGh123456" ); JsonObjectRequest req = new JsonObjectRequest ( URL, new JSONObject ( params ), new Response. Listener < JSONObject >() { @Override public void onResponse ( JSONObject response ) { try { VolleyLog. v ( "Response:%n %s", response. toString ( 4 )); } catch ( JSONException e ) { e. printStackTrace (); } } }, new Response. ErrorListener () { @Override public void onErrorResponse ( VolleyError error ) { VolleyLog. e ( "Error: ", error. getMessage ()); } }); // add the request object to the queue to be executed ApplicationController. getInstance (). addToRequestQueue ( req ); JsonArrayRequest This class can be used to retrieve JSON array but not JSON object and only HTTP GET is supported as of now. As it supports only GET, so if you are to specify some querystring parameters then append those in the URL itself. The constructor does not accept request parameters. JsonArrayRequest 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 final String URL = "/volley/resource/all?count=20" ; JsonArrayRequest req = new JsonArrayRequest ( URL, new Response. Listener < JSONArray > () { @Override public void onResponse ( JSONArray response ) { try { VolleyLog. v ( "Response:%n %s", response. toString ( 4 )); } catch ( JSONException e ) { e. printStackTrace (); } } }, new Response. ErrorListener () { @Override public void onErrorResponse ( VolleyError error ) { VolleyLog. e ( "Error: ", error. getMessage ()); } }); // add the request object to the queue to be executed ApplicationController. getInstance (). addToRequestQueue ( req ); StringRequest This class can be used to retrieve the response from server as String, ideally you should use this class when you intend to parse the response by yourself, e.g. if it is XML. It also provides overloaded constructors to further customize your request. StringRequest 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 final String URL = "/volley/resource/recent.xml" ; StringRequest req = new StringRequest ( URL, new Response. Listener < String >() { @Override public void onResponse ( String response ) { VolleyLog. v ( "Response:%n %s", response ); } }, new Response. ErrorListener () { @Override public void onErrorResponse ( VolleyError error ) { VolleyLog. e ( "Error: ", error. getMessage ()); } }); // add the request object to the queue to be executed ApplicationController. getInstance (). addToRequestQueue ( req ); Setting a priority to the request is possible, this may be desirable in some cases where you want to move certain requests higher up in the order. The requests are processed from higher priorities to lower priorities, in FIFO order. To set a priority you need to override the getPriority() method of the request class. The current available priorities are – Priority.LOW, Priority.NORMAL, Priority.HIGH and Priority.IMMEDIATE. Cancelling requests Volley provides powerful APIs to cancel pending or ongoing requests, one reason when you need to do this is if user rotates his device while a request is ongoing you need to cancel that because the Activity is going be restarted. The easiest way to cancel a request is to call the cancelAll(tag) method of the request queue, this will only work if you have set a tag on the request object before adding it to the queue. The ability to tag requests allows you to cancel all pending requests for that tag in one method call. Adding a request to the queue using a tag: 1 request. setTag ( "My Tag" ); As per the ApplicationController class shown above, this is how you’ll add the request to the queue: 1 ApplicationController. getInstance (). addToRequestQueue ( request, "My Tag" ); Cancelling all requests with the specified tag: 1 mRequestQueue. cancelAll ( "My Tag" ); As per the ApplicationController class shown above, this is how you’ll cancel the requests: 1 ApplicationController. getInstance (). cancelPendingRequests ( "My Tag" ); Retrying failed requests and customizing request Timeout There is no direct way to specify request timeout value in Volley, but there is a workaround, you need to set a RetryPolicy on the request object. The DefaultRetryPolicy class takes an argument called initialTimeout, this can be used to specify a request timeout, make sure the maximum retry count is 1 so that volley does not retry the request after the timeout has been exceeded. Setting Request Timeout 1 request. setRetryPolicy ( new DefaultRetryPolicy ( 20 1000, 1, 1.0f )); If you want to retry failed requests (due to timeout) you can specify that too using the code above, just increase the retry count. Note the last argument, it allows you to specify a backoff multiplier which can be used to implement “exponential backoff” that some RESTful services recommend. Setting Request Headers (HTTP headers) Sometimes it is necessary to add extra headers to the HTTP requests, one common case is to add an “Authorization” header for HTTP Basic Auth. Volley Request class provides a method called getHeaders() which you need to override to add your custom headers if necessary. Adding custom headers: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 JsonObjectRequest req = new JsonObjectRequest ( URL, new JSONObject ( params ), new Response. Listener < JSONObject >() { @Override public void onResponse ( JSONObject response ) { // handle response } }, new Response. ErrorListener () { @Override public void onErrorResponse ( VolleyError error ) { // handle error } }) { @Override public Map < String, String > getHeaders () throws AuthFailureError { HashMap < String, String > headers = new HashMap < String, String >(); headers. put ( "CUSTOM_HEADER", "Yahoo" ); headers. put ( "ANOTHER_CUSTOM_HEADER", "Google" ); return headers ; } }; Using cookies There is no direct API through which you can set cookies in Volley. This makes sense because the core philosophy of Volley is to provide clean APIs to write RESTful HTTP requests, these days most of the RESTful API providers prefer authentication tokens instead of cookies. Using
Mr. Weinig received the highest sentence allowed: 11 years, 3 months. The Strategy Lawyer Who Knows Justice Dept. About a year later, two friends of Ms. Morey were playing host at a dinner in their apartment in a turn-of-the-century building at 82nd Street and Broadway. The night's topic: how to free Harvey Weinig. The guests included prominent lawyers and scholars and some former prosecutors who had worked for the United States attorney's office that had convicted Mr. Weinig. The dinner was lovely, the prognosis grim. An appeal was not an option. Parole for the federal crime did not exist. And Harvey Weinig could not be described as a sympathetic victim of some kind of Rockefeller-era state law that imprisoned people for decades for merely possessing or dealing drugs. As one friend, Thomas J. Concannon, a longtime Legal Aid Society lawyer in Brooklyn, put it, ''I remember being absolutely convinced that nothing could come of it, other than for all the anxious people who were rooting for Harvey and Alice to come to terms with it, almost like a death.'' On Feb. 28, 1997, John R. Wing, Mr. Weinig's lawyer, wrote to Mary Jo White, the United States attorney in Manhattan, in a last-ditch attempt for a reduced sentence. In a 34-page letter, he focused on the disparity in sentences, noting that virtually every other defendant received prison terms of three years or less, even probation. Ms. White's office rejected the request. Ms. Morey thus turned to the long-shot notion of clemency. ''I had to do something,'' she said. A New York lawyer who was her friend advised her to hire a Washington lawyer, and she turned to Reid H. Weingarten, a former Justice Department attorney. Mr. Weingarten said he agreed to work on the case for very little money, moved in part by the trauma suffered by Mr. Weinig's two young sons. ''I'm a single father,'' said Mr. Weingarten, 51, who is divorced. ''I felt for the kids.'' 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. Among lawyers in Washington, if one's reputation is often defined by the prominence of one's clients, Mr. Weingarten had reached elite status during the Clinton administration. Advertisement Continue reading the main story By the end of last year, he had represented at least one client in almost every recent Washington legal skirmish. His clients included the secretary of commerce, Ronald H. Brown; the former secretary of agriculture, Mike Espy; and Yah Lin Trie and Pauline Kanchanalak, who were both charged in the Democratic National Committee campaign financing investigation. Mr. Weingarten had also worked for 10 years at the Justice Department as a senior trial lawyer in the Public Integrity Section, prosecuting major corruption cases. ''I'm a department guy,'' he liked to say. ''I grew up in the Justice Department.'' Among his closest friends is Eric H. Holder Jr., who was the deputy attorney general under Janet Reno. But he also knew the faceless bureaucrats, the career staff. ''I mean, he's not a fixer. He's not one of those big lobbyist types,'' said Margaret C. Love, the Justice Department's top pardon lawyer from 1990 to 1997. ''He's a good lawyer. He makes people in the department feel comfortable because he was there a long time. He knows the ropes.'' As a private lawyer, he had filed two clemency petitions during Republican administrations, winning one. Mr. Weingarten told Ms. Morey that they would more likely succeed pursuing a commutation -- a sentence reduction -- rather than a full pardon. Ms. Morey said she did not care. ''We just wanted him home,'' she said. Mr. Weingarten began writing the petition in late 1999. He and Ms. Morey collected testimonials from dozens of friends, former colleagues, and therapists who had treated the couple's children. There were also letters from inmates and a counselor at Fort Dix. In the cover memorandum, Mr. Weingarten called Mr. Weinig a lawyer with a history of public service who ''made a horrible, life-changing mistake.'' In early April 2000, Mr. Weingarten filed the thick petition with the pardon attorney's office. ''I believed,'' Mr. Weingarten said, ''and I believe today, that if someone reads this stuff, if someone looked at this, that we were going to win.'' Mr. Weingarten said he next called Mary Jo White, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. Her deputy responded that Mr. Weinig did not deserve clemency. ''It was 1,000 percent clear that they were going to oppose it,'' Mr. Weingarten said. ''She was appalled that a lawyer would engage in this kind of behavior.'' Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Weingarten also made an appointment to see Roger C. Adams, the Justice Department's pardon attorney. The pardon attorney's office has responsibility for developing a formal recommendation to the president. Mr. Weingarten said he did not believe that Mr. Adams would reverse Ms. White's position. But Mr. Weingarten wanted to influence the final Justice Department document, so he made what he called a kind of ''closing argument.'' Months later, though, the pardon attorney sent the president a report strongly opposed to clemency. A former White House aide described the report as all but dictated by Ms. White's office and transmitted without changes. Nonetheless, Mr. Weingarten pressed his case when and where he could on trips to the White House to Mr. Podesta; to Beth Nolan, the White House counsel; and to Bruce R. Lindsey, another White House lawyer. The Ties Friends and Family Lead to White House If Ms. Morey's hiring of Mr. Weingarten was a smart move, it was not her only one. And so as Mr. Clinton entered his final six months, she decided to take what she called ''the political route.'' ''My goal,'' she says, ''was to find someone -- or many people -- who had enough of an 'in' one way or another to get it to the president's attention.'' ''What I said was, 'I'm not asking you to ask your friend to push Clinton to sign this petition. I'm asking you to ask your friend to ask Clinton to read it and do what's right.''' Ms. Morey and her husband were hardly major contributors to the president. They donated $500 to Mr. Clinton in 1991 and $50 to Hillary Rodham Clinton last year. Advertisement Continue reading the main story But Ms. Morey was not without tools. David E. Dreyer, a cousin by marriage, was deputy White House communications director from 1993 to 1995, and then was a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin. She made her pitch. Mr. Dreyer, who said he was fond of his cousin Alice and occasionally saw Mr. Weinig at bar mitzvahs and other family functions, responded affirmatively. His friendship with Mr. Podesta, the president's chief of staff, remained strong. Occasionally, they jogged together on a trail that Mr. Podesta, an aspiring marathoner, had marked off in Rock Creek Park. One day in July 2000, Mr. Dreyer, while visiting Mr. Podesta's office, gave him the cover memo from Mr. Weingarten's petition. ''I asked him to take a look at it,'' Mr. Dreyer said, ''and explained to him the relationship, and why this mattered to me.'' Mr. Podesta made no promises, Mr. Dreyer recalled, and asked if the petition had been sent to the pardon attorney and White House counsel. ''He was certainly willing to look into it as an act of friendship,'' Mr. Dreyer said. ''But he is a person who lives, works and acts by the book.'' When Mr. Dreyer raised the matter again last fall while the two were jogging, Mr. Podesta said not to expect any action for several months. Ms. Morey, meanwhile, also decided to approach another friend, Mr. Ickes, a former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Clinton, who knew the Weinig family through their children at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Manhattan. Mr. Ickes said the friendship was part of the reason he agreed to help. Advertisement Continue reading the main story ''I think what really drove it home to me was the disparity in the sentences,'' Mr. Ickes said. The case finally reached Mr. Clinton's desk. There was a presentation of 10 to 15 minutes. Mr. Podesta said that to him the issue was close, tilting perhaps 55 to 45 in favor of clemency, with some lawyers from the White House counsel's office opposed. ''I think that people were aware of what he had done, but that ultimately, I think that based on the length of time he had served and based on a humanitarian plea, while a difficult case, it seemed like the right decision,'' said Mr. Podesta, who recommended clemency. Mr. Ickes said the president raised the case with him. ''He asked me about it a couple of times,'' Mr. Ickes said. ''I don't think he was aware of all of the nuances, so I told him my view of it. It was the sentencing issue. I said, 'Look, this guy was sentenced. He pled guilty. And nobody is claiming that he's a saint.' '' The family and Mr. Weingarten were jubilant when they received the news on Jan. 20. Mr. Weinig called from prison and cried when they told him. Some strongly attacked the commutation. Jeffrey Drubner, a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who led the money laundering investigation of Mr. Weinig, said, ''It was his greed and his poor judgment which landed him where he is. There's nothing so special about Harvey Weinig and his family that distinguishes them from any other family that's been broken apart because the father decides to go out and be a criminal.'' In reflection, those who advocated for Mr. Weinig in the White House and those who privately rooted back in New York concede there are inequities in a system in which not every deserving case reaches the president. ''I understood that there were others similarly situated,'' Mr. Podesta said, ''and that weighed on me, but this was the case in front of us.'' Thomas Concannon, Mr. Weinig's close friend and a veteran lawyer, said, ''If his case didn't get to the attention of the president, then some other file in front of him on the desk -- the one just before Harvey's -- might have been the last one before he needed to get something to eat.'' At that point, Mr. Concannon added: ''I wouldn't have wanted him to be thinking about the larger philosophical questions. I would rather have him touch what's right in front of him.''In the seemingly ceaseless tragedy of murdered indigenous women, the country has been left with one crystal-clear impression: the overwhelming majority of those women were in some sort of relationship with their killers. A vigil held on Parliament Hill to call for a national inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women. At time of publication, the Star’s research had identified 1,129 cases where an indigenous woman or girl was either murdered, died in suspicious circumstances, or is missing. Nearly half didn't know, or barely knew, their killers, analysis shows. (2014 file photo). ( Sean Kilpatrick / The Canadian Press ) This is not true. A Toronto Star analysis suggests 44 per cent of the women were victims of acquaintances, strangers and serial killers. This finding is based on a Star review of publicly available information on more than 750 murder cases. Of that number, 224 murders remain unsolved. There are many public lists of murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada. The Star compiled those lists into a single database then set out to verify as much information as possible. Relying on newspaper clippings and court documents, the Star’s database includes 1,129 names, dates and, when a case was solved, some information on the offenders. Article Continued Below Our review found 420 cases where details of the relationship between victim and offender were known. Some of them date to the 1960s. Of those: Half of the victims were domestically related to the perpetrator. This includes all types of family and partner connections. 16 per cent of the offenders were acquaintances; 15 per cent were strangers; and 13 per cent serial killers. Aboriginal leaders who reviewed the Star’s findings say they show that the killers cannot be easily profiled and that reasons why indigenous women make up a disproportionately high percentage of homicide victims are not so neatly diagnosed. The Star also obtained details through an access-to-information request to suggest the “solved” rate is not as clear-cut as the public RCMP report into missing and murdered indigenous women suggests. In two reports, the Mounties said the “known-to” category includes spouses, family members and acquaintances. The latter category can mean “close friends, neighbours, authority figures, business relationships, criminal relationships and casual acquaintances.” Article Continued Below What is a casual acquaintance? A friend of a friend or someone met online? In how many cases did the victim know the perpetrator only briefly, meeting them only once? The RCMP will not say. From the start, Alberta’s Cold Lake First Nation Chief Bernice Martial has not believed most indigenous women knew their killers and that they were mostly indigenous men: “I want the facts. I want the data. I want to see proof.” Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde wants the definition of “known to” clarified. “It could be the corner store grocery man, or whoever brings milk to the door. It doesn’t necessarily mean the boyfriend,” Bellegarde says. “You need to break this down further and define it. The way you looked at it, only 50 per cent are in relationships. If the RCMP said it was 90 per cent — well, there is a discrepancy already. It is alarming — the transparency and openness.” In April, then aboriginal affairs minister Bernard Valcourt told First Nations chiefs that, in 70 per cent of the cases of murdered and missing aboriginal women, indigenous men had been the perpetrators. “The notion of First Nations women only being killed by their boyfriends and spouses is a myth,” said Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler of Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which represents 49 northern Ontario First Nations. Carolyn Bennett, the new indigenous and northern affairs minister, said she was “appalled” by Valcourt’s remarks. “It was misleading for him to characterize it that way and I, at the time, was furious,” Bennett said. RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson confirmed the number citing their database — even though the report issued by the Mounties last year had not noted the ethnicity of perpetrators. But Paulson added a caveat. RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson says it's not the ethnicity of the offender that is relevant but the relationship between victim and offender with respect to prevention. ( The Canadian Press ) “It is not the ethnicity of the offender that is relevant, but rather the relationship between the victim and offender that guides our focus with respect to prevention,” Paulson wrote to Martial. Most homicides involving female victims of all ethnicities involve family or intimate partner violence, Paulson added, but the rate is actually lower for aboriginal women — 62 per cent compared to 74 per cent for non-aboriginal women. In its follow-up report, the RCMP said in the past couple of years, the offender was known to the victim in every solved homicide of an aboriginal woman in RCMP jurisdictions. Since the RCMP found that aboriginal women are significantly more likely than other women to be killed by an acquaintance — 17 per cent of the aboriginal female homicides involved casual acquaintances and 7 per cent criminal relationships — uncertainty surrounds hundreds of cases. “You need to break this down further and define it,” said Bellegarde. Are police forces working together, asks Bellegarde, by sharing correct information? And are there protocols to improve communications? “This all speaks to the bigger realm of why there needs to be an inquiry coupled with an action plan,” he said. Bennett, one of the ministers charged with establishing the national inquiry, said cases that involve family violence should be viewed through a wider lens. “We’ve got to go way back upstream to actually look at the effects of colonization and residential schools on the indigenous population in Canada,” Bennett said. Secrecy and the list The Star shared its database findings with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police two months ago and on two occasions since to check the accuracy of its research. The Star also asked several questions about how the RCMP arrived at its findings. In May 2014, the Star made an access to information request for the RCMP’s database of murdered and missing indigenous women and girls. In early October 2015, some 16 months later, the RCMP released 2,000 pages related to work that led to its 2014 report. All names and personal details of the women and girls were redacted. The RCMP cited several reasons for redacting information, including personal information, law enforcement investigations and information obtained in confidence. Their 2014 report notes that the Mounties were asked to sign an “Undertaking of Confidentiality” to obtain data from Statistics Canada and that other police services had to agree that Statistics Canada could share their data. On Nov. 13, after more questions from the Star, Janice Armstrong, deputy commissioner of RCMP aboriginal policing, welcomed media efforts to investigate, saying the cases of murdered and missing aboriginal women require “a co-ordinated response that addresses the underlying root causes of violence.” Yet none of our questions was answered. The RCMP database — notwithstanding the RCMP’s already published interpretations of it — remains a secret. Seeking clarity on a local level presented its own challenges. On Aug. 13, the Star contacted the Winnipeg Police Service requesting an interview with Project Devote, an integrated task force between the RCMP and Winnipeg police charged with the investigation of unsolved homicides and missing persons in Manitoba involving exploited and “at risk” persons. Ethnicity and gender are not predetermining factors for inclusion. Across a period of more than three months, two trips to Winnipeg and repeated communications, including with the RCMP, Winnipeg police denied the request on Nov. 20. On that date, Winnipeg police did send a list of cases under investigation, but would not indicate which cases involved indigenous persons. Of a current case load of 28, including one male, the Star’s own research found 22 cases involving missing and murdered indigenous women. The number could be higher. The lack of co-operation highlights the barriers to capturing accurately the necessary data. Asked how many members of Project Devote are indigenous, Winnipeg police responded via email that the “heritage of the investigators on the task force is irrelevant.” The Ontario Provincial Police were also reluctant to answer questions about the deaths and disappearance of women in northern Ontario. Police secrecy masks the scope of the problem, said Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler. “What is the scope of the problem?” asks Fiddler. “There is really no definitive picture. If there was a collaborative effort we could get an accurate picture. There is no databank somewhere, no central place where you can find some answers. There is no co-ordinated effort. We know the Ontario Provincial Police has numbers, the RCMP has numbers and even the Native Women’s Association of Canada has numbers,” said Fiddler. No one can answer simple questions: What is the status of these investigations? Which force is handling the investigations — the RCMP, the OPP or the Thunder Bay Police? Are they actively investigating these cases? “What is the scope of the problem?” asks Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler. “There is really no definitive picture. If there was a collaborative effort we could get an accurate picture. There is no databank somewhere, no central place where you can find some answers. There is no co-ordinated effort. We know the Ontario Provincial Police has numbers, the RCMP has numbers and even the Native Women’s Association of Canada has numbers.” ( Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star ) Solve rates As of November, the Star’s research had identified 1,129 cases where an indigenous woman or girl was either murdered, died in suspicious circumstances, or is missing. It is by no means a complete list. In some cases, the Star could not verify details. For those reasons, the Star is sharing an aggregate level analysis of the cases. In 130 cases — 78 of which were from British Columbia — the Star could not find information to verify the type of case (murdered or missing), nor any information to exclude them. Of the total, 937 cases are from 1980 to 2015. Looking at the solve rates of homicides, the annual ratio of unsolved to solved cases was higher during the 1980s and 1990s, and is gradually decreasing. Overall, there are 768 murder cases with 20 identified as murder-suicides. Two hundred and twenty-four are unsolved and, of those, 186 involve killings since 1980. The Star can’t verify the RCMP’s claim that 88 per cent of all aboriginal female homicide cases have been solved. The Star’s analysis suggests a solve rate of 70 per cent. The Star analysis also identified 180 unsolved cases between 1980 and 2012; the RCMP cited 120 cases. The Mounties provided no explanations for the discrepancies. The RCMP data came from police-reported figures from more than 300 different agencies. The Star analysis is based largely on media reports. In her letter to the Star, Janice Armstrong, deputy commissioner of RCMP aboriginal policing, said commenting on the discrepancies would be “inappropriate,” citing differences in methodology and data sets. A possible explanation can be found in the fine print of the 2014 RCMP report, which says solved cases include those where the suspect was “chargeable” but not charged. In other words, the police recommended the prosecutor lay charges but a charge may not have been laid. How many homicide cases stalled with no one charged, tried or sent to jail? The RCMP will not say. The phrase “suspect chargeable” appeared throughout the heavily censored 2,000-page document the Star obtained from the RCMP. Should police lump such cases into the same category as those that came with convictions and certainty for the families of victims? “When you take that strict interpretation of solved — that becomes an issue unto itself. This does not bring any peace to the family, if they are charged and not convicted. Basically, when they do that, there is no justice or healing or closure for the family. The family’s pain and hurt is still ongoing.... That has to be reviewed,” said Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde. Behind the numbers There are many public lists of murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada, some more detailed than others. The Star compiled a single database from those lists and then went about verifying as much of the information as possible. Five Star journalists and two Star librarians searched and read through thousands of news stories, obituaries and online legal documents to check the status of cases. New cases were added and some were removed after the research revealed, for example, that a missing woman had been found or that a murdered woman was not indigenous. At time of publication, the Star’s research had identified 1,129 cases where an indigenous woman or girl was either murdered, died in suspicious circumstances, or is missing. It is by no means a complete list. In some cases, the Star could not verify details. For those reasons, the Star is choosing to share an aggregate level analysis of the cases. Star reporters David Bruser, Jim Rankin, Joanna Smith, Tanya Talaga and Jennifer Wells; librarians Astrid Lange and Rick Sznajder; database specialist Andrew Bailey; and demographic experts Hidy Ng and Matthew Cole were involved in the research and analysis. Caveats, data at a glance In 130 cases — 78 of which were from British Columbia — the Star could not find information to verify the type of case (murdered vs. missing), nor could the Star find any information to exclude them. Of the 1,129 cases, 937 are from 1980 to 2015. Looking at solve rates for homicides, the ratio of unsolved to solved cases, by year, was higher in the 80s and 90s, and is decreasing graduallly. Overall, there are 768 murder cases, of which 20 were identified as murder/suicides. Of the murders, 224 are unsolved, with 186 of those cases involving killings since 1980. Solved totals in the Star analysis do not include cases where an accused was acquitted, but they do count cases where an arrest has been made and a trial is pending, or in instances where an accused has died. The Star also included as solved cases where the outcome was unclear, such as a case where there was a trial but the outcome could not be determined. There are 171 missing women and girls in the Star database, which is nearly identical to RCMP figures from 2014, which tallied 164 missing cases, dating back to the 50s. Between 1980 and 2012, the solved rate in the cases of murdered indigenous women compiled by the Star is 70 per cent, which is much lower than the 88 per cent solve rate the RCMP reported in its groundbreaking 2014 report for the same time frame. The RCMP report cited a solve rate for non-aboriginal female homicides to be 89 per cent, based on an analysis of Canada-wide homicides from 1980 to 2012. The ratio of unsolved to solved murders is decreasing. Murders of aboriginal women and girls peaked in 2005. Another difference between the Star research and RCMP findings is the number of unsolved cases. The Star analysis identified 180 cases between 1980 and 2012. The RCMP cited 120 cases for that same time period. It is unclear why there are such large differences. The RCMP data came from police-reported figures from more than 300 agencies. The Star analysis is based largely on media reports. The Star shared a findings package with the RCMP and flagged the differences in letters to Commissioner Bob Paulson. In a letter to the Star, RCMP Deputy Commissioner Janice Armstrong cited the differences in source material as a factor and wrote that it would therefore be “inappropriate” to comment on the differences. The RCMP did not answer a long list of questions posed by the Star. Armstrong, in her letter to the Star, said the RCMP welcomes “actions that result in positive outcomes in the lives of Aboriginal women and girls” and expressed appreciation that the Star conducted an independent investigation that can “further raise awareness among the public as to the reality of this tragedy. We commend your efforts in this endeavor.” Unless stated otherwise, figures for murdered and missing indigenous women in Gone are for all years.TREND Jan 10, 2018 /r/thedivision is trending – Trend thread TOP 400 Mar 26, 2016 /r/thedivision enters TOP 400 subreddits No. 1 Non-default Mar 23, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day No. 1 Non-default Mar 22, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day 100K Mar 19, 2016 /r/thedivision hits 100K subscribers No. 1 Non-default Mar 17, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day No. 1 Non-default Mar 16, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day TOP 500 Mar 16, 2016 /r/thedivision enters TOP 500 subreddits 90K Mar 15, 2016 /r/thedivision hits 90K subscribers No. 1 Non-default Mar 15, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day No. 1 Non-default Mar 14, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day No. 1 Non-default Mar 13, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day 80K Mar 13, 2016 /r/thedivision hits 80K subscribers No. 1 Non-default Mar 12, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day 70K Mar 11, 2016 /r/thedivision hits 70K subscribers No. 1 Non-default Mar 11, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day No. 1 Non-default Mar 10, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day 60K Mar 9, 2016 /r/thedivision hits 60K subscribers TREND Mar 8, 2016 /r/thedivision is trending – Trend thread No. 1 Non-default Mar 8, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day TREND Mar 7, 2016 /r/thedivision is trending – Trend thread 50K Mar 6, 2016 /r/thedivision hits 50K subscribers TOP 1K Feb 29, 2016 /r/thedivision enters TOP 1K subreddits 40K Feb 21, 2016 /r/thedivision hits 40K subscribers TREND Feb 19, 2016 /r/thedivision is trending – Trend thread 30K Feb 2, 2016 /r/thedivision hits 30K subscribers No. 1 Non-default Feb 1, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day No. 1 Non-default Jan 31, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day No. 1 Non-default Jan 30, 2016 /r/thedivision - the fastest growing non-default reddit of the day 20K Jan 29, 2016 /r/thedivision hits 20K subscribers TREND Jan 28, 2016 /r/thedivision is trending – Trend thread 10K Dec 18, 2015 /r/thedivision hits 10K subscribers 5K Nov 6, 2014 /r/thedivision hits 5K subscribers TOP 5K Nov 29, 2013 /r/thedivision enters TOP 5K subreddits TREND Nov 28, 2013 /r/thedivision is trending – Trend thread 1K Jun 25, 2013 /r/thedivision hits 1K subscribers 500 Jun 14, 2013 /r/thedivision hits 500 subscribers TOP 10K Jun 14, 2013 /r/thedivision enters TOP 10K subreddits 100 Jun 12, 2013 /r/thedivision hits 100 subscribersPolice given crucial logs about Diego Garcia's role in rendition programme when it was allegedly used as a secret prison Crucial logs revealing flights to a British overseas territory when it was allegedly used as a secret US prison are in the possession of the police, the Observer has learned. The revelation has raised concerns about why, despite repeated demands, details of the flights have not been shared with lawyers and MPs, who for years have been investigating the role played by Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian ocean, in the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme. A Whitehall official was photographed last week carrying documents marked "sensitive" confirming that the logs recording details of planes landing and taking off at the atoll have been handed to detectives. The documents, a series of printed emails and handwritten notes made by the official, reveal internal Foreign Office discussions about the line to take in response to questions about the British territory raised by lawyers and MPs. The Foreign Office has repeatedly stressed there is no evidence Diego Garcia was used in the rendition programme, with the exception of two occasions in 2002 when two planes, each carrying a detainee, landed to refuel. But in April leaked classified CIA documents from a forthcoming US Senate intelligence committee report revealed that the US had held "high value" detainees on Diego Garcia, which has been leased by Britain to the US since 1966, with the "full co-operation" of the British government. The Metropolitan police are currently investigating allegations that an opponent of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was rendered via Diego Garcia. Attempts to obtain the logs, which would allow lawyers to check them against planes known to have been used for rendition, have met with stonewalling from ministers. When Andrew Tyrie, the Tory MP who is chair of the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, demanded to see the logs in 2008, he was told "a thorough review had been conducted which had found no such information". The Commons intelligence and security committee has also complained in its annual reports that a lack of access to such documents compromised its ability to carry out an effective investigation into rendition, resulting in the publication of an inaccurate and misleading report. Last week, in an astonishing new twist, the Foreign Office revealed in a parliamentary answer to Tyrie that the flight logs existed, but maintained some had been lost "due to water damage". Foreign Office minister Mark Simmonds said: "Daily occurrence logs, which record the flights landing and taking off, cover the period since 2003. Though there are some limited records from 2002, I understand they are incomplete due to water damage." However, blowups of the photographed emails reveal that both "monthly log showing flight details" and "daily records [obscured] month of alleged rendition" exist and are in the possession of the police. "All relevant treaties, UN mandates and an ever-increasing body of authoritative court rulings demand that investigations into suspected state involvement in the mechanisms of torture, including rendition, be speedy, transparent and far-reaching," said Gareth Peirce, a lawyer for several Guantánamo detainees. "If answers to Andrew Tyrie's direct questions have contained no mention of highly relevant logs seemingly at all times in the possession of police, then the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] has marched this country into clear violation of its most fundamental legal obligations." "The FCO should immediately release all documents, including the water-damaged ones, so a proper assessment can be made of this material and what it means," said Cori Crider of human rights group Reprieve. "Only this can begin to address the decade-long whitewash of Diego Garcia's position in the CIA secret prison system." An FCO spokeswoman said: "We do not comment on internal documents."Labour women MPs have been speaking out about the need for women’s voices to be heard in the referendum debate and explaining why remaining in the EU makes sense for women. But with just over a week until polls close, it’s important that grassroots Labour and trade union women now make the case to Remain to women in their workplaces and communities. Labour has always led the way on equality. Almost every major piece of legislation that has improved the lives of women has been introduced by Labour. Just look at what we have achieved together: Labour has more women MPs than all the other parties put together In 1997 Labour became the first government since the Second World War to accept state responsibility for developing childcare for working women Labour governments introduced the Equal Pay Act, the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equality Act Flagship policies such as Sure Start and tax credits made a significant difference to the lives of women, particularly single mothers The Work and Families Act (2006) extended the right to statutory maternity leave to a full year to all employed women, regardless of length of service We introduced paternity leave in 2003 Worklessness fell during the Labour years, especially among lone parents – the vast majority of whom are women By 2008 there were more than three times as many nursery places as there had been in 1997 The introduction of a minimum wage benefited thousands of women working in low paid sectors of the economy The gender pay gap reduced by a third under the last Labour government It’s a record to be proud of – but it’s easy to overlook just how important the EU has been in our struggle for women’s rights. Some rights came directly from the EU, some rights were enhanced because of the EU, and our rights as women at work can’t be taken away because they are guaranteed by our EU membership. The EU ensures that women in the UK have the right to be paid equally, not to be discriminated against, not to be harassed, not to be oppressed because you’re a part-timer, a right to return to work after having a baby, to have a right to take time off to go to ante-natal appointments, the right for fathers to have time off when their children are young. Equality is one of the European Union’s founding values – explicit in the Lisbon treaty, the charter of fundamental rights, and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It was hardwired into the EU from the beginning. Of course some may suggest that the battle has been won on women’s rights and that there is no more left to do. But that would be to forget the dogged opposition to progress we have encountered every step of the way, as well as the worrying actions and words of the Tories and UKIP. Women’s rights are in the firing line whenever there’s a call for deregulation or “cutting red tape”. Under this Tory government, levels of maternity discrimination in the workplace are soaring, and as of the last budget, 86% of the net savings made to the treasury through tax and benefit changes will have come from women. The question on 23rd June has to be: would you trust either the Tories or UKIP to uphold hard won rights for women? With just over a week to go until the British people go to the polls on the biggest democratic decision in a generation, it is crucial that Labour women speak to as many people as possible about the importance of Europe for women’s jobs and rights at work
of the Survey of Marital Generosity indicate that religious mothers of large families are particularly likely to enjoy high levels of marital happiness, compared both to less religious wives and to other religious wives (with fewer or no children). By contrast, religious fathers of large families are no different from other religious husbands when it comes to marital happiness. Figure A4 shows that mothers of four or more children who are not religious are no happier than their nominally religious or secular peers who have smaller families, and they are less happy than childless wives who do not regularly attend religious services. But religious mothers of four or more children are markedly more likely than other wives—including other religious wives with fewer or no children—to report that they are “very happy” in their marriages. Figure A4 indicates that 59 percent of wives with large families who attend religious services at least weekly report that they are very happy, compared to 38 percent of childless religious wives, 30 percent of childless wives who are nominally religious or secular, slightly more than 25 percent of religious wives who have one to three children, and about 20 percent of married mothers who are nominally religious or secular. FIGURE A4. PREDICTED PROBABILITY OF WIVES BEING “VERY HAPPY” IN MARRIAGE, BY NUMBER OF CHILDREN AT HOME AND RELIGIOUS SERVICE ATTENDANCE Note: Model adjusts for age, education, income, and race/ethnicity. Source: Survey of Marital Generosity, 2010–2011. A skeptic might speculate that religious mothers of large families have no choice but to put on rose-colored glasses when describing their own marriages, given their practical dependence upon and moral commitment to marriage. Perhaps this is true. But, given the religious meaning, social support, and normative importance attached to marriage by men in many religious communities, it seems likely that part of what is happening is that religious mothers of large families benefit from having particularly attentive husbands. The Survey of Marital Generosity indicates that their husbands are more likely to engage in regular acts of generosity—such as making coffee in the morning for their wives or frequently expressing affection—and to spend more quality time with their spouses compared to other husbands. While few Americans wish to have nineteen children, the blend of religious faith and social support depicted in 19 Kids and Counting may come closer to the reality of today’s large families than the equally exotic but ultimately tragic way of life brought to the small screen in Jon & Kate Plus 8. For statistical details on the results discussed in this sidebar, see www.stateofourunions.org/2011/e-ppendix.php Sarah R. Hayford and S. Philip Morgan, “Religiosity and Fertility in the United States: The Role of Fertility Intentions,” Social Forces 86 (2008): 1163–88. W. Bradford Wilcox, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).You may have heard that yesterday President Trump finally decided to “end” the Obama-era DACA program protecting the children of illegal immigrants. You probably also know that a lot of people are upset about it, including Barack Obama himself. My position on the issue itself is pretty nuanced. In principle, I am against illegal immigration and living in Southern California I see every day the negative impacts that it can have on our society. On the other hand, my family is full of teachers who work in schools filled with the children of illegal immigrants, so I can see the human side of the subject as well. I am also a realist and, to me, the topic of illegal immigration is one which, contrary to what Trump’s shocking election win might indicate, has already been lost by conservatives. Once Proposition 187 was revoked by the liberal courts here in California in the late 1990s, it was inevitable that we would become a country which provided a huge incentive for people to come here illegally. Ironically, Trump’s presidency is, counterintuitively, further proof of how this is largely, much like abortion, an issue which has been decided in the liberal direction. After all, Trump got the Republican nomination primarily because of his strong rhetoric (lies) on the issue, and yet there has been no movement at all on his famous wall, nor any sign at all of the massive deportation forces he promised during the campaign. The reality is that Trump just used this issue to dupe the GOP base into thinking that he was the toughest guy in the race on the border. Instead, he was just the only one free enough to say things that everyone (including probably Trump himself) presumed would mean you could never win a general election. He doesn’t actually believe any of it. This is not even a matter of serious dispute, unless you are a member of his “Cult 45.” Heck, in the previous election cycle he strongly supported DACA, and even after his announcement Tuesday he claimed to have “great love” for the co-called DREAMers it protects. What is really amazing, and probably more important than the issue itself (which, since DREAMers are never going to be deported, is, in my view, overrated), is just how pathetically Trump seems to be playing the political game here. For a guy who became famous for The Art of the Deal, he’s negotiating this situation like a naïve first-time home/car buyer. The first part of this debacle is that he is pushing to end a policy that he doesn’t really oppose and which the public actually likes. However, his ego apparently won’t let him accept criticism from his base for not keeping one of his key campaign promises (which he has the authority to implement without the help of Congress.) Then there is the bizarre six month delay before DACA is fully ended, supposedly so that Congress can act and fix the problem (as if THAT has ever happened before on a controversial issue). This makes no sense. If Trump really wants the program disbanded (he doesn’t) then why does he want Congress to come up with a way to keep it going? Even worse, if Trump thinks it was bad for DACA to be created by the force of presidential edict, why in the world would he want to exist, far more forcefully, by the force of actual law? I get that there is a Constitutional principle at stake here, but those are hardly high on Trump’s priority list and even some of his biggest fans on the immigration issue are worried about the likely impact here. Trump fans are arguing that this is actually a brilliant chess move because it means that he will be able to get something, like funding for his cherished wall, in exchange for DACA becoming the law of the land. However, this highly optimistic calculus is missing important pieces in its equation. Democrats will never vote for wall funding in exchange for DACA because they will feel no pressure to do so. They have no fear of being blamed if DACA is disbanded and, frankly, such an outcome would help gin up their base at the start of a mid-term election. As for Republicans, those who are most strongly for the wall are also the most against DACA. How is Trump going to get them to go along with this plan which is way better, in theory, for Trump than it is for them? Other Republicans are against the wall project on principle, so holding their slim majority together would seem tougher than scaling the big beautiful wall of Trump’s campaign fantasies. But there is another problem with Trump’s “plan” here. It presumes that, at the very least, that Congress will feel the urgency to act so that 800,000 DREAMers aren’t left out in the cold (again, they won’t be, even if DACA really is ended). Trump has already effectively cut off whatever leverage he may have had, however, by tweeting that he will “revisit” DACA if Congress doesn’t act. He is clearly bluffing and everyone not in his cult knows it. So, the most likely outcomes here are: – Congress does nothing, and Trump says “never mind” (at best, an embarrassing draw). – Congress does nothing and Trump, out of ego, ends DACA in an election year (Democrats win). – Congress passes something very liberal and Trump vetoes, but keeps DACA (Democrats win). – Congress passes something very liberal and Trump signs DACA into law (Democrats win). Can someone please explain to me how Trump got elected president of the United States claiming to be a master negotiator and strategist who was going to fix our illegal immigration problem? John Ziegler hosts a weekly podcast focusing on news media issues and is documentary filmmaker. You can follow him on Twitter at @ZigManFreud or email him at [email protected]. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.In the immediate aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the EU, there were already rumblings that the surprise decision that triggered market chaos would prompt Scotland to again consider leaving the United Kingdom. As the Brexit vote was tallied, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Scotland “sees its future as part of the EU.” While the U.K. overall favored cutting ties with the bloc in Thursday’s vote, Scotland had cast an “unequivocal” vote to stay, she said. The poll results certainly bear that out. Scottish voters favored staying in the EU by a 62.2% to 38.8% margin, whereas 54.6% of English voters and 55.5% of Welsh voters favored leaving. Voters in Northern Ireland voted to remain by 55.7% to 45.3%. Sturgeon said earlier this week that another independence referendum “is definitely on the table” if Scotland votes to remain in the EU but the rest of the U.K. votes to leave, though she said she hoped that wouldn’t be the case since she supported Remain. Sturgeon backed Scotland’s referendum in 2014 to leave the United Kingdom, but the measure failed by a 55.3% to 44.7% margin. At a press conference Friday morning, Sturgeon confirmed that Scottish Parliament had the right to call a second referendum because the Brexit vote triggered a “material change” in the circumstances under which the 2014 vote was held—that Scotland would remain a member of the EU by being part of the U.K. Remaining in EU “was driver of staying in U.K.” for many Scottish voters two years ago, Sturgeon said. That Scotland could be taken out of the EU against against its will, she said, is “democratically unacceptable.” She said legislation is being prepared to call another referendum. Apart from Brexit, the economic conditions for Scottish independence have moved against Sturgeon and her supporters since its independence vote in 2014 with the collapse of global oil prices taking a devastating toll on the economy. The trade group Oil and Gas UK said last week that it expects the industry, which is centered around the town of Aberdeen in north-east Scotland, to lose 120,000 jobs by the end of the year. This story has been updated to reflect Sturgeon’s comments during her press conference Friday.Oli Scarff / Getty Images Chess history is best viewed through the game’s evolution: the Romantic Era of the 19th century, the Hypermodernism of the early 20th, the post–World War II dominance of the Soviet School. The elite chess players of today are of no school. They hail from all over the world, as illustrated by current world champion Viswanathan Anand of India and young Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, who is due to challenge Anand for the championship this year. I had the opportunity to train Carlsen in 2009, and his intuitive style conserves the mystique of chess at a time when every CPU-enhanced fan thinks the game is easy. Carlsen is as charismatic and independent as he is talented. If he can rekindle the world’s fascination with the royal game, we will soon be living in the Carlsen Era. Kasparov is a former chess world champion and a political activist Next Sheryl SandbergThe team behind the popular Kryptokit wallet and encrypted messaging extension for Chrome browsers now has a new offering called RushWallet, allowing near-instant bitcoin wallet creation from any device or platform. The philosophy behind RushWallet is “ease of use and removing friction”; effectively, bitcoin should be as quick and accessible as reaching into your pocket for some cash. There shouldn’t be any need to remember login and password credentials every time you need to spend some money, and you should keep full control over your private keys. RushWallet is the latest product of the Kryptokit company based at the Decentral cryptocurrency co-working space in Toronto, which includes co-founders Anthony Di Iorio (team leader) and Steve Dakh (lead developer), among others. A better successor to Instawallet Di Iorio told CoinDesk that RushWallet is designed to be a more reliable implementation of the now-defunct Instawallet, which served a similar purpose: “Since then it’s been our goal to come up with a new instant wallet service, and that’s actually where Kryptokit came from. The key is to have an instant wallet that’s very easy to set up without any login credentials.” Created in 2011, Instawallet had over 1 million accounts and was once lauded by bitcoin developers for its ability to quickly create and use bitcoin addresses. But, a 2013 hack saw it fraudulently relieved of all user funds. Hackers were able to gain access to users’ secret URLs, which were stored online. Instawallet later replaced most users’ balances after a 90-day claims process. RushWallet is open-source and does not house any user information, bitcoins, ‘brain wallets‘ or passwords on its servers, instead storing everything locally on users’ machines. If the service were to disappear, users could simply import their brain wallet elsewhere without any loss. Di Iorio explained: “We never want to hold on to people’s coins. And should anything ever happen to us, you have the full ability to import your wallet somewhere else.” How to create and use a RushWallet To create a new RushWallet, simply go to the company’s website and move your mouse (or finger on a touchscreen) around the box to generate added randomness, or entropy. There is the option to password-protect the wallet, though this is not compulsory. RushWallet then generates a brand new wallet with a public key. Look in the URL/address bar and you will see a random-looking string starting with ‘#’ or hash – the code after the hash is your brain wallet seed, and is a ‘secret link’ not visible anywhere other than on your local browser. Either copy the full URL somewhere safe or bookmark it for future access. If you want, you can import this brain wallet seed into the Kryptokit extension, a Blockchain wallet, or anywhere else that supports importing this format. Users may create an unlimited number of RushWallet addresses and re-use them at any time providing they can remember the secret URLs. The service also integrates with the OneName system, which allows users to send and receive bitcoin using simple user names instead of the standard, difficult-to-remember bitcoin addresses. Users also have the option to create their own custom brain wallet seeds by typing https://rushwallet.com/# followed by a self-created string. Not the wallet for life savings, or total anonymity One word of caution: even though the ‘secret URL’ is never stored on the Internet itself, most modern browsers will save every URL they see, meaning your new brain wallet may get saved too. That’s handy if you’re the only person using your machine, but more dangerous if you’re using a shared or public computer. For this reason, the RushWallet team recommends setting a password, or using RushWallet only for quick transactions after which the new wallet is emptied and disposed of. Even if a hacker were to somehow gain access to a user’s secret URL, a password would prevent them accessing your funds. Otherwise, be sure to clean out the browser’s history as you would to get rid of any other embarrassing or unwanted URL record. While using multiple, easily created bitcoin addresses is a step toward anonymity and makes payments more difficult to tie to an individual, Di Iorio said this is not one of RushWallet’s primary functions. Despite early impressions last year, neither RushWallet nor the Kryptokit extension is designed as a competitor the upcoming Dark Wallet, or the various other coin-mixing services available. The Kryptokit extension The RushWallet team’s previous offering, the KryptoKit wallet extension for Google’s Chrome browsers, has proved a solid and easily-accessible bitcoin wallet. It also supports encrypted instant messaging, auto-detection of bitcoin addresses on a page and a directory of bitcoin-accepting merchants. Kryptokit has proved reliable so far. Its only hiccup was in May, when it was erroneously marked as malware and auto-removed from browsers by Google. It was restored promptly without any users losing funds. The service counts Erik Voorhees, Roger Ver and Vitalik Buterin as team advisors. Hardware wallet coming soon Toronto’s Decentral, on the city’s Spadina Ave, is also the birthplace of the Ethereum project and the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada. Once RushWallet is launched and running smoothly, the development team will turn to its next project: a hardware wallet. Led by hardware specialist Deepayan Acharjya, it has already produced a prototype device. The plan for now is to ultimately produce two devices: one version designed to be either portable or even wearable for use “like a checking account”, and a second for ‘pure’ cold storage in a safe place, eliminating the need to keep a spare computer for the purpose. The team is currently working with a design firm to produce a more stylish version of the prototype. Disclaimer: This article should not be viewed as an endorsement of any of the companies mentioned. Please do your own extensive research before considering investing any funds in these products. Images courtesy RushWalletBhopal/New Delhi: The frown on the face of Shakti Singh Tomar belies his recent successes. A 44-year-old farmer from Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, Tomar proudly says he purchased a Mahindra Scorpio SUV in 2014 by paying Rs8.1 lakh in cash. “Unlike others, I do not have a loan to repay and purchased two hectares of land recently," he said. A large farmer once at the mercy of the vagaries of nature and vulnerable to lower crop prices, Tomar now earns at least Rs6 lakh a year by renting out farm machinery. “The centre that I am running has been a blessing," he added. Shakti Singh Tomar from Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh earns Rs 6 lakh in a year by renting out farm machinery. Photo: Sayantan Bera Tomar is not an isolated success story. He is among 1,205 farmers spread across Madhya Pradesh who are running custom hiring centres (CHCs) which rent out machinery to small and marginal farmers and employ rural youth who manage these centres all day. The cost? Rs25 lakh to set up one centre, which will get a Rs10 lakh government subsidy. However, as Madhya Pradesh has showed, the social benefits of the scheme have far outweighed the costs. Machinery available for hire has reduced manual labour and lowered the cost of cultivation, which has gone up due to a labour shortage. Farmers renting equipment have reported yields rising by around 20%. Fragmented farm holdings mean individual ownership of machinery is unviable for small farmers. Photo: Reuters Stories like that of Tomar also show the structural transformation under way in Indian agriculture: farmers harnessing the opportunities of the market economy, using new technology and becoming entrepreneurs. For instance, Tomar is planning a trip to Haryana to purchase a seed grading machine that costs more than Rs6 lakh. With a group of farmers, he wants to start production of certified seeds that can be sold at a premium. Mechanization has become a necessity due to higher costs and paucity of farm labour, said Rajesh Rajora, principal secretary (agriculture) with the state government. “Every year, nearly 4.5 lakh farm hands move out of rural areas (in Madhya Pradesh) in search of skilled or unskilled work. As purchasing equipment is costly and unviable for small farmers, custom hiring is the way out," he said. Fragmented farm holdings mean individual ownership of machinery is unviable for small farmers. For instance, 85% of farm holdings in India belong to small and marginal farmers cultivating less than two hectares. A tractor needs at least 1,000 hours of operation every year to be economically viable, while two hectares means at most 100 hours. In states like Punjab—India’s most mechanized state with double the number of tractors it needs—individual ownership of machinery has not only led to higher cost of production and lower net income to farmers, but also rising debt among farm households. Every year, nearly 4.5 lakh farm hands move out of rural areas (in Madhya Pradesh) in search of skilled or unskilled work. As purchasing equipment is costly and unviable for small farmers, custom hiring is the way out- Rajesh Rajora, principal secretary (agriculture), Madhya Pradesh government. In comparison, Madhya Pradesh is promoting CHCs as a simple and transparent way of renting farm equipment. Rural youth under 40 years with an undergraduate degree can apply for a grant under the scheme. While agricultural graduates are preferred, final applicants are selected through a lottery. The subsidy is limited to 40% of the cost of a centre or Rs10 lakh. Applicants have to place a margin money of Rs5 lakh and the rest is financed by bank loans. After the candidates are selected, they are sent for a week-long technical training that is a prerequisite to qualify for the bank loan. The applicant has to purchase a mandatory set of equipment required for farm activities from ploughing to harvesting. Each centre serves 200-300 farmers within a radius of less than 10km. In January 2015, 38-year-old Gyan Singh Parmar from Sehore district saw an advertisement in the newspaper inviting applications for setting up farm equipment renting centres. “I was lucky to be selected in the lottery and by September, the centre was fully functional," he said. 38 year old Gyan Singh Parmar from Sehore earned over Rs 3 lakh from the custom hiring centre he started with government support. Photo: Sayantan Bera The returns for Parmar are handsome. The thresher worked for nearly 500 hours harvesting the winter wheat crop in April at a rental of Rs700 per hour. In less than a year, Parmar earned over Rs3 lakh. He has employed two people at a salary of Rs5,000 per month, and is planning to buy a crop reaper cum binder which costs Rs3.5 lakh. “We approve applications in such a way that there is no more than one CHC in a village. This helps keep the model financially viable in the long run," said Anil Porwal, an agriculture engineer who oversees the programme at the state level. While 286 CHCs were set up in the first year of the scheme (2012-13), the number rose to 444 in 2014-15 and 475 in 2015-16. This year, the state has set a target of 612 centres. Rural youth under 40 years with an undergraduate degree can apply for a grant under the scheme. While agricultural graduates are preferred, final applicants are selected through a lottery “The progress of CHC scheme in Madhya Pradesh is impressive," said Ankur Seth, executive officer at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s agriculture division which carried out a multistate study commissioned by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, India’s apex rural development bank. Seth adds that different states have followed different models—while in Andhra Pradesh, CHCs are run by informal groups of farmers who find it difficult to access bank credit, in Punjab, CHCs are run by cooperative societies as an added service. In comparison, the Madhya Pradesh model is designed to retain youth who are losing interest in farming by giving them an opportunity to run a business and also promote the centres as technology transfer units at the village level, Porwal said. While Madhya Pradesh has performed exceptionally in the past few years and states like Tamil Nadu, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh are coming on board, some states like Gujarat, Bihar, Rajasthan and Haryana are not utilizing central funds for mechanization, said a senior official in the Union agriculture ministry who did not want to be named. The centre in 2016-17 allocated Rs160 crore to states under the Sub-Mission on Agricultural Mechanization, but the unspent balance was as high as Rs103 crore by the end of March this year, shows data from the agriculture ministry. While Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh are coming on board, some states like Gujarat, Bihar, Rajasthan and Haryana are not utilizing central funds for mechanization In Madhya Pradesh, the scheme for promoting CHCs does not work in isolation. The state is also implementing a scheme called Yantradoot where 200 villages are adopted every year and farmers get to see first-hand how farm mechanization can boost productivity, save labour costs and even help fight climate change. For instance, 30km from the state capital of Bhopal, Acharpura village has 20 tractors but few improved implements to go with them. Until last year when the village was adopted under Yantradoot, farmers used single box seed drills (for planting crops like soya bean and pulses) where seeds and fertilizers are mixed together, resulting in a poor harvest. The scheme brought in double box seed drills where seeds and fertilizers were applied separately, and many farmers benefitted from the reversible plough, which overturns soil from deep within. Deep ploughing increased the fertility of the soil and also helped control weeds, said Kaluram Ahirwar, a farmer from the village, adding, “productivity of my wheat crop increased from 17 quintal per acre to 22 quintal per acre". Machinery available for hire has reduced manual labour and lowered the cost of cultivation, which has gone up due to a labour shortage. Farmers renting equipment have reported yields rising by around 20%. Photo: Mint Encouraged by the potential of the machines, 24-year-old Haridesh Maran, a commerce graduate from the village applied for a CHC, but did not make it in the lottery. Maran now wants to buy a combined harvester which costs over Rs20 lakh. Isn’t that a risky investment? “If harvesters from Punjab can come this far and make money, why can’t I? In one season, a combined harvester can do a business of Rs7 lakh and I can recoup the investment in three years," he says with confidence. In the neighbouring village of Ratata, Kalyan Singh shows how his soya bean and groundnut crops were not washed away despite heavy rains. Under Yantradoot, his land was sown with a raised bed cultivator that is attached to a tractor. The cultivator made 15-inch raised beds where seeds were sown, alternated with deep furrows which drain the excess water when it rains too much, and conserve soil moisture during dry spells. ALSO READ \| Good monsoon puts tractor sales on the road to recovery In the rush to mechanize farm operations, the private sector too isn’t far behind. According to a report published in July by lobby group Ficci and the German Agribusiness Alliance, leading farm equipment manufacturers such as Mahindra and Mahindra, TAFE, Escorts and John Deere are trying out different models of custom hiring. Noting that purchasing costly equipment like combined harvesters can be prohibitively expensive, even for large farmers, the report said that “custom hiring is the only practical way to introduce capital intensive, high quality mechanisation to the small farming structures prevalent of India". “Farmers who used the combined harvesters took 45 minutes to harvest, thresh and pack wheat in an acre, which otherwise takes a week and 15 labour days," the report said, citing a 2013 field study from Madhya Pradesh. ALSO READ \| Cheap custom hiring can boost farm mechanization, says report No one knows this better than Chandra Mohan Gupta, a former engineer who quit his job to manage 20 acres of his family farm in Narsinghpur district. In 2013, Gupta opened a CHC with government support. “To meet the rising demand from farmers, I also purchased a second tractor, a raised-bed cultivator and a seed grader that cost Rs15 lakh," said Gupta. Chandra Mohan Gupta, a former engineer who quit his job to manage twenty acres of his family farm in Narsinghpur district, has invested over Rs 15 lakh for his custom hiring centre. Photo: Sayantan BeraA police cruiser in Washington, D.C. Black members of Congress sent a letter Tuesday asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director James Comey for help locating missing children in Washington, D.C. According to the Associated Press, the District “logged 501 cases of missing juveniles, many of them black or Latino, in the first three months of this year.” Of those, 22 were unsolved as of March 22, according to D.C. police. “Ten children of color went missing in our nation’s capital in a period of two weeks and at first garnered very little media attention,” read the letter, penned by Congressional Black Caucus chairman Cedric Richmond and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. “That’s deeply disturbing,” They asked that the Justice Department and the FBI “devote the resources necessary to determine whether these developments are an anomaly or whether they are indicative of an underlying trend that must be addressed.” But D.C. police say there hasn’t been an increase in missing persons in their jurisdiction; according to local data, the number of missing children dropped from 2,433 in 2015 to 2,242 in 2016. A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said the increased attention in the cases was because they’d been posting them to social media. Nevertheless, the apparent trend has sparked concern in the District. According to the AP, “hundreds of people packed a town-hall style meeting at a neighborhood school on Wednesday to express concern about the missing-children cases,” and the hashtag #FindOurGirls has taken off on Twitter and Instagram. Derrica Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation, added that “one missing child” is “too many.”saving kids from hell one science class at a time An accidental sneak peek at what kids are taught in a creationist science class shows a profound disregard for both the Bible and scientific facts. He’s on a mission to save your kids from hell. With a Bible in one hand and absolute certainty in his views of how the universe we know came to be in the other, he’ll make sure that rather than study the vetted facts from peer reviewed scientific publications, his students first and foremost ascribe to his religion. While this debate began in the comment lines of my post about the state of education in Texas, I thought I would give readers a peek into the mind of the kind of teacher you can expect in a school district where creationists rule and show you an example of one of his lessons: trying to tie scientific and historical facts to the Bible in class. The claim is that they match so closely, it’s a downright miracle. But why don’t we take his examples of where the Bible is ahead of the times and predicts modern scientific discoveries and put them to the test? The Book of Job was written about 2000–1800 B.C. and points out the earth is hung on nothing. Job 26 talks about the geography of the heavens and the verse in question describes supernatural forces in the process of stretching out “the north over an empty place” and the word earth is used the same way we use the word “ground.” The ground is not being suspended in mid-air during a mystical experience for all of us so I’m going to mark this claim as a massaging of the Bible. There’s also a problem with the dating of the book itself. That dates he gives are based on other Biblical passages and not on any real evidence. Finally, what is the significance of the “hung on nothing” quote and how does this apply to actual science? Moses stated that in the beginning all the seas were in one place and the land was together in one place. This is before Continental Drift began. Genesis 1:9–10 Considering that supercontinents are a product of continental drift, I would say that a few very basic lessons in geology wouldn’t have hurt before making this claim to his students. So not only was he proselytizing, but he’s giving them bad science in the process, providing proof for the argument that creationism in the classroom is going to hurt the quality of education. Now, while the relevant verse does talk about something we could say sounds like a supercontinent like Pangea if we really used our imaginations, there have been more than one supercontinent like it. Why aren’t Vaalbara, or Kenorland, or Rodinia, or the 500 million year cycle of massive single continent being formed on the surface of the Earth, ever mentioned? Normally, this is when I would stop after giving you a sufficient taste of what a creationist science class is like, but considering that we’re dealing with a fully fledged Gish Gallop here, I’m willing to continue. When given an endless stream of quotes and claims to evaluate and dissect, the hope is that you’ll be daunted by the sheer scale of the task and eventually stop hacking your way through so what you either choose to omit for the sake of brevity can be used against you as evidence that since you didn’t refute the claim, it magically became true and perfectly valid. Since this is a blog and I have the ability to respond to every point, I’ll bite the bullet and do it. And in case you’re wondering, the quotes don’t get any better or more interesting past this point. In fact, they descend into irrelevance and grasping at straws… Solomon stated all water flows to the sea, yet the seas are not full [long] before the Water Cycle was understood by meteorologists. Ecclesiastes 1:7 Solomon was never able to see an evening weather report so how did he know about the water cycle. I’m not sure what modern meteorology has to do with something that people could see day in and day out and how it would be a great scientific achievement, especially when it’s part of a rambling speech. Considering a very long history of irrigation, I’m pretty sure that even the first city states knew about the water cycle and there is a whole lot more to modern meteorology than watching how water evaporates and turns to rain. All people are of the same blood. Human blood is different from the blood of all other creatures on earth. Leviticus 17:11, Deuteronomy 12:23, Acts 17:26 There are different blood types but human blood is distinguished from all non-human blood. It has only been 200 years since medicine has understood that a person’s life is in his blood. People knew full well that humans needed blood. It was one of the four humors in pre-scientific medicine and things like bloodletting were intended to get rid of bad blood, not kill someone. As for the Biblical quotes, Acts is extremely confusing in what it’s actually talking about when it refers to an unknown god making all nations out of one blood, Deuteronomy forbids the consumption of blood, and Leviticus just reinforces this tenet. It takes a real butchering of history to say that until 1800, we thought blood was irrelevant and a disregard for all intellectual honesty to cite quotes that barely contain anything to back up one’s claims. Mountains and valleys were seen under the ocean’s surface by Job many years before the aqua lung was discovered. Jonah 2:6 Written about 785–760 B.C. Jonah’s quote about going down to the moorings of mountains is made from inside a whale that swallowed him, so how exactly this would tie to oceanography? Is he using sonar to explore the ocean floor? Also, when were the roaming school of aqua lungs discovered in the seas? I thought they were built. Oh and if the Bible is so accurate about science, why does it call whales fish when they’re actually mammals? Egyptian spears and chariots with gold plated spokes have been photographed at the bottom of the Dead Sea where Moses and the Israelites escaped to get away from the Egyptians. The Dead Sea? You would have to be really deep into Judea to come across the Dead Sea. Maybe he meant the Red Sea? The one Egyptians crossed all the time for wars and conquest and may have lost some military hardware along the way? And how is this a scientific claim about the Bible? It’s just historical revisionism. What is the secret of the snow? The secret of the snow is as it falls through the atmosphere, the snow absorbs nitrogen in the air and when the snow melts the farmers get a fertilizer application on the ground. Farmers today pay big bucks to have nitrogen put on their crops. [Job 38:22] Wow, we’re talking about the mysteries of life and the universe and discussing from where snow comes? It’s not like ancient farmers couldn’t have figured this out on their own and needed the Bible to tell them. Frankly, I was expecting something at least a little bit more impressive than the history of snowfall. Also, how does Job asking about storehouses of snow explain the actual chemistry he detailed? My guess is that he just took a Biblical quote mentioning snow and tacked it on to his explanation during the class preaching session. All creatures reproduce after their own kind. Genesis 1:21–25 […] thanks to Watson and Crick we know today that animals of different species cannot reproduce with each other… the chromosome numbers must be the same for conception to occur. Except for horses and donkeys which can produce a mule with a different chromosome count. And what about the hybrids between recently divergent species like grizzlies and polar bears? Biology is far more complex so for this statement to be right, there should be no such things as hybrids. Oh and by the way, the actual quote says nothing about only mating with one’s own kind. It’s just a crude attempt at taxonomy. Oceanography was developed when a man was reading Psalms 8:8 and read words saying “the paths of the sea.” He said, “If the Bible says there are paths in the sea, then I will find them.” He became the father of oceanography because of a Biblical statement he proved to be true. And of course, there’s nothing more convincing than a random story without a name or link to a biography or a shred of evidence that this actually happened for that matter. Just more lying. Oh wait, I meant repeating what he was told by televangleists looking out for his soul. Wind currents were written about by Solomon in Ecclesiastes 1:6. He got it right. How did he know about wind currents when he’d never been to the poles or understood the concept of hot air rising and cooler air falling downward. Information written about 935 B.C. Oh I
of the 1970–71 season. Petticoat Junction is another series often cited in the purge, but that show was already in decline (due in part to shifting tastes and to the death of star Bea Benaderet in 1968) by the time it was canceled in 1970. The success of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, and newer, more urban variety shows such as The Carol Burnett Show in 1967 and The Flip Wilson Show in 1970, would allow for the mass cancellations of most of the now "undesired shows" at the end of 1971, despite their high ratings and popularity. Both Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies had dropped from the Nielsen top 30 by the 1970–71 season, yet both shows continued to win their respective time slots and had a loyal following, warranting renewal for another season. Other shows still pulling in even higher ratings when canceled included Mayberry R.F.D., which finished the season at number 15, Hee Haw at number 16, and The Jim Nabors Hour at number 29.[14] Nevertheless, the course had been set by the networks and the shows were canceled to free up the schedules for newer shows. The inclusion of demographics in determining a series' worth to its sponsors meant high ratings alone did not necessarily warrant a series for renewal. Series such as ABC's The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family were never truly ratings hits; however, both series appealed to a younger demographic and thus were renewed for three more seasons and have been rerun on various outlets for decades since. Replacement shows Edit Other cancellations Edit Shows canceled due to the purge Edit See also EditSweeping Sundance this year with the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Awards was Fruitvale, the true story of 22-year old Bay Area resident, Oscar Grant, who was killed by a transit police officer in Oakland, CA on New Year’s Day 2009. The tragic event, captured on cell phone video cameras by a crowd of witnesses, ignited protests and support by the local community and has come to symbolize the epidemic of police brutality against young African American men in our culture. First-time director Ryan Coogler crafts a compelling and emotional film that chronicles the last day in Oscar’s life, as we watch a man with a good heart try to straighten out his life, care for his daughter, girlfriend, and mother, and stay out of trouble with the law. With the buzz surrounding the film and an acquisition by Harvey Weinstein, it’s hopeful that this little indie film could get enough spotlight to do what most well-intentioned filmmakers aspire to do — make a difference. Cinematographer Rachel Morrison captures the essence of the story of Fruitvale as if we are part of Oscar’s circle of friends and family with great authenticity. Her lens puts us in the center of things as a silent observer to both Oscar’s emotions and the physicality of his day — in the passenger seat cruising around Oakland, chilling out at a family gathering, and on the crowded subway platform — as if we’re watching a documentary of events unfold unobtrusively. With grit and grain reminiscent of 1960’s news footage achieved by shooting super 16mm film, Morrison’s work on Fruitvale serves the story well and feels like an appropriate yet courageous artistic choice compared to the digital world of indie film we currently live in. Fruitvale is Morrison’s fourth Sundance film in the past three years, and is heading to theaters in the Fall. I had a chance to chat with Rachel after this year’s festival. How did you get involved with the project? Ilyse McKimmie at Sundance Institute’s Screenwriting Lab recommended me when Ryan was interviewing DPs. We had an initial Skype meeting which was incredible – we connected on every level and I knew he was someone I wanted to collaborate with. What was your vision for the look of the film and what were your inspirations? We both felt, to do this story justice, we needed it to look real and feel authentic. We knew we wanted to shoot on film and for the grain to be visible. We also decided to shoot the entire feature handheld and to look for ways to connect the characters using the camera to explore the world as Oscar navigates it. We referenced everything from photojournalists like Robert Capa to features including “The Prophet,” “Warrior,” and “City of God.” What did you shoot the film on? We shot on ARRI 416 with Zeiss Ultra 16 primes provided by ARRI CSC, with Kodak Vision3 500T 7219. How did you come to decide to shoot on film, specifically s16mm? There’s no substitute for the organic structure and movement of film – Ryan and I both felt the audience would connect better if they felt like they were watching something real as it unfolded, and we really believed even at a subconscious level, film would help us achieve this. We went back and forth between 35mm and 16mm, but Ryan in particular had an affinity for Super 16 because he used it while he was learning his craft, and of course it further highlights the grain structure – we wanted people to be immersed in the story, but also to know it was shot on film. I suggested 2 perf 35mm which could be force processed to enhance the granularity, but we ultimately decided 2.35 would distance us from Oscar, when we wanted the film to be an intimate portrait of the man himself. At first I wasn’t sure how I would work around the greater depth-of-field, but I came to embrace it, as the story’s second layer was really about Oscar’s environment. The film had both a documentary and cinema veritae feel, but in a very intimate way. How much did you and the director collaborate on how you were going to capture the characters and story? I have a background in nonfiction work, so I’ve spent a long time honing my handheld camerawork. Ryan pretty much trusted me implicitly while we were shooting – I had to make him look at the monitor! The nice thing about this is it freed him up to engage with the actors directly. Honestly, the success of the film’s intimacy I would attribute to this process. It was often just Ryan and I side-by-side in the room with the actors. He wasn’t directing from behind a curtain at video village. What was your workflow like on location? We had to adapt quickly to each new location. I didn’t have the gear and crew to start from scratch in each new space. Instead, I tried always to supplement and enhance the existing sources (from practicals to windows). We shipped the film to Fotokem in LA to be processed and transferred to HDCAM SR. I communicated with the colorist by sending stills I had taken on my Canon 5D and notes as simple as “warm up the highlights.” They then shipped the HDCAM to Spy Post in San Francisco for DVD and digital dailies. Because we could only afford 2 day shipping, it was over a week before we actually saw anything we shot. It was only slightly terrifying. There were VFX shots predominantly handled by the students at California Arts Academy and we worked with Spy Post for the final color correction. We never got to go back to the original negative but instead worked from our HDCAM master. How many production days? 20 days, but really only 18 if you count three days on the Bart platform, where we only had four hours of shooting time. What was your biggest challenge on the film? The aforementioned Bart platform was the biggest challenge because we had little time, coupled with an ensemble cast, stunts, firearms, a moving train, SFX makeup and over a hundred extras. Ryan played football his whole life. We treated these three 4-hour shoots like we were running football plays. We had a laminate playbook and everything. We had approximately 18-20 shots to get in 4 hours. We only got 1-2 takes with a fast reset between them. We had a few lights in the air and I had one electric on each unit on the ground. One grip holding a floppy for negative fill etc. I play soccer myself and it was definitely like working together in a team sport. I’m really proud of what we accomplished! How involved were you in the post process? It was so quick – we had to get the film done in time for Sundance. I flew to SF for five days to work with a great colorist at Spy Post, Chris Martin. Our main dialogue regarded the broader strokes, as Ryan had fallen in love with the online color and I had some pretty big changes in mind all along. I think we found a really nice compromise, but we didn’t have as much time as I would have liked for matching shot-to shot. I had to return to New York to finish another film, but communicated the final day of work by emailing frame grabs and short clips. What is your favorite shot of the film and why? My favorite shot is the steadicam at the beginning of the prison flashback. We lead Oscar to meet his mother in the visitation area and we see him transform from the hardened version of himself (who he needs to present for survival in jail) to a devoted and loving son. Jordan gives an incredible performance and this shot really tells the story of Oscar in all his complexity. My second favorite is the steadicam at the end of the same scene, but now we are leading Wanda (Octavia Spencer) away from her son while he is held back by the guards behind her. Now we see the layering of all the emotion he has caused in her.The Federal Reserve's commitment to loose monetary policy is likely to lead to asset and equity bubbles in the next two years which could be worse than the previous crisis, renowned economist Nouriel Roubini said in an opinion piece for Project Syndicate. Roubini, co-founder and chairman of Roubini Global Economics famously dubbed Dr Doom for his accurate prediction of the 2008 financial crisis, wrote earlier this week that "the problem is that theFed's liquidity injections are not creating credit for the real economy, but rather boosting leverage and risk-taking in financial markets." "The issuance of risky junk bonds under loose covenants and with excessively low interest rates is increasing; the stock market is reaching new highs, despite the growth slowdown; and money is flowing to high-yielding emerging markets," he added. According to Roubini, a slow exit from the Fed's quantitative easing (QE) policy would be similar to 2004, when the central bank began to slowly raise rates. Between June 2004 and December 2007, the Fed raised rates in 25 basis point increments. The gradual rate hikes were blamed for keeping monetary policy accommodative for too long and worsening the housing bubble. (Read More: Bernanke Watch: Is He Eyeing the Exit?) On Wednesday, the Fed held fast to its ultra-accommodative monetary policy after its policy meeting because of what board members described as an economy weakened by fiscal policy. The Fed will continue to buy $85 billion a month in bonds under its QE3 program. (Read More: Fed Keeps Interest Rates Low. Continues Bond Buying Program) According to Roubini, the Fed's program and that of similar programs from other central banks have far-reaching consequences with the troubled euro zone periphery even gaining from the increased liquidity. Roubini said that even when interest rates begin to rise, which he predicts will be in 2015, it will be slow and steady. But Roubini doesn't prescribe an alternative. Instead, he said, that moving too quickly "would crash asset markets and risk leading to a hard economic landing." (Read More: Roubini: Brace for Market Correction Later This Year) According to him, markets should be braced for turmoil once monetary tightening starts and further turbulence once tightening is finished. "The exit from the Fed's QE and zero-interest-rate policies will be treacherous: Exiting too fast will crash the real economy, while exiting too slowly will first create a huge bubble and then crash the financial system. If the exit cannot be navigated successfully, a dovish Fed is more likely to blow bubbles." —By CNBC's Shai Ahmed; Follow her on Twitter @shaicnbc.Australian stunt rider launches going 71 mph, drops 18 1/2 stories and jumps 374 feet; warms up by racing down the bobsled run at Utah Olympic Park For those wondering what Robbie Maddison would do for his next trick, the answer has arrived with two stunts of Olympic proportions. The Australian motorcycle stunt rider, known as today's Evel Knievel, dropped in on the Utah Olympic Park in Park City and raced down the bobsled run before making a spectacular jump off the K120 Nordic Ski long jump. Maddison, 33, launched going 71 mph, dropped 18 1/2 stories (or 185 feet, said to be a world record), and jumped a total length of 374 feet. Maddison teamed with Skullcandy and Red Bull Media House's On Any Sunday to produce the video Drop In (the bobsled run starts at the :50 mark; the jump at 2:05): These stunts are the latest in a long line of feats by the daredevil whose biography describes him with one word: nutter. "He’s jumped over a football, held world records for longest distance jumped on a motorcycle (with a trick thrown in for good measure!), he jumped onto a replica of the Arc de Triomphe, then just for fun, jumped back down," the Robbie Maddison bio says. "He back-flipped over the opened Tower Bridge in London, leapt over 300 feet across the Corinth Canal and most recently jumped close to 400 feet over the San Diego Harbor with friend Levi Lavallee on a snowmobile next to him. Starting to get the picture?" To be sure, Maddison is every bit as daring as Knievel. On the 40th anniversary of Knievel's ill-fated jump over the fountains at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on December 31, 2007, Maddison broke the world record for motorcycle jumping, travelling 322.6 feet. He has since jumped 350.98 feet. And like Knievel, Maddison has had his share of injuries. "In some ways, serious injuries helped me refocus on how important this whole adventure around the world is to me," he says in his bio. "It fires me up more than ever, so it’s a blessing in disguise. Traveling the world, doing something I love, meeting the people I’ve met—it’s been a wild ride and I want to keep it going for as long as I can." Can't wait to see what Robbie Maddison will do next. h/t Transworld Motocross Follow David Strege on Facebook More from GrindTV Man on cellphone casually avoids disaster Kelly Slater completes surfing's first 540 9-year-old skate prodigy Sabre Norris lands 540The Cork music shop that sold Rory Gallagher his first guitar has closed after 87 years in business, with the closure being blamed on the increasing number of musicians buying their instruments online. Sheena Crowley is the third generation to run Crowleys Music Centre, but on Saturday she closed the outlet’s doors on McCurtain Street for the last time, ending almost nine decades of service to the music industry. “It was my grandfather Tadhg Crowley who set up the business - he was an uilleann pipe maker and he set up a workshop in Drawbridge Street in 1926 with 12 workers, and he had a shop on Merchants Quay selling the instruments. “My father Michael later took over the business and it was he who sold Rory Gallagher his first guitar in August 1963 - it was a Fender Stratocaster which had been ordered by Jim Connolly, who was playing with one of the showbands. “Jim Connolly had wanted a cherry red Stratocaster, but Fender sent a sunburst one, so he decided against taking it... and so my father had to sell it as a second-hand guitar - and Rory bought it for just under £100 - and the rest is history.” The 1960s, ’70s and ’80s saw Crowleys servicing the burgeoning Irish rock music scene. Over the years the store, which moved to McCurtain Street in 1974, has supplied instruments to some of the best known names in the Irish music business. “We supplied instruments to The Horslips, Joe Herlihy who became U2’s soundman used to work for us and he used to ring up looking for certain guitars for The Edge, and Christy Moore used to ask my father to get certain types of guitar for him.” Ms Crowley says the arrival of the internet posed major challenges for the business. About six years ago she noticed online sales were beginning to have a big impact on their business. “It started hitting us fast - we did everything we could for musicians in terms of getting the best instruments for them, but it just seems that they started buying their stuff online and our turnover was halved pretty quickly,” she revealed. Last year, Ms Crowley held a showcase of Irish handmade instruments featuring the work of local instrument makers in a bid to counter the impact of the internet by showing musicians quality instruments being made in Ireland. “What I wanted to say is, ‘I know ye are online and are looking for the best bargains and your instruments might be €100 cheaper, but I wanted to highlight instrument makers like Ari Sheehan, who makes fantastic guitars for the likes of Declan Sinnott. “Saturday was our last day - it’s sad but that’s life,” said Ms Crowley, who hopes to develop a website to sell quality Irish-made instruments internationally, including to the US, Japan and China, where she believes a market for the instruments can be developed.Nintendo Switch hits store shelves in just a few months, but Nintendo is staying tight-lipped (at least until January 12th) about its software lineup. In the meantime, various reports have been leaking details ahead of the official reveal, and today we have a new report from Laura Dale of Let's Play Video Games. According to sources at both Nintendo and Ubisoft (who have proven accurate in the past), Nintendo Switch is getting a Mario & Rabbids crossover RPG. Dale reports that Ubisoft is developing a turn-based RPG under the watchful supervision of Nintendo. The game has the working title "Mario RPG: Invasion of the Rabbids," and Nintendo is aiming to make it a launch title for Nintendo Switch. The game's plot revolves around the Mario universe being invaded by Ubisoft's Rabbids characters, some friend and some foe, and Bowser (who has a new form based on the design of the Rabbids) will be a recurring boss. Yoshi will be a key member of your party, as will a playable Rabbid, and there will be numerous cameos from other Mario characters. The game features an auto-save feature to ensure that players won't lose their progress if their battery dies while playing on the go, and the Joy-Con controllers are said to vibrate to indicate a Rabbid jumping into and out of them from the TV or handheld screen. This title is said to be one of the focuses of the upcoming Nintendo Switch presentation in January, and Nintendo intends to have a playable demo ready for the press at that time. This information is not officially confirmed by Nintendo at this time, but one of Dale's sources is a Nintendo employee who has previously proven accurate by leaking when the Switch reveal would take place, the content of the reveal, Switch's use of cartridges, and more. The second source is "A source close to development at a Ubisoft studio," and they are primarily familiar with Nintendo Switch development kits. This source previously tipped Dale off to the look of the portable device. Additionally, GameXplain reports that they have heard the same details from their sources. Source: Let's Play Video GamesThe Telluride Film Festival has held tributes for but a handful cinematographers over the last 44 years. The names are titans of the form: Karl Struss (“Sunrise,” “The Great Dictator”), Sven Nykvist (“Cries & Whispers,” “Fanny and Alexander”), John Alton (“An American in Paris,” “Elmer Gantry”), Vittorio Storaro (“Apocalypse Now,” “The Last Emperor”). This year, on the heels of a lifetime achievement prize from the American Society of Cinematographers earlier this year, Ed Lachman joins their ranks. Oscar-nominated for “Far From Heaven” and “Carol,” Lachman is a frequent collaborator of director Todd Haynes. This year’s celebration of his work is pegged to their latest, “Wonderstruck,” which is part of the festival’s main program. But Lachman’s career outstretches those three movies alone, from working with icons of pop (Madonna) and humanitarianism (Mother Teresa), to collaborations with artists at the beginning (Sofia Coppola) and end (Robert Altman) of their careers. Lachman spoke to Variety about his career to date and a momentary pause to look back. Variety: Congratulations on receiving a Telluride tribute. How does it feel to get that kind of treatment and to look back on your career? Related Todd Haynes on ‘Wonderstruck’: ‘It Is a Kids’ Movie’ Cinematographer Ed Lachman on ‘Carol’ as a Stylistic Foil to ‘Far From Heaven’ ‘Carol’ Cinematographer Ed Lachman on Challenges of a Tight Budget Ed Lachman: I’ve been going to Telluride since around 1979, and I’ve had six to eight films there, I can’t remember. One I even co-directed. So for me Telluride has become a kind of sanctuary that embraces film as an art form, both past and present, with known and unknown artists and their films. This award, and I should say the ASC award earlier this year as well, might seem like closure to my creative life, but it’s a way of revisiting my memories, friendships and images. They’ve only honored a handful of cinematographers. And it’s pretty heady company. I’m more than frightened by it! I was fortunate to have worked with Sven and Vittorio, who I gained many exceptional insights from. During your career so far the biggest shift has probably been from photo chemical to digital. What do you foresee being the next big shift? Industry or marketing always thinks technology drives our stories and images, but if you see what’s happening, people are actually embracing film again because they know there’s a different aesthetic and look to it. Not all stories should be told the same. There are certain stories that I think lend themselves to the digital media and certain stories that lend themselves to film, so I don’t think technology is the thing that’s going to change our stories. We can look at holographic imagery, you know, or virtual reality, but ultimately it’s about storytelling and the stories that I’m interested in are not stories that are video games and amusement rides but stories about what makes us human or vulnerable. So the VR world isn’t something you’re caught up in. I’ve seen some work. I think right now visual artists are doing the most interesting things with virtual reality. The technology isn’t there yet, to tell you the truth. What I’ve seen is pretty primitive. You’ve done quite a lot of documentary work over the years. How do those experiences shape a DP’s personal aesthetic and work flow? It’s been essential. I always say even the narrative fictional form is really a documentation in space and time. No performance is ever the same. The light is not exactly the same. The camera responds to the action. I feel it’s like another actor because it’s engaging with the performance. So actually documentary has always informed my work. When I walk into a location, I’m always interested in how that location responds to the light, where the light fixtures are, where the windows are. Even if I stylize a film like “Far From Heaven,” I’m still looking at reality to create the fiction. You’ve worked with a wide array of artists and filmmakers. If you’ll indulge a speed round on some of them here, just to get your recollections of those collaborations — let’s start with David Byrne (1986’s “True Stories”). Wow. Here we go. The interesting thing is I just re-authorized “True Stories” for Criterion. The most incredible thing about David was how he used images as ideas. David was very much involved with the process. He’s a musician but he’s also a visual artist, so “True Stories” was kind of a collage of re-appropriation. He said he based it out of stories from newspaper articles that were so-called true stories. I felt it was way ahead of its time in the way he told his story with visual irony and metaphor. How about Madonna (1985’s “Desperately Seeking Susan”)? What can I say about Madonna? She was very young and open and I thought “Desperately Seeking Susan” captured a certain period of time. I looked at a film like “Midnight Cowboy” and I thought, “How could I capture New York in the ‘80s the way ‘Midnight Cowboy’ captured New York in the ‘60s?” And so the downtown East Village, which is so prevalent in the film, is kind of this enticing and foreboding world and she embodied that. I think that performance is a strong statement for that time period. Mother Teresa (1986 documentary “Mother Teresa”)? She was the real thing. I’ve read now that certain books have tried to discredit her. I find that totally erroneous. Her compassion was always remarkable. While filming with her in Beirut, I witnessed what she did. She went into West Beirut and pulled Muslim children out of a hospital that was being inadvertently bombed, and the senior priests were resistant to her going into that because they were afraid for her well-being. They were also afraid it would be used politically against the Israelis. But she made it very clear that these children should not be seen as Christian or Muslim, that they were God’s children. She knew her mission was to go and protect them. So I only have the greatest admiration for her. You were the last DP Steven Soderbergh (1999’s “The Limey,” 2000’s “Erin Brockovich”) hired before he started shooting his films himself. Well, Steven, I think he got bored just directing. I think he wanted more of a physical activity. I always say the camera operator is the first audience for the performance, and I think he wanted to be part of that experience and the immediacy of the image. Actually on “The Limey” he did “B” camera. So I don’t think it was such a big leap. And believe me I’ve done both and each job takes its own amount of energy. It’s hard to do both. So I’ve always been a great supporter of Steven and he’s always been a great supporter of projects I’ve worked on. In fact, he was instrumental in helping us get “I’m Not There” off the ground. I always have the greatest admiration and respect for Steven, not only because of his work, but how he supported other filmmakers in the industry. You helped Sofia Coppola (“The Virgin Suicides”) develop her aesthetic early on. In my career I’ve worked a lot with female directors and I’ve always found that working with women, the ego didn’t get involved with the work, and so my collaboration with people like Susan Seidelman, Mira Nair, Stacy Cochran, Deborah Kampmeier, Sofia — I’ve always had a positive experience. Sofia knew her story. She had written a script and she had visual ideas, but she was very open to everyone’s contribution. I remember visually we looked at “Badlands” and we were looking at kind of the pop photography of Japan at the time. It was a very wonderful collaboration. You worked with Robert Altman on his last film (2006’s “A Prairie Home Companion”) and you were in pre-production on his follow-up, “Hands on a Hardbody,” when he passed. Robert Altman wanted the audience to feel a sense of discovery with the camera. So he would shoot with two or three cameras on a dolly all the time, and he told me it came out of his experience in television. He knew he could cut around if the one camera saw the other camera, but he wanted the immediacy of the image and of the performance. And another important point was he loved jazz. So he saw the camera as kind of improvisational, like jazz music. I came on and did a scene for “Dr. T and the Women,” with Richard Gere, where he’s in a tornado. This is what kind of cemented our relationship because they didn’t know exactly how they were going to do it, but he wanted to use rear screen projection. So I had, in commercials, used this thing called the Roundy Round, where the camera could be placed in this device. You could rotate the camera on axis and it would spin around. So I used that and then when they blew all the debris in and out and we moved the camera around against the rear screen projection, it looked totally realistic. That’s what I loved about Bob was he would always set up the visual problem, but then he would give you the freedom to solve it. And finally, Todd Solondz (2009’s “Life During Wartime,” 2016’s “Weiner-Dog”). With Todd, it all comes from his writing and the performance and his casting. He always questioned that he didn’t want the image to supersede the thematics of the story. So I have a really great relationship with him in the sense that I can try to articulate visual ideas of how we can reinforce his stories. We complement each other very well that way. Let’s move on to Todd Haynes’ “Wonderstruck.” It’s a film split into two eras, the 1920s and the 1970s. The ’20s section takes its cues from silent-era cinema. Were there any films of that period that were a particular influence visually? Absolutely. We looked at a number of them, but the three that come to mind are “The Last Laugh,” “The Wind” and “The Crowd.” When that portion of the film takes place, that was really the height of the silent era. They were experimenting with a very sophisticated way of using a camera with orchestrated movement and German expressionistic lighting. And how about for the ’70s portions? We reference the films that were coming out of New York in the ‘70s, like “The French Connection” and earlier films like “Midnight Cowboy.” They were shooting on the streets, kind of an urban grit. They were mirroring the economic and social times of New York, which was going through economic hardships and kind of a physical deterioration. There was an authenticity to the image. Ultimately this film feels like a slightly different direction for Haynes. It has an unusual energy. Did it feel like a departure for you in your ongoing collaboration with him? Todd’s always worked in the different cinematic languages of time periods. In this film you could say the ‘20s is the black-and-white silent era, which becomes a visual metaphor for the two characters’ deafness. The ‘30s, we worked on “Mildred Pierce.” The late-‘50s, we worked on “Far From Heaven,” and the early-‘50s, “Carol.” So I don’t find it such a departure. Maybe the subject matter, dealing with a child’s imagination, but if you look at his films like “Superstar,” it really tracks the same ideas. I do think this is very experimental in the language it uses with these miniatures and using silence. But for me, Todd has honored the imagination and the intelligence of children. He felt Brian Selznick’s book and script offered a chance to do something sophisticated, nuanced and mature for kids, showing how children gain access to their imagination and the language of communication. The interesting thing about this film is it needs the audience to be active. He tested it on numerous occasions with children at different ages and they got it. They don’t need the same kind of construction of narrative that I think we grew up with, because they’re much freer in their ability to receive and experience information. I think that’s what’s unique about the film. It works on another level.A four-month-old boy has died and his 22-month-old brother has been left with life-changing injuries after they were mauled by a dog in Colchester. Archie Joe Darby, his older brother Daniel-Jay, and their mother were found injured at a detached house on Harwich Road at 3.10pm on Thursday. All were taken to hospital, where Archie Joe died from his injuries. Daniel-Jay was initially treated at Colchester general hospital before being transferred to a specialist unit elsewhere, according to a tweet by the area’s MP, Will Quince. The boys’ mother was treated for minor injuries and has been discharged from hospital. The dog has since been put down, police have said. On Friday evening, the family paid tribute to the boys. In a statement, they said: “Our beautiful sons Archie Joe Darby and Daniel-Jay Darby are so, so loved by us all and were such happy little lovable boys. It doesn’t seem real that our little Archie Bum has gone to heaven and our little Daniel is in intensive care because of a tragic, tragic incident involving a dog attack. “We have lost our gorgeous little four-month-old baby and our beautiful 22-month-old boy is currently being treated for his injuries. Heaven has gained a beautiful little angel and he will be greatly missed by us all and our other little soldier is still fighting strong. Please, please, please can you all respect our privacy at this time.” Police and forensic investigators were still at the house on Friday, and the property’s back garden was taped off. Neighbours said they did not know the family well because they had only moved in earlier this year. Ellen Double, 87, who lives several doors down, said: “We never knew the people who lived there. I’ve never seen anybody go in there and as for a dog or children, you never see anything except three cars – that’s all I have seen. So yesterday when I saw the ambulance … First it was just one ambulance, and suddenly there were two emergency ambulances and police cars. The whole road was blocked.” Double said she saw a woman being guided from the house and into the back of one of the ambulances. “The last thing I saw was that a young woman came out with something draped over her head and she went into the ambulance,” she said. “I was standing up at my bedroom window and I couldn’t help watching, but I didn’t know how serious it was. She was bent down and she had her coat or whatever draped right over her head, so nobody could see her, but she got into the ambulance, which then drove away.” Scott Mills, 24, an accountant who lives across the road from the scene, described the light brown dog that was removed from the house as “like a staffordshire bull terrier, but slightly more built”. “It was like it was a cross-breed,” he said. “It was primarily staffordshire in its looks, but it was a lot broader.” Armed response units arrived at the scene, Mills said, but the dog was taken away by a specialist handler. “It was on a pole lead,” he said. “It was totally calm coming out. There was no blood or anything on it. It didn’t appear aggressive; it just appeared that it was being put on a lead to go for a walk. It just jumped in the back of the van and the van left.” Ch Insp Elliot Judge said: “This is a tragic incident that Essex police is investigating. Specially trained officers are providing support to the family at this difficult time. We will not be making any further statement at this time and would ask the media to respect the family’s privacy.” An East of England ambulance service spokesperson said: “We received a call yesterday (13 October) at 3.08pm to reports of a serious incident in Colchester. We dispatched three ambulances, a rapid response vehicle, an ambulance officer, and an air ambulance from the Essex and Herts air ambulance trust. “At the scene two young children were treated by crews, one for life-threatening injuries, and the other for life-changing injuries. Both were taken to Colchester general hospital via land ambulance in a serious condition.”Site Background Newgrounds and the people involved. Adventures Crazy stories about NG trips and events. Rants & Raves I like to complain, so sue me. Speaking of which... Making the Game Read the stories behind your favorite Flash games! Hate-Mail Always good for a laugh, emails from various zealots and wackos. Contributions Stories (fact and/or fiction) written by fans! Site Background / The Troma Connection A sick and twisted website, with hits like Assassin, Club a Seal, and Telebubby Fun Land. A sick film company, with hits like The Toxic Avenger, Tromeo & Juliet, and Killer Condom. A match made in heaven! From September 1999 until December 2002, Newgrounds was hosted as part of the Tromaville Network. In return, they managed the ads and kept a cut for themselves. Troma came to me at the perfect time, because I had three options: Shut down the site because I could no longer afford bandwidth fees. Sell the site to the Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), who was a huge hype at the time, but has since gone out of business (the $60 million dollars they spent in one year wasn't enough to stay afloat). Affiliate with Troma, and get free hosting and revenue from the banner ads. As tempting as the Den offer was at the time (especially for a poor college kid), I took the Troma offer. I signed the contract with Troma in September of 1999... Over that next year I had a barrage of offers from other affiliate networks and other companies wanting to buy Newgrounds. Other affiliate networks offered a lot more money, which made me bitter about the contract I was stuck in - but those companies have since failed to pay their affiliates and have gone out of business. We eventually ended the partnership when Troma dissolved their network. We still actually host a large number of network sites as a courtesy - Troma let us keep the hosting hardware, so we just kept the affiliate server running. We've upgraded all the other hardware since then, of course. :) Before the Tromaville Coalition: ASK THE PENIS MONSTER Before Troma even started their affiliate network, I worked with them to create some on-line games. My first Troma creation was "Ask the Penis Monster", featuring the Penis Monster from Tromeo & Juliet. Tommy Lee was quoted in "Yahoo! Internet Life" as saying Ask The Penis Monster is his favorite thing on the web!Wishing all our readers happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year from all of us at Remodelista and Gardenista. Here’s a look back at
or "beyond anything experienced" should not be conflated with the spurious claim that the devastation wrought by Harvey is "unpreventable" or "unexpected." The outcry by advocates, experts and activists against the unplanned, for-profit development of cities like Houston has been consistently ignored by city officials, leaving millions--especially the poor and people of color--in the fourth-largest city in the U.S. in a death trap. "Houston is the fourth-largest city, but it's the only city that does not have zoning," Dr. Robert Bullard, a Houston resident and a professor who studies environmental racism, told Democracy Now! on August 29. "[As a result], communities of color and poor communities have been unofficially zoned as compatible with pollution...We call that environmental injustice and environmental racism. It is that plain, and it's just that simple." Thousands attempt to flee the devastating flooding in Houston, Texas The image of elderly people in a nursing home sitting in waist-deep water is a shocking illustration of how the most vulnerable segments of the population are struggling to deal with the effects of Harvey. Thankfully, all of those people have been rescued and brought to safety. But, as Dr. Bullard points out, the nightmare for tens of thousands of the city's poorest residents living in close proximity to Houston's vast petrochemical industry is just beginning. They are literally being gassed by and steeped in the toxic materials unleashed by the floodwaters that have damaged the oil refineries and chemical manufacturers that surround their homes and neighborhoods. The choices facing people in these neighborhoods are gut-wrenching. Should you and your family stay as toxic floodwaters rise all around you? If you decide to go, where do you go? THE CHOICES confronting Houston's undocumented population are equally terrifying. Just hours before Harvey made landfall (and exactly one week before the state's notorious "show me your papers" bill known as SB 4 is set to take effect), Customs and Border Patrol officials announced they would maintain their checkpoints to verify immigration status as people fled north, evacuating ahead of the approaching destruction. Although Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, bowing to the ensuing public criticism, announced that those fleeing would have access to shelters regardless of their immigration status, the overall message to the undocumented was clear: drown or get deported. The private prison corporations running Abbott's detention centers, their cells filled by raids and roundups carried out by the state's deportation machine, were similarly opaque about their plans to deal with the prisoners under their control. Confusion continued with contradictory orders from city and state officials about whether residents should stay or flee. Many stayed behind, some without the money to do otherwise. The homeless were naturally distrustful of the police, who have denied them access to food and hounded them from the streets, under the rule of Mayor Sylvester Turner. The common refrain from local officials in Houston and elsewhere was that telling people to leave would simply trap people on the roads as the storm arrived--so people should just take shelter where they were and hope for the best. But this makes it seem as though the situation facing city managers in Houston was an unanticipated dilemma, and that the city's captains of industry and elected officials haven't had a hand in constructing the conditions that made the effects of Harvey so devastating and turned parts of Houston into a deathtrap. Houston's lack of infrastructure to manage potential flood events is in many ways an environmental expression of the crisis of neoliberalism. As a crucial port city that thrives off of oil revenues, Houston is one of the largest profit-making urban areas in the U.S. The flood of fixed capital, particularly into the construction and petrochemical sectors, has also made the city a flood capital. Heavy investment in impermeable concrete has turned wetlands into high rises, shopping malls, parking lots and manufacturing platforms. But wetlands are irreplaceable as natural shock absorbers for heavy rainfall and reduce the risk of flooding. Concrete, by contrast, acts like a sluice to transmit and concentrate water. The activities of developers thus transform nearby neighborhoods, once relatively safe from flooding, into basins for collecting floodwater. Even when regulations are imposed, they are routinely ignored and go unenforced. But regulation is rare because elected officials are the lapdogs of developers who regard better drainage systems as an unconscionable cost that others should pay for--in particular, through regressive taxes on working people. LOCATED IN a region prone to heavy rain, Houston's last significant flood prevention measure was a set of dams introduced in the 1940s to prevent the city's system of bayous from overflowing into its central business district. The dams, however, were in the middle of repair as the storm arrived Friday--just as the levies around New Orleans were being upgraded when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. In order to avoid the embarrassment of a levy breach reminiscent of Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers opted for a controlled release of a limited amount of water to lower the stress on the dams, their fragility a hieroglyph of a general crisis of public infrastructure thrown into sharp relief by Harvey's arrival. Houston meanwhile has been subject to devastating floods for decades, the most memorable of which was not Hurricane Ike in 2008, but tropical storm Allison in 2001, which left 41 people dead. Massive storms that flooded the city in 2015 were likewise described as "unprecedented." Having ignored the warnings of scientists and the protests of trapped residents, officials are now feigning ignorance and surprise despite the fact that they facilitated the transformation of Houston into a capitalist fantasyland that doesn't absorb water, but gathers it in. We drown in the accumulating water; they "drown" in the accumulating profits. But if "unprecedented," "once-in-a-lifetime," "historic" weather events are happening with greater frequency--the number of natural disasters has quadrupled since 1970, according to the Economist--then it should be obvious that they are no longer unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime, historic events. They are the new normal, brought about fossil-fueled climate change. In that sense, they may in fact be unnatural storms. Rising air and ocean temperatures alongside increased levels of water vapor in the atmosphere--the consequences of extracting and burning fossil fuels--have created the conditions for powerful storms, like Harvey, to emerge in the Gulf. These conditions cause them to move slowly through the open ocean, siphoning up ever-increasing amounts of water that return to earth once the storms make landfall. When Harvey struck, worsening atmospheric conditions also meant that there was little wind to keep the storm moving once on land. As a result, like Allison, Harvey came ashore and hovered, dumping 11 trillion gallons of water and transforming poor and working-class neighborhoods into water tanks. (A couple years ago, this was the exact shortfall of water responsible for California's "unprecedented" drought.) HOUSTON'S FATE provides merely a glimpse of what's to come for other coastal cities as sea levels continue to rise. Nuclear power plants and petrochemical processing sites in Bay City, just east of Houston, and elsewhere along the coast are unnatural disasters lying in wait for an unnatural storm to set them loose. Reports have estimated damages in the tens of billions of dollars and claimed the storm has set Houston back years. But the fact is that capitalism has rigged the cities of the Gulf Coast for disaster from top to bottom. As in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and more recently after Hurricanes Ike and Sandy, the destruction in the wake of Hurricane Harvey will leave Houston wide open to the vultures of "disaster capitalism" as publicly owned infrastructure, liquidated by the storm's unnatural carnage, is replaced with further private development--and more impermeable concrete. The White (House) supremacist, meanwhile, seems to have been overcome by an irrepressible urge to flatter Hurricane Harvey on Twitter, as if the mainstream media's personification of the storm is real. It makes you wonder whether he thinks Gulf Coast residents did something to provoke Harvey, with its flooding "on many sides." Trump made his priorities clear as he doubled down on his racist economic nationalism by announcing his plan to resume the transfer of military hardware to police forces and pardoning the grotesque Sheriff Joe Arpaio as news coverage of Harvey--a storm already reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, which laid bare the fault lines of race and class in New Orleans--was ramping up. Houston's ruling class has no ability (not just for want of competence, but that too), much less interest, in resolving the city's flood problems, and Trump is certain to buttress their project by fomenting racial divisions among the downtrodden while he diverts the necessary funds for urgently needed public services to a barbaric budget for military spending. Ultimately, a real recovery from social tragedies like Harvey will come from struggles that seek to reconfigure urban space in the interests of working-class people--by overturning the system that currently designs it to maximize the extraction of profit no matter the human or environmental cost.Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman has outlined a new content policy that many users fear marks a new era of censorship on the platform. Under the proposed policy, many of the site’s user-created communities “may be hidden” from public areas of the site or even face deletion. According to Huffman, who recently replaced interim CEO Ellen Pao after two tumultuous user revolts on the site, the following content will be banned or restricted on Reddit: Publication of someone’s private and confidential information Anything that incites harm or violence against an individual or group of people Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence) Although inoffensive to a normal observer, anti-harassment drives of the kind outlined by Huffman have become controversial recently. On Twitter, “anti-harassment” tools often serve as a mask for politically motivated ostracization, while college activists are increasingly fond of disinviting offensive or politically disagreeable speakers on the grounds that they feel “unsafe.” Huffman clarified to a user that disagreeing or indicating dislike for a group of people would still be allowed on Reddit, telling the user, “It’s ok to say, “I don’t like this group of people.” It’s not ok to say, “I’m going to kill this group of people.” In another reply, Huffman elaborated further. “Mocking and calling people stupid is not harassment.” The fact that Huffman’s clarification was necessary reflects the suspicion that many Redditors feel towards the administration. A previous purge of subreddits enacted under Ellen Pao led many to view the site’s owners as inherently pro-censorship, hence the decision of some Redditors to give her the moniker of “Chairman Pao.” Prior to Huffman’s posts, speculation had been mounting about the level of censorship he would engage in. Redditors on some anti-censorship subreddits predicted an “inevitable sh*tstorm” or a “purge” of offensive subreddits. Huffman’s previous track record at Reddit, which he acknowledges in his post, was one of arbitrary censorship. In the early days of Reddit, Huffman admitted that he would regularly ban users who “spewed hate,” and the community “rarely questioned him.” However, Huffman now says he is eager to avoid bans wherever possible, describing them as the Internet equivalent of “capital punishment,” only to be used in “the clearest of cases.” Instead, he has opted for a technical solution. With the exceptions of subreddits that incite violence or harass others, Huffman will reach for the quarantine pen rather than the ban hammer. Huffman confirmed that /r/coontown, a racist community that many Redditors (including ex-CEO Yishan Wong) believed would be banned in the coming “purge,” would remain on the site. Instead of being banned, it will be hidden from the public areas of Reddit, only to be seen by users who opt-in to offensive content. It’s somewhat odd that a poisonously anti-black community is seen as less of a problem to Reddit than “fat-shaming” communities like the recently-banned “/r/fatpeoplehate.” Nonetheless, many anti-censorship Redditors will be relieved that a new purge has yet to materialise. Huffman is modeling his approach to filtering offensive content on the approach used to filter adult content. “Separation and opt-in techniques have worked well for keeping adult content out of the common Redditor’s listings, and we think it’ll work for this other type of content as well,” writes Huffman. Poor communication with moderators, one of the grievances cited by subreddit moderators in last week’s Reddit Revolt, still seems to be an issue. The moderators of KotakuInAction, a top 50 subreddit that houses the site’s GamerGate-supporting community, tell me they have heard nothing from the admins on the status of their subreddit and whether it falls afoul of the new rules. “We’re running on pure speculation at this point,” says TheHat2, the head moderator of KotakuInaction. “I don’t think KiA will be banned, but the possibility is always there, just because of our association with GamerGate, and its association with harassment. Frankly, I just don’t know what will happen.” GamerGate’s association with harassment is, of course, specious. Peer-reviewed research from the feminist group Women, Action and the Media, as well as independent data science, show no evidence that there is any more abuse in GamerGate than there is in other online movements–or indeed the Internet at large. Nonetheless, allegations that GamerGate is a harassment movement has appeared across the media, making the moderators of KotakuInAction wary of new rule changes. Another moderator of the subreddit, Logan_Mac, was particularly concerned. “I for one think this is just the first step, they will slowly ban any ideological dissent.” Gawker is in a gloomy mood too, but for different reasons. Gawker’s bloggers, especially Sam Biddle, have been beating the drum about “toxic” Reddit communities for some time. They now appear to be disappointed by Huffman’s failure to enact a draconian purge. “Either Reddit has a severe, profound misunderstanding of what its problems actually are,” writes blogger Ashley Feinberg, “or it just doesn’t care.” Follow Allum Bokhari @LibertarianBlue on Twitter.A card with pictures of five Cubans convicted in 2001 of spying on the United States for the Cuban government. (ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images) Stephen Kimber teaches journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada, and is the author of “What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five.” Consider for a moment what would happen if American intelligence agents on the ground in a foreign country uncovered a major terrorist plot, with enough time to prevent it. And then consider how Americans would react if authorities in that country, rather than cooperate with us, arrested and imprisoned the U.S. agents for operating on their soil. Those agents would be American heroes. The U.S. government would move heaven and Earth to get them back. This sort of scenario has occurred, except that, in the real-life version, which unfolded 15 years ago last month, the Americans play the role of the foreign government, and Cuba — yes, Fidel Castro’s Cuba — plays the role of the aggrieved United States. In the early 1990s, after the demise of the Soviet Union made the collapse of Cuba’s communist government seem inevitable, Miami’s militant Cuban exile groups ratcheted up their efforts to overthrow Castro by any means possible, including terrorist attacks. In 1994, for example, Rodolfo Frometa, the leader of an exile group, was nabbed in an FBI sting trying to buy a Stinger missile, a grenade launcher and anti-tank rockets that he said he planned to use to attack Cuba. In 1995, Cuban police arrested two Cuban Americans after they tried to plant a bomb at a resort in Varadero. Those actions clearly violated U.S. neutrality laws, but America’s justice system mostly looked the other way. Although Frometa was charged, convicted and sentenced to almost four years in jail, law enforcement agencies rarely investigated allegations involving exile militants, and if they did, prosecutors rarely pursued charges. Too often, Florida’s politicians served as apologists for the exile community’s hard-line elements. But the Cubans had their own agents on the ground in Florida. An intelligence network known as La Red Avispa was dispatched in the early 1990s to infiltrate militant exile groups. It had some successes. Agents thwarted a 1994 plan to set off bombs at the iconic Tropicana nightclub, a tourist hot spot in Havana. And they short-circuited a 1998 scheme to send a boat filled with explosives from the Miami River to the Dominican Republic to be used in an assassination attempt against Castro. In the spring of 1998, Cuban agents uncovered a plot to blow up an airplane filled with beach-bound tourists from Europe or Latin America. The plot resonated: Before 2001, the most deadly act of air terrorism in the Americas had been the 1976 midair bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455, which killed all 73 passengers and crew members. Castro enlisted his friend, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to carry a secret message about the plot to President Bill Clinton. The White House took the threat seriously enough that the Federal Aviation Administration warned airlines. In June of that year, FBI agents flew to Havana to meet with their Cuban counterparts. During three days in a safe house, the Cubans provided the FBI with evidence their agents had gathered on various plots, including the planned airplane attack and an ongoing campaign of bombings at Havana hotels that had taken the life of an Italian Canadian businessman. But the FBI never arrested anyone in connection with the airplane plot or the hotel attacks — even after exile militant Luis Posada Carriles bragged about his role in the Havana bombings to the New York Times in July 1998. Instead, on Sept. 12, 1998, a heavily armed FBI SWAT team arrested the members of the Cuban intelligence network in Miami. The five agents were tried in that hostile-to-anything-Cuban city, convicted on low-bar charges of “conspiracy to commit” everything from espionage to murder and sentenced to impossibly long prison terms, including one double life sentence plus 15 years. Fifteen years later, four of the Cubans still languish in American prisons. Now you begin to understand why the Cuban Five — as they have become known — are national heroes in their homeland, why pictures of their younger selves loom on highway billboards all over the island, why every Cuban schoolchild knows them by their first names: Gerardo, René, Ramon, Fernando and Antonio. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has stated that the Cuban Five “were all convicted in U.S. courts of committing crimes against the United States, including spying, treason.” It is true that three of the five men — Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labañino and Fernando Gonzalez — did have, in part, military missions beyond simply infiltrating and reporting back on the activities of Miami’s exile groups. But their purpose was not to steal America’s military secrets or compromise U.S. security. During the 1990s, Cuban authorities believed theirs might be the next Caribbean country to face an American military invasion. It wasn’t a stretch when you consider Grenada (1983), Panama (1989) and Haiti (1994). Then, too, there was the growing influence of militantly anti-Castro lobbying groups such as the Cuban American National Foundation, which were pushing Washington to overthrow Castro and his brother. Based on its assessments of those earlier invasions, Cuban intelligence had developed a checklist of signals that an invasion might be imminent: a sudden influx of combat and reconnaissance aircraft to a southern military base, for example, or unexpected, unexplained visits by military brass to Southern Command headquarters in Miami. Agents such as Antonio Guerrero — who worked as a janitor at the Boca Chica Naval Air Station in Key West from 1993 until his arrest in 1998 and is serving 22 years in prison — were Cuba’s low-tech equivalents of U.S. spy satellites, counting planes on runways and reporting back to Havana. Of course, Cuban authorities were eager to vacuum up every tidbit of gossip their agents could find, and Havana occasionally pressured Guerrero to up his game; he responded mostly by sending clippings from base newspapers. No wonder. Guerrero spoke little English and had no security clearance; military secrets were well above his pay grade. And U.S. military secrets were never Cuba’s real priority — it just wanted to know if the Yankees were about to invade. Seven months after the FBI charged the five with relatively insignificant counts — failing to register as foreign agents, using false identities and, more seriously but less specifically, conspiracy to commit espionage — prosecutors tacked on the charge that would galvanize Cuba’s exile community. They charged Gerardo Hernandez, the leader of the network, with conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the shootdown three years earlier of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. Brothers to the Rescue, an anti-Castro group that had been rescuing rafters in the Straits of Florida but had lost its raison d’etre after a 1994 immigration deal between Washington and Havana, had been illegally violating Cuban airspace for more than a year, occasionally raining down anti-government leaflets on Havana. The Cubans protested the flights. The U.S. government did its best to prevent further incursions, but the wheels of the FAA bureaucracy ground slowly. In early 1996, the Cubans sent messages to Washington through various intermediaries, warning that if the United States didn’t stop further Brothers flights, the Cubans would. Washington didn’t. So the Cubans did. On the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1996, Cuban fighter jets blew two small, unarmed Brothers to the Rescue aircraft out of the sky, killing all four men aboard. The Cubans claim that the planes were inside their territory. The U.S. government claims — and the International Civil Aviation Organization agreed — that the planes were in international airspace when they were attacked. But did Hernandez really know in advance that the Cuban government planned to shoot down those planes? Was he involved in the planning? My answer is no. During my research for a book on the Cuban Five, I reviewed all 20,000-plus pages of the trial transcript and sifted through thousands of pages of decrypted communications between Havana and its agents. I found no evidence that Hernandez had any knowledge of, or influence on, the events that day. The evidence instead paints a picture of a Cuban intelligence bureaucracy obsessed with compartmentalizing and controlling information. Hernandez, a field-level illegal intelligence officer, had no need to know what Cuba’s military planned. The messages and instructions from Havana were ambiguous, hardly slam-dunk evidence, particularly for a charge of conspiracy to commit murder. In one message, for example, Hernandez’s bosses refer to a plan to “perfect the confrontation” with Brothers to the Rescue, which prosecutors insisted meant shooting down the planes. But as Judge Phyllis A. Kravitch pointed out — in her 2008 dissent from a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuitupholding the murder charge against Hernandez — “There are many ways a country could ‘confront’ foreign aircraft. Forced landings, warning shots, and forced escorted journeys out of a country’s territorial airspace are among them — as are shoot downs.” She said that prosecutors “presented no evidence” to link Hernandez to the shootdown. “I cannot say that a reasonable jury — given all the evidence — could conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Hernandez agreed to a shoot down,” Kravitch wrote. A “reasonable jury.” There’s the rub. By the late 1990s, Miami juries had become so notorious in cases involving Cuban exiles that federal prosecutors in a different case opposed a defense motion for a change of venue from Puerto Rico to Miami for some Cuban exiles accused of plotting to assassinate Castro. Miami “is a very difficult venue for securing a conviction for so-called freedom fighters,” former U.S. attorney Kendall Coffey explained to the Miami Herald at the time. “I had some convictions, but some acquittals that defied all reason.” Anti-Cuban militants, in fact, were considered heroes. In 2008, more than 500 Miami exile movers and shakers gathered to honor Posada’s contributions to la causa — as the effort to overthrow Castro is known in the community — at a gala dinner. His contributions? Besides the Havana hotel attacks (“I sleep like a baby,” he told the New York Times, commenting on the tourist who was killed), Posada is the alleged mastermind of the bombing of Cubana Flight 455. Cuba and Venezuela have asked for his extradition. The United States has refused. In 2000, Posada was arrested in Panama in connection with a plot to assassinate Castro; he was convicted and served four yearsbefore receiving a still-controversial pardon. That pardon was revoked in 2008. The closest the U.S. government has come to prosecuting Posada was in 2009, when the Obama administration charged him — not for his role in the Havana bombings but for lying about his role on an immigration form. He was acquitted. Today, Posada, 85, walks the streets of Miami, a living contradiction in America’s war on terrorism. How to square his freedom with President George W. Bush’s post-Sept. 11 declaration that “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime?” How to square Posada’s freedom with the continued imprisonment of the Cuban Five, whose primary goal was to prevent terrorist attacks? It is a contradiction Americans should consider. Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.For anyone who sees Mitt Romney's loss in the November presidential election as a harbinger of GOP decline, conservatives have a message - make that two, tellingly conflicting, messages. One, embodied by the Conservative Victory Project (CVP) - a group backed by Karl Rove's "super PAC" seeking to curb influence from far-right organizations - and spelled out Tuesday by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.: Our olive branch is ripe, Democrats, and with the right legislation, we're willing to compromise. The other, perhaps best summarized in paperwork filed today by ousted Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., to create a "super PAC" countering Rove's: The tea party that in 2010 ushered into Washington a wave of staunch conservative ideologues isn't going away. The Rove group's formation was just the most explicit among intensifying calls to inject discipline into a Congress that has seen unprecedented gridlock, particularly on critical economic issues. Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La. - a favorite on 2016 speculation lists - at a GOP retreat last month said, "We've got to stop being the stupid party," and called on his fellow Republicans to start talking "like adults." Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., appearing subsequently on CBS News programs, rushed to condone the remarks. "I think we clearly have to change," Gingrich said. GOP leader endorses Dream Act principles Meanwhile, Cantor's speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday brought substance to the argument, not to mention a glimpse into what the tone of the newly minted 113th Congress might be. Reviewed largely as a recasting of the Republican Party's image, Cantor's remarks offered a striking departure from the partisan battles that in the past few years have brought the government more than once to the brink of crisis. Rather than emphasizing spending cuts, he spoke of the economy from an American family standpoint; most drastically, he also endorsed immigration principles of the Dream Act. "There are some who would rather avoid fixing the problem in order to save this as a political issue," Cantor said of immigration reform proposals currently making their way through congressional committees. "I reject this notion and call on the president to help lead us towards a bipartisan solution rather than encourage the common political divisions of the past." While announcing gun trafficking legislation today, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said he was "very encouraged" by the House majority leader's speech. "I think he clearly opened the door for the House to move on meaningful legislation," he said. "Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of opening doors." House Dem: Cantor speech may have opened doors to compromise But despite some who believe the tea party peaked with its influx of dogma-driven freshmen in 2010, the grassroots activist group is sounding off about this new push toward the center. Statements from the various factions of the movement have echoed the sentiment expressed on Nov. 7 by Tea Party Patriots coordinator Jenny Beth Martin, blaming President Obama's reelection on the GOP's nomination of Romney - "a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican Party." Even Tea Party Express chairwoman Amy Kremer, who despite early criticism ultimately supported Romney, and who, during the near-government-shutdown ordeal of 2011, advocated "realistic" pragmatism in budget negotiations, in a statement Monday pointed to "the biggest Republican victories in modern American politics" as indicative that CVP won't be successful. "Reagan's victories in the 1980s, Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolution of 1994, and the Tea Party's historic wins in 2010 were all made possible because the Republican Party, and its candidates, stood strongly and proudly for pro-growth fiscal conservative policies," Kremer said. "The newly launched Conservative Victory Project wants to push the tea party out and replace them with the failed strategies of 2008 and 2012. This Super PAC is choosing power of principle, but will end up alienating conservatives and electoral losses. "If the establishment's large donors want to see a complete electoral catastrophe, then all they need to do is push tea party conservatives into supporting alternative third candidates," she continued.Procession in memory of victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire If you're like me, you learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in high school history, but what you learned was fairly sketchy—the opening paragraph of its Wikipedia entry probably about captures it: The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent immigrant Jewish women, age 16-23. Many of the workers could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. People jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers. As you might guess, that leaves out rather a lot. This is the week of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire, and tomorrow (Monday) night at 9:00, HBO is airing a new documentary. Triangle: Remembering the Fire is relatively brief, but it adds a great deal to the sketch, on several levels. The documentary first places the Triangle fire in context: Less than two years earlier, garment workers had gone on strike in the Uprising of 20,000, making outrageous demands like a 52-hour work week and overtime pay. Meanwhile, the fiercely anti-union owners of the Triangle factory met with owners of the 20 largest factories to form a manufacturing association. Many of the strike leaders worked there, and the Triangle owners wanted to make sure other factory owners were committed to doing whatever it took—from using physical force (by hiring thugs to beat up strikers) to political pressure (which got the police on their side)—to not back down. Soon after, police officers began arresting strikers, and judges fined them and sentenced some to labor camps. One judge, while sentencing a picketer for “incitement,” explained, “You are striking against God and Nature, whose law is that man shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God!” The Triangle company held out, the workers went back, and the safety concerns they raised went unaddressed. That New York's garment workers had been fighting for better treatment, and that many of the fire's deaths might have been prevented had they succeeded, is a central part of the context Triangle: Remembering the Fire provides. That context of struggle is crucial to understanding the fire's aftermath, in which New York instituted a range of workplace protections. Frances Perkins would later famously call March 25, 1911 "the day the New Deal began." We don't, in other words, have fire alarms and sprinklers and adequate exits and other workplace protections because big employers want us to have them. We don't have them solely because of tragedy. We have them because workers have joined together and fought for them. In 1911, workers' struggle was the context that made the Triangle fire something other than a meaningless accident, that showed a way to prevent similar tragedies. Triangle: Remembering the Fire does something else as well. It vividly, forcefully puts the humanity of the Triangle workers in front of us. Much of it is told by descendants of the fire's victims and survivors, and augmented by photos of the victims. It takes hold of you, all their beautiful serious faces—teenagers working 60 or 70 hour weeks, recent immigrants struggling to get ahead. And after the fire, their families were left struggling to identify them from the smallest remnants, seemingly inconsequential possessions that survived. The care this documentary shows for the workers of the Triangle company is exquisite, so much so that finally the list of the fire's victims is complete. Michael Hirsch, one of its writers and co-producers and a longtime member of the Daily Kos community, searched out the final six names: No New York City agencies and no newspapers at the time produced a complete list of the dead, Mr. Hirsch said. The most thorough list — 140 names — was compiled by Mr. Von Drehle when he wrote his book, and that was largely based on names plucked from accounts in four contemporary newspapers. The obscurity of their names is evidence of the times, when lives were lived quietly and people were forced by economic and familial circumstances to swiftly move on from tragedies — with no Facebook or reality television cameras to record their every step and thought. Mr. Hirsch, 50, an amateur genealogist and historian who was hired as a co-producer of the coming HBO documentary “Triangle: Remembering the Fire,” undertook an exhaustive search lasting more than four years. He returned to the microfilms of mainstream daily newspapers overlooked by researchers before him and to ethnic publications that he asked to have translated, like the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward and Il Giornale Italiano. He estimates that he consulted 32 different newspapers. (He also appeared on CBS News Sunday today.) Triangle: Remembering the Fire is an indispensable memorial to the 146 working men and women who died horrible deaths on March 25, 1911, doing justice to both the story of lives lost and families grieving and to the story of struggle for workers' rights and the importance of government regulations. Those two sides of the story would often be called the human side and the political side, but this documentary ultimately reveals the inadequacy of that binary opposition. The Uprising of 20,000 is a human and a political story, with women risking their livelihoods and freedom for better working conditions. The long hours and brutal working conditions garment workers faced—including the fire that killed 146 of them—are a human and a political story. "Government regulations" and "workplace safety laws" sound like dry terms, but this is what they're about: nothing less than people's lives. And that is something to remember when you hear the likes of Scott Walker and John Kasich arguing that employers oughtn't be bound by those pesky government regulations.The Rhode Island Ocean Special Area Management Plan (Ocean SAMP) aims to improve state review processes and policies to facilitate the development of offshore projects across an area that spans approximately 1,467 square miles over portions of Block Island Sound, Rhode Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. "By developing this plan, Rhode Island has emerged as a national leader in coastal management and ocean stewardship," said NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, who joined state leaders on the shore of Narragansett Bay last week to recognise the plan's approval. "This plan takes into account all ocean uses for enhancing commercial, recreational and environmental goals. This plan is what President Obama envisioned in the National Ocean Policy and it sets a great example for other coastal states." With NOAA's approval of the state's Ocean SAMP under the federal Coastal Zone Management Act, Rhode Island becomes the first state to have incorporated a comprehensive ocean special area management plan in its coastal zone management programme. This approval means that enforceable policies in the Ocean SAMP for protecting existing activities such as fishing, important habitats and archaeological resources, and identifying areas suitable for energy projects, may be applied to federal actions in federal waters. The approval follows the court backing of a power-purchase agreement for the pilot 30MW Block Island offshore wind farm at the start of July.With the DROID Turbo’s Android 5.1 Lollipop update arriving via soak test to members of the Motorola Feedback Network, the rest of you are probably wondering when the update will be available to your phone. The answer – starting tomorrow. Verizon pinged us moments ago, stating that the “actual push will begin tomorrow afternoon” for update 23.11.38. Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone will see the update pop-up on their phones. Instead, the update will rollout in phases, but you can always manually check to see if it’s available through Settings>About phone. Motorola posted a full changelog for the update that can be found here. Verizon has not posted theirs, but we should have it later tonight or in the morning. IT’S HAPPENING. Also, here is a video we did of the original Lollipop update for the Moto X (2nd gen). If you haven’t been keeping up on all that is new in Android 5.0+, this is a good video to check out. UPDATE: Here is Verizon’s changelog. UPDATE 2: Verizon had to tweak the changelog after the update went live because it included features that weren’t actually included in the update. Here is the newest list that should be correct. [Verizon]Alexander Podrabinek. Photo: RFE/RL Staunton, September 17 – Vladimir Putin has no need of Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia or Crimea, Aleksandr Podrabinek says. He has moved against all of them “not for territory but for his own self-assertion and personal power, things which only the state of war can guarantee him.” That is how Putin began his rise to supreme power in 1999 with the apartment bombings, the Moscow commentator says in an essay on Grani.ru, and that is how he will continue in Ukraine and elsewhere given that, to use George Orwell’s expression, he is interested only in building and retaining personal power. “The shedding of blood preceded Putin’s
canopy researchers and is probably the most accurate, and can be used to quantify crown area. On large trees it can be accomplished quickly with a laser rangefinder. The increased accuracy is largely overkill for champion tree registers, and slope correction can get tedious to say the least! 2 (SUM/n) = Average crown spread Lasered crown spreads The use of a laser rangefinder can really speed things up when measuring crown spread. The laser can also be used to measure crown spread on tree canopies over an obstacle such as those described below. As in measuring tree height, several points on the tree can be “explored” to find the furthest point. Simply use the formula described below in Figure 3. In the illustration below, the observer is directly under the opposing crown edge, but multiple triangles can be used or combined with ground-based measurements as in figure 3b. Figure 3a. Measuring challenging crown spreads with a laser rangefinder Crown spread= Distance 1 COS (A1) Figure 3b. Spread= D1+D2 Height Getting an accurate tree height is the nemesis of many potential tree hunters, and the leading source of point errors on champion tree lists. Although the techniques are very simple, employing them accurately is another story, which will be dealt with later in this section. Tree heights are typically remotely obtained using a clinometer or transit for angles and a measuring tape or infrared laser rangefinder for distance. By using simple trigonometry and laws of similar triangles and right triangles, the true height of a tree can be easily obtained. In all cases, the height obtained is the vertical distance between the top and base, not trunk length. Leaning trees and hardwoods have longer trunk and branch systems than indicated by vertical height, but is beyond the scope of my efforts or champion tree lists to measure. Non-laser techniques i.e. Cross-triangulation Huh? News Flash! The top of a tree is never directly over the base. This assumption is the fatal flaw of conventional forestry height measuring techniques. We all have been taught to measure out 100 feet from the base of the tree, take an angle reading with a clinometer and multiply the result by 100 to get the tree height. Some forestry clinometers are calibrated in “chains” (66’), and work similarly. These techniques do work, but only on trees that have ALL of the following conditions satisfied: · The highest point of the tree is directly over the base of the tree · The highest point of the tree is clearly visible · The tree is growing on level ground · The tree does not lean How often does this happen? Not very often! Aside from perhaps a Norway spruce growing in a level parking lot, most trees do not ordinarily satisfy all of the above conditions. Older trees and trees in old-growth forests do not typically grow straight or have a well-defined top when viewed from our limiting terrestrial level. I have climbed many tall conifers and performed tape drops (vertical) from the highest point to the ground. The tape has never come down on the base. Ten feet or more is a common displacement from vertical on large conifers. Hardwoods can be much more. In fact, live oaks and other wide spreading trees can have tops more than 40 feet off the base. Consider the photo below of the Middleton Oak in Charleston, SC. Where do you begin? Is what appears to be the highest point really the tallest part of the tree? A huge tree like the Middleton Oak is a challenge to measure, and lots of time will be spent chasing false leads and finding nested tops. For example, the highest point of the tree above is actually a small triangle shape “peeking” though the window of sky formed under what appears to be the highest part in the photo. It is fully 35 feet off the base and on the other side of the tree! OK, back to cross-triangulation. Cross-triangulation is essentially the process to map a point on the tree (the top) in three dimensions. Once we know where the top is, we can then properly measure its position relative to the ground (height). In a two dimensional photo like the one above, there is no way of knowing for sure which part of the tree is far back and which is closest. In cross-triangulation, you pick a target point. Dangling your clinometer (or plumb-bob) by the lanyard, you transpose the point to the ground (a helper is useful). Mark this point with a stick or other object. Go ahead and measure the angle to the top while you are there. This is the point in one dimension that the top intersects the ground, and is in a sense the “X” axis. Then, observing the same point with your eyes, go 90 degrees to either side and transpose the top to the ground again. This is the “Y” position on the “X” axis that the top resides. Move the stick to that position, staying 90 degrees (perpendicular) to the line of sight. It is often helpful to lay the measuring tape out on the first sighting so that you can more easily find the 90 degree mark, and when you move the stick to the “Y” position you can modify the distance and calculate the height. The stick’s position is the adjusted baseline. Figure 4. Cross-triangulating a leaning tree On some trees this is a very difficult and time intensive procedure to accomplish, and if you are going to measure a lot of trees or trees in a forested setting, I encourage you to skip this method, buy a laser rangefinder and go to the section on page 11 on the ENTS Method. Regardless, cross-triangulation is good to know, as it illustrates the fallacy and pitfalls of conventional techniques, and when your laser battery dies or you forget your equipment, you can fall back on it. When properly applied, the results of cross-triangulation are extremely accurate. Its biggest drawback is TIME! Side note: I must point out that within the Eastern Native Tree Society and many universities cross-triangulation techniques are no longer being used. This is because once you get familiar with using a laser rangefinder; you basically can’t imagine doing it any other way. The technique is so accurate, quick, and foolproof that its introduction into scientific canopy studies was a “no-brainer”. Height growth of mere inches can be ascertained with the techniques described after this section on conventional forestry methods. The following diagrams explore the formulas and scenarios associated with tape and clinometer measuring techniques, AFTER cross-triangulation has been performed and the highest or targeted point has been identified. Figure 5. General formulas and techniques for measuring tree heights. Height= H1+H2, where: H1= BTAN (A1) and H2= B TAN (A2) Ideal parameters rarely occur in nature, and situations critical to accuracy are often overlooked or not considered, thus making many claims of tree height inaccurate and unacceptable. See the figures below for an illustration of common sources of tree height errors. Figure 6. Common sources of height errors on leaning trees In Figure 6, the tops are leaning towards the observer, and it is necessary to cross- triangulate the actual top projection to the soil (the point directly under the highest point). From this point a separate baseline for the top measurement is taken, otherwise the height will be exaggerated (or underestimated on a tree leaning away from the observer). Without correcting for the lean and the true top location, even small trees can yield enough error (i.e. point spread) to keep co-champions away (6 points). Trees on a slope The slope distance of a line between the observer and the tree (B1) is longer than the same horizontal distance (B2) between the same points. Since conventional height calculations are based on the horizontal distance between the observer and the tree, the distance must be corrected to the horizontal equivalent. This is very easy, and even easier to forget to do! Figure 7. Correcting the baseline for trees growing on a slope Horizontal distance B2 = B1COS (A1) Cross-triangulation summary All of the above situations (i.e. a leaning tree and leaning ground) can compound themselves into massive height errors. Such compounded errors can be highly significant on small trees as well as on trees that don’t appear to be leaning much. Naturally, the observer can often position themselves in such a way as to minimize the potential for having to correct for compounding errors. Such tactics include selecting a sighting position perpendicular to the lean and sighting from a point level with the base. Here is an example of a calculation you may need to use to avoid compounding errors: H1= [TAN (A1)][B1(COS a1)] +/- H2= [TAN (A2)B2(COSa2)] H1= Height above eye H2= Height below eye A1= Angle to top a1= Slope angle of baseline for top A2= Angle to base from observer a2= Slope angle of baseline for base B1= Sloped baseline distance for top B2= Sloped baseline distance to base NOTE: Absolutely none of the challenges associated with cross-triangulations are an issue when using the ENTS laser method. The ENTS Method Laser Technique If the above figures and techniques are mind-boggling, then buy a laser and try this! This low-cost method has the advantage of being the quickest, simplest, and most accurate. A clinometer and a laser rangefinder is a relatively minor expense (<$300) and easily justified by the speed, accuracy, and foremost, the REPEATABILITY of your results! The laser rangefinder is a device that sends out a pulse of infrared laser light. This light reflects off a target and bounces back to the laser unit. A clock inside times the bounce and calculates the distance based on elapsed time. Since the laser requires a return bounce, this method has the distinct advantage of automatically measuring a physical part of the tree, as opposed to an extrapolation of a part of the tree via cross-triangulation or conventional methods. Only four numbers are needed to complete the tree height calculation, and no tape is necessary, nor is direct contact with the tree. This last bonus can be useful for trees across a river, road, a mean dog lair or other obstacle. When searching for champions, a quick height reading will tell you if further exploration and contact with the tree, the dog or its owner are necessary. Since the hypotenuse of the triangle is the baseline and it is measured from a physical part of the tree any lean or slope correction is irrelevant. You are simply creating two right triangles to an imaginary (but fully real) level plane (eye-level or tripod, etc.) that is the base of the top triangle and the top of the lower triangle. Figure 8: The “ENTS Method” Total tree height= H1+H2, where H1= [(SIN) A1D1] and H2= [(SIN) A2D2] <<< THAT’S IT!!! >>> Some common questions and answers What can I do if… · I can see the base but can’t get a laser bounce? Shoot the distance level on the trunk, and use the TANGENT of the angle to the base instead of SINE. Only useful on shallow angles and non-leaning trunks. · I am not sure I am getting a bounce off a certain part of the tree? Fire the beam into the sky behind the target. Slowly move the sight towards the target until you get a hit. The laser will not read anything when it “misses”. · I have a great shot of the top and base, but from different locations? Shoot them from the best locations and reference the triangles to a common point easily seen from both sites, i.e. lowest branch, a burl, or bend in the trunk. Create two triangles from the two (or more) locations and add the results. Figure 9. Using a reference point to create triangles from two positions · I can see the top and/or base but the laser bounces are from branches of other trees? If practical, back up from the tree far enough that you can put the laser into a filtering mode, such as “rain”. This will allow it to ignore the clutter under a certain yardage and give the reading to the tree only. Use a reflector on the base. · I can almost get a laser return through underbrush, or the distance seems short? First, verify the distance’s plausibility by shooting an unobscured portion of the trunk close to the base. Place a reflective material, (white paper, bicycle reflector) on the trunk to get a strong laser bounce. Reflectors are excellent! · I have an excellent shot just beside the trunk, but not on it? Have an assistant stand or hold a reflective object perpendicular to the center of the trunk, and level with the base or a known height relative to the trunk. Some more helpful laser advantages When measuring from a level, common substrate as in a boardwalk in a swamp, a canoe, a field or an observation deck, one base height can be determined and the rest of the tree heights shot at will and added to it. You can measure as many trees as you can see from one point, useful for “exploiting” good vistas from a trail or other prime vantage point in the forest. General questions · The laser only reads in.5 to 1 yard (or meter) increments, how can it be so accurate? Before you use a new laser, it must be calibrated. To do this, stretch out a long measuring tape flat on the ground. Have an assistant stand at various locations on the tape with a reflective target. Place yourself in a position so the eyepiece of the laser is over the “0” mark on the tape. Alternately, you can do this by yourself by affixing the “0” end to a reflective target and walking down the tape, shooting back at the target and noting your position at click-over. Shoot a known distance; say to 40 yards (or meters). Have the assistant move the target closer or away from you until you get to the “click-over”, or inflection point of the laser for 40 yards (or meters). Note where the target is in relation to the tape. Do this calibration over a wide range of distances to see the variation and correction factor to use (if needed). For example, if the laser reads 40 yards at a distance of 40.6 yards based on the measuring tape, then you would use that figure when your laser gives the click-over reading for 40 yards. By calibrating your laser, you can actually be mere inches off in the distance measuring part of the tree height. · How do I explore the crown architecture? “Skate” the laser over the surface of the crown and in “nested” pockets and places you may not expect a high part to be. The highest point may be well below what appears to be the tallest part. Look for the farthest distance first, then the highest angles with far readings. Once you become familiar with a species and its architecture, you will know how to narrow your search down. · What if the tree I am measuring has multiple stems? Measure the attributes of the target stem only. Do not include the crowns or heights of the other sprouts. · What is a multi-stemmed tree? The definition of a multi-stemmed tree can vary from one person to another. I am a purist, so my definition may seem extreme, but we need to start somewhere. To me, the entire point of a champion tree list and the ENTS research is to assess the capabilities of the eastern species. The best way to assess this is to study individual stems or trees of the species. By focusing on individuals we can accurately assess the potential and find benchmarks for restoration efforts or whatever the goal may be. To me, a champion tree is one that represents the best development of an individual, and therefore I do not include multi-stemmed trees in my research or nominations. Many will argue that a clump of sprouts fused into a huge trunk that originates from one root system is a single tree. I would agree, but it is not a single stem and thus does not represent the potential of an individual. Although the conglomeration may be of identical genetic material or was planted by the owner from a single pot, it is a collective effort, not that of an individual. I know of fused examples of tuliptree, white basswood and eastern hemlock that would redefine the National Champions for the species, but I have not nominated them simply because they are not individual stems. Some ENTS members use the “slice test”. Basically, if the tree was cut at 4.5 feet above the ground, would the tree hold together? I have trouble with this, as a tree that would fail one year would pass the next. I think of it more as a “pith test”. If the tree has more than one pith at ground level it is a multiple-stemmed tree. Note I did not say 4.5 feet above the ground. This is because the 4.5 foot height is a forestry standard and is an arbitrary and convenient place for most people to measure a tree. Some trees, like flowering dogwood or rhododendrons, may branch well below 4.5 feet but have a single pith at ground level. In the case of such trees, I would measure the narrowest point below the lowest fork. All trees do not conform to our set standards, but we can always set new ones! What about shooting straight up? The laser is calibrated in.5-1 yard increments, and shooting straight up seems to be a logical way to at least rough-out a trees height. This is true, and shooting straight up is in fact a fully legitimate and appropriate method to measure a tree that has a crown conducive to it. Dense conifers and fully leaved hardwoods are impossible to measure this way, but hardwoods in winter are typically fine. Some trees, such as oaks and sycamore are easy to measure by this method during early leaf-out. Careful exploration of the canopy is necessary to find the highest point. Figures obtained from straight-up shots are usually recorded as “NLT”- “not-less-than”. I use this technique to help determine if more careful searching is needed or to find the highest leader for more detailed measurements. Since a straight line leaning 11 degrees off vertical is still over 98% of vertical length, this technique gives you a full 40' circle of exploration on a 100' tree from one spot. Figures obtained by shooting straight up are seldom less than one foot different than the two triangle ENTS technique (often listed as SIN+SIN) described above. All you need to do is find the inflection or click-over point and sight the level point on the trunk and add it to the laser reading. See Figure 9 below: Figure 10: Exploring the crown by shooting straight up Conclusion It is the inaccurate figures and resulting false claims that concern us as much, if not more than, the inability to put an accurately measured tree on any champion tree register. The types of measurement errors discussed here are exceedingly common, and equally overlooked. Many ancient forest trees certainly exceed the false heights of some of the open-grown trees that have been incorrectly measured. This is significant in the sense that it does not give justice to the accurately measured trees and their measurers, but the inaccurate numbers misrepresent the true nature of the species and confound conservation efforts. Of the several champion trees nominated by other tree hunters that I have remeasured, only three even came close to the true height of the tree. In all other cases, the error on the height alone added enough points to exclude a challenger from co-champion status. Some trees have had height errors exceeding 35 percent of true height, which in some cases added dozens of points. The height errors were due to the application of inaccurate techniques and unverified assumptions. In all cases the trees were leaning or had a wide spreading crown. For more information, please visit the ENTS website: http://www.nativetreesociety.org/The startup where I was working had massive layoffs -- nearly 50 percent of the staff -- and it was my turn to cast my net out to find a new IT position. A contract-to-hire opportunity came to my attention the old-fashioned way: through family connections. The cousin of my dad's wife was a VP in a service provider to the financial industry and agreed to forward my resume to his friend, the CTO. I heard through the grapevine that my resume was well-received, which was nice to hear since I had more than 15 years experience in the business. I finally interviewed with a manager in a satellite office. The job was gathering and documenting business and functional requirements for an ongoing project. She demoed the current application, which was three years in the making. I was seriously underwhelmed. There was a UI shell and really nothing else. [ Want to cash in on your IT experiences? Send your tech tale, lesson learned the hard way, or war story from the trenches to [email protected]. If we publish it, we'll send you a $50 American Express gift card. ] [ Working with data in the cloud requires new thinking. InfoWorld shows you the way: How Cosmos DB ensures data consistency in the global cloud. \| Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing Report newsletter. ] I felt from the beginning that we weren't connecting, but she must have been told by the CTO to try and get me on board because she kept casting about looking for something that resonated with her. When she learned that I started my database designs in the 3rd normal form, she finally got behind me and gave me the contract. I told a friend that it was the strangest qualification I ever floated to land a contract, and one of the most meaningless, but it did the trick. Very quickly, it was clear that things were not going to work. Within the first week, she curtailed the times I could physically be in the office and laid down the maximum hours per day I could bill (no making up for lost time). Then she canceled my access to the system with the existing functional requirements. My requests for things like project charter, statement of work, functional specifications, use cases, and stakeholder interview notes were denied. They existed, but I couldn't see them. I couldn't meet with the executive sponsor nor could I meet with the key stakeholders until she arranged it. I got into trouble for making an Access database to track user statements, business requirements, and technical requirements because it was "programming" and I was an analyst. She threatened to have Access uninstalled from my desktop. When I finally got to work with the key stakeholders, we made good progress. For a few weeks, great information was coming out and I wrote some solid reports and requirements specifications. The stakeholders and CTO were all very pleased with the quantity and quality of work I was producing -- but no feedback from the manager. After that first round of interviews and business requirements, she had me cancel all future meetings until she could review the work done to date. Naturally, no review was ever done. No meetings were ever scheduled. When I asked about the review, she said that I was aggressive and pushy. So, two weeks went by with nothing really happening. I couldn't interview stakeholders, I couldn't use Access, nor could I write VBA to automate Excel spreadsheets with the data I collected. Finally, she came up with some busy work: clean up a huge database dump. By hand. Within one day she had written a dozen e-mails to me complaining that the work was incorrect (but no corrections were provided), incomplete (but no indication of what should be done), and too slow (although automation tools were prohibited and she wasn't available for questions for hours on end). The next morning, my account was disabled and the contract was terminated. I think that she never wanted me there in the first place, but hired me because her boss told her to. Plus, from everything that I saw, the project was a serious train wreck and she didn't want anyone else to know about it. I had only ever read about managers like this, but now I can put a check in the "been there, done that" box labeled "have worked for incompetent manager."The academic boycott of Israel organized by the BDS movement claimed a big success when the Guardian ran an article yesterday, Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of Israel. That report set off a furious response, since the academic boycott of Israel is anathema to almost all academics. In the U.S., only the disreputable actions of the Association of Asian American Studies, led by U. Mass-Boston Professor and Associate Provost Rajini Srikanth, have given any legitimacy to the boycott. The boycott, which singles out only Israel, attracts open and de facto anti-Semites and those in the leftist-Islamist coalition who seek Israel’s destruction. So when a renowned physicist, who is dying of a disease for which Israelis are working on a cure, allegedly joined the boycott, it was big news. But it may have been a lie, the BDS equivalent of Pallywood. The Commentator reports, Prof. Hawking trip NOT cancelled due to Israel boycott: New details about the cancellation of Professor Stephen Hawking’s trip to Israel have emerged today after numerous news reports claiming that Prof. Hawking had chosen to boycott the State of Israel. The Guardian, which broke the story late last night, claimed that Hawking was due to boycott Israel after receiving an erroneous statement from the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), apparently with Hawking’s approval. The statement said that the move was “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”. However, a Cambridge university spokesperson has confirmed to The Commentator that there was a “misunderstanding” this past weekend, and that Prof. Hawking had pulled out of the conference for medical reasons. Responding to an e-mail including an open letter to Prof. Hawking, shared nearly 2000 times, a University spokesman said: “Professor Hawking will not be attending the conference in Israel in June for health reasons – his doctors have advised against him flying.” When asked for further information, the spokesperson confirmed that the BRICUP organisation had “assumed” Hawking’s position on the matter, and that it was fundamentally untrue. The Montreal Gazette further reports: Tim Holt, media director at the University of Cambridge spokesman, said Hawking’s decision was based strictly on health concerns. “For health reasons, his doctors said he should not be flying at the moment so he’s decided not to attend,” said Holt. “He is 71 years old. He’s fine, but he has to be sensible about what he can do.” A University of Cambridge statement released earlier Wednesday cited “personal reasons” for his decision. Hawking suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. CIF Watch has the email: This should be a lesson to all, regardless of Hawking’s position. The attempt to delegitimize Israel in academia is part of the war on Israel, done by people with bad intent. Update: AP also is reporting health reasons, Physicist Stephen Hawking won’t attend Israeli conference, cites health. Tim Holt, quoted above, is Hawking’s official media spokesman. Algemeiner reports the same, Hawking Israel Boycott Story is a Fraud, Trip Canceled for Health Reasons: However, a University spokesman told The Algemeiner that Prof. Hawking’s cancellation was due to a health issue. “Professor Hawking will not be attending the conference in Israel in June for health reasons – his doctors have advised against him flying,” the spokesperson said. Hawking’s spokesman has requested that the BDS supporters take down the assertion that Hawking supports the boycott, via AP: University spokesman Holt said that Hawking “did not specifically approve” the committee’s statement. Holt said he had asked the committee to remove the posting. Update No. 2 — despite quite clear denials on the record multiple times by Hawking’s official spokesman, the following email has been sent, as reported by CIF: Though original reports yesterday that Stephen Hawking cancelled his planned Israel trip in order to express support the academic boycott were (as we reported earlier today) flatly denied by Tim Holt, Acting Director of Communications at Cambridge and Hawking’s spokesperson, Holt recently informed us via an email of the following new statement just released by the University: “We have now received confirmation from Professor Hawking’s office that a letter was sent on Friday to the Israeli President’s office regarding his decision not to attend the Presidential Conference, based on advice from Palestinian academics that he should respect the boycott. “We had understood previously that his decision was based purely on health grounds having been advised by doctors not to fly.” If this latest statement holds up, then the bad guys have won a victory, and Hawking should be counted among the bad guys. Shame and a stain on his legacy. Further update: This apparently was Hawking’s statement, it’s not an embrace of the academic boycott movement, more the equivalent of refusing to cross a picket line, but it does support the claim that he withdrew from this conference on political grounds: “I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference. Had I attended I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster.” I wonder if the result would have been different if Israeli academics were as aggressive at lobbying Hawking — but then again, the Israelis probably didn’t see this coming. Let that be another lesson.One of the best gifts we can give ourselves and those we love is a great meal. Whether it’s the feast of Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve, a more traditional turkey or roast on Christmas Day, or just opting for Chinese takeout, there are many ways to ring in the season that define our annual traditions. Jordan Coelho for Quartz Day 13 of Quartz’s 25 Days of Exchange But what did people eat in America 100 years ago during the holiday season? Menus catalogued by the New York Public Library from Christmas dinners served in the early part of the 20th century offer an interesting look at our ancestors’ dining habits. The menus come from a survey of restaurants, hotels, and even an Army fort’s Christmas dinner service. Old-school crudités (especially celery) are common on most menus shown, as are oysters (preparation unknown). The tried and true roasts of turkey, beef or fowl are well represented, though the clear turtle consommé may be harder to find these days. Take a look; maybe some of the vintage delicacies deserve at place at your table this year. Fort Huachuca, Arizona, 1920 This meal featured turkey and barbeque pork, and wrapped up with a round of cigars. Courtesy of New York Public Library Hotel Casey, Scranton, Pennsylvania, 1912 The Hotel Casey was one of the largest hotels in Pennsylvania at the time it was built, at 11 stories tall. It was demolished in 2001. Courtesy of New York Public Library Central Hotel, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1900 Red snapper a l’Indienne, Filet of beef a la Yorktowne: two preparations we’re not terribly sure what they are. Courtesy of New York Public Library San Juan Hotel, Orlando, Florida, 1900 Fittingly, this Florida Christmas dinner features the traditional egg nog served frozen. Courtesy of New York Public Library Tulane Hotel, Nashville, Tennessee, 1900 At the top of the menu is green sea-turtle soup. That dish would be impossible to find now, as the animal was placed on the endangered species list decades ago. Courtesy of New York Public Library Hotel Colonial, San Francisco, 1899 One of the listed soups, the consommé napier, is served with a thinly sliced marrow bone. Courtesy of New York Public Library Hotel Windemere, Chicago, 1898 Cardinal Punch, the boozy drink served mid-meal at this dinner, dates back to the mid 19th century and features a strong concoction of red wine, rum, brandy, champagne, spices and citrus. Courtesy of New York Public Library Hotel Metropole, Fargo, North Dakota, 1898 This dinner, held just a month after North Dakota officially joined the union, features a saddle of antelope, fitting for a meal served “home on the range.“Unearthed High finalist returns to triple j with a future facing mix. Still in her teens this Sydney producer feels like a bit of a wunderkind. Fresh off the back of her first official label release Ninajirachi took some time out to sling together this high-qual dance mix. Skip Souncloud Track FireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame. SOUNDCLOUD: Same World She’s got Listen Out tour dates on the horizon, and a swag of amazing music up her sleeve – the game is most definitely on for Ninajirachi in 2017. Dates 19 August – Proud Mary’s, Erina 23 September – Listen Out, Melbourne 24 September- Listen Out, Perth 30 September – Listen Out, Sydney 01 October – Listen Out, Brisbane Tracklist Mura Masa – Love For That (feat. Shura) Unknown Mortal Orchestra – CKCMP (SILICON Rework) Mura Masa – Wave Emancipator – Eve II (ODESZA Remix) Bag Raiders – Snake Charmer Mat Zo – Soul Food Cosmo’s Midnight – Ether (feat. Hi Tom) Cashmere Cat – Victoria’s Veil Mat Zo – EZ The M Machine – Deep Search SOPHIE – VYZEE Lewis Cancut – Systems Donatachi – A/S/L (feat. Tashka & Blair de Milo) Cashmere Cat – 9 (After Coachella) [feat. MO & SOPHIE] Mura Masa – Shibuya SOPHIE – LEMONADE Charli XCX – Roll With Me Lindsay Lowend – Wind Fish Wave Racer – Stoopid Iglooghost – Mametchi / Usohachi (feat. Mr. Yote) SBTRKT – Lantern Mat Zo – Lucid Dreams (The M Machine Remix) Flight Facilities – Stand Still (feat. Micky Green) DZZ – Fugue Kero Kero Bonito – Flamingo Lindsay Lowend – Basement Dweller Overture Porter Robinson – Flicker Ninajirachi – Pure Luck (feat. Freya Staer)Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James said in a recent interview that if President-elect Donald Trump tries to drop the F-35 in favor of the F-18, the service will oppose that move. In December, Trump caused a scene when he suggested that Boeing price out a version of the F-18 to substitute for the F-35, the most expensive weapons program in history. James is now pushing back against the idea that the F-18 could possibly compare to the F-35, Defense News reports. For James, the F-35 is a much more advanced weapons system. “The Air Force does not view the F/A-18 and the F-35 to be substitutable at all,” James said in an interview with Defense News Jan. 5. “They fulfill different requirements. They’re both fine aircraft, don’t get me wrong. But it’s fourth generation, and F-35 is fifth generation.” “The leaders of the Air Force will have the opportunity when the time comes to advise the president-elect on this,” James said. “But based on everything I know, the two are not interchangeable and the Air Force has not expressed interest in the F/A-18s.” James said it’s unclear what exactly Trump intends to do with the F-35, but from what she can tell, he seems to be trying to drive down the cost. Trump’s view on the F-35 may represent another clash between himself and his pick for secretary of defense, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, who has affirmed to Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal that he has a “clear commitment” to the F-35 program. Trump first tweeted out Dec. 12 that “The F-35 program and cost is out of control,” hinting that he would try and reduce the cost of the weapons program once he officially takes over the presidency. He followed up that tweet Dec. 22 with a request that Boeing “price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet!” Trump does have the authority to cancel a weapons program, but it seems as though the Air Force will advise against that move. Follow Jonah Bennett on Twitter Send tips to [email protected]. 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] are a number of different hilarious artistic styles found within the SpongeBob cartoon series. Plenty of moments where you catch a small glimpse into a character’s true desires and how they really feel. Thankfully the artists over at Nickelodeon Studios have always had a sense of humor when animating these scenes. I’ve gone through a collection of the best episodes and put together 30 detailed, graphic, unbelievably ridiculous screenshots. Many of the screens focus on the more detail-oriented shots witnessed throughout a lot of the earlier episodes. Anyone who truly loves this cartoon will be cracking up at some of these faces. I probably missed a few classics as well, so feel free to share other hilarious moments in the comments discussion area. I’m Cool Serving Up Smiles Does This Look Unsure to You? You’re Old There’s Two of Them?! These Are My People The Health Inspector Free-Form Jazz Key to the Krusty Krab SpongeBob Fake Mustache Show Them Your House Triple Patty Deluxe in One Bite Sabotage I Lost Something Once Still Working on that Mustache You Mean Like This?? Squidward’s Reaction Why’d You Eat Snail Po? Have I Ever Not Been Right? Not Lame Glass Eyes Picking the Hall Monitor SpongeBob’s Goatee Patrick’s Warm Pants Freeze! But we’re supposed to be “Friends Forever” True Meaning of Summer I’m Sorrrrblh Let’s Go Scare SomebodyThis (D2kA) is my mod for the OpenRA game with the goal to improve on Dune2k gameplay in multiple small steps. New content and inspirations from the Dune books take precedence over balance changes, initialy. (See DONE FEATURES for new content) Step 1 (
was actually Bob Dylan. Both were controversial. Both have antagonized power and their own audiences. Both have been misunderstood (as well as understood and fairly criticized). The idea that Encore and Relapse were just confusing, Dylanesque bumps in the road on the way to Mathers’ Blood On The Tracks didn’t seem completely ridiculous before this. Recovery is Dylan announcing that he just can’t figure out where to turn, so he’s going back to doing all solo acoustic protest songs because gosh darn it that’s just what The Fans want. Screw The Fans. What ever happened to “a brand new CD for these fuckin’ retards” (“Criminal”) and “Fuck it, just shut up and listen” (“The Way I Am”)? Is there a significant difference between his relationship with The Fans on this album and the way conservative protest groups invoked The Kids during the SSLP/MMLP era? *** Something I’ve always liked about Eminem was his ability to summarize his albums satisfyingly on their last songs. Regardless of what you think of the albums themselves, it’s hard to argue against “Still Don’t Give A Fuck,” “Criminal,” “Encore,” and “Underground” being appropriate and/or illuminating capstones on their respective subject matter. Admittedly, “My Dad’s Gone Crazy” isn’t really about anything, but neither is TES. Yet even there he managed to muster up a tidy recap of his career on the last verse. So what can we learn about Recovery from the appropriately title-less last track? Something about fish poop? or Troy Polumalu’s hair, perhaps? “Untitled” is a void Eminem stands in the middle of “yellin’ at air” (“On Fire”)—a vacuum of mindless virtuosity left in the wake of the album’s irreconcilable conflicts canceling each other out. On one side there’s someone who swears he’s back to his old self, the one who was always on the brink of flaming out and just didn’t give a fuck. On the other, a person slavishly prostrating himself before his audience, begging for forgiveness and swearing he’ll never change or go away. He claims to have cleaned up his life and become a mature, responsible adult worthy of respect (both from himself and his audience) while insistently preserving the misogyny and homophobia from his earlier music. YOU CANNOT LIVE ON THE MOON. These are not compelling contradictions that culminate in thrilling, explosive moments like “Criminal” (in which, even if you don’t find the argument convincing, you at least feel like one has been articulated––and in an entertaining style), they just sit there awkwardly, interfering with any sense of cohesion. Mathers seems to want this album to be about how he finally knows who he is. Well, who are you? He certainly claims to know, but if he had actually figured it out, I think he would’ve hammered the answer home in the last song—or at any point, really. The only “insight” he really offers up can be boiled down to a möbius strip wherein he’s back because he’s finally figured it out, and what he’s figured out is that he’s back. The real problem, then, is not that Recovery sucks, but that Eminem is so blindly self-assured and aggressively proud of his fear of the future and misunderstanding of the past. He’s made it the heart and soul of his expression. He’s become Stan. Even if he somehow realized his grandiose claims on this album were empty, I think admitting it would be too humiliating. He trashed Relapse (his other “comeback album”) and Encore on this album. Trashing Recovery on his next…? It’d make him an untrustworthy laughingstock. Thus, this album is likely the cursed burial ground on which he will build the rest of his career. And I don’t care if he calls his next record Resurrection—he ain’t coming back from that as anything but a reanimated corpse. * I thought about ending this with some kind of aphorismic line like, “So, why did Eminem die? Easy, he couldn’t kill himself” as a tribute to this oddly-relevant Old Man Murray article and a callback to the karmic load that’s been accruing since the half-aborted Encore. “He brought it on himself!” and all that… While I wouldn’t have written the above if I didn’t believe that he’d sealed his own fate (slowly over time and indelibly by betting everything on Recovery), we’d be remiss if we didn’t reflect on our own role in Eminem’s passing. For better or worse, Marshall Mathers has always been, to different degrees and in various ways, aware of his audience’s perceptions of him. Recovery was for the fans he felt he had let down. He wanted to be loved again. That he offered up an album I hope I have proved is at least objectively stupid in order to accomplish that is perhaps less important than the fact that he was listening at all. We could’ve told him this album sucks too. We didn’t. We stood by as he buried his face in the dried up tits of past conquests and cheered when he started motorboating them. “Dude is gettin’ LAID!” we were impressed to note. We were as thoughtlessly rabid in our desire to declare “Shady’s back!” as he was rabidly thoughtless in his desire to be back. He was lost before this (recall his frank admission of wavering faith in rap being able to redeem him on Relpase’s “Beautiful”). Can we really blame him for latching onto some positivity when he finally found it after years of turmoil? The short answer was: “He won.” Maybe it’s the long answer as well. The popularity of this album can’t be ignored. It’s generated two of the top ten most-viewed YouTube videos! I may hate it and believe it will damn him to making worthless music for the foreseeable future, but he was right. He undoubtedly got what he wanted out of Recovery. He’s back. We made him “relevant” again. We could’ve held out for a narrative misadventure as funny as “Brain Damage,” an opening couplet as dazzling as “I murder a rhyme one word at a time. You never / heard of a mind as perverted as mine” (MMLP‘s “I’m Back”), a five-syllable rhyme as jaw-dropping as “heterophobic” and “genitals bulgin’” (“Criminal”), or just some freakin’ subtlety of any kind. (Revisiting the relaxed, silken flow of SSLP-era material wouldn’t hurt either.) Instead, we settled for him spasmodically screaming in the third-person about his Legacy and how he’s married to The Game and The Industry as if they were far more than concepts. If he truly thinks “rap is a landfill” (“Cold Wind Blows”), why not find some hungry young talents and put them in the spotlight (Sticky Fingaz’ verse on MMLP‘s “Remember Me?” will still knock you flat) instead of Rihanna and P!nk (again, hat-tip to Wikipedia)? Maybe it’s because he knows he may be louder and more flamboyant than up-and-comers, but is no longer more insightful or deft. Maybe it’s because he’s just a bland pop star now too, rehashing That Which Sells ad nauseum. I’m not saying there should’ve been a boycott or anything like that. I know it’s inevitable that an Eminem album is going to sell millions of copies. However, Encore and Relapse both sold millions and he was still ashamed of them because people were disappointed. Recovery was celebrated. For all his audience antagonism in the content of his lyrics, when it comes to the overall quality of the music, he seems to be sensitive to our reactions. We blew it here, folks. Songs like “Stan” and “Just Lose It” are proof that, at one point, Mathers understood what was compelling about his work and had some ironic distance from it. Is there any proof that The Fans at large were right there with him? Maybe people only liked “Stan” because Elton John star-wiped in for the chorus during a high-profile Television Event. Maybe years of being surrounded by enthusiastic supporters who missed the point of his work as often as his less-thoughtful critics did made him question what the point was to begin with. *** I’ll leave you with this final piece of incriminating evidence: “The Real Slim Shady” was never supposed to exist. MMLP was, as far as Mathers was concerned, finished. Interscope disagreed, demanding an additional song be recorded that re-introduced Eminem and his music to the public, a la SSLP‘s “My Name Is.” With the album’s due date fast approaching, crunch time inspiration produced “The Real Slim Shady,” which replaced “Who Knew” (a song of more depth, though certainly less catchiness) as the lead single. I’ve always wondered how Eminem might’ve turned out if that hadn’t happened. Maybe he wouldn’t have become so ubiquitous so quickly, allowing him a chance to mold a less reactionary identity at a more natural pace. The attention he received might’ve been less overwhelmingly widespread, but more encouraging and sympathetic to his unique talents and specific goals for MMLP—one of which was, ironically, to definitively establish that he was not a pop star. He didn’t want to be “pigeonholed” or have to “top on ‘My Name Is’” (“The Way I Am”). Did these record execs listen to the album’s lyrics? Did they even look at the song titles? There were already tracks called “The Way I Am,” “I’m Back,” “Marshall Mathers,” and “Remember Me?”—the first of which proved to be quite serviceable as a smash hit single. That’s already too much introductory material. A singles run of “Who Knew,” “The Way I Am,” and “Stan” would’ve been a near-perfect distillation of purpose. The album was going to be huge with or without a sequel to “My Name Is.” I don’t hate “The Real Slim Shady.” It’s fun, I guess. But what does an environment which rejects “Who Knew” in favor of “The Real Slim Shady” do to a person over the years? Is it possible that this decision, a microcosm of many things to come, prematurely transformed Eminem from an accidental pop star dynamically figuring out what he stood for into a calcified cultural institution? Was it the chunk of plaque that amassed girth until it broke off of the artery wall, entered the bloodstream, and ended up causing a stroke? Decide for yourself. Cause Of Death: Due To: OSC: Manner Of Death: Signature:__________________________________ AdvertisementsThe track will appear on the DJ's new album Stories Avicii's collaboration with The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, entitled 'The Days' has appeared online. Listen to the track below. The track, co-written with Flowers, was released as a single in October last year with Robbie Williams taking up vocal duties, however the new version featuring its writer Brandon Flowers is now set to appear on Avicii's forthcoming album Stories. The album, expected to be released later this year, is also set to feature the likes of Chris Martin, Tom Odell, Billie Joe Armstrong and John Legend. Listen to Avicii and Brand Flowers' 'The Days' below: &amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt; Speaking to the &amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/brandon-flowers-interview-people-dont-appreciate-what-the-killers-achieved-10250367.html" target="_blank"&amp;amp;gt;Independent&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;, Flowers revealed that his track 'I Can Change' (which samples Bronski Beat's 'Smalltown Boy') came about after his label made a 'big push for me to do an appearance on a DJ song". In a recent interview with The Independent, Flowers discussed his record label's desire for him to make an EDM record which saw a number DJs approaching him: "Everybody. Every single one. They all sent me tunes – songs you hear on the radio [now]. But I just couldn't sing them… So anyway, part of all that was them asking me, 'Well, what would you like?' And I said, 'Well, something that's like 'Smalltown Boy' would be cool.'" Flowers went on to sample Bronski Beat's 'Smalltown Boy' for the single 'Lonely Town'.Don’t care to watch football while the turkey’s cooking (or after the big meal)? Maybe you need to brush up on the game? Here are 10 football-themed films for non-football fans to watch this holiday season. 1. “The Blind Side” Sandra Bullock delivers an Oscar-winning performance as Leigh Anne Tuohy in this true story about Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a homeless teen who is taken in by the Tuohys, with whom he soon starts to thrive. As a stand-in mom, Leigh Anne encourages him to play football and teaches him, during a notable practice session, that his team is his family and he has to protect them and his blind side. Advertisement: Thanks to Leigh Anne, Michael develops self-confidence and has success on the field; he eventually becomes an NFL first round draft pick. In return, Michael has an impact on the family, teaching its members to care more about others, especially during Thanksgiving, Sitting alone at the dining room table, on the day when food and football rule, Michael motivates Leigh Anne to turn off the game and have the family eat together. “The Blind Side” may be a “white savior” film, and the film’s heartfelt inspiration is pure pablum, but Bullock’s steeliness is infectious. 2. “Gleason” One of the most heart-tugging documentaries this year, “Gleason” chronicles the life of New Orleans Saints’ safety Steve Gleason, who says he wants to give his newborn son “as much of myself as I possibly can while I can.” When he finds out he has Lou Gehrig's disease (also called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS), he starts recording his thoughts and advice for his unborn son as well as his feelings of helplessness as his condition worsens and he has difficulties with speech and mobility. Gleason’s nine-year career in the NFL is briefly addressed, as is his career-defining play, blocking a punt. But what emerges from this remarkable documentary is not just Gleason’s positive attitude and courage, but his determination to raise awareness (and funding) for ALS. Equally moving is the overwhelming love he has for his saintly wife, Michel, and their son, Rivers. “Gleason” also navigates Steve’s uneasy relationship with his religious father. The film is sentimental at times, but that in no way diminishes its power. 3. “Any Given Sunday” Oliver Stone’s epic sports drama has (fictional) Miami Sharks coach Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino), trying to put his team back together after injuries sideline two quarterbacks. His third-stringer, Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx), doesn’t start out promisingly. But after he changes some plays in the huddle, and leads the team to some victories, he becomes a superstar. Advertisement: Of course, Tony and Willie don’t see eye to eye, which is part of the film’s fun — as is the fact that Tony also does not get along with the team’s owner, Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz). Will Tony and Willie stay with the team? Shouty Al (reuniting with Stone, who wrote “Scarface”) is as characteristically overstated as Stone’s critique of the business of football. (Fun fact: The NFL didn’t let Stone use a real team). Regardless of the politics, the bone-crunching sports violence and gratuitous locker-room nudity make “Any Given Sunday” entertaining as hell. 4. “Varsity Blues” A guilty pleasure, this amusing comic variation on “Friday Night Lights” has Texas high school football players contending with the pressures of their parents, coaches and fans. Jonathan “Mox” Moxon (James Van Der Beek) takes over as the Coyotes’ quarterback when Lance Harbor (the late Paul Walker) gets badly injured. Mox’s style doesn’t mesh with legendary coach Bud Kilmer (Jon Voight) but he does manage to inspire his teammates, which include goofball streaker Charlie Tweeder (Scott Caan) and Billy Bob (the late Ron Lester), a 400-pound lineman. The emphasis in “Varsity Blues” is less on the gridiron and more on partying and the film’s famous “whip cream bikini” scene, but the film does score points for addressing the dangers of cortisone shots and how sons want to take a different path than their fathers in a place where “football is a religion.” Advertisement: 5. “The Replacements” Taking the 1987 football strike as inspiration, this irreverent comedy has a team of ordinary misfits becoming Washington Sentinel football players for coach Gene Hackman (wasted). It’s a comedy of errors, not just because Keanu Reeves doesn’t really cut it as a quarterback but because the filmmakers think humor is a contact sport. So heavyweight players literally pick up and move a badly parked car or a bar fight breaks out and the motley crew of players dance to “I Will Survive” in a jail cell. While “The Replacements” makes most football fans cringe, the film does have its admirers. Advertisement: 6. “Invincible” Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, right? This Disney production takes some liberties with the actual story of regular guy Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg) who played for the Philadelphia Eagles rom 1976 to 1978, but the film’s good intentions don’t hurt this rousing biopic. (Director Ericson Core does have a penchant for using slow motion for added emotional button pushing). When Vince is encouraged to attend open tryouts for the Eagles, he catches the attention of coach Dick Vermeil (Greg Kinnear) and is picked for the team. Sure, Vince has his self-doubts — he vomits before his first game — but he does well on the field in the climactic game ('natch,though reality was a little different). This modest film is a nice “Philadelphia” story about a little guy who made it to the big time. Advertisement: 7. “Brian’s Song.” Want to see a grown man cry? Just put on this acclaimed TV movie about Brian Piccolo (James Caan) and his friendship with Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams). The athletes, who play for the Chicago Bears, are rivals who become roommates and before long fast friends. They display the true meaning of teamwork: They break down racial barriers and they are there for each other on the field and off. Piccolo helps Sayers become more confident as a person; Sayers help Piccolo become more confident as a player. But when Piccolo receives a diagnosis of cancer, Sayers advocates for his friend, even donating blood. Set in the world of football, this film is a heartfelt tribute to the love and respect these two men had for each other. “Brian’s Song” remains a classic for that reason — and because it makes grown men cry. 8. “North Dallas Forty” Advertisement: The tagline for this seriocomic look at the Dallas Cowboys (renamed the Bulls in the film) was “Wait till you see the weird part.” For football fans, what was weird was seeing country singer Mac Davis (in his acting debut) as a quarterback. Nick Nolte, however, scores giving a flinty performance as Phil Elliott, an aging, cynical wide receiver hanging on to his career and his sanity. He pops pills to get through the physical pain of the game, but he also has emotional battles with the coaches and owners and is benched for his attitude. “North Dallas Forty” captures the authenticity of football and the differences between the players who see it as a game and the staffers who see it as a business. The film’s behind-the-scenes look at football makes it far more notable than all the weird stuff that happens at the parties the teammates attend. 9. “The Longest Yard” Burt Reynolds, who played football at Florida State, stars as Paul Crewe, a former NFL star (disgraced in a point-shaving scandal) who is sent to prison after stealing his girlfriend’s car and punching a cop. The warden, Hazen (Eddie Albert), is a football fan, so he sets up a deal: Crewe can have an easy life in jail if he agrees to coach the prison’s semipro team. Crewe declines. Advertisement: Extended an offer of early parole, Crewe is asked to set a game between the prisoners and the guards. He reluctantly agrees. But there are more deals to be made — such as Hazen moves the goalposts telling Crewe to let the guards win. “The Longest Yard” mixes comedy and action as the Big Game plays out (with a lengthy, action-packed sequence), and director Robert Aldrich used real players on the teams, including Sonny Sixkiller as a Native American playing for the prisoners and the hulking Ray Nitschke as Bogdanski, one of the meanest (and meanest looking) guards. The outcome is highly satisfying, unlike the 2005 Adam Sandler remake. 10. “Remember the Titans” Based on a true story, this is an inspirational drama about teamwork and racial accord in 1971. Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) is hired as the coach for the Alexandria, Virginia, high school team, the Titans, in a bid to unite the black and white communities as the schools become integrated. Boone’s style is to be tough and fair — and he is — helping the players to realize their full potential by working together. His efforts also enlighten coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton) who slowly comes to appreciate Boone’s style as well as understand the racism he experiences on a regular basis. But as far as its preachy lessons go, “Remember the Titans” is best when Boone gives pep talks to his team, on the hallowed grounds of Gettysburg (after a 3 a.m. run) or in a rousing locker-room speech before the athletes play an all-white team. Washington’s performance pushes the film over the goal line, and that is why fans remember “Remember the Titans.”Translation of Lambda Expressions April 2012 About this document This document outlines the strategy for translating lambda expressions and method references from Java source code into bytecode. Lambda expressions for Java are being specified by JSR 335 and implemented in the OpenJDK Lambda Project. An overview of the language feature can be found in State of the Lambda. This document deals with how we arrive at the bytecode that the compiler must generate when it encounters lambda expressions, and how the language runtime participates in evaluating lambda expressions. The majority of this document deals with the mechanics of functional interface conversion. Functional interfaces are a central aspect of lambda expressions in Java. A functional interface is an interface that has one non- Object method, such as Runnable, Comparator, etc. (Java libraries have used such interfaces to represent callbacks for years.) Lambda expressions can only appear in places where they will be assigned to a variable whose type is a functional interface. For example: Runnable r = () -> { System.out.println("hello"); }; or Collections.sort(strings, (String a, String b) -> -(a.compareTo(b))); The code that the compiler generates to capture these lambda expressions is dependent both on the lambda expression itself, and the functional interface type to which it is being assigned. Dependencies and notation The translation scheme relies on several features from JSR 292, including invokedynamic, method handles and the enhanced LDC bytecode forms for method handles and method types. Because these are not representable in Java source code, our examples will use a pseudo-syntax for these features: For method handle constants: MH([refKind] class-name.method-name) For method type constants: MT(method-signature) For invokedynamic: INDY((bootstrap, static args...)(dynamic args...)) Readers should have a working knowledge of the JSR 292 features. The translation scheme also assumes a new feature that is in the process of being specified by the JSR-292 Expert Group for Java SE 8: an API for reflection over constant method handles. Translation strategy There are a number of ways we might represent a lambda expression in bytecode, such as inner classes, method handles, dynamic proxies, and others. Each of these approaches has pros and cons. In selecting a strategy, there are two competing goals: maximizing flexibility for future optimization by not committing to a specific strategy, vs providing stability in the classfile representation. We can achieve both of these goals by using the invokedynamic feature from JSR 292 to separate the binary representation of lambda creation in the bytecode from the mechanics of evaluating the lambda expression at runtime. Instead of generating bytecode to create the object that implements the lambda expression (such as calling a constructor for an inner class), we describe a recipe for constructing the lambda, and delegate the actual construction to the language runtime. That recipe is encoded in the static and dynamic argument lists of an invokedynamic instruction. The use of invokedynamic lets us defer the selection of a translation strategy until run time. The runtime implementation is free to select a strategy dynamically to evaluate the lambda expression. The runtime implementation choice is hidden behind a standardized (i.e., part of the platform specification) API for lambda construction, so that the static compiler can emit calls to this API, and JRE implementations can choose their preferred implementation strategy. The invokedynamic mechanics allow this to be done without the performance costs that this late binding approach might otherwise impose. When the compiler encounters a lambda expression, it first lowers (desugars) the lambda body into a method whose argument list and return type match that of the lambda expression, possibly with some additional arguments (for values captured from the lexical scope, if any.) At the point at which the lambda expression would be captured, it generates an invokedynamic call site, which, when invoked, returns an instance of the functional interface to which the lambda is being converted. This call site is called the lambda factory for a given lambda. The dynamic arguments to the lambda factory are the values captured from the lexical scope. The bootstrap method of the lambda factory is a standardized method in the Java language runtime library, called the lambda metafactory. The static bootstrap arguments capture information known about the lambda at compile time (the functional interface to which it will be converted, a method handle for the desugared lambda body, information about whether the SAM type is serializable, etc.) Method references are treated the same way as lambda expressions, except that most method references do not need to be desugared into a new method; we can simply load a constant method handle for the referenced method and pass that to the metafactory. Lambda body desugaring The first step of translating lambdas into bytecode is desugaring the lambda body into a method. There are several choices that must be made surrounding desugaring: Do we desugar to a static method or instance method? In what class should the desugared method go? What should be the accessibility of the desugared method? What should be the name of the desugared method? If adaptations are required to bridge differences between the lambda body signature and the functional interface method signature (such as boxing, unboxing, primitive widening or narrowing conversions, varargs conversions, etc), should the desugared method follow the signature of the lambda body, the functional interface method, or something in between? Who is responsible for the needed adaptations? If the lambda captures arguments from the enclosing scope, how should those be represented in the desugared method signature? (They could be individual arguments added to the beginning or end of the argument list, or the compiler could collect them into a single "frame" argument.) Related to the issue of desugaring lambda bodies is that of whether method references require the generation of an adapter or "bridge" method. The compiler will infer a method signature for the lambda expression, including argument types, return type, and thrown exceptions; we will call this the natural signature. Lambda expressions also have a target type, which will be a functional interface; we will call the lambda descriptor the method signature for the descriptor of the erasure of the target type. The value returned from the lambda factory, which implements the functional interface and captures the behavior of the lambda, is called the lambda object. All things being equal, private methods are preferable to nonprivate, static methods preferable to instance methods, it is best if lambda bodies are desugared into in the innermost class in which the lambda expression appears, signatures should match the body signature of the lambda, extra arguments should be prepended on the front of the argument list for captured values, and would not desugar method references at all. However, there are exception cases where we may have to deviate from this baseline strategy. Desugaring example -- "stateless" lambdas The simplest form of lambda expression to translate is one that captures no state from its enclosing scope (a stateless lambda): class A { public void foo() { List<String> list =... list.forEach( s -> { System.out.println(s); } ); } } The natural signature of the lambda is (String)V ; the forEach method takes a Block<String> whose lambda descriptor is (Object)V. The compiler desugars the lambda body into a static method whose signature is the natural signature, and generates a name for the desugared body. class A { public void foo() { List<String> list =... list.forEach( [lambda for lambda$1 as Block] ); } static void lambda$1(String s) { System.out.println(s); } } Desugaring example -- lambdas capturing immutable values The other form of lambda expression involves capture of enclosing final (or effectively final) local variables, and/or fields from enclosing instances (which we can treat as capture of the final enclosing this reference). class B { public void foo() { List<Person> list =... final int bottom =..., top =...; list.removeIf( p -> (p.size >= bottom && p.size <= top) ); } } Here, our lambda captures the final local variables bottom and top from the enclosing scope. The signature of the desugared method will be the natural signature (Person)Z with some extra arguments prepended at the front of the argument list. The compiler has some latitude as to how these extra arguments are represented; they could be prepended individually, boxed into a frame class, boxed into an array, etc. The simplest approach is to prepend them individually: class B { public void foo() { List<Person> list =... final int bottom =..., top =...; list.removeIf( [ lambda for lambda$1 as Predicate capturing (bottom, top) ]); } static boolean lambda$1(int bottom, int top, Person p) { return (p.size >= bottom && p.size <= top; } } Alternately, the captured values ( bottom and top ) could be boxed into a frame or an array; the key is agreement between the types of the extra arguments as they appear in the signature of the desugared lambda method, and the types as they appear as (dynamic) arguments to the lambda factory. Since the compiler is in control of both of these, and they are generated at the same time, the compiler has some flexibility in how captured arguments are packaged. The Lambda Metafactory Lambda capture will be implemented by an invokedynamic call site, whose static parameters describe the characteristics of the lambda body and lambda descriptor, and whose dynamic parameters (if any) are the captured values. When invoked, this call site returns a lambda object for the corresponding lambda body and descriptor, bound to the captured values. The bootstrap method for this callsite is a specified platform method called the lambda metafactory. (We can have a single metafactory for all lambda forms, or have specialized versions for common situations.) The VM will call the metafactory only once per capture site; thereafter it will link the call site and get out of the way. Call sites are linked lazily, so factory sites that are never invoked are never linked. The static argument list for the basic metafactory looks like: metaFactory(MethodHandles.Lookup caller, // provided by VM String invokedName, // provided by VM MethodType invokedType, // provided by VM MethodHandle descriptor, // lambda descriptor MethodHandle impl) // lambda body The first three arguments ( caller, invokedName, invokedType ) are automatically stacked by the VM at callsite linkage. The descriptor argument identifies the functional interface method to which the lambda is being converted. (Through a reflection API for method handles, the metafactory can obtain the name of the functional interface class and the name and method signature of its primary method.) The impl argument identifies the lambda method, either a desugared lambda body or the method named in a method reference. There may be some differences between the method signatures for the functional interface method and the implementation method. The implementation method may have extra arguments corresponding to captured arguments. The remaining arguments also may not match exactly; certain adaptations (subtyping, boxing) are permitted as described in Adaptations. Lambda capture We are now ready to describe the translation of functional interface conversion for lambda expressions and method references. We can translate example A as: class A { public void foo() { List<String> list =... list.forEach(indy((MH(metaFactory), MH(invokeVirtual Block.apply), MH(invokeStatic A.lambda$1)( ))); } private static void lambda$1(String s) { System.out.println(s); } } Because the lambda in A is stateless, the dynamic argument list of the lambda factory site is empty. For example B, the dynamic argument list is not empty, because we must provide the values of bottom and top to the lambda factory: class B { public void foo() { List<Person> list =... final int bottom =..., top =...; list.removeIf(indy((MH(metaFactory), MH(invokeVirtual Predicate.apply), MH(invokeStatic B.lambda$1))( bottom, top )))); } private static boolean lambda$1(int bottom, int top, Person p) { return (p.size >= bottom && p.size <= top; } } Static vs instance methods Lambdas like those in the above section can be translated to static methods, since they do not use the enclosing object instance in any way (do not refer to this, super, or members of the enclosing instance.) Collectively, we will refer to lambdas that use this, super, or capture members of the enclosing instance as instance-capturing lambdas. Non-instance-capturing lambdas are translated to private, static methods. Instance-capturing lambdas are translated to private instance methods. This simplifies the desugaring of instance-capturing lambdas, as names in the lambda body will mean the same as names in the desugared method, and meshes well with available implementation techniques (bound method handles.) When capturing an instance-capturing lambda, the receiver ( this ) is specified as the first dynamic argument. As an example, consider a lambda that captures a field minSize : list.filter(e -> e.getSize() < minSize ) We desugar this as an instance method, and pass the receiver as the first captured argument: list.forEach(INDY((MH(metaFactory), MH(invokeVirtual Predicate.apply), MH(invokeVirtual B.lambda$1))( this )))); private boolean lambda$1(Element e) { return e.getSize() < minSize; } Because lambda bodies are translated to private methods, when passing the behavior method handle to the metafactory, the capture site should load a constant method handle whose reference kind is REF_invokeSpecial for instance methods and REF_invokeStatic for static methods. We can desugar to private methods because the private method is accessible to the capturing class, and therefore can obtain a method handle to the private method which is then invokable by the metafactory. (If the metafactory is generating bytecode to implement the target functional interface, rather than invoking the method handle directly, it will load these classes through Unsafe.defineClass which is immune to accessibility checks.) Method reference capture There are multiple forms of method references, which, like lambdas, can be divided into instance-capturing and non-instance-capturing. Non-instance-capturing method reference include static method references ( Integer::parseInt, captured with reference kind invokeStatic), unbound instance method references ( String::length, captured with reference kind invokeVirtual), and top-level constructor references ( Foo::new, captured with reference kind invoke_newSpecial). When capturing a non-instance-capturing method reference, the captured argument list is always empty: list.filter(String::isEmpty) is translated as list.filter(indy(MH(metaFactory), MH(invokeVirtual Predicate.apply), MH(invokeVirtual String.isEmpty))())) Instance-capturing method reference forms include bound instance method references ( s::length, captured with reference kind invokeVirtual), super method references ( super::foo, captured with reference kind invokeSpecial), and inner class constructor references ( Inner::new, captured with reference kind invokeNewSpecial). When capturing an instance-capturing method reference, the captured argument list always has a single argument, which is this in the case of super or inner class constructor method references, and the specified receiver for bound instance method references. Varargs If a method reference to a varargs method is being converted to a functional interface that is not a varargs method, the compiler must generate a bridge method and capture a method handle for the bridge instead of the target method itself. The bridge must handle any needed adaptations of argument types as well as converting from varargs to non-varargs. For example: interface IIS { void foo(Integer a1, Integer a2, String a3); } class Foo { static void m(Number a1, Object... rest) {... } } class Bar { void bar() { SIS x = Foo::m; } } Here, the compiler needs to generate a bridge to perform adaptation of the first argument type from Number to Integer, and the gathering of the remaining arguments into an Object array: class Bar { void bar() { SIS x = indy((MH(metafactory), MH(invokeVirtual IIS.foo), MH(invokeStatic m$bridge))( )) } static private void m$bridge(Integer a1, Integer a2, String a3) { Foo.m(a1, a2, a3); } } Adaptations The desugared lambda method has an argument list and a return type: (A1..An) -> Ra (if the desugared method is an instance method, the receiver is considered to be the first argument). The functional interface method similarly has an argument list and return type: (F1..Fm) -> Rf (no receiver argument). And the dynamic argument list to the factory site has argument types (D1..Dk). If the lambda is instance-capturing, the first dynamic argument must be the receiver.
That could be catastrophic for Seoul, a city of 10 million people right near the border, and near North Korea's artillery. It's considered a prime target for a retaliatory strike from North Korea if the U.S. launches military action against Pyongyang. U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un are locked in a war of words that has U.S. and South Korean troops at Kunsan on high alert. (Getty Images) There was a glimpse of the danger recently, as Seoul held its annual drill to test civil defences during a simulated attack. Emergency workers in red plastic suits and oversized moon helmets carried "victims" out of Seoul's subway. Others were laying on the ground pretending to suffocate. But as the sirens wailed, many complained they didn't know where to go for safety. Critics said even if civilians made it to shelters, there wouldn't be nearly enough stockpiled food, water or medicine to sustain a long emergency. Military expert Yang Uk, who's with the Korea Defence and Security Forum, says tens of thousands of people could die daily in conflict — or while hiding from it — because officials and emergency services aren't ready. "They're not preparing for the North Korean nuclear attack, not preparing for the North Korean long range artillery, so right now, we are kind of defenceless," he says. South Koreans are worried, too, much tenser than just a few months ago, when the mood toward North Korea was conciliatory. Now, polls show rising support for building up this country's arsenals, with 70 per cent backing the reintroduction of tactical nuclear arms here. American nuclear-tipped artillery and similar weapons were withdrawn from South Korea in 1991. Of course, all of this requires continued help and protection from United States forces, working with South Korea's own military. That explains why both seem to be on a war footing here.The average cost of tuition and room and board at a four-year private university in the U.S. has risen to $39,518 annually. Here is a breakdown of where that money goes: $250: Omnipresent collegiate scent Omnipresent collegiate scent $40: Ream of diploma paper Ream of diploma paper $2,543: Laundry facilities capable of handling constant, round-the-clock loads of pajama pants Laundry facilities capable of handling constant, round-the-clock loads of pajama pants $25: Credit check Credit check $5,000: Morgan Spurlock appearance fee Morgan Spurlock appearance fee $0.15: Student mental health services Student mental health services $4.40: You think all those comedy hypnotists are stopping by out of the kindness of their hearts? You think all those comedy hypnotists are stopping by out of the kindness of their hearts? $250: Quills Quills $8,000: Standard wasted money fee Standard wasted money fee $29,000: Big tall clock that goes “ding”She has caused a stir by recording a new song called F**d My Way Up To The Top. And Lana Del Rey has admitted there is an element of truth to the title of the song which appears on her newly released album Ultraviolence. However while she says she has had plenty of sexual relations with men working in the music industry, she denies it helped her career. Scroll down for video Singing like a canary: Lana Del Rey has confessed there is an element of truth to her new song Fd My Way Up To The Top as she covers Complex magazine The singer, whose real name is Elizabeth Grant, told Complex: 'You know, I have slept with a lot of guys in the industry. 'But none of them helped me get my record deals. Which is annoying.' Lana was previously engaged to Jock rocker Barrie-James O'Neill, and has also had rumoured flings with the likes of Marilyn Manson, Asap Rocky and even Guns 'n' Roses singer Axl Rose. 'I like a physical love. I like a hands-on love,' she said during the interview. 'How can I say this without getting into too much trouble? I like a tangible, passionate love. For me, if it isn’t physical, I’m not interested. 'Everything else is so hard; hopefully love is the one thing that is actually fun.' Ethereal: Lana appears to b falling in an inside shot from the magazine, but in fact it's just a picture turned upside down Candid: The singer, whose real name is Elizabeth Grant, said, 'You know, I have slept with a lot of guys in the industry' The star didn't hold back during the interview, and also spoke candidly about her vices. 'Well, smoking is one of them. Sugar, coffee. I must have 13 cups a day. It’s a shame about the health consequences because a lot of great things happen over coffee and a cigarette. A lot of great songs were written,' she said. Lana's career has certainly not been hampered by her dalliances or guilty pleasures. In fact her new album topped the charts in its first week of release back in June. 'Because that gold and platinum stuff, it doesn’t mean as much if you’re walking down the street and you can hear people saying things about you. That doesn’t even out,' she said. She added: 'The good thing about catching so much grief from critics is that you literally do not fing care. It put me in a mind frame where I expect things not to go right, because they generally don’t.' 'I like a physical love' The singer said she likes a 'tangible, passionate love' and if it isn't physical, she's 'not interested' It was the former boarding school pupil's first platter reach the summit of the Billboard 200. selling an impressive 182,000 copies. And it was the largest sales week for a female since December 2013, when Beyonce's self-titled album sold 310,000 in its third week in the charts. This is not the first time she has raised eyebrows while promoting her latest release, as she claimed in June she wished she were dead. It caused an angry response from tragic Nirvana star Kurt Cobain’s daughter Frances Bean, who tweeted musicians should stop romanticising dying young. Singing like a canary: Lana Del Rey has confessed there is an element of truth to her new song F***d My Way Up To The TopEveryone wants Nick Saban’s defense. That’s one reason everyone keeps hiring his former assistant coaches. The Georgia Bulldogs have been trying to build a Saban-quality defense over multiple seasons, starting in 2014, when they hired former and current Saban assistant Jeremy Pruitt as defensive coordinator and culminating in 2016, when they made longtime Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart their head coach. The Dawgs have been good on defense over this period, ranking as high as 11th in defensive S&P+ in 2015, but this season, they might be breaking into elite status, currently ranking No. 8. 2017 has already seen Georgia put away a pair of strong spread offenses led by dual-threat QBs, with a 20-19 victory in South Bend over Notre Dame and a 31-3 home victory over Mississippi State. Among teams that’ve played multiple ranked opponents, Georgia and Clemson rank far above the rest in yards allowed per play; UGA’s allowed 3.71 to ranked teams. The Dawg defense held Notre Dame’s Brandon Wimbush to a total of 212 yards despite the Irish QB throwing or running 55 times, an average of 3.9 yards per play with a pair of lost fumbles. They held Nick Fitzgerald to 130 total yards on 39 combined passes or runs, for a total of 3.3 yards per play with a pair of interceptions to boot. They also held the Irish to almost seven yards below their average per carry otherwise (1.49 to 8.28) and MSU to more than a yard per carry less than LSU allowed (4.78 to 5.94). For spread offenses built around the QB, those are dismal numbers that virtually guarantee defeat. Here’s how the Dawgs have been shutting these teams down. 1. Matching big on big against Notre Dame Georgia regularly recruits at an elite level; you just wouldn’t necessarily know it from some of their results over the last decade. The state is loaded with prospects, ranking as the second-highest in talent per capita. The ultimate blue-blood privilege is access to 250-pound high schoolers who can move, and the Georgia defensive line is loaded with elite talents. They’re particularly loaded at strong side DE and defensive tackle, spots manned primarily by Jonathan Ledbetter, Trent Thompson, and Tyler Clark. The Dawgs also have a pair of senior outside linebackers, Davin Bellamy and Lorenzo Carter, who can attack from various angles on the perimeter. Against these spread teams, their abundance of big athletes across the front is a tremendous advantage. Smart likes hybrid fronts that split the difference between attacking opposing backfields and eating up interior lanes to free up linebackers and defensive backs. The Dawgs tend to play either a three-down front with both the DT (T below) and the DE (E) in a 4i-technique, which means lined up inside of the offensive tackles... ... or in an hybrid front, with the T moving further inside and Bellamy (J) right outside of him: In either set, the DE and DT are primarily in charge of the gaps between guards and tackles, with the outside linebackers focused on keeping the ball inside and the inside linebackers running free. Notre Dame plays a lot of 11 and 12 personnel sets (one or two tight ends), and under new offensive coordinator Chip Long, has become more of a gap-oriented running team, using TEs to pin edge players while guards and tackles pull around in search of linebackers. Consequently, Georgia’s plan for Notre Dame involved a lot of base defense with Bellamy and Carter on the field, to make sure they had some muscle on the edge. For example, here the Irish try a pin-and-pull scheme from a double-TE set against the Dawgs’ 3-4 base defense. The pulling guard gets little movement against Bellamy, and the LT/TE combo on DE Jonathan Ledbetter also fails to move the line. On the backside, No. 78 Thompson and No. 7 Lorenzo Carter get off blocks to swallow up the cutback. Here’s a QB outside zone, with the TE and RB serving as lead blockers to create a numerical advantage: Georgia is in its 4-3 under front. Carter forces the edge, preventing the Irish from getting horizontal. Irish TE Durham Smythe fails to kick him out wide or even keep him blocked, and the pursuit reaches the ball easily. 2. Erasing space against Mississippi State Dan Mullen’s offense is rather different from the Irish attack. While MSU often plays with a tight end, it prefers to operate on the perimeter with spread-option concepts. Georgia aligned mostly in nickel and worked to deny MSU access to the perimeter. Here’s MSU running an outside zone read that present threats to three different areas on the perimeter: First, there’s the bubble screen to the three WRs aligned on the right side. Georgia plays three DBs to that area while middle linebacker Reggie Carter (No. 45) also waits to see what Fitzgerald does with the ball. Then there’s the zone-read element, which could allow Fitzgerald to run off the edge, but DE David Marshall (No. 51) is forces the MSU QB to hand off. Finally, there’s the actual outside zone play, which has five OL working against two DL and two linebackers, with Carter and the free safety en route. Bellamy works to set a hard edge, so the RB can’t bounce into space, and the nose tackle crashes into the left guard, to make sure he can’t cut off linebacker Roquan Smith. Mississippi State gets some yardage from two sheer double-team blocks, but never succeeds in springing a player into open grass. Here’s how that looked if they didn’t get a double-team on the DT they were running toward: Georgia is basically playing with five in the box and a sixth or seventh defender coming as late help, daring MSU to run. Mississippi State wasn’t up for it. 3. Matching athletes on the perimeter By matching Notre Dame’s TE sets with base personnel, Georgia dared the Irish to either win mano y mano in the trenches or win by passing. That meant that it was difficult to get safety help over Notre Dame’s receivers, because safeties were needed to fill in holes left by Carter’s presence on the edge. The risk would have been a 100-yard day by star receiver Equanimeous St. Brown. Notre Dame targeted the big receiver nine times and got a pair of catches for seven and nine yards and a pass interference call for another 15-yard gain. Including the penalty, that’s 3.4 yards per target to their best receiver. Part of the reason was former walk-on defensive back Aaron Davis, who spent much of his night blanketing St. Brown. The Dawgs played Davis on the left and Deandre Baker on the right, and the Irish couldn’t throw against either. These two had impressive days against Fitzgerald as well. While Notre Dame’s passing game is largely play-action oriented and built off the downhill run game, Mississippi State uses lots of quick routes and dropback passing to slot receivers in the middle. Georgia moved Davis inside to nickel, to help take away the quick game, and the senior had a huge day. His physical play on wide receiver blocks required that he often be double teamed on bubble screens... ... while his quickness and route recognition allowed him to smother rub routes on third downs: Georgia has a blistering pass rush, bringing Bellamy and Carter on the edges or star linebacker Roquan Smith from unexpected angles. It’s hard to beat a quick-pass team without smart coverage in the middle, though, which Davis provides. On this play, the Dawgs are in their dime package, with Davis as an inside linebacker of sorts. The Bulldogs are loaded with athletes at every position on defense, and it’s difficult for opponents to create leverage for their own top players as a result. Between their deep and powerful defensive line, multiple edge players, speedy linebacker corps, and strong coverage defenders, UGA can typically force right-handed offenses to use their left hands, so to speak.Lewis Holtby is hoping to return to Tottenham in the summer having helped Fulham to avoid relegation. Lewis Holtby joined Fulham on loan in January. • Mison: Fulham building belief Holtby, 23, moved to Craven Cottage on loan in January, and Saturday sees his current side take on his parent club in desperate need of a result to help lift them out of the drop zone. The midfielder, however, will not be part of Felix Magath’s squad as he will be ineligible, unlike in Germany where it is common for on-loan players to face their full-time employers. “When I wear the colours of a club, I want to win,” Holtby told kicker. “Back then, I also scored once and provided two assists when I played against [parent club] Schalke with Mainz. We need those points more than Tottenham.” Holtby was twice sent out on loan from Schalke -- first to Bochum where he got relegated for the only time in his career, and then to Mainz where he first made a name for himself in the Bundesliga. But while the Germany international is unlikely to be around at Fulham next season, he is still determined to give everything to help the club retain their Premier League status. “I don’t say that I want to look good here, and everything else does not matter,” Holtby said. “I have been relegated before with Bochum and I don’t want to go through that again -- the sad fans, the people at the club who sometimes lose their jobs. I will give it my all and want to start my holidays with a smile.” Despite being deemed surplus to requirements for the time being at Tottenham, Holtby is still hoping to be a success at White Hart Lane. “My contract at Tottenham runs until 2017. As of now, I will return and would be delighted if I could play there. That is my goal. But it is a long summer, and you never know what happens,” Holtby said. During the January transfer window, Holtby came close to returning to the Bundesliga, with Schalke and Borussia Dortmund both reportedly keen on acquiring his services. “A few clubs were interested in me,” he said. “But it did not work out, and I also thought that I have not shown everything in England.”DUBAI: Hundreds of car enthusiasts from across the Gulf lined up to catch a glimpse a new safety device called an ‘indicator’ at the Dubai Luxury Car Show this week. “It’s incredible,” said Dubai resident Ahmed Al Suweidi. “You simply press down a lever at the steering wheel and a blinking light flashes at the back of your car. That way, other drivers know you are about to switch lanes.” Al Suweidi said he had already ordered four Mercedes with the new device. “I’ve got to have one. When my friends see it, they’ll be so jealous because nobody in the Gulf has ever seen one before.” Abu Dhabi resident, Khaled Al Khaltani, said that, until this week’s show, he had simply swung his Hummer into the next lane at high speed, certain that other motorists would get out his way in time. “With this new ‘indicator’, I can let others know in advance that I’m about to do. It’s a car revolution.” BMW salesman, Ron Parkswith said that the ‘indicator’ would come as standard on all BMW models. “There has been enormous interest over the three days of the show,” he said. “Gulf residents are keen to stand out from the crowd and show they have the latest luxury. With the ‘indicator’, they will be doing something never, ever seen before.”Why Groundwater Is Running Out in the Panhandle By Sheyda Aboii Email Tweet Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images The Texas Panhandle’s corn crops are greener now than they have been in many months. Recent rainfall has given this season’s crops a new lease on life. But, corn crops thirty years from now might not be so lucky. The rapid depletion of the Panhandle’s groundwater supplies could dramatically alter the character of agriculture in the region. A new study on groundwater depletion in the Central Valley of California and the High Plains Region has placed most of the blame on agriculture irrigation practices. Researchers at the University of Texas claim that the Texas Panhandle will be unable to sustain irrigated agriculture within the next thirty years if current patterns of groundwater use continue. “Current rates of replenishment in the Panhandle are very low and we are basically pulling out water faster than it is being replenished,” says Dr. Bridget Scanlon, senior research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology. “It’s just like a bank. If you withdraw money faster than you deposit money, you will eventually run out. The groundwater depletion rate in the northern Texas panhandle is now at least ten times its recharge rate.” And the Central Valley of California faces a similar situation. In that region, farmers in the early twentieth century began to meet their crop irrigation needs with groundwater supplies. Heavy use of these resources subsequently led to dramatic drops in groundwater levels. Some places witnessed record four hundred-foot declines. The construction of dams, canals, and reservoirs beginning in the 1930s saw the return of as much as three hundred feet to some groundwater supplies. But according to Scanlon’s research team, increasing irrigation demand since the 1950s has offset these gains by more than one hundred feet. In response, the Sunshine State has turned to groundwater banking (the storing of excess surface water in natural aquifers) as a possible solution. Two to three cubic kilometers of water are currently stored in California’s groundwater banks, but Scanlon claims that these efforts can be further expanded. “California is expanding its water banking practices more but it all depends on how much water is available to store in those banks,” said Scanlon. Unfortunately, groundwater banking doesn’t seem to be an option for the Texas Panhandle. “There is very little water available to bank in the Texas Panhandle. In California they are diverting water from the north, where it’s humid, to the south, where it’s arid. Unlike Texas, they have extensive infrastructure that was built in the 50s and 60s to divert water this way,” said Scanlon. If groundwater levels were to drop to the point of no return, farmers might be forced to abandon their traditional irrigated crops and adopt non-irrigated crops such as sorghum instead. Such a shift could create tremendous economic challenges for Texas. Non-irrigated crops tend to produce half the yield of irrigated crops and are particularly fragile in drought. Sheyda Aboii is an intern with StateImpact Texas.Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has criticized the current world order as "discriminatory and inefficient", calling for a new system based on "compassion and justice", PRESS TV reported. "Discrimination and inefficiency in the current world order set by corrupted powers has been proven to the world," Ahmadinejad said at a Thursday press conference on the sidelines of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro. He said that a small minority have established a method of ruling that is to their own benefit and to the detriment of other nations adding, they seek "to impose their domination on other nations by creating division, rivalry and hatred among them." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the global powers, who have deceitfully dominated the centers of power and wealth, humiliate other nations and reserve the right for themselves to do what they want against other nations, including the proliferation and use of atomic bombs and chemical weapons. He described growing poverty and insecurity as well as persisting economic and social woes as instances of the inefficiency of the current dominating world order in tackling the global issues. "We need a new order that is based on compassion and justice and that all nations and human beings are treated with respect in it," he said, urging collective efforts to achieve the objective. At the summit Ahmadinejad met with UN chief Ban Ki-Moon, where the two conferred on the latest regional and international developments. "All Iran's nuclear energy activities have so far been based on [international] regulations and under the surveillance of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Islamic Republic of Iran has remained committed to and fulfilled all its undertakings," said President Ahmadinejad. He added that negotiations between Iran and the six powers would be a "proper chance" for them to return to the law. The president pointed to the latest round of talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany in the Russian capital of Moscow on June 18-19 and noted that Iran presented "legal, constructive, fair and friendly proposals on ways to resolve issues." The UN chief, for his part, praised Iran's significant role in regional and international developments and said Tehran plays a considerable role in various global issues. Iran and the G5+1 held several rounds of talks in Baghdad on May 23-24. The Baghdad meeting came after Iran and the Group 5+1 resumed negotiations in Istanbul on April 14 after more than a year of stalled talks. The Iranian president arrived in Brazil early Wednesday, leading a high-level delegation, to participate in the Rio+20 Summit on the second leg of his ongoing Latin American tour. The Rio+20 sustainable development conference, which is currently in progress in the city of Rio de Janeiro, is a 20-year follow-up to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) that was held in the city. The summit, which ends on today on June 22, seeks to reach a plan on how to sustain an economic growth without destroying the planet Earth. President Ahmadinejad is scheduled to travel to Venezuela on the last leg of his South American tour for a state visit. Edited by: S. Isayev Follow Trend on Telegram. Only most interesting and important newsEwa Michalak...we meet at last! Aaaaaaah......we meet at last! If you haven't heard about this polish lingerie brand, you definitely should have; it's getting more and more popular each day! Probably for their gorgeous handmade designs, paired with an impressive size range - one of the biggest of the market! - and the option to customize the size and many aspects of the bras! In my case, I was longing to try the brand for quite a few months now! After all, considering my bra shape (narrow and projected!), going polish is perfection! (Those narrow wires are L-I-F-E!) Comexim, with my Ingrid in 60HH, First it was, with my Elena and a Sonia plunge in the same size (soon to be reviewed!). followed by anand aplunge in the same size (soon to be reviewed!). Syrena after I saw it's preview at Ewa's facebook page Now, after weeks lusting overafter I saw it's preview at Ewa's facebook page birthday wishlist is proof of my devotion!) (myis proof of my devotion!) she's fiiiiiiiiiiiinally mine... The S cut proved to be deep, narrow and absolutely PERFECT!Two men were the founding fathers of evolutionary game theory. Both their fathers died when they were young, neither studied biology as their first degree and both fought cancer in middle age. George R Price (pictured) trained as a chemist and was working for IBM when he was struck down with thyroid cancer in 1966. He underwent surgery to remove a tumour in 1967 but, whilst curing the cancer, it left him in need of medication for the rest of his life. He decided to restart his life and moved to the UK, there he started to take an interest in evolution and natural selection. John Maynard Smith was originally an engineer designing military aircraft. He changed direction in the early 1950s and retrained as a biologist. Despite having been born in different countries and studied different subjects both men were now living in England and studying evolution. Their paths crossed and they collaborated on their 1973 paper, The Logic of Animal Conflict, which was the first to combine game theory and evolution, it introduced the idea of an evolutionary stable strategy. The key difference between evolutionary game theory and standard game theory is that standard game theory assumes that the players in the game are rational and trying to play their best strategy. Evolutionary game theory does not assume that the players are rational, instead it assumes that they have a bias to choosing a particular strategy and if that strategy turns out to be a good one then the will be successful and pass on their preference for a particular strategy to the next generation. Over time a strategy may prove to be stable within a population of players. Their paths separated again and on John Maynard Smith’s 55th birthday, George R Price took his own life. He made a great contribution to science but depression overtook him when he was unable to continue helping the homeless when he lost his own home in 1974. John Maynard Smith continued to study evolution until his death in 2004. Despite the coincidence of their fathers dying when they were young their lives were very different. One was from a privileged background who went on to live a long life and the other from a poor background who lived a tragically short life. But we should be grateful that their paths crossed for long enough to create something genuinely new and useful within game theory.No country for young men. No country for young men. Prior to each election cycle, one topic is sure to be raised in the debate for office seekers in every corner of the nation where energy exploration takes place. Where do you stand on fracking? Properly known as hydraulic fracturing, fracking is the liberal boogieman which is, according to environmental activists, responsible for everything from the rampant destruction of the wilderness to exploding sinks. So popular is this allegedly common knowledge that The Daily Show’s Asif Mandvi did a “special report” on the subject this year. He highlighted the hazards posed to citizens residing near natural gas drilling rigs and lampooned industry experts who had the audacity to question the scientific accuracy of esteemed liberal studies on the subject such as the Matt Damon film, Promised Land. As with most such displays of eco-warrior activism, a few pesky but pertinent details were left out of the Comedy Central analysis. One of the chief accusations which was somewhat casually tossed into the report dealt with the commonly held belief on the Left that fluids used in the hydraulic fracturing process – along with the sought after natural gas itself – somehow migrate to the surface and contaminate the drinking water of those living nearby. But do they? No less of a Right Wing source than CBS News reported just last year that extensive studies in Pennsylvania had failed to provide proof of this allegation. As part of an ongoing test, the drilling company agreed to inject unique chemical markers into their fracking fluid and allow the state Department of Energy to conduct regular tests of wells and ground water over a period of years to see if the markers were making their way to the surface. Not surprisingly, none were detected. The fracking fluid is more than 98% water and sand, with the small remaining volume being a combination of chemicals used to free up the natural gas more easily. They are typically injected at depths greater than 8,000 feet under the ground, and to make it to the surface they would need to travel upwards in defiance of gravity, passing through several different geologic layers before reaching the aquifer above. To date, studies have not indicated that this is happening. But what of the Pennsylvania man who was able to set his tap water on fire in the fictional movie, Gasland? Surely that must mean something! It does. And to understand precisely what it signifies, we should take a brief detour to another location in the Keystone State. The town of Centralia, or at least what remains of it, lies in the same geographic belt as the natural gas mining sites mentioned above. If you go to Centralia you’ll find a ghost town, all but abandoned by man. In various spots, steam and noxious gases rise from the ground with no obvious cause and the air is considered unfit for human habitation.Image caption The development team behind the satellite Ghana has successfully launched its first satellite into space. GhanaSat-1, which was developed by students at All Nations University in Koforidua, was sent into orbit from the International Space Station. Cheers erupted as 400 people, including the engineers, gathered in the southern Ghanaian city to watch live pictures of the launch. The first signal was received shortly afterwards. It is the culmination of a two-year project, costing $500,000 (£400,000). It received support from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The satellite will be used to monitor Ghana's coastline for mapping purposes, and to build capacity in space science and technology. Richard Damoah, director of the Space Systems Technology Laboratory at the All Nations University, said it marked a new beginning for the country. "It has opened the door for us to do a lot of activities from space," he told the BBC. He said it would "also help us train the upcoming generation on how to apply satellites in different activities around our region. "For instance, [monitoring] illegal mining is one of the things we are looking to accomplish."Close Scientists have long known that animals' farts and poop contribute to global warming but findings of a new study have suggested that researchers may have underestimated the impact of methane emissions from livestock on climate change. Methane And Global Warming Methane, a principal component of farts, is a natural byproduct of digestion produced when microbes in the animal's gut break down and ferment food. Methane is a gas known to contribute to the greenhouse effect, which traps the heat within the Earth's atmosphere and contributes to climate change. While carbon dioxide is often blamed for global warming, methane is actually 85 times more potent when it comes to trapping heat. Sources of methane are varied. Some come from natural sources such as marshes and other wetlands but a bulk of methane emission comes from human activities that include cattle operations. "We update information for cattle and swine by region, based on reported recent changes in animal body mass, feed quality and quantity, milk productivity, and management of animals and manure," the researchers wrote in their study. "We then use this updated information to calculate new livestock methane emissions factors for enteric fermentation in cattle, and for manure management in cattle and swine." Previous Estimates Off By 11 Percent Researchers of the new study made new calculations on how methane emissions from animals contribute to global warming. Taking into account the changes in the way humans use and keep livestock, they found that previous estimates that served as basis for the 2006 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were off by 11 percent. USDA plant physiologist Julie Wolf and colleagues reevaluated the data that were used to calculate the IPCC 2006 methane emissions estimates. These estimates were based on relatively modest rates of increase in methane emission from 2000 to 2006 but things dramatically changed after this period as methane emission increased by 10-fold over the next decade. "In many regions, livestock numbers are changing, and breeding has resulted in larger animals with higher intakes of food," Wolf said. "This, along with changes in livestock management, can lead to higher methane emissions." The study, which has been published in the journal Carbon Balance and Management, also showed that methane is responsible for about 16 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2006. Besides cattle operations, other human activities such as the production and transport of oil, coal and gas, as well as the decay of organic waste contribute to methane emissions. ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Image Source: theblaze.com The coming latest trend may be to own a drone of your own. Yes you read it correct it will be the next requisite tech tool. According to an Indian origin researcher Parimal Kopadekar, manager of NASA's Safe Autonomous System Operations Project at Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, Calif. He said it will not happen in some long-distant future but in coming 5 to 10 years, where every home will have their own drone and people will use them from farm and roof-top inspection to buying a screw driver. Once standard air traffic system will set up properly for UAV, than it will turn Drone into an engine of the economy. You might be amazed why drones been in news so much since a long time? Its reasons are the following two essential factors which matter a lot in present era – First one is very well known to all is Technological advancement, which allows unmanned aerial vehicle to be accurately and safely guided over the long distance. And the second one is to gather better intelligence on the ground and the places where human cannot reach. Recently amazon has declared to start using drones to deliver packages in the United States in 2016 just after the approval of FAA. Similarly other service provider and individual also planning to take advantage of this unmanned flying objects for the various purpose. Keeping this thing in mind, here are some ideas how to build and program your own drone. The Skyworks website advertises with the help of Project Eedu, which stands for “easy educational drone unit,” You can build and use your own drone just within 30 minutes. In the above video, the Skyworks team has built a laser tag game out of Eedu drones to teach and acknowledge what users can achieve with their kits. Right now the application is restricted to only gaming, can’t be customized for any different purpose. But soon it will come up with new useful and essential applications like smoke detectors,” or entertainment tools. While building the drone of your own, you also need to know the act of flying them, so here is the instruction manual from Eedu Know Before You Fly, an instructive website that consists of the basic rules for flying UAVs in public. Everyone who wants to build their own drone should read it carefully before going forward with the manufacturing process. Similarly, Omnie Solutions considered all the points before developing Real Time Monitoring System – That can shoot full HD video for clean slow motion and also take 14 megapixel still shots. Some of the next big things you should know about drone – Sony soon launching a company to build a camera drone in joint venture with robotics start-up company ZMP. And most important thing is Sony will not going to sell the drones but will lease to all those who need for measuring, surveying, inspecting and observing their farms, ground or for delivering things and for many different other purposes. Facebook announced recently that it has hired 5 engineers that will develop solar power drones that could stay in the air for years to expand internet wherever it is not available right now. Few well known company’s like Amazon and Google are trying to develop a drone traffic control system to tackle a scenario when the multiple drones together will swarm in the air. An emerging class of very tiny insect size flying drones are in research by private and public labs which can be helpful for spying and surveillance purpose and can also be used for disaster monitoring or delivering goods to humans. Image Source - technologyreview.com According to WII's wildlife scientist K Ramesh, in-charge of the wild life project said besides regular surveillance of wildlife, drones may soon control man-animal conflict in Indian forests. Hence it’s been clear from above facts, in no time drone will transform aviation industry. People will use it in the same way as they are using smartphone in the present time. It will be a part of every home or individual according to their need.Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace Harry Elmer Barnes During the last forty years or so, revisionism has become a fighting term. To so-called revisionists, it implies an honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that are a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations. In the minds of anti-revisionists, the term savors of malice, vindictiveness, and an unholy desire to smear the saviors of mankind. U.S. memorial poster of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Actually, revisionism means nothing more or less than the effort to correct the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude. It has been going on ever since Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) exposed the forged "Donation of Constantine," which was a cornerstone of the papal claim to secular power, and he later called attention to the unreliable methods of Livy in dealing with early Roman history. Indeed, the revisionist impulse long antedated Valla, and it has been developing ever since that time. It had been employed in American history long before the term came into rather general use following the first World War. Revisionism has been most frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars, because truth is always the first war casualty, the emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime, and both the need and
Learn about the needs of our customers that we aren’t meeting, so we can improve the overall service we provide Now, you might already have such a specific goal in mind, but you might not. If you don’t, there are a few questions you can ask yourself to help narrow your focus: What do I want to learn? Who do I want to ask? What am I going to do with the information I learn? Let’s look back at one of the examples from above: Get feedback from customers who have purchased our products online, so we can determine if the checkout process is streamlined or not. This goal clearly answers each of the questions above: They want to learn about the quality of their online checkout process They want to ask only customers who have shopped at their online store They want to streamline the checkout process for their online shoppers Setting such a definitive goal makes it much easier to create a survey with a clear focus, which, in turn, increases the chances that the information gathered from the survey will be incredibly useful to your organization. It also makes it easier to develop your survey, and increases the likelihood of generating responses from your customers. More on that later. Back to top. Customer Survey Software & Tools You probably aren’t going to be creating your survey by hand, right? And you almost certainly aren’t going to be manually collecting, sorting, and analyzing your data, either. To make the survey process go as smoothly as possible – both for yourself and for your survey respondents – you’ll want to use tools that: Are easy to use Offer the necessary features and capabilities Are cost-efficient Let’s briefly talk about each of these factors in terms of both your organization and your customers. (Note: Fieldboom is a great choice for creating your customer surveys. Sign up free.) Ease Of Use This is probably a no-brainer, but the entire reason technology and tools exist in the first place is to make processes easier. So, when looking for a customer survey-creation tool, you want to be sure it’s actually going to enable you to do what you need to do without adding any frustration to the mix. More importantly, though, you absolutely want to be sure that your survey is easy for your customers to complete. If they face any kind of glitches while doing so, they’re much more likely to abandon the survey altogether than they are to stick around and figure out what the problem is. Make sure the survey software you decide to use makes it easy for you to create your survey and even easier for your customers to complete it. Features (For You) On the back-end of things, the survey tool you use should allow for a number of customization options, such as the use of various question types and the implementation of survey logic (we’ll get more into these things later). Such customization will allow you to tweak your survey to ensure that you can actually ask the question you want to ask. On the other hand, a tool that only allows you to create surveys with generic question types and the like will make it more difficult to actually reach the goal you’ve already set for your survey. Also, the tool you use should automate the process of collecting and organizing data in a variety of forms. This will allow you to easily view the important data you’ve been seeking in a way that is most intuitive and understandable to your organization. One last thing to consider is whether your tool of choice offers the ability to automate receipt confirmation and follow-up messages to your respondents. Keep this in mind for later on. Before you pull the trigger and purchase a survey-design tool, make sure it does exactly what you need it to do. But be prudent, as well. An all-encompassing survey tool might actually offer too much for your current needs, and may end up costing you more than it was worth. Features (For Your Audience) On the front end, you want to be able to design your survey so that it’s aesthetically pleasing to your audience. Make sure the tool you choose allows you to customize the look and feel of your survey, so that your customers aren’t forced to stare at an ugly, poorly-designed form for your benefit. In terms of what to look for, make sure your chosen survey tool allows you to align your survey with your brand’s color theme and overall style. It may seem trivial, but offering your customers a survey that looks and feels like it’s truly a part of the overall customer experience can make respondents more apt to engage with and fully complete your survey. Other Resources Before you dive into the process of creating and delivering your customer survey, you want to have a pretty good idea of what it will cost you in terms of resources such as time, money, and manpower. To do so, you’ll need to think realistically about everything that conducting a customer survey involves: Survey Creation & Delivery: From question creation to design, actually creating a survey can (and should) be a time and resource consuming process. Doing so involves input from a number of specialists, perhaps some of which you’ll be hiring on a freelance basis. Make sure you plan ahead to ensure your team has ample time to focus on developing your survey, or that your company can afford to hire out if needed. From question creation to design, actually creating a survey can (and should) be a time and resource consuming process. Doing so involves input from a number of specialists, perhaps some of which you’ll be hiring on a freelance basis. Make sure you plan ahead to ensure your team has ample time to focus on developing your survey, or that your company can afford to hire out if needed. Responding to Surveys: As we’ll talk about a bit later on, responding to customers once they submit their responses is incredibly important – especially if they report having had a negative experience. Make sure you have resources set aside to communicate with respondents immediately, should the need arise. As we’ll talk about a bit later on, responding to customers once they submit their responses is incredibly important – especially if they report having had a negative experience. Make sure you have resources set aside to communicate with respondents immediately, should the need arise. Analyzing Results & Making Improvements: After you’ve conducted a survey, your work has only just begun. You’ll then need to dig into the data your customers have provided to determine how you can improve your company’s operations to better serve them. Of course, making these improvements will inherently require heavy resource allocation. Make sure you’re prepared to make this step to avoid having wasted all the time, money, and energy you’ve utilized up until this point. Back to top. Planning Your Customer Surveys For Distribution The way in which you distribute your customer surveys depends largely on the answer to one question: Where are your customers most active? In other words, think about where and how your customers are most likely to engage with and complete your survey. The most common means of delivering customer surveys are: Online (via company website) Email Phone In Person But just because you deliver your survey through a given channel doesn’t mean you can’t use other channels to point your audience to it. For example, if you make your survey available on your website, you can, of course, include a link to the page within email and social media communications (and other channels). This guide will focus mainly on strategies and tips for creating web-based customer surveys. (Note: You can apply everything you’ve learned in this guide by creating a beautiful, customized survey with Fieldboom. It’s free to get started and you’ll gather the insights you need to improve your product, increase your sales and keep your customers happy.) Back to top. Effective Survey Design In the last section, we talked a bit about survey design in terms of aesthetic appearance and overall functionality. In this section, we’ll talk more about how to structure your customer survey in a way that makes it easy for your audience to engage with it. Let’s start at the very beginning. Customer Survey Introduction As with any piece of deliverable content, your survey absolutely needs an introduction. A strong survey introduction includes the following elements: Company Info: A short description of your company and its services. This serves to refresh your customer’s memory, and builds a frame for the rest of the survey. A short description of your company and its services. This serves to refresh your customer’s memory, and builds a frame for the rest of the survey. Survey Goals: Explain why you’re conducting the survey. While you can describe these goals from your company’s perspective, you should also explain how respondents will ultimately benefit from your conducting the survey. Explain why you’re conducting the survey. While you can describe these goals from your company’s perspective, you should also explain how respondents will ultimately benefit from your conducting the survey. Data-Tracking Information: Tell respondents how the information they provide will be tracked. Explain whether they’re expected to provide identifying information, or if the survey will be conducted anonymously. Tell respondents how the information they provide will be tracked. Explain whether they’re expected to provide identifying information, or if the survey will be conducted anonymously. Survey Instructions: Provide a short explanation for how to fill out the survey, as well as how to submit the form. Be clear and concise with your instructions – but also provide the option for respondents to skip the instructions if they aren’t needed. Provide a short explanation for how to fill out the survey, as well as how to submit the form. Be clear and concise with your instructions – but also provide the option for respondents to skip the instructions if they aren’t needed. Survey Length: Explain how long it typically takes respondents to complete the survey. This will give your customers a good idea of how much time they should set aside – and will cut down on instances of abandonment. Explain how long it typically takes respondents to complete the survey. This will give your customers a good idea of how much time they should set aside – and will cut down on instances of abandonment. Privacy Statement & Consent Form: Regardless of whether the survey is conducted anonymously or not, make sure to include information regarding how the submitted information will be used (as well as what information will be used). Be sure to include a consent form, as well. This form could be as simple as a checkbox next to a statement of consent. Though it might seem like a rather inconsequential part of the overall survey, a well-designed introduction serves many purposes: It gets your customers really thinking about their experiences with your brand It empowers them by explaining that their opinion is truly valued, and will help improve the services your company provides It explains what the survey will be asking of them in terms of information provided, as well as time and energy being spent Now, let’s look at how to structure your survey’s questions. A Note On Survey Length In a perfect world, we’d be able to provide you with an “ideal” length for your customer survey. However, because so many variables exist from one response instance to another, it’s not exactly possible to provide a finite answer to this question. That being said, the typical customer probably isn’t going to spend more than a few minutes filling out your survey. And they definitely won’t want to fill out a survey that asks a bunch of superfluous or otherwise unimportant questions. So, the best advice to take when determining the length of your survey is: Make it as long as it needs to be – and no more. Get right to the heart of the matter by ensuring each question (and the answers respondents provide) relate directly to your goal for conducting the survey. One thing to note, though, is that the longer your survey is, the less time respondents will spend on individual questions. The less time they spend thinking about their answers, the less valid these answers become. The trick, then, is to find a balance in terms of survey length that leads respondents to spend an amount of time on each question that allows them to answer each sufficiently, but not so much time that they end up rushing through the last half of your survey. Survey Question Order In the next section, we’ll dive into the actual creation and writing of survey questions. But first, let’s talk about how the order in which these questions appear can influence the way in which your customers answer them – and what you can do to mitigate such bias. Broad To Specific Or Vice-Versa? Your survey will undoubtedly include some questions that deal more with your customer’s overall experience, and some that deal with specific aspects of such. As you may have guessed, the order in which you ask these questions definitely has an effect on how your customers will respond. There’s been ongoing debate about whether to begin customer surveys by asking broad questions first, like so: How would you describe your overall experience with XYZ company? How welcome XYZ’s staff make you feel? How would you describe XYZ’s customer service? How would you describe XYZ’s checkout process? Or to begin with the specific questions, and end the customer survey with an overarching question, like so: How welcome XYZ’s staff make you feel? How would you describe XYZ’s customer service? How would you describe XYZ’s checkout process? How would you describe your overall experience with XYZ company? There are two schools of thought that validate either of these methods. On the one hand, asking more general questions first leads respondents to think about their overall experience in more holistic terms. In other words, they’ll first think about how the entire experience made them feel – without breaking down the experience into specifics. On the other hand, asking specific questions first will lead respondents to think about their experience in more procedural terms, all of which eventually combine to form the entire experience. However, certain issues can arise no matter which way you decide to go. Customers responding to a broad-to-specific survey may frame their answers to specific questions in terms of how they answered the broad ones – or they might not be entirely honest with their more specific answers. For example, if they report that their overall experience was “very pleasant,” they might subconsciously convince themselves that all of the more specific aspects of the service were “excellent,” even if some of these areas were lacking. Customers responding to a specific-to-broad survey can also be influenced by their previous responses, as well, in that their answers to the specific questions might cause them to go “against their gut” when answering the general question. For instance, let’s say a customer initially felt they had a negative overall experience. If they responded rather positively to the specific questions that were asked, this might cause them to second guess their initial response. Of course, there may be other factors that the survey didn’t address that led to this customer’s negative experience – but, on paper, it will appear as though their experience was overall pretty positive. As it was with survey length, there’s no hard-and-fast solution to this conundrum. Rather, you just need to know that these biases exist – and keep them in mind when digging into your survey’s results later on. In turn, you’ll be better able to make more sense out of responses that, at first glance, appear to contradict each other, or that are otherwise rather anomalous. Answer Order The order in which you list your answers can also influence your customers’ responses This comes into play most often when asking multiple-answer questions (which we’ll talk about in a bit). For example, say you ask the question, “What do you enjoy most about our service?” and provide the following choices: Customer Service Atmosphere Pricing Products Other While not an absolute certainty, respondents may simply choose the first answer they see that jumps out at them – even if another choice would be more accurate. The larger the number of respondents who fall into this bias, the less reliable your overall results will be. To mitigate this issue, you can randomize the order in which the answers are listed for this type of question. While this doesn’t eliminate the bias in individual respondents, per se, it will at least make it so the bias doesn’t result in a focus on one single answer across the board. Two things to note: Randomization only works with the above type of question. Don’t implement it within questions dealing with scaled responses Don’t include answers such as “other” or “not applicable” in the randomization. These answers should always be at the end of the list Survey Logic Earlier on, we mentioned the term “survey logic,” and that, in order to ensure that your customers’ responses are as accurate as possible, you need to make sure the tool you use to conduct your surveys allows you to implement this strategy. Survey logic is implemented in one of two ways: Branches Filtering Branching (also known as “conditional branching” or “branch logic”) allows survey creators to send respondents to specific survey questions or section based on their answers to a former question. Say, for example, a respondent reports that a company’s customer service was most influential in determining the quality of their overall experience. The survey creator would be able to create more specific questions regarding aspects of their customer service, and then use branching logic to bring this respondent to these more specific questions. Respondents who answered differently would, of course, be brought to a different set of questions. Filtering is similar to branching in that it allows subsequent questions to be asked based on a respondent’s answers. However, filtering also dynamically skips questions that don’t apply to certain respondents based upon their previous answers. For example, a customer survey might ask, “Did you ask for assistance from customer service during your shopping experience?” If the respondent answers “yes,” they’ll be brought to a set of questions about the customer service department’s ability to help them. If they answer “no,” they’ll simply be brought to the next survey question. Survey logic is beneficial for a number of reasons: It allows you to probe deeper into a specific issue “on the fly” It shortens surveys for respondents by eliminating unnecessary questions It creates a more personalized for each of your respondents All of these factors increase the chances that your customers will complete and return your survey – and increase the validity of their responses, as well. Wrapping Up Your Customer Survey Once your respondents have completed the “meat” of your survey, you want to metaphorically put a bow on the experience for them. First things first, use the final page of the survey to thank them for taking the time to help your company improve its services. This small show of gratitude humanizes the experience, and reminds your audience that your company truly does value their input. On this same page, provide respondents with added value or a surprise offer. You might choose to give them a coupon for free or discounted service, or you might provide them with complimentary downloadable content, such as an ebook or ultimate guide. Lastly, if applicable, ask for their contact and demographic information. The reason to do this last is because their survey responses will have already been submitted whether or not they choose to provide this information. On the other hand, if you were to ask for this information first, anyone who didn’t want to do so wouldn’t fill out the survey at all. For those that do submit their email address or other contact information, make sure you send them an additional “thank you” message as a follow-up. When it comes to figuring out what your customers want to get out of your products or services, one of the most efficient ways of doing so is to simply ask them. Okay, okay. So it’s not quite that easy. While you might at first assume that most customers would jump at the chance to have their voices heard, in truth the vast majority of consumers don’t respond to customer surveys of any kind. Surprisingly, a response rate of 10-15% is actually pretty decent; a response rate of just 2% is reportedly the norm across most industries. There are a number of reasons the response rate of customer surveys is so low, such as:This multimedia learning experience features six chapters, over 30,000 words, and a mixture of videos, infographics, guides, podcast episodes, and more—all designed to deliver you a comprehensive and unparalleled landing page education—and all for free. Whether you’re a marketing veteran in need of new strategies and a good refresher, or you’re just getting started marketing with landing pages—you’re in the right place. (Note: You can apply everything you’ve learned in this guide by creating a beautiful, customized survey with Fieldboom. It’s free to get started and you’ll gather the insights you need to improve your product, increase your sales and keep your customers happy.) Back to top. Writing Customer Survey Questions Now, we’re going to dig into perhaps the most critical part of survey creation: Writing the survey’s questions. First, we’ll talk about the types of questions you might choose to include in your customer survey. Then we’ll discuss why the way in which you word these questions is so important and go over some of the most common mistakes made when creating survey questions. Let’s start with survey question types. Types Of Survey Questions There are many different ways you can ask questions regarding your customer’s experience with your brand. But, because you’ll want to set certain parameters for your respondents’ answers, you’ll want to ask certain questions in certain ways. Here, we’ll discuss the types of questions you might choose to ask, as well as the possible responses you might include to accompany these questions. Open & Close-Ended Questions No matter what, every question you ask within your survey will either be open- or close-ended. Close-ended questions provide specific answer choices for respondents to choose from. Examples include: “On a scale of 1-7 (7 being highest), how would you rate our customer service?” “Did you make your purchase in person or online?” “Of the following choices, which most influenced your decision to make a purchase?” Close-ended questions are inherently quantifiable, in that responses to a single question can be tallied across a customer base to assess where the majority of a company’s customers stand on a certain issue. Of course, close-ended questions don’t offer respondents the opportunity to clarify their answers. Which is where open-ended questions come in. Open-ended questions allow respondents to use their own words within their answer. Examples of open-ended questions include: “Explain what you liked best about our service.” “Why did you chose x as the most important factor in your buying decision?” “Was there anything the survey didn’t mention that you want to discuss? If so, explain.” While open-ended questions can provide a more complete look into a customer’s experience, it’s best to use them sparingly. On the respondent’s end, open-ended questions take much longer to answer – and they require more effort to complete, as well. Because of this, respondents often choose not to answer open-ended questions. On the surveyor’s end, responses to open-ended questions aren’t quantifiable – which means they take much more time to analyze and understand. Whereas responses to close-ended questions can be quickly categorized (and can even be done automatically via survey software), open-ended responses need to actually be read by the surveyor in order to be understood. That being said, open-ended questions are best used to accompany close-ended questions, rather than to stand by themselves. For example, you might choose to provide respondents the option to explain their answer to a given question. Again: make it clear that responding to these open-ended questions is optional; otherwise, you run the risk of overwhelming your respondents, leading them to abandon the survey altogether. Single Answer Versus Multiple Answer Questions For these questions, respondents will only be able to choose one answer. The answers to these questions are typically either opposites of each other or scaled responses. For example, for the question “Was your most recent purchase made online or in person?”, only one of the answers can be true. Or, if a question asks respondents to rate the company’s checkout process on a scale of 1-7, they would need to choose a single rating. Another possibility would be a question in which respondents are asked to choose what they consider to be the most important aspect of the company’s service. In contrast, multiple-answer questions (often called “checkbox questions”) are those which, naturally, allow respondents to choose more than one answer. For example, you might ask your customers how they’ve interacted with your company in the past, providing answers such as “Social Media,” “Website,” “Storefront,” etc. Respondents who have engaged with your brand in more than one way would then be able to choose every answer that applies to them. To further illustrate the difference between the two, the above question in single-answer form would be “Which channel do you use most when engaging with our company?” In this case, only a single answer would provide the information the surveyor is looking for. Forced Versus Neutral Questions The way in which answer options are provided for certain survey questions can do one of two things: Force respondents to “pick a side” Allow respondents to choose a neutral answer give their opinion on a certain topic. Forced-response questions will provide an even number of choices, while neutral-response questions provide an odd number. Note that, unlike in the example mentioned above, the wording of the question need not change. Consider the survey question, “Agree or disagree with the following statement: “Our customer service department was helpful.” Forced-response options would be as follows: Strongly disagree Disagree Agree Strongly agree On the other hand, neutral-response answers would be as follows: Strongly disagree Disagree No opinion Agree Strongly agree Either option, of course, has its pros and cons. Clearly, forced-response questions force respondents to decide: was the customer service helpful or not? On the one hand, this can mitigate instances in which respondents wish to choose the neutral option in lieu of skipping the answer entirely, or in which they truly want to answer negatively but perhaps don’t want to “ruffle any feathers.” On the other hand, perhaps respondents truly were indifferent to the customer service they received – and now have to choose a side whether they actually believe their choice or not. Of course, they could always skip the question altogether – which provides you with absolutely no information at all. However, it’s also important to realize that a neutral answer is not a null answer. In other words, there’s a lot to glean from a neutral response. Think about the customer who reports having “no opinion” on how your customer service department affected their experience. While it doesn’t seem as if anything’s going wrong in this area, there isn’t much to celebrate, either. In other words, a neutral response can be a sign that you have room for improvement in a certain area if you want to be able to “wow” your customers. A Quick Note On Net Promoter Score Net Promoter Score measures a customer’s propensity to recommend your services to people in their network. NPS is derived by the following steps: Asking customers the question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand to your friends, family members, or colleagues?” Defining Promoters, Passives, and Detractors using the following criteria: Response of 9-10: Promoter Response of 7-8: Passive Response of 0-6: Detractor Determining the percentage of responses defined as Promoters and Detractors Subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters your brand’s perceived value, as well as how you stack up against other companies within your industry. Mistakes To Avoid When Writing Customer Survey Questions As we’ve alluded to throughout this (and previous) sections, the way in which you word your survey questions can influence your respondents’ answers heavily. Your wording can also nullify their responses entirely. at length before, but let’s briefly review some of the most common (and detrimental) mistakes that can be made when writing survey questions. Double-Barreled Questions Double-barreled questions are those that mention two topics at the same time, creating a dilemma for respondents. For example, consider the question (or rather, statement) “The checkout process was quick and easy.” For the respondent to “strongly agree” to this statement, the checkout process would have had to be both quick and easy for them. If it was easy, but it took more time than expected, the respondent’s truthful answer should be “strongly disagree.” On the surveyor’s end, there’s no way to understand the meaning behind a negative response to such a question. Was the checkout process quick but not easy? Was it easy but not quick? Was it slow and difficult? It’s impossible to tell without reaching back out to the respondent – rendering the initial survey’s results moot. Double-barreled questions can easily be fixed by simply breaking them into two questions. This ensures your respondents won’t be confused by the question, and that their answers will address one topic only. Leading Questions Leading questions, intentionally or not, make respondents feel as if there’s a certain “right” answer to the question at hand. In the “real world,” leading questions are used all the time, like “You don’t want to miss out on a great deal, do you?” or “That was a great meal, don’t you think?” Those are pretty obvious examples of leading questions that are pretty easy to avoid when creating survey questions. But leading questions can be much more subtle than that. For example, the question “How high would you rate our customer service?” plants a seed in the respondent’s mind that the service was high in quality, and it’s just a matter of how great the service was. You can fix a leading question by removing any semblance of quality from it. Using the previous example, you’d simply ask: “How would you rate our customer service?” You’d then provide a Likert scale, defining 1 as “Very Poor” and 7 as “Very Good.” Loaded Questions A loaded question makes an assumption about the customer’s experience without clarifying such, then asks a question based on this assumption. For example, the question “How would you define your interaction with our customer service team?” makes the assumption that the respondent, indeed, interacted with the company’s customer service team. In such instances, respondents might skip the question, or they might simply choose the “neutral” or “not applicable” option. But, going back to what we talked about earlier, this doesn’t give the surveyor much information. Is the respondent saying they have no opinion about the quality of service the team provided? Or did they not interact with the team at all? Again, there’s no way to immediately tell either way. To avoid loaded questions, you’ll first need to ask a qualifying question (e.g., “Did you engage with our customer service team?”). Then, depending on the respondent’s answer, you can use branching or skip logic to either ask a follow-up question regarding the quality of service provided or move on to the next question. this post on our blog to learn more about how to avoid making mistakes that could render your entire customer survey useless. (Note: You can apply everything you’ve learned in this guide by creating a beautiful, customized survey with Fieldboom. It’s free to get started and you’ll gather the insights you need to improve your product, increase your sales and keep your customers happy.) Back to top. Collecting & Analyzing Customer Survey Responses Once you’ve distributed your customer survey and have begun receiving responses, you can begin the process of categorizing, analyzing, and assessing the information you’ve collected. In this section, we’ll discuss: How to determine what constitutes a statistically significant sample size How to address negative feedback What to do with the data you collect How soon you should send your next survey We’ll begin by discussing the factors that determine statistical significance. Factors Determining Statistical Significance Understanding statistical significance is incredibly important in order to collect data that’s actually meaningful and actionable. Think about it – if you send a survey to 1,000 customers, and only 10 reply, there’s no way you’d be able to extrapolate and apply those ten responses to your entire customer base. On the other hand, if 900 out of 1,000 customers replied, you could be confident that these responses would be a pretty decent representative of the whole population. Statistical significance is determined by the following factors: Population Size: The total amount of individuals you plan on sending your survey to The total amount of individuals you plan on sending your survey to Margin of Error: A percentage that describes how much the data collected from your sample size might deviate from the opinions of the entire population. The closer your sample size in number to your actual population size, the higher the probability that the data collected accurately represents the whole – resulting in a lower margin of error. A percentage that describes how much the data collected from your sample size might deviate from the opinions of the entire population. The closer your sample size in number to your actual population size, the higher the probability that the data collected accurately represents the whole – resulting in a lower margin of error. Confidence Level: Represents your confidence (in percent out of 100) that, if you were to repeat the survey with different individuals within the same population, that the results would be at least similar – if not exactly the same. Generally, confidence levels are set at 90%, 95%, or 99%, depending on the importance of the survey. Represents your confidence (in percent out of 100) that, if you were to repeat the survey with different individuals within the same population, that the results would be at least similar – if not exactly the same. Generally, confidence levels are set at 90%, 95%, or 99%, depending on the importance of the survey. Sample Size: The total amount of surveys you need to get back in order for your survey to be statistically significant Addressing Negative Feedback We talked a bit about this before, but to reiterate: While it’s important to respond to all of your respondents through automation, it’s essential that you reach out to those who responded negatively to your survey personally and immediately. After determining the problem (by analyzing the customer’s survey responses), reach out to them in order to: Apologize for the inconvenience or lack of service provided Empathize with their specific situation Provide options for them for how you’ll fix the problem Deliver the “fix” Provide added value, such as a full refund or voucher for discounted services in the future By responding to unsatisfied customers as quickly as possible – and remedying their issue in an efficient manner – you increase the chances that they’ll give your company another chance. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing them for good. Using The Data To Improve Your Products & Services We talked about this in the earlier section on defining goals for your survey. But it’s much easier to know exactly what you need to do to improve your company’s operations once you actually have concrete data from your customers in front of you. The moment you reach statistical significance, you should begin thinking about what the data is telling you, and where you need to go moving forward. Quick side note: While you may want to start making moves from the moment you begin collecting data, it’s important to wait until you’ve reached statistical significance – otherwise you may end up making moves in the wrong direction. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to have a solidified plan of attack immediately. But, at this point, you should at least have a general idea of: What areas of your service you need to focus on Who will be involved within your company when making these improvements What other resources will be needed to make these improvements How long it will take to begin seeing results As you collect more and more data, you’ll be better able to create a concrete plan. For now, stay flexible. Thinking Ahead To The Next Customer Survey Once you’ve collected all the data you expect to collect, have begun implementing changes to your operations, and have started to see results, you can start thinking about sending out a subsequent survey to the same population segment. The general rule of thumb is you should wait about six months before sending out the next survey. This will not only give you time to implement the improvements you’ve determined need to be made, but it will also give your customers time to experience these improvements, as well. Now, this six-month period isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, as some industries are more volatile and subject to fluctuation than others. For example, the needs of consumers within the electronics industry change with every new product update. On the other hand, the needs of hotel guests remain relatively steady until major industry overhauls occur. That being said, no matter how volatile your specific industry is, you should never send a single population segment more than one survey every two months. The more surveys you send, the less you can expect to get back – and the lower the validity of each survey received becomes. Back to top. It Pays (Literally) To Spend Time Crafting Well-Designed Customer Surveys So, there you have it – our blueprint to take your customer surveys from ideation to implementation and beyond. Sure, it might take a little longer to follow the steps we’ve outlined here, but it does guarantee that you’ll ask the right questions, get insightful answers and most importantly, be able to use that feedback to keep growing your business in a way that creates happy and satisfied customers who will tell their friends and family about your products and services. And at the end of the day, nothing will grow your business faster than WOM (or Word Of Mouth) marketing. It’s free and amazingly effective. Good luck! 🚀🚀🚀 Get Started Now You can apply everything you’ve learned in this guide by creating a beautiful, customized survey with Fieldboom. It’s free to get started and you’ll gather the insights you need to improve your product, increase your sales and keep your customers happy.By now, opposing offenses realize they can't take the Carolina Panthers' defensive line for granted. They've seen the film, and they know that Greg Hardy and Charles Johnson have blossomed into one of the best defensive end tandems in the NFL. What they may not realize is that when they are going up against the Panthers, they are actually facing a giant sea monster bent on destruction. Every Sunday, Hardy transforms into an alter-ego he calls "Kraken," a name taken from the enormous mythological sea monster. He paints his face black, puts on back- or white-colored contact lenses and even affixes a piece of tape with the name "Kraken" over "Hardy" on the back of his jersey for pre-game warmups. "The Kraken is a giant monster that just demolishes everything that moves," Hardy told the Charlotte Observer last year. "On Wednesday or Thursday, I go down in my subconscious. I find him, and I unlock the cage. About Saturday he usually comes out. Then he's always out on Sunday. I don't control him then. What he does when I'm not there, I don't know." Hardy's alter-ego has served him well, as he has tallied 6.5 sacks through nine games this year, but it has also led to some embarrassing moments. Last year he forgot to take off the "Kraken" tape and was fined by the Panthers. A few weeks ago against the Redskins, Hardy's emotions got the best of him, and he yelled at his offensive teammates towards the end of the game. The 6-foot-4, 290-pound Hardy has a few other eccentricities. He loves riding motorcycles and driving at high speeds, and he even posted a photo on Twitter that appeared to show him driving faster than 100 mph. But after a crash last year which resulted in a foot injury that sidelined him for most of the
the book, began to read, and read it through in one shot!! That's my Wow factor. I had the opportunity to meet the author, Evan DeCarlo, at a book signing in his hometown, where he generously signed my copy. Again, another WOW! I work with young adults, and recommended this book. As it was new, and probably in no way familiar with this book, several students did book reports on it. This, of course, required teachers to read the book for student's understanding and content. WOW again. Unfortunately, I loaned out my copy, which I never do, especially with a signed first edition. But, I relented. When I received the book back, pages were bent, the cover was bent from reading with the cover wrapped and it is in horrible condition. (this is why I do not loan my books out!) But, the good news is that my friend enjoyed the novel, shared it with her 3 teen/pre-teen kids who all loved it! I look at it as a sort of Judy Blume for this generation. Sad factor: my book is destroyed, but atleast it had a happy life!!For those of you who were formally introduced to chess like me, you may recall being taught the importance of the solidarity in pawn structures. The more fragmented a structure becomes, the more pawn islands are created. Since pawns are “stronger” together, it’s logical then to believe that each pawn island (or isolated pawn) created thus weakens the integrity of one side’s overall structure. This static consideration is so important that many coaches for beginners say that the side with fewer pawn islands can be considered better! While this grossly undervalues the power of dynamic play, this consideration can help steer the structurally better player in the right direction. In the case of endgames, understanding this principle is crucial, as a brittle structure offers various targets throughout the duration of the game. In our previous Endgame Essentials posts, we discussed how a weak king or a badly placed piece can single-handedly change a result. By simultaneously asking yourself how you can improve your position and stop the opponent’s counterplay, we can try to stretch out (or limit!) our opponent’s defensive resources by creating a passed pawn, or dominating an opponent’s piece. When taking structures into consideration, often times we don’t need to immediately create our own attacking resources because they are already provided for us. As we have with our past studies, we resume our travel through Magnus Carlsen’s career – resuming in 2009, and today reaching the year 2011. As we move through each exercise, I encourage you to continue asking yourself how Carlsen can improve his position. When playing against a weak structure, the duration of the plan will take longer, and usually a win is not simply obtained by tactical means like some of our previous examples. Carlsen – Karjakin, 2009 At a first glance, neither sides’ pieces are particularly impressive. Karjakin’s rook on d8 seems to stand strong on the d-file, but as we’ll see in a second, it actually has no entry square on the d-file that’s particularly useful. To get a better assessment of who’s better, we move to the theme of today’s lesson by comparing structures. In the purest definition of the word, each side has exactly three pawn islands. However, the value of each island is different. For example, visually, we can already see how the isolated c6 pawn is a lot weaker than White’s on h3. By being on a half-open file, Black’s c-pawn can present him with immediate problems. Furthermore, I think something needs to be said of Black’s e5 pawn. While at a basic level it belongs to the same pawn island as the f-, g-, and h- pawns, supporting it with another pawn would actually be a concession for Karjakin. Already, the pawn on e5 limits the scope of Black’s dark-squared bishop. Should Black ever play …f7-f6, he limits the bishop even more, while White’s opposite colored bishop improves. So as we can see, while Carlsen also has three pawn islands, it doesn’t limit his ability to improve his position. 21. Nd1 Rd6 22. Rc5 Kf8 23. Kf1 h5 24. Ne3 Ke7 25. Ke2 Bg7 Both sides have tried to improve the position, but White’s done a better job of addressing Black’s weaknesses. From c5, Carlsen’s rook hits both the c6 and e5 pawns. Without a clear improvement, White spends this move asking himself “what’s my worst piece?” and finds that the knight on e3 has limited mobility despite its centralization. With 26. Nc2 Carlsen makes a move he’ll have to make anyway to reactivate the knight while waiting on Karjakin to find improvements 26…Bh6 27. Ra5! Why not immediately take the pawn on e5? Carlsen decided here that given the choice, he’d rather win the pawn on a7. Should White win this pawn, not only does he get a passed pawn on the a-file, but the pawn on e5 still blocks in Black’s bishop. Karjakin didn’t let this happen, but protecting the a-pawn means retreating one of his pieces. Carlsen wasn’t worried about 27…Rd2+ 28. Kf1 Rd1+ 29. Kg2 and with no more checks, Black must go back and protect a7. It’s in this line that we see how Black’s rook isn’t really a factor on the d-file. 27…Rd7 28. Rxe5+ Kd6 29. Ra5 Bg7 30. f4! Giving Karjakin a choice. By taking the pawn on b2 like he did in the game, Black temporarily puts his bishop offside and has to spend several tempi reactivating it. Meanwhile, White can still put pressure on c6 and a7. While Karjakin’s chances for survival dwindle by playing the role of materialist, he doesn’t exactly have a better option. 30…Bxb2 31. e5+ Ke7 32. Nb4 Kf8 += In ditching his c6 pawn, we can safely say that Carlsen holds an advantage. Had Black tried to hold on with 32…Rc7? 33.Rxa7! Rxa7 34. Nxc6 still gives White a nice two pawn cushion. White doesn’t even have to be flashy because 33. Rc5 will win on c6 as well – if 33…Kd7 34. Bxf7 +-. 33. Nxc6 Bc1 34. Kf3 Rc7 35. Rc5 Ba3 36. Rc2 After spending the last few moves to regroup, Carlsen’s ready to move onto phase two of this endgame. While White stands a pawn up, given the nature of rook and minor piece endgames, there’s still more work to do. The most immediate solution is to try to find ways to make the e-pawn passed. With White’s bishop on b3, it’s important to keep an eye out for sacrifices on f7, but there’s time to improve the position first. Since Black lacks any light square control, White can play to isolate Black’s f7 pawn with Kf3-e4, and f4-f5 with an edge. While this never happened in the game, I’m sure Carlsen saw it (the engine approves too!). 36…Nc8 37. Ke4 Kg7 38. Bxf7! Though the idea of 38. f5 would have won slowly, this move immediately points out Black’s lack of coordination. Karjakin must take back on f7, and whichever way he chooses, he allows Nc6-d8 with a discovered attack on c8. Even with two minor pieces for the rook, Black doesn’t have enough to slow White’s passed pawn. 38…Kxf7 39. Nd8+ Ke8 40. Rxc7 Kxd8 41. Rc3 Bb4 42. Rd3+ +- And now for phase three – creating more passed pawns. By trading the f4 and g6 pawns, Carlsen can have connected passed pawns, thanks to his other f-pawn on f2. Once this happens, Magnus will push the e- and f-pawns until Black’s minor pieces stop immediate advances. The remainder of the game is added for the sake of completion. 42…Ke7 43. f5 gxf5+ 44. Kxf5 a5 45. f4 Nb6 46. Rg3 Nd5 47. a3 Be1 48. Rd3 Nc3 49. e6 a4 50. Rd7+ Ke8 51. Rd4 Ke7 52. Ke5 Nb5 53. Rxa4 Sure, White has a passed a-pawn now too, but if anything, this is just a confirmation that Black has lost. 53…Bc3+ 54. Kd5 Nc7+ 55. Kc4 Bf6 56. Ra7 Kd6 57. f5 Ne8 58. Rd7+ Ke5 59. Rd5+ Ke4 60. a4 Nc7 61. Rd7 Ne8 62. e7 1-0 Black must now give up a minor piece to stop White’s passed pawns, after which White’s rook and a-pawn will prove enough. This endgame was particularly instructive because it shows the uncomfortable decision Black must constantly make between material and activity. Here Karjakin was consistently compliant with Carlsen’s pawn grabbing, but once the position opened, White was able to use his passed pawn (like our earlier endgames) to limit Black’s play and win. In our next game, Carlsen faces Ivanchuk in a rook and knight endgame where the Ukranian was adamant to hold onto his material. Carlsen–Ivanchuk, 2012 So again we have a position where piece play is relatively even. Each sides’ rooks are planning to contend for the c-file and are arguably worth the same at the moment. While White’s knight seems menacing on d4, it can only move backward. Black’s knights have a similar issue as it’s unclear as to where they belong. If we do a basic pawn island count, we can see that Carlsen has two, while Ivanchuk has three. So where in the position is White’s structural advantage giving Carlsen an edge? The d4 square. Since Black’s d5 pawn is isolated, that means a pawn can never kick a piece from d4. However, we already mentioned that the knight here doesn’t offer much for White. When our opponent’s pawn structure doesn’t give us enough to work with, the next step is to see if we can create new targets. This is why Carlsen played 39. h5! and after Ne7 40. Rh1 gxh5 41. gxh5, we’ve reached a new structure. Even though White’s created an isolated pawn of his own, Black now has three isolani in the position. I think it’s interesting to note how the engine still considers this endgame equal. Perhaps in a perfect world this position is tenable, but in practice this isn’t so easy to hold – and that should be enough for White. Carlsen’s plan is to activate his rook via h1-h4-f4 to attack f7, and then push his queenside pawns to create another weakness. 41…Rg8 42. Ng3 Rg5 43. b4 Kd7 44. Rh4 Ne8 45. Rf4 Nd6 46. a4 b6 Black creates a padlock here and has done well thus far to improve his position. Black’s rook is a little awkward on g5, but it’s doing a good job of pressuring White’s only concession as a result of the structure change seven moves ago. Meanwhile, the knight on d6 offers Black mobility, with ideas of …Nd6-c4, putting pressure on e3, making sure the king stands guard. 47. a5 bxa5 This is more or less forced, as 47…b5 48. Nb3! with the idea of reaching c5 and pressuring a6. By trading on a5, Ivanchuk eliminates this permanent outpost. 48. bxa5 f5? += Black’s woes begin here with this committal move. Already it was becoming difficult to find improving moves for White, so simply waiting with 48…Re5= would have forced Carlsen to come up with new ideas. The Ukranian’s move is a mistake because it moves his weakness within reach of White’s knights, making it easier for Carlsen’s pieces to create pressure. I’m thinking Ivanchuk just panicked here because Rf4-f6 can be met with …Ne7-g8 and Black holds. 49. Rh4 White’s rook is no longer needed on f4 since White’s knights are watching Black’s f-pawn. By activating the rook White can play to infiltrate on the queenside. Black can bring his rook over too, but that means no pressure on h5, and fewer defenders of the f5 pawn. Before relocating the rook, Carlsen will insert f3-f4 to stop any potential pawn sacrifice ideas of …f5-f4 and fix the weakness. 49…Nc4 50. f4 Rg4 51. Rh3 Nd6 52. Rh1 Rg8 53. Rb1 Ra8 While it may not seem like much has happened, all of Black’s pieces are tied to pawns, giving White time to do the one thing he’s done best: improve his pieces. 54. Kf3 Kc7 55. Ne6+ Kc8 56. Nc5 Rb8 57. Rxb8+ Kxb8 58. Nxa6+ A good rule of thumb for knight endgames is that often times they can be calculated to a result like pawn endings. While this can be impractical to do over the board, being up a pawn in a knight endgame is definitely a promising sign, and in this game, Carlsen manages to convert. For the sake of brevity, I want to skip to a critical moment. 58…Kb7 59. Nb4 Nc4 60. a6+ Kb6 61. Ke2 Nd6 62. Kd3 Nb5 63. Ne2 Ka5 64. Nc3 Nc7 65. Nbxd5! Sacrificing the knight! Thanks to the spread of White’s pawns, Black is not in time to stop promotion. Being able to sacrifice the knight to simplify into a won endgame is an important resource, and it’s definitely not an uncommon endgame idea. The game continued: 65…Nexd5 66. Nxd5 Nxd5 67. a7 Nc7 68. Kd4 Kb6 69. Ke5 Kxa7 70. Kxf5 Nd5 71. Kg6 Nxe3 72. Kxh6 1-0 Black’s king is too far to stop White’s pawns, so Ivanchuk resigned here. Unlike the Karjakin game, Ivanchuk held onto his weaknesses (and rightfully so!), only to err later with 48…f5?. In retrospect it seems like a simple mistake, I think it’s really illustrative of how difficult it is to play such a position and just hold. In today’s post, we discussed how a simplistic understanding of pawn islands can help us find weaknesses and weak squares. Similar to having better pieces, having a better structure can give you control of the pace of the game, ultimately making the difference between a win and a draw. AdvertisementsRefugees = Friends Es war auf einer dieser vielen, im Rückblick nutzlosen, Anti-Pegida-Kundgebungen im Winter letzten Jahres, irgendwann im November oder Dezember, als die Abschlusskundgebungen von Pegida noch auf dem Dresdner Theaterplatz stattfanden. „Refugees = Friends“ hatte ein junger Demonstrant auf ein Pappschild geschrieben, das er nun hochhielt, auf dass die Nazis und Pegida-AnhängerInnen auf der anderen Seite der durch Bullenwannen gebildeten Barrikade es sehen mögen. Auch wenn wir darüber nur spekulieren können, ist davon auszugehen, dass der junge Anti-Pegida-Demonstrant damit nicht ausdrücken wollte, dass viele seiner persönlichen FreundInnen Refugees wären, sondern es war offensichtlich eine allgemeine Grundhaltung den Flüchtlingen gegenüber, die hier ausgedrückt werden sollte. Welche, wahrscheinlich emotionalen, Bewegungen ihn auch immer zu diesem Statement getrieben haben – es steht doch paradigmatisch für die Einstellung der Linken zur Flüchtlingsfrage überhaupt. Flüchtlinge, das sind FreundInnen, denen man eben auf der Flucht hilft, wie den anderen FreundInnen beim Umzug. Flüchtlinge ohne Gesichter Gefragt wird nicht, wer die Leute sind, die nach Deutschland kommen; was sie tun und taten, was sie denken und wollen. Die Flüchtlingshilfe wird gewissermaßen als Dienstleistung erbracht, in Ergänzung zu der unzureichenden, die die Flüchtlinge vom Staat erhalten. Sie gilt dem, der vor Assads Fassbomben-Terror floh, genauso wie dem, der ihn ausführte und sich, in Erwartung des Zusammenbruchs seines Regimes, unter die Flüchtlingsströme mischte. Solche Hilfe kann man leisten und sollte es auch, und auch erstmal unabhängig von vielen Fragen. Aber offensichtlich passiert hier mehr, nämlich eine positive Aufladung und Romantisierung, eine Identifikation mit den Flüchtlingen (deren Gründe an anderer Stelle näher zu beleuchten sind). Diese Identifikation geht eine Weile lang gut, solange sich davon absehen lässt, dass die realen Verhältnisse der eigenen Projektion widersprechen und oftmals höchst enttäuschend sind. Um bei Dresden zu bleiben, allein hier sind zahlreiche Probleme bekannt, die so gar nicht in das positive Bild “Refugees = Friends” der Linken passen wollen: die Weigerung vieler Flüchtlinge aus anderen Regionen im Zeltlager in der Friedrichstadt, mit afrikanischen Flüchtlingen in einem Zelt zu schlafen; Morde an anderen Flüchtlingen aufgrund irgendwelcher Lappalien; Massenschlägereien zwischen Syrern und Afghanen in den Lagern; die Vergewaltigungen außerhalb der Lager; dazu die Hölle, die die Frauen in den Lagern durchmachen müssen. Für Dresden liegen uns zu diesem letzten Punkt keine Berichte vor, aber aus anderen Städten und Lagern erzählen Frauen und Mädchen, dass sie sich nachts nicht auf Toilette trauen, dass sie in den öffentlichen Bereichen einem Spießrutenlauf von Anmachen und Übergriffen ausgesetzt sind usw. Rassistische und sexistische Gewalt „dekonstruiert“ Wie reagiert die Linke darauf? – Soweit wir das überblicken, mit einer äußerst billigen und wohlfeilen Kritik, indem sie nun brav darauf verweist, dass es doch auch das rassistische Bild des frauenverachtenden und übergriffigen Moslems gäbe – so, als ob damit die tatsächlichen, täglichen Gewalttaten ebenso „dekonstruiert“ wären. Natürlich gibt es die Facebookgerüchte und die Lügen der Nazis, aber durch den Verweis darauf verschwinden die Berichte der Flüchtlingsfrauen und SozialarbeiterInnen von den Übergriffen in den Lagern und die Polizeimeldungen über die Vergewaltigungen nicht. Natürlich geht die Gewalt nicht von allen, vielleicht auch nur von einem kleinen Bruchteil der Männer aus, aber trotzdem bleibt die reale Gefahr für Frauen durch diesen Teil der Flüchtlinge bestehen. Und dieses individuelle Verhalten einiger ist auch nicht allzuschwer zu begreifen. Waren diese Linken noch nie in der Türkei, wo junge Frauen – verschleierte Türkinnen, falls das eine Rolle spielt – von jedem einzelnen Mann, der im Auto vorbeifährt, angehupt werden, auf dass man vielleicht einen Blick erhasche, irgendeine obszöne Geste machen oder einen Spruch bringen könnte? Waren sie nie im Iran, wo eine Frau nicht an einer Gruppe von Männern vorbeigehen kann, ohne angemacht oder mit sexuellen Anspielungen und Beleidigungen grinsend belegt zu werden? Es sind nicht einfach die für Frauen benachteiligenden Gesetze in diesen Staaten, die dahinter stehen, und es sind dementsprechend auch nicht die deutschen Gleichstellungssgesetze, die in erster Linie bedroht sind. Es ist ein Stück öffentlicher, patriarchaler Kultur in diesen Ländern, ein Stück männlicher Selbstverständlichkeit, dass Frauen hier weniger gelten als Männer und ihnen der Gang in der Öffentlichkeit zum Spießrutenlauf gemacht wird. Wie immer gilt das nicht für alle Männer dort, aber es ist doch ein qualitativer Unterschied zu Deutschland, den man nicht vergessen sollte. Es sind diese konkreten Menschen selbst, die nun aus ihren konkreten sexistischen und rassistischen Verhältnissen nach Europa kommen, und als Träger dieser Ideologien ihr Handeln teilweise unverändert fortsetzen. Es sind hierbei, und das ist das Perfide, erneut vor allem Frauen aus diesen Ländern, die irgendwie arabisch aussehen, die bevorzugt auf der Straße beleidigt werden. Nichts erregt den Hass einiger Männer mehr, als Frauen, die hier nicht wie sie als Bettler, sondern als Studentinnen der Informatik und Elektrotechnik hergekommen sind – ein Mechanismus von Projektion und Hass, in dem sie übrigens den Pegida-AnhängerInnen nicht unähnlich sind, aber das nur nebenbei. Nicht wenige von diesen Frauen waren hergekommen, um all diesen Drangsalierungen zu entgehen, und werden nun davon wie von einem Alptraum eingeholt. Es ist nicht immer nur der Staat, der schuld ist Aber dieses, dass es die Individuen sind, die die Verhältnisse in sich tragen, sie reproduzieren und negativ ideologisch verarbeiten, bleibt in der linken Auseinandersetzung um die Flüchtlingssolidarität außen vor. Hier stehen wir wieder vor dem grundsätzlichen Mangel der linken Gesellschaftskritik, wie er auch in der Konstruktion linker Mythen über die „Sexarbeit“ deutlich wurde (siehe „Warum die Linke auf das Konstrukt der „Sexarbeit“ abfährt“, Ausgabe 22). Linke Gesellschaftskritik, das hieß Kritik an der Regierung, Kritik an ungerechten Gesetzen, Kritik an falscher Politik. Kritik an fehlenden Chancen, Kritik an fehlenden Möglichkeiten zur Selbstverwirklichung, und Kritik an der allgemeinen Beschränkung und Einengung der Individuen. Dass die Individuen selbst es sind, die die Zumutungen der Gesellschaft an sich vollziehen müssen und in diesem Prozess mörderische Ideologien produzieren, dass sie diese Gesellschaftlichkeit in sich tragen, sie reproduzieren und fortsetzen – dies kommt gerade nicht vor. Was hier gerettet werden soll, ist erneut das Bild des schlussendlich außerhalb dieser Gesellschaft stehenden, von ihr nicht affizierten Individuums. Es ist das Bild der Linken von sich selbst. Dementsprechend verharmlost man die Gewalt und den Rassismus und verschweigt den Sexismus unter den Flüchtlingen. An den Massenschlägereien in den Lagern soll allein der Staat schuld sein, der die Leute so zusammenpferchte. Wollte man dieser Logik treu bleiben, wäre auch der Staat schuld an den sexuellen Übergriffen und Vergewaltigungen in den Lagern, was man sich zu sagen dann doch nicht traut. Hier muss stattdessen verdrängt werden, und der Rassismusvorwurf tut sein übriges. Hier, wie auch bei der Prostitution, werden die betroffenen Frauen mit ihren Erfahrungen, über die nicht geredet werden darf, schlussendlich allein gelassen. Und auch hier betrifft es insbesondere wieder die nichtdeutschen Frauen, über deren Schicksal die Linke nichts wissen will. Man scheut den Widerspruch, mit dem man nicht umzugehen weiß, man scheut die Einsicht, in die gesellschaftliche, sexistische und rassistische Konstitution des kapitalistischen Individuums. Pegida in die Hände arbeiten Damit aber spielt die Linke auch hier Pegida in die Hände, und zwar auf doppelte Weise. Pegida kann nun nämlich zum einen ein neues soziales Thema besetzen, und greift mit beiden Händen zu. Wer Antworten auf die Anmachen und die sexuellen Übergriffe sucht, findet sie bei Seehofer oder beim Nationalen Widerstand Dortmund, dessen Mitglieder vor einigen Wochen Streife liefen, um alle, die nichtdeutsch aussahen, aus den Stadtvierteln zu prügeln. Und auch in einer zweiten Hinsicht ist das linke Schweigen und die linke Verharmlosung ein Volltreffer für Pegida, denn diese können nun höchst erfolgreich von der sexistischen Grundierung der deutschen Volksgemeinschaft ablenken, schließlich sind sie ja die einzigen, die sich dieser Sache annehmen. Die Linke macht hier denselben Fehler, durch den sie für die Stärke und den Zulauf Pegidas verantwortlich war, denn sie unterlässt es, diese sozialen, für Menschen in ihrem Alltag relevanten Themen zu bearbeiten, was doch gerade ihre Aufgabe wäre. Pegida erreichte seinen Zulauf – über seinen Nazikern hinaus – vor allem dadurch, dass es soziale und politische Themen besetzte, für die die Linke keine Antwort geben konnte: den Ukrainekonflikt, die Propaganda und Gleichschaltung der deutschen Medien, die tabuisierte gesellschaftliche Verelendung und Verunsicherung angesichts von Krise, Leiharbeit und Hartz IV-Sanktionen. Dies alles waren und sind Themen, durch deren Besetzung die Linke Pegida tatsächlich das Wasser abgraben und diese Bewegung zusammenbrechen lassen kann. Durch Niederschreien und Blockieren aber wird es nicht gelingen, Pegida loszuwerden, wie sich im letzten Jahr zeigte, noch dazu sind die Dresdner Demonstrationen nur die Spitze des gesellschaftlichen Eisbergs hinter Pegida. Dabei wäre es doch ein Leichtes, die Falschheit und Verlogenheit zu demaskieren, mit der Pegida, wie aller Faschismus, die soziale Frage, und nun eben auch noch die Frauenfrage, anpackt. Dass, wer dort mitläuft, schlussendlich für die Fortsetzung und Verschärfung, nicht aber für die Kritik und Abschaffung des eigenen Elends eintritt. Solange die Linke nicht in der Lage ist, eine tatsächlich die gegenwärtige Totalität ins Visier nehmende Gesellschaftskritik zu formulieren, wird Pegida sie wie der eigene Schatten, oder vielleicht: wie das eigene schlechte Gewissen, verfolgen. Reflexion Was wäre dagegen zu setzen? Eine emanzipatorische, auf theoretischer Reflexion und konkreter Analyse basierende Praxis. Warum soll es denn so schwer sein, beides in den Blick zu nehmen – den Rassismus, Sexismus und den Antisemitismus der Deutschen, und zugleich den der Flüchtlinge? Warum nicht einfach mal einen dieser „Nein heißt Nein“-Flyer, die im lokalen Alternativen Zentrum an jeder Wand kleben, auf arabisch übersetzt, und zusammen mit dem Willkommenspaket ein paar Leuten in die Hand gedrückt? Oder irgendwas mit „Starke Männer belästigen keine Frauen“, es muss nicht originell sein. Wo auch immer die Flüchtlinge herkommen, und welche Ideologien sie auch immer mitbringen – so heißt dies alles doch nicht, dass sie nicht in der Lage wären, das zu reflektieren, wie jedeR andere auch.A judge has dismissed the case against former Miramonte Elementary School teacher Martin Springer, who was charged with three counts of committing lewd acts on a child. Patrick Healy reports from Alhambra for the NBC4 News at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014. (Published Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014) The case against one of two former Miramonte Elementary School teachers accused in a sexual abuse scandal has been dismissed after an accuser decided not to provide testimony considered "essential" to the case, according to prosecutors. The case against Martin Bernard Springer was dropped, but prosecutors reserved the right to re-file charges, a court official told NBC4. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office was "unable to proceed because the victim does not want to testify," the office said in a statement. "When a child tells you she is traumatized by the process, we are not going to force her to come in and testify," said Alison Meyers, deputy district attorney. Case Dropped Against Ex-Teacher Accused in Sex Abuse Scandal The case against one of two ex-Miramonte School teachers accused of sexual abuse is dropped. Patrick Healy reports for the NBC4 News at Noon on Wednesday Feb. 5, 2014. (Published Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014) Springer was arrested in February 2012 after two girls -- one of whom earlier recanted the accusation -- claimed he fondled them in the Florence-area school. He was charged with three felony counts of lewd acts upon a child under the age of 14. The accusation involved Springer allegedly placing a hand on the girl when he kneeled to speak with her. Springer has been free on bail. A preliminary hearing in Springer's case had been scheduled for Feb. 16, but the accuser "was very traumatized with the experience of testifying in court," according to the district attorney's office. Springer's arrest came after fellow Miramonte Elementary School teacher Mark Berndt was arrested in connection with the sex abuse scandal. Springer's attorney John Tyre said his client was caught up in the web of Berdnt's case. "It was like a tornado was spinning, and things close to it were swallowed up," Tyre said. Their arrests came within the same week, but no connection was established between the two teachers, investigators said. Berndt entered a no-contest plea and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The no-contest plea avoided a trial in the Berndt case, which would have included testimony from accusers who were 7 to 10 years old at the time of the allegations. Berndt was being held on some two dozen charges, including an allegation that he laced cookies with his semen and fed them to children. In November 2013, a judge approved $30 million in damages to the families of 63 children, six of them alleging they had been victimized by Springer. School district officials say they still want to fire Srpinger. "We hold our employees to a different standard of professional behavior and we expect more out of them," said Sean Rossall, an LAUSD spokesman. Springer has requested an administrative hearing to fight his firing, which is scheduled for May. A trial is due to begin in April for dozens of unsettled civil suits demanding the school district pay for the alleged misconduct of Springer and Berndt.It means that one candidate can get things done to improve the lives of others, and of the nation too - proven by his past performance Clinton and Trump: Past Performance is, Guarantee of Future Results! In the real estate profession “You’re Only as Good as Your Next Deal”. In the securities business it is said, that “Past Performance is no Guarantee of Future Results.” In fact, the best fund managers pick companies, among other factors, based on the past performance of managing executives who made “good deals.” Both mantras prove that We, Americans, had to fight for our real estate the same as Israelis fight for theirs, the same as Americans today have to fight again to reconstitute the Republic for which, We, The People, once stood. Character AND performance matters in politicians, except when character no longer matters, and past performance is forgotten for expedience. Among progressives character, or the lack of it; and corruption and the overwhelming evidence of it, never mattered. Therefore the progressive ignores the past performance of the leading opposition who employs 35,000 people and has spent a life of resounding success managing large enterprise; and also ignores the disastrous record of their favorite candidate’s complicity in the deaths of 350,000 human beings while she denied having had any complicity in it. Shortcomings matter more concerning the progressives’ enemies, and never for their own which is in most cases, many times larger. Given this history one can almost posit that it is the lack of character that attracts the progressive to his idol…the lack of character that the progressive evidently shares with his idol. Take the billionaire who threatens the status quo, whom allegedly went broke when he actually never had; and his opponent who claimed to be broke herself, when in fact she never was. This sort of a lack of character appears most glaringly when a president who has never built anything but a path to the nearest welfare office pointed his forefinger at the “broke” billionaire who has built everything imaginable, including skating rinks. Lack of character is best seen in irony again when one side has had a thirty year record of chronic women abuse and a felony conviction to back it indicts the other side falsely of women abuse. In fact the second, Trump, promoted and elevated women to high positions in traditionally men’s jobs an age when women just became aware of their oppression. It gets even better when the one making the charges paid, as a matter of record, 38% less to women than to men for years. In the prog world character, morality and ethics are merely three inconvenient words in the dictionary. Character never mattered. All that mattered was power, the lying to get it, and the control needed to reengineer society to fit in with the tyrannical agendas written about in the book 1984. The Clinton’s version was a tragicomedy. Hillary trashed Donald for bragging about his ability to create jobs. She must have meant he did not…and she had. How many jobs did Hillary create? I should add, how many did Bill create? Well, he did, with a Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich that ended Welfare as Usual and Business as Usual. That, was the Contract From America. Putting people to work. Until Bill Clinton’s final year when the Tech Bubble collapsed leaving the nation out of work and Hoping For Change in their pockets and food on the table. And the nation with skyrocketing deficits. In fact, Hillary’s co-President whom she promised to put in charge of America’s economic future, was the direct cause of the global economic collapse, and the $20 trillion debt America owes today. Hillary’s answer to Donald Trump’s past performance, a success gained in the usual way by working and investing for it, vs. her husband’s, was to outsource the U.S. economy to Bill and his Clinton Foundation that sold America’s uranium to Vladimir Putin. Putin in turn sold it to Iran. Hillary approved the sale. Hillary needs Bill because she has neither the knowledge nor the confidence to run our economy. Remember, she was “broke.” In fact, Hillary has never achieved anything for women or her country, except the deaths of many innocents abroad. Imagine how the media might have treated this story had Donald Trump outsourced the US economy to Melania and Slovania. On that MEMO to Hillary: Trump employs 35,000 women and men who put food on the table, send their kids to college without Bernie Sanders-marked lunchboxes, pay their insurance and medical bills, and buy new cars, the manufacture of which employ millions of Americans. That, is about 34,989 more people employed at Trump’s expense than Hillary and Bill’s at government’s - meaning the taxpayers. It means that one candidate can get things done to improve the lives of others, and of the nation too - proven by his past performance. The other never has. SPENGLER, aka David P. Goldman at PJ Media wraps it up: In Alien vs. Predator, I’m for Predator, Because He’s OUR Predator A fit of high dudgeon has gripped many of my Republican friends, ex-friends, and soon-to-be-ex friends now that Donald Trump has all but won the Republican nomination. My advice to them: get over it. This presidential race will look like Alien vs. Predator. I’m for Predator, without a second’s hesitation, because he’s our Predator. For all his faults, Donald Trump
ory MP Richard Ottaway, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, added: 'We have to keep diplomatic channels open, and I'm sure they are. What this means is calm and mature consideration rather than banging drums in public. David Cameron is quite capable of standing up to BP in private - but I think it should stay in private rather than escalate the war over the airwaves.' John Napier, chairman of Royal Sun Alliance - one of the City's biggest insurers - last night published an open letter to President Obama accusing him of being grossly unfair. In a brutal attack, Mr Napier said: 'There is a sense here that these attacks are being made because BP is British.' It goes on to accuse Mr Obama of 'double standards', who should be reminded of the damage which American banks have wreaked on the global financial system. And London Mayor Boris Johnson said: 'I would like to see a bit of cool heads rather than endlessly buck-passing and name-calling.' Pensions Minister Lord Freud has suggested UK pension funds may be to blame for investing too heavily in one company. In a House of Lords debate, Lord Freud said that of all the dividends paid last year by FTSE 100 companies, BP was responsible for around 14 per cent. He said: 'This raises the question...To what extent are pension funds acting responsibly with regard to their ownership responsibilities to companies?' Stop the anti-British bias, say City chiefs By Becky Barrow and Karl West One of the biggest names in business yesterday led a City backlash against President Obama's critical treatment of BP. The intervention came from John Napier, chairman of one of the country's biggest insurers Royal Sun Alliance. He was backed up by former trade minister Lord Jones who insisted: 'Obama is saying to himself "How can I distance myself from this problem?". His answer is to throw BP to the wolves.' Yesterday Mr Napier, 67, published an open letter to Barack Obama accusing the President of being grossly unfair in his approach to the embattled oil company. He wrote: 'There is a sense here these attacks are being made because BP is British.' The letter goes on to accused Mr Obama of 'double standards' after the damage which American banks caused on the global financial system. Mr Napier also accuses Obama of being'somewhat prejudicial and personal' towards BP's boss Tony Hayward. He writes: 'The immediate issues are very challenging but are best solved together in a more statesmanlike way. The leak may take time to fix, and it will be, but Afghanistan and Iraq will take much longer. 'We can all agree that the first and absolute priority is to stem the leak. Perhaps the second one is to ensure the reputation of the Presidency outside the U.S.A is seen as objective, balanced, able and capable of taking the heat when under pressure. 'We liked the Obama we saw at your election. Can we have more of it, please?' Last night, RSA insisted Mr Napier's comments were made in a personal capacity. But asked on Sky News why he had 'taken a pop' at President Obama, Mr Napier said: 'Have I had a pop at him? Not at all. I've just put on record my concerns about the tone that has developed, particularly about the personalisation of issues which is alien to us and our culture and the fact that it's being received over here as an anti British rhetoric.' He added: 'That may not be his intent but that's how it's reading and you don't have to take my word for that, you have only got to read the press around me and there are dangers in that and I think there are concerns and therefore I'm raising those concerns legitimately and moderately.' Mr Napier went on to say his letter had been'moderate' and'supportive' and was also giving the President 'good feedback'. When asked whether his views were shared in the City, Mr Napier added: 'This is not an RSA view, this is my personal view and as a person who is very interested in the interplay between business and politics therefore I have expressed these concerns. A source close to Mr Napier said he is an 'admirer and supporter' of President Obama, but that he had grown tired of pot-shots at BP because it is a British company. The source added: 'John feels the comments have turned prejudicial because BP is a British company and that is not the new politics promised by Obama and it is not helpful. 'The language has gone from being critical of the leak to going a step beyond.' David Buik, from broker BGC Partners, said: 'I just think invective and hysterical rhetoric from the world's leading statesman is very counterproductive when dealing with a serious commercial problem which does not require political input. 'The fact remains the U.S. government needs to satisfy itself that BP has the financial resources to meet its obligations - and apart from that BP should be left alone.'It issued a statement saying it would halt rocket strikes as long as troops were taken out of Gaza within a week and the borders of the devastated enclave were opened up to international aid. In the absence of a full ceasefire agreement, the Israelis said the decision to wind-up Operation Cast Lead remained under review. Twenty rockets were fired by militants, drawing retaliatory fire but no resumption of the bombardments and fierce fighting of previous days which have left more than 1,300 dead. A senior Israeli spokesman said the troops would leave Gaza within days, not weeks and yesterday troops were pulling back into remote parts of the Palestinian enclave. Gordon Brown called on Israel to immediately pull its forces out of Gaza as European leaders led efforts to entrench a long-term armistice. He said: "Three weeks of tragedy must be followed by immediate action to secure a permanent peace settlement. Amid suffering and grief and tears, I believe I can see a clear path to peace." There were signs that diplomatic efforts could quickly satisfy both Israel and Hamas. Mr Brown and five other European leaders, including President Nicolas Sarkozy, were to meet the Israeli leader Ehud Olmert last night in Jerusalem to outline measures that would meet Israel's security concerns while allowing it to lift the blockade of Gaza. The Israeli campaign reached a turning point last week after Mr Olmert's government secured international guarantees that the flow of arms to Hamas in Gaza would be stopped. Israel was promised American involvement in the effort to stop shipments from Iran, a development that triggered offers of patrols by the Royal Navy and its French and German counterparts. Measures to increase patrols and monitors on the Gaza border were discussed at a summit of the Europeans with Egyptian and Palestinian leaders in Sharm El-Sheik before arriving in Jerusalem. Britain promised an extra £20 million for humanitarian relief in Gaza as Mr Brown used unusually strong language to criticise the extent of Israel's bombing campaign and ground incursions. "We are yet to discover the full scale of the appalling suffering," he said. "Israel must allow full access to humanitarian workers and to relief supplies. We must also end Gaza's economic isolation by reopening the crossings that link it to the outside world." The Hamas announcement came in a televised speech on Syrian television by Mussa Abu Marzuq, a spokesman, who rejected Israeli claims that it had renewed its ability to deter attacks by Palestinians. "The Israeli enemy has failed in its bid to impose conditions," he said. "We in the Palestinian resistance movements announce a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and demand that enemy forces withdraw in a week and open all the border crossings to permit the entry of humanitarian aid and basic goods." Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman, said its ceasefire rested on not being attacked by Hamas but that did not mean it would deal directly with extremist Islamic group. "Israel announced a unilateral ceasefire of offensive activities against Hamas," he said. "If Hamas does not attack Israel and does not provoke Israel, we will honour the ceasefire." Israeli officials said Hamas had suffered heavy depletion of its weapons stockpile, large numbers of fighters had been killed and a new international regime to prevent the organisation rearming had been established. Israeli newspapers reflected the mood of relief and triumphalism that has swept the country. The smooth conduct of the operation was applauded by the public, in contrast to the deep shock in the wake of the army's bungling of an offensive against Hizbollah in Lebanon in 2006. Photographs showed combat troops standing on an withdrawing Merkava tank, smiling wearily as they raised their arms to make V for victory hand signals. The newspaper, Maariv printed a banner headline proclaiming: "The Victory". Officials were privately relieved that operation had been brought to standstill before the world's attention turned to the inauguration of President Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday. A spokesman yesterday stated that Mr Obama would take an active role in resolving a dispute that underpins the divisions of the Middle East.Photograph by Cam Kirk / Via camkirk.tumblr.com On a cold evening in February, right after Drake performed for a room of celebrities and TV executives at a private Super Bowl party in New York’s Meatpacking District, his DJ played one song to close out the night: On a cold evening in February, right after Drake performed for a room of celebrities and TV executives at a private Super Bowl party in New York’s Meatpacking District, his DJ played one song to close out the night: “Danny Glover,” by the 22-year-old Atlanta rapper Young Thug. Seated in the VIP section, Paul McCartney and Kim Kardashian’s little sister Kendall Jenner listened as Thug’s voice shifted shapes, darting between quick yelps and warbled singing over drums seemingly set to the time of someone skipping. Earlier in the night, the crowd had sung along as local radio jock Funkmaster Flex spun wedding classics like “I Love Rock and Roll,” but now the room felt momentarily off-balance and charged with attention. “Danny Glover” was a challenging proposition, but not unwelcome. A handful of guys dressed like bankers howled along: “Money stand like 8 feet just like twoooo midgets.” “Danny Glover” is a strange song that sounds immediately familiar, its melody and Thug’s elastic delivery carrying more meaning than its lyrics. The instinctive response to hearing it is to loosen your limbs and throw them at the air — or at least that’s what Drake and Kanye West did with admiration at different clubs as DJs spread the song in January. Later that month, Nicki Minaj mimicked Thug on her own version of “Danny Glover.” “It was one signature stylist welcoming another to the club,” the New York Times wrote. By February, Kanye had reportedly summoned Young Thug to California from his home in Atlanta to record. “Danny Glover” could be heard on radio stations nationwide, along with his song “Stoner,” a singsong anthem that also became the unofficial soundtrack of a Vine dance craze. The people who made videos of themselves dancing to “Stoner” proved what people in Atlanta had known since Thug, who was born Jeffrey Williams, The people who made videos of themselves dancing to “Stoner” proved what people in Atlanta had known since Thug, who was born Jeffrey Williams, emerged there in 2011 — Thug’s songs were as catchy as they were weird-sounding, and his dare-to-be-different approach made him a lovable people’s champ. But while the grassroots fans Thug had worked to win over — and who thought of Thug as an eccentric, unsigned underdog — had the power to create a conversation around him, they didn't have the power to get “Stoner” onto radio in New York. Still, someone had added the song to Power 105.1’s regular playlist in mid-January, and Hot 97’s playlist in early February, and it was an industry guessing game to figure out who. It turned out the answer was a record label whose contract with Thug was a secret. (The secret was not an exceptionally well-kept one — rumors of the deal surfaced online after another rapper from the label’s roster was tacked on to a “Stoner” remix.) But why would a label keep their relationship with a budding star under wraps? And why had no one put an official version of that track up for sale — especially since rap’s power players were clamoring to tie themselves to the buzz of “Danny Glover"? Because although Young Thug wanted nothing to do with the label, he’d signed a contract with them that he couldn't get out of. According to multiple sources, he felt ripped off and went rogue, seeking out new advisers, while those at the label that now owned a percentage of his income scratched their heads and waited. In the meantime, the career of one of hip-hop's most promising rising stars hung in the balance. Photograph by Cam Kirk / Via camkirk.tumblr.com Long before Drake was a fan, Gucci Mane, the Atlanta rap icon whose erratic behavior has threatened to overshadow his prolific talent, recognized Young Thug as a peer and potential successor. “I chased the boy down and told him like, you’re one of the most talented people I’ve ever worked with,” Gucci said last year, after recruiting Thug to come work at his private studio, the Brick Factory, an “open environment” where a team of producers and rappers worked around the clock. In the summer of 2012, they were two mad geniuses egging each other along. The results of their shared burst of creative productivity can be heard across two early 2013 releases: Gucci Mane’s Trap House III and 1017 Thug, the mixtape that cemented Thug’s reputation in Atlanta and appeared on lots of nationwide best of 2013 lists. 1017 Thug’s title pledged allegiance to Gucci Mane’s label, 1017 Brick Squad, and Thug has remained fiercely loyal to Gucci since that tape’s release. After Gucci Mane underwent a public meltdown last fall, insulting former allies on Twitter and ultimately being sent to jail for violating the terms of his parole, Thug defended him. “If Gucci Mane said fuck you,” he told one reporter, “you need to please know that Young Thug says fuck you too.” Thug's allegiance wasn't in name only — he'd also signed a binding production deal with Gucci Mane and 1017 Brick Squad. This happened around March 2013, said an Atlanta music publicist who has worked with Thug. The exact terms of that contract are unknown, but a current industry-standard contract for a different rap production deal obtained by BuzzFeed outlines an agreement where, for an agreed-upon period, a production company owns the exclusive rights to an artist’s recording masters, videos, artwork, and name. The deal stipulates that the production company will release and promote the artist’s videos, mixtapes, or albums in order to develop their career and eventually a secure a deal with a major record company. Then, the production company would furnish the artists’ exclusive recording services to the major label, for a price, to be negotiated by the company that signed the production deal. So when Young Thug signed another deal with Atlantic Records imprint Artist Partners Group just weeks after Gucci Mane returned to jail last September, it’s not clear if he knew that by doing so, he was creating an arranged marriage of sorts between them and Gucci Mane. “Gucci was in jail,” the Atlanta publicist said. “I think at that point, [Thug and his team] felt like the Gucci contract was void. Thug is a real street kid — paperwork and legal shit, it don’t register to him like that.” Emails obtained by BuzzFeed confirm that APG signed Young Thug in the fall of 2013, and worked to promote him. When the deal was made, APG did not know that Thug had signed a deal with Gucci Mane, according to Jordan, a source who worked with APG on the Young Thug project and was privy to Thug’s contract negotiations and promotional budget. “If APG knew about his deal with Gucci at that point, they might have not even signed him,” Jordan said. APG has two divisions: Artist Partners Group for recording artists and Artist Publishing Group for producers. Its mission statement is “to further the careers of the next generation of superstar songwriters, producers and musicians.” Photograph by Cam Kirk / Via camkirk.tumblr.com “They’re good at getting people early,” one artist manager whose client has a publishing deal with APG told BuzzFeed. “When APG look at someone, they think about breaking somebody into popular culture, not something that’s gonna be the hottest thing on the urban market. That’s the reason APG exists: They’re gonna go find those talents that [parent company] Atlantic Records probably wouldn't put any money into, cause they’re a higher risk.” “They’re good at getting people early,” one artist manager whose client has a publishing deal with APG told BuzzFeed. “When APG look at someone, they think about breaking somebody into popular culture, not something that’s gonna be the hottest thing on the urban market. That’s the reason APG exists: They’re gonna go find those talents that [parent company] Atlantic Records probably wouldn't put any money into, cause they’re a higher risk.” According to Jordan, APG thought of Young Thug as a risky artist, with a vague name that might be hard to sell. But when APG A&R Jeff Vaughn traveled to Atlanta and witnessed how Thug was admired there, Jordan said, he sold Mike Caren — APG’s CEO and the president of Atlantic parent company Warner Music Group’s A&R department — on the idea. “Mike was like, ‘Fuck it, if you can sign him cheap, go for it,’” said Jordan. Multiple sources confirm that Thug signed a “full-blown 360 deal” with APG, meaning that the label negotiated rights not only to income from Thug’s recorded music, but also things like his live performances and merchandise. “Mike Caren is the most honest person I ever met in this industry. But that’s the business model at Atlantic, 360 deals," said the artist manager with an APG-signed client. This claim isn’t new — back in 2010, Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco criticized Atlantic for pressuring him to revise his existing contract and sign a 360 deal. Still, even though APG stood to make money from Thug’s music as well as his other ventures, their up-front investment in him was small. Jordan claimed Thug’s entire contract was worth just $30,000, and that he got a $15,000 advance at signing. (Another source confirms the $15,000 advance, and added "I'd be surprised if it was more than $50,000 total.") Compared to the million-dollar deals buzzing rappers have reportedly signed after recent bidding wars, these numbers are strikingly slight. Deals like Thug’s — where a label acts like a friend (or in startup terminology, an angel investor), throwing a little money behind videos or online advertising for an artist who’s made some songs on their own, hoping to help them get noticed and make some money back with revenue from tours and merch — are a relatively new phenomenon. Until the early '00s, labels focused less on promoting existing songs than creating new ones, and tailoring them to mainstream tastes. “You used to get a guy with a decent amount of raw talent, and put him in the studio with as many people as you can until something workable came out that was glossier or more broadly appealing than whatever they started out doing,” New York Times pop critic Jon Caramanica said. But since 2000 or so, major-label rap sales have tanked, and rappers became able to instantly distribute their own music through networks like Myspace and DatPiff. This is the decade where mixtapes — an album-length compilation of new or hit songs, usually hosted by a DJ, and sometimes featuring rappers freestyling over beats taken from songs released by major labels, sometimes sold but often available for free — seriously threatened the popularity of major-label rap releases. By 2007, major labels started cracking down on mixtapes where rappers "borrowed" industry beats without paying for them. Prominent mixtape host DJ Drama was arrested, and artists were pushed to record more original songs for their tapes. As a result, many of the decade’s most memorable releases were artist-driven mixtapes, with no label push behind them — Gucci Mane put out no less than six in 2009. “If major labels were smart or crafty enough to dictate where hip-hop went — especially grassroots, street-oriented hip-hop — it would've went somewhere very different. We would not have wound up with Gucci Mane,” New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh said in 2011. In post-Gucci Mane 2014, artists compete to be seen as street favorites, making hits on their own terms that spread organically among fans, with the help of tastemaking blogs and sites like Livemixtapes.com. “In the current hip-hop business climate, in order to become an artist that people care about, it’s basically irrelevant if you’re signed to a major label,” Caramanica said. Marcos Rippy, who worked as Young Thug’s manager in 2013, said that for new artists, affiliation with a major label can be regarded as a kind of handicap: “It’s better when things come from an underground point, especially in rap music. It’s better when it comes from the fans than when it comes from the executive level,” he said. Photograph by Cam Kirk / Via camkirk.tumblr.com These days, rappers prove their viability by breaking into public consciousness independently. And Thug did self-start his career — “Stoner” was first released on a Fallon and Letterman, they aspire to turn micro nationwide phenomena into macro ones. These days, rappers prove their viability by breaking into public consciousness independently. And Thug did self-start his career — “Stoner” was first released on a free compilation mixtape last September, before APG signed Thug. “An A&R guy is at this point is just checking the internet and being like, 'Who’s bubbling? How can I get that guy to make money for me?'” Caramanica said. After catching wind of what’s trending online, labels step in to offer the promise of scale. With video budgets and touring support, or by getting acts onand, they aspire to turn micro nationwide phenomena into macro ones. In emails obtained by BuzzFeed that were sent in October and November 2013, Atlantic staffers discussed plans for a January 2014 Young Thug album, to be called #HiTunes. They talked about creating “Grateful Dead-inspired” cover art for “Danny Glover” and “Stoner,” and shooting a video for Thug’s song “2 Cups Stuffed.” According to Jordan, if all had gone according to plan, Thug could have put out up to six releases with APG and Atlantic’s support: two EPs released for sale on iTunes (but marketed, for the sake of approachability and authenticity, as “mixtapes”), followed by four full-length albums. Based on the success of Thug’s single “Stoner” — as of late March, it had been streamed 11 million times on YouTube and another million times on Spotify, and was in its third week on Billboard’s Hot 100 charts — Jordan said Thug may have been able to renegotiate the terms of his contract, leveraging for more money. (Jordan claimed that another APG rapper, Kevin Gates, did this. Reps for Kevin Gates declined to speak with BuzzFeed for this story, but after a couple of successful iTunes releases, Kevin Gates is now publicly listed on both APG's and Atlantic’s rosters.) But #HiTunes was never released. By the end of January, Jordan said, APG had stopped spending money on Young Thug altogether. Rapper Danny Brown asked Thug to open up for him on the U.S. leg of his spring tour, but Jordan says Thug turned down the offer when APG refused to pay for Thug’s tour expenses, because he hadn’t been cooperating with them. Today, while Atlantic continues to promote Young Thug’s single “Stoner” to radio, Thug has ceased all communication with APG. He and the label are “in a stalemate,” Jordan said. Several other sources — the Atlanta publicist, an A&R working for another label, and an Atlantic staffer — corroborated Jordan’s version of events. Thug and the label are now estranged, or in “limbo.” Photograph by Cam Kirk / Via camkirk.tumblr.com The easy scapegoat here is APG — the industry guys signing the local scene king for whatever he’d take. But in fact, it seems there’s no one party totally responsible for what’s become of Thug’s deal. “There are things that Young Thug could have done that he didn’t do,” Jordan said. “He wouldn’t take the time to go meet with a lawyer.” (Young Thug did not respond to multiple inquiries, through reps, to comment for this story.) This type of situation — an artist signing a production deal, then joining up with a major label — is not uncommon, and usually wouldn’t be an issue, if the original deal-holder was able to negotiate the terms of the new deal. But by implying he was a free agent when he signed with APG, Young Thug essentially forced an unintended partnership between APG and Gucci Mane, without either party’s consent. “Gucci Mane was supposed to negotiate what label Thug would have ended up on, but that didn’t happen,” Jordan said. It didn’t help that Gucci Mane and Atlantic already had a particularly sticky relationship. Gucci Mane was once signed to Atlantic as a solo act, and his boutique imprint 1017 Brick Squad was distributed by Atlantic. But after his September 2013 breakdown, during which he insulted Atlantic on Twitter, Gucci reportedly was dropped from Atlantic. (The relationship of Gucci Mane’s 1017 label to Atlantic is now unclear — one label rep told Billboard that 1017 Brick Squad is still an Atlantic imprint; another reached by BuzzFeed said “1017 is not a part of Atlantic.” It’s possible that 1017 Brick Squad is operated independently but somehow backed by Atlantic’s parent company, Warner Music Group — perhaps via the Warner-owned distribution arm Alternative Distribution Alliance.) According to Jordan, APG realized that Thug had a pre-existing deal with Gucci Mane around Thanksgiving 2013. “They thought Gucci was crazy and that he didn’t actually have paperwork signed with Thug,” Jordan said. “Then Gucci produced the paperwork.” That's when Jeff Vaughn, the A&R who brought Thug into APG, called Thug a liar, according to Jordan. (Vaughn declined to speak with BuzzFeed for this story.) After that incident, APG’s working relationship with Thug unraveled quickly, and Thug’s star rose rapidly. In January, while Kanye was dancing to Thug at clubs, Thug fired his manager, Marcos Rippy, who had brokered the deal with APG. “Other people started getting into Thug’s ear saying they could get him out of the deal,” Jordan said. In late January, Thug tried to shop for new contracts with a new manager, Akon's brother Abou “Bu” Thiam, and the senior VP of A&R at Columbia Records, Shawn “Tubby” Holiday — who helped create the summer smash “Blurred Lines” as Robin Thicke’s manager — spent time with Young Thug in the studio. “We were interested,” Holiday said. “I think [Thug is] a good artist for a major label; he knows how to make good melodies and he’s got a song that can work not only in the club but also on radio. But he was already signed.” For Thug to get out of the APG deal, according to Jordan, APG would have to willingly terminate the contract, or Thug would have to fulfill the obligations of the contract — to record and release music. Even so, Thug continued to speak as if he was clear to get out of the APG deal and move elsewhere. During a radio interview with Atlanta’s DJ Drama in January, Thug said he had signed with rapper Future’s Freebandz label, an imprint of the major label Epic, which is owned by Sony. After just a couple of weeks, Young Thug and Bu parted ways. According to multiple sources, Birdman — the Cash Money Records mogul best known for guiding the careers of Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, and Drake — came on as Young Thug’s manager in February. Birdman's crew YMCMB is “the best imaginable fit for [Thug]," former manager Rippy told BuzzFeed. "He’s been dreaming of working with those guys his whole life.” When asked about his label allegiances these days, Thug trumpets this new affiliation. “Rich Gang to the death,” he said in a March interview with The Fader, referring to the name of Birdman’s management company. (A rep for Birdman said he was unavailable to comment for this story.) It’s uncertain what Thug, with the backing of his idols, will do now. Thug’s friends have been releasing new Thug songs online, apparently against the will of APG. “They want him to stop putting out music, because they want the focus of Young Thug to be on 'Stoner,'” Jordan said. “But Young Thug’s gonna do what Young Thug’s gonna do.” All of this uncertainty has become a part of Thug’s appeal. “Isn’t his charm, at least for now, his being fundamentally unwrangleable?” critic Caramanica asked. “You don’t wanna create some romantic idea of a guy who’s an outlaw from the system, but I like the fact that he seems to be operating a bit in the void right now.” Jordan hypothesized that Atlantic, perhaps now feeling that Thug is a smaller “risk” than it once thought, may try to shift Thug from APG to 300, the new label from veteran executives Lyor Cohen, Todd Moscowitz, and Kevin Liles, which will be distributed by Atlantic. Backed with funding from Google and working with data from Twitter to sniff out trends early, 300 aims to help self-sufficient artists reach new heights, while working with fewer people and less bureaucracy than a traditional record company. According to Jordan, it may be possible for 300 to sign Young Thug because 300 is in the Atlantic system, and has more sway over Atlantic chairs Craig Kallman and Julie Greenwald than APG CEO Mike Caren. “[Lyor] could go in there and be like, ‘I’ll do the deal with 300, I’ll keep Mike involved and I’ll give Thug and additional advance to keep him happy,'” Jordan said. If Thug does sign a deal with 300, it seems that Gucci Mane will remain involved in some capacity too. “He’ll continue to get money from it and he’ll earn some money up front,” Jordan said. (Through a PR rep, 300 declined to speak with BuzzFeed.) In the meantime, a Gucci Mane and Young Thug joint album will be released on April 1. (The songs on it were recorded in the summer 2013, before Gucci Mane went to jail, according to the Atlanta publicist.) Another producer, Metro Boomin, will independently release an album of songs he recorded with Thug, under the moniker Metro Thuggin, this spring. Young Thug and Atlanta rapper Rich Homie Quan — who also has a complicated label situation — have plans to release a joint project too, tentatively titled Rich Homie Thug, though they appear uncertain about when they’ll be able to put it out, or whether or not they’ll be able to charge for it: “Coming out, a Rich tape, ain’t gonna tell y’all when. It might be an EP; might not even give y’all no more free music,” Quan said in a March video interview. Standing at his side, Thug looked off in the distance and tossed his head to the side, thinking. “Fans first,” he added wistfully. Photograph by Cam Kirk / Via camkirk.tumblr.com The biggest takeaway from the Thug mess is that the music industry is hungry for capital-A artists, who’ve independently proven themselves to be creative, polarizing, or generally attention-grabbing enough to cut through the clutter around them and engage their niche of the market. “You want somebody who has potential, the talent, and is a star. There are just certain things you can’t teach,” said Columbia executive Holiday. “What you’re finding now is that not everyone has the man power to do artist development. So some labels look for stuff that already has a buzz or already has a following.” And now, social media data has made it easier than ever for labels to identify artists like Thug, whose influence can be measured in his ability to inspire listeners to make Vine videos, or win Instagram likes for how well he wears a dress. But for his fans, Young Thug is now a star in waiting, a corkscrewing voice with a deep inner well of resonant ideas. Fans know how he sounds, but they’re waiting to see how his brand might look on a large scale. For now, though, the dream of his emergence from label limbo, his sonic promise matched to a big-budget live show with outrageous costuming, feels distant, and hard to touch. “I don’t think anyone wants to make a song and not know its fate or not know who owns it,” said critic Andrew Nosnitsky, who runs two popular rap blogs. “I don’t think anyone benefits from these messes — not the artist, not fans, not the label, not anybody. It’s sad, because there are a lot of people that would be psyched to hear that Young Thug signed a deal.” Name has been changed to protect identity.The Supreme Court on Monday gave the Union government three weeks to come up with a proposal to amend the Christian divorce act while asking it to take a quick decision on a uniform civil code to end the confusion over personal laws. “If you want to have a uniform civil code, have it. If you want to follow the uniform civil code, follow it. But you must take a decision soon,” a bench headed by justice Vikramjit Sen told solicitor general Ranjit Kumar. We have a National Democratic Alliance government, and with the Bharatiya Janata Party alone having a majority in the Lok Sabha with 282 seats, the excuse for shelving the discussion for a Common Civil Code has evaporated. The BJP manifesto had promised to deliver on this issue. It’s time for a debate once again. It's time that we are no longer separated by law. Relevant laws The cornerstone of a democratic society is equality. Without equality, there can be no justice, just as without justice there can be no equality. True justice cannot be based on unjust laws, though it is possible to have a law-abiding society with the most unjust laws in place. Just laws are a pre-requisite for a democratic society and, therefore, a just and orderly society. The concept of justice also changes with the dynamics of the times. Laws evolved and deemed sacred in more primitive times cannot continue to be considered so, if they do not satisfy the conditionalities of the doctrine of equality. On this, the tallest philosopher of our times, John Rawls, wrote: "Laws and institutions on matter, however efficient and well arranged, must be reformed, or, abolished if they are unjust." In his celebrated work, A Theory of Justice, Rawls said that every person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. As such, justice denies that this loss of freedom for a few is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifice imposed on a few is outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore, it follows that in a just society, the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled. The rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interest. Favouring personal laws Much of the legal argument by those still in favour of the existing system of separate personal laws on the basis of religion and custom derive from the premise that personal laws are part and parcel of the freedom of religion guaranteed by Article 25 of the Constitution of India. This is despite the fact that Clause 2 of the same article specifically saves secular activities associated with religious practices from the guarantee of religious freedom. Even so, personal laws are not laws under Article 13, and, therefore, do not have to conform to fundamental rights and the doctrine of equality enshrined in Article 14. But if personal laws were tested against the doctrine of equality under law, it will be found that a large number of them are unjust, arbitrary, and unconstitutional. It is this issue the Supreme Court addressed in the matter of Father John Vallamattom, when the Chief Justice ruled: “we find section 118 of the Act being unreasonable, is arbitrary and discriminatory, and therefore violative of Article 14 of the Constitution.” Choosing reason Most of those who oppose a common civil code do so on the grounds that this is not the time as the minorities, especially the Muslim community, spoken for by its self-declared leadership, are not ready for it. A “theological” argument has also been advanced, that these existing laws are God-given and, therefore, cannot be tampered with. The rationality of such an argument, and of the persons who advance them, do not deserve any serious attention in this day and age. This is the same logic that wants us to suspend reason and believe that a particular God was born at a particular spot just because it is commonly believed to be so. All laws, even the eternal ones, are man-made and reflect the level of thinking and advancement of human knowledge and civilisation at that moment of time. If we have to accept what lawgivers such as Manu evolved in the period before the Gupta Empire or in medieval Arabia as sacrosanct, then we will forever be condemned to be governed by archaic, unequal and unjust laws. In the age of reason, the demand that people obey laws must be rooted in reason and not sentiment. Destabilise to modernise The task of modernisation entails the destabilisation of many institutions. Our founding fathers, Hindus and Muslims alike, in the process of seeking to modernise India, had destabilised and uprooted many traditional institutions. They destabilised the manner in which much of Hindu society was organised. They destabilised the hierarchy of castes. They also outlawed many discriminatory practices, apparently ordained by Hindu religion and custom. The traditional objections of a uniform civil code hark back to the argument posed when the matter was debated in the Constituent Assembly. The two main objections then were that it would infringe on the fundamental right to freedom of religion guaranteed by Article 25, and that it would constitute tyranny of the majority. The first objection is misconceived because the directive in Article 44 does not infringe the religious practices as stated under Article 25. As stated earlier, secular activities associated with religious practices are specifically saved from the guarantee of
poster thanking Romario flaps and strains in the wind. Image caption Romario enjoys playing futevolley on the beach opposite his apartment in Rio Two hours after the appointed time, the numbers have swelled. Romario's staffers have long since handed out hundreds of expensively produced freesheets pumping Romario's list of achievements as an MP. And then, at last, our long-suffering local producer, Julien, receives a text from Marcia. Romario is not coming, after all. His reason - it is raining, and so the traffic will be bad. It was, in fact, barely spitting. And the roads that Sunday had been the clearest we had seen all week. The people of Jardim America still held their small ceremony, inaugurating the new football pitch. The boys, whose faces had fallen at the news that Romario wasn't coming, poured on to the astroturf for a chaotic game involving several balls. Romario himself had, back in parliament, conceded to us he wasn't perfect. In one respect, though, he is determined not to sink to the level of some of his fellow MPs. "What I have in my conscience is that while I'm here in Congress, I won't be corrupted, I will do justice to the people who voted for me." And the people of Jardim America will probably vote for him again en masse at the next election. What really motivates Romario may remain a riddle. He may still have a deep streak of self-centredness, of - as football writer Tim Vickery puts it - the "malandro", the stereotypical Rio wideboy, "who only does what he wants, and all that he wants". But is Romario making an impression in politics? There can be no argument there. Romario Tackles Brazil is broadcast on BBC News Channel on Saturday, 18 May and on BBC World News on Saturday 18 and Sunday, 19 May. You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on FacebookThe stew's #BelowDeck castmates deny socializing with her since Season 3 ended. During Tuesday night's Season 3 finale of Below Deck, we saw that things didn't end too well between Raquel "Rocky" Dakota and many of her fellow crewmembers — especially Eddie Lucas and Kate Chastain. But in a post published on Bravotv.com after the finale aired, Rocky described the contact she's had with several of her Below Deck crewmembers, including receiving constant calls from Connie Arias and cooking dinner for Captain Lee Rosbach and his wife whenever she's in Florida. However, after Connie and Captain Lee denied socializing with Rocky after the show ended, she admitted on Twitter that her comments were "a joke." "Connie NEVER calls me & I DONT hang w Capt. Lee!! It was a JOKE!" Rocky tweeted Wednesday. "Kate, Connie, & Lee hate me!" True! Connie NEVER calls me & I DONT hang w Capt. Lee!! It was a JOKE! @Bravotv Kate, Connie, & Lee hate me! pic.twitter.com/BoGxTEnFTj — Raquel Dakota (@raqueldakota) November 19, 2015 This admission came after Rocky's Below Deck crewmembers told their side of the story on Twitter. FYI @Bravotv Rocky is a flat out liar. She never cooked for captain lee,Connie doesn't call her. out of control pic.twitter.com/frdDJS9rKU — Kate Chastain (@Kate_Chastain) November 18, 2015 No Rocky has never been invited to my home, and I doubt that she ever will be. @andy @Bravotv @BelowDeck https://t.co/w4B99pZSKt — Captain Lee (@capthlr) November 18, 2015 Ressa, no its not, Rocky's never been invited to my home n I doubt that she ever will be. Not sure what she is doing https://t.co/0oYvVOHyGF — Captain Lee (@capthlr) November 18, 2015 Rocky has never been to my home and I doubt that she will be invited now or in the near future. @andy @Bravotv https://t.co/AqnqhxPBrf — Captain Lee (@capthlr) November 18, 2015 Kellie, no she lied, she has never been to my home, that would take an invitation and that simply didn't happen. https://t.co/zhDpXf0Cl2 — Captain Lee (@capthlr) November 18, 2015 In the article, Rocky also said that she had been doing freelance work for Aleks Taldykin, which the Below Deck Season 1 cast member confirmed on Twitter. @king07_truth @AshMichelle831 @raqueldakota Maybe she learned a lot from the experience. She's worked on my yacht fine and without issue — Aleks Taldykin (@Captaleks) November 12, 2015 What will happen when Rocky reunites with her Below Deck crewmembers during the Season 3 reunion on Tuesday, November 24 at 9/8c? While you ponder that, relive one of Rocky's most dramatic moments from this season in the clip, below.A common player mistake in block wargames is expecting quick results. In a hex-and-counter game you often can use high movement allowance to cleverly gather forces from far afield to launch an unexpected attack. You roll on the CRT and get a result, hopefully a decisive one, if you planned correctly. Immediate feedback results either way. Block wargame offensives typically require considerable preparation. Movement rates are comparatively slow. You can’t be certain of the opposing force’s strength. And it may very well take several rounds of fighting, possibly spread over more than one turn (bringing the possibility of outside interventions) to get a result. Like a real general, careful planning is key. You can’t just throw something at the wall and see what sticks. You may get stuck yourself. This need to understand the unusual pacing of operations in block wargames often throws players off and contributes to the common perception that these games favor the defender and tend to bog down into stalemates. Generally this is due to the offensive player making inadequate preparations for his offensive, so in this way the game does favor the defender. This is appropriate, as Von Clausewitz noted the defense is the stronger form of warfare. But block game attackers still have the inherent advantage of all attackers of the initiative and being able to choose the place and time of battle. Patience allows you to exploit those advantages. (to be continued)The Knights of the Front: Medieval History’s Influence on Great War Propaganda By Haley E. Claxton Crossing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship, Vol. 1:1 (2015) Abstract: Spanning a number of academic areas, “Knights of the Front: Medieval History’s Influence on Great War Propaganda” focuses on the emergence of medieval imagery in the First World War propaganda. Examining several specific uses of medieval symbolism in propaganda posters from both Central and Allied powers, the article provides insight into the narrative of war, both politically and culturally constructed. The paper begins with an overview of the psychology behind visual persuasion and the history behind Europe’s cultural affinity for “chivalry,” then continues into specific case studies of period propaganda posters that hold not only themes of military glory and prowess, but also themes of race, gender, and religion as well. Finally, the article makes the argument that the realities of the First World War shattered the chivalrous and romantic ideals of war so completely that the concepts and images were no longer appropriate for use as propaganda. Introduction:“For Honour’s Sake! Our Cause is Just!” A group of the king’s heralds called knights to do their duty in an impending war within the kingdom. “Take up the sword of Justice! Your king needs you to maintain the honour and glory of the Empire!” Clad in armor, knights, as the story goes, quickly rose from their peaceful lives as farmers or nobility to face their foes, to maintain the code of chivalry, and to seek the glory and adventure of battle. Fast forward several centuries to the advent of World War One. Throughout Europe, and soon the United States, these were the words that rang out from poster after poster, plastered to every surface and circulated by any means available. Posters urged men to join the military to uphold the honor of their nation, and to do their manly duty in combat. Many posters included images of the distant past. The iconic medieval knight served as the chivalrous protector of the homeland and the weak. Images of the mythology of medieval war, the legends of heroism and chivalry, were widely propagated to garner new fighting forces. War itself, according to the story woven together by the governments and cultures of the Entente and Central Powers, was adventure. War offered the chance to be remembered as strong and patriotic, or even as a national hero, harkening back to tales of knights and chivalry of old. The glorious story of battle success in the European Middle Ages was retold in many ways through the ages, and at the start of World War One, very prominently through propaganda posters and other images. The visualizations and rhetorical techniques of propaganda were artfully constructed to draw parallels between ancient battles and the more modern war effort. Click here to read this article from Crossing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship Smartphone and Tablet users click here to sign up for our weekly emailQuadruple #Rainbow at #glencove ny @LIRR station Today will be 4 pots of #gold #lucky #chasetherainbow #aprilshowers pic.twitter.com/4YUUveJuy6 GLEN COVE, N.Y., April 21 (UPI) -- Forget the double rainbow, upside-down rainbow and even the rainbow Whopper. A New York state commuter snapped a photo of a rare quadruple rainbow and shared the photo on Twitter, where it quickly went viral. Amanda Curtis' photo, taken Tuesday morning at a Long Island Rail Road station in Glen Cove, N.Y., was retweeted hundreds of times. Raymond Lee, a professor of meteorology at the U.S. Naval Academy, published a study in a 2011 issue of journal Applied Optics describing the conditions necessary for sightings of triple and quadruple rainbows. "[There are] a couple conditions that are conducive to forming these things. Neither one of them is very enticing for photographers or casual viewers," Lee told National Geographic. "You have to have... an absolutely inky black cloud background... and then either a uniform distribution of raindrop sizes, or it has to be absolutely pouring."Olympic Armageddon: How terrorists could send nuclear bomb up the Thames to target London 2012 Games This week, Security Minister Lord West warned there was a real danger that Al Qaeda terrorists could use a boat to transport a 'dirty' nuclear bomb up the Thames and detonate it in the heart of London. Here, top thriller writer TOM CAIN, whose most recent novel is about a terrifying Al Qaeda attack on London, imagines the unthinkable... Queen Anne's Gate, Westminster, July 27, 2012. The group of men and women gathered in the Home Office meeting room were grey-skinned with exhaustion. They had been working together for years, sharing a steadily growing burden of responsibility that now threatened to crush them. Imagine: This is what the London Olympic stadium might look like if terrorists were able to send a dirty bomb up the Thames In less than an hour, the London Olympics of 2012 would get under way at a ceremony presided over by Her Majesty the Queen and attended by political leaders from around the world. More than a billion people would be watching live on TV. The Olympic Stadium was now, officially, the top terrorist target on earth. The meeting room contained representatives from MI6 and MI5 the Special Forces, the Metropolitan Police's SO15 Counter-Terrorism Unit and a slew of Government departments. They were way past the point of making preparations. Every possible eventuality had been considered and its dangers analysed. CCTV cameras, backed by facial recognition systems, were tracking the crowds travelling to the Olympic Stadium and gathering in its stands. Teams of sniffer dogs had gone over every square millimetre of the Olympic site, looking for explosives. In the skies above London, police spotter drones were tracking any suspicious movements of traffic. Helicopters fitted with radiation sensors had swept the city from the air, seeking out the gamma rays that would signal the presence of a nuclear device. Everything had been thought of. And yet there could still be nasty surprises. Such as the alert they had just received from GCHQ, the Government's surveillance centre in Cheltenham. It stated there had been a sudden spike in communications traffic between known activists in the Islamic fundamentalist movement. Warning: Security Minister Lord West says terrorists could launch an attack from water on the London Olympics One email in particular had caught the attention of a GCHQ supercomputer. Sent from an iPhone belonging to a regular worshipper at one of London's most radical mosques, it read: 'Have collected those old 90s records. Taking them to the party now.' It seemed perfectly innocent, but for two digits and two letters, placed consecutively: 9-0-s-r. Together they formed the chemical symbol for a substance called strontium-90. And that was enough to silence the room. 'Wonderful,' sighed a senior MI6 officer with heavy irony. 'A dirty bomb. Just what we need.' Though no one in Westminster knew it, about 50 kg of strontium-90 was sitting at that moment less than five miles from the Olympic Stadium. It had come from the frozen wasteland of Russia's Arctic coast. There, it had been used to power one of a string of unmanned lighthouses erected by the former Soviet government, then forgotten in the chaos of the post-Communist years. Retrieved by a Russian mafia gang, the strontium was sold on to Al Qaeda operatives fighting alongside Islamic rebels in Chechnya. They placed it in a lead casket, which rendered the strontium's radioactivity undetectable, and transported it to the UK in a container marked Agricultural Equipment. Now the strontium had come to rest in an anonymous unit on an industrial estate in Walthamstow, East London. But it would not be at rest for much longer. The Prime Minister had sent his deputy director of communications to the Home Office meeting, the director himself having bagged a Royal Box seat at the Olympics opening ceremony. 'Dirty bomb' was not a phrase the spin doctor wanted to see on tomorrow's front pages. 'What are we talking about here?' he asked. 'Is this some kind of nuke?' An official from the Ministry of Defence, whose speciality was threat assessment, was the first to speak. 'Not exactly. A dirty bomb contains nuclear material, but it doesn't use it to generate the actual explosion. The blast comes from conventional explosives, like a regular bomb. So it's much, much less powerful than even the smallest atom bomb.' 'Well that's a relief.' 'Ah, not exactly. You see, the blast from the explosives smashes into the nuclear material, such as this strontium-90, and blasts it into highly toxic dust, which is spread by the force of the blast and then carried on the wind. Anyone breathing that air inhales the toxic dust.' Under construction: An aerial view of the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, east London, taking shape The spin doctor grimaced at the thought of talking away that disaster. 'How dangerous is this toxic dust? What kind of casualties are we talking?' 'It's a matter of quantity. People close to the blast, who are exposed to high doses of radioactive material will die. In less severe cases, exposure will cause serious, but survivable, sickness. 'For most people, however, who breathe a very diluted amount of the material, a mile or two from the bomb site, it would be no better or worse than, say, smoking a few packets of cigarettes.' 'Well, that's good, isn't it?' asked the spinner, desperate for a positive angle. 'Not entirely,' the bureaucrat replied. 'For one thing, a large, high-explosive bomb in the Olympic Stadium, could easily cause thousands of casualties. And with 80,000 people crammed into a confined space, even those who escape the blast will inevitably breathe in a great deal of heavily radioactive air. 'In total, I would expect many times the number of deaths the Americans suffered on 9/11. The same would apply, of course, if the bomb were to go off at any of the other Olympic celebrations tonight.' Giant screens had been erected in Britain's major cities to broadcast the opening ceremony. Each would attract tens of thousands of revellers. Just down the road from the meeting, Trafalgar Square was already crammed with people. 'My God!' the spin-doctor gasped. 'And the whole thing'll be live on TV. The Olympics will be over before they'd begun. Britain's reputation in the world would be...' 'Devastated,' nodded the MI6 officer. 'This would give Al Qaeda the greatest propaganda triumph in its history. And it would be our greatest humiliation.' Main venue: The wave-shaped aquatics centre roof, which will cover two 50-metre pools, a dive pool and a dry diving area 'There's something else,' said the man from the Ministry of Defence. 'The dust eventually settles on the ground and on buildings as fallout, which, in strontium's case, would continue to emit radiation for around 30 years. So it has to be cleaned up, which is not an easy process. 'In fact, it may be simpler to knock down any affected buildings, remove contaminated earth and rebuild from scratch.' 'So the Olympic site...' 'Would be a write-off, as would any city centre hit by a dirty bomb. A decade after 9/11, the Ground Zero site was still a gigantic hole in the ground. A dirty bomb in central London would be even more devastating. Politically, financially, psychologically, this would be a wound from which the country might never recover.' 'So where the hell is this strontium then?' the spin doctor demanded. And this time, no one had an answer. Rafik Anwar was the son of a Pakistani industrialist and an upper-class Englishwoman. Educated at Harrow and Oxford, Anwar appeared to devote himself now to the playboy life that his money, charm and looks so well suited. He bedded high society's prettiest girls. He gave witty quotes to delighted gossip columnists. And in his most private moments, with none but his God to observe him, Anwar waited for the day when he would tear their world apart. That day had now come. In the drab, shed-like surroundings of the industrial unit, Anwar had watched as an Al Qaeda explosives expert wired the deadly strontium-90 to a 200 kg charge of C4 plastic explosive, packed on a wooden pallet. State-of-the-art: Residential towers are erected for the Olympic village where athletes will live When the job was done, the expert sent a coded message on his i-Phone via a series of apparently innocent contacts to the team's controllers in Pakistan, confirming that the operation was on schedule. Had any of the bombers known that the message had been intercepted, they would have been untroubled. It was too late to stop them now. The completed bomb was loaded into a dusty white Transit van. Anwar and two other men got on board, then drove away through the streets of East London, out past Walthamstow Marshes towards the Springfield marina on the River Lee Navigation. The river flows to the Thames. And it passes right by the Olympic Stadium on the way. Three months previously, Anwar had bought a berth at the marina and used it to moor his pride and joy, a £1.1m XSR48 superboat, capable of doing 100mph. The pallet was loaded aboard. The van drove away. Then Rafik Anwar took the controls of his boat, left the mooring and set off for the Olympic Stadium and his own glorious martyrdom. The security forces had not been idle. While telecoms experts worked on determining the location from which the 90sr message had been sent, military commanders had doubled the number of bomb-disposal teams on-site at the Olympic Stadium. MI5 agents were hustling all their informants and sources of information, trying to find any scraps of data that might provide a clue as to who was planning what and when. Meanwhile, the dignitaries were starting to arrive at the Olympic Stadium. Thirty-seven minutes before the ceremony was due to begin, the email was traced to the industrial estate where the bomb had been assembled. Within ten minutes, armed police had arrived there, closely followed by MI5 and Special Forces personnel. It took a further three minutes to uncover the unit used to house the strontium. Footage from the nearest CCTV cameras was swiftly examined, the Transit was identified and its route to the marina tracked. Rafik Anwar's face was caught on video footage and recognised by an MI5 officer, not because he was on any list of suspects, but because she recognised him from an article in Tatler magazine. Terrorist fears: Olympic gold medalist Ben Ainslie is pictured sailing along the Thames near Tower Bridge By chance, the article had described Anwar's magnificent speedboat. So now they knew how he planned to deliver his attack. Whether there was any time to do anything about it was another matter. The 2012 Olympics were eight minutes away from starting and the Royal Box was all but full when security personnel reached the marina where Anwar's boat had been moored. But the berth was empty. The boat had gone. The Olympic Stadium stands on an island surrounded by rivers and canals. One of them is the River Lee Navigation, which runs along one side of the stadium. It is possible to go by river and canal all the way from the Olympic site to Birmingham. This would make the stadium extremely vulnerable to waterborne attack, were it not for the many locks that govern the flow of water and boats. Shut down the locks and you shut down the water traffic. On the day of the opening ceremony, there wasn't a working lock within several miles of the stadium That explained the choice of the Springfield marina. It was as far from the stadium as one could travel without passing through a lock. Rafik Anwar was, therefore, able to shift at motorway speeds down open water towards the Olympic site in his XSR48. And with him was coming a radioactive dirty bomb. Anwar's boat was rocketing past Hackney Marshes when a Metropolitan Police patrol helicopter picked it up. The pilot swooped towards the river, hovering 20ft above the water. He switched on the chopper's powerful searchlight, beaming it straight at Anwar's face, hoping to dazzle him. Then the pilot spoke through a loudspeaker: 'This is the Metropolitan Police. Stop immediately or we will shoot. I repeat: stop or we will shoot.' The boat kept coming. The helicopter swung through 90 degrees, so that it was side-on to the boat. The sliding door of the cabin opened and two police marksmen opened fire with Heckler and Koch MP-5 submachine guns. From the riverbank, a four-man SAS squad added to the hailstorm of hot lead. The windscreen in front of Rafik Anwar disintegrated. The cockpit erupted around him as one bullet after another smashed into it. He rocked backwards in his seat as he was hit in the shoulder. Another round grazed the side of his body. But he ignored the pain and forced himself to grip the controls even tighter. He was almost there. The stadium was just a couple of hundred metres ahead. In a matter of seconds he would be alongside it. The guns kept firing. A round smashed into Anwar's chest, ripping into his heart. Another struck him in the lungs. He slumped forward over the controls. But Rafik Anwar died with a smile on his face. It was too late to stop him now. The quad bike carrying an ammunition technical officer, one of the Army's elite bomb disposal men, had been racing along the path that ran parallel to the water, following the boat, which had come to rest with its sleek, pointed nose resting against the riverbank. The ATO skidded to a halt, jumped off the bike, raced to the bank and leapt onto the boat. He wore no protective suit. There was no point. When you're working next to a bomb, it doesn't matter how much armour you've got on. If it goes, you go. There were two minutes to go till the ceremony began. There was no hope of evacuating the stadium and, anyway, the spectators would be safer in it than out in the open. The ATO found the massive bomb in the passenger cabin in the bows of the boat, forward from the shattered cockpit where Rafik Anwar lay. There was a timer atop the mass of C4 and strontium-90. It struck the ATO that even if the bomb did not go off, he was so close to the radioactive material that it might just kill him anyway. The clock showed 48 seconds till detonation. From the stadium there came the sound of a massive roar as the lights over the athletics field dimmed. The show was about to begin. The ATO ignored everything as he examined the wires and circuit boards in front of him. Thirty seconds.He couldn't fix it in time. Twenty seconds... 15... 10... The hell with it, the ATO simply cut every wire he could see. He waited for the detonation of a booby trap. He watched the clock count down to zero. And nothing happened. The bomb remained silent and inert. The Olympic Stadium was safe. In that room in Queen Anne's Gate, the people who had been following the drama on screens linked to video-phones slumped in exhausted relief and exchanged wan smiles of congratulation. They had no idea that less than 200m away another Transit van, driven from a different industrial estate, was making its way towards Trafalgar Square and its celebrating crowds. And in the back of that van was another pallet loaded with C4 explosives. And a second consignment of strontium-90...Silverstone are optimistic they will be able to retain the British Grand Prix into the next decade, despite the increasing cost of hosting the event. Renewed fears over the British GP’s long-term future surfaced last week after a letter from Silverstone’s owners, the British Racing Drivers’ Club [BRDC], to members raised the spectre of the circuit having to activate a break clause in its 17-year F1 contract to drop the race after 2019. A five per cent escalator built into the deal signed in late 2009 means this year's race will cost just over £17m. But Derek Warwick, the chairman of the BRDC and a former F1 driver, has now delivered a more positive message about the race’s future after talks with the sport’s incoming new owners. “We made a Christmas note to our members giving them an update on Silverstone and a lot of that then came out as the possibility of causing the break clause before the grand prix this year,” he said at the Autosport International Show. “Don’t worry: we 100 per cent have got a grand prix for the next three years, up until 2019. “I’ve just got a feeling…we can’t do without the British GP, we can’t do without Silverstone, some compromise will be made, either with Bernie [Ecclestone] or the new people who are taking over F1, which is Liberty. “We’ve had meetings with Liberty and [F1 chairman] Chase Carey. He understands our dilemma and we understand he has to make money because that’s what these guys are doing, but I just feel there is light at the end of the tunnel. “I think we will have a grand prix past 2019.” Could another circuit stage British GP? Silverstone, the third longest-serving circuit on the calendar, is one of the few grands prix which does not benefit from state support but Warwick confirmed some discussions held been held with central Government, as well as F1 supremo Ecclestone. “It’s not widely known, but we are talking to Government to see if there is any help there,” added Warwick. “I’m not really sure [of the outcome]. “We’re talking to Liberty and even Bernie now is calling us and saying ‘let’s set up a meeting and talk about it’. We’re feeling very positive at the minute and there’s a lot of good things happening at Silverstone.” The BRDC has been searching for outside investment for a number of years but fresh talks with Jaguar Land Rover concluded in November without a deal being agreed. “Of course, we’re a bit short of cash,” said Warwick. “We would like to resurface the circuit and so on, so we are still looking for something out there. “For me, the second Jaguar Land Rover deal which has failed and gone away a few months ago, that hit me hard because I felt that was a nice fit between JLR and Silverstone.”The 2005 Blue Room Christmas Tree The White House Christmas Tree, also known as the Blue Room Christmas Tree, is the official indoor Christmas tree at the residence of the President of the United States, the White House. The first indoor Christmas tree was installed in the White House sometime in the 19th century (there are varying claims as to the exact year) and since 1961 the tree has had a themed motif at the discretion of the First Lady of the United States. History [ edit ] President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy with the first themed Blue Room tree in 1961. The 2002 Blue Room Christmas tree. First tree [ edit ] There are two claims to the "first" genuine White House Christmas tree. President Franklin Pierce is said to have had the first indoor Christmas tree at the White House during the 1850s,[1] variously reported as 1853[2] or 1856.[3] Others claim the first tree was during President Benjamin Harrison's administration (either in 1888,[4] 1889,[5][6] or 1891[1]). First Lady Caroline Harrison helped decorate the tree, which was installed in the second floor oval parlor today's Yellow Oval Room.[5] There is an 1880 reference to President John Tyler in the 1840s, hosting a children's party at which there was a Christmas tree with gifts.[7] General [ edit ] Following the Harrison administration indoor trees were not always used at the White House. First Lady Lou Henry Hoover began the tradition of presidential wives decorating the White House tree with the first "official" White House Christmas tree in 1929.[5] In 1961 First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy began the tradition of selecting a theme for the White House Christmas tree by decorating with a Nutcracker motif.[8] Years without a tree [ edit ] As stated, there were years where no indoor White House Christmas tree was installed at all. It is verifiable that there was no Christmas tree in the White House in 1902,[9] 1904,[10] 1907,[11] and 1922.[12] The lack of a tree in 1902 was due to the fact that President Theodore Roosevelt had not ordered one by December 23.[9] Additionally, other presidents never displayed a tree in the White House. First U.S. President George Washington held office at a time when there was no White House, thus it is impossible for him to have displayed a tree there.[13] There is no evidence that Abraham Lincoln ever displayed a Christmas tree in the White House.[14] In 1922 First Lady Florence Harding's illness led to a more subdued Christmas celebration at the White House and no Christmas tree.[12] Controversy [ edit ] The 1995 Blue Room Christmas tree – one of its ornaments was a source of political controversy for some. The official White House Christmas tree has several times been seen as controversial by some. In 1899 the White House of President William McKinley received letters urging the president to forgo participation in the "Christmas tree habit".[15] The letter writers, which the Chicago Daily Tribune noted had taken up the "forestry fad", referred to "arboreal infanticide", according to the Tribune.[15] Those opposed to a tree in the White House that year also termed Christmas trees "un-American" because it was a historically German tradition.[15] At least one tree was displayed in the White House that year, in the kitchen department, for the maids.[15] The Nixon administration's choice of tree topper, the atomic symbol of peace rather than a traditional star, was criticized.[16] The 1995 Blue Room Christmas Tree sought ornaments made by architecture students from across the United States.[17] Contest winner Rene Spineto stirred up some controversy when she designed an ornament that depicted two stockings, one marked "Bill" and the other marked "Newt" (in reference to President Bill Clinton and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich).[17] While the stocking marked "Bill" was filled with candy and presents, the one marked "Newt" was filled with coal.[17] The Clinton administration hung the ornament on the tree without censorship.[17] In his 1998 book Unlimited Access, former-FBI agent Gary Aldrich describes what he claims he saw in the White House during the Clinton administration. The book, published by an established conservative publishing house, Regnery Publishing,[18] states that the 1994 White House Christmas Tree was decorated with condoms and drug paraphernalia.[19] George Stephanopoulos called the book a "work of fiction";[18] it has also been called "infamous".[20] In 2008 one of the ornaments designed by a Seattle artist, Deborah Lawrence, was rejected for inclusion on the Blue Room Christmas Tree.[21] The rejected ornament was a red and white striped 9-inch (23 cm) ball with the words "Impeach Bush" emblazoned on it.[21] The ornament was the only one of about 370 submitted that was rejected.[21] Tree [ edit ] The 2007 Blue Room Christmas tree arrives by horse-drawn carriage Description [ edit ] The White House Christmas tree is selected from various growers nationwide.[22] Growers in the state of North Carolina have provided 12 trees, more than any other state. The states of Washington and Wisconsin, as of 2011, share the second highest total of trees provided for the White House with seven. The White House Christmas tree has been displayed in the Blue Room many times since 1961. It has also occasionally been displayed in the Entrance Hall.[8][23] Generally, there is more than one Christmas tree in and around the White House, for instance, in 1997 there were 36,[24] in 2008 there were 27.[25] Traditionally, the tree in the Blue Room is the official White House Christmas tree.[24][26] The White House Christmas tree usually stands nearly 20 feet tall and the crystal chandelier in the Blue Room must be removed for the tree to fit the room.[26] Frequently, the tree's height is reported as 18[27][28] or 18½ feet tall.[29][30] The Blue Room tree is donated each year by the National Christmas Tree Association (NCTA).[26] The NCTA has donated the tree since 1966;[31] it is chosen through a contest among members of the trade group.[31] List of White House Christmas trees (1961–2016) [ edit ] List of other known White House Christmas trees [ edit ] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ]These principles can be traced back at least as far as the largely forgotten eighteenth-century Swiss writer Emer de Vattel, who emphasized that nations should be “free and independent.” Benjamin Franklin sent a copy of Vattel’s 1758 treatise The Law of Nations to the Continental Congress in 1775. A year later Vattel’s work influenced the language and purpose of the Declaration of Independence, which used an argument about “unalienable Rights” to assert that the United States were now “Free and Independent.” Vattel’s main goal in his discussion of civil wars was to bring them under international law by reframing them as standard international conflicts. This was what the Declaration of Independence accomplished in fact: It said that a civil war within the British Empire was actually an international war between separate countries. Vattel said that a mere “sedition” or “insurrection” escalated to a civil war when the rebels fighting against the sovereign had justice on their side, usually as the result of some train of evils or abuses. For Vattel, there was essentially no distinction between a civil war and an international war, since a civil war already represented the splintering of a single political community into two separate and hostile societies. International law rather than domestic law should govern the conflict, and foreign states should feel free to assist one side or another just as they would in a standard war. The implications of Vattel’s argument were huge. By his logic, foreign powers could intervene at their own discretion in the internal conflicts of other countries. All they had to do was declare that the conflict rose to the level of a civil war and that one party had right on its side. In 1778, France became the first country to recognize the Declaration of Independence and entered an alliance with the United States, helping ensure that the war would be remembered as a successful revolution and not simply a failed civil war. Should rebels be accorded the rights of lawful combatants, or should they be prosecuted as criminals? More than 80 years later, Vattel would have declared that the American Civil War was also a case of two separate, warring nations in which international law, not domestic law, should apply. The Union general and international lawyer Henry Halleck disagreed, contending that the right of foreign powers to recognize both parties in a civil war as independent states was a recipe for chaos. The question of whether the conflict was a rebellion or a civil war had immediate practical implications: Should rebels be accorded the rights of lawful combatants, or should they be prosecuted as criminals? In 1862, Halleck asked the German American political scientist Francis Lieber to draw up a military code to guide the conduct of Union troops. The result, as John Fabian Witt details in Lincoln’s Code (2012), became the foundation for the modern laws of war. “Civil war is war between two or more portions of a country or state,” Lieber wrote, “each contending for the mastery of the whole, and each claiming to be the legitimate government.” The precise details in this definition justified the Union’s
Bosnia and Herzegovina, and will sooner or later happen in FYRoM too. However, even then the usual EU response tends to be only more worn-out statements that have no impact, as it waits for the problems to again go off the radar when more pressing crises emerge to demand all of Europe’s attention – and its diminishing resources. After the genocidal 1990s, it should be a positive thing that the Balkans are not news any more and are largely off the top of the European agenda – provided that it meant things were firmly on the right track. But the growing perception of international actors in the region is that there are real causes for concern. The atrophy of peace frameworks based on power-sharing One serious concern is the deteriorating situation in both Bosnia and FYRoM, the two most intractable crises in the region. When simmering popular frustration in Bosnia led to violence and protests in February, EU foreign ministers briefly addressed the issue in successive Council meetings and senior EU leaders conducted the usual shuttle and outreach diplomacy. The truth is that Bosnia, a potential EU candidate country, has been in free fall for roughly a decade. Yet unfortunately, as protests and popular plenums have fizzled out, so has the momentum for a badly needed change of course. Now, any movement will likely be delayed until after the elections in October, which could deepen the stalemate until some time in 2015. Things are on a downward spiral in FYRoM too. Negotiations on the name issue are deadlocked. Ethnic tensions between Albanians and ethnic Macedonians still surface frequently. The main opposition refuses to recognise the outcome of April’s elections. And the public has doubts about a government that it perceives as authoritarian. The power-sharing agreements enshrined in the Dayton and Ohrid Agreements were designed as transitory mechanisms, meant to arrest further conflict and encourage consensus politics. But the international momentum that led to their initial implementation is probably gone for good. The political environment now is one of continuous institutional boycotts, segregation, and bad governance by elites who recklessly inflame ethnic tensions in order to maintain their hold on power and on the perks that go with it. The EU and the international community in general go no further than constant diplomatic mediation to put out one fire after another. They act only as spectators – and, at times, as convenient tools for local elites – in the toxic politics in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Skopje. In Serbia and Kosovo, the progress made in recent years is at risk of being reversed. In Serbia and Kosovo, the progress made in recent years is at risk of being reversed. Last year’s EU-brokered “First Agreement of Principles Governing the Normalisation of Relations between Serbia and Kosovo” was at the time hailed as a success for the EU’s foreign policy. But now, its implementation is largely frozen. As the EU is distracted by its own transition, new elections are slated for Kosovo, which is in the midst of its biggest political crisis since independence. There is no guarantee that further progress will be made without sustained European involvement, of the kind that is not easily forthcoming these days. Many in Kosovo perceive the agreement’s core power-sharing provisions, such as the Association of Serbian Municipalities, as a potential tool for maintaining Belgrade’s influence in the country, raising the spectre of a sort of “Daytonisation” of Kosovo. These perceptions, as well as frustration with a corrupt leadership, work in favour of emerging forces such as the nationalist group, Vetevendosje, which is opposed to the agreement. Much of the region is thus trapped in a sort of three-layered existential limbo. Atrophied power-sharing frameworks are not the onlysource of the problem, but they maximise incentives for Balkan-style confrontational politics and act as another stumbling block on the European path. Divided international institutions provide different levels of tutelage. But regardless of the merits of their work, they can never yield the sort of transformational democratic politics that these peoples badly need, even if they are still needed to maintain security, as is the case with KFOR in Kosovo. And a European process that seems ever more distant does not provide powerful enough incentives for changing the system. Shallow Europeanisation Europe could take comfort in the fact that at least the rest of the region seems intent on following an EU-bound path. But even in front-runner EU candidate countries such as Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania, there are reasons for disquiet. Beneath the surface, old legacies weigh heavily. EU enlargement criteria cannot easily alter a political culture that abhors compromise and favours the heavy-handed leadership of strongmen: čvrsta ruka, in Serbo-Croat. Progress on core European standards such as the rule of law, media freedom, and the fight against corruption is often superficial or simply non-existent. And independent monitors warn against rollbacks of the progress that has been made. Euroscepticism is widespread, fanned by politicians’ association of Europe with unpopular reforms. The lives of ordinary citizens in this largely rural region are made more difficult by struggling economies that have been hit hard by the eurozone crisis, by extreme social need, and by rampant unemployment. Euroscepticism is widespread, fanned by politicians’ association of Europe with unpopular reforms (including on normative standards such as gay rights), unwelcoming statements by EU politicians, and the reputational loss suffered by the EU in recent years. The politics of enlargement is helping to foster two trends. One phenomenon that has emerged is a breed of Balkan populist reformists. These leaders deftly play on the European constituency in their countries and pass measures that please it. But they do so in ways that are reminiscent of the old ways (even if wrapped up in new ones), and at the same time, they slowly cement their grip on power and limit the scope for a plural space. A second phenomenon is the profound entanglement of the European project with the region’s polarising, zero-sum domestic politics. EU-set benchmarks have become a central element of internal strife and an excuse for inaction. Unlike previous rounds of enlargement, far from furthering national compromises, the back-and-forth milestones of enlargement have arguably reinforced several negative dynamics in the Balkans. The EU is wasting its own levers, without really changing the old destructive politics that form the source of popular frustration. The spill-over effects of the Ukrainian crisis The Balkans are a crucial, if subtle, front for geopolitical tensions with Russia. Though the EU dislikes geopolitics, seeing the region only through the normative prism would be a mistake – as the EU should have learned from Ukraine. Many echoes from the Ukraine crisis can be observed in the region. For a start, Russia has the edge over Western diplomacy when it comes to exploiting its many levers in frozen conflicts and other hotspots, seizing its openings to exert pressure and hinder European interests. Two cases in point are Kosovo and Bosnia, where Russia is a member of the Peace Implementation Council’s Steering Board. In the past, it occasionally acted as a constructive player in this kind of peace arrangement. But if it wanted to, Moscow could use such levers to sow instability and jeopardise the countries’ already difficult paths to Europe. For example, it may be trying to do so with its support for Republika Sprska’s Milorad Dodik, who has toyed with Crimean-style independence declarations. Russia cannot compete with the EU in terms of trade presence and other incentives. However, it has skilfully spun a web of influence made up of energy (for example, the South Stream project), corporate presence, loans, and other resources that limit the foreign policy options of accession states. This causes problems for core countries such as Serbia, with whom Russia has a free trade treaty. More geopolitical balancing will soon be on the horizon. In the finest Yugoslav tradition, countries in the region try to pursue a course of tactical balancing between the EU and Russia, much like that tried by Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych prior to his fall. But this strategy will become more difficult to sustain as tensions heighten. This was evidenced in the recent spat over sanctions: a leaked EU aide memoire to Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić warned the leader against Belgrade’s efforts to maximise Moscow’s sanctions, on the grounds of “European solidarity”. More geopolitical balancing will soon be on the horizon, when Serbia assumes the chairmanship of an OSCE that will be focused on Ukraine. This kind of geopolitical struggle retains some civilisational overtones. Moscow and its powerful allies in the region can leverage pan-Slavism as an alternative to an EU whose fractious politics damage its soft power. If enlargement stagnates and the region’s economies continue to deteriorate, much of the Balkans could eventually opt to pivot to other powers that provide short-term lifelines with fewer normative strings attached. Therefore, as one European diplomat says, the EU should do its best to “snatch the region from the clutches of Moscow”. The end of Pax Americana and the reconfiguration of “Pax Europeana” As the United States disengages with European security, the 1990s Pax Americana in the Balkans is largely history. The “Pax Europeana”, which has pinned its hopes for success on soft power, long-term transformation, and integration, has undoubtedly triggered positive developments. But its results have not always been positive, and it is shakier than Europe will officially recognise. There are no magic solutions, but more of the same muddling through is clearly not enough. A European policy reset in the Western Balkans is needed, with intertwined internal and external tracks. The internal track would see an honest debate (hopefully without more wise men committees) among and within member states on the future of the European political project and the options for its reinvention, as well as on the benefits of its extension to non-EU Europe. Europe should undertake a thorough and candid reassessment of what works in the Balkans and what does not. The external track would begin with an equally honest reassessment of current policies, beginning with Bosnia and FYRoM. With a new High Representative tasked to come up with a Global Strategy in 2015, Europe should undertake a thorough and candid reassessment of what works in the Balkans and what does not, even as it seeks ways to shape events elsewhere. This policy reset cannot wait – because, unfortunately, things in the Balkans hardly ever sort themselves out. Counting on soft power to achieve foreign policy aims proved to be a (partly) flawed strategy in Ukraine. Rather than continuing business as usual, EU leaders need to come to terms with some inconvenient truths in the Balkans too. EU-style soft power tools may have worked to encourage the Eastern Partners’ transformation to full democracies (although Viktor Orban’s Hungary somewhat contradicts that assertion). But this model cannot be the only solution for the post-conflict, divided Balkans, particularly given European divisions over peace mechanisms and the ultimate prospects of enlargement. Europe badly needs to assume a key global role if it is to retain its international leverage. But it cannot take on this role if it cannot achieve policy success in a European region that aims at EU membership. Nor can it let this region go adrift. It should be able to address all fronts in which its model, its prosperity, and its stability are challenged, whether in Asia, the Sahel, or the Balkans. And over the next few years, for all its need for home-grown processes, the Balkans will unfortunately require more, rather than less, European diplomacy and international statecraft. This engagement will need to be serious in order to tackle challenges such as real democratisation and reconciliation. Read more on: Wider Europe,Western BalkansThere was much to like about little Linus Omark’s game, so much so that almost all major prognosticators saw him making a major breakthrough with the Oilers in 2011-12, earning a spot on the Oilers second line. At the start of the year, The Hockey News predicted Omark would get 44 points with the Oilers. At Oilers Nation, Jonathan Willis had him down for 43. In his “reasonable expectations” series, Allan Mitchell of Lowetide figured 37 points was the right number for Omark. The number-crunching Vukota system of Hockey Prospectus had Omark down for 32. I suspect most fans would have expected at least that much out of Omark. But it was not to be. Omark got all of three points in just 14 games with the Oilers. He never closed the deal when it came to making the Oilers starting line-up and now he’s signed a one year contract with a Swiss team, Zug. My take on Omark? A small player who played a big man’s game, shielding the puck with his body, working the boards, Omark often held the puck for lengthy periods in the offensive zone, but he never had much luck finishing the play. In 65 Oilers games, he had 30 points, decent enough production, but not enough to keep himself ahead of players like Jordan Eberle, Taylor Hall, Ryan Smyth and Ales Hemsky on the Oilers top lines. With a number of younger, bigger and talented wingers in the system — players like Magnus Paajarvi, Teemu Hartikainen and Nail Yakupov — there was no room for him on the Oilers. A faction of Oilers fans will argue that minutes that went to a player like Ryan Jones should have gone to Omark, but Jones was a bigger player on a team needing size, and a penalty killer on a team needing defence. Omark’s job in the NHL, if he was going to have one, was going to be as a scorer and power play specialist. Perhaps he could have some success in that role, but any other NHL team could have traded for the player, giving up little in return, and there were no takers. I was rooting for this player to step up, but when given brief stints on lines with top forwards like Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, he never really excelled. He did OK, but just OK, failing to create an over-abundance of scoring chances. If offense is your calling card, you’ve got to step up on the attack when given that chance. Omark missed that mark. Not a bad player, certainly an OK one, but not the right fit in Edmonton. Perhaps he will tear it up in Zug and get another chance at the big money of the NHL. Other post Can Edmonton build a downtown arena and build it right? Yes, and here is how. Oilers qualify Omark Will Oilers regret sending Omark down the line? Writing on the wall for Omark"Sound energy policy begins with the recognition that we have vast untapped domestic energy reserves right here in America. The Trump Administration will embrace the shale oil and gas revolution to bring jobs and prosperity to millions of Americans. We must take advantage of the estimated $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, especially those on federal lands that the American people own. We will use the revenues from energy production to rebuild our roads, schools, bridges and public infrastructure. Less expensive energy will be a big boost to American agriculture, as well." Meaning, you can bet we'll begin mining federal lands for fossil fuels and energy independence. But the plan so far is vague enough that, as presented to the public, just about anything can be done under it. What's more, the closing sections are at odds with what came before it. The post goes on to say that "protecting clean air, clean water, conserving our natural habitats and preserving our natural reserves and resources will remain a high priority." The types of extraction typically used in mining and oil drilling aren't exactly environmentally (or worker) friendly, hence Obama's $28 million investment in training former coal workers for high-tech jobs last October. Rather than having the Environmental Protection Agency focus on pesky things like climate change, Trump's version of the administration, led by climate change skeptic Scott Pruitt, will "refocus" on protecting our air and water. Protecting them from what, exactly? In May 2016 Trump said he'd rescind the Climate Action Plan as part of his first 100 days in office, so he's working to keep one of his campaign promises. Already, the White House's website has been scrubbed of any reference to the Climate Action plan. Same goes for anything regarding climate change, or the climate itself. Versions from the Obama administration live on in archived form.(RNS) — Forty years ago, Alex Kronemer was a bored college student on a semester-abroad tour of Italy when he entered what felt like his millionth Catholic church. Thinking to sneak away, he headed for the exit. There, by the main door, was an exquisite Giotto fresco depicting St. Francis of Assisi undergoing trial by fire before the sultan of Egypt. Kronemer stopped in his tracks. “It immediately captured my imagination,” he said of the fresco, which shows Francis defiant before a chest-high pillar of flame that arises at the command of the enthroned sultan. “It stayed with me,” Kronemer added, because he always felt that there was more to this particular saint than “just the guy who loved animals.” On Tuesday (Dec. 26), PBS will air the result of Kronemer’s fascination with the story in “The Sultan and the Saint,” a one-hour documentary he wrote and directed. Official Trailer \| The Sultan and the Saint \| PBS Francis of Assisi and the Sultan of Egypt risk it all to end the Crusades. The film, narrated by Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons, recounts the unlikely friendship between Francis and Malik al-Kamil Nasir al-Din Muhammad, ruler of Egypt and nephew of the great Muslim leader Saladin. The Italian saint — whom Pope Francis is named after — traveled to Egypt in 1219 to preach against war among the Christian Crusaders. He arrived as tens of thousands of Christian soldiers besieged the Muslim fortress of Damietta, defended by Sultan Malik al-Kamil. The story goes that Francis crossed the battle lines and made his way to the sultan’s camp. He told the sultan he wanted to preach the Gospel to save his and his companions’ souls — and the sultan, who could have killed him as his enemy, instead received him graciously. Francis offered to walk through fire — the inspiration for the Giotto fresco — to demonstrate the truth of the Gospel, but the sultan declined. He allowed Francis to preach to his court. The two men spent several days together, eating together, talking together, before Francis returned to the Christian side of the battlefield. Scholars depict the encounter as pivotal for Francis. “I believe in watching Muslims pray, men and women, five times daily that it really struck Francis unexpectedly,” Michael Cusato, a Franciscan priest and historian, says in the film. “I think it profoundly moved him.” Kathleen Warren, a Franciscan sister, adds, “The respect they had for each other spoke volumes to Francis that this, indeed, was not an enemy, this was not a beast, but this truly was a brother.” But the Crusaders had other ideas and continued their siege, wiping out 80,000 people in Damietta. Francis was sickened and disheartened and returned to Italy. The sultan, forced to retreat, soon turned the tables on the Crusaders and had them surrounded and starving. But instead of going in for the kill, he sent his enemies food and feed for their animals. Many lives were saved and both sides returned home. “The sultan had every reason in the world to let the Christians die, but he responded with mercy and compassion,” Kronemer said. “It is not the reason the Crusades ended, but it really was the beginning of the end and it was these two men of faith who got that moving.” Why tell this 800-year-old story now? Kronemer believes many of the circumstances that made the mass slaughter of the Crusades possible are in play again between East and West, especially the dehumanizing of one’s enemies and rhetoric that “otherizes” those who are considered different because of religion or race. “When people begin otherizing that bleeds out into” other areas, such as politics, Kronemer said. “I think that is a period I think we are in right now. We are hoping that the film raises that and provides a model through these two individuals to how you can overcome that.” That’s reflected in the viewing parties Kronemer’s production company, Unity Productions Foundation, and PBS have organized nationwide for the airing Tuesday. There are more than 100 scheduled, ranging from family gatherings to interfaith meet-ups. Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Baha’i groups are hosting parties from Massachusetts to California. Michael Lavach and his wife will hold a viewing party at their house near San Diego the next time their monthly devotional interfaith group gets together. They are Baha’is and saw the film a year ago at the invitation of a Catholic sister who knew of a screening. “What we are trying to do in (their devotional group) is break down barriers and help people become more open to different faiths so they can understand that all major belief systems come from one God and should not be a cause for fighting,” he said. “We thought if St. Francis and the sultan can come together, why not everybody else?”In the United States, more than ten million women use contraceptive hormones. Ethinyl estradiol and levonorgestrel have been mainstay contraceptive hormones for the last four decades. Surprisingly, there is scant information regarding their action on the central nervous system and behavior. Intact female rats received three weeks of subcutaneous ethinyl estradiol (10 or 30 μg/rat/day), levonorgestrel (20 or 60 μg/rat/day), a combination of both (10/20 μg/rat/day and 30/60 μg/rat/day), or vehicle. Subsequently, the rats were tested in three versions of the novel object recognition test to assess learning and memory, and a battery of tests for anxiety-like behavior. Serum estradiol and ovarian weights were measured. All treatment groups exhibited low endogenous 17β-estradiol levels at the time of testing. Dose-dependent effects of drug treatment manifested in both cognitive and anxiety tests. All low dose drugs decreased anxiety-like behavior and impaired performance on novel object recognition. In contrast, the high dose ethinyl estradiol increased anxiety-like behavior and improved performance in cognitive testing. In the cell molecular analyses, low doses of all drugs induced a decrease in tyrosine hydroxylase mRNA and protein in the locus coeruleus. At the same time, low doses of ethinyl estradiol and ethinyl estradiol/levonorgestrel increased galanin protein in this structure. Consistent with the findings above, the low dose treatments of ethinyl estradiol and combination ethinyl estradiol/levonorgestrel reduced brain-derived neurotrophic factor mRNA in the hippocampus. These effects of ethinyl estradiol 10 μg alone and in combination with levonorgestrel 20 μg suggest a diminution of norepinephrine input into the hippocampus resulting in a decline in learning and memory.The WWE world is currently gearing up for what has been dubbed “the biggest Wrestlemania ever” in just three weeks’ time, but today marks the official 10 year anniversary since Wrestlemania 20. Time to look at how much the business has changed. The final image from Wrestlemania 20 saw the WWE Champion Eddie Guerrero (who had just beaten Kurt Angle to retain his title) and World Heavyweight Champion Chris Benoit (who had just won a triple threat match against Triple H and Shawn Michaels to win the title) celebrating together in the ring. Along with “The irresistible force meets the immovable object” at Wrestlemania 3 or The Ultimate Warrior’s return at Wrestlemania 8, this has become one of the most iconic moments in Wrestlemania history, for perhaps all the wrong reasons. Eddie and Chris were the best of friends, inside and outside the ring. Along with Rey Mysterio, fans referred to them as “the three amigos” which is why them embracing in the ring after Benoit’s first ever world title win made so much sense back then. But who could have known that seven years on both would be gone? Eddie was taken away so tragically in November 2005 before Chris followed in even worse circumstances less than two years later. The two were on top of the world that night in March 2004, but just over a year later the landscape of WWE would change forever. Eddie was one of the greatest personalities WWE have ever possessed, he had something about him that made you cheer for him even when he was lying and cheating. He knew how to play a crowd and was so much fun to watch. WWE even dedicated the Raw that was filmed live the day he died to him, which saw most of the WWE roster give emotional interviews about him and their love for him. Chris was one of the people visibly effected by the passing of his good friend, but it seemed after that he had tried to move on with his life and 18 months later was set to face CM Punk at Night Of Champions in June 2007. When he didn’t show up to the pay-per-view the alarm was raised and Benoit was found hanged with his wife and son at their home both dead. The former United States Champion could have gone onto win the ECW World Championship that night which happened two days after his “double murder suicide” but since the media blamed it on steroid use, the WWE have since tightened their wellness policy and handled steroid taking with harsher consequences. So Chris managed to change the business in a good way, even if he will forever be thought of in a bad light, his matches are now available on the network but with a disclaimer. One of the greatest technical wrestlers of our generation goes from hero to villain in 25 months. Since Eddie’s departure, his real life wife Vickie has become a formidable figure on WWE TV whilst his daughter Shaul has also signed a WWE contract and is currently performing on its NXT brand. Ten years have gone by since that iconic moment, how much has changed? How much effect did these two best friends have on the WWE and what it has become today? Very little. Yes everyone knew who they were, they knew the circumstances behind their deaths and they will never forget them, but as for playing a part in the WWE today? No. WWE has become a very different place from the one they would have walked out of even as little as seven years ago. I think a lot of it was a change for the better with wrestlers like CM Punk and Daniel Bryan becoming a massive part of the new era. At the same time WWE doesn’t feel the same without their sorts of people, there is still a little Benoit inside Jack Swagger and Cesaro and even Daniel Bryan just like I guess there is a little bit of Eddie inside everyone, the heart of a champion and the determination to succeed but will it ever feel the same without them? Wrestlemania is just three weeks away, Andre the Giant is about to be remembered in his very own 30-man battle royale, but don’t forget – Every wrestler shaped the business into what it is today, whether WWE want to remember them or not. Ten years ago today two man stood tall above all the others. Who will stand tall on April 6th? Thank you for reading. Please take a moment to follow me on Twitter – @Dstokie01. Support LWOS by following us on Twitter – @LastWordOnSport – and “liking” our Facebook page. Interested in writing for LWOS? We are looking for enthusiastic, talented writers to join our Wrestling writing team. Visit our “Write for Us” page for very easy details in how you can get started today!Image copyright AFP Image caption Buildings in the planned buffer zone are being demolished by the military Egypt has begun demolishing homes along its border with the Gaza Strip as part of a planned 500m buffer zone that is intended to prevent weapons smuggling. Residents living along the border with the Palestinian territory have been given 48 hours - and promised compensation - to leave their homes. The buffer will include water-filled trenches to prevent tunnelling. Egyptian media accuses Gaza's Hamas administration of aiding militants in Sinai. Hamas denies the charge. Last week, more than 30 Egyptian soldiers were killed in a militant bomb attack on an army post in Sinai. After the bombing, Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi passed a law authorising the military to protect state facilities - including power plants, main roads and bridges. He also declared a three-month state of emergency in Sinai. Critics of the move said it allows the army to return to the streets and brings back military trials for civilians. Image copyright AFP Image caption Residents began leaving their homes in the buffer zone on Wednesday, watched by troops The planned buffer zone will reportedly stretch along the length of the 13km (eight mile) border. Those who refuse to leave their homes within the deadline set by the authorities will have their property seized by force. North Sinai's governor, General Abdel-Fattah Harhoor, said on Wednesday that 800 homes in the border city of Rafah had been evacuated. Compensation has been offered to the displaced, except those whose homes are found to contain smuggling tunnels. Some residents have complained that the government's action is breeding anger. Forcible displacement is a criminal act under the Egyptian constitution. Militants operating in Sinai and in Gaza have been accused of using tunnels below the border to move weapons and fighters. The tunnels have also played a vital role in the economy of the Palestinian territory, which has been struggling to cope with a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt in 2007 as a measure against Hamas.Turn 3 begins! Wow, you can move entire airbases. Just up and move 'em to wherever there's a friendly airfield. Neat. I don't think the Iranians have anything at all to fear from the enemy air forces except for interdiction missions cutting off ground unit supply. They aren't numerous or high quality enough to cause a great deal of damage against Iranian ground units or airbases. I pretty much just keep Iranian air on offensive missions and let the air defense deal with the occasional ineffective enemy air raid. Still amazed at how vital trucks are in this game. I have a perpetual shortage of trucks and a continual surplus of things that I need them to do for me. At this point if my trucks were gone, I would almost certainly lose the game. Things that look easy are not. Getting my guys down near Riyadh in a timely fashion is difficult. The fact that I've got armor trailing infantry seems really wrong but that's the price I'm paying for going in heavy with armor against Kuwait in the early turns. Where is the best place to put this F-14 EW unit? It can only detect stuff that's 4 operational hexes away. I suppose it would work best over a friendly airbase that's vulnerable to enemy bombardment but I'm feeling pretty secure against attack anyways. None of the units in the game so far are what you would call amazing or even pretty good. Iran has a shortage of support units and its planes can only take 2 hits before they are destroyed. Compared to the other enemy nations like UAE or Saudi Arabia, however, it is a steamroller. I realized way too late that the Saudi base in Al Hufuh needs a supply depot to keep it hooked into the Saudi supply network. I fib a bit with supply points and place the depot just east of Riyadh. Using a deliberate assault by the 2nd Armored Division on the remnants of the Kuwaiti army was a huge waste of supply. A Hasty Assault or even an MC formation attack would have achieved the same results. Can you spot the great big rookie mistake in this picture? End of Turn 4 Doing well in the ground game is mainly a matter of knowing how to gain favorable column shifts through the use of formations, troop quality, terrain, and support. Amazing how one elite Saudi mech brigade beat the crap right out of a force that was twice its size and in good defensive terrain. The Saudis are probably doing the right thing by forcing the Iranians to fight on Saudi terms. There's no question they will lose but they may be able to significantly delay the Iranian forces in a way that tilts the game against Iran from here on out. I should have used the 9th or 10th infantry brigade to cover Kuwait City instead of using a battalion out of a broken-down 7th division. Now I won't be able to build up the 7th division because the individual units are too far away from each other. There's an ebb and flow of supply points that you have to master in this game. There are times when you need to push everything and then right after, you need to do everything you can to just conserve those precious SPs for the next big battle. I spent the Iranian SPs like a drunken sailor in the first two or three turns and now I'm starting to wonder a bit if I'll be hurting when it comes to the big push on Riyadh. If you've been keeping up with my latest blog posts aboutthen you'll know that I've been playing scenario 1 and trying to learn the system as best as I can. The first scenario from Mark Herman's sprawling 1983 epic pits the forces of Iran and the Soviet Union against the Americans and the Gulf Council nations. In the first two turns of the game, Iran barged down through Kuwait, hoping to use air power to destroy the Kuwaiti forces while the bulk of the army kept moving south into Saudi Arabia. It was a gamble that didn't really work. Airpower in Gulf Strike can be a finicky thing and even if your air strategy is golden, you might find yourself without any real gains despite spending lots of supply points to send your planes out on missions.In this article, I'm going to look at the events of turn 3 and 4 with an eye on what I have learned so far. I'm always thumbing through the rules and gaining a better understanding of how the small things in this game work. I'm guessing that, like most games, the real challenge to masteringis knowing how to bring all of these small details together to create a really special experience. Before you get to the point where you can unleash a coordinated and beautiful symphony of destruction on your opponent, however, you're going to suck very badly at even getting your guys moving from A to B in a timely manner. This is where I am right now withDuring my first two turns, I felt pretty comfortable with therules as I had set out scenario 1 and played the first turn many times before getting distracted and putting it away early. Now that I had conquered Kuwait and was still playing, I had no good clues about what I should be doing next. All I knew was that I needed to get the Iranian army moving and that I was doing a fairly bad job of it. Here's how it went:The Situation -The Kuwaiti army is nearly destroyed as all of its supply points are gone after Iran's capture of Kuwait City. Several Iranian armored divisions are still sitting in Kuwait while the rest of the army is slowly but surely making its way south on the highways of northern Saudi Arabia. Panic spreads among the Gulf Council nations as Iranian troops and tanks pour down the Arabian peninsula unopposed.The Americans begin to get serious with deploying troops in the region to counter the Iranian threat. C-5 Galaxies airlift all the components for an airbase in Somalia with an AWACS and a pair of F-15 squadrons for protection. 1/82nd Airborne lands in Somalia with a C-130 to help them get around. The rest of the US reinforcements (7MAB, 7th ADA battalion, and a truck unit) are placed in Diego Garcia and will be transported into theater at some other point in time. DC airbase now has an extra F-15 squadron to help shoulder the CAP duties.In the Unit Assignment Stage, I break down both Iranian infantry divisions into regiments. Now I can transport them via truck and they don't have to march down towards Riyadh on foot.During the first action stage, the Iranian player puts the 2nd Armored Division with an artillery brigade into Deliberate Assault formation and declares combat against the adjacent reduced Kuwaiti armored brigade. This will be a slaughter.I'm trying to get my guys as far south as they can without running them out of supply. I'm also worried about pushing them too hard and having the Saudis use their meager but potent air force to perform interdiction missions and push my guys beyond the 20 MP limit between supply sources/depot and the units I'm moving. On the other hand, I feel the urgent need to get my guys down there as fast as possible before the Americans turn up and rain on my death parade.I load up the 9th and 10th infantry brigades and get them into 0552, 17 MP away from the supply depot in 0644. The 3rd Mechanized and 4th and 5th Armored Divisions roll into 0950, 0951, and 1051 respectively. One of my trucks heads all the way back to Basra because I will need to buy a supply depot at the end of the turn and transport it down south to extend my supply lines next turn.I have several units sitting in Kuwait City. The 1st Armored Division with the 11th Armored Brigade and an HQ unit are waiting for the 4th Armored Division to clear the highway of enemy opposition to the south before moving on later in the turn (the 1st Armored has been placed in Reserve mode at the start of the turn).The Iranian air force and navy tries and badly fails at sinking three Saudi ships (an FF, CO, and DD). An Iranian destroyer takes two SSM hits and a frigate takes the other in combat just north of Bahrain. Throwing a P-3 Orion in there did very little beyond the initial detection of the enemy naval units.Finally, I use a C-130 to move one of the airbases from Tehran into the Kuwait City hex. Now my airpower extends just a bit farther south to cover my advance. It's not much but it's good to have.The Qataris attempt to bomb the Iranian navy with their Mirage jets but fail. Another Mirage from the UAE earns a hit on one of the Iranian trucks transporting an infantry brigade in 0552.Some observations this turn:For the Iranians, turn 4 is all about getting set up for the big push on Riyadh. That means trying to get my supply depots in place and putting the troops in the right spot to jump off into an offensive. The Saudi army will likely start moving units around in anticipation of the coming flood of troops and tanks. They have not budged from their original position since the start of the game, waiting to see how the Iranians will line up their forces. The Saudis have also refused to come north to fight the Iranians, wary of long vulnerable supply lines and less hospitable terrain for the defender.Iranian trucks drop off two infantry brigades in 0358. These are the first troops to arrive near the enemy. The 3rd and 4th Armored Divisions are just behind them and to the east with the 3rd Mechanized
, Salsa, Zumba, Karate etc. They try to take maximum advantage of their stay here in the US. Back home either these lessons are not available or usually available for a high cost. Watch out for pitfalls Personally, I feel that being in America permanently and going all-out into extreme frugality is not a very good idea for a long-term perspective. When constant couponing and deal seeking becomes a habit it can tax your personal life. It may cause household tensions. Do make fun a constant routine and reward saving-money attitude. The temporary visa workers can neglect small health related issues while they are in this country. They get their annual leave to go back home. It provides a good opportunity access health care at a much lesser cost. You being permanently in the US do not have this flexibility. Do not let health issue unattended. If you do, you may run into a bigger healthcare cost later on. By sowing frugality, we reap liberty, a golden harvest. ~ Agesilaus Readers, what do you think about these visa workers? I am sure you have come across a few, how was your experience with them? LIKE THIS POST? I agree to have my personal information transfered to MailChimp ( I agree to have my personal information transfered to MailChimp ( more information Join our community of 5000+ subscribers to increase your net worth and build wealth We hate spam. Your email address will not be sold or shared with anyone else. About the Blogger Hi I am Some links on this page may be affiliate links, if you make a purchase following the links, I may earn a commission. Read Hi I am SB, a personal finance enthusiast with a career in software development. I am an immigrant to the USA since 2005, after being born and brought up in India. This 40 something technocrat lives and breathes personal finance whenever he gets time from the day job, job as a husband and a dadSome links on this page may be affiliate links, if you make a purchase following the links, I may earn a commission. Read affiliate disclosure hereThank 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. Police officers arrested Jean Paul Beaumont late last week after conducting video surveillance of his home through a camera they had secretly installed in early May, court was told. Beaumont, the sergeant-at-arms of the Rock Machine, has a long criminal record and has been charged with repeatedly breaching conditions of his previous bail and probation, including a curfew and driving prohibition. Desautels made his candid comments during a bail hearing for a high-ranking member of the Rock Machine. He also shed new light on a wave of recent shootings in Winnipeg. "There's a gang war going on," Crown attorney Mike Desautels told provincial court Associate Chief Judge Mary Kate Harvie on Monday. "It has reached a fever pitch." Justice officials have publicly admitted for the first time what has become obvious to many citizens -- tensions are high on Winnipeg's biker front. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 4/7/2011 (2793 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 4/7/2011 (2793 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Justice officials have publicly admitted for the first time what has become obvious to many citizens — tensions are high on Winnipeg's biker front. "There's a gang war going on," Crown attorney Mike Desautels told provincial court Associate Chief Judge Mary Kate Harvie on Monday. "It has reached a fever pitch." Desautels made his candid comments during a bail hearing for a high-ranking member of the Rock Machine. He also shed new light on a wave of recent shootings in Winnipeg. Police officers arrested Jean Paul Beaumont late last week after conducting video surveillance of his home through a camera they had secretly installed in early May, court was told. Beaumont, the sergeant-at-arms of the Rock Machine, has a long criminal record and has been charged with repeatedly breaching conditions of his previous bail and probation, including a curfew and driving prohibition. The hidden camera allegedly caught Beaumont leaving his home and driving away in a vehicle on several occasions. The Crown is fighting to keep Beaumont in custody, citing the ongoing battle between the Rock Machine and their rivals, the Redlined Support Crew. Desautels filed a detailed report on the city's gang situation, authored by members of the police organized crime unit, to boost his argument that public safety is at stake. He told court police have been closely monitoring Beaumont, along with other gang members, because of the ongoing tensions in the biker world. Beaumont's bail hearing was adjourned until today to allow the judge to read the report. There was no publication ban on the proceedings. The Hells Angels created the Redlined Support Crew last year to stand up to other criminal networks that might muscle in on their former drug turf after many of their members were arrested and jailed following a trio of recent undercover police operations. At the top of that list was the Rock Machine, which waged war with the Hells Angels in Quebec during the 1990s but has never had much of a presence in Manitoba until recently. Multiple sources have told the Free Press the Rock Machine has slowly gained power in Manitoba, with some former Hells Angels associates even joining their ranks in recent months. Just recently, a founding member of the "Game Tight Soldiers" gang in British Columbia moved to Winnipeg and joined the Rock Machine ranks, according to a source. Desautels told court Monday how Joseph Strachan, the Rock Machine's president, had his Winnipeg home shot up last week. A St. Vital-area home belonging to Strachan's parents was then hit with gunfire and Molotov cocktails the following night. There were no injuries in either incident, and no arrests have been made. 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. Desautels said a member of the Redlined gang was also targeted last week when a "flare" was shot through the window of his home. Police are also investigating whether two other recent shootings are linked to the ongoing hostilities. A 14-year-old boy was wounded early Monday morning after a townhouse on Taft Crescent in Lord Roberts was sprayed with gunfire. Police admitted the boy is lucky to be alive and may have been an innocent bystander. There were nine people inside the residence at the time, including a baby. No arrests have been made. Members of the organized crime unit are continuing to investigate. Sources told the Free Press Monday there may be other recent incidents that either haven't been reported to police or haven't been released to the public. Last November, a former high-ranging associate of the Hells Angels was shot "execution-style" inside his own home. No arrests have been made in the slaying of Daniel Kachkan, which was believed to have been connected to Kachkan's alleged role in a previous homicide. However, police distributed an internal memo around the time of the killing, warning members of the Rock Machine motorcycle gang are believed to be armed and may be planning attacks against those affiliated with the Hells Angels. www.mikeoncrime.comThree people were stabbed during a fight outside a Midtown public school Wednesday, the NY Daily News reported. The attack took place at Public School 35 at on W. 52nd St. near Eighth Ave. at about 1:45 p.m, and the NYPD was on the spot. Manhattan: West 52 St & 8th Ave, Active Crime scene in regards to 4 Students stabbed inside at PS35 public school. #BREAKING — NYC Scanner (@NYScanner) May 24, 2017 NYC Police, cited by Bloomberg, said that three teenagers were stabbed on a street near the Theater District during a fight among students at a nearby school. The stabbing happened in midtown Manhattan, just around the corner from the new Broadway production of "Groundhog Day." Police have identified a suspect as a 16-year-old boy wearing a red hat. The attacker fled the area, heading downtown from the scene. An NYPD Level 1 Mobilization was requested, and a crime scene was secured. Heavy traffic was reported in the area. Authorities say the victims are a 16-year-old boy with a stab wound to the stomach, a 17-year-old boy with a slash on his ear and an 18-year-old with a wound on his arm. Authorities say the victims are expected to live. A call to the state Department of Education wasn't immediately returned.Ald. John Arena has taken drastic measures to fight construction on a street in his ward. NBC Chicago's Christian Farr reports. (Published Monday, July 20, 2015) A North Side Chicago alderman parked his car in front of a bulldozer Monday morning to stop construction on a street in his ward. Ald. John Arena (45th) said no one from the city contacted him about a construction project that would permanently close a stretch of a road at Wilson and Lamon. Arena said the road helps relieve traffic congestion from Lawrence and Cicero, where traffic often gets backed up. The construction project is being done to put up a digital billboard sign. “It’s not going to be closed,” Arena said. “Not for a billboard.” Arena has called for a meeting with the mayor’s office, the construction company and the department of transportation to “explain why they would come in the cover of darkness and tear up one of our streets without due process.” Arena said the city has apologized for not contacting him or area residents before beginning the project. The Chicago Department of Transportation said the changes are intended to “enhance safety on Lamon Street” and to “accommodate the placement of a digital sign.” CDOT said the sign was approved by City Council in 2013. “These changes will address the speeding problem, eliminate crashes from cars that lose control at the curve from Lamon to Wilson, and reduce the number of trucks that strike the low-clearance viaduct on Wilson,” the department said in a statement.Atlanta (CNN) A top Democratic National Committee leader called the Republican Party "the party of racism" at a conference for liberal activists Friday, pointing to President Donald Trump's positions on immigrants and refugees. "You hear Republicans say, 'We're the party of Lincoln.' He wouldn't recognize these people," said Rep. Keith Ellison, a congressman from Minnesota and Democratic National Committee deputy chairman. "The fact is that the Republican Party today is the party of racism. Now I'm not saying every Republican is a racist, but I'm saying their party does hold that up.... It is the Republican Party in 2017 that says, 'wall them off, ban them out, no transgender in the military.' If it's mean, if it's racist, if it's greedy, it's coming from them." Ellison was speaking as part of a panel discussion at the Netroots Nation conference, an annual gathering for liberal activists. Ellison was the only representative from the party on the panel, and he made the comments after criticism from fellow panelists of Democrats, especially after the bruising primary fight in 2016 and failure to take control of the White House. In response to this criticism from progressives of his party, Ellison argued that the Democratic Party was the best vessel of power those on the left have available to fulfill their goals. "I'm going be with the people who are most likely to win and have policies that are saying we do believe America is a nation of immigrants, we are against racism, we believe in civil rights and we do believe that there ought to be a right to organize and we need to address climate," he said, adding, "You're not going to have perfection." He acknowledged the Democrats' past of running segregationist candidates in the 20th century, but argued that they were stamped out in the mid-1970s. Ellison also addressed revelations last year that Democratic Party leaders had favored Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries -- a scandal that forced then-Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz from her position -- and vowed that it wouldn't happen again in future primary contests. "We will be scrupulously neutral," he said. "If you hear the Democratic Party is helping out some incumbent or not playing straight and fair, then I would like to know about it."Is lock-free logging safe? Published on May 30, 2013 by Jesse Storimer This is a bit of an odd question without some context. Recently, I saw the mono_logger project. It claims to provide "a lock-free Logger for Ruby 2.0". When I saw it I thought "Cool! I want to see what tricks they used to implement this". It looked pretty straightforward at first. When I looked closer and compared it to Logger found in Ruby's stdlib, I saw that it was the exact same, minus the mutex. This led me to asking the question, is lock-free logging safe? Ruby probably put a mutex there for a reason. What if multiple threads try to log a message at the same time? Will their log messages be interleaved like this? A programmer had a problem. He thought to himself, "I know, I'll solve it with threads!". has Now problems. two he — Davidlohr Bueso (@davidlohr) January 8, 2013 When I started looking around for the answer to this question, I realized that the overarching questions I was asking was: are calls to write(2) atomic? In other words, if two threads or two processes write to the same file at the same time, are the writes atomic? Or can they be interleaved? Unix beard too short... This is a deep Unix question. When I posed this question on the mono_logger bug tracker, I admitted that my Unix beard wasn't long enough to know the answer. So I turned to my favourite source of Unix lore: The Linux Programming Interface. It had the answers I was looking for. There are a few bits of knowledge that lead to the answer to this question. For starters, all system calls are atomic. From TLPI: "All system calls are executed atomically. By this, we mean that the kernel guarantees that all of the steps in a system call are completed as a single operation, without being interrupted by another process of thread." Great! So if two threads or two processes write to a file at the same time, we can be sure their data won't be interleaved. This confirms that we don't really need a mutex around the call to write(2) to ensure that it's atomic, the kernel already guarantees that. But there's one problem. Typically when writing to a file (from C-land), you need to seek to the location in the file where you want to write, then perform the actual write to the file descriptor. Unfortunately, this involves two system calls, lseek(2) and write(2). Individually they're atomic, but as two operations that's not the case. Let me demonstrate. As pseudo-code, this might look like: lseek ( fd, 0, SEEK_END ); // seek to the end of the file write ( fd, "log message", len ); // perform the write This isn't safe in a multi-threaded situation. Since there's no atomicity guarantees across these two system calls, the following situation is possible: Thread A seeks to the end of the file -- the thread scheduler decides to switch context to Thread B -- Thread B seeks to the end of the file Thread B writes its data -- thread scheduler switches context back to Thread A -- Thread A has already done its lseek, so it doesn't do it again, it just performs its write d'oh, Thread A is no longer pointing to the true end of the file, it's pointing to the previous end of the file, the location where Thread B wrote its message. When Thread A performs its write, it overwrites whatever Thread B wrote. So with this approach, it's possible to lose data. But there's a solution! In order for the seek and the write to happen atomically, you can set the O_APPEND flag when opening the file. Then any writes performed will atomically be appended to the file. This is exactly what we want in the case of a shared logfile. Both Logger and MonoLogger use this option when opening the logfile. open ( filename, ( File : :WRONLY \| File : :APPEND )) So MonoLogger should be able to append to the logfile atomically without a mutex. Update: @jacknagel raised some good points on the MonoLogger issue tracker. Most notably that write(2) doesn't guarantee that all of the data you pass it will be written. It returns the number of bytes written. This is for cases where the call is interrupted by the arrival of a signal. Update #2: Eric Wong got in touch and confirmed that MonoLogger's behaviour is safe. His messages are posted to the usp.ruby email list. PIPE_BUF_MAX? In the github issue, I raised a point about something called PIPE_BUF_MAX. I won't say much about it here, because it's not relevant when writing to files. Essentially, a write(2) of any size is guaranteed to be atomic when the target is a file. However, when writing to a pipe, your write(2) is only guaranteed to be atomic if it's less than PIPE_BUF_MAX. I'm interested to see what happens with MonoLogger in the wild. Anyone out there using it yet?Kaspersky Lab is still monitoring malicious websites involved in the recent Japan spam campaigns. For those who may have missed the two first blogs, you can read them here and here However, today we discovered than some of the payloads were not the usual Trojan-Downloader.Win32.CodecPack.*. Instead, the payload is now Ransomware (detected as Trojan-Ransom.Win32.PornoBlocker.jtg), disguising itself as a fake warning message from the German Federal Police. The message pretends that your computer has been blocked because it was found to be hosting child pornography. Victims are asked to pay a 100 euros fine to unlock the machine. As if the German police logo wasn’t enough, they also use logo from anti-virus companies such as Kaspersky Lab to look more convincing. On successful exploitation, the malware hijacks the desktop to display the following warning: The victim can no longer use their computer, unless they pay a 100 euros ransom. Here is a translation of the blackmail test: Attention! An operation of illegal activities has been detected. The operating system has been blocked in connection with violations of the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany! Following violation was noted: Your IP address is with this IP, pages containing pornography, child pornography, bestiality and violence against children were visited. Your computer also has video files with Pornographic content, elements of violence and child pornography! There were also sent emails in the form of spam, with terrorist backgrounds. This serves to lock the computer to stop your illegal activities. [Computer related info] To unlock the computer, you are obligated to pay a penalty of 100 Euro. The payment must be made within 24 hours. If the payment is not made in the allotted time, your hard disk will be irrevocably formatted (erased). Payment is made by a Ukash coupon code in the amount of 100 Euro. In order to be carried out the charge, please enter the purchased code into the payment box and then press 0K (if you have multiple codes, enter this simply a sequence, then press OK) Should the system report errors, you must send the code by email (removed). After receipt of payment your computer within 24 hours re-opened. Technical details: The fake Federal German Police page is actually an html page embedded inside the malware executable. Upon execution, the malicious program creates a new window with the TOPMOST attributes in order to stay above every running window. This window is used to display the content of the html file, through the use of OLE and the WebBrowser control. A new threat is created in order to kill Task Manager and suspend Windows Explorer. Just before it actually does that, the malware takes over the default Windows shell inside the registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon) and replaces explorer.exe. It then starts an infinite loop and tries to kill the “taskmgr.exe” process if found running, and also suspends “explorer.exe” every 100ms in order to block user interactions: The result is a suspended Windows Explorer, no way to run the Task Manager, and the topmost window displaying a web page. Inside this html page, there is Javascript – used to send the entered Ukash coupon code to a remote server. However, at the time of discovery the DNS involved was already disabled, leaving infected users’ computers unusable. Kaspersky Lab continues to investigate this malware and will update the blog if more important information is discovered.Working the internet like it was something Uncle Walt had sketched out at his trademark drawing table, Disney Studios unveiled its big live-action Aladdin casting announcement at the company’s biennial D23 Expo this weekend. Canadian actor Mena Massoud, who has a few TV credits, will play the title character, Disney said July 15 in Anaheim, California. As had been rumored, the more widely known English actress Naomi Scott will portray his love Princess Jasmine. It was already pretty much out that American action star Will Smith will be the Genie, a role voiced brilliantly by the late Robin Williams in the 1992 animated blockbuster. Still, nothing is simple when it comes to Aladdin. The casting of Scott especially made some fans upset on the racial and ethnic grounds that have featured within a long-simmering debate. A magic lantern to wish away all the resultant noise might come in handy for the studio—if Disney really minded it at all. apparently disney have actually cast a white non arab jasmine for aladdin? pic.twitter.com/7dM6g4x7Us — indie (@COCONUTOILBAE) July 15, 2017 Scott’s mother is of Gujarati Indian descent and her father is British. Massoud is of Egyptian descent. Just days before D23, the studio had made it known via The Hollywood Reporter that it was encountering a trouble finding the right cast members for the starring roles. Where oh where could British director Guy Ritchie—said to have embarked on a months-long global search—find performers of Middle Eastern or Indian descent who can sing and act well enough? THERE IS LITERALLY AN ENTIRE SECOND MOST POPULOUS COUNTRY IN THE WORLD W AN INDUSTRY OF MEN WHO DANCE AND SING. #aladdin https://t.co/iu0RsdCgPs — Jenny Yang👲👲🏽🐉 (@jennyyangtv) July 11, 2017 Many voices in the digitally connected world advised that Bollywood might be among the obvious places to start. Not so fast, said others who wanted more Arab representation. The root of the problem: It’s hard to say exactly where the Aladdin of Disney’s making is set—the Arab world, the Indian subcontinent, or someplace in between. One could say that Disney split the difference in casting its male and female leads. Making some fans unhappy, and leaving many confused. The vitriol centered on the selection of Scott also drew defenders to her side. #Aladdin classic arab fairytale will have no arabs…i just….DISNEY COULDN'T FIND AN ARAB GIRL..so many arab nations but nope…#iamtired pic.twitter.com/sBAZMKuU4Y — millie (@millieelba) July 16, 2017 When word came of Ritchie’s supposedly culturally aware casting difficulties, Fatima Zehra wrote in Kajal Magazine—in a post republished by Quartz India under the headline “Just because Aladdin is casting a brown lead doesn’t mean it’s not racist”—that Disney missed the point: Aladdin strung together a few generalizations about North Africans, south-east and south Asians, and blurred out our distinctions. The movie takes place in the fake city of Agrabah—combining together “Agra,” the historical city in northern India, with “Bah” to make it sound more Middle Eastern, I guess. The lack of specificity and care that went into the story is also the reason it doesn’t matter who the lead of this movie is, as long as he’s vaguely brown and maybe Muslim. The animated story putatively was based on a tale spun in One Thousand and One Nights by the fictional storyteller Scheherazade. Original Arabic collections didn’t include the story of Aladdin and his lamp, which was likely added by a French translator in an 18th-century edition. Some speculate that the character has origins in China. Straight-out cultural appropriation can be troubling and complicated enough. In the globe-spanning realm of big American studio productions, the misguided mashup that is Aladdin had a seemingly incongruous effect—the creation of a multinational class of fervent young fans. As Zehra put it: “Aladdin, a movie that is super-orientalist, was paradoxically important for south Asian, Arab, and Muslim kids because it’s one of the few movies that addresses the fact that our cultures existed, by not specifically identifying them.” That audience backstory—illustrating the singular symbolic appeal of Aladdin to disparate groups—guaranteed a torrent of unforgiving reactions to any casting news. This is Naomi Scott. She is Indian, and white. This is Jasmine, she is middle eastern. And not white. #Aladdin pic.twitter.com/MTvfQvyaMt — Hamza Mussé (@HamzaMusse) July 15, 2017 Us: So Disney casted a white non Arab as Jasmine in Aladdin? Fake woke twitter: No Naomi is 1/2 Indian Us: But that's still not Arab FWT: pic.twitter.com/N8hmgovBck — Eman (@ferrarswarner) July 15, 2017 As the world awaits the news of who will play the other main roles—the villainous Jafar, his sidekick Iago, and the kind Sultan—one might look at Twitter and think Disney stumbled once again on the identity politics of Aladdin. Yet the Mouse might say, “What me, worry?” Eyes widened by what’s been unfurled on the internet also will be watching Aladdin unfold on much bigger screens.Steve Reich wins 2013 BBVA Foundation Award (February 2014) Steve Reich has won the prestigious BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award for his renewal of culture and fusing of diverse traditions. Steve Reich is the winner of the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Contemporary Music category. The jury citation describes how the American composer (b.1936) has developed "a new concept of music, based on the use of realist elements from the realm of daily life and others drawn from the traditional music of Africa and Asia." Previous recipients of the award include Pierre Boulez, Salvatore Sciarrino, Helmut Lachenmann and Cristóbal Halffter. The jury notes how "Steve Reich has carved out new paths, fostering a dialogue between popular and high culture and between western modernity and non-European traditions, and achieving a rich combination of complexity and transparency.” They also single out his ability to attract the widest, most varied audiences “by engaging frontally with world issues, from the Israeli-Palestine conflict to the 9/11 attacks, as well as contemporary problems like the relations between faith and science and technology.” For the full press release visit > www.boosey.com/downloads/BBVAawardPR.pdf Steve Reich has just finished writing a quartet for two vibraphones and two pianos with first performances by the Colin Currie Group this autumn, and is working on a new piece for the Royal Ballet in London and the Signal Ensemble in Chicago for premiere in 2016. For further information visit: > www.boosey.com/reich > www.stevereich.com About the Award The BBVA Foundation - based in Madrid - promotes, funds and disseminates world-class scientific research and artistic creation, in the conviction that science, culture and knowledge in its broadest sense hold the key to a better future for people. The Foundation designs and implements its programs in partnership with leading scientific and cultural organizations in Spain and abroad, seeking to identify and prioritize those projects with the power to move forward the frontiers of the known world. The BBVA Foundation established its Frontiers of Knowledge Awards in 2008 to recognize the authors of outstanding contributions and radical advances in a broad range of scientific and technological areas congruent with the knowledge map of the late 20th and 21st centuries, and others that address central challenges, such as climate change and development cooperation, deserving of greater visibility and recognition. Their eight categories include classical areas like Basic Sciences (Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics) and Biomedicine, and other, more recent areas characteristic of our time, ranging from Information and Communication Technologies, Ecology and Conservation Biology, Climate Change and Economics, Finance and Management to Development Cooperation and the innovative realm of artistic creation that is Contemporary Music. For further information visit: > http://www.fbbva.es Photo: Wonge Bergmann > News SearchThai military courts on Friday sentenced two people to long prison terms on charges of insulting the monarchy, the heaviest sentences for the crime in the country’s history, lawyers and a legal monitoring group said. In the first case, Pongsak Sriboonpeng, 48, was sentenced to 30 years for six Facebook posts in 2013 and 2014, said his lawyer, Sasinan Thamnithinan. He had originally been sentenced to 60 years, but the time was reduced because he pleaded guilty, Mr. Sasinan said. In the northern city of Chiang Mai, another military court handed down a prison sentence of 28 years, reduced from 56 years, for a 29-year-old woman who also pleaded guilty, said Yingcheep Atchanont, a researcher at the legal monitoring group iLaw. The woman, Sasivimol, who wanted only her first name used, was sentenced for seven Facebook posts that insulted the royal family, the researcher said. Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws are the world’s harshest and make it a crime to defame, insult or threaten the monarchy.Today we have some news for all Order of Battle fans out there. If you are missing any of the packs set in the Pacific theater, then this is your chance to get them. We are releasing an Order of Battle: Pacific Pack on Steam, containing U.S. Pacific, U.S. Marines, Rising Sun and Morning Sun, all at a great 40% off discount! It is a complete your set bundle, meaning that you don't get to pay for items you already own. For instance, if you already U.S. Pacific and Rising Sun you can get the bundle and only pay for U.S. Marines and Morning Sun - at 40% off! The base game, Order of Battle: World War II, is free to play. You're free to download it and try it for free - you'll get access to the boot camp and the first mission of every campaign which was released.CARACAS (Reuters) - An outbreak of H1N1 flu has killed 17 people in Venezuela and infected another 250, private media and local authorities said on Monday. H1N1, often referred to as swine flu, was a flu strain that swept around in the world in a 2009/2010 pandemic. “We’re suffering a tail-end of the pandemic,” a former Venezuelan health minister, Rafael Orihuela, told a local TV station, commenting on the widespread reports of 17 deaths in the South American nation of 29 million people. Most of the cases were in border states near Colombia. Venezuela’s government has not confirmed the figures given by media and local health authorities. But officials said high-risk groups had largely been immunized, with 3 million vaccinations carried out so far this year. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) official data show 18,500 people were reported killed in the 2009/2010 H1N1 pandemic, but a study in The Lancet last year said the actual death toll may have been up to 15 times higher at more than 280,000.Huddersfield Town drew with Southampton in their third Premier League game. It was one of the best 0-0 games I’ve ever seen, with plenty of chances and action. I’ve gone through the statistics websites and pulled out the five most interesting stats from the game and looked at what they mean. We put a lot of crosses into the box Squawka shows we played 32 crosses during the Southampton home game. Southampton managed just eight. It’s been noticeable that we’ve changed our attacking style this season and often look to get the ball into the air and try to get Mounié on the end of it. Looking at the position the crosses came in from and where they ended up shows that we’re now playing to Mounié’s strength in the air. While we didn’t get the goal we wanted against Southampton, if we can keep on giving him this kind of service then I’m sure he’ll score plenty. Tommy Smith played much higher up the pitch Tommy Smith’s heat maps from the first three Premier League games on Sofascore show that his average position was much further up the pitch against Southampton. Because we were away from home the direction of the Crystal Palace game is reversed (thanks to Trev for pointing this out on Twitter), but if you flip it over in your head, you can see he was much more adventurous against Southampton. I think Smith has been rushed back from his injury due to our lack of cover in the right back area, but he looked like he was closer to match fitness on Saturday. There were some signs that he’s still not there (he got caught out of position a few times) but the international break should give him chance to get fully fit. If not Florent Hadergjonaj might threaten to take his place in the team. The xG model shows that Town were the better team The graphic above from Understat.com shows the “expected goals” (xG) score for Huddersfield and Southampton. It’s hard to see from the picture, but it plots the number of shots and shows that Town had more shots (16 v 6) and on average Town would have scored 1.59 goals from the chances they created. Not that you can score 0.59 of a goal, but you get what I mean. So despite Alan Shearer suggesting we rode our luck on Match of the Day, it seems that Southampton are the ones that should be most grateful to have come away with a point. The BBC have written a good explanation of what expected goals means, so I’ll not get too deep into it here. There are many critics and fans of this system. I think it’s an interesting way of looking at who had the best chances in a game but it often doesn’t tell the whole story. We need to play a proper “number 10” This heat map from WhoScored.com shows the Huddersfield Town team when in possession against Southampton. The green blob nearest the Southampton goal shows that Mounié was a bit isolated. I think this is partly the result of Tom Ince playing number 10. Ince had a good game but drifted into the flanks to support the wide-men. This meant we didn’t have anyone close enough to Mounié. Playing Kasey Palmer or Hamed Sabiri will mean we’ve got a more natural number 10, who can link play between midfield and the main striker. Town are currently playing far above their individual abilities Transfer mrkt is a website that estimates the value of players. Their figures show Southampton’s squad as being valued at £177.39m more than Town’s. While these figures might not be 100% accurate, it does give an impression of the huge disparity between the market values of the two teams. Town’s team might not have many players that are (currently) household names but they’ve shown no fear in the opening few games and got results from teams that have been far more expensively assembled. David Wagner has done an amazing job of getting the right players in and making them play above themselves. It’s easy to forget just how incredible his achievements have been. To match, and for periods outplay, a team like Southampton is incredible given we only escaped League One a few seasons ago.
York City, when I call her one weekend. Salvi, who is also an organizer of Recycle This!, an activist group, says when she first started the New York Freecycle group, she gave away nearly everything she owned to get the group going. Now Salvi estimates her network is responsible for a few hundred transactions each week, and she personally has found an iron, travel books and a bicycle on Freecycle. "There's so much stuff out there that's usable and free," she says. To be sure, the day I sign up for Freecycle, an eclectic group of items were offered: a Beatles CD, a microwave that "works just fine" and -- one of the quirkier items -- a stack of vocabulary words from one family's word-a-day calendar. "We keep the ones we don't know to look at again later, but we have a stack a few inches high of words we do know," read the offer. "We hate to throw perfectly good words away." Salvi is quick to dispel a common misconception that Freecycle is a one-stop source for free luxury goods. "People get this sense that it's Santa's workshop," says Salvi, describing posts seeking new television sets, iPods and other electronics. "We have to train people to understand how the group works." Sara Hatfield, a 37-year-old personal trainer in Brooklyn, says she found solace in Freecycle after she broke up with her longtime boyfriend this past summer. "I did a huge closet purge," she says, listing the items she gave away, including books, a computer, printer, scarves and hats. Hatfield, a self-described "ex-hippie," says she loved knowing that someone would use her unwanted items. "I'm positive it's not going to the landfill, at least not on my karma," she says. Hatfield also took some of her stuff to a local "FreeMeet," or flea market-type gathering where everything is free. She disposed of the ex-boyfriend's Diesel leather jacket and Diesel jeans. "That was very cleansing," she says. And vindictive? "Maybe a little," she admits with a laugh. Even for non-green types, Freecycle may become more fashionable during the current recession, says Dr. Maurie Cohen, an associate professor in the graduate program in Environmental Policy Studies at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. "When people lose their jobs they, with good reason, try to put a more positive gloss on it as they try go get back on their feet." But Cohen points out that Freecycle has its limitations: "The larger culture denigrates second-hand goods, by and large," he says. Also, consumer products today are made so cheaply that sometimes it's easier to simply replace a worn or unwanted item. "Yesterday, one of my kids broke my electric pencil sharpener. What am I going to do? I'm not inclined nor do I have the skills to fix the thing. In most cases, from computers to radios to televisions, it's cheaper to just chuck the thing." But in my case, I wanted to unload the table to someone who had a use for it, to keep the Freecycle legacy going. As my (bad) luck had it, the barista had a busy day at work and never picked up the table. So a week later, I reposted the table on Freecycle, again receiving a crush of e-mail responses. This time, I combed my inbox for a serious response from someone who provided a phone number and suggested a time to meet. A few e-mails later, I arranged to leave the table with my doorman for pick-up that evening. I don't know what time the new owner of my IKEA table came by that night; I didn't check. But by the next morning, the table was gone. More freecycle stories from the Mother Nature Network: • Freecycle and Recycling electronics • Freecycle and Building a Green Nursery Freecycle: pay it forward Freecycle is one of the ways to focus on reducing waste by deciding to reuse. Learn about freecycle and how freecycle can help convince people to reuse.Long time Grails developers are well aware of who Marc Palmer is. Those that are new to the platform may have seen his name pop in constantly in the mailing lists, and with good reason: he has written more plugins than anyone else so far. Marc will tell us how he got started with Grails and more. Enjoy! Andres Almiray: Could you please introduce yourself. Marc Palmer: Hi, I’m a long-time Grails developer with a long background in Java development across web, desktop and mobile, and before that all those horrible things we try to forget; Delphi, C++, Pascal, C, 68000 assembly. I’ve been a freelancer since 1997 and love it. I consult for various clients (yes I’ve got capacity currently - drop me a line!) and am currently paid to work part-time on Weceem CMS. I’m also founder of NoticeLocal.com, a pure Grails app startup. I’m also the primary author of a bunch of plugins including the new grails-resources framework, cache-headers, email-confirmation, invitation-only, authentication, feeds, taxonomy, one-time-data... and more. Andres: How did you get into Grails? Marc: Back in 2005 I started developing the websites for a few PepsiCo UK juice brands, using my own “craptastic” framework gluing together Spring DI/MVC, WebMacro and Groovy. Groovy was such a breath of fresh air. Graeme Rocher kept telling me to take a look at Grails when it was around version 0.3 and while initially confusing for me, I liked the ideas. I couldn’t use it for the PepsiCo sites at that time because our first roll-outs were well advanced, and there was a bunch of fundamental stuff that was still missing until about Grails 0.4/0.5. I started some contributions to feature proposals on some of the boilerplate stuff - codecs, mail plugin, plugin framework and contribs to core like the Artefact API - yes that spelling is my Brit’s revenge for decades of having to type “color” - custom validators and stacktrace sanitizing. The next year we moved all the sites and future ones to Grails and I have never looked back. Any Java dev who does not completely fall in love with Groovy must be paid by the character rather than their skills. I get really excited by stuff that improves the user experience for developers - we’ve all suffered for too long! Andres: You're quite the prolific plugin author. How do you keep up with all the updates and changes coming from new Grails releases? Marc: I’ll be honest, I do struggle. It’s hard to keep up with the backlog on my existing plugins, let alone new stuff coming along and my new projects. My main sources of info are the grails mailing list, twitter, and chatting to other grails developers. Luckily most of my plugins are relatively simple and not significantly affected by changes to Grails. This is really testament to the stability of the framework. Back when I wrote shareware components for Delphi/C++ Builder this became a real problem over time where you had to do so much work on new releases specifically for new framework/IDE versions - I got sick of it and gave up. One notable exception is Functional-Test plugin which desperately needs some love since some tricky XML API dependency problems crept in with newer Grails builds. I just haven’t had the time/need to fix it yet. Ultimately the best way to keep your code up to date is to respond to your users’ needs. Andres: If I recall correctly the resources plugin will be merged eventually into Grails core. What’s the secret sauce that powers this plugin? Marc: Well the ideas behind this plugin were formed a few years ago. I wasn’t happy with the web performance tools available because they seemed to be missing something and tied me into a given plugin’s implementation. I eventually worked out that this missing something was dependency information and extensibility of processing resources for minify/zip etc. Part of the secret sauce is that we have a DSL to describe the resources you need, in modules. Modules can depend on other resource modules - including those provided by other Grails plugins. This means that coupled with Grails plugin transitive dependency resolution, you get some really smart stuff. Instead of including specific resources in your GSP pages or layouts, you now just say what modules you need using a tag. It works out the rest including the correct load order of the resources, and which resources should go in <head> and which should defer to the end of <body> etc. Another part is that we process the resources at runtime instead of build time. This may sound a little counter-intuitive, but we only do this once at startup (except for when the resource is not declared explicitly). It adds a small bit of bloat to the WAR but the benefits are that your WAR still looks like your source tree did, and at runtime we can do all the smart processing stuff using the information from the DSLs - because we know at runtime how the link for a given resource has changed and to what. Oh, and we can also process undeclared resources - even resources not present at build time for apps that require it (think CMS... although Weceem does not yet work with this) within certain limits. Its very exciting for me as the power is immense - it’s a really different take on including resources in HTML content. The plan is for this to be in Grails core in 1.4, but it remains to be seen if I can fit that in with my workload (sponsorship is welcome!). There are still a couple of tricky bugs to track down and some integration work to be done. I want to release a solid 1.0 of the framework for pre-Grails 1.4 apps to use, before it goes into 1.4 as a core plugin. Andres: Please tell us more about Weceem. What motivated you to build it in the first place? What can we expect of it in the future? Marc: Well Weceem is actually an application that originated at jCatalog AG, one of my clients. They had a rough prototype 0.1 release, and seeing the potential of Grails they wanted to take this further and open source it to give something back to the community - so they asked me to help out initially as consultant but then I became the sole developer which has been great fun A core driver is that, in our view at least, most Java-based CMS were really too heavyweight and complicated to deploy and use - having a pure Grails solution simply rocks. Taking it step by step towards 1.0 has been a long process, but we’ve been focusing on the core feature set and 100% embeddability inside other Grails apps as a plugin. You might not have thought it but this turns out to be a very popular use-case - you can build your own CMS or just CMS-enabled Grails app using Weceem in minutes. Release 1.0 is in RC stage now. In the future, post-1.0, I’m really desperate to overhaul the admin UI completely - if you follow my tweets you know how much I hate bad UIs. Part of this will be updating all the example content to be nice and polished. I also have some plans for reusable fragments of the content graph, for some great new features. It may seem odd to have yet another Java-based CMS, but what other CMS can you embed in your own Grails app and customize to your heart’s content? For simple apps you don’t even need your own Grails code, you can set up actions that run Groovy code right in the CMS. Andres: What's your favorite Grails plugin? Marc: That’s a tricky one. I have to say at the moment that it is the mongodb plugin. It is almost magical in the same way that Grails was when I first started. I have never wanted to waste much of my life learning the intricate details of any ORM - Grails was initially so attractive because it hid most of the Hibernate stuff that made me want to grab that rusty saw and start on my own leg rather than code J2EE the conventional (or hibernate) way. Mongodb plugin does the same for mongo, and the amazing abstraction of GORM in the recent Grails releases makes this possible. With zero knowledge of Mongo DB I had a test app up and running in no time at all. Oh, and I can mix and match mongo and hibernate in the same app. Incredible. Andres: What can you recommend to a developer that’s just about to start building his first plugin? Marc: I would say take a good look at the best plugins out there to see how they work - and more importantly try to understand the Grails-y "attitude" behind it (see for example Taggable, Resources, Searchable or Cache-Headers). Plugins that just wrap something thinly are boring - a slight step sideways and coming at it from a convention and/or DSL based mindset will help you create something much more compelling. Don't think like you are in Java-land, think like you are in the new exciting Groovy-land. Push yourself to create something really new. Andres: If you could go back in time and change a key decision in Grails' design, what would it be? Marc: Well I would really have no right to do such a thing... but it always bugged me that the original hibernate-only GORM was so leaky an abstraction. It seemed so simple at first but then you find you are constantly referring back to Hibernate documentation to get non-trivial things done and discovering gotchas. I wish Grails had “owned” its ORM completely from the start - “ownership” of key technologies is so important. This is less of an issue now the GORM APIs have been abstracted but I’d still like to see a Groovy-targetted top-notch SQL ORM for Grails, but nobody has the appetite to write this, it would be very hard work. I would also have liked to see a bit more abstraction away from Spring DI/MVC and Binding. Spring DI/MVC is great, but for many Grails apps it is overkill. Spring Binding just does not seem to work well for us in Grails - complex custom binding is really painful. Andres: What’s the feature on the current Grails 1.4/2.0 roadmap that excites you the most? Marc: This sounds dull but actually its the plugin usage tracking feature, something most people will not even see. I believe this is so critical to the health of the ecosystem. A lot of people disagree with me, but the mist obscuring any info about usage and quality of the plugin ecosystem has to be lifted. From usage information springs useful statistics that can begin to be used to provide information to developers about what is or isn’t a “good” or at least “well used” plugin. Plugin authors are effectively marketing a product at no cost. This means you have to be able to connect with your users, and at the very least know how many there are to know if it is worthwhile doing it any more. Furthermore, its impossible to build a commercial model around plugins when you have no information about the size of the market, and though many devs don’t like this thought... commercial options are necessary to maintain high quality product and customer service. An adaptation of an anti-Linux dig that a friend told me applies: “Open source is free if your time is worth nothing.“ As a lone developer you might be able to make one really high quality plugin in your spare time and maintain and support it for the next 5-10 years. If you want to do more than that outside of work-time, you will either die young, or die alone! Understand that plugin usage tracking is not going to force people to pay for plugins or anything like that - but its a step towards providing the fundamental juice of economics: information. Imagine if the Grails plugin ecosystem was full of great high quality plugins that add killer functionality to your apps, with polished and highly usable admin UIs, aggressively developed and maintained, and documented exquisitely with PDF and epub docs and screencasts. Quality like this would grow the Grails community further, and the effect snowballs. You attract more developers because there is a viable model and growing community etc. This level of quality is never going to happen unless we (the community) can create a commercial market of some kind. I’ve been doing shareware/open source for too long to ignore this - the truth is right there in front of me in my own neglected projects. Oops I went a bit off-topic :) Andres: Do you make use of other Groovy tools like Spock, Gradle or CodeNarc? Marc: Sadly not yet - I just haven’t had enough time, though I surely will soon. All three of those are on my to-do list. Andres: What would you like to see in a future release of the Groovy language? Marc: I have to say there’s not much I wish for in Groovy, it is just fantastic - Guillaume, Jochen and the guys do a great job. Obviously everyone is keen to see more and more performance out of it, but one of the little things I would like is improvements to the Groovy JDK docs to make them integrate with regular Java JDK docs. Having to consult two different sets of docs for a given JDK class is a pain. Actually while you’re asking, I think a complete revamp of the Groovy website and a dedicated domain would do wonders for the language. An online complete language-reference and MOP guide would really help people. I used to love those Borland language references with full detailed explanation of every language feature. Andres: How do you keep in touch with Groovy news and community? Marc: Again, the typical answer of groovy mailing list and Twitter. I also subscribe to GroovyMag and read it on the iPad (where else!). I do view Groovy through the lens of Grails however, like many people. This is perhaps a little unfair to the Groovy community, but ultimately its the frameworks that sell a “new” language. i.e. Most people learn a language because they’re going on holiday somewhere nice and it works better for everyone if you can communicate well. Andres: What's on your reading table right now? Marc: Oh... I’m not much of a reader because I spend all my time coding, being with my family, working in the garden or practicing drums! However on my iPad I am currently dipping in and out of “Geology - The Key Ideas” (working out why there are fossils up the hill from us, and why our garden is full of clay), “iPad Programming”, Apple’s “Objective-C Programming Language”. Along with watching the WWDC videos showing a bunch of the key iOS technologies... Andres: Any parting thoughts you may want to share? Marc: Yes actually... the Grails community really needs people with great graphic design skills! I think all the “funky” people disappeared to Rails-land, and we’re left with a bunch of really smart Java developers who really suck at UI :) [<<<Note the smiley] ….OK, if I’m wrong community, please prove it to me! Grails and its plugins NEED YOU! Thanks for listening. Thank you Marc! Marc can be reached on Twitter at @wangjammer5. He blogs regularly at http://www.anyware.co.uk.You are not qualified to be my student if you can’t afford an iPad From Eastday: A teacher from Shanghai Maritime University became famous because of a piece of Weibo (micro-blog) he wrote “go buy an iPad during the summer break. If you don’t have money, just earn it by yourself. If you can’t get 4000 yuan in two months, it means you are not suitable to be majoring in finance, neither to be my student.” These controversial words spread widely through the internet. (He later deleted this post on his Weibo and even changed his name) Liang Zhenyu is a Financial English teacher. He asked all of his students to bring an iPad to class next semester. And all his lectures, exams and information will be given out in iPad compatibility mode. “iPad represents the most modern thinking. I hope all of my students have it too. If you can’t afford it, go earn money. Poor or rich does not depend on the situation of your family, but your ability.” Liang also demanded all his students have his lessons in suit. The male students should wear formal suits and leather shoes while female students should wear serious make-up. The one who is in casual shirts and pants will affect the final scores of this course. “You are what you wear. If you want to study the finance, then dress like a finance man.” Liang explained. Many people on Weibo opposed it and said he was kind of money worshiper. Some students even don’t have enough money to pay for the education fees next year, let alone the money for an IPad. Liang explained that it was just an advice, not a demand. “iPad is efficient and good for the students. For example, they can send their oral English for me via wireless network during the lessons. And you will cost only 15 dollars to download the calculation software with iPad, while you have to pay over 62 dollars to buy a calculator.” But he also showed regret to this Weibo. He deleted it soon under the pressure from the netizens.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp; A San Antonio, Texas mattress store will be closed "indefinitely" after a commercial it posted on social media promoting a "Twin Tower sale" days before the 15th anniversary of 9/11 ignited a firestorm of criticism. "We will be silent through the 9/11 Anniversary to avoid any further distractions from a day of recognition and remembrance for the victims and their families," the owner of Miracle Mattress, Mike Bonanno, said in a statement posted on the store's Facebook page on Friday. Employees of the store had also received several death threats after the 20-second spot was released. The offending ad for Miracle Mattress starts with San Antonio branch store manager Cherise Bonanno -- Mike Bonanno's daughter -- asking "What better way to remember 9/11 than with a Twin Tower sale?” and ends with two employees falling backwards onto two piles of mattresses with an American flag in between them. Cherise Bonanno gasps in horror as her coworkers and the mattresses topple over. She then turns to the camera and says: "We'll never forget." Cherise Bonanno told San Antonio's NBC affiliate the ad was a mistake. "We are not hate, we are love. We are somebody that stands out. We're Miracle Mattress, we make miracles happen. For our lives to be in danger, that's no what we ever wanted," she said. Mike Bonanno claimed the video was made without his knowledge. He told the San Antonio station WOAI that they would donate 30 percent of its sales over weekend to the 9/11 Foundation before deciding to indefinitely shutter the store. "Our intentions were not to hurt anyone at all,” he said in a statement. "Our staff is full of military and some relatives have passed away due to 9/11. We are promoters of peace and love. We have given abundantly to our community here in San Antonio and wish to remain known as a company who respects and loves others. We hope you find it in your hearts to forgive us. Please accept our apology." However, their apology was not well-received. "How utterly disgusting! Apology NOT accepted! I hope you go out of business. How any one could think this was funny is beyond me. There is no excuse for this! We will never forget that horrible day! The pain of that day and the loss of loved ones will always be with us. How sick!!!" one Facebook user wrote on the store's page. "Too bad you can't apologize to the men and woman that died on 9/11," wrote another. "When you say you are sorry that we offended you... You aren't actually apologizing for the act. You're apologizing because we somehow took it the wrong way," another added. "There is no other way to take this than as exploitive (sic), as disgusting, as profiteering on a national tragedy. A tragedy, may I remind you, that not only affected Americans but the entire world. A tragedy that changed our way of viewing the world permanently."Chinese businessman Dai Yongge failed in an attempt to take over Hull City in September The proposed takeover of Reading by a Chinese-based consortium is hinging on approval by the Premier League. Businessman Dai Yongge and sister Dai Xiu Li began negotiations in November to buy the club from its Thai owners. The Premier League, who have a say in takeovers of clubs who could compete in their league, are said to be cautious. Yongge failed in an attempt to buy Hull City in September after reportedly not meeting the Football Association's fit and proper persons test. One insider at Reading sees the Chinese offer as the "dream ticket". However, the deal is dependant on convincing officials that Yongge and his associates are suitable additions to the English game. Reading sit third in the Championship in manager Jaap Stam's first season in charge, but following a 1-0 defeat by QPR on Thursday, Dutchman Stam made his frustrations public at the uncertainty off the pitch. "Everybody's asking me questions about what's going to happen," he told BBC Radio Berkshire. "I don't know if there is going to be any more transfers. "You need to have clarity within the group, a certain structure within the club with what's going to happen. "What I thought was going to happen when I joined Reading was to build a team and hopefully make steps towards the Premier League. "But, with the club for sale, you don't know what the new owners want to do." Reading have been owned by the Thai consortium of Lady Sasima Srivikorn, Sumrith Thanakarnjanasuth and Narin Niruttinanon since September 2014. They are understood to have become increasingly squeamish over the outlay required to bankroll the club from month-to-month. Enthusiasm seems to be waning, despite Reading's exceptional form on the pitch, which has put them in promotion contention.U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos expressed deep disappointment on Saturday after an aid convoy came under fire in a besieged rebel district of the Syrian city Homs, though she vowed to keep pushing to deliver humanitarian assistance to Syria's neediest. "I am deeply disappointed that the three-day humanitarian pause agreed between the parties to the conflict was broken today and aid workers deliberately targeted," Amos said in a statement. "Today's events serve as a stark reminder of the dangers that civilians and aid workers face every day across Syria," she said. Saturday's attack threatened a United Nations-led operation to bring food and medicine to 2,500 people in Homs and evacuate civilians trapped by months of fighting in the Syrian city. The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) said mortar fire landed close to its convoy and shots were fired at its trucks, wounding one of its drivers. "I continue to call on those engaged in this brutal conflict to respect the humanitarian pause, ensure the protection of civilians and facilitate the safe delivery of aid," she said. "The United Nations and our humanitarian partners will not be deterred from doing the best we can to bring aid to those needing our help." Syrian authorities blamed the attacks on rebels but opposition activists said President Bashar al-Assad's forces were responsible for them, as well as earlier mortar fire that delayed the start of the operation on Saturday morning. The humanitarian deal for Homs was the first concrete result of talks launched two weeks ago in Geneva to try to end the country's nearly three-year-old civil war that has killed over 136,000 people. Short link:ESPN is removing NFL legend Mike Ditka from “Sunday NFL Countdown” and moving him into an “unspecified emeritus-type NFL role at the network,” The Big Lead reports. According to The Big Lead, Matt Hasselbeck and Charles Woodson will take over for the exiting Ditka and former first overall pick Keyshawn Johnson. Throughout the 2016 cycle, Coach Ditka has given several interviews in support of Republican front-runner Donald Trump. He first endorsed the real estate mogul back in September 2015, and in an interview last week, Ditka said Trump exhibits the type of leadership President Obama has failed to bring to the White House. (AUDIO: Ditka: Obama Is Daaah ‘Worst President We’ve Ever Had’) In January, a Deadspin report uncovered a leaked ESPN memo, urging on-air talent to avoid making political statements. The memo — which ESPN claims was circulated in early January — requires employees to “refrain from political editorializing, personal attacks or ‘drive-by’ comments regarding the candidates and their campaigns (including but not limited to on platforms such as Twitter or other social media). (RELATED: ESPN Shuts Down Curt Schilling For Conservative Views) ESPN declined The Daily Caller’s request for an on the record comment. UPDATE: Ditka released a statement through ESPN in which he welcomed the change. This new role is really a blessing. It’s something I asked for. After many years of weekend travel, I’m thrilled I’ll get to watch NFL games on Sundays and Monday nights in the comfort of my own home. I enjoy being part of the game and part of ESPN. I really do. So this is a great solution. Follow Datoc on Twitter and FacebookThe movement’s self-professed goal is the creation of a white state and the destruction of “leftism,” which it calls “an ideology of death.” Richard B. Spencer, a leader in the movement, has described the movement as “identity politics for white people.” It is also anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and opposed to homosexuality and gay and transgender rights. It is highly decentralized but has a wide online presence, where its ideology is spread via racist or sexist memes with a satirical edge. It believes that higher education is “only appropriate for a cognitive elite” and that most citizens should be educated in trade schools or apprenticeships. Alt-Left Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the “alt-left.” Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and “anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn’t like.” Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Sign Up for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a deep and provocative exploration of race with a diverse group of New York Times journalists. 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 agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Recaptcha requires verification I'm not a robot reCAPTCHA Privacy - Terms Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. You are already subscribed to this email. View all New York Times newsletters. See Sample Privacy Policy Opt out or contact us anytime Some centrist liberals have taken to using this term. “It did not arise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network,” Mr. Pitcavage said in an email. “It’s just a made-up epithet, similar to certain people calling any news they don’t like ‘fake news.’” On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the “alt-left” was partly to blame for the Charlottesville violence, during which a counterprotester, Heather D. Heyer, was killed Alt-Light The “alt-light” comprises members of the far right who once fell under the “alt-right” umbrella but have since split from the group because, by and large, racism and anti-Semitism are not central to its far-right nationalist views, according to Ryan Lenz, the editor of Hatewatch, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Members of the alt-right mocked these dissidents as “the alt-light.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story “The alt-light is the alt-right without the racist overtones, but it is hard to differentiate it sometimes because you’re looking at people who sometimes dance between both camps,” he said. The two groups often feud online over “the Jewish Question,” or whether Jews profit by secretly manipulating the government and the news media. Antifa “Antifa” is a contraction of the word “anti-fascist.” It was coined in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s by a network of groups that spread across Europe to confront right-wing extremists, according to Mr. Pitcavage. A similar movement emerged in the 1980s in the United States and has grown as the “alt-right” has risen to prominence. For some so-called a ntifa members, the goal is to physically confront white supremacists. “If they can get at them, to assault them and engage in street fighting,” Mr. Pitcavage said. Mr. Lenz, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the group “an old left-wing extremist movement.” Members of the “alt-right” broadly portray protesters who oppose them as “antifa,” or the “alt-left,” and say they bear some responsibility for any violence that ensues — a claim made by Mr. Trump on Tuesday. But analysts said comparing antifa with neo-Nazi or white supremacist protesters was a false equivalence Cuck “Cuck” is an insult used by the “alt-right” to attack the masculinity of an opponent, originally other conservatives, whom the movement deemed insufficiently committed to racism and anti-Semitism. Photo A white supremacist militia at the rally in Charlottesville on Saturday. Credit Edu Bayer for The New York Times It is short for “cuckold,” a word dating back to the Middle Ages that describes a man who knows his wife is sleeping with other men and does not object. Mr. Lenz said the use of the word by the “alt-right” often had racial overtones. Advertisement Continue reading the main story S.J.W. S.J.W. is short for “social justice warrior” and is used by the right as an epithet for someone who advocates liberal causes like feminism, racial justice or gay and transgender rights. It is also sometimes used to imply that a person’s online advocacy of a cause is insincere or done for appearances. It became widely used during “GamerGate,” a controversy that began in 2014 over sexism in video game subcultures. Mr. Lenz, whose organization has specific criteria for which groups it classifies as Nazi organizations, said the right used the phrase “to rhetorically address the fact that the left sometimes calls anyone who disagrees with it Nazis.” He said the alt-right had created the term so its followers had a similar blanket term to deride the left. Blood and Soil Video taken at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville on Saturday showed marchers chanting “blood and soil.” The phrase is a 19th-century German nationalist term that connotes a mystical bond between the blood of an ethnic group and the soil of their country. It was used as a Nazi slogan in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s and since then “has been transported to neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacists around the world,” Mr. Pitcavage said. It is one of several Nazi symbols that have been adopted as a slogan by some members of the “alt-right.” Globalism Globalism is sometimes used as a synonym for globalization, the network of economic interconnection that became the dominant international system after the Cold War. The word has become more commonly used since Mr. Trump railed against globalism frequently on the campaign trail. For the far right, globalism has long had distinct xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic overtones. It refers to a conspiratorial worldview: a cabal that likes open borders, diversity and weak nation states, and that dislikes white people, Christianity and the traditional culture of their own country. White Genocide White genocide is a white nationalist belief that white people, as a race, are endangered and face extinction as a result of nonwhite immigration and marriage between the races, a process being manipulated by Jews, according to Mr. Lenz. It is the underlying concept behind far-right, anti-immigration arguments, especially those aimed at immigrants who are not white Christians. The concept was popularized by Bob Whitaker, a former economics professor and Reagan appointee to the Office of Personnel Management, who wrote a 221-word “mantra” on the subject that ended with the rallying cry: “Anti-racist is code word for anti-white.” Mr. Pitcavage said the concept of white genocide was often communicated online through a white supremacist saying called the Fourteen Words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The saying was created by David Lane, a white supremacist sentenced to 190 years in prison in connection with the 1984 murder of the Jewish radio host Alan Berg.Even though she is in one of the most highly skilled trades and working for one of the best paying employers in her industry, apprentice Laura Gunther could have to save for a decade to put a deposit on a median priced Sydney home. "It's depressing. It's very depressing," the 28-year-old fitter says. "I guess that is what the position is for people at my age and earning similar money to me. We don't really get to own in Sydney." Laura Gunther is an apprentice at Sydney Ferries and although she has a good job it will take her at least 10 years to save for a deposit on a property. Credit: Kate Geraghty According to economic modelling by the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union, highly skilled and well paid tradespeople such as Ms Gunther would need to save for up to 11 years from their first year as an apprentice to pay a 20 per cent deposit on an $882,000 home. For a $500,000 home, tradespeople such as Ms Gunther would have to save for eight years to have enough for a $100,000 deposit.Meek Mill and Drake‘s beef has been the underlying story line for much of the latter half of 2015, and judging by the above video clip, the tension won’t subside for the new year. Since they traded diss tracks in late July and early August, Drake and Meek Mill have done little to rile each other up, choosing instead to work on music of their own: Drake’s “Hotline Bling” skyrocketed to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October, Meek is prepping his new mixtape, Dreamchasers 4, to be released soon. On the forthcoming project, Meek Mill apparently revives his issues with Drizzy, rapping “When I was saying shit about the rhymes you ain’t wrote/I can’t wait until we run into ya/I’ma put a gun in ya,” a clear reference to his July claims that the Toronto native doesn’t write his own rhymes, and didn’t write his verse on Meek’s own “R.I.C.O.,” which appeared on Dreams Worth
5. As more and more wearable technologies and Internet-of-things devices come out, we’ll see a sharp spike in devices running Linux. Even some robots already run Linux, and future robots with more powerful processors will be more likely to run Linux than the minimal embedded operating systems many already run today. Even Google’s self-driving cars are powered by Ubuntu Linux. Microsoft definitely doesn’t want to miss this boat, which is why it’s frantically working on “Windows for IoT,” which will not require the traditional Microsoft licensing fee. But Linux—including variants like Android—is already an operating system manufacturers are turning to today. Want to stay up to date on Linux, BSD, Chrome OS, and the rest of the World Beyond Windows? Bookmark the World Beyond Windows column page or follow our RSS feed. Forget Linux on the desktop Gordon Mah Ung Razer's Forge TV set-top box. That old phrase “the year of Linux on the desktop”—now uttered mostly as a joke—is distracting us from the massive success Linux has had everywhere else. We already know how popular Linux is on servers; “the year of Linux on the server” happened long ago. Android is the most popular smartphone platform in the world, so “the year of Linux on the smartphone” happened a few years ago, too—and Ubuntu Phones are inbound shortly. Android tablets are also more popular than iPads worldwide, so “the year of Linux on the tablet” is already reality, as well. It certainly looks like we’re headed for “the year of Linux on the (smart) TV” and huge successes in Internet-connected appliances and wearable computers. Linux is even making inroads in laptops (Chromebooks) and some desktops (Chromeboxes) thanks to Google’s Chrome OS. And yes, Chrome OS is gaining steam. As Fedora’s project leader told me, simplified platforms like these are the future of computing for average people. Traditional Linux desktop platforms will be an oasis for power users and content-creators. In other words, “the year of Linux on the desktop” is a diversion. Don’t sit around waiting for Linux to become mainstream—it already is. The year of Linux on everything but the desktop is here!Summary Currently, ICONOMI has two in-house funds, managed by Columbus Capital: ICONOMI is a digital assets management platform where people can easily invest in digital assets. Cryptocurrency investing is volatile and complicated for those who are new, so ICONOMI wants to be the place where new investors put money in when it comes to crypto investing. In the future, ICONOMI will allow crypto investors to launch their own fund (called Digital Assets Array or DAA). Users will be able to find the DAA that matches their investment objectives. How advanced is the project? ICONOMI had its ICO in August 2016. The platform is currently in beta where only ICO contributors have access to. Public launch is scheduled in August 2017. As at June 26, 2017, ICONOMI has $39 million assets under INCP. ICONOMI has a target of $200 million assets under management by the end of the year. In May 2017, ICONOMI launched an app on iOS where users can get up-to-date information on ICONOMI’s two DAA – INCX and INCP. How can token holders make money? ICN tokens represent ownership of the ICONOMI platform, allowing their holders to receive dividends and vote on ICONOMI related issues. The profits generated by ICONOMI will be used to purchase ICN from the open market. At the end of each quarter, all the repurchased tokens are burned, reducing the supply of ICN. This is similar to share buybacks used by stocks. There are multiple streams of revenue:The solution to Alabama’s budget ‘crisis’ is so simple it will blow your mind (No tax hikes necessary) Deadlines and crises sometimes force lawmakers to implement reforms and solve problems they would typically rather not tackle. Alabama should be experiencing such a moment right now. The state’s General Fund Budget is facing a $250+ million shortfall and the current fiscal year ends Sept. 30. That sure seems like a lot, but considering the state spends roughly $29 billion each year, the deficit actually comes out to about one percent of the state’s total expenditures. So how on Earth are we broke over one percent of our total expenditures? The answer is really quite simple: earmarks. No, not the reviled earmarks that congressmen use to pile pork barrel spending into bills on the federal level. Earmarking here simply means mandating certain tax revenues be spent on certain programs, no matter what. Alabama does this with a stunning 91 percent of its money, far more than any other state. Alabama gets roughly $21 billion from federal and restricted funds. Dollars from the feds must go to whatever programs or projects Washington dictates. Nothing can be done about that. But when it comes to state-level tax revenue, Alabama is one of only three states in the country with two completely separate budgets. Roughly $6 billion per year flows into a budget earmarked for education. That leaves only about $1.8 billion flowing into the General Fund earmarked to fund everything else. So the $250+ million shortfall the state is currently facing is actually about 14 percent of the General Fund Budget. Now you can see why it is causing so much handwringing down in Montgomery. Budget-busting programs like Medicaid and prisons are growing at a rate faster than the handful of taxes flowing into the General Fund can sustain, and after borrowing $437 million to patch the hole a few years ago, there are no more one-time fixes left. Unfortunately, most “solutions” proposed to this point maintain this completely nonsensical way of budgeting. And as anti-common sense as this probably seems already, here’s a stat that will really blow your mind. When the Legislative Fiscal Office briefed Alabama lawmakers in March, it reported the General Fund Budget to be facing a $290 million shortfall, while the Education Budget is anticipating a $287 million surplus. Wait, what? You mean one Alabama budget is short approximately the same amount the other Alabama budget will have in excess? Yes. Here’s an analogy explaining how insane this is. Imagine a husband and wife maintain two separate bank accounts and split up the household bills. Unfortunately the husband, who’s tasked with paying the power bill, keeps coming up short month after month. Is the wife, who lives in the same house, actually going to allow her lights to be cut off? Of course not! But as silly as that may seem, Alabama’s budgeting structure — with two separate budgets and 91 percent of the money earmarked — is no less ridiculous. The current system is a remnant of the dark days when Democrats and their teachers’ union allies ran the state. Now Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature and the Alabama Education Association (AEA) is in shambles. So what is the hold up? Defenders of the status quo claim combining the budgets means taking money away from teachers and students. It’s a political tactic used for years by the once-powerful teachers’ union to scare away reformers. But it didn’t stop Republicans from passing historic school choice reforms and still getting re-elected with an even bigger majority than before. On top of that, the argument that combining the budgets necessarily means the state will spend less money on education is just untrue. Un-earmarking and combining the budgets gives lawmakers the flexibility to set spending priorities, and constituents can hold them accountable for the decisions they make. Other defenders of the status quo express concerns about reforming the budgeting process because constitutional amendments are required to un-earmark and combine the budgets. That means Alabamians would vote on the plan at the ballot box. In years’ past, the teachers’ union would spend millions to run disingenuous ads to defeat such a ballot initiative. But after the AEA had to borrow millions to prop up their failed election strategy in 2014, they’re tapped out. In short, conservative lawmakers have nothing to fear and should feel empowered by the renewed mandate voters gave them at the ballot box last November. The General Fund Budget shortfall is not a crisis, it’s a gift. For the first time in decades, reformers in the Alabama Legislature are being given a genuine opportunity to solve one of the state’s biggest, most persistent challenges. Alabama does not have a revenue problem. There is no need to raise taxes. Alabama does, however, have a budgeting problem, and there is a need for reform. It has been said that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The time to fix Alabama’s dysfunctional budgets is upon us. Dear Republican legislators, don’t let it slip away.Sources close to the situation have informed us that jr. welterweight contender Emmanuel Taylor is no longer in the running to face three-division world champion Adrien Broner when he makes his return to the ring on September 6. Instead, it looks like former lightweight champion Paul Spadafora could now be the frontrunner to land the assignment. "Paul's definitely in the running. Nothing has been finalized, but Golden Boy's matchmakers are discussing it as we speak," a source that's close to Spadafora confirmed to FightHype.com. Sporting a 49-1-1 record, Spadafora might best be known for footage from an infamous sparring session that took place over ten years ago, seemingly showing him getting the better of undefeated pound-for-pound king Floyd "Money" Mayweather. Although he just suffered the first loss of his career last November, Spadafora recently rebounded with an 8-round unanimous decision victory over Hector Velazquez earlier this month. As previously reported by FightHype.com, Broner's return is still expected to take place in his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio and the card will feature several up-and-coming local fighters, including bantamweight Rau'Shee Warren and lightweight Robert Easter. Former welterweight champion Andre Berto and hard-hitting jr. welterweight Lucas Matthysse are also expected to make their return to the ring on the same date, but it's unclear if either will be on Broner's card or fighting in a different venue. That being said, one should not be surprised to see Showtime broadcast a split-venue show on that night. [ Follow Percy Crawford on Twitter @MrFighthype ]When people who are well below the threshold of poverty think bernie sanders is a terrible presidential candidate because they’re too busy eating Donald trumps shit. I’d probably believe Bernie Sanders was a bad idea, too, if I didn’t understand the necessity of having a college degree, if I didn’t see first hand how impossible it is to survive on $10 an hour, or how fundamentally flawed our nation is that we view HEALTHCARE to be a privilege allotted only to those who can AFFORD it. We will literally bail out huge corporations going bankrupt, give enormous tax breaks to multi-billion dollar companies, allow those same companies to take American jobs overseas where they can then exploit people in other countries for their cheap labor at the expense of americans. But you know, Healthcare and education are “free handouts”. I’ll resume this conversation with this person again when they hit a glass ceiling at their job because they don’t have a degree…because they can’t afford college…and can’t manage to make more than 30-40k a year while living in one of the most expensive states in the country.The Weeping Angels are an alien race developed for and featured in the current run of Doctor Who. The version presented here has been slightly altered in order to create a compelling 4th edition combatant. “Don’t blink. Blink and you’re dead. Don’t turn your back. Don’t look away. And don’t blink. Good Luck.” – The Doctor. The Weeping Angels are one of the oldest races to have crossed from the far realm into our world. Even still little is known about how they live and operate, since few people realize they’ve encountered the creatures and live to tell the tale. To mortal eyes, the Weeping Angels appear as statues, unmoving and without breath. When none are watching the creatures come to life, stealing the energy from a living soul to sustain themselves. Form of Angels It is said that Weeping Angels can appear in many forms, but most tales tell of the form of an angel. One ancient scholar speculates that since the Weeping Angels appeared on the material plane as early as the Dawn War, the angelic servants of the gods were likely the first creatures they encountered. Owing much to the deities who forced the primordials into the elemental chaos, angels were some of the first beings to be immortalized in stone, and so what may at first have been simply a form to exist in our world, became a natural disguise. Some speculate that present gargoyles are descendants of the Weeping Angels, who slowly lost some of their aberrant nature, and became more like the native stone they mimicked. Uncontrollable Defenses The Weeping Angels ability to take statue form is both a defense and a weakness. The ability is an innate part of their being, and they cannot ignore it. Whenever another sentient creature views them, including another Weeping Angel, they must become inanimate. For this reason they often cover their eyes with their hands, so they do not accidentally lock vision with another of their kind. This gives them the appearance of crying while in statue form. One tale tells of a particularly powerful person who wished to rid one temple of the beings. He purposefully bound his eyes, relying on his other sense to hunt the monsters. Without another being viewing them, the angels did not have their hard skin to protect themselves. Different tellings vary on whether his plan proved successful. Life Leeches The Weeping Angels feed off of energy and potential energy. They can take this energy directly from creatures who run off the elements, and can often be found in cities rich with constructs of steam-driven technology. When facing the living for energy, they cut the creatures connection to the plane, forcing them out of existence. Creatures of powerful will can fight this ability and sometimes manage to force themselves back onto the plane, but only have a short amount of time to do so. Angels in Play Should all the PCs be removed from play, they lose a direct link to the material plane and may not be able to make saves to return. They may instead appear in a different point in time, in the far realm, or some other area that is difficult to escape, as your campaign dictates. The Weeping Angels may also be used against players of lower level, where a combat situation is less likely to succeed. In this case I recommend running the angels as a skill challenge. The Players making Endurance and Perception checks to keep their eyes unblinking on the angels, while they attempt to get to safety, or trick the angels into viewing each other.The veteran player, who has seen a little of everything, takes the cautious approach. He’s lived here through seasons of big expectations and failed results. He’s also witnessed the opposite. So, as the Redskins start the season, receiver Santana Moss knows it’s best not to believe what you see. On paper, that is. On paper they have a talented quarterback, a 1,600-yard running back who is perhaps hungrier than a year ago and a defense that returns its top pass rusher. It adds up to legitimate hopes for an NFC East title repeat. But when your franchise hasn’t won back-to-back division titles since winning three straight from 1982-84 -- and when they've won one playoff game since 1999 and haven't reached the postseason in consecutive years since 1991-92 -- it’s best to ignore what anything looks like on paper. “It always looks great on paper until you show up and do what you’ve got to do,” Moss said. “As a team we have a better team than a lot of years, but until we play and continue to be efficient in all phases and be consistent, then we can’t speak about being better than this team or that team or being the best team. Until we do it I have nothing to say. I definitely don’t want to be the one talking about it. I want us to go out there and be good enough so our actions really speak louder than our words.” Very true. The Redskins have entered a number of seasons with grand hopes only to crash (it wasn’t just the infamous 2000 season with Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith, either. In 1998, coming off an 8-7-1 year, they signed Dana Stubblefield and traded for Dan Wilkinson; team staffers were talking Super Bowl. Instead, they started 0-7. They made the postseason in 2007 with a strong finish only to have Joe Gibbs resign, Jim Zorn hired and the path back to glory lengthened. There are more such stories, as you know.). But this is the first time there is something that could be sustained long-term because of Robert Griffin III. The Redskins haven’t had a franchise quarterback since Joe Theismann, someone capable of excellent play for several seasons and not just one (like Mark Rypien in 1991 or Brad Johnson in 1999). Griffin’s presence doesn’t guarantee anything other than hope. As long as he’s healthy, that is. Even before Griffin arrived there was a different sense in the locker room, a growing confidence. A couple years ago tight end Chris Cooley talked about it before the season, only to see the Redskins struggle to a 5-11 season. But one reason Cooley was so glad to return last season was that he still sensed that difference. Others do, too. At the bye week last season, with a 3-6 record, fullback Darrel Young (and other players) talked about how the Redskins were about to do something special. He said it with a look that suggested you take him seriously. Few probably did. Now? “In the past I was worried about wins and losses,” Young said. “The difference between now and two years ago is I don’t think that way. There’s no doubt in my mind we’re going to go out and win any game. Not that I doubted or questioned what we were doing [before] but then I would really say I want to win this game. Now it’s, ‘Let’s go win this game.’ It’s just different." That’s what happens with a culture change plus a young star quarterback plus continuity. The offensive and defensive systems are the same for the fourth straight season. Twenty one of 22 starters returned. “Put guys in the system and let them stick around for a while and you have a great chance of being successful,” Young said. “And the difference between this team and teams of the past is that you can’t key on Chris Cooley or key on Santana Moss or Clinton Portis, the guys that you know the ball will go to. Now you have guys like Aldrick Robinson. Or Alfred [Morris], stepping into the scene last year. Guys who were unknown who made a name for themselves. Everyone’s stepping up, playing a part in where we’re trying to go.” OK, Robinson is not on the same level as Morris. But he can provide an occasional threat because of his speed. There are warning signs here: a secondary that must prove itself; a game-changing quarterback who must prove durable; a defense that needs to eliminate big plays and prove it can rush the passer; coverage in the back seven. Depth on the offensive line is a concern. This is a good team; it’s not a perfect team. But they do have a good chance of being the first repeat NFC East winner since the Philadelphia Eagles from 2001-04. It’s not just because of Griffin, either. They won seven straight games in a variety of ways: with a backup quarterback; with the defense causing turnovers; with Morris’ legs; with Griffin passing. You don’t win seven straight because of one guy, though he is a good place to start. So is Morris. Nearly two weeks ago he talked about where he felt he had improved. It’s something others in the organization have noticed, too, and it’s another reason they’re optimistic. “He definitely understands the run game and how to set up his blockers better, seeing holes a lot better,” London Fletcher said. “Now it seems like he has more explosiveness and quickness and at the same time still has the same power.” Having a healthy Pierre Garcon and Fred Davis on the field at the same time … having Brian Orakpo back … tapping into Ryan Kerrigan’s versatility. And, yes, then there’s Griffin. He will still run the ball – and must run the ball. With him as just a pocket passer, the Redskins would have a good offense. With him as a running threat, too the Redskins have a dynamic offense. The zone read option creates gaps and openings for other players and makes them more dangerous. Aldrick Robinson snuck behind the Dallas secondary because it was frozen watching the zone read fakes. Better running lanes after the catch result from linebackers scrambling into coverage. But there’s no doubt for the offense to evolve, then Griffin must mature as a passer. He knows this. The Redskins, at times, simplified his reads to help a player who came from an elementary passing attack in college (compared to, say, Russell Wilson or Andrew Luck). What Griffin will know in a couple years will considerably dwarf what he knew, or could do, as a passer in 2012. It’s not about completion percentage; it’s about route concepts and reading coverages and getting through progressions just a little bit faster because of a pre-snap look. It’s about relying a little less on his legs and more on what he sees and his arm. But those legs will always remain a weapon. Can he sustain his career running 120 times a season? Not for a long time he can’t. But a kid this smart who works the way he does knows what he must do. “Just do everything better than you did the year before,” he said. Griffin was talking about himself. That applies to the Redskins as well; that is, if they want to do more than look good on paper.Abstract Bactofilins are a recently discovered class of cytoskeletal proteins of which no atomic-resolution structure has been reported thus far. The bacterial cytoskeleton plays an essential role in a wide range of processes, including morphogenesis, cell division, and motility. Among the cytoskeletal proteins, the bactofilins are bacteria-specific and do not have a eukaryotic counterpart. The bactofilin BacA of the species Caulobacter crescentus is not amenable to study by x-ray crystallography or solution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) because of its inherent noncrystallinity and insolubility. We present the atomic structure of BacA calculated from solid-state NMR–derived distance restraints. We show that the core domain of BacA forms a right-handed β helix with six windings and a triangular hydrophobic core. The BacA structure was determined to 1.0 Å precision (heavy-atom root mean square deviation) on the basis of unambiguous restraints derived from four-dimensional (4D) HN-HN and 2D C-C NMR spectra. Keywords Cytoskeletal proteins Bactofilins Protein Structure Solid-state NMR The cytoskeleton was once thought to be a unique feature of eukaryotic cells, but homologs to all major components of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton have also been found in prokaryotes (1–3). Additionally, bacteria-specific cytoskeletal elements have been identified. Among them are the bactofilins, a recently discovered family of cytoskeletal proteins that occur in most bacterial lineages (4–6). Bactofilins have a central conserved domain and variable proline-rich flanking terminal regions. They polymerize spontaneously and independently of nucleotides or other cofactors and are involved in a variety of crucial cellular processes. In the prosthecate α-proteobacterium Caulobacter crescentus, the two bactofilin paralogs BacA and BacB assemble into membrane-associated polymeric sheets that are specifically localized to the cell pole carrying the stalk—a thin protrusion of the cell body involved in cell attachment and nutrient acquisition (4). These assemblies serve as spatial landmarks mediating the polar localization of the cell wall biosynthetic enzyme PbpC, which is involved in stalk biogenesis and organization. The human pathogen Helicobacter pylori, by contrast, requires the bactofilin homolog CcmA for maintaining its characteristic helical cell shape, a feature required for cells to efficiently colonize the gastric mucus (7). Recently, we demonstrated that high-quality solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) spectra of BacA could be obtained, which allowed us to achieve the resonance assignment for the central core domain (residues 37 to 139) (8). As determined from conformation-dependent chemical shifts (9), BacA adopts a structure with a rigid core comprising 18 β strands and flexible N- and C-terminal regions. On the basis of the assigned β strand segments and additional data on the mass per length of the BacA filaments from scanning transmission electron microscopy, a β-helical fold was proposed for the BacA subunit (8). Additionally, homology modeling of BacA (8) and its Myxococcus xanthus homolog BacM (10) suggested a left-handed β-helical arrangement. Because no cytoskeletal filament protein has yet been reported to adopt a β-helical fold, the determination of an atomic-resolution structure of a member of the bactofilin family was highly desirable. X-ray crystallography and solution NMR are difficult to apply to bactofilins because of the rapid polymerization of the subunits into fibrillar structures during overproduction. In light of the high-quality ssNMR data reported so far (8) and the recent success in using ssNMR to solve the atomic structures of supramolecular protein assemblies (11–13), we therefore set out to determine the structure of the BacA subunit by ssNMR. First, we analyzed spectra of sparsely 13C-labeled BacA samples obtained by growing BacA-overproducing Escherichia coli cells in media that contained either [1,3-13C]glycerol or [2-13C]glycerol as the sole carbon source (14, 15). The resulting samples enabled the acquisition of carbon-carbon correlation spectra of excellent quality and resolution (see figs. S1 and S2). The [2-13C]glycerol–labeled BacA sample yielded spectra containing many cross peaks in the aromatic and Cα regions (fig. S1) that could be unambiguously assigned and converted into long-range (that is, \|i − j\| > 4) distance restraints. Similarly, spectra from the [1,3-13C-glycerol; U-15N]–labeled BacA sample provided long-range distance restraints between side-chain methyl groups (fig. S2). On the basis of a total of 374 reliable 13C-13C long-range distances and additional 172 torsion angle restraints, predicted from the assigned backbone atom chemical shifts (table S1) by the software TALOS-N (16), a β-helical structure with six windings was calculated. Although right-handed models were more abundantly generated by the structure calculations using Xplor-NIH (17), both left-handed (1 to 2 of 20) and right-handed (18 to 19 of 20) β helices were among the 10% (20 of 200) of the lowest-energy structures. To unambiguously identify the handedness of the β helix, we collected short [that is, d(H,H) ≤ 5 Å] proton-proton distance restraints from four-dimensional (4D) HN(H)(H)NH (18, 19) and 2D NHHC (20) spectra. The excellent resolution of the cross peaks in the proton-detected 1H-15N correlation NMR spectrum (Fig. 1A) of deuterated and 100% back-exchanged BacA 37–139 allowed the unambiguous identification of HN-HN distance restraints from a 4D spectrum. Initially, a total of 96 amide proton resonances were assigned using a series of 3D proton-detected NMR experiments (21). The 4D HN(H)(H)NH experiment used 5.2-ms radio frequency–driven recoupling (RFDR) mixing (22) for the magnetization transfer between adjacent NH pairs (fig. S3). To reduce the measurement time of the 4D experiment, the data were acquired by sine-weighted Poisson-gap nonuniform sampling (NUS) of 25% of the total number of data points (23, 24). In the resulting spectrum, the chemical shifts of HN i, N i, N j, and HN j were correlated on the basis of the HN i -HN j dipolar interaction. For example, in the 2D plane defined by the HN and N chemical shifts of residue L73, cross peaks were exclusively observed to residues spatially close to L73 (Fig. 1, B and C). The distance restraints collected by this method agreed well with the β helix model generated by our earlier calculations based on carbon-carbon distances and predicted dihedral angles (see above). Because the peaks are very well separated in the 4D spectrum, this approach significantly reduces assignment ambiguities. A total of 59 unambiguous HN i -HN j distance correlations (present in both of the corresponding HN correlation planes) were extracted (table S2). Structure calculations (see below) showed that these restraints fitted only to the model of the right-handed β helix. These results could be further corroborated by HN i -Hα j contacts extracted from an NHHC spectrum recorded on the [1,3-13C-glycerol; U-15N]–labeled BacA sample (fig. S4). Fig. 1 Structural restraints from 1H-detected ssNMR. (A) 2D H-N correlation spectrum of deuterated and 100% back-exchanged BacA 37–139 with some of the amino acid residues annotated. (B) One plane of the 4D HN(H)(H)NH correlation spectrum. Plane taken at chemical shift positions of the L73 residue (diagonal peak marked in red). Long-distance restraints (cross peaks) annotated in black. For better visualization, the corresponding residues are labeled in blue in (A). The appearing cross peaks represent spatially close amide protons and are used for structure calculation. (C) Schematic representation of magnetization transfer from residue L73 to spatially close residues during the 4D NMR experiment (blue arrows). Dashed red lines represent hydrogen bonds between consecutive windings of the β helix. In total, 1932 distance restraints were collected, including 178 medium-range (that is, \|i − j\| = 2, 3, or 4) and 488 long-range contacts (fig. S5). These peaks were selected in an iterative manner: Before the first structure calculation, only unambiguous peaks were selected. The resulting structure was then used to select additional (structurally unambiguous) peaks for refinement. This was repeated in several rounds until almost all of the peaks in the spectra were assigned. Additionally, the 172 torsion angle restraints predicted by TALOS-N and an additional 116 β sheet hydrogen bond restraints were used in the NMR structure calculation of the rigid central domain (residues 37 to 139), resulting in the structure depicted in Fig. 2. The heavy-atom average root mean square deviation from the mean structure of the 20 lowest-energy conformers out of 200 calculated structures is 0.4 Å for the backbone and 1.0 Å for all heavy atoms, indicating a high precision of the calculated structure ensemble. Fig. 2 Structure of the BacA subunit (residues 37 to 139). (A and B) Top view (A) and side view (B) of BacA. (C) Schematic representation of the six windings. Hydrophobic residues are colored white, acidic residues are colored red, basic residues are colored blue, and others are colored green. Mutations of residues L122, M124, and F130 (winding #6) to alanine or serine affect the BacA assembly in vivo. These residues are marked with an asterisk. The overall organization of the BacA core domain is a right-handed β helix with six windings and a triangular hydrophobic core. The core is defined by three β strands per winding that form continuous parallel β sheets (Fig. 2C). Many of the “corners” of the β helix are formed by glycines, a feature that is commonly seen in β-helical structures. These glycines are highly conserved within the bactofilin family (8). The β sheet arrangement is stabilized by hydrogen bonds between adjacent strands and hydrophobic side chains tightly packed in the interior of the β helix. All charged residues face toward the outside, and some of them are arranged on top of each other such that their charges mutually compensate each other (E49-K65-E82, E57-R72, E88-K103-E120, and D116-R133). The first (#1) and the last (#6) windings of the β helix are not as well defined by the data as windings #2 to #5. Here, we could not detect any intermolecular distance restraints between windings #1 and #6 as would be expected from a head-to-tail arrangement of the subunits. The lack of such restraints could either indicate a different supramolecular arrangement or reflect an increased local mobility of windings #1 and #6. All of our observed distance restraints were unambiguously assigned to intrasubunit contacts, leaving no unassigned restraints that could have arisen from intermolecular subunit-subunit contacts. This suggests that the lack of restraints for windings #1 and #6 results from increased dynamic motion in these regions. This possibility is further supported by the observation that cross-peak intensities in the dipolar-based correlation spectra used for the assignment were generally attenuated for residues located within these windings (fig. S6). Notably, mutations in winding #6 (L122S, M124A, M124S, and F130A) (8) were previously shown to affect BacA assembly in vivo, whereas an A123S exchange did not. On the basis of the arrangement of winding #6 determined here, the side chains of L122, M124, and F130 point to the hydrophobic core, whereas that of A123 points outside (see Fig. 2C). Mutation of the three core residues may thus destabilize winding #6 or render the surface provided by winding #6 less hydrophobic, thereby potentially preventing intersubunit interaction. Here, we have determined a de novo atomic-resolution structure of the bactofilin BacA, on the basis of a large number of unambiguous ssNMR-derived distance restraints. Thus far, the right-handed β-helical fold has not been described for any other cytoskeletal protein. However, the BacA structure is similar to that of the prion protein HET-s in its amyloid state (11). It will be interesting in the future to investigate the arrangement of BacA in the context of the membrane-associated polymeric sheets observed in vivo by complementary techniques such as cryo-electron microscopy and tomography (25–27) and to determine a hybrid structure of the whole assembly (28, 29). MATERIALS AND METHODS Sample preparation To prepare 13C-labeled samples, we produced BacA-His 6 in M9 medium with 0.3% (v/v) [2-13C]glycerol or [1,3-13C]glycerol as the sole carbon source. The [1,3-13C]glycerol–containing medium additionally contained 15NH 4 Cl as the sole nitrogen source. The overproduction protocol was based on a previously described procedure (8). Briefly, cells of E. coli Rosetta(DE3)pLysS (Invitrogen) were transformed with pMT879 and grown in 1 liter of SB medium supplemented with appropriate antibiotics at 37°C to an OD 600 (optical density at 600 nm) of 3 to 4. Cells were harvested by centrifugation and washed with 100 ml of M9 salt solution. The pellets were then resuspended in 1 liter of M9 medium containing the indicated carbon and nitrogen sources. The cultures were grown for 1.5 hours at 37°C. Subsequently, the production of BacA-His 6 was induced by the addition of 0.5 mM isopropyl-β-d-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG). After 24 hours of cultivation, the cells were harvested, and BacA-His 6 was purified as described previously. The samples, together with a few crystals of DSS (4,4-dimethyl-4-silapentane-1-sulfonic acid), were packed into 4-mm magic angle spinning (MAS) rotors, using protein quantities of ~30 mg each. To produce a shortened version of BacA that corresponded to the rigid DUF583 domain of BacA, we cloned the coding sequence for amino acids 37 to 139 into a modified pET28a vector (Clontech), encoding a cleavable N-terminal heptahistidine tag. After transformation into E. coli BL21(DE3), cells were grown at 37°C in an M9 minimal medium with 15NH 4 Cl and 13C 6 -d-glucose as sole nitrogen and carbon sources, respectively, prepared in 99.9% D 2 O. Overproduction of the [2H,13C,15N]-labeled fusion protein was induced by the addition of 0.5 mM IPTG. The culture was harvested 15 hours after induction, resuspended in lysis buffer [50 mM tris-HCl (pH 8.0), 500 mM NaCl, 5 mM imidazole, and 0.5 mM phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride] supplemented with Benzonase (25 U/ml; Merck Millipore), and lysed by sonication. From the supernatant, the fusion protein was purified by immobilized metal affinity chromatography on Ni-NTA (nickel–nitrilotriacetic acid) Sepharose. The protein was eluted with 20 column volumes of buffer with 300 mM imidazole. The eluate was dialyzed against tobacco
Oats man, and the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, as well as countless pin-ups and, at the end of his life, a cover for ‘Playboy.’ He did Irma Harding, too, who was rosy-cheeked but not cheeky, generous with her smile but a stickler, one sensed, for details and doing things right. In this way, Irma Harding personified the image of cordial, steady, dependability International Harvester wanted to project to its pragmatic prairie customers. The brain of Irma Harding was a composite of perhaps five different women. Two of them are known to be Zelma Purchase and Olive White, who worked in the home-economics department of International Harvester’s Evansville, Indiana, plant, which had been built from scratch for IH’s new domestic refrigeration division. “They had a test kitchen,” Pickett says, “and there are photographs of it in magazines like ‘Harvester World,’ which was one of the company’s internal-facing publications.” As with everything else International Harvester did at the time, the company invested heavily it its new division. While Pickett was interested in Irma Harding for professional reasons, she was also intrigued by the character’s sociological role, which still holds currency in 2014. “I needed an authentic identity that would appeal to the ladies who collect tractors and the wives of tractor collectors,” Pickett says. “I wanted something to represent the IH legacy that was a little more feminine. That’s what appealed to me about bringing Irma Harding back. I didn’t have to invent her, she already existed, so we dusted her off, tweaked her graphics, and fleshed out her personality, but we kept her fair-and-square attitude and the way she spoke in a forthright manner to readers of the recipe pamphlets.” For a while, IH’s experiment with home refrigeration and Irma Harding worked pretty well, but the postwar years were difficult for International Harvester, which was beset by mismanagement—sales were climbing, but so was the company’s debt, which by 1951 had soared to $257 million. (That debt proved to be a hole that IH would never quite climb out of; in 1984, the farm-equipment part of IH was gobbled up by arch-competitor Case.) By the middle of the 1950s, the shiny new plant in Evansville was beginning to look like a pretty bad idea—in 1955, IH sold the plant to Whirlpool. In hindsight, having a tractor company sell freezers to farm wives seems like an obvious mismatch, but International Harvester was at the top of its game immediately after World War II. Indeed, the reason for the failure of IH’s refrigeration division may have been that the company had not been ambitious enough. After all, their existing farmer network was only going to get them so far, and while rural electrification represented a solid business opportunity, the nation’s population was getting more urban. The cities were were International Harvester needed to be. And so, in the end, they were—fictionally, at least. One of the most famous examples of an International Harvester refrigerator is the bulky appliance that sat in the background of Monica and Rachel’s urban apartment on the TV show “Friends.” Of course, television sitcoms are not required to play by the rules of reality. Tractor companies are, which is why International Harvester eventually pulled the plug on its refrigeration division and its fictional spokeswoman, Irma Harding. (All photos via Irma Harding’s Tumblr page, ShopCaseIH.com’s Pinterest page, Octane Press, and the McCormick-International Harvester Collection. To order a copy of “Canning, Pickling, and Freezing with Irma Harding,” visit Octane Press.)Posted on August 11, 2016 The 2016 Australian Craft Beer Survey by Beer Cartel is the first publicly available research looking at the Australian craft beer drinker. The survey received widespread support across the industry. In total over 6,500 craft beer drinkers took part in the survey. Craft Beer is the only segment of Australian beer market which is in continuous growth, with overall consumption of beer in decline. The data that follows provides an extremely accurate birds-eye view of this young and exciting industry. A prize of $500 of craft beer was offered as incentive to take part in the research. To see if you were the lucky winner simply scroll to the bottom of this page. Key findings from the research include: - Feral Brewing voted Australia’s best craft brewery - Victoria voted Australia’s best State for craft beer - Australia voted the best beer producing nation in the World - Pale Ale is the most consumed craft beer style in Australia - Australian craft beer drinkers are frustrated by the beer selection at sporting and music events - Australian craft beer drinkers believe the Government should do more to support the craft beer industry The following is an outline of findings from the research. More detail is provided through the links provided. Feral Brewing is Australia’s best craft brewery, with newcomer Pirate Life second. View the full results here, or see the results by state, or by capital city. Pale Ale is Australia’s most consumed craft beer style, with India Pale Ales (IPAs) also widely enjoyed. View the full results here. Victoria leads the way, taking the title of best Australian state for craft beer. View the full results here. Australian craft beer drinkers are highly loyal, considering themselves the best beer producing nation in the world. View the full results here. The Australian craft beer drinker is typically male, aged 30-39 and based on Australia’s Eastern Seaboard. They have a high household income, with a third having previously home-brewed, and almost half part of a beer appreciation group. Improving the beer selection at sporting and music events, and the Government doing more to support craft breweries are highly important issues for craft beer drinkers. Craft breweries and bars are sought out by almost all craft beer drinkers when travelling, while three quarters specifically look for restaurants with craft beer on their list. Craft beer is changing beer consumption habits, with most saying they now drink less but better quality. The vast majority of drinkers are also aware beer tastes best from a glass. While the use of cans in the Australian craft beer industry is growing, most still believe bottles are better. A large proportion of craft beer drinkers visit liquor stores, craft beer bars and breweries on a regular basis. The average total weekly spend on beer by craft beer drinkers is $56 a week ($2,912 per year), with the majority spending $26-$100 a week. This is inclusive of purchases at bars, restaurants, breweries and liquor stores. For those that drink craft beer it is widely preferred over the alternatives; mainstream beer and home-brew. While a third of drinkers are home-brewers, the majority still consider craft beer better than their DIY equivalent. In addition to drinking craft beer, those surveyed enjoy a range of other alcohol types; particularly wine/champagne and spirits/premixed drinks. Craft drinkers not only enjoy beer, but engage in a range of related activities and events. In the past year, the majority have attended a beer festival, with one in three having been on a paid craft beer tour. Following on from Victoria being voted Australia’s leading state for craft beer, Melbourne’s Good Beer Week is the leading craft beer week in Australia. View the full results here. Based on overall usage, The Crafty Pint is Australia’s favourite website for craft beer news. View the full results here. Over a third of Australian craft beer drinkers embrace technology when it comes to craft beer, with beer rating app Untappd, leading the way as Australia’s most used craft beer app. View the full results here. Congratulations to The Beer Pilgrim, rated Australia’s favourite blog based on usage, with Radio Brews News Australia’s number one beer podcast. View the full results here. A special thanks goes out to all those who have helped support the 2016 Australian Craft Beer Survey. Without your assistance none of this would have been possible. We raise a glass to each and every one of you, and thank you for being a part of this hugely exciting industry. Sharing of Content Please feel free to share any of the information/charts above - charts can be downloaded here. We simply ask that Beer Cartel is attributed, including a link to www.beercartel.com.au when sharing online. High resolution images and interviews are available on request. About Beer Cartel: Beer Cartel is Australia’s leading craft beer retailer, stocking over 1,000 craft beers from Australia and overseas. Purchases can be made through the Beer Cartel website (www.beercartel.com.au) and its’ Sydney store. Media Contact: Richard Kelsey Phone: 0405 251 864 Email: [email protected] Website: www.beercartel.com.au Winner of $500 of Craft Beer Announced Congratulations to Aidan Birch, winner of $500 of craft beer.Gaming is surely catching up of late on your fav mobile OS, Android. Thank the upcoming dual-core phones or the 1 GHz processors powering your phone or the developers (probably the best of three factors) to take due notice of android’s huge sales of 300,000 phones per day. Each day, we’re getting closer to get our fav titles on android sooner than ever. Oh yes, the new market policies enforced recently by Google also deserve credit for the game developers now listing games on android market. First, Google now allows 50 MB of space per app/game, against 25 MB earlier. And second and more important, users can get the refund only if they request it within 15 mins of purchase, which was 24 hours before that. The second factor really helps games devs who felt that users can complete the game within 24 hrs and then return it as per policy. Now, with 15 mins time frame, android market seems a happy place to them, rather than launching the games on own website. The latest to realize android’s growing potential is the EA Mobile, who just listed two of its already launched awesome titles on android market: Need for Speed and the Sims 3. Both the games cost $4.99, which isn’t insane and you can expect similar pricing for yet another solid title, Madden NFL 11, that would come soon in Jan ’11. Currently, four games of EA mobile have been launched in the android market and it won’t be wrong to expect all games that are on iOS, to come soon on android market too. Oh, be the way, we do hope that our another lovely game developer, Gameloft, takes inspiration from this! More screen shots and Link to Android Market The Sims 3 Market Link for The Sims 3 Need For Speed Shift Market Link for Need for Speed Shift Via AndroidandMeA long time ago, in a North Atlantic far far away… Introduction Earlier this week I was drawn into an enlightening discussion with my colleague Ben Frey about the complicated textual tradition that lies behind George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” which few outside the scholarly community realize is a modern rendition of an old Germanic legend of a fatal conflict between a father and his treacherous son. Below I present some remarks on the Old Icelandic version of the legend, with some spare comparative notes on the cognate traditions in other old Germanic languages. The story as presented in George Lucas’s films represents only one manuscript tradition, and a rather late and corrupt one at that – the Middle High German epic called Himelgengærelied (Song of the Skywalkers). There is also an Old High German palimpsest known to scholars, later overwritten by a Latin choral and only partly legible to us today, which contains fragments of a version wherein “Veitare” survives to old age after slaying “Lûc” out of loyalty to the emperor, but is naturally still conflicted about the deed when the son of his daughter Leia avenges the killing on him. This is also the ending that we infer for the Icelandic Tattúínárdǿla saga (the Saga of the People of the Tattúín River Valley), though unfortunately the ending of that saga is lost and has to be reconstructed from the scant remains of the Old High German poem and from references in other sagas (it should be noted that the later chivalric Lúks saga Anakinssonar is derived from another tradition and may well be a translation of a continental epic, probably one closely related to the extant Middle High German Himelgengærelied, from which Lucas’s narrative is drawn). The author of the Old English poem Déor also knows an “Anacan, haten heofongangende” (“Anacen, named the sky-walker”), who later in the poem is referred to by an alternative byname, “sunubana” (“son-killer”), suggesting that the more tragic version of the tale was current among the Anglo-Saxons too. Hammershaimb seems to know a Faroese ballad on the two “Himingangarar,” but there is no trace of the text of this ballad in any known collection, and it was not known to the last exponents of the Faroese oral tradition in the early twentieth century. Tattúínárdǿla saga tells of the youth of Anakinn himingangari, beginning with his childhood as a slave in Tattúínárdalr, notably lacking the prolonged racing scene of the MHG version, and referring to the character of “Jarjari inn heimski” only as a local fool slain by Anakinn in a childhood berserker rage (whereas in the MHG version, “Jarjare” is one of “Anacen’s” marshals and his constant companion; Cochrane 2010 suggests that this may be because the MHG text is Frankish in origin, and “Jarjare” was identified with a Frankish culture hero with a similar name). After this killing, for which Anakinn’s owner (and implied father) refuses to pay compensation, Anakinn’s mother, an enslaved Irish princess, foresees a great future for Anakinn as a “jeði” (the exact provenance of this word is unknown but perhaps represents an intentionally humorous Irish mispronunciation of “goði”). This compels Anakinn to recite his first verse: Þat mælti mín móðir, at mér skyldi kaupa fley ok fagrar árar fara á brott með jeðum, standa upp í stafni, stýra dýrum xwingi, halda svá til hafnar, hǫggva mann ok annan. (“My mother said/ That they should buy me/ A warship and fair oars,/ That I should go abroad with Jedis,/ Stand up in the ship’s stern,/ Steer a magnificent X-Wing,/ Hold my course till the harbor,/ Kill one man after another.”) The etymology of “xwingi” (nom. *xwingr?) is unknown; numerous editors have proposed emendations, but none is considered particularly plausible. It is likely to be another humorous Irish mispronunciation of a Norse word. As a teenager, Anakinn purchases his freedom from his owner, and arranges for passage to Kóruskantborg with the notorious Viking Víga-Óbívan, with whom he is sworn into the service of the King of Kóruskantborg after a series of adventures that prove his mettle and initiative in battle. Over the next several years, we follow the career of Anakinn as he falls in love with Irish princess Paðéma after killing her father at the Battle of Confey, and his mentor Víga-Óbívan continues to encourage him to betray Falfaðinn, the King of Kóruskantborg. Eventually Falfaðinn learns of Víga-Óbívan’s duplicity and exiles him. Víga-Óbívan returns to Tattúínárdalr, and Anakinn is conflicted when he learns that Paðéma has been in league with Víga-Óbívan and sails to Tattúínárdalr with him. However, Anakinn is loyal to his oaths to King Falfaðinn and remains with him in Kóruskantborg, where he rises to great honor in the service of the king and is the recipient of many good gifts. He also begins the planning of the construction of the great ship Dauðastjarna, which when completed will be the crown jewel of Falfaðinn’s fleet, and will hold a crew large enough to sack a city single-handedly. Because of his great skill in hunting, Anakinn is now known to most as Veiðari-Anakinn, “hunter-Anakinn,” or often simply Veiðari. Back in Tattúínárdalr, Paðéma gives birth to twins, Lúkr and Leia, before dying from her grief at having betrayed her husband. One of the most memorable lines in the saga is given to her on her deathbed: Þá mælti Paðéma: “Þeim var ek verst er ek unna mest.” (Then Padmé said: “I was worst to the man that I loved most.”) Víga-Óbívan commends Leia to the care of a local goði and Lúkr to a man whom he believes to be Anakinn’s brother, but who is probably a disguised Óðinn. Déor speaks of the son of “Anacan” as having been raised by “Owen,” which may suggest that this interpretation is correct, but if this is in fact the name of the god, it is unclear why the form should lack the initial glide of Anglo-Saxon (unless this part of the story originated in the Danelaw; for full discussion of this and other problems of the text in Deor see Nashat 2010). Víga-Óbívan waits for Lúkr to attain manhood, and by now is himself an old man. When young Lúkr follows some lost sheep onto Víga-Óbívan’s property and is attacked by his retainers, Víga-Óbívan defends him and later tells Lúkr (who in a dream has been given his father’s byname, “himingangari,” by a dís, but is unaware that his father also bore it), that Lúkr’s father Anakinn was slain by Veiðari, the great captain of King Falfaðinn of Kóruskantborg. Lúkr swears vengeance, accepts the gift of his father’s sword Ljósamækir from Víga-Óbívan, and with the help of the mercenary Hani (if scholars are correct in emending his name in this way; the manuscript reads “Hann”) and his ship the Þúsundár Fálkinn, sails to find the great ship Dauðastjarna, which Veiðari steers as captain of Falfaðinn’s fleet. After a long series of close battles, Lúkr and a team of Hebridean Vikings (who, we learn in a long prelude to this encounter, have long quarreled with Falfaðinn over a taxation matter) finally sink the Dauðastjarna, though not before Víga-Óbívan is slain in a holmgang with Veiðari, and the Hebrideans’ base on the island now known as Mainland has been looted by Veiðari’s Vikings. The saga spends several chapters describing the escalation of tensions between Veiðari and Lúkr over the next years. Hani returns to Tattúínárdalr and is there betrothed to Leia (whom Lúkr still does not know to be his sister); he becomes a great goði. Meanwhile Lúkr shipwrecks on an island in the Faroes called Dagóba (the name is of unknown origin but probably Celtic) where he meets and is trained by the great warrior Jóði, who was a companion of Víga-Óbívan in his youth; Jóði continues to incite Lúkr to kill Veiðari, but his remarks are confusing in the text as preserved and are probably much damaged by later redactors – the word order is considerably jumbled and many of his comments reflect anachronistic Christian sentiments. Finally Lúkr sees the ghost of Víga-Óbívan outside the latter’s howe, and Víga-Óbívan intones a scornful skaldic stanza at Lúkr, informing Lúkr that Hani and Leia (whom he now strongly hints is Lúkr’s sister) have been abducted by Veiðari’s men, and upbraiding him for being in the Faroes “sporting with Jóði” when this occurred. Lúkr returns to Jóði (who in a bizarre aside is revealed to live inside a giant tree trunk in the middle of a marsh), and tells him of the apparition. Jóði foresees that if Lúkr leaves, he will face his death, but in typical saga-heroic fashion Lúkr refuses the older man’s counsel and sets out to rescue his sworn brother. Their exchange is well-known to students of Old Icelandic literature as a classic example of the forecasting of which the saga authors were so fond: “Þú munt vera maðr feigr,” segir Jóði, “Ok ver þú varr um þik.” “Ekki mun mér þat stoða,” segir Lúkr, “Ef mér er þat ætlat.” (“You must be a doomed man,” said Yoda, “Be watchful of yourself.” “That will not avail me,” said Luke, “If this be my fate.”) Having infiltrated Veiðari’s court, Lúkr discovers that his sworn brother Hani has been turned to ice by Veiðari’s sorcery, and engages in a memorable holmgang with Veiðari, in which Veiðari reveals to Lúkr that he is his father: Veiðari mælti: “Víga-Óbívan segði aldrigi þér þat, er orðit er af feðr þínum.” “Hann sagði mér ǿrit,” segir Lúkr, “Hann sagði mér, at þú hann dræpir.” “Ekki er þat satt,” kvað Veiðari, “Ok em ek þinn faðir.” (Vader said: “Obi-Wan would never tell you, what happened to your father.” “He told me enough,” said Luke, “He told me that you killed him.” “That is not true,” said Vader, “I am your father.”) In the German version made famous by Lucas’s films, “Lûc” proceeds to deny “Veiter’s” statement, repeatedly shouting “no” and imploring the heavens to see to it that it should not be so. However, in the Icelandic version, Lúkr coolly accepts Veiðari’s statement and continues to fight: “Eigi vil ek þat trúa,” segir Lúkr, “En ef þú ert víst minn faðir, svá fær þú skilit þat, at ek held þínu sverði Ljósamæki.” “Já vist,” segir Veiðari, “Eða hvat segir þú til?” (“I will not believe that,” said Luke. “But if you are truly my father, then you can see, that I hold your sword Lightsaber.” “Yes I can,” said Vader, “What more do you have to say about it?”) The conclusion of their heroic dialogue has stirred the imaginations of generations of Old Norse enthusiasts: “Þat mun ekki gera,” segir Lúkr, “Þú munt þó drepa vilja Hana, mág minn, ok er þat skǫmm, ef ek sit hjá.” Ok lagði til Veiðara tveim hǫndum sverðinu. “Karlmannliga er at farit,” segir Veiðari. Veiðari høggr á hǫndina Lúki, svá at af tók, en niðr fell Ljósamækir ok með honum Lúkr. (“It doesn’t matter,” said Luke, “You will still want to kill Han, my brother-in-law, and it would be shameful for me to sit idly by.” And he swung the sword at Vader with two hands. “That is manfully done,” said Vader. He cut Luke’s hand, so that it was cut off, and Lightsaber fell down and with it Luke.) Lúkr is saved from drowning by the intercession of Leia and Hani’s men in the Þúsundár Fálkinn. Following this memorable climax, there is an extended lacuna in the manuscript, and the action picks up again with an episode wherein Lúkr rescues Hani and Leia from the corrupt (and grossly obese) Danish merchant Jabbi, a rather comical figure on the whole, and this entire incident is probably to be reckoned an interpolation from a later chivalric saga. Unfortunately the saga shows its repetitive nature at this point, and we once again learn that Veiðari is building, under the auspices of Falfaðinn, a great ship to be named Dauðastjarna in meiri. At a great feast, Lúkr and Hani swear that they will kill Veiðari and Falfaðinn, burn Dauðastjarna, and conquer Kóruskantborg. Their boasts are considered binding and the sworn brothers lead several warships loaded with men to the position of the Dauðastjarna. There Hani is assisted by what the saga describes as “birnir” (literally “bears,” but in context probably to be understood as “Shetlanders” – the German version confusingly seems to understand these as actual bears) in his great assault on Falfaðinn’s fleet, but Lúkr is captured by Veiðari and brought to an audience with Falfaðinn. Here the text of Tattúínardǿla saga is regrettably lost, but is almost surely to be reconstructed as discussed above (with the aid of hints from the Old High German text): with a climactic final holmgang in which a conflicted Veiðari chooses loyalty to his lord over loyalty to his bloodline, killing his son Lúkr and in the process bereaving himself of his own heir, and a later conclusion in which the prosperous, but troubled and aged, hersir Veiðari is himself slain in vengeance for Lúkr by the son of Hani and Leia. Jackson Crawford teaches in the Department of Scandinavian at UC Berkeley. His new translation of the Poetic Edda presents the original myths of the Norse gods and heroes in dynamic, contemporary English. Note: When the above introduction was written in 2010, I had not yet intended to write out the saga chapter-by-chapter, as I did over the following couple of years. The story as presented in the saga below does occasionally contradict the introduction, not least in including the ending of the story. If you want to skip the prequels, the original trilogy starts between chapters 16 and 17. Note that the way the saga is written in English is a deliberate pastiche on the old-fashioned English of so many translators. Link to the Old Norse text of the saga here. Chapter 1: Concerning Jarl Jothi Gormoarson JOTHI WAS THE NAME OF A MAN, son of Gormo. Jothi was a little man, but so strong that none was his equal. When he was young, he went a-viking and raided. With him in friendship was that man who was named Vindu, a noble man and the most valiant in strength and daring. He was a berserker. He and Jothi were in good agreement about everything, and there was the greatest friendship between them. Jothi had one son. He was named Duku. Duku was a black-haired man and ugly, like his father both in appearance and in manners. He became a very active man. He was skilled in wood and iron, and became the greatest smith. Now when Duku was in his twenties, he began to go raiding. Jothi got him a longship. With him on his expeditions went the sons of Vindu – they had a good following and another longship – and they went a-viking during the summer and took much property and gained good loot. During the summers they would go out a-viking, but in the winters they would stay home with their fathers. Duku would bring home many treasures and give them to his father. This was good both for his wealth and for his station among men. At this time Jothi was at an advanced age, but his son was in the prime of his life. Falfathinn was the name of a war-king, who was called Falfathinn lightning-bolt. He became king of Koruskantborg in Norway, and swore that he would become sole king over Norway. King Falfathinn lay with his army in the region of the Jedi Fjords. He sent his men out around the land there to meet those men who had not joined him, but whom he thought it would be profitable to have with him. The king’s messengers came to Jothi and received a good welcome. They announced their errand, and said that the king wanted Jothi to come meet him. “He has,” they said, “Learned that you are a noble man and of a great family. You will receive great honor from him. The king is very eager to have with him those men whom he learns are valiant in power and physical courage.” Jothi answered and said that he was an old man, so that we has not physically capable of going out in warships. “I would rather sit at home now, and leave off serving kings.” The messengers went away, and when they came to the king, they told him everything that Jothi had said to them. The king was angry about this and said so in as many words, and declared that Jothi’s family was one of proud men, and wondered what kind of offer they would be content with. Maul the Red was near, and bade the king to leave aside his anger. “I will go to meet Jothi, and he will want to join you immediately when he learns that it means so much to you.” Then Maul the Red went to meet Jothi, and said to him that the king was angry and that it would not avail, unless one of them, he or his son, went to the king, and said that they would receive great honor from the king if they would bow to him. He told him, as was surely the truth, that the king was good to his men, and gave them honor and riches. Jothi said that it was his plan “that my son and I not kowtow to this king, and I will not go to meet him. But if Duku comes home this summer, he will be easily persuaded to this and will want to become the king’s man. Say to the king, that I will gladly be his friend and the friend of all men, who respect my words, and I will hold to my friendship with him. I also want the same authority and charge given to me by him as by earlier kings, if the king will that it be so, and if he agrees to this we’ll see about whether I’ll serve him.” Then Maul went back to the king and told him that Jothi would send him his son, and said that it was better that he was not then home. The king let the matter rest for a time. Duku Jothason and Meis Vindusson came home that autumn from raiding. Duku went to his father. The father and son took to talking. Duku asked what had been the errand of those men whom Falfathinn had sent. Jothi said that the king had sent word, that either Jothi or his son should become the king’s man. “How did you answer?” Asked Duku. “I said what was on my mind, which was that I would never sell myself into the hand of King Falfathinn, and you wouldn’t either, if you took my advice. I think that in the end this king will cause our death.” “You think of this quite differently from me,” said Duku, “For I think that I will receive from him the greatest glory, and so I am firmly resolved that I will go to meet the king and will become his man, and I have learned for the truth, that his following is made up of only the most valiant men. It seems to me a great opportunity to join that following, if they want to have me. Those men are treated better than anyone else in this land. I hear that the king is incredibly generous with his money and gives all of it to his men and doesn’t hesitate to give them advancement and land when he thinks that they’ve earned these things. But I hear that all those who turn him down and don’t want to accept his friendship, become unimportant men, and some leave the country, or become migrant workers. It seems strange to me, father, that you, such a wise man as you are, and so eager for glory, would not want to accept gratefully the honor that the king has offered you. But if you think that you have a vision that we will suffer at the hands of this king and that he will become our enemy, why didn’t you fight against him in the army of the king that you used to serve? It seems unreasonable to me, to be neither Falfathinn’s enemy nor his friend.” “It went as I expected,” said Jothi, “For those who went to fight Falfathinn lightning-bolt up north in Møre. And it will be the same now as it was then, that Falfathinn will be a great harm to my kinsmen. But you, Duku, you must follow your own wishes. I don’t doubt, though you enter into Falfathinn’s army, that you will become a man considered better than a match for any other, and equal to the best in any kind of combat. But beware that you do not think too much of yourself, and that you do not fight with men greater than you. But I do not need to counsel you to be any less yielding than you are.” Then Duku pledged himself to the king and entered his following. Duku had one son. He was named Kvaeggan. Kvaeggan was then eighteen years old, a promising young man and brave. He was a good-spirited man, generous and energetic, and the best fighter. He was popular with everyone. When Jothi learned of the treachery of his son Duku, he became angry at the news, so that he stayed in his bed out of sorrow and old age. Kvaeggan came to him often and spoke to him, bade him take cheer, and said that anything would be better than to lie in bed miserably. “Rather do I think that it is a good idea, that we should take land in Iceland and set up residence there. Men can take land there for free, and choose where to build a home.” Jothi agreed soon to this idea, and they resolved to move their home and leave the country. Early in the spring they prepared their ships. They had good ships and big ones; they had in their possession two large ocean-going ships, and on each one thirty able-bodied men, in addition to women and children. They had with them all their cattle that they could bring, but no man wished to buy their land for fear of the king. And when they were ready, they sailed away. They sailed to those islands, which are called the Faroes. And on one island, which is called Dagoba, Jothi disembarked and walked away, and never came back to his ship. Kvaeggan went to look for him, but he had left no trace. Then Kvaeggan ordered everyone to search for him, but they never found him. Chapter 2: Concerning Chieftain Kvæggan Dúkússon Kvaeggan Dukusson arrived with his ship on Iceland at Nobu Valley. On the ship with him was his son, Obivan. Kvaeggan set up a homestead. In the spring he moved the homestead north over the heath and set up his home in the place called Nobu. And one night he dreamed that his grandfather Jothi came to him and said: “There you lie, Kvaeggan, and rather unwarily. Move your home away from here and west over the Nobu River. There your luck will be good.” After that he woke up and moved over the Tattuin River into Tattuin Valley, in a place later called Kvaeggan’s Place. Vatto was the name of a man who lived on the estate called Mosaesli. That is in Tattuin Valley. He had a slave woman who was named Smy. She was a widow and had a bastard son, and he was named Anakinn the Sky-Walker. She said that he was the son of a certain Fossi, a kinsman of Jothi Gormoarson, but Kvaeggan did not know this. He was called Anakinn the Sky-Walker because he could leap higher than his own height, and he leapt so high that he seemed to walk in the sky. Vatto enjoyed games and tests of strength, and he was always going on about such things. Anakinn was a combative boy and irritable, and he was a good wrestler. One year, at the beginning of winter, long after Kvaeggan had come to Iceland, a wrestling match was held in Mosaesli, and it was well-attended. Men from all over the region came, and many of Kvaeggan’s men went there too. Most prominent among them was Obivan Kvaeggansson. He was twenty years old. He had grown big and strong early in his life, and was manly in temperament, a bit dark and with an ugly nose but otherwise handsome, with long, reddish hair. He was called Viga-Obivan (Killer-Obivan
AND THOSE WHO 'HINDER THE HAPPINESS OF THE PEOPLE'. Also, it will ensure the swift crushing of any possible uprising. IT MAY ALSO HAPPEN THAT OUR NEW 'MASTERS' WILL END UP TELLING THE PEOPLE THAT THEY HAVE THE ALIENS' SUPPORT, AND THAT WE (ARE) AT THE 'EVE OF THE MILLENNIUM, A GOLDEN AGE'...... IT WILL BE THE WORST DICTATORSHIP EVER KNOWN TO MANKIND. "......IT IS QUITE CERTAIN THAT OTHER BASES HAVE BEEN BUILT IN THE UNITED STATES AND ELSEWHERE IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE. IT MAY EVEN BE THAT THE US BASES OCCUPIED BY THE GREYS, IN THE US MAINLAND, ARE OF THE SAME TYPE. ONE RUMOR HOLDS THAT A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE GREYS IS FOUND IN EACH OF THE UNDERGROUND US BASES IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE. "None of the above has anything to do with science fiction. All of what I said in this text is true, and doesn't give a very rosy picture of the future." (INPUT 003) There are many who believe that there are elements within the U.S. government who desire to make the truth known about an 'alien invasion' which is taking place on a subtle level. Apparently they realize that there is very little chance that the 'problem' can be solved without the support of the general public. One might wonder that with all of the cumbersome bureaucratic garbage which has accumulated within government, and with all the'red-tape' politics which are necessary to get many things accomplished, that it may be extremely difficult to mobilize any UNIFIED effort against possible alien aggressors. Some 'government' officials seemingly realize this dilemma and are attempting to reconcile their Constitutional oaths with other seemingly contradictory 'orders' to mis-inform the public about a very real threat. This 'what you don't know can't hurt you' philosophy simply does not work, and in the Government's efforts to suppress widespread panic (or in some cases the secrecy is implemented by non-loyal factions within government agencies based on even more sinister motives), the government may have inadvertently destroyed the 'national security' they have been led to believe they were defending. The following article, titled, "OFFICIAL DISCLOSURES HOVER ON HORIZON: PANEL FORESEES GOVERNMENT 'UNCOVER-UP'", appeared on pp. 6-7 of the Vol. 2, No. 4 issue of 'UFO' Magazine: "The controversial MJ-12 documents, if proven to be authentic, may be the beginning of a government effort to finally release UFO information to the public, according to one of the MJ-12 researchers, nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman. "One important document purports to be a top-secret briefing to President-Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower about an alleged 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico and the government's ensuing coverup of the incident. Friedman, along with colleagues Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera, is still in the process of researching the documents, but says they are reasonably convinced of their authenticity (see MJ-12 news story, last issue). "'There were actually plans to release a lot of UFO data to the public in 1973,' Friedman said. His remarks came at a panel of UFO speakers presented at the Whole Life Expo held in October in Los Angeles, California. "The first of the government's three intended steps was the production of a made-for-television movie called 'UFOs: Past, Present and Future,' which focused on government information. There were to have been two more movies made, each using only government material and gradually escalating the degree of disclosure on government involvement, maybe from sightings to bodies to who knows what,' said Friedman. "(In an later interview, Friedman's colleague Bill Moore attributed this information to producer/writer Bob Emenegger, who says he was approached by a high level government official to make the documentaries. Moore says Emenegger was invited to the Pentagon, and was given access to 800 feet of film of an alien landing at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, footage that was subsequently retrieved by a colonel when the government changed its mind about the timing of its plan. 'UFOs: Past, Present and Future' was made without the government footage, and Emenegger went on to write a book of the same title.) "'Unfortunately, right as this plan began to be implemented, a little event came along called Watergate, and it was obviously not the time to do this,' Friedman told the Expo audience. "'Remember the special circumstances of that--because they're appropriate now. Nixon had been reelected, and that meant he could not run again. Reagan is the next president to be in the situation; he cannot run again,' Friedman said, conjecturing that this could lend credence to the idea that the release of the Majestic-12 documents is the next step of that postponed release of information. "'It seems entirely likely that the government may have gotten STUCK IN A POSITION OF COVERUP A LOT LONGER THAN THEY INTENDED. When you read the MJ-12 debriefing document, it states very clearly that one of their reasons for coverup was that there had been almost a public panic in response to sightings in 1947 (Not to mention Orson Well's radio adaptation of the 'War of the Worlds', which caused quite a panic as well - Branton). "'Apparently, as long as UFO occupants' motivations weren't known, and government officials didn't know what their technology was, they felt they could not in good faith discharge their public responsibilities by telling the public "oh, by the way, there are these alien vehicles flying over our country. We don't know what they want, we don't know what they've done or will do, but we thought you ought to know."' "Friedman agrees that it would have been an irresponsible approach to dealing with the problem. 'I am by no means in favor of putting everything out on the table, especially in matters of technical detail, but that doesn't mean I don't think we ought to know what's going on.' "Indeed, Friedman is one of the key figures in a group of ufologists who are vigorously seeking to secure UFO data from government agencies. He held up one such document for the audience to see, the result of months of court appeals and denials. It was almost entirely crossed out with black felt-tip marker, deletions said to have been made in the 'Interests of national security.' "'Anytime someone tries to tell us that there is no such thing as a coverup, I say, "except what's under the felt-tip, and except what's in all of the classified material that they have refused to release,"' Friedman says, adding that government agencies have denies ufologists thousands of pages of documents relating to UFOs. "'Freedom of Information is not a magic key that unlocks all the doors, nor should it be.' "His associate Bill Moore, also on the panel, voiced another opinion as to the nature and reasons for the coverup. 'To be subjective for a moment, one has to assume that if an alien intelligence is capable of manifesting itself, as some have alleged, through channeled experiences, or 'translations of light', as I've heard them referred to today, if they're capable of manifesting to some people in a group and not others, if they're capable of appearing in people's bedrooms and walking through walls, if they're capable of erasing memories, as appears to be the case in literally hundreds of alleged abductee experiences, if they are capable of coming here across the vast distances between us and the nearby stars, and underline 'if,' then maybe, by an extension of that logic, they would be capable of MANIPULATING THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN THE RECOVERY OF THIS CRASHED VEHICLE AND THE STUDY OF IT,' said Moore." Seemingly prophetical of Moore's own words, some researchers allege that even government officials trying to release UFO information might in SOME respects be deceived by alien influences into accepting information which is false or at least misleading, whether or not such researchers or expositors are 'knowingly' spreading such forms of propaganda. Some believe that Moore is caught in the middle of a kind of tug-of-war between government officials who are interested in getting the truth to the public and others who are intent on confusing the issue and continuing the cover-up. One possible indication of this comes from a UFOlogist, B.W., who sent a copy of the so-called 'South African Affair' information describing an alleged disk-recovery operation, to William Moore. On March 13, 1990 Moore responded with the following words: "You sent me a couple of pages of material on an alleged South African case. Try checking out the two people behind the documents: Henry Azahehdel and James van Groenen. You will find that the first is a convicted smuggler who had just been released from jail when that story just surfaced, and the second is a known con man with a history of forged credentials and shady deals. Want proof? I have it." Leaders of QUEST INTERNATIONAL, the British UFO-club made up largely of ex-military, police and security officials with an interest in UFOs, argues however that such charges are misleading, and that SEVERAL people were involved in the investigation of the South African case, and that the evidence available indicates that either the incident actually occurred or the International 'Intelligence' Community is intentionally perpetrating a complex hoax for some undetermined reason. Moore also stated that, in regards to the alleged underground installation near Dulce, New Mexico: "My first trip to Dulce was in 1982... I am completely satisfied that the whole Dulce story began as government disinformation, and that there is absolutely nothing beneath Archuleta Peak. How do I know? I've been up there... The satellite photo you sent me (made in 1968) is indeed of Groom Lake, which is in 'Area 51'...'Dreamland' is a different area entirely, and lies west of Area 51." Also, Moore claims to have documentation that Frank Scully, who wrote 'BEHIND THE FLYING SAUCERS', which was one of the first books to describe an alleged disk-retrieval after an apparent 'UFO crash' near Aztec, New Mexico, was inspired by Silas M. Newton, a confidence artist, who along with his partner L. A. GeBauer systematically conned Frank Scully into writing the book. Moore offers his subscribers copies of F.B.I. files on Newton and many others. Actually, Moore seems to have unusually free access to sensitive government files on certain individuals. This in itself would indicate that he'might' have ties with certain organizations within the Intelligence Community. Incidentally William Moore, according to THE JOURNAL OF UFO INVESTIGATION, admitted that he has worked with U.S. Intelligence in Connecticut for many years. (also see: 'CRASHED UFOS; EVIDENCE IN SEARCH OF PROOF', by William L. Moore [item #1258]; 'FBI FILES ON SILAS M. NEWTON: 1941-1971' [item #4512/A]; 'FBI FILES ON LEO A. GEBAUER: 1941-1969' [item #4512/B]; 'AFOSI & MISC. DOCUMENT FILE ON AZTEC' [item #4512/C]; Available from: William L. Moore Publications & Research., 4219 West Olive Ave., Suite #247., Burbank, CA 91505.) Researcher Jason Bishop, when asked to respond to these allegations by Moore, stated: "...At his talk in L.A. on April 1st (1990) he stated that there are NO animal mutilations OR abductions! About the Aztec crash... it DID occur. Frank Scully did get bad info, but a crash DID occur... Moore says there is no base at Dulce because he has been there. How could he locate a base that is 4000 ft. in the ground? We have soundings that show large hollow areas below Archuleta Mesa (not just peak)... "Moore is WRONG about 'Dreamland; being west of area #51. Groom Lake is WITHIN 'Dreamland' (Area #51)! Do not trust Moore... He is full of dis-information... Just a few months ago John Anderson (Integrated Health Network, Inc. Tempe, AZ) witnessed 3 discs land north of Dulce. His car would not work (not even the headlights) till they left (flew away). They met a McDonell Douglass traveling Lab van and Several Security Vehicles (nearby). The Japanese witnessed discs too (at Dulce). They also videotaped 2 discs at Area #51 in Feb. '90 and broadcast it on March 24th, '90 on NIPPON TV in Japan..." So, the controversy rages on... (INPUT 004) In the April, 1991 issue of FATE magazine, there appeared the following article written by Ann Druffel, titled: 'UFOLOGY'S "MR. CONTROVERSY"?' Following are some excerpts from this lengthy article: "William L. Moore has admitted passing disinformation to ufologists. Here is the rest of the story along with some startling NEW information---Do you believe it...? "(William Moore) made the startling announcement at the 35th MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) Annual Symposium in Las Vegas, Nevada, that he and his associate, Jaime Shandera, had been part of a disinformation scheme launched by the government against Paul Bennewitz, a scientist who had set out to prove that there was ongoing UFO activity at a military base adjacent to Bennewitz' New Mexico home... "WHY HE COOPERATED - Moore asked the forum audience the question, 'If an individual, flashing credentials of an agency of your government, invited you to cooperate with him in studying UFOs, what would you do?' He admitted that he jumped in, he felt he had to find out what there was to find out. He found himself in the midst of a widespread effort on the part of several government agencies to collect data, to send this data up to higher agencies, and to disseminate DISINFORMATION among the public. "Moore differentiated between 'disinformation' and'misinformation.' Disinformation is a diversion away from the truth; it necessarily has some truth sprinkled in. Misinformation is lies, or phony information. "At this point, Moore made it plain that the disclosures he and Jaime Shandera planned to make at this forum were with the express permission of the government agents with whom they had been cooperating for several years. THE INFORMATION, HE WARNED, WOULD BE A MIXTURE OF TRUE INFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION, FOR THAT WAS THE WAY THE GOVERNMENT WORKED, EVEN IN THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM. He assured the audience he and Shandera had tried to sort out fact from fiction in order to share it with them... "According to Moore...the official government policy for the past 21 years--ever since the 'close' of Project Blue Book, which ostensibly disseminated public information about UFO sightings-- is that UFOs do not exist. Why is the government, through the '80s and up to present, still spreading falsified data? "Perhaps the most blatant example of this concerns the Roswell, New Mexico, crash of 1947. In that situation, Moore is sure that something did crash on an isolated ranch near Roswell and that the air force put out a bulletin that they had recovered a 'flying saucer.' However, the next day this was denied and a cover story about a 'balloon' was disseminated as a cover-up, a story the government has stuck by for over 40 years. "To date, after years of investigation by Moore, Stanton Friedman and others, 130 people have been contacted and interviewed in connection with the Roswell crash. More than 36 claim to have been first-hand witnesses to the situation, and some claim to have actually held the wreckage in their hands. "Some reported that dead alien bodies were recovered from parts of the wreckage which came down a few miles from the main object. These 130 source stories do not include numerous other statements made by persons whom the investigators judged to be less than honest and reliable. "Moore thinks that writing THE ROSWELL INCIDENT opened a can of worms. In September 1980, shortly after the book was published, a source to which he gave the pseudonym 'Falcon' contacted him with the offer to participate in government UFO studies. To this day, Moore is not sure what the government people's motives were or what they continue to be. Other government sources continued to contact him, and he and Shandera continued to give each source the name of a bird. In this way, the two could discuss the activities in which Moore was involved without having to worry about telephones being bugged or being overheard in public places. "Bill Moore stated with a grin, 'There are now 12 in the aviary,' [Not to be confused with MJ-12 or Majestic 12. It is merely a coincidence that the 'aviary' and the alleged Majestic 12 high-level government UFO study group each have 12 members.] (Note: Moore stated that some of his information may be misleading. For instance, other sources stated that 'MJ-12' has more than just 12 members - Branton) all credible people, well-placed as employees, scientific consultants, or intelligence agents. They hold a variety of 'need to know' security clearances, and seem to know each other. Falcon's identity still remains a mystery, but Bill describes him as very knowledgeable about UFOs. (There is an ongoing controversy in the UFO field about Falcon's true identity as demonstrated by recent letters to the editor of Fate by such UFO notables as Jerome Clark and Linda Moulton Howe.) "He went on to describe the main characteristic of each aviary member: 'Hawk is a person well-connected in areas of study in ESP since the 1960s, with impressive credentials. Blue Jay is a person close to the President of the United States, capable of checking on information to determine its reliability. Partridge is a scientist privy to UFO information collected by the government. Chickadee is well-placed in the Pentagon and versed in scientific data. Heron is enigmatic and puzzling; he seems to'speak in riddles.' Sparrow is the code name for Richard Doty, a former agent for the Air Force's Office of Scientific Information (AFOSI), and was the original go-between between Falcon and myself, and so on.' "Later, Moore stated that Doty was a small man in the operation. The process, in his opinion, started 'originally from the National Security Agency (NSA) and high levels of the AFOSI. "According to Moore's assessment, AFOSI holds prime responsibility for UFO data collection in the government. It is also responsible for planting information and disinformation on the subject. Why are they doing this if UFOs don't even exist? If it is a case of national security, why is this so? How could UFOs jeopardize the national security of the U.S.? "Of one thing Moore is sure. Government agents are faster at planting 'data' than civilians can check and verify it. Civilian UFO research finds itself in a pitiful state. Moore pinpointed the case of Paul Bennewitz as an example. The Department of Energy, the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies were interested in Bennewitz' claim that he had intercepted low-frequency electromagnetic signals which he believed originated from UFOs. "Bennewitz was a reputable scientist; his only crime, according to Moore, was his claim that he was receiving signals from UFOs. To this date it is UNCLEAR whether or not the strange signals Bennewitz was picking up actually originated from secret government projects, and had no connection with UFOs... "According to Moore, he tried to diffuse all disinformation schemes containing references to underground alien bases, UFO involvement in cattle mutilations, genetic research by aliens and government, (so-called) 'hybrid' babies, and rumors of 'aliens among us.' He recognizes such incredible rumors--as the sort of thing that was fed to Paul Bennewitz and others. Disinformation, but even more so (Note: If such things as subterranean 'alien' activity, cattle mutilations, abductions, secret government-grey interaction, genetic experimentation, and alien infiltration do exist as many claim, and the reality of which Moore denies, could this attempt to label such ideas as 'government disinformation' be a form of disinformation tactic itself, explaining why the 'Aviary' and the NSA, etc., so readily allowed Moore to speak openly when this would not seem consistent with a group of intelligence agencies involved in DECADES-OLD coverups? Remember Moore's words to the effect that anything he might tell the public may be DISINFORMATION. Veteran aviator John Lear believes this to be the case, and suggests that such denials are part of a secret government-grey 'agreement' wherein the elite'secret' government (not the U.S. Constitutional government) receives 'technology' in exchange for their promise to keep hidden from the public such activities as those listed above, including the malevolent nature of the 'greys' itself - Branton). "At the 1989 MUFON symposium in Las Vegas, Moore tried to defuse such stories, but they are still believed by some in the UFO community and by many members of the 'unsuspecting' public... "(Moore) has come to believe that ETs are more than one race. Whether they are extraterrestrial or intradimensional... they have some stake in our existence. Their agenda is their own, and to date not even the government has been advised of it. When Moore asks the aviary about this, he receives short and enigmatic answers. He has asked them about the question of UFO abductions, reports of which are flooding the UFO research field. The short answer by the aviary? 'Abductions are not happening...' (Note: According to 'abduction' expert Bud Hopkins, he was approached by the CIA and asked if he would be willing to work for them, and be their 'abduction' expert. Strange that the intelligence community would hire someone to work with abductees when 'abduction', according to them, do not exist - Branton). "...Whatever aliens are doing on Earth, they are actively manipulating us as a race. They are also manipulating our awareness of them, and this is responsible for the various groups of humans in the UFO research field who are manipulating each other! But evidently some conditioning process is at work... "(Moore) learned that government agents had tested 20 people, all civilian researchers, to see what they would do with limited information, and Moore and he were chosen as a result of their reaction to the test... "During the past decade, there have been four or five'summit meetings' of the aviary with Shandera and Moore. Once the meetings began, information flowed quite freely. Specific questions had to be asked of the right person, and the questions had to be carefully phrased. Other contacts are with just one of the aviary. "...Although the U.S. Presidents from 1947 onward have been advised of MJ-12's existence, they DO NOT control its activities. It is an INDEPENDENT entity, responsible for policies regarding UFOs and alien contact..." (INPUT 005) Mysterious informant 'Commander X' related the following information in one of his reports: "...In the revised September, 1959 edition of THE EFFECTS OF ATOMIC WEAPONS, prepared for and in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense and The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, under the direction of The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, we read about how 'complete underground placement of bases is desirable.' On page 382: 'There are apparently no fundamental difficulties in construction and operating Underground various types of important facilities. Such facilities may be placed in a suitable existing mine or a site may be excavated for the purpose.' In reference to the 'Delta' Force which allegedly supplies security for Above Top Secret projects involving 'interaction' with the aliens (greys, etc.), the government informant states: "The DELTA Group... have been seen (within the Intelligence Support Activity) with badges which have a black Triangle on a red background. "DELTA is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. It has the form of a triangle, and figures prominently in certain Masonic signs. "EACH BASE HAS ITS OWN SYMBOL. The Dulce base symbol is a triangle with the Greek letter 'Tau' (T) within it and then the symbol is inverted, so the triangle points down. "The Insignia of 'a triangle and three lateral lines' has been seen on 'Saucer (transport) Craft,' The Tri-Lateral Symbol. "Other symbols mark landing sites and 'Alien' craft..." (INPUT 006) In his book 'ANATOMY OF PHENOMENA: UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT IN SPACE - A SCIENTIFIC APPRAISAL', researcher Jacques Vallee states: "Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, wrote in 'De Grandine at Tonitrua' how in 840 AD he found the mob in Lyons lynching three men and a woman accused of landing from a cloudship from the aerial region of Magonia. The great German philologst, Jacob Grimm, about 1820 described the legend of a ship from the clouds, and Montanus, an eighteenth century writer on German folklore, told of wizards flying in the clouds, who were shot down. The belief of Beings from the skies who surveyed our earth persisted in human consciousness throughout the Middle Ages." (Comments given by 'Drake', as related by Jacques Vallee) Vallee quote's 'Drake's' translation of a manuscript, 'ANNALES LAURISSENSES' - A.D. 776,which gives some additional details on this incident: "In 927 the town of Verdun, like the whole eastern part of France, saw fiery armies appearing in the sky. Similar phenomena happened several times under King Pepin the Short, under Charlemagne (and) under Louis I, the Debonair. These sovereigns' capitularia mention penalties against creatures that travel in aerial ships. Agobard, the archbishop of Lyons, is said to have freed three men and a woman who had come down from one of these spaceships, and were accused by the mob of being emissaries sent by Grimoald, Duke of Benevento, to spoil the French harvests and vintage by their enchantments. Emperor Charlemagne's edicts forbade the perturbing of the air, provoking of storms by magical means and the practicing of mathematics... Agobard's manuscript, which can be consulted at the National Library, mentions that the astronauts captured at Lyons were obviously foreigners and that 'by an inconceivable fatality, these unfortunate people were so insane AS TO ADMIT THEY WERE WIZARDS.' The mob killed them, and their corpses were fastened to boards and thrown into the rivers... In March, 842, multicolored armies were seen marching in the sky... these sightings of INFERNAL armies were nocturnal, THEY SEVERAL TIMES ACCOMPANIED THE SIEGE OF JERUSALEM."For AT&T customers who switched to T-Mobile with a free year of DIRECTV NOW, the Un-carrier’s doing right by you with the addition of a full, free year of Hulu Bellevue, Washington – January 25, 2017 – T-Mobile (NASDAQ: TMUS) today announced they are giving a free year of Hulu to every AT&T customer who switched to the Un-carrier for a free year of DIRECTV NOW …. Because, well, as the New York Post put it, DIRECTV NOW is “a total disaster.” And as The Verge said, the streaming service “appears to be a complete mess” and “users report constant errors and a near-unusable service.” And as Tom’s Guide noted, AT&T’s over-the-top app is “sluggish, buggy and sometimes broken” and “not ready for prime time.” And, well, you get the idea. So, to make things right for those new T-Mobile customers, the Un-carrier is giving everyone who participated in this deal a free year of Hulu – an awesome streaming service that actually works – on top of their free year of DIRECTV NOW. “It turns out DIRECTV NOW is barely watchable, but we’ve got our customers’ backs! So, every former AT&T customer who took us up on our offer now gets a free year of Hulu on us – and they get to enjoy it on a faster, more advanced network with unlimited data!” said John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile. “Even I can’t believe AT&T spent $67 billion on DIRECTV and still couldn’t roll out a streaming service that worked! <shock face emoji>” T-Mobile customers love streaming video. In fact, they stream twice as much as the carrier customers. And who can blame them! When you have unlimited high-speed data – and you don’t have to share with everyone else in the family – you can watch without limits. Every former AT&T customer who signed up for a free year of DIRECTV NOW will receive a notification from T-Mobile in the coming weeks with a unique code good for a free year of Hulu Limited Commercials service. Video typically streams at 480p. On all T-Mobile plans, during congestion the top 3% of data users (>28 GB/mo.) may notice reduced speeds until next bill cycle due to data prioritization. Limited time offer; subject to change. Prompt redemption required. 1 subscription/code. About T-Mobile US, Inc. As America's Un-carrier, T-Mobile US, Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) is redefining the way consumers and businesses buy wireless services through leading product and service innovation. The Company's advanced nationwide 4G LTE network delivers outstanding wireless experiences to 71.5 million customers who are unwilling to compromise on quality and value. Based in Bellevue, Washington, T-Mobile US provides services through its subsidiaries and operates its flagship brands, T-Mobile and MetroPCS. For more information, please visit http://www.t-mobile.com. T-Mobile Media Contacts T-Mobile US Media Relations [email protected] row has broken out after a Christian printer declined to produce cards for a transgender diversity consultant over concerns that such work can be used to “marginalise” fellow believers. Joanne Lockwood ordered promotional material for the consultancy firm SEE Change Happen, which offers advice on “equality, diversity and inclusion”, the Sunday Times reported. Nigel Williams turned down a contract to print these cards, telling the diversity consultant he would be “very happy” to print for Lockwood, but not for SEE Change Happen. “The new model of diversity is used (or misused) to marginalise (or indeed discriminate against) Christians in their workplaces and other parts of society if they do not subscribe to it,” he wrote in an email. “Although I’m quite sure you have no intention of marginalising Christians it would weigh heavily upon me if through my own work I was to make pressure worse for fellow Christians.” Let Them Eat Cake: The Victimization Of Christian Bakers Signals It's Time to Fight Back http://t.co/pu5BHWeoYB pic.twitter.com/CN6ZXF9SvT — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 20, 2015 “Gobsmacked” by the response, Lockwood reported the email to police — who marked it as a “hate incident” — and asked for further investigations to be carried out, according to Portsmouth News. “I am keen that whatever happens here, it is used as an example in society to show diversity and inclusion is important,” said the consultant, who claimed to have “been the victim of some discrimination”. “I was not expecting a lecture. I disbelieved this could happen in 2017,” said the 52-year-old, who took on the identity of a transgender woman in January, adding: “I have been distraught and cried and my wife consoled me.” Lockwood denied seeking to take legal action against the printer, instead asserting that the choice to speak out was in order to “make a stand” against Williams, having met him at a networking event last month before emailing to ask if he would be interested in making cards for SEE Change Happen. The printer declined while making it clear he would be “very happy” to produce for Lockwood with regards to other ventures, but not the diversity consultancy. A spokesman for the Christian Institute, which is supporting Williams over his decision to turn down the printing contract, said the printer “made it clear he would be prepared to do work for Jo Lockwood. “But he was not prepared to do work for a business that actively promoted a cause which might impact negatively on those with a Christian faith. “The terms ‘equality’, ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ have been twisted out of all recognition in an attempt to marginalise, shame and punish Christian people,” the spokesman noted, adding that the Christian Institute has “warned of growing hostility towards people with mainstream Christian views” for years now. According to the Institute spokesman, the case bears similarities to the ruling in which a Ashers bakery was found to have breached equality laws when it refused to make a cake emblazoned with the words “Support Gay Marriage”, in 2014. The Belfast bakery’s Christian owners said they would be happy to serve the homosexual customer in the case, but had felt unable to make a cake endorsing a message that went against their beliefs.Ecuador’s decision to study the asylum petition of US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has angered the opposition and sparked fears that the United States could retaliate by hitting Ecuadoran exports. The small South American nation has been at the center of the international drama involving the former National Security Agency contractor, whose global flight from American justice has shaken US ties with a clutch of nations including Russia and China. Business leaders fear that giving Snowden asylum could prompt the United States to take retaliatory measures, with a preferential trade deal set to expire at the end of July unless Washington renews it. “We don’t have the luxury of taking the wrong steps,” the head of the Ecuadoran Business Committee, Roberto Aspiazu, told AFP. “What would we gain from giving political asylum to Snowden — confirming Ecuador’s international image as an anti-imperialist country? I don’t think we need that.” The United States is Ecuador’s main trade partner, buying 40 percent of the Andean nation’s exports, or the equivalent of $9 billion per year. Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said Tuesday that the US State Department had contacted his ministry about the case. “Since this message is only verbal for now, I have asked that they send it to us in writing so that we can take it into consideration when we analyze the asylum request of Mr. Snowden,” Patino said during a trip to Vietnam without providing more details. Snowden was believed to be on his way to Ecuador when he left Hong Kong and landed in Moscow on Sunday, but Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was still in the transit area of the Russian airport on Tuesday, though free to leave. Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa said he would take a decision on Snowden’s application “fully respecting our sovereignty” and his allies in the Congress vowed to back the leftist leader, who has often tussled with the United States in his six years in power. But the opposition lashed out at the government’s involvement in the Snowden affair, accusing Correa of double standards by defending the fugitive who revealed a broad US surveillance program while undermining freedom of the press at home. “While they want to send Ecuadorans to prison for expressing their opinion, foreigners are given asylum, which confirms the government’s double standards,” lawmaker Dalo Bucaram told reporters. Correa granted asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in August last year, allowing the Australian buster of US government secrets to take refuge in Ecuador’s embassy to London and avoid extradition to Sweden where he faces sex assault claims.Michael Pettis: Money Is Not Created Out of Thin Air A recurring conversation I have with clients concerns the ability of banks to create credit, and of governments to monetise debt, and whether this ability is the solution to or the cause of financial instability and economic crisis. Monetarists and structuralists have very different answers to that question as each side may assume an idealised version of an economy. We are normally taught that banks allocate credit by lending the money that savers have deposited in the banking system, but in fact banks create deposits in the banking system by creating credit, so it seems to many as if they can create demand out of nothing. Similarly, if governments are able to create money, and if they can borrow in their own currency, they can easily monetise debt, seemingly at no cost, by printing the money they need to repay the debt – or by crediting bank accounts, which amounts to the same thing. This means that when they borrow, rather than repay by raising taxes in the future, all they have to do is monetise the debt by printing the money needed to repay it. It seems that governments too can create demand out of nothing, simply by deficit spending. There is a rising consensus – correct, I think – that the misuse of these two processes – which together are what we mean by endogenous money – were at the heart of the debt surge that was mischaracterised as “the Great Moderation.” For example, in a book published earlier this month, Between Debt and the Devil, in which he provides a description of the rise of debt financing in the four decades before the 2008-09 crisis, Adair Turner specifies these two as fundamental to the rising role of finance in the global economy. He writes: “…in modern economics we have essentially two ways to produce permanent increases in nominal demand: either government fiat money creation or private credit money creation.” I am less than half-way through this very interesting book, so I am not sure how he addresses the main characteristics of debt, nor whether he is able to explain how much debt is excessive. He invokes the work of Hyman Minsky often enough, however, to suggest that unlike traditional economists he fully recognizes the importance of debt. And it is because of this importance that the tremendous confusion about what it means to create demand out of nothing is dangerous. When banks or governments create demand “out of thin air”, either by creating bank loans, or by deficit spending, they are always doing one or more combinations of two things. In some easily specified cases they are simply transferring demand from one sector of the economy to themselves. In other equally easily specified cases, they are creating demand for goods and services by simultaneously creating the production of those goods and services. They never simply create demand “out of thin air”, as many analysts seem to think, as doing so would violate the basic accounting identity that equates total savings in a closed system with
” Lamar and friends bring Compton to the lawn of the White House, a judge with x’d-out eyes lying at their feet. Both works were created in the shadow of Obama, and they are shadowed by the illusion sustained by a black President, and by the fear of being absorbed into that illusion. Even though “The Sellout” is set during the Obama Presidency, it feels as if it were incubated during the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, with their contestations over these new vectors of identity and authenticity. Back then, there were few accusations quite as withering as branding someone a “sellout.” At a basic level, selling out meant turning your back on the community that shaped you, whether it was the local punk underground or black America as a whole—not that these forms of compromise were equal. But the discourse around selling out assumed a kind of purity in remaining marginal, as though something vital would be lost in that transition from periphery to core. It was a way of insuring that people were true not just to themselves but to an abstract belief in the bonds of community as well. At different times, Booker T. Washington, the N.A.A.C.P., Michael Jordan, and black conservatives have been branded sellouts. The concept is a pillar of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin_._” It’s a theme that’s been parsed by Malcolm X, the Geto Boys, and Oprah Winfrey. It’s an unnamed fear that underlies “To Pimp.” But the notion of betrayal, as Randall Kennedy remarked in his book on the subject, assumes that the sellout was inside the community to begin with. There’s a scene in “The Sellout” where BonBon recalls seeing a black comedian roast a white audience member for laughing at one of his jokes in an inappropriate way. It’s inspired by Dave Chappelle, who famously walked away from his TV show after he began suspecting that white people were laughing at rather than with him. We have to protect “our thing,” the comedian in “The Sellout” exclaims, which sounded good enough at the time to BonBon. But gradually he began to wonder: What did this mean, “our thing?” How could we serve and protect something so ephemeral, so mystical? “Loving you is complicated,” Lamar muses on “u,” a dizzying look in the mirror and what it reflects. His album seeks to understand what happens once “our thing” becomes someone else’s property. Perhaps the question, then, is not what it looks like to succeed, to be on the inside. After all, those who couldn’t understand Chappelle’s investment in the sanctity of “our thing”—his desire to keep that unmitigated piece of himself—branded the comedian as “crazy.” Rather, it’s the desires and the anxieties that are unlocked with each unprecedented step taken in the name of progress. It’s the experience of that success, how we live within and alongside it. Ellis’s bold call in “The New Black Aesthetic,” for example, came during the culture wars, a time when identity politics were in flux. How will future generations conceptualize art in the age of Obama? How has his exceptional rise animated projects like the sitcom “Black-ish,” the movie “Dear White People,” Kara Walker’s sugar sphinx, Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” or Beatty’s “The Sellout,” where BonBon’s very blackness is put on trial? What of “To Pimp” and recent albums by D’Angelo and Kanye West that brood over twenty-first-century blackness at a time when Macklemore and Iggy Azalea sit comfortably in the musical mainstream? What can it possibly mean to “sell out” in this context, assuming you still take seriously such a term? The history of selling out is an index of all that was once unimaginable, all that a previous generation presumed would never possibly sell. Perhaps that’s why the term is no longer so charged. If the notion of selling out once demarcated that hazy zone between fantasy and reality, the exceptional and all the rest, then today we inhabit a moment that, on the surface, far exceeded anyone’s dreams. This is the desperation that drives “To Pimp” and “The Sellout” toward darkness. What does it mean to speak of protecting or compromising “our thing” when someone is always there to remind you that the most powerful man in America is black? The only solution is to opt out altogether—to reckon with that contradiction rather than pretend we can resolve it. “I’m not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is,” BonBon observes near the end of “The Sellout,” “but whatever it is, it doesn’t sell. On the surface Unmitigated Blackness is a seeming unwillingness to succeed.” Again, if only it were so simple. For the hero of Beatty’s frenzied novel, being branded a sellout is a way of being disciplined. Instead of being chastened, he pursues the audacity of hopelessness, a “nihilism that makes life worth living.” What did he turn his back on? Broken promises and the leaders who try and convince us that things are otherwise. All of which makes the Sellout’s odyssey, from a willfully forgotten black suburb to the highest court in the land, so perfect. He reaches the inside. Sometimes you need to holler. Sometimes you need to write lines so outlandish and full of truth-seeking that they slice through the fray. It will seem crazy, and that’s the curse of shouting from the periphery. A few blocks away from the Supreme Court, Kendrick Lamar is on the lawn of the White House, unwilling to be merely a rapper. His style can be copied, but there is something pure, something unmitigated, in his core—something that can’t be sold or sold out. That’s the part of him that makes him a leader. A character in a novel, a rapper at the mountaintop—they’re both in places that were never intended for them. BonBon lights up a joint, kicks his feet onto the table, and enjoys the moment. How much worse could things possibly get?“Ben-Hur” could lose $100 million after collapsing at the box office last weekend. The biblical epic cost well over $100 million to produce and tens of millions to market and distribute globally. That amounts to a hefty price, one that stands little chance of being recouped following “Ben-Hur’s” paltry $11.2 million domestic debut. The film will be lucky to top out at $30 million when it finishes its stateside run, and will almost certainly shed screens next weekend as theaters try to move more popular films onto that real estate. Those estimates come from executives at rival studios. Sources close to the film, however, believe the ultimate losses will likely be between $60 million and $75 million, because they think that the film could do well on DVD and other home entertainment platforms. “Ben-Hur” seemed to resonate more strongly in the South, particularly with faith-based consumers. Overseas, “Ben-Hur” may fare better. The film kicked off to $10.7 million from 18 international markets, representing 31% of territories where the movie will ultimately roll out. It could do $100 million of business overseas by the time it ends its run. It’s not clear what percentage of that will flow back to the film’s backers. Domestically, studios get roughly half of a film’s ticket sales, but internationally it varies by territory. Sources at rival studios put the film’s break-even point at approximately $250 million globally. Related ‘Ben-Hur’: 5 Reasons the Biblical Epic is Summer’s Biggest Flop Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had some recent success with “Barbershop: The Next Cut” and the romantic drama “Me Before You,” put up more than half of the film’s budget with Paramount chipping in the rest and foreign distributors defraying production costs, sources say. Warner Bros. was originally approached to partner on the film, but passed, according to an individual with knowledge of the matter. The studios’ financial risk was somewhat off-set by some foreign pre-sales, which helped reduce their overall exposure. “Ben-Hur” follows a prince who seeks revenge against the Roman soldier who betrayed him by becoming a chariot racer. The film is the latest adaptation of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.” A 1959 version with Charlton Heston was a box office smash and scored an Oscar for best picture. That latest iteration stars Jack Huston and Morgan Freeman, with Timur Bekmambetov, who previously oversaw “Wanted,” directing. “Ben-Hur’s” backers courted religious leaders extensively, holding a series of tastemaker screenings and producing spots with pastors and other figures from the Christian community espousing the film’s biblical values. Paramount has had a rough run at the box office. It will likely make money on “Star Trek Beyond,” but it failed to draw crowds to “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” “Zoolander 2” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.” Paramount’s financial performance is expected to come under much closer scrutiny by parent Viacom, whose board is planning to meet soon with its management to review the studio’s 2016 performance and 2017 budget.A proposal outlining the industrial benefits Boeing is prepared to deliver to Canadian companies in exchange for a sole-source interim fighter jet contract will land on desks at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada on Wednesday. The pitch is being made even though the Liberal government has suspended discussions with the U.S. aerospace giant over a separate trade complaint and is reviewing the military purchase, which Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan has claimed is urgent. The proposal deadline renews concerns about the Liberal government's plan to replace the air force's aging fleet of CF-18s on both an interim basis and a long-term plan. Buying 18 advanced Super Hornet fighters was described as necessary last fall in order for the air force to meet all of its obligations under both Norad and NATO simultaneously. The government told Boeing last fall that it wanted delivery of the first jet by 2019. "If that is the case, the clock is ticking mighty fast," said Dave Perry, a Canadian Global Affairs Institute analyst who tracks defence procurements. The government intended to purchase the Super Hornets as a stopgap until it could organize a full-blown competition to buy 88 advanced jet fighters on a permanent basis. Perry said the falling out with Boeing has broader implications than just the interim purchase. "I cannot see how this is not negatively impacting progress on the competition," he said. Unfolding commercial battle Boeing's commercial division has been engaged in a public battle with Canadian aerospace company Bombardier. The U.S. aircraft maker accuses Quebec-based Bombardier of being subsidized by the government, allowing it to sell its CSeries aircraft at well below cost. In Washington, the U.S. Commerce Department is weighing whether to impose tariffs on Bombardier — a decision is expected at the end of September. The Liberals, in a series of public rebukes, have called on Boeing to withdraw the complaint, saying the fighter jet deal requires "a trusted partner." Talks over technical issues and benefits were suspended. The government also made a show of snubbing Boeing officials at the recent Paris air show. Despite that, defence industry sources say, the company is expected to deliver its proposal on time. A briefing note prepared for Navdeep Bains, minister of innovation, science and economic development, says buying fighter jets from Boeing could result in 'high value economic benefits for Canadian industry.' (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press) Federal officials have been tight-lipped about whether the interim purchase will proceed, bouncing questions from CBC News between different departments. "Our government has been clear that Boeing has not been behaving like a trusted partner, and that we are reviewing current military procurements that relate to Boeing," Karl Sasseville, a spokesperson for the innovation minister said in an email to CBC. "No decisions have been made at this time with regard to the potential purchase of an interim fleet of Super Hornet jets." Benefits to Canadian companies Since Canada had planned to buy the aircraft directly from the Pentagon through a government-to-government sale, there are no guaranteed benefits for Canadian companies. Any benefits forthcoming would depend on what the federal government manages to negotiate with Boeing. Documents obtained under federal Access to Information legislation show the federal government requested a benefits proposal on March 20, and officials had high expectations. "The potential procurement is a unique opportunity to seek high value economic benefits for Canadian industry," says a March 15, 2017, briefing note for Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains. "As such, an ambitious negotiating strategy has been prepared that relates to … supplier development, innovation and aerospace global value chains." High hopes Officials said they believed their goals were "targeted and realistic," and informed by an analysis of what Boeing and other contractors could bring to Canada. The government intended to "seek a high ratio of [research and development] projects." Heavily censored background papers attached to the briefing notes seem to suggest the government saw the in-service support contracts, rather than the actual purchase of the fighter jets, as having the larger economic opportunity for Canada. All of those high hopes were set out before the dispute over Bombardier subsidies.The deep sea is filled with scaly and gelatinous creatures feasting on each other — and now we have an unprecedented view into this cannibalistic all-you-can-eat buffet. Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have analyzed 30 years’ worth of videos taken by underwater robots off the coast of California, to better understand who’s eating whom in the deep sea. Their findings, recently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show that jellyfish are key predators, gobbling up a great variety of other species. One type of jelly for instance, in the genus Solmissus, was observed feasting on at least 22 different types of prey, from krill to worms to other jellyfish. That’s “pretty incredible for something that just looks like a clear dinner plate,” says study co-author Anela Choy, a postdoctoral fellow at MBARI. Historically, scientists have been studying what deep-sea animals have for dinner by catching fish, opening them up, and literally counting what’s inside their guts. That has some obvious limitations: how easy can it be to identify a partially digested species? Gelatinous animals are in a particularly tough spot, because they decompose faster once they’re eaten and also easily dissolve once caught in nets. To solve these problems, scientists have been using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). These underwater robots can dive deeper than two miles, and take high-definition videos of whatever creatures are doing down there — including their meal times. Choy and her colleagues analyzed thousands of hours of footage of almost 800 instances of animals feeding on each other, from tentacled siphonophores grasping little fish to transparent jellyfish gobbling up red shrimp. The scenes don’t get too gory, according to Choy. Having spent lots of hours slicing up fish to study their gut contents, “I’m sort of numb to the gore,” Choy tells The Verge. But they are sometimes shocking. Last July, Choy was on a ship off the shore of Monterey Bay, looking at the video footage transmitted by an ROV many feet below. A Gonatus squid was spotted sucking off the face of a “really huge dragonfish,” she says. “It took a little while to figure out what’s going on here, who’s eating whom, how is this going to end?” (The squid won.) Overall, the videos revealed just how ravenous gelatinous creatures like comb jellies and medusae are, playing a critical role in the ocean food web. “Food webs are the backbone of our understanding of all life in the ocean,” Choy tells The Verge. And if we understand how animals are connected through feeding, then we can better understand how to conserve species and ecosystems, she says. So in a way, the tuna sandwich you eat is brought to you by the feeding frenzy happening in the dark recesses of the ocean. For your enjoyment, here are some more postcards from that deep-ocean buffet. Bon appétit!Back in 2006, the compiler in Ubuntu was patched to enable most build-time security-hardening features (relro, stack protector, fortify source). I wasn’t able to convince Debian to do the same, so Debian went the route of other distributions, adding security hardening flags during package builds only. I remain disappointed in this approach, because it means that someone who builds software without using the packaging tools on a non-Ubuntu system won’t get those hardening features. Think of a sysadmin trying the latest nginx, or a vendor like Valve building games for distribution. On Ubuntu, when you do that “./configure && make” you’ll get the features automatically. Debian, at the time, didn’t have a good way forward even for package builds since it lacked a concept of “global package build flags”. Happily, a solution (via dh) was developed about 2 years ago, and Debian package maintainers have been working to adopt it ever since. So, while I don’t think any distro can match Ubuntu’s method of security hardening compiler defaults, it is valuable to see the results of global package build flags in Debian on the package archive. I’ve had an on-going graph of the state of build hardening on both Ubuntu and Debian for a while, but only recently did I put together a comparison of a default install. Very few people have all the packages in the archive installed, so it’s a bit silly to only look at the archive statistics. But let’s start there, just to describe what’s being measured. Here’s today’s snapshot of Ubuntu’s development archive for the past year (you can see development “opening” after a release every 6 months with an influx of new packages): Here’s today’s snapshot of Debian’s unstable archive for the past year (at the start of May you can see the archive “unfreezing” after the Wheezy release; the gaps were my analysis tool failing): Ubuntu’s lines are relatively flat because everything that can be built with hardening already is. Debian’s graph is on a slow upward trend as more packages get migrated to dh to gain knowledge of the global flags. Each line in the graphs represents the count of source packages that contain binary packages that have at least 1 “hit” for a given category. “ELF” is just that: a source package that ultimately produces at least 1 binary package with at least 1 ELF binary in it (i.e. produces a compiled output). The “Read-only Relocations” (“relro”) hardening feature is almost always done for an ELF, excepting uncommon situations. As a result, the count of ELF and relro are close on Ubuntu. In fact, examining relro is a good indication of whether or not a source package got built with hardening of any kind. So, in Ubuntu, 91.5% of the archive is built with hardening, with Debian at 55.2%. The “stack protector” and “fortify source” features depend on characteristics of the source itself, and may not always be present in package’s binaries even when hardening is enabled for the build (e.g. no functions got selected for stack protection, or no fortified glibc functions were used). Really these lines mostly indicate the count of packages that have a sufficiently high level of complexity that would trigger such protections. The “PIE” and “immediate binding” (“bind_now”) features are specifically enabled by a package maintainer. PIE can have a noticeable performance impact on CPU-register-starved architectures like i386 (ia32), so it is neither patched on in Ubuntu, nor part of the default flags in Debian. (And bind_now doesn’t make much sense without PIE, so they usually go together.) It’s worth noting, however, that it probably should be the default on amd64 (x86_64), which has plenty of available registers. Here is a comparison of default installed packages between the most recent stable releases of Ubuntu (13.10) and Debian (Wheezy). It’s clear that what the average user gets with a default fresh install is better than what the archive-to-archive comparison shows. Debian’s showing is better (74% built with hardening), though it is still clearly lagging behind Ubuntu (99%): © 2014, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) has become notorious for his comments about rape, but there are many other good reasons to consider him one of the most recklessly dangerous pols in the nation. Fresh revelations about his criminal record and his approval of proponents of anti-abortion violence are now coming out almost daily. Josh Glassteter at People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch has come up with video that demonstrates how this is so. The National Journal is now reporting that Akin was arrested at least 8 times in connection with anti-abortion protests in he 80s -- including an instance in which he was blocking access to a clinic, refused to leave and had to be "carried out by police." A few days after the 1993 assassination of Florida abortion provider, Dr. David Gunn, Akin's longtime anti-abortion/militia pal, Tim Dreste, stood in front of the clinic of abortion provider Dr. Yogrenda Shah with a sign stating: "Dr. Shah, are you feeling under the Gunn?" Here is the video: A few months later, Akin contributed $200 to Dreste's dark horse race for state representative.With the Labour Day weekend now over, the federal election campaign moves into its second phase. It starts with the three major parties locked in a close race, but the longer term trends point to the Liberals coming out of the first phase with the momentum — and the Conservatives on the decline. The New Democrats still hold the lead in the CBC Poll Tracker, as they have since the start of the campaign. The party is averaging 32.4 per cent support, with the Liberals following in second at 30.2 per cent and the Conservatives at 26.9 per cent. Compared with where the averages stood on Aug. 2, when the campaign officially kicked off, this represents a drop of 0.8 percentage points for the NDP, a slide of four points for the Conservatives, and a gain of 4.6 points for the Liberals. The trend line has generally been positive for the Liberals since the start of the campaign, and that of the Conservatives negative. The New Democrats, however, have been wobbling up and down. Their lead over the second-place party has been as narrow as 1.3 percentage points and as wide as 9.3 points over the past month. The polls have also been somewhat inconsistent, at least on the face of it. Some have given the New Democrats a wide lead, others have shown the three parties clustered within the margin of error. But though the polls may be in some disagreement on the precise state of the race, they are showing broad agreement on how this campaign is unfolding. Seven pollsters have been in the field in the weeks prior to the campaign launch and during the campaign itself. Across all of these seven sets of polls, the parties are showing similar trends. The New Democrats have been posting either steady or fluctuating results, with little discernible trend in one direction or another. For the Conservatives, the polls have all been showing stagnant or negative trends, with five of the seven pollsters posting the Conservatives at lower numbers now (often significantly so) compared with where they were prior to the campaign launch. All seven pollsters have the Liberals with more support in their latest soundings than their last pre-campaign survey. A minority government, but of what hue? The polls are also all pointing toward a minority government, and with the NDP leading it has the inside track. The party is currently projected to win between 108 and 137 seats, with the average projection awarding it 122. The Liberals are now not far behind, with a projected range of between 90 and 125 seats (or 114 on average). Narrowly in the rear are the Conservatives, with between 89 and 125 seats (or 101 on average). While that suggests the NDP is the favourite to win at this stage, the performance of the polls in past elections (as reflected in the seat ranges) show that, if an election were held today, no bet on who would win would be a safe one. The changes in the seat counts since the start of the campaign align with the polls. The New Democrats have hardly budged (they were projected to win between 116 and 143 seats on Aug. 2), but the Conservative range has dropped by 23 seats, and the Liberals' has increased by about 30. The regional breakdowns show how each party's hopes are based on particular parts of the country. The New Democrats are slated to win almost half (58 to 64) of their seats in Quebec, with 20 to 25 in British Columbia and 18 to 28 in Ontario. The Liberals take half of theirs in Ontario (43 to 64), while winning 18 to 22 in Atlantic Canada and 10 to 14 in Quebec. The Conservatives are projected to win 36 to 54 seats in Ontario, 28 to 31 in Alberta, and 14 to 18 in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Ontario key to Liberal/Conservative standings If the Liberals are on the upswing and the Conservatives are on the downswing, it is primarily due to Ontario. The Liberals have been making gains in British Columbia and the Prairies during this campaign, but the bulk of their increase has come from Ontario — and most of that from the Conservatives. The Liberals currently lead in the province with 37 per cent, a gain of almost nine percentage points since the campaign's kickoff. The Conservatives have been consistently dropping in Ontario, falling five points to 30 per cent. The NDP has seen less movement overall (though it has gone through ups and downs in the polls), down just under four points to 27 per cent. The New Democrats still lead in British Columbia, but have dropped almost five points there to fall to 36 per cent. The Liberals are running second with 29 per cent, a gain of six points, while the Conservatives have dropped four points to 24 per cent. The Greens are polling at their best in this region, up 3.5 points since the start of the campaign to 11 per cent. The NDP has also seen weaker numbers in Alberta and the Prairies, benefiting the Conservatives in the former and the Liberals in the latter. But making up for these losses in the West has been an NDP surge in Quebec. The party started the campaign in good form in the province, and has since seen its support there balloon by nine points to 45 per cent. The Liberals follow with 21 per cent, down two points, while the Bloc Québécois is floundering with 16 per cent support (down three points). The Conservatives are in fourth in the province with 14 per cent. These regional shifts show how fluid the race continues to be. On the whole, the Conservatives are down and the Liberals are up, with the NDP holding steady. But the Liberals are down in Quebec while the Conservatives are up in Alberta, and the NDP is gaining in Quebec while dropping in the West. These shifts all have serious implications in the seat count: further gains by the NDP in Quebec and the Conservatives in Alberta do little to improve their seat totals when they already dominate these provinces. Incremental gains in Ontario and British Columbia, where there are more seats at play, pay greater dividends. And for now, that is where the Liberals are improving their position. The poll numbers in this campaign will continue to go up and down between now and Oct. 19. But the second phase, despite some movement in the preceding weeks, starts with no clearer indication than there was on Aug. 2 of who will prevail. CBC's Poll Tracker aggregates all publicly released polls, weighing them by sample size, date and the polling firm's accuracy record. Upper and lower ranges are based on how polls have performed in other recent elections. The seat projection model makes individual projections for all ridings in the country, based on regional shifts in support since the 2011 election and taking into account other factors such as incumbency. The projections are subject to the margins of error of the opinion polls included in the model, as well as the unpredictable nature of politics at the riding level. The polls included in the model vary in size, date and method, and have not been individually verified by the CBC. You can read the full methodology here.Jemele Hill’s two-week suspension is scheduled to end on Oct. 23. The likelihood is she will come to work that day in Bristol, CT. and continue to co-anchor the 6 p.m. ET edition of SportsCenter for the foreseeable future. But I believe her tenure as a SportsCenter anchor is effectively over. I also think her time as an ESPN employee is down to months rather than years. Hill cannot feel that she has management’s unwavering support given the events of the last month—and ESPN management clearly has limits to the speech it will allow from front-facing talent on social media, and particularly those representing the SportsCenter brand. Then there is the show itself, dubbed SC6. What Hill and co-host Michael Smith envisioned, what made their chemistry honest and unique on the ESPN2 show His and Hers and their podcasts together, is being slowly chopped away by the addition of segments you see on traditional SportsCenter shows. Those include interviews with reporters in the field and blocks that feature the kind of short, bite-sized takes viewers get on shows such as Around The Horn. Multiple people told me last week that there is an effort to bring in ESPN talent as guests with opinions counter to the hosts. If I had to bet, I would bet that at this time next year the 6 p.m. ET slot is either a standard version of SportsCenter or some sort of PTI-extension. I would also bet that Hill is elsewhere. What do the parties say? I’ve reached out repeatedly to ESPN to speak with the senior management who made the decision on Hill. That includes ESPN president John Skipper and ESPN executive vice president Connor Schell. I’ve been repeatedly declined. Hill is also declining comment. The end of SC6 is simply my prediction from observing ESPN for years. I have no specific reporting that says it is done. That opinion is shared—and was first posited long before I came to it—by James Andrew Miller, the author of a best-selling oral history on ESPN Those Guys Have All The Fun. He was one of the guests this week on the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast along with Brooklyn Nets analyst Sarah Kustok. Miller said he believes there is a fundamental flaw in assigning opinion-first talent to SportsCenter. “I don’t think it is going to make it,” Miller said. “I think it was an experiment where the [SportsCenter] brand is being challenged technologically and by a host of other challenges in the marketplace, and they were trying to figure out ways to rescue it in a different way. You know what? That is great. That is what networks and executives are supposed to do. You try things and you don’t necessarily bat 1.000%. I think in this case, I think there is enough evidence and minds along the road to say we tried and we are going to figure out something different. If there is one takeaway from this whole SC6 experiment it is to make sure that if you are going to have someone with bold opinions and lot of gumption that you put them in an environment do that.” It was interesting to look back this week at the Jan. 30, 2017 press release when Hill and Smith were announced as the hosts of a re-imagined version of SportsCenter. This was when management was touting boldly that ESPN had made a strategic shift in thinking to rebuild the SportsCenter franchise around what one of its executives termed “personalities and conceits that work for specific audiences.” Here is part of that release: “With a format geared to fit Smith and Hill’s personalities, along with a specially-designed set and its own music, The Six will be different from any other SportsCenter produced since ESPN’s first telecast of its signature news and information program in 1979. Debuting on the day after the Super Bowl, the premiere episode of the weekday offering will be hailed with an hour-long simulcast on ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNEWS. Smith and Hill, who previously co-hosted ESPN2’s His & Hers and will be the first African-American duo to host SportsCenter on a regular basis, will combine some of the best elements of their previous program with SportsCenter for the new show, including a deliberate and well-paced conversational format in which they discuss sports topics, news, culture and social issues. The program will continue SportsCenter’s focus on news of the day and breaking news as warranted. “I’m most excited for the viewers to see how much freedom we are going to have,” said Smith, who’s been with ESPN since 2004. That was only eight months ago, but it feels like a lifetime given the news cycles since Hill’s series of tweets on President Donald Trump last month, and another series of tweets following Dallas Cowboys owner and GM Jerry Jones saying his players will stand for the national anthem and not disrespect the flag, and if they don't, the player or players will not play. Of all its selective discipline for on-air talent over the years, ESPN management has made it very clear that the subject where it offers little flexibility for employees is when management believes an employee has said something that could impact the company’s bottom line. Skipper said as much in his statement to employees following Hill’s series of tweets on Trump. He never publicly supported Hill in the statement. He did, however, sound like Triple H of the WWE in one of his sentences. “We had a violation of those standards in recent days and our handling of this is a private matter,” Skipper wrote. “As always, in each circumstance we look to do what is best for our business.” The moment I read that statement is the moment I believed Hill’s ESPN tenure was coming to an end. As far as the viewership of the show, management knows that any replacement for SC6 will not produce a magic bullet. Douglas Pucci of Programming Insider and Awful Announcing has charted ESPN studio shows over the past couple of years. What he found was that ratings movements (ups or downs) are generally parallel to those of its PTI lead-in (which is down double digits since 2015). I’ve said this repeatedly: ESPN’s studio shows in the afternoon are only trending one way long-term and that is down. That will be the case long after whenever Hill and Smith depart too. For the week of Sept. 26-29, 2017, Pucci’s last post on ESPN ratings, SC6 averaged 508,000 viewers including 277,000 adults 18-49. One year earlier in the same week (Sep. 27-30 & Oct. 2), the SportsCenter 6:00 p.m. show averaged 475,000 and 245,000 adults 18-49. That is a 6.9 percent increase in overall viewership. You can also find weeks where the show is down: For example: For Sep. 12-15, 2017, SC6 averaged 448,000 viewers, down 20.2 percent from the 562,000 viewers for the corresponding week in 2016 when Hill and Smith were not hosts. The show averaged 408,000 viewers (and 215,000 adults 18-49) from Oct. 3-6, 2017. That was down from 477,000 from Oct. 4-7, 2016, per Pucci. Then there are the weeks that are flat: The 6:00 p.m. SportsCenter averaged 469,000 viewers for Oct 11-13, 2016. Last week, from Oct. 10-12, it averaged 463,000 viewers. I've talked a lot with Hill over the years about a number of topics in sports media, from sexism to race to sports media people discussing social issues on Twitter. I find her to be one of the most honest brokers I deal with in sports media. This quote from August 2017, from her to me, always stood out: “It’s very important to make the distinction between politics and commentary, information and discussion of social issues,” she said. “I find that the majority of what comes into my timeline is related to social issues. Nobody is dying to engage in a discussion about repeal and replace, at least not with me. The percentage of people who want to discuss social issues has, however, increased substantially. Everyone is consumed with what's happening in our country right now. I don’t tweet a lot about politics. I do tweet more about social issues, which I consider to be issues of morality. Racism isn’t politics. Racism is an issue of right and wrong. Tweeting about significant issues that impact marginalized people isn’t politics. That's right and wrong. If I had to guess, I would say I’ve increased my tweets about social issues about 20%. I’ve tried really hard not to let these issues consume my feed, because there are a lot of days where I just want to have fun on Twitter. I want to debate with Power and Insecure fans about what's happening on the show. I want to make jokes and have silly sports arguments, but unfortunately those days feel like they happen less.” THE NOISE REPORT (SI.com examines some of the week’s most notable sports media stories) 1. Incredible work by Andrés Cantor of Telemundo last week as he simultaneously called three World Cup qualifying games of meaning: Honduras-Mexico, Trinidad & Tobago-United States and Panama-Costa Rica. Telemundo showed a triple box in the second half and Cantor morphed between them. “I mainly tried to focus on the three teams that—if they scored—changed the entire equation,” Cantor said in an email. “We had decided in pre-production that if two games had implications, we would show those. As it happened all three had everyone’s chances on the line until the final whistle. I mainly focused on the attacks of the teams that needed a goal and on the defensive plays of the teams that needed not to concede. It was challenging to say the least but a great way to show all the drama at once." Cantor said a similar situation happened to him while calling the World Cup in France in 1998. “Mexico was losing to Holland in the last group match and was being eliminated,” Cantor said. “They needed help from South Korea that was playing Belgium simultaneously so I called every South Korean attack and then every Mexico attack. When Luis Hernández scored the tying goal at the 90’ minute, we dissolved full to the Mexico game and stayed with it until the end since they were securing their qualification to the next round.” Here’s a podcast I did with Cantor on how he approaches his
and began working at a tomato farm in Marshall, Texas.[38] It was hard work in the heat and Heisman was losing money.[39][40] He was contacted by Walter Riggs, then the manager of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn University) football team. Auburn was looking for a football coach, and Heisman was suggested to Riggs by his former player at Oberlin, Penn's then-captain Carl S. Williams.[39] For a salary of $500, he accepted a part-time job as a "trainer".[38] Heisman coached football at Auburn from 1895 to 1899. Auburn's yearbook, the Glomerata, in 1897 stated "Heisman came to us in the fall of '95, and the day on which he arrived at Auburn can well be marked as the luckiest in the history of athletics at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute."[41] At Auburn, Heisman had the idea for his quarterback to call out "hike" or "hep" to start a play and receive the ball from the center, or to draw the opposing team into an offside penalty.[42] He also used a fake snap to draw the other team offsides.[43] He began his use of a type of delayed buck play where an end took a hand-off, then handed the ball to the halfback on the opposite side, who rushed up the middle.[42] As a coach, Heisman "railed and snorted in practice, imploring players to do their all for God, country, Auburn, and Heisman. Before each game he made squadmen take a nonshirk, nonflinch oath."[44] Due to his fondness for Shakespeare, he would sometimes use a British accent at practice.[41] While it was then illegal to coach from the sidelines during a game, Heisman would sometimes use secret signals with a bottle or a handkerchief to communicate with his team.[38] 1895 [ edit ] Auburn vs. Georgia in 1895 Heisman's first game as an Auburn coach came against Vanderbilt. Heisman had his quarterback Reynolds Tichenor use the "hidden ball trick" to tie the game at 6 points.[45][46] However, Vanderbilt answered by kicking a field goal and won 9–6, making it the first game of Southern football decided by a field goal.[47] In the rivalry game with Georgia, Auburn won 16–6. Georgia coach Pop Warner copied the hidden ball trick, and in 1903, his Carlisle team famously used it to defeat Harvard.[48][49] Earlier in the 1895 season, Heisman witnessed one of the first illegal forward passes when Georgia faced North Carolina in Atlanta. Georgia was about to block a punt when UNC's Joel Whitaker tossed the ball out of desperation, and George Stephens caught the pass and ran 70 yards for a touchdown.[50][51] Georgia coach Pop Warner complained to the referee that the play was illegal, but the referee let the play stand because he did not see the pass.[51] Later, Heisman became one of the main proponents of making the forward pass legal. 1896 [ edit ] 1896 Auburn team, Heisman standing on the right Lineman Marvin "Babe" Pearce had transferred to Auburn from Alabama, and Reynolds Tichenor was captain of the 1896 Auburn team, which beat Georgia Tech 45–0.[52] Auburn players greased the train tracks the night before the game. Georgia Tech's train did not stop until Loachapoka, and the Georgia Tech players had to walk the 5 miles back to Auburn.[53] This began a tradition of students parading through the streets in their pajamas, known as the "Wreck Tech Pajama Parade".[54] Auburn finished the season by losing 12–6 to Pop Warner's Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association champion Georgia team, which was led by quarterback Richard Von Albade Gammon.[55] Auburn received its first national publicity when Heisman was able to convince Harper's Weekly to publish the 1896 team's photo.[38] 1897 [ edit ] The 1897 Auburn team featured linemen Pearce and John Penton, a transfer from Virginia.[56] Of its three games, one was a scoreless tie against Sewanee, from "The University of the South" in Tennessee.[57] Another was a 14–4 defeat of Nashville, which featured Bradley Walker.[58] Tichenor had transferred to Georgia. Gammon moved to fullback and died in the game against Virginia.[59] Auburn finished the 1897 football season $700 in debt, and in response, Heisman took on the role of a theater producer and staged the comedic play David Garrick.[60] 1898 [ edit ] Having made enough money for another football season, the 1898 team won two out of three games, with its loss coming against undefeated North Carolina.[57] After falling behind 13–4 to Georgia, Heisman started using fullback George Mitcham, and won the game 18–17.[56][61] 1899 [ edit ] The 1899 team, which Heisman considered his best while at Auburn,[56] was led by fullback Arthur Feagin and ran an early version of the hurry-up offense. As Heisman recalled, "I do not think I have ever seen so fast a team as that was."[62] Auburn was leading Georgia by a score of 11–6 when the game was called due to darkness, lighting not being available at that time, resulting in an official scoreless tie.[63] Heisman fitted his linemen with straps and handles under their belts so that the other linemen could hold onto them and prevent the opposing team from breaking through the line. The umpire W. L. Taylor had to cut them.[38] Auburn lost just one game, 11–10 to the "Iron Men" of Sewanee, who shutout all their other opponents.[64] A report of the game says "Feagin is a player of exceptional ability, and runs with such force that some ground belongs to him on every attempt."[65] Heisman left Auburn after the 1899 season, and wrote a farewell letter with "tears in my eyes, and tears in my voice; tears even in the trembling of my hand".[66] "You will not feel hard toward me; you will forgive me, you will not forget me? Let me ask to retain your friendship. Can a man be associated for five successive seasons with Grand Old Auburn, toiling for her, befriended by her, striving with her, and yet not love her?"[66] Clemson [ edit ] (pictured) helped get Heisman hired at Auburn and Clemson. Walter Riggshelped get Heisman hired at Auburn and Clemson. Heisman was hired by Clemson University as football and baseball coach. He coached at Clemson from 1900 to 1903, and was the first Clemson coach who had experience coaching at another school.[67][68] He still has the highest winning percentage in school history in both football and baseball.[69] Again Walter Riggs, who moved on from Auburn to coach and manage at Clemson, was instrumental in the hiring. Riggs started an association to help pay Heisman's salary, which was $1,800 per year, and raised $415.11.[70] Heisman coached baseball from 1901 to 1903, posting a 28–6–1 record.[71] Under Heisman, pitcher Vedder Sitton was considered "one of the best twirlers in the country" and one of "the best pitchers that Clemson ever had".[72][73] In his four seasons as Clemson football coach, Heisman won three SIAA titles: in 1900, 1902, and 1903.[10][74] By the time of his hiring in 1900, Heisman was "the undisputed master of Southern football".[75] Heisman later said that his approach at Clemson was "radically different from anything on earth".[76][77] 1900 [ edit ] The 1900 season had "the rise of Clemson from a little school whose football teams had never been heard of before, to become a football machine of the very first power."[78] Clemson finished the season undefeated at 6–0, and beat Davidson on opening day by a 64–0 score, then the largest ever made in the South.[79] Heisman at Clemson Clemson then beat Wofford 21–0, agreeing that every point scored after the first four touchdowns did not count, and South Carolina 51–0.[80][81] The team also beat Georgia, VPI, and Alabama. Clemson beat Georgia 39–5, and Clemson players were pelted with coal from the nearby dorms.[81] Clemson beat VPI 12–5. The game was called short due to darkness, and on VPI was Hall of Famer Hunter Carpenter.[81][82] Stars for the Clemson team included captain and tackle Norman Walker, end Jim Lynah, and halfback Buster Hunter.[56] 1901 [ edit ] The 1901 Clemson team beat Guilford on opening day 122–0, scoring the most points in Clemson history, and the next week it tied Tennessee 6–6, finishing the season at 3–1–1.[80] Clemson beat Georgia and lost to VPI 17–11, with Carpenter starring for VPI.[83] The season closed with a defeat of North Carolina. Lynah later transferred to Cornell and played for Pop Warner.[84] 1902 [ edit ] Heisman was described as "a master of taking advantage of the surprise element."[85] The day before the game against Georgia Tech, Heisman sent in substitutes to Atlanta, who checked into a hotel, and partied until dawn. The next day, the varsity team was well rested and prepared, while Georgia Tech was fooled and expected an easy win. Clemson won that game 44–5.[69][86] In a 28–0 defeat of Furman, an oak tree was on the field, and Heisman called for a lateral pass using the tree as an extra blocker.[87] The 1902 team went 6–1.[80] Clemson lost 12–6 to the South Carolina Gamecocks in Columbia, for the first time since 1896, when their rivalry began.[88] Several fights broke out that day. As one writer put it: "The Carolina fans that week were carrying around a poster with the image of a tiger with a gamecock standing on top of it, holding the tiger's tail as if he was steering the tiger". Another brawl broke out before both sides agreed to burn the poster in an effort to defuse tensions. In the aftermath, the rivalry was suspended until 1909.[89][90] The last game of the season, Clemson beat Tennessee 11–0 in the snow, in a game during which Tennessee's Toots Douglas launched a 109-yard punt (the field length was 110 yards in those days).[91][92] 1903 [ edit ] 1903 Clemson football team: Heisman in back, second from left with glasses The 1903 team went 4–1–1, and opened the season by beating Georgia 29–0. The next week, Clemson played Georgia's rival Georgia Tech. To inspire Clemson, Georgia offered a bushel of apples for every point it scored after the 29th.[93] Rushing for 615 yards, Clemson beat Georgia Tech 73–0.[93] The team then beat North Carolina A&M, lost to North Carolina, and beat Davidson.[80] After the end of the season, a postseason game was scheduled with Cumberland, billed as the championship of the South. Clemson and Cumberland tied 11–11.[94] While both teams can therefore be listed as champion, Heisman named Cumberland champion.[74][95] In 1902 and 1903, several Clemson players made the All-Southern team, an all-star team of players from the South selected by several writers after the season, analogous to All-America teams. They included ends Vedder Sitton and Hope Sadler, quarterback Johnny Maxwell, and fullback Jock Hanvey.[72][96] Fuzzy Woodruff relates Heisman's role in selecting All-Southern teams: "The first selections that had any pretense of being backed by a judicial consideration were made by W. Reynolds Tichenor...The next selections were made by John W. Heisman, who was as good a judge of football men as the country ever produced."[97][98] Georgia Tech [ edit ] After the 73–0 defeat by Clemson, Georgia Tech approached Heisman and was able to hire him as a coach and an athletic director.[99][100] A banner proclaiming "Tech Gets Heisman for 1904" was strung across Atlanta's Piedmont Park.[101] Heisman was hired for $2,250 a year and 30% of the home ticket sales,[102] a $50 raise over his Clemson salary.[101][n 3] He coached Georgia Tech for the longest tenure of his career, 16 years. Baseball and basketball [ edit ] 1907 Georgia Tech baseball team: Heisman in center, holding megaphone At Georgia Tech, Heisman coached baseball and basketball in addition to football.[103] The 1906 Georgia Tech baseball team was his best, posting a 23–3 record.[104] Star players in 1906 included captain and outfielder Chip Robert, shortstop Tommy McMillan, and pitchers Ed Lafitte and Craig Day.[105][106] In 1907, Lafitte posted 19 strikeouts in 10 innings against rival Georgia.[107] In 1908, Heisman was also Georgia Tech's first basketball coach.[108] For many years after his death, from 1938 to 1956, Georgia Tech played basketball in the Heisman Gym.[109] In 1904, Heisman was an official in an Atlanta indoor baseball league.[110] In 1908, Heisman became the president of the Atlanta Crackers minor league baseball team. The Atlanta Crackers captured the 1909 Southern Association title.[111] Heisman also became the athletic director of the Atlanta Athletic Club in 1908, its golf course having been built in 1904.[102][112] Heisman never had a losing season coaching Georgia Tech football, including three undefeated campaigns and a 32-game undefeated streak.[n 4] At some time during his tenure at Georgia Tech, he started the practice of posting downs and yardage on the scoreboard.[114] 1904–1914: The first decade at Georgia Tech [ edit ] Heisman's first football season at Georgia Tech was an 8–1–1 record, the first winning season for Georgia Tech since 1893 (the 1901 team was blacklisted).[102] One source relates: "The real feature of the season was the marvelous advance made by the Georgia School of Technology."[115] Georgia Tech posted victories over Georgia, Tennessee, Florida State, University of Florida (at Lake City), and Cumberland, and a tie with Heisman's previous employer, Clemson. The team suffered just one loss, to Auburn. Tackle Lob Brown and halfback Billy Wilson were selected All-Southern.[116] The same season, Dan McGugin was hired by Vanderbilt and Mike Donahue by Auburn. Vanderbilt and Auburn would dominate the SIAA until 1916, when Heisman won his first official title with Georgia Tech.[117][118] The 1905 Georgia Tech team, the first to be called "Yellow Jackets",[119] went 6–0–1 and Heisman gained a reputation as a coaching "wizard".[120][121] Heisman also drew much acclaim as a sportswriter, and was regularly published in the sports section of the Atlanta Constitution,[122] and later in Collier's Weekly.[123] Rule changes [ edit ] After the bloody 1905 football season—the Chicago Tribune reported 18 players had been killed and 159 seriously injured, United States President Theodore Roosevelt intervened and demanded the rules be reformed to make the sport safer.[124] The rules committee then legalized the forward pass, for which Heisman was instrumental, enlisting the support of Henry L. Williams and committee members John Bell and Paul Dashiell.[125][126] Heisman believed that a forward pass would improve the game by allowing a more open style of play, thus discouraging mass attack tactics and the flying wedge formation.[22][127] The rule changes came in 1906, three years after Heisman began actively lobbying for that decision.[22][128] Before the 1910 season, Heisman convinced the rules committee to change football from a game of two halves to four quarters, again for safety.[129] Despite lobbying for these rule changes, Heisman's teams from 1906 to 1914 continued to post winning records, but with multiple losses each season, including a loss to Auburn each season but 1906. 1906–1909: Start of the jump shift [ edit ] Diagram illustrating Heisman's shift formation The 1906 Georgia Tech team beat Auburn for the first time, and in a loss to Sewanee first used Heisman's jump shift offense, which became known as the Heisman shift.[130][131] In the jump shift, all but the center may shift into various formations, with a jump before the snap. A play started with only the center on the line of scrimmage. The backfield would be in a vertical line, as if in an I-formation with an extra halfback, or a giant T. After the shift, a split second elapsed, and then the ball was snapped.[132] In one common instance of the jump shift, the line shifted to put the center between guard and tackle. The three backs nearest the line of scrimmage would shift all to one side, and the center snapped it to the tailback.[133] The 1907 team played its games at Ponce de Leon Park, where the Atlanta Crackers also played.[120] The team went 4–4, and suffered Heisman's worst loss at Georgia Tech, 54–0 to Vanderbilt.[134] "Twenty Percent" Davis, considered 20% of the team's worth,[135] was selected All-Southern.[136] Chip Robert was captain of the 1908 team, which went 6–3, including a 44–0 blowout loss to Auburn in which Lew Hardage returned a kickoff 108 yards for a touchdown.[120][137] Davis again was All-Southern.[138] Georgia attacked Georgia Tech's recruitment tactics in football.[139] Georgia alumni incited an SIAA investigation, claiming that Georgia Tech had created a fraudulent scholarship fund.[139] The SIAA ruled in favor of Georgia Tech, but the 1908 game was cancelled that season due to bad blood between the rivals.[139] Davis was captain of the 1909 team, which won seven games, but was shutout by SIAA champion Sewanee and Auburn.[120] 1910–1914: Relying on the jump shift [ edit ] Heisman's 1910 team went 5–3, and relied on the jump shift for the first time.[120][132] Hall of Famer Bob McWhorter played for the Georgia Bulldogs from 1910 to 1913, and for those seasons Georgia Tech lost to Georgia and Auburn. In 1910, Georgia Tech was also beaten by SIAA champion Vanderbilt 22–0. Though Vanderbilt was held scoreless in the first half, Ray Morrison starred in the second half and Bradley Walker's officiating was criticized throughout.[140] Tackle Pat Patterson was selected All-Southern.[141] The 1911 team featured future head coach William Alexander as a reserve quarterback.[142][143] Pat Patterson was team captain and selected All-Southern.[120] The team played Alabama to a scoreless tie, after which Heisman said he had never seen a player "so thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of football as Hargrove Van de Graaff."[144] circa 1913 Grant Field1913 The 1912 team opened the season by playing the Army's 11th Cavalry regiment to a scoreless tie. The team also lost to Sewanee, and quarterback Alf McDonald was selected All-Southern.[145] The team moved to Grant Field from Ponce de Leon Park by 1913, and lost its first game there to Georgia 14–0.[146] The season's toughest win came against Florida, 13–3, after Florida was up 3–0 at the half. Heisman said his opponents played the best football he had seen a Florida squad play.[147] The independent 1914 team was captained by halfback Wooch Fielder and went 6–2. The team beat Mercer 105–0 and the next week had a 13–0 upset loss to Alabama.[120] End Jim Senter and halfback J. S. Patton were selected All-Southern.[148] Four straight SIAA championships [ edit ] During the span of 1915 to 1918, Georgia Tech posted a 30–1–2 record, outscored opponents 1611–93, and claimed four straight SIAA titles.[74] 1915 [ edit ] The pennant at the annual banquet for the 1915 team The 1915 team went 7–0–1 and claimed a shared SIAA title with Vanderbilt, despite being officially independent.[149] The tie came against rival Georgia, in inches of mud.[150] Georgia center John G. Henderson headed a group of three men, one behind the other, with his hands upon the shoulders of the one in front, to counter Heisman's jump shift.[151] Halfback Everett Strupper joined the team in 1915 and was partially deaf.[152] He called the signals instead of the quarterback.[153] When Strupper tried out for the team, he noticed that the quarterback shouted the signals every time he was to carry the ball. Realizing that the loud signals would be a tip-off to the opposition, Strupper told Heisman: "Coach, those loud signals are absolutely unnecessary. You see when sickness in my kid days brought on this deafness my folks gave me the best instructors obtainable to teach me lip-reading." Heisman recalled how Strupper overcame his deafness: "He couldn't hear anything but a regular shout, but he could read your lips like a flash. No lad who ever stepped on a football field had keener eyes than Everett had. The enemy found this out the minute he began looking for openings through which to run the ball."[154] Fielder and guard Bob Lang made the composite All-Southern team, and Senter, quarterback Froggie Morrison, and Strupper were selected All-Southern by some writer.[155] The team was immediately dubbed the greatest in Georgia Tech's history up to that point.[149][156] However, the team continued to improve over the next two seasons. Sportswriter Morgan Blake called Strupper, "probably the greatest running half-back the South has known."[157] 1916 [ edit ] The 1916 scoreboard, showing football's worst blowout The 1916 team went 8–0–1, captured the team's first official SIAA title, and was the first to vault Georgia Tech football to national prominence.[143] According to one writer, it "seemed to personify Heisman" by playing hard in every game on both offense and defense.[158] Strupper, Lang, fullback Tommy Spence, tackle Walker Carpenter, and center Pup Phillips were all selected All-Southern.[159] Only one newspaper in all of the South was said to have neglected to have Strupper on its All-Southern team.[160] Phillips was the first Georgia Tech center selected All-Southern, and made Walter Camp's third-team All-American.[161] Spence got Camp's honorable mention.[162] Without throwing a single forward pass, Georgia Tech defeated the Cumberland College Bulldogs, 222–0, in the most one-sided college football game ever played. Strupper led the scoring with six touchdowns.[163] Sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote, "Cumberland's greatest individual play of the game occurred when fullback Allen circled right end for a 6-yard loss."[164] Up 126–0 at halftime, Heisman reportedly told his players, "You're doing all right, team, we're ahead, but you just can't tell what those Cumberland players have up their sleeves. They may spring a surprise. Be alert, men! Hit 'em clean, but hit 'em hard!"[164][163] However, even Heisman relented, and shortened the quarters in the second half to 12 minutes each instead of 15.[163] circa 1917, in front of Clemson's Bowman Field Heisman,1917, in front of Clemson's Bowman Field Heisman's running up the score against his outmanned opponent was motivated by revenge against Cumberland's baseball team, for running up the score against Georgia Tech 22–0 with a team primarily composed of professional Nashville Vols players,[165][166] and against the sportswriters whom he felt were too focused on numbers, such as those who picked Vanderbilt as champion the previous season.[167] 1917 [ edit ] In 1917, the backfield of Joe Guyon, Al Hill, Judy Harlan, and Strupper helped propel Heisman to his finest success. Georgia Tech posted a 9–0 record and a national championship, the first for a Southern team.[168] For many years, it was considered the finest team the South ever produced.[169] Sportswriter Frank G. Menke selected Strupper and team captain Carpenter for his All-America team; the first two players from the Deep South ever selected first-team All-American.[170] Joe Guyon was a Chippewa Indian, who had transferred from Carlisle, and whose brother Charles "Wahoo" Guyon was Heisman's assistant coach on the team.[171] Judy Harlan said about Guyon, "Once in a while the Indian would come out in Joe, such as the nights Heisman gave us a white football and had us working out under the lights. That's when Guyon would give out the blood-curdling war whoops."[172] His first carry for Georgia Tech was a 75-yard touchdown against Wake Forest.[173] The 1917 Georgia Tech backfield The 1917 Georgia Tech team outscored opponents 491–17 and beat Penn 41–0. Historian Bernie McCarty called it "Strupper's finest hour, coming through against powerful Penn in the contest that shocked the East."[174] Pop Warner's undefeated Pittsburgh team beat Penn just 14–6.[175] Georgia Tech's 83–0 victory over Vanderbilt is the worst loss in Vanderbilt history, and the 63–0 defeat of Washington and Lee was the worst loss in W&L history at the time.[171] In the 48–0 defeat of Tulane, each of the four members of the backfield eclipsed 100 yards rushing, and Guyon also passed for two touchdowns.[176] Auburn, the SIAA's second place team, was beaten 68–7.[171] 1918 [ edit ] University faculty succeeded in preventing a postseason national championship game with Pittsburgh.[177] In the next season of 1918, after losing several players to World War I, Georgia Tech lost a lopsided game to Pittsburgh 32–0.[178] Sportswriter Francis J. Powers wrote: At Forbes Field, the dressing rooms of the two teams were separated only by a thin wall. As the Panthers were sitting around, awaiting Warner's pregame talk, Heisman began to orate in the adjoining room. In his charge to the Tech squad, Heisman became flowery and fiery. He brought the heroes of ancient Greece and the soldier dead in his armor among the ruins of Pompeii. It was terrific and the Panthers sat, spellbound. When Heisman had finished, Warner chortled and quietly said to his players: 'Okay, boys. There's the speech. Now go out and knock them off.'[179] Heisman cut back on his expanded duties in 1918, and only coached football between September 1 and December 15.[102] Georgia Tech went 6–1 and eclipsed 100 points three different times.[180] Buck Flowers, a small back in his first year on the team, had transferred from Davidson a year before, where he had starred in a game against Georgia Tech.[181] Flowers had grown to weigh 150 pounds and was a backup until Heisman discovered his ability as an open-field runner on punt returns.[182] Also in 1918, center Bum Day became the first player from the South selected for Walter Camp's first-team All-America, historically loaded with college players from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other northeastern colleges.[183] Flowers and tackle Bill Fincher made Camp's second team.[184] Guyon made Menke's first team All-America as a tackle.[185] 1919 [ edit ] The 1919 team was beaten by Pittsburgh and Washington and Lee, and in the final game Auburn gave Georgia Tech its first loss to an SIAA school in 5 years (since Auburn in 1914).[186] Flowers, Harlan, Fincher, Phillips, Dummy Lebey, Al Staton, and Shorty Guill were All-Southern.[187] Heisman left Atlanta after the season, and William Alexander was hired as his successor.[188] Penn and Washington & Jefferson [ edit ] Portrait of Heisman in his mid-fifties at Rice University Heisman went back to Penn for three seasons from 1920 to 1922. Most notable perhaps is the 9–7 loss to Alabama in 1922, the Crimson Tide's first major intersectional victory.[189] In 1923, Heisman coached the Washington and Jefferson Presidents, which beat the previously undefeated West Virginia Mountaineers.[190] Rice [ edit ] Following the season at Washington and Jefferson College, Heisman ended his coaching career with four seasons at Rice. In 1924, after being selected by the Committee on Outdoor Sports, he took over the job as Rice University's first full-time head football coach and athletic director, succeeding Phillip Arbuckle.[191][192] His teams saw little success, and he earned more than any faculty member.[192] Rice was his last coaching job before he retired in 1927 to lead the Downtown Athletic Club in Manhattan, New York.[193] In 1935, the Downtown Athletic Club began awarding a Downtown Athletic Club trophy for the best football player east of the Mississippi River.[9] Personal life [ edit ] Heisman met his first wife, an actress, while he was participating in theater during his time at Clemson.[194] Evelyn McCollum Cox, whose stage name was Evelyn Barksdale, was a widow with a single child, a 12-year-old boy named Carlisle.[195] They married during the 1903 season, on October 24, 1903, a day after Heisman's 34th birthday.[196] While in Atlanta, Heisman also shared the house with the family poodle named Woo. He would feed the dog ice cream.[197] In 1918, Heisman and his wife divorced, and to prevent any social embarrassment to his former wife, who chose to remain in the city, he left Atlanta after the 1919 football season.[146][194] Carlisle and Heisman would remain close.[87][194] Heisman met Edith Maora Cole, a student at Buchtel College, where he was coaching football during the 1893 and 1894 seasons.[194] The two were close, but decided not to marry due to Edith's problems with tuberculosis.[194] When they met again in 1924, Heisman was living in Washington, Pennsylvania, and coaching at Washington and Jefferson College. This time, they did decide to marry, doing it that same year, right before Heisman left Pennsylvania to take his last head coaching job at Rice University in Texas.[194] Heisman as an actor [ edit ] Heisman considered himself an actor as well as coach, and was a part of several acting troupes in the offseason. He was known for delivering grand theatrical speeches to inspire his players, and some considered him to be an eccentric and melodramatic. He was described as exhibiting "the temperament, panache, and audacity of the showman."[38] David Garrick, produced and acted in by Heisman, Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn) 1897 Poster for the play, produced and acted in by Heisman, Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn) 1897 His 1897 Auburn team finished $700 in debt. To raise money for next season, Heisman created the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn) Dramatic Club to stage and act as the main character in the comic play David Garrick by Thomas William Robertson.[38][198] George Petrie described the play as "decidedly the most successful event of its kind ever seen in Auburn".[38] A local newspaper, The Opelika Post, reviewed Heisman's performance: He was naturalness itself, and there was not a single place in which he overdid his part. His changes from drunk to sober and back again in the drunken scene were skillfully done, and the humor of many of his speeches caused a roar of laughter. He acted not like an amateur, but like the skilled professional that he is.[38] During his time at Auburn, Heisman also took on more serious roles, and was considered as a refined elocutionist when performing Shakespearean plays or reciting his monologues.[38] The next year, the API Dramatic Club performed A Scrap of Paper by Victorien Sardou.[38] In May 1898, Heisman appeared in Diplomacy, an English adaptation of Dora by Sardou, with the Mordaunt-Block Stock Company at the Herald Square Theater on Broadway. Later that summer, he performed in The Ragged Regiment by Robert Neilson Stephens at the Herald Square Theater and Caste at the Columbus Theater in Harlem.[199] In 1899, he was in the Macdonald Stock Company, which performed at Crump's Park in Macon, Georgia, including the role of Dentatus in Virginius by James Sheridan Knowles. When the Macdonald Stock Company took a hiatus in June 1899, Heisman joined the Thanouser-Hatch Company of Atlanta. He performed in at least two plays for this company, in Brother John by Martha Morton at the Grand Theater in Atlanta, playing the role of Captain Van Sprague.[199] At the end of Auburn's 1899 season, a public conflict developed between Heisman and umpire W. L. Taylor. Heisman wrote to the Birmingham Age-Herald complaining about Taylor's officiating in general and specifically his cancellation of an Auburn touchdown because the scoring play began before the starting whistle following a time out. In his published reply, Taylor critiqued Heisman as someone with "histrionic gifts," making "lurid appeals," and seeking "peanut gallery applause" for "heroically acted character parts" in some "cheap theater." Heisman responded to that characterization as "The heinous crime I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny" and that what Taylor said could be a "studied insult to the whole art of acting."[38] In 1900, Heisman joined the Spooner Dramatic Company of Tampa, Florida. On return from Key West, Heisman got very seasick.[38] By 1901, Heisman joined the Dixie Stock Company, which performed several plays in the Dukate Theater at Biloxi, Mississippi.[200] There, he received his first major romantic lead, Armand in Camille.[38] In 1902, he managed Crump's Park Stock Company.[200] He started the Heisman Dramatic Stock Company while at Clemson in 1903, which spent much of the summer performing at Riverside Park in Asheville, North Carolina.[201] By 1904, Heisman operated the Heisman Stock Company. It performed at the Casino Theater at Pickett Springs Resort in Montgomery, Alabama. Their first performance was William Gillette's Because She Loved Him So. The next summer opened with a performance at the Grand Opera House in Augusta, Georgia. In 1906 and 1907, Heisman again performed in Crump's Park in Macon, as well as the Thunderbolt Casino in Savannah. In 1906, he purchased an Edison kinetograph for his audiences.[202] By 1908, Heisman managed Heisman Theatrical Enterprises.[196] Death and legacy [ edit ] Heisman died of pneumonia on October 3, 1936, in New York City.[9] Three days later, his body was taken by train to his wife's hometown of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where he was buried in Grave D, Lot 11, Block 3 of the city-owned Forest Home Cemetery.[203][204] When Heisman died, he was preparing to write a history of football.[205] Legacy [ edit ] A Heisman Trophy Heisman was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1954, a member of the second class of inductees.[2] Heisman was an innovator and "master strategist".[10] He developed one of the first shifts.[206][207] He was a proponent of the legalization of the forward pass. He had both his guards pull to lead an end run and had his center snap the ball. He invented the hidden ball play, and originated the "hike" or "hep" shouted by the quarterback to start each play. He led the effort to cut the game from halves to quarters. He is credited with the idea of listing downs and yardage on the scoreboard, and of putting his quarterback at safety on defense.[2][208] On December 10, 1936, just 2 months after Heisman's death on October 3, the Downtown Athletic Club trophy was renamed the Heisman Memorial Trophy, and is now given to the player voted as the season's most outstanding collegiate football player.[9] Voters for this award consist primarily of media representatives, who are allocated by regions across the country to filter out possible regional bias, and former recipients.[9] Following the bankruptcy of the Downtown Athletic Club in 2002, the award is now given out by the Heisman Trust.[209] Heisman Street on Clemson's campus is named in his honor.[210] Heisman Drive, located directly south of Jordan–Hare Stadium on the Auburn University campus, is named in his honor, as well.[211] A bust of him is also in Jordan–Hare Stadium.[212] A wooden statue of Heisman was placed at the Rh
) and Minister of Justice Philippe Moureaux (accused by The Sprout of having been present at the murder of Julie and Melissa, together with Cardinal Danneels) (confirmed it had been offered to him and that he declined the offer). February 27, 1988, De Morgen, Francois Raes (BOB officer and whistleblower who exposed NBD highest level drug dealing) commentary: "Isn't that story of these two ministers strange? They are contacted to buy secret information and they don't inform a single police service. At the very least that's a lack of civil goodwill." Bouhouche and Beyer founded the Agence Recherche Investigation (ARI) in April 1983, a private detective agency. With just a few thousand bucks they apparently were able hire about half a dozen storage places and apartments, and buy computers, cars and weapons. Where they got the additional source of income to buy or hire all this stuff has not established. Prominent member of the Belgian Practical Shooting Association, together with Jean Bultot. Became director and secretary of the Practical Pistol Club of Belgium (PPCB) in 1982. Instructor at the Parabellum Club, a practical shooting club. In 1980, Bouhouche had instructed several of his associates/friends at the Parabellum Club. After the men (without Bouhouche) left the club they went to drink something at a nearby cafe. Here they got into a fight with one Frenchman and two Algerians. The two Algerians were shot and the Frenchman was hit in the face with a broken beer bottle. The friends of Bouhouche were arrested or, like Jean-Marie Paul (a close friend of Paul Latinus), fled to Paraguay. Closely associated with the Front de la Jeunesse (instructor there), headed by Francis Dossogne (paid "advisor" to Baron de Bonvoisin; took his orders from Army Intelligence major Jean Bougerol, head of PIO and personally picked by Vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin; another "private detective"; director of CIDEP, publisher of the fascist NEM magazine; good friend Jean Bultot, who is closely tied to the Gang of Nijvel; gave permission to Paul Latinus in '78-'79 to reorganize the Brussels department of Front de la Jeunesse; according to Martial Lekeu, Dossogne, Latinus and DEA agent Frank Eaton were leaders of Group G, a Nazi-inspired NATO-sanctioned parallel organization within the Gendarmerie). Possibly a member of Westland New Post (often considered an associate member only), set up and headed by Paul Latinus (Nazi; recruited by the DIA in 1967, age 17; trained by NATO; reserve lieutenant with the Air Force; paid informant of State Security; recruited as an intelligence agent by PIO in 1977; recommended everywhere by the CEPIC leadership; member Front de la Jeunesse; founder Westland New Post (WNP) in 1981; named as one of the leaders of Group G; suicided in 1984). Bouhouche was mainly in contact with Latinus' right hand, Michel Libert. WNP was an initiative of PIO, a US-NATO-sanctioned private military intelligence group set up by Baron de Bonvoisin (CEPIC) and Paul Vanden Boeynants (CEPIC) together with the Belgian army. Latinus and other senior member of WNP claimed the real name of WNP was Westland National Sozialistische Ordnung, which for obvious reasons was only used internally. CEPIC director Bernard Mercier, "inspector-general" of the WNP, provided a flat to the WNP. Bouhouche was in contact with members of Group G, a secret Nazi group within the Gendarmerie that was part of a wider operation to destabilize the Belgian state. Similar cells were located in the Army, the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), the Royal Military School, the Mobile Legion, the Special Intervention Squadron (Diana Group), the narcotics section of the BOB and different other branches of the Gendarmerie. Most members of a particular cell did not know about the others and Nazi-fascist infiltration could have been much larger than the estimated 60 recruits. The Nazis Paul Latinus and Francis Dossogne, who were sponsored by Baron de Bonvoisin and Paul Vanden Boeynants, oversaw Group G. Commandant Francois and Frank Eaton were important members. Gendarme officer Martial Lekeu (close friend of Commandant Francois and Paul Latinus; member Group G) exposed the group in 1989 (already gave his information to the proper authorities in 1984, but nothing was done), after he had fled to the United States. As a devout Nazi he had been recruited in the late 1970s by a colleague at the BOB. Lekeu: "When I joined the Gendarmerie I became a devout fascist. At the Diana Group I got to know people who had the same convictions as me. We greeted each other like the Nazis. Every time we clicked the heels of our boots together in the canteen or halls of the BOB building at the Leuvense street we heard others do the same. That was a sign of solidarity.... Together with about 10 other Gendarme officers we listened to march music of the Waffen-SS. Nazi flags were decorating the walls." Lekeu explained how an attempt to destabilize Belgium had been in the workings since 1975. Group G (Gendarmerie) and Group M (Military) were to conduct a whole range of terrorist attacks, somehow resulting in the CEPIC crowd becoming all-powerful. It's likely that the idea was to introduce police state legislation and possibly even to declare martial law, but apparently the average fascist didn't know the exact procedure. Lekeu in 1989 in Panorama magazine: "During the gatherings of the Front a plan was developed to destabilize Belgium and to prepare it for a non-democratic regime. This plan consisted of two parts: a cell political terrorism and a cell gangsterism. I worked in the cell gangsterism. I was one of the specialist who had to train young guys with rightist leanings, to knead them into a well trained gang prepared to do anything. After that I had to break all contact with them, so they could exist as an independent group and do robberies without them realizing they were part of a well-planned plot." The existence of Group G, the involvement of Bouhouche and Lekeu in it, and that some organized crime seemed to have a political motive behind it, was already confirmed by the BOB in an extensive PV dated March 18, 1985. In the first half of 1989 a team led by investigating magistrate Freddy Troch and substitute Willy Acke managed to track down 10 former members of Group G. They largely confirmed the story of Lekeu, although obviously tried to marginalize the whole operation. Interestingly, Bob Beyer once mentioned that Bouhouche asked him if he would be interested in joining a clandestine organization. Beyer declined and says he doesn't know what this group was about. Some time before his death Juan Mendez said to his family and friends that he had been invited to join a clandestine group that was gathering data on political adversaries to be used during and after a coup. Bouhouche regularly went to the Jonathan in Sint-Gillis, a night club with strippers and prostitutes. The visitors of the Jonathan were mainly Nazis and other fascists who often worked for the police, military or mercenary corporations. The owner of the Jonathan in the 1980s, Jean-Paul "Pepe" Derijcke, made sure that pictures and video was taken of his customers when they were involved with one the club's prostitutes. This material was used for blackmail purposes. It's probably no coincidence that Michel Nihoul was a good friend Derijcke. Frequent visitors of the Jonathan included Jean Bultot (Son of Lucien Bultot, who was a nominee for the fascist Parti des Forces Nouvelles; good friend of Francis Dossogne, head of the fascist Front de la Jeunesse (private militia behind Parti des Forces Nouvelles); became assistant director of the Sint-Gillis prison in Brussels in 1978, despite a strong negative advice from State Security (attacked for years by the fascist de Bonvoisin and CEPIC in general); acted as a liaison between several Nazi inmates and Belgian's fascist underground, for which he allegedly did some recruiting; friend of Jean-Paul "Pepe" Derijcke, owner of the Jonathan in Sint-Gillis in the 1980s; member Belgian Practical Shooting Association, together with Bouhouche and other fascists; founded the Prisons Practical Pistol Club and mainly recruited fascist friends from the police and prison guards, including Bouhouche, Juan Mendez, Alain Weykamp and Bob Louvigny; organized shooting events at which a number of participants usually wore Nazi emblems and shirts of Soldier of Fortune; at these practical shooting events the theme 'warehouse panic' was quite prominent and was later put into practice by the Gang of Nijvel; seriously linked to the Gang of Nijvel; fled to Paraguay in 1986, after the murder on Juan Mendez (by Bouhouche); from Paraguay he began claiming that State Security (again, attacked for years by the fascist de Bonvoisin and CEPIC in general) was involved in the Gang of Nijvel and gave the advise to examining magistrate Freddy Troch to reinvestigate the Pinon affair (quite possibly a hidden threat to Belgium's establishment)), Juan Mendez, Lucien Ott (born and raised within the Foreign Legion in Algeria (colony of France); airborne commando veteran; served in French Indochina (colony of France); joined French Military Intelligence; founded the International Bodyguard Association (IBA) in 1957; bodyguard of de Gaulle during the height of the OAS crisis; died in 1980), Francis Dossogne (paid "advisor" to Baron de Bonvoisin; took his orders from Army Intelligence major Jean Bougerol, head of PIO and personally picked by Vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin; another "private detective"; director of CIDEP, publisher of the fascist NEM magazine; good friend Jean Bultot, who is closely tied to the Gang of Nijvel; gave permission to Paul Latinus in '78-'79 to reorganize the Brussels department of Front de la Jeunesse; according to Martial Lekeu, Dossogne, Latinus and DEA agent Frank Eaton were leaders of Group G, a Nazi-inspired NATO-sanctioned parallel organization within the Gendarmerie), Jean-Francis Calmette (joined the terrorist OAS, which tried to assassinate de Gaulle and destabilize Algeria; director of Wackenhut Belgium until 1981 (since 1977 allowed in Belgium; does dirty black ops for CIA, DEA, etc.; had to leave Belgium in early 1980s after some of its guards were accused of luring immigrant children into basements and beating them up), and recruited Marcel Barbier (Wackenhut employee since before 1981; recruited as a guard at European Institute of Management (EIM) around 1981, the follow-up of the shady Belgium military-intelligence unit PIO, since 1981 headed by Douglas MacArthur II; co-founded Westland New Post (WNP) with Latinus in 1981, and became head of its security section (seen as Latinus' right-hand); when police searched Barbier's apartment for unrelated reasons, they found it filled with Nazi symbols and literature, weapons, papers that allowed him entrance to the barracks of the general staff of the Army in Evere, and a whole batch of secret NATO documents; his lawyer at that point became Vincent vanden Bossche, who represented other fascists and was a member of Cercle des Nations and Ordre du Rouvre, was named as someone involved in the cover-up of the Pinon child abuse affair; convicted in 1987 for a double WNP-organized murder, in which Barbier hIntroduction: There is perhaps no other team in Hollywood so consistently reamed in reviews for misconceptions about their films resulting from their own advertising as are Ethan and Joel Coen. It happened with Intolerable Cruelty ; it happened with Burn After Reading ; it happened with Inside Llewyn Davis ; and now it is happening with Hail, Caesar! as well. Whoever is in charge of marketing these movies is doing a comically bad job. For the most part, the error is clear: The Coens’ nuanced dark comedies and comedic dramas keep being marketed as flat, uncontroversial, plain old comedies. In my personal opinion, the movie of theirs that was most affected by this disconnect between the total levity of the marketing and the deadpan satire of the film is Burn After Reading. But that’s water under the bridge by now, so instead I would like to spend this article saying exactly what Hail, Caesar! is, and exactly what Hail, Caesar! is not. The nature of this article is such that it requires spoiling basic plot details of Hail Caesar!, so you should only continue reading after this paragraph if you either do not mind spoilers or have already seen the film. Trailers for Hail, Caesar!: Let me start by confronting the elephant in the room: yes, the title says to not trust reviews of the Coen Brothers’ movies and this is a review of one of their movies. Well, feel free to distrust it. It’s good to be skeptical, and I don’t mind, really. In fact, I’ve implied one falsehood already: in reality, Hail, Caesar!‘s critical reception still skews toward the positive, and I would personally rate it on the lower end of the Coens’ filmography. But its failures are of scope and focus, rather than, as I have seen repeated in many reviews, tone or lacking comedy. Setting the critics aside for now (myself included), I’m going to at least try to dispel some of the damage done by the marketing machine surrounding this film, so that you can enjoy it as much as possible. Now, as a primer, go ahead and watch the video at the bottom of this page and then come back. As with all of the Thursday Theater articles, a trailer for the film is embedded there. Based only on that trailer, what does Hail, Caesar! look like to you? I’ll tell you what it looks like to me: a silly crime caper movie starring George Clooney. As far as I can tell, the premise is that the kidnapping of a famous movie star endangers a studio and hi-jinks ensue. I was ready for something along the lines of Fargo (a crime movie with an emotional core), with a hint of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (a historical-mythical comedy). Now here’s the reality: the kidnapping-of-George-Clooney sequence is not the main plot, but instead a subplot that ends in two consecutive anti-climaxes; the main plot is about following mid-twentieth-century movie executive Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) through a day-in-the-life during a stressful period when he has to make a tough life decision. (Granted, hi-jinks still most assuredly ensue.) Hail, Caesar!‘s two primary themes are the place of faith and the value of entertainment in a modern society. There is a moment in that trailer when Baird Whitlock (Clooney’s character) is trying to deliver the movie-within-a-movie’s climactic speech and forgets the word ‘faith.’ This may seem like a moment akin to the purely comedic “Would that it were so simple” exchange featured elsewhere in Hail, Caesar!‘s marketing (to similarly ill emphasis). What the trailer does not show or imply is that, prior to the interruption, the speech goes on for almost 60 seconds of uninterrupted discourse on Whitlock’s character’s sincere conversion. The film portrays it without irony, and we see the speech capturing the attention and awe of everyone in the studio, only for it to be cut off abruptly by Whitlock’s lapse in memory on the last word. The comedy of this moment takes the wind out of the speech’s sails while implying that the core value intended by the movie-within-a-movie (faith) is rather far from the minds of those working on it. Faith, Value, and Art in Hail, Caesar!: The theme of faith was very popular in 1950’s Hollywood. Tales of faithful glory and Roman conversion represented many of the lengthy blockbusters of the time. And this tradition carried on for decades, as evidenced by everything from Quo Vadis to The Ten Commandments to A Man for All Seasons to Spartacus. Sprawling religious epics are few and far between these days, but were common currency in the not-too-distant past. This emphasis on faith is present throughout Hail, Caesar!. But the film is not kind to traditional conceptions of faith. Near the beginning, we see a meeting between Brolin’s character and a number of religious leaders (providing consultation on the movie). The leaders quickly devolve into comical, factional, doctrinal bickering. Religious symbolism and religious scenes in the primary movie-within-a-movie are routinely dealt with perfunctorily or exploited for laughs (including a wonderful moment when we see George Clooney try multiple takes of an awed revelation reaction shot when first laying eyes on the actor playing Jesus). So, finally, to bridge into where I think the Coens’ conception of faith in Hail, Caesar! overlaps with the value of entertainment, I would like to point out that the movie ends with Brolin’s character choosing to remain at the studio, with an ambiguously tongue-in-cheek ending monologue reporting that this work would bring needed respite and fantasy to a weary world. This is directorial apologetics; this is a justification for the making of movies. Certainly the Coens have dedicated their lives to that endeavor, and would care deeply about what motivates and justifies that decision. Why not instead, as various characters consider (or do), join a communist revolution or work in the defense industry or settle into family life? And their response, coming in part through that ending monologue, is that filmmaking, or at least entertainment, is the highest church and the most noble calling there is. Conclusion: The undercurrent of how best to support the working class (especially with scenes concerning the communists of ‘The Future’) seemingly concludes on this note: that the most immediate support the working class can receive is a lightening of their burden through art. Hail, Caesar! alleges that fidelity to the production of enjoyable art is the proper application of faith, and investment of time and energy and capital into the production of enjoyable art is the most responsible economic doctrine. So, yes, it is a comedy, and, yes, it is funny—with most of the jokes being at the expense of either communism or old actor and director personalities—but to go in expecting nothing but a riotous laugh-a-minute affair is to set yourself up for disappointment. What Hail, Caesar! offers is at once less and more than that. I don’t think it’s even close to being in the top tier of the Coens’ movies, but I also think that reviews characterizing it as a failed satire of Hollywood have paid too much attention to the marketing.Wes Anderson has been on the site a lot in the past week, most recently with the release of a trailer for the now much anticipated "The Grand Budapest Hotel" but also for The Wes Anderson Collection, a book by Matt Zoller Seitz. It seems as though he is also releasing a video essay series on each of Anderson's films starting with Bottle Rocket. So here is some weekend watching for you that could be nicely complimented with the films themselves... "This new series is an adaptation of my book, which is itself adapted from another video essay series, "The Substance of Style," a five-parter that I wrote, narrated and edited back in the spring of 2009. The book came about because Wes contacted me in summer of 2009 to say he'd seen the video series and liked it, and then a few weeks later Eric Klopfer, my future book editor, wrote me to say he was a big Wes Anderson fan and wanted to do a book about his movies, and would it be possible to somehow adapt "The Substance of Style" to hardcover form? So I figured out a way to combine an interview with Wes and an adaptation of the video essay series, which eventually led to "The Wes Anderson Collection." Of course at that time, Wes hadn't released "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" yet, so I couldn't account for that in "The Substance of Style." And "Moonrise Kingdom" was barely a glimmer in his eye, probably. I thought it would be fun to do a "second edition" of that video series, after having seen two more Wes films and gained a lot of inside knowledge about Wes and his movies by interviewing him for the book. I originally thought about approaching this new series as I had in the first time, scrutinizing the totality of the work in a somewhat detached way, but as I started writing the narration and adding in editing suggestions for Steven, I realized that the whole process felt different. As Steven pointed out to me in the editing room this weekend, "The Substance of Style" was analytical, but this new series is more emotional. It also feels a bit more like a traditional documentary in places, though there are characteristic digressions into nerdy areas. This opening chapter, for instance, has a detour about the state of American independent film in the early 90s and how directors built their careers, and why "Bottle Rocket" was a break from that tradition. Part 2, about "Rushmore", will run Wednesday, Oct 16, "The Royal Tenenbaums" on Friday, Oct. 18, "The Life Aquatic" on Monday, Oct. 21, "The Darjeeling Limited" on Wednesday, Oct. 23, and we'll finish out the series with a double feature of "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "Moonrise Kingdom" on Friday, Oct. 25. Here we go! Thanks, as always, for reading and watching." -Matt Zoller SeitzDave Daubenmire, a veteran 25 year high school football coach, was spurred to action when attacked and eventually sued by the ACLU in the late 1990's for alledgedly [sic] mixing prayer with his coaching. After a two year battle for his 1st amendment rights and a determination to not back down, the ACLU relented and offered coach an out of court settlement. God honored his stand and the ACLU backed off. Coach's courageous stand, an inspiration to Americans everywhere, demonstrated that the ACLU can be defeated. prohibits future acts of religious indoctrination and establishes a system for reporting violations of the agreement to the United States District Court in Columbus. In a separate case, the ACLU is still defending seven members of the London community who had criticized Coach Daubenmire's religious activities. London High School football coach David Daubenmire was warned or reprimanded several times by the superintendent about his management and discipline of the team, and he was criticized by parents, including criticism for religious activity and prayers by the team. Several parents and faculty members lobbied the Board of Education to not renew his contract, and when unsuccessful, spoke publicly about Daubenmire. He sued for defamation, the trial court granted summary judgment for the defendants on the basis that Daubenmire was a limited purpose public figure and a qualified privilege applied, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. There are four categories of defamation plaintiffs: (a) private persons, (b) public officials, (c) public figures, and (d) limited purpose public figures. Whether a plaintiff is a public figure is a question of law; it does not depend on the plaintiff's wishes, and a plaintiff may not escape public figure status if he voluntarily engages in a course of conduct that invites attention and comment. A limited purpose public figure is a person who becomes a public figure for a specific range of issues by being drawn into or voluntarily injecting himself into a specific public controversy. Public figures and limited purpose public figures must show by clear and convincing evidence that the statements were made with actual malice. Daubenmire v Sommers, 156 Ohio App 3d 322, 2004-Ohio-914 (12th Dist, Madison) In addition to his weekly radio show, Coach has made regular national appearances on Hannity and Colmes, CBS Evening News, Scarborough Country on MSNBC, Fox News, The Edge with Paula Zahn, Dayside with Linda Vester, and Court TV. His website has one version of the hero's origins:This is a curious usage of the word "defeated", given that Daubenmire's "courageous stand" meant him paying the ACLU $18,000 in costs, and the school district instituting an agreement which (according to the ACLU website However, Daubenmire's First Amendment posturing only went so far; the ACLU also reported that:Daubenmire had attempted to bully his critics into silence through a libel action, which was just as successful as his "two year battle" against the ACLU. This went on an appeal in 2004, which also went badly for him; a site noting Ohio Court Opinions records that (scroll down):Since then, though, the "limited purpose" Daubenmire has trod the familiar path of a victimised warrior of the right spurred into action by liberal persecution: inevitably, the "coach" became a pundit Most recently, he has called for James Dobson and other members of the Christian Right "A-List" to abandon the Republican Party in favour of Judge Roy Moore: The Log Cabin Republicans are a group of homosexuals who support the Republican Party. For Heaven's sake what are we doing on the same team? Do the donations of Christians and donations of homosexuals go into the same pot? How can Christ bless that?... A Judge Moore candidacy will ignite Christian passion. The two parties and their imps will call him a lawbreaker, a radical, and a hatemonger, but they were never with us anyway. Isn't it time we voted for a man who truly shares our values? A man who understand that all government answers to God? They will tell us he can't win, but if we turn out the vote for him, he can and will. It is time to separate the sheep from the goats. Things are not looking good for Republicans. It is time to abandon ship, to build an ark, to raise the standard. Republicanism is making Christianity look bad. The Coach has also pontificated on US history, with unhappy results: Dispatches from the Culture Wars has more on this. (Adapted from my blog, here)CLOSE The colorful former Colts punter Pat McAfee enjoyed holding court in the locker room. Clark Wade/IndyStar Buy Photo Pat McAfee's next big thing? He's retiring from the colts to pursue entertainment and marketing plans. (Photo: Matt Detrich/The Star)Buy Photo INDIANAPOLIS – This is the most Pat McAfee thing ever. Retiring at age 29? Leaving millions of dollars on the table? To go into comedy? Who does that? Indianapolis Colts punter Pat McAfee does it — he just did it — because he’s not like anyone else. In a world full of unique snowflakes, no two people being alike, McAfee is a blizzard unto himself. Given that McAfee made $2.9 million this past season and could’ve punted for another decade — Houston Texans punter Shane Lechler is 40, Colts kicker Adam Vinatieri is 44 — he’d need a pretty damn big table to hold all the money he’s leaving behind. Walking away from $30 million in earnings, and probably much more given the way NFL salaries rise, might sound like the dumbest decision ever. Two things about that: One, Pat McAfee is a borderline genius, and if I had to guess, he’s north of that border. MORE ABOUT MCAFEE Two, his earnings might actually go up now that he’s shed that whole football thing. Not many NFL players can make more money in their second career than their first — Michael Strahan comes to mind — but McAfee’s on that list given that beautiful mind of his. And it’s beautiful, make no mistake about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah — he’s the idiot who jumped into the Broad Ripple canal and was fished out by the police. Seen his mugshot from that 2010 arrest? He doesn’t look smart. He looks drunk, which he was. That was the mistake that saved his career and maybe even his life, because 23-year-old Pat McAfee was young and dumb and living it up one year into his NFL career, a blue-collar kid from the ‘Burgh succumbing to the clichéd life of the nouveau rich professional athlete — until life dumped a pail of Central Canal water over his head. Now look at him. He uses that canal plunge as the self-deprecating punch line of a comedy act that is headliner-worthy, and not because he’s pretty funny for a punter. He’s funny, and then put a period on the sentence. Professional comedy is an exercise in advanced intellect, the sign of a brain moving faster than most of us can manage, and McAfee has one of those brains. On the Wonderlic test given to NFL prospects, he scored a 37 — which puts his IQ in the 98th percentile, according to Mensa. McAfee has a photographic memory, by the way. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but I saw it before his comedy show at the Carmel Palladium in July 2015. At the VIP meet-and-greet, a line of 50 people waited for a moment with McAfee. He asked each of them their name, committed it to memory, and then addressed VIPs as they mingled before the show. That’s a pretty good story. McAfee’s mom once told me a better one: "At the (2009 NFL) rookie symposium, they gave players a list of something like 26 numbers in a row, to see how many they could recite from memory," Sally McAfee said. "Pat remembered all 26. He could say it forward and backward." A beautiful mind, I’m telling you, and this guy has a similarly gifted leg. Whether he returns to the NFL or not, McAfee hasn’t kicked his last famous kick. He’s always wanted to make a YouTube video and watch it go viral as he launches the longest field goal ever recorded or strikes a soccer ball in excess of 130 mph, the neighborhood of the current world record. He believes he can do both — as well as smash the longest rugby punt — because he’s fooled around with it and come close. But he’s not going to do it for free. He’s wrestling with the idea of wearing a company’s shoe and doing it as a commercial. CLOSE We've all heard stories about "that crazy kicker." Here are some of the craziest, real-life quotes straight from the mouth of former Colts punter Pat McAfee. Wochit Meanwhile, on company time, McAfee led the NFL in punting this past season with a 49.3-yard average. And he’s walking away? Well, yeah, because that brain of his gets restless. His ADD tires him to the point that he needs naps to recharge, and then he wakes up and stars in an on-court skit with the Harlem Globetrotters or hosts an IndyStar high school awards show or starts a foundation to raise money for veterans. A brilliant snowflake, I’m saying, and 30 years from now he’ll be his era’s Frank Gifford or Ahmad Rashad or Michael Strahan, someone so famous off the field that the younger kids, the ones not born yet, will be surprised to learn that, wait a minute, Pat McAfee used to punt? Yeah, youngster. He did. He used to punt as well as anyone ever has. But he was better at other stuff. Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyelTo say that gun laws are a contentious issue in the United States is putting it mildly. When asked whether the government should protect Americans’ Second Amendment right to bear arms or focus on controlling gun ownership, people in the U.S. are split roughly 50-50, with the pro-gun rights contingent having a slight edge, according to a 2015 Pew Research survey. Whatever their position, most respondents had a strong opinion on the question. About 91% of people who wanted to protect gun rights felt strongly about the issue, while 81% of people were just as firm in their feelings that we need more gun control. Whether you’re hoping for increased restrictions on firearms or want more pro-gun legislation, you’ll want to take a close look at what’s happening in each state. Though occasional efforts to change federal gun laws get a lot of attention, most of America’s gun legislation happens on a state-by-state basis. Some states have adopted more stringent gun control measures, while others have been moving to liberalize gun laws, making it easier for people to carry weapons in public places, for example. The result is a patchwork of legislation, with gun laws that are constantly in flux. Determining who has the strictest and loosest gun laws isn’t a straightforward task. Nonetheless, several organizations track and monitor state laws on guns. We looked at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s 2016 Gun Law State Scorecard, Guns & Ammo’s 2015 ranking of the best states for gun owners, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence’s State Scorecard, and the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action. Based on that information, the following nine states have some of the fewest restrictions on guns in the U.S. 1. Arizona In Arizona, there are few restrictions on gun ownership and sales. You don’t need a permit to purchase a handgun or rifle. The state doesn’t require ownership registration. And you can carry a handgun, either concealed or openly, without a permit. Those and other factors earned it the top spot on Guns & Ammo’s list of gun-friendly states. It ranked 47 out of 50 (with 50 being the weakest gun laws) on the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s state scorecard. 2. Alaska Alaska residents can carry a gun openly or concealed without a permit. Local governments don’t have the authority to regulate firearms. And there are no limits on the number of guns you can purchase at once or waiting periods before gun purchases, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Few gun restrictions combined with a strong hunting culture earned Alaska the No. 3 spot on Guns & Ammo’s list of states friendliest to gun owners. The state has the second loosest gun laws in the country, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. 3. Wyoming Wyoming’s loose gun laws earned the state an “F” rating on the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s state scorecard. (It’s one of 26 states that received a failing grade from the organization.) You may carry a concealed weapon without a permit. The state is one of the few that do not have a law requiring information about mentally ill individuals to be reported the National Instant Criminal Background Check System or an in-state database. In early 2017, Wyoming’s governor vetoed a bill that would have allowed concealed carry at government meetings. But he signed into law a measure that allows schools to decide whether employees can carry weapons. 4. Vermont Vermont has a reputation as a liberal state, but it bucks blue state trends when it comes to gun laws. It’s the second most gun-friendly state in the U.S., according to Guns & Ammo. And recent efforts to impose more restrictions on guns have been met with strong opposition. It’s the only state where people as young as 16 can purchase certain types of guns, and there are no laws that prevent people from bringing guns into places of worship, bars or restaurants where alcohol is served, or polling places. Unlike most other states in the Northeast, there’s also no law regulating firearm sales at gun shows. 5. Kansas “Kansas has become one of the strongest states for gun owners in the nation,” according to Guns & Ammo. The state doesn’t require a permit to carry a concealed firearm; open carry is also legal. Public employees (except those who work for schools) are now permitted to carry concealed weapons while working. Gun buyback programs funded by taxpayers are prohibited. And students are allowed to carry concealed weapons on campuses of public universities and colleges. The state ranked 48 out of 50 on the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s state scorecard. 6. Kentucky Kentucky ranked fifth on Guns & Ammo’s list of firearm-friendly states. Unlike some states on this list, you do need a permit to carry a handgun in the Bluegrass State, but state law requires a permit to be issued to anyone who fulfills the basic requirements. Kentucky doesn’t have laws banning people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors or subject to domestic violence protective orders from possessing firearms (though federal law does prohibit them from owning guns). 7. Mississippi Mississippi ranked dead last on the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s state scorecard, and the state has recently loosened some of its restrictions on guns. Permits aren’t required to carry a firearm, either openly or concealed, and the state reduced conceal carry permit fees for those who do wish to obtain them. The state also doesn’t license or heavily regulate firearms dealers. 8. Utah Utah’s loose gun laws earned the state an “F” rating on the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s state scorecard. The state does not require the reporting of mentally ill individuals to the database used for firearm background checks and forbids local governments from enacting gun laws. Utah also doesn’t require the reporting of lost or stolen firearms. 9. South Carolina South Carolina ranked 14th on Guns & Ammo’s list of firearm-friendly states and received “nearly top marks in every category, with no restrictions on what types of firearms can be owned or possessed in the state.” The state’s loose gun laws earned the state an “F” rating on the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s state scorecard. It also does not give law enforcement discretion to deny a concealed handgun permit. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook!KOLKATA: Over 18 hours of continuous pounding by torrential rains that started Friday evening has inundated vast areas of 13 districts, almost all of them in South Bengal, marooning over 18 lakh people. Excess rain since the beginning of the monsoon season in mid-June had already left these
.” The powerful state agency charged with implementing AB 32 and other climate control measures, claims the low carbon fuel standard will “only” raise gasoline prices $.30 gallon in 2013. The California Political Review reported implementation of these the policies will raise prices by $1.00 per gallon. Detroit was once the most prosperous manufacturing city in the world, a title later secured by California. Will California follow Detroit down a tragic path to ruin? In 1950, no one could imagine the Detroit of 2010. In 1970, when foreign imports started to make a foothold, the unions and their bought and paid for politicians resisted any change. In the 1990s as manufacturers fled to Alabama and South Carolina, the unions and their political minions held firm, even as good jobs slipped away. No one in Detroit envisioned their future. Today, California is following Michigan’s path with exploding pension obligations, a declining tax base, and disastrous leadership. Housing prices have fallen 30 to 60% across the state, evaporating trillions of dollars of equity and wealth. Unemployment remains stubbornly high and under-employment is rife. Do our politicians need any more signs? Governor Brown’s budget will first slash money to schools and raise tuition on its students while leaving all 519 state agencies intact. He apparently will protect political patronage at all costs. Jobs, and job creators, are fleeing the state. Intel, Apple, and Google are expanding out of the state. The best and brightest minds are leaving for Texas and North Carolina. The signs are everywhere. Meanwhile, the voters send the same cast of misfits back to Sacramento each year – just as Detroit did before them. The beaches are still beautiful. The mountains are still snow capped and the climate is still the envy of the world. Detroit never had that. But will California’s physical attributes be enough? If the people of California want to glimpse their future, they need look no farther than once proud City of Detroit and the once wealthy state of Michigan. It can happen here. Robert J Cristiano PhD is the Real Estate Professional in Residence at Chapman University in Orange, CA, a Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, CA and President of the international investment firm, L88 Companies LLC in Denver – Newport Beach – Washington DC - Prague. He has been a successful real estate developer for more than thirty years.So we’ve already said the Canadiens will finish locked in a dogfight for first place in the Atlantic Division with the Tampa Bay Lightning. Nothing we saw in pre-season changes that opinion. We here at Monday Morning Quarterback Central have been wrong before (and you’ve been kind enough to remind us when it happens) and it could be we’re wrong this time. But the 2016-2017 Montreal Canadiens are a very different team than the woeful edition that stumbled to the golf course last spring. And here are the top 10 reasons the Habs are bona fide contenders this time around. 1. Price check on Aisle 31: All the off-season changes the Canadiens made put together don’t equal the impact of one man: Carey Price, all-world goaltender. Obviously, the saves Price is capable of making when he’s healthy and at his best are critical to this team – but Price brings so much more. He infuses the entire team with a sense of confidence, determination and calm. With Price around, you don’t need different players to have them play differently. Every player is better when Price is back there. The legs have more power, the lungs hold more oxygen. If Price goes down for any length of time, all bets are off. But with him, the sky’s the limit. All the more reason the Canadiens have to keep him fresh so that he isn’t beaten down come playoff time. 2. Shea it isn’t so: Shea Weber is going to make fans here forget P.K. Subban. Okay, okay. Subban is pretty unforgettable. But Weber is going to have an impact second only to the effect Price’s return will have on the Habs. Not because he’s a huge upgrade on P.K. at the position – they’re very different players but they are both elite defencemen. But this will be a more cohesive team with Weber. For whatever reason, Subban skated in an orbit of his own. That won’t be the case with the former Nashville captain. Weber will lead by example and the defence corps and most of his teammates will follow. Yes, the Canadiens will be less entertaining without P.K. Subban – but winning is always entertaining. 3. The Shaw redemption: Flip the talented but always enigmatic Lars Eller for Andrew Shaw and what do you get? A team with far more grit and drive, that’s what. Season after season, it looked like Eller was about to break out. Season after season, the break-out failed to materialize. Eller did a lot of little things right but he wasn’t so great on the big things – like scoring big goals. Shaw is Brendan Gallagher with a mean streak. He plays over the line more than Gallagher but sometimes you need that. And he has those rings because he’s learned how to win from the best in the business. 4. Totally Rad, bro: Again and again, GM Marc Bergevin has rolled the dice in an attempt to bolster his team’s scoring power. Again and again, he’s come up snake-eyes. Not this time. Alexander Radulov is one big, fast, talented Russian. He really does seem to have undergone an attitude transplant since he flamed out with the Predators. Radulov is mature, he wants to be here, he is playing for a long-term contract. It says here that he’s going to give the Canadiens the extra scoring dimension they need – and he’s going to earn that contract. 5. Great Nate: If we can believe the exhibition season, Nathan Beaulieu is the most improved player on the roster. Beaulieu is the perfect complement to Weber and the fact that he will start the season as Weber’s partner is a huge vote of confidence from the coaching staff. Beaulieu will have to prove night in and night out that he’s a top-pair blue-liner but there’s no question that he has the talent. 6. Gally proof No. 1: For the first time since Saku Koivu was young and healthy, the Canadiens have a true No. 1 centreman. The fan base was mightily exercised that it took Michel Therrien so long to put Alexander Galchenyuk where he belongs — but you can’t argue that it didn’t work. Galchenyuk’s play over the final weeks of the lost season was something to behold. Now the young man has a chance to unleash that talent over a full campaign. 7. Gally proof No. 2: Someone wrote early in camp that Brendan Gallagher was due for a breakout season. Huh? Gallagher broke out a long time ago. The only problem with his game last season was that too much of the time, he was either out with an injury or playing hurt. The Habs don’t need a break-out campaign from Gallagher: all they need is for him to be healthy and be himself. 8: All hail Mikhail: You never want to put too much on an 18-year-old, especially not an 18-year-old defenceman. But Mikhail Sergachev seems to possess the entire package. Big, fast, calm with the puck, mature far beyond his years. Grabbing Sergachev at No. 9 in the draft might turn out to be the draft coup that any franchise needs to get over the top. At this point, it’s possible Sergachev won’t stick and it’s still unlikely that he can have a huge impact on the season. Sergachev will have a major impact on this team. The only question is when. 9. A couple of patches for Patches: It may be surprising to see your perennial top goal-scorer at No. 9 on the list of reasons the Habs should excel – but the key is that Max Pacioretty is now surrounded with enough talent to allow him to relax. With plenty of additional leadership from Weber and Shaw, Pacioretty can concentrate on what he does best: Scoring goals and killing penalties. 10: Bergie’s Baby: This is Marc Bergevin’s gamble and Bergevin’s team. After years of tweaking, Bergevin finally went all in with the Subban trade and the acquisition of Shaw and Radulov. Will it work? Put it this way: If it does, Bergevin will be a candidate for executive of the year. If it doesn’t, he won’t be here this time next year. Nor will his coach. [email protected] Twitter.com/jacktodd46The band Waft performs at Radio Room, a 65-seat music venue on North Pleasantburg Drive. (Photo: KEN OSBURN) Story Highlights Join the conversation at the Radio Room Thursday, March 26, 7:30 p.m. Edwin McCain is arguably Greenville's most successful homegrown musician, but it was Charleston, not his hometown, that boosted him onto the national scene. "Greenville has never really been a music town, so they have no baseline," McCain says. Maybe not, but a movement has been under way to change that perception. Since the Handlebar's closing last year left Greenville without a midsize venue, the city's musical identity has been a topic of hot debate. In public forums in recent months, music lovers have explored the possibility of enticing a promoter to open a similar midsize venue — seating 500 to 1,000 people — to showcase up-and-coming acts that may bypass Greenville for a market like Asheville or Charlotte. But is Greenville's music scene — or lack thereof — really about a venue? As McCain sees it, Charleston has long had a more music-friendly culture. When McCain was forging a career in the early 1990s, Charleston had an independent radio station 96 WAVE, plenty of local clubs, and fans who were hungry for new music. That radio station, McCain says, "galvanized the city as a trend-setting music town." The station played his music, even rough demos, and McCain gives 96 WAVE a huge share of the credit for his success. In Greenville, "people haven't had that luxury of saying to themselves, 'Hey, let's go out and hear some music.' It's usually an event that has to happen, to get people out. In Charleston, there was music everywhere," he recalls. "And so you could say to yourself, 'Let's go hear some music,' and you wouldn't even know who you were gonna go see." But Greenville, McCain says, lacks a couple of important puzzle pieces in order to become a hot town for music. "It's going to take a venue that becomes sort of a rallying point for up-and-coming bands," he says, "and a different generation of people that are moving here and that are part of the scene here." Comfortable and familiar Musician Hans Wenzel describes Greenville's music scene in five succinct words. "Cover bands, DJs and karaoke: For me, that kind of sums up the current musical identity of Greenville," he says. "It's rare that people will actually go out to see a local original artist, and support that." Greenville likes its music safe, familiar, radio-friendly. From a national perspective, that can be a good thing. Andrew Buck is a music agent with New York-based APA, an agency whose clients include a diverse lineup of artists, from rapper Flo Rida to alt-rockers AWOLNATION to iconic metal band Judas Priest. He sees Greenville as a city on the way up, with fans hungry for music, or at least for the well-known acts he promotes. In Buck's view, Greenville's music scene is "burgeoning," and promoters need to bring even more shows to town. Because of the colleges and festivals in the area, Greenville "is gaining a lot of notoriety, especially with some of the shows coming to the market," Buck says. "There are a few really solid promoters who do an amazing job and are making this market stand out." It's another story, though, when it comes to booking acts with a more experimental or indie vibe. Joady Harper, CEO and senior agent with Rocky Road Touring, represents out-of-the-mainstream acts like Har Mar Superstar and Skinny Puppy. Harper says she has better luck booking her artists in Spartanburg than Greenville. "My personal experience has only ever seen me be able to place acoustic artists in Greenville," Harper says. "I'm not sure if that's because that is the genre that does the best there, or the market just doesn't connect with other artists I work with." Wenzel has played music in Greenville since 1999, both as a solo artist and with bands such as Noxious and Swinging Richards. Trying to carve out a successful career has been discouraging, and Wenzel is taking a page from McCain's playbook. In June, he will move to Charleston and try his luck there. Fans in Greenville don't make it a priority to support local music, especially original artists, Wenzel says. "I don't think that we're really attracting other national acts, regional acts, to this area because people are afraid to go and see something they've never heard before," he says. Mikey Carvajal grew up in the Greenville music scene, and his band Islander has gone on to tour with national artists like Seether and Papa Roach. Islander forged its sound in small clubs in Greenville and Spartanburg before moving on to bigger things. He has fond memories of going out to the Powerhouse in Taylors as a teenage music fan. The music venue was affiliated with a church, and fans could check out hot new bands for a couple of bucks and a canned food donation. "It was really good bands, like touring bands at the time," says Carvajal. "And the truth of the matter is, we don't have something like that nowadays," For Carvajal, the music scene in Greenville is a well-kept secret, and that's due to everything from the scarcity of venues to the lack of fan support. He wishes that people in Greenville understood just how many great bands are bubbling under the surface, paying their dues in basements and tiny clubs, in front of audiences of a couple dozen people. Like McCain, Carvajal continues to make his home in Greenville as he builds a national career. But he finds it disappointing that his hometown doesn't make it easy for other aspiring musicians to launch their careers. "I really think Greenville has a thriving music scene waiting to be discovered, but because of how it's been handled, the way we haven't stewarded it the way maybe we should, and cultivated it, a lot of those musicians are sitting in their bedrooms, and nobody knows that we have them," Carvajal says. All about that stage Club owners have their own frustrations with the scene. Chuck Floyd, owner of Gottrocks, has been promoting music in Greenville for 15 years, and "we've obviously done OK with it. But it kind of hurts my feelings when I see regular sports bars doing better business and more business than music venues are." If Greenville wants to see itself as a cool music town on par with a place like Austin, Texas, it's up to music fans to do their part, Floyd says. "Until the public gets involved and starts supporting the artistic things in Greenville, it'll never happen," Floyd says. But having a midsize venue could make a difference, he says. The city has small venues such as Smiley's Acoustic Cafe, which seats fewer than 100, and places that can hold 100 to 300 people, such as Independent Public Alehouse and Gottrocks. And then there are the Peace Center and Bon Secours Wellness Arena, which seat far more people and attract national artists. Which means that acts on their way up the charts may bypass Greenville for a market like Asheville or Charlotte, with more venues and larger fan bases. "I'd love to see a larger venue; I'd love to see a 1,000- to 1,500-seater venue that would bring in some of the larger acts, some of the stuff that, say, the Orange Peel is doing in Asheville. But at the same time, I'd love to see people get out and support the venues we have now," he says. Wes Gilliam, talent buyer for the Radio Room, a 65-seat music club that brings in a mix of indie-rock, punk and hardcore bands, has a different view of what would elevate Greenville's profile. For starters, Gilliam says, a music subculture, with all sorts of under-the-radar artists, is far more interesting than a culture. Gilliam, who is putting on the Hey Look! Music Festival May 30 at Thomas Creek Brewery, is always on the lookout for a different flavor when booking shows. It's the "what's gonna blow my mind?" factor, he says. "I think what we really need is a 200- to 300-person club, not a 500- to 1,000-person club," says Gilliam. "I would love to be able to do that, bring cool shows in, keep it intimate, keep prices reasonable." A place like that would allow bands to network and form friendships, boosting the music scene across the board, Gilliam says. Fans have the power The conversation has started. Fans have gathered at places like Moe Joe's and Gottrocks to talk about what makes a music scene, and how Greenville can juice up the scene it has. And a recent TEDx Greenville Salon focused on the city's music culture and ideas for improving it. Much of the discussion has revolved around how to surmount the obstacles, everything from fan support to parking problems to less-restrictive ordinances downtown. But many music lovers say if fans demonstrate the demand exists and city officials are open to making downtown more music-friendly, the chances of getting new venues and more musical variety are vastly improved. For national agent Buck, Greenville has the potential to support all kinds of music, and he doesn't rule out any style of music when it comes to routing a tour. "Honestly, I am always willing to take a chance," Buck says. "As a company, we have put all different genres in the market. I am not scared to put any genre of music in any situation as long as the demand is there." Greenville has the power to create a music scene, Buck says. "At the end of the day, fans create a'scene.' Where that scene is big or small can help create demand and interest in music in that community," he says. "Music is all about the grass-roots movement, and fans create the culture in the market. What kids are listening to resonates with agents and makes us realize that we need to route more shows through certain markets." McCain is hopeful that Greenville's fans will step up and give the city and its musicians a boost. The calendar of events around the Upstate is a busy one, he acknowledges, but all folks have to do is put down their smartphones and open their minds and ears. "When people do go into a venue and stop looking at their phones for five minutes, they're still as able to be moved as they always were," McCain says. "It's just getting them in there, into that mindset." MORE FROM GREENVILLE: Read or Share this story: http://grnol.co/1bqx3HyCosmicSpiral Profile Blog Joined December 2010 United States 10772 Posts #1 Thanks to some fortunate choices we will get to see this theory in action on Thursday. Group D is notable enough for being the first all-zerg group in GSL history; in previous GSLs there weren’t enough representatives to even try this out. Only the best of the best were cultivated for this particular harvest. Life and Leenock are the two best zergs in the entire scene right now, Symbol is perpetually on the edge of a championship run every other week, and Soulkey is a poster boy that BW players can indeed play another RTS at a high level. It seems a flagrant defiance of God’s will that two of these players cannot advance to the Round of 8. This is the group I am most excited to watch. My favorite player is up in the first match, my third favorite player will be in the second match, and there’s a chance that both of them will get out as favorites to win Season 5. It will be a true test of Soulkey’s ZvZ prowess which has been mostly limited to beating up crummy foreigners, transitioned BW pros, and CoCa. Best of all I get to see how the top pros apply the “less races = easier time” philosophy to the most frustrating and fast-paced mirror matchup in the game. Are they going to mess around with opening builds or attack timings? Will Soulkey bring out Cloud Kingdom if he loses on Whirlwind? Will Symbol cheese, once? How will the different styles influence the mindgames and decision-making which will determine who gets out? Commentators and spectators always talk about how race homogeneity benefits a player when preparing for a group stage. When you have less possible matchups to deal with, you can dedicate more time to one specific matchup and leave the others “up to chance”. In addition you can concentrate on exploiting your enemies’ tendencies (the main advantage of having prep time for a BoX against a single person) instead of merely working out the kinks in your own gameplay.Thanks to some fortunate choices we will get to see this theory in action on Thursday. Group D is notable enough for being the first all-zerg group in GSL history; in previous GSLs there weren’t enough representatives to even try this out. Only the best of the best were cultivated for this particular harvest. Life and Leenock are the two best zergs in the entire scene right now, Symbol is perpetually on the edge of a championship run every other week, and Soulkey is a poster boy that BW players can indeed play another RTS at a high level. It seems a flagrant defiance of God’s will that two of these players cannot advance to the Round of 8.This is the group I am most excited to watch. My favorite player is up in the first match, my third favorite player will be in the second match, and there’s a chance that both of them will get out as favorites to win Season 5. It will be a true test of Soulkey’s ZvZ prowess which has been mostly limited to beating up crummy foreigners, transitioned BW pros, and CoCa. Best of all I get to see how the top pros apply the “less races = easier time” philosophy to the most frustrating and fast-paced mirror matchup in the game. Are they going to mess around with opening builds or attack timings? Will Soulkey bring out Cloud Kingdom if he loses on Whirlwind? Will Symbol cheese, once? How will the different styles influence the mindgames and decision-making which will determine who gets out? Gee, these lights are pretty bright. I guess they make my awesome jacket look more awesome though. Life is known as an extremely aggressive player who seeks to dictate the pace of the game from start to end. However this was not always the case with his ZvZ. Back in February when he began to establish himself as the premier ZvZ specialist in Korea, Life was one of the most stubborn macro players. In any Bo3 you could predict his opening build orders throughout the whole series. He would open 15 hatch in the first game, 15 hatch in the second game and if he was feeling particular risky, 15 hatch with an immediate gas afterwards in the last one. He would never do a dedicated attack unless he had a third base behind it, and nobody could break his defenses unless they were doing an all-in. During this period Life popularized several new builds notable for their practicality as well as their innovation: a refined version of Nestea’s 2 base mutalisk build that became the norm for ZvZ mutalisk play, a fake muta build that was actually a +1 roach speed timing to counter fast infestors (which has become the standard counter to fast muta today), 10 pool expands to punish hatchery first, etc. Today Life seems to be a very different player. Since macro ZvZ has become the norm, he has gone to aggressive openers to exploit such tendencies. The 10 pool expand, a build he used to save for Ohana alone, is now his second favorite opening besides hatchery first. He goes to 2 base mutalisk a lot less often than before and prefers fast infestors. On a map as large as Whirlwind we may see nydus worms or one of his newer builds, +1/+1 zergling harassment into roach/infestor. With any overall strategy comes the threat of zergling runbys. During his Ro32 interview Life said that he didn’t want to play many ZvZs in the next round yet here is Curious, saying that ZvZvZvZ couldn’t be a better outcome. With recent clutch victories over Sniper, Violet, and Leenock, Life might be very confident about his chances in an all-zerg group. But those games were the closest ones he had played in a long time; he really should not have beaten Leenock at MLG Dallas if it wasn’t for some sloppy play on his opponent’s side. If Life told his teammate that this is a great idea, then mischief is afoot. Life is known as an extremely aggressive player who seeks to dictate the pace of the game from start to end. However this was not always the case with his ZvZ. Back in February when he began to establish himself as the premier ZvZ specialist in Korea, Life was one of the most stubborn macro players. In any Bo3 you could predict his opening build orders throughout the whole series. He would open 15 hatch in the first game, 15 hatch in the second game and if he was feeling particular risky, 15 hatch with an immediate gas afterwards in the last one. He would never do a dedicated attack unless he had a third base behind it, and nobody could break his defenses unless they were doing an all-in. During this period Life popularized several new builds notable for their practicality as well as their innovation: a refined version of Nestea’s 2 base mutalisk build that became the norm for ZvZ mutalisk play, a fake muta build that was actually a +1 roach speed timing to counter fast infestors (which has become the standard counter to fast muta today), 10 pool expands to punish hatchery first, etc.Today Life seems to be a very different player. Since macro ZvZ has become the norm, he has gone to aggressive openers to exploit such tendencies. The 10 pool expand, a build he used to save for Ohana alone, is now his second favorite opening besides hatchery first. He goes to 2 base mutalisk a lot less often than before and prefers fast infestors. On a map as large as Whirlwind we may see nydus worms or one of his newer builds, +1/+1 zergling harassment into roach/infestor. With any overall strategy comes the threat of zergling runbys.During his Ro32 interview Life said that he didn’t want to play many ZvZs in the next round yet here is Curious, saying that ZvZvZvZ couldn’t be a better outcome. With recent clutch victories over Sniper, Violet, and Leenock, Life might be very confident about his chances in an all-zerg group. But those games were the closest ones he had played in a long time; he really should not have beaten Leenock at MLG Dallas if it wasn’t for some sloppy play on his opponent’s side. If Life told his teammate that this is a great idea, then mischief is afoot. Coach Ryu said my Penance Stare works from this distance, but nothing’s happening... Soulkey was always cited as one of the BW pros who transitioned quickly and efficiently to SC2. Before Rain became the best protoss in the world and Flash showed up to MLG Dallas, people were talking about Soulkey as one of the first who would show results. Unfortunately those two others players have shaped the popular perception of what a KeSPA player should be accomplishing. Soulkey has sketchy ZvP, fails to beast through everyone who isn’t a GSL champion, and doesn’t have the star power to draw crowds. In addition he was petrified at the news that he would have to face Life in the Ro16. All of these factors make him the apparent underdog in Group D. But if there is one matchup Soulkey can ride into the Round of 8, it is his ZvZ. His summer Proleague status weren’t particular impressive but he has really picked up the pace starting from WCS Korea. Since then he is 31-10 in individual sets which includes a 22-7 record during the MvP Invitational and a 7-3 record at MLG Dallas. Now I’m not going to pretend that CoCa, Sheth, Hawk, Idra, and Ret are top-level ZvZ players. But it’s important to realize that he is beating the people he is supposed to beat very handily, and that is a typical pattern for all players who are proficient in any matchup. Life and Soulkey have similar aggressive styles except Soulkey prefers slightly later aggression after hatchery first. It’s typical to see Soulkey get an early baneling nest to either defend or threaten; one of his favorite habits is to morph 6-8 banelings near his opponent’s natural and immediately attack when zergling speed finishes, immediately following it up with lair. Occasionally he gets overaggressive in this position and needlessly sacrifices banelings in pursuit of drones. Soulkey’s infestor control is notable for his careful usage of energy and positioning. Instead of spamming ITs and headbutting the front line of enemy roaches, he spits a few out of them out at a time and micros his infestors to the back. Soulkey’s largest weakness is indecision when he is in a position of weakness. He is very technical with engagements and will forgo attacks, even with a huge army advantage, if he cannot get the position he wants. But if he’s caught in a bad spot Soulkey hesitates to take decisive action and give his opponent critical time to push his advantage. We saw this happen twice against Revival at MLG. During the base race on Cloud Kingdom, Soulkey appropriately created a spine wall at his natural but failed to push Revival’s natural at the same time; he hesitated to go for the kill multiple times on Antiga Shipyard despite having more infestors and roaches in each situation. During the latter game Revival caught Soulkey out of position several times and picked off crucial infestors, which lead to an overwhelming push that could not be stopped. Both times the TSL zerg managed to squeeze out a narrow victory to close out the series. Soulkey cannot hesitate against Life, one of the few players in the game who possesses the uncanny ability to make the right decisions in the worst conditions. If he manages to get a big drone lead or tech advantage he must use it to make a calculated strike instead of waiting back. Soulkey was always cited as one of the BW pros who transitioned quickly and efficiently to SC2. Before Rain became the best protoss in the world and Flash showed up to MLG Dallas, people were talking about Soulkey as one of the first who would show results. Unfortunately those two others players have shaped the popular perception of what a KeSPA player should be accomplishing. Soulkey has sketchy ZvP, fails to beast through everyone who isn’t a GSL champion, and doesn’t have the star power to draw crowds. In addition he was petrified at the news that he would have to face Life in the Ro16. All of these factors make him the apparent underdog in Group D.But if there is one matchup Soulkey can ride into the Round of 8, it is his ZvZ. His summer Proleague status weren’t particular impressive but he has really picked up the pace starting from WCS Korea. Since then he is 31-10 in individual sets which includes a 22-7 record during the MvP Invitational and a 7-3 record at MLG Dallas. Now I’m not going to pretend that CoCa, Sheth, Hawk, Idra, and Ret are top-level ZvZ players. But it’s important to realize that he is beating the people he is supposed to beat very handily, and that is a typical pattern for all players who are proficient in any matchup.Life and Soulkey have similar aggressive styles except Soulkey prefers slightly later aggression after hatchery first. It’s typical to see Soulkey get an early baneling nest to either defend or threaten; one of his favorite habits is to morph 6-8 banelings near his opponent’s natural and immediately attack when zergling speed finishes, immediately following it up with lair. Occasionally he gets overaggressive in this position and needlessly sacrifices banelings in pursuit of drones. Soulkey’s infestor control is notable for his careful usage of energy and positioning. Instead of spamming ITs and headbutting the front line of enemy roaches, he spits a few out of them out at a time and micros his infestors to the back.Soulkey’s largest weakness is indecision when he is in a position of weakness. He is very technical with engagements and will forgo attacks, even with a huge army advantage, if he cannot get the position he wants. But if he’s caught in a bad spot Soulkey hesitates to take decisive action and give his opponent critical time to push his advantage. We saw this happen twice against Revival at MLG. During the base race on Cloud Kingdom, Soulkey appropriately created a spine wall at his natural but failed to push Revival’s natural at the same time; he hesitated to go for the kill multiple times on Antiga Shipyard despite having more infestors and roaches in each situation. During the latter game Revival caught Soulkey out of position several times and picked off crucial infestors, which lead to an overwhelming push that could not be stopped. Both times the TSL zerg managed to squeeze out a narrow victory to close out the series.Soulkey cannot hesitate against Life, one of the few players in the game who possesses the uncanny ability to make the right decisions in the worst conditions. If he manages to get a big drone lead or tech advantage he must use it to make a calculated strike instead of waiting back. Rule 1 of Leenock: even a teddy bear still has claws. For the first time in a while Leenock is a stable presence in ZvZ. If there has been one steady obstacle in Leenock’s quest to be the best player in the world, it has been his inability to turn a ZvZ winning streak into standard form. Occasionally he goes on these incredible runs where he runs over the likes of DRG, Nestea, and Violet. Then he will lose to a player like Min or July in an incredibly scrubby way that makes you question his competence in the matchup. These winning streaks far outnumber the losing streaks (Leenock’s career ZvZ winrate stands at around 60%) and it looks like Leenock is in the middle of another winning streak at the moment. Leenock is the type of player who likes to constantly attack but never commit to a push that will endanger his own economy. In the past he was a big proponent of ling/baneling all-ins; today, he uses small baneling skirmishes to keep his opponent scared. Overall he is quite conservative in build orders and will never try those weird gasless builds or pure speedling armies. Leenock is somewhat stubborn when it comes to his lair tech, as he will stick to his infestor/mutalisk build no matter the circumstance or map. If there are identifiable weaknesses, it is that Leenock may be too stylistic in ZvZ. He almost never attempts 1 base builds unless he is in a position where he can afford to take a loss, and all of his desperation pushes involve pulling his queens along for the ride. He comes into Group D as the second favorite alongside Life, only separated by a close 3-4 loss against Life at MLG Dallas. The games were incredibly close and Leenock should’ve won Game 7 if he did not retreat his mutas to deal with a speedling counterattack. No one would be surprised if he comes out of this group in first place. However, Symbol’s playstyle matches up well against Leenock and the FXO prodigy will have to fight for a spot in the winners’ final. For the first time in a while Leenock is a stable presence in ZvZ. If there has been one steady obstacle in Leenock’s quest to be the best player in the world, it has been his inability to turn a ZvZ winning streak into standard form. Occasionally he goes on these incredible runs where he runs over the likes of DRG, Nestea, and Violet. Then he will lose to a player like Min or July in an incredibly scrubby way that makes you question his competence in the matchup. These winning streaks far outnumber the losing streaks (Leenock’s career ZvZ winrate stands at around 60%) and it looks like Leenock is in the middle of another winning streak at the moment.Leenock is the type of player who likes to constantly attack but never commit to a push that will endanger his own economy. In the past he was a big proponent of ling/baneling all-ins; today, he uses small baneling skirmishes to keep his opponent scared. Overall he is quite conservative in build orders and will never try those weird gasless builds or pure speedling armies. Leenock is somewhat stubborn when it comes to his lair tech, as he will stick to his infestor/mutalisk build no matter the circumstance or map. If there are identifiable weaknesses, it is that Leenock may be too stylistic in ZvZ. He almost never attempts 1 base builds unless he is in a position where he can afford to take a loss, and all of his desperation pushes involve pulling his queens along for the ride.He comes into Group D as the second favorite alongside Life, only separated by a close 3-4 loss against Life at MLG Dallas. The games were incredibly close and Leenock should’ve won Game 7 if he did not retreat his mutas to deal with a speedling counterattack. No one would be surprised if he comes out of this group in first place. However, Symbol’s playstyle matches up well against Leenock and the FXO prodigy will have to fight for a spot in the winners’ final. This country
with a snip of your Mr. Hobby nippers, but I find that a knife gives me more precision. After that, it gets really easy—you just snap the pieces together. Look how clean Vegeta's hairline is here. Since Vegeta is in a fixed position and is not an action figure, these are some of the nicest lines I've seen on a Bandai kit. He doesn't have to be poseable, which allowed Bandai more precision in how he fits together. One of the unnecessary steps I did to make this kit my own was panel-lining. Panel lining is a technique where you color in grooves on the kit to make them stand out more. Here, I am panel-lining one of Vegeta's shoulder pads. It's messy, but don't worry! …Because I immediately wiped away the excess ink with a Q-Tip. Panel-lining always looks severe at first, but then you do your smudging step and it looks fine. Here's a comparison of the shoulder pad I didn't panel-line yet with the one I did. See how it really defines Vegeta's outfit? It didn't take long to fully assemble Vegeta. He looks so peaceful! For the pod, I had a lot of sticker applications to do. I used tweezers to avoid getting the oil from my fingertips on the kit—since that could make the stickers fall off more easily. The keyboard had more stickers than anything else. To get it to look like this, I used three main stickers, which needed to be lined-up as precisely as possible. Here's the pod closed. The hardest part of the whole kit was getting that sphere as spherical as possible. The top of the pod was especially difficult, and in fact the instructions include a warning to cut it out as cleanly as possible and don't leave any nubs—otherwise it might not fit together as a circle. I had a lot of trouble with this myself, even with the X-Acto knife, and ended up taking it apart, cutting even closer, and reassembling it more tightly. Here's the pod, two hours after I started building. Even with the difficulty I had with the sphere, it ended up looking great for the amount of effort I put into it. The large pieces, combined with how fixed most of it was, meant there was little room for human error. Thanks again to Bluefin for giving me a chance to test this kit. If you're a DBZ fan interested in a kit that will be forgiving of your errors and still end up looking good, this is a good pick.Read more articles by Matt Christie Don’t miss any action. Sign up for the free BN newsletter(s) here HEROL GRAHAM is widely considered the best British fighter never to win a world title, and on November 24 1990, he came exceptionally close to claiming one. Matched against fearsome slugger Julian Jackson for the vacant WBC middleweight title, the silky fighter’s accurate blasts had closed the slugger’s eyes. The American’s vision was limited even before a punch had been thrown, but by the fourth round, he was virtually blind. All Graham had to do was stay out of trouble for three minutes and the fight would have been stopped in his favour. But the Briton increased his fire. It lit the dynamite that lurked in Jackson’s right mitt. Graham’s trainers, the Ingles, remember the night well. “After three rounds, me dad [Brendan Ingle] says to him, ‘stick to the plan, box him, and don’t get involved’,” said Dominic. “But Herol wanted to knock him out. He could have run around for three minutes and he’d have won. But he went out to try and finish it and, bang, he got done.” John Ingle added: “It’s like a having a footballer with an open net in front of him thinking ‘I’m going to bicycle kick this in’.” Although Graham remains one of the Ingles’ most accomplished graduates, his claims that he invented the famous switch-hitting style that made the gym world famous, do not sit well with Dominic, Brendan and John. “People always say that,” John snaps. “We don’t have to do this [develop boxers], there’s no financial pressure on us today because of what we have consistently achieved. If Herol Graham was such a genius then why hasn’t he done it? If he’s the mastermind, why has he let my dad do it? If it’s Herol Graham’s style, he should sue us for copyright because we’ve made a fortune out of it.” Read more ON THIS DAY articles here Subscribe to BOXING NEWS, established in 1909, and the longest running publication on the market. SAVE MONEY and GET THE BEST COVERAGE EVERY WEEK.I’ve been practicing law in metro Atlanta, Georgia for more than two decades. One of the things that I incorporate into my practice is to set aside time to do pro bono (i.e., free; my children call it pro-bonehead) legal work. A couple of months ago I found out about a criminal case. It was going on in a small town near my practice in Atlanta and was being handled by a public defender. The Client was a younger man in his 20’s, charged with some property crimes. Speaking with The Client’s attorney, I learned that the accused was caught with the goods, as they say. As is often the lot of public defenders, this was factually and legally a losing case. Not much to defend and not much of a challenge for the prosecutor to make her case. “What can I do to help you?” The Client’s attorney told me he really didn’t know. He was trying to diminish the severity of the sentence but the prosecutor and the judge were adamant that 10 years in prison was “the deal.” “What’s his story?” I asked. “Everyone has a story.” “I don’t know. I really didn’t get into his personal life. But he seems like a young man with some real promise.” So I asked if he would like me to talk to his client. “Sure,” he said, “what do we have to lose?” The following week I visited The Client. I had no idea what to expect. Would he be surly, full of excuses, angry at the world? The overwhelming weight of my experience is that legal trouble is always “someone else’s fault.” What I encountered, however, was a young man humble, offering no excuses, remorseful, and eager to make amends. He shared the story of his life. As he knew it. He was the product of a teen-aged white mother and an older than that black father. Raised by his paternal grandmother who dealt harshly with him. He was told that he would never amount to anything. He was shown little love. The Client also reflected on the first year of his life. Obviously, he knew only what others had told him. He described a “rich white family from up North” who adopted him and of a long court battle over who would keep him. He said that he often wondered what happened to them and that he would love to ask them why they fought so hard to keep him. Here, I must interrupt myself. Hearing The Client’s words sent me back in time to our family’s own journey into adoption that began more than a quarter century before. It started with a telephone call. A call I will never forget. It was Someone I had never spoken to before. Or since. Their tone was more of a dare than anything else. The caller suggested that if I cared so much about unborn children, why don’t I show some concern for a child that wasn’t killed. I disregarded the dubious logic and asked, “What are you talking about?” The Someone told me of a child that was due to be born in a few months – a child that would be given up for adoption. “Give me a number. I’ll make the call.” I did make the call, hired a lawyer. And waited. Late one night, the year was 1990, we got a call. Another in the litany of phone calls to never forget. The birth mother was in labor. My wife and I raced to the distant hospital. We were “greeted” icily by the hospital staff. They gave us two chairs. In a broom closet. We waited. Finally, they brought a little boy to us. We loved on him, prayed over him, and thanked God for this precious gift. We named him Zachariah ( which means “God remembers”). Occasionally, one of the nurses would come into the room to check on us. As the night wore on, we were still excited but also falling victim to fatigue. During the nurse’s next visit to our broom closet, she told me I was holding Zach incorrectly. I snapped back for her to leave me alone; we had six more children at home and I knew well enough how to hold a baby. She beat a hasty retreat. A few minutes later, she re-entered with a completely different demeanor. “You know,” she started reluctantly, “this is a mixed-race baby.” “Yes, we know. What’s your point?” I asked. With that, she ushered us out of the broom closet and into a very nice private room. We enjoyed the comfort and got some rest until we were allowed to leave with Zach. At home, Zach was a delight. He was loved on bountifully and loved deeply. There was so much that happened during the next several months. But we were always so glad to have Zach in our home. In our hearts. In our family. Months later I received another unforgettable call; this one, of the worst variety. My lawyer told me the birth mother had changed her mind and wanted her baby back. Our hearts were broken. Without boring you with the legal theories, our attorney told us that a court fight would be an uphill battle. So we fought uphill. Through many hearings, in at least two different courtrooms, we fought. We hoped. We prayed. But we also lost. Through a cascading avalanche of tears, we were eventually forced to give Zach up. Though that was nearly three decades ago, reciting those words makes my heart hurt all over again. Like many deep wounds, the hole in our family heart eventually scabbed and scarred. The tears didn’t flow anymore, but the recollection, reflection, and prayers continued. Best as I can describe it, it is a very, very sad happiness. Happy for the opportunity – the time we have together in the best of circumstances is short enough – but sad that it was over. Sad that maybe God hadn’t remembered. So achingly, dishearteningly sad that Zach was gone. But The Client interrupted my interruption. I guess he thought that I hadn’t heard what he just said, so he repeated himself about the rich, white family from up north who he wanted to talk to someday. With his recitation, I knew that I had to tell a part of The Client’s own story. So I reached into my briefcase. I showed him something that has been in the top drawer of my desk for twenty six years: The Client stared and studied. After several moments, he asked me, “Is that me?” I told him it was. As he continued to take this in, he asked further, “Who are you?” “I am the rich, white guy from up North.” I replied. “I’m not rich, I’m darker than you are, and, Atlanta isn’t up North. But 26 years ago, we fought so hard because we loved you. And for the last 26 years, we have loved you, and prayed for you, searched for you, and hoped to see you again. We called you Zach.” “You mean,” Zach asked, “I have a family?” Yes, you do Zach. Yes, you do. Of course, if you’re reading this, your story isn’t over yet. Neither is Zach’s. But I did tell the judge and the prosecutor the story that I have just told you. The judge sat – as judge’s often do – expressionless. The prosecutor – as prosecutor’s never do – declared it to be the best story she had ever heard. The judge asked me what I wanted. I told him I had my son taken away from me twenty-six years ago. I didn’t want him taken away again. Instead of prison, Zach received probation, which by all accounts is a miracle. Many challenges lay in the path before him. But he does not have to walk the path alone. So say a prayer for Zach and the many who are helping him to walk that path successfully. One part of this story is that our family has had the opportunity to re-connect with Zach. The reunion has been sweet. Another part is that through his legal situation, he has also been able to connect with some of his mother’s extended family in a way that was not possible before. They are good, kind, and generous Christian people who are investing themselves in Zach’s life as well. But that wonderful story is for them to tell. Even if this is not the best story you have ever heard, it’s still a good story. And every good story deserves a good moral. God always remembers his children.In partnership with Nedbank, one of South Africa’s largest banks, companies controlled by or connected to the wealthy and politically-connected Gupta family via its lieutenants extracted more than 1 billion rand (US$ 67.2 million) from Transnet, a state-owned company charged with constructing rail, port, and other transportation infrastructure to serve South African citizens. Credit: www.transnet.net The operation, which took place during late 2015 and early 2016, was one of the most intricate schemes in a long story of private influence over the running of the South African state. Private companies employing government-connected insiders manipulated Transnet’s operations to get it to carry out complex financial operations solely to generate consulting fees for the companies. While other South African banks called the financial schemes "tainted" and "toxic" and declined to get involved, Nedbank signed on as the Guptas’ financial partner in trades involving loans that netted the Gupta-linked firms millions of dollars per transaction. The scheme belies Nedbank’s recent portrayal of itself as a corruption fighter. Last year, it showily supported former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan when he went to court to thwart the Guptas’ demand that the government force banks leery of the family’s reputation as money launderers to do business with them. Eventually, crafty asset managers apparently decided to cut even the complicit Nedbank out of a portion of the deals, leaving more fees for themselves. This phase of the scheme involved defrauding Transnet’s pension fund, on which 51,000 pensioners rely. The Transnet fraud might have stayed hidden but for documents turned over to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) exposing collusion in the scheme by senior Transnet officials. Astoundingly, Transnet's auditor, SizweNtsalubaGobodo (SNG), also counted the company on the receiving end of the millions as its client, even as its audit of the suspect transactions failed to uncover anything unproper. The Guptas’ Rise While the Gupta family has grown to be fabulously wealthy and powerful, its origins were modest. According to a Sunday Times profile, Shiv, the father of Atul, Ajay, and Rajesh, once sold wheat flour, oil, and corn meal out of humble cooperatives in Saharanpur, a dusty city some 200 kilometers from India’s capital, New Delhi. Indian businessmen Ajay and Atul Gupta in Johannesburg, South Africa on March 4, 2011. (Gallo Images/City Press/Muntu Vilakazi) Led by Atul, the family relocated to South Africa in the heady days of the mid-1990s when apartheid fell and business opened to non-whites. The Guptas set up Correct Marketing, a computer parts firm, and it did well. By 1997, they reached a milestone -- about 97 million rand (over $20 million) in revenue. Paying tribute both to their city of origin and their newly adopted continent, they renamed their firm Sahara Computers. Fortune smiled on the family again in 2003 when Jacob Zuma, then a deputy president, became embroiled in an infamous arms deal scandal that revealed his relationship with two prominent brothers, Schabir and Shamim (Chippy) Shaikh. He still faces more than 700 corruption charges including racketeering, corruption, and fraud. With the Shaikhs facing legal prosecution, Zuma needed a new set of wealthy supporters, and appears to have chosen the Guptas. Within a decade, Zuma’s son Duduzane had become tightly bound with the family business empire. The Guptas and their associates were able to win lucrative government contracts, obtain bank loans on highly favorable terms, and use their political connections to dismiss and appoint senior public officials. South African President Jacob Zuma (GovernmentZA, CC BY-ND 2.0) The scope of the Guptas’ alliance with now-President Zuma was on full display in 2015, when a series of officials -- including former Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene -- were fired after clashing with Zuma over deals that involved the Guptas’ business interests. As it turns out, the Guptas were also able to use their connections to direct millions of dollars from Transnet, a major state firm, into their pockets. The rise of Regiments and Trillian Ironically, the Guptas’ Transnet gambit was made possible by a company that declined to sell them shares. This was Regiments, a firm that, for years, had been closely connected to the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and, allegedly, its systems of patronage. A boutique equities and securities investment firm, Regiments is run and co-owned by Litha Nyhonyha, one of the first licensed black accountants to gain prominence after the end of apartheid. Nyhonyha soon became a key ANC business ally, helping run critical entities, such as Thebe Investment Holdings, that were designed to assist the party in funding such needs as elections and events through institutions like the Batho Batho Trust. Draft contracts obtained by OCCRP show that Elgasolve, a company run by Gupta’s key associate Salim Essa, offered to purchase 50 percent of Regiments Capital for 200 million rand ($14 million), promising that it would earn massive profits thanks to their involvement. According to a High Court filling, Nyhonyha declined Elgasolve’s offer. But Regiments’ two other directors, traders Magandheran (Niven) Pillay and Eric Wood, appeared to be tempted. Pillay conceded that he met with the Guptas at their home with Wood, where it was explained that, if the other went through, he would become the company’s head. Ultimately, though, he would decline the offer. By early 2016, Wood created a number of companies under an umbrella group called Trillian along with Gupta associate Salim Essa. Between them, Wood and Essa owned 85 percent of the new firm. Internal documents obtained by OCCRP show that Trillian informally took over some of Regiments’ contracts and then formally acquired a division of the company, including 50 employees – and, notably, its trade in securities. According to an affidavit seen by OCCRP, the intent was to run Trillian only until 2019 -- a period that corresponds to President Zuma’s current term in office. A document trail examined by OCCRP indicates that before Trillian was even properly formed, Wood -- known as a prominent trader -- had been using Regiments’ securities desk to earn millions in collusion with the Guptas at the expense of Transnet. Booking deals As one of the country’s top three borrowers, Transnet, a state-owned freight transport company, proved an easy target for loan manipulation. In 2015, Brian Molefe, the Transnet group chief executive and a known Gupta ally, appointed a man named Phetolo Ramosebudi -- whose brother was one of the Regiments traders who moved over to Trillian -- to lead Transnet’s treasury department. Among other tasks, he was responsible for driving the company’s funding strategy. In what would become a key element of the scheme, on Dec. 3, 2015, Ramosebudi sent a memo to Transnet’s acting chief financial officer, Garry Pita, calling for unusual changes in the company’s securities trading policy. The memo is in the possession of OCCRP. The memo made three key recommendations: First, in a new approach, Regiments would handle Transnet’s large loans and interest rate risk management, rather than Transnet handling it in-house, as had been the normal practice. Second, loans arranged by Regiments would use fixed interest rates, rather than the lower, market-based floating rates that had usually been arranged by the specialized, and highly skilled, Transnet team of treasury unit. Finally, the memo called for Regiments’ consulting fees for executing the loans, which proved exorbitant, to be folded into the interest rates -- essentially hiding them from scrutiny. South African market experts OCCRP spoke with weren’t willing to go on the record to characterize this new strategy, citing repercussions within their tight-knit community. But several specialists described the approach recommended in the memo as “excessive,” “a rip-off,” “laughable,” and “unimaginable.” One expert described it as “an end game to extract ludicrous fees.” “These kinds of deals don’t normally happen,” he said, “because state-owned entities [like Transnet] have their own internal units specializing in this.” On the very next day after Ramosebudi sent his memo, Regiments carried out the first of a series of transactions on Transnet’s behalf using the new policies. as the counterparty. It involved borrowing 4.5 billion rand ($314 million) to buy a set of locomotives from China. (The deal benefited the Guptas and would later become scandalous in its own right.) Then, in a transaction arranged on behalf of Regiments, as instructed by Eric Wood, Nedbank stepped in as a counterparty to do an interest rate swap on the loan from the floating rates to higher fixed rates. An interest rate swap is a contractual agreement between two parties to exchange, over an agreed period, two streams of interest payments. It is usually done when a company with a variable interest rate wants a more predictable loan payment and swaps its floating rate for a fixed rate with a counterparty -- usually a bank or investment firm -- that’s willing to take the risk, or vice versa. Such rate swaps are not regulated by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). But in these deals, Transnet ended up paying consistently higher rates than they would have had they not made the swap -- and then paid large fees to Regiments on top of that for arranging the deal. “No invoice is created,” quotes the affidavit of a whistleblower, referring to the fees folded into the interest rates. Because Transnet’s outsourcing of these arrangements under such terms was unprecedented, Nedbank was the only bank willing to go along. According to the same affidavit obtained by OCCRP, other banks approached with the same offer found it “strange” that an external consultant would perform transactions on financial instruments that Transnet’s internal team would have done directly in the past, describing it as “tainted and toxic.” OCCRP obtained copies of the transactions which show the difference between the floating rate Transnet’s loans should have had and the fixed rate Regiments arranged. The fixed rate (11.15 percent) was 2 percent higher than the floating rate (9.1 percent), and the consulting fees specified in Ramosebudi’s memo added still more, yielding a final interest rate of 11.83 percent, a margin of 2.6 percent. Thanks to the extra fees, Regiments earned 161.8 million rand ($11.29 million). Nedbank earned another 28.2 million rand ($1.96 million dollars), presumably its cut of the fees. In early March, the operation was repeated again, earning Regiments 335 million rand ($21.9 million) and Nedbank 46.15 million rand ($3.02 million). A few weeks later, according to internal documents obtained by OCCRP, Transnet’s Treasury unit held a meeting with Pillay and Ramosebudi. The dealers complained that they had been excluded from the process and that the costs of executing the swap were miles from the market -- the second higher than the first. At the meeting, Pillay explained that his role had been limited to making a phone call to a Nedbank trader. He said that he had done this on instruction by Wood as a favor to him. By that month, Trillian acquired Regiments’ financial advisory division, affording Wood greater control. Rather than continuing to use Nedbank, Wood then apparently decided to use Transnet’s pension fund -- a separate legal entity known as TSDBF -- as the counterparty. This meant, in practice, that Trillian wouldn’t have to pay a cut of their fees to a counterparty (previously Nedbank). Fortunately for Wood and Trillian, a key ally was in place. About a year earlier, South Africa’s Minister of Public Enterprises, Lynne Brown, who had appointed many of the Gupta family’s friends to key roles and who was associated with them via her partner -- brought Stanley Shane, himself a Gupta ally and Trillian principal, into the Transnet board. Shane would also take on the role of chairman of the TSDBF board of trustees. This put him in a position to lobby heavily for Regiments to win a TSDBF tender for asset manager. Affidavits and other documents in OCCRP’s possession show that, though a range of highly rated asset managers applied for the role, Shane ensured that Regiments would have insider information and get the contract. At the same time, he acted on behalf of Trillian in examining Transnet deals. "Stanley Shane... helped establish Trillian, which he then helped get work for while being a board member of Transnet," said Mosilo Mothepu, a former CEO of Trillian Financial Advisory, the unit that acquired Regiments Advisory, where she previously worked. Speaking to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Public Enterprises on October 31, she described how uncomfortable Trillian's own directors were that Shane, Essa and Wood made decisions which directors, like herself, would be accountable for. Over the next few months, two interest swap operations using the TSDBF fund were carried out, earning Regiments 284.6 million rand ($19.1 million) on the first swap and 148.4 million rand ($9.9 million) on the second. These speculative swaps cost Transnet’s pension fund consulting fees. There is no defensible reason for a pension fund to take part in large interest rate swaps – and, in fact, the volume of derivatives TSDBF came to hold because of its participation violated laws meant to protect the pensioners from excessive risk. TSDBF had contracted with Regiments, not Trillian, to manage its assets – so when the fund discovered that Regiments had transferred its consulting fees to Trillian (even though Trillian had arranged the deals), it sued Trillian and others involved, demanding repayment of 230 million rand ($16.3 million) Notably, this money had been deposited into Trillian’s account at the Bank of Baroda, which government reports show is a linchpin of the Guptas’ financial empire. According to the Sunday Times, citing the TSDBF court filing, the same account was also used by Albatime, a shell company the Public Protector report says was part of the Guptas’ massive money laundering machine. The company is run by Kuben Moodley, then an adviser to Minister of Mineral Resources Mosebenzi Zwane. The use of this bank account by both Albatime and Trillian underscores Trillian’s close connection to the Gupta family. From December 2015 - the date of the first interest rate swap - until April 14, 2016, shortly after the last swap, Albatime received 42 million rand (nearly $3 million) from Regiments via this account. The Public Protector report confirmed that Albatime contributed to the purchase of a coal mine for the Guptas. Regiments’ transfers to Trillian soon became the subject of a dispute among the alleged conspirators of the fleecing of Transnet. State Capture Attempt Even as the interest rate swaps were playing out from December 2015 through April 2016, the Trillian principals’ influence over South Africa’s state-owned companies continued to grow. According to whistleblower affidavits seen by OCCRP, by October 2015, Wood (then still with Regiments), had received advance knowledge of President Zuma’s plans to fire Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene. (Meanwhile, the deputy finance minister, Mcebisi Jonas had publicly revealed that the Guptas had offered him 600 million rand (then around $ 44 million) to take over Nene’s position.) “[Wood] emailed me a document that essentially outlined initiatives that the new finance minister was going to approve - about 12 of them- and the potential fees that Regiments - at the time, was going to earn,” said Mothepu, the former CEO of Trillian Advisory, to parliament of the day that Wood told her Nene would be fired. “Six weeks later in December 2015, I confirmed to Eric that he was right,” he continued. “He then mentioned a colleague at Regiments, Mohammed Bobat, an advisor to the new Minister, and his role was to essentially channel all the work from state-owned companies or national treasury to [the company that would become] Trillian.” On Dec. 9, 2015, several days after the first interest rate swap, the president announced he would fire Nene and hire Des Van Rooyen as his replacement -- with Mohammed Bobat, a Regiments principal -- as advisor. Their alleged role, according to leaked emails, would be to channel government tenders from the national treasury and various state-owned entities like Transnet to the newly-formed Trillian. But the appointment of Van Rooyen, an ANC parliamentary backbencher, caused a financial panic. Days later, he was replaced by Pravin Gordhan, known to be a corruption fighter. But affidavits obtained by OCCRP indicate that in March 2016, when Trillian was established, Trillian’s CFO confirmed that “they” (meaning the Guptas) would soon have Gordhan replaced. By March 2017, the following year, he was. No Honor Among Thieves In the meantime, the architects of the Transnet scheme began to fall out with each other. Even as Regiments was pocketing millions from Transnet, it began to squabble with Trillian over who would get the lion’s share of the money and the deals. According to Mothepu, Regiments gave 50 cents of every rand earned from its public sector contracts to Salim Essa and Kuben Moodley -- showing that the Gupta associate and the Albatime head were both benefitting from Regiments’ success. But by late April 2016, Transnet’s board voted to transfer its Regiments contracts to Trillian officially. As Trillian absorbed Regiments’ business under Wood’s direction, Regiments principals Pillay and Nyhonyha fired back, filing a court case that accused Wood of diverting their business opportunities. Meanwhile, Wood is quoted in a prominent report on state capture as saying that nothing improper had happened, as Trillian had been subcontracted by Regiments to carry out the Transnet work. This was backed by Brown, the Minister of Public Enterprises, who stated Trillian Asset Management was introduced to Transnet as a subcontractor to Regiments and as part of the latter’s supplier development obligations to Transnet.” Nyhonyha has denied these claims, according to his High Court filing, in which he argued that Trillian had not been subcontracted by Regiments. WhatsApp messages seen by OCCRP show that Pillay at least was well aware that, without the knowledge of Ramesbudi, Wood was engaging in interest rate swaps during this period. During the October 31 parliamentary cross-examination of Mothepu, questions were posed, asking how Regiments was able to obtain the type of consultancy contracts that only state-owned companies like Transnet would know about and which Trillian later hijacked. Mothepu responded that work was channeled through the business development partners, Salim Essa and Kubentheran Moodley. When asked how the staff of these state-owned entities felt when internal capacity and expertise was put aside in favor of external consultants, she said that internal staff felt resistant but such decisions were taken by the executive - men like Anoj Singh, Brian Molefe, Garry Pita and Phetolo Ramosebudi. The Audit As a state firm, Transnet is subject to annual audits to ensure that it is using taxpayer funds wisely and legally. However, the firm’s long-time auditor, SizweNtsalubaGobodo (SNG), which conducted the audit for the financial year in question, failed to uncover any irregularities related to the interest rate swaps -- such as the 612 million rand in additional consultancy fees costs earned by Regiments. Though Transnet’s 2016 annual financial statements show 511 million rand in losses on interest rate swaps, as compared to none in the previous year, SNG’s audit did not address the issue. SNG said it was not within the normal audit scope to look at mandates between counterparties and suppliers. However, the first two swaps (with Nedbank) violated section 8.3 of Transnet’s public procurement manual, which declares that external consultants, like Regiments, may not be approached for specialist services that fall into the competency of the treasury unit. SNG appears to have had its own conflict of interest. It is the auditor not only of Transnet, but also of Regiments, and, from April 2016 until September 2017, of Oakbay, the most prominent firm within the Guptas’ business empire. In the summer of 2017, Stanley Shane resigned from the board of Transnet. Shortly thereafter, in July, the fixed interest rate charged to Transnet dropped by a significant margin. Shane was too ill to answer questions posed by OCCRP. After submitting interview questions to SNG via email, OCCRP was informed that the head of audit was also too sick to answer questions. SNG did send a response, but immediately recalled the message several times. In a subsequent response, SNG said that “The interest rates swaps due to their nature and the risk associated with were part of the audit scope for the 2015/ 16 audit.” Trillian and Regiments did not respond to emailed questions. Nedbank did not respond to questions, citing client confidentiality. Transnet did not respond to specific questions, saying it had never dealt with a news agency of this nature before. State-owned companies - the low hanging fruits - were Regiments and later Trillian’s main clients. "We were essentially being given stuff on a silver platter that other companies did not have," Mothepu told parliament. This story is part of the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium, a partnership between OCCRP and Transparency International. For more information, click here. This article was supported by Trust Africa, a non-profit organisaton supporting investigative journalism and advocacy.The Money Behind Fox's Promotion Of Cliven Bundy's Battle With The Feds April 25, 2014 4:24 PM EDT ››› Blog ›››››› OLIVIA KITTEL Right-wing media have been rushing to distance themselves from the Nevada rancher they've spent weeks championing after Cliven Bundy revealed his racist worldview, but two of Bundy's biggest cheerleaders -- Sean Hannity and Fox News -- have vested corporate, financial, and political interests in the promotion of Cliven Bundy's anti-government land ownership agenda. Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy became Fox News' favorite folk hero after he refused to comply with court orders directing him to remove his trespassing cattle from public land. Hannity and many other right-wing media rallied around Bundy and his armed supporters as they threatened violence against federal law enforcement officials attempting to impound Bundy's cattle and collect the $1 million he owes in fines and fees after decades of noncompliance with the law. Bundy has said he doesn't recognize the existence of the federal government nor its authority over the land and has attacked the federal ownership of lands as subverting Nevada's "state sovereignty." Hannity has promoted Bundy's anti-government rhetoric, arguing that the federal government owns far too much land and pushing Bundy's claim that not only does the federal government not have land-ownership authority but that they don't need or use the land they claim to own. On the April 23 edition of his show, Hannity attacked the government for owning too much land, agreeing with Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano that they do not have the constitutional authority to own any of the land. Throughout the land battle, Hannity continuously argued that the government is irresponsibly fighting for land they have no intended use for -- such as building hospitals, schools, or roads -- and should focus their efforts elsewhere to rapists, murderers, criminals, and pedophiles. Bundy and Hannity's promotion of state ownership of federal lands gives airtime to an issue that conservatives have long been campaigning for but have had difficulty getting voters excited about -- an issue in line with the land interests of the Koch brothers. Slate reported on April 23 that the Fox News corporate, financial, and political interests being served by Hannity's promotion of Bundy lie in the network's connection to the Koch brothers: Bundy's anti-federal agenda is closely aligned with that of Charles and David Koch, major Republican donors who have been pushing for states to gain control over federal lands - so they can be sold or leased to people like the Koch brothers in deals. Fox News Network and Sean Hannity have a particular interest in the promotion and realization of such Koch interests because their funding depends on it -- Hannity receives major funding and large ad buys from Koch-affiliated Heritage and Tea Party Patriots. Hannity's Koch-affiliated funders have a long history of promoting the privatization of public lands and condemning the federal ownership of land. Tea Party groups have supported local efforts to transfer federal lands. Heritage has advocated shrinking the U.S. government's control by selling its physical assets such as "huge swaths of land (especially out west)." Heritage was also a loyal promoter of the Federal Land Freedom Act of 2013, advocating for the transfer of federal land management to state regulators for energy resource development. Giving airtime to an issue that is obscure but significant to his conservative funders makes perfect sense for Hannity. Politico reported that Heritage began sponsoring Hannity in 2008 and in 2013 Hannity began advertising for the Tea Party Patriots, "lending his name to fundraising drives, hosting its leaders on his radio and Fox News shows, and even using the Fox airwaves to promote the Tea Party Patriots website." The Koch brothers have been covertly funding right-wing organizations such as Heritage Action and
two years – A Piano Summit in 2011 started it off. This year we have a presentation on entitled ‘A Brief History of Piano Jazz’, and workshops based on drumming for beginners, for saxophonists, and trombonists. Interested musicians can look at our online brochure for times and dates. They can download a Workshop Registration Form, or get more info by telephone. The festival has now been around for a long time and some would say that the past couple of years has been the festivals best years, how do you strive to make each year better than the last and where do you see the festival in 10 years? We will keep innovating, every year. We will keep the Festival format fresh with new venues and performances. We keep looking out to put on events in unusual places. In 2014 we will spread the festival programme out of Clitheroe into at least two of our attractive Ribble Valley villages. Scottish band, Camerata Ritmata, will be appearing at Grindleton Village Hall,just two miles out of Clitheroe, thanks to collaboration with Spot On Rural Touring organisation. Two bands will be appearing for the first time at the Spread Eagle Hotel at the village of Sawley, just three miles away. Organising a festival of this calibre takes incredible skill, team-work, coordination and dedication. Outside of your direct festival planning team (who seem to do an outstanding job by the way!) is there any person or groups of people you would like to especially thank for their help in making the festival a success? Yes there is someone who fits this bill – it’s John Flanagan from Blackburn! He is a Graphic Designer and Website Developer with an affection for blues and a good few friends in the arts arena. He has been doing all our marketing stuff since we first set up in 2007 – and just as keen now as he was then! Any time and any day you will get a response. We often swap emails past midnight! Serves him right for turning out at our public meeting in 2007… Many people say that it’s the festivals diverse range of jazz styles and the introduction of other similar music genres that has led to the success of the festival. How do you manage to walk the fine line between keeping both the jazz purists happy with the programme lineup and audiences with lets say a more ‘general’ taste in music? That’s a great question! There are other festivals in the North West that mainly present a contemporary jazz programme – I am thinking about Manchester Jazz Festival, and the Lancaster Jazz Festival. Possibly the organisers plan their programme around their personal choice of music? Which is ok if you get the numbers, which you will in Manchester, and possibly Lancaster – both big student populations, and Manchester is a big city of course. But that’s not our approach in small market town Clitheroe – we try are keep everyone interested in something, and it seems to work ok for us. In this way, there is always the chance that people will see and hear a bit of jazz that challengers what they think jazz is. More than Dixie? Yes! Funky jazz works with young people, and older people as well! Our own Big Band, Ribble Valley Jazz Collective – a community band, was playing in the street at Clitheroe Food Festival in August last year. Halfway through the session Martin went off on a crazy solo during a standard, and the crowd loved it! (I think he might have been to the pub beforehand?!) What is the biggest marketing challenge you face when trying to spread the word about the festival? Are there any particular avenues or strategies you have focussed on that have led to noticeably good results? Distribution of 10,000 festival brochures, and 15,000 flyers, has been the best form of marketing in our first four years. Our printed info helps stimulate the spread of info via word-of-mouth which is the most effective means of recruitment. But, we are increasing our efforts to be MEGA online! Just need a few extra volunteers thought to help cover the massive opportunity to keep promotions going through the internet – just keeping up to date with opportunities for entering events online listings is an enormous task – so a few extra reliable bodies helping to make entries on the various Listing sites would give us a huge boost, especially if we want to spread the interest in Ribble Valley Jazz Festival to more people in the wider UK, and further abroad. I think we have some visitors from Finland this year. For people wishing to help out at the festival this year round can you please tell them a little about any volunteer opportunities you offer or other ways they can help? This year we have 35 bands featuring 325 musicians (thanks to the big bands) over 5 days – so we do need about 50 volunteers to help with all kinds of tasks, especially by helping to steward/supervise gigs during the weekend. This is an enjoyable task, and volunteer contributions help sustain the festival. Register an interest in volunteering by mid April via [email protected], and come to our stewards’ briefing session at our Annual General Meeting late April. What would be your best advice for somebody visiting the festival for the very first time? First timers should start off by registering an interest in our festival by adding their name to our email list – giving us a chance to update with good news regularly. They should keep looking at our web site for updates, and especially so in December/January when our brochure is available for downloading – www.rvjazzandblues.co.uk Keep a look out for Early Bird ticket offers – Rover Tickets on sale but only till 31 March! And if you are likely to stay over the full weekend, make sure you find somewhere to stay as soon as you can. Above all though, aim for getting a wide experience of all that is good in Jazz on a May Day Bank Holiday Weekend. Can you give an estimate for your predicted turnout/attendance rate for the 2014 Ribble Valley Jazz & Blues Festival? Our forecast is for 7,000 people attracted to the 2014 Ribble Valley Jazz Festival – a 15% increase on 2013, and boosted by shoppers in our Saturday Street Jazz Festival. Not bad for a small Lancashire rural market town, but a figure we aim to beat year-on-year. And finally, who are your personal all-time favourite jazz performers? Visits to the UK by Duke Ellington in the 1960’s and 70’s started me on the journey through jazz. I once appeared on stage at an Ellington concert in Manchester Free Trade Hall – well, only because the gig was a sell-out and the venue put extra seating on stage! I was sat next to Harry Carney, and got a first rate introduction to baritone sax! Saw Nina Simone at Bridgewater, Manchester in 2011 – an excellent experience. Liane Carroll, top UK vocalist in 2012, was brilliant at our 2013 Festival. Top British jazzers though – Alan Barnes. You can catch him at just about all UK festival. We would like to make a special thanks to [Pablo] and [his/her] team for taking the time out of their busy schedule to answer these questions. We wish you all the best with this upcoming festival. If you require any further information on this festival or would like to leave a message for others then please use the comments section below. NB. You also find photo galleries, live festival news, transport information in the tabbed section below. All festival listings are changing continuously, check back regularly. Additional ResourcesLAKELAND, Fla. — On Wednesday, Donald Trump said Paul Ryan made a “sinister deal” to undermine him, charged that the Islamic State would conquer the United States if Hillary Clinton defeats him and vowed to jail Clinton’s lawyers along with their client. A day after tweeting that the shackles had come off of him, an angry Trump gave Florida voters a taste of what that meant, as polls continue to show him tanking — he’s now tied with Clinton in deep red Utah — and Republican leaders contemplate the recriminations they will face for publicly abandoning their nominee’s sinking ship. Story Continued Below A day after his running mate confronted a supporter who called for a “revolution” to overthrow the government if Trump does not win, the Republican nominee said, “If we don’t win this election, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” In the meantime, Trump is crossing new rhetorical lines, predicting the end of the United States at the hands of ISIL if he does not win on Election Day. “I can tell you this, they are hoping and they are praying — they are hoping and praying that Hillary Clinton becomes president of the United States,” said Trump at his first stop of the day, in Ocala. “Because they’ll take over not only that part of the world, they’ll take over this country, they’ll take over this part of the world. Believe me.” After refraining earlier in the day from attacking Ryan — who told GOP lawmakers this week that he would not help elect their nominee after the billionaire businessman was caught on video bragging about being able to get away with sexual assault due to his celebrity status — Trump complained in Ocala that the House speaker and other party leaders had abandoned him. “Already, the Republican nominee has a massive — a massive disadvantage, and especially when you have the leaders not putting their weight behind the people,” said Trump, speaking about himself in the third person. “They’re not putting their weight behind the people.” Trump was especially miffed that Ryan had not called to congratulate him on Sunday night’s debate, which most scientific polls showed Trump losing. “Instead of calling me and saying, ‘Congratulations, you did a great job, you absolutely destroyed her in the debate like everybody said,’” Trump said, before trailing off and plugging Pat Buchanan’s assessment that he gave “the single greatest debate performance in the history of presidential politics.” In 2000, Trump called Buchanan a “neo-Nazi.” “So wouldn’t you think that Paul Ryan would call and say, ‘Good going?’ In front of just about the largest for a second-night debate in the history of the country,” Trump continued. “So, you know, you’d think that they’d say: ‘Great going, Don. Let’s go. Let’s beat this crook. She’s a crook. Let’s beat her. We’ve got to stop it.’” While Ryan’s abandonment of Trump came days after The Washington Post published the now infamous 2005 video, the Republican nominee said the real motivation for Ryan’s actions remained hidden. “There’s a whole deal going on there,” he said. “I mean, you know, there’s a whole deal going on. We’re going to figure it out. I always figure things out. But there’s a whole sinister deal going on.” Despite Trump’s insistence that he won Sunday night’s debate, he also railed against the Commission on Presidential Debates. “The head guy used to work for Bill Clinton. I just found this out,” he said in Ocala. Indeed, the bipartisan commission is co-chaired by Clinton’s former White House press secretary Mike McCurry and former Republican National Committee chairman Frank Fahrenkopf. When Trump’s mic briefly stopped working in Lakeland, he joked that it was the commission’s fault. In response to WikiLeaks’ revelation that Donna Brazile, now interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, obtained planned questions ahead of a town hall in the Democratic primary and fed them to the Clinton campaign, Trump lamented that he couldn’t get the same advantage. “Why can’t Reince feed me information prior to a debate? I’m so angry at the Republicans. I want to be fed information like Hillary gets,” Trump said, apparently joking. “The Republicans are not doing their job. They should be able to get me all of the questions prior to the debate.” The tenor of Trump’s campaign has grown increasingly dark since its inception, and the focus of his digs at Clinton have shifted from her competence and stamina to charges of corruption and criminal liability. Trump has repeatedly vowed to sic a special prosecutor on Clinton and the FBI in recent weeks. At Sunday’s debate, Trump said that if he were in charge of the legal system, Clinton would be in jail. On Wednesday, he made his intentions even more explicit. “She deleted the emails,” he said. “She has to go to jail.” Trump also called for the jailing of Clinton’s lawyers for approving the deletion of emails they deemed non-work-related. “Those representatives within that law firm that did that have to go to jail,” he said in Lakeland. Earlier, in Ocala, he said of Clinton’s lawyers, “They should be implicated because they have committed a crime.” Despite the efforts of Clinton and her lawyers, Trump expressed a belief that her emails have not been totally lost. “I have a feeling that the NSA has them,” he said. “They don’t want them.” Trump has had crime on the mind during his Florida swing, repeating at each stop on Tuesday and Wednesday the false claim that “More people are being murdered now than being murdered 45 years.” While the murder rate has increased significantly this year, the spike comes on the heels of decades of dramatic decline, and Trump’s claim is categorically false. As usual, Trump held forth on a wide range of topics. On trade, he expressed a preference for bilateral deals, because they are simpler than multilateral deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump has vowed to scrap. “We’ll make deals with individual countries,” he said. “Not this big web of complicated stuff.” He also mocked the NFL for its efforts to limit concussions. "Uh! Uh! A little ding in the head you can't play the rest of the season,” he said. Through it all, Trump’s bravado was undiminished, and he promised his supporters that the world would hear their voices on Election Day. “The whole world is going to see what’s going to happen to the United States of America,” he said.What is Canada’s place in regulating bitcoin? This is the theme running through the Canadian Senate’s Standing Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce’s study on the use of digital currency. The Bitcoin Strategy Group, BitAccess and CAVirtEx sat before the senators on 9th April to demonstrate how bitcoin is purchased and stored. Their representation marks the first presence of bitcoiners in the Senate sphere. The Canadian Senate has already heard from the Bank of Canada, the Department of Finance, economic historians and other academics. On Thursday, April 10th, the committee will hear directly from the Royal Bank of Canada, the Canadian Bankers’ Association and the Canadian Payments Association. The mission of this study is to understand virtual currencies. In bitcoin’s case, the question is “How do we treat this? Do we regulate this?” The panel covered a range of topics, including wallets and bitcoin storage, the three ways of acquiring bitcoin (peer to peer, exchanges and bitcoin ATMs), and allowed for targeted testimony from Canada’s largest virtual exchange – CAVirtEX – and Ottawa-based bitcoin ATM manufacturer BitAccess, who both offered their unique perspective as business owners working daily with bitcoin on the need of government regulation. Unfortunately, the committee hearing was cut short by a Senate vote. As a result, the first half of the presentation was testimony, followed by a live ATM demonstration. Christopher Reed, Policy Assistant to Senator Irving Gerstein, the Chair of the Committee, was the first individual to purchase bitcoin from an ATM within session in parliamentary history when he inserted C$100 into the BitAccess machine. Demonstration session The Senate is at the beginning of its 18-month long study with the objective of researching and learning about bitcoin. Seeing person-to-person transactions, as demonstrated by Kyle Kemper, a partner at the Bitcoin Strategy Group and Victoria van Eyk, a bitcoin consultant, and an in-person demonstration using the ATM was integral to this understanding as it made bitcoin more ‘tangible’ and accessible. CAVirtEx’s newly hired Advisor, former Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien, represented the exchange’s view that Canada needs to act on regulation, and fast. Regulating the ‘on and off-ramps’ of bitcoin is required to transform exchanges into serious businesses, with proper checks-and-balances in place to give consumers confidence in transacting with the digital currency. Due to the last-minute vote, significant content was omitted, however. [post-quote] The Bitcoin Strategy Group hopes to return in the future to focus on the day-to-day benefits of digital currencies that we can all relate to, including the opportunity for cost savings in the remittance world – where Western Union pocketed $1.1 billion in 2013 for transferring funds, mostly to developing nations – the future of micropayments and ‘social tipping’ for the arts and online content, and the huge benefit for retailers when using bitcoin to transact with. In a further demonstration, the Group purchased cupcakes from local Ottawa bakery The Flour Shoppe to show the Senate first-hand that local retailers are getting on board with the digital currency, and that it is easily tradeable. The latter part of the hearing was a robust question and answer period. Many Senators questioned the specific need for regulation. Senator Paul J. Massicotte questioned the need for bitcoin regulation, asking if it undermined the essence of bitcoin in the first place. Joseph David, CEO of CAVirtEx responded quite quickly, stating that, if Canada hopes to remain in the bitcoin exchange business, banks need to cooperate, and that requires government regulation. He added: “Our only other option is going offshore.” Education and understanding CAVirtEx’s stance on regulation drew questions from the Senators, who wondered if the very act of regulating undermined bitcoin’s libertarian roots. One senator also brought up the possibility that regulating the currency would add so many costs that the benefits would disappear. Kyle Kemper called for Canada to “become a global leader on the bitcoin opportunity” and pressed for increased education and understanding before implementing any regulation. Kemper explained: “Canada has become one of the leading countries in the world in terms of Bitcoin entrepreneurship and innovation. Before we can come to any conclusions, we must understand what Bitcoin is, how it works, and what the future with Bitcoin may look like.” Overall, the present Senators had a better-than-average understanding of the currency and the protocol, and were actively engaged throughout the entire presentation. Their questions also touched on HST and taxation concerns, volatility risk with merchant purchases, and bitcoin’s impact on the current Canadian dollar money supply. Regulation questions The question from the Senate remains: “What is necessary from us?” Influential bitcoiners like Andreas Antonopoulos, Chief Security Officer at BlockChain.info, regularly oppose regulation, citing the ability of the community to self-regulate as sufficient for the industry. Additionally, it was mentioned that there are already regulations in place that keep bitcoin ‘in check’, including FINTRAC – an independence agency that reports to the Ministry of Finance. Many large bitcoin businesses, including panelists CAVirtEx and BitAccess, follow FINTRAC regulations. However, some senators disagreed with the idea of self-regulation, citing government regulation as “necessary” for bitcoin to succeed. Joseph David requested that bitcoin be considered a foreign currency and regulated in the same way. This comment drew interest from the assembled senators, as it was the first time the idea had been raised. Regulation is currently a hot topic for bitcoin, as it becomes more mainstream. The recurring theme at the recent Inside Bitcoins New York conference was regulation. Indeed, the US government is also educating themselves on bitcoin: is it a coincidence that a Robocoin ATM was installed and demoed on Capitol Hill on 8th April, while Canada’s Senate were introduced to the local bitcoin ATM on the 9th? Funnily enough, there was a complete lack of press at the Senate committee hearing tonight, as compared to the overwhelmingly attentive journalists capturing every moment of Congressman Jarod Polis’ purchase of bitcoin on Capitol Hill. Either way, government is interested. Canada is currently in a unique position to be a leader in the bitcoin space. The country has made it this far without any regulations, however it’s time to be proactive on establishing a policy framework for regulators who are looking for guidance with this sphere. View the full video of the Senate of Canada’s Standing Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce’s study of virtual currencies here. Parliament Hill image via ShutterstockIt seems strange to think of Brett Gardner as the old man on the Yankees, but that was essentially the role he filled this season. He’s the longest-tenured member of the team, and, of the 51 players that suited-up for the Yankees this season, only Chase Headley, CC Sabathia, Matt Holliday, and pub trivia tidbit Erik Kratz are older. And, despite that, he’s still a high-quality starter in left field. It All Starts with Defense A few years ago it seemed as though Gardner was losing a step in the outfield. His numbers went from scale-breaking in his first few seasons to between average and very good thereafter, and it is never shocking when a player reaches his 30s and slows down. This season, however, was something of a blast from the past. Twenty-three players put in at least 500 innings in left field in 2017, and Gardner led them all in Defensive Runs Saved, with 17, and fielding percentage, as he went errorless in 1024 innings. He also finished fourth in UZR/150, and ranked near the top in every Inside Edge Fielding category. And, while fielding metrics are occasionally fickle, Gardner won the Fielding Bible Award for left field, and was named as a Gold Glove finalist. Both awards represent a blend of advanced metrics and the good ol’ fashioned eye test, so it stands to reason that Gardner was really that good. An Asset in the Leadoff Spot Gardner batted.264/.350/.428 (108 wRC+) this year, and he hit a career-high 21 home runs. Those 21 dingers represent exactly 25% of his career output, but I wouldn’t read into it too much – after all, 117 players hit 20-plus home runs this year, up from 111 in 2016, and 64 in 2015. It is worth noting, though, that Gardner’s bump in home runs wasn’t solely a product of Yankee Stadium, as 11 of his bombs came on the road. And there’s no overstating his ability to work the count. There was a great deal of talk about Gardner’s clutchness in the postseason (more on that in a bit), but he came through in big situations all season long. The difference in his overall production versus his numbers in late and close situations was negligible, and he slashed.302/.393/.566 with 4 HR in 61 PA with runners in scoring position and two outs. As a result of this he led the Yankees in WPA, and finished second in FanGraphs’ Clutch metric (behind Jacoby Ellsbury, of all people). He Can Still Run, Too We as fans have been oscillating between loving Gardner for his high-efficiency base-running and lamenting his lack of stolen base attempts for years now. He averaged 58 stolen base attempts per 162 games in his first four seasons, as compared to 29 since he lost most of 2012 to injury. His 23 steals and 28 attempts this year were his most since 2013. That being said, with the modern style of play those 23 steals were good for 17th in all of baseball. It isn’t just about raw steal totals, though. Gardner’s 82.1% success rate is well-above the break even point (and league-average is 73%), and within the top-20 among players with at least 15 SB attempts. He also ranked 11th in the game in FanGraphs’ BsR, which factors in stolen bases, caught stealing, taking the extra base, or making an out on the basepaths on a batted ball. As per Baseball-Reference, he took the extra base 49% of the time, which is comfortably above the league-average of 40%. For the sake of comparison, Jose Altuve took the extra base 48% of the time this year, and Dee Gordon did so on 60% of his opportunities. Surprising Durability Despite having the feel of a player that’s perpetually banged-up, Gardner has appeared in at least 145 games and racked up at least 609 PA in each of the last five seasons. This season represented a career-high of 682 PA for the 34-year-old, and 583 of those came from the top of the order. Given his hot and cold spells, it might make sense for Gardner to sit out a few more games – but his reliability in the field and on the bases combined with his ability to play almost every day is extremely valuable to the team. The Playoffs Gardner’s bat was largely silent in the ALCS, but he came through several times in the Yankees 13 game playoff adventure. The most memorable, for me at least, was his absolutely epic 12 pitch at-bat against Cody Allen in the decisive Game 5 of the ALDS. I highly recommend Jeff Sullivan’s detailed account of that at-bat, which could serve as a fine ‘Exhibit A’ of a nebulous ‘professional hitter’ presentation. Well, that, or Gardner’s go-ahead home run in the Wild Card game, which included an uncharacteristic (and wonderful) stare-down of Ervin Santana: When you drop the bat like that … you know. #WildCard pic.twitter.com/pLTZnUqs3Y — MLB (@MLB) October 4, 2017 How awesome was that? The swing, the bat-drop, the stare, the crowd … amazing. The Bottom Line As per Baseball-Reference, 2017 was the second-best season of Gardner’s career, as he posted a fantastic 4.9 bWAR. That put him in the top-five at the position, which is kind of amazing in and of itself. Were it not for Aaron Judge towering over the game like a colossus, Gardner would have easily been the team’s MVP. 2018 Outlook Gardner is perpetually brought-up as a trade candidate, and we may well see more of the same this off-season. Judge has right field on lock, Aaron Hicks was quite good in center, Clint Frazier is ready for an extended look, and Jacoby Ellsbury has an albatross of a contract in center. And Gardner is eminently movable, given his $11.5 MM salary for 2018 and affordable $12.5 MM team option in 2019. It would be much, much better to send Ellsbury packing – but it’s a veritable guarantee that one of the two need to be moved. That being said, Gardner is a bargain in 2018, and I would be happy to see him in left field for the Yankees on Opening Day. I don’t know how confident I am that that will happen, though.Calling state grand jury systems broken, the Rev. Al Sharpton announced a national march on Washington next weekend to protest the lack of indictments against cops in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, whose actions led to the deaths of black civilians. Sharpton, speaking from the Harlem headquarter of his National Action Network on Thursday, vowed to put pressure on the federal government to take action in both cases. “We need to centralize and make clear, we want the Justice Department and the federal government to deal with the fact that the grand jury systems on a state level are broken and seem to lack the capacity to deal with police when you are dealing with questions of criminality and killings,” he said. The families of both Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen who was fatally shot by a white Ferguson cop, and Eric Garner, who died after being taken down by a white cop who threw his arm around his neck on Staten Island, will join the leaders of the march on Saturday, Dec. 13. “We want a centralized march around the specific address of a broken system that the grand juries have only underscored,” Sharpton said. He called out the grand jury’s decision, released Wednesday, to not indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo despite video footage of the incident. “When even with a videotape you cannot seem to achieve a standard of probable cause.... A man laying down already surrounded by police, and he’s still choking. He said ‘I can’t breathe’ 11 times. If that is not probable cause, then I don’t know what probable cause has ever been established,” Sharpton said. {snip} Original Article Share ThisNews Transfer Rumours West Ham West Ham United manager Slaven Bilic has identified Olivier Giroud as his main target for this transfer window according to various sources including Sky Sports and the reliable @ExWHUEmployee on Twitter. The Frenchman wants regular playing time at Arsenal, but with the North London club targeting Alexandre Lacazette, it’s unlikely Giroud will have his wish. It has been reported Arsenal would let go of Giroud for a fee in the region of £20m. West Ham would face competition from French side Olympique Lyonnais, though. The French side are said to be looking for a replacement for Alexandre Lacazette, who could be on his way to Arsenal. The only thing that seems to be making the deal difficult for the signing of Olivier Giroud is Arsenal’s lack of depth in the striker position, with Chilean superstar Alexis Sánchez seemingly on the way out, leaving Arsenal with just Lucas Pérez and the injury-prone Danny Welbeck. West Ham source, known as ExWHUEmployee on Twitter, has since said that the signing of Olivier Giroud is reliant on Arsenal bringing in a suitable replacement. The Hammers are also in a very similar situation with Chelsea striker Michy Batshuayi, despite being snubbed by him last season. He has since grown frustrated at the lack of game time and is looking to leave Chelsea, whether it be a permanent or on loan signing, leaving West Ham with a possible decision to make, given both parties are interested in the move.He has also implied that the reform law created an unelected board that’s “ultimately” going to tell people what treatments they can have. The advisory board is specifically precluded by the law from recommending cuts in benefits or eligibility; its job is to propose cuts in payments to providers and insurers if necessary to meet budget targets. A major goal of the law was to cover some 30 million more people by expanding Medicaid and subsidizing coverage for middle-income people. That goal would be lost if the law was repealed. The Republicans, of course, have no plans for covering the uninsured beyond assuming they can use emergency rooms, leaving the problem to the states. MEDICARE Mr. Romney has misrepresented what would happen to both current beneficiaries and future generations under his proposals. He says his plans would have no effect on people now on Medicare or nearing eligibility. But if he succeeded in repealing the reform law, which has many provisions that hold down costs for Medicare enrollees, most beneficiaries would see their annual premiums and cost-sharing go up. The average beneficiary in traditional Medicare would pay about $5,000 more through 2022, and heavy users of prescription drugs about $18,000 more over the same period, if the act is repealed, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. 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. Mr. Romney also argues that the reform law will weaken Medicare because it cuts some $716 billion from future Medicare spending by slowing the rate of increase over the next decade. Of course, that is essentially the same amount of Medicare cuts in Mr. Ryan’s budget resolutions, approved this year and last year by House Republicans. The reform law justifiably reduces the excessive subsidies to private plans (known as Medicare Advantage) that enroll many beneficiaries. It also lowers the annual rate of increase in payments to providers, like hospitals, nursing homes and home care agencies, to force them to become more efficient. Mr. Romney wants to keep overpaying the plans and providers simply to pander to elderly voters. For future generations, the Romney-Ryan ticket would turn Medicare into a premium-support — or voucher — program in which the federal government provides a fixed amount of money to beneficiaries each year and allows it to grow by a small amount annually, which may not keep pace with medical costs. The whole point of turning to vouchers is to reduce federal spending on Medicare, so it seems likely that many beneficiaries would end up worse off than now. (At the vice-presidential debate, Mr. Ryan tried to pretend his premium-support proposal was bipartisan, but the sole Democrat who backed an early version — Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — has disavowed his plan.) Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan insist that the magic of competition among health insurers — both private plans and a public option like Medicare — will bring down premiums. But if competition fails to do that, beneficiaries would almost certainly get socked with added payments or fewer benefits. They say that lower-income beneficiaries would get more-generous premium support and wealthier individuals would receive less support. But, of course, they provide no numbers on what those support levels might be. MEDICAID The Republicans want to repeal the reform law’s expansion of Medicaid to cover millions of low- and middle-income people and instead shrink federal funding by turning Medicaid into a block grant. States would be given a fixed amount of money equal to what they had been getting in federal payments for Medicaid, and that grant would then grow at a rate tied to inflation. If those increases failed to keep up with medical costs, states — faced with the necessity of balancing their budgets every year — would probably have to cut enrollments or benefits or payments to providers. That could include cuts to coverage for long-term and nursing home care that millions depend on. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The block grant proposal in Mr. Ryan’s budget resolution would reduce federal Medicaid payments to the states by more than $800 billion over 10 years and would cut federal funding by a third in 2022, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Mr. Romney blithely said that if a state got into trouble “Why, we could step in and see if we could find a way to help them.” Or maybe not. It’s another of those vague promises.Image copyright Getty Images Adolescence is thought to be the time when children go off exercise - but a study in The British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests it happens much earlier, around the age of seven. Sitting is replacing physical activity from the time children start school, the research suggests. Children should get at least an hour of exercise a day. Many of the 400 children enrolled in the study did less than this as they got older. The experts from Glasgow and Newcastle tracked the activity levels of the children over eight years using monitors worn for a week at a time. The amount of exercise the children did was measured at age seven and then again at age nine, 12 and 15. On average, boys spent 75 minutes a day exercising when they were seven, falling to 51 minutes when they were 15. The average girl spent 63 minutes per day doing moderate to strenuous physical activity when seven years old, which fell to 41 minutes age 15. Most boys and girls in the study did moderate levels of exercise at seven, which then gradually tailed off. But one in five of the boys bucked the trend and managed to maintain their exercise levels over the eight years. They were the ones who started off with the highest levels of activity at the age of seven, the researchers said. Sitting too much Although the study cannot prove what causes the drop-off in physical activity, Prof John Reilly, study author from the University of Strathclyde, said "something is going wrong in British children" long before adolescence. He said it coincided with the peak rate of obesity cases in children and the greatest increases in weight gain - which happen around the age of seven. Different research on the same group of children found that the time lost to exercise was spent sitting instead. Children aged seven spent half their day sitting, and by the age of 15 this had gone up to three-quarters of their day spent sitting. "Activity tails off from around the time of going to school, when there's a change in lifestyle," Prof Reilly said. "Schools should be more active environments. There should be more activity breaks to break up long periods of sitting." Image copyright Getty Images But he emphasised that activities outside school also had an important role to play because children only spent half of their year at school in total. The children who took part in the study lived in Gateshead in north-east England and were tracked between 2006 and 2015. Eustace de Sousa, national lead for children, young people and families at Public Health England, said: "It's a major concern that one in five children leaves primary school obese. "Most children don't do enough physical activity, which has consequences for their health now and in the future," he said. "It's up to all of us to ensure children get their recommended one hour of physical activity a day." Mr De Sousa said this principle was at the core of the government's childhood obesity plan, which provided extra funding for schools to get children moving and support for families to keep children active outside of school. NHS Choices says children and young people should cut back on the time they spend watching TV, playing computer games and travelling by car. How much exercise should children be doing? at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day - this should range from moderate activity, such as cycling and playground activities, to vigorous activity, such as running and tennis on three days a week, these activities should involve exercises for strong muscles, such as gymnastics, and exercises for strong bones, such as jumping and running Source: NHS Choices Five tips for getting your child to be more activeBasically I will never tire of topping desserts with other desserts. Luckily it’s slowly becoming coat weather, so we’re all slightly more willing to go hard on the icing, if you will. You also still have plenty of time to whip up these DIY truffle monster cupcake toppers that I made with real LINDOR truffles. Who’s pumped?! They’re also really easy to make and your co-workers will love you. At least mine did! Never-mind the fact that I’m engaged to one, and the other loves truffles even more than I do, which no one thought was possible before now. We also put together a fun little video for the how-to, because I think we could all use a little dessert monster in action today, don’t you think? We chose to go with the Halloween Jack-a-Lantern and Ghost mixed truffle bag since they’re obviously fitting for the theme, but we just tried out the new LINDOR Pumpkin Spice
of the nucleus accumbens with limbic brain areas involved in emotion (Heimer et al., 1991), a salvinorin A-induced increase of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens might be involved in the modulation of affective and motivational properties. Indeed, decreased dopaminergic function in the nucleus accumbens produced depressive-like behaviours such as anhedonia (Wise and Bozarth, 1982). Thus, it appears that salvinorin A, given acutely, at very low doses, produced antidepressant-like effects whereas, when repeatedly administered at high doses, it is pro-depressant. However, it remains to be elucidated how long, after multiple injections, the antidepressant-like effects of salvinorin A last, before suggesting that this compound is antidepressant. Preliminary findings (data not shown) indicate that salvinorin A, at the highest dose (1 mg·kg−1), given in a triple administration, produced pro-depressant-like effects, as shown by Carlezon et al. (2006). The mechanisms that mediate the putative anxiolytic/antidepressant-like activity of salvinorin A are still unclear. However, the fact that both the selective κ-antagonist nor-BNI and the selective CB 1 receptor antagonist AM251 prevented these effects led to the idea that salvinorin A acted through both κ-opioid and CB 1 cannabinoid receptors. The possibility that non-specific effects could be responsible for the observed antagonism might be ruled out, because the two antagonists per se had no effect in our behavioural assays on emotional reactivity. However, the possibility that AM251 was acting as a κ-opioid antagonist cannot be ruled out. Our results with the cannabinoid antagonist agree with those of Capasso et al. (2008) who found, in a model of croton oil-induced ileitis, that inhibition of intestinal motility induced by salvinorin A was prevented by both nor-BNI and another CB 1 cannabinoid receptor antagonist, rimonabant. Consistent with our results, salvinorin A has been shown to exert some other effects through the activation of κ-opioid receptors (Butelman et al., 2004; Zhang et al., 2005; Capasso et al., 2006; 2008; McCurdy et al., 2006). Concerning the involvement of the endocannabinoid system, which has a functional role in the expression of emotional behaviour (Patel and Hillard, 2006), our binding data seem to exclude the direct action of salvinorin A at CB 1 cannabinoid receptors. In fact, its K i is quite high (202 µmol·L−1), ruling out a specific interaction. However, the dose-related displacement only at high concentrations might suggest the existence of a binding site with very low affinity, which could not account for the in vivo effect obtained at very low doses. These findings agree with those of Capasso et al. (2008) who found that salvinorin A, added to membranes from HEK cells transfected with human CB 1 or CB 2 receptors, had no affinity for CB 1 and only a weak affinity for CB 2 receptors. More consistently, salvinorin A induced a significant inhibition of FAAH activity in the amygdala, suggesting that this compound could induce elevations in the brain levels of anandamide and other fatty acid ethanolamides that are substrates for FAAH, as reported for the selective FAAH inhibitor, [3-(3-carbamoylphenyl)phenyl] N-cyclohexylcarbamate (URB 597) (Kathuria et al., 2003). Decreased FAAH activity after salvinorin A, was only observed in amygdala, which is a brain region linked with the effects of cannabinoids on emotionally relevant behaviours (Katona et al., 2001) and where anatomical studies have reported the presence of κ-opioid receptors (Mansour et al., 1994). It could be argued that the observed decrease of FAAH activity (22%) is too small to be relevant. However, a similar decrease (30%) was able to induce an anxiolytic effect, evaluated in the elevated plus maze, when URB 597 (0.01 µg·rat−1) was injected into the prefrontal cortex (Rubino et al., 2008) or given i.p. (0.3 mg·kg−1) (Kathuria et al., 2003; Gobbi et al., 2005). Capasso et al. (2008) found that salvinorin A exhibited less than 20% inhibition of FAAH activity, concluding that it could have no effect on anandamide inactivation. However, these authors measured FAAH activity in membranes prepared from whole brain whereas we used membranes from specific brain regions and found inhibition in only one of the three regions examined. How salvinorin A alters FAAH activity is unclear as is the connection between decreased FAAH activity and κ-opioid receptor-mediated responses. However, in a very recent paper (Haller et al., 2008), anandamide, if protected from degradation, acted via the CB 1 cannabinoid receptor to interact with the κ-opioid receptor system mediating opioid analgesia in mice. In conclusion, the present study provides evidence for the first time of an anxiolytic/antidepressant effect of salvinorin A in rats, which probably could explain some of the subjective symptoms as laughter, happiness, well-being reported by González et al. (2006) in young recreational users of S. divinorum. Besides the well-known interaction of salvinorin A with κ-opioid receptors, the involvement of the endocannabinoid system in emotional reactivity may contribute to an understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the complex effects of S. divinorum or salvinorin A, observed in humans. Further studies are needed to elucidate the biochemical nature of this interaction.The fastest growing market in sex education today is the “Baby Boomers.” They grew up in the hot ’60s and are now confronting their own myths around sexuality, mid life and aging. Most Boomers grew up believing that after 50 was a fast trip into a kind of sexual deep sleep. And now that many Boomers have received their AARP card, they are finding that they’re not ready for their sexuality to retire. Not even close! It’s time for the world to stand up and take notice. Drum roll please! The Over 50, mid life, baby boomer sexual being has arrived. What they want is support and information around how to expand their sexuality with changing bodies. Hold the advertisements for diapers please! Let’s Bust Some Myths Around Sexuality After 50 1. Over 50 men and women are reporting they they are indeed very interested in sex! For many there is a renewed curiosity abut their bodies and a deep desire to explore their eroticism more fully. A National Council on Aging survey reports that among people age 60 and over who have regular intercourse, 74 percent of the men and 70 percent of the women find their sex lives more satisfying than when they were in their forties. 2. While bodies may be changing and needing some special attention such as hormonal shifts in women after menopause: Boomers are reporting a willingness to explore their sexuality in many out of the box ways. They are exploring “Tantra”, taking retreats centered around sexuality, seeking out the support of sex coaches and therapists. The Over 50 crowd is ready and willing to explore. They tend to be adventurous, orgasmic, and sexually curious. 3. So what is the sexy mid lifer seeking? With all the focus on mid-life plastic surgery, diets, and botox you would think that sexuality in mid life is all about looking younger and attracting a partner. While that may be true for some, it’s not what I’m seeing in my sex coaching practice or at my retreats for women. There is a shift. Boomers are wanting to “feel” sexy inside. Many are on a quest to find out what their sexual desires really are, and how to safely express them. If not now, when? 3. So what is the sexy mid lifer seeking? With all the focus on mid-life plastic surgery, diets, and botox you would think that sexuality in mid life is all about looking younger and attracting a partner. While that may be true for some, it’s not what I’m seeing in my sex coaching practice or at my retreats for women. There is a shift. Boomers are wanting to “feel” sexy inside. Many are on a quest to find out what their sexual desires really are, and how to safely express them. If not now, when? Click here to view original web page at www.psychologytoday.com Category: SexualityFRUITLAND, Md. (AP) — The Somerset County Sheriff’s Office says the police chief of Fruitland was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol. Deputies say Chief Michael Phillips was arrested after a traffic stop… FRUITLAND, Md. (AP) — The Somerset County Sheriff’s Office says the police chief of Fruitland was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol. Deputies say Chief Michael Phillips was arrested after a traffic stop about 10:25 p.m. Sunday in Princess Anne. Authorities say Phillips was charged with DUI, DWI and following too closely. Phillips’ lawyer, John Phoebus, said in a statement Monday that Phillips was driving his personal car, was off duty. unarmed and not in uniform when he was arrested. Phoebus says the Fruitland City Council put Phillips on paid administrative leave Monday at Phillips’ request. Phillips has been chief of the Fruitland Police Department since 2008. He previously had been a Maryland State trooper for 22 years. Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.African penguins are amazing animals with unique adaptations that make them true masters of their environment. Here are 10 ways that African penguins are better at doing things than humans - we hope that after reading this you will appreciate these awesome endangered, endemic birds a bit more on this African Penguin Awareness Day. 1. Walking on an empty stomach Penguins walk with an adorable bum-wiggling, swagger-filled waddle. It looks very clumsy, especially compared to us humans - the only other animal that has evolved to walk with an upright spine. So clearly we are better at walking upright than they are, right? Wrong. Actually, penguins do it more efficiently. When penguins walk, the top of their body acts as a pendulum (pengui-lum?) so they are only using energy to rotate a bit with each step. On the other hand, we need to partially lift our whole body up each time we take a step. The swaying of penguins allows them to recover as much as 80% of all the energy that they expend - making them about 20% more efficient than us. This is why penguins still have the energy to migrate and hunt even after long periods of fasting, as their waddle is the most efficient way to walk. 2. Rocking a tuxedo Why are penguins black and white? Many believe that the dark back and white belly serve as camouflage when they are underwater - but if you've ever looked at an underwater photo of a penguin you'd soon realise that this is not very effective. In fact, ancient penguins were red and grey - far better deep-water camouflage. African penguins' black and white tuxedo colouration has a few other uses: Penguins can turn their black backs to the sun when they are cold, and their white bellies towards it when they are hot. Pigments in black feathers make these feathers stronger, so their backs can withstand the elements when they lie on their bellies. The high-contrast colours of penguins make them easily visible to each other, and enable them to coordinate with each other underwater. 3. Seeing underwater Have you ever opened your eyes underwater and noticed how blurry your eyesight becomes, and how the water stings your eyes? Well, penguins don't have this problem! Penguins' corneas are flattened by strong muscles around their eyes, which prevents the light from bending when it enters their eyes and blurring the image underwater. They also have an extra, transparent eyelid called a nictitating membrane that keeps the saltwater out (shysharks have them too, by the way). It's almost like they are wearing a scuba mask all the time. 4. Being adorable “I find penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a penguin.” – John Ruskin African penguins are an excellent example of something conservationists call "charismatic megafauna": big, lovable animals that inspire people to support conservation, which aids the species' entire environment and the "less adorable" species it shares this environment with. 5. Having conversations in a crowd Human beings can hear sounds as low as 20Hz (the rumble of a far-away truck) and as high pitched as 20 000Hz (so high your cellphone speaker can't produce it). Compared to the flat ear holes of penguins, our relatively giant ear cones are exceptionally good at catching sound, allowing us to determine the direction sound is coming from, and its distance away - useful skills for a land animal. Penguins' hearing seems much more basic, as they can only hear 100Hz to 15 000Hz, and their small heads and flat ears limit their ability to detect the direction of sound. However, penguins are exceptional at telling frequencies apart - they have the ability to hear the exact call of their chick or mate amongst tens of thousands of other penguins. Especially important considering their "language" has so few words. 6. Having long-term relationships African penguins are true masters of romance: 80 to 90% of all African penguin breeding pairs stay together for the entirety of their lives. African penguins return to the same breeding site every year, with mates reestablishing their existing pair bond. They will only begin to look for a new partner if their mate dies, or does not return during the breeding season. 7. Enjoying abstract art We know that humans can see amazing colour, while animals like dogs are "colourblind". Well, compared to an African penguin, we humans are colourblind too. We see colour because of cells in the back of our eyes called cones, which detect certain types of light. Humans have three types of cones for seeing our primary colours - red, blue and green. Penguins have an extra cone that allows them to see ultraviolet light - so to them our UHD TVs would look as awful as old black and white TVs looked to us. 8. Sneakily getting what they want Finding nesting material on rocky and barren shorelines is not easy for penguins, and we can see how they have evolved to cope with this - female Adélie penguins choose the mate who brings them the most stones, rockhopper penguins find existing holes and crevices, and emperor penguins don't even build nests (they just rely on being fuzzy). African penguins (and their close relatives) dig burrows that they then decorate with bits of debris. Unfortunately, with the destruction of South Africa's guano islands, there is no longer anywhere for them to burrow as sand tends to collapse. To compensate, African penguins collect more "decorations" (twigs, seaweed and even bits of garbage) to insulate their shallow nests. As these resources are scarce, they have become very adept at sneakily stealing bits of nesting material from each other. 9. Babysitting African penguin parents share all the babysitting responsibilities. They spend approximately 40 days taking turns incubating their eggs, while the other parent goes hunting for food or guards the nest from predators. When the chick has hatched and is able to walk, multiple couples group their chicks together in a "crèche" so that fewer adults are needed to protect them. This allows both parents to go out hunting and bring food back to the fledgling. After about four months in this crèche, juveniles are old enough to forage for themselves, and head out to fend for themselves in the wild. 10. Eating & drinking Have you ever seen a penguin drinking fresh water? Nope, because they don't. African penguins swallow salt water when they are swimming. A specialised suborbital gland filters salt out of their blood, and they then sneeze this salt out. If we had this ability, Cape Town's water crisis would be a non-issue. Penguins also have very few tastebuds compared to us - they don't even have the DNA to be able to taste bitterness, sweetness or umami (savouriness). All that they are able to taste is salty or bitter - which is important as these are the tastes that allow them to eat only fresh fish, not rotting ones. Imagine if we could be healthy all the time, not craving chocolate and being able to eat really gross-tasting health food with ease! One thing we can be better at: Making a difference With fewer than 30 000 breeding pairs of African penguins left in the wild, it is crucial that we all do our part to save these bundles of joy. Here are a few things you can do to support these endangered animals this African Penguin Awareness Day: Support SANCCOB or the African Penguin and Seabird Sanctuary (APSS) – amazing organisations doing great work to save our wild penguins. Have a Penguin Experience at the Two Oceans Aquarium, and part of your fee will go towards seabird conservation. Make a Penguin Promise to live a lifestyle that minimises your impact on the ocean. Here are a few simple examples of things you can do: Use energy-efficient light bulbs Separate household garbage for easy recycling Use water-saving showerheads Buy local rather than carbon-heavy imported goods Say “no” to plastic drinking straws Eat less meat Do not litter, and to pick up litter where you see it Eat only sustainable seafood (by adhering to the colour-coded SASSI consumer guide) Ban single-use plastic from your home Ok, and we've figured out how to fly better than penguins...Blues are second from bottom in the Championship after a humiliating home defeat Managerless Birmingham City suffered a record home defeat as Bournemouth scored eight goals at St Andrew's. Brett Pitman put the visitors ahead inside three minutes before Blues defender David Edgar was then sent off for a foul on Callum Wilson. Wilson and Matt Ritchie made it 3-0 by half-time before the Cherries ran riot in the second period. Marc Pugh netted a hat-trick and two more from Tokelo Rantie, the first a penalty, completed Birmingham's misery. In addition, Paul Caddis had a spot-kick saved by Bournemouth goalkeeper Artur Boruc with the score at 3-0. Anything Southampton can do... Bournemouth's demolition of Birmingham came seven days after neighbours Southampton hammered Sunderland 8-0 in the Premier League It was the first time that the Cherries had ever scored eight goals in a league game (barring a 10-0 win over Northampton in September 1939 which was expunged from the records after World War II broke out the next day), while they also recorded their biggest winning margin in a league fixture A week after south coast neighbours Southampton put eight past Sunderland, Eddie Howe's side repeated the feat to register a fourth straight Championship win, a result that lifted them up to fourth in the table. Blues slip to second from bottom after a wretched afternoon, extending their poor run at St Andrew's to just one win in 25 home matches. And the nature of their second-half capitulation will be of huge concern to whoever Blues appoint to succeed the sacked Lee Clark as their new manager. Media playback is not supported on this device Howe on Birmingham v Bournemouth Pitman gave Bournemouth the perfect start, running through unchallenged before beating goalkeeper Darren Randolph, and things got worse for the hosts when Edgar pulled back Wilson and was deemed to be the last defender, resulting in a straight red card for the Canada international. Pitman missed two further chances before the lead was eventually doubled, as Randolph's attempted clearance fell nicely for Wilson to race clear and net his 10th goal of the season. Ritchie scored a third to settle the contest before the break, firing in a loose ball after another defensive mix-up, but Bournemouth were hungry for more goals. Caddis's failure from the spot, following Tommy Elphick's foul on Clayton Donaldson, summed up Birmingham's day and it was to get much worse for the home side, who conceded five goals in the final 27 minutes. Pugh turned in two crosses from Simon Francis to make it 5-0, before Rantie's brace and Pugh's third sealed a momentous win. Birmingham City caretaker manager Malcolm Crosby told BBC WM: "I feel shellshocked. The way we played was embarrassing. I have to take the blame because I picked the team. "The confidence drained out of the players. They have played badly because we let in eight goals. But those players have got to go out again next week and have to get over this setback. It has been a terrible day. "I apologise to the supporters. Whoever comes in as manager, I do not think he will have another performance like that." Bournemouth manager Eddie Howe: "We got a great start and the sending-off was a key moment. "From that moment it was always going to be difficult for Birmingham and we really put them to the sword in the second half. "The most pleasing aspect was that we didn't showboat. We wanted more goals but we did it in the right way." Marc Pugh (left) scored a second-half hat-trick against BirminghamHitler’s amazing map that turned America against the Nazis: A leading novelist’s brilliant account of how British spies in the US staged a coup that helped drag Roosevelt to war Map divided South America into four states after German WWII victory The map changed President Roosevelt's mind about U.S. fighting It is thought the map may have been planted by UK spies Was it real? The map of South America had been divided into four new enormous states to be administered by Germany I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government – by the planners of the New World Order. This map makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America, but against the United States as well…’ It was October 27, 1941. The speaker was Franklin D. Roosevelt, 39th president of the United States, a country which was yet to join the war and whose citizens, to the mounting anxiety of Britain and its Allied friends, showed few signs of wishing to fight the Germans. Many of America’s richest and most influential citizens were actively pro-Nazi. The map was a hypothetical atlas of South America divided into four new enormous states – or ‘gaus’ – to be administered by Germany: Brasilien, Argentinien, Neuspanien and Chile. The margins contained handwritten notes in German asking questions about fuel supplies for Lufthansa air routes between Africa and South America and, more importantly, airline networks that extended north to Panama and Mexico – right on the doorstep of the United States. To Roosevelt, determined to end US isolationism, this was more than a coup. It was invaluable evidence of Nazi aggression across the Atlantic, touching his closest neighbours. With Germany’s imperial ambitions exposed, the tide of opinion began to turn significantly towards Britain, easing the way for what would prove to be America’s decisive intervention. Yet the origins of Roosevelt’s remarkable document remain thoroughly mysterious – as shadowy as the brave but mostly forgotten team of British agents who somehow first obtained it. The men and woman of British Security Coordination (BSC) had been sent across the Atlantic by Winston Churchill himself, ordered to stop at almost nothing in their efforts to discredit the Nazi cause. Forgery was well within their remit. When it comes to writing a novel sometimes ‘luck’ is as valuable as inspiration. In 2005 I was inspired to write a spy novel set in the Second World War but I wanted to create something different and unfamiliar – no parachuting into occupied France, no code-cracking at Bletchley Park. At the time I was intrigued by the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt and had a hunch that it wasn’t as warm as it was generally perceived to be. Then, while reading around the subject, I had a stroke of luck. I came across a throwaway remark about ‘Churchill’s dirty tricks in the USA’. What was all that about, I wondered? I soon realised I had struck narrative gold – at least as far as my novel was concerned. What I stumbled across was a book with the bland title of British Security Coordination. It was the reprint of a lengthy anonymous document detailing the activities of the said group from 1940-45, some 500 pages long, crammed with precise detail. BSC was set up by Churchill in 1940, shortly after he became Prime Minister. It was an umbrella organisation that drew on the expertise of MI5, MI6 and the Special Operations Executive and was charged specifically with doing everything in its power to change American public opinion from its overwhelmingly isolationist, non-interventionist stance, and to somehow bring the USA into the war in Europe. On taking office, Churchill declared this was his vital and overriding objective – without the USA on our side the war against Hitler could not be won. Dealbreaker: To Roosevelt, Hitler's plan to invade South America was invaluable evidence of Nazi aggression across the Atlantic, touching his closest neighbours We forget today – in this era of the so-called ‘special relationship’ – how predominantly Anglophobe the American population was in 1940. Powerful groups violently opposed any participation in the war in Europe. German and Italian immigrants and Irish Republican factions all had their grudges and own reasons for not wanting the USA to become Britain’s ally. The virulently isolationist America First movement, fronted by the celebrated aviator Charles Lindberg, had close to a million members and hundreds of ‘chapters’ throughout the country. Polls indicated that some 80 per cent of the American population was against joining the war in Europe. In this fervid climate of negative opinion the challenge to BSC was enormous. The key weapon they employed was what was termed political warfare – the spreading of black propaganda against the Nazi/Axis countries’ threat and the urgent promotion of the interventionist, British case. BSC was controlled and overseen by a wealthy Canadian called William Stephenson. He relocated its offices to the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan where, at its moment of greatest power and influence, BSC filled three floors. It wore the thin disguise of a Passport Control Office (a section of the British Embassy), but in fact it soon became the nerve centre of a massive effort of media manipulation and covert operations that stretched from Chile to Bermuda and Vancouver. BSC secretly operated its own powerful shortwave radio station, WRUL. It seemed a bona fide US station, but it disseminated a constant barrage of pro-British, anti-isolationist news items. A press agency was set up, the Overseas News Agency (ONA), that fed stories to American newspapers. ‘Cut-outs’, as American sympathisers and sub-agents were known, were used to hide the sources of this information. Nobody has ever fully quantified the number of people working for BSC during the war, but it ran into the hundreds, if not thousands. All sorts of schemes were evolved by BSC to foment anti-Nazi feeling. Walter Winchell, whose newspaper column was read by 25 million Americans, was sent a forged letter, with documentary evidence – purportedly written by an American merchant seaman – about German propaganda efforts in the US. It duly appeared in his column. A bogus Hungarian astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was despatched from Britain to the US on a lecture tour, telling audiences the stars predicted Hitler was to die. He claimed Hitler’s horoscope showed Neptune was in the house of death and, that very summer of 1941, Uranus and Neptune would coincide to bring about his demise. BSC also had a statement released in Egypt by another astrologer, Sheikh Youssef Afifi, who independently corroborated de Wohl’s predictions, saying ‘a red planet will appear on the eastern horizon and will indicate that a dangerous evil-doer, who has drenched the world in blood, will pass away’. Simultaneously, correspondents in Nigeria reported that a celebrated fetish priest, called Ulokoigbe, had a vision in which a Hitler figure – ‘Long Hair’ – slipped ‘from a high rock and fell shrieking like a madman’. These stories were duly carried by the American press, making de Wohl’s prophecy seem uncanny. BSC’s grander plan was that it might reach the ears of Hitler, who was known to be a believer in astrology. BSC evolved a prankish game called ‘Vik’ – a ‘fascinating new pastime for lovers of democracy’. Teams of Vik players across the USA scored points depending on the level of embarrassment and irritation they caused Nazi sympathisers. Players were urged to indulge in a series of petty persecutions – persistent ‘wrong number’ calls in the night; dead rats dropped in water tanks; ordering cumbersome gifts to be delivered, cash on delivery, to target addresses; deflating the tyres of cars; hiring street musicians to play ‘God Save the King’ outside Nazi sympathisers’ houses, and so on. A special department was set up as a ‘rumour factory’. For example, a rumour was originated stating the British had developed a devastating depth charge with a new, incredibly powerful explosive. This was to demoralise German U-boat crews. ONA put out the story with a dateline of Ankara, Turkey, which was cabled to the Soviet Union’s Tass correspondent in Washington. This was broadcast from Moscow – in 1940 Russia was not yet at war with Germany – citing the neutral source. This was picked up by the US press, where it then appeared as a bona fide story in American newspapers – thus items of war-related interest, fabricated in the Rockefeller Centre, travelled round the world to re-emerge in American media as genuine news. However, when it came to undermining America First – which was highly suspicious of covert British activities – BSC had to be more shrewd. At America First rallies, Churchill’s name would be greeted by boos while Hitler’s would receive a respectful silence. For one rally in Madison Square Garden, New York, BSC forged thousands of duplicate tickets, causing huge confusion as people found their seats were double-booked. Accusations of fakery: Franklin D. Roosevelt, pictured with Winston Churchill At The Casablanca Conference In Morocco in January 1943, had made a throwaway remark about 'Churchill¿s dirty tricks in the USA' At another in Milwaukee, a violently anti-British American congressman, Hamilton Fish, was handed a note on which was written in large letters, ‘Der Fuhrer thanks you for your loyalty’. This was snapped by a planted photographer and made excellent copy. At least something was being done to put the British case to the American people and the effect of BSC’s effort was impressive – but would it have really swayed American public opinion to the extent that intervention in the war would be welcomed? BSC needed to come up with a more tangible threat and one of the most elaborate operations in its history was set in motion towards the end of 1941, originating in the neutral but significantly pro-Axis Buenos Aires, Argentina. In October 1941 a German courier from the embassy was involved in a car accident in downtown Buenos Aires. He was being followed by BSC agents and in the confusion, his despatch case was purloined and rifled. Inside it, supposedly, was a German map dividing South America into German fiefdoms. This was sent to New York and found its way to the FBI and then to Roosevelt himself – with satisfying results. Was this BSC’s greatest coup? Quite possibly, but there were, reputedly, only two copies of this map – one kept by Hitler and the other by the German Ambassador to Argentina. Once Roosevelt’s speech had been made, the Germans investigated and it was discovered both maps were still with their owners – so the third map, the one Roosevelt cited, must have been a copy. But who had copied it and why was such a secret, inflammatory document being carried in a despatch case by a humble embassy courier? The South American map was, I’m convinced, an elaborate fake, concocted by BSC’s expert department of forgery (known as Station M and based in Canada). It hoodwinked CIA chief J. Edgar Hoover and Roosevelt and, having seen a reproduction of it, I can testify to its authenticity – the scribbled marginalia of some anonymous German official, asking precise questions about fuel supplies and Mexican participation, being the masterstroke. In the annals of covert operations this was one of the most significant and most successful ever. And yet we, the British, have kept extremely quiet about it. BSC’s conspicuous success has no place in our espionage history compared to, for example, Bletchley Park and the Enigma decryptions. There has been no triumphalism, no plaudits delivered, no heroes honoured. It’s as if we’re somewhat ashamed at the guileful ingenuity we displayed in the way we managed to dupe our most powerful and necessary ally. Might the South American map have been the catalyst for the USA finally abandoning its isolationism? We will never know because on Sunday, December 7, 1941, just 41 days after Roosevelt’s powerful denunciation of Nazi regional ambitions, the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was attacked by the Japanese. The US duly declared war on Japan and a day later Italy and Germany, Japan’s allies, declared war in turn on America. BSC’s main objective, Churchill’s crucial order, had been effectively achieved – thanks to the Japanese. BSC remained in place in the Americas until 1945 when it was disbanded and its history was written up, one of the three authors being Roald Dahl, who was seconded to BSC in 1942. And then everybody ‘forgot’ about it. The details of wartime British covert operations in the US were brushed as far under the historical carpet as possible – not surprisingly, when one considers the massive extent of BSC’s penetration of the American media and its brilliantly clever manipulation of the country’s news organisations. One American commentator who read the BSC history remarked: ‘Like many intelligence operations, this one involved exquisite moral ambiguity. The British used ruthless methods to achieve their goals; by today’s peacetime standards some of the activities may seem outrageous.’ At the height and spread of its power, BSC was able to plant pro-British propaganda, and anti-Nazi black propaganda, in all of the significant outlets of American media from the largest circulation newspapers and press agencies to the most influential columnists and radio broadcasters. It was even able to reach the desk of the President himself. Whatever the explanation of that map, the secret history of the BSC and the extraordinary achievement of its covert activities in the United States proved – 60 years on – vital and timely grist to my fictional mill. One British novelist was extremely grateful.Video Game DIY Pocket Chip Is Now Upgraded With 3D Acceleration, Can Run VR Close What if I told you there's a ready-made mini console chip that allows you to program your video games on the fly and play it right there and more stuff on top of that? This is not news for most game enthusiasts as 'CHIP' was launched a year ago doing exactly what my previous statement said. Did I mention the device sold more than a hundred thousand units? Next Thing Co. launched a ultra-fun computer named CHIP sold at $9. It is packed with 1G Hertz ARM processor, memory of 512MB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and battery. Not quite at par with modern PCs but it's more than enough to let you have fun and bring out your creativity. It also has various output standards for video, audio, and other necessary connections to interact with this mini device. You need to get hold of an old TV or a composite video input screen, mouse, keyboard, and househole power. After installation, wait a few seconds and you are now ready to do some computer stuff. It also has the ability to do other internet things like sending emails, writing stuff, watching videos, even learn programming. It runs on Linux Debian so you can install all the stuff you need. Pocket CHIP, 3D Acceleration,...and VR? Now that we've discussed its basic predecessor, let's move on to the new one. Officially dubbed as Pocket C.H.I.P., in their official website, the device is a mixture of portable synthesizer, a game console and a field terminal for Linux. If you work on it for a bit, it will become a lot more as it is claimed that it can be converted to a VR headset. Their slogan for the product says something like "it can be what you want it to be". Pocket CHIP is sold at $69, quite a bit pricey compared to its previous model but considering the amount of stuff it can do and the fun times you'll have with it, it's more than just a bang for the buck. On top of all the awesome things it can do, Venture Beat has reported that Pocket CHIP has just got a software upgrade to run 3D games with the likes of Quake III. The device and its updated software can now be purchased as holiday gifts. With that said, Pocket CHIP is now another player, along with the mini-NES and other retro devices that would be competing with modern consoles in terms of holiday sales. CHIP and Pocket CHIP are devices that are targeted for the DIY community so if you want something that's ready-made, go look somewhere else as the product is meant for creativity and tinkering before it can do something awesome, although there are presets loaded in it. I personally would love to get my hands on these and create something like an auto-feeder for dogs, or just tinker and make some videogame levels and then challenge my friends to finish the game. Lots of ways you can work with this little wonder so I suggest you'd get one too. Sign Up for the ITECHPOST Newsletter Get the Most Popular iTechPost Stories in a Weekly Newsletter © 2019 ITECHPOST, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.example/word-counttask-file.lua is a sample task-file for work count which implements following functions. Each of these functions are invoked using coroutines to avoid non-blocking calls so as well as returning results one entry at a time to save the memory. All these functions must be defines as
wamba reports that astute Chinese vendors are cutting out the middle man by traveling to African nations themselves, to sell the goods produced at their Guangdong factories, sometimes for half the price. Time to go? In Mwamba's office, on the 17th floor of a rundown tower block, the twilight sun is exposing dust on a framed photograph behind his desk of the suited "ambassador" posing before the Guangzhou skyline. After 13 years in China, he is ready to go home. This is not a retreat -- more a decision to use his know-how where it's needed most. "Everyone wants to go back to their own African country and start something," he says. "We've learned here about small factories, trade. "We should return home and apply that knowledge." Additional reporting by CNN's Beijing intern Sean Zhong.Burnley striker Danny Ings tested Jack Butland in the Stoke goal three times in the first half Stoke reach 51 points to ensure best-ever PL points tally Relegated Burnley have scored one goal in their last eight Turf Moor is lowest-scoring stadium in the PL this season Stoke secured their best-ever Premier League points tally with a goalless stalemate at relegated Burnley. The Clarets' highly-rated striker Danny Ings looked like a player destined for better things, testing Jack Butland three times in the first half. Stoke's misfiring Mame Biram Diouf missed a number of clear chances to score, heading wide with the goal gaping just before the break. Goalkeeper Tom Heaton made a point-blank save from Diouf on the hour. The visitors carved out the better opportunities, but their failure to steal a win will not overshadow the achievement of Mark Hughes's team in reaching 51 points - and also guaranteeing successive top-half finishes in the top flight for the first time in 40 years. Media playback is not supported on this device Burnley are in good shape - Dyche Despite their relegation to the Championship, Burnley also managed to hold their heads high during the final-whistle lap of honour. Manager Sean Dyche has got his team to perform impressively this season, given their modest budget and small squad. Ings was their undoubted star and showed his worth from the off as he slalomed through the Stoke defence early on before peppering Butland with shots on goal in the opening period. Stoke took a while to get going, but should have made it 15 Premier League wins this season, thanks to the efforts of Diouf in particular. The visitors broke quickly in the 39th minute, with Charlie Adam feeding Jonathan Walters on the right wing. Media playback is not supported on this device Burnley 0-0 Stoke: Mark Hughes proud of Potters points record His cross landed perfectly in the path of an unmarked Diouf, but, 10 yards out and with Heaton struggling to get across, the Senegalese forward failed to make a proper connection. On the hour, Diouf at least got the ball on target, but his prodded attempt allowed Heaton to hook it away. Burnley faded late on and their big problem this season - goalscoring - again proved beyond them. This was the 18th Premier League match in which they have failed to score and, even more pertinently now, it is highly unlikely they will have Ings to lean on next term. How the match unfolded on BBC Sport live text commentary. Burnley manager Sean Dyche: "Today was a familiar story, but there's a lot of pride in our all performances this season. We've taken everyone on home and away; be they the superpowers or otherwise, we've given them a game. "Our supporters have been right behind myself, the club and the whole team this season. It will continue - the next challenge is a tough one. "I've been through the Championship. I know how hard it is to get a club over the line." Stoke boss Mark Hughes: "It's a great effort form everybody, and its been more difficult this year than last - with long term injuries and everything. "The group itself has been really strong, and that strength in depth and character has enabled us to achieve another top half finish. "We haven't been in the [transfer] market or spent a great deal of money, so that's credit to our recruitment department. Everyone's had an impact for us since they've come to the club. We're delighted with that. It's been a long season and we're looking forward to the last game."October 14, 2015 Rewards are officially in progress! We have hours left on Kickstarter, and Colin and I would like to thank everyone who has taken a part in making this happen. Without your support and pledges, this would not have been possible. THANK YOU, Team Samurai My You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 October 9, 2015 With 6 days left on Kickstarter, the 3D modeling is complete! Here is the final model of Samurai My: October 5, 2015 With 10 days left on Kickstarter, Samurai My is really starting to come to life! Here is the most updated turnaround from the modeler, Gil: September 30, 2015 We love to work as closely to our artists as possible. Gil and I have to find a time that we can critique the modeling process while factoring the time difference in. Here are some clips of this morning's tweaking session! You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 September 28, 2015 We have brought on two new amazing artists to help us bring My to life! Gil Franco from New York, is fully modeling Samurai My in 3d. While Zach Marsh from Burbank, CA, has been working extremely hard composing scores for the short. Below are two short videos of Gil beginning this beautiful process with the sounds of Zach. We will be updating frequently, so be sure to check back again soon! You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 Get to know them: Gil : www.gilfranco.com Zach: zacharymarsh.com From the creative mind of My-Hanh Lac and the amazing artistic talents of Colin Chan comes the heartwarming comedy-adventure, “Samurai My”, the tale of a 6-year old tomboy named My aspiring to become the first and best female samurai. In feudal Japan, the renowned warrior/bushi Mitsuo hangs up his sword in order to single-handedly raise his two daughters, Mariko and My. You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 But after a catastrophic natural disaster, only My remains, without a family or home. Desperate, afraid, and inspired by bedtime stories her father told her of his training and battles, My sets out on a journey in search of Mitsuo’s legendary sensei, Isamu, and a new place to call home. With the aid of a mysterious wizard and a furry sidekick, Kobe, My finds her way to the bustling city of Sobasato, where she instead finds a band of city orphans threatened by the evil Mistress Uni. You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 My must rely on her samurai skills to save the kids from a dark and villainous operation. Will My have enough wit and courage to save her friends and find a new place to call home? Mitsuo: Father to Mariko and My. Legendary samurai warrior. Strong, kind, and highly-skilled, he will stop at nothing to protect his daughters. Mariko: Elder sister to My. Free-spirited like her mother, Mariko cares for My while juggling the obstacles of becoming a young woman. Isamu: A kooky old man who seems to show up at just the right time. Coming and going with the wind, there seems to something very strange about this weird, old wizard. Is he friend or foe? Auntie Miso: Cooking from a food cart in the city of Sobasota, Miso and her son Dashi, take pity on a hungry My and welcome her into their home. Samurai My: Young, feisty, and extremely intelligent for her age, My wishes to be come as skilled as her father in the ways of the samurai. Quickly learning the techniques her father taught her, My is a rascal to be reckoned with. Dashi: A local boy running the streets with the city orphans, Dashi befriends My and shows her the ropes. Buta: Another one of Ms. Uni's thugs, Buta is the muscle behind Ms. Uni's operation. Mistress Uni: A social worker with a villainous agenda, Ms. Uni is rounding up the orphans of Sobasota to use for her own gain. Hebi: One of the two thugs under Ms. Uni's employment, Hebi is a slippery character that's one of the best at what he does. Samurai My is a princess, but not in the traditional sense. Unlike most princess stories, My does not need someone to save her. She begins her journey alone, trying to save herself. Samurai My's story is about empowering young women, independence, and being comfortable in your own skin. "We just wish there were more stories like this out there." Up until now, we have managed to get this far with just a two-person team. This entire project was born in the living room of the creator, where we have spent thousands of hours creating My and her world for you all. With your help, we hope to expand our team and take this project through the next phase. This means 3D modeling all of the characters, and soon thereafter, begin the 3D animation process. Our goal is to pitch an entire 10-15 minute 3D animated short to a major animation studio. Although, in the event that our project makes well over its goal, our priority then would be to establish our own animation studio, full team, and produce the full-length animated feature film in-house. We've worked hard to design rewards we feel everyone will love! Below is a picture of some of the rewards that we want to give back to you, the backers of our potential success. Please show your support by following us on social media: We would like to thank everyone for taking the time to watch our video and supporting our project. A special thanks to the individuals that helped tremendously with putting this campaign together and spreading the love! Motion Graphics: Thomas Moore & Colin Chan Video Editing: Thomas Moore Original Music: Kao Saechao & Thomas Moore Social Media: My-Hanh Lac 3D Printing: Sean CharlesworthBefore And After Irene, Ron Paul's No Fan Of FEMA Enlarge this image toggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) said before Hurricane Irene rolled over the mid-Atlantic and up through New England that the Federal Emergency Management Agency does more harm than good because "all they do is come in and tell you what to do and [what you] can't do" and add billions of dollars to the federal deficit. Plus, he added, the agency did not perform well after Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans' levees six years ago — devastating that city. And, said Paul, the federal government just doesn't have the money to fund FEMA anyway. After Irene and as FEMA and other agencies are mobilized, Paul is his consistent self, telling Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace that "FEMA has been around since 1978, it has one of the worst reputations for a bureaucracy ever.... It's a system of bureaucratic central economic planning, which is a policy that is deeply flawed." The 2012 Republican presidential contender says he would get money to those who need it following Irene by ending U.S. involvement in wars overseas. "We could save $1 billion from the overseas war mongering, bring half that home, put it against the deficit, and yes, tide people over until we come to our senses," he said.Random House Germany had argued against paying to publish Nazi propaganda minister’s diaries in new biography on moral grounds Descendents of Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister, are to be paid royalties for extracts from his diaries published in a new biography, following a bitter legal battle. The publishers of the biography, Random House Germany, had resisted demands to pay Goebbels’ estate, arguing that copyright laws should be overturned on moral grounds. But the Munich district court ruled against the publisher on Thursday, although it said the rights to Goebbels’ literary estate expire at the end of 2015 and similar cases are not expected “to any significant extent in the future”. Cordula Schacht – a lawyer whose father, Hjalmar Schacht, was Hitler’s minister of economics – represented the Goebbels estate in taking legal action against Random House Germany and its imprint Siedler. The family of Goebbels, who was one of the architects of the Final Solution, argued that they should be paid for extracts from his diaries which are published in the biography by Peter Longerich, a professor of modern German history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Rainer Dresen, the general counsel of Random House Germany, said Schacht had rejected his offer – made privately and in court – for royalties to be paid if they were donated to a Holocaust charity. Schacht insisted that money should go to Goebbels’ family, thought to include descendants of his siblings. Dresen spoke on Thursday of his shock at the court’s verdict, describing it as a sad day for Germany. He noted the irony of the court’s setting in Munich, where Hitler and the Nazis rose to prominence. Dresen said: “You have a strange feeling. You’re crossing those buildings, buildings where … Hitler was … on the balcony. That of course is not a legal thing. It’s a moral issue.” Dresen said the insensitivity of the verdict was an extension of the defence used by Nazi war criminals – that they were just following orders. He added: “They have no feeling for the meaning above the legal questions … I was shocked by the [court’s] lack of historical interest… They took the easy road.” This way, he observed, they “can go on ignoring the fundamental question: should money go to the estate of a war criminal?” The work, which makes extensive use of the diaries, was published in Germany in 2010. The English edition was published by Penguin Random House UK and its imprint Bodley Head in May. Goebbels remained with Hitler in their besieged bunker in Berlin. He and his wife took their own lives after poisoning their six children. His diaries span 1924 to 1945. Copies of them are in public libraries. Last September, the Munich district court ordered Random House Germany to disclose its earnings, but the publisher appealed on legal, copyright and moral grounds. The case was heard in April. Dresen said the court was not interested in the moral question even “for one second”. He described the verdict as elegant but without morality. The publisher now intends to appeal through the German supreme court.The scientists of National Geographic’s Crittercam team are no strangers to innovation—they’ve spent the last thirty years designing and refining ride-along cameras that record intimate data about the daily lives of over 70 species on land and at sea. The latest trick in their tool belt? Peanut butter. “No doubt Greg and I will be arguing for years about whose idea the peanut butter was, so naturally you should put it in writing that it was my idea,” jokes Joshua Stewart by email. But on a recent dive in Bahía de Banderas, Mexico, they noticed a problem. The suction cups, designed for the smoother skin of marine mammals like whales and seals, couldn’t get a good grip on mantas’ sandpaper-y hides. Like all sharks and rays, mantas’ skin is covered in tiny tooth-like bumps, called denticles, which reduce drag and make for faster swimming—and make it harder for a suction cup to fully seal. Giving the suction cup a solid push could sometimes help a camera stay attached for as many as three hours before it slipped off and floated to the surface, where its radio signal could be picked up by the Crittercam team. But in other attempts, cameras popped off in under a minute. A Sticky Situation The team reasoned that some cameras stuck longer because the manta’s skin had more mucus, which filled in the gaps between denticles and made for a stronger seal. But how to replicate the effect consistently? “We happened to have peanut butter on hand, and decided 'what the hell, let's give it a go!'“ says Stewart. When the first deployment of a buttered-up suction cup kept the camera in action for six hours—double the previous record—the team knew they were on to something. They had to act fast: Yelapa, the small coastal town serving as research home base, only stocked a few jars of peanut butter to sell to American tourists. “We cleaned them out to be sure we would have enough for the coming weeks,” Stewart says. “Luckily there was some left over for sandwiches.” (Watch “These Giant Manta Rays Just Want to Hang Out”) So far, the team has made about 30 successful deploys of peanut buttered-Crittercams, raking in double the data on manta ray behavior. And though the team looked for a better alternative to their on-the-fly solution, in the end they chose to stick with it. It turns out peanut butter is a more efficient sealant than silicone grease or denture cream, not to mention tastier. Up Close and Personal Being able to deploy Crittercams for twice as long, and in more challenging dives, could help Stewart and the team plumb the hidden depths of manta ray ecology. Although popular with tourists for their friendly manner and awesome size—mantas can weigh as much as a mid-size sedan, their wings stretching over twice the car’s length—manta rays still have plenty of secrets. Most observations of manta rays, and of mobulas, their smaller, flying cousins, occur at reef cleaning stations as small fish scrub their skin of bacteria. Mantas’ habitat use, especially foraging behavior, remains murkier in open water. Scientists can associate mantas’ presence in an area with high zooplankton productivity, but they rarely observe the animals feeding. Now the Crittercams are providing evidence that mantas forage at greater depths, where warm surface water abruptly cools. Stewart theorizes that mantas are flexible feeders, able to exploit different resources within a restricted area rather than migrating as other large marine vertebrates do. (Read “Manta Rays Prefer Staycations Over Long Migrations”) But for Stewart, who is deeply involved in the conservation initiatives Manta Trust and Gulf of California Marine Program, the science is only half the story. “The unfortunate story is that in many places, mantas and mobulas are doing very poorly,” Stewart says. A slow reproductive rate and a lack of natural predators make them especially susceptible to—and slow to recover from—human exploitation. Though mantas are not a heavily targeted fishery, they’re easily snared as accidental bycatch. And those pressures may increase with a recent demand for manta gill plates, which are used as an ingredient in neo-traditional Chinese medicine despite their absence in ancient texts. (Read “Transforming Indonesia's Manta Fisheries”) Yet there is evidence that protected manta populations can stabilize and recover. And the gentle giants’ charisma doesn’t hurt: one study estimates the manta ecotourism trade brings in about $140 million a year around the world, whereas targeted manta fisheries scrape together less than 3% of that sum. A deeper understanding of mantas’ movements would allow scientists to better predict where they’ll be, in turn enabling more efficient protections for the species.Note: you seem to have JavaScript disabled. This page requires it to be enabled for full functionality. The calendar below shows the phase of the moon for each day of the selected month. You can change the month and year to whatever you like between January 3999 BC and December 3999 AD. This version of the Moon Calendar uses HTML 5, Javascript, and SVG. It replaces the Java-based version of the calendar, which is still available here. Hovering your mouse over any day in the calendar will display a popup showing the moon's distance, phase and other information. Instructions on what the various controls do is found below. There is also a reference section for those interested in the algorithms used. Feel free to with your thoughts on the program.Update, 12.9.2016: KSL.com reports that Amazon is entitled to keep approximately 18% of the sales taxes it collects in Utah, under the terms of the deal. However, neither the company nor the state has confirmed that figure. It is not uncommon for states to reward businesses for collecting and remitting taxes when they aren't required to do so by law. Amazon.com has agreed to voluntarily collect Utah sales tax as of January 1, 2017. This is a victory for Governor Gary Herbert and the Utah State Tax Commission, which helped negotiate the agreement; the giant online retailer isn’t required to collect the tax because it lacks a physical presence in Utah. Amazon hasn’t publicly commented on the deal, but it has made similar agreements with a number of other states, including Alabama, Ohio, and the District of Columbia. Gov. Herbert was clearly pleased, telling members of the Deseret News and KSL editorial boards: “News flash: Amazon has agreed. We have been working to get a voluntary agreement with Amazon, and it looks like we’ve done that now.” Yet getting Amazon to agree to collect tax on Utah sales is just the first step, as Amazon isn’t the only remote seller not collecting tax on Utah transactions. The governor recommends the state “aggressively pursue collection of the estimated $200 million in taxes currently due on remote sales." He calls this a “major issue.” Although Utahans “may enjoy not paying the tax that is currently due on internet and catalog purchases … [it] creates a very real impact on the state’s ability to fund education in Utah.” Fix the sales tax base Untaxed remote sales aren’t the only reason the state’s sales tax base hasn’t kept pace with its economic growth, and taxing remote sales is just one part of the governor’s budget recommendations for fiscal year 2018. He’s also calling for the state to “expand the tax base to move toward taxing all final consumption (goods and services) uniformly while maintaining a low and competitive rate.” His plan notes that the economy has become increasingly service-based, and many services are excluded from sales tax. In addition, “digitization of goods has eliminated or reduced some segments of the economy that were goods-based and turn them into electronic services,” many of which are exempt from sales tax. The governor proposes broadening sales tax to currently exempt services and electronic goods and services. Finally, he plans to align “Utah’s tax structure with the modern economy … [by] identifying and reviewing tax credits, tax exemptions, tax exclusions, and other preferential tax loopholes.” Not a new tax Utahans have always owed tax on any taxable goods purchased online or from a catalog. If sales tax isn’t collected at the time of sale, consumers owe the state use tax. Use tax is supposed to be remitted with state income tax returns, but individual use tax compliance is extremely low. It’s also hard to enforce, which is why Utah’s sales and use tax revenue has decreased as online shopping as increased. Sales and use tax compliance always increases when retailers such as Amazon collect tax on behalf of consumers. Sign up for the Avalara Sales Tax Newsletter and stay up-to-date with sales tax news.Extremely high rainfall rates were reported in parts of Charleston, South Carolina, Monday morning, which led to flooding that rendered some roadways impassable. The National Weather Service reported 6.25 inches of rain had fallen at Charleston International Airport between midnight and 8 a.m. EDT Monday morning, shattering the old daily record of 2.61 inches, achieved in 2006. It was already the second-wettest August day on record at the airport, which got more rain in under 8 hours than it had reported for the first 30 days of August, combined. "A dip in the jet stream over the South is helping to send a pipeline of deep moisture from Florida northeastward to the coastal Carolinas," said weather.com meteorologist Chris Dolce. "This has contributed to the development of slow-moving thunderstorms this morning near the South Carolina coast that have unleashed torrential rainfall." (MORE: Track the Storms As They Move Across the Southeast ) The flooding had negative impacts on travel Monday morning. Authorities were forced to close several roads that were under water, and the NWS reported a water rescue was in progress Monday morning in North Charleston. Just before 8:30 a.m., a mudslide was reported by ABC News 4 near the intersection of Dorchester Road and Parmount Drive. One ramp was completely blocked, the report added. All bus service was temporarily halted Monday morning due to the flooding but resumed shortly after. Another factor was likely to worsen the flooding. High tides are expected to be even more severe due to a King Tide affecting the area through Wednesday, WCSC-TV reported. The remnants of Tropical Storm Erika continue to push north and won't help matters, either. "Heavy rain could create additional flooding problems on Monday from the coastal Carolinas to Florida, where moisture from former Tropical Storm Erika will enhance rainfall," Dolce added. MORE ON WEATHER.COM: Charleston Floods, Two Weeks AgoSECURITY WORKERS ON Amsterdam’s public trams and buses are being issued with special kits to collect DNA from unruly passengers who spit at staff, city officials said on today. The “spit-kits” are part of an experiment to catch offenders which began on October 1 after a series of attacks left dozens of drivers and conductors covered in saliva — an assault that carries a three-month jail term or a €4,000 fine. “Spitting is one of the most humiliating forms of aggression around,” said Mireille Muller, spokeswoman for Amsterdam’s Council Transport Company (GVB). “Although it is getting safer for our staff, the idea is to completely eradicate this crime,” she told AFP. Security personnel are now issued with a special “spit kit” consisting of a plastic tube and a gauze swab and have been trained by forensic specialists to collect saliva samples. They can get to the scene of any spitting incident within six minutes, Muller said. The DNA sample is then handed over to police and prosecutors for further investigation and sent off to the Dutch National Forensic Institute for profiling, said Franklin Wattimena of the Public Prosecutor’s office. Even if there is no match, the DNA sample is kept for the next 12 years, he added, making future matches possible. Since the “spit-kit” experiment was introduced at least one attack has been recorded, Dutch media has reported although the outcome of the probe is not yet known. “We encourage our staff to immediately report any incidents as soon as they happen,” said Muller, hoping the “spit-kits” will help prevent future attacks. More than 740,000 passengers make use of Amsterdam’s public transport services daily, according to the GVB’s latest figures. The GVB is one of the largest employers in Amsterdam, with a staff of more than 3,500 people. - © AFP, 2015A Florida mother has been charged with murder after her 6-year-old son allegedly beat his 13-day-old baby sister to death, PEOPLE confirms. Kathleen Marie Steele, 62, was arrested and charged with aggravated murder of a child on Aug. 8, Pinellas County Sheriff officials tell PEOPLE. On Monday, the mother-of-three left her newborn, also named Kathleen, in her car with her two older brothers, 6-year-old Frankie and 3-year-old Philip, for 38 minutes as she ran errands. While Steele was in a cell phone shop, the infant started crying. Steele’s eldest son allegedly removed his newborn sister from her car seat and beat her to death. “[Frankie allegedly] slammed her head onto the ceiling, banged her head on the floor and dropped her numerous times, which ultimately led to the baby’s death,” according to a news release. The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now The infant allegedly had sustained severe head trauma that included extensive bruising and multiple skull fractures. “[The beating] was one of the worst things that I’ve ever seen,” Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said at a press conference Thursday, describing the baby’s damaged skull as “mush.” “This kid’s face was a mess,” he continued. When Steele got back into the car, Frankie allegedly told her that the baby’s condition was “serious.” Steele allegedly ignored her son’s comment and went to run another errand. Steele did not notice that the baby was unresponsive until she got home and went to take the newborn out of the car. “When she returned home [Steele] realized her daughter was unresponsive,” the news release states. Gualtieri described the badly beaten baby as purple, blue and “cold to the touch.” Authorities believe the child was dead by the time the family left the cell phone store’s parking lot.Steele brought the infant into her home and called a neighbor who is a registered nurse and lives on her street. The neighbor began CPR on the infant and called 911, according to the news release. Investigators did not learn of the baby’s violent death until they interviewed Frankie who described to them what he had allegedly done. Sheriff:'[We] Have Never Seen Anything Like This’ At a press conference on Thursday, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri detailed how Steele had become pregnant with her daughter at 62. According to Gualtieri, last year, Steele was artificially inseminated with her late husband’s sperm by a doctor in New York. She had had the procedure before in 2012, which resulted in the birth of her second son. Her late husband died of cancer in 2011, Gualtieri said. He was 63. The couple conceived one child together before the husband died. “By numerous witness accounts, Kathleen Steele was an inattentive parent and Frankie and Philip were largely unsupervised and had very serious behavior issues,” Gualtieri said. In late July, Gualtieri says, there was a fire at Steele’s home that forced the family to live in a hotel room. One night, during a fire alarm, Steele accidentally tripped and dropped the baby. The newborn struck her head and was taken to a local hospital in St. Petersburg. The baby allegedly suffered from a minor brain bleed.Pinellas County deputies were notified of the accident and after a thorough investigation determined that there was no evidence of abuse and the incident at the hotel appeared to be accidental. On July 31, the infant was released from the hospital with the agreement that deputies would visit Steele and her family on Aug. 1. However, Steele cancelled the appointment and rescheduled the appointment for Aug. 10, two days after the infant died. On Aug. 2, authorities were called by an unidentified individual claiming all three children were unsupervised. Deputies conducted a home visit and determined there was no evidence of inadequate supervision at that time, Gualtieri says. On the day of her daughter’s death, Steele brought her baby to a pediatrician concerned that she was not eating enough. The pediatrician told Steele the newborn was fine and later told authorities the baby appeared unharmed. Steele allegedly told authorities she had planned to use the rest of her late husband’s frozen sperm to have another baby, hopefully a son, Gualtieri said: “Something is seriously messed up with that.” “Those of us that have been doing this in this business for a very long time have never seen anything like this,” he adds. Due to his age, Frankie will not be criminally charged with his sister’s death. Steele is currently being held at the Pinellas County jail. She is schedule to appear before a judge this afternoon and has not yet been assigned an attorney, Pinellas County District Attorney officials tell PEOPLE. This article originally appeared on People.com Contact us at [email protected] grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia indicted a local police officer on Thursday in connection with the fatal shooting of a mentally ill man last June, WTKR-TV reported. The panel opted to charge Officer Michael Carlton Edington, Jr. on one charge of voluntary manslaughter for shooting and killing 35-year-old David Latham. The grand jury selected the manslaughter charge instead of two heavier charges, second-degree murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. “I just want to say that I’m glad the justice system is working out and that we are on the right path,” Latham’s mother, Audrey, told the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. The grand jury was called by Commonwealth’s Attorney Greg Underwood’s office, and was the first such panel called in the area in connection with a fatal police shooting since 2008. When asked whether another officer had ever been indicted in such circumstances during her 10 years working for Underwood’s office, spokesperson Amanda Howie said, “Not to my knowledge.” Edington was one of four officers who went to Latham’s home on June 6, 2014, after his mother told a dispatcher that he had grabbed a knife. Latham was living with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and police had been called out to the residence several times since he and his mother moved there in March 2013. However, Edington had not been involved in any of those calls. “We kind of trusted them,” Audrey Latham said to the Virginian-Pilot earlier this month. “A lot of times they would come out and talk with David.” When Edington and the other officers arrived at the house, David Latham was on his porch, holding the knife. His mother said Edington ordered her son twice to drop the knife, then opened fired. Latham was shot at least six times. “[Edington] was just trigger happy,” Audrey Latham said the day after the shooting. “I don’t know if he was fearful or what, but he didn’t give my son any time to think. They shot him like a dog.” Edington has been on administrative leave since the shooting. Police Chief Michael Goldsmith urged residents in a statement not to rush to judgment. “These officers put their lives on the line every day and have my full support as we move forward,” Goldsmith said. Watch WTKR’s report on the indictment, as aired on Thursday, below.MOUNT OLIVE — Dylan tried to be true to his given gender and name. He'd been born female, but thought of himself as male, and struggled with the disparity. The now-16-year-old sophomore at Mount Olive High School fought a constant mental tug-of-war. Last September, Dylan finally embraced who he felt in his mind he is -- even though his anatomy didn't coincide. He asked all his teachers to start referring to him as Dylan instead of his female name, listed on the school's roster name. He came out as a transgender teen. "For the longest time, I felt something was wrong but I just didn't know what it was," Dylan said. "My entire life growing up my best friend was a guy. I hung out with guys. I dressed like guys. I acted like guys. "It's hard for people to understand. My brain thinks one thing, but I was born with this body. It just doesn't match. It makes you wonder, 'Why did this happen? How your mind can be totally different from what you were born as.' In middle school, I tried to adjust to what society wanted me to look like. Then, halfway through my freshman year in high school, I decided I was just going to be myself." Dylan is one of three transgender teens at Mount Olive High School who recently sat down with NJ Advance Media to share their journeys. Only one agreed to give her last name. None wanted to provide their given names. Bruce Jenner, others in the news The three trans students are coming to grips with their gender identity. They're not alone. Trans life saw worldwide attention when former Olympian Bruce Jenner came out as a trans woman. The Amazon comedy Transparent, about an older father coming out as a trans woman, has won accolades. And the Oxford English Dictionary is considering adding the gender-neutral title of "Mx" to the mainstream honorifics "Mr, Mrs and Miss," according to a recent report on DailyMail.com. "I was so happy with the Bruce Jenner interview and the resulting media attention," said Dr. Khadija Ibeh, an Edison-based psychiatrist. "It made people feel a bit more comfortable with the transgender population." MORE: N.J. transgender teen begins to transition in a complex world Transgender individuals are those whose gender identity doesn't match their anatomy at birth -- a transgender person can in some cases be someone who's had a sex change. "At first, I thought it was a thing where I was just one of the guys," said Matt, a 16-year-old junior at Mount Olive High School who was born a female but presents as a male. "About a year or so ago, I decided, 'Nope, I'm not one of the guys, I am a guy.' You feel trapped in your body. "It's such a weird feeling. I read an article on transgender people and I was like, 'Oh my God! That's me.' It hit me really hard. I was in denial for months. I've come to realize it's okay to break society's norms. That was a huge thing in holding me back from discovering who I was." Not a conscious choice Danielle Kulawiak, the faculty adviser for the Mount Olive Gay Straight Alliance Club, is helping the teens navigate through their high school years. The club, started by Kulawiak in 2006, has approximately 30 members, many of whom are straight and have more conventional gender identities. "I think the biggest misconception about trans students is people think these students are making a conscious choice, that someone woke up one morning and decided they were going to throw on a dress or something," Kulawiak said. "There's a big difference between these students and a drag queen like RuPaul. For them, it
addition to the Tony Hawk game for consoles, a new mobile game is in the works, while the previously announced mobile game, Tony Hawk's Shred Session, has been put on hold indefinitely. What would you like to see from a new Tony Hawk console game? Let us know in the comments below!A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some Space Age/Exotica playlists on Spotify. Space Age is the name of that entire scene of easy listening music, popularized by the likes of Martin Denny, Les Baxter and others. George Russel used the term for an incredible jazz album in that name That’s how I accidently stumbled upon this brilliant album by Seattle based Jetman Jet Team, We Will Live the Space Age. Wow. What an incredible album. Noisy pop album, soaked in reverbed guitars and silky vocals, wrapped in a shoegaze melancholy and hovering above the earth. They bring influences from Jesus and Mary Chain to Flying Saucer Attack, obviously My Bloody Valentine and Ride. This is one brilliant album that I can’t get enough of, and if the list of band above tickles your heart, you’ll be addicted to that as well. Listen to the album So I was curious to hear what were their influences. The band wrote me: These are all albums that for some reason or another, whether it be mood, the atmosphere, the experimentalism, tone and texture or recording techniques have inspired and influenced us. Without these albums we wouldn’t have had the drive or motivation to make music.” And here’s their list, in no particular order: Stereolab – Cobra & Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night Boards of Canada – In a Beautiful place out in the country. Air – Talkie Walkie Casino Versus Japan – Tracks 1999 – 2003 Cocteau Twins – Loves Easy Tears Kraftwerk – Kraftwerk 1 Neu! – Neu 2 Deerhoof – Runners Four Lou Reed – Metal Machine Music Cornelius – FantasmaGermany's second largest city, Hamburg, will host the G20 this week. With 6,000 delegates and 3,000 members of the global media flocking to the city, residents and the police are bracing themselves. Adding to the problems created by the somewhat baffling choice of a city center location, Hamburg is home to a burgeoning left wing scene, far from shy to take to the streets.Indeed, a number of protests are planned to coincide with the G20, the largest of which is expected to involve up to 100,000 people. Thursday's Welcome to Hell march will also provide a challenge for the police and security services, when around 8,000 leftwing radicals and anarchists are expected to descend on the location of the summit - the Congress Center.Complicating the security operation further, the Congress Center is located on the edge of the 'Schanzenviertel', an area of the city much-loved and lived in by those involved with or sympathetic to left wing groups. According to the Hamburg police force, there are 1,090 known left wing extremists residing in the city, 620 of which are considered to be prone to violence. Looking to the whole of Germany, the figures grow to 26,700 and 7,700 respectively.The resources required to police this potentially huge group of people leaves less available for the ever-present threat of jihadist terrorism. In addition to the far-left and far-right, there are believed to be at least 640 Salafists living in Hamburg. 310 of these have been classified as jihadist. In the worst case, this could all end up leading to a perfect storm of chaos.Nine months after the government commissioned an independent review into artificial intelligence, the authors have revealed their fundings. The major recommendations? AI and its applications shouldn't be subject to direct regulation, but an AI council should oversee the industry. The report, commissioned in February, was described as a "major review" into the development of AI in the UK. After speaking to more than 100 experts, the authors have revealed their findings. Jérôme Pesenti, from BenevolentAI, and Wendy Hall, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton, say there should be greater training and access to data if the UK is going to compete with other countries around the world on AI. Advertisement The proposed AI council, the report's authors argue, should "operate as a strategic oversight group" and allow for discussions around "fairness, transparency, accountability and diversity". By not recommending regulation of AI technologies, the report goes against recent calls from the likes of Elon Musk to introduce more checks and measures. In January a report from the Alan Turing Institute called for an AI watchdog to be setup to audit and scrutinise algorithms. "They could go in and see whether the system is actually transparent and fair," the authors of the Turing Institute said. The government's report, titled Growing the artificial intelligence industry in the UK, says AI governance shouldn't be covered by the proposed AI council. It does, however, say guidelines proposed by the Royal Society could be used for AI applications in the UK. Elsewhere within the new review's 18 recommendations, the authors argue there should be a framework created to explain how decisions are made by AI systems. This should be created by the data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and should seek to outline how processes and AI services work. Academics working within machine learning have expressed concerns that the systems are "black boxes" that come to decisions that can't be explained. The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will also place more transparency obligations on businesses. Advertisement The report also says that data trusts should be created. These would create a body to advise on how data used for training AI systems is handled. It could, in theory, stop complex incidents such as the NHS and DeepMind's unlawful data sharing deal. "To use data for AI in a specific area, data holders and users currently come together, on a case by case basis, to agree terms that meet their mutual needs and interests," the report says. Data trusts would not replace the ICO. Pesenti and Hall also argue there should be greater resources made for AI education. Their recommendations say 300 PhD places should be created at universities, The Alan Turing Institute should become the national institute for artificial intelligence and there should be online courses available to people. Separately, the House of Lords is conducting a review into AI and its economical, ethical and social implications on the world.I have a hard time asking for help. I see myself as an independent, competent person who can take care of herself quite well without anyone’s assistance. At least that is how I felt until some recent events altered my thinking profoundly and permanently. In my writings I always struggle a little with how much to share of my personal life. However, since one of my goals is to raise issues that others may face, I select situations from my experience which may resonate with others. With this in mind, here is what caused my shift in attitude. About a month ago, I was out of town helping a cousin and her husband each of who were diagnosed with terminal illnesses within ten days of each other. As you can imagine, this was an extremely difficult situation with endless things to manage around doctors, hospitals, finances, insurance, legal matters, and home care. Many of us have gone through fraught times like this and we know the seemingly infinite details to be handled. Fortunately, I was not the primary caregiver, but was there to help my relatives and those responsible for their care. In the midst of this chaos, I began to feel unwell and decided to come home. I made a four hour drive alone, partly in the dark, and in pain. I went directly to Newton Wellesley Hospital Emergency Room where I was diagnosed with a kidney stone. For those of you who have had kidney stones, you know how it feels – awful. I made the drive with compelling clarity that I had to be among my family and others who knew me, and in a health system that was familiar. I did the right thing by coming home. I didn’t want to be cared for in an unfamiliar place among strangers. So that was the good thing – coming home. The not so good thing was that I didn’t tell anyone that I was making this drive. I only called my children when I was back in Newton. I was totally convinced that I didn’t need anyone to help me. When I got to the hospital, the staff there confronted me by saying, “your children are going to be pretty upset with you for making this journey by yourself under these circumstances.” I explained to everyone that I stopped several times at rest areas, and that I knew that the pain would keep me awake. However, these feeble responses did not seem to be sufficient to qualm everyone’s concerns. And, of course, they were right to be annoyed at me. One of my children said, “Mom you should have at least let us know you were coming. We could have met you half way and taken you back to Newton.” Another said, “One of your problems is that you don’t ask for help when you need it.” They are right of course. I showed a lack of judgment, not in the decision to return, but in not informing loved-ones that I was on my way. This episode has forced me to reflect on some very important issues. First, I now acknowledge how scary it is for me to ask for help. My reluctance, I think, reflects my fear of becoming dependent. If I request assistance, does that suggest that I am no longer in control of my life? Does it mean that others will start making decisions for me? I, and probably many people my age, worry about these things. It is natural to fight to retain long-standing independence. Certainly it is good to maintain autonomy as long as possible. But I now see there may be a point at which self-sufficiency must yield to reason, especially when safety is at risk. I never felt unsafe during my drive – only the pervasive feeling that I had to get home. That sensation overrode everything and I was blind to any potential for disaster. I strategized my trip by breaking it up into segments – one stretch is 45 minutes – I can do that. The next segment is 50 minutes – I can do that. And I did it – one leg and the next. It was only on reflection that I saw the chances I may have been taking. Second, and related to this revelation, is the obvious notion that doing something that was not very smart put my credibility more in jeopardy than if I had faced the situation up-front and told people what was happening. Finally, I became stunningly aware of how important my family, friends, and community are. I had a primal need to be surrounded by people who I knew in a place where I didn’t have to guess about where to go for help. This support system is surrounding me and it is there for a reason – to be available when I need it. But, it can’t help me if I don’t ask. I know now in the depth of my being that the next time I’m in trouble I will ask for help. It is the best way, perhaps the only way, for me to stay safe, strong, and independent.John F. Kennedy High School in Sacramento is abandoning an annual fundraising auction in which students pay for seniors to perform tasks after classmates said they consider the practice racially insensitive and “all-around wrong.” Lamari Johnson, a senior and an African American, noted in her online petition that February is Black History Month and that her “ancestors fought for freedom, fought to not be enslaved, sold and separated from their family.” She wrote that students were making jokes about it, saying, “ ‘Oh hey look. I just bought two slaves,’ which is not OK... Auctioning off a human is all-around wrong.” The event has gone on for more than a decade to raise money for the school’s senior ball, and students this year held an auction on Feb. 9. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Sacramento Bee Principal David Van Natten said he decided last week to end the tradition in future years after hearing concerns from Johnson and other students, as well as discussing the matter with other administrators. Van Natten did not know how much money was raised this year. Both he and district spokesman Alex Barrios said participation was voluntary. A student might pay $20, for example, to have a senior carry a backpack throughout the day, said Barrios. Or a senior might during the day have to recite a poem on demand, Van Natten said. Johnson, 17, said Sunday she started the petition after the auction, after talking to other students on campus and after a teacher she approached did not take her complaint seriously. Once it was posted, she said she became a target of personal attacks from students who disagreed with the event cancellation. “I understand some people don’t get it. But it’s also been kind of hard for me,” she said, adding that she “didn’t want to make it just a racial issue.” The takeaway, she said, “was seeing how important it is to take a stand for something you believe in, even when people are against you because there are so many other people who fought for something. If people didn’t fight for gay rights, if they didn’t fight for civil rights, we wouldn’t be where we are today.” Sonia Lewis, who previously taught history at Kennedy and led the Criminal Justice Academy, said that years ago she shared with her students a global perspective on what it means to auction a “thing” versus auctioning a person. Auctioning human beings, she said, creates a sense of entitlement and discomfort. “I think when you replace things with people you run the chance of having a slippery slope, of being offensive,” said Lewis, who is a member of Black Lives Matter Sacramento, a group that helped Johnson with the petition. Lewis said during her five years at the high school, she saw auction episodes that were offensive. “I don’t care what the race is, I know there are sensitivities that come into play,” she said. She recalled a case in which a group of students bought a senior, who was not African American, and tied his hands with rope and led him around on a leash all day. On other occasions, she heard students boast repeatedly, “I bought you as a slave for the day.” “Any time any of those things are going on, I think we have to step back as adults and say this is not appropriate.” This year, when Johnson met with Van Natten to voice her objections, the principal said he listened and took notes. Van Natten said that even before Johnson contacted him, he had discussed the idea of ending the auction, raising it with his administrative team last year, his first as Kennedy principal, and again this year. He said Johnson called the event “insensitive in light of Sacramento’s reputation for human trafficking.” She also was concerned that students were on campus talking about buying other students, and doing that during February, which is Black History Month. “She felt that for both of those reasons, the event, although it’s a tradition at the school, should not continue.” As of last week, Johnson’s petition had 167 signatures, according to Change.org. Van Natten said Thursday that after hearing Johnson’s concerns, he spoke again with his administrative team. Then he notified Kenneth O’Flaherty, the student activities director, that “the event would not continue,” Van Natten said. He said he asked O’Flaherty to advise student government of his decision. He said the word went out on Tuesday that the tradition of auctioning seniors would end. “The goal is a learning environment that is nurturing, safe and inclusive,” Van Natten said. “And as principal, the buck stops here. I did not feel like this event met those criteria and, hence, my decision it would not go on.” Van Natten said he has not received any requests for refunds, and seniors have already performed most of the auctioned activities. He said he thinks most students are “over it” by this point. Nina Jones, a freshman, said Thursday that she was unaware of the auction, but she reacted to the idea. “That’s a person!” she said, with some indignation. It made no difference to her that that racially diverse people participated. “It’s still wrong” because of the nation’s history of slavery, said the 15-year-old. Nancy Luong, a senior, knew only about a counterpetition circulated online by an anonymous person who sought to continue the auction. That petition had 77 signatures last week. That petitioner said, “Being bought doesn’t even mean anything and the whole thing is just for fun.” But Luong, 17, said, “I believe that some people have been through so much (racism) already, that it’s impossible to have thick skin.”DeLand police released 911 tapes on Thursday that revealed the hectic moments that followed a 9-year-old girl accidentally shooting her 8-year-old brother. The children apparently made their way to a neighbor's home, who then called 911. "I have a young boy here... and he's bleeding out the side of his head," the man said. The neighbor repeatedly told the boy to stay still. A voice in the background could be heard saying "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry." Police said the girl "somehow obtained a handgun that belonged to a parent" on Wednesday and was handling when it discharged, hitting the boy in the head, police said. The boy was airlifted to Arnold Palmer Hospital where he was last listed in critical condition, said DeLand police Sgt. Chris Estes. The shooting occurred around 6:30 p.m. at a home in the 600 block of South Parsons Avenue. Three other children – ages 6, 5 and 1 – were also in the home alone at the time of the incident and were uninjured, Estes said. A 19-year-old woman and 15-year-old girl were supposed to be watching the children but had gone to a nearby store and were on the way back when the incident occurred, Estes said. When police arrived they found the boy in front of the neighbor's home. The 911 caller said he was trying to stop the bleeding. "It's (the blood) all over his shirt and everywhere else," the caller said. The incident remains under investigation, including if charges will be filed. "The investigator's are continuing the all important interviews with witnesses," said DeLand police Deputy Chief Randel Henderson. "Charges, if any, are dependent on what they learn and if the elements of a chargeable statute are satisfied." Records show the police have been called to the home about 20 times since last year. No further details were released. [email protected] or 407-420-5471Dan Horrigan became Akron’s 62nd mayor Jan. 1, filling a chair occupied for 28 years by Don Plusquellic. At his inauguration, Horrigan said he had a strong belief that “our city is on the verge of a renaissance” and that Akron is “poised to innovate and grow.” A former school teacher, Horrigan entered politics in 1999, winning election to Akron City Council. After eight years in council he was appointed clerk of Summit County’s Common Pleas Courts, filling an unexpired term. He won election the next year and was re-elected in 2012. Soon after he was declared Akron’s new mayor, Horrigan appointed a task force to help him map out a plan for the city’s future. One area of focus in the Blue Ribbon Task Force report issued in February was economic development. In an interview with Crain’s Akron Business, Horrigan focused on his plans for economic development, laying out where his administration is headed. He focused on several key areas, among them how the city will attract new businesses. He also expanded on his thoughts about how Akron can be a city of innovation and about his concern for what he called the “skills gap,” the need for the city to help its residents train for the jobs of the future. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.Image copyright AFP Image caption More women in Pakistan are demanding an end to gender-related violence Nearly 1,100 women were killed in Pakistan last year by relatives who believed they had dishonoured their families, the country's independent Human Rights Commission says. In its annual report the commission said 900 more women suffered sexual violence and nearly 800 took, or tried to take, their own lives. In 2014 about 1,000 women died in honour-related attacks and 869 in 2013. Correspondents say a large number of such crimes go unreported in Pakistan. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said there is no place in Islam for killing in the name of family honour. "The predominant causes of these killings in 2015 were domestic disputes, alleged illicit relations and exercising the right of choice in marriage," the report said. Most of the 1,096 victims were shot, the report said, but attacks with acid were also common. Image copyright AFP Image caption The 2014 killing of Farzana Parveen by her relatives in Punjab triggered protests Among the cases highlighted in the report are a man who shot dead his two sisters in Sargodha, Punjab, because he believed they had "bad character" and three teenage girls killed by their male cousin for "dishonouring" their family in Pakpattan, Punjab. The report said that 88 men were also the victims of honour killings last year. In February, Punjab, the country's largest province, passed a landmark law criminalising all forms of violence against women. However, more than 30 religious groups, including all the mainstream Islamic political parties, have threatened to launch protests if the law is not repealed. Religious groups have equated women's rights campaigns with promotion of obscenity. They say the new Punjab law will increase the divorce rate and destroy the country's traditional family system. Among the most infamous cases of honour killing in Pakistan was the stoning to death of Farzana Parveen in 2014 outside the High Court in Lahore. She had married against her family's wishes. Her father, brother, cousin and former fiance were all found guilty of murder. Another brother received a 10-year jail sentence. The issue of honour killings in Pakistan inspired a documentary film, A Girl in the River - The Price of Forgiveness, which won its creator, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, an Oscar at this year's Academy Awards. In her acceptance speech, she said it was after seeing the film that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had vowed to change the law on honour killings.Destitute refugees now comprise half the people living in Lebanon, Cardinal Bechara Rai, patriarch of the Maronite Catholic Church, has said during his visit to New York. He added that refugees are attractive targets for terrorist recruiting, and their continued presence threatens to drown Lebanon’s identity, he said. Cardinal Rai spoke yesterday at Catholic Near East Welfare Association headquarters in New York while in the United States for a pastoral visit. A permanent solution to the refugee crises throughout the Middle East requires lasting peace and the repatriation of refugees, not resettlement to third countries, he added. “A political solution to the conflicts ought to be the top priority, and a just, global and permanent peace should be established as soon as possible,” the Lebanese cardinal said. “We would ask nations to help refugees where they are; but it’s not enough to help, they should also stop wars, because every day we are at war, we’re creating new refugees,” Cardinal Rai said. “We must find a just, global and lasting peace for refugees, repatriate them and help them rebuild their lives and businesses.” “The longer we delay the solutions, the more open we become to terrorism, because terrorists recruit among the refugees,” Cardinal Rai said. The refugees need money and the terrorists pay them, he explained. The conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims is the largest conflict in the region, with Saudi Arabia representing the Sunni faction and Iran the Shia, Cardinal Rai said. The United States could play an important role mediating peace between the two countries, he said. In Syria, reconciliation will only be accomplished when the foreign factions that entered the conflict reconcile their own differences, practice justice, and recognise the humanity of those affected. “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the origin of the Middle Eastern problems” and could be solved through “the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state, the return of Palestinian refugees, and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon,” the patriarch said. “You cannot really come to agreement or establish peace without justice,” he said. “The separation between religion and state for both Judaism and Islam is one of the basic conditions for a permanent political solution in the region,” he said. When a country has an official religion, “you are in deep trouble because you are automatically excluding citizens who do not confess the religion of the state,” he said. Cardinal Rai said, “Despite all the difficulties plaguing the Lebanese system,” it could be a model for the workable separation of church and state.” It is the only country in the Middle East without either a state religion or requirement that the head of state must be a Muslim. Under an agreement forged in 1943, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon “live together on an equal basis” and share leadership of the government, he said. There are 18 distinct religious groups in the country and all are recognised in the parliament. Under the agreement, the president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the parliament a Shia Muslim. Nonetheless, the Lebanese presidency has been vacant since May 2014. Cardinal Rai said Islamic nations cause great harm to Islam by acting as “silent observers, simply looking and doing nothing about the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and all terrorist organisations.” Sunnis and Shias should condemn attacks on Christian and ethnic and religious minorities, including the violation of their churches, homes and possessions, he said. Christians and Muslims have lived together in the Middle East for 1,400 years. In recent years, most of the Christians in Iraq and Syria have been killed or displaced by international military, ethnic and racial conflicts in which they took no sides, but paid the heaviest price, Cardinal Rai said. Despite the circumstances, Christians remain attached to their lands, and committed to Gospel values, Christian witness and cooperation with their compatriots, he said. “The absence of Christians from the Middle East, or the weakening of their cultural influence, will certainly impoverish both Christians and Muslims, as it harms the culture of dialogue and coexistence,” the patriarch said. Cardinal Rai said the international community bears significant responsibility for the conflict in Syria because some members give monetary, military political or personnel support to terrorist organisations who take the conflicts to neighbouring countries and Western nations, and make terrorism a global problem. Cardinal Rai is the leader of the Lebanon-based Maronite Catholic Church, the largest of six Eastern Catholic patriarchal churches. There are more than 3 million members worldwide, approximately 85,000 of whom live in the United States. Lebanon is the size of the state of Connecticut. The country’s 4 million inhabitants are host to 1.5 million Syrian refugees and 500,000 Palestinian refugees. The Palestinians began to arrive more than 30 years ago for what was anticipated to be a temporary stay. The presence of so many refugees is destabilising, according to Archbishop Paul Sayah, vicar general of the patriarchate. Suicide bombings in a Christian village in northeast Lebanon yesterday killed at least five people and are an example of what could happen more frequently if refugees are not repatriated, he said. “I don’t know how Lebanon is surviving. It’s a miracle it’s still functioning. The refugees are living in misery. No human should be subjected to such misery,” he said. “The problem is we are making refugees of the Lebanese,” Cardinal Rai said. Lebanese are leaving the country because of economic stress. He said Syrians will work for half the wages, their shops will sell goods for half the profit and they don’t pay taxes. “Our cultural identity is threatened by the presence of the refugees,” he said. Cardinal Rai said Catholic aid is crucial to the people of Lebanon. Citing Catholic Near East Welfare Association, Catholic Relief Services and Aid to the Church in Need, Cardinal Rai said, “If they don’t do it, it’s not getting done. The vast majority of people being helped are non-Christian and the vast majority of the helpers are Christian.”Word to your collective Mothers on this special Holiday Edition of TRF’s Playoff Pontificator! As some of you may have heard or read, Tuck (and Family of Tuck©) were thwarted by Mother Nature once again this past weekend. The first time was in Oakland during the October Deluge which ended in a soggy, disheartening loss to the Chiefs. This time, I couldn’t even get close to the final destination of San Diego. Late Friday, and well into Saturday, the mile-high snow fell at a fast and furious pace. As a result, our entire family was stranded at Denver International Airport for almost 24 hours. While this was a personal disappointment, our resplendent team adorned in silver and black did not disappoint. With yet another dramatic comeback win under their belt, the Oakland Raiders managed to secure their first playoff berth in 14 years. Given that reality, many of you may be wondering why bother having any sort of Playoff Pontification this week. Well, I’m here to tell you that that type of wondering would be wrong; there is plenty to Pontificate on! In this Edition, I’ll dive into exploring our possible paths forward. I will also look at how our AFC West foes are doing on the playoff front. What they need, and how likely they are to get there. With no further ado, lets begin by looking at our own situation as we head into week 16… To use a baseball parlance, our magic number is two. That is, any combination of Raider victories and KC losses totaling two gives us the Division title, a home game, and a much-coveted week off once the post season begins in January. Right now, here are the Raiders’ odds for each of the six NFL playoff Seeds: Seed 1: 20% Obviously in this scenario the Raiders win the AFC West, which means that they met the “magic number” of 2 as it relates to KC. In order to grab the top spot, Oakland must also win at least one game and (at least) equal the W-L record of the Patriots. With the top seed, the Raiders would have home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Seed 2: 47% There are several ways Oakland can get to the magic number of 2. One option includes winning out. In which case it won’t matter what KC does in Weeks 16 and 17. The Raiders could also lose out and still grab the number 2 slot. However, in that case, the Chiefs would also need to lose their remaining two games. A record of 1-1 could also work, so long as KC follows suit (or loses both contests). Seed 3: 2% There is only one way this can come to pass. Here both Oakland and KC lose out while the Pittsburgh Steelers win their final two games. Yeah, probably not… Seed 4: 0% Not happening. The best the AFC South Champion can do is 10-6. We have already 11 games under our belt. Seed 5: 32% After Seed 2, this is the most likely (but clearly least desirable) outcome for the Raiders. In this case, the team doesn’t meet the magic number of 2 threshold and KC wins the West. Seed 6: 0% Like Seed 4, this is impossible. If the Steelers finish 11-5,they win the AFC North title. The best that Baltimore (Pittsburgh) can do in a Wild Card slot would be 9-7 (10-6). The Broncos can’t do any better than 10-6 at this point. What about Miami? Miami can finish at 11-5 but they lose to Oakland via the NFL’s number 3 Wild Card common games tiebreaker (5-0 vs. 3-2). Well there you have it, our Seeding possibilities in a nutshell. As the numbers show, Oakland is most likely to finish at the #2 slot, followed by #5 and then #1. I for one would be quite content with a #2 Seeding. The top slot would be gravy but not a deal killer if we don’t achieve home field throughout. Besides, having NE at #1 leaves open the grand possibility of a snow rematch in Boston. What a sweet way to finally end the “Tuck Rule Curse.” As a Pontificator bonus, lets take a quick look at our Division rivals’ playoff situations. Up first, KC… The thing that jumps out at you with KC is that they still can miss out on the playoffs. Is this likely? No, of course not but looking at their remaining games (and their propensity for faceplanting at the worst possible times) it makes me wonder, just a little. The specifics as it relates to the Chiefs playoff picture… Week 16 Win (vs. Den) and in Still in with a loss and… A Steelers win over the Ravens Week 17 (assuming they are not yet in) Win (at SD) and in If Dolphins lose at the Bills (in Week 16) then… KC still gets in with a loss at SD and … A Ravens loss at the Bengals OR A Dolphins loss vs. the Pats OR A Steelers loss vs. the Browns If Dolphins win at the Bills (in Week 16) then… KC still gets in with a loss at SD and … A Ravens loss at the Bengals OR A Steelers loss vs. the Browns Denver’s situation is much more dire. In fact, right now at 8-6, they have a 17% chance of reaching the post season. (In comparison, the Chiefs’ odds still sit at lofty 98%.) In addition, the Broncos’ path is rather complicated given that they are jostling with 8 other teams that could potentially take the one slot that is still open to them (Seed 6). Capturing the Division is impossible for the Broncos. Even slot 5 is unattainable given that they lose all tiebreakers with KC at 10-6. Nevertheless, they are alive and their odds range from 6-8% with a record of 9-7 to as high as 51% if Denver wins out and goes 10-6. Rather than dive into the myriad of possibilities, I’ll simply look at how Denver could get eliminated after this week’s games. If by chance Denver’s playoff heart is still pumping come Christmas night, I will delve into their possible pathways once we have a handle on Week 16’s final outcomes. The Playoff Picture for Denver going into Week 16: The Broncos cannot clinch a berth under any circumstance… Denver CAN be eliminated with a loss at KC and… A Dolphins win vs. the Pats OR A Ravens win at the Steelers As awkward as it is to type, we as Raiders fans should be rooting for a Broncos win this weekend. The silver (and black) lining here is that Denver will be incredibly desperate for a win and should make life tough for the Chiefs this week. While there is no question that watching the reigning World Champion Broncos get eliminated would be enjoyable, seeing the Chiefs hand us the Division title and a bye on a Christmas day silver (and black) platter would be even more satisfying… Raider Santa anyone? Even with a win in Week 16, the Broncos are still likely to find a lump of coal in their Christmas day stocking. At best, they will almost assuredly need to beat us in Week 17 not to mention receive a significant amount of outside help just to get a seat at the playoff table. No matter how you slice it, Raider fans are looking at a very Merry Christmas this year. May you and yours continue to enjoy this fun-filled Raider holiday season. Written by: Tuck Rule Fool Edited by: Kenny Stapler last week’s prediction poll results: Raider Game Predictions (Responses)Marvel's DOCTOR STRANGE Movie Will Not Be An Origin Story Recently, Devin Faraci of Badass Digest, was a guest on the Meet The Movie Press podcast. During the broadcast he revealed that the new Doctor Strange film will not be origin story. "This is not going to be twenty-minutes of him being a doctor" - Devin Faraci Back in June and July of 2013, Latino Review posted a couple of breakdowns regarding the Dr. Strange script that was written by Joshua Oppenheimer in 2010. Since then, Marvel has changed their Dr. Strange movie plans. They've recently hired Scott Derrickson ("Deliver Us From Evil") to direct it and hired screenwriter Jon Spaihts ("Prometheus") to work on the screenplay. Devin Faraci of Badass Digest appeared on Meet The Movie Press alongside Mark Reilly and Jeff Sneider. There, he revealed, Dr. Strange is not an origin story. "So, for Dr. Strange they've had a script in-house forever. It is a pretty standard origin story for Doctor Strange. It's got Baron Mordo as the bad guy. That's all gone. Marvel's new thing is no more origin stories. So, Dr. Strange movie no longer has an origin. It begins in medias res. It has Dr. Strange already established as the Sorcerer Supreme. It is a totally new script. Jon Spaihts is working totally new, On his own, without any of the previous stuff. Not even touching the previous script." - Devin Faraci Skip to the 52 minute mark Thanks to a heads up from Jeremy Flores Back in June and July of 2013,posted a couple of breakdowns regarding thescript that was written byin 2010. Since then, Marvel has changed theirmovie plans. They've recently hired"Deliver Us From Evil") to direct it and hired screenwriter("Prometheus") to work on the screenplay.ofappeared onalongsideand. There, he revealed,is not an origin story. DISCLAIMER: ComicBookMovie.com is protected under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and... : ComicBookMovie.com is protected under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and... [MORE] DISCLAIMER: ComicBookMovie.com is protected from liability under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and "Safe Harbor" provisions. This post was submitted by a volunteer contributor who has agreed to our [LESS] : ComicBookMovie.com is protected from liability under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and "Safe Harbor" provisions. This post was submitted by a volunteer contributor who has agreed to our Code of Conduct. CBM will disable users who knowingly commit plagiarism, piracy, trademark or copyright infringement. Please contact us for expeditious removal of copyrighted/trademarked content. Learn more about our copyright and trademark policies HEREA ONE-MAN play
ino) 45’ – Raul (Assist: Ayoze) 85’ – Ruben Bover Highlights: The Stakes: With a three-way race underway for the first-place spot in the combined table, the Cosmos were looking for a win to put them back into first place, taking advantage of an Ottawa stumble in Tampa Bay. With only three games remaining in the season, it was crucial that they take maximum points from this match. Missing players like Adam Moffat and Roversio due to injury and Andres Flores to international duty would be factors to consider. With only one playoff spot remaining, three teams have begun to separate themselves from the rest of the NASL pack. With the Strikers and the Rowdies failing to log wins, FC Edmonton looked for the three points to put themselves in the fourth place spot by evening’s end. With several players called away on international duty (Lance Laing, Sainey Nyassi, Hanson Boakai) and injuries to consider, only five subs would make the trip. The Match: While the Cosmos controlled possession in the first half, the Eddies presented a serious challenge due to their size and the physical nature of their game. A Tomi Ameobi attack in the 16th minute left Carlos Mendes on the floor and Hunter Gorskie just barely holding him off until the ball could get picked up by Jimmy Maurer. The Cosmos, forced to meet the physical challenge and throw it back at the Eddies, were able to use this to create the first goal. In the 37th minute, Raul won a ball in the air and Gaston Cellerino picked it up, connecting with Sebastian Guenzatti for the first goal, the second time in two games that they have done this. The Eddies repeatedly failed to mark the Cosmos adequately throughout the night and, in the 44th minute, this was their undoing. An unmarked Raul picked up an Ayoze corner that bounced through the area and buried it under a falling Matt Van Oekel to send the Cosmos into halftime with a 2-0 scoreline. The Eddies failed to make an impact in the second half, with the Cosmos attack keeping them on the back foot and the Eddies unable to take the initiative for most of the half. The 72nd minute saw a glimmer of hope for the visitors as Daryl Fordyce, entering the game five minutes earlier, managed a shot on goal, their first for the evening. Any hope of forcing a result came to an end in the 85th as Ruben Bover found his first goal of the season with a lovely chip over Van Oekel that curled into the far post. He nearly picked up a second in the 90th when his redirect was barely grabbed on the line. The Results: The Cosmos completely dominated the match in possession (59%-41%), corners (9-0), shots (17-4), shots on goal (12-1) and, of course, the scoreline. The dominant form they’ve displayed in their last two games gives them momentum as they prepare to close out the season and enter the playoffs. Their challenge will be to keep the momentum going with a bye weekend coming up. They also are a game up on United and the Fury and will watch their results closely. The Eddies are down, but not out. Currently tied for fifth place with the Strikers, they are a game up, which gives the Strikers a chance to pull ahead. They have played an equal amount of games as the Rowdies (currently in the final spot), but sit one point out of the playoffs. In Form: Back Line (NYC) – Faced with a tough, physical task, the Cosmos back line not only held, but only permitted one shot on goal in the whole game that didn’t come until the 72nd. Strong performances from center backs Mendes and Gorskie meant Maurer barely had anything to do across the evening and they combined for their second shutout in as many games. Gaston Cellerino (NYC) – With a goal and two assists in his last two games, and better looking performances in each game so far, Cellerino has made his case to be the regular starter up front. His first touch has improved noticeably and his hunger to finish and physical strength is a combination the Cosmos have not possessed until now. Sebastian Guenzatti (NYC) – Two goals in two games for Guenzatti are also making it more difficult for coach Savarese to select his starters. His obvious chemistry with Cellerino has paid off and could be crucial in the final stretch. Raul (NYC) – Returning from injury, there was some question as to whether the Cosmos would get the lethargic Raul on the pitch or the spirited one. The latter was the answer as Raul scored, tested the Eddies defense with more shots, and created chances for the Cosmos throughout the night. Ruben Bover (NYC) – An incredible goal aside, Bover is really beginning to stand out on the first team. Called up from Cosmos B, his increase in confidence is noticeable and he continues to make smart decisions both on and off the ball. Matt Van Oekel (FCE) – Yes, he gave up three goals and it may be strange to put him here, but he faced twelve shots on goal across the night, saving nine, including a miracle grab on the line in the 90th. He stood on his head and kept his team in it for much of this nightmare. The first two goals were a result of him being hung out to dry by his back line and that same weak defending made the third goal possible. But let’s talk more about that in… Liabilities: Eddies defense – This game was a complete meltdown from the back line. The right-side defenders were Albert Watson and Allan Zebie were part of a series of missed slides and clearance attempts on the first goal, but were so badly out of position, they could do nothing. The second goal had a wide-open Raul sit on that side and fire at his leisure. A poor Watson clearance to the foot of Bover and lackluster defending by Kareem Moses made the final goal possible. Tomi Ameobi – The talented, big forward should have been able to take advantage of a smaller back line that tended to drift forward and support the attack. But, he was made complete ineffective and eventually was brought off in the 72nd minute. One of the images of the night was the sight of a small Gorskie doing absolutely everything to deny him a 1 v 1 with Maurer. Things You Won’t See in the Highlights: Most teams traveling to Shuart come in a bus or some combination of vans or buses. But at the end of the evening, they were all piling into a small fleet of assorted SUVs, cars, etc. Maybe due to the travel costs they incur? Still an interesting sight to see for an away team.With the current economic situation and job competition, it’s easier to consider the ever-growing significance of higher education—especially a Masters Degree. There has been consistent growth in online college enrollment since 2002 and, according to the 2012 Survey of Online Learning, “the number of students who have taken at least one online college course has now surpassed 6.7 million”.[ii] But is a Masters degree and other higher education degrees becoming so significant today? Here are some ideas: Bachelor Degrees on the Rise The number of people who have bachelor degrees are increasing. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), the percentage of people who earned a bachelor’s or higher rose from 22 to 32% between 1980 and 2011.[iii] With such growth in educational attainment, how can you set yourself apart from other people when it comes to employment? In the past, it was earning a Bachelor’s degree. Now, it seems to be a Master’s degree or even PhD. Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, says that the number of Masters that have been awarded has doubled since the 1980s and the “rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years”.[iv] This data reveals a new higher ed trend. Increasing Specialization With this degree trend, arrives a distinction between degrees of the past and a Masters degree today. The popularity of a professional science masters or PSM is gaining momentum. It is a new type of graduate degree that encourages advanced training in STEM related fields like science and math, along with honing workplace skills.[v] A degree of this type could be attractive to employers who are seeking graduates with employable skills. Even humanities departments seem to want in on the professional degree action—for example, a Masters degree in public history that is geared for work in a museum[iv]—is now available at certain colleges and universities. Networking & Connections With a tough economy, there typically is more of a need for increased networking. Through social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, along with connections made in graduate school, students might garner contacts that could lead to future career leads. Grad school may be a great way for students to interact with professors who are considered leaders in their fields and who may grant glowing recommendations when the time comes to apply for post-grad school jobs. What should you know about earning a Master’s degree if you are thinking about either continuing your education immediately after earning your Bachelor’s degree or if you will be returning to college after a long hiatus? How long will it take to finish my Master’s degree? Usually a Master’s degree takes around 2 years to complete; however, you may finish up sooner or later depending on your course load. What types of Master’s degrees are available? The two most common types are a Master of Art (MA) or a Master of Science(MS).[vii] There are also focused degrees like a Master of Business Administration (MBA), a Master in Social Work (MSW), or a professional science Master’s degree (PSM). Will I have to write a lot? Most Master’s degrees involve writing a thesis which should include some type of research either through analysis or experiments. Some Master’s degrees even require internships where you are able to apply learned skills like in the field of psychology.[vii] Is it really worth it? Only you can really answer this question. However, given the information above with a seeming surplus of Bachelor’s degrees and employers seeking employees with advanced education and skills, earning your Master’s degree may be the best decision you ever made. Even more exciting is the option to earn your Master’s degree online. You can even get into graduate schools to earn a Master's with an undergrad GPA of 2.7 or 2.8 - so don't let your undergrad grades stop you!But now Pizza Hut is asking its customers to order their meals in a whole new language. To mark World Emoji Day this weekend (17 July) the chain has translated its entire menu in to emoji for a limited time only. Diners will be encouraged to crack the code and order in emoji language, but can still request the original English menu if it all gets a bit confusing. The special menu will be available at six Hut’s nationwide from 13-17 July. Kath Austin, director of HR and marketing at Pizza Hut Restaurants, said: "We have a huge focus on menu innovation and having already launched a brand new menu recently, we hope customers enjoy decrypting the emoji version as much as we did creating it!" Participating restaurants include The Strand London, Birmingham Bullring, Liverpool Paradise Street, Edinburgh Hanover Street, Manchester Fountain Street and Cardiff Queens Street. The emoji menu is the latest unusual project from the chain, after it trialled a ‘subconscious menu’ in 2014 and craft beer-infused pizzas earlier this year. It comes after Aloft Hotels launched an emoji room service menu in the UK, allowing guests to order hangover kits and toiletries by texting different emoji combinations to staff.The rugged terrain of Alaska’s Mystic Pass, looking north. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post) In the age of Google Earth, it’s tempting to think human knowledge of the world is complete, with no frontiers to be charted. Which is why Alex Stack thought modern technology could get him through the mighty Alaska Range after a successful 2006 moose hunt. Stack and his buddies Aric Beane and James Eule hit bad weather as they flew home through Mystic Pass, a narrow valley winding through 8,000-foot peaks southwest of Mount McKinley. One minute, the weather was fine; the next, clouds were rolling down the snow-streaked ridges. “Have you ever been in 100 percent fog? That’s exactly what it’s like,” recalled Eule, an Anchorage surgeon. “You’re flying blind, knowing there’s mountains all around you.” Alone in a nimble Cessna, Eule was able to turn around. Stack and Beane, in a larger plane carrying most of the 1,000-pound moose, were forced to press on, eyes glued to a handheld GPS screen, praying its fusion of satellite signals and government terrain maps would guide them to safety. Unfortunately, the maps were wrong. Alaska, it turns out, has never been mapped to modern standards. While the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is constantly refining its work in the lower 48 states, the terrain data in Alaska is more than 50 years old, much of it hand-sketched from black-and-white stereo photos shot from World War II reconnaissance craft and U-2 spy planes. Errors abound. Locals tell of mountains as much as a mile out of place. Streams flow uphill, and ridges are missing because a cloud happened by when the photo was taken. “Mars is better mapped than the state of Alaska,” said Steve Colligan, president of E-Terra, an Anchorage mapping firm that specializes in aviation safety. Thanks to the Pentagon, the wilds of Asia and the Middle East are better mapped, too. “We have this amazing map of Afghanistan. It’s the most modern geological map ever made,” said Kevin Gallagher, associate director for USGS Core Science Systems. “I would love to invest in America like this.” Now, Gallagher is getting the chance. The USGS, along with numerous state and federal partners, has launched the 3D Elevation Program, an effort to chart all 50 states with airborne lasers (lidar) or radar (ifsar). The new technology permits astonishingly precise measurements of terrain, buildings and roads, waterways, coastline, even vegetation, right down to individual plants. “It’s not an image; it’s data. That’s what makes it so powerful,” Gallagher said. “Lidar is like looking at the world through a new set of glasses.” The technology is transforming archaeology and geology, revealing lost cities in the jungles of Cambodia and Belize and new fault lines under the streets of Seattle. It has guided rescuers after the Oso, Wash., landslide; gauged flood risk in North Carolina; and helped residents decide whether to install solar panels on Manhattan rooftops. Lidar also has countless commercial applications. A 2012 report on the benefits of better elevation data drew support from Idaho’s J.R. Simplot Co. (precision agriculture), the Mendocino Redwood Co. (timber inventory and landslide avoidance), TomTom (vehicle guidance) and an array of energy firms (windmills, solar farms and oil-well siting). Gallagher predicts the 3-D program will be as “transformational” to the U.S. economy as the original Army Corps surveys that fueled the Westward expansion in the 1800s. For about $150 million a year, the USGS estimates the new maps could boost government savings and private investment by as much as $13 billion annually. Because Alaska is so badly mapped, the project kicked off there in the summer of 2010 using ifsar, which is slightly less accurate than lidar but cheaper and able to penetrate clouds. Within months, however, Republicans had won the U.S. House and begun squabbling with President Obama over government spending. The 3-D program has since struggled to gain a toehold in the federal budget as gridlocked policymakers have repeatedly rubber-stamped old spending priorities in quickie budget bills, known as continuing resolutions, or CRs. The USGS has persevered, cobbling together existing federal funds and money appropriated by desperate Alaska officials. Still, four years later, just half of the state has been mapped and impatient contractors have been flying extra territory on spec in hopes that Congress will finally boost the program’s budget. “We lobby. I’m sure Fugro lobbies. But as soon as they go to a CR, you’re screwed,” said Ian Wosiski, sales director at Intermap Technologies, which, along with Fugro EarthData, is flying the planes that collect the ifsar data. “We’re talking about $30 million to finish the state. Thirty million dollars,” Wosiski said. “When you consider all the benefits of the program, it seems like a no-brainer.” 1 of 11 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Charting through Alaska View Photos Lars Gleitsmann, 44, breaks off from formation while flying in the vicinity of Puntilla Lake near Alaska’s Rainy Pass. Caption The state’s landscape has never been mapped to modern standards, and consequences have been dire for some pilots. Oct. 1, 2014 Bush pilot Lars Gleitsmann flies his Bellanca Citabria toward Puntilla Lake near Rainy Pass, one of the dozen deadliest mountain passes for Alaska pilots. Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. Some argue the project has already paid for itself. A few months after the project’s “skybreaking” at an Anchorage airport, an F-22 Raptor crashed while training in remote territory near Denali National Park. The pilot died on impact, and the plane — by then a $150 million hunk of hazardous material — was submerged in a 20-foot crater in a streambed between two ridges. It was just before Thanksgiving. The mountains were covered with snow, and the days were short, with six hours of sunlight. As the military readied a 33-person recovery team, Army contractor Mike Davis remembered the skybreaking and called to see whether ifsar had been collected over the crash site. It had. Fugro rushed the raw data to Anchorage, where Davis used it to plot a course for helicopters to land safely without touching off an avalanche. A mapping specialist from Colorado State University, Davis had been campaigning for better elevation data for at least four years, since the Army began moving Kiowa helicopters to Fort Wainwright outside Fairbanks. Though the Pentagon had aerial images of its vast Alaska training fields, Davis said, they were useless to the Kiowas without accurate information about the lay of the land. “We realized we had elevation errors in the hundreds of feet in our maps,” Davis said. “And now we’ve got all these guys coming in, expecting to train at night and fly map-of-the-earth-type stuff. And the answer was just no.” He put together some PowerPoint slides and began lobbying military commanders. “I said: ‘Here’s the level of data they have for terrain in Afghanistan. And here’s the crap we have here,’ ” Davis recalled. “They got the message pretty quickly.” Davis may have helped prod the Defense Department’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to put $2.3 million toward the first ifsar flights. Steve Wallach, an NGA executive at the time, did not recall mention of the Kiowas. But funding ifsar “probably served multiple training purposes,” he said, adding, “The quality of the existing elevation data was very poor.” These days, Davis works for HDR, an engineering firm. As the ifsar data has become available, he has been loading it onto iPads for his associates, including a four-person crew assigned this summer to scour a proposed natural gas pipeline corridor for signs of ancient settlements. Davis has also scouted Devil’s Canyon on the Susitna River, site of a proposed hydroelectric dam. There, the ifsar data will be used to model water flow in a watershed the size of West Virginia. Davis also dreams of using it to fly drones up the canyon so pilots don’t have to risk their lives photographing the area. Drones “need crazy elevation data,” he said. Scientsts, meanwhile, are using the data to model tsunami evacuation routes and waiting eagerly for future flights over the state’s active volcanoes. Earlier this month, new data arrived from the Columbia Glacier, causing a stir in the glacier office at the USGS Alaska Science Center in the hills of east Anchorage. USGS scientist Louis Sass said the new data will permit better measurements of thinning and shrinkage since Alaska glaciers were last mapped in the 1950s, increasing understanding of global warming. “It’s beautiful data,” Sass said. “You can actually see details in the ice, like where the glacier is calving.” He pointed to several small lumps on the map on his computer screen. “Those are icebergs,” he said. “You can actually see little icebergs in the ocean.” Columbia Glacier, in 2004. (David McNew/Getty Images) Alaskans, of course, have more prosaic problems than melting glaciers and crashing fighter jets. Take, for instance, land rights. How do you lay claim to land that has never been mapped? “Stuff that is unthinkable in the contiguous U.S. is perfectly normal here,” said Lars Gleitsmann, a geologist and entrepreneur who has testified in mining disputes. “A surveyer draws on a map, then he goes out into Mother Nature using the GPS to locate his place. Nothing matches, nothing fits. Soon, everybody is at each other’s throats.” Gleitsmann, an expert bush pilot, is also deeply involved in the state’s most urgent ifsar-related project: improving aviation safety. Alaska pilots are 36 times as likely to die as the average U.S. worker, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state has few roads, so everything and everybody has to travel in small planes capable of landing on remote runways. Alaska has roughly six times as many pilots per capita as the rest of the nation. And they are usually flying in conditions that are inherently dangerous. The weather is brutal and hard to predict. The rugged and badly mapped terrain leads to a particularly deadly kind of crash called “controlled flight into terrain,” which in Alaska means the pilot has flown a perfectly good plane at full speed into the side of a mountain. Since 2008, 15 such crashes have killed 16 people and left seven seriously injured in Alaska, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Among them was the crash that killed former senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) in 2010. Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell (R), a longtime champion of better mapping, said he has lost 25 friends in plane crashes — and he feared for his own life during a 2012 flight through the Alaska Range via Rainy Pass, one of the state’s deadly mountain passes. “There was a crucial four or five minutes where we didn’t know where we were,” Treadwell said. “Then we landed at the Rainy Pass Lodge, somebody handed me a cold beer and made me a hamburger, and it was wonderful.” The Federal Aviation Administration has worked since 2000 to improve flight safety with training programs and new technology. But Colligan, of E-Terra, said he had to warn the FAA against trying to produce an in-cockpit map system using the old terrain maps. “I told them, this is not the same as the lower 48. You’ll kill people here,” he said. With ifsar, such a map is finally possible. NASA recently released to Alaska officials a prototype of a navigation app that will deliver 3-D terrain maps — as well as real-time weather forecasts — into the cockpit for testing as soon as next year. E-Terra, meanwhile, is developing a hyper-realistic 3-D map that would let socked-in pilots virtually brush the clouds away. Both projects need more terrain data, however. “GPS is no good if it only covers four blocks downtown,” Colligan said. So Gleitsmann has been flying the mountains with a camera, documenting the power of ifsar in hopes of helping the state shake loose more federal cash. Among his targets: Mystic Pass, where Nick Mastrodicasa, the state’s project manager for the digital mapping initiative, remembered two hunters finding themselves in bad weather in a plane full of moose meat in 2006. “That is probably the worst thing that can happen to any pilot, that situation,” Gleitsmann said. “What they were facing was really, really bad.” Aric Beane and Alex Stack, shown on the morning they headed home via Mystic Pass from a 2006 moose hunt in Stack’s bush plane, a de Havilland Beaver. Both were killed when the plane crashed into a ridge in bad weather. (Courtesy of James Eule/The Washington Post) An experienced pilot, Stack had purchased a brand new GPS device just before the hunting trip. Studying his position on its moving map, he steered the plane through the clouds nearly the full length of Mystic Pass. He had one last ridge to clear before the land opens up into a wide, friendly river valley. Ifsar later measured the final ridge 263 feet higher than Stack’s GPS would have shown that day. The plane slammed into rock about 300 feet below the ridgeline, rescuers said — close enough to suggest the bad map may have made a difference. Stack, 38, and Beane, 33, died on impact, leaving behind three small children. Eule, meanwhile, was flying west, looking for a safe path through the mountains. Low on fuel, he landed at a remote hunting lodge where the wary female caretaker wanted “to make me sleep in the plane.” He used a satellite phone to call his wife, who checked Stack’s parking spot on the Web cam at the Anchorage airport. She reported his plane missing around 4 a.m. Two days later, the Alaska Air National Guard found the wreckage. The fuselage was incinerated, and rescuers found no trace of the GPS on which Stack had pinned his hopes. “He was probably doing a really good job, because he navigated quite a ways in the clouds,” Eule said. “If he had better tools, maybe he would still be around.” Since the crash, Eule, 45, said his wife has pressed him to stop flying. In September, he went hunting on horseback, instead of by bush plane — along with his wife, who bagged the family moose. But Eule said he will not give up flying completely. “It’s the only way to get out,” he said, “and do the things you moved to Alaska for.”1. Jameis Winston’s sophomore season will be fascinating because: Usually the question with QBs entering Year 2 is whether they can sharpen their understanding of their system and of defenses. But that’s not the concern with Winston, a precocious student of the game. Rather, the question is: can Winston hone his mechanics? As a rookie, they were rough enough to be considered an obstacle to his long-term development. It doesn’t matter if a QB can read the coverage or make audibles if his body can’t keep up with his mind. And, eventually, that player’s body will prohibit his mind from progressing further. Winston must get tighter in his dropback, in his ball release and in his footwork. He currently requires too much time and space in the pocket. The good news: Winston is working with the right instructors (head coach Dirk Koetter; quarterbacks coach Mike Bajakian); he’s shown the toughness to hang in and keep his eyes downfield when the pocket starts to collapse; he’s willing to attack tight windows downfield. The right foundation is there. • CAMP REPORT: Colder than cold in Tampa Bay 2. Dirk Koetter’s system fits Winston as well as any NFL system fits its quarterback. Even if Winston tightens his mechanics, he’ll never be a quick-twitch thrower. Koetter knows that. And so the Bucs’ passing game is heavy on slower developing downfield route concepts—things like post routes, corner routes, fly patterns and deep digs. Winston’s 13.0 yards per completion ranked third in the league, behind only Cam Newton and Carson Palmer. This vertical approach also fits the measured movement and big frames of wideouts Mike Evans and Vincent Jackson. 3. If you’re going to have this sort of vertical passing game, you need a strong running game. The majority of deep routes come out of running formations. Running formations set up the type of elongated play-action that impacts safeties—the defender you must beat in order to go deep. They also put the extra tight ends and fullbacks in place to help the offensive line hold up longer in pass protection. Last season the Bucs played base personnel (2 RB, 1 TE or 1 RB, 2 TE) with regularity, and according to Football Outsiders, they even put six offensive linemen on the field more than any team except Washington. Expect this to continue. • DEEP DIVE: The Best Quarterbacks Ever! Or a Reasonable Review of Rookies Mariota, Winston 4. The Bucs may come to regret not drafting or signing a wide receiver. They’re banking on either untested 2015 fifth-rounder Kenny Bell, undrafted second-year pros Donteea Dye and Adam Humphries or on Louis Murphy, coming off an ACL, to be their No. 3. This offense has no speed and quickness at tight end or receiver. That’s also part of the reason the Bucs are a methodical, downfield passing team with a run-heavy approach. 5. Another reason the Bucs need to have a run-based foundation is tailback Doug Martin. No player in the NFL is more adept at maneuvering through small cracks. While most backs in today’s game flourish in space, the more blockers you pack in for Martin, the better he gets. 6. Second-year pro Donovan Smith is the type of left tackle who needs to win early in the down. All left tackles need to win early in the down, of course. But in Smith’s case, it’s magnified. He improved his pass-blocking balance and technique as his rookie season unfolded. When he wins early, those skills are the drivers. But when he doesn’t win early, his lack of twitchy athleticism gets exposed and he can’t recover. 7. The Bucs’ D could feature a sneakily effective pass rush. It’s added five-tool veteran end Robert Ayers and second-round rookie Noah Spence. Ayers could probably be an effective three-technique in certain nickel fronts. The Bucs, however, might be too rich already for him here, assuming Gerald McCoy and Clinton McDonald stay healthier than they did in 2015. There’s also stellar depth up front. Jacquies Smith and Howard Jones are worth 10-12 situational snaps a game. Are any of Tampa’s defensive linemen game-wreckers? Besides McCoy, no. But afforded the luxury of staying fresh in a deep rotation, they’re more than capable of generating pressure in critical passing situations. That wasn’t the case last season. 8. Lavonte David needs to bounce back from a mediocre season. The linebacker did not stand out at all on film until November. He was dominant at times down the stretch, but the Bucs need that from him in all 16 games. 9. If David does bounce back, the Bucs, who last year still ranked second behind only Denver in yards allowed per rush (3.45), will have an outstanding linebacking unit. Second-year middle ’backer Kwon Alexander has the speed you look for, and his awareness improved precipitously as a fourth-round rookie. Incoming veteran Daryl Smith can still play, too—not just in the base 4-3 but also as an alternative option in nickel, where he’s an adept blitzer. 10. New defensive coordinator Mike Smith will employ more creative pass-rush concepts and coverage changeups than last year’s defensive signal-caller, head coach Lovie Smith. And that’s a good thing; last year this D allowed completions on an NFL worst 69.9% of passes against them. Mike Smith will still keep Lovie’s 4-3 zone foundation, but the first-round selection of cornerback Vernon Hargreaves suggests the Bucs want to play more man coverage. That will take time, however: the rest of their defensive backs are average at best. Question? Comment? Let us know at [email protected] Doublelift As many of you may have heard, our current AD Carry Yilliang ‘Doublelift’ Peng will no longer be with us at TSM for the coming 2018 NA LCS season. We understand that this would be a controversial decision amongst many fans, given his reputation as world class and one of the best AD Carries in North America and the amount of success he has achieved with the team. We recognize Doublelift’s value and greatly respect all the work he has put in over the past few years. While TSM has always remained committed to establishing strong relationships with its players, the number one commitment has always been to win Worlds, something that every player that comes through the organization knows. Even with the team’s success in North America, our lack of a strong shotcaller for the past two Worlds has been one of our most glaring weaknesses. With our goal of winning Worlds in mind, it would have been disingenuous not to consider available players during the preseason whom could rival our current bot lane in skill, but fill our shotcalling gaps. We truly believe that this decision has resulted in a roster with the highest chance of winning Worlds. After our early exit from Worlds this year, we chose to be as clear and candid as possible with all our players, and told them that changes would be made to the team in the preseason. Doublelift was able to find an amazing offer, which he took before we even signed someone to fill his role. Despite his departure, we will always remain supportive of Doublelift as we have with many of our former players. We will be sad to see him leave, but we also look forward to competing against him in the LCS. We wish to thank him for all his hard work and for his role in all of our achievements, and wish him the best of luck for the future. “I'm really sad to be leaving TSM. We had a magical roster with a combo personality and success that will be hard to find again. For me, one door closing is many more opening up. With my next team’s roster and my determination to succeed where none have been able to before, I know this path will be exciting and ambitious. TSM is my competition now - I will make sure my next team holds the trophy - but we will always be friends.” -Yiliang ‘Doublelift’ PengPartygoers dance and smoke pot during the annual 4/20 marijuana festival in Denver (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) Through federal court challenges and Congressional initiatives, activists have been pushing hard to have marijuana removed from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. Marijuana sits with heroin on the highly restrictive Schedule I, while cocaine and methamphetamine are on the less restrictive Schedule II. This leaves many people puzzled: How can the federal government claim that pot is as dangerous as heroin and more dangerous than meth? In reality, that isn’t what the Schedule I status of marijuana means, but the odds are long against this ever being widely understood by policymakers or the public. The interpretive problem comes about because the CSA tries to capture in a single number two variables that aren’t necessarily connected: Medical value and dangerousness. The CSA rates drugs on scale, creating a scheduling system that runs from I to V. In general, the higher the number of the schedule, the less dangerous a drug is considered to be, and thus controls on it are weaker (i.e., It’s easier to obtain and refill prescriptions). For example, Robitussin AC cough syrup, which contains a small amount of codeine, is on Schedule V, whereas the more potent and dangerous opioid fentanyl is on Schedule II. But another factor comes into play in differentiating Schedules I and II: to be Schedule II a drug has to be approved for medical use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Cocaine for example goes on Schedule II because it has been approved as a topical anesthetic in certain surgical procedures. Marijuana in contrast can’t become FDA approved because unlike cocaine it is raw plant matter of complex and varying composition. A standardized, pure component of marijuana – for example the synthetic tetrahydrocannabiol found in the Schedule III medication dronabinol – can escape schedule I by going through the FDA process. In contrast, the plant itself, not being suited to the FDA approval system, ends up on a more restrictive schedule than cocaine, which kills over 4,000 Americans a year. The implicit assumption of the scheduling system is that not being medically useful gives some drugs an extra “oomph” of dangerousness that pushes them into Schedule I, the worst of the worst. This would make sense if medical value and dangerousness were the opposing ends of the same dimension, but they are not. Prescription opioids are highly effective for easing the pain of cancer patients, yet also kill more Americans each year than all Schedule I drugs combined. Similarly, drug policy expert Mark Kleiman of New York University’s Marron Institute argues that the current scheduling system “has no logical place for drugs like psilocybin mushrooms that have no recognized medical use, but not much abuse potential either”. Kleiman favors a simplified scheduling system that focus only on a drug’s potential for abuse. “Medical utility is simply a different question”, he points out. At a minimum, such a system might be easier for the public and policymakers to understand. Psychological research indicates that human beings are prone to global, emotionally simple judgements of risk, i.e., we want to think of a drug as either harmful or beneficial, not as harmful in some ways and dangerous in others. The current scheduling system accentuates the human tendency to oversimplify, and thus prevents us from grappling honestly with the fact that sometimes the most dangerous and most medically useful drugs are one and the same. Keith Humphreys is a Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Mental Health Policy at Stanford University.Most of the 2900 men who make their living caring for under-fives butt up against these assumptions regularly in a way that their 100,000-plus female counterparts do not, he says. ''It's a very common story,'' d'Arcy says. Most paedophiles are relatives or trusted family friends but, as more perpetrators are caught awareness grows and, with it, a fear that can become out of proportion to the danger. A Newcastle University lecturer on family issues, Richard Fletcher, knows of a school principal who wanted to cancel a program allowing grandfathers to run playground activities for children when one of the men had too much to drink, spooking the staff. An underlying attitude that ''men are
award or "a bomb will be detonated." The event took place on March 19, and Sarkeesian told Kotaku that she "...decided to go on stage and accept the award anyway, but it was a nerve-wracking evening to say the least."People wait in line at an emergency food pantry in Brooklyn in 2014. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Millions of Americans could go hungry if President Trump moves forward with a draft executive order that restricts the welfare benefits available to immigrants, according to experts in immigration law. That’s because the order would restrict access to needs-based nutrition programs, like SNAP and WIC, that are currently accessed by millions of first-generation immigrants both for themselves and on behalf of their second-generation, citizen children. According to a recent analysis by the National Academies of Sciences, 45.3 percent of all immigrant-headed households with children use a food assistance program. Eighty-eight percent of all children living with immigrant parents are themselves U.S. citizens. [The basic error of Trump’s draft order targeting immigrants on welfare] “He would literally be taking food out of the mouths of babes,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies, “and some of them would be U.S. citizens.” The draft executive order, which leaked publicly on Tuesday, seeks to reduce the number of immigrants using government assistance. It’s unclear when Trump plans to sign the order, if at all, and whether it will be signed in its current form. Even if signed, it could take time for government agencies to act on the president’s orders, and their eventual actions might not play out as implied in the draft order. But as it is currently written, the draft order instructs the departments of State and Homeland Security to overhaul their definition of a “public charge” -- a person who is likely to become dependent on government help after immigrating. It would also make immigrants who use public benefits “for which eligibility or amount is determined in any way on the basis of income” subject to possible deportation. [Trump administration circulates more draft immigration restrictions, focusing on protecting U.S. jobs] Under long-standing policy, the government has not considered receipt of nutrition, medical or housing benefits when evaluating if someone has become a public charge for deportation purposes. While the federal government has prohibited even legal immigrants from accessing many of these programs as soon as they arrive in the United States, some states allow access if they have children under 18 years old. And some federal benefits, such as WIC, the school lunch program and emergency Medicaid, are not restricted. Practically speaking, almost no one is deported for receiving such benefits unless there’s evidence they deceived the government at the time they immigrated. The executive order could hypothetically change that, barring potential immigrants who may need nutrition assistance and making the use of these programs a deportable offense. Advocates say that will cut the number of people who apply for SNAP, WIC and reduced-price school lunch, even when they, or their children, are legally eligible for them. “It’s a radical change to 100 years of case law that say the exact opposite,” said Charles Wheeler, the director of training and legal support at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. “It’s like imprisoning someone for failing to pay a debt. Didn’t we take care of that a long time ago?” Immigrants already face restrictions on the welfare benefits they can receive, Wheeler said. Since the late 19th century, it has been formal U.S. immigration policy to deny admission to people who seem likely to need government aid to subsist, usually because they’re unable to work or require institutionalization. (Critics contend that, in recent years, this policy has not been enforced.) When an immigrant comes to the United States through a familial connection, that sponsor must also sign an affidavit promising to take responsibility for the immigrant's finances. [The key difference between what poor people and everyone else eat] Once they are admitted to the United States, legal immigrants cannot apply for cash benefits -- including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Social Security and Medicaid -- until they have been in the country for five years. Immigrants are immediately eligible for food stamps, or SNAP, if they have young children, and data from multiple sources suggests that many households take the government up on that benefit. However, according to the Department of Agriculture, the SNAP participation rate among eligible noncitizens is already significant lower than it is among eligible citizens. “There is a perception that participating in SNAP could affect immigration status … but this is not true,” the department writes in its guidance to noncitizens. “It is important for non-citizens to know they will not be deported, denied entry to the country, or denied permanent status because they apply for or receive SNAP benefits.” Trump’s draft order could, of course, change that. History suggests such a move could have significant consequences for public health. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the welfare-reform law that first established the five-year wait time for cash benefits for immigrants. In the years following implementation, immigrant use of public benefits fell off dramatically, prompting Harvard University economist George Borjas to take a closer look at the numbers. He found that for every 10 percent drop in the fraction of the immigrant population that received public assistance, there was a 5 percent increase in the number of households classified as “food insecure.” Borjas recently ran the numbers on immigrants and welfare again: In 2016, 8.9 million U.S. households were headed by a noncitizen. Of those, almost 42 percent received Medicaid, food stamps or cash assistance. “Put bluntly,” he wrote, “taking the public charge provisions of immigration law seriously could potentially affect 3.7 million households, making the recent kerfuffle over a relatively small number of refugees look like small potatoes.” Of course, such a dramatic turn in U.S. immigration policy would also save a lot of money on entitlements -- something that American voters are perennially concerned about. Polls show that immigrants’ receipt of welfare benefits remains a national anxiety. And while it's impossible to calculate an exact number for how much taypayers could save, given the available data, numbers from the National Academy of Sciences suggest it could be in the ballpark of $19 billion. That’s just in the short run, though -- and advocates warn that poverty, and particularly food insecurity, have long-term implications. According to work by researchers at the National Cancer Institute, the Boston University School of Medicine and other institutions, children who don’t get enough to eat are more likely to develop chronic health conditions and to require hospitalization. Among adults, hunger frequently contributes to less productivity -- as well as social isolation and illness. The liberal Center for American Progress estimates that in 2010 hunger cost the U.S. health-care system $130.5 billion. “With this sort of thing,” Appleby said, “there are unintended consequences.” More from Wonkblog: What it’s like to live on $2 a day in the United States What happens when a family runs out of food stamps The controversial reason tens of thousands of people just lost their food stampsPit People Update 4: Vibrant Villains has launched on both Xbox One Game Preview and Steam Early Access! There are new story missions, 2 new multi-part city quests, and a whole new world map with 15 new bonus missions. With everything combined, players can expect at least another 5 hours of gameplay! We also have several other improvements to the game. See the full change list HERE. Steam Summer Sale From June 22, 2017 to July 5, 2017, all of our Steam games are on sale during the Steam Summer Sale! Pit People Steam will be discounted at 20% OFF the Early Access price (which means it’s actually 40% OFF the full release price point!) Pit People Merch Today is also our launch of the Pit People Plushies in our online store! Get a Cupcake, Space Bear, Mushroom, or Rainbow Horse plush for $25 (before shipping) and cuddle with your new buddy while you strategize in the Pit. Developer AMA on the Xbox One subreddit Join us June 26th @ 11AM PDT / 19:00 BST for our first developer AMA on the Xbox One subreddit! Post your questions and give us your feedback on the latest update of Pit People! (No direct link available at this time, but we’ll be sure to post it once it’s up)(Reuters) - Mississippi will ban abortions after more than 20 weeks of pregnancy from July, joining other conservative U.S. states that have placed restrictions on the procedure. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 but the practice still polarizes U.S. society. A handful of states have in recent years enacted laws that place restrictions on the procedure, especially on late-term abortions, citing hotly debated medical research that a fetus feels pain at 20 weeks of gestation, halfway through a full-term pregnancy. The Mississippi bill referred to that research. “Today is an important day for protecting the unborn and the health and safety of women in Mississippi,” Governor Phil Bryant said in a statement after signing the bill, which becomes law on July 1. Physicians who defy the law could lose their medical license. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma and Texas are among the states that have passed similar legislation. In Mississippi, abortions would be legal after 20 weeks if a woman’s life was in danger or if the fetus suffers “from fetal abnormalities so great that life outside the womb is not viable,” said Bryant, a Republican. Nancy Northup, president of the nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights, criticized the bill, saying it does not include exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. “It’s time for these politicians to stop passing laws that attack constitutionally protected women’s health care,” Northup said in a statement. According to data collated in 2011 by the Guttmacher Institute for sexual and reproductive health, 23 percent of U.S. abortion providers offer terminations after 20 weeks, though only 1.2 percent occur later than that.It is not true that the Berkeley group has found relevant evidence for the core questions in the AGW debate Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature led by Richard Muller – a top Berkeley physics teacher and the PhD adviser of the fresh physics Nobel prize winner Saul Perlmutter, among others – has recalculated the evolution of the global mean temperature in the most recent two centuries or so, qualitatively confirmed the previous graphs, and got dishonestly reported in the media. Some people including Marc Morano of Climate Depot were predicting that this outcome was the very point of the project. They were worried about the positive treatment that Richard Muller received at various places including this blog and they were proved right. Today, it really does look like all the people in the "BEST" project were just puppets used in a bigger, pre-planned propaganda game. In the video below, Andrew Revkin says that a "skeptic confirms substantial recent global warming". This is not a truly valid proposition because Richard Muller is no skeptic: realizing that Michael Mann has made things that can't be tolerated in science is nice and it may make you a heretic among some hardcore believers but it's not enough for you to be a genuine climate skeptic. However, you find much worse responses in the media than Revkin's loaded headline. For example, the Guardian chose this title: Global warming 'confirmed' anew (BBC) Different method, same result: global warming is real (Nature) Climate change skeptics eat crow (Gizmodo) Independent study provides proof global warming is reality (Click green) Climate skeptic admit he was wrong to doubt global-warming data (L.A. Times) A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data (The Washington Post) This is just a complete lie. Doubts about the validity of the surface temperature record constitute something like 1% of the issues that climate skeptics as a community have ever raised and not a very important one.Similarly, the Economist writes:I admire the immense and diverse work that Anthony Watts and others have been doing for years and I do realize that the verification of the surface temperature record has probably been Anthony Watts' greatest hobby or his loveliest pet project but I, for one, have never paid any significant attention to the one-by-one analyses of individual weather stations, doubts about the corrections that were applied (I have always considered the adjustments, the most accurate ones you can apply for any systematic change, to be legitimate and much better than no adjustments), and similar things. Anthony's network of volunteers has been cute and impressive but it couldn't guarantee that its implications would be far-reaching. I didn't believe in such far-reaching implications so I have almost never mentioned it on my blog. And you may say the very same thing about most climate skeptics; in this sense, Anthony Watts is an exception whether or not he is the key figure behind the world's most influential climate blog. Many years ago, I made calculations that led me to a strong enough belief that the imperfections of the weather stations either can't be large to matter, or they largely average out because the errors come with both signs.So among the hundreds if not thousands of articles about the climate on this blog that were written between 2004 and 2011, you will probably not find a single article that seriously suggests that the global mean temperature didn't change (or cooled down) in the recent 100 years – although I wouldn't be quite 100% sure about the "overall warming figure" and I am not 100% sure now, either. (The overall global temperature change since 1900 could have been 0.7 ± 0.2 °C where the error may be viewed as a "statistical one" if you compare different figures from different teams so the possibility that it was negative is simply nonzero, a 3.5-sigma effect, if you wish.)But this is just not what the bulk of this controversial topic has been and is all about. The bulk of the topic is all about the analyses of theof the temperature change (there are lots of natural drivers that determine at least a significant portion of the temperature change and that are capable to beat any effect of CO2 and have done so many times in the past, even over 30-year periods), the evaluation of theof the temperature change (it is not important: as Ivar Giaever likes to say, the thermometer data show that the absolute temperature in the recent century was remarkably stable, within 0.25%, and such tiny changes of the averaged temperature are negligible relatively to noise and make no visible impact and surely not a dangerous one), and the search for rationalto it (the most rational response is no mitigation at all and preparations for adaptation to any possible change of the weather, under business-as-usual).It's a Berkeley day on TRF: note that the article about trileptons at CMS builds on an ongoing conference in Berkeley, too. Another interesting event at UC Berkeley is a mumps outbreak that has affected dozens of students. One student brought it from Europe; Czechia has seen an elevated level of mumps in 2011, too. It turns out that the vaccination has failed in many cases, too.The animation and graph at the top shows the land temperature only; the land temperature is much more variable than the ocean temperature. Even the overall warming extracted from the linear regression is much larger than it is for the oceans. It suggests that it is not only the short-term variations that are being filtered out by the ocean and its large heat capacity. It's even the centennial trends. The enhanced greenhouse effect predicts that the warming of the oceans over a century should be pretty much equal to the warming of the land mass (the greenhouse effect is about the trapping of the Earth's emitted heat by the atmosphere which is the same all over the globe, not the trapping of the solar heat by asphalt!): this prediction of uniformity seems to disagree with the Berkeley graph (and others).Also, there is no substantial correlation between the CO2 concentration and the global mean temperature in the graph above. You might argue that the Berkeley graph shows the same warming during the 19th century as it does during the 20th century although the accuracy is much lower (and the fluctuations are much more violent) for the 19th century than they are for the 20th century because the number of weather stations was low and they didn't cover the whole globe which made the ancient noise larger relatively to the signal. Also, the BBC admits that the temperature in the new Berkeley graph is more correlated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation than it is to CO2.At any rate, many of the statistical and conceptual principles that the Berkeley group followed (or planned to follow) were overlapping with the principles I found important (e.g. replacement of gridding by a more robust technique independent of arbitrary conventions) so I believe that their results are very similar to the results I would get by the best calculation using the imperfect and chaotic weather station data that I could imagine.Much more importantly, the newest events seem to confirm the predictions by Marc Morano and maybe others that the Berkeley project is just a puppet show that was pre-engineered to get misinterpreted exactly in the way that the Guardian shows today: "a skeptic shows that skeptics were wrong". First of all, Muller is not a real skeptic; second of all, he has only studied one partial problem that is relevant for this discussion – and the least contentious one. I obviously agree with Muller about the qualitative behavior of the global mean temperature in the last two centuries – and I have arguably always agreed – but this is extremely far from implying that I agree with him about the key questions surrounding the global warming debate, especially when it comes to the "final question" of the AGW debate, namely whether or not it makes any rational sense to attempt to "mitigate" climate change.With all my past respect to Richard Muller, he is just being dishonest if he allows the journalists to misinterpret the results of their work in this way. In fact, his quoted statement "My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly skeptical" does suggest that it's not only the journalists but it's himself who has had and still has an agenda. Mr Muller, you can't win people like me because our opinions about the question you were addressing have always been almost identical. But my views on the core climate change issues can't be "won" by your research because the research has nothing to do with them: and you must surely be aware of this fact as well as I am. If you have any doubts that Richard Müller himself, and not just other "evil" journalists, promotes the idea that their work proves man-made global warming, check his text "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism: There were good reasons for doubt, until now" in the Wall Street Journal. (A positive point is that Muller confirms the calculation by your humble correspondent: "We discovered that about one-third of the world's temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming." Well, it was me WUWT ] and not him who discovered it, but otherwise OK.)It's likely that Richard Muller will already remain a stooge of Big Carbon and especially Big Geoengineering (in his case) according to my reading of the situation. He has just realized that the likes of Michael Mann have been discredited beyond repair but Richard Muller's ultimate goal and the basic features of the not-quite-honest methods to achieve it are analogous to those of Michael Mann and others and Muller just decided to supersede the likes of Mann, to become a Mann with a (so far) more human face. And that's sad.But that's the memo.Top (Czecho)Slovak singer, Richard Müller (oops), sings a meteorologically emotional song named "The Pressure is Low" (Tlaková níž). Sorry for the bugs in the DVD record: I wanted the pictures to match. In the lyrics, his GF is asking him why he's sleeping and being kind of impotent all day. He blames it on the heaven and the atmosphere: the pressure is low, he says. At least, he didn't blame it on CO2. Ms Dominika Stará's cover. After a few hours, dozens of reports appeared in the media. Pretty much every single one dishonestly claims that Muller is a skeptic and his/their work addresses the core of the global warming debate. Some titles:Sigh.Richard Müller's "Snow" (Sníh).Throughout its history, accommodating and at times contesting the push and pull of its much more powerful neighbors have defined Korea’s weltanschauung and attendant policies. This is hardly surprising given that the Korean Peninsula is the only place in the world where the strategic interests of the world’s most powerful countries, such as the United States, China, Russia, and Japan, converge geographically and geopolitically. The residues of great power competition have always affected Korean politics and security, including the emerging U.S.-China competition. For some two thousand years, Korea’s major strategic interaction was focused on relations with the regime that ruled mainland China—predominantly dynasties dominated by Han Chinese but also by the Mongolians during the Yuan Dynasty and the Manchus during the Qing Dynasty. As the one country that was most affected by, but one that also adhered most closely with the Sinocentric world order, Korea’s geopolitical fate correlated directly with perturbations on the mainland, particularly during the final stages of dynastic collapse followed by significant political and military turmoil. But the collapse of the Sinocentric East Asian order, beginning with Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), resulted in a massive power vacuum that no other power other than Imperial Japan was willing or able to fill. Since the creation of the two Koreas in 1948 and especially in the aftermath of the Korean War, North Korea remained in a reformatted Sinocentric orbit buttressed by ties with the USSR until the end of the Cold War. South Korea came under the U.S. security umbrella, but crucially, also unshackled itself from its centuries-old continental worldview to a more internationalized, maritime worldview. South Korea’s interactions with mainland China only began to pick up after normalization in 1992. Since then, however, China has emerged as South Korea’s largest trading partner ($360 billion in 2015). Moreover, while Beijing continues to support Pyongyang, China has grown increasingly wary of North Korea, particularly in the aftermath of four nuclear tests. Commensurate with China’s rise and intensifying competition between the United States and China, many have asserted that South Korea is becoming increasingly caught between these two great powers. As one of America’s core treaty allies in the Asia-Pacific, a vibrant democracy, and as the world’s 12th largest economy, South Korea maintains crucial ties with the United States. At the same time, Seoul and Beijing have both gained from greater congruity; they are key trading partners and have mutually reinforcing political interests, such as Chinese concern with its long-time ally North Korea. But amongst all of Seoul’s foreign relations, none are more complicated than its ties with the United States and China. Four key factors are going to affect the degree of maneuverability South Korea can muster in its future relations with the United States and China. First, the depth of South Korea’s political and security consensus that continues to anchor Seoul firmly in its alliance with Washington, even as political interests with Beijing continues to deepen. Second, Seoul’s ability to maintain strong ties with other Asian powers, such as Japan, select ASEAN states (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines) as well as India and Australia, in order to broaden South Korea’s political and economic options. Third, South Korea’s comprehensive crisis management capabilities with matching diplomatic abilities throughout the “unification tunnel” or the process with the confluence of various forces that will result ultimately in a unified Korea. Such capabilities will become critical, particularly in the aftermath of possible volatile political change in North Korea, such as a regime collapse. And fourth, Beijing’s and Washington’s respective responses to potentially rapidly shifting political currents on the Korean Peninsula and the net value they both perceive in maintaining and hopefully strengthening their leverages in a unified Korea. Being perennially sandwiched between the world’s most powerful states has resulted in wars, invasions, colonization, and proxy conflicts. But it also spurred South Korea into becoming the world’s 12th largest economy with formidable military strength and diplomatic acumen. Without such residual capabilities, it would always be at the mercy of the great powers’ machinations. However, Seoul’s abilities will be tested as never before since it has to ensure unification under its auspices, cope adroitly with disruptive change in North Korea, and convince its neighbors that a unified Korea under the leadership of South Korea will not be a threat or a strategic liability. Although the circumstances are very different, the depth of strategic trust that existed between the United States and West Germany throughout the phase leading to German unification must be replicated between the United States and South Korea as Seoul prepares for eventual unification. Throughout its history, Korea has borne the brunt of the repercussions stemming from great power rivalries in Northeast Asia. But even though one can’t ignore geography or the pressures characterized by intensifying U.S.-China competition, it’s not necessarily mission impossible. Hard power remains as an important barometer in assessing the looming strategic makeup of the Korean Peninsula but for the first time in Korean history, so too will the voices of democracy, freedom, and human rights. This is because the real purpose of a unified Korea must lie in enabling Koreans on both sides of the 38th parallel to be prosperous and free. And in this context, Korea’s alliance with the United States is an essential buffer against an increasingly assertive China and growing uncertainty within North Korea. But it is also a vibrant symbol of shared universal values and commitment to democratic governance.TUNIS, Tunisia — On a day of unprecedented anger, in which tens of thousands of Egyptians took to their streets demanding an end to three decades of authoritarian rule, one voice stood out in the crowd. “Tear gas. We r trapped inside a building. Help we r suffocating,” said Mohamed Abdelfattah in several postings on the social networking site Twitter. “Help!!! Arrested. Ikve been beaten a lot.” Abdelfattah, a video journalist based in Alexandria, had gone to work Tuesday to cover the protests. The civil unrest that has gripped Tunisia for more than a month has spread to Egypt, its relatively stable neighbor that has been led by President Hosni Mubarak for 29 years. Security forces tried to quell the rare public outburst by Egyptians calling for political and economic reforms after calls for a second day of demonstrations on Wednesday. On Tuesday, as many as 15,000 people chanted for freedom from oppression on the streets of Cairo, including outside parliament, the ruling party's headquarters, and in Tahrir Square, the bustling city center home to the famous Egyptian Museum and several five-star hotels. Clashes erupted after protesters tossed rocks at police and burst through a cordon of riot soldiers, who responded with beatings and tear gas, on Tuesday. Security vehicles also doused protesters with high-pressure water cannons. In one of the most dramatic videos captured at Tuesday’s scene, a defiant Egyptian youth stood up to a water-cannon truck in the middle of a Cairo street, eventually wrestling control of the hose. Two protesters were killed and more than 60 others injured by exposure to tear gas during protests in the city of Suez, according to the Reuters news agency. One security official was also reportedly killed in clashes. More than 70 demonstrators were arrested on Tuesday, according to local news reports. Small-scale political and economic protests have been very common in Egypt over the past few years. But Tuesday’s demonstrations defied most expectations — even, apparently, the country’s vast security forces, which appeared largely outnumbered and overrun in several cities. The protests were loosely organized through the social networking site Facebook, on a page devoted to Khaled Said, a young man allegedly tortured and killed by police in Alexandria last summer. The eruption of widespread anger on the streets of Egypt, however, has much deeper roots. In his three decades of rule, Mubarak has watched as rising inflation and growing unemployment added to an already stagnating economy. Neo-liberal economic reforms in the past decade were widely criticized, having served the country’s rich, without trickling down to average citizens. Around a fifth of Egypt’s nearly 80 million residents live on or below the poverty line. If college graduates in Egypt are able to find work, they can expect to make the national minimum wage, roughly $70 a month. And for opposing voices, change doesn’t come easy. Political competition in Egypt is virtually non-existent. Elections frequently take place amid allegations of vote-rigging and intimidation by security forces. Human rights advocates also criticize the country’s harsh emergency law, in place continuously since 1981, ostensibly to combat extremism. Many say the security it provides also allows Egypt’s police forces to operate with total impunity, especially with political opponents of the regime. Opposition members were hoping the plethora of political and economic problems facing many Egyptians would draw more protesters to the streets. The “day of anger” also comes just two weeks after massive, countrywide protests in Tunisia, which eventually led to the ouster of strongman President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Most Egyptian political activists watched with glee as Ben Ali fled the authoritarian seat he held for 23 years. The freshly energized opposition realizes the protests come at a critical point in Egypt's history. Elections for the presidency are scheduled for September. Although the president has not announced whether he will run for a sixth term, Mubarak has long vowed to serve “until his last breath.” But the health of the 82-year-old is rumored to be in decline. Having never named a vice president, public speculation over the future of the Egypt’s leadership has reached an all-time high. Many in Egypt believe Mubarak’s son Gamal is being groomed for the job — Gamal has played a more visible role in the leadership of his father’s ruling National Democratic Party throughout the past decade. Protesters fearful of the perceived plans for a nepotistic transfer of power in Egypt shouted anti-Gamal slogans on Tuesday. But most of the anger was directed squarely at his father. At least one of the many billboards displaying Mubarak’s image throughout the country was torn down, another rare occurrence in Egypt.Phil Jones: Manchester United defender has learned from final-day despair of last season The England international signed from Blackburn Rovers in the summer of 2011 and has since gone on to make 47 appearances. Jones saw United lose out on the Premier League title of the final day of the 2011/12 season to bitter rivals Manchester City with almost the last kick of the campaign, but has since seen United take a six-point lead over City ahead of the busy Christmas fixture list. On the final day drama, Jones told his club's official website: "It was crazy to be part of it. You went from high to low in the space of about 10 seconds. We thought we'd done it and then we hadn't. "But I think we've bounced back from that, got over it and started the season really well - albeit with a few hiccups here and there - and now we're in a strong position. The manager just told us: 'Always remember this experience and don't let it happen again'." The England international missed the start of this season with a back problem followed by knee surgery after a pre-season training setback. He admitted: "I was tearing my hair out, it was so frustrating. I just wanted to be out there playing, but I couldn't. "I'm absolutely delighted to be back involved again and hopefully I can force my way back into the team and get a run of games under my belt." Don't miss any live and exclusive football coverage this festive season. Click here to visit Sky Sports' Festive CalendarTed Cruz continues to be one of the hardest working members in Congress. In the last two weeks, president Trump has signed two bills into law from the Texas firebrand. Previously, President Trump signed a bill sponsored by Cruz that authorized $19.5 billion in funding for NASA. The second bill signed into law last Friday allowed states to expand the number of applicants that can be drug tested that receive unemployment benefits. According to Dallasnews.com: President Donald Trump on Friday signed legislation backed by two Texas Republicans that will allow states to expand the pool of applicants for unemployment benefits who can be drug tested. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rep. Kevin Brady of The Woodlands, nullifies a Labor Department rule that went into effect in September limiting drug tests to applicants who had a job that does regular drug screenings. Under the previous administration, the Department of Labor undermined the ability of states to conduct drug testing in their programs as permitted by Congress. This rule was yet another example of executive overreach by the Obama administration, and I commend President Trump for signing this resolution into law. Democrats often call Cruz an “obstructionist,” but all that really means is that he is creating legislation deeply rooted with conservative values. Very few lawmakers still wake up every single day and fight for conservative principles like Ted Cruz. During the 2016 presidential election, Heidi Cruz said: “politics to Ted is about getting things done for others.” Two bills in two weeks. Looks like Cruz is making it very clear he wants to get a lot done this year. We need principled conservatives to work with Trump now more than ever to ensure that we get this country back on track. If we truly want to “drain the swamp,” we need conservatives like Ted Cruz on our team.Mats Bergquist, Gotlands LS. Foto: Toivo Jokkala Trots löften från polisen att de skulle titta på övervakningsfilmerna kom alltså nedläggningsbeslutet nästan omedelbart efter att anmälan upprättats. Mats Bergquist i Gotlands LS av SAC tycker att det är väldigt allvarligt och säger att han tänker gå till botten med det. – Vi fick besked om att polisen skulle titta på övervakningsfilmerna på kvällen, eftersom de inte kunde göra det när arrangemanget pågick. Men då har de inte sett på någon film. Som skäl för att anmälan lagts ned skriver polismyndigheten i Stockholm: ”Vidtagna åtgärder har inte lett till att någon kan misstänkas för brottet. Ytterligare utredning kan inte antas ändra på det.” Men Mats Bergquist ger inte upp. Han kommer att kräva att polisen utreder brottet igen. Själv har han suttit i flera timmar under dagen och försökt få tag på utredaren, men utan framgång. Utredarens telefon är avstängd. Även Arbetaren har sökt personer på polisen som kan svara på varför fallet blivit nedlagt, men inte fått svar. Fotnot: Efter att artikeln publicerades fick Mats Bergquist i Gotlands LS tag i utredaren på polisen. Han menade i sin tur det inte funnits något övervakningsmaterial från platsen natten då sabotaget skedde. Polisen hade flyttat runt övervakningskamrorna från och till under Almedalsveckan. Enligt polisen fanns därför ingen film att titta på. – Utredaren lät trovärdig ändå. Men det går ju inte att bevisa om det stämmer, säger Mats Bergquist till Arbetaren.It is that time of year, teams are practicing, position battles are being won, and now we have our first preseason poll, the Amway/USA Today Coaches Poll. Michigan comes in at No. 9, while Ohio State is ranked second. Other Big Ten teams to make the list are Penn State at No. 6, and Wisconsin at No. 10. Michigan’s week one opponent, Florida, is No. 16 on the list. Alabama is number one. The rankings don’t mean a whole lot before a game is even played, but there’s certainly enough to talk about. Although Penn State won the Big Ten, Michigan smoked them 49-10 in 2016, so the Nittany Lions ranking higher than Michigan will leave a sour taste in the mouths of Wolverines fans. The same goes for fans of Clemson, who demolished Ohio State 31-0, yet are ranked below the Buckeyes at No. 5. The rankings will ultimately be decided by what happens on the field, but for now, what are your thoughts about the rankings? Check out the full list here.Why I Think I Should Marry a Rich Man Obstacles to overcome: my personality and physical appearance Emma Lindsay Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 6, 2016 So, being raised all like, feministy and shit I was always taught I was supposed to be independent. Make my own money! Have my own career! But, having my own career is super depressing. On top of the fact that I won’t earn as much as my male peers, will not be promoted as much as my male peers, will not be taken as seriously as my male peers, and will generally be found to be more grating than my male peers, careers also happen to be brainwashing tools of the capitalist patriarchy. Most people have useless jobs, doing useless things for the machine. Especially most people who make serious money, because the people with the most useful jobs (you know, teachers/nurses/etc.) get paid less because it’s presumed that an additional benefit they accrue from their work is “meaning.” This is the way it needs to be; if people had too much leisure time, they’d revolt. Working 8 (10? 12?) hour days changes your mindset; essentially, you think about work (or, avoiding work, or avoiding being caught for avoiding work) all day and then when you get home at night you’re too tired to think of anything dangerous. You know, like plans for how to overthrow the capitalist patriarchy. But, I really like having time to dream up plans to overthrow the capitalist patriarchy. However, I only have so much savings and when that runs through, I’m going to need a backup plan. Hence: plan marry rich man. There are some downsides to marrying a rich man, but upon deeper consideration, I think those downsides pale in comparison to the downsides of continuing in the workforce. I will not be respected as a “trophy wife.” So, ignoring for a moment that I may not be hot enough to be a trophy wife, this downside of everyone thinking I’m some dumb blonde doesn’t seem so bad. (Note to self: dye hair blonde.) I’m already not respected at
HiPo-289, but not made from nodular iron rather Ford's standard material. The Mexican 302 block was produced through to the mid-1990s and even showed up in Ford cars, trucks, and vans throughout the 1970s and early 1980s (Mexican-made 302 engines were often used by the USA car plants when CEP1 could not produce enough engines and many Ford replacement engines were Mexican). Mexican blocks were not made from a high-nickel content material as is generally thought, but rather Ford's usual ACB specification material. They are a good block but no stronger than any other USA-made component and the bore service life is generally lower due to less wear-resistant South American-sourced iron ore. All Mexican V8 blocks were cast and machined to accept a front engine mount as required for their truck applications. 255 [ edit ] In the late 1970s an urgent need to meet EPA CAFE standards led to the creation of the 255 cu in (4.2 L) version for the 1980 model year, essentially a 302ci with the cylinder bores reduced to 3.68 in (93.5 mm). The 302 /5.0 L was to be phased out and the 255/4.2 L was to be an interim engine which would remain until the new V6 was in production - the 255/4.2 L was a quick fix. Rated power (SAE net) was 115-122 hp (86-91 kW), depending on year and application. Cylinder heads, which were specific to this engine, used smaller combustion chambers and valves, and the intake ports were oval whereas the others were all rectangular. The only externally visible clue was the use of an open-runner intake manifold with a stamped-steel lifter valley cover attached to its underside, reminiscent of previous-generation V8 engines, such as the Y-block and the MEL. It was optional in Fox-chassis cars including the Mustang and corporate cousin Mercury Capri, Thunderbird, Fairmont, and standard equipment in the Ford LTD. Some variants (i.e. Mercury Grand Marquis) were fitted with a variable-venturi carburetor which were capable of highway fuel economy in excess of 27 MPG. Due to its dismal overall performance the 255 was dropped at the end the 1982 car model-year with 253,000 units manufactured - 302/5.0 L V8 engine production continued and the plans to phase it out were dropped. Applications: The 302 returned in 1982 as the 5.0 High Output, manual-transmission equipped Mustangs and Mercury Capris were first equipped with two-barrel carburetors (1982), then a four-barrel Holley carburetor (1983–85). The block was fitted with revised, taller lifter bosses to accept roller lifters, and a steel camshaft in 1985, and electronic sequential fuel injection was introduced in 1986. While sequential injection was used on the Mustang beginning in 1986, many other vehicles, including trucks, continued to use a batch-fire fuel injection system. The speed-density based EFI systems used a large, two-piece, cast-aluminum manifold. It was fitted on all engines through 1988, after which year it was phased out for a mass-air type measuring system in most applications (non-California compliant Panther platform cars retained the speed-density system until the Lincoln Town Car received the Modular V8 for model year 1991, and the Crown Victoria and Grand Marquis for 1992). The same manifold was used in MAF applications, with the addition of the MAF sensor in the air intake tube. The MAF system continued, with minor revisions, until the retirement of the engine in 2001. Ford offered a performance head that was a stock part on 1993–1995 Mustang Cobra models and pre- 1997-1/2 Ford Explorers and Mercury Mountaineers equipped with the 5.0 L engine called the GT-40 head (casting ID F3ZE-AA). In mid-1997, the Explorer and Mountaineer 5.0 L heads were revised and renamed GT40P. The GT40P heads, unlike the GT40 heads, had a very well-developed port shape/design which yielded about 200 cfm on the intake side and 140 cfm on the exhaust side without increasing the size of the ports at all from standard E7TE castings, and without increasing the exhaust valve size. They also had smaller 59-61 cc combustion chambers for added compression, and the combustion chamber shape was revised to put the spark plug tip near the center of the chamber for a more even burn. These GT40P heads are considered by many enthusiasts to be extremely efficient. The 302 remained a mainstay of various Ford cars and trucks through the late '90s, although it was progressively replaced by the 4.6 L Modular engine starting in the early 1990s. The last 302 engine was produced for installation in a production vehicle was at Cleveland Engine Plant #1 in December 2000, as part of a build-ahead to supply Ford of Australia, which installed their last such engine in a new vehicle in August 2002. The 302 is still available as a complete crate motor from Ford Racing Performance Parts. Applications: In 2001, Ford Australia also built some stroked, 5.6 L (5,605 cc, 342 cu in) Windsors with reworked GT40P heads (featuring larger valves), a unique eight-trumpet inlet manifold, long-throw crank, H-beam rods, and roller rockers. They produced 335 hp (250 kW) at 5,250 rpm and 369 lb⋅ft (500 N⋅m) at 4,250 rpm.[8] The 5.6 litres of displacement were reached by lengthening the stroke from 76.2 mm (3.0 in) to 86.4 mm (3.4 in).[9] Truck 302 [ edit ] The Truck Division instigated a pushrod-operated four-valve-per-cylinder, cylinder head conversion in the early 1990s as a means of modernizing/improving and furthering the service life of the Windsor engine. This work was done for Ford by Roush Industries (for US$1 million) and two 302ci/5.0L and one 351ci/5.8 L variants were built and tested. These engines were highly successful, but upper management refused to allow engines so equipped to go into production, stating that to use a cast iron block in a new car (though the 302 remained an engine option in Explorers through MY2001) was no longer acceptable. One of the 5.0 L engines is in use in a hot rod. Various aftermarket manufacturers have also produced four-valve heads for the 302, notably Arao Engineering and Dominion Performance. Marine 302 [ edit ] The 302 was also offered for marine applications in both standard and reverse-rotation setups. 351W [ edit ] A 351 Windsor V8 in a 1969 Ford Mustang The 351W is often confused with the 351 Cleveland, which is a different engine of identical displacement. The 351 cu in (5.8 L) Windsor featured a 1.3 in (32.5 mm) taller deck height than the 302, allowing a stroke of 3.5 in (88.9 mm). Although very much related in general configuration to the 289-302 and sharing the same bell housing, motor mounts, and other small parts, the 351W had a unique, tall-deck block, larger main bearing caps, thicker, longer connecting rods, and a distinct firing order (1-3-7-2-6-5-4-8 versus the usual 1-5-4-2-6-3-7-8, a means to move the unacceptable 'noise' of the consecutive firing adjacent front cylinders to the more rigid rear part of the engine block all while reducing excessive main bearing load), adding some 25 lb (11 kg) to the engine's dry weight. The distributor is slightly different, so as to accommodate a larger oil pump shaft and larger oil pump. Some years had threaded dipstick tubes. It had a unique head which optimized torque over high-rpm breathing, frequently replaced by enthusiasts with aftermarket heads providing better performance. The early 1969 and 1970 heads had larger valves and ports for better performance. The head castings and valve head sizes from 1969 to 1976 were different, notably in passages for air injection and spark plug diameters (1969-1974 18 mm, 1975 and up 14 mm). From 1977 onward, the 351W shared the same head casting as the 302, differing only in bolt hole diameters (7/16 inch for 302, 1/2 inch for 351W). Early blocks (casting ID C9OE-6015-B) had enough metal on bearing saddles 2, 3, and 4 for four-bolt mains, and as with all small-block Fords (SBFs), were superior in strength to most late-model, lightweight castings. Generally, the 1969 to 1974 blocks are considered to be far superior in strength than the later blocks, making these early units some of the strongest and most desirable in the entire SBF engine family including the 335-series. During the 1980s, a four-barrel version (intake manifold casting ID E6TE-9425-B) was reintroduced for use in light trucks and vans. In 1988, fuel injection replaced the four-barrel carburetor. Roller camshaft/lifters were introduced in this engine in 1994. The original connecting rod beam (forging ID C9OE-A) featured drilled oil squirt bosses to lubricate the piston pin and cylinder bore and rectangular-head rod bolts mounted on broached shoulders. A number of fatigue failures were attributed to the machining of the part, so the bolt head area was spot-faced to retain metal in the critical area, requiring the use of 'football head' bolts. In 1975, the beam forging (D6OE-AA) was updated with more metal in the bolt-head area. The oil squirt bosses were drilled for use in export engines, where the quality of accessible lubricants was questionable. The rod cap forging remained the same on both units (part ID C9OE-A). In 1982, the design of the Essex V6 engine used a new version of the 351W connecting rod (E2AE-A), the difference between the two parts was that the V6 and V8 units were machined in metric and SAE units, respectively. The cap featured a longer boss for balancing than the original design. The block underwent some changes since its inception. In 1971, deck height was extended from 9.480 in to 9.503 in (casting D1AE-6015-DA) to lower the compression ratio to reduce NOx emissions without the need to change piston or cylinder-head design. In 1974, a boss was added on the front of the right cylinder bank to mount the air injection pump (casting D4AE-A). In 1974, the oil dipstick tube moved from the timing case to the skirt under the left cylinder bank near the rear of the casting. These details made swapping older blocks from passenger cars with front sump oil pans to more recent rear-sumped Mustang and LTD/Crown Vic Ford cars more difficult unless an oil pan had the dipstick mounted therein. In 1984, the rear main seal was changed from a two-piece component to a one-piece design. Introduced in 1969, it was initially rated (SAE gross) at 250 hp (186 kW) with a two-barrel carburetor or 290 hp (216 kW) with a four-barrel. When Ford switched to net power ratings in 1972, it was rated at 153 to 161 hp (114 to 120 kW), although actual, installed horsepower was only fractionally lower than in 1971. Around 8.6 million 351W engines were manufactured between 1969 and 1996 at the Windsor Engine Plant Number One. During the 1990s, motor enthusiasts were modifying 351 Cleveland 2V cylinder heads (by rerouting the coolant exit from the block surfaces to the intake manifold surfaces) for use in the 351W, resulting in the Clevor (combining Cleveland and Windsor). This modification required the use of custom pistons by reason of differing combustion chamber terrain (canted valves vs. straight valves) and intake manifolds. This combination yielded the horsepower potential of the 351C with the ruggedness of the 351W small block and was possible because more 351C 2V cylinder heads were manufactured than the corresponding engine blocks (the 351M and 400 used the same head as the 351C 2V). The 5.8 L, 351W, was changed during the '90s from speed density to MAF; performance gains were directly affected. Before 1994, the 5.8 L was equipped with speed density. This programmed coding was placed into the vehicle's computer to tell the motor how much air it should be getting, therefore supplying an appropriate amount of fuel. However, if modifications are made to increase air flow, the computer does not provide more fuel, as it is still following the programmed amount of fuel supplied. After 1994, the engine was changed to mass air flow (MAF). This allowed the computer to read how much air the engine was receiving through the help of a sensor in the air intake. Because the computer reads this, it is able to increase the amount of fuel the engine gets when the air flow is increased, thus increasing performance. Without the MAF conversion, the performance of a nonstock to heavily modified 5.8 L, fuel-injected engine will be lacking. Applications: Marinized 351 [ edit ] From the late 1960s through the early to mid-1990s, the 351 Windsor had a long history of being marinized by Holman Moody Marine, Redline of Lewiston, ID (now defunct), Pleasure Craft Marine (PCM), and Indmar for use in about every make of recreational boat, including; Correct Craft, Ski Supreme, Hydrodyne and MasterCraft inboard competition ski boats. The early marinized engines were rated at 220 hp (164 kW). Most PCM and Indmar marinized 351s were rated at 240 hp (179 kW). In the early 1990s, a 260 hp (194 kW) version and a high-output version that used GT-40 heads and the Holley 4160 marine carburetor was rated at 285 hp (213 kW). A few 351 GT-40/HO engines were marinized equipped with throttle-body fuel injection (TBI) and were rated at 310 hp (231 kW). The marine industry's relationship with the 351W platform ended when Ford was unable or unwilling to compete with GM's production of TBI- and MPI-equipped engines in mass quantity. During that time, the recreational marine community's small-block V8 platform of choice shifted to the 350 cu in (5.7L) GM L31 (Vortec 5700) engine series. 427 Aluminum Block [ edit ] The Windsor small-block engine was bored and stroked to 427 cu in (7.0 L) for use in the Saleen S7 (2000-2004) and its competition model S7R (although it used Cleveland style heads). The road going engine was capable of producing 550 bhp (410 kW; 558 PS) at 6400 rpm. The S7's top speed was an estimated 220 mph (354 km/h). In 2005, Saleen released the S7 twin-turbo version of the engine with two Garrett turbochargers producing 5.5 psi (0.38 bar) of boost, increasing the maximum power to 750 bhp (559 kW; 760 PS) at 6300 rpm, and the maximum torque to 700 lb⋅ft (949 N⋅m) at 4800 rpm. The top speed of the twin-turbo S7 was 248 mph (399 km/h). Ford Racing Boss Blocks [ edit ] FR Boss 302 [ edit ] The new Boss 302 engine was unveiled in the 2006 SEMA show.[10] FR Boss 351W [ edit ] The 'Racing Boss 351' (not to be confused with the Ford 335 engine Cleveland-based Boss 351) is a crate engine from Ford Racing Performance Parts. The block was based on the 351 cu in (5,752 cc) Ford Windsor engine, but uses Cleveland sized 2.75 in (70 mm) main bearing journals. Deck height choices include 9.2 in (234 mm) and 9.5 in (241 mm). Maximum displacements are 4.25 in (108 mm) stroke and 4.125 in (105 mm) bore. The resulting displacement is up to 454.38 cubic inches (7445.9 cc, or 7.4 L). The uncross-drilled block with increased bore capacity became available from the third quarter of 2009. A 427 cu in (6,997 cc) Boss 351-based crate engine producing 535 hp (399 kW) was available from the first quarter of 2010. In 2010, the MSRP for the Boss 351 block was US$1,999.[11] See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] ^ With 2001 Explorer-style water pump kit (Ford part M-8501-A50). Blocks with older pumps are 1.25" longer. ^ Ford measures engine height here from the bottom of the oil pan to the top of valve covers, excluding any breathers or oil fill tubes. References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ]We are glad to introduce a cool new app in the iOS App Store: Tryolabs Mobile Showcase. This small yet powerful application shows some super interesting open source components that we have built in order to bootstrap some typical tasks for iPhone and iPad development. You can see these components in action, navigate their descriptions, see source code or even share them with your contacts. Also you can navigate through some information about Tryolabs, what we do and you how to contact us directly without leaving the app. Get it from the Apple App Store and please let us know what you think! If you want more information about the component in this app check our previous blogposts, github repos or contact us! We will be happy to show you what we have and help you getting started!Themed Resources Exhibitions, special presentations, lesson plans and other materials gathered from throughout the Library of Congress for selected curricular themes. Abraham Lincoln Explore the life of the sixteenth president of the U.S. through photographs, his correspondence, speeches and expert commentary from the Library of Congress. Advertising The rise of consumer culture traced through branding and product information. Asian Pacific Americans Official documents, newspapers, photos, poems, maps, images, and Webcasts chronicle the experiences and accomplishments of Asian Americans in the United States. Baseball Culture, change and history, including Jackie Robinson's groundbreaking role, through baseball cards, songs, and historical documents. Civics and Government The evolution and functioning of the U.S. Government from the Constitution and other founding documents through current legislative information. Civil Rights The African-American struggle for full citizenship from abolition, Reconstruction and the Jim Crow laws, continuing to Brown v. Board of Education, and the civil rights movement. The Civil War America's Civil War made real through photographs and sketches; maps, letters and diaries; oral histories and music. Colonial and Early America European colonization of America from early settlers through George Washington's presidency in images, maps and other primary documents. Elections Elections and the electoral process, the voting franchise, and campaign materials as well as first ladies and presidential inaugurations. Exploration and Explorers Exploration of the Americas from Amerigo Vespucci and Columbus through the westward expansion. Flight and Early Aviators Scientific evolution of flight from early inventors and aviators including Bell, the Wright brothers, Lindbergh and Earhart. Geography and Maps U.S. history and change over time through maps and related historical materials. The Great Depression Insights into the effects of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl; migrant workers; the New Deal and the WPA. Hispanic Americans Maps, paintings, drawings, photographs, songs, and inscriptions recount the contributions and interactions of Hispanic peoples in North America from 1492 to present. Holidays Songs, images and historical perspective on holidays as varied as Thanksgiving, Veteran's Day, Labor Day and Mother's Day. Immigration Cultural geography, personal identity and immigration patterns. Labor The history of workers including women, unions, and child labor through historic films and photographs. The Lewis and Clark Expedition Westward expansion and exploration chronicled in letters, journals, maps and manuscripts from the Lewis and Clark expedition. Literature and Poetry History and culture conveyed in the creative written expression of poetry and story. Music and Dance The stories of the nation in sound recordings, dance manuals, sheet music, and correspondence. Native Americans Culture, assimilation and relocation efforts, music, treaties, images and speeches. Nature and the Environment Human interactions with the environment including the American conservation movement, ecology, and the national parks system. Political Cartoons Perspectives on political events or issues through cartoons ranging from "Join or Die," considered the first American political cartoon, to responses to the September 11, 2001, bombings. Science and Invention Inventors and innovations that shape how we live conveyed in images, films and primary source documents. Summertime and Recreation Culture and traditions through sports, leisure activities, song and dance. Wars and the Homefront Experiences of veterans and civilians conveyed through oral histories, letters, photos, military campaign maps, and songs. Women's History Women's contributions to suffrage, sports, war efforts, and labor reforms. TopIn support of the U.S. Men’s National Team’s upcoming match against Belgium on Tuesday, the Waffle House restaurant chain has called for national support against the rival nation’s breakfast of choice: TMZ originally reported that Waffle house called for a boycott, and now the chain has begun to rally support on Twitter. “We’re America’s place to eat, so of course we’re supporting Team USA,” a representative for the chain told EW. Of course, Waffle House doesn’t feature Belgian waffles on its regular menu, serving up sweet-cream waffles instead. The American variety has a smaller grid pattern (due to a differently shaped waffle iron) and a creamier flavor, according to their rep. Team USA faces off against Belgium at 4:00 p.m. tomorrow, giving you plenty of time to prep your very American, small-grid breakfast in the afternoon. And while no one’s come out and said it yet, some argue that French fries were invented in Belgium. So maybe it’s time for the freedom fry to return, too.Governor Andrew Cuomo at a briefing on the state budget on Wednesday Philip Kamrass/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo Throughout Wednesday, details about a supposed budget deal between Governor Andrew Cuomo, senate Republicans, and assembly Democrats started to emerge that seemed not only odd but incredibly unrealistic. The massive 421-a tax break for developers, which expired last January, would now be tied to city rent regulations, meaning that if the $800 million a year in developer subsidies were ever removed, the city of New York would be thrown into free market chaos as regulated tenants saw their rents skyrocket. Charter schools would now see a massive increase in funding at a time when public schools are scrambling for funds. “Raise the Age” was being watered down to a point beyond recognition. And funding for indigent legal services was now something that Cuomo wanted to revisit, after he vetoed it last year. In fact, Cuomo kept bringing up more and more issues with the budget in the supposed final hours of negotiations. By the end of Wednesday, lawmakers had thrown up their hands, and many left town wondering what the hell had just happened. What had happened was this: Andrew Cuomo, who thrives in the toxic miasma of Albany dysfunction, had just sabotaged the budget process. For the past six years, Cuomo has prided himself on passing on-time budgets, which usually contained some social service increases to please Democrats and tax cuts to please Republicans. But once this year’s negotiations dragged into last weekend, and an on-time budget looked increasingly unlikely, Cuomo embraced the idea of a “budget extender,” which would the keep the state operating for the next two months by using the parameters of last year’s budget but not include any of the contentious issues that are holding up the new one. Without a new budget or an extender, state offices wouldn’t have opened on Monday, a shutdown threat legislators usually employ as leverage to get a deal done. Over the weekend, Cuomo told the legislature that a deal was “close,” and the extender bill would give them a few more days to iron everything out. Shortly after introducing the 700-page extender bill, the legislature voted to approve it, with none of its members having read it. As it turned out, the extender bill kept the government from shutting down while keeping Cuomo’s own pet projects fully funded. But it also took the pressure off of Cuomo to get a deal done: With no shutdown on the horizon, Cuomo could take as long as he wanted to negotiate a deal he was pleased with. Legislators, on the other hand, won’t get paid until they vote on a final budget. They begin a three-week break on Thursday. “What is happening right now is ridiculous,” Senate Minority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said after the budget blew up. “Dysfunction and chaos has descended on Albany. This situation has spiraled out of control and New Yorkers deserve better.” While “dysfunction and chaos” doesn’t necessarily “descend” on Albany so much as appear as if controlled by tidal forces, Stewart-Cousins’s exasperation is a far cry from the optimism that lawmakers were showing when they voted on the budget extender. For weeks, Cuomo has stated his preference for a budget that would allow him to tinker with it throughout the year, controlling disbursements without legislative approval. This, he claims, would give New York flexibility to deal with federal cuts that are sure to come later this year. “I am looking for continuing financial flexibility in the budget process,” he said during a press conference following the breakdown of budget negotiations yesterday, “but certainty and permanence in the operations that need to continue, which is what we accomplished in the extender.” The extender and sabotaging of the budget negotiation process is perhaps Cuomo’s most blatant move toward a total consolidation of power. By shooting down progressive priorities at every turn, like vetoing a bipartisan indigent defense bill or reneging on funding for an affordable housing plan, and empowering senate Republicans through his alliance with the Independent Democratic Conference, Cuomo has pushed all meaningful legislative initiatives into the budgeting process, where he can control much of the debate and its attendant anarchy. With U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara deposed and ethics reforms completely off the table, Cuomo has leaked details of supposed “deals” to media outlets (like the noxious 421-a rumor that first appeared in Politico Pro, cited to “sources close to the negotiations”), sending Democrats into a frenzy of dissent. He’s upped his game by texting Democrats in the middle of closed-door negotiations to let them know that, yes, he’s somehow listening in, and he hears them shit-talking him. At his strangely victorious press conference on Wednesday evening, Cuomo seemed unfazed by the late budget, something that would have driven him insane almost a year ago. “Having the right resolution is more important than just having a resolution,” Cuomo told reporters, laying out a rationale for budget negotiations stretching on for weeks. Instead of a resolution, he has secured an even greater victory: a process of permanent negotiations in which, for at least the next two months, he holds all the cards. Cuomo will be able to toy with the legislature and bend it to his will on issues like Raise the Age, which he’d like done in a way that won’t have to be revisited; 421-a, which he’d like made as permanent as possible (which is why he’s trying to tie developer tax breaks to rent regulations, ensuring that progressive downstaters can’t go after them without cooking their own goose); and support for charter schools, which he’d like to keep so long as it doesn’t take too much money away from public schools. It’ll be a longer, more grueling budget battle, with the real losers being social services and other care providers in New York that will operate with no idea of what the future budget may hold. (The budget is kept mostly secret even after it’s voted on.) For the New Yorkers who rely on those programs, this will lead to a loss of the security that comes with a finalized budget. But for someone like Cuomo, whose ideology bends only toward the consolidation of power, this is what triumph looks like.563 "I believe in you guys." From 'Haikyu!!' the volleyball anime series with its third season airing, comes a Nendoroid rerelease of Aobajohsai High's volleyball team captain, the 'Grand King' Toru Oikawa! He comes with three expressions including his standard smiling expression which sees through anything, a fearless expression showing his confidence as the 'Grand King' as well as a more playful expression with his tongue sticking out. He comes with a variety of optional parts allowing you to display him in various poses including a serving pose. A volleyball and special stand made in the image of a volleyball court are both included to bring out the atmosphere of the series, and he also comes with effect parts to display him performing his powerful'murder serve' as well as his jersey for a slightly different look. Enjoy the Grand King of the court right in your collection!Dejan Lovren remains doubtful for Liverpool’s friendly with Wigan Athletic at the DW Stadium on Friday night (7.30pm kick-off). The £20million centre-back sat out Wednesday’s 4-0 victory over Tranmere Rovers due to tightness in a leg muscle. The Reds are confident that it’s only a minor issue but the Croatia international continued to work away from the main squad at Melwood on Thursday. Jurgen Klopp will take no chances with Lovren and may opt to hold him back for next week’s Asia Trophy games in Hong Kong. Klopp will put his players through their paces at Melwood on Friday morning before deciding on his line up for the clash with the Latics. The Reds boss must decide whether Philippe Coutinho and Adam Lallana are fit enough to feature - three days after they returned to pre-season training. Sadio Mane remains out as he continues to build up the strength in his knee but record signing Mohamed Salah is likely to make his debut after belatedly getting his work permit. Klopp is set to adopt the same approach as against Tranmere by fielding a different XI in each half.Swiss-headquartered fintech firm Lykke announced today the establishment of Lykke Vanuatu (lykke.vu), a new licensed entity. The Vanuatu Financial Services Commission (VFSC) has approved Lykke Vanuatu as a Dealer in Securities. Lykke Vanuatu will provide access to Lykke Exchange for residents in Asian and African countries in compliance with local regulations. Internet users in these countries can download the Lykke Wallet application to participate. Lykke founder and CEO Richard Olsen notes that Vanuatu is the first license of the group. “We welcome our new friends from Asia and Africa and encourage them to visit Lykke Exchange,” he said. “Lykke’s mission has always been to build a global marketplace. We want to level the playing field, so that everyone has access to trading.” Join the iFX EXPO Asia and discover your gateway to the Asian Markets Suggested articles Why Brokerages Outsource Their Broker TechnologyGo to article >> The Vanuatu license enables Lykke to offer a comprehensive service package. The company offers online trading on FX currency pairs and contracts for differences (CFDs) with 0% commission as well as seamless integrations. Lykke Corp is applying for licenses in Cyprus, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Japan, and the United States to provide broker services all around the globe. Lykke concluded its initial coin offering (ICO) at, October 11th, to develop a global blockchain-powered marketplace. The crowdsale sold 23,226,753 coins, raising 1,161,338 CHF. The sale lasted a month, during which over 1,200 new people downloaded Lykke wallets and registered with the service and the number of Lykke coin holders jumped from 147 to 717.Two former detainees of the US’s Guantánamo Bay detention centre in Cuba are to be resettled in the Republic, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern has confirmed. The Government has previously said it was looking at taking in two Uzbek prisoners identified for resettlement to help facilitate President Barack Obama's order that the prison be closed by the end of January. A definite timetable has yet to be established for the transfer of the two male detainees but both are expected within the next couple of months, Mr Ahern said today at a meeting in Dundalk with the new US Ambassador Dan Rooney. While the two men were not being admitted as refugees within the terms of the Geneva Convention, Mr Ahern said he intended to adhere to the norms of official procedure in respecting the rights of the two men to their privacy. “There would not therefore be public disclosure of any personal information, family situations, nor would details of the arrangements for travel to Ireland be made public,” he said. The Minister said he made the decision to accept the men after receiving a report from a group of Irish officials last weeek on their visit to Washington and Guantanamo. Mr Ahern said he was conscious of the intention of the Obama administration to close the centre at Guantanamo Bay, “in part by transferring detainees, no longer regarded as posing a threat to security but who cannot return to their own countries, to other countries willing to accept them.” He said during his tenure as Minister for Foreign Affairs he had consistently called for the closure of the detention facility. European Union member states had agreed arrangements last month concerning monitoring of former detainees accepted by member states for resettlement, and Mr Ahern said that Ireland would be complying with those arrangements. Mr Ahern called on the public to acknowledge the difficult conditions in which the two men had been detained for a number of years and to allow them time and space to adjust to their new circumstances when they arrive. Welcoming Mr Ahern’s decision, Amnesty International Ireland said the Government has always been consistent in its opposition to the use of Guantánamo Bay Detention Centre and was one of the first governments to call for its closure. Director Colm O’Gorman said: “Today we see these calls matched by action. We are delighted that Ireland will play a valuable role in shutting down Guantánamo and in assisting these men in rebuilding their lives. Mr O’Gorman said: “We especially welcome Minister Ahern’s determination to protect the privacy of these men. After years of imprisonment and possible torture they will need time and support to adjust to life outside of prison. “While Guantánamo is the responsibility of the US, other countries made it possible. They allowed people to be transferred through their territory, actively participated in illegal detentions and kidnapping or, as in Ireland’s case, they allowed their territory to be used as a staging area for rendition operations,” he said. “Those countries that played a part in the system should follow Ireland’s example and help shut it down.” Legal charity Reprieve applauded what is described as the “compassion and foresight” shown by the Government and urged other European governments to follow suit. The charity’s legal director Zachary Katznelson said: “Ireland today has joined the vanguard of human rights, committing to accept men who have been abused and mistreated for years by the United States, but who do not pose any threat.” Green Party justice spokesman Ciarán Cuffe said the decision "shows a strong commitment to our international human rights responsibilities and a gives a positive signal to the Obama administration in their efforts to close the Guantánamo facility”./ NEVADA, Iowa — Cheryl Farrington will take some solace knowing that the man who shot and killed her daughter last year inside the Coral Ridge Mall will spend the rest of his days in prison. “We will keep smiling the way Andrea did,” she said, who along with other family members and friends donned “Justice Has Been Served” T-shirts to talk with reporters. “She was bubbly and full of life and had an infectious smile and attitude. I have no doubt she is here today, looking down on us.” After trial testimony that consumed a week and a half, jurors needed only about 90 minutes Monday to find Alexander Kozak, 23, guilty of first-degree murder in the June 12, 2015 shooting. The former mall security guard shot Andrea Farrington, 20, three times in the back as she worked in the welcome center outside the Iowa Children’s Museum at the Coralville mall. Testimony showed that even though the two exchanged hundreds of text messages, their relationship never turned physical. Nonetheless, Kozak’s defense asserted he suffered from mental disorders that caused him to snap when Farrington called that off and argued for conviction on a lesser count. Cheryl Farrington was among the family members who broke down in the courtroom when the first-degree murder verdict was read. Across the aisle, Kozak’s mother Cyndy McComas, his sisters and his wife Kellie Kozak were also crying, knowing he faces life in prison. For his part, Kozak didn’t have any visible reaction to the verdict. He looked straight into the eyes of a deputy who handcuffed him and led him from the room. The jury got the case about 2:30 p.m. Monday. The verdict was read aloud about 4:05 p.m. Kozak will be sentenced June 6 in Johnson County District Court. A first-degree murder charge carries a punishment of life in prison without parole. Talking with reporters after the verdict, Cheryl Farrington said she wanted to thank the Johnson County Attorney’s Office, law enforcement investigators, victim advocates and the people of Story County, where the trial was moved on a change of venue because of publicity. And she wanted to thank the mall shooting witnesses who worked, albeit in vain, to save her daughter that night. She hugged one of them — Dorian Potter — after she spoke with the media. Potter, a former Army medic who was working at the mall that day, testified about making bandages out of trash bags and tape in an attempt to stop bleeding from the gunshot wounds. Parrish said
) falling in the line of duty. There follows an insanely boring funeral, which includes the whole of the Lord's Prayer and the slow and solemn furling, by a porno star, of the American flag. Porno star Jenna grieves for the fallen extra. After returning from the funeral she finds herself alone with another porno star dressed up as a firefighter. He seeks to assuage her grief, so she gives him a blowjob plus full intercourse. The next sex scene, which occurs about a millennium later, is also triggered by grief counselling. Here a male porno star comforts two female porno stars, one of them anally... After a while you begin to think that porno stars, despite being very bad at acting, are very good at acting in one particular only: they can keep a straight face. But then humourlessness, universal and institutionalised humourlessness, is the lifeblood of porno. Films like Flashpoint go out to the video stores and, in the soft version (where the hard action is partly obscured by some stray object - a fireman's hat, say, or a fireman's boot), are sold to cable and to hotel chain franchises, and so on. Features owes the humiliating fatuity of its conventions to an old legal precedent called the "Miller Test". Miller v California (1973) established that a dirty movie was obscene if it was "utterly" without social, literary, artistic, political or scientific "value". In juridical terms, the key word here, of course, is "utterly" and millions of dollars have been spent on its definition. With a wife like Hillary, Bill Clinton could never be a true pal of porno, but he largely left it alone on First Amendment grounds. Unlike his two predecessors, who systematically harassed the industry with confiscations, multiple prosecutions, fines, jail terms. It's a fair guess that porno never felt more gorgeously secure than when Clinton, in his second term, became in effect the porno president. Now porno is tensed and braced forchanges. It feared Gore. It dreaded Bush. Gonzo porno is also known as "wall-to-wall". It shows you people fucking without concerning itself with why they're fucking. There are no Lord's Prayers, no furled American flags in Gonzo. Features porno is much, much dirtier than it used to be, but Gonzo porno is gonzo: way out there. The new element is violence. Strength and Pain I had lunch with Temptress (Features). I had lunch with Chloe (Gonzo). And the next day I joined Chloe on the set of Welcum To Chloeville. My lunch with Temptress was a relatively sedate affair. At first I was reminded of the time I interviewed Penny Baker, a Playboy Playmate of the Year: within a minute I had run out of questions. Temptress, like Penny, seemed to be inhibited by the presence of a company executive - in this case Steve Orenstein of Wicked Pictures, for which she is a contract player. But Temptress loosened up. "Tell me, Temptress," I said (having apologised for the corniness and mild hostility of my inquiry), "what won't you do?" "I won't do anal," said Temptress. "They keep trying to coax me into it. You know: 'Just a finger or a tongue. Or just a little bit: just the tip.' But I won't, I used not to do facials. But I do them now." Temptress is not talking about beauty treatments. She is talking about the destination of what is variously referred to as the "pop-shot" or the "money-shot": the ejaculation of the male. "What happens," I asked, "when a co-star can't get hard?" The fiasco used to be the nemesis of porno. A penile no-show could make the difference between profit and loss. But the situation has been changed, I was told, thanks to Viagra. On Viagra, the actor performs 45 minutes behind schedule, with a flushed face and a headache. "You also lose a dimension," John Stagliano would explain. "The guy's fucking without being aroused." He's just "showing off" - and pretty soon you're back to bullshit. Another thing with Viagra is that the guy can have a problem with the pop-shot, thus endangering the facial. "What do you do then, Temptress?" "You get some pina colada mix. The cock's in your mouth and you let it, like, ooze out around it." Physically Temptress reminded me of the daughters of my friends. She didn't sound shy, but she looked it. With her long straight hair frequently steered over her shoulders by her slow-moving hands, with her face unglazed by cosmetics, with her gently narrowed eyes, she exuded what Philip Larkin called the "strength and pain/Of being young". I asked about her history and she told me something of it. And there was strength and there was pain (and there was certainly youth: Temptress is 21). "But I don't want you to write about that. And could you not mention my real name?... I don't have relationships any more. They make life unstable. The only sex I have is the sex on screen." Temptress is one of the lucky ones. She's a star. After lunch I went to Wicked Pictures and had a talk with Jonathan Morgan (performer turned director) in a computerised cutting-room while he edited his latest Feature, a fantastically unfunny comedy called Inside Porn. "Ah," said Jonathan. "Now here we have a double anal." A double anal is not to be confused with a DP (double penetration: anal and vaginal). A double anal is a double anal. And there have been triple anals, too. "The girls could be graded like A, B and C. The A is the chick on the boxcover. She has the power. So she'll show up late or not at all. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of them do that." He gestured at the screen and said, "Here you have a borderline A/B doing a double anal. Directors will remember that. She'll get phone calls. For a double anal you'd usually expect a B or a C. They have to do the dirty stuff or they won't get a phone call. You've had a kid, you've got some stretchmarks - you're up there doing double anal. "Some girls are used in nine months or a year. An 18-year-old, sweet young thing, signs with an agency, makes five films in her first week. Five directors, five actors, five times five: she gets phone calls. A hundred movies in four months. She's not a fresh face any more. Her price slips and she stops getting phone calls. Then it's, 'Okay, will you do anal? Will you do gangbangs?' Then they're used up. They can't even get a phone call. The market forces of this industry use them up." I thanked Jonathan Morgan for his candour. But he wasn't as candid as Chloe. We met in the lobby of my hotel and we strolled out to her Mustang. "See that?" The number plate said: STR82NL "Straight to anal," said Chloe. And she hadn't even got started. Chloe was gonzo. She gave me the truth. Extreme Productions A single issue of Adult Video News (April 2000) yields the following. Last October porno star Vivian Valentine attended the XXX-Treme Adults Only vacation in Mexico sporting the black eye she copped from Jon Dough on Rough Sex (Anabolic Video). "I have no regrets or bad feelings about it," she said. Regan Starr who worked on the second film in this "line", Rough Sex 2, had a different take. "I got the shit kicked out of me," she said. "I was told before the video - and they said this very proudly, mind you - that in this line most of the girls start crying because they're hurting so bad... I couldn't breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn't stop. They kept filming. You can hear me say, 'Turn the fucking camera off', and they kept going." The director of the Rough Sex series (now discontinued), who goes by the name of Khan Tusion, protests his innocence. "Regan Starr," Tusion claims, "categorically misstates what occurred." If you don't like Khan Tusion, you won't like Max Hardcore. AVN's regular "On the Set" column carries a cheerfully scandalised account of the making of Hollywood Hardcore 13. In this scene, actor-director Hardcore is having rough sex with Cloey Adams, who is pretending to be under age. "If you're a good girl, I'll take you to McDonald's later and get you a Happy Meal." Hardcore then "proceeds to piss in her mouth". Addressing the camera, Cloey Adams says, "What do you think of your little princess now Daddy?" Nor is Hardcore through with her. "Turning to the crew, he calmly says, 'I'll need a speculum and a hose'... One of Max's favourite tricks is to stretch a girl's asshole with a speculum, then piss into her open gape and make her suck out his own piss with a hose. Ain't that romantic?" Now. American porno (and how could it be otherwise?) is market-driven. We can see what the above tells us about porno. But what does it tell us about America? And if America is more like a world than a country, what does it tell us about the world? The average American spends three hours and 51 minutes of every day watching porno (video and internet). The average non-homeowning American male spends more on porno than he spends on his rent. Porno accounts for 43.5% of the US Gross Domestic Product. Like pussies, these statistic are bullshit. I made them up. But the true figures are similarly wild, similarly dizzying, similarly through-the-roof. This isn't bullshit. Porno is far bigger than rock music and far bigger than Hollywood. Americans spend more on strip clubs than they spend on theatre, opera, ballet, jazz and classical concerts combined. In 1975 the total retail value of all the hard-core porno in America was estimated at $5-10 million. Last year Americans spent $8 billion on mediated sex. Whatever porno is, whatever porno does, you may regret it, but you cannot reject it. To paraphrase Falstaff: Banish porno, and you banish all the world. Chloe "I have herpes," said Chloe as she drove me to a smoker-friendly bar. "After you've been in this business for a while, you have herpes. Everyone has herpes. On the set sometimes you'll say to a guy, 'What's this?' And he'll say, 'What? That? It's a fuck sore.' And it may well be a fuck sore, what with all the traffic. But it's more likely to be a herpes sore, and that guy shouldn't be working. My movies are all-condom, but condoms won't protect you from herpes. They don't cover the base. Sometimes when you're doing girl-girl you'll say, 'Honey, I think you should go and see someone.' It can be a very stinky scene down there. I'll send her to a porno-friendly doctor (the others treat you like shit) and she'll come out holding her Flagyll prescription with multiple refills." Chloe is 26. For 10 years she trained as a ballerina; then, at 17, she got into drugs, mostly speed ("I'd fuck for 72 hours"); at 20 she started shooting up heroin and was already in the industry by the time she quit, over two years ago. Chloe has fair, fine red hair and a warm and clever face. She has a ballerina's body: strong legs, a full muscular butt - "- and no tits. It's true that some Features companies urge the girls to have implants and offer to pay for it. On the road [ie, stripping] girls used to boast about the cubic capacity of their titjobs. 'I've got 840s.' 'I've got 1220s'. One of them turned to me and said, 'Get tits or suck cock.' I'd rather suck cock, I really would." If you're going to be a porno star, what do you need? It's pretty clear by now. You need to be an exhibitionist. You need to have a ferocious sex drive. You need to suffer from nostalgie de la boue (literally "mud nostalgia": a childish, even babyish delight in bodily functions and wastes). And - probably - you need damage in your past. You also need to be humourless. Chloe is not humourless. When she talked to me she was like someone peeping over a wall demarcating two different worlds, telling me stories about the other side. "I like to be peed on. I like being spat on: it feels like come on your chest. I like to be choked. I like to be fisted. Here we have the 'no-thumbs' rule? A girl can have 16 fingers up her. But no thumbs." She laughs, and continues: "For vaginal I prefer a girthy kind of dick. And some of these guys" - Chloe seizes the broad base of a water glass on the table before us - "are like this. For anal I prefer a longer, thinner kind of dick." "So when you do DP you get one thick one and one thin one." "Right... No. Come to think of it," she said brightly, "I get two thick ones. I like to feel crammed. You know, I did my first anal for $200? I still can't believe that." "And what are your rates now, Chloe?" "In Gonzo, you're paid, not by the picture, but by the scene. So it's girl-girl: 700, plus 100 for an anal toy. Boy-girl: 900. Anal: 1,100. Solo [a rarity]: 500. DP: 1,500. I won't do anal fisting or double anal. People ask me how I can hang on to my title as Anal Queen of LA when I won't do double anal. But I have hung on to it." In common with about 10% of the porno girls (her estimate), Chloe retains the approval of her parents (and so does Temptress). In fact, Chloe's guardians are gonzo. She recently shot a film out near their place, and her stepfather (while absenting himself from his stepdaughter's scenes) "was like a towel-boy". And Chloe's mother, for two years running now, has marched out of the AVN Awards, brandishing Chloe's Best Anal trophies above the heads of the crowd. After lunch we drove to Chloe's apartment: barred gates, the feel of a two-floor motel, a modest, comfortable, orderly apartment, featuring a cute black cat with a porno name, Siren. Chloe thinks that some porno girls get their names by looking out of the window at the road sign: Laurel Canyon, Chandler, Cherry Mirage. For a while Chloe talked about her love life. She is torn, at present, between the neglectful Chris, a rock musician (bass), and the attentive Artie, a fellow performer. She suspects that Chris just strings her along because it's a status symbol for a rock star to have a porno-star girlfriend. Chris, I think, knows about Artie. But Artie doesn't know about Chris. "And with Artie, he comes over and I'm horny as hell and he says, 'I can't, I have to do two scenes tomorrow.' " "With private sex, is there a crossover in your head?" "Oh yeah. I find myself thinking, 'Fuck. I should be being paid for this.' Or 'Fuck. I wish I had a camera.'" "I'd better not write about Chris and Artie." "Go ahead. They'll both be over anyway. Here, it doesn't last." Chloe was unforgettable. I won't forget the way she said this (she said it with sorrowful resolve): "We're prostitutes... There are differences. You can choose your partners, and they're tested for Aids - you won't get your john to do that. But we're prostitutes: we exchange sex for money." "You've thought this through." "I looked it up in the dictionary and that's what it says." In etymological terms pornography is what I'm doing: I'm writing about whores. I will see Chloe on set tomorrow morning. The scene they'll be shooting? Gonzo girl-boy-girl anal. Mister Monster Towards the end of Rabbit At Rest, John Updike writes: Rabbit thinks of adding $5.50 to his bill to watch something called Horny Housewives... The trouble with these softcore porn movies on hotel circuits, in case some four-year-old with lawyers for parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and ass and even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard or soft at all. It's very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what we care about, you have to see them. Maybe we're all queer, and all his life he's been in love with Ronnie Harrison. Or, as a friend would put it to me later that week: It's no good without Mister Monster. You must have Mister Monster.Must you? Gore Vidal once said that the only danger in watching pornography is that it might make you want to watch more pornography; it might make you want to do nothing else but watch pornography. There is, I contend, another danger. As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I'd like it. Porno services the "polymorphous perverse": the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You'd better hope that this doesn't happen while you're watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer - or an undertaker. That week in Los Angeles I found out what I don't like. I don't like Mister Monster. High up in higgledy-piggledy Hollywood Hills, I hobnobbed with Andrew Blake, the Truffaut of porno, and two incredibly beautiful girls in incredibly expensive underwear (and six inch heels). Strictly speaking, Blake's work is Gonzo: scriptless, storyless, with the performers interacting with the camera. But Blake is pre-eminently "high-end". His actresses look like voluptuous fashion models, and he flatters and glorifies them on the screen, with oils, unguents, silks, cords, ribbons, textures. "I hired Monica because she has these beautiful breasts," he told me, "and that's what we're going to be concentrating on. I've never worked with Adriana before but she seems to be really something." Laconic, gruff, direct and, of course, humourless, Blake goes about his business. "Now put your hand into her panties... And maybe a nipple comes out, a nipple is revealed?... Squeeze them, caress them, do the whole nine yards with them... Try opening your legs. Kind of tease the panties... Don't smile so much. Just kind of be into yourself... So is the bra ready to ride? Kiss the nip... Arch up your butt a little more... Cross and uncross your legs. Show a little pussy... Now this is the panties coming off..." Behold. A platonically perfect pubis, wearing nothing but the latest hairstyle, a minimal mohawk. "This must be a tough day's work for you," said the make-up girl amiably. "Someone's got to do it. Right?" Her remark obliged me to examine my "affect", or feeling-tone. I admit to a strong sense of furtive beauty-assimiliation. But the instinct being aroused in me was not sexual so much as protective. Naked Adriana was 20 years old. And the last thing I wanted to see, at that moment, was Mister Monster. Outside, during an intermission, Blake said in his flat, declarative style, "I'm into looking at woman. Not all this 'pissing and fisting'. I've never had any legal problems." Work permit A "tough" day's work for me, then, and the same could be said for Adriana and Monica. They weren't being slapped around by Khan Tusion or peed on by Max Hardcore. But were they being "used up"? If you're a porno performer, your latest HIV test is your work permit. Two years ago the actor Marc Wallice started to become evasive about his work permit. He was using an out of town health centre and seemed to be fudging his results. By the time he was found out, Wallice's condition was fulminant. He infected six actresses. "The tests we take only test for Aids," says Chloe. "We've contained Aids in the industry but what about all the others? You know we're now up to Hepatitis G? "You should be at least 21 before you work in this industry. You should know your body, understand your body. But that would wipe out half of San Fernando Valley. There are whole lines on the 18 pluses." And there are: Dirty Debutantes, Nasty Newcomers, Filthy First Timers... One of the actresses infected by Marc Wallice (his condition now is so pitiful that no one thinks him worthy of persecuting) is Mrs John Stagliano. Stagliano himself, the pioneer of gonzo, is HIV-positive (he contracted the virus recreationally, in a Rio bordello). A medium-sized fortune has been made by Stagliano, in a business where, contrary to popular belief, very few fortunes are made. But I often think of the Staglianos, out by the pool, gazing at an ocean to which they have no access. Gonzo Girl-Boy-Girl Chloe's shoot is on Dolorosa Drive. The porno house, the porno fish in the porno tank (the fish are porno-coloured: yellow, mauve, blood-orange), the porno TV set (as big as a double refrigerator), the porno deck, the porno pool, with a plastic duck floating around in it. Beyond the fence stands the house of the pain-in-the-ass neighbour who keeps climbing on to the roof with a mouthful of nails to get himself shocked enough to call the police. Girl-boy-girl: the girls are Chloe and Lola (a friendly Amerindian-style beauty); the boy is Artie (Chloe's offscreen lover: tattooed, muscular, balding). Artie seems to be a nice guy, but he keeps talking with a jokey French accent. Porno performers are great ones for funny voices, funny faces. German scientists, Russian spies, French connoisseurs; in Features they can keep it up all movie long. There is a crew: the DP (for the time being this means Director of Photography) and the sound-recordist, who go about their business like middle-aged handymen; a plump youth who seems to be there for general work experience; and Chloe's sister, Shannon, caterer and towel-girl. Chloe will soon be calling out to Shannon, "Stop that phone!" Shannon: "It's the home phone! There's like ten of them!" Artie is giving us more French accent, then more French accent, while Chloe and Lola strip for the "pretty girl" shots that will go on the box-cover. Chloe, with whom I spent five hours the previous day, walks past me, naked. It doesn't bother her that she's naked. She doesn't know she's naked. The porno stills by the porno pool. "See pink? Want lots of pink?" "Let's have some booty." "Open it? You want it all?" It is barely 10 o'clock in the morning, and I am, I realise, experiencing the kind of anxiety that usually precedes a mild ordeal. A line is about to be crossed. I shouldn't be here. None of us should be here. But we all have work to do. Fifteen minutes later, referring to the achievements of Lola, Chloe stabbed a hand through the air at me, and shouted with joy and triumph (Chloe is the director, remember, and she was thrilled to have this scene in the can): "That's the kind of blowjob I was telling you about yesterday!" I reeled out into the yard with my notebook, laughing, and shaking my head. There are plenty of "jokes" on a porno set, and there is much raucous mirth to dispel tension. But only a Chloe, only an exception, can inject humour. She sounded like Mel Brooks, in The Producers, saying, "That's our Hitler!" The kind of blowjob Chloe was telling me about yesterday was this kind of blowjob. It is as if the girl's passionate - indeed desperate - intention is to kiss the boy's lower abdomen. She faces an obstacle. She can't go around it. She has to go through it. "I mean," Chloe had said admiringly, "some of these girls go down. Drooling and slobbering, saliva everywhere, choking dry-heaving." It had to be said that the dry-heaving, from Artie's point of view, was visibly efficacious. When Lola was done, he gazed down with some complacence as Mister Monster went from three o'clock to half past 12. And that was the tenor of it: heat. That is where the market is taking us: toward heat, intensity, a frenzied athleticism. More than this, porno, it seems, is a parody of love. It therefore addresses itself to love's opposites, which are hate and death. "Choke her!" "Spit inside me!" "Break me! You can't break me! Try!" "COMING!!!" Chloe screamed this last word like a mother answering a child's cry from the other end of the house. Then, to Lola, "Choke me!" And Chloe's entire upper body flushed with pink, and she seemed to swoon... "I wanna piss," said Artie, during one of his many intermissions. For a moment the DP's eyes widened in alarm. He thought, wrongly, that Artie wanted to piss on camera. "Pissing is as bad as coming," he confided to me. "They're supposed to piss and they can't. They go off to the shower, then they say they can piss and they can't." Artie trudged back from the can, worriedly nursing his condomed erection. "God I'm old," he muttered, as he headed back to the fray. Well I'm old too, and I blew a kiss at Chloe and took my leave - before the anal and the popshot. Shannon drove me back to the hotel. Poor Shannon: she was having one of those days. First, shopping in a health-food store, she dropped a jar of wheatgerm on her foot and was now limping heavily. Then she discovered that her boyfriend was cheating on her - and she fired him. Contemplating the suspension of her love life, Shannon said sadly, "And when you compare it to that, the sex doesn't seem much anyway." I knew what she meant, in a sense. Chloe-Artie-Lola made me feel like a virgin. ContinuedObama: Evidence MH17 Hit By Missile From Rebel-Held Area Of Ukraine Hide caption One day after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, investigators are trying to learn more about the crash and who might be responsible. Ukrainian coal miners search the crash site near the village of Rozsypne. Previous Next Dmitry Lovetsky/AP Hide caption The passenger jet had nearly 300 people aboard; none survived. A white ribbon tied to a stick indicates the presence of human remains at this region of the crash site, in Grabovka, Ukraine. Previous Next Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images Hide caption Pro-Russian fighters walk by the crash site near the village of Hrabove on Friday. Kiev officials accuse pro-Russian separatists of firing a missile at the jet, which crashed in territory held by rebel insurgents. The separatists, Ukraine's military and Russia have all denied any involvement in shooting down the plane. Previous Next Evgeniy Maloletka/AP Hide caption People arrange candles for the victims of Flight MH17 at a shopping mall in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The flight was on its way to the Malaysian capital from Amsterdam. Previous Next Joshua Paul/AP Hide caption Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima sign a condolence register at the Ministry of Security and Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. More than half of Flight MH17's passengers were from the Netherlands. Previous Next Phil Nijhuis/AP Hide caption A woman looks at the wreckage in Grabovka. Parts of the crash site were still smoldering Friday. Previous Next Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images Hide caption A man lays a stuffed bear among flowers outside the Dutch Embassy in Moscow. Previous Next Ivan Sekretarev/AP Hide caption A firefighter douses the smoldering wreckage of Flight MH17 on Thursday. Previous Next Alexander Khudoteply/AFP/Getty Images Hide caption People hold candles and place flower tributes outside the Dutch Embassy in Kiev to commemorate victims of the crash. Previous Next Sergei Chuzavkov/AP Hide caption A woman at Kuala Lumpur International Airport reacts to news of the crash. Previous Next Samsul Said/Reuters/Landov Hide caption Malaysia Airlines lost contact with Flight MH17 when it was about 25 miles from the Russia-Ukraine border. Previous Next Dmitry Lovetsky/AP Hide caption A candle and a rose are placed on a piece of debris at the site of the crash. Previous Next Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images 1 of 12 i View slideshow This post was updated at 5:00 p.m. ET. President Obama says it is likely that a missile fired from rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine brought down Malaysia Airlines MH17 and that at least one U.S. citizen is among the dead. "Evidence indicates that the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists inside of Ukraine," Obama said, noting that it's not the only time in recent months that the pro-Russia rebels had taken down airplanes. He called the deaths of the 298 people aboard the plane "an outrage of unspeakable proportions." President Obama on MH17 The president identified the American killed on the flight as Quinn Lucas Schansman, who he said held dual citizenship. Schansman's other citizenship was Dutch, according to the U.S. State Department. Obama referred to the arming of the rebels and the "steady flow of weapons from Russia" and said if Russian President Vladimir Putin makes a decision not to arm the separatists, then the flow will stop. "There has to be a credible investigation," he said. "There must be an immediate cease-fire. Evidence must not be tampered with." He promised U.S. assistance in the investigation. All sides in the conflict in Ukraine — Kiev, the separatists, and Moscow — have denied any involvement in the downing of MH17. The president's remarks at a news briefing on Friday came as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, and Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby sought to flesh out the evidence. Power, in a presentation to the U.N. Security Council, said that pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine had been spotted by a Western journalist manning an SA-11 surface-to-air missile system at a location near where MH17 went down just hours before the plane crashed. "We assess Malaysian Airlines Flight 17... was likely downed by a surface-to-air [SAM] missile, an SA-11, operated from a separatist-held location in eastern Ukraine," she said. Power said that because of the flight's high altitude, shorter-range missile systems had been ruled out. She noted that one of the missile systems had been reported to be in the area of the crash Thursday, before the plane went down. Separatists had posted videos and boasts online about downing a Ukrainian plane Thursday, Power said, adding that some of those materials have since been deleted. "Because of the technical complexity of the SA-11, it is unlikely that the separatists could effectively operate the system without assistance from knowledgeable personnel. Thus we cannot rule out technical assistance from Russian personnel in operating the systems," she added. The U.S. isn't aware of any Ukrainian SA-11 systems in the area where the crash occurred, Power said. She added that the Ukrainian military hadn't fired any anti-aircraft missiles since the fighting began, despite incursions by Russian planes. The Flight Path Of Malaysia Airlines MH17 Power spoke at an emergency session of the council. The meeting began with all of the diplomats and their staff members standing to observe a moment of silence for victims of the crash. At the Pentagon, Kirby told reporters that he didn't have any specific information that the SA-11 system, known as a "Buk," had "transited" the Russian border, "but we are not ruling anything in or out. "We don't directly know who's responsible for firing that missile," he said. However, if the separatists are involved, it "would be strange credulity to say they could do this without some level of Russian assistance," he said. Audio Recording As they try to piece together how Flight MH17 was brought down, U.S. experts are analyzing a recording released by Ukraine's government that it says is a string of intercepted phone calls in which separatist rebels acknowledge that they shot down an airliner. YouTube However, as NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports, U.S. intelligence has not yet publicly authenticated the recording. "Privately, U.S. officials say they suspect separatist rebels were behind the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17," Dina reports. "U.S. officials say they are still analyzing the audio. They are also using algorithms and mathematics to pinpoint where the missile was fired from." The fate of the flight's "black box" data recorders remains in question. After the separatists said they had recovered them from the crash site, Ukrainian officials disputed that account. And while some reports stated that the flight recorders might be sent to Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Moscow has "no plans to seize the flight recorders," according to state-owned news agency RT. Reporter Noah Sneider is in the Donetsk region; he says he has seen separatists near the wreckage. "They have taken control of the crash site, because they're in control of this region," Sneider tells NPR's Newscast unit. "The Ukrainian forces have a position not too far from here, but for the most part, this stretch of road is controlled by the rebels. YouTube "They were the first ones on the scene," he adds, "and they're the ones who are now guarding the entrances to it." Saying that Ukrainian authorities still aren't being given full access to the crash site, Ukraine's prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, says security forces will create a corridor so that "Ukrainian experts and international experts will be allowed to hold a vast international investigation." That's according to The Guardian, which quotes Yatsenyuk saying, "This is a crime against humanity. All red lines have been crossed." Passengers And Flight Route Malaysia Airlines executive Huib Gorter says that an "initial cash payment of $5,000 per passenger" is being offered to the victims' next of kin, to help them with expenses as they cope with the aftermath of Thursday's crash. In a news conference at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, Gorter said that Malaysia Airlines and other international carriers had been using the same route, making the crash a "tragic incident that could have happened to any of us." He said they are all now avoiding the airspace. Of the plane, Gorter said that it had been built in 1997 and that all systems were functioning normally when it was last checked out earlier this month. Of the flight routes over eastern Ukraine, NPR's David Schaper reports, "There had been no warnings about that area from the FAA, nor from the U.N.'s International Civil Aviation Organization." David adds that the airspace over Crimea, which seceded from Ukraine earlier this year, has been under restrictions since April. Parts of the crash site are still smoldering Friday; photos from the scene show parts of the plane and personal items scattered around open fields. And a video that reportedly shows the aftermath of the crash shows debris falling through a cloud of thick black smoke. We'll update this post as news comes in. Here's a quick update on what we know about the situation: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 had been flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lampur carrying 298 people — 283 passengers and 15 crew. (Early reports of 295 people onboard were updated with the news that three infants were among the passengers.) The breakdown of nationalities: 192 Dutch; 44 Malaysians; 28 Australians; 12 Indonesians; 10 Britons; 4 Germans; 4 Belgians; 3 Vietnamese; 3 Filipinos; 1 American (dual U.S.-Dutch citizen); 1 Canadian; 1 New Zealander; 1 Hong Kong Chinese. The flight plan filed by the plane's pilots had requested an altitude of 35,000 feet during their passage over Ukraine, but air traffic control in Ukraine instructed them to fly at 33,000 feet, Malaysia Airlines says. Enlarge this image toggle caption Diptendu Dutta/AFP/Getty Images Diptendu Dutta/AFP/Getty Images The Boeing 777 went down in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, which for months has been a focal point of fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukraine's central government. U.S. officials tell NPR the airliner was likely shot down by a surface-to-air missile and that they're working to determine who fired it. Kiev officials accuse the separatists of firing a missile at the jet. The separatists, Ukraine's military and Russia have all denied any involvement. The separatists have promised to aid the investigation, reportedly planning a three-day truce to allow investigators to reach the wreckage. More than half of the flight's passengers were from the Netherlands. The U.S. is trying to determine whether any Americans were onboard. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has barred all U.S. flights from using the airspace over eastern Ukraine. The agency notes that no U.S. airlines have been flying routes there. Investigators from the FBI and NTSB will reportedly help analyze the crash — President Obama offered that assistance to Ukrainian President
/energy-efficiency/sustainable-business-practices/small-business-trends http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonnazar/2013/09/09/16-surprising-statistics-about-small-businesses/#3ada3fa3078c http://www.census.gov/econ/susb/ http://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/ https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_March_2014_0.pdfMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Rich Walker of Shadow Robotics tells Jonathan Amos how they developed the hands for the robo-chef A London-based company has launched a prototype "robo-chef" for the home. Moley Robotics is demonstrating its concept at this year's Hannover Messe - a big trade fair for industrial technology held annually in Germany. The cooking machine learns by capturing the movements of a human in the action of preparing a meal. These movements are then turned into commands that drive a sophisticated pair of robot hands. Tim Anderson, the 2011 BBC Masterchef champion, is training the robo-chef. At the Hannover Messe, he has got the machine making a crab bisque. "It's the ultimate sous-chef," Mr Anderson told BBC News. "You tell it to do something - whether it's a bit of prep or completing a whole dish from start to finish - and it will do it. And it will do it the same every single time." The product is still two years away from market. Moley wants to make the unit slightly more compact, and give it a built-in refrigerator and dishwasher. The robot could then do everything from assembling and chopping all the ingredients, doing the cooking on the hob or in the oven, and finishing up by cleaning the dirty pans. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption BBC Masterchef (2011) Tim Anderson: "It's the ultimate sous-chef" "We want people to be comfortable with this device," says Moley's Mark Oleynik. "It's not an industrial device; it's not a device that works at 10-times normal speed. No, it's a device that moves like you move, and at the same speed as you do." Appetising apps The goal is to produce a consumer version costing £10,000. It is likely find a ready market in the urban apartment where space is at a premium. The vision is to support the product with thousands of app-like recipes. The motion capture capability would also allow owners to share their special recipes online. A key innovation is the hands. Produced by the Shadow Robot company, they use 20 motors, 24 joints and 129 sensors to mimic the movements of human hands. Shadow's Rich Walker believes his robotic appendages will ultimately cope with some of the uncertainties of cooking, such as when beaten eggs decide to peak. "Something would change; we would see it in the sensor data. Maybe something gets stiffer or softer," he explained. "We should be able to sense that and use it as the point to transition to the next stage of the cooking process." Image copyright MOley robotics Image caption The consumer unit would contain a fridge and a dishwasher Robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) were identified by the UK's coalition government as one of "eight great technologies" that could help to rebalance the British economy - along with the likes of satellites, synthetic biology and so-called "big data" applications. The potential for RAS is thought to be immense. A recent report by the McKinsey consultancy estimated that advanced robotics could generate a potential economic impact of between $1.9tn and $6.4tn (£1.3tn to £4.4tn) per year by 2025. But the use of robotics in the home is currently in its infancy. The setting is not one that many people immediately think of when considering autonomous systems. That will have to change if robotic chefs and other applications are to be accepted and embraced. And, in time, it will believes Prof David Lane at Heriot-Watt University. "It's interesting to note that Dyson is launching its robotic vacuum cleaner in Japan - a traditional early-adopter market," he told the BBC. "But people more generally are taking the baby steps towards accepting this type of technology. "The example I always like to give is the Docklands Light Railway in London: everyone gets on it and doesn't think twice that there's no driver, no human, at the front. "The UK is in a good position to take advantage of the new wave of robotics that is coming. "It's small, agile, disruptive start-up activity that is going to grow big - and that's where we have to put our energies."Four men on the Nak'azdli Whut'en reserve northwest of Prince George have just moved into the first homes they've ever owned as part of a pilot project that's using "tiny houses" to combat homelessness. "We didn't know what to expect. We just thought, you know, they don't deserve to be treated like this," said Aileen Prince, the capital housing and lands manager for Nak'azdli. "They deserve to be treated like anyone else." Prince came up with the idea after seeing TV shows about tiny houses. Compact homes have surged in popularity for people looking at affordable — and sometimes portable — living options. "I thought, you know, that's something that really could alleviate some of the problems we're having with housing people on the reserve," she said. 'Couldn't get the grin off his face' Working with the band office, land was set aside for a pilot project, and Prince started taking applications from people within the community to move into the tiny homes. They had to be over the age of 45, and had to be people who had never owned a home or rental property before. Each 'tiny house' is just 320 square feet but contains a washroom and a stacking washer and dryer set. (Nak'azdli Whut'en) Four men were chosen, and they moved into their new homes last Friday. Prince said it's already made an obvious difference to their lives. She described the reaction of the first man to receive keys. "He was just super excited, he just couldn't get the grin off his face," she said. "I've seen the transition that's happened with him. His place is spotless, he won't let people smoke in his house, he's very much changed what he does during the day. He's got some books now that he's started to read and I just thought, wow, this is amazing - Aileen Prince "Before it was just, basically, you know, looking for something to drink. And now he feels like he's got a place to just relax. And he was telling one of our other workers that he's got some books now that he's started to read and I just thought, 'wow, this is amazing.'" Each "tiny house" is just 320 square feet, but they all have a washroom, a washing machine and a dryer. The band holds the mortgages to the homes, but the men pay the costs and utilities every month. Prince estimates it will take about five years for the band to recoup the initial costs. In the meantime, she's already looking towards building the next set of houses for people in the community who want their own tiny home. "Everybody deserves to have a home." To hear the full story click on the audio labeled 'Nak'azdli First Nation builds tiny houses to combat homelessness' For more stories from northern British Columbia follow Daybreak North on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to the podcast.Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke. For the first time in U.S. history, its credit rating has been downgraded, from a AAA to an AA+. UPI/Kevin Dietsch \| License Photo WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- The bond rating agency Standard & Poor's Friday downgraded U.S. debt from its current triple-A rating to AA+, a move a government official called "amateur." Citing government officials it did not identify, ABC had reported earlier Friday the administration was preparing for such a move. S&P said the downgrade reflects its opinion that the debt reduction plan Congress enacted "falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics." "The effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges," S&P said in announcing its decision. One federal official told ABC News the downgrade would be based in part on confusion associated with the way Congress handled legislation to raise the limit on federal borrowing and a lack of confidence that further deficit reduction can be achieved under the current U.S. political system. Citing another source it did not identify, ABC said another reason for the move was because the Republicans' refusal to allow a deficit reduction deal to include new revenues. However, another government official said the White House had told S&P the company's thinking was "based on flawed math and assumptions." And S&P acknowledged "its numbers are wrong." An administration official told NBC News after the credit rating was lowered, "It's amateur hour at S&P." Treasury Department officials said the S&P announcement came after Treasury pointed out the rating agency, in a draft of its downgrade announcement, overstated U.S. debt by incorrectly adding $2 trillion to its projection of the debt, The New York Times reported. The effect of the downgrade was a matter of speculation Friday but the Times noted that a small increase in interest rates on borrowed funds could add tens of billions of dollars to the nation's annual debt repayment. There is also a possibility that a downgrade of federal debt could lead to downgrades of other government-backed instruments, possibly leading to higher mortgage interest rates. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.,, the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee, said on MSNBC the decision was "just a political judgment by a group of incompetents." "This is the rating agency that took money from people who were selling junk bonds and told other people to buy it," Frank said, accusing S&P of overvaluing private debt while consistently undervaluing public debt." "They are as responsible for the financial crisis as anybody else," he said. "There is zero chance of (the United States) defaulting." Moody's Investor Services and Fitch Ratings both said Tuesday they will keep the country's credit rating at triple-A for now, but they said a downgrade is still possible if the U.S. financial situation deteriorates or if promised federal spending cuts don't materialize. The two credit ratings firms issued their assessments after President Barack Obama signed into law compromise legislation passed by Congress to raise the nation's debt limit and cut its budget deficit.Firearms officers equipped with body-worn video cameras are patrolling London streets for the first time, Scotland Yard announced today. Frontline armed officers who target gangs and armed criminals are being equipped with the cameras in a new trial aimed at restoring trust in the police. They are the first armed officers in Britain to be equipped with the equipment. The move comes after protests over the death of Mark Duggan, 29, who was shot by Met officers in Tottenham in August 2011 — sparking widespread rioting. In January a jury ruled that Duggan was lawfully killed by armed officers even though the gun he had was not in his hand at the time. After the inquest the Met announced the testing of body worn cameras. Officers in 10 London boroughs have been equipped with 500 small cameras. A small group of 14 firearms officers manning a “proactive unit” in Armed Response Vehicles have been equipped with the cameras. The Trojan Proactive Unit is assigned to help boroughs beset with gun crime, violence and gang issues. Commissioner Sir Bernard-Hogan-Howe said: “This is the next step towards us improving our policing service to Londoners through the use of technology. “It allows us to be more open and accountable to the public.”Latinos' acceptance and support of the LGBT community has become more visible in recent years, folding the notion that Latinos are more intolerant than other groups. Numerous reports have been published testifying to the fact. The National Council of La Raza and Social Science Research Solutions released a study written by SSRS vice-president David Dutwin, entitled LGBT Acceptance and Support: The Hispanic Perspective, that vanquishes misperceptions held about Latinos' stand on LGBT issues. The survey, published in 2012, discloses that 54 percent of the Hispanic population supports gay marriage, making them one percent more supportive than the overall American population. Sixty-four percent are supportive of civil unions and 83 percent support legal protections against discrimination and hate crimes. Also, more than 75 percent support open military service. Dutwin's research also showed that anti-gay attitudes that develop within the Latino community often originate in the church. Those who attend churches that have anti-gay clergymen are four times less likely to support gay marriage. Also, many Latin nations are far less encouraging of homosexuality, which enables discomfort when discussing the topic. Evidence shows that the longer Hispanics live in the U.S, the more they are likely to accept and support pro-LGBT policies. However, The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) published a report, Growing Up LGBT in America, which slightly challenges Dutwin's findings, insisting that the LGBT youth who identify as Latino experience greater rejection within their own community than non-LGBT youth. According to LULAC's findings, less than half of LGBT Latino youth has someone to turn to when they feel worried or sad, while 80 percent of non-LGBT peers have such an adult. Additionally, the report shows that this demographic is also less hopeful about meeting goals; more concerned about family acceptance; more likely to face harassment and violence; and, they're twice as likely to say that they don't "fit in." "As a nation, we are making great strides towards greater equality for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender," said Los Angeles Mayor-elect Eric Garcetti. "However, gaining acceptance and understanding is still very difficult for LGBT youth and especially for young LGBT Latinos. This report highlights the need to do more to help Latino families stay strong and supportive of their children's needs." Latin American LGBT rights advocates recently met with their American counterparts in hopes of "showing other realities to LGBT kids and youth so they can have hope for the future and celebrate diversity," according to Juan Fuentealba Álvarez of the Chilean It Gets Better Foundation, who spoke with the Washington Blade. U.S. LGBT rights advocates welcomed the opportunity to meet with Latin American counterparts, hoping that it would send a message of support to Latin(o) American youth. Gay New York State Assemblyman Danny O'Donnell stated that "marriage rights for same-sex couples, anti-LGBT violence and efforts to curb bullying" was discussed during their meeting.Rain-x product line-up This past weekend the sun was out in full force. Making it very obvious to me while driving just how filthy my windscreen was. It was covered in a light haze from all the salt on the roads this winter, there were traces of sticky film that had accumulated some how and many other spots of god knows what that just made the whole viewing experience less than enjoyable.Having used Rain-x in the past on my GTR and been quite pleased with the results, I thought this time I'd try out there entire product line-up all at once. Let's start by taking a look at how the water acts on a window before it has the rain-x treatment:You can see that the water stays almost stuck to the window in a large sheet, it doesn't disperse well at all. This apparently has something to do with the surface tension of the water droplets and the microscopic pores in the windshield.We begin by using what I can only assume is the equivalent of some sort of exfoliant but for cars, the Rain-x Extreme Clean is a foamy substance that has small beads in it which help to remove dirt and grime from glass and plastic.Start by rinsing the area with water to remove any loose dirt and grime.Follow'd by applying some Ran-x Extreme Clean to a damp cloth and moving across the windscreen in circular over-lapping motions. This is the process which removes the haze and grime from the window so put your muscles into it!They claim it works on plastic as well so I followed the same process on the headlights.Once you have applied Extreme Clean to the complete surface, you should see a milky haze form. Using fresh water rinse all of it off and clean the area with that damp cloth from before. Rinse again and this time dry it completely using a dry towel.Once the area is completely dry, you can feel there's a difference on the windscreen, it is now time to apply Rain-x Original Treatment. Similar to the last procedure you simply apply it to a dry cloth and rub in circular-overlapping motions across the surface. Allow it to dry completely until a light film has formed over the area.You can clearly see the difference here with the rain-x Original applied. I followed the same procedure for the headlights as well. Once dry, wipe off the area with a clean dry cloth, this is the same principle as waxing a car for anyone who is familiar with that.The result on the headlights was noticeable. They appear clear now with no fog over the lenses. On the windscreen itself you can see how the water now just beads off completely. The difference is clear.Check out the video to really see the effect, compared to the untreated windows it's incredible.The final step of the process is to fill up the washer fluid reservoir with Rain-x de-icer. This will prolong the treatments life span.The one thing I've notice which is worth mentioning regarding this treatment, especially when it comes to colder climates where ice may form on windshields, is that although ice may still form on the windscreen, it will not bond or stick to the glass itself, making it very easy to clean the windows.Electrical Brain Stimulation Can Instantly Improve Self-Control • Next article in this series: • Previous article: License to Sin: How to Dodge a Devilish Self-Control Loophole Self-control can be boosted using tiny electrical pulses from electrodes, a new study finds. Neuroscientists have successfully used a new type of brain stimulation to act on a mental braking system located in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain above the eyes. The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, gave participants a simple test of self-control (Wessel et al., 2013). This involved them trying to stop themselves from routinely pressing a button when suddenly given an unexpected auditory command. Participants had electrodes attached to their heads to deliver the electrical stimulation to the precise area of their brain which has an inhibitory effect on behaviour. The electrical current passing through the brain was relatively small, and so imperceptible to participants. The part of the brain targeted, in the prefrontal cortex, is a crucial component in the network that slows down and stops some behaviour. Sometimes participants were given help to inhibit the button pressing behaviours by having the electrical current delivered. The results showed that the electrical stimulation helped inhibit their button pressing. One of the study’s authors, Nitin Tandon, M.D., explained: “There is a circuit in the brain for inhibiting or braking responses. We believe we are the first to show that we can enhance this braking system with brain stimulation.” Although the research is a long way from being able to improve human self-control at a general level, it does show that it is possible to affect the brain’s braking system with the application of electrical currents in certain circumstances. It’s particularly interesting because usually electrical brain stimulation disrupts brain activity. In this case, though, the stimulation had a coherent, positive effect on behaviour. And this from such low electrical currents that participants in the study could not feel it. Image credit: Krischan SchallenbergerJournalist who broke Guardian story about NSA surveillance says new documents 'will help inform the debate even further' Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the National Security Agency revelations from Edward Snowden in the Guardian, said on Sunday a book he is writing about the case will contain “a lot of new stories from the Snowden archive”. Speaking to Brian Stelter, the host of CNN's Reliable Sources, at the end of a week in which Guardian US and the Washington Post shared a Pulitzer prize for public service reporting, Greenwald said: “There are stories that I felt from the beginning really needed the length of a book to be able to report and to do justice to, so there’s new documents, [and] there’s new revelations in the book that I think will help inform the debate even further.” Greenwald left the Guardian in October 2013. In February 2014 he launched a website, The Intercept, which was the first venture from First Look, a media company backed by the eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. His book on Snowden is due out in May. Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, recently returned to the US for the first time since stories about the NSA based on documents provided by Snowden were published, in June last year. On Friday 11 April he collected a George Polk Award, with Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and the filmmaker Laura Poitras. Asked about his return to the US and whether he had expected any government action, Greenwald said: “I had lawyers working for several months, including many who have connections at the highest levels of the Justice Department, trying to get some indication about what the government’s intentions were if I want to try to return. And they were given no information – they were completely stonewalled. “The government wouldn’t say if there was a grand jury empaneled, if there was an indictment under seal, if they intended to arrest us. They wanted to keep us in this state of uncertainty.” In August 2013 Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was detained for nine hours at Heathrow airport, under UK terrorism laws. Greenwald said the release of his book would likely lead to more visits back to the US. “I think the material in the book which includes a lot of new stories from the Snowden archive has a lot of impact for the United States,” he said, “and I want to come back and talk to the people most affected by that story, which are Americans.” On Monday, the Republican congressman Peter King used Twitter to say: “Awarding the Pulitzer to Snowden enablers is a disgrace.” Asked about such opinions, which have also been expressed by figures within the Obama administration, Greenwald cited US government attitudes to previous cases involving whistleblowers, such as that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, and said: “You know, I look at Peter King’s condemnation as an enormous badge of honour.”The Little Acre, an enchanting hand-drawn adventure has today had its release date confirmed…and we won’t have to wait very long at all. Arriving on November 22nd, The Little Acre from Pewter Games and Curve Digital comes in on Xbox One, PS4 and PC with a price tag of just £9.99 / $12.99 / €12.99 (although pre-order and launch discounts will also be available). You’ll also get access to a free digital art book which celebrates the creation of the point and click adventure title, although in order to receive that you’ll have to pre-order from the relevant digital store – we’ll be sure to tell you when it arrives on the Xbox Games Store for pre-order. A charming, story-led adventure, The Little Acre merges the wonder of classical Don Bluth animation (All Dogs Go To Heaven) with the magical wonder of a Miyazaki world. The game is set in 1950s Ireland and follows the story of Aidan and his young daughter, Lily. Investigating the sudden disappearance of his father, Aidan finds himself transported to a strange new world populated by bizarre creatures. Things are made slightly more difficult when young Lily decides that she is going to ‘help’ and encounters her own perils along the way. “The game has been a real labour of love for us here,” says Chris Conlan, Pewter Games. “The original vision was to create something which felt classic yet modern – something I think we’ve achieved.” “There’s a whole generation of gamers out there who won’t have played a point and click adventure before,” adds Ben Clavin, Pewter Games, “Of course, those well versed in adventures will feel at home with The Little Acre, but we’re equally excited to introduce the genre to a brand new audience.” “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with the Pewter Games team,” says Charles Cecil, creator of the Broken Sword series of games. “They are full of passion and creativity, and watching that translate into a game they can be very proud of has been a real joy. I’m enormously excited to see how modern players respond to the point and click genre – if it goes well, I can see a real resurgence. I’d certainly be interested in revisiting some of our titles, too.” We can’t wait for the 22nd November to arrive!We’ve now reached a point where it’s near impossible to tell the difference between a mixtape and an album. The price tag attached to it used to be the biggest difference but now with streaming, you’re basically making albums available to your fans for free. Still, as Charli XCX discovered, if you call it a “mixtape” over an “album” your label is more likely to let the public have it faster without all the roadblocks that push back albums. With that in mind, despite it being called a mixtape, Number 1 Angel is an album. In fact, it’s Charli’s best album to date. It picks up on her debut True Romance‘s dark electronic vibes but injects what she’s learnt about top line writing and collaborating to make it a far more mature and invigorating listen. It’s also the latest chapter in her relationship with PC Music, one that started with her SOPHIE-produced EP Vroom Vroom. This record has been predominantly produced by PC Music head A.G. Cook and together they compliment eachother expertly. Cook pushes the instrumental as far towards the experimental as possible while Charli ushers them gently into the pop world. It’s this balance that makes Number 1 Angel so successful. While her previous single After The Afterparty was a glossy, sugar high, this mixtape is much darker. In a way, it’s the aftermath – the point where the afterparty has ended and the loneliness and regret creeps in. On opener Dreamer she’s still in party mode, the tempo is slowing but she’s got her crew, Starrah and RAYE. It’s a pop song but it puts an emphasis on the verses in the same way a rap song does and the three of them lock together effortlessly. It’s after this that things take a turn. She recruits MØ for 3AM (Pull Up), a frustrating track about a late night relationship going around in circles. It’s a perky, glassy backdrop but Charli’s vocals darken the tone as she delivers one of the most emotional verses of the record. MØ’s contribution is just as perfect as the two trade in that same brand of shouty, raw pop. Charli’s collaborations on this record have been chosen so carefully and she bonds with each of them. When she sings, “Go fuck yourself, don’t say you’re sorry,” in the final chorus it feels as if she’s being supported by MØ in the background. If that song made it to radio, it would sound slightly weird but it would gain traction. She’s aiming her songs at the pop world but she’s not going to conform for a quick pop hit (something she’s slightly guilty of with Boom Clap. Several moments on this record make a strong argument for what pop is going to sound like next. Roll With me takes us straight back to ’90s commercial rave music and would likely revolutionise acceptable tempos on the radio while Emotional reinvents the big Sia ballad with far more interesting textures and sounds. There are other moments where she takes the crisp, clean pop format and messes with it so much that it falls into the experimental world. ILY2‘s verses are conventional but the chorus distorts and shreds adding an extra grit to the track. It then ends on a howling guitar solo. It’s these unexpected parts that make the mixtape so thrilling. One of the main criticisms of PC Music is that it sometimes sounds so synthetic that it’s hard to connect to or attach human qualities to. This mixtape is otherworldly but Charli is so direct and personal with her lyrics that she adds the human that Cook’s productions are often bereft of. “We had something that never happened,” she sings on Emotional, exploring the grittiest imperfections in her voice in the same way Rihanna did with so much success on ANTI. “Baby, you’re the love of my life,” she sings on Drugs, piling on the hyperbole but really believing in her own melodrama. Throughout she captures all the frustrations of love in real time from the feeling that you can’t survive without it (Drugs) to the anger when someone screws you over (Blame It On You). She brightens up for the mixtape’s closing parts pulling Uffie out of hiding for the highlight Babygirl. She brings ’80s Californian vibes and dreamlike verses that are just incomprehensibly genius. She’s soft and flirty, juxtaposing Uffie’s harsh, attitude-filled verse. Together, they’ve created what may be the feel-good pop song of the year. She leaves us with the circling rave synths of Lipgloss, handing the verses to CupkKake and proving that pop/hip-hop crossovers don’t always have to be so cut and dried. It’s likely that Charli’s left the radio jams for her forthcoming album but that doesn’t mean this tape is any less delectable. She’s always been a great pop writer but on Sucker it was as if she felt pressure to make things a little more normal as to not scare commercial audiences. Number 1 Angel proves she’s found a way to deliver the hooks and stay weird and wild. She wrote and recorded this over a matter of weeks in LA and the pace she works at means that we’re served up her emotions in real time. She might hate what she’s said here in months to come but it’s so exciting to have an ‘of the moment’ popstar who just wants to set free what she’s working on to move onto the next thing. Number 1 Angel feels restless, energetic and frustrated. That’s the best part about it.The remains of a bed frame in a room on the eastern wing of the Outpatient Department building. KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — In the muted light of a hazy afternoon, the compound was silent. The graying walls of the outer gates, streaked with vertical mud stains, were largely undamaged, belying the devastation within. Torn foliage and broken branches were strewn about the grounds as if a storm had passed through the night before. After days of heavy fighting in Kunduz — and the resulting logistical obstacles — I had arrived at the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Kunduz Trauma Center, or what remained of it. The streets surrounding the compound were deserted and all the wider for the lack of parked cars. Adjacent to the hospital, the gaudy, three-story office buildings with faux bronze colonnades and reflective pink windows had been shuttered, bearing marks where stray bullets had cut into their facades. There wasn’t a person in sight. The quiet was unnerving. Gun battles between the Afghan National Army (ANA) and a small number of Taliban — that had held out since the government counteroffensive was launched 10 days earlier — a few hundred feet away, toward the periphery of Kunduz from the hospital, had gathered momentum through the morning and peaked early in the afternoon. Embedded with the ANA’s 2nd Brigade, I watched on consecutive days as Taliban fighters — invisible but for the pop of their firing rifles — were painstakingly corralled by the soldiers, from mazes of mud-brick homes and light industrial buildings on Kunduz’s outskirts, into the city where, if all went according to plan, other ANA units would encircle them from the north. But by 2 p.m. on Oct. 10, apart from sporadic bursts, the sounds of war had become more distant. By 3 p.m., there was at least a semblance of respite across the south of the city, with only the occasional report of a Kalashnikov. The lull provided a window of opportunity in which to enter the city and access the hospital. A local driver agreed to take me to the site and confirmed the 10-minute drive would now be safe.Genre: Block Breaker Website: https://www.diplopiagame.com/ Maker: James Blaha Release date: End of 2014 Download Page: HERE Game Support: Windows, DK1, DK2 About Diplopia To make it short, it is a virtual reality game designed for people who have amblyopia (lazy eye) and strabismus (crossed eye). It is quite interesting actually as the game developer James Blaha himself suffers from visual disorder named amblyopia. As he discovered the power of Oculus Rift, he got inspired to make a game designed for people like himself. The game itself is very good for visual training, and as it is quite an impressive game, it got 10x more money in IndieGogo than James Blaha initially planned for. If you wish to back it up even more, feel free to donate here. Wish to find more Oculus Rift games like this? Then CLICK HERE!Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) endures as “the quintessential modern genius” for his seminal contributions to science, but he was also a great champion of human rights. In fact, despite having taken a backseat to his scientific legacy, Einstein’s strong humanistic and political convictions are no less notable and revolutionary amid the assumptions of his era. Nowhere do they shine more brilliantly than in his lesser-known exchanges with people of radically different backgrounds and beliefs, always deeply thoughtful, irrepressibly respectful, and driven by an earnest desire for mutual understanding and encouragement — including his conversation with the Indian philosopher Tagore about science and spirituality, his correspondence with Freud about violence, peace, and human nature, and his letter to a little girl in South Africa on why her gender shouldn’t hold her back from pursuing science. Some might assume that Einstein’s compassionate outlook and unflinching commitment to equality were shaped by his own experience of being on the receiving end of history’s deadliest anti-Semitism. When Hitler took over Germany on January 30, 1933 — twelve years after Einstein earned the Nobel Prize, which had already exposed him to anti-Semitism — he had just left Berlin with his wife Elsa to spend their third winter at CalTech, where Einstein had been invited as visiting faculty. The trip may well have saved his life — mere months later, the situation in Germany became inhumane, then gruesomely lethal, for Jews. Finding himself a reluctant refugee, Einstein — whom the great author and physicist C.P. Snow declared “Hitler’s greatest public enemy” — proclaimed in the press: As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance and equality of all citizens before the law prevail. But Einstein’s stance was deeper than the particularities of his own experience and predated that. In 1930, the legendary American author, sociologist, historian, and civil rights icon W.E.B. Du Bois reached out to Einstein for a contribution to The Crisis, the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois had co-founded NAACP in 1909, two decades after becoming the first African-American to receive a doctorate from Harvard, where he had studied under and been greatly influenced by the pioneering philosopher and psychologist William James. Dr. Du Bois’s correspondence with Einstein, included in Einstein on Race and Racism (public library), begins with this magnificently courteous invitation from October 14, 1931 — a sublime manifestation of why Virginia Woolf considered letter writing “the humane art,” and a wistful reminder of how different modern life would be if we corresponded with each other in this way — originally written in German and sent while the scientist was still living in Berlin, where Du Bois had studied on a fellowship during his graduate work: Sir: I am taking the liberty of sending you herewith some copies of THE CRISIS magazine. THE CRISIS is published by American Negroes and in defense of the citizenship rights of 12 million people descended from the former slaves of this country. We have just reached our 21st birthday. I am writing to ask if in the midst of your busy life you could find time to write us a word about the evil of race prejudice in the world. A short statement from you of 500 to 1,000 words on this subject would help us greatly in our continuing fight for freedom. With regard to myself, you will find something about me in “Who’s Who in America.” I was formerly a student of Wagner and Schmoller in the University of Berlin. I should greatly appreciate word from you. Very sincerely yours, W. E. B. Du Bois Two weeks later, 51-year-old Einstein replied, with equal courtesy, in the affirmative: My Dear Sir! Please find enclosed a short contribution for your newspaper. Because of my excessive workload I could not send a longer explanation. With Distinguished respect, Albert Einstein Du Bois translated Einstein’s essay himself and introduced it in The Crisis with the following laudatory “Note from the Editor”: The author, Albert Einstein, is a Jew of German nationality. He was born in Wurttemburg in 1879 and educated in Switzerland. He has been Professor of Physics at Zurich and Prague and is at present director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Physical Institute at Berlin. He is a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science and of the British Royal Society. He received the Nobel Prize in 1921 and the Copley Medal in 1925. Einstein is a genius in higher physics and ranks with Copernicus, Newton and Kepler. His famous theory of Relativity, advanced first in 1905, is revolutionizing our explanation of physical phenomenon and our conception of Motion, Time and Space. But Professor Einstein is not a mere mathematical mind. He is a living being, sympathetic with all human advance. He is a brilliant advocate of disarmament and world Peace and he hates race prejudice because as a Jew he knows what it is. At our request, he has sent this word to THE CRISIS with “Ausgezeichneter Hochachtung” (“Distinguished respect”). Although titled “To the American Negro” — a phrase confined to both specific geography and, by virtue of its dated language, a bygone era — Einstein’s short essay bears enduring resonance for all varieties of oppression, discrimination, and the woeful pathology of in-group/out-group polarization to which humanity is so easily susceptible. (Another duo of humanists, Tolstoy and Gandhi
Pakistan to change its ‘paradoxical’ policy of supporting the militants who are causing the country great losses. In an interview to a conservative radio host, Hugh Hewitt, Mr McMaster also defended President Trump’s strategy on winning the war in Afghanistan by giving unrestricted powers to the US military based in the war-torn country. US officials have often accused Pakistan of helping the militants, a charge Islamabad vehemently denies, but this marks the first time that the allegation has been attributed to President Trump. “The president has also made clear that we need to see a change in behaviour of those in the region, which includes those who are providing safe haven and support bases for the Taliban, Haqqani Network and others,” Mr McMaster said. “This is Pakistan in particular that we want to really see a change in and a reduction of their support for these groups. I mean, this is of course, you know, a very paradoxical situation where Pakistan is taking great losses. They have fought very hard against these groups, but they’ve done so really only selectively,” he added. Commenting on Mr Trump’s decision to win the Afghan war, Gen McMaster said: The president has said that, “He does not want to place restrictions on the military that undermine our ability to win battles in combat.” “He has lifted those restrictions, and you’re beginning to see the payoff of that — as well.” The US media reported earlier this week that in a July 19 meeting at the White House, President Trump berated his generals for not winning the war in Afghanistan and for allowing it to continue for more than 16 years. He also criticised a team of national security consultants tasked with crafting a new winning strategy for Afghanistan for failing to do so. At the same meeting, President Trump also “repeatedly suggested” to his senior military advisers that they should replace Gen John Nicholson, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, with a new general who could win the war. But Gen McMaster seems to disagree with this suggestion. Asked if he had confidence in Gen Nicholson, he said: “Of course. I’ve known him for many years. I can’t imagine a more capable commander on any mission.” Although the White House has not announced a comprehensive strategy on Afghanistan yet, Mr McMaster said “the president’s already made some important decisions on Afghanistan”. He said Mr Trump does not necessarily want to telegraph his intentions but “you’ve heard in pieces” the strategy that he wants to implement in Afghanistan. “What we’re endeavouring to do is pull this all together in a regional strategy that makes sense,” he said. President Trump has authorised the Pentagon to take the lead on military decisions in Afghanistan, although he formed a separate team of experts to form the new Afghan policy. Gen McMaster defended the campaign in Afghanistan, arguing they had seen “tremendous” success in the country. “There’s a tremendously successful campaign going on with Afghan forces in the lead. It’s an unreported campaign in Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan,” Mr McMaster said. He said Mr Trump disagrees with the Obama administration’s strategy of announcing everything, from US deaths in Afghanistan to the deadlines for sending in or pulling out American troops from there. “And so the president has said, ‘that is not the way to fight a war. It never has been’. This is an invention of recent years,” Mr McMaster said. Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2017“The three Bharatas seamlessly united … the land itself in political and cultural unity.” – Sandhya Jain Bharatavarsha is encompassed from north to south by Sagarmatha, forehead of the ocean, a beautiful epithet for the tallest Himalayan peak, and Hind Mahasagar, the Indian Ocean. Famed as a divine creation, it is the bhumi of the Bharatas, hallowed by its sacred geography and the great souls who have guided her spiritual ascent and steered her civilizational destiny. Bharatavarsha literally means the continent (varsha) that is dedicated (rata) to light, wisdom (bha). Our Vedic Rishis devoted themselves to the quest for the eternal truth and ultimate reality, kevala jnana, satchidananda. The Bharatas were a venerable and ancient tribe mentioned in the Rig Veda, particularly in Mandala 3 of Bharata Rishi Vishwamitra. Mandala 7 says the Bharatas were on the victorious side in the Battle of the Ten Kings. There were three personifications of “Bharata” in Hindu tradition, one each in the first three yugas, or time cycles. Together they are regarded as the epitome of the civilisational values of the Sanatana Dharma. Bharata of the Satyuga The first Bharata was born in the Satyuga as the son of Rshabdeva, first among recognized ancient sages. The Jaina community traces its spiritual lineage from Rshabhdeva, designated as the first Tirthankara; he is also known as Adinath, and synonymous with Siva, the foremost yogi of the Hindu tradition. Jinasena’s Adipurana says three great events occurred simultaneously in Jaina history: Rsabhdeva attained enlightenment and became the first Jina; the cakra (wheel) appeared in the armoury of his son Bharata and proclaimed him a cakravartin (emperor); and a son was born to Bharata, ensuring continuation of the Iksvaku dynasty founded by Rsabhdeva. Elaborating the multiple rebirths of father and son in the bhogabhumi (world of enjoyment) where salvation is not possible, the Adipurana explains their evolution to karmabhumi (world of karma) where the law of retribution operates and men follow different occupations (karman). Rsabhdeva created the Ksatriya, Vaisya, and Sudra castes; Bharata later created Brahmanas and appointed kings. The duty of the cakravartin is total conquest of all the directions (digvijaya) by means of superior moral and political powers, to unite the country under a single moral kingdom and prevent anarchy. Readers will note that the cakravartin is not merely an ideal ruler, but a powerful ancient political concept, inspired by a vision of the Hindu bhumi as a unity which was not belied by the presence of multiple centres of political power. That is why civilisational values permeated the whole land and gave the tradition its abiding continuity. As first cakravartin, Bharata, fasted, meditated, performed puja and followed the cakra symbolizing his kingship as it moved of its own accord to various parts of the country. He paused to perform pradaksina in Saurastra, where the Jina Aristanemi (cousin of Sri Krishna) would be born, all the while circling Ayodhya, centre of Aryavarta (land of the Arya, noble ones). Bharata thus subjugated rival kings and punished those who taxed their subjects excessively. His digvijaya was accomplished without violence, through innate capability, on account of punya (merit) acquired in previous lives through practice of Jaina precepts. He exemplified the virtues of compassion (daya), divine wisdom (Brahma-jñana) and penance (tapas). Bharata of the Tretayuga The second Bharata was born in the Tretayuga as the son of King Dasaratha of Ayodhya, and younger brother of Sri Rama. He embodied the virtues of love (prema), devotion (bhakti), and brotherhood (bandhutva). The story of the Ramayana is well-known, but briefly, Keikeyi, the second wife of King Dasaratha, schemes to have the heir apparent, Sri Rama, sent into exile for fourteen years, and her own son, Bharata, appointed crown prince in his place. Rama, accompanied by his brother Lakshman, and wife Sita, departs immediately and the grief-stricken Dasaratha passes away soon afterwards. Bharata, then on a visit to his maternal grandfather’s kingdom in Gandhara, returns only to learn of his father’s tragic demise and brother’s unfair exile. Tortured further by the thought that he could be considered complicit in this palace conspiracy, he decides—unswervingly—not to accept the throne. He then leads the people to the forest to persuade Rama to return. This political renunciation of a kingdom won illegitimately is a unique Hindu ethic. Bharata is regarded as the symbol of dharma and idealism, second only to Sri Rama. To this day, he is revered for his adherence to family values, truth, righteousness, filial love and duty. When Sri Rama refused to return to Ayodhya as rightful king, Bharata, at the intervention of Sita’s father, King Janaka, accepted the onerous duty of facilitating Rama to live righteously, i.e., in exile for fourteen years. He vowed to immolate himself if Rama did not return immediately at the end of the exile period and ascend his throne. Agreeing to govern Ayodhya only as regent, he placed Sri Rama’s sandals at the foot of the royal throne as the symbol of His kingship. Bharata of the Dwaparyuga The third Bharata was born in the Dwaparyuga as the son of Shakuntala and King Dushyant. Their story is part of the Mahabharata narrative, but it was Kalidasa who immortalized their love in Abhigyan Shakuntalam. Shakuntala was the daughter of Rishi Vishvamitra and the apsara Menaka, who was sent by Indra to distract the sage. Menaka returned to heaven, and her daughter was raised in the hermitage of Rishi Kanva. King Dushyant was the youngest son of King Puru, who had sacrificed his youth for his father, King Yayati. He founded the Paurava dynasty. Dushyant was hunting in the forest when, following a wounded deer into the hermitage of Rishi Kanva, he found Shakuntala nursing the animal. He fell in love and they married secretly in the Gandharva style, being their own witnesses. The king gave her a ring as token of his love and to establish her identity as his wife. Sadly, Shakuntala lost the ring and the king refused to accept her; she retired to the forest and gave birth to Bharata, who grew up so bold and fearless that he played with lions. Some years later, the ring was found and Dushyant brought Shakuntala and Bharat to Pratishthan, where Bharata later became king. Bharata is regarded as the greatest king of India, who lent his name to the country. He had nine sons, but deemed none of them fit to succeed him, and hence adopted a capable child as future ruler. Bharata personified the values of service (seva), valour (shaurya), and charity (dana). Eternal values, eternal tradition Thus the three Bharatas (two kings, one prince) seamlessly united the Satayuga, Tretayuga and Dwaparayuga and the land itself in political and cultural unity. They exemplified three ideals each that permeated Hindu civilisation and form its core values to this day. Rsabhdeva’s son Bharata gave us daya, Brahma-jñana and tapas; Dasaratha’s son Bharata gave us prema, bhakti, and bandhutva; and Dushyanta-Shakuntala’s son Bharata gave us seva, shaurya and dana. Their sterling qualities raised a landmass to divine bhumi—Bharat Mata, mother of the Bharata people. This explains the Hindu anguish and anger over M. F. Husain’s exceedingly vulgar imagery of the Eternal Mother. Hindus impart these nine values to every generation. The jeneu ceremony marking the transition from childhood to youth revolves around this value system. The youth bestowed the sacred thread takes nine vows; each vow is represented as a knot that binds the three separate strands of the jeneu. The jeneu was therefore a great privilege, bestowed upon conscious Hindus. Today Hindu gurus are extending its reach to all sections of society, shattering mindsets and barriers, and raising the whole population to higher awareness about the responsibilities of religion and culture. Useful idiots All this should nail the lie—peddled incessantly by Western Abrahamic so-called scholars and a modern “caste” designated by some as Useful Indian Idiots—that India was not a nation until the British made it so; that Hindu dharma is not a religion but an assorted collection of “cults” (whatever that means) and beliefs of folk origin (whatever that means too—who’s going to ask, anyway?). We have only to look at ourselves as our Vedic Rishis and Gurus did—as children of the Himalayas, the Ganga, Yamuna, Narmada, Krishna, Godavari, down to Kanyakumari. According to the distinguished scholar, Prof. Lokesh Chandra, the eternal significance of Adi Sankara is that in establishing mathams in the four corners of India, he also established the sacred geography of the four directions and united the country in common pilgrimage and cohesive culture at a time of grave danger. As we look back, some things startle the mind. The ancient seers travelled extraordinary distances, covering every nook and corner of the country and every community howsoever remote, and uniting them in a complex religious and cultural matrix that endures to this day. But more extraordinary is the fact that the ancient world seems to have had singular communicative skills. In the absence of what is called a common language (read English), a villager from Kerala could traverse the land and dominate the civilisation for over a thousand years, Marathi poets from the Deccan could settle in Punjab, a Guru from Punjab could reach Karnataka and Patna, one born in Gujarat could dominate north India. No one felt alien, or homeless, or misunderstood. This is surely one of the most enduring mysteries of the Sanatana Dharma. » Sandhya Jain is a writer of political and contemporary affairs and writes a fortnightly column for The Pioneer, New Delhi. She edits an opinions forum at Vijayvaani.Veterinary Advice Online - Ferret Sexing. Ferrets are pretty darn easy to sex to be quite honest, even for amateur ferret keepers, making this ferret sexing page somewhat of an unnecessary addition to this website.Still, for those of you who "just want to be sure", this page on sexing ferrets should make it easy for you to determine the gender of your ferret friends. This page contains everything you, the pet owner, need to know about sexing male (hob or jack) and female (jill) ferrets. Information provided on this ferret sexing page is supported by a number of helpful picturesand photographs that clearly illustrate how to distinguish the boys from the girls. Ferret sexing topics are covered in the following order: 1. Some basic dos and do nots when handling and sexing ferrets for the first time. 2. Ferret Sexing - How to tell male ferrets from female ferrets. 3. Female ferrets who come into heat and stay in heat can die - an important health message for all ferret keepers. WARNING - IN THE INTERESTS OF PROVIDING YOU WITH COMPLETE AND DETAILED INFORMATION, THIS FERRET SEXING PAGE DOES CONTAIN IMAGES AND PHOTOS OF FERRET ANATOMY THAT SENSITIVE READERS MAY POTENTIALLY FIND EXPLICIT. 1. Some basic dos and do nots when handling and sexing ferrets for the first time. There is not too much that can go wrong when attempting to determine the sex of ferrets, aside from the sexergetting bitten, however, I will draw your attention to a couple of important ferret-handling dos and do nots, which shouldbe taken into consideration. DO: Handle your ferret gently and quietly. Ferrets may bite if they are alarmed or hurt by the handler. Perform ferret sexing or any ferret examination on the floor or on a very low table (e.g. short coffee table). This way, if the animal struggles or bites and gets away, no injury will occur as a result of the animal falling from a great height. Rest ferrets on a clean towel on their backs or rumps (holding them firmly and gently such that they are comfortable, but cannot escape or bite) or hold them cupped in your hands on their backs to examine their genitals. Ferret genitalia is more easily examined when the animal is sitting on its bottom or back. It can help to have a person hold the ferret for you (handling the head and body), freeing up your hands to hold the back legs and examine the genitalia. Ferrets are strong and some can be too wriggly and squirmy for one person to sex on their own! Exceptionally tricky or bitey ferrets can be wrapped in a towel (loosely wrap the upper, bitey half of the ferret in the towel, leaving the belly and hindlegs free), enabling you to handle the hindlegs and genitals without getting bitten. Wriggly, non-bitey ferrets can be wrapped in a towel, as described above, however this kind of man-handling is not usually necessary. Nice, but wriggly, ferrets are usually able to be distracted with food or Nutrigel (a tasty vitamin paste), keeping them still enough for you to examine their bellies and bottoms. Where possible, wait until ferrets are over 4-6 weeks of age (weaning age) before trying to determine their gender. This will reduce the risk of the mother ferret rejecting her newborn ferret babies because of your smell. 4-6 weeks of age (weaning age) before trying to determine their gender. This will reduce the risk of the mother ferret rejecting her newborn ferret babies because of your smell. If you must handle young pups, do put them back with their mother immediately if they become distressed from handling. If you have to handle and sex newborn ferrets, wear disposable gloves (so you don't pass any diseases on to them) and do so in a warm area and for no more than 5 minutes at a time so that they do not get cold and distressed. to handle and sex newborn ferrets, wear disposable gloves (so you don't pass any diseases on to them) and do so in a warm area and for no more than 5 minutes at a time so that they do not get cold and distressed. Wear disposable gloves if handling newly-acquired ferrets whose background (history, where they came from and so on) is unknown, particularly if they show any signs of skin sores, hair loss (bald spots), scaly skin, snuffles, respiratory disease, diarrhea or neurological disease or if you already have healthy ferrets at home. Ferrets can carry a range of diseases that are contagious to humans and other ferrets (e.g. mange, mites, ringworm, influenza, distemper and so on) and wearing gloves will help to reduce disease transmission. There is not too much that can go wrong when attempting to determine the sex of ferrets, aside from the sexergetting bitten, however, I will draw your attention to a couple of important ferret-handling dos and do nots, which shouldbe taken into consideration. DO NOT: Handle ferrets roughly. You can hurt them and they can and will bite you. Pick ferrets up by their tails or hang them by their tails (they are not mice!). This is cruel and unnecessary. Handle newborn ferret pups (pups under 4 weeks of age) if you can avoid it. Mother ferrets (especially new mothers) can become uncertain of their new puppies if you handle them too much and get your human smell all over them. This can potentially lead to the mother ferret rejecting her pups. ferret pups (pups under 4 weeks of age) if you can avoid it. Mother ferrets (especially new mothers) can become uncertain of their new puppies if you handle them too much and get your human smell all over them. This can potentially lead to the mother ferret rejecting her pups. Handle pups if they are still suckling (not yet weaned) and their mother is clearly distressed by you handling them. This can result in bites and rejected puppies. Handle newborn puppies (<3 weeks old) for long periods of time. They can become cold away from the nest. Hold ferrets loosely or leave them unattended on elevated surfaces. They will dash off a high table or bench top if frightened, leading to severe injury. Attempt to expose or pull out the penis of prepubescent male ferrets (hobs under 6 months of age). Such animals are not capable of exposing their penis and attempting to do so forcibly can damage the penis. 2. Ferret Sexing - How to tell male ferrets (hobs or jacks) from female ferrets (jills). The best way to determine the sex of male and female ferrets is to rest the animals ontheir backs or rumps on a warm towel or hold them cradled on their backs in your hands and examine their bellies and genitals. Ferret genitalia is more easily examined when the animal is sitting on its bottom or back. It can help to have a person hold the ferret for you (handling the head and body), freeing up your hands to hold the back legs and examine the genitalia. There are several differences that exist between male and female ferrets, even newborn ferrets, which you can look out for when sexing ferrets. Important note - only keep ferrets on their backs for a short period of time: just long enough for you to determine their sex. Keeping them on their backs too long can be distressing to them and even nice ferretsmight bite you under these conditions. 1. Male ferrets are larger than female ferrets. The body of male ferrets is generally larger in size and bulk than that of female ferrets (comparingferrets of the same age, of course). Males tend to have more body muscle and much larger, wider, rounder heads than females. Females tend to have narrower, daintier heads, with thinner, pointier noses. Ferret sexing pictures: These are photos of two young ferrets. Their age is the same. The male ferretis the larger animal (white fur) with the longer, wider body and bigger head. The smaller, narrower ferret is the female (the animal with the brownish sable "polecat" coloration). The best way to determine the sex of male and female ferrets is to rest the animals ontheir backs or rumps on a warm towel or hold them cradled on their backs in your hands and examine their bellies and genitals. Ferret genitalia is more easily examined when the animal is sitting on its bottom or back. It can help to have a person hold the ferret for you (handling the head and body), freeing up your hands to hold the back legs and examine the genitalia. There are several differences that exist between male and female ferrets, even newborn ferrets, which you can look out for when sexing ferrets.- only keep ferrets on their backs for a short period of time: just long enough for you to determine their sex. Keeping them on their backs too long can be distressing to them and even nice ferretsmight bite you under these conditions.The body of male ferrets is generally larger in size and bulk than that of female ferrets (comparingferrets of the same age, of course). Males tend to have more body muscle and much larger, wider, rounder heads than females. Females tend to have narrower, daintier heads, with thinner, pointier noses.These are photos of two young ferrets. Their age is the same. The male ferretis the larger animal (white fur) with the longer, wider body and bigger head. The smaller, narrower ferret is the female (the animal with the brownish sable "polecat" coloration). Ferret sexing images: These are photos of two young ferrets. Their age is the same. The male ferretis the larger animal (white fur) with the longer, wider body and bigger head. The smaller, narrower ferret is the female (the animal with the brownish sable "polecat" colouration). Ferret sexing - male: These are photos of the head of a large entire male ferret. The first photois a front-on image showing the broad, round face of the male ferret. The second photo showsthe slightly arched, 'Roman nose' of the male ferret. Ferret sexing - female: This is a photograph image of the head of an entire female ferret.Her head is small and her nose appears 'pointy' and narrow in profile. 2. Male ferrets have a penis in the middle of their belly and two testicles located beneath their anus. Females do not. This is all pretty self-explanatory. The belly of the female ferret is smooth, whereas the male ferret hasa small, raised, pointed penis in the middle of its tummy. The penis of the male ferret is easiest to spot whenthe ferret is placed on its back. The fur surrounding the male ferret's penis is often stained dark brown or yellow. This staining may be the result of: natural fur colouration, urine residues, moist yeast over-growth and/or licking activities (the ferret licking and grooming the penis region). The male ferret has a pair of marble-sized testicles contained within a furred scrotal sac locatedimmediately beneath the anus. These testicles are easily seen when the ferret is placedon its back. The female ferret does not have any testicles (obviously). Instead of testicles, the genital opening (vulva) of the female ferret is located in this region just beneath the animal's anus. The vulva of thefemale ferret appears as a vertical slit-like opening (the entrance to the vagina). If the ferretis not in heat, the skin of the vulval opening is flat and flush with the surrounding skin. If the ferret is in heat (estrus),the skin of the vulval opening swells massively, rising well above the level of the surrounding skin(the swollen vulval tissue looks like a giant, swollen 'donut' surrounding the vaginal opening). Note - The male ferret's penis and testicles are most easily seen and photographed when the belly ofthe ferret is shaved (e.g. prior to desexing surgery). As a ferret owner, you should not need to shave the animal'sbelly to determine its sex (you can usually find the penis by looking through the ferret's belly fur and by feeling the belly skinwith your fingers). I have, however, included pre-surgical images of male and female ferrets with shaved tummiesto more clearly illustrate the differences that exist between the two sexes. Ferret sexing - Male (hob) ferret pictures: Ferret sexing pictures: This male ferret has been anesthetized ready for neutering surgery. This is a photo taken of him laying on the preparation table just prior to clipping. No fur hasyet been clipped away, but his penis and testicles are clearly evident through the hair. Sexing ferrets images: This male (hob) ferret has been anaesthetised ready for desexing surgery. This is a close-up photo of his belly and genital region taken just prior to clipping. No fur hasyet been clipped away, but the penis and testicles are clearly evident through the hair. The prepuce(sheath protecting the penis) skin is raised into a small point in the middle of the belly. The fur around thispenis region is colored dark brown (either staining or just the natural color of the fur in this case). The testiclesare marble-sized and contained within a furred scrotal sac located just beneath the animal's anus. Ferret sexing images: This is a different ferret to the one seen in the images above. This male (hob) ferret was not anaesthetised for this photo - he was a nice boy who was very happy to rest on his back in someone's arms. This is a close-up photo of his belly and genital region. The penis and testes are clearly evident through the hair. The prepuce (sheath protecting the penis) skin is raised into a small point in the centre of the belly. The fur around thispenis region is coloured dark brown (either staining or just the natural colour of the fur in this case). The testiclesare marble-sized and contained within a furred scrotal sac located just beneath the animal's anus. Sexing ferrets photos: In this picture, the ferret's testicles have been raised to show their closeproximity to the animal's anus. Ferret sexing pics: This male (hob) ferret has been anaesthetised ready for desexing surgery. This is a photo of his belly and genital region taken just after clipping. The fur hasbeen clipped away from his scrotum (i.e. the skin covering the two testicles), but not his penis. The two round balls that are the testicles are now clearly evident within their scrotal skin covering. The testicles are marble-sized and contained within a scrotal sac located just beneath the animal's anus. Ferret sexing images: This is a close-up photo of the above ferret's genital region, taken just after clipping. The fur has been clipped away from the scrotum (i.e. the skin covering the two testicles)and the two round balls that are the testicles are now clearly evident within their scrotal skin covering. The testicles are marble-sized and contained within a scrotal sac located just beneath the animal's anus. The second ferret sexing image shows the testicles being elevated within their scrotal covering. The image gives you some idea of the roundness and size of the two testes located within the scrotal sac. Sexing ferrets pictures: This is a different male (hob) ferret who has just been anaesthetised ready for neutering surgery. This is a side view of his belly and genital region, taken just after clipping. In this instance, the fur has been clipped away from his scrotum (i.e. the skin covering the two testicles)and from around his penis sheath. Although it is not usually typical for the penis fur to be removedfor this surgery, the clip does show off the raised, pointed shape of the ferret penis (prepuce) quite nicely. The two round balls that are the testicles are now clearly evident within their scrotal skin covering. The testicles are marble-sized and contained within a scrotal sac located just beneath the animal's anus. Ferret sexing photographs: This is a close-up side view of the above ferret's belly and genital region, taken just after clipping. In this instance, the fur has been clipped away from the scrotum (i.e. the skin covering the two testicles)and from around the penis sheath. Although it is not usually typical for the penis fur to be removedfor this surgery, the clip does show off the raised, pointed shape of the ferret penis sheath (prepuce) quite nicely (in particular, look at image 3 for a close-up view of the prepuce). The two round balls that are the testicles are clearly evident within their scrotal skin covering. The testicles are marble-sized and contained within a scrotal sac located just beneath the animal's anus. The skin over the testicles appears orange in theseimages because the animal's skin has been prepared for surgery using a povidone-iodine surgical solution. Ferret sexing pictures: This is a photo of the above male (hob) ferret taken from a different angle.As before, the fur has been clipped away from the ferret's scrotum (i.e. the skin covering the two testicles)and from around his penis sheath. Although it is not usually typical for the penis fur to be removedfor this surgery, the clip does show off the raised, pointed shape of the ferret's penis (prepuce) quite nicely. The two round balls that are the testicles are clearly evident within their scrotal skin covering. The testicles are marble-sized and contained within a scrotal sac located just beneath the animal's anus. Ferret sexing images: This is a close-up magnification of the above male (hob) ferret photo. The image shows off the raised, pointed shape of the ferret's penis (prepuce) quite nicely. The two round balls that are the testicles are clearly evident within their scrotal skin covering. The testicles are marble-sized and contained within a scrotal sac located just beneath the animal's anus.As discussed previously, the skin over the testicles appears orange in theseimages because the animal's skin has been prepared for surgery using a povidone-iodine surgical solution. Ferret sexing cryptorchidism pictures: This ferret only has a single testicle present within its scrotalsac. This is because the animal is a cryptorchid with a retained second testicle (testis held inside of its abdomen). For info on cryptorchidism, see our cryptorchidism page. Ferret sexing - Female (jill) ferret pictures: Ferret sexing images: These are photos of a female ferret. This female (jill) ferret was not anaesthetised for these photos. Although not the most compliant of patients (very wriggly), this ferret was a nice girl who was quite happy to recline on her back once there was an extra pair-of-hands available to cradle her body. A second person was needed to hold her back feet so that her belly could be clipped. The belly clipping was not performed to spay her, but to look for evidence of skin bruising (a possible side effect of her being heavily in-heat - see next section). These are close-up photosof her clipped belly. Unlike the male's, the female ferret's belly is smooth and there are no testicles. Ferret sexing photographs: These are close-up photos of the clipped belly of a female ferret.Unlike the male's, the female ferret's belly is smooth and there are no testicles. The grayish dot in the centreof the belly is the animal's umbilicus (belly button or navel). Ferret gender determination photographs: These are photos of the anus and vulva of a female ferret.The female ferret does not have any testicles (obviously). Instead of testicles, the genital opening (vulva) of the female ferret is located just below the animal's anus. The vulva of thefemale ferret appears as a vertical slit-like opening (the entrance to the vagina). If the ferretis not in heat, as seen in the above images, the skin of the vulval opening is flat and flush with the surrounding skin. Ferret sexing pictures: These are close-up photos of the anus and vulva of a female ferret.The female ferret does not have any testicles (obviously). Instead of testicles, the genital opening (vulva) of the female ferret is located just below the animal's anus. The vulva of thefemale ferret appears as a vertical slit-like opening (the entrance to the vagina). If the ferretis not in heat, as seen in the above images, the skin of the vulval opening is flat and flush with the surrounding skin. Ferret gender determination images: These are photos of the belly and vulva of a female ferret who isin heat (in estrus). As discussed previously, the female ferret's belly is smooth with no penis or testicles.The genital opening (vulva) of the female ferret is located just below the animal's anus. The vulva of thefemale ferret appears as a vertical slit-like opening (the entrance to the vagina). If the ferret is in heat, as seen in the images above, the skin of the vulval opening becomes massively swollen, rising well above the level of the surrounding skin(the swollen tissue looks like a giant, swollen 'donut' surrounding the vaginal opening). Ferret sexing pics: These are close-up photos of the anus and vulva of an in-season female ferret(ferret in heat or in estrus). The skin of the vulval opening is massively swollen, rising well above the level of the surrounding skin (the swollen tissue looks like a giant, swollen 'donut' surrounding the vaginal opening). This is proof that the animal is in estrous (heat) and ready for mating. 3. Female ferrets who come into heat and stay in heat can die - an important health message for all ferret keepers. Female ferrets are induced ovulators, which means that they ovulate eggs from their ovaries only when stimulated to do so by the friction of mating (i.e. during copulation). In the absence of such mating activity (e.g. an undesexed female ferret kept as a pet without the presence of a male ferret), an entire female ferret who comes into heat will generally remain in heat for very long periods of time. You should be able to tell if your female ferret is in heat because she will have a persistently swollen and enlarged vulval opening (i.e. donut-shaped perivulval skin swelling) like the one seen in the ferret sexing image opposite. This persistent heat (estrus), in the absence of mating, is very dangerous for the female ferret should she be allowed to remain in heat for a prolonged period of time (i.e. should she be given no opportunity to mate and, by doing so, ovulate her eggs and go out of heat). The ripe ovarian follicle/s (the follicle/s that require the stimulation of mating before it/they can be ovulated) secrete massive amounts of estrogen. Whilst this estrogen is the essential 'female' hormone that causes the female ferret to "show the signs of heat" (e.g. swollen vulva, attraction to male ferrets) and stand to be mated by the male of the species, it is also toxic inextreme and prolonged doses (i.e. as seen in a female ferret who is in heat for too long). Estrogenat toxic levels causes thinning of the fur (especially in the tail-base region) and, most critically, bone marrow suppression. The estrogen stops the bone marrow from making red blood cells (which carry oxygenaround the body); white blood cells (which fight disease, cancer and infection) and plate
the final revised rules we are still working on. The updated rules will be posted as soon as they are complete. Mayday is taking a significant step up with this project, we're talking molds, plastic minutures, full scale production with an expansion to boot. We had a serious thing for this game and really want to get it out to YOU before Christmas. We have most of our clams tied up in other projects and need your help to speed things down the road. Please be our Darb and get some slick rewards in the process! We aren't just bringing a hit game out of Al Capone's vault or anything, we're talking about taking this game to the next level including: We also have some updated variants to take out some of the luck if you just can't leave your fate in the hands of the dice. Just addressing the issue of the plastic pieces and improving the visibility of the numbers on the trucks is a big expense. We're really doing the WORKS on this game it doesn't come cheap. We have already secured the license from the designers, the agreement with the former publisher and the artwork. We need your help to help with the molds, finalizing the artwork and printing the game. This game was produced in its first form way back in 2004 and has been out of print and in limbo for years. We had to get the designers on board with us bringing it out of obscurity, and then get some legal hurdles out of the way due to some contracts and things. It's all very technical but let us tell you, it was the most complicated process we've ever been through for a game! We're so excited to even have this chance! "The theme (which is obviously about bootlegging) is extremely strong, and the game is fair and balanced with some interesting mechanics... a successful blend of American theme with a “German” game, to produce something that is quick and fun with tremendous components. Fun Factor: Bootleggers was pure fun. The guys from SDR games have really produced some fun rules, and the bits... are just fantastic. It may sound silly to you, driving trucks around, and having turf wars with henchmen; but it really is a lot of fun, especially combined with good mechanics. No one will call this game dry, boring, or over analytical. But at the same time, I can’t see anyone calling it luck-driven, random, or chaotic. Bootleggers is an excellent American-themed game that should appeal to Euro gamers." -Tom Vasel, The Dice Tower "Bootleggers is a party favorite. I've been to at least three different parties where we played this wacky gangster throw-down. The rules take a little explaining, but once you get going, it makes sense and is really easy to play." Drakes Flames Game Reviews "[I]t’s a heck of a lot of fun. Gamers who get their thrills by sticking it to ‘The Man’ while selling (then) illegal hooch that’s as good in a gas tank as someone’s gullet, gamers who enjoy posing with a Tommy gun that holds a 50-round drum magazine while riding on the rickety wooden boards of an “a-WOO-gah” kind of truck while clanking down side roads to the accompaniment of clinking bottles of said hooch packed in crates in the back to make thousands in illicit dough while reading long rambling sentences, you’ll love this game as much as I did, so read on. (Breathe.)" Scott Parrino, Wargamer.com "Bootleggers is a ton of fun. As long as an adult who knows the rules is playing, there is no reason younger kids could not join in. My eight-year-old daughter won the first two games we played, and both my children are continually pestering me to play again. I generally give in without much persuasion, because I have enjoyed playing Bootleggers. Once the complexity wears off, Bootleggers is a fun game of selling booze and shooting people that I can play with my kids. And that is just about the best of both worlds." RPG.net Review 10/10: "This is a tremendous game. Theme is just oozing all over the place. The game play is excellent. I love the free form negotiation (even though I'm not that good at it), and having an opponent reneging on a promise bites, but fits with the theme. Highly Recommended." -Simon Hunt, BGG 10/10: "This game reached the pinnacle of greatness when I was able to simultaneously extort a player for money and then turn around and screw him over anyway. Bwahahaha!! Of course, then my wife turned around and did the exact same thing to me in a later game. Gah! Within a few necessary guidelines, pretty much anything goes. Use your imagination. The more people get into this, the more fun it is. Five and six player gaming at its finest. Just make sure everyone is aware of the overwhelming power of a player who Controls a larger speakeasy and is getting the profit for several turns. It's very easy for someone to run away with the game if others aren't careful." -Jason Nachtrab, BGG 9.5/10: "This game has a lot going for it -- Euro-style multiple phase per turn mechanics; lots of high quality components; a well-written, colorful, humorous, example-filled rule book that covers every rule clearly; and plenty of theme. This is a game where you literally load a toy truck with crates of whiskey and back it up to the Speakeasy docks! Most important, Bootleggers has more interaction than most games with almost unrestricted negotiation, and this part is key: the game promotes screwing over your opponents! It's flat-out fun. The only thing that keeps it from getting a 10 is the amount of randomness due to the use of dice, but I really can't come up with any improvements for this excellent game." -Bill Jones, BGG 9/10: "Fun game. There is a nice depth to the economic system here, similar to something like Puerto Rico, but the dice and cards add a little more forgiveness to the system. I think that, along with the theme, make this a good game to try out on non-gamers who want something deeper than Ticket To Ride." BoB3K, BGG There are tons and tons of other reviews and praise for the game, but you get the idea! If you are putting in your hard-earned money to support this project then you deserve some special thanks! Here is what you'll get if you pledge at the "Hair of the Dog" or higher level: For starters you are getting the game shipped to you at least three weeks before anyone else! This is including distributors, retailers, anyone! We will not be sending these to anyone else until 3 weeks after all Kickstarter shipments have shipped out, period! Every copy of the game from Kickstarter will come with a limited edition poster of the original art sketch by Paul Neimeyer. The poster will not be Kickstarter exclusive, but late adopters will have to pay a little extra, while you get it early and for FREE! Here is a proof of what the poster will look like. Note actual poster may be slightly different. You will get two promo bonus cards! These are "mystery" cards for now but we will unlock them during the kickstarter campaign. The promo will not be Kickstarter exclusive, but late adopters will have to pay a little extra, while you get it early and for FREE! You can get the never-before seen expansion "The Boardwalk" and can even get in on some early bird discounts if you're fast. This much anticipated expansion has been in the works for several years and we are happy to finally offer it! We will post the rulebook and further details as they become available but here is a little taste of the Expansion: Projected Game Components in Expansion: Casinos – Casino Upgrades will be available to replace Speakeasy locations. Casino Cards – New Men of Action cards to be used with the casinos Entertainment Act Tiles – Casino improvements. At any point in the game, should a player have the money, a speakeasy may be redeveloped into an upscale casino. That player abandons their trucks and stills to operate the casino for the rest of the game. Minor enhancements to the original rules integrate casinos into the gameplay of Bootleggers. This is only a draft version as the final details of the expansion are still being finalized. Actual expansion may vary! We are also offering 25 limited edition, signed by Paul Niemeyer prints of the original pencil artwork of the "Copper" from the game. Paul did this years ago and will be releasing just 25 of these for the Kickstarter. Paul's sketch really captures the feel of the game and will look really sharp! Here is a sample of the art: We also have some choice rewards planned for stretch goals and some real humdingers too! Some more promo cards and a few other things up our sleeves! So kick in now and help make this project a success! ________________________ UPDATE July 20: Stretch Rewards Details! ________________________ We have been overwhelmed with the support for this project, with 2 weeks to go we are about 90% of the way there, so it looks very promising. We are happy to announce that if we make it to the $20,000 goal that we will be including 4 extra bonus cards in for every backer at every level who is getting at least the expansion or above. For those at the $55 or above level we are also going to include 2 free packs of Mayday Brand card sleeves, enough to sleeve the entire game + lots extra. For a stretch reward if we can reach $25,000 we will be adding 4 more bonus cards, for a total of 8 bonus cards. We will post more details soon but wanted to let everyone know we have some great things in store!By Joe Alton, MD and Amy Alton, ARNP Home canning is a great way to have good things to eat, even in the coldest of winters, and more and more people are learning this useful skill. Indeed, Jarden Home Brands, which makes Ball canning jars, saw a 30 percent increase in sales last year. Home canning techniques are much advanced from its beginnings about 180 years ago, with many scientific improvements that make it an excellent way to preserve food for later use. Canned food can have a shelf life ranging from one to five years, although it can be longer under certain circumstances. In 1974, samples of canned food from a ship that sank in 1865 in the Missouri river were tested by the National Food Processors Association. There was no trace of microbial growth and, though not in its original state, was determined to still be safe to eat. But home canners, and even food conglomerates, sometimes make mistakes; when they do, pathogens (disease-causing organisms) can invade the very stuff that we depend upon for nourishment. One of these pathogens is Clostridia Botulinum. Clostridia Botulinum Clostridia Botulinum is a rod-shaped bacteria found in soil worldwide. The organism is anaerobic, which means that it grows best in conditions where oxygen is absent. In addition, it forms “spores” that survive in a dormant state until conditions favor their development. You might be surprised to know that botulinum spores exist on most fresh food surfaces. Here, they are harmless because the spores activate only in the absence of air. Clostridium botulinum’s spores are hardy, heat-resistant, and exist just about everywhere. Once in a favorable, oxygen-poor environment, they activate. This leads to the production of certain noxious substances called “toxins,” some of which are so dangerous they have been considered as biological weapons. There are a number of different botulinum toxins, some of which cause illness in humans, others in animals. This illness, which primarily affects the nervous system, is called “botulism.” First described as a disease in the 18th century in people who got sick after eating contaminated meats (the word “botulism” is derived from the Latin word for sausage), the bacteria itself wasn’t isolated until near the beginning of the 20th century. With advancements in home and commercial processing of food, botulism is much less common than it once was. Despite this, over 100 cases are reported in the United States every year. Types of botulism Although there are various ways that botulism may be transmitted, three types are most common: Infant botulism: Infant botulism occurs after consuming spores of the bacteria, which activate and multiply in the intestinal tract. The source of infant botulism may be ingestion of honey, which the FDA warns against in the first year of life. Despite this, it’s much more likely to be caused by exposure to soil that contains the bacteria. Wound botulism: When a wound, even a scratch, is contaminated with Clostridia Botulinum, toxins produced by spores can cause major damage. In recent decades, wound botulism has occurred not so much in accidental trauma as in self-inflicted injury, such as the injection of heroin. Food-borne botulism: Food-borne botulism in home canning is the focus of this article, and can be seen in foods that are low in acid, with a pH of 4.6 or lower. They include, according to the USDA, red meats, seafood, poultry, milk, and all fresh vegetables except for most tomatoes. Clostridia Botulinum doesn’t seem to find high-acid and refrigerated foods as agreeable. It should be noted that botulism doesn’t appear to be spread from human to human. When a cluster of cases are identified, it’s usually because the group ate the same contaminated food. Sign and symptoms When you eat food containing botulism neurotoxins, a chemical known as acetylcholine is inhibited. This chemical is required for nerve cells to “communicate” with each other and control movement and other vital functions. The end result is paralysis if untreated, but other symptoms are seen earlier, usually within a day or so of exposure. They include: • Blurred or double vision • Weakness of facial muscles • Difficulty speaking and swallowing • Drooping eyelids • Dizziness and fatigue • Nausea and vomiting • Dry mouth • Abdominal cramps • Difficulty breathing Some victims experience only a few of the above symptoms. Untreated botulism carries a death rate of close to 10 per cent, usually due to respiratory failure in areas without access to advanced methods of mechanical ventilation. Paralysis of extremities can occur and be very slow to recover in survivors. Diagnosing and treatment A physician can usually suspect a diagnosis of botulism from the history, physical signs, and symptoms of the patient. However, a number of other nerve conditions, such as Guillain-Barre syndrome (recently tied to Zika Virus infection), and even strokes, can produce similar symptoms. Certain lab tests of blood, stool, or vomit are required to provide definitive proof. Waiting for lab results may not be appropriate, however, and supportive care should be initiated, especially respiratory support. If botulism was likely to come from recently ingested food, many physicians will induce vomiting or even administer enemas to remove as much of the offending substance as possible. The definitive treatment for food-borne botulism is an “anti-toxin” derived from horse serum. Although it eliminates the ill effects of botulism toxins, nerve damage is not reversed. Luckily, humans can regenerate nervous tissue, although the process may take months of rehabilitation therapy. Full recovery can be expected in a majority of cases. Although caused by bacteria, antibiotics are effective only in cases of wound botulism, which may also require surgery to remove infected tissue. Although a vaccine exists against botulism, it has been of limited effectiveness and has some unwanted side effects. Home canning and botulism prevention Home canners should follow the guidelines set in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) “Complete Guide to Home Canning,” easily accessible online. The guide has been recently updated, so make sure you find the most recent version. Jackie Clay-Atkinson’s book “Growing and Canning Your Own Food,” available through this magazine on page XX is also an excellent guide. Low-acid and tomato foods not canned according to USDA recommendations present a risk of botulism. Although this article doesn’t claim to be a guide on home canning practices, the USDA suggests that home canners: • Carefully select and wash fresh food. • Peel some fresh foods beforehand. • Hot pack many foods. • Add acids (lemon juice or vinegar) to some foods. • Use appropriate jars with self-sealing lids. • Process jars in a pressure canner for the correct period of time. If the USDA guidelines are strictly followed, you will prevent the growth of pathogens and, importantly, help form a high vacuum in jars. Good vacuum forms a tight seal which keeps liquid in and germs out. Why not just boiling? Botulinum spores are heat-resistant and may survive basic boiling-water temperatures. All low-acid foods should be sterilized at temperatures of 240° to 250°F with pressure canners operated at 10 to 15 PSI. The USDA specifically states that pressure canning is the only recommended method for home-canning meat, poultry, seafood, and vegetables. Boiling-water canners are associated with a greatly increased risk of botulism. Using proper technique, the time needed to destroy bacteria in low-acid canned food ranges from 20-100 minutes. The exact time will vary based on the type of food, the way it is packed into jars, and the size of the jars. Even if there is no evidence of spoilage, the USDA recommends that low-acid and tomato foods should be boiled in a saucepan before consuming. At sea level or altitudes below 1,000 feet, boil food for 10 minutes. As water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitudes, add an additional minute of boiling time for each 1,000 foot rise in elevation at your location. Spinach and corn should be boiled for 20 minutes or longer. Having said this: If you have, indeed, followed the USDA guidelines to the letter, low-acid canned foods may be eaten without boiling if you are certain that: • Food was processed in a pressure canner. • The gauge of the pressure canner was accurate. • Appropriate process times and pressures were used for the size of jar, style of pack, and kind of food being canned. • The process time and pressure recommended for sterilizing the food at your altitude was followed. • Jar lids are firmly sealed and concave. • Nothing has leaked from jar. • No liquid spurts out when jar is opened. • No unnatural odors are detected. The bottom line: If you’re not certain that you followed USDA guidelines, you might consider discarding it. In addition, Never eat canned foods if the container is bulging, leaks, or has mold. Food should not appear to have become “mushy.” Toss any food that foams or emits a strange odor when boiled. It should be noted that baked potatoes may also harbor botulism toxin if not eaten hot or stored in the refrigerator. Infused oils with garlic or herbs should also be refrigerated. Don’t leave them out at room temperature. With some attention to detail, you can safely can your fresh food and avoid the threat of food-borne botulism. g Joe and Amy Alton are the authors of the #1 Amazon Bestseller “The Survival Medicine Handbook.” For more than 600 articles on medical preparedness in wilderness, disaster, or other austere settings, go to their website at www.doomandbloom.net. The beneficial side of botulinum toxin You might be surprised to learn that botulinum toxin may have medical uses. In addition to the anti-wrinkling injection, “Botox,” the toxin can: • Eliminate chronic migraine headaches • Decrease neuralgia. Neuralgia is a intense, shooting pain that comes as a result of nerve damage or dysfunction, such after outbreaks of shingles. • Reduce spasticity. Spasticity is the involuntary tightening of the muscles caused by traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, stroke, or spinal cord injury. • Reduce excessive sweating by injections in the underarm or other areas. • Reduce the sudden urge to urinate caused by an overactive bladder. • Eliminate twitching or “tics” in eyelids and other facial muscles. • Decrease tooth grinding and the dental damage it causes.28 July 2017 - 4:12pm Japan’s new ‘scientific’ whale hunting programme (known as NEWREP-NP) in the North Pacific has been formally criticized, once again, by the European Union (EU) in a letter to the governments that form the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the international body that regulates whale hunting. The letter from the 25 EU Member States is critical of Japan’s decision to ignore new IWC rules that require any new scientific whaling programmes be fully reviewed by the IWC and its Scientific Committee. The EU States then go on to emphasise their concerns regarding the threat posed to the population of minke whales that Japan is targeting. The letter urges Japan to work within IWC agreed processes rather than acting against them and against international law. Pressure on Japan by the EU States is welcome but the EU should reconsider its decision not to raise whaling in recent free trade talks with Japan and look at backing up letters such as these with economic pressure. More on WDC’s whaling campaign here.Black Swan events are proliferating for many reasons—notably climate change and the growing scale and interconnectedness of the human enterprise. World population doubled in the last half-century to just under seven billion people, so there are simply more people living in harm’s way, on geologic faults and along vulnerable coastlines. In effect, we have re-engineered the planet and ushered in a new era of radical instability. Advancing and securing women's rights are a key aspect of the solution to these problems. This fall, world population will reach 7 billion people at a time of accelerated environmental disruption. This article is the first in a multi-part series commissioned by Rewire to examine the causes and consequences of population and environmental change from various perspectives and the policies and actions that need to be put in place to both avoid and mitigate the inevitable impacts of these changes. Welcome to the age of the Black Swan. The tornado that nearly leveled the city of Joplin, Missouri in May was a Black Swan; so was the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan in March; and the “hundred-year floods” that now take place every couple of years in the American Midwest. A Black Swan is a low-probability, high-impact event that tears at the very fabric of civilization. And they are becoming more common: weather-related disasters spiked in 2010, killing nearly 300,000 people and costing $130 billion. Get the facts, direct to your inbox. Subscribe to our daily or weekly digest. SUBSCRIBE Black Swan events are proliferating for many reasons—notably climate change and the growing scale and interconnectedness of the human enterprise. World population doubled in the last half-century to just under seven billion people, so there are simply more people living in harm’s way, on geologic faults and along vulnerable coastlines. As the human enterprise has grown, we have reshaped natural systems to meet human needs, weakening resilience of ecosystems, and by extension our own. In effect, we have re-engineered the planet and ushered in a new era of radical instability. At the same time, the world’s people are increasingly linked by systems of staggering complexity and size: think of electrical grids and financial markets. What were once local disasters now reverberate across the globe. So what does this have to do with women’s rights, you may ask? A lot, as it turns out. The great challenge of the 21st century is to build societies that can cope with the flock of Black Swans that are headed our way. Advancing and securing women’s rights, especially reproductive rights, is central to meeting that challenge. The New World, and How We Got Here The age of the Black Swan marks a sharp turn on the long path of human history. It is hard to overstate how swiftly and profoundly we have transformed the way we live. Imagine that all of humanity’s existence was compressed into a 24-hour day, with each hour representing 100,000 years. Our humanoid ancestors first appeared at midnight, then spent the night and most of the following day hunting and gathering in small, mobile bands. At 11:56 pm, we invented agriculture. In the last seconds before the end of the day came the industrial revolution, the Pill, and The Jersey Shore. Also in the last seconds before midnight, our numbers increased sevenfold, and—in the blink of an eye—we former hunter-gatherers had colonized every corner of the planet. Just think: it took from the beginning of human history until 1800 for our numbers to reach one billion. Now, just over 200 years later, there are nearly 7 billion of us. And we will likely reach 8 billion by 2025. In many ways, the history of our species is an incredible success story. We’ve vanquished diseases, produced staggering quantities of food, and used our ingenuity to circumvent every drudgery and inconvenience. Some of us, at least, live in luxury that could scarcely have been imagined a few generations ago. I got to thinking how far and how quickly we’ve come when I went looking for information about my maternal grandmother. I found her (on the web) in the painstakingly handwritten records of the 1910 census. There she was as an eight year-old girl, living in an apartment in Baltimore with her grandparents, mother, a couple of siblings, and some random boarders taken in to help pay the bills. Consider her environmental footprint. Her family didn’t have a car, or electricity, or even indoor plumbing—chamber pots and an outdoor privy sufficed. She ate organically grown, local produce (there wasn’t any other kind; pesticides and synthetic fertilizer weren’t yet widely used). Meat was a luxury. No plastics. No airplanes. No petrochemicals. Believe me, I don’t idealize the past (I am very, very fond of indoor plumbing). But I am struck by how much our family’s environmental impact has grown in the space of two generations. My family of four lives in a house twice the size of the apartment my grandmother shared with seven others. Between my ailing Subaru, my central air conditioning, and the occasional airplane flight, I produce well over 20 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide each year. My grandmother, burning a few lumps of coal for heat in the winter, likely produced a tenth as much. Moreover, my out-sized consumption habits are shared by a much larger number of people. When my grandmother was a kid, there were 92 million Americans, today there are 308 million. Globally, our numbers grew from 1.75 billion to nearly 7 billion in that time. While most of the world’s people do not consume resources as rapaciously as Americans (more on that later), it is safe to say that both human numbers and consumption have skyrocketed in the space of a few generations. The Dark Side Which gets me to the dark side of the human success story. In our brief stint of planetary dominion, we have done a vast amount of damage. We have replaced the riotous diversity of nature with uniform monocultures. We’ve changed the chemistry of earth and sky—increasing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent, and acidifying the oceans. We’ve cut down nearly half of the planet’s forests, and destroyed two-thirds of its coral reefs and mangroves. We have brought about the greatest mass extinction of plant and animal life in our history; every year, some 30,000 species become extinct (about three per hour). Nature is inherently resilient; ecosystems regenerate after disturbances like hurricanes and wildfires. But we have weakened nature’s ability to bounce back by removing key species, by harvesting resources more rapidly than they can renew themselves, and by loading ecosystems with more wastes than they can absorb. In so doing, we’ve weakened our own resilience. Healthy ecosystems are the foundation of human well-being; they provide a range of essential goods and services to humankind, such as food and freshwater, pollination, and protection from storms. As a result of our chipping away at that foundation, a recent global survey found that the “the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.” And, as we have weakened human and natural resilience, we have created new threats. Human-induced climate change has ushered in an unknowable future of intense storms, floods, and droughts. As NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen puts it, “Ten thousand years of good weather is over.” Cue the Black Swans. Of course, not all humans are equally culpable for this state of affairs. And that illuminates the other dark aspect of our species’ success: staggering inequity. The unprecedented affluence that some humans now enjoy has not been evenly shared; some 40 percent of the world’s people—2.6 billion—still live on less than $2 per day. Most of the world’s poor have environmental footprints that resemble my grandmother’s more than my own. The average citizen of Tanzania, for example, emits about a tenth of a ton of CO 2 per year—about what the average American puts out every 28 hours. But, tragically, it is the poor—those who contributed least to the sacking of the planet—who are most vulnerable to the consequences of environmental decline. So, to recap: humans have had a good long run, but in the process of establishing dominion over the Earth, we’ve weakened the support systems that have enabled us to thrive thus far. We have altered our planet in fundamental ways, ushering in the age of the Black Swan—a period of instability and suffering—with the poor and vulnerable at greatest risk. This is, admittedly, a bleak picture. The good news is that it is possible to build more sustainable and resilient societies, and to limit damage to the natural systems that we depend upon. And that is where women’s rights—including reproductive rights—come in. Sustainability and Scale Environmental sustainability is, in part, about how a society uses resources. On the simplest level, if resource use is unsustainable, you can’t keep doing it. If you take fish from the ocean faster than the fish can reproduce, you run out of fish. (Of course, affluent countries and people typically get around this problem by helping themselves to other people’s fish.) But collectively, humans are using resources more quickly than they can regenerate: two thirds of the planet’s ecosystems—including fisheries and fresh water—are now being used in ways that simply cannot be sustained. Sustainability is a function of the scale of the human enterprise; of the way we consume resources, on one hand, and of the number of consumers on the other. On a finite planet, neither human numbers nor human appetites can grow forever. For those of us who live in the United States and other countries that devour a disproportionate share of the planet’s resources, reducing consumption is the top priority. It can be done, with a wholesale shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, greater efficiency, cities and towns built around reliable public transportation, and food systems that encourage us to eat lower on the food chain. Fundamentally, we need to reorient our economy from the production and consumption of goods of dubious value to a new emphasis on meeting human needs. UN Population projections, High (red), Medium (yellow) and Low (green). And, as human numbers approach 7 billion, people everywhere need to think about where we go from here. The United Nations recently published new population projections, which envision a range of possibilities for the 21st century. If fertility rates stay where they are today, we’d pass 26 billion by the end of this century. But that’s not likely: thanks to wider availability of contraception, urbanization, and other factors, fertility rates have fallen steadily in recent decades, from an average of 5 children per woman in 1950 to just 2.5 today. The question is how quickly, and how steeply, they will continue to fall. In the UN’s low projection, fertility dips to 1.7 children per woman and human numbers peak at 8 billion by mid-century, then decline to 6 billion by 2100. By contrast, the medium and high projections envision slower declines in fertility—and continued growth for the foreseeable future. The medium projection would reach 10 billion by 2100; the high projection, nearly 16 billion. I don’t believe there is an optimal size for the human population; greater equity and more efficient use of resources would greatly extend the planet’s “carrying capacity.” But, when you consider the resource challenges of the 21st century, and the unpredictable new era we have entered, 8 billion looks more sustainable than 16 billion. Take water, for example. While there is no global shortage of freshwater, a growing number of regions are chronically parched. And many of those regions—including parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—are also where population is growing most rapidly. The World Bank has identified 45 “water-poor” countries where shortages are especially acute. Those countries have an average fertility rate of 4.8 children per woman—nearly twice the world average. And their populations are expected to double by 2050. Slower population growth is not a panacea for the world’s water problems. Much can be done to develop better technology and better policies on water use. But slower growth and smaller population numbers could help ease pressure on scarce resources. That’s true for countries dealing with the deadly combination of poverty and water scarcity—and it’s true for the world as a whole. Population and Women’s Rights The difference between 8 billion and 16 billion is all about women’s rights. Fertility rates have fallen in most of the world’s countries, but they remain high where women’s status is low. Less than one-fifth of the world’s countries will account for nearly all of the world’s population growth this century. Not coincidentally, those countries—the least developed nations in sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and elsewhere—are also where girls are less likely to attend school, where child marriage is common, and where women lack the means and the power to make their own decisions about childbearing. That can change. Nations can raise women’s status by educating girls, by enforcing laws that prohibit child marriage and sexual violence, and by improving women’s access to credit, land, jobs, and training. Where women enjoy these fundamental rights, smaller (and healthier) families become the norm. At the same time, women must have the means to make choices: family planning and other reproductive health services. Around the world, some 215 million want to avoid pregnancy, but aren’t using effective methods of contraception. Fulfilling that “unmet need” for family planning is vital to ensuring women’s reproductive rights, and to slowing population growth. In this way, the goals of the sexual and reproductive health and rights movement are deeply aligned with the imperatives of environmental sustainability. A Three-Legged Stool Achieving a sustainable balance among people, consumption, and resources is necessary and important. But it is not sufficient. We have entered an era of unpredictable, wrenching, change. Consider the climate: even if we ceased emitting greenhouse gases today, the legacy of past emissions guarantees a future of warming temperatures, stronger storms, and rising seas. To thrive in the face of these changes, our societies must be resilient—they must be able to absorb disturbance while continuing to function. What makes a society resilient? There is a substantial—and growing—literature on this subject; a few points bear repeating here. Some characterize resilience as a three legged stool: the “legs” of the stool include a nation’s environmental capacity—the health of its ecosystems; its human and civic resources; and its economic capacity, or wealth. Women have an important role to play in bolstering each leg of resilience. First, environmental capacity: in much of the developing world, women are primary caretakers of natural resources such as forests and freshwater. Empowering women with property rights and decision-making authority can result in better stewardship of those ecosystems. That’s what happened in Gujarat, India: when women were well-represented on community forest management committees, forest conditions improved dramatically. Second, human resources. Women’s power, knowledge, and creativity are vital—but underutilized—human resources. Girls and women are often held back; they get less food, less medical care, less formal education, and fewer opportunities than their male counterparts. Investing in girls and women yields enormous benefits. For example, girls’ education is associated with a vast range of positive outcomes, from higher crop yields to lower rates of HIV and better nutrition. Finally, economic capacity: A growing body of research shows that ensuring economic opportunity for women may be the best way to end world poverty. This is not only because women are at a greater risk of being poor, but also because women in poor countries are more likely to spend their income on food, education, and health care for their children—giving families a lasting path out of poverty. The growing risk of Black Swan events lends urgency to improving women’s status, because women are among the most vulnerable in times of crisis. In the 2004 South Asian tsunami, for example, three times as many women died as did men. Why? In part because of rigid gender roles; not only did women shoulder the burden of saving children and the elderly, their traditional clothing made it difficult to move quickly, and—unlike their brothers—they had not been taught to swim. Addressing women’s vulnerabilities is a top priority for any effort to build resilience. Of Rights and Resilience We can’t know what the age of the Black Swan has in store for us. We have never been here before; the environmental and social challenges we face today are utterly without precedent. But change—sweeping and transformative—is a constant in natural and human history. We can embrace change and prepare for it by building sustainable, resilient societies. To do so, we need to ramp up our efforts to ensure women’s rights. In an age of uncertainty, no nation can afford to squander half of its human capital. And, where women enjoy equal rights, societies are healthier, more prosperous, and less vulnerable. At the same time, we need to find a sustainable balance among people, consumption, and resources. That means intentionally downsizing the scale and impact of the human enterprise, by reducing wasteful consumption and by choosing a slower growth path for human numbers. Here, too, women’s rights—especially reproductive rights—are key. When I think about the paths our numbers could take, I am again reminded of my grandmother. On the 1910 census where I found her name
berg who specializes in marijuana law. In comparison, Colorado and Washington had hundreds of dispensaries. Transporting marijuana across state lines is still a federal crime so sellers must grow marijuana in-state. "The fundamental problem is we're coming into the recreational market with not as developed or as mature a medical program as we had seen in other states," Fine said. "We don't have currently cultivation capabilities to keep even close to the anticipated high demand once the first recreational marijuana retailers open up." Fine noted that the industry is moving from a marketplace for medical marijuana, which is worth a few hundred million dollars and serves 40,000 registered patients, to an anticipated $1.2 billion industry serving anyone over 21, including out-of-state visitors. "It's going to be a slow rollout," Bernard said. "When places start to open, they will probably run out quick." Medical marijuana facilities today sometimes put caps on the amount of marijuana someone can buy when the dispensary faces shortages of a particular type of drug. Bernard predicted that some recreational marijuana shops may cap sales in order to give more customers a chance to buy. Bernard said his group is planning to push for legislation to allow someone who grows marijuana at home to sell it to retail stores, as long as it is properly tested, which could help with the supply issue.Dear Commissioners, This proceeding must lead to stronger open Internet (Net Neutrality) rules in Canada, and an end to data caps. First, for wired Internet, data caps in most of the industrialized world are unheard of. For wireless, they are far more reasonable than what most Canadians enjoy. Claims that data caps are used solely for network management have been debunked. They are used as a pricing tool that discourages Internet use, and disincentivizes service providers from investing in network capacity. For these reasons, we ask you to end data caps on wired Internet, and ensure all Canadians have access to affordable, unlimited wireless data plans. Second, the Commission must ban differential pricing schemes such as “zero-rating.” Telecom giants must be banned from using their power to unfairly privilege certain apps and services over others, inflating the cost of competing apps and services. Internet users, not telecom providers, should be the ones deciding what we read and watch online, and who the winners and losers of the web are. Third, you must improve Canada’s Net Neutrality rules. Canadians have already fought for and won open Internet rules to prevent Big Telecom from restricting our access to online services. We are calling on the CRTC to improve these rules by guaranteeing they prevent website blocking, throttling, and paid-prioritization. Finally, we need additional transparency and enforcement measures (AKA: “Internet openness audits”) to ensure Internet users are meaningfully informed and their interests protected. We require strong mechanisms to ensure that telecom companies are playing by the rules and that effective penalties apply when those rules are broken. I acknowledge that my comments and information will form part of the public record for this proceeding including on the CRTC website. I do not wish to appear at the hearing in relation to this submission. I ask that this submission be granted the same weight as that of any other party. Thank you. [Your Name Here]At the 29C3 Chaos Communication Congress that was held in Germany in December last year, researcher Sadia Afroz described to the audience that it is possible to identify up to 80% of underground Anonymous forum users using various methods including stylometric analysis, Latent Dirichlet allocation and the authorship attribution framework Jstylo. Stylometry uses linguistic information found in a document to perform authorship recognition The researchers techniques could also be able to identify the subtle differences between a conversation on say credit card hacking from a discussion on creating exploits, however this is still being worked upon and is not possible yet. For the moment the analytic techniques look for Function Words as a means of identifying “If our dataset contains 100 users we can at least identify 80 of them,” researcher Sadia Afroz told an audience at the 29C3 Chaos Communication Congress in Germany. We wanted to see what stylometry could do when applied to an interesting real world dataset containing short text in multiple languages. As a result, we applied stylometry to leaked underground forums. Online forums are frequently used by cyber-criminals around the world to establish trade relationship and exchange fraudulent goods and services such as the sale of stolen credit card numbers and compromised hosts, spamming, phishing, and online credential theft. These forums are popular among the cyber-criminals as they are easily accessible and provide some high degree of anonymity. In this work, we examine several multilingual underground forums, for example, thebadhackerz.com, blackhatpalace.com, www.carders.cc, free-hack.com, hackel1te.info, hack-sector.forumh.net, rootwarez.org, L33tcrew.org, antichat.ru. We did authorship attribution on these users and so far have had 72% success in correct attribution (however we believe this number will be significantly improved by the time of the talk as we continue our analysis and bring in new features). Authorship attribution in the underground forums requires new features since the text used in these forums are multilingual, contain numerical information such as credit card and bank account numbers, and have many symbols in the URLs and services being shared. These properties of the text are not similar to common writing. We are expecting a significant increase in the accuracy once the above mentioned feature set is implemented. It found up to 300 distinct discussion topics in the forums, with some of the most popular being carding, encryption services, password cracking and blackhat search engine optimisation (SEO) tools. Whilst the researchers state that they are able to identify up to 80% of individuals via their writing patterns, they could only do this when the text being analysed was in English. When the writing was in any other language the results went down to 65%. Translating the foreign text using free online tools like Google translate and Bing didn’t aid in improving the results (if you have ever used Google to translate a certain amount of text from one language to another, you will understand why) However, there are also open-source tools that have been released that will aid in anonymising users from authorship recognition methods such as the methods discussed by the researchers like Anonymouth (Authorship Recognition Evasion Tool) and JStylo. (An Authorship Recognition Analysis Tool) JStylo, is the machine learning engine which powers Anonymouth Video tutorial on how to use Anonymouth and Deceiving Authorship Detection Here is the talk by researcher Sadia Afroz and team and is very eye-opening. (45 mins long) The research was carried out by the Drexel and George Mason universities research team consisting of composed of Sadia Afroz, Aylin Caliskan Islam, Ariel Stolerman, Rachel Greenstadt, and Damon McCoy. So what are the implications of the researchers finding and how and when will companies and indeed governments start to use such analytic tools to look for individuals across the internet by their writing styles? That really is the big question. We could very well see people’s anonymous Twitter, Facebook, reddit accounts scanned into huge databases that an algorithm would then go to work on, attempting to link certain accounts and forum posts by their unique writing styles via Function Words and stylometric patterns. Maybe that is just me being very paranoid, but with the amount of snooping certain governments currently carry out, it’s not that far-fetched by any stretch. Either way it really was a fascinating bit of research from the Drexel and George Mason research teams and one I hope isn’t used against law-abiding people instead of the intended criminal element. Your thoughts? Via SC MagazineDads in the UK are not treated as “equally valuable parents”, a new report on Fatherhood by the NSPCC has claimed. According to the child protection charity “we assume that children need their mums, yet dads are somehow different [and] this reflects the gender inequality that exists around parenting.” The claims, made in the Dad Project report, will raise eyebrows amongst men’s rights and fathers’ rights campaigners who have long accused the charity of being anti-father. In 2006, for example, the MP Tim Loughton, who went on to become the current coalition government's Children’s Minister, slammed an NSPCC campaign to prevent separated fathers from being given an automatic right to have contact with their children. Loughton told the House of Commons: "The [NSPCC] briefing is alarmist, sensationalist, misleading, empirically flawed, completely irresponsible and highly reprehensible. It is not worthy of an organisation such as the NSPCC, which claims to stand up for our children." In its latest report on Fathers, the NSPCC has published the findings of new YouGov survey revealing the 95% of dads agree that it is important for dads to be involved in looking after their babies. However, the children’s charity acknowledges that the number of dads who remain involved in their children’s lives is much lower. 40% of children don't see much of dad “Research suggests that as many as four in ten children are being brought up by their mothers, with no regular contact with their fathers", says the report. "To prevent this drifting of fathers out of their children’s lives, we must do all we can to capture and maintain their early enthusiasm right from the start – to help dads to be active parents through pregnancy, birth and beyond." The campaign group Fathers 4 Justice, which has staged protests at the charity’s London headquarters, alleges that the NSPCC has ignored “repeated requests” to investigate cases where separated fathers are unfairly prevented from being involved in their children’s lives. The NSPCC report overlooks the issue of Family Law reform, focusing largely on the way health professionals, such as midwives, involve fathers in the birth of their child. According to the YouGov survey, while 76% of dads agreed that it is important for midwives to support dads as well as mums, 43% say midwives are not very good at including new dads in maternity care. Society is biased against dads The charity does acknowledge that the issue of undervaluing fathers isn’t confined to midwives. “It is important to be clear that it isn’t just health services that often fail to treat dads as equally important parents” says the report, “this bias exists across all of society.” One example of “society” undervaluing fathers is the way men are treated in the media. Men’s advocates have consistently complained that the NSPCC “demonises” dads by disproportionately portraying fathers as abusers in advertising campaigns. In response, the NSPCC has been forced to acknowledge that its own research found that mothers were responsible for 49% of violent incidents against children with fathers responsible for 40%. The charity also agreed to withdraw its “all I want for Christmas is for daddy to stop hitting me” advertising campaign, after receiving numerous complaints. In this latest report, the NSPCC points the finger at social attitudes that prevent boys playing with toys that prepare them to be involved fathers (such as dolls and tea sets); the limited paid parental leave provided by the government and the unwillingness of employers to supplement parental leave for fathers as often as they do for mothers. “Dads are not treated as equally valuable parents,” says the NSPCC. “We need to look across the board at how we change our portrayal of, and interactions with dads. The media, marketing, social norms, public attitudes and public services all have a role to play.” If you liked this article and want to read more, follow us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook ---Photo credit: Flickr/Maik Meid Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men Also on insideMAN:Share 0 BY ARIEL HERNANDEZ State Sen. Jose Peralta (D-Elmhurst) has allocated $50,000 to western Queens organizations that help immigrants, LGBTQ and women who have been the victims of crime in the past two weeks. On Thursday, Peralta allocated $50,000 in state funding for Apicha Community Health Center, an organization that provides affordable healthcare for vulnerable New Yorkers. The money would enable the group to expand its services and move into a new site in Jackson Heights. “Our Jackson Heights site aims to significantly improve health outcomes for LGBTQ people, immigrants, women and their children, and the entire community,” said Apicha CHC CEO, Therese R. Rodriguez. “Through adult and pediatric primary care, mental health, dental services, and a neighborhood meeting space we strive to enhance the lives of all those we serve.” The allocation will support a patient associate that will assist with the enrollment of community residents into Apicha’s health service. Last week, a nonprofit organization that provides aid to immigrant families also received a $50,000 allocation from Peralta. The Center for the Integration and Advancement of New Americans (CIANA), which is an Astoria-based nonprofit that works to prevent the increasing marginalization of refugees and new immigrants, will use the allocated funds to provide legal representation and other services to immigrants in Queens. “Under the current political climate, helping immigrants has become my number one priority,” Peralta said. “Immigrants built New York, and our doors will always remain open. As we lead the way on so many issues, nobody, not even President Trump, is going to change who we are, a society where hard-working immigrants are welcomed and our values are untouchable. My parents came to the United States seeking a better life for their families, and I want to make sure the same opportunities are available for all those who decide to come to our city and state, especially newcomers.” Since 2006, CIANA has been recognized for its reach into marginalized immigrant communities. “CIANA is very excited to be a recipient of funding, made possible through Senator Peralta’s efforts, which will help us to continue to provide vital services to our marginalized immigrant population in the most diverse borough of New York City,” said CIANA Founder and CEO Emira Habiby Browne. “It highlights New York’s history of welcoming newcomers and its tradition of generous compassion and warm hospitality, and underscores the value New York places on strengthening families and helping them succeed.” Lastly, Peralta allocated $50,000 to Her Justice, an organization that provides legal services to women who have been the victims of crime and helps them to obtain U Visas. “Her Justice is deeply grateful to Senator Peralta for his support in this year’s state budget,” said Her Justice Executive Director Amy Barasch. “Her Justice helps hundreds of women obtain U visas, which are specifically for victims of crime. Most of our clients are eligible because they have been victims of intimate partner violence. U visas are particularly important as they can lead to work authorization. In the current climate, the volunteer attorneys with whom we work are eager to take these cases, but the delay in processing U visas at the Federal level often makes that difficult. This funding will enable us to meet the increased demand for volunteer opportunities from law firms and help more clients, which is especially critical now as alternate paths to legal status are threatened.” Peralta’s first $50,000 allocation this month went to nonprofit. Woodside on the Move. “In this case, Woodside on the Move will be able to hire a lawyer who will provide legal assistance to hard-working immigrants,” said Peralta. “Sadly, immigrants need more help than ever, and we must ensure we assist them as much as we can.” Woodside on the Move previously worked with Peralta on a turkey drive, back to school giveaway and coat drive. “We really appreciate in many ways the valuable support given by Senator Peralta to Woodside on the Move to continue providing free services and impacting significantly the quality of life of the constituents and the community in general,” said Woodside on the Move Director of Housing Programs Maritza Muñoz. Reach Ariel Hernandez at (718) 357-7400 x144 or [email protected] video is part of B/R's series "The Rookies," where we take the helmets off the players and bring you closer to their lives and personalities. Raider Nation. The Black Hole. Pick whatever phrase you want, there's no denying that Raiders fans are among the most passionate, rowdy and sometimes delirious fanbases in the NFL. One trip to Oakland, and you can feel and see the Silver and Black all over the city. The Raiders truly represent the mindset and culture of the the city. Imagine being drafted by the Raiders, and all of a sudden you go from a college atmosphere like UConn to this maddening obsession the Raiders have 365 days a year. Check out the video above as Raiders rookie linebacker Sio Moore and roommate D.J. Hayden get one of the most unbelievable introductions to Raider Nation you'll ever want to see. Let us know in the comments below: Are Raiders fans indeed the most passionate in the NFL? Will Sio Moore and D.J. Hayden have an impact on Oakland's defense this year? Thanks for watching!There's something special about the the Feb. 17 issue of Billboard Magazine, featuring former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello on the cover. Can't figure it out? OK, I'll just tell you: It was photographed with an iPhone 7 Plus using Portrait mode. But there's no way you'd have known that unless someone had told you. The cover was shot by portrait photographer Miller Mobley, who has worked for Billboard before and has photographed celebrities like Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lawrence, Tom Hanks, and Ryan Gosling. The project — specifically to shoot with the iPhone 7 Plus' Portrait mode — however, was Billboard's idea. "The photo editor was like, can you shoot the next cover with the iPhone 7 Plus?" Mobley told me over the phone. "I had never shot [professionally] with an iPhone. It was a cool idea. I'm all about embracing new technology and not being afraid of it, so I was totally up for the challenge." For cover shoots, Mobley's go-to gear usually consists of expensive professional cameras like the Mamiya 645DF+ and a Canon 5D Mark III, along with tripods and complex lightning systems that add up to tens of thousands of dollars. In comparison, the iPhone 7 Plus starts at $770. The result (heavily edited and retouched as it is) still looks pretty damn good: (Click to enlarge) Image: billboard Shooting professional work with an iPhone isn't really a new thing. With each new iPhone, Apple ups the ante on imaging. And like clockwork, creatives rush out to push the camera to its limits. "A lot of photographers have used iPhones at this point to do professional, paid work that would ordinarily be done on a DSLR or medium format camera," said Greg Scoblete, Technology Editor at Photo District News (PDN), one of the leading magazines for professional photographers. "The image quality is definitely there. In the right hands, the photographer can definitely make it work." Ask any serious photographer what's the best advice they would give to another shooter and they'll probably say: Don't focus so much on the gear and instead focus on making great photos. "...she thought nothing of...[me] shooting with an iPhone." That's exactly what Mobley did while shooting Cabello at a residence in Southern California. "My whole objective was to blend seamlessly my shots with the [Canon 5D Mark III] and [Mamiya] with iPhone shots," Mobley said. "I want you to look at the images as a whole and [not] really think about the tool used to make them." "One thing that was cool was the subject I was shooting — she was a 19, up-and-coming pop star — she thought nothing of...[me] shooting with an iPhone. It was cool — because of this generation you’re just using this tool you have and it’s totally normal." Simple, but still challenging As advanced as the iPhone 7 Plus' dual cameras and Portrait mode are — making it easy for anyone to get "professional-looking" photos — it's not without limitations, especially for professional work. "One thing that was really tricky was low light. It didn’t perform at the level of the [5D Mark III]," Mobley said. "[I'd] have to throw a lot of light on the subject for it to read Portrait mode." Another challenge with using an iPhone to shoot professional magazine-quality photography is that the entire production process just takes longer. Shooting with an iPhone 7 Plus and Portrait mode requires more thought into things like composition because, not only are you working with less resolution to crop later when compared to a beefy DSLR, the mode requires that you "preview" it from a certain distance (the phone camera needs to be within 8 feet of the subject and sometimes doesn't register). Image: lili sams/mashable "These were more thought out images than me taking more casual snapshots," Mobley said. "I wasn’t rapid firing shots. It was moments here and there... the speed of shooting — you have to slow down, especially with Portrait mode." "You can definitely tell that there’s still some work that needs to be done with the technology. There are just some strange things that happen every once in a while. [For example], the hair; some of it’s cut out and looks like a mask." In addition to the iPhone not being able to sync with many professional lighting systems that consist of flashes, strobes and other studio lights, photographers have to overcome technical challenges like its smaller image sensor, and inferior resolution and dynamic range. Oftentimes, clients request photo resolutions far greater than the iPhone 7 Plus' 12 megapixels. We're talking files that weigh on average 600-700MBs or more; photos shot with an iPhone are less than 5MBs. It's one of the main reasons why professional photographers aren't trading their pricey gear for iPhones just yet. "It’s kind of like fighting a fire with a garden hose. You could do it but it’ll take longer to get it to work," Scoblete said. While it would have been nice if Portrait mode included RAW images (the iPhone 7 can only capture RAW files in the regular camera mode, and only with a third-party app), Mobley said he didn't find anything terrible about the JPEGs from his shoot. Outside of a little color correction he made to tweak the images to fit his creative style, he said "there wasn't much image deterioration." In the end, like any new experience, Mobley says it was an interesting challenge and he'd shoot with an iPhone if asked to do it again. "I would love to keep embracing it as an extra tool that I could use. I enjoyed the process. It was interesting," he said. What makes a photo professional? Despite the iPhone 7 Plus's incredible image quality, there's still this stigma in the professional industry that it's not good enough, even though it's clearly good enough for a magazine cover and huge billboards. Aside from the aforementioned technical limitations of an iPhone, why aren't professionals taking the iPhone's camera more seriously for their "real," non-personal work? One reason that's kind of lame, but sadly very true, is simple perception. "If you have a client that pays you thousands of dollars, and you show up with an iPhone, it looks bad," Scoblete said. The perceived value of your professional services is suddenly diminished based on your choice of tool, even if you can produce better results with it than with something more complicated. For example, for professional wedding photographers, they need to have cameras with dials, buttons, etc., because "that still matters." "We’re moving into an era where there’s more flexibility for the artist." This shouldn't stop anyone from using their iPhone for professional work, though, says Joe Hyrkin, CEO of Issuu, an electronic publishing platform for magazines, catalogs and newspapers. "What's the definition of 'good?' What is the effect you’re trying to achieve? If you can achieve that effect with the iPhone in your pocket and some level of lighting, then you can achieve that professional effect more effectively." Thanks to new platforms (i.e. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), the definition of "good" or "professional" has changed and will continue to change. What makes a photo on Instagram "professional?" It's not what gear was used to shoot the photo, but the look and quality of the image — the creative vision behind it. "We’re moving into an era where there’s more flexibility for the artist. They don’t always need to do it the same way it was always done and just do it one particular way," Hyrkin said.LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) wrapped his opening week as a 2016 GOP presidential candidate here with remarks to an overflow crowd. Coming on stage to “Teenage Wasteland” and chants of “President Paul!” from the more-than-a-thousand-person crowd crammed into the Desert Vista Community Center, Paul opened his remarks by noting that a “while back I decided to count up a few things.” “I found out that the Lord’s Prayer is 66 words long,” Paul said. “The Gettysburg address is 286 words long. The Declaration of Independence is 1,322 words long. But the government regulation for the sale of cabbage is 26,911 words long.” Much of the speech focused on an oversized federal government encroaching into Americans’—and Nevadans’—personal lives. “It’s not getting any better,” he said. In the past six years, the president’s EPA has added 25 million words of regulations. We have got a government that is literally run amok.God only knows how many words have been written to distinguish the greater prairie chicken from the lesser prairie chicken. Anybody here think Nevada needs more federal regulations of your land? “NO!” the crowd shouted in unison. Paul hammered Obamacare, and hit Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts—a George W. Bush appointee—for upholding it. “Obamacare was 2000 [pages] long,” Paul said. You remember, Nancy Pelosi said you could read it after we passed it. Unelected bureaucrats have now added 20,000 pages of Obamacare regulations. I have a novel idea. Why don’t we repeal two regulations for every new one? Our freedom is at risk from a Supreme Court that fails to protect our liberty. In the mistake of the century, Justice Roberts affirmed the power of the state to force an individual to buy a certain type of insurance. Justice Roberts argued that we must presume Obamacare constitutional. I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we presume Liberty? Just as we are presumed innocent, so too we should be presumed free. Paul also hammered the Washington political class—both parties—for hurting Americans with big government policies. “Many Americans are left behind,” Paul said. The reward of work seems beyond their grasp. Under the watch of both parties – the poor seem to get poorer and the rich seem to get richer. Trillion dollar government stimulus packages are handed out and yet the income gap continues to widen. Politically connected cronies get taxpayer dollars by the hundreds of millions of dollar. Poor families across America, though, continue to suffer. Paul laid out plan for “Economic Freedom Zones” to allow impoverished areas big tax breaks so they can keep their own money rather sending it to the federal government. “Some say, but oh, Democrats care more about poor people,” Paul said. If that’s true, why is black unemployment still twice white unemployment? Why has minority household income declined by $3,500 over the past six years? Liberal policies have failed our inner cities. Liberal policies have failed to alleviate poverty. Our schools are not equal and the poverty gap continues to widen. You want to know where the income gap is greatest? Cities run by Democrats, states run by Democrats, and countries run by Democrats. The crowd went wild. Paul then talked about his criminal justice reform agenda, explaining it is “not a white problem, not a black problem, it’s a poverty problem.” “Somebody needs to lead the country,” Paul said. “I am unafraid to challenge the status quo. Everyone in the country should be treated the same under the law no matter what religion it is, no matter the color of the skin, no matter how rich or how poor—everybody should be treated equally.” Paul also pushed for school choice, when he hit President Obama for sending his daughters to a fancy private school. Sasha and Malia Obama attend Sidwell Friends in the D.C. area, while ordinary Americans don’t have such opportunities. “Is it just me or does anyone else think it’s ironic that the president’s kids get to go to a great school but if you’re not rich your kids are stuck in a failing public school?” Paul said.As the United States chose an unorthodox new president, the citizens of Maine quietly approved an unorthodox way of electing people to office. Ranked-choice voting is used in a few municipalities, but Maine would be the first state to use the system for gubernatorial, congressional and legislative races (if the referendum proposal withstands any court challenges). As The Bangor Daily News describes the rather complex process, “A winner is declared if a majority picks a candidate as their first choice. But if not, the candidate with the lowest share of first-place votes is eliminated and second-place votes for that candidate are reallocated, a process that will be repeated until a majority is won.” Under such a system, candidates who do not fit the rigid two-party model could have a path to election—candidates, for example, who support Democratic Party economics but are pro-life, or who support the Republican Party on spending and taxation but also back environmental protection measures. But ranked-choice voting could also lead to a proliferation of niche candidates hoping to slip into office with little scrutiny, and the system may not be compatible with the compromise and coalition-building that are essential in a working democracy. Maine, where independent candidates are unusually popular and several state officeholders have recently won with far less than a majority of the vote, is a good state for this experiment. But it would be wise for other states to see what happens in Maine before adopting this innovation themselves. AdvertisementHere we see the brain structures surrounding the surgeon’s approach path [gray]. Magenta indicates a tumor; light coral, blood vessels; yellow, functional areas; and the tangle of rainbow colored strands are the neuronal fibers. Image: University of California, Davis Green means go. The color of the lines in this display indicate the distance from the tumor to the brain’s surface, green being the shortest distance and red the longest. Image: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A tumor deforms the colorful neuronal pathways in these three images. Red corresponds to paths inside the tumor; yellow indicates paths 5 millimeters away; green, 10 mm; greenish blue, 15 mm; and blue, 20 mm. Image: Technische Universität München/ KAUST/University of Utah/University of Konstanz/DFKI Saarbrücken The system shown here lets neurosurgeons view the brain’s neural tracts in stereoscopic 3-D. They can manipulate the image with a “3-D mouse,” such as a Nintendo Wii controller. The white spheres are the patient’s eyes. Image: CMSoft/University of Tohoku This view gives surgeons a sneak peek through the patient’s head at the location of the tumor and the neuronal fibers that cross the path. Toggle switches (not shown) allow surgeons to change which fiber tracts are visible. Image: University of Koblenz-Landau This psychedelic-looking brain highlights the neuronal fibers that reach the tumor [in red]. A ruler tool [blue line] indicates a distance of 6.6 centimeters from the tumor [top of ruler] to a selected critical motor area [bottom]. Image: Université de Sherbrooke The white cylinder in this winning visualization shows one possible path to the tumor [in red]. Meanwhile, the “tumor map” at bottom left can indicate distances from the tumor’s center to important neighboring brain regions. Image: University of Münster/University Hospital of Münster On their path into the brain, neurosurgeons must preserve important nerve fibers. This team’s see-through “safety margin” around the tumor [green] could help surgeons spot those fibers. Image: Universität Leipzig / University Hospital Tübingen No, the tumor hasn’t exploded. In this visualization, the purple and green rays “shine” brightest where it’s safest to approach. Image: Graz University of Technology / Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Clinical-Forensic Imaging Plotting the path to a brain tumor first requires a map. As part of next week’s VisWeek conference, the 2010 IEEE Visualization Contest pitted graphics teams from both industry and academia against one another to see who could best draw that map. Each team transformed the same sets of MRI data into unique, and sometimes bizarre, pictures of the safest paths through the brain. Neurosurgeons decided the winner. Next year’s contest to model the turbulence from a fluid pump is already accepting submissions. If you are viewing this page with an iPad or iPhone, click here to launch the slideshow: /ns/slideshows/10W_SlideS_Visualization_iPad/index.htmlMichael Moore Destroys Wolf Blitzer Live On CNN! Posted by Pile (43546 views) [E-Mail link] [ News Media ] [ Activists ] It's been three years since Michael Moore appeared on CNN, and he took full advantage of appearing LIVE in front of Wolf Blitzer to respond to the network's hit piece on his movie "Sicko" and call out CNN for their irresponsible journalism on the Iraq war and more. This is one clip you must see. First, here's the hit piece on "Sicko" done by CNN leading up to Michael Moore's ass-kicking (Conveniently removed from Youtube - here's another version): Now the main course.. Michael Moore's counter from his web site: DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN: "(Moore says) the United States slipped to number 37 in the world's health care systems. It's true.... Moore brings a group of patients, including 9/11 workers, to Cuba and marvels at their free treatment and quality of care. But hold on - that WHO list puts Cuba's health care system even lower than the United States, coming in at #39." THE TRUTH: * "But hold on?" 'SiCKO' clearly shows the WHO list, with the United States at number #37, and Cuba at #39. Right up on the screen in big five-foot letters. It's even in the trailer! CNN should have its reporter see his eye doctor. The movie isn't hiding from this fact. Just the opposite. * The fact that the healthcare system in an impoverished nation crippled by our decades-old blockade (including medical supplies and drugs) ranks so closely to ours is more an indictment of the American system than the Cuban system. * Although Cuba ranks lower overall than the United States, it still has a lower infant mortality rate and longer life span. (see below) * And unlike the United States, Cuba offers healthcare to absolutely everyone. In an independent Gallup poll conducted in Cuba, "a near unanimous 96 percent of respondents say that health care in Cuba is accessible to everyone." ("Cubans Show Little Satisfaction with Opportunities and Individual Freedom Rare Independent Survey Finds Large Majorities Are Still Proud of Island's Health Care and Education," January 10, 2007. http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brlatinamericara/ 300.php?nid=&id=&pnt=300&lb=brla) CNN: "Moore asserts that the American health care system spends $7,000 per person on health. Cuba spends $25 dollars per person. Not true. But not too far off. The United States spends $6,096 per person, versus $229 per person in Cuba." THE TRUTH: * According to our own government – the Department of Health and Human Services' National Health Expenditures Projections – the United States will spend $7,092 per capita on health in 2006 and $7,498 in 2007. (Department of Health and Human Services Center for Medicare and Medicaid Expenditures, National Health Expenditures Projections 2006-2016. http://www.cms.hhs.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/proj2006.pdf) * As for Cuba – Dr. Gupta and CNN need to watch 'SiCKO' first before commenting on it. 'SiCKO' says Cuba spends $251 per person on health care, not $25, as Gupta reports. And the BBC reports that Cuba's per capita health expenditure is… $251! (Keeping Cuba Healthy, BBC, Aug. 1 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/5232628.stm ) This is confirmed by the United Nations Human Development Report, 2006. Yup, Cuba spends $251 per person on health care. (http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/52.html). As Gupta points out, the World Health Organization does calculate Cuba's per capita health expenditure at $229 per person. We chose to use the UN numbers, a minor difference - and $229 is a lot closer to $251 than $25. CNN: In fact, Americans live just a little bit longer than Cubans on average. THE TRUTH: * Just the opposite. The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report's human development index states the life expectancy in the United States is 77.5 years. It is 77.6 years in Cuba. (Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006 at 283. http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf) CNN: The United States ranks highest in patient satisfaction. THE TRUTH: * True, but even when the WHO took patient satisfaction into account in its comprehensive review of the world's health systems, we still came in at #37. ("World Health Organization Assesses The World's Health Systems," Press Release, WHO/44, June 21, 2000. http://www.who.int/inf-pr-2000/en/pr2000-44.html ). * Patients may be satisfied in America, but not everyone gets to be a patient. 47 million are uninsured and are rarely patients - until it's too late. In the rest of the Western world, everyone and anyone can be a patient because everyone is covered. (And don't face exclusions for pre-existing conditions, co-pays, deductibles, and costly monthly premiums). * It's not that other countries are unhappy with their health care – for example, "70 to 80 percent of Canadians find their waiting times acceptable." ("Access to health care services in Canada, Waiting times for specialized services (January to December 2005)," Statistics Canada, http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/82-575-XIE/82-575-XIE2006002.htm
his tour bus for an in person interview; we talked about subjects such as their upcoming album and promoted a very cool company called Distrokid. How is Summer Slaughter going and how was this awesome lineup made possible? Well, every band on the Summer Slaughter tour is really awesome. Thank you to all the people coming out and supporting these shows, I think it is fantastic. On how we got on this tour, we have known Cannibal Corpse, Nile, Krisiun, Revocation and all these bands throughout our history. We have played with them and toured with them a lot… Summer Slaughter was formed by word of mouth. We put into the hat and we pitched in and we saw how much Summer Slaughter would pay. With Suffocation we were able to budget it out to make it as comfortable as possible. I have to say thanks to Ash and everyone else who put together Summer Slaughter. This is the first one we have played, but it’s the best one we have played due to the line up. Which bands are you most excited to play with on this tour? Pretty much every single one of them. Cannibal Corpse is always a staple of my diet, Nile, Krisiun, Revocation, and Carnifex all are as well, but everyone on this tour is great. I don’t play favorites. Every genre has its share of great bands. I’m usually there to watch the whole thing instead of coming and going ’cause I’m a fan as well. Are you guys working on any new music at the moment? We have a whole new record that is pretty much written we just haven’t had time to record any of it yet. It will be out on Nuclear Blast. We hate pushing things back, but we have always been touring. We just haven’t had the time to be in the studio and record it. We have a whole new record written already and I can’t wait for you guys to hear it. We have not titled it yet. We are looking for the best artists we can to give the record a great cover. What’s the style going to be like on this new record? You guys tend to evolve a lot. It’s pretty straight forward. There are quite a bit of guitar solos on it and quite a bit of aggressive everything. It’s pretty much a standard Suffocation record. We try to capture in the studio what best represents the band at the time. I’m just going to tell you it rips. What kind of set list are we expecting? Like always it will be a mix of old school and new school stuff. We do not have much time on this bill since we aren’t a headliner. We mix up the sets every day. You should just expect straight brutality, ’cause that is the way we always come off. I noticed Frank hasn’t been touring with you. Is this a permanent thing or will Frank return to touring with you guys again? Frank has a full time job and he also has children. His life has relied on that job. As the economy tanks, it gets harder for him to get the time off he needs. It is a heart felt choice for Frank to not be on the road all the time. Plus he does not like traveling as much as I do. After all these years he got stuck with this life choice where he cannot be on the road all the time. There are only about two to two and a half weeks a year where he can really play shows. Unless it’s a week or close to home you might see him,but if it’s far away say like eight hours of flying, it would take him more time to get there to play then it would to get home. We try to utilize him as much as we can where he can play as many shows possible without wasting his time traveling. It is really hard for him, so we have Ricky Myers singing for us. I mean, Frank is not going out of Suffocation ever. He will always be part of the band as he is a focal point. He is also my fucking close friend. We made this shit together. In that kind of aspect it’s a little different for us. I heard a lot of fans like Ricky’s vocals too. Ricky is a great singer. He has good timing and his band Disgorge is awesome. Ricky is a good musician and Frank, knowing he couldn’t do the tours, had heard something that Ricky had sent to us and told us to grab him. Ever since then, Ricky has done a hundred gigs with us at least. We are really happy to have him on board, he is a good dude. I know when your second album Breeding the Spawn came out you guys were not proud of it at all. Do you still have the same feeling on it? Oh Yeah! We just had a rough turmoil time with the band we didn’t have an engineer to help us out. Roadrunner Records pretty much just rigged us cold. At that point in time we were still a young band in the industry. With that being said the real turmoil got transferred directly to your ear. To this day we hate thing so we try to do a Breeding the Spawn song re-recorded whenever we do a record. Look forward to hearing another on our next record. Do you guys remember playing in the Hudson Valley area a lot during your early days? Oh, yes I do. One of my favorite shows was playing The Class in Middletown with Lesch-Nyhan and Morpheus. Morpheus is now called Morpheus Descends, very cool guys. Human Remains from Jersey always played, very sick band. That band is great. How do you feel the death metal scene in New York is now compared to back then? We still have a bunch of death metal bands in New York. We have a lot of new death metal bands, black metal bands and hardcore bands. Nowadays New York City and Long Island is mostly hardcore. In terms of that we are still a little difference then a lot of those bands. Who you should check out is The Merciless Concept. They are a very good newer metal band from Long Island, heavy as shit! I also am always hearing about this band called Necroptic Engorgement. I still never heard the band, but I always hear their name. Maybe I should check them out! To conclude, this I just want to mention one of our sponsors who are doing really good things for younger bands. The name of it is Distrokid. Dark Angel is even using them! A lot of other well known bands and musicians are using Distrokid. It is something to get you guys and your new music to all the streaming sites out there. They help to push smaller bands to keep all their publishing and all their royalties and things of that nature. So if you are in a new band and don’t know what to do and have yourselves a CD, then I really think you guys should contact Distrokid. Very good people and the intention is to keep the money in the musicians’ hands. Not in everybody else’s so check it out!Copyright by WATE - All rights reserved Associated Press - MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - An Arkansas driver has been sentenced for trading a tractor-trailer filled with lunch meat for crack cocaine. According to the Shelby County District Attorney's Office, 45-year-old Larry Bowen was sentenced to one year of in-patient drug treatment and six years of probation. The Mabelvale man also was ordered to pay $18,500 in restitution. Bowen had been hired to deliver more than $50,000 worth of lunch meat in Alabama and Florida. When the meat was not delivered, officers found Bowen and the truck at a Memphis service station. The trailer was in a nearby storage facility with about a third of the lunch meat missing. Bowen told police he stopped at the service station three days earlier and "inadvertently" traded the rig to two men who offered him crack cocaine. Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.April 7, 2008 Bear Stearns Customers Were Not at Risk John P. Hussman, Ph.D. All rights reserved and actively enforced. Reprint Policy Thursday's Senate Banking Committee hearing regarding the Fed's involvement in the purchase of Bear Stearns by J.P. Morgan was somewhat enlightening, but also disturbing. Probably the most important and responsible statements came from Christopher Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who correctly noted that "Despite the run on the bank to which Bear Stearns was subjected, its customers were fully protected." Cox continued "At no time during the week of March 10th through the 17th were any of the customers of the Bear Stearns' broker-dealers at risk of losing their cash or their securities." Cox also clarified the distinction between capital (a solvency buffer) and liquidity, noting that SEC regulations are designed to ensure the adequacy of both. But he noted that the surprise in the Bear Stearns case - not well covered by existing regulations - was the unforeseen possibility that the markets would be unwilling to provide capital that was fully collateralized even by Treasury securities and the mortgage securities of government sponsored entities like Fannie Mae. My impression is that this is exactly the situation in which the Fed has an important role - the short-term provision of liquidity against government-backed collateral. The Fed always had the ability to provide funds to Bear Stearns, fully collateralized by Treasury and agency securities of the type and quality regularly accepted by the Fed, with the expectation of being made entirely whole even in the event that Bear Stearns went bankrupt. The troubling aspect of the Fed's action was not that it lent to a non-bank entity. That ability is clearly authorized by Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. The problem is that it made its "loans" as "non-recourse" funding - meaning that it would not stand to be repaid if the collateral itself was to fail, even if Bear Stearns and J.P. Morgan survived. This feature converted the "loans" by the Fed into unauthorized "put options," benefiting private entities at potential public expense. This is a terrible precedent, and it deserves far more scrutiny and reluctance before we accept that this was the only available option. Another troubling aspect was that shortly after making an initial non-recourse loan to Bear Stearns, and indicating the funds would be available for "as much as 28 days," the Fed pulled the funding over the weekend. By doing so, the Fed itself forced the de facto collapse of Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns' CEO Alan Schwartz testified "We believed at the time that the loan and corresponding back-stop from the New York Fed would be available for 28 days. We hoped this period would be sufficient to bring order to the chaos and allow us to secure more permanent funding or an orderly disposition of assets to raise cash, if that became necessary." As the New York Times summarized, "by the end of the day, with continuing problems surfacing and the downgrading of the firm's credit rating, he said he was told by the Federal Reserve of New York that he had misunderstood the terms of the deal. He was told that the loan would expire on Sunday, and that he had to find a buyer for the bank by then â€” before the Asian markets opened. The decision, Mr. Schwartz testified, left him with no negotiating leverage as talks proceeded with JPMorgan. "On Friday night, we learned that the JPMorgan credit facility would not be available beyond Sunday night," Mr. Schwartz said. "The choices we faced that Friday night were stark: find a party willing to acquire Bear Stearns by Sunday night, or face what my advisers were telling me could be a bankruptcy filing on Monday morning, which could likely wipe out our shareholders and cause losses for certain of our creditors and all of our employees." Note that Schwartz didn't say "losses for our customers and counterparties." He didn't, because he couldn't. As SEC Chairman Cox noted previously, there was never a point where Bear's customers and counterparties were at risk. What's in that $30 billion "portfolio"? The odd secrecy and vague description of the portfolio of assets held by the Fed is, let's say, curious. On what might be called the "bright side," evidently, a good portion of the collateral taken by the Fed in the Bear Stearns deal represents government mortgage obligations, including those of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The portfolio also includes non-agency securities rated BBB- or higher among its "cash assets." The characterization of these as "investment grade" is not reassuring, given that many such structured mortgage securities maintain such ratings only because of bond insurance from companies that are themselves increasingly in question. More troublesome is the part of the portfolio described as "related hedges." The question here is that the net value of a so-called "portfolio" might be $30 billion, but the gross or "notional" value of the portfolio can conceivably be a substantial multiple of that. If you own $100 billion in assets, but have $70 billion in offsetting liabilities against that, then sure, you've got a portfolio "worth" $30 billion, but as Long-Term Capital Management discovered, you could end up losing a whole lot more than $30 billion, depending on how well those assets and "hedges" offset. The description is just unclear - I would be a lot more comfortable about this if we were assured that the total notional value of the portfolio held by the Fed does not exceed $30 billion. We should also know what portion of that $30 billion represents strictly government agency obligations. That would clarify how large the maximum potential loss might be on this portfolio of "cash assets and related hedges." If the collateral was just a plain vanilla portfolio of securities, literally the only reason for the Fed to do the "non-recourse" loan would be to protect Bear Stearns' bondholders from losses, since J.P. Morgan was willing to assume all customer accounts and counterparty liabilities of Bear Stearns, plus over $75 billion in debt obligations to Bear Stearns bondholders, yet needed only $30 billion of Federal assurances to do it. Think of Bear Stearns' assets as being divided into two boxes. One box holds $45 billion worth of valuable customer relationships (the actual customer securities are segregated and are not at risk even if the company fails) and a "book" of investment positions and transactions, including claims and obligations to counterparties. In the other box is either $30 billion in mortgage-backed securities, or a pile of packing peanuts. The only thing not in one of those two boxes is a $75 billion liability to Bear Stearns own bondholders (we'll assume that shareholder equity has already been wiped out). How much would an acquirer pay? Well, if you were J.P. Morgan, you would say: I'll take the $45 billion worth of known, valuable stuff, and the Fed can have the mystery box in return for $30 billion. That gives me $75 billion in assets. I'll also take on the $75 billion in Bear Stearns debt. And of course, since the assets I'm getting are worth the same as the liabilities, I'm going to pay essentially nothing for the deal. If you were Ben Bernanke, you would say, "I can't lose! I love packing peanuts!" This is the deal that was actually struck. But why didn't J.P. Morgan say: I'll take the $45 billion of valuable stuff, and the mystery box. In that case, even if J.P. Morgan thought the box contained packing peanuts, it would still have been willing to pay a minimum of $45 billion for those boxes, provided it did not take on any of the debt to Bear Stearns bondholders. Customers and counterparties would have been protected, and despite "technical" default for Bear Stearns' bonds, there would have been enough to pay at least 60%, and possibly 100% of bondholder claims, without the need for public funds. In this case, if you were Ben Bernanke, you could have said, fine, we'll stand behind that deal and provide a loan of $30 billion, or even $45 billion in medium-term liquidity to facilitate that outcome. But you, J.P. Morgan, the bank, will have to put up Treasury and government agency collateral, and assume all risk of the deal. The Fed's only risk, in that case, would have been the risk that J.P. Morgan itself would default. Instead, Bernanke's actual response was apparently "Nope! I want a shot at those packing peanuts! And we ought to be using public funds to bail out Bear Stearns' bondholders!" So that's what they did. In any event, the markets do not care about Bear Stearns' stockholders or its bondholders. The only thing they care about is that J.P. Morgan is willing to stand behind all the customer accounts and counterparty obligations of Bear Stearns. That commitment could have been achieved without the commitment of public funds, because the value of that book was unquestionably positive. As I noted last week, Title IX of the 2005 Bankruptcy Act includes expanded provisions for the rapid transfer and netting of derivatives and over-the-counter obligations of the sort to which Bear Stearns was a party. Current law does not allow broker-dealers to cherry pick counterparties that owe them, and default on counterparties that are owed. There was no risk of a long delay or "automatic stay" even if Bear had nominally defaulted on its bonds. As for actions that might have prevented Bear's sudden collapse, Timothy Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, indicated that the Fed had not made funds available to Bear earlier in the week, saying "I would not have been comfortable lending to Bear at that time. We only lend to sound institutions. Lending freely to Bear would not have been a prudent act." Evidently it was prudent to commit $30 billion in public funds without the assurance of being made whole. On Friday, former Fed official Robert McTeer gave high marks to Geithner on CNBC for his performance during the Senate hearing. Adding to the impression that the hearings had not been entirely illuminating, McTeer's praise included an odd compliment that Geithner had "answered the questions that he answered very well, and he dodged some questions very beautifully too, and he got away with it." Among those was a question by the Committee to the effect that while it was clear that Bear Stearns' shareholders had not been "bailed out," the same could not be said for Bear Stearns' bondholders - didn't this send a signal to the credit markets that could encourage excessive risk taking in the belief that the government stood behind the bonds of private companies? Geithner gave a general response that credit spreads among financial companies remained relatively wide, so the market had not been provided with that sort of confidence. There was no follow-up question. The Senate Banking Committee never put two and two together that the primary beneficiaries of the Fed's action had been Bear Stearns' bondholders, while Bear's customers were never at risk. The upshot is that the Fed could have provided early, fully-collateralized liquidity to Bear Stearns, but failed to do so. It then provided emergency funding to Bear Stearns as a "non-recourse" loan, but promptly called in those funds over the weekend, forcing Bear Stearns into a corner. Though customers and counterparties were never at risk of loss, Bear Stearns feared for its own shareholders, its bondholders and its employees. The Federal Reserve could have provided Bear with short-term, fully collateralized funds through the weekend, allowing Bear Stearns more bargaining time, but instead, it provided public funds in return for a long-term investment in questionable collateral to finance a private transaction between Bear Stearns and J.P. Morgan. The effect of this public guarantee was to defend the value of a private company's bonds. But we're all OK with this, I guess, so barring any substantial new developments, this is the last I'll write extensively about it. In any event, SEC Chairman Cox is right - Bear Stearns' customers and counterparties were never at risk of loss. Though counterparties don't have the SIPC protections, they did in the Bear Stearns instance have a substantial capital wall and legal safe harbors specifically designed to limit systemic problems. There was a willing buyer for Bear's entire book, so the book didn't need to be unwound, just sold in its entirety on day one. Major U.S. financial companies have enough capital (shareholder equity and bondholder debt) to provide a cushion in the event of substantial writeoffs, without customers or counterparties being at risk of loss in the event of outright bankruptcy. The only instance where there would be a question would be if the book value of the failing company was negative after entirely zeroing out all shareholder equity and bondholder debt, or if the only way to liquidate the book was to unwind it. That was not the case for Bear Stearns. As I said a couple of weeks ago, if we keep on believing that the default of Bear Stearns bonds ("bankruptcy") would have caused a global financial crash, then I expect that we are in for a global financial crash anyway. Not because there is any true risk to customers and counterparties, but because investors are misinformed about how the financial markets work, and they will panic as foreclosures and writedowns inevitably soar in the months ahead. A financial panic is fully avoidable if Wall Street and the media stop propagating the utterly false belief that a Bear Stearns bankruptcy would have led to a "chain reaction" of financial losses. While we might very well see some over-leveraged firms go bankrupt, with substantial losses to their own stockholders and bondholders, the customers and counterparties are generally not at risk if there is enough stockholders equity and bondholder capital to eat through without leaving the remaining book value negative. Bankruptcy or no bankruptcy, the underlying book of assets and liabilities can be transferred quickly. The only question is how much the bondholders come away with. That "chain reaction" theory is just utterly irresponsible fearmongering. Look. I would welcome lower stock market valuations because they would increase prospective long-term returns enough to accept a significant amount of market risk, but I have no desire to see the financial markets in distress. The U.S. economy will get through this, but the credit problems are not over. Even if they were, the U.S. stock market would still be vulnerable because the valuations of recent years have been based on unsustainably high profit margins. Unfortunately, profit margins are cyclical, and competitive forces bring them down over time. So even if investors are inclined to celebrate the Fed's intervention over the near term, it does not alter the broader risk to stock market values. In short, stocks are still vulnerable, but there is no need for an outright financial panic, and no need to misuse public funds to benefit the bondholders of individual companies. I am very concerned that investors and even Congress have swallowed the "chain reaction" theory hook, line and sinker. The fact that they have makes me more concerned about crash risk, not less. In any event, it is wishful to believe that a $30 billion misuse of public funds has suddenly put problems of mortgage foreclosures, profit margin risks, rich valuations, and an oncoming (not outgoing) recession behind us. Market Climate As of last week, the Market Climate in stocks was characterized by unfavorable valuations and still unfavorable market action, holding the Strategic Growth Fund to a fully hedged investment stance. Market action has been relatively good even in the face of poor employment numbers and upward revisions in job losses. Moreover, new claims for unemployment shot above 400,000 last week, as is characteristic of early recessions. The first chart on Bill Hester's recent piece (Recessions and the Duration of Bad News) provides a good picture of where the economy probably stands. New claims are an early, not late indicator of recessions. Counter to the assertions that the current job losses are simply a delayed reflection of a credit crisis that is now averted thanks to Uncle Ben, my impression is that the difficulties in the job market and in profit margins are early in the making. Nonetheless, we'll respond to the evidence as it emerges. If market action improves, we would expect to reduce the short-call side of our hedges moderately. Unfortunately, valuations are still too rich to remove hedges outright, but lifting off a portion of the short calls would open up the potential to participate in any sustained speculative run. I use the word "speculative" because the elevated valuations suggest there is no compelling long-term "investment" merit in accepting market risk. While we are willing to lift a moderate portion of our short calls if the recent improvement in market action broadens further, my guess (and it's presently only a guess) is that the market may be vulnerable to a steep break here. From the fact that I have an opinion on market direction, you can immediately infer that the market is either a) overbought in an unfavorable Market Climate, or b) oversold in a favorable Market Climate. At present, of course, the answer is a). Such conditions don't guarantee a market slide, but the average outcomes are not good. We are hedged and defensive here. The only thing that would improve the current picture would be for the Market Climate itself to shift as a result improved market internals. In effect, further strength would tend to confirm and reinforce a speculative mood among investors. With earnings season upon us, a great deal will depend on guidance about coming quarters. This could be an Achilles' heel, but we'll take our evidence as it comes, and respond accordingly. In bonds, the Market Climate remains characterized by unfavorable yield levels and relatively neutral yield trends. The StrategicTotal Return Fund continues to have an unusually short duration of about 1 year, largely in Treasury bills. The Fund also has just over 15% of assets in precious metals shares, where the Market Climate remains favorable. As I've noted before, at the point where real interest rates become positive and trend higher, we may observe a softening in commodities. Presently, we don't observe that, but it is important to keep in mind that the strength in commodities largely mirrors a persistent decline in U.S. real interest rates, and in the value of the U.S. dollar. As the downward pressure on real interest rates abates, so most probably will the upward pressure on commodity prices, particularly as measured in US dollars. --- The foregoing comments represent the general investment analysis and economic views of the Advisor, and are provided solely for the purpose of information, instruction and discourse. Prospectuses for the Hussman Strategic Growth Fund, the Hussman Strategic Total Return Fund, the Hussman Strategic International Fund, and the Hussman Strategic Dividend Value Fund, as well as Fund reports and other information, are available by clicking "The Funds" menu button from any page of this website. Estimates of prospective return and risk for equities, bonds, and other financial markets are forward-looking statements based the analysis and reasonable beliefs of Hussman Strategic Advisors. They are not a guarantee of future performance, and are not indicative of the prospective returns of any of the Hussman Funds. Actual returns may differ substantially from the estimates provided. Estimates of prospective long-term returns for the S&P 500 reflect our standard valuation methodology, focusing on the relationship between current market prices and earnings, dividends and other fundamentals, adjusted for variability over the economic cycle (see for example Investment, Speculation, Valuation, and Tinker Bell, The Likely Range of Market Returns in the Coming Decade and Valuing the S&P 500 Using Forward Operating Earnings ).Vizio wants to do for audio what it has done with TVs: Make it dead easy to stream music from any service using Google Cast and look good doing it. The company's new $299.99 SmartCast Crave Pro and $249.99 Crave 360 speakers are competitively priced with Sonos' Play:1 and Play:3 speakers. SEE ALSO: New partnerships will let you tell your Sonos speakers what music to play With metal high-quality aluminum designs and fabric-wrapped mesh, both speakers are quite handsome and minimalist. The Crave Pro is the more powerful of the two. It has a 2.1 audio system with two integrated subwoofers to deliver loud, bass-heavy sound. Vizio Crave Pro Image: RAYMOND WONG/MASHABLE There are no physical playback controls on the Crave Pro. Instead, you twist the top portion of the speaker to adjust volume, tap to play and pause, and swipe left and right to skip tracks. It works really well. Image: RAYMOND WONG/MASHABLE Image: RAYMOND WONG/MASHABLE Just as Vizio has used the Google Cast protocol to make discovering and beaming content from iPhones and iPads and Android phones and tablets to TVs via the SmartCast app simple, it's doing the same for music. Whether you use your phone or tablet or a touchscreen remote (sold separately or from your Vizio SmartCast-enabled TV), it's super easy to access all of your music through any number of music streaming sources and have them organized in one place, ready to stream to a Crave speaker. The SmartCast app puts all your content in one place. Image: RAYMOND WONG/MASHABLE The Crave 360 is a portable speaker that can deliver 360-degree sound. It charges via a magnetic dock (like the Amazon Tap) and can last up to eight hours off a single charge. Crave 360 Image: RAYMOND WONG/MASHABLE Controls are basically the same on the Crave 360 as on the Crave Pro. Wireless charging dock. Image: raymond wong/mashable Both speakers support Bluetooth and Wi-Fi audio streaming for high-fidelity sound. As impressive-sounding as both speakers are, they're even better when connected to multiple Vizio SmartCast speakers and sound bars for multi-room audio. Do they sound better than Sonos speakers? Hard to say since I wasn't able to compare the two side-by-side, but I will say I was impressed with the audio quality from both Crave speakers. The Crave 360 is available immediately on Vizio's online store and on SamsClub.com and the the Crave Pro will be available on Vizio's online store "soon."Anaheim Ducks Accused of Abusing Jewish Player Anaheim Ducks Accused of Abusing Jewish Player hockey player drafted by theis suing the team -- claiming coaches within the organization launched multiple "verbal anti-Semitic attacks"... TMZ has learned.23-year-old-- a 3rd round NHL pick in 2005 -- claims from the moment the Ducks assigned him to play for an affiliate team called the... his coaches unleashed a "barrage of anti-Semitic, offensive and degrading verbal attacks."In the suit, filed today in Orange County Superior Court, Bailey claims the head coach of the Condors told him "[Jews] only care about money and who's who" and that he "never wanted his son to be raised Jewish or to wear a Yarmulke."Bailey claims the assistant head coach would get in on the Jew-bashing too -- saying things like, "Oh, I just got a friend request from a dirty Jew."Bailey says the coaches also forced him to travel apart from the team and he was "rarely given any ice time" in games because he's Jewish.According to the documents, filed by Bailey's powerhouse lawyer, Bailey complained to the Ducks about the hostile work environment -- and the team reacted by instructing the coaches to pen apology letters to Bailey in which they both admitted to using hurtful language.Bailey was eventually traded to the Ottawa Senators in 2009 -- and insists the Ducks were "happy to be rid of him."Bailey is suing for unspecified damages.Calls to the Ducks have not been returned.The clear top three guys for me are White Sox second baseman Yoan Moncada, Yankees shortstop Gleyber Torres and Red Sox outfielder Andrew Benintendi, in that order... I listed only five pitchers in my top 32, starting with Cardinals right-hander Alex Reyes at No. 9... prospects not on the current Top 100 (remember, we put it together in July) who made my top 50: Blue Jays third baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (No. 31) and Cardinals catcher Carson Kelly (No. 49)... next on my list at No. 51 would be Dodgers right-hander Yadier Alvarez, whom I suspect could rank significantly higher than that by the end of 2017. The MLBPipeline.com crew has begun the process of revamping our Top 100 Prospects, and we'll release the updated list at the end of January. My first step was putting together a personal list of the 50 best prospects, and here are a few random observations from my rankings: The MLBPipeline.com crew has begun the process of revamping our Top 100 Prospects, and we'll release the updated list at the end of January. My first step was putting together a personal list of the 50 best prospects, and here are a few random observations from my rankings: The clear top three guys for me are White Sox second baseman Yoan Moncada, Yankees shortstop Gleyber Torres and Red Sox outfielder Andrew Benintendi, in that order... I listed only five pitchers in my top 32, starting with Cardinals right-hander Alex Reyes at No. 9... prospects not on the current Top 100 (remember, we put it together in July) who made my top 50: Blue Jays third baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (No. 31) and Cardinals catcher Carson Kelly (No. 49)... next on my list at No. 51 would be Dodgers right-hander Yadier Alvarez, whom I suspect could rank significantly higher than that by the end of 2017. :: Submit a question to the Pipeline Inbox :: Tweet from @joeydivito: @jimcallisMLB @MLBPipeline You compared Swanson to Jeter. Can you explain what tangibles and intangibles he has that led you to this? Will he be ROY this season? I've thrown out the Dansby Swanson/Derek Jeter comparison a few times, always with the caveat that it doesn't mean I think Swanson is a lock first-ballot Hall of Famer. But that parallel works in terms of their games and their personalities. Like Jeter, Swanson should hit for a high average with moderate power (albeit good pop for a shortstop) and a decent amount of walks. He has similar quickness and should provide 20 or so steals per year. Swanson is a solid defender and likely a better shortstop than Jeter was, though he probably won't match The Captain's five Gold Glove Awards. Swanson's charisma is reminiscent of Jeter's as well. Relative to the market sizes, Swanson will become as big a star in his hometown as Jeter was in New York. Tweet from @lot_49: @jimcallisMLB @MLBPipeline Given his very high k% and failure to establish himself at a position, is Yoan Moncada being overrated? Dan pointed out in a follow-up tweet that he was playing devil's advocate to some extent with this question, but I've also been asked it with more seriousness. To which my response is: Maybe we shouldn't go too crazy over 19 big league at-bats (yes, they included 12 strikeouts). Don't forget they came from a 21-year-old who had played exactly 45 games above Class A, who was asked to learn a new position on the job, who was doing so in the middle of a playoff race -- think he might have been a little overwhelmed? If the Red Sox hadn't called up Moncada, his 2016 would be judged solely on his stellar Minor League performance:.294/.407/.511 with 15 homers, 45 steals and 72 walks in 106 games. He did strike out 124 times in 491 plate appearances, and there are some swing-and-miss concerns, though it also should be noted that he made less contact while he got more aggressive and started tapping into his power in Double-A. Maybe he doesn't reach his "Robinson Cano with more speed" ceiling, but his floor looks like a.260 hitter with 20 homers and 30 steals per year. With Moncada's quickness and arm strength, he should be an asset almost anywhere on the diamond, though most evaluators project him as just an average second baseman. The only reason Boston moved him to third base was because it has Dustin Pedroia, not because Moncada can't play second base. Tweet from @cronebender: @jimcallisMLB @MLBPipeline Where do you stand on the Giolito concerns of his status as a prospect being stuff-not-results? I'm less concerned about White Sox right-hander Lucas Giolito's lackluster big league debut than others may be. He did get lit up for a 6.75 ERA, 26 hits (including seven homers) and 12 walks in 21 1/3 innings, but as with Moncada, I won't get too carried away by a small sample size. I also don't think the Nationals handled him very well last season, calling him to Washington on five separate occasions but never letting him take consecutive turns in the rotation, as well as having him change teams nine times. Giolito is still just 22 and has barely pitched above Double-A. Some scouts worry if he can repeat his mechanics consistently to get enough out of his pure stuff, though White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper should be able to help with that. And it's hard not to love the pure stuff: a running fastball that can top 100 mph, an equally vicious power curveball and a sinking changeup that shows flashes of becoming a plus third pitch. I'm not surprised that Chicago was able to get Moncada as the centerpiece of a Chris Sale deal, but I'm still stunned it got Giolito (plus right-handers Reynaldo Lopez and Dane Dunning) for Adam Eaton. It feels like the Nationals sold low on a guy who began 2016 considered as the game's best pitching prospect. Tweet from @UWSBX69: @jimcallisMLB @MLBPipeline which ny ss would you take Rosario or Torres and who has the advantage in each of the 5 tools I answered the first part of this question in my introduction to this column. I believe Torres is the top shortstop prospect in baseball and ranked him No. 2 overall. The Mets' Amed Rosario isn't that far behind, however, coming in at No. 5 on my personal Top 50. Let's break down those tools. Torres is the better offensive player, as he has a chance to become an elite hitter with solid power, while Rosario's ceiling is more as a plus bat with fringy pop. Rosario
fatto che per due anni e mezzo Roma abbia ricevuto meno della metà del denaro dato a Milano per il trasporto pubblico, è indice che non c'è stata una piena collaborazione dal governo nazionale e da quello regionale".. "Quando iniziò la vicenda nel dicembre 2014 ed era evidente che né io né la mia Giunta avevamo nulla a che fare con quel mondo, l'allora vicesindaco Luigi Nieri mi disse 'perché non ti dimetti adesso, verrai rieletto a furor di popolo nella primavera 2015'. Io ho ragionato come avrei fatto in sala operatoria: ero vicinissimo a chiudere per la prima volta il bilancio preventivo del 2015 entro il 2014 e dovevo buttare la città in una campagna elettorale solo perché io ne avrei avuto un grande vantaggio? Ho scelto di chiudere il bilancio 2015 entro il dicembre 2014".Ha parlato poi del suo successore, il commissario starordinario Francesco Paolo Tronca: "E' stato indicato monocraticamente da un capo del governo non eletto dal popolo. Non posso giudicarlo, le azioni del prefetto sono riconducibili al governo, è semplicemente un esecutore".A distanza sono arrivate le risposte del presidente della Regione Lazio, Nicola Zingaretti,"Io non ho letto il libro. Ho letto dello stadio della Roma e voglio chiarire che la Regione è ancora in attesa del progetto dello stadio - ha detto il governatore del Lazio - Io non sono abituato a dire dei sì o dei no in assenza di progetti, è stravagante che si possa teorizzare il contrario"."Offeso e rattristato" il deputato democratico Marcoper le accuse mosse dall'ex primo cittadino. "Io gli avrei detto, nel consigliargli le dimissioni da sindaco di Roma, questa frase: 'Tu lasci Roma, vai a Philadelphia, spegni il cellulare e diventi irreperibile per otto o dieci giorni. Così per irreperibilità del sindaco il governo dovrà nominare un commissario e sciogliere consiglio e giunt'. Questa frase, o comunque l'argomentazione in essa contenuta, non mi appartiene e non l'ho mai usata. Si tratta di un falso. Un falso che mi offende e mi rattrista"."Da Marino oggi solo tanto livore e parole offensive nei confronti del nostro partito. Da ciò rimprovera di aver proposto la nomina a vicesindaco dell'ex presidente del Consiglio comunale Mirko Coratti, ndr) Guerini che viene riportato da alcuni giornali, esse chiamerebbero in causa anche una mia presunta ingerenza per la nomina di un componente della sua giunta (Marino gli. Fatto che smentisco nuovamente e in modo categorico", ha riferito il vicesegretario del Partito Democratico, LorenzoConcerns about the inner workings of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been mounting in recent months amid disclosures of cozy corporate alliances. Now a group of more than a dozen senior scientists have reportedly lodged an ethics complaint alleging the federal agency is being influenced by corporate and political interests in ways that shortchange taxpayers. A group calling itself CDC Scientists Preserving Integrity, Diligence and Ethics in Research, or (CDC SPIDER), put a list of complaints in writing in a letter to CDC Chief of Staff and provided a copy of the letter to the public watchdog organization U.S. Right to Know (USRTK). The members of the group have elected to file the complaint anonymously for fear of retribution. ADVERTISEMENT “It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests… and Congressional intent for our agency is being circumvented by some of our leaders. What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception,” the letter states. “These questionable and unethical practices threaten to undermine our credibility and reputation as a trusted leader in public health.” The complaint cites among other things a “cover up” of the poor performance of a women’s health program called the Well-Integrated Screening and Evaluation for Woman Across the Nation, or WISEWOMAN. The program provides standard preventive services to help 40- to 64-year-old women reduce their risks for heart disease, and promote healthy lifestyles. CDC currently funds 21 WISEWOMAN programs through states and tribal organizations. The complaint says there was a coordinated effort within the CDC to misrepresent data given to Congress so that it appeared the program was involving more women than it actually was. “Definitions were changed and data ‘cooked’ to make the results look better than they were,” the complaint states. “An ‘internal review’ that involved staff across CDC occurred and its findings were essentially suppressed so media and/or Congressional staff would not become aware of the problems.” The letter mentions that Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, who has been a proponent of the program, has made inquiries to CDC regarding the data. A spokesman for her office, confirmed as much. The complaint also alleges that staff resources that are supposed to be dedicated to domestic programs for Americans are instead being directed to work on global health and research issues. And the complaint cites as “troubling” the ties between soft drink giant Coca-Cola Co., an advocacy group backed by Coca-Cola, and two high-ranking CDC officials - Dr. Barbara Bowman who directed the CDC’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention until retiring in June, and Dr. Michael Pratt, senior Advisor for Global Health in the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP) at the CDC. Bowman, retired after revelations of what the complaint called an “irregular” relationship with Coca-Cola and the nonprofit corporate interest group set up by Coca-Cola called the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). Email communications obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by USRTK revealed that in her CDC role, Bowman had been communicating regularly with - and offering guidance to - a leading Coca-Cola advocate seeking to influence world health authorities on sugar and beverage policy matters. Emails also suggested that Pratt has a history of promoting and helping lead research funded by Coca-Cola while being employed by the CDC. Pratt also has been working closely with ILSI, which advocates for the agenda of beverage and food industries, emails obtained through FOIA showed. Several research papers co-written by Pratt were at least partly funded by Coca-Cola, and Pratt has received industry funding to attend industry-sponsored events and conferences. Last month, Pratt took a position as Director of the University of California San Diego Institute for Public Health. Next month, ILSI is partnering with the UCSD to hold a forum related to “energy balance behavior,” planned for November 30 to December 1 of this year. One of the moderators is another CDC scientist, Janet Fulton, Chief of the CDC’s Physical Activity and Health Branch. Pratt is on annual leave from the CDC during his stint in San Diego, according to the CDC. The forum fits into the messaging of “energy balance” that Coca-Cola has been pushing. Consumption of sugar-laden foods and beverages is not to blame for obesity or other health problems; a lack of exercise is the primary culprit, the theory goes. Experts in the nutrition arena have said that the relationships are troubling because the mission of the CDC is protecting public health, and yet certain CDC officials appear to be close with an industry that, studies say, is linked to about 180,000 deaths per year worldwide, including 25,000 in the United States. The CDC is supposed to be addressing rising obesity rates among children, not advancing beverage industry interests. CDC spokeswoman Kathy Harben would not address what the agency might be doing, if anything, in response to the SPIDER complaint, but she said the agency makes use of a “full range of federal ethics statutes, regulations, and policies” that apply to all federal employees.” “CDC takes seriously its responsibility to comply with the ethics rules, inform employees about them, and take steps to make it right any time we learn that employees aren't in compliance,” Harben said. “We provide regular training to and communicate with staff on how to comply with ethics requirements and avoid violations.” The SPIDER group complaint ends with a plea for CDC management to address the allegations; to “do the right thing.” Let’s hope someone is listening. Carey Gillam is a veteran journalist, formerly with Reuters, who directs research for U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit consumer education group focused on food safety and policy matters. The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.The nearest so-called "supermoon" in close to 70 years has graced the Earth with its bigger and brighter presence — and there won't be another like it until 2034. Here's a view of the moon late Sunday and before sunrise Monday, as captured by WBUR's Jesse Costa. If you missed it, meteorologist David Epstein says you'll still have a chance to catch the supermoon rising at around 5 p.m. Monday on what is supposed to be a very nice day with clear skies until the late evening. The supermoon in the western sky behind the Citgo sign in Kenmore Square in the early morning hours on Monday. (Jesse Costa/WBUR) The supermoon rises in the east on Sunday. (Jesse Costa/WBUR) The supermoon sets behind the Mass. Pike at 6:09 a.m. on Monday. (Jesse Costa/WBUR) The supermoon rising in the east on Monday evening. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)BY: Follow @FBillMcMorris The Supreme Court will hear arguments about forced unionization among government workers on Tuesday in a case that could greatly curtail powerful labor groups. At issue is an Illinois law crafted by imprisoned former Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D.) and enforced by his successor Pat Quinn (D.) that forces home healthcare workers, including family members caring for relatives, to pay union dues. The state claims that the caregivers are government employees since patients receive taxpayer dollars through Medicaid and Medicare. But the issue is more complicated than who is signing the checks, according to lawyers for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF), which is spearheading the challenge. "The Illinois law only defines them as employees in terms of unionization and no other rights at all," said NRTWLDF lawyer Bill Messenger. "This is a scheme for compulsory lobbying." The caregivers do not receive liability insurance coverage or retirement benefits that other government workers are entitled to, according to Messenger. If the court holds that state governments can force any secondary beneficiary of taxpayer dollars in the union, "vast swaths of the population" would end up paying union dues. "All doctors or nurses who care for Medicare patients would have to join a union by that logic," Messenger said. "What unions are looking at is trying to attach themselves to any kind of government funding." Harris v. Quinn could be a defining case in labor law, according to labor experts. Justin Wilson, managing director of labor watchdog Center for Union Facts, said that forcing healthcare workers to pay union dues has been a cash cow for public sector unions, which enjoy a larger membership than private unions. Michigan unions, for example, benefitted from a similar policy that was eliminated by GOP Gov. Rick Snyder and later rejected by voters in a 2012 ballot initiative. "Home healthcare workers have been ripe sources for Service Employees International Union, as they represent the largest pool of untapped resources," Wilson said. "There’s real money on the line for the unions." The case could extend beyond Illinois and home healthcare workers. Messenger is pushing the justices to overturn the 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which allowed governments to enforce compulsory union membership as a condition of employment. If he is successful, public employees across the country could withdraw from their unions in a manner akin to Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s labor reforms. "Compulsory unionism infringes on the First Amendment rights. The Illinois law and the unionization of providers shows what’s wrong with the Abood decision," Messenger said. "It’s time to bring some measure of freedom to public employees." Wilson said that the ambitious goals of Messenger and his allies could change the landscape of labor relations for years to come. "What we’ve recently seen is that public sector workers represent the future of the labor movement because it’s been relatively easy to unionize them," he said. "It could have sweeping ramifications on the future by raising the question of whether compulsory membership is allowed."GNH Defined Edit GNH is distinguishable from Gross Domestic Product by valuing collective happiness as the goal of governance, by emphasizing harmony with nature and traditional values as expressed in the 9 domains of happiness and 4 pillars of GNH.[12] The four pillars of GNH's are 1) sustainable and equitable socio-economic development; 2) environmental conservation; 3) preservation and promotion of culture; and 4) good governance.[13] The nine domains of GNH are psychological well-being, health, time use, education, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards.[14][15] Each domain is composed of subjective (survey-based) and objective indicators. The domains weigh equally but the indicators within each domain differ by weight.[16] Implementation of GNH in Bhutan Edit The Gross National Happiness Commission is charged with implementing GNH in Bhutan.[17] The GNH Commission is composed of the Secretaries each of the ministries of the government, the Prime Minister, and the Secretary of the GNH Commission.[18] The GNH Commission's tasks include conceiving and implementing the nation's 5-year plan and promulgating policies. The GNH Index is used to measure the happiness and well-being of Bhutan's population. A GNH Policy Screening Tool[19] and a GNH Project Screening Tool is used by the GNH commission to determine whether to pass policies or implement projects.[20] The GNH Screening tools used by the Bhutanese GNH Commission for anticipating the impact of policy initiatives upon the levels of GNH in Bhutan.[21] In 2008, the first GNH survey was conducted.[22][23] It was followed by a second one in 2010.[24] The third nationwide survey was conducted in 2015.[25] The GNH survey covers all twenty districts (Dzonkhag) and results are reported for varying demographic factors such as gender, age, abode, and occupation. The first GNH surveys consisted of long questionnaires that polled the citizens about living conditions and religious behavior, including questions about the times a person prayed in a day and other Karma indicators. It took several hours to complete one questionnaire. Later rounds of the GNH Index were shortened, but the survey retained the religious behavioral indicators.[26] The Bhutan GNH Index was developed by the Centre for Bhutan Studies with the help of the researchers from Oxford University researchers to help measure the progress of Bhutanese society. The Index function was based on Alkire & Foster method of 2011.[26][27] After the creation of the national GNH Index, the government used the metric to measure national progress and inform policy.[28][29] The Bhutan GNH Index is considered to measure societal progress similarly to other models such as the Gross National Well-being of 2005, the OECD Better Life Index of 2011, and SPI Social Progress Index of 2013. One distinguishing feature of Bhutan GNH Index from the other models is that the other models are designed for secular governments and do not include religious behavior measurement components. The data is used to compare the happiness between different groups of citizens,[30] and changes over time.[31] Spread of GNH Outside of Bhutan Edit Criticism Edit GNH has been described by critics as a propaganda tool used by the Bhutanese government to distract from ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses it has committed.[51][52] Bhutanese democratic government began in 2008. Before that time the government practiced massive ethnic cleansing of non-Buddhist population of ethnic Nepalese of Hindu faith in the name of GNH cultural preservation.[53][54] The NGO Human Rights Watch documented the events.[55] According to Human Rights Watch, "Over 100,000 or 1/6 of the population of Bhutan of Nepalese origin and Hindu faith were expelled from the country because they would not integrate with Bhutan’s Buddhist culture."[56] The Refugee Council of Australia stated that "it is extraordinary and shocking that a nation can get away with expelling one sixth of its people and somehow keep its international reputation largely intact. The Government of Bhutan should be known not for Gross National Happiness but for Gross National Hypocrisy."[57] Some researchers state that Bhutan's GNH philosophy “has evolved over the last decade through the contribution of western and local scholars to a version that is more democratic and open. Therefore, probably, the more accurate historical reference is to mention the coining of the GNH phrase as a key event, but not the Bhutan GNH philosophy, because the philosophy as understood by western scholars is different from the philosophy used by the King at the time.”[58] Other viewpoints are that GNH is a process of development and learning, rather than an objective norm or absolute end point. Bhutan aspires to enhance the happiness of its people and GNH serves as a measurement tool for realizing that aspiration.[59] Other criticism focuses on the standard of living in Bhutan. In an article written in 2004 in the Economist magazine, “The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is not in fact an idyll in a fairy tale. It is home to perhaps 900,000 people most of whom live in grinding poverty."[60] Other criticism of GNH cites "increasing levels of political corruption, the rapid spread of diseases such as AIDS and tuberculosis, gang violence, abuses against women and ethnic minorities, shortages in food/medicine, and economic woes."[61][62] See also EditIt’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s just an unemployed guy in a red cape. A Florida unemployment agency is under investigation for spending $14,000 in public funds on red superhero capes as part or broader campaign that frames joblessness as a battle between good and evil. The agency, Workforce Central Florida, even created a fictional villain, Dr. Evil Unemployment, whose superpower is apparently handing out pink slips in a bid to somehow take over the world.According to the Orlando Sentinel, Workforce Central Florida has spent $73,000 overall on the Cape-A-Bility campaign, including $14,200 for 6,000 red satin capes, and an additional $2,300 for cardboard cutouts of Dr. Evil Unemployment. To earn a cape, prospective superheros can take part in a WCF event, post a job listing to the agency’s website, submit a photo of themselves with a cutout of Dr. Evil Unemployment, or become a fan of the WCF Facebook page. In addition to a red cape, job seekers and employers who perform any of those tasks also become eligible to win a $1,000 prize pack of gift cards and tickets to WCF events. The AP reported Tuesday that Florida’s unemployment agency director, Cynthia Lorenzo, had called for an investigation into WCF over their use of funds, saying the spending appeard to be “insensitive and wasteful.” No word yet on what powers the red capes bestow on those who wear them.As if they weren’t already scary enough: New research shows the extent to which crows are able to remember individual human faces and hold grudges against people who have crossed them in the past — even if it’s been several years since they had a negative encounter. New Scientist reports: [scientist John Marzluff] and his colleagues donned a rubber caveman mask and then captured and banded wild American crows. Whenever a person wearing the same mask approached those crows later, the birds scolded them loudly. In contrast, they ignored the same person wearing a mask of former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, which had never been worn during banding. “Most of the time you walk right up to them and they don’t care at all,” says Marzluff. The birds’ antipathy to the caveman mask has lasted more than three years, even though the crows have had no further bad experiences with people wearing it. In the ‘sample size of one’ department: Animal Intelligence passes on the story of an Israeli man who picked up a young crow who had fallen out of its nest and was thereafter attacked by a large crow every day, to the point that he had to wear a helmet in his own backyard. (via New Scientist. Thanks, Hannah!)China has begun operating a lighthouse on one of its artificial islands in the South China Sea near where a US warship sailed last year to challenge China's territorial claims. China claims most of the energy-rich waters of the South China Sea, through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. But its neighbors Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam also have claims. China's transport ministry held a "completion ceremony," marking the start of operations of the 180-foot lighthouse on Subi Reef, where construction began in October, the state news agency Xinhua said late Tuesday. The US guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen sailed within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef in October, drawing an angry rebuke from China, which called the action "extremely irresponsible." Subi Reef is an artificial island built up by China on dredged-up sand over the past year or so. CSIS/AMTI/Amanda Macias/Business Insider Before China turned it into an island, Subi was submerged at high tide. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, 12-nautical-mile limits cannot be set around man-made islands built on previously submerged reefs. China says much of its construction in the South China Sea is designed to fulfill its international obligations in terms of maritime safety, search and rescue, and scientific research. Asked about the lighthouse, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China was dedicated to providing public services in the South China Sea to ensure safety and freedom of navigation, which would be helpful for commercial users of the waters. Chinese Defense Ministry Xinhua said the lighthouse, which emits a white light at night, "can provide efficient navigation services such as positioning reference, route guidance, and navigation safety information to ships, which can improve navigation management and emergency response." The South China Sea is an important maritime area and major fishing ground, it added. "However, high traffic density, complex navigation condition, severe shortage in aids and response forces have combined to threaten navigation safety and hindered economic and social development in the region." China has lighthouse projects on two other reefs in the area: Cuarteron Reef and Johnson South Reef. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, Robert Birsel)Panera's new cups highlight the fact that a 20-ounce soft drink contains 17.25 teaspoons of sugar. Panera Panera just announced a change that promises to cut into the chain's profit margins in the short term. But that's just fine with CEO Ron Shaich. On Tuesday, Panera announced that beginning this week the chain's cups would feature calorie and added-sugar information. The new cups — which highlight the fact that a 20-ounce soft drink contains a whopping 17 teaspoons of sugar — coincide with the national rollout of Panera's line of lower-sugar drinks, which launched earlier this year. "We believe in two things: real choices and real transparency," Shaich told Business Insider. A survey commissioned by Panera found that 99% of Americans were unaware of the amount of sugar in soft drinks, and Shaich says it's the chain's mission to educate them. Excess sugar consumption has been linked to higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and Alzheimer's, and cutting out soda is one of the easiest ways to cut sugar from your diet. But at the same time, Panera has a financial incentive to sell as many soft drinks as possible. Panera CEO Ron Shaich. Panera/David Elmes Soda is cheap for chains to prepare, and it has an incredible profit margin. According to "Fast Food Nation," the syrup to make a large Coke cost McDonald's about $0.12, but the drink costs customers $1.49 — a 1,200% profit margin. Shaich says Panera's new craft-beverage line is more expensive to produce, meaning the drink won't provide the same easy money. Yet Panera is trying to persuade customers to ditch sugary soft drinks anyway. Shaich believes it's the right long-term strategy for Panera as the chain continues to double down on healthy eating trends. There has already been an 8% shift toward Panera's lower-sugar beverages over soft drinks since they were added to the menu in March. The cups are designed to push that figure further, especially with the blunt listing of added sugar by teaspoon as opposed to grams. "The only people who know what grams are are drug dealers and Walter White," Shaich said. It's easier for people to visualize 17.25 teaspoons than 69 grams. Panera Wall Street doesn't typically support changes that cut into companies' profit margins. But Panera doesn't have to worry about that after its $7.5 billion acquisition by JAB Holdings earlier this year — a change Shaich says gives him freedom to focus on the long term instead of what he called "short-term stupid" strategies. While Panera's stock rose 8,000% over the past 20 years, being a private company means Shaich doesn't have to worry about activist investors' meddling or investor criticism when a new strategy doesn't immediately drive sales. If Panera were still public, Shaich says, he'd most likely have to deal with pushback from investors after announcing something like the new cup. Then, there are other perks of going private. "We don't have to worry about Ron sneezing on an earnings call and having that impact shares," Sara Burnett, Panera's director of wellness and food policy, said.Although Australia has a drinking culture, people in the UK drink more Australian police are beginning their biggest co-ordinated operation to curb alcohol-related violence nationwide. Operation Unite, deploying thousands of extra officers, will be the most widespread and concerted blitz in Australia and will last for two nights. It is an attempt to send the message that excessive alcohol consumption and bad behaviour will not be tolerated. Alcohol-related violence, including sexual assaults and fights, has nearly doubled in the past decade and a half. Drinking age calls This weekend police will flood into towns and cities in an unprecedented show of force. Our casual approach to drinking in our society is actually destroying lives and destroying people Alan Morrison New South Wales Ambulance Service Your comments on this story Undercover officers will join their uniformed colleagues along with dog squads and mounted units. "If you intend to go out and get paralytic and vomit and fight and abuse people and damage property then there is no real place for you on our streets," Sydney Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione was quoted by Australian Associated Press news agency. One thousand extra police will be patrolling in Sydney. The crackdown ends at 0600 local time on Monday. Each week the abuse of alcohol kills on average more than 60 Australians, while 1,500 end up in hospital. Alan Morrison from the New South Wales Ambulance Service says what he calls an epidemic of self-destruction must be addressed. "There certainly is a cultural acceptance of drinking in Australia and I'm not sure I understand why that is the case. "I see the effects of it all the time and I think most people don't come into contact with the kind of things paramedics or police or emergency departments see to understand that our casual approach to drinking in our society is actually destroying lives and destroying people," he said. NICK BRYANT'S AUSTRALIA When people conjure up a mental image of the Australian good life, something chilled is often in the picture. Read Nick's thoughts in full Health workers have called on the government to raise the legal drinking age from 18 to 19. Neurological experts have warned that binge drinking could be inflicting untold damage on the brains of young Australians. Although this country has always had a boozy reputation, it ranks about 20th in the global alcohol consumption league table. People in Britain, for example, drink about 25% more than their Australian counterparts. Some historians say Australia's love affair with the bottle has always been exaggerated. In a recent history of Australian drinking, the authors said barely 50% of Australians are motivated to drink on a daily or weekly basis; one in 10 Australians [has] never drunk a full serve of alcohol, another 7% are ex-drinkers, and a third of the population [enjoys] a drink now and then. Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionIndividualist anarchism has always been very much a minority within the anarchist movement and given some of its advocates, you can understand why. However, it is always good to see material from the past made available to modern day radicals simply in order to allow people to judge for themselves. So the publication of both Individualist Anarchism Revolutionary Sexualism: Writings by Émile Armand (Pallaksch Press, Austin, Texas, 2012) and Stirner’s Critics (LBC Books and CAL Press, Berkeley/Oakland, 2012) is to be welcomed. Both books, like both writers, are very different. The Armand book is tiny both in size and writings, with 13 short articles collected for the first time and split roughly evenly into anarchism and sexuality. Stirner’s Critics, in contrast, is more substantial and as well as complete new translations by Wolfi Landstreicher of two important texts by Stirner, also has a lengthy and important introduction (“Clarifying the Unique and Its Self-Creation”) by Jason McQuinn. Making these works available fills a big hole in our understanding of Stirner which previous partial translations (Daniel Guérin’s No Gods, No Masters) have only indicated. Émile Armand (1872–1963) was one of the leading French Individualist Anarchists of the early-to-mid 20th century. He wrote for and edited the anarchist publications L’Ère nouvelle (1901–1911), L’EnDehors (1922–1939) and L’Unique (1945–1953). As such, editor A. de Acosta should be congratulated in making his writings more accessible even if it is, I am afraid, a case of learning from pervious mistakes in order to avoid certain dead-ends. First, I need to be clear because individualist anarchism is not a unified theory of works (as would be expected it reflects the individual perspectives of each author). The American forms of it (most associated with Benjamin Tucker) are somewhat different to the European kind, although as I note in section G of An Anarchist FAQ other American individualists are closer to the European individualists (and so the anarchist mainstream) than others. This is best seen by their opposition to wage-labour as such rather than embrace Tucker’s hope for a non-exploitative form it and so they are consistent anarchists and follow through their ideas to recognise that wage-labour violates both their opposition to rule (archy) and views on property (limited to possession). This is shown when Armand writes that the “anarchist wishes to live without gods or masters; without bosses or directors” (11) and is “against the exploitation of the individual” (9). They oppose “exploitation” (to “make [others] labour on his account and for his profit”) and “monopolisation” (“possessing more than is necessary for its normal upkeep”) (14) and are against communism because “the individual would be as subordinate as he is presently” but “instead of being under the thumb of the small capitalist minority… he would be dominated by the whole of the economy. Nothing would properly belong to him.” (13) So Armand, rightly, lists wage-labour – having bosses – as a form of oppression and exploitation which individualist anarchism is against. Yet this highlights a key problem with the theory because modern economies are based on workplaces which, in the main, have to be run by a group of workers. However, property is considered by Armand to be a key feature of individualist anarchism – a source of independence and autonomy for the individual. So we have a contradiction – if the means of production are owned by individuals then how are these to be managed? If it is by the owner and it needs a group to operate then we have wage-labour – and so exploitation and oppression. If it is by the workers jointly then we have socialisation – and so no private property. Armand resolves this contradiction by getting rid of any form of workplace which needs more than a few people to operate: “property in the means of production and the free disposition of products [are] essential guarantees of the person. It is understood that this property is limited by the possibility of putting to work (individually, by couples, by familial groups) the expanse of soil or the engines of production required to meet the necessities of the social unit; with the condition that the possessor not rent it to anyone or turn to someone in his service to put it into use.” (14) This is no solution at all but it does go to the heart of the problems with individualist anarchism. Yet it is hardly a new problem as it was highlighted by Proudhon in the 1840s and his solution is the basis for all forms of social anarchism – socialisation of the means of production based on workers’ associations. Thus, to quote Proudhon, the “organisation of labour, which involves the negation of political economy and the end of property he who participates in [a workplace] must do so… as an active factor… [and] have a deliberative voice in the council… regulated in accordance with equality” for “all accumulated capital being social property, no one can be its exclusive proprietor.” This federated and self-managed economy was the basis on which disagreements within social anarchism – over, for example, tactics (reform or revolution) or goals (distribution of goods by deed or by need) – were played out. So if Armand’s vision of a free economy is problematic to say the least, what of his tactics? He writes of “struggle in all places for complete expression of thought… for absolute liberty of association… and secession. We are for the intangible freedom of exposition, publicity, experiment, and realisation.” (9) The individualist anarchist is “always asocial, insubordinate, an outsider, marginal, an exception, a misfit” (11) and are “enemies of the State and all its institutions… There is no possibility of conciliation between the anarchist and any form whatever of society resting on authority”. (11-2) This means “an abyss separates anarchism from all forms of socialism, including syndicalism.” (13) Yet the promise of individualist anarchism – a conscious rebellion against every form of tyranny – becomes, in practice, quietism of epic proportions. This can be seen from Armand’s texts – what is the most revolutionary act the individual can do? Is it to down-tools in a strike against your economic tyrant, the capitalist? No. Is it to rise-up in revolt against your political tyrant, the state? No. It is to take off your clothes: “revolutionary nudism” for the “rulers know” that little “would be left of their prestige, of the authority delegated to them” if everyone was naked. (126-7) Indeed, nudism is ultra-revolutionary, revolutionary multiple times more than mere strikes, revolts or insurrections: “in a triple sense: affirmation, protest, liberation.” (125) Action which would actually challenge the state or capital – mass revolt – is dismissed: “as before the war, we remain the resolute adversaries of revolutionary or insurrectionary attempts… [This is] no chance of success; it would result in a [bloody] repression… it would give the authorities an occasion to silence permanently those rare spirits who have known how to resist the general disorder” (29-30) Which leaves criticism: “The individualist anarchist critiques to free themselves and others.” (37) With enemies like this, neither the state nor capital needs friends. While Victor Serge traded in (elitist) individualism anarchism for (elitist) Bolshevism – one of those “misled by the dialectics of the fossils of the International” (32) – and is not the most reliable of memoirists, he was right to summarise his individualist phase in Memoirs of a Revolutionary as having “adopted what was (at that moment) the extremist variety [of anarchism], which by vigorous dialectic had succeeded, through the logic of its revolutionism, in discarding the necessity for revolution.” There is, however, an element of truth in Armand’s works – we do need to transform how we live our lives now. Every anarchist is – or needs to be – a “lifestylist” anarchist. An anarchist who does not apply their ideas in practice is not much of an anarchist (for example, some male anarchists combine a theoretical commitment to gender equality with sexist attitudes and practices). Yet we must never forget that this lifestyle transformation, while necessary, is not sufficient. So Armand was right to argue that there “are only masters because there are slaves” (13) and rail against hypocrisy, the “race for appearances” (21), which lead radicals to say one thing while doing the opposite, but his politics rejected the means by which people can change themselves while changing society – the class struggle, the encouraging of the revolt and self-organisation of the masses against their oppressors. Instead he proclaims “[w]e have not criticised vehemently enough the enrolment in leagues, unions, syndicates, and other bodies where individual autonomy and initiative are sacrificed to the common weal.” (30) In reality, we express our individuality best when we unite with our equals to defend our common interests and, in so doing, be in a position to replace hierarchical organisations with self-managed ones. Finally, half the book is made up of Armand’s writings of “revolutionary sexuality” and it is hard not to agree with the editor when he notes that in these texts Armand “ended up simply narrating his
, Velvs," he reassured her, rubbing her back gently. "I know she did - and I know why. But it was a bad reason." She took a deep, shuddering breath. "I don't want this sort of responsibility again." "You did fine, but if you asked, I'm sure Coco would understand. She's not going to push you to do something you're uncomfortable with." Velvet nodded against his shoulder. "Can - can we not talk about it right now? I just - " She swallowed hard. "It's reminding me of Haven." Yatsu wasn't quite sure how the two were related, but he was more than willing to drop the subject. "Are you looking forward to the dance?" he asked, voicing the first thing he thought of that wasn't related to their current situation. Velvet's next breath trembled less and she nodded. "Coco helped me pick out a really nice dress. Suggested we should switch partners for at least one song." He let out a pleased hum. "We never did finish talking about those two." She blushed a deep red. "Is there something we needed to talk about?" she asked, almost sulkily. "Just - just 'cause I like them doesn't mean we have to do anything." "No, but if something did happen, I wouldn't object," he said, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "I wouldn't either," Velvet admitted. "But… only them? I don't know how I feel about other people just yet." Yatsuhashi nodded. "Seems fair. Fox and Coco are special." She smiled, looking up at him. "They are, aren't they?" After Coco got back with Fox that evening, Velvet pulled her aside to talk. She couldn't put off the conversation - not when it felt like so much was at stake. Yatsuhashi had managed to explain what had happened with Beryl, but Velvet knew he had been too kind and had left out her panicked reaction, and so she needed to talk to Coco about not taking on this level of responsibility again. She hadn't gotten more than a couple halting words out when Coco grabbed her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. "Neither of us signed up for this," she said. "It was supposed to be a cakewalk. But Velvs, listen, I still would have chosen you, even if I knew it was going to be this hard." "But Coco, I panicked, and a kid went missing," Velvet pointed out. She'd failed. Coco frowned. "But you kept a cool head and you managed to find Beryl and get her back to her parents. It's okay that it was stressful." "I just - I don't want to do this again," Velvet lamented, looking down at the floor. Coco's brow furrowed. "That's fine, but Velvs, Velvet, I trust you with this. You've more than earned - " Ripping her hand back, Velvet all but snarled at Coco, angry tears welling up in her eyes. "No! I haven't! And I don't need your pity - any more than I needed Professor Lionheart's! I don't want this, Coco! I've never wanted this." She turned and stalked out of the room, leaving a bewildered Coco staring at the door that had been slammed shut in her face. The fight had been nearly impossible to not overhear. He hadn't made out the exact words, beyond a couple here and there, but when he heard a door slam shut and one of his teammates stalk out of the building, he followed, expecting to find his partner. "Coco?" he called, following her down an alley. But it wasn't her who let out a snort. "Wrong teammate," Velvet said as she slid down to sit with her back against a wall. He startled slightly - he wasn't aware Velvet had such a temper - but sat down next to her regardless. He could be here for her just as easily as he could for Coco. "Hey, Velvs. Do you want to talk about it?" "Not really." He nodded in understanding and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, smiling when she leaned in to his embrace. "Can I tell you a story instead?" "Sure?" she asked, sounding a little confused. "Coco and I met when we were about seven years old, and we became really fast friends. We were inseparable by the end of the year - always at the other's house, always partnered up for projects." He let out a chuckle. "Even the teachers would pair us up because it was easier than letting us sulk. When - " he paused and took a deep breath. This part never got easier. "I lost my parents when I was ten. She convinced her mom to take me in to live with them. We got into a huge fight over it - I didn't want her pity." Velvet flinched slightly at his choice of words. "It wasn't out of pity. She genuinely wanted me to be part of her family. It took me a long time to realize that. Coco does a lot of things, but she doesn't ever do something just because she pities someone. It's because she actually wants them there." He rubbed her shoulder. "She doesn't pity people - she just wants to help them." Velvet rested her head on his shoulder. "It was a dumb thing to say." Fox hummed. "You're hurting and didn't know. Knowing her she was probably being stubborn, which didn't help matters. I know her, she's not going to push if you're firm with her." She nodded, head moving across his shoulder. "Okay. I'll tell her, I just - I'm not ready to take on leadership responsibilities again." "That's fine, you don't ever have to be ready. Gods know I don't want to shoulder that kind of responsibility." She hummed thoughtfully. "Maybe eventually, but not yet," she said after a long moment. He pressed a gentle kiss to the top of her head, nose twitching when he brushed against her rabbit ears, and she giggled. "Should we go back?" he asked. "She's not going to be upset, just a little concerned." Velvet sighed and nodded. "Probably." "Not just probably," he promised, standing and offering her a hand up. Coco looked up when Fox and Velvet walked in, smiling when she noticed they were holding hands. She'd almost followed Velvet out the door when she'd stormed off, but Yatsuhashi had come in to talk her down instead when he saw Fox going after Velvet. "I'm sorry, Coco," Velvet said, voice small. "I don't - I know it's what you think is best, but I just can't handle it. I can't handle the pressure." Coco stood and wrapped her arms around Velvet in a tight hug. "I'm sorry too - I should have done something else when you were uncomfortable during the meeting with Port. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to do this." Velvet hugged her back. "I said it was okay, remember? I'm fine, I can handle it this time, but next time - " "Yatsu will be my second," Coco finished, nodding. "Not a problem." Coco didn't know what had caused the original outburst - Velvet had mentioned what had happened with the kid, but it seemed like there was something more going on than just that. She idly twirled a lock of hair around her finger. Had something happened at Haven that Velvet wasn't mentioning? It was something to consider for another day - she adored Yatsuhashi, but Velvet really had a better head for this sort of thing. She was glad Velvet had agreed to tough it out as best she could for the remainder of the mission - they'd need every advantage they could get to make it through this.In my continuing quest to learn everything I can about beer I picked up a copy of Tasting Beer: An Insider’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Drink by Randy Mosher off of Amazon a few weeks ago. They had a sale where the Kindle version was only $3 down from the normal $9, the dead tree version is $11. I would recommend the kindle version because at its core this is a reference book. Being able to open it up on your phone in a bar/bottle shop and search for the style of beer you’re looking at is where this book will shine in the long run. With the name Tasting Beer, I expected loads of information on how to taste beer and what to expect from styles. I was slightly disappointed though. It was quite a way into the book before you reach any information about what styles bring what tastes, aroma, etc… I say I was slightly disappointed, but that was really only due to my expectations and assumptions of what this book was. I am extremely happy with this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in learning about beer. Most of the book is about the brewing process, ingredients, and loads of history. The history includes general beer history, style history, country-specific histories and stories of how their beer styles developed. This is a great part of the book, such in-depth historical info. Once you get to the stylistic taste info there is pretty good info including brewing location, Flavor profile, aromas, balance, seasonality, pairing suggestions, and suggested beers to try. However all of this info and far more is available from the BJCP site as well as Beer Advocate or Rate Beer. So if you’re just looking for style info stick to the internet and pass on this book. We just, quite coincidentally, got an email sent to us from Inkling. Inkling is an interactive book app/website that enhances books with links and fancy. They contacted us about this book, not knowing that I’d recently finished it and hooked us up with a little trial action to check it out. Having already finished the book I didn’t dig into it too much, just skimmed around a bit on the web. Seems like a fun way to read the book, they also have some “tasting record” forms you can fill in with your notes about styles. Overall it may be a bit cheesy, I’m also light-weight peeved that there is no Android app. I realize iOS still dominates tablets, but the majority of smartphones in this world run android… anyway, I digress. Regardless of any of that they’re selling this app for $1.99 next weekend. I have no interest in shilling their stuff nor allegiance to them, but I am always interested in saving you money! In the end, I suggest this for everyone and I think it’d make a great gift for the beer fan in your life plus a sweet book to have on the shelf or coffee table.CAM INMAN is the San Francisco 49ers beat writer for the Bay Area News Group. After watching Origin II, he reveals what the NFL could learn from rugby league... and what league could learn from the NFL. THIS dumb American is catching on to Origin’s epic rivalry, and apparently at a great time, judging from Wednesday’s high-intensity show. New South Wales’ passion to level the series paid off, in the form of a 26-18 comeback win over Queensland before a record crowd of 91,513 in Melbourne. Wait, no gratuitous television shots of sexy cheerleaders ushering the victors off the field? This definitely is not the NFL that I’m used to covering. Origin I introduced me to rugby league action. Origin II roped me in further. Once Origin III arrives, my neighbours will be used to me invading their home, where I watch these games recorded before dawn on their satellite feed. READ CAM INMAN’S WILDLY POPULAR ACCOUNT OF ORIGIN I STATE OF ORIGIN II PLAYER RATINGS: WHO STARRED, WHO STANK The NFL is on hiatus until late July, but having covered America’s most popular league since 2000, it’s always on my mind, even while watching the State of Origin series. So, what can the NFL learn from Origin, and vice versa? Let’s count three ways each: WHAT THE NFL CAN LEARN FROM ORIGIN 1. MULTIPLE POSITIONS: The NFL is a specialized world, where jobs are divided up so players can perfect their craft and not risk harm on the other side of the ball. Rugby league players must do so much, at a non-stop pace. Several decades ago, the NFL employed many two-way players, and that art has been lost. After all, would the 49ers want to pay Colin Kaepernick $15 million a year to have him throw passes and then see him getting hurt tackling a punt returner? Deion Sanders sure added fun as a Hall of Fame cornerback and aspiring wide receiver. Here’s to more versatility! Colin Kaepernick’s $15 million a year arm doesn’t get risked on defense in the NFL. Source: Getty Images 2. PASSING PRECISION: As NFL offenses evolve, the read-option system could grow. It has been successful on occasion, such as by Kaepernick, who will read the defense before deciding to keep the ball and run or to toss it back to a teammate at the last second. Origin II offered some excellent passes and decision making, especially those that led to tries by Queensland’s Matt Scott and NSW’s Aaron Woods. More than one backward pass is rare on a NFL play, so perfecting that one is vital, and rugby league helps show how. 3. VIDEO REFEREE: Great drama builds for a referee’s verdict to appear on a stadium’s video board. The NFL, however, lets the on-field referee look at the replay and then announce his ruling, often with a convoluted explanation that isn’t totally relayed by his sporadic microphone. A simple “TRY” or “NO TRY” visual sure works, even if I can’t comprehend why stripping the ball is illegal and thus nullified Greg Inglis’ 90-metre run for a would-be try. It was cool, however, to hear the microphone-wearing Origin referee share his interactions with players, when warranted. WHAT ORIGIN CAN LEARN FROM THE NFL 1. LESS PLAYERS: Fielding only 11 players a side, as the NFL does, would open up running lanes and add scoring opportunities. Did you see how the hole Josh Dugan dashed through for the Blues’ final try? More offense has bolstered the NFL’s popularity, year after year, while a staunch defense might ultimately decide a championship. There is a symmetrical beauty, however, to rugby league’s option of deciding whether to attack on the right or left flank with precision passes. 2. PROTECT HEAD AND NECK: The NFL’s recent emphasis to prevent head and neck injuries is worth exploring in rugby league. Watching defenders’ forearms and fists slam into ballcarriers’ heads and necks is plain dangerous. Ryan Hoffman took a shot to his chin from Justin Hodges and temporarily left the game; Hoffman likely wouldn’t have returned in a NFL game because of his apparent concussion history. Soft helmets, such as Johnathan Thurston’s, should be encouraged, and it was good to hear Origin II announcers call Thurston “the toughest player in the game” after he survived a hit. 3. RULE CHANGES: Rugby league shouldn’t become the NFL, or vice versa. But … Why not allow blockers, perhaps only one or two, to open up lanes for a ballcarrier, as was nearly the case on Queensland’s final try by Matt Gillett? How about accepting the forward pass like American football did over 100 years ago, and not just because Mitchell Pearce’s try was invalidated by Brett Morris’ forward pass? Origin’s version of a fade pass Wednesday saw Pearce kick the ball ahead so Josh Morris could leap above defenders to grab it for a try. Finally, the NFL moved its goalposts to the back of the end zone in 1974 out of safety concerns, and that image came to mind as Matt Scott narrowly avoided the right post on Queensland’s first try Wednesday. FOLLOW CAM INMAN ON TWITTER @CamInmanActually, I just wanted to drop a note letting everyone there know I received the Full Circle DVD and was BLOWN AY-WAY! I LOVE IT!!! I cannot express this enough. I remember seeing the COD album covers on REX inserts when I purchased Sixpence None the Richer's first two albums back in March of 1995. Some guys in college I knew were totally into the REX label, and I would occasionally hear them playing albums from the label when I happened to be around. One guy actually taped one of the inserts to his door - I presume to let everyone know he was a huge REX fan. I found the self-titled album at a pawn shop near my workplace in NW Arkansas back in the mid- to late-nineties and, remembering seeing it on those inserts, bought it. Still have it. After my first few listens, I went out and found every other album of COD I could find, including the Brainchild-Mindwarp CD and the Argyle Park CASSETTE! (The CD version was too expensive back then...) :D Watching this video took me back. I really wished I could have made some shows, but travelling long distance for concerts, though it was on my agenda, I didn't want to do alone, and I couldn't get my friends to come with me. After discovering his Celldweller material a few years ago (which I was peripherally aware of, but wasn't familiar with), I began collecting all of his new stuff [as you may be aware of, considering how much I've spend over the past year or two on FiXTstore.com]. Please pass the word along to Klayton and the rest of the crew how much I appreciate this new DVD, and that many of us fans feel you should all be very proud of what you've accomplished. As a hardcore Christian, Calvinist/Post-Millenialist, most people think I'm absurd to love a band like COD or Argyle Park, much less Celldweller, Scandroid, Sunset Neon/Blue Stahli, and so many others of the bands out on FiXT, but you all produce some of the best, most honest music around, and I can't get enough. Just thought I'd drop a note to let you all know how much I appreciate what you do.With President Trump offering Roy Moore his formal endorsement, the RNC flip-flopping and resuming financial support of his campaign, and Mitch McConnell endorsing Moore as well, it's worth dwelling on the fact that the policy stakes of the Alabama special election are high. Back before Moore was accused of enjoying sexual predation of teen girls, he was already a controversial figure due to his habit of defying valid court orders, his view that Muslims should be barred from serving in Congress, his view that homosexuality is a "criminal lifestyle," etc. The GOP establishment wanted to nominate someone else for the seat, but when Moore won, they embraced his despite his disregard for the rule of law and the Constitution because — in the immoral words of Rob Portman — "he's going to be for tax reform, I think." That same calculus applies today. The House has passed a version of tax reform, and so has the Senate, but while they're broadly similar in spirit, they are different enough that reconciling them is not trivial. And the Senate bill was so hastily drafted that it contains important provisions — most significantly around the corporate alternative minimum tax — that GOP leaders seem to genuinely want to scrap. So they really will have to write another bill and pass it again, and while the odds are very good that they'll succeed, those odds drop a lot if Democrat Doug Jones rather than Moore replaces Luther Strange in the Senate. With Strange holding the seat, there are 52 GOP senators (plus Vice President Mike Pence), so they can handle the defection of two senators and still pass a bill. If it's Jones instead, they can only handle one defection. And we already know that Bob Corker has decided he objects to the scale of the borrowing involved. Operating with zero margin for error on such a large and complex bill is dangerous, because it means any single senator can credibly threaten to derail the whole thing unless he gets his pet provisions. The Wall Street Journal's Kate Davidson and Joshua Jamerson have a great rundown of pet provisions that mysteriously snuck into the Senate bill at the last minute, including: A favor for mortgage servicers from Mike Rounds A favor for car dealerships from Rand Paul A favor for the cruise ship industry from Dan Sullivan A favor for the oil and gas industry from John Cornyn If Jones wins the seat, many more legislators will be encouraged to push for similar favors. After all this talk of Republicans reversing the war on coal, for example, surely someone will wonder why coal shouldn't get the same special treatment as oil and gas. This "Christmas tree" style of legislation, however, poses two problems. One is that scrapping the corporate AMT provision requires the bill to go in the exact opposite direction — they need to inject more spirit of true tax reform with fewer special favors and carve-outs so they don't need that AMT revenue. The other is that to sell the bill in the House, where party leaders are asking members from rich districts to vote for SALT and mortgage deduction curbs that are bad for their constituents, they really do need to be talking up the team spirit of tax reform. Otherwise, if Dan Sullivan can protect cruise ship operators, why can't New Jersey Republicans protect heavy salt users? It's telling that Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the California House GOP delegation, immediately demanded the corporate AMT provision be repealed. He's asking his home-state colleagues to swallow a lot for the sake of tax reform. If you turn it into a Christmas tree, that doesn't make sense. But if Moore loses, it's hard to stop it from turning into a Christmas tree. So at the end of the day, if Republicans are really committed to enacting a large, unpopular corporate tax cut — and they sure seem to be! — then they really need Moore to win the election next week, whether he's a bigot or a sex criminal or whatever else. This is an abbreviated web version of The Weeds newsletter, a limited-run policy newsletter from Vox’s Matt Yglesias. Sign up to get the full Weeds newsletter in your inbox, plus more charts, tweets, and email-only content.(AllHipHop News) Later this year, Paul Giamatti will star as former N.W.A manager Jerry Heller in the biopic about the legendary Hip Hop group. The real life Heller has now spoken out about Straight Outta Compton. The 74-year-old longtime entertainment insider discussed the film and more with the Murder Master Music Show. On his feelings about the movie: I haven't seen anything yet. I am waiting until the movie comes out, and I will be there in the front row with my lawyer and looking to make sure it is an accurate movie. They didn't reach out to me at all to give any kind of advice, insight, or background, so it's hard for me to believe that they got it right... I didn't expect them to [consult with me], because that's the way that they are. I certainly thought that Universal, Warner Bros,or one of their companies would insist on it. I am really shocked that, even though they didn't reach out, somebody didn't reach out. On whether Giamatti contacted him about portraying him: I am sure that somebody told him not to do it. I am sure they told him to stay away. They can't write me out of it, but they can sure re-write it. If it is accurate then I'm a fan like everybody else. If it's not accurate, I'm not going to sit back and let them say whatever they want. On Dr. Dre and Ice Cube: I have never seen Cube anywhere since the day he left Ruthless. I never saw him anywhere - at a Laker game or a Dodger game. I never saw him again. I've seen Dre a couple of times. His mother lives a few streets away, so I see her all the time. I used to see him once in awhile. We were always pleasant to each other. I'd run into him at the gas station or whatever. We always tried to be pleasant and superficial whenever I saw him. I got nothing against Dre. I think Dre is the most talented guy of the entire rap era. On DJ Speed: He was never in N.W.A. He was a gopher. He took Eric's [Eazy-E] laundry in. He was a friend of Eric's. I just found out from Vinnie Caruso that he got in trouble and Eric fired him. He was never a member of N.W.A. All the years I knew Eric, I probably ran into Speed two or three times. He talked s**t about me all the time like he knows something. He's just a punk. He had nothing to do with N.W.A. Listen to Jerry Heller's interview below.“Within minutes, a river of black water and big stones followed us into the temple,” he said by phone after returning to his home village, Tailagram, in the Rudraprayag district of Uttarakhand. The temple survived the assault, but when the water receded after a cold night of prayer, Mr. Kukreti found himself standing among piles of dead pilgrims. “Everywhere I looked I saw dead men, women and children,” he said. Most of the buildings around the temple were destroyed, and the town of Kedarnath, which has grown around the temple, was submerged. After braving cold, hunger and grief for three days inside the temple, Mr. Kukreti and about 400 pilgrims hiked a few miles to an emergency landing pad, and rescue helicopters flew them to a relief camp. Google has developed a Person Finder application for the Uttarakhand area, and the state government has created a message board on its Web site, where relatives of missing pilgrims are posting their phone numbers and names, and the last locations and pictures of their missing relatives. In a message on the Uttarakhand government bulletin board, Rajneesh, an anxious relative, who uses only one name, said he was looking for his missing brother and sister-in-law and their two children named Honey and Money. The Himalayan pilgrimage centers have been straining to cope with the disaster. In the past two decades, religious expression has increased in India along with economic growth, and the number of pilgrims visiting religious sites has greatly increased. According to official statistics, 30 million tourists visited Uttarakhand in 2010, up from 10 million in 2001, according to official statistics. “It is an ecologically fragile region and the Himalayas are young mountains, but there is haphazard construction to serve increasing numbers of tourists and pilgrims,” said Ashish Kothari, an Indian environmentalist and a co-author of “Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India.” “All sorts of hydroelectric projects are coming up in these areas, and anything goes in the name of environment assessment.” The rescuers are racing against time; the Indian Meteorological Department predicted more rain in northern India starting Monday.A majority of US voters believe Donald Trump is not fit to be president and only 36 percent approve of the job he is doing in the White House, according to a poll released Wednesday. Americans were deeply divided by party, gender and race on whether Trump is fit to serve as president, the Quinnipiac University pollsters said. But most agreed on one thing — Trump should stop tweeting. Sixty-nine percent of the 1,412 voters surveyed nationwide by Quinnipiac said Trump should step away from Twitter, while just 26 percent said he should continue firing off tweets. Overall, 56 percent of those polled said Trump is not fit to serve as president while 42 percent said he is fit. Ninety-four percent of Democrats said Trump, a Republican, was not fit while 5 percent said he is fit. Eighty-four percent of Republicans said he is fit while 14 percent said he is not. American men were equally split on the question — 49-49 — while women believed by a 63-35 margin that Trump is not fit to be president. White voters were divided with 50 percent saying he is fit and 48 percent saying he is not. Black voters overwhelmingly thought Trump was not fit, by 94 percent to just four percent. Most Hispanics — by a 60-40 margin — also thought Trump was unfit to be in the Oval Office. Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said they disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president with 36 percent saying they approved. Trump's job approval numbers have hovered between 33 percent and 40 percent in the Quinnipiac polls since March. Fifty-one percent said they were embarrassed to have Trump in the White House while 27 percent said they were proud. “There is no upside," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. "With an approval rating rating frozen in the mid-thirties, his character and judgement questioned, President Donald Trump must confront the harsh fact that the majority of American voters feel he is simply unfit to serve in the highest office in the land,” Malloy said. The poll, conducted Sept. 21-26 has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.Immigration issues related to the Pan-Borneo Highway, that passes through Brunei, are expected to be solved before the Malaysia-Brunei Annual Leaders’ Consultation next year. Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak said Malaysia’s proposal to establish a new route from Bandar Seri Begawan to Limbang in Malaysia was accepted by the Sultan of Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah. Najib said the sultan also wanted the current immigration process, which requires one’s passport to be stamped seven times for each trip across Brunei, to be reduced to only one entry stamp and one exit stamp. The prime minister also said that Malaysia would propose for a more applicable and secured system to be developed, so as to ease the movement of people of the two countries. “The issues have been discussed for some time and both parties had agreed that it must be solved before the next annual leaders’ consultation,” he told a press conference after having a four-eyed meeting with the sultan in conjunction with the 21st Malaysia-Brunei Annual Leaders’ Consultation here, here today. Najib said Hassanal Bolkiah (photo) was clearly looking forward to smooth pan-Borneo movement, because only last week the sultan participated in a regatta in Kuching, but his team members who travelled by road had to endure a 14-hour journey before they finally reached the venue. The prime minister said he had informed the sultan that once the Pan-Borneo Highway was completed, the travel time would be reduced to almost half. “That is part of the results of the Pan-Borneo Highway development,” he added. - BernamaSomething -- or some things -- in the blood of young mice has the ability to restore mental capabilities in old mice, a new study by Stanford University School of Medicine investigators has found. If the same goes for humans, it could spell a new paradigm for recharging our aging brains, and it might mean new therapeutic approaches for treating dementias such as Alzheimer's disease. In the study, to be published online May 4 in Nature Medicine, the researchers used sophisticated techniques to pin down numerous important molecular, neuroanatomical and neurophysiological changes in the brains of old mice that shared the blood of young mice. But they also conducted a critical experiment that was far from sophisticated, said Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, the senior author of the study and a professor of neurology and neurological sciences. The scientists simply compared older mice's performance on standard laboratory tests of spatial memory after these mice had received infusions of plasma (the cell-free part of blood) from young versus old mice, or no plasma at all. "This could have been done 20 years ago," said Wyss-Coray, who is also senior research career scientist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. "You don't need to know anything about how the brain works. You just give an old mouse young blood and see if the animal is smarter than before. It's just that nobody did it." Wyss-Coray has co-founded a biotechnology company, Alkahest, to explore the therapeutic implications of the new study's findings. He serves as the director of Alkahest's scientific advisory board. The study's lead author, Saul Villeda, PhD, now has an active lab of his own as a faculty fellow in anatomy at the University of California-San Francisco. Villeda was a graduate student at Stanford and, briefly, a postdoctoral scholar under Wyss-Coray's direction when the bulk of the work was performed. "We've shown that at least some age-related impairments in brain function are reversible. They're not final," Villeda said. Previous experiments by Wyss-Coray, Villeda and their colleagues, described in a paper published in 2011 in Nature, had revealed that key regions in the brains of old mice exposed to blood from young mice produced more new nerve cells than did the brains of old mice similarly exposed to blood from old mice. Conversely, exposing young mice to blood from old mice had the opposite effect with respect to new nerve-cell production, and also reduced the young mice's ability to navigate their environments. But that earlier work didn't directly assess the impact of young mouse blood on older mice's behavior. This time, the researchers checked both for changes within nerve circuits and individual nerve cells and for demonstrable improvements in learning and memory. First, they examined pairs of mice whose circulatory systems had been surgically conjoined. Members of such pairs, known as parabiotic mice, share a pooled blood supply. Wyss-Coray's group paid special attention, in these parabiotic mice, to a brain structure called the hippocampus. In both mice and humans, this structure is critical for forming certain types of memories, notably the recollection and recognition of spatial patterns. "That's what you need to use when, for example, you try to find your car in a parking lot or navigate around a city without using your GPS system," Wyss-Coray said. Experience alters hippocampal activity and anatomy. Studies have found, for instance, that a veteran London cabdriver's hippocampus is larger than it was when the driver was first hired, and larger than the average person's. The hippocampus is also extremely vulnerable to the normal aging process, showing early erosion in function as people grow older. In dementias such as Alzheimer's disease, this hippocampal deterioration is accelerated, leading to an inability to form new memories. "We know that detrimental anatomical and functional changes occur in the hippocampus as mice and people get older," said Villeda. "This is just from natural aging. We're all heading in that direction." When the investigators compared hippocampi from old mice whose circulatory systems had been conjoined with those of young mice to hippocampi from old mice that had been paired with other old mice, they found consistent differences in a number of biochemical, anatomical and electrophysiological measures known to be important to nerve-cell circuits' encoding of new experiences for retention in the cerebral cortex. The hippocampi of older mice that had been conjoined to younger mice more closely resembled those of younger mice than did the hippocampi of older mice similarly paired with old mice. The old mice paired with young mice made greater amounts of certain substances that hippocampal cells are known to produce when learning is taking place, for example. Hippocampal nerve cells from older members of old-young parabiotic pairs also showed an enhanced ability to strengthen the connections between one nerve cell and another -- essential to learning and memory. "It was as if these old brains were recharged by young blood," Wyss-Coray said. Villeda, Wyss-Coray and their associates next subjected regular older mice to a test in which the mice were trained to quickly locate a submerged platform in a water-filled container. The mice had to speedily orient themselves using memory cues provided by their surroundings. The investigators injected old mice intravenously with plasma from young or old mice and ran them through the test. Typically, untreated older mice did poorly compared to young mice, as they did when injected with plasma from old mice. But if they were infused with young mice's plasma they did much better. This was likewise the case on another test in which mice were trained to freeze in fear when plunked into a particular environment. The better they recognized that environment, the longer they would freeze. Older mice typically freeze for a shorter period of time than younger ones do. Again, "freezing" times for older mice given young plasma, but not old plasma, increased significantly. In both tests, the improvement vanished if the plasma provided to the old mice had first been subjected to high temperatures. Heat treatment can denature proteins, so this hints that a blood-borne protein, or group of them, may be responsible for the cognitive improvements seen in old mice given young mouse plasma. "There are factors present in blood from young mice that can recharge an old mouse's brain so that it functions more like a younger one," Wyss-Coray said. "We're working intensively to find out what those factors might be and from exactly which tissues they originate." "We don't know yet if this will work in humans," he said, adding that he hopes to find out sooner rather than later. A near-term goal of his company is to test this proposition through a clinical trial.Hey, currently working on making a shaman murloc deck. This is currently what I have so far. Record: 19/4 2 losses to mech based rogue decks (added lightning storm to combat this needs more testing) 1 loss to priest (bad hand and draws) 1 loss to warrior (bad hand led to armor getting out of control) Typically looking for for early murloc drops in mulligan. Keep nothing over 4 mana. Tend to keep 1 removal unless lacking any drops. Key Cards: Far Sight: has been a true mvp within this deck. Several times it has snagged me Murloc Warleader for some insane combos, and at times bloodlust for some easy pre turn 5 finishers. has been a true mvp within this deck. Several times it has snagged me Murloc Warleader for some insane combos, and at times bloodlust for some easy pre turn 5 finishers. Jeeves: Allows for great draw power after dumping hand. (this happens quite often with cheap murlocs and cards manipulated by Far Sight. (Something to note, only have had one game where the enemy has been able to gain any value from it). Allows for great draw power after dumping hand. (this happens quite often with cheap murlocs and cards manipulated by Far Sight. (Something to note, only have had one game where the enemy has been able to gain any value from it). Crackle: This card has won me games on several occasions. Can burst for some insane damage if pro
into something REALLY IMPORTANT. I make sure to put my serious face on when I say this. They do the same. Then I drop the bomb. “Let’s talk about wanking.” A shock wave of genuine anxiety ripples across their face. I charge on. “You’re probably wondering why I’m bringing this up. That’s a good question. And I can assure you that it has nothing to do with you specifically. No, I do not think that you specifically have a problem with slapping your donkey, or whatever they call it these days. In fact I have no idea whether you do or not, and frankly I’m not that concerned. Because what I do know is that – all men in the modern world have a problem, to some degree, with creaming their avocado whether they like it or not. So I want to open the subject up so that we have no doubt in our minds about what this entails from a balls and boobs out enlightenment perspective. Are you open to hearing me out?” They usually nod at this point. Green light on. “Firstly I’m sure we all can agree that there’s nothing particularly empowering about spending minutes at a time hunched in some corner of your house like a dribbling medieval peasant frantically trying to strangle a weasel. It’s just not a good look. There’s also the side effect that masturbation, if done quickly (which it usually is) trains us to premature ejaculate. Fantastic. Just what everyone wants more of. And what about that ridiculous idea that’s been perpetuated for years about jerking off before a first date? Seriously? I mean what towering intellect came up with the idea of shooting all your UNAGI into an old sock before meeting a goddess with whom you want to marshal all your male potency to engage with? I mean, what if you make it to home base? You think ejaculating like a stroke victim trying to keep his rice pudding down is going to blow her hair back? The release of your cosmic life force should have the raw power of a samurai sword chopping off the tip of a fire hydrant. It should explode with the force of Old Faithful. It should drench the woman, the entire house. Semen should be running down the staircase from her bedroom like the rivers of blood in the Shining. It should fill the fireplace and shoot out the chimney. The neighbors should be able to dance underneath the shower that covers the street like a Bedouin tribe celebrating the arrival of the rain after a drought. Animals in the nearby Zoo should run for higher ground. What I’m trying to say here is that it should be an event. Do not jerk off before a date. But the real reason we do this is simply because we are not in training. We have no understanding of how to channel our sexual energy. So when a powerful woman enters our sphere of awareness we simply can’t hold onto our donkey, and it pops. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because whats really going on here is far more dis-empowering than simply losing control of your chi when you should be transmuting that shit back up your spine and shooting it out of your third eye like a boss. No, what this is really all about, is where we, as men, psychologically and emotionally train ourselves to go while we’re masturbating. What? Hear me out. Modern men all over the world have been trained since a very young age to masturbate in a very particular way that involves focusing our awareness onto a very specific, very secretive place inside our psyche that is often completely contrary to what a fulfilling sexual experience usually looks like. What I’m talking about is not your every day WANK BANK, but your SECRET VAULT, your CONCRETE BUNKER. That place that all men born in the modern world and exposed to advertising, television, film, magazines, pornography have been, on a very deep level, programmed to go to when fantasizing. It’s that place that has been trained to be turned on by an active or passive sexual violence, an aggressive domination or submission, or any other variation of the classic “dominator hierarchy.” And the underlying reason? As a society we’re still, for the most part, getting off with our egos. And an undeveloped ego only ever feels good when locked fast in an endless struggle for power and control. The result is an unconscious yearning for the kind of sexual relationship that couldn’t be further from a healthy sex life that most of us truly want. And in the midst of a mental health epidemic it seems logical (if incredibly painful because of the stigma of shame surrounding it) that at some point we might want to consider how we actually teach our young men to masturbate in a way that doesn’t simply churn and hard wire some version of sexual toxicity within them, so they can actually begin to set themselves up for a healthy sex life thereafter. But for the most part, we’re still too immature as a society to even talk about it. The result is that most of us never ever truly turn and face that deep, dark place inside where our personal off-shore secret Swiss Wank Account is stored so that it has no choice but to grow in interest until it eventually gets so bloated that it spills over into our public life like an Elliot Spitzer, Dominique Strauss Khan, or Anthony Wiener. Because if our sexual fantasies are not aired, cleansed and processed into something healthy, they will ultimately take control of us in a moment of weakness and remind us that the deeper we repress them, the greater their power over us. Lest we forget masturbation is arguably the place where our ideas about sex first begin to crystallize. And there’s nothing worse than having a nice young chap with good intentions give off a totally rape-y vibe for no other reason than for a few minutes, a dozen times a week he trains his brain to wire around some twisted sexual power struggle simply because he hasn’t been offered a healthy, empowering alternative to put in its place. And finally, its important to get straight that an orgasm is a tremendous window into the unconscious. When we climax we’re in a profoundly receptive state. Those few seconds are a sacred neurological ground that we want to make sure we grace with phrases and acts and emotional content that is going to strengthen not weaken us as individuals.” By this time they’re nodding their head. They’re even smiling a bit. They get that this isn’t a take down, or a pot shot, or some weird messed up turn of events where they’re going to have to spam me and change their phone number. No, they get the point and are hearing me out. Which as you can imagine only ever takes place because we’ve already established an I’d-take-a-bullet-for-you level of rapport. But what does this all really come down to? I’d have to say that it comes down to sexual slavery. Harsh, perhaps. But if you’re a man, and you’re not eighty years old, or have a testosterone deficiency, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Because all men, in spite of our best intentions, have at one time or another felt completely at the mercy of our libidos. It’s just part of the game. And don’t get me wrong. In an age where so much emphasis is finally being placed upon the Feminine, and rightly so, it can be a curious thing to bring in such a concept. That as men, we need to be understood for the biological pressures that we’re being put under by the Heavy Weight Champion of the chemical world: Testosterone. Mr T., AKA The Dark Lord Ballsdemort. Yes, ladies, I can assure you that Ballsdemort has the power to put your higher functions into a choke hold in the blink of an eye like a magic spell you can be under in no time. And with all the support Ballsdemort gets from the mass media machine, it can be a full time job for men finding their center when every cell in their body seems to be screaming kill every man you meet and have sex with every woman. Most men I speak to usually have no trouble admitting that they have, at one time or another, felt like Ballsdemort’s bitch. A slave to his (and not their) desire. And I’m not giving testosterone a bad rap here. It has its upside for sure. I’m just talking about the spell that takes training to come to terms with, to meet with a level of personal empowerment that doesn’t just involve repression. Because at some point there comes a time when we all have to stare our relationship to sex, and to our sexual fantasies squarely in the face, with our eyes open, so that we can begin to ask the inevitable question – do I want to be free from this? And I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone does. But for those of us who are tired and do want to, I offer a few suggestions: 1. Identify where you go in your deepest, darkest fantasies. But don’t just stick your big toe in them, or glance at them cowardly from a distance. Dive into them. If they’re unconscious then you may even have to allow yourself to go there consciously, which may very well inflame the part of you that is ashamed. Yeah, it’s a Gordian knot. But until you hold your eyes open to them no matter how strange or painful they are you won’t be able to identify the underlying dynamic that you’re training yourself to get off on. Is it the abuse of power? Is it humiliation? Self-deprecation? Aggression? Usually a distortion of power is involved, but not always. Identifying what it is, and then understanding the underlying need that wants to be expressed is the first step in understanding how that need might authentically be met in a way that heals and empowers. 2. Take a meta perspective of yourself in the act. The first time I forced myself to do this it changed my relationship to masturbation forever. It was like throwing a rock through a mirror and seeing the truth. So just take a moment to really engage your pattern, really commit to going to that secret place physically, emotionally, psychologically, and then right in the middle of it – turn and check yourself out in the mirror. Dear lord, its like having a bucket of cold water thrown over you while being hit by lightning. Seriously, if you’ve got your cum face on and your hunched over you probably look like a beaten down dog taking an incredibly painful shit. It’s horribly humiliating and allows the spell of your own illusion of what you think you’re doing to be momentarily broken. At the very least you’ll realize that if you’re going to masturbate then you could attempt to bring some dignity to the act. Think, The Masturbations of Marcus Arelius. 3. Stop it with the celebrities for god’s sake. They get enough energy as it is without you beaming your first chakra directly into their psychic storage center. More importantly, masturbating over public figures can perpetuate the unconscious belief that your sexual fulfillment will always remain unattainable, always within the realm of individuals with whom you may never meet. Then again if you are in a position where you may meet them, then even more reason not to. The last thing you want to do is walk into a meeting and have to actually shake hands with someone with the same five digits you beat off to them with. 4. And yes, stop watching porn. Porn is erotic junk food. There are plenty of other areas that can turn you on that don’t involve the exploitation of women and an unhealthy example of sexual fulfillment. So try going cold turkey, or if that’s too difficult then gradually phase out from full fledged porn, into “art” photography, then into “normal women” with “normal bodies” photography. This will begin to bring the fantasy back into reality. Like retraining your taste buds into understanding that a fresh salad is always better than a big mac and fries. Your libido is the same. Now for God’s sake say Om. ~ If you enjoyed this post consider checking out the recently released Part 2 of Why We Need To Talk About Male Masturbation. Photo Credit: HeliosThere are often stories of huge (and often hilarious) Photoshop fails in the advertising industry, in which models are seen with extra limbs or ridiculous body proportions. Snickers just released a clever advertisement that pokes fun at these Photoshop fails. “Photo retouchers get CONFUSED when they’re hungry,” says the ad, which can be found on the back cover of the new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Take a look for yourself (click the image for the full-res version): How many of the intentional Photoshop fails can you spot? There’s the extra hand on the shoulder, the cloned-out handbag, the missing thigh, the relocated belly button, the floating hair, the cut off bikini strap, and the misaligned horizon line. That’s 7 mistakes. AdWeek reports that the ad was created for Snickers by the agency BBDO New York, and that there are a total of 11 retouching errors. See if you can find them all, and be sure to let us know in the comments below!Sen. Lee Introduces the Human-Powered Travel in Wilderness Act Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Orin Hatch (R-UT) introduced the Human-Powered Travel in Wilderness Act, a bill that would allow more Americans to mountain bike in wilderness areas. “Our National Wilderness Preservation System was created so that the American people could enjoy the solitude and recreational opportunities of this continent’s priceless natural areas,” Lee said. “This bill would enrich Americans enjoyment of the outdoors by making it easier for them to mountain in wilderness areas.” “Utah is blessed with an abundance of beautiful wilderness, and Americans should be free to enjoy it,” Hatch said. “This bill presents a reasonable approach to allowing the use of mountain bikes on trails and grant federal land managers the ability to do necessary maintenance.” Specifically, the Human-Powered Travel in Wilderness Act would: (1) Allow local land managers to decide whether to allow and how to manage mountain biking in wilderness areas; and (2) Allow federal employees or designees to use non-invasive, minimal technology to maintain wilderness trails.Darren Thompson has a “crazy dream” to buy the Toronto Maple Leafs — and he’s recruiting Canadians from coast to coast to help him make it a reality. When he heard that the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan plans to sell its 66 per cent stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the 35-year-old Alberta man built a website to build community support. Thompson grew up playing hockey on the pond near his New Brunswick home. He relocated to Leduc, Alta., just south of Edmonton, a decade ago. “It’s always been a dream of mine to own a professional sports team, and being a good Canadian, that professional sports team should be a hockey team,” Thompson said. “I believe there’s enough people out there to truly and honestly do this.” The plan is simple: Thompson would take a $1,000 investment from one million Canadians — and supporters have already pegged more than $1 million to the project.Pochacco, My Melody, Chococat, Keroppi, and Hello Kitty have arrived at Irvine’s Tanaka Farms. Their year-long visit kicks off pumpkin season starting today, and we paid them a visit to give you the photo ops and details you’re wanting to know about. If you’re lucky enough to head out there today, here’s what you can expect. Note: we are not advocating skipping class for this (cough cough). Entrance is only $3 (ages 2 and under are free), and includes access to all photo ops, the corn maze, and a big ‘ol pumpkin patch. There’s also a petting zoo, featuring sheep, goats and an alpaca for an additional $3. They’ve got a special $10 package that includes entry, the zoo, plus a wagon ride around the 30 acre farm. This can only be purchased when you first arrive at the patch, so go for it if you’re not in a rush. If you want to get some farm fresh produce, their U-Pick Veggie Garden allows visitors to stock up for $2.99 per pound. Every weekend in October they’ll be holding a Fall Harvest Festival. Additional activities, ATV rides and kid-friendly games will be available. This weekend in particular, they’re offering free wagon rides with paid admission. Bonus: We also hear Keroppi and Hello Kitty will be there on Saturday afternoon. Look out for the pumpkin cannon and save your squash selection for the end, as you’ll be lugging it around otherwise. We scored a silvery blue Jarrahdale pumpkin for our front door. They’ve also got an even bigger Halloween event scheduled for Saturday the 28th, complete with costume competition and a special appearance by Hello Kitty! Be sure to check out their specially branded Sanrio shirts, plush and pins by the produce stand, only being sold at Tanaka. Open every single day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Halloween, chances are opening weekend...heck, all weekends in general will be crazy busy. Trust us when we say a weekday morning or early afternoon will be less stressful. Parents that are looking for an educational visit should keep an eye out for future Tanaka Farms programming, as they’ll also be incorporating the Sanrio experience into upcoming workshops. If you’re on social media, be sure to hashtag #sanrioxtanakafarms. Those on Snapchat can check out the super kawaii filter they’ve set up for the season. See you on the farm! (If you happen to be at tonight’s Decadence event at Hotel Irvine, we might have some limited edition Sanrio swag to give away if you say hi to us. Just sayin’.) Tanaka Farms is at 5380 3/4 University Dr in Irvine, (949) 653-2100; www.tanakafarms.com.Ignaz Karl Hummel, January 17, 1933 Oskar Daubmann (originally, January 17, 1933 Oskar Daubmann (originally Ignaz Karl Hummel; March 9, 1898 – January 20, 1954) was a Swiss-German con man whose case attracted international attention in 1932. Biography [ edit ] Ignaz Karl Hummel was born in Oberwil, near Basel in Switzerland.[1] He ran away from home at the age of eleven. After being arrested for thievery, he was assigned to a reform school. Afterward, he continued his career as a petty criminal, earning multiple convictions and prison sentences. In 1930 he settled in Offenburg, working as a tailor. In 1931 he married Kreszentia Allgeier.[1] In 1932, he left his pregnant wife for economic reasons (she filed for divorce the same year) and went to Algeria with the intention of enlisting in the French Foreign Legion.[1] He had, however, stopped in Italy near Napoli.[1] Since he had no money for the return journey, he decided to call himself Oskar Daubmann, the name of a former school friend from Endingen am Kaiserstuhl, whom he knew had been missing since the First World War.[1] According to another version of the story, he had been imprisoned for ten years for burglary, and shortly after his release had bought a second-hand uniform in a shop, in which pockets he found a soldier's passport in the name of Oscar Daubmann.[2] Hummel claimed to have been captured in 1916 at the Battle of Somme and that the French had imprisoned him for 16 years.[2] After an escape attempt in 1917, he was allegedly accused of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in an Algerian prison camp, to which he was transferred from a prisoner of war camp.[1][2] In Algeria, he claimed to have been starved and tortured.[1][2] Eventually, he was supposedly able to make his escape, and was picked up by an Italian ship after walking over 3,000 miles along the African coast.[1][2] On 21 May 1932, Oskar Daubmann's parents received a letter from Italy, in which Hummel described his dramatic story and asked for assistance.[1] They turned the letter over the local press, and the story quickly became known in German and international press.[1] At first, doubts about Daubmann's identity and history were largely ignored by the public, often dismissed as French lies and propaganda.[2] The French were supposed to have released all German captives by 1930[2] and the case inflamed the French-German relations for a while.[1][2] The alleged wrongful imprisonment of a German national quickly became a German and even international sensation, and Hummel - now Daubmann - found international recognition.[1] The German press found in him a welcome opportunity for stirring up "national passions", inciting a hate campaign against France, which was accused of hypocrisy and cruelty.[1] In particular, he became a popular figure in the Nazi press.[2] Joseph Goebbels, writing in the Nazi magazine "Der Angriff", demanded a war of vengeance.[1] The supposed last prisoner of World War I was welcomed in a homecoming ceremony on 29 May attended by more than 15,000 people in his "hometown" of Endingen.[1] Amazingly, the parents of the real Oskar Daubmann accepted the impostor as their son - despite his different eye color and lack of known facial scar.[1][2] Anton Bumiller, an officer from Sigmaringen who had served with the real Daubmann in the same regiment, nonetheless decided to exploit the situation.[1] Bumiller organized lecture tours, and the "hero Daubmann" held numerous lectures in the following weeks and received numerous awards.[1] He received the honorary citizenship of 18 towns and was elected as an honorary president of the Society of Ex-War-Prisoners.[2] Bumiller would sell Daubmann merchandise and wrote an adventure novel based on his "real story", and inquires were made about a movie.[2] In the meantime, the Daubmann issue became a Nazi propaganda story, contributing to Nazi victory in the federal election in July that year.[1] However, the French issued an official note casting a doubt on the story on 5 September 1932, in which they reported that after a detailed search of their archives, they failed to find any evidence to support his story.[1] The Nazi press dismissed the French report, but other German authorities investigated the claims, due to growing inconsistencies in Daubmann's story, as many former colleagues had failed to recognize him.[2] Eventually, police identified his fingerprints as those of Karl Ignaz Hummel.[1] He was arrested on 11 October 1932.[1] (According to a more sensational version, he was recognized and denounced by his own real father).[2] The sensational turn provided ammunition to opponents of the Nazi Party.[1] On 12 July 1933, the District Court of Freiburg found him guilty of serious forgery and fraud and sentenced him to two and a half years in prison.[1] After serving his sentence, Nazi authorities exacted revenge for their past embarrassment, persecuting him once more, and from 1938 till 1945, when he was freed by the American forces, Hummel was in preventive detention in Schwäbisch Hall.[1] Afterward, he remained in Schwäbisch Hall, remarrying in 1946 and working as a tailor until his death in 1954.[1] His story resurfaced in 1998, when archived German police material was made public.[1] References [ edit ] (in German) Zum Fall Daubmann im Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg Further reading [ edit ]NEW YORK—Veteran New York City construction worker Lonnie Barbierri may, on the exterior, seem like the tough-guy type. But as any woman who has ever strolled past a building site where he was working can attest, under that rough exterior lies a sensitive side. No matter how busy he is, Barbierri always takes time to make sure the ladies know that he is interested, available, and ready for romance. And though he remains single after countless attempts to meet that special someone, Barbierri still believes that true love is within his grasp. "A lot of guys are afraid to make themselves vulnerable by revealing their emotions, but when I meet someone I'm interested in, I express how I feel—usually by saying something like 'Hey! You want a piece of this?'" said Barbierri, grabbing his crotch, grunting, and rhythmically thrusting his pelvis forward. "I figure you've got to put yourself out there. If you can't open up to a woman, she'll never have any way of knowing how much you want to give her the high hard one." Advertisement "Deep down, I'm just a hopeless romantic," he added. Calling every woman special in her own way, Barbierri explained that he always tries to touch upon the individual qualities of each woman he greets. For example, if she happens to be drinking something through a straw, he'll ask if she wants something else to suck on. If she seems to be in a hurry, he'll ask where the fire is, and then subtly suggest that it may be, in fact, in his pants. And if her nipples are visibly poking through her shirt, he'll inquire if she is cold, and gallantly offer to warm those beauties up for her. "If I see a great pair of cans, I say so," said Barbierri, working on the twelfth floor of a future condominium complex on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "Who knows? She could be the one, and if I let my shyness get in the way, I might miss out forever on the chance to meet the girl of my dreams. I don't want to go through the rest of my life wondering whether fries do come with that shake." Advertisement Despite Barbierri's disarming friendliness, personal warmth, and inviting "Sit on My Face" chest tattoo, virtually no women pedestrians are receptive to him. In fact, on the day Barbierri was interviewed, the female passersby invariably increased their pace, stared silently ahead, and avoided eye contact with the ironworker. To Barbierri's credit, he didn't let the string of rejections derail his positive outlook. "The right girl—the one who'll one day slice me off a serving of that sweet stuff and bring it straight home to Daddy—is out there, somewhere," he said. "New York's a big town, you know? And as long as I keep yelling 'nice rack' at all the hot pieces of ass out here on the sidewalk, I have faith that one of them will respond. Maybe even flash me the cooze." And despite his traditional Italian Catholic upbringing, Barbierri has never been one to allow race, creed, or color to stand in the way of his appreciation of beauty. Advertisement "Hey, check out the Asian broad with the briefcase!" he said, spotting another potential life partner. "I wouldn't mind feeding her some beef chow mein, know what I'm saying? Yo, Tokyo Rose! You speakee dee Engrish? Me love you long time, baby!" Yet Barbierri doesn't base his judgments on surface appearances. Though admitting that some women whom he initiates contact with are "not that hot," all women, he said, have something about them that is beautiful. "I don't care if she's a triple-bagger— everybody deserves a compliment now and then," he said. "That's the God-honest truth. Besides, some of the ugly ones might still have great legs, or a hot ass. Just because their faces could stop a train, that don't mean they can't give great head or appreciate a hot beef injection." Advertisement It remains to be seen whether Barbierri, who turned 47 in April, will ever meet his soul mate. But if his optimism and enthusiasm provide an insight into his true character, Barbierri is quite the catch. "The important thing is to keep the lines of dialogue open," he said. "With women, communication is everything."Seattle Municipal Archives on flickr Brazilian Ana Catarian Bezerra suffers from a chemical imbalance that triggers severe anxiety and hyper sexuality. To cope she masturbates around 47 times a day, sometimes at the office. When the accounting company she works for complained, Bezerra took them to court. And won. Translated by Guanabee from Analitica: After winning a court battle and seeking professional medical help, Ana is allowed to masturbate and watch porn — using her work's computer, no less — legally. Carlos Howert, Ana's doctor, prescribes Ana with a "cocktail" (read: an entire medicine cabinet's worth) of tranquillizers. We're not sure how that "cocktail" doesn't knock Ana out (half a Claritin feels like an elephant tranquillizer to us), but thanks to Dr. Howert's concoction, Ana only has to masturbate around eighteen-times a day.By 1948, our view of the Universe had changed drastically from 1909. Instead of space being run by Newton's Gravity, where our Milky Way comprised the entire Universe, we had learned that space and time are governed by Einstein's General Relativity, that our Universe contained at least many thousands of other galaxies, and that the farther these galaxies were from us, the faster they moved away from us. In other words, the Universe was not only vast and full of interesting stuff, it was also expanding as it got older! The prevailing idea of the day was the Perfect Cosmological Principle, stating that -- on average -- the Universe was the same at all places and at all times. In other words, even though galaxies close to us were expanding away from us, the Universe would make more in their place as they moved away. This way, the Steady-State Theory of the Universe would be just fine, even in an expanding Universe. Why was this idea so pervasive? Because, with the exception of small events (e.g., supernovae, the slow drift of nearby stars), the Universe doesn't appear to change over the hundreds and hundreds of years we've been observing it! And this is true. Compare this image of Andromeda (M31) taken in 1887 by Isaac Roberts: with this one of Andromeda taken by this guy with this telescope, just a few years ago: See? The Universe doesn't change. End of story. What, you're still here? You aren't convinced? What kind of contrarian are you? Perhaps you're like George Gamow: smart and a smart-ass. Gamow wasn't buying this "steady-state" garbage for a minute. He did a little bit of extrapolating instead. If the Universe has the density it has now and the expansion rate that it has now, and we know the Laws of Gravity, what was it doing in the past? Well, things were closer together (denser), things were moving at a faster rate (larger velocities), and the temperature was higher (hotter). The small deal was that this meant we lived in an expanding, cooling, slowing Universe. But the big deal was that the Universe used to be hotter, denser, and faster. In principle, this means that if we looked back, billions and billions of light years away, we'd see the Universe as it was when it was billions of years younger. Would it be hotter, denser, and faster? Well, the answer is yes, but telescopes weren't even close to good enough at that point to measure temperature or density at those distances. Of course they were moving faster; that's Hubble's Law! But Gamow didn't let this stop him. He simply decided to extrapolate further back in time. He realized that high temperatures and densities made the early Universe very interesting in two special ways, in addition to the hotter/denser/faster consequence above! Well, if the Universe was hot, dense, fast, and cooling in the past, there must be some point where we formed neutral atoms for the first time. When you combine an electron and a nucleus together, they emit light (right). If you combine all the electrons and nuclei in the Universe together at the same time, you should be able to see the afterglow of this light everywhere in the Universe. Because the Universe has expanded and cooled, Gamow estimated that the temperature of this light should only be a few (~5 was his guess) degrees Kelvin. And, he said, this cosmic background would be evidence of this hot, dense, early phase to the Universe. 2. At high enough temperatures, nuclei dissociate into protons and neutrons! Going even further back in time, at some point the temperatures and densities were so high that protons and neutrons -- much like in the Sun today -- fused together to make heavier atomic nuclei! It's very hard to get heavy elements like Carbon, Nitrogen, and Oxygen, much less Iron or Nickel, but it's easy to get Helium-4, Helium-3, Deuterium, and Lithium-7. In fact, it's easier to get these elements here than it is in stars! Gamow calculated what the abundances of the light elements should have been, and got that the Universe should be about 76% Hydrogen, 24% Helium, and everything else should be less than 1%. And this is exactly -- to the best of their observations -- what we saw. It wasn't until the 1960's that they found the Cosmic Microwave Background, confirming the third of the three pillars of Big Bang Cosmology, and relegating the Steady-State Theory to the history bin. But Gamow, for masterminding this new theory of the Universe, and getting it right, you are totally my hero of the decade for the 1940s. After all, we wouldn't be Starts With A Bang if it weren't for you!Is Rand Paul's campaign in the midst of a collapse? Everyone from Nate Silver to Politico to the thinkers at Salon has suggested as much. It's fast becoming conventional wisdom that the Kentucky senator is dead in the water. That's absurd on many levels, as my colleague Brian Doherty outlined beautifully last week. After all, John McCain's campaign struggled mightily in the money game and underwent a pretty serious reorganization during the '08 primary cycle. It didn't stop him from snagging the Republican nomination. But what to make of the polling? There's no denying that Paul's standing has slipped. His RealClearPolitics average has gone from 17 percent in 2013 to less than 6 percent today. If you're a fan of Rand, should you be concerned? Hardly. As I've written here at Reason, national primary horserace polling is astonishingly bad at predicting the ultimate victor in a months-long nominating contest. Around this point in 2007, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were leading in the polls by double-digit margins. In 2011–12, no fewer than five different GOPers traded off for the first-place spot in national polls before Mitt Romney finally pulled out the win. And the polling conditions this year are even worse. Having a reality TV celebrity jump into the race throws things off like crazy—because when polled early on, before they've had a chance to really learn about the different candidates, people tend to give the name of whomever they've heard of most often and/or recently. There's no question in 2015 that name is Donald Trump. Some 98 percent of respondents in a recent CNN/ORC poll had heard of the New York billionaire. This gives him an enormous leg up. For Rand Paul, that number was more than 20 points lower. Scott Walker, meanwhile, was known by just 58 percent of respondents. So you can see how much room candidates like Walker and Paul have to improve. Even now, Paul is in a reasonably strong position. That CNN/ORC survey put him tied with Ted Cruz for fifth position—fifth out of 17 declared Republican candidates. I wouldn't be surprised, either, if a good number of the folks going to Trump in the polls right now ended up voting for Paul on Election Day—not because Trump's and Paul's positions on the issues are alike, but because Trump is attracting the type of people who are "fed up with establishment politics" and "tired of career politicians." But offering a different brand of Republicanism has been Paul's selling proposition all along. I doubt very much that, once they've stopped to think about it for a moment, GOP primary voters will decide they trust a former Clinton financier over the most interesting man in politics. To be clear, I'm not saying I think Paul will win the nomination. For my money, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is still the man to beat. Nor am I saying early polling is good for absolutely nothing. Survey research gives campaigns important strategic insights into what the public knows and thinks. And in this particular year, when a candidate's performance in the polls might be enough to keep him or her off the main debate stage, it's likely that some bottom-tier presidential hopefuls will be pushed out of the race entirely because of how they fared in the polls. But surely it's premature to disqualify someone who's polling in the front half of the pack more than six months out from the first primary ballots even being cast. Rand Paul's campaign isn't over. From the perspective of the rest of the country, the race has barely gotten started.Responsive iOS UI without AutoLayout Koala Tea Team Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 15, 2017 Note: All of the concepts in this post are about creating views programmatically. I do not use Storyboards at all in my projects and therefore do not create views or layout constraints from the interface builder. Intro Hello, dear reader! The other day as I was perusing reddit, I came across a post that was something along the lines of “The case against AutoLayout”. The post linked to an issue on the IGList Github repo, where Ryan Nystrom, a developer for Instagram, said “Instagram doesn’t use self-sizing-cells or auto layout at all”. This had me thinking. I don’t love or hate AutoLayout but I’ve also never considered there was a different way to create views, and I certainly didn’t think that a company as big as Instagram would shy away from the industry standard of AutoLayout. After researching and testing a few ways to create UI without AutoLayout, I believe I have found a solid starting point. Today we’ll go over the basics and I’ll show you how I got from a design in Sketch straight to Xcode using math and not a single AutoLayout constraint. We’ll go over some of my issues with AutoLayout, explain some of the math and custom view classes we’ll be using, cover our Sketch design, and finally start writing the code in our project. If you’d like to skip to a specific section that is okay. You can also just go straight to the Github repo for the full project
through the menu bar item.Click on the padlock icon and enter an Administrator password.Click the Open Uninstaller button.Click Uninstall and then Continue Uninstallation on the Warning screen: The Warning screen lets you know that you will need to restart your system once the installation process is complete.Re-enter an Administrator password and click OK. Once the NVIDIA Web Driver and NVIDIA Driver Manager have been removed from the system, click Restart.Restart your Macintosh computer and simultaneously hold down the “Command” (apple) key, the “Option” key, the “P” key and the “R” key before the gray screen appears.Keep the keys held down until you hear the startup chime for the second time. Release the keys and allow the system to boot to the desktop.The original OS X v10.11 (15A284) driver will be restored upon booting, although the NVIDIA Web Driver and NVIDIA Driver Manager will not be uninstalled from the system. GeForce 600 Series: GeForce GTX 680 GeForce 200 Series: GeForce GTX 285 GeForce 100 Series: GeForce GT 120 GeForce 8 Series: GeForce 8800 GT Quadro Series: Quadro K5000 for Mac, Quadro 4000 for Mac Quadro FX Series: Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 5600FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, center, joins hands with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, left, and Jessica Rosenworcel, before the start of their open hearing in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) Why won't they release the rules?!?! It's been less than 24 hours since the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve strict new regulations on Internet providers, but that's the leading question coming from its critics. Conservatives are demanding that the FCC release a full copy of the regulations that it's planning to impose on companies such as Comcast and Verizon — and taking the agency's silence as evidence of a cover-up. Readers of an FCC blog post have suspiciously mused that "these new regulations should have been published by now." It's much the same over on Twitter. @victoriastrauss @b_fung If these "rules" are so wonderful why, even after the vote, are they STILL being withheld? #ObamaNet — Sarcastic Texan (@TexanSarcastic) February 26, 2015 Let's stop this nonsense right here. It's a stretch to think the FCC is withholding anything. While it was certainly within FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's power to release his draft proposal before it came to a vote, the regulations now must go through a formal process before they become official. And say what you will about bureaucratic inefficiency, but that's the chief reason the FCC won't be releasing the rules for some time. Not even Internet providers, who are generally frustrated by the content of the rules, are all that outraged about the delay. They're going to see the document, sooner or later. And they'll still likely sue to have them overturned. "This is one more step in the swamp — there's much more of a slog to come," said one wireless industry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely. It's easy to see how all this "secrecy" could be confusing. Once a vote takes place and the gavel drops, shouldn't that be the moment when the world changes? After all, it's more or less how elections work, right? Well, rulemaking is a little bit different. "As is typical for a final rule and order," said Kim Hart, an FCC spokeswoman, "the final document is not available until staff makes final edits, which must be cleared by each commissioner." "Final edits" don't mean a secret attempt by officials to scribble in new regulations at the last minute. Here's what that means instead: Under the FCC's procedures, dissenting arguments must be tallied up and responded to by the FCC's majority — in this case, the Democrats. When that's done — probably after a few weeks — the FCC will post the rules on the agency's Web site. At that point the public will be able to see the specific language. It'll be another few weeks before the document will be published in the Federal Register, the collection of all the rules and notices adopted by the government. For the most part, the rules won't take effect for another 60 days after that. Certain parts of the regulation will take even longer. "Until then, a lot of nothing's going to happen," said a telecom industry official, who asked not to be named to discuss internal deliberations more freely. Read more: FCC approves strong net neutrality rules President Obama to reddit: Thanks for your help on net neutrality The FCC rules against state limits on city-run InternetThe men who cheat and the women who are fine with it? It’s the classic fairy tale: Boy meets girl. Girl falls in love with boy. Boy pops the question. Girl gets pregnant. Girl gives birth at the precise moment boy is getting drunk AND picking up an 18-year-old bimbo across town. And they lived happily ever after! Oh wait, I forgot. This isn’t a fairy tale, this actually happened. I heard about this travesty while on a treadmill at the gym. My friend and I were running side by side as she went on about the douche bag guy in question, who also happened to be her best friend’s husband. He may have been in the room when his twin girls came into the world, but by the time those little angels finished their first breast feeding, he was on his way to the grand opening of the latest supper club du jour. Didn’t matter that I had a direct source, I thought for sure this was one of those dating urban legends, until I saw him with my own eyes the very next night at a bar, doing shots of Patron with a waitress, his arm firmly around her waist, his face hovering over her neck. I would have sent over a round, on me, to toast his newest bundles of joy—born just 72 hours earlier—except I didn’t want to rock that boat (Translation: I didn’t want to get the crap kicked out of me). But it was then that it dawned on me, that this was happening more and more. I can think of at least five guys who have been involved in not-so-secretive affairs, each one parading his paramour around town like she was the Stanley Cup. And a few times I had the misfortune of having ring-side seats: There’s the time I went to a hockey game with a buddy of mine and his “secretary,” where I couldn’t help but notice their constant need to hold hands in between periods. Another time when a friend of a friend had to leave a party early cause his girlfriend locked herself out of their home ( not to be confused with his wife, who lives in his other home ). ). And who could forget the time I saw my buddy’s cousin treating his whole family to an afternoon of bowling—at the same alley where his much younger mistress handed out the shoes. Strike! Adultery used to be about secret hook-ups and coordinating sleazy motel rendezvous with the precision and secrecy of an Ocean’s 11-type heist. Now, they may as well bring a webcam with them and charge by the minute. And the even more peculiar part is that even though there are plenty of married women who are up to no good, they seem to know how to keep a lid on it. Are we witnessing a new trend? Husbands cheating out in the open? And worse yet: If the whole city is in on it, why aren’t their wives out roaming the streets with machetes? Is it denial? Are they conditioned to believe that men have to cheat because it’s in their DNA? Or is it that these husbands just haven’t been caught…yet. My friend has a theory (and claims she’s not alone on this) that this can all be summed up by the one unspoken rule that wives belonging to this club abide by: “I don’t care what he does after, as long as he’s home to put my kids to bed every night.” Translation: If you just pay the bills, keep a roof over my head, and give me a hand with raising the children, I’ll let you off the hook. I’d normally brush off this head-scratching living arrangement, except that it seems to be creeping up a lot lately: Women who turn a blind eye to indiscretions for, what, the sake of family unity? I say “blind eye” because I continue to operate under the belief that they GOTTA KNOW at this point that something’s up, right? Anyone? So you have to ask yourself: Just how many cheated wives are in on it, and are they a victim, or co-conspirator? And why the hell did they even get married? Things that make you go hmm… Just when you thought adultery couldn’t get any messier. But it does make for a great read.U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton holds a news conference on the airport tarmac in front of her campaign plane in White Plains, New York, United States September 8, 2016. REUTERS/Brian Snyder A small but significant group of Americans is considering casting their vote this fall for a third- party "protest" candidate. Some are thinking they may not vote at all. They say they don't like any candidate enough to vote so they will "sit this election out." I realize many of the Americans considering a third-party vote -- or sitting out the election -- have sincere, deeply-held feelings that are driving their actions. Some are just disgusted by what they think is a vitriolic tone of the campaign. Unfortunately the media encourages that kind of cynicism and disgust by presenting the attacks mounted by each side in the campaign as equally credible. But while it is easy to understand the reasons that some people might be inclined to choose a "protest" vote -- or decide to sit on their hands -- the fact is that either of these actions will have one and only one result: putting Donald Trump into the White House. And "trust me," the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States will have long-term consequences that will make it ever so clear why every voter has to overcome his or her cynicism, or personal likes and dislikes, and go vote -- for Hillary Clinton. History makes the results of third party "protest" votes in modern American elections crystal clear. In 2000, thousands of idealistic young Americans chose to vote for Ralph Nader rather than cast their vote for Vice President Al Gore. There were 50,000 Nader votes in Florida. Gore lost the presidency by 537 Florida votes. Had Gore won, there would have been no Iraq War in 2003 -- and likely no ISIS today. There would have been no Bush tax cuts for the rich. There would not have been the massive Bush-era deregulation of Wall Street that led to the Great Recession. And for those who care deeply about climate change, remember that it was private citizen Al Gore who, after losing the election, sounded the climate change alarm with his amazing film "An Inconvenient Truth." Had Gore been President, the United States of America would likely have initiated the battle to curb global carbon emissions over a decade and a half ago. And you can bet that if they knew what would happen in a Bush presidency, many of those 50,000 Nader voters would have begged to reverse history and let them vote for Al Gore for President instead of cast the "protest vote" that cost us all so much. Of course it's not just the 2000 election where third-party protest votes have been decisive. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 -- and the whole right wing "Reagan Revolution" -- would likely never have happened, were it not for the third party candidacy of John Anderson. Remember that none of the 2016 third-party candidates has any credible chance whatsoever of becoming President of the United States. Someone who casts his or her vote for one of these third-party candidates must be betting that the results of their own "protest" are more important that the consequences that a Donald Trump Presidency would have for the country -- and for their lives. But I would wager that a significant number of those 2000 Nader Voters personally suffered from the consequences of Bush's two terms in office. Odds are good that many of their families lost loved ones in Iraq, or that their home values collapsed in the Great Recession, or that they lost their jobs or their pensions, or saw their college loans explode. Many suffered from rising health care costs that Bush failed to address through any form of health care reform. I'm betting that many of those voters would agree today that whatever momentary sense of power they felt by sticking it to the system and protesting their presidential options in 2000 is now far outweighed by the regret they feel at the consequence of what they did. If you're considering casting your vote for a third party candidate, or simply abstaining from voting entirely, please think seriously about how you'll feel about that vote next year, or ten years from now -- if, like the Nader voters of 2000, your votes determine who will be president. It's one thing to cast a "protest vote" or decide to stay home, if you think the election is already decided. A month ago many people thought Hillary Clinton would run away with the election, so why not vote for a third party candidate? Not so today. That's exactly what happened in Britain during the Brexit vote earlier this summer. Many voters -- especially younger voters -- who opposed Britain leaving the European Union -- thought they didn't need to go to the trouble to vote because Brexit could not possibly pass. The day after the election, they were shocked to learn they were wrong -- and then it was too late. Polls showed that young people overwhelming opposed Brexit. But many of them didn't take the time to vote. Now they wish they did. Today, most millennial voters oppose the bigotry of Donald Trump. They also understand that a man with Trump's temperament has no business with the country's nuclear launch codes. They want lives of commitment for themselves. They honor the sacrifice of leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Congressman John Lewis who were willing to lay their lives on the line for the welfare of others. And they understand that Donald Trump is the antithesis of a leader who has devoted his life to others and to the common good. They know that Donald Trump is a man who has done nothing in life but look out for himself -- no matter who he hurt, no matter whose lives he ruined. But if Donald Trump is actually elected President, that division, that hatred, that bigotry, that selfishness and the impetuous childish insults will define America. They will be our future. In a close race like this one, no one can afford to make a "protest vote" that may end in that result. No one can afford to say: "my vote doesn't matter." No one can afford to allow their own disappointment with the result of the primary -- or their wish that someone who is more to their taste were the candidate -- to contribute to such an historic disaster for America and the entire world. In many states, early voting -- or mail balloting -- starts in a matter of weeks. If you were thinking about casting your vote for a third party -- or staying home from the polls -- please think again. You, your children and maybe even your grandchildren, will be glad you did.164 Shares En inaugurant « Passeur de sciences », fin 2011, j’expliquais dans mon prologue-profession de foi l’admiration (teintée d’une certaine jalousie) que j’éprouvais pour le quotidien britannique The Guardian, qui avait récemment ouvert une plateforme de blogs scientifiques. A l’époque, à l’exception de ce que je m’apprêtais à faire sur le site Internet du Monde et de ce que faisait (et fait toujours) mon confrère Sylvestre Huet sur liberation.fr, la science était la grande absente des blogs tenus sur les grands journaux français d’information générale. Un peu plus de deux ans plus tard, les choses changent (et en bien), au moins sur le site du Monde et j’ose très immodestement penser que le succès de « Passeur de sciences », qui a passé cette semaine la barre des 20 millions de pages lues, n’y est pas étranger. A la fin de l’été dernier, j’ai commencé une mission pour le compte du Monde.fr, qui consiste à animer sa rubrique Sciences et à la développer. L’objectif étant de proposer aux internautes davantage d’informations scientifiques, sous toutes les formes. Et bien sûr, les équipes du Monde.fr et moi avions en tête l’idée d’une plateforme scientifique, de donner de la compagnie à mon blog qui se sentait un peu seul… Le projet est en train d’aboutir et je suis ravi de vous annoncer que trois nouveaux blogs viennent d’être créés. Le premier, consacré à l’astronomie, s’appelle « Autour du ciel«. Il est tenu par Guillaume Cannat, auteur depuis deux décennies d’un Guide du ciel destiné aux astronomes amateurs. En plus de suivre l’actualité de la discipline, comme il l’a par exemple fait avec le réveil de la sonde Rosetta il y a quelques jours, Guillaume proposera régulièrement des billets pratiques, pour toutes celles et tous ceux qui, le soir venu, veulent lever les yeux vers le firmament pour observer Lune, planètes, étoiles et constellations. Le deuxième blog s’intitule « Dans les pas des archéologues » et il est l’œuvre du journaliste Nicolas Constans, qui a longtemps tenu la rubrique « Archéologie » pour le magazine La Recherche. Je vous conseille d’ores et déjà son tout premier billet qui revient sur une mystérieuse épave découverte au large de la Nouvelle-Zélande, dont l’analyse suggère qu’entre la découverte de l’archipel par Abel Tasman en 1642 et son exploration par James Cook plus d’un siècle après, d’autres Européens se sont aventurés dans les parages. Le troisième blog est collectif et se nomme « Binaire ». Tenu par des chercheurs de la Société informatique de France, il a pour objectif de montrer que l’informatique, ce n’est pas qu’une histoire de matériel, de logiciels et de technique, mais que derrière tout cela, il y a une science à part entière. Enfin, je ne serais pas complet si j’oubliais de parler d’« A la source », le blog de mon confrère du Monde, David Larousserie, qui explore les coulisses du journalisme scientifique. Cinq blogs, ce n’est certes pas encore autant que ce qui existe sur le site du Guardian ou sur celui du Scientific American, mais c’est un bon début et d’autres projets sont dans les cartons. Sans violer le secret des négociations, je peux déjà vous annoncer que LeMonde.fr finalise un partenariat pour vous proposer toutes les semaines des vidéos scientifiques. Dans mon prologue de novembre 2011, j’écrivais : « Cela fait exactement quinze ans que je me bats pour faire comprendre (…) qu’au même titre que la politique, l’économie, la culture, la diplomatie, toutes matières jugées nobles dans la presse, la culture scientifique fait partie de la culture tout court de l’honnête homme et de la grille de lecture du monde que les médias lui tendent chaque jour, qui dans leurs postes de télévision, qui dans leurs radios, qui dans leurs journaux. » J’ai aujourd’hui le sentiment que, dans cette longue lutte en faveur de la vulgarisation scientifique, les équipes du Monde.fr et moi-même avons aujourd’hui remporté une petite victoire. Pierre Barthélémy (suivez-moi ici sur Twitter ou bien là sur Facebook) Signaler ce contenu comme inappropriéSPRINGFIELD - Hockey fans don't throw their hats on the ice anymore, but scoring three goals is just as satisfying to a player as ever. "My dad was in the building, and even he didn't throw his hat,'' Springfield Thunderbirds' forward Dryden Hunt said with a grin after his three-goal outburst Sunday led a rousing 7-4 win over the Belleville Senators at the MassMutual Center. "Losing does get in your head a little bit, but to get the first win and before the home crowd - that was good.'' Thus ended a six-game losing streak to start the season. The Birds had scored only 11 goals in those six games, but the first victory was not only a relief but a signal of talent that needs time to develop. "It's been a bit of a tough start everywhere on the ice, from special teams to scoring goals. You know (the first win) is going to come, but better sooner than later,'' Hunt said. For as much as the 38-shot offensive burst was welcomed, this game was also won with remarkable penalty killing. Making its first appearance as an Ontario franchise after moving from Binghamton, Belleville went 0-for-10 on the power play. In the first period, Springfield collected four straight penalties in 3 minutes and 41 seconds. Playing shorthanded for six minutes and two men down for much of that time, the Thunderbirds held onto their 1-1 tie and then took the lead at 18:54, when Hunt's first goal came on the power play. For a very young team on a losing streak, negotiating that minefield and reaching the first intermission with a 2-1 lead was a blessing. While Belleville was coming up empty on the power play, the Thunderbirds were 3-for-7 with the manpower advantage. One of the penalty killers was defenseman Ed Wittchow, who also had three assists. Anthony Greco, Blaine Byron, Curtis Valk and Alexandre Grenier had the other goals, and Grenier had two assists. Valk's goal with 4.4 seconds left in the second period made it 5-2. Belleville made it interesting when Patrick Sieloff scored at 32 seconds of the third, but rather than go into a shell, the Thunderbirds played aggressively with a third-period lead that was frankly a new experience for them. It made for a pleasing AHL starting debut for goalie Evan Cowley, who made 27 saves. Cowley saw brief action in relief at Syracuse Saturday night, and the 22-year-old University of Denver product said that helped prepare him for Sunday. Cowley made some key saves, but deferred much of the credit to his defense, especially during the telling first-period stretch when the Birds were playing a man or two short. "There was great structure by our guys. They were getting sticks in the middle and letting me see pucks coming in,'' Cowley said. When a team is struggling, it's looking for signs the drought is ending. For Springfield, it might have been Byron's first pro goal in the former Maine collegian's sixth game. Hunt's power-play goal at 9:41 of the second period had given the Thunderbirds a 3-2 lead. The Birds were still on the power play when Byron deposited the puck from in front just 48 seconds later, causing Byron to pound the glass to celebrate a rare T-Birds luxury - a two-goal lead that had the 3,517 fans on their feet. "Playing three games in three days makes the third game a mental game,'' Hunt said after a busy weekend had ended. "You've got to play through that, and it's good we did."Local police chief announces investigation into Nathaniel Robinson’s use of stun gun, after pulling mechanic over for a class C misdemeanour A Texas police officer is under investigation for using a stun gun on a 76-year-old mechanic he had pulled over for an expired inspection certificate. In dashboard-cam footage uploaded by local newspaper the Victoria Advocate, officer Nathaniel Robinson, who is 23, can be seen slamming Pete Vasquez on to the hood of the police car. He then puts him in a restrictive hold, before the two abruptly fall out of the camera’s field of vision. Soon after, Robinson returns into sight holding his stun gun, shouting “put your hands behind your back.” Police later confirmed the stun gun had been used twice on Vasquez. The car was a dealer vehicle, and so Vasquez was exempt from being cited. If he had been cited, an expired inspection certificate is a class C misdemeanour. The Victoria police chief, Jeffrey Craig, told the Advocate that he was opening an investigation into the incident. “Public trust is extremely important to us. Sometimes that means you have to take a real hard look at some of the actions that occur within the department,” he said. Craig also apologised to Vasquez. Larry Urich, a co-worker of Vasquez who witnessed the incident, told the Guardian that he made Robinson aware that the car had dealer plates, and that the expired sticker was not a violation. He said he had called Robinson a “goddamned Nazi stormtrooper”. “It’s a tragedy,” Urich said. “There was absolutely no reason to grab and try and restrain this 76-year-old guy. This was a muscled-up cop who was in absolutely no distress whatsoever.” Urich said that he saw Vasquez Sunday evening, and that his shoulder, back and arm were hurting. “I’ve known the guy for years,” he said. “He’s a nice, sweet, gentle man. I’ve never seen him be smart-aleck, or rude to anyone.” Urich said that he had the utmost respect for the Victoria police department, but that in his opinion this should be a firing offence for Robinson. “You just don’t do this to senior citizens.”Going into Sunday night's debate, ABC, CBS and NBC offered relentless coverage of the just-disclosed audio of Donald Trump in 2005 talking about his attempted sexual conquests, suggesting this could be the revelation that finally ends Trump's campaign. Even though the story broke on Friday afternoon, the three broadcast evening newscasts were ready with just under 10 minutes of coverage that night; the next morning, the Saturday morning shows churned out another 36 minutes of coverage of Trump's scandal. But shortly after the Trump story broke, hacked e-mails gave political reporters a glimpse into the speech excerpts that Hillary Clinton's campaign refused to disclose during her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders. The excerpts showed Clinton boasting in her speeches to big Wall Street banks that she had to present one set of policy views to the public, while keeping her private views to herself. The networks treated this as an afterthought. Friday's CBS Evening News carved out a mere five-second mention at the conclusion of a story about Russian hacking of the election. The next morning, the Saturday broadcast morning shows offered less than five minutes of coverage to Clinton's latest headache. <<< Please consider helping NewsBusters financially with your tax-deductible contribution today >>> On ABC's Good Morning America, co-host Dan Harris pointed out the incongruity to analyst Matthew Dowd: “On any other morning we’d be leading with a story that broke overnight about Hillary Clinton, these leaked excerpts of highly paid speeches she gave to elite Wall Street firms..." Dowd agreed the disclosures made Clinton "very vulnerable," but then acted as if the media had no choice but to bury them under the avalanche of Trump news: "This is getting totally lost....When you compare it to what Donald Trump is going through, there’s no comparison." Indeed, looking at Saturday night's news and the Sunday morning and evening shows, the networks produced another 58 minutes of Trump coverage, not including political talk shows like Meet the Press or This Week. But the Clinton scandal received just under three minutes of additional coverage. Add it all up, and from Friday night through Sunday night, the networks produced 103 minutes of coverage of the Trump tape and its potential effect on the race, vs. just under eight minutes of coverage for Clinton's scandal. And to those who might suggest that such a sleazy, lewd disclosure about someone who might be president deserves such massive coverage, consider this: In February 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones sued then-President Clinton for allegedly dropping his pants and instructing her to "kiss it." That night, CBS and NBC skipped the news, while ABC gave it just a short 16 second brief. According to the MRC's MediaWatch newsletter, "Three days later in a 'Style' piece on the 'primal scream' of hatred for Clinton expressed at a conservative conference, The Washington Post's Lloyd Grove discounted it as 'another ascension of Mount Bimbo.'" Not exactly the same level of concern the media are showing now for the revelations about Trump's past conduct.Washington, DC–(ENEWSPF)–June 13, 2016. Our national parks are America’s crown jewels, inspiring awe and wonder. Iconic locations like Yosemite and Yellowstone attract visitors from all over the world, but our public lands are so much more than just the big 59 national parks. They’re also scenic rivers, national marine monuments, national battlefields and wildernesses. Here at Interior, we work every day to protect our nation’s special places so current and future generations can experience our natural and cultural treasures for years to come. With more than 400 national parks, 560 national wildlife refuges and nearly 250 million acres of other public lands managed by Interior, there’s at least one public land near you. What’s the difference between a national park, national forest and national monument? What about national wildlife refuges, national historic sites or national conservation areas? We’re breaking down America’s public lands for you: National Parks Established in 1899, Mount Rainier is the 5th national park in the U.S. Ascending to 14,410 feet above sea level, Mount Rainier stands as an icon in the Washington landscape. Subalpine wildflower meadows ring the icy volcano while ancient forest cloaks Mount Rainier’s lower slopes. Photo by Richard Thompson (www.sharetheexperience.org). National parks tend to be large swaths of land that protect a variety of resources, including natural and historic features. National parks can only be created by Congress — our first national park was Yellowstone — and are managed by the National Park Service. National parks strive to keep landscapes unimpaired for future generations while offering recreation opportunities. There are also national preserves — like Florida’s Big Cypress or Lake Clark National Park & Preserve in Alaska. Activities like hunting, fishing or oil and gas extraction may be permitted at national preserves if they don’t jeopardize the park’s natural resources. In total, the National Park System has 28 different types of designations, but they’re all considered national parks no matter the name. National Forests White River National Forest is the most visited national forest in the nation encompassing 2.3 million acres of opportunities. With 11 ski resorts, eight Wilderness areas, 10 mountain peaks over 14,000 feet and 2,500 miles of trails, this Colorado forest is a place where you can press play on adventure and inspiration! Photo by Daniel Kokoszka (www.sharetheexperience.org). National parks may protect some of the best-known natural landmarks, but national forests have just as remarkable landscapes. The U.S. Forest Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture, manages 154 national forests under a multiple use concept — meaning they provide Americans with a number of services, including lumber, grazing, minerals and recreation. National forests tend to be located near national parks and frequently are less crowded than parks. For example, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is next to three national forests — Cherokee, Pisgah and Nantahala. These forests often also act as a protective buffer zone around parks. National Wildlife Refuges Located on the southern coast of Virginia, Back Bay provides feeding and resting habitat for migratory birds. The refuge contains over 9,250 acres, situated on a thin strip of coastline typical of barrier islands found along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Photo by Tyrone Singletary (www.sharetheexperience.org). If national parks are America’s best idea, then national wildlife refuges are America’s best kept secret. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service manages wildlife refuges to conserve America’s fish, wildlife and plants. Created in 1903 when President Theodore Roosevelt established Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge, the Refuge System has grown to more than 560 sites. With at least one wildlife refuge in every state and U.S. territory (and one within an hour’s drive of most major cities), they offer a chance for urbanites and so many others to connect to nature. While national wildlife refuges work to safeguard wildlife populations and their habitats, more than 500 of them provide a wealth of recreation opportunities, including hiking trails, canoeing and kayaking, auto tours, wildlife viewing, hunting, fishing and more! These natural treasure troves see more than 47 million visits from the public each year. National Conservation Areas King Range National Conservation Area has long been recognized as a crown jewel of the Pacific Coast. Covering 68,000 acres and extending along 35 miles of coastline, King Range preserves the dramatic meeting of land and sea. Established by Congress in 1970, King Range National Conservation Area became the first location in the Bureau of Land Management’s National Conservation Lands. Photo by Bob Wick, BLM. National conservation areas are public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management that are set aside for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations. Similar to national parks, national conservation areas are designated by Congress and feature scientific, cultural, historical and recreational features. They’re places like California’s Lost Coast, King Range National Conservation Area, and Utah’s Red Cliffs National Conservation Area. National conservation areas are just one part of the Bureau of Land Management’s National Conservation Lands, a system of public lands that contain some of the nation’s most spectacular landscapes. They include 873 federally recognized areas, encompassing approximately 32 million acres, primarily across 12 western states. In addition to national conservation areas, national conservation lands include certain national monuments, wildernesses, wilderness study areas, wild and scenic rivers, and national scenic and historic trails. National Monuments Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah is best known for it’s geologic amphitheater — a brilliantly colored limestone coliseum that plunges a half-mile deep. Surrounding the canyon are lush meadows and one of the world’s oldest trees, the bristlecone pine. Sunset photo by Bud Walley (www.sharetheexperience.org). National monuments protect a specific natural, cultural or historic feature. These could be places like Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument or Chicago’s Pullman National Monument. Some special places — like Grand Canyon, Badlands and Zion — were first protected as national monuments before later becoming national parks. Since 1906, 120 national monuments have been created, and they can be managed by any of seven different agencies — either individually or jointly. Wildernesses The scenic Handies Peak Wilderness Study Area in Colorado is known for its mountains, multi-colored rock formations, diverse vegetation and vast, open vistas. The area is home to Handies Peak, which rises 14,048 feet over the area. Photo by Bob Wick, BLM. Wilderness areas are places untamed by humans. The Wilderness Act of 1964 allows Congress to designate wilderness areas to ensure that America’s pristine wild lands will not disappear. Wilderness areas can be part of national parks, national wildlife refuges, national forests or public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. There are more than 680 wilderness areas — protecting over 106 million acres in 44 states — with the most recent one designated being Boulder White Clouds in Idaho. The Bureau of Land Management also has 517 wilderness study areas — lands unspoiled by roads or other development that provide outstanding opportunities for solitude. Often these places have special ecological, geological or scenic values, like Handies Peak in Colorado or Slinkard in California. Some wilderness study areas have been designated as wilderness areas or national monuments, while others have been opened to non-wilderness uses. National Historic Sites From its vantage point overlooking the spectacular Golden Gate, Fort Point has stood guard over the San Francisco Bay for more than 150 years — from California’s Gold Rush through World War II and now as a National Historic Site. Although Fort Point never saw battle, the building has tremendous significance that includes military and maritime history and beautiful brick architecture. Photo by Ben Pelta-Heller (www.sharetheexperience.org). Although the National Park Service is best known for protecting some of our country’s most inspiring landscapes, it is also America’s storyteller. Over half the national park locations preserve places and commemorate people, events and activities that are key to our nation’s history. National historic sites (like Lincoln Home or Tuskegee Airmen) contain a single historical feature, but national historical parks like Independence National Historical Park — where the Continental Congress voted for Independence and then where, years later, the Constitution was written — discuss multiple stories from different times. No matter the name, these places tell iconic American stories that define who we are and what we stand for. National Memorials Dedicated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 13, 1943, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial stands in a straight line with the White House in Washington, D.C. During the spring, visitors flock to the area to see the glorious cherry blossoms surronding the Tidal Basin. Photo by Andrew Rhodes (www.sharetheexperience.org). National memorials are sites that commemorate a historical person or tragic event. Many national memorials are located in or near the District of Columbia (think the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument and Thomas Jefferson Memorial), but several others are scattered across the country. One of the most recognizable: Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in Missouri, which is home to the Gateway Arch (commonly called the St. Louis Arch). National Battlefields Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania — this is America’s battleground, where the Civil War roared to its bloody climax. No place more vividly reflects the War’s tragic cost in all its forms. Photo by Theresa Rasmussen (www.sharetheexperience.org). There are a number of titles used for battlefields — national military park, national battlefield park, national battlefield site and national battlefield — but they all conserve our nation’s military history. Protecting places like Shiloh National Military Park or Cowpens National Battlefield ensures that Americans can learn from our past. National Recreation
2017]. Yet this would have been regarded as an idealistic, internationalist sentiment in 1939, with the “White Europe” being redundant, just as “White American” was to the founding generation that wrote the Naturalization Act of 1790. But there was a more specific agenda behind the MSM reaction. As the viscerally anti-white Anne Applebaum and many others argued, it’s not that every one of the marchers was “far right,” it was that the Law & Justice Party, a National Conservative party by orientation, “welcomed and encouraged Saturday’s march as a ‘patriotic’ action, though the party knew who was behind it”. [Anne Applebaum: Neo-fascists in Poland suddenly feel enabled and encouraged, The Salt Lake Tribune, November 13, 2017] Thus, this international media campaign is a vast exercise in concern trolling, trying to get the Polish government to punch right and undermine its own coalition. The endgame of course, is to force Poland to accept mass Muslim immigration, break Eastern European resistance to the policies being set by Germany and other anti-white Western European governments, and reduce Poland to simply a province of the EU, rather than an independent nation-state. And the campaign is working. After a few days of media hysteria, President Andrzej Duda was sufficiently broken and dutifully repeated the tired slogans about how “there is no place in Poland” for xenophobia. He also seemingly endorsed Poland as a proposition nation, proclaiming it didn’t matter what a person’s origin was [Polish president sharply condemns weekend nationalist march, by Vanessa Gera, Associated Press, November 13, 2017]. But if that’s true, then why bother resisting Muslim immigration, if they can somehow become just as Polish as everyone else? For that matter, why bother celebrating independence at all, if Poland is just a spot of dirt rather than homeland for a particular people? One Narrative widely deployed by reporters is that Poland, as a country conquered by the Wehrmacht during World War II, has no right to be nationalist. Martin Sandbu moans: That this [the march] should happen in Poland is particularly saddening. It is a country that has benefited enormously from its return to the western family after four decades behind the Iron Curtain. And it is a country whose size means it could, in time, take its rightful place among Europe’s chief powers if it stayed on a European course. [Poland leads the way in normalizing the far right, Financial Times, November 13, 2017] But it’s precisely because Poland wants to remain European that is so hated by the MSM and the EU’s anti-European leadership. Indeed, it’s a step beyond Orwell that the word “European” is now used by reporters to refer to a deliberate policy of replacing the Continent’s indigenous population with the Third World and facilitating the Islamization of what was once Christendom. And to appeal to Poland’s history of foreign occupation as a way of shaming it into surrendering independence is nothing less than obscene. Poland, like every other nation, must decide whether to resist or die. There is no other choice: the globalist elite and its servants in the press will not permit it. The National Question will dominate Western politics for the decades to come. And how each nation answers will determine whether that nation and people continues to exist. Indeed, it will determine whether Western Civilization will continue to exist. The hateful maniacs of the global media are demanding we pretend a country’s culture and identity be considered as something entirely separate from the people who make it up. Poland’s president has already shown weakness in defying this absurd commandment. He had better find his courage. For if he loses this ideological battle, in far less than time he could expect, it will mean the end of Poland’s national sovereignty and European identity. The same goes for every leader of every Western nation, including President Donald Trump and the United States of America. James Kirkpatrick [Email him] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc.Accounting for Adaptation in the Economics of Happiness NBER Working Paper No. 21365 Issued in July 2015 NBER Program(s):Aging, Health Economics, Public Economics Reported happiness provides a potentially useful way to evaluate unpriced goods and events; but measures of subjective well-being (SWB) often revert to the mean after responding to events, and this hedonic adaptation creates challenges for interpretation. Previous work tends to estimate time-invariant effects of events on happiness. In the presence of hedonic adaptation, this restriction can lead to biases, especially when comparing events to which people adapt at different rates. Our paper provides a flexible, extensible econometric framework that accommodates adaptation and permits the comparison of happiness-relevant life events with dissimilar hedonic adaptation paths. We present a method that is robust to individual fixed effects, imprecisely-dated data, and permanent consequences. The method is used to analyze a variety of events in the Health and Retirement Study panel. Many of the variables studied have substantial consequences for subjective well-being - consequences that differ greatly in their time profiles. The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. Acknowledgments Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w21365 Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:On the eve of a crucial meeting in Brussels, the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation is warning that significant sections of the fishing industry could face a threat to their future if a “simplistic” ban is imposed on discards. The hearing tomorrow will give the European fishing industry the chance to tell the European Commission of its major concerns over the proposed ban. The SFF is totally opposed to discarding but warns that sensible measures must be used to keep discard levels to a minimum – otherwise the consequences for the structure of the fleet and coastal communities could be severe. Bertie Armstrong, SFF chief executive, said: “The Scottish fishing industry abhors the waste inflicted by discarding, but we are extremely concerned with the commission approach to its management, which up until this point has been alarmingly superficial, giving scant recognition to innovation from the industry and many member states in pursuit of discard reduction. “The limited details in the proposal for a discards ban made public by commissioner Maria Damanaki at a recent high level meeting of fisheries ministers fails to recognise the complexities of the fisheries – especially those dealing with mixed catches – that many of our boats operate in. “The major source of discarding is not bad behaviour by fishermen, but instead their unavoidable reaction to the ill-fitting regulations for mixed fisheries – the disease underlying the symptom of discarding. “We are disappointed that the EC has not yet qualified its condemnation of discarding with any form of commitment to attack the source regulatory problem. The commission has yet to offer to take practical account of the work being progressed urgently across the industry, with the help of other stakeholders, to seek and develop solutions. “The commission’s present stance does no justice to the complexity of the problem and to the commitment of stakeholders to innovate and experiment. Instead, in sharp contrast, the message transmitted to the public is that the industry clearly needs the electric-shock treatment of a ban to stimulate action.” Mr Armstrong said this was an enormous source of frustration, given that discarding does not exist in all fisheries at all times and that much of the European industry has demonstrated its commitment to the development of practical solutions to prevent discarding. In the UK, these include the use of more selective nets; closed fishing areas; cod avoidance initiatives; catch quota trials; partnerships between scientists and the industry for research and innovation; and marketing initiatives for under-used species. Mr Armstrong said: “There is no present mechanism by which an attack on the regulations causing discards can be made by stakeholders, other than to hope that the commission’s eye will be caught by our innovation and dedication to resolving the problem. It is hoped that under CFP reform, such a mechanism may be created, leading to tailored regional solutions. “We urge the commission to recognise publicly the complexity of dealing with discarding and the efforts of the industry in addressing the problem. Simply banning the practice is over-simplistic – a commitment to regulatory change must accompany the ban, or the consequences for the industry will be unpredictable instability, with serious implications for our fragile fishing communities.”Copyright by WJTV - All rights reserved RANKIN COUNTY, Miss. (WJTV) -- More clown sightings have been reported, this time in Rankin County. A driver claims that a clown caused a recent wreck. "It's a lot of foolishness," said J.R. Crain, a Rankin County resident. "That's my real thoughts about it." "It's probably a teenager or something like that going through and trying to get something to put on youtube," said another resident, Gary Woodard. Most people WJTV talked to about the clowns sighting in Rankin County said they think it's someone just clowning around, and they aren't concerned. "It's silly," Crain said. "It's childish. It's probably just a prank of some sort, but it has a tendency to want to have some danger to it I think." The sheriff's department said they've been hearing claims of someone dressed as a clown causing a wreck Friday on Highway 469 South. They responded to a wreck in that area, but county officials said they searched up and down Highway 469 all night without seeing a clown. "If they're doing it, they need to stop because someone's going to get hurt," said Kathy Patrick, a resident of Rankin County. "Especially down here in the South. Pople carry guns." Earlier this week, Tchula's police chief said there was a sighting in Holmes County. Chief Kenneth Hampton said he saw a clown in a neighborhood, holding a machete. "I think they're weird because they're just trying to scare people and it's not funny," Adriana Dee said, another resident. So far, no pictures of any local creepy clowns have been verified. Police said if you see someone in a clown costume causing a disturbance, give them a call.This 2002 BMW M3 (VIN WBSBL93472JR12696) has been prepped for NASA TT3 racing with plans to move up to GTS4 once fully sorted and dialed-in. The seller claims to have over $60k and hundreds of hours invested into the build, further claiming that it’s scored four victories out of four outings this season, including one track lap record that would have put it on pole for GTS4. Find it here on eBay in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for $42k OBO. Stripped back with no HVAC, radio, carpeting or seats aside from the driver’s unit seen here, custom door cards do retain standard power window mechanisms but these shouldn’t make to much of a difference to the car’s total 2,900 pound quoted curb weight. No engine shots are provided, but power is said to have been measured at 321 RWHP from a largely stock motor. Mods include a Bimmerworld race exhaust with catless, ceramic coated headers, an Epic Motorsports race ECU tune, aFe Magnum intake, underdrive pulley kit and an oil cooler kit. Brakes have been upgraded with Performance Friction big rotors, stainless braided lines, metallic race pads and cooling ducts. Suspension consists of double adjustable dampers, 850/950 pound front/rear springs, adjustable sway bars, camber plates, and more, the ad also noting a full corner balance and race-spec alignment. It looks and sounds like a well-developed car, and though still titled the seller doesn’t recommend driving it on the street. We’d be tempted to take it for a spin around the block, but agree it’d best be used on track.Warning: these are dangerously good. I’m house/offspring sitting family friends and Georgia (from Georgia’s Blueberry Cake) and I went through 5 cookbooks before we chose this recipe. They take a while to make, and need tons of time to cool (like 3+ hours), but they are completely worth it…just don’t do what I did and listen to Georgia’s impatient 15 year old brother and cut them too soon! Butterscotch Bars Base ¼ cup unsalted butter, room temperature ½ cup granulated sugar ½ cup dark brown sugar, packed 2 eggs ½ teaspoon vanilla 1¼ cups all purpose flour ½ teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon salt Preheat oven to 350oF, and grease and line the bottom of a 8×8 inch square pan with parchment paper. In a bowl, cream butter and sugars together. Add eggs and vanilla, beat until fluffy. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt. Add to butter mixture and stir until evenly blended. Spread batter into a prepared pan and bake for 20-25 minutes, to an even golden brown. Set aside to cool. Butterscotch ½ cup unsalted butter ½ cup granulated sugar 1 cup dark brown sugar, packed ½ cup golden corn syrup ¼ cup water ½ teaspoon salt 1 cup walnut pieces ¾ cup unsweetened coconut ½ cup whipping cream 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract ¾ cup chocolate chips Melt butter over medium heat in a medium sized saucepan. While butter is melting, combine sugars, corn syrup, water, and salt, and increase heat to medium-high. Once melted, add to saucepan; when mixture reaches a boil, stir in walnut pieces and coconut. Simmer for 7 minutes, stirring often (mixture will become thick and darker in colour). Remove from heat and stir in cream and vanilla (watch for steam). Pour butterscotch over base and sprinkle with chocolate chips. Bake for 13-16 minutes, until bubbling around the edges. Allow to cool before cutting into squares or bars. Notes: 1) These need at least 3 hours to cool. A good recipe to make well in advance of serving them. 2) Do not refrigerate – the sugars don’t like the fridge. 3) I chose to melt the chocolate chips and spread them over the top after baking, instead of sprinkling them in beforehand. 4) Bars will keep up to 3 weeks in an airtight container. Source: Sugar, by Anna Olson AdvertisementsBy Matt Maccaro in News \| February 29, 2016 at 6:35PM CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin announced over $1.5 million in substance abuse funding in a news conference Monday afternoon. The funding will create new services in 12 counties, and expand existing services in eight counties. “Substance abuse doesn’t necessarily have to be a dead end,” said Vice President of First Choice Health Systems Scott Jarrett. “There is recovery and there are folks who have gone through the process and have gone back to their jobs, their families and continue to be an integral part of the community here in West Virginia.” First Choice runs the new 24-hour state help line at 844-HELP-4WV, which he said had seen success since its inception last September. “The funding today is not earmarked for the call center, but it does go to provide beds and treatment for folks across the state,” Jarrett said. “And there’s a peer coach, peer support element that this funding will play a big part in.” Tomblin hoped the funding would continue to solve the Mountain State’s drug abuse epidemic. “Substance abuse is one of the greatest struggles our state has ever faced, and my administration continues to make the fight against (it) a top priority,” Tomblin said. “We want those struggling with substance abuse to find help and hope in West Virginia, and that starts with giving our residents the support they need to get on the path toward recovery.” The funding will go toward 150 new treatment beds, a women’s recovery residence and specialist and recovery coaches in each county.You wanna beat the breathalyzer? You wanna drive around pissed outta yer skull, giving not fuck nor shit for pedestrians and other “users of the road”, ie the selfish gits who wanna curb yer enthusiasm? Then read this!! (courtesy of some blogger called KEVIN who blogs on “myspace.com” fer fuck’s sake… HOW TO BEAT A BREATHALYZER!!!!! Current mood: contemplative Want to trick that breath machine into a false reading?Not that difficult: just vary your breathing pattern. As I’ve indicated in earlier posts, these breath machines which determine guilt or innocence in DUI cases are not exactly the reliable devices that law enforcement would have us believe. Yet another example of that unreliability is the fact that the results will vary depending upon the breathing pattern of the person being tested. This has been confirmed in a number of scientific studies. In one, for example, a group of men drank moderate doses of alcohol and their blood-alcohol levels were then measured by gas chromatographic analysis of their breath. The breathing techniques were then varied. The results: Holding your breath for 30 seconds before exhaling increased the blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) by 15.7%. Hyperventilating for 20 seconds immediately before the analyses of breath, on the other hand, decreased the blood-alcohol level by 10.6%. Keeping the mouth closed for five minutes and using shallow nasal breathing resulted in increasing the BAC by 7.3%, and testing after a slow, 20-second exhalation increased levels by 2%. “How Breathing Techniques Can Influence the Results of Breath-Alcohol Analyses”, 22(4) Medical Science and the Law 275. For another study with similar findings, see “Accurate Measurement of Blood Alcohol Concentration with Isothermal Breathing”, 51(1) Journal of Studies on Alcohol 6. Dr. Michael Hlastala, Professor of Physiology, Biophysics and Medicine at the..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />University of Washington has gone farther and concluded: “By far, the most overlooked error in breath testing for alcohol is the pattern of breathing….The concentration of alcohol changes considerably during the breath…The first part of the breath, after discarding the dead space, has an alcohol concentration much lower than the equivalent BAC. Whereas, the last part of the breath has an alcohol concentration that is much higher than the equivalent BAC. The last part of the breath can be over 50% above the alcohol level….Thus, a breath tester reading of 0.14% taken from the last part of the breath may indicate that the blood level is only 0.09%.” 9(6) The Champion 16 (1985). Many police officers know this. They also know that if the machine contradicts their judgment that the person they arrested is intoxicated, they won’t look good. So when they tell the arrestee to blow into the machine’s mouthpiece, they’ll yell at him, “Keep breathing! Breathe harder! Harder!” As Professor Hlastala has found, this ensures that the breath captured by the machine will be from the bottom of the lungs, near the alveolar sacs, which will be richest in alcohol. With the higher alcohol concentration, the machine will give a higher — but inaccurate — reading. This web posting is for general information and does not contain a full legal analysis of the matters presented. It should not be construed as legal advice or relied upon as legal opinion on any specific facts or circumstances. The invitation to contact Kevin Mark Wray, Esquire is not a solicitation to provide professional services and should not be construed as an availability to perform legal services in any jurisdiction in which Kevin Mark Wray isnot licensed to practice. 10:09 AM – 0 Comments – 0 Kudos – Add Comment http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=135912847&blogID=265262236 Advertisements Like this: Like Loading... RelatedScottish finance secretary Derek Mackay today unveiled the SNP government’s draft budget for 2018-19, using new devolved powers for the first time to create a unique Scottish income tax system. For the lowest earners, a new starter rate of 19p will be introduced, meaning those earning between £11,850 and £13,850 will be taxed at 19%. The basic rate will remain unchanged from UK levels at 20%, but an “intermediate rate” of 21% will be levied on those earning £24,000 to £44,290. The higher and top rate will be increased by a penny to 41p and 46p respectively. These changes mean Scotland will be the lowest taxed part of the UK for the majority of taxpayers, with only a slight increase in the tax paid by those earning over £30,000. Mackay had faced weeks of lobbying from Scottish business and criticism from the Conservative party for proposed income tax changes. Perhaps continuing a tradition of managerialism instead of radicalism, Mackay apparently conceded to this pressure from an emboldened Scottish Conservative group, saying a bigger increase in tax paid by those earning over £150,000 might reduce revenues as the highest earners may avoid paying it. Other announcements included a slight increase in public sector pay, lifting the pay-cap to 3% for public sector workers earning under £30,000. This is arguably a poisoned chalice for local government, who will receive no extra funding in order to deliver on pay increases for their staff. Scotland will also continue to mitigate the bedroom tax as well as allocating £10m to an ending homelessness fund. University tuition will also remain free for EU and Scottish domiciled students. New Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard characterised the draft budget as “Tory-lite” saying, “a penny on the top rate just does not do it.” Leonard also criticised the SNP government for “tinkering around the edges”, saying they had failed to use the parliament for radical change. Scottish Greens co-convener Patrick Harvie welcomed the more progressive tax system, but said the government should have gone further. Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie said the budget was a missed opportunity: “We called on the Scottish government to deliver transformative investment in education and a step change in mental health. Instead, we have a set of announcements which pay lip service to the challenges Scotland faces.” Friends of the Earth Scotland welcomed the capital commitment to the National Investment Bank, but said future budgets should be strictly aligned with climate change targets and a just transition to a zero carbon economy. The National Union of Students in Scotland said the budget was a “missed opportunity” to fix Scotland’s broken student support system. President Luke Humberstone stated: “Whilst we welcome the government’s commitment to increase the student loan repayment threshold, there was no progress on that today. Graduates in Scotland are getting a raw deal, repaying their loans before they see the benefits of their education on their payslip.” With only a minority at Holyrood, the SNP will have to secure the support of at least one other party in the chamber to see their plans approved. Relying on the Scottish Greens or Liberal Democrats for support in the past, early signals indicate the SNP will have to make changes to their budget to ensure support.Sports Business Journal has posted their local ratings info for 21 of the 30 NHL teams (excluding those in Canada as well as Carolina and Nashville) and the results are quite interesting. The lead takeaway is the insane rise in ratings for the Columbus Blue Jackets. It’s no secret that the Blue Jackets have not been good for the better part of their entire existence, but they put together one of the league’s best records this season and had that memorable 16 game winning streak during the regular season. Sadly, their reward for their best ever season was a first round matchup with the defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins and a quick postseason exit after five games. However, things finally are beginning to look up for hockey in Columbus. The Blue Jackets posted a 2.09 local rating this year, which while still well behind other heavy hitters, is an insane 118% increase over last season. For any team to double their local numbers, especially in a market like Columbus, is a hugely impressive achievement. No team and no fanbase in the NHL could use a sustained run of success like the CBJ and if they can continue to build on this season maybe Columbus can become a bonafide hockey market after all. At the top of the list, the Buffalo Sabres led the way once again with a 6.22 local rating followed by the Pittsburgh Penguins (5.95), Minnesota Wild (4.40), St. Louis Blues (4.15), and Chicago Blackhawks (3.34). The Sabres’ numbers are even more impressive when you consider the fact that they haven’t made the playoffs for six consecutive seasons. That belies some of the other trends on the board when ratings rise and fall depending upon the team’s success. It’s no surprise to see Minnesota jump up into that rarefied air after their great season, for example. Hopefully those fans are rewarded soon with a return to the Stanley Cup Playoffs. At the other end of the spectrum, the Anaheim Ducks bring up the rear with a paltry 0.22 rating, down 50% from last year. For a team that just breezed into the second round of the postseason, that’s fairly disappointing. Other big market teams didn’t register very encouraging numbers, either. The New Jersey Devils, Dallas Stars, and New York Islanders are also in the bottom five of ratings along with the Florida Panthers. Furthermore, the Detroit Red Wings experienced one of the biggest declines in ratings, down 36%. The biggest decrease came from the Colorado Avalanche, who lost a ghastly 64% of their audience for a season their fans would like to forget. But perhaps the most important piece of information is this nugget about the league’s national ratings on NBC, which experienced a decline in spite of the fact that several teams saw local ratings increase. Overall, 10 of the 21 U.S.-based teams monitored posted ratings increases from last season; 11 teams saw a decline. The NHL’s local numbers stand in stark contrast to national TV ratings, which saw steep drops this season. NHL games on NBC posted their lowest viewership numbers on record. The 15 NHL games on NBC averaged 1.23 million viewers, down 20 percent. NHL games on NBCSN posted the NHL’s lowest cable viewership numbers since 2011-12. Its 91 games averaged 336,000 viewers, down 11 percent. The NHL is hugely dependent upon its traditional hockey powers and hockey towns to draw ratings. You can bet that the execs at NBC were apoplectic over the fact that the top seeded Blackhawks were swept out of the first round of the playoffs. And with major hockey markets having teams struggle this season (Philadelphia, Detroit, New York with the Islanders and Devils and the LA Kings) it’s easy to understand why ratings on the national scene could take a hit. While those national ratings are important they don’t have to be the be all and end all. The NHL can look at this season’s growth in expansion markets like Columbus and Minneapolis and Nashville in the second round as a sign of success and potential growth. Because the more the NHL can build all of their cities into true hockey towns, the better it will be for the league in the long run. [Sports Business Journal]I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and in the meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit, when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country.1 — Upton Sinclair, Letter to the L.A. Chief of Police, 17 May 1923 A classic proverb holds that “there is honour among thieves”. For 99% of thieves, this proverb is actually true. But there is a minority of thieves, alas, who have no honour at all. They are the thieves who create 97% of our money—in the form of debt—through the magic of double-entry accounting. Thanks to the added magic of compounding interest owed on all the money, the total amount of debt owed worldwide has grown so large, it is now impossible to repay. Although, truth be told, because all of the ‘money’ is actually debt, it has always been impossible to repay, because repaying all the debt would eliminate all the ‘money’. As two authorities on the matter—one, the High Priest, the other, a mere deacon of the Federal Reserve Bank—intoned way back in the Great Depression: If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.2 If all the bank loans were paid up, no one would have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of currency or coin in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks for our money. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp upon the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible – but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it is widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.3 If you were not previously familiar with the illogical, paradoxical, circular pseudo-realities that arise from double-entry accounting, then Welcome to Numberland, Alice. Even though this is the objective truth, the irrefutable reality of how the debt-based ‘money’ system works, most of us continue to believe in the impossible. That is to say, we continue to believe—falsely—that we are bound to honour our debts. Famed anthropologist and author of Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber explains: That common-sensical notion not only that it’s moral to pay one’s debt, but also that morality essentially is a matter of paying one’s debts can bring people to justify things that they would never think to justify in any other circumstance.4 Economist and historian Michael Hudson says that the bankers have known about this anthropological discovery since at least the 1980’s: They found out that the poor are honest. Almost the only people who believe they should repay their debts are the poor people. And in fact, the less money you have, the more you believe the debts should be paid.5 Nearly 2500 years ago, the man widely acknowledged to be the foundational figure for Western science, philosophy, law-making, and mathematics, gave this instruction to lenders and borrowers: μηδὲ νόμισμα παρακατατίθεσθαι ὅτῳ μή τις πιστεύει, μηδὲ δανείζειν ἐπὶ τόκῳ, ὡς ἐξὸν μὴ ἀποδιδόναι τὸ παράπαν τῷ δανεισαμένῳ μήτε τόκον μήτε κεφάλαιον No one shall deposit money with anyone he does not trust, nor lend at interest, since it is permissible for the borrower to refuse entirely to pay back either interest or principal.6 It turns out that Plato was right. It is permissible—legally—for all the world’s borrowers to refuse to honour all their debts to all the world’s banks. The reason why is because—legally—no bank has lent us any money. In fact—according to the banks themselves—legally, all the money in the banks was lent by us to them. (Feeling dizzy Alice?) According to Black’s, the most widely used law dictionary in the United States7, “money” is legally defined as (emphasis added): A general, indefinite term for the measure and representative of value; currency; the circulating medium; cash. “Money” is a generic term, and embraces every description of coin or bank-notes recognized by common consent as a representative of value in effecting exchanges of property or payment of debts. Hopson v. Fountain. 5 Humph. (Tenn.) 140. Money is used in a specific and also in a general and more comprehensive sense. In its specific sense, it means what is coined or stamped by public authority, and has its determinate value fixed by governments. In its more comprehensive and general sense, it means wealth.8 Rather than lending us legal money, bankers have misled and deceived us into renting a record of a promise to pay legal money. They have misled and deceived us into believing that their record of their promise to pay us money, is actually money (legal substance). They have also misled and deceived us into believing that their record of their promise to pay us money, is actually our money (ownership title). And here’s the real kicker. Despite the fact that they claim to have loaned us all this money, thanks to the magical paradox at the heart of double-entry accounting, they also claim, simultaneously, precisely the opposite to be true — that we have actually loaned all that money to them. (We will return to this later – think “bail-in”). It really does beg the question, “Does anyone really own money?” Because the ‘money’ that the bankers have purportedly ‘loaned’ to us—that we have loaned to them—is neither money in true legal substance, nor is it certain just whose ‘money’ it actually is, we can confidently assert that the bankers have misrepresented the sign, true substance, and true value of the “consideration” component of the loan agreement, engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in the withholding and/or obfuscation of key information pertaining to their capacity to deliver on their promise of performance, made false, misleading, and deceptive statements and representations in the inducement of borrowers to enter into an agreement of exchange of mutual performances (the “offer”), failed to deliver on their promise of performance (“failure of consideration”), engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in obfuscating their failure to deliver on their promise of performance, and gained dishonest advantage (“interest”, “yield”, “return”) through these acts of misleading and deceptive conduct. You may well be feeling—like Alice—rather incredulous about this, and questioning how it is possible. After all, surely the financial accounting standard-setters and our government regulators would prevent such things from happening? Alas, no. Just as with double-entry accounting—the magical foundation on which the entire parasite worm-ridden edifice of global banking and finance is built—the truth is exactly the opposite. Ever since the “financial reporting revolution ushered in by financial economics ascendance in the 1960s”9 and the “increasing hegemony of neo-liberal ideology over issues of public policy and regulation ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher”10, the financial accounting standards bodies and government regulators have aided and abetted the bankers in their misleading and deceptive conduct: Well documented is the growing dominance of the social sciences and of business education by neoclassical economic ideas (Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton, 2005), which form the intellectual foundation of neo-liberal morality and politics.11 Transforming accounting in the academy into a neoclassical economics sub-discipline (Reiter & Williams, 2002), which the financial reporting revolution accomplished, has impoverished accounting discourse as a moral discourse (Reiter, 1998; Williams, 2000) and led to the understanding of accounting as a practice whose purpose is to cohere with a world made natural by the discourse of neoclassical economics.12 For at least four decades, the private not-for-profit (oh really?) financial accounting standard-setters (FASB, IASB) have continued to actively aid and abet the bankers’ misleading and deceptive conduct, despite frequent accounting-enabled corporate scandals and resultant financial crises, and the often stunning revelations and criticisms presented in the peer-reviewed accounting literature (emphasis added): The savings and loan failures in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Enron, Global Crossing and Tyco corporate scandals, Andersen’s demise, and the sub-prime mortgage crisis all relate to deception [emphasis in original]. All such scandals involved to varying degrees the telling of accounting untruths…13 Accounting representations are true if they predict, or true if they abet the privileged group to pursue its objectives, a quite different notion of true than implied by the popular usage…14 [M]any accounting signs no longer refer to real objects and events and accounting no longer functions according to the logic of transparent representation, stewardship or information economics.15 [A]ccounting today no longer refers to any objective reality but instead circulates in a “hyperreality” of self-referential models.16 The accounting sign now precedes (and even creates through its ‘‘sign value’’) the referent that it once purported to represent. It is no longer an abstraction or an appearance of any ‘‘real’’ thing. It is its own pure simulation, making circular references to other models which themselves make circular references to accounting signs.17 Are such disasters [Enron] necessary before accountants begin to realise how indispensable it is to make a distinction between conceptual representation (including accounting representations and misrepresentations) and the reality to be represented?18 As mentioned earlier, around 97% of so-called ‘money’ in ‘circulation’ (hint: it doesn’t actually circulate in the true meaning of the word; it magically disappears in one place, and magically reappears in another) is not actually money (“coined or stamped by public authority”)19. It is bank-created ‘credit’. By legal definition, bank ‘credit’ is not real money. Bank ‘credit’ is actually just an electronic double-entry accounting record of the bank’s promise to pay real money. However, this objective legal reality has not prevented the FASB/IASB from aiding and abetting the bankers in their false, misleading and deceptive misrepresentation of the mere sign of money as actually being real legal money, and consequently inducing prospective borrowers into forming loan agreements for the purpose of gain for the bankers (“interest”, “yield”, “return”) on the basis of this fundamental misrepresentation. For example, effective July 1, 2009—that is, in the middle of the global banking liquidity crisis known as the “GFC”—the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) introduced Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) §305 Cash and Cash Equivalents. This new standard effectively sanctioned—and obfuscated—the banks’ misleading and deceptive conduct
’s 6th Congressional District last night, Democrats have continued plowing forward with their same losing strategy. They pander to their far-left, reliable (white) liberal base, while ignoring and excluding large blocs of voters who would/could potentially vote for them if they put forth the proper effort. If Democrats want to defeat Trump and start winning Congressional seats and gubernatorial races, they’ll need to start winning elections instead of trying to buy them. Ditch the homosexual/feminist rhetoric Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate who lost the Georgia special election last night, made LGBT issues a top priority throughout the campaign trail. The 6th Congressional District of Georgia has been owned by Republicans since 1979 when “Dixiecrat” John Flynt retired and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich handily defeated challenger Virginia Shapard (D) by a 54-46 margin. Since that time, Republicans have held the seat either unopposed or winning elections against Democrats with 64%+ of the vote. It was either ignorance or arrogance that made Democrats believe they could go into a Southern, Republican district talking about LGBT-this/feminist-that and win. Democrats blew a golden opportunity to win this district as Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 36% overall (lowest since becoming President), including an 11% drop among GOP voters since April. Regardless of what individual Democratic voters think of it, 79% of Georgians claim to be some kind of Christian, with 64% believing religion is very important in their lives. Democrats cannot go into a district like GA06 with the same strategy they would use in coastal California, Massachusetts, or New York. Politics is a game of balance and adaptation, both of which Democrats failed to exercise last night. Democrats do not all of a sudden have to become anti-gay. But homosexuality, feminism and trying to force people to believe men are women and vice versa, is not going to play well with southern white people, Christian black people and Catholic Latinos/as. Its politics. Its a game of give and take. Democrats should not and cannot perpetually mention sexuality/LGBT on the campaign trail. Homosexuality cannot be their primary platform issue alongside “beat Trump.” They will either accept this reality or continue losing. Ditch the Clinton corporate candidates Most of the reasons people dislike Trump have merit. But many of the reasons the same number of people dislike Hillary Clinton also have merit. As long as Democrats continue pretending like Hillary Clinton and her disciples are noble saints, they will continue seeing election results like last night. Democrats have long marketed themselves as the “party of the people,” the party that cares about the little guy and forces Federal Reserve note hoarders to pay their fair share of taxes. But its all disingenuous politics, as Hillary Clinton charges upwards of $335,000 to give speeches. Bill and Hillary Clinton made over $150 million total giving speeches from 2001 to 2015. Hillary operates the same way when it comes to donors for elections. Her entire campaign was financed mostly by billionaires, while corporate and foreign donors have funneled millions to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary, like Trump, is also a serial liar and flip-flopper who will say whatever it takes to rile the base and get votes. Hillary has mesmerized liberals in the same way Trump has far-right wingers. She can do no wrong in their eyes. But if the DNC continues featuring Clinton and her disciples as candidates, more loses are on the horizon. Distinguish or death The hard truths Democrats must face revolve mostly around the foregoing, but go deeper than that as far as demographics. Most black Americans know that the USA will always be a racist/terrorist/manipulative state towards them whether Democrats or Republicans are in control. Latino/as know that whether its Republicans or Democrats in power, both will continue tearing apart their families and taking advantage of them in the workplace. Fact remains Democrats are much better at public relations than the GOP. Many black and brown folks view them as the only hope in the country, while the GOP becomes more and more blatantly white supremacist as the years pass. The GOP has owned the white vote in every Presidential election since 1976, garnering 55% of said vote on average. The only reason Barack Obama could win while only receiving 41% of the white vote on average is because he nearly monopolized the black vote, and got 71% and 67% of the Latino vote in 2012 and 2008 respectively. He is also a charismatic black man with a good-looking family that gave many people of color hope (real or otherwise) in a country founded on racism. Obama could push the homosexual agenda and still get enough votes from people of color because of who he is. White, rich Clinton disciples cannot and will not have that type of influence on people of color, who are key to Democrats winning national and local elections. Democrats have about 17 months to get their act together, look in the mirror, accept reality and adapt. Otherwise MAGA and “Heil Trump” will dominate the political landscape far beyond 2018.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The Lebanese army only confirmed Majid al-Majid's identity through DNA tests on Friday A prominent al-Qaeda-linked militant in Lebanon has died in custody in a Beirut hospital, Lebanon's army says. Majid al-Majid, a Saudi who led the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and was on Saudi Arabia's most-wanted-terrorists list, was arrested recently. An army general told Associated Press the militant died of kidney failure. The Abdullah Azzam Brigades claimed a double suicide bomb attack on the Iranian embassy in southern Beirut in November that left 23 people dead. Analysis Majid al-Majid was no doubt a very precious catch not only for Lebanon but for many other countries where he was among the most-wanted. The whole intelligence operation, from the capture of the Saudi national until the announcement of his death, has been mired in rumour and ambiguity. Many reports in local media talk of a US tip-off leading to his capture. The Lebanese army is keeping a tight lid on any details, perhaps fearing a backlash from supporters of various Islamist groups. The most important question remains whether the authorities were able to extract any valuable information before he died, or whether he was interrogated at all. There is only one certainty: Lebanon appears to have become an operational centre for al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Many fear Majid al-Majid is just one link in a long chain of jihadi groups here. The Iranian cultural attache was among those killed. 'Interrogated' A Lebanese army statement said Majid al-Majid died in a military hospital in Beirut on Saturday, as he was receiving medical treatment. Security sources said he had gone into a coma suffering from kidney failure. He was believed to have required dialysis for the condition. It was only on Friday that the Lebanese authorities said that DNA tests had confirmed his identity. Defence Minister Fayez Ghosn earlier confirmed the commander was being held by army intelligence in Beirut and was "being interrogated in secret". He refused to say when and how the arrest took place. However, a Lebanese security source told the Reuters news agency that he had been captured with another Saudi militant and had been living in the southern city of Sidon. Image caption Lebanese women hold placards of victims of the Iran embassy bombing, claimed by the Brigades Image caption The attack left 23 people dead, including the Iranian cultural attache Majid al-Majid had led the Abdullah Azzam Brigades since 2012. Abdullah Azzam Brigades Based in Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula Formed in 2009, according to US, but name used to claim attacks in Egypt in 2004 and 2005 Saudi wing claimed 2010 attack on Japanese oil tanker off the coast of Oman Lebanese wing behind occasional rocket fire against Israel since 2009, but not believed to have carried out a major attack until embassy bombing Led since 2012 by Majid al-Majid, a Saudi citizen named on the kingdom's most-wanted list Profile: Abdullah Azzam Brigades Based in both Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula, the group is named after a Palestinian jihadist ideologue who recruited mujahideen for the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The group has attracted hardline Islamist militants who fought in the Iraqi insurgency and has based itself in the Ein el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, near Sidon. The US designated the group a terrorist organisation in 2012, freezing its assets. November's Iranian embassy bombing was believed to be its first major attack. Iran and the Hezbollah militant group are allied with the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Paul Wood on the embassy attack Media reports said Majid al-Majid had pledged allegiance to the leader of the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate seeking to overthrow President Assad. After the Iran embassy bombing, a Salafist cleric close to the Abdullah Azzam Brigades warned attacks would continue in Lebanon until Iranian and Hezbollah forces stopped fighting alongside government forces in Syria, and the Sunni group's prisoners were released in Lebanon.But what if they say that GFV is in a different club than the others? They would let existing direct DVC member to use points to book it like they do with Disney collection, while resales would not have the same option. At the same time they would let direct GFV to book other resorts outside the "GFV DVC" as a perk, not available to who will buy GFV resale in the future. Existing members will not be able to complain, because we purchased before GFV being sold so we were never been promised to be able to book there. But as more resorts will be added with this restriction, resales will be more and more limited. I only hope they grandfather existing contracts like they did. Click to expand...Cubic.fm just launched its new platform and you don't want to miss out on this new online experience. Soon coming to mobile with playback features, they've been hard at work improving the app and site with some amazing headway. Here's the idea: Users can now stream all music on one player from Cubic.fm's site by saving and clicking links from any service, bookmarking it and adding it to a personal playlist. This will allow you to save anything from Spotify, 8 Tracks, Pandora, TuneIn, Beatport, Reddit, Twitter, Hypem, YouTube, Soundcloud, you name it (currently also uses Deezer, Rdio). Currently, you can use most of these on the layout at Cubic.fm. Check it out and try it free! The developers are also looking for positive feedback as this service develops. We think it's a pretty cool way to save and listen to music online, especially if you're hopping around a lot. Check out a tutorial here: This week, they launched the new player which features: Channels: For all of you who wanted to categorize your music in a simple way You can now create different channels to group the tracks you save. You’ll be able to save a track directly to a channel from the extension as well. Drag&drop: Drag&drop tracks to reorder, share, or to add to a channel. Sharing: Easily share a track you saved; in the web-app, or just instantaneously with the extension. Login: We know you don’t all have Facebook accounts. We’ve added Twitter and Google+ login as well. New player: You can now manually select the available sources for a track. Shuffle & repeat? They’re added too. New extension: Our extension now lets you know when you’re on a page that it covers. You can also save tracks directly to a channel you created, or create a new one, without ever going to cubic.fm. Check out a screenshot of what the player looks like. You can read more here on their website. Right now, you can sign up simply by adding your email address and getting an early account. Check out their Facebook page or contact [email protected] SPANISH TV presenter has come under fire after his comments on live television following the Manchester bombing. The 13TV program El Cascabel was live when the terror attack occurred and the outrageous statement was recorded. Antonio Jimenez announced that there “was some sort of explosion in the Manchester Arena stadium,” and followed up with the question: “Which stadium is that? That’s not United’s is it?” A reporter continued to report the news as it unfurled and once finished Jimenez interjected again. “Manchester Arena isn’t Manchester United nor City’s ground is it?” After an awkward pause he continued: “It isn’t right? We football fans don’t know if Manchester Arena is one of the two teams’ stadiums” A co-presenter then said: “I’ll give you a short lesson, there are more things in life than football.” “No sir, football is the most important thing,” Jimenez responded. Spanish social media was quick to condemn his comments, calling it “embarassing” and that he should be “ashamed of himself.” El presentador de 13Tv cuando salta la noticia de las explosiones en Manchester. Vergüenza ajena es poco. pic.twitter.com/weWeHrmF67 — ZerBe (@ZerBe_Zero) May 23, 2017COLLEGE STATION — The scene seems straight out of a crime show: A mountain of a man appears from the night, having entered student housing at one of the nation's most prestigious universities, where brainy collegians are hanging out on a weekend. The muscular hulk targets a victim resting on a lounge couch, pours a can of beer on his head and then punches the unsuspecting prey, a seemingly random attack requiring eight stitches above the eye at a nearby emergency room — all according to a Rice University probable cause statement. Three witnesses, all Rice students, later identify the alleged perpetrator as Texas A&M senior defensive end Gavin Stansbury, who is 6-foot-4 and 255 pounds, as each collegian separately picks him out of a photo lineup featuring five other men “with similar characteristics,” according to Rice police. There's only one thing keeping the incident from March 16 as clear cut as it appears: Stansbury vows he hasn't been on the Rice campus in years, although he was listed as staying at a hotel a mere block from Rice at the time of the alleged assault. Stansbury, 21, is scheduled to appear in a Harris County court Thursday on charges of misdemeanor assault, and according to a person familiar with the case and also the county's justice website, he doesn't appear to have legal representation to this point. An A&M spokesman said Stansbury wasn't reached Friday in terms of whether he had retained a lawyer. For its part Rice, having turned the case over to the Harris County district attorney's office, declined further comment on the matter. According to the probable cause statement from Rice, one of the witnesses, a Rice student, said she first met the alleged perpetrator while strolling back to student housing from an on-campus party late at night. She said he identified himself as an A&M football player who intended to transfer to Rice in the coming semester. She then asked him not to follow her into a women's restroom, the statement said. He soon showed up on the fourth floor of the residential area, where students were relaxing around 2:30 a.m. Sunday. After the perpetrator allegedly struck the victim, both men were pulled apart by those on hand, according to the police report. More than three weeks later, Stansbury was in a car pulled over close to midnight April 10 by College Station police and subsequently arrested on the charges stemming from the incident in Harris County after an officer ran his driver's license. The alleged assault victim and none of the witnesses to the supposed attack returned messages for this story. Stansbury, who's from Franklin, La., told police he was, indeed, in Houston that night, while serving as a paid intern for the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo. The rodeo's chief operating officer, Leroy Shafer, confirmed Stansbury was a rodeo intern from March 11-16, and that his employees told him Stansbury had been a good worker in the audio-visual department during that time. Stansbury further told police he hadn't been on the Rice campus in “several years,” and that he and his girlfriend had “traveled to League City to wash clothes and prepare red beans” the night of the assault, and even went to bed in League City around 1 a.m. (an hour and a half prior to the purported assault). Stansbury added he returned to College Station the night of March 16. Shafer said while rodeo interns earn minimum wage, they're also offered hotel rooms during their stay, and the primary intern hotel is the Hilton Houston Plaza, located about a block from Rice in the medical center. Deb Dunsford, an A&M senior lecturer and supervisor of Houston rodeo interns, said Stansbury was listed as staying at the hotel that week, but she wasn't certain of his whereabouts that particular Saturday night (and early Sunday morning). Following his arrest Stansbury, voted the defense's best player last season by his teammates, was immediately suspended from all A&M athletic activities, but has since been reinstated, A&M spokesman Alan Cannon said. Cannon added A&M would not discuss a specific case — hence why Stansbury was so quickly allowed back on the team. A&M did not make Stansbury available for an interview for this story. Stansbury didn't play in the Aggies' 2013 season opener against Rice after he was one of four A&M defenders receiving a two-game suspension for violating A&M athletic department rules and regulations in the previous offseason. Stansbury's arrest two weeks ago continued another active offseason for the Aggies on the legal front. Two of his teammates, safety Howard Matthews and receiver Edward Pope, were in the vehicle with him when they were pulled over, and Matthews and Pope were each arrested at the same time as Stansbury for prior failure to appear in court. Receiver Ricky Seals-Jones recently was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but his lawyer, Cameron Reynolds of Bryan, said Seals-Jones is fighting the charges. Quarterback Kenny Hill, who's vying for the starting job, recently was arrested on charges of public intoxication. Touted safety Kameron Miles was dismissed from the program in early March for what has been reported as theft. Defensive tackle Isaiah Golden was arrested in February on a misdemeanor marijuana charge, while fellow sophomore Darian Claiborne, a linebacker, was arrested at the same time for a noise violation (for yelling while the players were being questioned). Claiborne already had been arrested on charges of marijuana possession in December and missed the Aggies' victory over Duke in the Chick-fil-A Bowl on New Year's Eve as a result. Last year, about half of Sumlin's starting defense was suspended for the Aggies' season-opening victory over the Owls after various transgressions in the previous offseason. Sumlin has responded this offseason to the multiple arrests by claiming the athletic department has measures in place to continually educate A&M student-athletes on trying to stay out of trouble. [email protected] Twitter: @brentzwernemanA Florida man was arrested and accused of knocking out his mother after she told him not to practice martial arts in the house, according to a report.Cory Morrel, 27, is charged with domestic battery after allegedly kicking his mother in the head, leaving her unconscious in their Naples home for several minutes, NaplesNews.com reported over the weekend.While practicing his craft, Morrel accidentally left a scuff mark on a wall, prompting his mother to shout profanities at him, according to a Collier County Sheriff's Office report cited by NaplesNews.The report didn't disclose what happened next that led to Morrel allegedly kicking his mother in the head, but when she was unresponsive, he called 911, according to the NaplesNews.com report.When deputies arrived, she wasn't able to recall what happened, then was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, NaplesNews.com reported. A Florida man was arrested and accused of knocking out his mother after she told him not to practice martial arts in the house, according to a report. Cory Morrel, 27, is charged with domestic battery after allegedly kicking his mother in the head, leaving her unconscious in their Naples home for several minutes, NaplesNews.com reported over the weekend. Advertisement While practicing his craft, Morrel accidentally left a scuff mark on a wall, prompting his mother to shout profanities at him, according to a Collier County Sheriff's Office report cited by NaplesNews. The report didn't disclose what happened next that led to Morrel allegedly kicking his mother in the head, but when she was unresponsive, he called 911, according to the NaplesNews.com report. When deputies arrived, she wasn't able to recall what happened, then was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, NaplesNews.com reported. AlertMerelated media assets (image or videos) available. Click to see the gallery. 2 related media assets (image or videos) available. Click to see the gallery. In the second of a 3-part series from China's "rust belt", Jeremy Koh visits Hegang in China's northeast, where moves are afoot to develop new industries following the mining sector's slump. HEGANG, China: Sun Qiuhe has been driving a taxi in the coal city of Hegang since he was laid off by a local mining company about a year ago. A native of the northeast, where people are known for their candour and forthright manner, Sun appeared embarrassed when he said that his wife, a teacher, is now the family’s main bread winner. Advertisement He said: “Life now is very different from before. For example, I can’t afford to buy cigarettes anymore and I like to joke about it, that I am now of a lower class. "My wife earns more than I do and the burden to support the family is now loaded on her.” The 32-year-old is among hundreds of thousands of coal workers made redundant in recent years in China’s "rust belt" provinces. He used to work for the Heilongjiang Longmay Holding Mining Group, the biggest coal enterprise in China's northeast. Unfortunately for him, it is also one of the biggest loss-making coal producers in China. #Hegang, in #China's rust belt #Heilongjiang, is among more than 60 cities identified by the central government as resource-depleted cities. pic.twitter.com/5myufUkTRM — Jeremy Koh (@JeremyKohCNA) October 2, 2017 The coal sector including companies in Hegang, a city of about one million, was among the most severely hit in China’s "rust belt". They were affected by China’s economic downturn, which led to rising capacity, falling prices and weak demand. The situation is even more dire for Sun. His hometown in Heilongjiang province is among more than 60 cities identified by the central government as resource-depleted cities. These are cities whose development models badly need a makeover or they risk dying out completely. They used to be rich in natural resources such as coal and timber, but those are now exhausted after years of helping to realise China's economic miracle. But the challenge for President Xi Jinping is more than just trying to rejuvenate a few dozen ghost cities. There have been concerns that if nothing is done, the entire "rust belt" region, home to more than 100 million people, will die a slow death. Last year, the central government pledged about US$250 billion to revive the area. Advertisement Advertisement Analysts also said that for cities like Hegang, a direct bankruptcy or sizable layoffs could prompt social unrest. In 2015, for instance, thousands marched on the streets of Hegang to protest delayed salaries. The organisers were arrested and jailed. This is why many miners here are wary of speaking to foreign media, including Sun, who only spoke to Channel NewsAsia. The actions of workers like him are being watched closely because China's bloody past has taught the Communist Party to fear chaos above all. Some analysts have also said that the staying power of the Communist Party has been linked to its ability to deliver continued economic progress and jobs. Bian Yongzu, an expert at the Chongyang Institute of Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, said: “The government has demonstrated great determination to try to solve the region’s problems. This is a political task and they’ll have to solve all the problems, so it’s definitely a top priority.” A NEW ERA? The heavy investment appears to have worked, with latest data showing economic improvement in the three "rust belt" provinces. Policy support and funds have been poured in to help develop new industries here. Policy support and funds have been poured in to help develop new industries in #Hegang & graphite has been identified as a new growth driver pic.twitter.com/JK3bYyfFRj — Jeremy Koh (@JeremyKohCNA) October 2, 2017 In Hegang, graphite, a type of mineral that is used in making lubricants and lithium-ion batteries, has been identified as a new growth driver for the weary coal city. That policy shift has benefited companies like Aoyu Graphite Group, a local manufacturer of natural flake graphite. Chen Rui, the group's operations director, said: “The support from the central government towards Heilongjiang province has never been this strong. We can really feel it, now the policy for the revival of the northeastern old industrial area has been elevated to the highest level. "They’ll definitely come out with some supporting policies.” The company’s revenue is now more than 10 times what it was 10 years ago, but the number of people it hires to keep the machines running is about one-tenth of what it used to be. This is good news for a fading coal city that seeks to move up the value chain. But there is a drawback - even if Hegang is rejuvenated, it may still have no place for labourers like Sun who have little education and low-level skills.What draws young people to terror? Is it gullibility? Is it youthful angst? These are some of the questions that Indian experts are struggling to answer as investigators try to understand what drew 22-year-old Kalyan youth Areeb Majeed and his friends to join the Islamic State (IS) terror group. What is worrying is that Majeed is hardly an exception. One of the facets of Islamic State that has been grabbing headlines - apart from grisly videos of beheading style executions - is its frighteningly effective recruitment of young men from around the world. Younes Abaaound from Belgium for instance, created shockwaves when IS released a picture of the baby faced 13 year old boy brandishing a AK-47. Similarly 17-year-old Australian Abdullah Elmir who went to join IS after telling his parents he was going on a fishing trip, made headlines when he was shown in a six minute video threatening Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot. Closer to home, Mohammed Kasab was 23-years-old when he became the face of the 26/11 attacks And its not just boys who are seem to be falling under the spell of radicalised terror. In France alone, there are more than a hundred documented cases of young girls leaving to join the Islamic State. Two Bosnian girls, Samra Kesinovic, 17, and her friend Sabina Selimovic, 15 became poster girls for the group. They soon had a change of heart -- calling their parents and asking to come home -- but neither have been heard from since. So why do the young idolise terrorism? Maybe for the same reason they idolise pop stars and celebrities. Much like a celebrity, the terrorist possesses that ineffable charm we call 'glamour'. Shortly after Rolling Stone magazine controversially featured the Boston bomber on its cover in 2013, author Virginia Postrel wrote in Time magazine,"Glamour gives its audience the feeling of "if only"--if only I could belong to that group, wear that dress, drive that car, date that person, live in that house. If only I could be like that. By embodying our longings in a specific image or idea, glamour convinces us, if only for a moment, that the life we yearn for exists. That dream can motivate real-world action, whether that means taking a resort vacation, moving to a new city, starting a band or planting a bomb with visions of martyrdom. What we find glamorous helps define who we are and who we may become." "Terror is glamour--not only, but also," author Salman Rushdie noted in a 2006 interview, where he argued that extremists "are influenced by the misdirected image of a kind of magic... The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives." Areeb Majeed's life offers damning proof of terror as glamour. By his own confession, he and his friends were drawn not to the ideology of radical Islam but the machismo of combat. When that expectation was thwarted, he wanted to out. According to a report in the Telegraph, the boy was reportedly angry that he wasn't being allowed the glory of being on the front lines of battle: "Arif has allegedly told the NIA that he had been assigned “insignificant” jobs like “cleaning toilets and scavenging” and “guarding women who would be brought in to pleasure his IS bosses... Anti-terrorism squad officers in Mumbai who are working with the NIA say Arif’s “prime grouse is that he was not allowed by the IS leadership to get involved in direct combat”. In other words, he was drawn by the glamour of battle not by genuine ideological commitment -- much as it was with the many young boys who jostled to join the Mumbai underworld a decade ago. Terror groups themselves are only too aware that they need to 'draw' recruits if they are to survive. And as more and more groups jostle for the mindspace of the same section of youth, they end up planning and carrying out more and more audacious acts of terror, intended to impress potential recruits as much as they are intended to cause harm. As pointed out by Firstpost editor R Jagannathan, "It is worth recalling that even the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai - where the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the CST suburban terminus, the Jewish Chabad House and the Leopold restaurant were targeted - was the direct result of a conflicted Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) trying to keep its organisation together in the face of more radical calls for participation in global jihad... The Lashkar, which was nurtured and encouraged by the ISI to target India, was thus in danger of splitting between its pro-al-Qaeda and pro-ISI factions, and it needed a spectacular terror extravaganza to keep its flock together." In fact, he warns that the competition between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State for the Indian subcontinent may well lead to another 26/11 style attack, as both groups try to "wow" their future believers. And Indian officials themselves know that this is a factor. According to a report in The Times of India, at an internal security meeting, Intelligence Bureau (IB) director Sayed Asif Ibrahim "raised serious concerns about the Indian diaspora being exposed to the 'glamour' of ISIS". Terror groups hold out the promise of what young, especially impoverished, boys ache for most: Power, agency and rebellion. Violence has always served as an easy short-hand for masculinity, a message drilled in by popular culture around the world, be it in Bollywood movies or rap songs. What better way to flout the rules than with an AK-47 in your hands? As Postrel notes, "To be a jihadi warrior, these images suggest, is to be a man. Martial glamour is as ancient as Achilles. It promises prowess, courage, camaraderie and historical importance. It offers a way to matter. " There will always be many young Majeeds aching to matter in Kalyan and elsewhere. And there will always be an unscrupulous terrorist or criminal organisation eager to tap into that ache. The question is whether we as a society can diminish their lure, or else offer a reasonable substitute. Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Let’s talk about sexy selfies on the internet. Let’s talk about the idea of young women acting and dressing in provocative ways. Let’s talk about moralizers on blogs and in major newspapers who want girls to stop doing this because they think a culture of girls who dress like the cast of Little House on the Prairie will return us to a state of moral uprightness. Let’s talk about what kinds of sexual behavior are considered appropriate. Let’s talk about the presumption that outward displays of sexuality are shameful. Let’s talk about the certainty that sexual behavior will always bring regret. Let’s talk about how it’s utter bullshit. Here are some pictures of me. I was 18. In one, I was dressed up for the Halloween dance my freshman year of college. In the next, I was wearing nothing but lingerie under that lab coat. It was a costume party hosted by a secret society I was president of. And one more picture from when I was 25 and dressed as a FemBot for Halloween. Do I feel shame over these pictures? No. Regret? No. Do I look at them and think that what I was doing was inappropriate? No. Nothing shameful, regrettable, or inappropriate was happening here. I was 18, 21, 25. I was young and as lovely as I will ever be. I was a sexual, sensual creature and it was a power I was learning to use. It was a part of who I was and who I would eventually be. It was fun. It wasn’t definitional. Dressing up and acting sexy was one thing I did in those days. But it wasn’t the only thing I did and everyone who know me then knew it. I wasn’t always doing this. It was part of a growing up process. Girls who post sexy “selfies” on the Internet today, the same girls who become the subject of moralizing screeds like the “FYI If You’re A Teenage Girl” post that’s gone viral today, are acting the same way I did and for the same reasons. They are young and they are as lovely as they will ever be. They are sexual, sensual creatures and it’s a power they are learning to use. It’s part of who they are and who they will eventually be. It’s fun. It isn’t definitional. It’s one part of who they are and people who know them – not nosy mothers who judge them based on a photograph but people who take the time to know them – know that. They are doing nothing wrong. No one should tell them otherwise. No one should force on them feelings of shame or regret for being human and at the peak of their sexual power. No one should thrust an alternate morality at them and force them to conform. The message we should send girls is that they are young and lovely and sexy and powerful. And they are smart and savvy and silly and success-driven and all of that, all of those things and more will make them into full-blown adults. They need to know all those parts of themselves: the sexy part, the ambitious part, the brainy part, the silly part — all the parts that will make the whole. They need to learn when to use which facet of their personality to achieve their goals. And they can only learn that by using all those facets and seeing how they work. They should be smart, take care to protect their health and safety but don’t let fear or shame make them stifle any part of who they are. The message we have to send to people who look at girls – or boys – in their sexy phase of growing up is that they are people of inherent worth and dignity. You may not judge based on appearances. This is true for everything: race, sexuality, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, ability, disability, age. You cannot look at one aspect of a person and pass final judgement. You must treat each person as an individual. Because that’s what it always comes down to: you must treat every person as an individual, worthy of respect, undiminished by prejudice. Don’t let one photo frame them in your mind forever. Rebekah Kuschmider is a DC area mom with an over-developed sense of irreverence, socialist tendencies, a cable news addiction, and a blog. Rebekah has an undergraduate degree in theatre and Master’s in Arts Policy and Administration and a decade of experience managing arts organizations and advocating in the public health sector. Rebekah also blogs about her life, her thoughts, and her opinions at StayAtHomePundit.com.She was voted one of the Top 25 Political Mom Blogs at Circle of Moms. Her work has also been seen at Salon.com, Redbook online, and the Huffington Post. Images courtesy Rebekah Kuschmider/all rights reservedJill Tarlov and Jason Marshall The cyclist who fatally collided with a woman in Central Park last week issued an apology a day after his victim died in a Manhattan hospital. Jason Marshall, 31, says he is "deeply saddened" about the death of Jill Tarlov, a 58-year-old mother of two and wife of a CBS executive who succumbed to her head injuries on Sunday. In a statement sent through his lawyer, Marshall says: I am deeply, deeply saddened about the accidental collision that I had with Ms. Jill Tarlov last week and her subsequent passing. I am utterly devastated. Please know that this was an unavoidable accident. I extend my deepest sympathies to Mr. Wittman and his entire family. Since the day of the accident, I and my family have been in constant prayer for her and her family. This is the deepest of pain. It is the deepest of tragedies. Marshall denies speeding before running into Tarlov. An NYPD spokesman told us Marshall was biking in the bike lane on West Drive moments before the collision, but had swerved out of the bike lane in an attempt to avoid some other pedestrians. Marshall has not been charged, but the investigation is ongoing. Meanwhile, one Upper East Side retiree tells the Post that Marshall is a maniac who almost ran him over back in June. "I’m telling you, this guy was booking like you couldn’t believe,” Jim Kelly tells the Post. “He kept yelling really loud ‘Get out of the way!’ It was like, ‘Get out of the way or you’re going to get killed.' I had to jump backwards. He missed me by like two inches. You could see the arrogance on this guy. He must have been doing 35 miles per hour, on an incline! I’ve never seen someone go
You get what you pay forThis case wasn't too bad overall to build in. It works as a mid tower and doesn't look half bad either!I build a decent gaming PC in this system but struggled to manage the cables. It was an excursive in cable tying things behind the motherboard tray and ferociously pushing the side panel inward while trying to slide it back on. It worked though and everything looked neat and tidy after all of this.I managed to get a 240mm Nepton 240m mounted in the top of this case which would cool my CPU. This was a very tight fit in this case as there was barely any room between the CPU socket and the radiator when the full thickness fans were fitted and long with the radiator. In addition to this, because of the reservoir and pipes on the AIO unit I could not fit the cooler in without first making a slight.... modification to to the case... To make it fit I had to use a hacksaw blade to cut back the drive cage at the top of the cage just a little so that there was enough space for the overhang of the radiator to go. I got it in there though and it really didn't look bad.Adding some RGB lighting did make this case look very nice but overall it felt cheap and wasn't particularly great to build in. I have now upgraded to a much better case if you have the budget for it. I now use the NZXT CA-S340W-B1 Source 340 Midi-Tower Case - Black Overall it works well as a budget case as long as you're willing to do the extra work to make it look good. If you do that though, it will not disappoint.It was surfing that drew Dean Lucas and Adam Coleman to Mexico last November: the lure of perfect waves, warm water, and empty beaches. Their construction jobs in Edmonton, Alberta, had wrapped in October, and, with six months’ worth of paychecks stashed in their bank accounts, the two Australians loaded their boards into Coleman’s 1992 Chevy van, drove across the Canadian Rockies to Vancouver, and then headed south along the Pacific coast. They passed through Washington and Oregon, stopping when the waves looked promising. Then Northern California. After a quick jaunt inland for a night out in Vegas, they beelined it back to the coast for a few sessions at Leo Carrillo, a break near Malibu. Then they were off again, down through SoCal and across the border into Mexico. “I don’t know what I am doing in 10 years, let alone next year,” Coleman wrote in a Facebook update as they drove, “but I don’t think that matters. Because today is today. And today is good.” Lucas and Coleman, both 33, had been friends nearly their entire lives. This trip was a last chance to catch a few waves together in Baja before heading separate ways. Coleman, with long, unruly dreadlocks and a buoyant personality, was in a hurry to get to Guadalajara. The previous winter he’d taken a trip to Mexico, where he met Andrea Gómez, a university student from the city. They’d made plans to reconnect at her family’s house, where they were going to spend Christmas together. After Baja, Lucas, an unflappable Aussie who grew up 500 yards from the Indian Ocean — and had been on a surfboard since he was 11 — had seven days left in Mexico. After that he would fly to Los Angeles and then to London, where he’d spend the holidays with his longtime girlfriend, Josie Cox, an English acrobat. They had met in India in 2012, and had become nearly inseparable. The two had plans to set off on a road trip through Europe once the holidays were over. But first Lucas wanted to catch some waves. “He could have been a professional surfer, but he couldn’t be bothered,” says Ben Smith, a longtime friend. “He just wanted to go surfing when he wanted and where.” Donate to Share the Stoke and PEACE in the name of Dean and Adam In Baja the swell was epic. They ended up scoring nearly perfect surf. They camped on remote beaches, cooked meals on the sand, and woke at first light to paddle out. But after a week of waves, it was time to move on. The plan was to take a ferry across the Gulf of California, the 140-mile-wide bay that separates the Baja California peninsula from the Mexican mainland, then drive south. It was 560 miles from the port of Topolobampo, Sinaloa, to Guadalajara. If they had any hope of making Coleman’s meeting at noon with Gómez, they’d have to drive through the night, taking turns at the wheel. Then the ferry was delayed two hours. As they waited, Lucas sent a message to a friend in Edmonton, where he lived with Cox. “Can you do me a huge favor if you are seeing Josie?” he wrote. “We have our three-year anniversary tomorrow and wanted to get some things for her like flowers and red Lindt chocolate.” When Lucas and Coleman finally arrived on the mainland, it was just before midnight. The two, together and on their own, had spent the last decade traveling the world racking up dozens of countries — South Africa, Sri Lanka, Iceland, India — as well as multiple surf odysseys to Mexico. They knew how to handle themselves in foreign lands, but it’s almost certain they didn’t know just how dangerous the stretch of road is that they were about to set off on. In the last two years, at least half a dozen travelers have been murdered on it, by bandits preying on motorists. On maps it’s marked as the Benito Juárez Toll Road. But locals have another name for it: the Highway of Death. Since 2006, more than 80,000 Mexicans have been killed in the country’s ongoing drug war, with another 27,000 missing. Even tourist areas are vulnerable. For instance, the U.S. State Department now advises against traveling outside the beachside tourism zone in Acapulco, and U.S. embassy workers are no longer allowed to travel inland. In Sinaloa, there are advisories against all unnecessary travel by road. It’s a similar story across most of the country. “Car theft, kidnapping, crimes that used to be taboo — today they’re commonplace,” says Tomás Guevara, a social psychologist and author of two studies on violence in Sinaloa. The recent spike in crime is a result, paradoxically, of Mexican authorities’, with the backing of U.S. antidrug forces, finally cracking down on it. Dozens of capos recently have been arrested or killed. But with the leaders gone, the militarized wings of their criminal organizations have been left to fight among themselves for the spoils or to strike out on their own. Many of those orphaned gangs have turned to crimes like extortion or highway robbery to extract a living. Their highway victims are usually motorists from far away, driving at night, and the bandits act quickly — a hijacking and robbery is usually over in 10 minutes. Typically, it’s a straightforward affair: The motorists get stripped of their valuables, and the crime goes unreported under threat of reprisal. But things occasionally go very wrong. In 2011, a philosophy professor at a university in Sinaloa was driving alone after dark when his car was hijacked and he was murdered. His body was found on the Benito Juárez just 80 miles from Topolobampo. In 2013, in separate incidents, a sports reporter from Sonora and a hotel manager from Los Angeles were shot execution-style on this same road. The Highway of Death is just a few hours from the coastal resort town of Mazatlán, itself just an afternoon’s drive from Puerto Vallarta and Sayulita. “Sure, there are night patrols on the highway,” says Eduardo Valdez Verde, the news director of the newspaper El Sol de Sinaloa. “But the bandits know the schedule of the patrols. They go away, they come back.” Last May, Verde was assaulted in broad daylight on the Benito Juárez with two of his colleagues. It was half past 8 in the morning, and he was driving at 75 miles an hour when an SUV swerved to a stop in his lane and three men sprang out, pointing AK-47s at his windows. “They almost broke the windows of the car with their rifles,” Verde recalls. “They poked an AK-47 in my ribs. I thought for sure they were going to kill us.” Instead they took all their money and their company car. Verde’s robbery happened a half-mile from where Lucas and Coleman were now driving. Thirty minutes after leaving the ferry at Topolobampo, their Chevy van pulled into a convenience store at Los Mochis. Coleman asked the lone gas attendant on duty that night for directions. “He asked me to direct him as far south as Mazatlán,” says Pedro, the 23-year-old attendant, who asked that his full name not be used. “But we weren’t understanding each other too well. So with gestures I told him which way to go.” Two hours later, at 2:23 a.m., a security camera captured their van passing through a tollbooth at Las Brisas, 50 miles away. The grainy photograph shows the van stopped briefly to pay the fare. The booth is brightly illuminated, and the sky beyond is completely dark. There is still a charcoal trace of burned earth off to the side of the tractor path where someone doused Adam Coleman’s van with gasoline and ignited it. When investigators picked through the debris, they found two gas grills, heat-swollen vegetable and soup cans, jars, dishes, and two sets of human remains. At first, police figured the victims for tiangueros, vendors who hawk their wares from street-market stalls in the city. In Mexico, 95 percent of murders go unsolved, so the crime was unlikely to warrant any special attention. It was largely a coincidence that led the police to look more closely. During the long drive south, Lucas and Cox had been texting each other frequently. He’d tell her about the surf in Baja or include her in a discussion he and Coleman were having. So after receiving the flowers and chocolate, then not hearing from him for 24 hours, Cox had a feeling something had gone horribly wrong. “I knew he was dead,” she says. “But the families were trying to keep positive.” Cox’s mother tried to assuage her fears, telling her that Lucas probably just got caught up surfing. Gómez was receiving the same sort of reassurances about Coleman. “I reached out to one of his friends and told him I was upset, and he tried to calm me down,” she says. “But more days went by, and we had to begin the search.” Seven days after last hearing from Lucas, Cox posted an appeal on Facebook: “It breaks my heart to do this.... We are appealing for any information regarding Dean Lucas and Adam Coleman.” Gómez translated it into Spanish. Pedro, the gas attendant who had given Lucas and Coleman directions, had seen images of the burned van displayed on the front page of a local paper. He recognized it immediately but had no idea who the two gringos were. Then he happened to see Gómez’s Facebook post, which had been shared widely. “This is going to upset you,” he wrote to her shortly afterward. “Please stay calm and try not to panic. The van in this photo looks like your boyfriend’s.” Suddenly the murders morphed from just another local tragedy into an international incident, with headlines around the globe. “Australian Surfers Missing in Notorious Sinaloa, Mexico,” ran a headline on an Aussie news site. “Australian Surfers Feared Murdered in Mexico During Quest for ‘Crazy Waves,’ ” ran another, in the U.K.’s Telegraph. The Sinaloa attorney general took the rare step of holding press conferences to detail progress on the case. Within 48 hours of discovering that the van had been registered to Coleman, he’d announced, police had captured three suspects and had issued arrest warrants for two others. State marshals from an elite investigative unit had set a trap for the bandits, stopping them at 5 a.m. on a dirt road leading from a breach in the fence along the Benito Juárez. They recovered the getaway car, a Jeep Cherokee, and the murder weapon, a.357 Magnum revolver. They’d also extracted signed confessions from all three suspects in police custody. At the wheel of the Cherokee was Julio César González Muñiz, a round-faced 27-year-old with a wispy mustache. The marshals, the arrest report notes, discovered the revolver in his waistband, and a ballistics test quickly matched the gun to a bullet removed from Coleman’s body. In the Cherokee’s passenger seat was the driver’s first cousin, Martín Rogelio Muñiz Ponce. The details of what happened that night come solely from the confessions of the Muñiz cousins and Sergio Simón Benítez González, their supposed lookout. On November 21, shortly after González witnessed Lucas and Coleman passing through the toll booth, the Cherokee pulled out behind them and flashed police strobes on the dashboard. Lucas and Coleman continued to drive for another mile before pulling over. One of the trio’s alleged accomplices that night, José Luis Espinoza Bojórquez — who remains at large and has at least two other murder charges against him — stepped out of the Cherokee wearing the uniform of a highway patrol officer. “They pulled two males out,” reads Julio César’s statement. “One of them was shirtless and wearing shorts and had long dreadlocks, the other was wearing dark pants and a black shirt.” Bojórquez forced “the long-haired one” into the backseat of the Cherokee and the other into the van and started driving to a nearby field, so they’d be out of sight. But as they exited the highway, Coleman tried to escape, forcing the Cherokee’s door open and jumping onto the dirt road. A desperate fistfight erupted. “This guy was getting in some hard shots and beating the hell out of them,” the confession reads. Muñiz pulled out the.357 and “put a bullet in the gringo, getting him in the face.” Coleman was severely wounded, but not fatally. At that point, Bojórquez, “furious from the ass-whipping he had gotten,” took charge. He jumped behind the wheel of the van while the others loaded the wounded Coleman and Lucas into the back. Soon they came to a stop at a tractor path dividing two cornfields. Bojórquez took the gun, then went to the hinged side doors of the van and fired four or five shots straight inside. The assailants doused the van in gasoline and Bojórquez threw a lit match inside. It was a tidy description of events. But nearly as soon as the arrests were announced, the case against the men began to unravel. The Muñiz cousins’ parents filed a complaint with the Sinaloa State Commission on Human Rights, alleging that authorities had coerced the confessions after beatings and death threats. “They were pouring water down my nose and mouth,” Martín says now, in a meeting room at Sinaloa’s state penitentiary, pantomiming the hand of a police officer pulling his shirt over his head to waterboard him. Martín says that plainclothes police came first for him, to his sister’s house in Culiacán, where he was staying. “I was asleep. They were hurting my sister, hurting me, wanting me to say where Julio lived,” he says. “That stuff was planted on us — uniforms, guns, all of it. We weren’t involved.” The cousins’ defense attorney, Francisco Fierro Verdugo, says the coercion is not surprising. The attorney general’s office was receiving massive amounts of bad publicity for the murders. “It is safe to presume there was a lot of national and international pressure to find the persons who committed these homicides,” says Verdugo. “The arrests relieved that pressure.” Javier Valdez Cárdenas, the editor of the Sinaloan newspaper Ríodoce, is familiar with the government’s description of the events and the upcoming trial. Valdez has been a journalist in Sinaloa for two decades, and he is an entrenched skeptic. “The story sounds really good,” he says of the Coleman and Lucas case. “That’s why you have to distrust every word.” It may never be known who killed Lucas and Coleman. Mexico has a way of absorbing things these days — lives, ideals, justice. What’s more probable is that Bojórquez, the shooter in the police version, played some role in the deaths. But the rampant suspicion among close observers of the case is that he is connected to a cartel and will never be arrested. And if the Muñiz cousins are clean, where did the murder weapon come from? Cox doesn’t entirely believe the police version of events, but she has no expectations that she’ll come closer to the truth by pressing the authorities. “This has been a problem here for so long,” she says. “I don’t see how it’s ever going to end.” In January, Cox and Lucas were supposed to be in the U.K., shopping for a camper van they planned to drive across the south of Europe. Instead, she was on her own, leaning on a stool at an empty bar on the roof deck of a hostel in Sayulita. It was near here, to the lighthouse in the small village of Punta de Mita, that Lucas took Cox for her 30th birthday, the previous year. The lighthouse overlooks a long, gentle left break, where on a good day a surfer can ride for half a mile. She’s decided to donate part of her and Lucas’ European travel fund to Peace, a community center just up the hill from the harbor in Punta de Mita. She also started a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for Peace and Share the Stoke, the latter a nonprofit that works with impoverished kids around the world. Before Lucas left, he had a discussion with Cox about what he wanted if he died before her. It was a random conversation, prompted by no serious concern. Sprinkle me over good waves, he said. Lucas’ parents had his remains cremated in January and entrusted Cox with fulfilling his wish. In the months and years to come, Cox plans to visit Jeffreys Bay in South Africa, the Gold Coast of Australia, Bali, Hawaii, Mexico, India, Iceland, California, Barbados, and Morocco. “I have to get him into all five oceans and pick some of the best waves in the world,” she says. These days, nothing lifts her spirits quite like when she faces the ocean.NASA via Reuters The 2015 Arctic sea ice summertime minimum was 699,000 square miles below the 1981-2010 average, shown here as a gold line in this visual representation of a NASA analysis of satellite data released September 14, 2015. In 2016 and 2017, the melt has continued. A former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist criticised his colleague’s data archiving methods. This is a pretty normal scientific argument, the kind that happens in fields from climate science to psychology to linguistics. A Daily Mail reporter wrote an article suggesting that the criticism was in fact a bombshell showing the NOAA had “duped” world leaders. The article had some serious factual errors. A climate science doubting congressman cited it as evidence of a conspiracy to hide data at the NOAA. Here’s something that happens a lot in science: Two researchers disagree about the best way to go about studying something. They fight about it. Maybe at first it’s a small personal squabble, but later it plays out in essays and papers and other documents that the whole world can look at. The stakes in this kind of fight are serious. A career’s worth of research might be on the line, or the accepted method for caring for patients, or even the future of a whole field of study. So things can get pretty heated; this past September one famous psychologist accused her peers of “methodological terrorism” in the midst of one such debate. But the audience for this scientific infighting is usually pretty small, made up of fellow researchers, students, and the occasional nosey reporter. Climate scientists don’t have that luxury. Every step they take happens under the scrutiny of a well-funded peanut gallery of professional science deniers, anti-science politicians, and agenda-driven writers eager to spin any misstep into evidence of a vast conspiracy. This happened back in 2009, when several climate scientists found their names dragged through the mud in Congress based on some stolen emails, despite no evidence of wrongdoing. And it’s happening again right now, after Daily Mail crime writer David Rose published an article with the alarming headline “Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data.” Rose interviewed John Bates, a retired NOAA scientist, who has a very specific criticism about the methodology used by fellow NOAA researcher Thomas Karl in a 2015 paper. That paper looked into a specific question in climate science: Why, according to some analyses, did the global rise in temperatures seem to pause or slow down during the first decade of the 21st Century? The answer, Karl suggests, is that the climate didn’t stop warming at all. Rather, measurement tools changed, creating the illusion of a pause. His conclusion isn’t exactly controversial: Other scientists using other methods have arrived at essentially the same result. But Bates felt that Karl’s paper wasn’t rigorous enough, and wrote a blog post about it on February 4. His criticism is fairly narrow: That Karl didn’t hew closely to the data-archiving standards Bates had worked to implement during his time at the agency. Other scientists, like NASA researcher Gavin Schmidt, have since criticised Bates’s analysis. And if you want to read more about that debate, I suggest this article by Warren Cornwall and Paul Voosen. Snopes also does a good job of laying out the underlying facts of the statistical argument. The key thing to understand though is that this is a fairly typical argument between scientists, the kind you can find in just about any field that relies on statistical analysis and data interpretation. Bates suggested that Karl put his “thumb on the scale” in an attempt to discredit the warming pause. And he told Rose in an interview that Karl had exchanged “good” data for “bad” data. Rose then turned that argument — which was about a single paper — into what he implied was essentially a conspiracy meant to deceive the public. He called Bates a “whistleblower” and his critique “devastating” to climate science writ large — to the point of arguing that world leaders had been “duped.” “[Bates’s] disclosures are likely to stiffen President Trump’s determination to enact his pledges to reverse his predecessor’s ‘green’ policies,” he added, “and to withdraw from the Paris deal.” The Mail article came up at a House Science Committee hearing where Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, a climate science sceptic, used it to suggest that NOAA is hiding the truth about climate change. Schmidt later showed that a graph included in the story — intended to be used as evidence of NOAA misconduct — had in fact used distorted data. Bates himself later told E&E News that “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was.” In other words: The issue was never the truth of the global warming pause, which most other scientists agree likely didn’t happen. Rather, it was a straightforward debate about data archiving and management. Hilarious screw up by @DavidRoseUK and #FailOnSunday 1st picture is ‘evidence’ of misconduct, 2nd shows diff when baselines are correct. pic.twitter.com/R5VsqqlNHr — Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) February 5, 2017 NOW WATCH: This startling animation shows how much Arctic sea ice has thinned in just 26 years Business Insider Emails & Alerts Site highlights each day to your inbox. Email Address Join Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.Last month, the United Kingdom parliament debated an arcane topic that hasn’t been raised in the legislative chamber in 170 years: money creation. The last time the subject was discussed in the House of Commons was when the Bank Charter Act of 1844 was passed. That historic act put an end to British commercial banks’ ability to issue banknotes, transferring those powers exclusively to the Bank of England. The member of parliament who revived the topic in the House was Steve Baker, who was recently elected to a seat on the Treasury Select Committee. The committee is responsible for scrutinising the Treasury, the Bank of England, the tax authority and the financial regulator. Bitcoin believers who heard the debate would have been pleased to discover that Baker is also a bitcoin user. During the debate, the MP called on the government to move away from creating new regulations specifically for alternative currencies, including bitcoin. Instead, he said, the state should do everything possible to regulate bitcoin under ordinary commercial law. Speaking to CoinDesk exclusively at the House of Commons, Baker explained his view, conceding that it was a strong position for a politician to adopt. He said: “Bitcoin should be regulated by the ordinary commercial business laws with no additional regulation. It is a big ask. It is saying to people, you can buy bitcoin, but don’t come running to us if the exchange goes down or you lost your wallet [private key].” Technology and finance background Baker’s CV puts him in good stead to grapple with bitcoin’s place in the regulatory world. After starting his career as an aerospace engineer in the Royal Air Force, he left in 2000 to complete a master’s degree in computation at Oxford University. After a series of software engineering and consulting jobs, Baker became chief architect of global financing and asset servicing platforms at Lehman Brothers in 2006, a role that gave him a ringside view of the coming financial crisis. Baker is a member of the Conservative Party, which is in power as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He was elected MP for Wycombe in 2010 and was elected to the Treasury Select Committee in May. The committee is one of 19 Select Committees created to independently scrutinise the policy, administration and expenditure of government departments. The less intervention the better For Baker, the less government intervention in the digital currency world, the better. Bureaucratic attempts to invent a new regulatory framework for bitcoin would only stifle entrepreneurialism and innovation, he said, adding: “The government should get out of the way of innovation – as long as it is lawful.” In Baker’s view, the UK government has already been largely supportive of bitcoin. He pointed to the Bank of England’s recent research into cryptocurrencies and the Treasury’s public call for information about digital currencies as evidence of this. “It is a remarkable fact that the UK Treasury is interested in cryptocurrencies at all,” he said. When asked if UK banks should adopt a more open posture towards dealing with bitcoin businesses, however, Baker declined to take a stronger stand. “The actual risk [for banks] is regulatory, not commercial … I would not presume to tell the banks how to cope with regulatory risk. I would just implore the government to create conditions that minimise that risk,” he said. ‘Red pill, blue pill’ moment Perhaps Baker’s stance on bitcoin regulation should come as no surprise. He is a proponent of the Austrian school of economics, a theory developed in 1871 by University of Vienna professor Carl Menger that emphasises the individual’s role in determining a product’s relative value. Baker describes the moment 14 years ago when he read the work of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, the two leading Austrian school thinkers of the 20th century, as the “red pill, blue pill moment”. In line with the Austrian school’s elevation of individualism, Baker believes consumers should be allowed to use digital currencies without being encumbered by a new set of laws. He said: “I’m a great believer in personal responsibility. I would say cryptocurrencies right now are accessible to a tiny portion of the population who are both technically competent and sufficiently willing to take risks and so forth.” What about the inevitable argument that bitcoin needs to be regulated because it is used for sale of illicit goods on dark markets like Silk Road? Baker once again invoked the individualist argument: “Money can always be used for different purposes … Money is a tool like a screwdriver or a hammer, just as cash can be used for prostitution or drugs.” Buying bitcoin is still cumbersome Baker cited his experience buying bitcoin from the Kraken exchange as an example of how bitcoin’s appeal is limited to a narrow set of the public. He said he had to open a currency trading account with his bank, buy euros to place in the account and then wire the funds to the exchange to purchase bitcoin. “My mum and dad are not going to do that,” he said. Pulling out his mobile phone to show CoinDesk his Blockchain wallet app, Baker observed that his initial €500 investment in bitcoin had halved in value to about €250. “I lost some money on it and I feel a bit stupid,” he said, adding that he made sure to say in Parliament that he used some of his bitcoins to buy a camera accessory, not to shop on the dark web. Bad money, good payment system How, though, does Baker’s argument against special regulations for bitcoin square with his own experience, as a financially and technologically savvy individual, losing money on the volatile cryptocurrency? Baker says the two experiences are consistent with his view of individual responsibility because he doesn’t think bitcoin is yet suitable for the man on the street. Bitcoin has not become a stable store of value so far, Baker said, making it a “bad money” that still suffers from speculative bubbles and extreme volatility. But bitcoin is an “excellent” payment system, he added, although he believed that the digital currency is due for a drop into the “trough of despondency” before it rises in popularity. Nevertheless, Baker is optimistic that bitcoin, or another cryptocurrency, will take hold of payments technologies in the near future. He describes a world, 10 years from now, where people use cryptocurrencies “without a second thought”, transacting digitally to buy coffee or groceries. Digital currencies were also lauded by a shadow cabinet minister from the opposition Labour Party, Chi Onwurah, two weeks ago. In an interview with CoinDesk, she said bitcoin could shift power away from big banks and return it to consumers. The UK government has been largely positive towards bitcoin. The most visible move was Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne hailing digital currencies as a way to turn Britain into a “global centre of financial innovation” this summer. Portrait image via Steve Baker/FlickrThe Vikings will hit the practice field at Winter Park at 1:25 this afternoon. But don’t expect either punter Chris Kluwe or cornerback Antoine Winfield to be participants. Kluwe is still nursing a hamstring injury suffered Sunday in Kansas City. He will not punt this afternoon but plans to return to practice Friday. Both Kluwe and special teams coordinator Mike Priefer said Kluwe should be fully healthy to punt in game action by Sunday. "We're taking the amputation option off the table,” Kluwe joked. “We're still considering it, though.” If Kluwe regresses at all and feels he’ll be unable to go, the Vikings would likely have to sign a punter some time Friday. Former Lions punter Nick Harris might be the insurance policy. Back-up quarterback Christian Ponder, meanwhile, could see his first NFL action as a holder in place of Kluwe. As for Winfield, defensive coordinator Fred Pagac didn’t have much to say about the neck injury that kept the veteran cornerback out of practice Wednesday. "Antoine, we don't know what's going to be happening with him," Pagac said. "We'll know later in the week." There’s a chance that the Vikings will take the cautious route with Winfield on Sunday. And if he were not to play against Arizona, Chris Cook would get the start in his place with Asher Allen seeing more work as well.We'd venture to guess that in recent years, there have probably been almost as many rumors swirling about a Toyota Supra successor than there have been for a mid-engine Corvette. (Case in point: the speculative renderings we came across a few years ago, pictured above.) While we don't expect the Corvette's recipe to change drastically any time soon, it looks like a Supra – or more appropriately a Supra-like car – could be closer than we think.First, there was an announcement of a BMW-Toyota joint venture. Said venture would, among other things, "Set up a feasibility study to define a joint platform concept for a mid-size sports vehicle."Upping chances even further, a new Automotive News report claims that incoming Toyota chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada wants a vehicle "comparable" to the Supra. Clearly there are a lot of parties that want a new Supra to happen – to say nothing of enthusiasts – but Uchiyamada might be just the guy to get it done. None of this is proof positive of an impending Supra, to be sure, but winds do seem favorable.What’s New:• Home now fully supports Steam’s Big Picture Mode – play the entire game with your Xbox 360 controller from the terrifying comfort of your own couch, or continue to use a keyboard if you prefer.• The most requested feature has been added to the game! Home now auto-saves your progress as you play, allowing for shorter play sessions if required. Continue where you left off, or start over from the beginning. The game still starts you from the beginning once you complete it, though—keeping the integrity of the experience while adding convenience for players who need it.• Some things may not always be what they seem. As promised in previous missives, players may start to see their Home experience change ever so slightly the next time they play. Was that room there before? I thought that was locked... This is just the beginning for long-term fans of the game.• Various other graphical tweaks and corrections to text and menus.A probationary Customs and Excise Department officer who posted statements critical of the Department’s internal practices on social media was terminated from employment on Tuesday. The officer, surnamed Lam, joined an “anti-smuggling” protest in Shatin in February. In March, he was identified by netizens opposed to the protest, some of whom said they would file official complaints against him. In the same month, Lam posted on Facebook that “at the department I am working in, there is an unwritten rule” that disabled, young and elderly people, mothers carrying babies and pregnant women “will not be bothered.” He questioned whether the rule could be abused by parallel traders using such identities as cover. According to Apple Daily, Lam had once found a large amount of illicit cigarettes concealed under a baby trolley but his colleagues told him “not to create a fuss.” Lam was asked to write a report about his participation in the protests and was transferred from his border control post at Shenzhen Bay Port to Man Kam To border control. Lam also said that later in March, he was questioned by disciplinary forces. The Customs Department asked him about everything he had published on social media, including one post on his participation in last year’s pro-democracy Occupy protests and another in which he urged his friends to take part in the anti-smuggling protests. In a letter from Customs in October, Lam was informed that he was suspended. The letter noted that his social media post may “reflect a problem in your character and discretion.” It also stated that his “integrity is being questioned.” Lam’s employment was subsequently terminated on Tuesday, December 15. Since he was still on probation, no reason was given for his termination. Lam is currently considering lodging a judicial review. Customs Officers Union chairman Chan Ming told Apple Daily that he had received a request from Lam for help and that they lodged a claim on his behalf—however, this was rejected. When asked whether the union will continue to assist Lam, Chan replied that “he’s already been fired.” Chan added that it was the first time someone in the Department had been fired for comments posted online. In a Facebook post published on Tuesday, Lam said: “I can let go of my job, but I can never let go of justice! Throughout history, change came from revolution, and revolution came from acts of resistance! Hong Kong must uphold its bottom line and freedom of speech online must not be controlled! This is Hong Kong, not China!” Lam’s termination letter was uploaded onto a Hong Kong Police Force fan page, with a caption praising the government’s actions and stating that Lam had got what he deserved. The Customs and Excise Department says that it will not comment on individual cases.Why use cordless vacuum cleaners? Cordless vacuums differ only from traditional vacuums in that they are powered by batteries rather than by connection to an electrical outlet. However, this can make a huge difference in the time it takes to clean your home since it removes the need to unwind a cord, plug in and unplug the vacuum every time you change rooms, and rewind the cord when you’re finished. Without a cord to navigate around while vacuuming, you can maneuver the vacuum more easily and not worry about tripping over the cord. Plus, without a cord, it is possible to vacuum spots in your home that are far away from an outlet or even to bring your vacuum outside to use on your patio or car interior. Vacuum type There are different types of vacuum cleaners in terms of their shape and design. Let’s see how they differ and what pros and cons there are. Upright When most people think of a typical vacuum cleaner, they think of what is known as an upright vacuum. These vacuums have the wand and suction unit integrated into a single standing vacuum. Upright vacuums offer a relatively large amount of suction power that is perfect for picking up hair and crumbs from rugs as well as hard flooring since they typically have a large roller head with brushes and many offer a removable suction hose. Although upright vacuums can be bulky, they tend to be the vacuum type of choice because of their versatility and suction power. Stick Stick vacuums are similar to upright vacuums but are designed with compactness and light weight in mind. These vacuums can be a great choice for people with very small homes, but stick vacuums are severely limited by suction power even on hardwood flooring. Canister Canister vacuums, on the other hand, separate the suction unit from the vacuum wand. Canister vacuums are typically smaller than upright vacuums and the wand is able to penetrate into harder-to-reach places, so they can be preferable to upright vacuums for people with small homes and little storage space. However, they lack the suction power needed to pick up litter from rug floors. Canister vacuums also require you
a bachelor's in law in absentia from the University of South Africa. Calls for release His freedom followed years of an international outcry led by Winnie Mandela, a social worker whom he married in 1958, three months after divorcing his first wife. Mandela was banned from reading newspapers, but his wife provided a link to the outside world. She told him of the growing calls for his release and updated him on the fight against apartheid. World pressure mounted to free Mandela with the imposition of political, economic and sporting sanctions, and the white minority government became more isolated. In 1988 at age 70, Mandela was hospitalized with tuberculosis, a disease whose effects plagued him until the day he died. He recovered and was sent to a minimum security prison farm, where he was given his own quarters and could receive additional visitors. Among them, in an unprecedented meeting, was South Africa's president, P.W. Botha. Change was in the air. When Botha's successor, de Klerk, took over, he pledged to negotiate an end to apartheid. Free at last On February 11, 1990, Mandela walked out of prison to thunderous applause, his clenched right fist raised above his head. Still as upright and proud, he would say, as the day he walked into prison nearly three decades earlier. He reassured ANC supporters that his release was not part of a government deal and informed whites that he intended to work toward reconciliation. Four years after his release, in South Africa's first multiracial elections, he became the nation's first black president. "The day he was inducted as president, we stood on the terraces of the Union Building," de Klerk remembered years later. "He took my hand and lifted it up. He put his arm around me, and we showed a unity that resounded through South Africa and the world." Broken marriage, then love His union to Winnie Mandela, however, did not have such a happy ending. They officially divorced in 1996. For the two, it was a fiery love story, derailed by his ambition to end apartheid. During his time in prison, Mandela wrote his wife long letters, expressing his guilt at putting political activism before family. Before the separation, Winnie Mandela was implicated in violence, including a conviction for being an accessory to assault in the death of a teenage township activist. Mandela found love again two years after the divorce. On his 80th birthday, he married Graca Machel, the widow of former Mozambique president, Samora Machel. Only three of Mandela's children are still alive. He had 18 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. Symbolic rugby South Africa's fight for reconciliation was epitomized at the 1995 rugby World Cup Fina l in Johannesburg, when it played heavily favored New Zealand. As the dominant sport of white Afrikaners, rugby was reviled by blacks in South Africa. They often cheered for rivals playing their national team. Mandela's deft use of the national team to heal South Africa was captured in director Clint Eastwood's 2009 feature film "Invictus," starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the white South African captain of the rugby team. Before the real-life game, Mandela walked onto the pitch, wearing a green-and-gold South African jersey bearing Pienaar's number on the back. "I will never forget the goosebumps that stood on my arms when he walked out onto the pitch before the game started," said Rory Steyn, his bodyguard for most of his presidency. "That crowd, which was almost exclusively white... started to chant his name. That one act of putting on a No. 6 jersey did more than any other statement in bringing white South Africans and Afrikaners on side with new South Africa." A promise honored In 1999, Mandela did not seek a second term as president, keeping his promise to serve only one term. Thabo Mbeki succeeded him in June of the same year. After leaving the presidency, he retired from active politics, but remained in the public eye, championing causes such as human rights, world peace and the fight against AIDS. It was a decision born of tragedy: His only surviving son, Makgatho Mandela, died of AIDS at age 55 in 2005. Another son, Madiba Thembekile, was killed in a car crash in 1969. Mandela's 90th birthday party in London's Hyde Park was dedicated to HIV awareness and prevention, and was titled 46664, his prison number on Robben Island. A resounding voice Mandela continued to be a voice for developing nations. He criticized U.S. President George W. Bush for launching the 2003 war against Iraq, and accused the United States of "wanting to plunge the world into a Holocaust." And as he was acclaimed as the force behind ending apartheid, he made it clear he was only one of many who helped transform South Africa into a democracy. In 2004, a few weeks before he turned 86, he announced his retirement from public life to spend more time with his loved ones. "Don't call me, I'll call you," he said as he stepped away from his hectic schedule. 'Like a boy of 15' But there was a big treat in store for the avid sportsman. When South Africa was awarded the 2010 football World Cup, Mandela said he felt "like a boy of 15." In July that year, Mandela beamed and waved at fans during the final of the tournament in Johannesburg's Soccer City. It was his last public appearance. "I would like to be remembered not as anyone unique or special, but as part of a great team in this country that has struggled for many years, for decades and even centuries," he said. "The greatest glory of living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall." With him gone, South Africans are left to embody his promise and idealism.Newborn giant panda triplets, which were born to giant panda Juxiao, rest inside an incubator at the Chimelong Safari Park in Guangzhou, Guangdong province on Saturday. (Reuters/China Daily) They’re calling it a “miracle.” A Chinese zoo says that giant panda triplets were born in July and are the first litter known to survive for more than 15 days. The trio were born to giant panda Juxiao and her mate, Linlin, in Guangzhou’s Chimelong Safari Park. According to reports, the pandas were naturally conceived, which could be the other miracle of this story. Giant pandas are notorious for being some of nature’s most finicky breeders. Females ovulate once a year in the spring and can only conceive in a two- to three-day window during ovulation. Previous panda triplets have been born in 1999 and 2013, but only one cub survived in both cases. Another set of triplets was born in 1967, though none survived. “It was a miracle for us, and [the births] exceeded our expectations,” the safari park’s general manager Dong Guixin, told AFP. “It’s been 15 days. They have lived longer than any other triplets so far.” Juxiao and Linlin’s courtship blossomed with some help, of course. Zookeepers “made them neighbors” so that they could smell each other, a prerequisite for taking the next step toward conception. Juxiao also had to do special panda exercises to get her strength up enough to carry cubs. No word on what exactly those exercises were. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/world/asia_pacific/giant-panda-gives-birth-to-triplets-in-china-zoo/2014/08/12/33c528d1-46db-4052-860b-a991743dce9b_video.html The tiny creatures were smaller than the size of a human hand when they were born — 1/900th the size of their mother. Rosy pink, covered in peach fuzz and blind, they have a long road ahead: They can only be considered “surviving” if they’ve lived to see six months, a nature reserve official told AFP. According to Guixin, panda cubs have extremely high mortality rates. But after being watched round-the-clock in an incubator by zooeepers, they have been returned to the care of their mother. The World Wildlife Federation estimates that there are 1,600 wild pandas remaining. Their habitat, the wild mountainous ranges in south central China, have been threatened by human encroachment and habitat destruction. Whether these babies are the “new wonder of the world” as the Chimelong Safari Park claims, we don’t know. But they’re cute. Check it out:Germany is reeling after a truck plowed into a Christmas market in western Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring dozens more in a suspected terrorist attack. The incident took place at 8:00pm on the pedestrianized Breitscheidplatz, home to one of Berlin’s largest Christmas markets. It is beside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and also close to the city’s key shopping mile, Kurfuerstendamm. LIVE UPDATES: Truck plows into Berlin Christmas market At least 12 people have died and 48 others were injured in the Christmas market truck incident, Berlin's police said. Two people were inside the lorry when it smashed into the market, a police spokesperson told Berlin Morgenpost. They confirmed that they are treating the incident as a suspected terrorist attack. One of the people was captured on the at the scene, but later died. Another suspect was discovered nearby and taken to a police station, an official said. Police believe that the surviving suspect was the driver of the lorry. Police later revealed that the lorry, which was loaded with steel beams, was Polish-owned. The owner, Ariel Zurawski, told AFP the driver was his cousin and that he had not heard from him since lunchtime on Monday. "We have not had contact with him since this afternoon. I do not know what happened to him. He's my cousin, I've known him since childhood. I vouch for him, " Zurawski said. Lorry just ploughed through Christmas market in #berlin. There is no road nearby. People crushed. I am safe. I am safe pic.twitter.com/63iWMmdSKr — Emma Rushton (@ERushton) December 19, 2016 According to a spokesperson from Berlin Fire Department, “around 50” were injured. The Police later tweeted that approximately 45 people had been seriously injured and taken to hospitals. Truck drives into a crowded Christmas Market in #Germany's #Berlin. Many people injured. Many unconscious on the ground. Reports of a shot. — Polla Garmiany (@PollaGarmiany) December 19, 2016 Police evacuated the market and sealed the area off immediately after the suspected attack. A nearby Underground station, Zoologischer Garten, was closed at both the entrance and exit. Law enforcement called on people in Berlin not to leave their homes and to refrain from speculating about the incident. “Please help us. Stay at home & spread no rumors,” a message on a police Twitter account said. They also asked people to avoid posting videos from the scene online in order to protect the privacy of the victims and their families. Facebook set up a 'Safety Check' page for people in Berlin to let others know they are safe. Facebook turned on #SafetyCheck. Use it to find out whether your loved ones are safe.#breitscheidplatzhttps://t.co/cbeIICZksQ — PolizeiBerlinEinsatz (@PolizeiBerlin_E) December 19, 2016 The suspected terrorist attack sparked an outpouring of condolences and condemnation both from within Germany and from around the world. German Justice Minister Heiko Maas tweeted his sympathies to the victims and their families. “Shocking news from the #Breitscheidplatz. We mourn with the families. The Attorney General is taking over the case,” Maas said. While the White House condemned what it said "appears to have been a terrorist attack," National Security Council spokesperson Ned Price said, “we send our thoughts and prayers to the families and loved ones of those killed, just as we wish a speedy recovery to all of those wounded. We also extend our heartfelt condolences to the people and Government of Germany." One eyewitness told Ruptly that the truck missed him and his girlfriend by “a few metres.” “We were inside the market, a truck came in it did not appear to be stopping, it missed by a few meters – three, five meters – and then almost immediately the truck had gone past us,” he said. “We tried to see who was injured … then I tried to help some people lift the side of one of the stalls so that some other people could pull [victims] from underneath.” READ MORE: ‘Terror has no borders’: Eyewitnesses of Berlin market carnage relay horrifying details to RT The incident bears a striking resemblance to the attack in neighboring France this summer. On July 14, a truck drove into crowds of people celebrating Bastille Day in the coastal city of Nice, killing 86 people. Around 400 were injured in the attack, which French officials labelled a terrorist act. The driver of the lorry was later killed in a shootout with police.An Austrian printed electronics company called Prelonic says it’s managed to print a display directly onto cardboard. Don’t expect Daily Prophet-style moving images in newspapers just yet, though – this was a very simple electrochromic (EC) display rather than a matrix display, meaning it can only show fixed signs and basic letters and numbers. However, the implications are intriguing. Advertisement In the burgeoning field of printed electronics, the substrate is key – what surface are you printing onto? Generally, flexible polymers do the job, but if the goal is to stick a screen onto a newspaper or magazine page, or onto simple packaging, that means adding an extra layer. Paper, with its rough, porous surface, presents its own problems. However, Prelonic said late last week that it had printed an EC display onto it, taking us closer to the inclusion of very low-cost printed displays on packaging. As CEO Friedrich Eibensteiner said: “Printed electronics has to move closer to the production reality. Printers, publishers and packaging producers don’t want clean rooms, new substrates and new processes. They like to use their common technologies to utilize printed electronics. We have to offer such developments, like a paper display.” Eibensteiner told me on Monday that the process would work with normal paper or cardboard that hasn’t had any special treatment – though if the cardboard has a very rough surface, then there should be an initial normal graphical printing layer in order to smooth it. “Interactive packaging and magazines and to provide information is a fully new form [that] could be realized with this development,” he wrote by email. “For me, one of the most promising things in printed electronics is the use in low-cost mass applications to support safety, information and entertainment, and human-machine-interfaces like displays are necessary for that.” According to Eibensteiner, it should be possible to also print batteries onto paper and cardboard, but developments in that arena are “not as mature as for displays.” It ain’t e-ink as we’ve thought of it in the past. But if it’s cheap and easy enough to use – Prelonic employs standard screen-printing technology, pardon the pun – then the technique is a lot likelier to see widespread deployment in the shorter term. This article was updated at the end of Monday to include Eibensteiner’s comment regarding batteries.Through a Glass, Darkly: Reflections on EFT-1 and Shadows of Apollo (Part 1) Yesterday, a machine designed to carry humans beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time in more than four decades came screaming back through the atmosphere at more than 20,000 mph (32,000 km/h) and temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees Celsius (4,000 degrees Fahrenheit), headed for a smooth, parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. NASA’s Orion spacecraft—flying its long-awaited Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1, atop a Delta IV Heavy booster—was delivered to a peak apogee of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), more than 15 times higher than the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS). This made it the farthest human-rated spacecraft since the end of the Apollo era. Almost half a century since NASA first sent astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, Orion’s myriad systems were evaluated during a perilous passage through the harsh radiation environment of the Lower Van Allen Belt, and its ability to survive re-entry velocities close to what it would experience during a return from lunar distance was tested in the most rigorous manner possible. Yet the fanfare associated with the mission—and the undeniably remarkable success of EFT-1—does not detract from the reality that NASA has a long way to go before it can hope to replicate the kind of deep-space piloted missions that it staged over a four-year period between Apollo 8 in December 1968 and Apollo 17 in December 1972. During that bygone era, no fewer than nine teams of astronauts returned from the Moon at velocities as high as 25,000 mph (40,230 km/h), and their hardy Apollo command modules, so similar in physical appearance to the conical Crew Module of today’s Orion, endured peak re-entry temperatures of 2,760 degrees Celsius (5,000 degrees Fahrenheit). In some respects, EFT-1’s accomplishment is reminiscent of the unmanned Apollo 4 mission on 9 November 1967, which rode the maiden voyage of the mighty Saturn V. Yet in other ways, Apollo 4 accomplished far more on its 8.5-hour flight than did Orion on its own mission, 47 years later. The spacecraft was delivered into a “parking orbit” of 115 miles (185 km), after which it executed two orbits of Earth, before the Saturn’s S-IVB third stage ignited for a second time to increase its apogee to 10,700 miles (17,220 km). Next, the Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine aboard Apollo 4’s service module was fired to send the spacecraft to a distance of 11,240 miles (18,090 km), whereupon it endured a 4.5-hour “soak” in the little-known radiation and temperature environment of deep space, between the inner and outer Van Allen Belts. In doing so, Apollo 4 dipped its toe into the kind of conditions that astronauts would soon experience as they journeyed across the 240,000-mile (370,000 km) gulf to reach the Moon. Aboard the spacecraft was an automatic film camera, which—in a similar vein to Orion’s EFT-1 mission—successfully acquired imagery of almost the entire Home Planet. For more than two hours, as Apollo 4 neared and passed its point of apogee, the camera recorded 755 color images at altitudes between 8,400 miles (13,510 km) and 11,240 miles (18,090 km). At length, with the nose of the conical command module pointed Earthward, Apollo 4’s SPS engine fired a second time for 281 seconds to bring it home. The service module separated, as planned, and the command module hit the upper atmosphere at a flight path angle of 7.077 degrees and a velocity of 24,920 mph (40,100 km/h) to simulate a return from lunar distance. Eight and a half hours after launch, the scorched and blackened command module descended to a splashdown in the north Pacific Ocean, just to the northwest of Midway Island. “The thermal conditions would equal the worst case possible during a return from the Moon,” wrote Chris Kraft in his autobiography, Flight. “It could hardly have been better. The command module’s guidance system controlled it through some complex entry maneuvers, its heat shield gave it more than enough protection, its parachutes opened and it splashed down less than ten miles (16 km) from our aiming point.” Seamen aboard the USS Bennington, the prime recovery ship, watched as Apollo 4 neared the ocean, beneath its three perfect parachutes, just as the crew of the USS Anchorage did for Orion, a few short days ago. And like the post-landing operations of EFT-1, the recovery of the spacecraft was accomplished by the combined efforts of an enormous NASA-Navy team, incorporating helicopters, boats, and hundreds of personnel. When one peruses the numbers, it is apparent that Apollo 4 traveled almost half a century ago to a far higher apogee, executed independent maneuvers with its main propulsion system, re-entered the atmosphere at far higher velocity, experienced far higher surface heating, and rode atop a far more powerful booster than Orion did on Friday, 5 December 2014. This, in a sense, is disappointing. On the other hand, Orion—it is hoped—will provide a broader base and a wider range of capabilities in the longer term for piloted deep-space exploration to a variety of celestial destinations. Moreover, in the late 1960s, Apollo was not undertaking its historic voyages in tandem with a permanently occupied space station and a viable Commercial Crew capability. At one stage, NASA planned to launch a crewed Apollo mission to a similar altitude as EFT-1. The original line-up for America’s drive to land a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s envisaged a seven-step process, labeled “A” through “G.” First came unmanned test flights (“A”) of the Apollo command and service modules (CSM), followed by an unmanned shakedown (“B”) of the spider-like lunar module (LM). A piloted “C” flight of the CSM in Earth orbit would then be followed by a manned demonstration of the entire CSM/LM system (“D”) in Earth orbit, after which the missions would become increasingly more complex, with a full dress rehearsal in lunar orbit (“F”) and the long-awaited first landing of humans on the surface of another world (“G”). Each of these crewed flights actually happened: Apollo 7 in October 1968 flew the “C” mission, Apollo 9 in March 1969 undertook the “D” mission, Apollo 10 in May 1969 executed the “F” mission, and Apollo 11 in July 1969 triumphantly planted the Stars and Stripes into lunar soil on the historic “G” mission. Yet one voyage which did not take place was the now largely forgotten “E” mission, originally baselined as a high-apogee test of the CSM/LM combo, which was tasked with flying to a record-setting altitude of more than 4,000 miles (6,400 km). This would soundly surpass the previous record of 850 miles (1,370 km), reached by Gemini XI astronauts Charles “Pete” Conrad and Dick Gordon in September 1966. Initially, veteran astronauts Frank Borman, Tom Stafford, and Mike Collins were named to the “E” mission, originally designated “Apollo 3” and scheduled to launch sometime in the summer of 1967. However, as recounted by Deke Slayton in his autobiography, Deke, the crew plan was adjusted in short order. “It wasn’t absolutely necessary for [Borman] to have two experienced guys with him,” Slayton wrote, “so I moved Tom Stafford off Frank’s crew.” Consequently, another astronaut, Bill Anders, joined the crew as its third member. Their backups were Neil Armstrong—who later became the first man to set foot on the Moon—together with Buzz Aldrin and Fred Haise. In addition to their high apogee, the E crew would become the first humans to ride the behemoth Saturn V, and this caused their mission to become known internally as “Apollo-Saturn 503” (AS-503). In a fashion not dissimilar to the maneuver planned on Moon-bound Apollo missions, it was intended that the Saturn V’s S-IVB third stage would be ignited a second time, though not for a Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) “burn,” but instead for a shorter firing to deliver Apollo 3 into a lopsided orbit, with an apogee that extended one-sixtieth of the distance to the Moon. Although an infinitesimally small leap into the cislunar gulf, it would nevertheless represent the farthest distance that humans had ever traveled from the Home Planet. The mission was expected to last “up to 11 days.” However, the highly elliptical orbit posed its own set of issues. “This little detail created all sorts of planning problems,” Collins explained in his autobiography, Carrying the Fire, “because one could only escape from this lopsided orbit at certain prescribed intervals and if one had troubles and was forced to return to Earth prematurely, it was entirely possible to end up landing in Red China. Following our high-altitude stint, we would give our LM a workout, conducting an elaborate rendezvous sequence.” The tragic loss of the Apollo 1 crew in January 1967 brought the program to its knees, but the year ended with the triumphant maiden flight of the Saturn V and a wave of optimism that the lunar landing could be accomplished before the end of the decade. From April 1968, some NASA managers began talking actively about eliminating the E mission entirely and expediting Borman’s crew from high Earth orbit to a circumnavigation of the Moon. An already record-breaking apogee of 4,000 miles (6,400 km) would be multiplied sixtyfold to 240,000 miles (370,000 km). As circumstances transpired, poor Mike Collins was removed from the crew for medical reasons in July, and Borman, Anders, and Jim Lovell would end up flying Apollo 8 on humanity’s first voyage to lunar orbit in December 1968. Had the story turned out differently, the Apollo “E” mission would have virtually mirrored the flight profile of Orion’s EFT-1, albeit with astronauts aboard. Although the E mission, ultimately, never happened, its deletion from the Apollo manifest allowed the program to land a man on the Moon, and by December 1972 no fewer than 24 astronauts would travel to our closest celestial neighbor—of whom three would do so on two occasions—and would return to Earth at the blistering velocities and searing temperatures that EFT-1 experienced during its meteoric descent last week. Their stories of returning to Earth at speeds and temperatures unheard of for more than four decades, juxtaposed with the story of the return of EFT-1 itself, will form the bones of tomorrow’s history article. Want to keep up-to-date with all things space? Be sure to “Like” AmericaSpace on Facebook and follow us on Twitter: @AmericaSpaceHope Solo, the starting goalkeeper of the U.S. women's national team, has filed a motion to dismiss domestic violence charges against her, according to multiple reports. In the motion, which was filed Wednesday, Solo reportedly is requesting that two misdemeanor counts of fourth-degree domestic violence assault be dropped because the alleged victims in the June incident have not cooperated with a court order to appear for a deposition. Solo is alleged to have hit her half-sister and 17-year-old nephew. In the motion, Solo's attorney, Todd Maybrown, said the nephew attacked Solo with a broomstick, according to a report from The Seattle Times. • WAHL: Drawing 'Group of Death' is good for U.S. women in 2015 World Cup The international soccer star was charged in June with two counts of fourth-degree domestic violence assault for allegedly hitting her half-sister and nephew. She has denied the charge and contends that she “used lawful force” when defending herself against her 17-year-old nephew, who is 6-foot-9 and 280 pounds, Maybrown wrote in the court filing. The man, Maybrown wrote, attacked Solo with “a broom stick handle” and “repeatedly” hit her over the head with it. Maybrown alleges the man used “such great force during these blows that he broke the stick in half.” Solo's trial is set for Jan. 20, 2015. U.S. Soccer has drawn criticism for allowing Solo to keep playing while the legal process unfolds, including from former U.S. women's national team goalkeeper Jillian Loyden, who believes Solo should be benched. Solo, 33, helped lead the USWNT to a championship at the CONCACAF Women’s World Cup qualifying tournament in October. The Cup is being held in Canada next summer.autistic-winter: actualaster: autistic-winter: list of things not invented on tumblr: - nonbinary people - otherkin - self-diagnosis - social justice list of things invented on tumblr: - “anti-sjw’s” Actually, I would argue this is wrong. For as long as social justice has been around there have been people opposed to it who use a variety of tactics including those used by tumblr anti-SJWs. sorry but you have missed the point of this post. anti-sjw’s frequently ridicule nonbinary genders, neopronouns, self-diagnosis, etc., by calling the associated people “special snowflakes,” pretending these are just passing trends, and acting these things have only ever existed on tumblr. So it’s missing the point to point out that you’re doing the exact same thing, then? Because you are. It is a devaluation tactic that predates tumblr. It is not a tactic that was created by anti-SJWs on tumblr.Credit: Gene Ha Credit: Gene Ha For Gene Ha, getting to tell his own stories has been a fantasy of his -- and now, he's doing it... with a fantasy series. On Friday at C2E2, the longtime DC artist Gene Ha announced the project he's been working on the past two years -- Mae. Set to launch using Kickstarter, Mae is a story of a girl named Mae who is reunited with a sister Abbie who ran away years ago and finds that the place she ran to was a fantastical other world called Cimrterén. Ha says "mad science and monsters are everywhere" in Cimrterén, and they're coming to get Abbie -- and whomever stands in their way, including Mae. Ha says that Mae is a project decades in the making, inspired by his early love of Matt Wagner's Mage and kickstarted by the recent crop of creator-owned success stories. Newsarama talked with Ha about this creative endeavor, the real world decisions behind it, and what he hopes to gain -- and it isn't money. Newsarama: Gene, what can you tell us about Mae? Gene Ha: Mae is the story of two sisters from small town Indiana. Eight years ago, the older sister Abbie Fortell disappeared. Mae, the younger sister, finished school, cared for their aging father, and took over the family business. She has no idea what happened to her sister until she gets a late night call from the Sheriff’s office. Abbie is back, with tales of adventure and mad scientists and monsters. Those stories are hard to believe until the monsters start appearing in Indiana… Nrama: So it's about two sisters, Abbie and Mae. In any other story about a fantastical other world, it would be Abbie's name in the title and not Mae, the one who stayed behind until now. Why is it titled what it is? Ha: The viewpoint character is Mae. Just as the first Middle Earth novel is called The Hobbit instead of Gandalf, this is a tale of an ingénue dragged into an adventure, not the guide. Mae will have a much more interesting take on the other world than her sister. Abbie is an action hero, so if she has a problem she just looks for an enemy to attack. Mae has a more nuanced view and more thoughtful solutions. Sometimes that solution will involve kicking an ass but not always. Mae will never stop growing and learning: that’s why Mae is the hero I want to write. Credit: Gene Ha Nrama: What is Abbie's other world like that Mae is drawn into? Ha: We see the monsters from the other world but we don’t see their home world yet. I can give you a broad description. In Cimrterén mad science works and monsters are everywhere, many of them quite pleasant and some of them terrifying. The first Czech explorers arrived in this other world in the 19th century, and Czech-Americans and then other US citizens followed them. For instance, there’s a large African-American population. Whatever your race or gender, economic and political power usually comes from mad science talent. Credit: Gene Ha I’ve created a history and basic principles for the mad science of Cimrterén. This is only for consistency’s sake; I won’t force it into the story just to show off. I want to avoid anything like midi-chlorians and long debates in the galactic senate. Nrama: And how would you describe the creatures coming to get Abbie here in this first installment? Ha: The tall armored leader is Rytí? Kazisvet, which means “Sir World Wrecker” in Czech. He uses chthonic mad science to create earthquakes, a ghastly power. He has a retinue of mechanical zombies and two beasties I’ve nicknamed Big Cat and Batninja. If any readers speak Czech, send me a note if you have name suggestions for those two! Nrama: You have over 50 pages done -- is it intended to be the first part of a comic book series, or OGN series? How do you see the size and length of Mae as a whole? Ha: The 57 page story I have ready to print is just the beginning. I hope to turn this into an ongoing series like Mouse Guard or Hellboy. A successful Kickstarter campaign will let me do that. Credit: Gene Ha Nrama: You're known almost exclusively for doing work at DC, Marvel and Alan Moore's ABC Comics line. What made you decide to jump out into the relative unknown of creator-owned, self-published comics? Ha: I wanted to have a story I own, and to tell it without compromises. I have a stake in Top 10, but I can’t tell tales set in Neopolis unless I get permission from DC. Zander Cannon and I would love to finish off Top 10 Season 2, but when I was under contract with DC they had more profitable uses for my time. It’s an understandable decision on their part, but I want the freedom to tell the story I want, when I want. Also, I wanted to reach new readers. For most of my career U.S. comics sales shrank as our readers aged. That’s finally changed and a younger generation have made us a growing industry. The new readers were born after 1980 and include at least as many girls as boy. It’s time for me to roll out the welcome mat to our saviors and offer them the best book I can make. It was a big risk living off my savings to complete Mae and launching it as a Kickstarter, but I have faith that readers, young and old, are ready for this book. It’s not the only thing I want to do. I still hope I get the chance to finish Top 10 with Zander and Back Roads, my project with Bill Willingham. Mae definitely comes first. Credit: Gene Ha Nrama: How long has the story for Mae been in your head? Ha: Mae has been around in some form since 1998, from inspiration I took from Kyle Baker’s Why I Hate Saturn and Hester & Worley’s The Picture Taker. At first it was going to be a space opera, and Abbie wore a space suit and ray gun. The story didn’t stand out from all of my other ideas yet. Around 2010 I drew Abbie in a Napoleonic jacket and a liberty cap, and it couldn’t be about space ships any longer. I had to build a world where that outfit made sense. Why were people still wearing 19th century clothing? Once I built that history the rest of the characters and plot came easily. Nrama: Ultimately, what are your goals with Mae? Ha: I want to tell the best story I can, for as long as I can. The art is always going to be beautiful and I’ll tell the smartest story I’m able to tell. If you’re going to pay for entertainment, I need to provide more than just a quick read. I want you to get the cheap pulpy thrills the first time through, and to provide thoughtful depth every time you read it again. That’s even if you first read it at age 13 and read it again 8 years later. I have big plans for the story. There’s an ever escalating set of complications and enemies. The heart of the story, however, will always remain the friendship between Abbie and Mae. Credit: Gene Ha Nrama: And what are your goals for yourself nowadays, as an artist and an author? Ha: My professional goal has remained the same throughout my career: give readers the same thrills and inspiration that Matt Wagner’s Mage gave me in high school. Mae is my best shot at that goal. Huh, I never noticed before how close Mae sounds to Mage! It’s funny, but the older I get the more I want to tell comics stories. I stay fit so I can live a longer life and draw more pages. I crave more time at the drawing table as the years go by. When I get to tell my own stories my way I absolutely love this job. Nrama: Is that hand lettering and hand-drawn balloons I see in the preview? What's it like doing lettering, coloring, writing -- virtually the entire package here? Ha: The hand lettering is by Zander. I wanted a style that was obviously hand drawn, even a little rough. I can show you my roughs with computer lettering, and the finishes with Zander’s letters. It adds so much energy. Other than the letters and a color assist from Rose McClain, it is all me. Coloring is the most labor intensive stage for me, even with help. After Rose starts a page, it takes me a full day of coloring to achieve the look I want. It’s not something I can explain to another colorist without digitally painting it myself. I hope to speed up the process and delegate more, but for this first story I had to do it myself. This is also my first comics writing longer than 12 pages. Tim Seeley was especially helpful. I wrote the first “script” in the form of a marker rough with dialog, and Tim went through and pointed out what worked and what didn’t. I ended up adding two 2-page scenes based on his comments. He was really encouraging. Tim told me the only way to learn writing is to just start doing it. Start writing now and don’t let your inexperience and fear stop you, you’ll learn quickly if you apply yourself
dynamic instrumentation and analysis of binary firmware, which was released in June 2017. This talk does not only introduce avatar², but also focuses on the motivation and challenges for such a tool. Dynamic binary instrumentation and analysis are valuable assets for security analysis and testing, and while a variety of tools exist for desktop software, the tooling landscape for analysing low-level binary firmware directly interacting with hardware is relatively empty. This talk will first outline the key problems for developing dynamic firmware analysis tools and pinpoint different approaches to overcome those problems. The core of this talk, however, focuses on avatar², an open source framework built to ease firmware reversing and security analysis. In more detail, avatar² utilizes partial emulation to enable transparent analysis of firmware, and while the main firmware is executed inside the emulator, I/O operations to and from the hardware are commonly relayed to the actual hardware or the emulator. To realize this complex orchestration, avatar² enables communication and state synchronization between a variety of popular tools, such as Qemu, OpenOCD, GDB, PANDA and angr. While the declared scope of avatar² the is analysis of embedded firmware, this talk will also show that the framework can also be useful in other contexts, such as scripting gdb in python from outside gdb, or loading the state of a concretely executed binary into angr. Download Related Embed Share: TagsI'm not responsible for any damages in your device. What you need? Step by step: EASY WAY - AUTOMATIC SWITCHING: COMPLICATED WAY - MANUAL SWITCHING: This is very IMPORTANT: Do NOT use v2.82 since it no longer have ability to reinstall binaries (SU binary occupied error), and it have "Android is starting" bug. See this post https://forum.xda-developers.com/sho...7&postcount=84 META-INF common arm arm64 armv7 mips mips64 x64 x86 6.1 6.1. Android 4.4.x and below: Android 4.4.x and below: Android 5.0.x and above: Android 5.0.x and above: Android 5.0.x and above: Android 5.0.x and above: Replace: Delete: Replace: Replace: Replace: Delete: After you replace any files, make sure the new file still has the same permissions as the old file. X-plore does this automatically, that's why X-plore is the best file manager. Root Browser doesn't, and you will lost root or get bootloop after reboot. But, you can re-root with KingoRoot and do it again. There is no need to replace "su" binaries since they are write protected, but SuperSU can replace them once you update it in STEP 8 Tested devices Most ARMv7 devices are tested and working. If you have a device with ARM64/v8 or x86, i need you to tell me the system files that Kingoroot have modified so i can find out which files to replace. PM me for more info Regarding "Android is starting" bugTo the south: the Nubians Some Egyptian leaders and rulers used invective whenever mentioning foreign enemies. Others, like Weni whose army included Nubians and ravaged the Sand-dwellers' land described his relations with the foreigners matter-of-factly Captured Nubian Multicoloured Faience; 20th dynasty, Medinet Habu [21] His majesty sent [me] to dig five canals in the South and to make 3 cargo-boats and 4 [tow]-boats of acacia wood of Wawat. Then the Negro chiefs of Irthet, Wawat, Yam and Mazoi drew timber therefor, and I did the whole in only one year. The Inscription of Weni, 6th dynasty The ancient Egyptians were not the most militaristic of peoples. Still, their view of foreigners - at least as far as the pharaohs were concerned - was often influenced by admiration of their own military prowess and success and contempt for their enemies' lack of them: Attack is valour, retreat is cowardice. A coward is he who is driven from his border. Since the Nubian listens to the word of mouth, to answer him is to him retreat. Attack him, he will turn his back. Retreat, he will start attacking. They are not people one respects. They are wretched, craven-hearted. Boundary stela of Senusret III, 12th dynasty[22] Turi, viceroy under Thutmose I, confronted the southern neighbours frequently and consolidated the Egyptian rule there Year 3, Pakhons 20th, his majesty passed this canal in force and power in his campaign to crush Ethiopia the vile. Prince Turo 18th dynasty [23] To the north: the Aegeans and the Hittites Egypt had trade relations with the peoples of the Aegean from quite early on, above all Senusret I expanded the commerce between Egypt and the Aegean isles. [15] Crete especially left its mark. Silver vessels from the time of Amenemhet II were, if not made in Crete itself, at least fashioned in the Cretan style. The Hyksos palace at Tel el Daba was decorated with Minoan paintings and a tomb picture from the middle of the 15. century shows the chief of the Keftiw (generally identified as Crete) bringing tribute and prostrating himself. [14] The Aegeans were depicted wearing a breech cloth and a codpiece held in place by a wide belt, or an embroidered kilt, sandals and leggings. [16] Relations with the Hittites were less peaceful. Conflict with Hatti began in the 14th century BCE when the Hittites extended their empire into the traditional Egyptian sphere of interest on the Syrian coast. When his majesty reached the city (i.e. Kadesh), behold, the wretched, vanquished chief of Kheta had come, having gathered together all countries from the ends of the sea to the land of Kheta, which came entire: the Naharin likewise, and Arvad, Mesa, Keshkesh, Kelekesh, Luka, Kezweden, Carchemish, Ekereth, Kode, the entire land of Nuges, Mesheneth, and Kadesh. Egyptian accounts of the battle of Kadesh, 13th century BCE Hittite Multicoloured Faience; 20th dynasty, Medinet Habu [21] The Egyptians kept up the pretence of superiority over other peoples, even when facts did not warrant any such claim. After the battle of Kadesh an equilibrium was reached between the Hittite and Egyptian empires in Canaan, still Ramses II considered the Hittite peace offer almost a surrender: The chief of Kheta sent, asking of me permanent peace. Never did he /// for them. Now [afterward] ////// under the great fame of the Lord of the Two Lands, King Ramses (II). The marriage stela of Ramses II, 13th century BCE To the west: the Libyans Libyan Multicoloured Faience; 20th dynasty, Medinet Habu [21] By historic times the lands to the west had undergone desertification and were of little interest to the Egyptians who continued to direct their efforts towards Nubia and the Levant. There were Libyan campaigns during the Old and Middle Kingdoms, but it was from the New Kingdom onwards that major conflicts with Libyan peoples erupted, and at first the Egyptians were still capable of driving them off: The wretched, fallen chief of Libya, fled by favor of night alone, with no plume upon his head, his two feet [failed]. Hymn of Merneptah The frequency of circumcision among Egyptians remains unclear. But the complete lack of it among the Libyans set them apart and drew the attention of the victors: Then returned the captains of the archers...... driving asses before them, laden with the uncircumcised phalli of the enemy of Libya together with the hands of every other country that was with them The Great Karnak Inscription of Merneptah, 13th century BCE J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Part Three, § 587Watch the 2016 Liberal election campaign advertisement to bring back the Australian Building and Construction Commission. MALCOLM Turnbull has finally got something new to say housing affordability but has he missed the point again? The Prime Minister has been under pressure over housing prices since the release of his first Budget, which contained no measures to address affordability. Unlike Labor he has refused to reform negative gearing or capital gains tax but rising prices are such a big issue he’s been clutching at ways to address it. Mr Turnbull has previously commented that the key to reducing prices was improving the supply of new housing, but of course this is a state planning issue, and not something the Federal Government can really change. Attempts to lighten the debate by joking parents should give their children money to buy a home, fell flat last week, as did his promotion of a family who had bought their baby a home using negative gearing measures. But in a new election ad, Mr Turnbull unveiled a new approach: highlighting the link between housing affordability and union corruption. See? He is doing something. In the ad, Mr Turnbull spruiked the return of the Australian Building and Construction Commission as a way of lowering the cost of construction. As Mr Turnbull sees it, cracking down on union corruption is one way of improving housing affordability. “We’re paying up to 30 per cent more for hospitals, schools and roads,” he said in a YouTube ad. “Even housing affordability is affected because of the high cost of building apartments.” But while Mr Turnbull could well be right, his comments kind of miss the point. Construction economist Gerard De Valence of the University of Technology, Sydney, said there were many variables involved in house prices, and construction costs were just one element. “I hate to say this but it’s more complicated that than,” he said. “It’s not just about the cost of housing blocks, it’s also about roads and sewerage systems.” Labour costs make up less than half the cost of building new apartments, Mr De Valence said, so over time this could have a significant effect on prices. “But it’s not going to be a magic bullet for the housing market,” he said. While cracking down on union corruption was important, especially to tackle criminal elements infiltrating the construction industry, Mr De Valence said housing affordability was a separate issue that really needed its own set of policies. He said the same thinking applied to Labor’s commitment to reform negative gearing and capital gains tax. “Neither the ABCC or negative gearing is the magic bullet,” he said. “They may help but they won’t solve the problem overnight. “The overwhelming truth is that it’s incredibly difficult to change one part of the tax system on its own. “For example, you can’t get rid of, or change negative gearing significantly without offering self-funded retirees or investors, an alternative investment. “We are asking people to become responsible for retirement incomes but only providing a limited opportunity to do that.” Mr De Valence said the purpose of negative gearing should be reconsidered, in the same way the government had explored the aims of superannuation. He said negative gearing was traditionally used as a way for people to get into the housing market as it allowed them to buy a property and rent it out, while paying off their mortgage and renting a cheaper home. “But because of other distortions in the tax system, today, negative gearing has exploded,” he said. Distortions included things like the capital gains tax discount, but Mr De Valence said the government also needed to offer alternatives to investors. “For example, infrastructure bonds for investors, targeted at self-funded retirees, would be a very attractive officer I imagine.” This is partly because low interest rates, which have fuelled property purchases, have also made it harder to earn a decent income out of investment accounts. “For hundreds of thousands of Australian retirees, a rise in interest rates would be fantastic,” he said. It would also help keep housing prices down. But Mr De Valence did give Mr Turnbull credit for his Smart Cities plan that aimed to create 30-minute cities. This includes looking at how to raise finance for projects that improved access to jobs, housing affordability and reduced traffic congestion by spreading out economic hubs. He said the approach was “fundamentally right”, adding “essentially housing is a state level issue.” Meanwhile Labor has released an election video of the Opposition Leader Bill Shorten hugging his wife and talking about his mum. “When mum passed away, I remembered how hard she worked for me to have the best education,” he said. Investment in education is a key plank of Labor’s campaign, even being used to sell the party’s own stab at innovation, one of Mr Turnbull’s favourite subjects. Labor suggests it will deliver “innovation through education” and wants to “make Australian schools the best”. The heartwarming advert is starkly different to one the Liberal Party has released on Mr Shorten, attacking him over his changing position on lowering company tax, the deficit reduction levy and personal income tax relief. Mr Shorten’s daggy dancing even makes an appearance. Voters should brace themselves for even more election highlights. It’s only day two of the official campaign.What could make a charity calendar of ripped semi-naked firefighters any better? Well, that all depends on your taste in calendars. But one thing’s for sure: everything is made better with puppies, and this calendar is no exception. The Firefighters Calendar is something of a tradition in Australia. It started in 1993 and all the proceeds go to the Children’s Hospital Foundation and the Westmead Children’s Hospital’s burns unit. The calendar has raised over $1 million to date, and this year they hope to raise even more money by posing with adorable rescue puppies on loan from Safe Haven Animal Rescue. All the animals are up for adoption and the proceeds will be split with the RSPCA, so if you’re wondering what to buy grandma this Christmas then wonder no more. It’s sure to keep her warm this winter. You can buy them here. More info: Facebook \| Instagram \| Safe Haven Animal Rescue \| Children’s Hospital Foundation \| Westmead Children’s HospitalWEST WHITTIER >> You might want to avoid the 605 Freeway this weekend — at least the southbound side from Whittier Boulevard to Washington Boulevard. The two right lanes on that side will be closed from 10 p.m. Friday until 5 a.m. Monday in order to finish a three-mile $14 million soundwall project. In addition to the lane closures, the Whittier Boulevard on-ramp to the southbound 605 and the Washington Boulevard east off-ramp will be closed for construction ingress, egress and staging. The closures are needed so the freeway shoulder can be repaved with plastic concrete, said Jim Gleig, director of construction management for sound walls for Metro. “By the time we remove (the existing pavement and put it back in, we need a 55-hour closure,” Gleig said. In order to safely put the new pavement in, the crew needs the two lanes to be closed, he said. This is the last major element of the project that goes from just south of Beverly Boulevard to just south of Slauson Avenue, Kleig said. “The project now is essentially to be done by mid-February,” he said. “This is kind of the last big hurrah.” Once the shoulder is repaved, all that remains will be the installation of some landscaping, he said. Kleig said motorists are being notified of the closure in a number of ways, including telling the media. In addition, there are message boards on the freeway and on the Whittier and Washington boulevard ramps, he said. The project is a good one, said Chris Magdosku, assistant director of public works for Whittier. “This is trying to make it more quiet and look nicer,” Magdosku said. The wall is expected to reduce traffic noise by 5 decibels; improve quality of life for local schools, residences, businesses and churches; and reduce pollution. According to Metro, there are more than 112 existing miles of sound walls in the region’s freeway system.Priceless: how our unknowing irrationality confounds the price of everything I just finished William Poundstone's Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It), a popular book on the history and present state of the art in analyzing how people arrive at prices (Poundstone's publisher, Hill and Wang, were kind enough to send this along). As with other behavioral economics texts, Poundstone is setting out to demonstrate how our own cognitive blindspots cause us to behave irrationally, and how this pervasive irrationality has more to do with the price of goods than any "rational consumer" (as posited in the traditional economic model). Poundstone liberally cites the greats of the field, notably, Dan "Predictably Irrational" Ariely, but even if you've read other recent books on the subject, Poundstone's book brings some new material to the discussion. First, Poundstone's treatment of the history of behavioral economics is both funny and fascinating, a kind of counterpoint to the history set out in Myth of the Rational Market. The mavericks who set out to investigate the ways in which we are both a) weird, and b) ignorant of how weird we are, were themselves very weird in an enormously entertaining way. Poundstone's subtitle hints that there will be some kind of Dale-Carnegie-style set of tips and tricks for exploiting pricing weirdness, or at least not falling prey to them. And there are a few of these -- such as taking the time to seriously set out all the reasons an item isn't worth the price you're considering -- but by and large, the book's cautionary tales about how bad we are at understanding our own irrationality are the best tool of all. As Poundstone reiterates throughout the book, experimental subjects, high-priced corporate clients, and friends and relatives just don't believe that their idea of a fair price can be reliably moved by exposing them to random numbers prior to negotiation (high numbers make us willing to accept high prices; low numbers, low prices), even when they've just participated in an experiment showing them exactly that. Poundstone's explanations make sense of everything from flat-rate mobile phone pricing to packaged goods box-sizes to the insane complexity of those same "simple" flat-rate phone plans. He goes a long way to explaining the way that prices ending in 9s are oddly attractive, and to showing up the dirty tricks involved in rebate pricing and other tricks of the price-gun. In some ways, Poundstone's thesis -- we make irrational purchases all the time -- should be self-evident. After all, advertisers have spent a century extolling irrational cases for buying their products (what do cowboys have to do with Marlboros?), even as they argued to regulators that everyone who bought a harmful or overpriced product did so on the basis of their rational free will. But the pervasive game-theory story of rational actors acting rationally on the micro, macro and intermediate scales persists, and more importantly, it guides our policy-making and our economic thinking. I don't think we're always irrational. But I think that we probably spend as much time kidding ourselves, misremembering, mispredicting, and misapprehending, as we do accurately gauging the circumstances and behaving accordingly. I think that our social system has long favored those who understand how to exploit cognitive failures, and that the subtle evolutionary pressure has created a world where the opportunities to be fooled in ways big and small are nearly everywhere. Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)The scheme, which has existed in its current form since 2007, provides eligible adults with $1000 each and eligible children with $400. So far, for the NSW bushfires, the money will go to people who have lost or had their homes significantly damaged, to those who have been seriously injured, or who have had an immediate family member killed. But shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus has questioned why the Coalition has not included those who are cut off from their homes, despite there being a history of Labor including the group in the disaster payments. When the Gillard government activated the scheme for the Tasmanian bushfires and Tropical Cyclone Oswald earlier this year, it extended funds to those who could not get to their homes for at least 24 hours because access had been cut off, to people who had been stranded at home for at least 24 hours or who had been without electricity or water for a continuous 48 hours. ''Mr Keenan has heartlessly removed assistance for people who have been cut off from their homes for more than 24 hours, or been without water or electricity for 48 hours,'' Mr Dreyfus said. ''Now is not the time for the government to be reducing assistance for NSW residents who need it most.''LAS VEGAS — Nick Diaz isn't currently licensed to corner his brother Nate at UFC 202. But that could change. Nick's manager Lloyd Pierson told MMA Fighting on Thursday night that his team is still working on the situation with the Nevada Athletic Commission (NAC). Nick still owes the state part of the fine from his 2015 marijuana sanctions, but the entire amount could be paid before Saturday night when Nate meets Conor McGregor at T-Mobile Arena. Nick Diaz owes Nevada $75,000 of the $100,000 fine he was levied in January, NAC executive director Bob Bennett told Damon Martin of FOX Sports on Thursday. Diaz's 18-month suspension was up Aug. 1, but he won't be able to fight or get a corners license until the total sum of his fine is paid off. Nick was given the suspension and fine after he tested positive for marijuana in relation to his UFC 183 fight with Anderson Silva in January 2015. Nick was initially suspended five years and fined $165,000 last year, but the discipline was reduced after a settlement. Nick was also front and center Wednesday when Team Diaz and Team McGregor got into a wild altercation during the UFC 202 pre-fight press conference at MGM Grand. Nick motioned for Nate to leave the press conference and the Diaz team stormed from the venue — but not before bottle-throwing madness ensued. Nate threw a bottle at Team McGregor in the stands and they retaliated by throwing things toward Team Diaz. Then McGregor, still on stage, launched a water bottle and energy drink can in the vicinity of Team Diaz. Bennett confirmed to MMA Fighting on Thursday that the incident is under review by the commission and McGregor and Nate Diaz could be facing sanctions at the commission meeting in September.There are literally thousands of iRobot Packbots deployed around the world in everything from military operations to search and rescue and police incident investigation. Controlling these $100,000-plus robots takes a lot of patience and training, but that’s all about to change. iRobot’s new uPoint Multi-Robot Control System (or uPoint MRC) puts all the controls for iRobot’s line of defense and security robots in one Android tablet interface. It’s so easy to use anyone can do it – even this reporter. See also: Dyson Robot Vacuum Is Real and It Sees Everything Originally, each iRobot security and defense robot had its own hardware-based control system, which usually included a physical joystick, a small screen, and a variety of separate controls for features such as an arm, grabber and sensors. Each controller would grow ever more complicated as iRobot and its customers added more and more specialized sensors, all of which might change the control configurations. As one iRobot executive put it, even well trained operators would need five to 10 minutes to familiarize themselves with the controls each time they used them. iRobot uPoint interface Image: iRobot uPoint MRC creates a unified radio network (WiFi, 4G or super lower frequency, depending on the job) and combines all the controls into one touch-based interface. The free Android app shows you the robot’s view through its on-board cameras and lets you tap, drag and drop to steer, move and control. “Success as a robot operator during high-stress, critical-operations depends on precise and reliable control, so the interface needs to be intuitive," said Frank Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of iRobot's Defense & Security business unit. Everything about the interface is simplified. I watched as the iRobot exec demonstrated all the key capabilities and then he handed me the tablet. I was able to drag my finger on the screen to where I wanted the Packbot robot to go, see a yellow predictive path on screen and then watch the robot drive along it. I tapped an onscreen button to change speeds (it could go quite fast), and when I wanted to pick up a bottle, was able to virtually grab the arm and move it into position, while the robot mimicked my actions in the real world. It was all so obvious and easy. To switch robots, I tapped on the Assets button and took control of the much smaller iRobot First Look (also known as a throwbot). Once again, driving it around was easy. When I wasn’t pointing and dragging to control the robot, I used Automatic Mode, which simply let me select a destination point, which the robot would immediately head to. These robots do not, for now, have collision avoidance detection, so I had to be careful not to send any of the robots into a wall. Now that it’s radically simplified the controls, iRobot may add object detection to future robots. iRobot uPoint and Packbot Image: Mashable, Lance Ulanoff The interface also includes a real-time 3D robot avatar that shows exactly how the robot is positioned and which way it’s pointed. This is critical for situations where the robot operator is guiding the robot blind, say, into a mine or under collapsed rubble. iRobot told me that all the robots are not only on the same network, they create a self-healing mesh network. If there’s a weak signal between the robot and the central radio hub, known as the uPoint Radio, one robot can, for example, act as a signal repeater. That radio, by the way will also work to find the best possible and least crowded communication frequency. When Packbot was tasked with investigative work at the scene of the Boston Bombing, it struggled because the communication frequency was overcrowded. iRobot execs say that won’t happen with the uPoint Radio. Available in 2015, uPoint MRC will come free with any of the iRobot defense and security robots. While the software is for Android, there is what iRobot calls a cloud-based observer mode that’s accessible via any smartphone or tablet, including iOS devices. Additionally, all data collected by the robots is instantaneously sent to a secure cloud where third parties can remotely participate in, for instance, an investigation.Despite a sometimes sloppy performance that saw the home team commit four errors, the Barons continued their recent run of dominance at Regions Field, defeating the Montgomery Biscuits 7-3 in front of 5,081 fans on a perfect Mother's Day in Birmingham. The Barons trailed 2-0 early as starter Spencer Arroyo flirted with danger for much of the afternoon scattering six hits and navigating through defensive miscues over 6.0 innings. The Barons were held scoreless until the fifth when Dan Wagner's RBI groundout scored Michael Earley from third base to make it a 2-1 ballgame. The score remained 2-1 until the 7th but as has been the case throughout the first two months at Regions Field, the Barons rallied, putting up five runs in the frame to take a 6-2 lead. Wagner tied the game with an RBI single that scored Andy Wilkins from second base just ahead of the throw from center field. Biscuits manager Billy Gardner Jr. was ejected following the play for arguing with the umpire. After the dust settled, the Barons four more times in the inning on a bases loaded walk to Tyler Saladino, a wild pitch and a two-run single by Trayce Thompson. The Barons would tack on an insurance run in the eighth on an RBI double by Earley to take a 7-3 lead they would not relinquish. The win was the ninth in a row for the Barons at Regions Field and pushed their record to 25-11 and 14-2 at home overall. The win went to Kevin Vance (2-1, 2.75) who allowed a run on two hits over 2.1 innings while striking out two. The loss went to Biscuits' starter Jacob Thompson who allowed four runs on six hits over 6.2 innings. The Barons and Biscuits return to action tomorrow as RHP Erik Johnson (2-1, 2.52) takes the hill against RHP Matt Buschmann (4-1, 3.10. First pitch is scheduled for 11:30 AM CDT.President Obama pardons the National Thanksgiving Turkey during a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House on Wednesday. (Reuters/Carlos Barria) When President Obama pardoned two turkeys named Honest and Abe this Thanksgiving, most Americans understood the reference to President Abraham Lincoln. But in China, a translation mix-up saw the second turkey’s name rendered not as the one-syllable “Abe” but with two characters, pronounced “ah-bay,” the same as those used in the name of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. That led to some merriment here, with Netizens wondering if Obama had in fact compared his Japanese counterpart and ally to a bird. "Abe should feel happy, because its American daddy is thinking about it," one social media user wrote, while others were more direct. “Abe is just a chicken,” wrote one. Many Chinese people resent Japan for not making amends for war crimes committed during its occupation of their country during World War II, while Abe is reviled by many for visiting a war shrine in Tokyo seen as a symbol of Japanese nationalism. According to the Associated Press, the faulty translation of Abe was published by state-run China Radio International and picked up by several other outlets. A man who answered the CRI news hotline told the AP that editorial staff there had used the Web to translate the name Abe. The tradition of the president granting a “pardon” to a turkey at Thanksgiving has happened every year for the last quarter century, although Lincoln may have been the first to spare one of the birds from the dinner table, reportedly because his son Jack had taken a liking to it. In China, though, one social media user suggested a more suitable use of a presidential pardon this year. "The main man pardoning a turkey this year should be Emperor Putin,” he wrote. That appears unlikely: Russian President Vladimir Putin called Turkey’s shooting down of one of his country’s warplanes this week a “stab in the back,” while Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called on Thursday for tough sanctions against the country. Xu Yangjingjing contributed to this report.When York Lions’ award-winning defenceman Derek Sheppard reflects on the last three seasons and the journey it took for his team to get to this weekend’s University Cup men’s hockey championship, a tremendous amount of success definitely comes to mind. But there’s been an equal amount of struggle as well. York University defenceman Derek Sheppard, the OUA’s Western Conference outstanding player, leads his team into the CIS championship this week in New Brunswick. ( Rick Madonik / Toronto Star ) “We met as a team early this season, and we have a very big team this year, there’s 32 guys involved with our team,” Sheppard said Tuesday, as the Lions prepped for the eight-team national tournament. The tourney begins Thursday in New Brunswick and features York, Queen’s, Alberta, St. Francis Xavier, Acadia, McGill, Saskatchewan and the host University of New Brunswick. “When we met, we spoke about what our team identity would be. We’ve been fortunate to have success, we won the Queen’s Cup (Ontario University Athletics championship),” he said. “But in my (freshmen year, 2014-15, when the team finished last) we had to stick together through the tough times too. So the success is something you appreciate because you went through the tough times together.” Article Continued Below Sheppard — who won the OUA’s Western Conference outstanding player award, top defenceman honours and first team all-star kudos — does his utmost to help promote his team and the brand of hockey at the university level. On Tuesday, he wolfed his lunch down and shuffled his study time — exams are coming up at York — to speak with a reporter. There’s a host of athletes multi-task this week with school and sports, both at the men’s championship and with the women’s championship being held at Queen’s University this weekend. Along with the men’s and women’s national hockey titles, Ryerson is hosting the national women’s volleyball championships at the Mattamy Athletic Centre. In many ways, Sheppard represents what many university athletes understand — you have school, studies and even jobs to make ends meet, but your teams are your second families. The 22-year-old from Ajax was overlooked in his major junior draft year. His parents, father Dan, a retired Toronto police officer, and mother Sandra, a figure skating coach, drove him around to rinks while he was playing with Pickering and then with Aurora in the Ontario Junior Hockey League. At one point, a scout from the QMJHL’s Gatineau Olympiques offered him a tryout and, after weighing that against attending college in the States, Sheppard went to Gatineau, where he spent two years as a fourth-line forward. “When I got there (Gatineau), they had an abundance of defenceman … I played defence may whole life, but they offered me the opportunity to play forward,” Sheppard said. “I’m happy to do whatever role they give me. I came back to York and (then coach Jim Wells) offered me the chance to play defence again.” Article Continued Below Sheppard was overlooked in the NHL draft as well, but he has a smile now, looking back at the improvements he made to his game to get to the weekend, where he enters the University Cup with a chance to earn all-Canadian honours and most outstanding player in the country. “I was brutal,” Sheppard said, about his skating when he was growing up, and the resulting lessons he had to take from his mother. “I started skating lessons with my mother, and I was working with a colleague of hers, who’s a power skating coach … I met up with Dan Milne, who goes to McGill now, and we’ve become good friends.” Does Sheppard still harbour a pro hockey dream? He does, and many of his co-horts this weekend do as well. The University of Alberta alone has sent 15 athletes to the NHL, the latest being Derek Ryan. Now 30, Ryan was overlooked in the NHL draft, and played four seasons, from 2007-11 for Alberta before rambling through Sweden, Austria and the AHL en route to a contract with the Carolina Hurricanes. The native of Spokane, Wa., made his NHL debut March 1 of last year and scored his first goal that very game, just a few days after his wife gave birth to the couple’s first child. At the nationals this weekend, UNB’s Phillip Maillet is a standout player, and a favourite to be named player of the year. Teammate and defenceman Jordan Murray is another all-Canadian candidate; Saskatchewan goalie Jordan Cooke was a member of Team Canada’s entry at the Spengler Cup this year, and former NHL goalie Sean Burke’s son, Brendan, is in net for Alberta. For Sheppard, dreams are on hold for now. He’s worked the past three summers working for a landscaping company, and is studying business and history at York. Exams are coming up after the University Cup, but the chance to play for a national championship is something to be cherished. “We (Lions) went through a tough road just to win the Queen’s Cup, we played Guelph, Lakehead and Windsor, and any of those teams could just as easily be playing this weekend too,” Sheppard said. “You break it down to one game at a time, but you break it down smaller than that too … down to a shift at a time, because if you get down after a bad shift, this tournament is too short to look back, or forward. “You live in the moment and you’re thankful for the opportunity.” Read more about:Chris Lattner, a longtime Apple software guru, has left his post running software for Tesla’s Autopilot division after just six months. Lattner announced his departure in a tweet late Tuesday. Earlier in the evening, Tesla announced that it had hired leading AI expert Andrej Karpathy as the company’s new director of AI and Autopilot. Karpathy had previously been a researcher at OpenAI, a nonprofit effort to advance artificial intelligence started by Musk and other Silicon Valley veterans. “Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all,” Lattner wrote. “I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!” A Tesla spokesperson confirmed Lattner’s departure, adding that "Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change. We wish him the best.” Jim Keller, who oversees hardware for Autopilot, will take on Lattner’s duties in the meantime. Lattner joined Tesla at a crucial time for Autopilot Lattner joined Tesla in January as the vice president of Autopilot Software. The electric car company hired him away from Apple, where he notably led the development of the Swift programming language. At the time of tweeting about his departure, Lattner’s Twitter bio still referred to Tesla’s Autopilot software as “the new frontier.” Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all. I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader! — Chris Lattner (@clattner_llvm) June 21, 2017 He joined Tesla at a crucial time for the company’s Autopilot software. Just months before, the manufacturer parted ways with Mobileye, an Israeli company that provided tech for the first version of Tesla’s semi-autonomous software. The split occurred after the two companies argued over which side’s tech was to blame for Autopilot’s failure in preventing the death of Josh Brown, a Tesla owner who died last summer after impacting a tractor trailer while using the self-driving feature. Since then, Tesla has been rebuilding its own version of Autopilot without Mobileye’s tech. It was only earlier this month that CEO Elon Musk said that he thinks Tesla’s system was nearing the quality it once had with Mobileye’s tech integrated into its cars. “It’s definitely been a tough slog transitioning from the Mobileye vision chip to Tesla’s internal vision
whatnot, renderpasses are handled a bit special, instead of checking the atlas for every primitive, the bounding box of the render pass itself is considered instead. Only when the bounding box of the renderpass increases does it damage the atlas and resolve any hazards which may arise. Render passes are always done in-order, so hazards between render passes are ignored in the atlas for simplicity. Overall, the performance of this approach turned out to be great, and seems to be very accurate for the content I’ve tested. The atlas implementation is API agnostic, so hopefully this should fix some bugs in the GL renderer as well if integrated. Render pass batching PSX renders one primitive at a time, so it is quite obvious that we need to aggressively batch primitives. There is another side here which is important to consider, for tiled-based renderers on mobile, each render pass has a very significant cost in that beginning/ending the render pass needs to read-in/write-out all memory associated in the render area, which is a quite large drain on performance. PSX games tend to make it difficult for us as clear rects come in, scissor boxes change and we need to batch as aggressively as we can here. Not all games use clear rects, so using loadOp = CLEAR isn’t always an option. The approach I took is very similar to the Rustation renderer, but with some extra considerations for Vulkan render passes. As a primitive comes in, it is placed in one or more queues: Opaque non-textured primitives Opaque textured primitives Semi-transparent textured primitives Semi-transparent primitives (including textured) and primitives which use mask bit The screen space bounding box is computed for this primitive. Using this information we can figure out if the primitive is “scissor invariant”, i.e. the scissor box cannot clip any pixel in the primitive. If this is the case, we can say the primitive belongs to scissor instance -1. If the primitive can be clipped, we assign the primitive a scissor index. The scissor index increases whenever set_draw_area() changes the scissor box. From here, we enter the atlas to see if the union of the scissored bounding box and existing render pass area increases, if it does, we need to check for hazards to avoid any synchronization issues. If this happens, we flush out the render pass, synchronize and start a new render pass. For clear rects, we similarly expand the render area as needed. If the current render area == clear rect area, this becomes a clear op candidate. If the render pass is later flushed with this particular area, we know we can use loadOp = CLEAR and save lots of readbacks on tiled GPUs, yay. When the render pass is flushed, we render out our queues in a particular order. While the PSX GPU does not have depth buffers, it doesn’t mean we cannot use depth buffering ourselves to sort primitives in a more favorable order. Opaque primitives are sorted by scissor index, and then front-to-back. These are rendered first. Then, we consider the semi-transparent textured primitives, these are conditionally semi-transparent. Just like Rustation, we render the primitives as if they were opaque, and discard the fragments if they are indeed opaque. If they are opaque, we end up writing the primitives Z to the depth buffer, serving as a mask (depth test = LESS) when we later redraw these primitives again a second time. Now that we have sorted out the opaque pixels, we render the semi-transparent primitives in-order, batching up as many primitives as we can depending on the VkPipeline they need to use. While some crazy reordering can be done here if primitives don’t overlap, I doubt it’s worth it. Primitives which use mask bit and semi-transparency are always drawn alone, because we need to perform a by-region vkCmdPipelineBarrier(COLOR_ATTACHMENT -> INPUT_ATTACHMENT) to safely read the framebuffer. This is quite expensive on IMR GPUs, but performance is just fine in the prime example of this PSX feature, which is Silent Hill. On tile based GPUs, this is basically free though, so that will be interesting to test in the future. 🙂 An important case where having a tight bounding box on our draw area is the MGS codec, generated from a frame trace in rsx-player: The “bloom” effect is done by rendering the codec text to the lower left, then blend it with offsets on top, effectively creating a gauss kernel (!?) If we used the draw rect naively as the bounding box, we would create 13-15 render passes just to draw this thing as the hazard tracker would think that we rendered to a framebuffer while also trying to sample from it at the same time, one render pass for each blend step. Line rendering Line rendering is always a PITA. PSX has a very particular rasterization pattern which games sometimes rely on to draw primitives correctly, you may have noticed the one pixel that was wrong in the video above … ye, it’s using lines, go figure. The current implementation generates a quad which tries its best to approximate wide lines to match the rasterization pattern of PSX, but it’s not quite there yet. Vulkan higher level API This time around I wanted an excuse to create a higher level Vulkan API. The Vulkan backend in the RDP is a bit too explicit in hindsight and adding things like VI filtering would require a ton of boilerplate crap to deal with render passes etc … so, this time around I wanted to do it better. I’m quite happy with the API as a standalone renderer API and I hope to reuse this in the RDP and other side projects when I get back to that. Reusable PSX renderer implementation The renderer exposes a C++ API which closely matches the PSX GPU. It should be fairly straight forward to reuse in any other PSX emulator or maybe even used as a renderer for a retro-themed game which tries to mimic the look and feel of early 3D games. Performance As you can expect, performance is good. The better desktop GPUs easily render this stuff at 8K resolution if you’re crazy enough to try that. In more modest resolutions, 1000++ FPS is easy, you’re going to be CPU bound in the emulator anyways, might as well crank it as high as it’ll go. The atlas hazard tracking doesn’t seem to appear in my profiles, so I guess it’s fast enough. Interestingly enough, I was worried that VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_GENERAL would decimate performance on AMD, but it seems just fine, guess I’m not bandwidth bound. 🙂 Enabling this renderer in Beetle Make sure you enable the Vulkan backend in RetroArch. Beetle will now try multiple backends until one of them succeeds, the final fallback is software. Bugs While I haven’t tested every game there is, I think it’s quite solid already, in far better shape than paraLLEl RDP is at least. The bugs I know of so far are all minor visual glitches which are likely due to either upscaling or slightly off rasterization rules. Source code repository The source code repository to Mednafen/Beetle PSX can be found here – https://github.com/libretro/beetle-psx-libretroIndia Today Editorial Director M J Akbar. India Today Editorial Director M J Akbar. We mere nationals have long learnt that the safest way to deal with multinationals is to bow in homage and get out of the way. Ever since I learnt, while doing a bit of research on one of the great architects of India's freedom, Subhas Chandra Bose, that the Ford Motor Company offered the freebie of its new V-8 cars for the use of Congress ministers at the 1938 Haripura session, reverence has deepened into total awe.Henry Ford, the eponymous pioneer of the American automobile industry, is famous for his assembly line; but this was a stroke of genius as an investment in goodwill. He got cushions in place early and firmly under the broad posterior of the future of India.This nugget came from Mihir Bose's biography of Subhas Bose. Searching for confirmation of Ford's imaginative seduction in Leonard Gordon's magisterial work on the Boses,, I learnt that Bose was actually driven to the Congress camp city in a chariot donated by a local worthy, harnessed to "51 lusty bulls". The trademark Congress vehicle in those days was the peasant's bullock cart; it would also serve as the Congress election symbol after 1952. But such symbolism, lusty bulls included, was reserved for the last mile. Bose arrived at Haripura, a small and till then largely inaccessible village on the banks of the river Tapti in Gujarat, at the session hosted by Sardar Patel, by car. Gordon does not state whether this car was a Ford V-8 or not. Old Henry Ford, or his executives, knew in 1938 what the mighty British Raj could not fathom; that power was shifting from one fulcrum to another, and the age of empire was on the verge of surrender to egalitarian nationalism. Ford was investing in a relationship with Congress ministers through the irresistible combination of comfort justified by convenience. By 1938, Congress had already tasted power, although it was no more than a desultory sip. Congress had been elected in more than half a dozen British provinces after the 1937 polls, but it was still a long way from jumped-up municipal authority in Lucknow to an independent government in Delhi. Anyone who believed at Haripura in February 1938 that India would be free in nine years was thinking with his heart, not his mind.It took a devastating world war for British resolve to crumble beyond restoration; and this war against Hitler was still 18 months away. If Hitler had not turned out to be a completely homicidal maniac, Britain's powerful appeasement lobby might have kept Britain out of conflict. Hitler had no quarrel with British rule in India; he supported it with almost as much eagerness as he dreamt of German rule over Britain. In the long term, no force could have prevented Indian independence, but it would have been a more violent, lengthy process had Hitler not exhausted Britain. In one of the great ironies of history, Germany recovered from defeat in 1945 but the British Empire never recovered from victory.There is some irony then in the fact that Bose, radical and pugnacious as ever, chose in his Haripura presidential address to castigate capitalism: "There is an inseparable connection between the capitalist ruling classes in Great Britain and the colonies abroad." Surely Bose did not think American capitalists were exempt. In another fascinating aside, Bose told whoever was ready to listen that he would not permit Japanese multinationals in free India, even when he was marching alongside Japanese forces to liberate his motherland. The Japanese, more focused on the immediate, said nothing.The conflict between the ideal and the practical is at least as old as the germination of ideas of what modern India should become. Six decades later, we both revere Subhas Bose and drive around in nifty Japanese cars, thinly disguised by an Indian pseudonym, Maruti. It is a very Indian compromise. We are very good at putting idealism in a framed photograph on the wall and getting on with life and chasing its pragmatic opportunities.Multinationals are cool, remorseless and concentrated on the profit margin. Politicians fulminate; commentators sermonise. Everyone with a voice had something to say about the ghastly eruption of violence at the Maruti factory in Haryana; its Japanese owners kept verbal intervention to a minimum, and spoke through an Indian when they had to. They read chapter and verse from the factory rule book, demanded accountability for death, and got on with life. Impressive.This column is not a plea for Ikea furniture in every Indian village in place of the charpoy. This is wistful envy on Independence Day, tinged with the hope that one day Indian businessmen, strengthened by a cold smile, bereft of self-pity, denied their divine right to waffle, will do unto others what some others have done unto us.Starting Point One of the knock-on effects of translating spells is that, as you are thinking up how spells are going to interact with the gameworld, you also realize that there are parts of the world that still need extra definition. The most recent situation that has come up (with Clerical spell translation) is Traps. Though Fate Core talks about traps and the system doesn't need any new rules to handle traps, during the process of translating the "Find Traps" spell it became clear I needed to clarify a few things in my own head about Traps before getting the spell dialed in. Granularity of Traps So, how important are "traps" in a particular game world? Depending upon your preferences or circumstances, a trap could just be a single-roll, Passive Opposition "Overcome" action and gameplay continues. However in the dungeon-laden gameworld of Greyhawk, I believe dealing with traps to be a fairly important activity and worthy of some depth. Traps are Niche Protection The gameworld of Greyhawk is one where characters have a class (or niche). Meaning there is a degree of specialization to each class--each class is good at something. This also provides some narrative justification for the notion of a "balanced" party of adventurers. Fighters are in the party to fight monsters and thereby keep everyone alive long enough to get to the treasure. Similarly, thieves are in the party because there's going to be traps to be defeated and thus, they also do their part to also keep everyone alive long enough to get the treasure. So with a goal that each player's character should have their moments to shine, I think it makes sense to have traps be considered as important, or have as much game depth, as monsters? Fortunately, Fate Core gives us a convenient method by which to define Traps as being as important as Monsters with the "fractal" approach. In short: define Traps more like monsters. Traps are Monstrous A GM could use the same broad categorizations with Traps as you do with monsters: Mook Traps Supporting Traps Named Traps Mook Traps Mook Traps would probably be just a simple one-time Overcome Opposition roll using Burglary or Crafts. A tie or failure would then result in success at a minor cost or serious cost.1 Example: A Thief attempts to disarm a Trap with a +4 difficulty, and only generates a +3 result. The trap was sprung, but at a minor cost. The GM chooses to let the player think up how that complicates matters. "You disarmed the trap on the chest but something goes wrong. What happened?" The point is that if there is a thief in the party, Mook Traps can be little more than an annoyance. However without a thief, even a simple Mook Trap might break a fighter's hand and could present a serious risk to the party's survival. Supporting / Named Traps As expected, these traps would be more involved. Meaning that if Traps are defined similar to monsters, and thieves are "trap combat specialists", then... Traps Have Skills A trap's Attack skill (I'll call it "Deadliness") A skill representing ability to "defend" against "attacks" by thieves' Burglary skill. I'll just call it "Difficulty to Disarm", to be more consistent with Mook Traps. Stealth skill if the trap is hidden. Traps Could Have Aspects A few examples could be: Poison Gas, Magic trap, Complicated gears and cogs, That's gonna require a block and tackle! Traps Could Have Stunts Zone Attack (I can't think of others at the moment--feel free to suggest trap stunts in the comments) Traps Could Have Stress Tracks A trap might require a certain amount of damage done to it (disarming it multiple times, or a sufficient degree of bashing), before it's rendered harmless. What Traps Don't Have Traps only have Active Opposition2 in the event that the Trap is considered as "attacking" a player. Remember that Passive Opposition, doesn't get a dice roll. Traps probably wouldn't have Consequences. If they even have a stress track, once it is exceeded, it's Taken out. Sandboxing a Trap For the examples that follow, use these statistics... The Thief The Thief has the following statistics: Burglary: +2 Athletics: +1 Notice: +1 Physical Track: OO The Lock The Lock on the Treasure Chest has the following statistics: Difficulty to Pick: +3 Physical Track: OOO The Trap The Trap on the Lock has the following statistics: Deadliness: +2 Aspect: Poison Needle Within the Lock Concealment: +2 Difficulty to Disarm: +1 The Conflict Does the Thief Find the Trap? This is a contest between the Trap's Concealment rating and the Thief's Notice skill. There's a couple ways a GM might go about this... Thief is Passively using "Notice" The DM could consider that the Thief is always using Notice skill in a passive sense (even if only to avoid hearing it repeatedly at the gaming table), and then you could just compare the Concealment of the Trap against the Notice Skill, and go from there. A Tie would be resolved according to "The Four Outcomes" [^2]...look under "Mook Traps" above for an idea what to say in that circumstance. Even in the event of failure, and that if the Trap is not noticed (the difficulty being higher than the skill), the Thief's player could elect to spend a Fate point and alter the narrative. Alternatively, the GM could also choose to roll the dice for the Thief without saying why (and increase the tension). Thief is Actively using "Notice" If the Thief is focused on actively looking for Traps (which could then be used against the Thief if a monster is laying in wait nearby...), then the Thief gets to use the normal 4dF roll to Overcome the difficulty. Does the Player Know there is a Trap? In Fate games, there's often an assumption at the table that the player knows more than what the player's character knows. This is in contrast to how most source material game sessions went in the past, where the player only knew what the player's character experienced. So now, the GM would tell the player of a Thief that a trap is on the locked chest, and then prompt the player to roll to determine if the Thief finds it. However if the Thief fails, the player still knows there was a Trap (which can create a more cinematically-flavored tension at the table). The players are now similar to movie watchers who know there's a trap on the chest, as the Thief's hands edge closer to the poison needle... So the Thief's Notice Skill generates... (Skill "Notice", +1) + (Dice 4dF, +2) = +3 ...against the Trap's Concealment of +2... (Thief +3) - (Trap +2) = +1 ...for a successful noticing of the Trap. So now the Thief is aware of the Trap and the aspect. Keep in mind that the Trap has not yet been disabled, and it's still deadly! However the fact that the Thief knows it's there prevents it from being deadlier than if it was a surprise. Forewarned is forearmed! Disarming the Trap The Thief attempts to Disarm the poison needle for a value of... (Skill "Burglary", +2) + (Dice 4dF, +1) = +3 The Trap's "Difficulty to Disarm" is +1 so... (Attempt, +3) - (Difficulty to Disarm, +1) = +2 to the attempt ...and so the Thief has successfully disarmed the poison needle trap. Note here that the trap is only providing passive opposition and doesn't get a die roll. Picking the Lock So the Thief attempts to pick the lock with the following examples... The Trap is Armed If the Trap is armed, then the during the Thief's action to pick the lock, the Trap interrupts the action by attacking the Thief: (Skill "Deadliness", +2) + (Dice 4dF, -1) + (Aspect Poison Needle Within the Lock, +2) = +5 attack The Thief tries to snatch his hands back, defending with... (Skill "Athletics", +1) + (Dice 4dF, -1) = +0 defense ...for a result of... (Attack, +5) - (Defense, +0) = +5 stress to defender The Thief (defender) takes 5 stress to his physical track, which will likely lead to a Minor Consequence of "Poisoned". Additionally, the lock has not been picked. What about Armor? Any defensive benefit of armor depends upon the nature of the Trap and the nature of the armor. In this example, a poison needle in the lock, the thief would be assumed to have removed any mundane armor covering his hands. Magical protection might still be of use in this circumstance, however. The Trap is Disarmed If the trap has already been disarmed, or has already been sprung (from the example above), it might look like this... The Thief attempts to Pick the Lock for a value of... (Skill "Burglary", +2) + (Dice 4dF, +3) = +5 The Trap's "Difficulty to Pick" is +3 so... (Attempt, +5) - (Diffculty, +3) = +2 to the attempt ...and so the Thief has successfully opened the lock on the chest. Other Thoughts on Traps "Just Bash It!" It's possible to try open the chest by just chopping it with an axe or attempting to break the lock with a prybar. Again, depending upon the circumstances, the Trap might injure the party in the attempt, the violence might damage the treasure held within the chest, or might alert nearby enemies to your presence and intention. Your mileage may vary. Complications Also remember that circumstances in a dungeon can make the thief's job a lot harder than if disarming a trap was done under "laboratory" conditions.Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Last month, Rakuten released the Kobo digital reader for the Japanese market. Pop into any electronics store in Japan and you will see two types of mobile phones. The more common variety is a smartphone, exemplified by Apple Inc.’s iPhone. The second type of handset is often called “gala-kei”–a shortened word that combines the words “Galapagos” and “keitai,” the colloquialism for a mobile phone in Japanese. Also known as feature phones in the rest of the world, Japan’s “gala-kei” handsets earned that monicker because they have evolved in isolation from the rest of the world, adapting to the local environment similar to the animals discovered by Charles Darwin on the Galapagos Islands that helped to formulate his theory of evolution. While some companies have tried (unsuccessfully) to wipe away the negative connotation associated with the word “Galapagos,” Japan’s absence from the global smartphone race has confirmed what many believed: Being unique–in this situation–is not necessarily an advantage.Mateo Musacchio: Opted against entering into transfer talks with Tottenham Mateo Musacchio claims to have turned down a move to Tottenham Hotspur as the terms on offer were unacceptable to him and Villarreal. The Argentine centre-half was reported to be a target for Mauricio Pochettino as he stepped up his pursuit of defensive reinforcements. An offer was put forward, with Musacchio prepared to listen to what Spurs had to say. He was, however, quick to knock the Premier League side back, with Villarreal also reluctant to enter into discussions. Having failed to make progress, Tottenham instead turned their attention to Sevilla’s Federico Fazio. Musacchio has no complaints at having missed out on a move, with the 24-year-old still enjoying his football in Spain. He told Estadio Deportivo: “I’m fine here. I never said I wanted to leave and I never forced the situation. “This is my home. I’ve been here since I was very young, I am comfortable here and for that reason I didn’t feel the need to leave. “When you get offers they have to be good for the club and for the player. In this case it wasn’t good enough for either, so in the end it didn’t happen and I’m carrying on here. “My head is here. I was always certain that I would continue to give 100 per cent, like I always have.”Let’s back up a bit and examine the day to day use of a View Model, and binding to the view model. In this mini-tutorial I’ll show the basics of binding a collection that sits in a View Model to a list box in the view. In the next, I’ll show how to capture the selection and, in the view model, determine what the details page should show. Let’s create a simple application that will display the full name of customers and their email, and that will (eventually) allow the user to click on one and go to the details about that customer. We start by creating a new MVVM application for Windows Phone. Once created, open the application in Expression Blend and add a ListBox to the content panel. I chose to have it fill the entire panel with a small margin all around. Creating the CustomerCollection The CustomerCollection class exists to give us some data to work with. I “borrowed” this class from a previous demo and have included it with the source code. We can summarize it here by saying that the class consists of a number of fields ( First, Last, Address, City, Zip, Phone, Fax, Email), properties and most important a property Customers that returns an observable collection of Customer instances generated by mixing and matching values for the fields randomly. Binding the ItemSource The key to understanding how MVVM handles the data binding is that the DataContext for the View is the View Model. The binding for the ItemsSource is created as you might expect, in the view: <ListBox x:Name="PersonListBox" Margin="10" ItemsSource="{Binding Customers}"> When you set up the MVVM Light application the data context for this page was set to the view model, and there you’ll need a (read only) property for binding. I suggest using the code snippet that was installed with the MVVM Light Toolkit. Thus, back in Visual Studio, in the code behind file, MainViewModel.cs, enter the letters mvvminpc and press tab. This will expand to a property, and by using tab you can set the property name to Customers and the backing variable to _customers. It turns out that we won’t need either the backing variable nor the setter, as we’ll use the Customers property from the CustomerCollection class. public ObservableCollection<Customer> Customers { get { var customerCollection = new CustomerCollection(); return customerCollection.Customers; } } All that is left is to provide a DataTemplate in the view so that each Customer is displayed as we wish, <ListBox x:Name="PersonListBox" Margin="10" ItemsSource="{Binding Customers}"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel> <StackPanel x:Name="DataTemplateStackPanel" Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock x:Name="FirstName" Text="{Binding First}" Margin="0,0,5,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextExtraLargeStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="LastName" Text="{Binding Last}" Margin="0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextExtraLargeStyle}" /> </StackPanel> <TextBlock x:Name="Email" Text="{Binding Email}" Margin="0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextSubtleStyle}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> Finally, we need to handle the event of the user clicking on one of the listed customers and responding by going to the Details page, which we will look at in the next mini-tutorial. The complete source code for this mini-tutorial is available here.Views 432 Views 432 -by Daniel Mogollon, Staff Writer; Image: Michigan Wolverines running back Karan Higdon. (Image Source: Duane Burleson/Getty Images) Here are this week’s picks against the spread: Last Week: 2-3 (-15 Units); Season: 20-16 (+50 Units) 12:00 – Michigan +7 ½ WISCONSIN (FOX) Running the football, protecting the football, and excellent defense is the classic formula to pulling off an upset, especially on the road (in inclement weather). With Wisconsin (followed by Ohio State) to close the season, that’s the formula Michigan has put together over the past three weeks when they re-set their season by inserting redshirt freshman Brandon Peters under center. Peters passes the eye test with a big arm and excellent athletic ability. Maybe more importantly, he’s also played sound football with four touchdowns to no interceptions. John O’Korn—1-2 as the starter—had one touchdown pass to five interceptions. He competed 55.2 percent of his passes (Wilton Speight 54.3 percent), while Peters is up to 60.9 percent. If Michigan is going to pull off the upset the youngster will need some help. With their offensive line coming together, the Maize & Blue are third in the Big Ten in rushing and their 5.0 yards per carry are equal to Wisconsin’s. They will need the shifty Karan Higdon (ankle) to be healthy and the speedy Chris Evans to turn in a big play or two. Going up against a much tougher defense this week means Don Brown’s unit—third nationally in total defense—needs to bring their A-game, which they didn’t do at Penn State. They are stout up front, can fly to the ball carrier, get to the quarterback off the edge, and play man-to-man on an island. Turnovers could make the difference. Wisconsin relies on them (22) and also gives them up (19). Quarterback Alex Hornibrook (12 INTs) has thrown a pick in seven-straight games and star running back Jonathan Taylor has a penchant for putting the ball on the turf. Bad weather might not favor either team, but should help keep this one close and low-scoring, baring a plethora of turnovers. The Wolverines are ready to “re-introduce themselves” on Saturday and will take on the spoiler role in the process. Expect a strong effort, as Jim Harbaugh’s crew makes a game of it in Madison. Grab the seven and the hook now. Units: 15 3:30 – IOWA -7 ½ Purdue (BTN) Coming home after an embarrassing loss, Iowa is going to bounce back in Kinnick Stadium. The key is going to be the offense, an offense that was shutout a week after hanging a double nickel on the Buckeyes (OK, the defense scored the first seven points.) The Hawkeyes are a different team at home (it’s all about those pink locker rooms!), where they’ve gone 5-1 (1-3 on the road). All five wins have come by at least a touchdown and four by 17-plus points, while their only loss in Kinnick came on the final play against Penn State. The biggest difference is their offense. In four conference home games—two against top ten teams—Iowa’s offense has scored 122 points (30.5 PPG not counting defensive scores) on 16 touchdowns. In three conference road games, Iowa’s offensive has scored 20 points (6.7 PPG) on two touchdowns. Purdue on the other hand has struggled scoring in Big Ten road games, putting up just nine points at Wisconsin, 12 at Rutgers, and 13 at Northwestern (all losses) for an average of 11.3 points per game with just three touchdowns to their credit. You’re also getting value, because if this game was last week you can bet the line would be closer to ten. This line was at 8.5 and might go down to seven. Units: 15 4:00 – MICHIGAN STATE -15 ½ Maryland (FOX) The Spartans are coming off their biggest loss of the Mark Dantonio era. They were humbled and humiliated, particularly on defense where they allowed 48 points, 335 yards on the ground, and four first-half rushing touchdowns. This a proud program and a proud defense. Not just prideful, but talented as well. Even with last week’s poor showing, the Spartans rank fourth in the Big Ten in stopping the run. Which creates a bad matchup for the Terps, who need to run the ball. Maryland could be without their right tackle Damian Prince (missed entire second half last week) and it’s possible fourth-string quarterback Ryan Brand gets the start again, with Max Bortenschlager to get the nod “if healthy.” Under D.J. Durkin, the Terps have taken steps in the right direction, however stepping up to their competition hasn’t been a strong point. This is how they’ve faired against teams that are currently ranked: lost 38-10 to UCF (home), lost 62-14 at OSU, lost 37-21 to Northwestern (home), lost 38-13 at Wisconsin, lost 35-10 to Michigan (home). Do you see a trend? Michigan State bounces back on senior day and wins going away. Units: 15 Daniel Mogollon is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America and the Football Writers Association of America. He is also a voter for the Thorpe and the Rotary Lombardi Award, as well as the Latino Sports MVP Awards.Image copyright Alamy More and more people are rejecting religion but embracing spirituality. But have they got things the wrong way around, asks Tom Shakespeare. After a relationship break up a few years ago, I signed on to a dating website. Filling in my online profile, I was interested to discover that the question on religious belief included an option that was new to me. You could tick boxes for the major religions, or for atheist, or for SBNR, which I discovered stands for "Spiritual But Not Religious". Whereas the word "religion" generally refers to organised forms of worship and a wider faith community, "spiritual" often describes people's private individual beliefs. A few minutes on Google revealed that SBNR is more than just an acronym. One in three Americans defined themselves as spiritual but not religious. Millions of people now think of themselves as on their own personal spiritual path, but not affiliated to any specific religion. American sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell talk about "Nones" - people who belong to no religion but still believe in God. Others have used the term "moralistic therapeutic deism" to refer to how young people are turning towards a vague belief that God exists and the point of life is to be happy. You could also call it "pseudo-religion". The people who tick the SBNR box are distinguishing themselves from atheism. They would probably believe in some supreme being or higher power. Perhaps they're interested in Eastern spirituality or some eclectic mixture of ideas. Image copyright Getty Images SBNR reflects a rejection of the dogmas of organised religion, even repugnance at the abuses committed in the name of Christianity and Islam and Judaism and Hinduism and Buddhism. I think it connects to the explosion of so-called personal growth movements in the West since the 1960s, such as yoga or transcendental meditation, as well as to new religious movements like paganism and Scientology. Find out more A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays 08:50 BST is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays 08:50 BST Tom Shakespeare is a sociologist, writer and performer who researches disability studies, bioethics and medical sociology He was born with restricted growth and leads research into the condition Listen to A Point of View on the iPlayer BBC Podcasts - A Point of View The rise of SBNR comes in the context of declining organised religion, at least in the UK. Fewer of us are calling ourselves Christians. According to the Census, numbers fell from just over 70% in 2001 to less than 60% in 2011. That's still a majority of the population - and other religions make up another 5% or so - but only one million of us will attend church this week. More than a quarter of Britons do not identify with any particular religion, But few members of this group are fully paid-up followers of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris or other humanist prophets. People might say, "I am not interested in organized religion, but I do have room in my life for spirituality." They have a sense that there is something "above and beyond" the everyday. They have beliefs, a faith in some transcendental force, or whatever, however inchoate it may be. It reminds me of the quotation from Carl Jung: "You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return." I want to challenge this approach, and explain why I was unwilling to tick the SBNR box on that dating website. I worry that SBNR can just be vague, lacking the rigour which comes from centuries of refinement and debate. And unlike traditional religions, it doesn't have much to say about charity and justice. Perhaps this is because it is a reflection of the individualism that seems to be such a problem in western societies. People want a reassuring set of beliefs that makes them feel better about their own life, rather than being challenged to help others or make the world a better place. For all these reasons, I agree with the writer James Martin when he says that "spirituality without religion can become a self-centered complacency divorced from the wisdom of a community". But then Martin is a Jesuit, and so of course he wants those wishy-washy spiritual believers to sign up to his organised faith. Image copyright Getty Images Whereas my biggest problem with SBNR is the opposite. It's that it often retains the mumbo-jumbo, aspects of religion. People have rejected the shelf with the ready-made religious beliefs, and gone straight around the corner to the pick'n'mix shop to buy a more or less random set of beliefs which are, if anything, even more incredible. Many people who are spiritual but not religious reject the organisation but hang on to the supernatural bit. But I don't want to be required to have faith in a supreme being or miracles or reincarnation, or any entity for which there is no scientific evidence. More from the Magazine Image copyright Thinkstock Research has suggested "spiritual" people may suffer worse mental health than conventionally religious, agnostic or atheist people. But what exactly do people mean when they describe themselves as "spiritual, but not religious"? Spiritual, but not religious (January 2013) So,
I’d miss out on her actually being the champion. And I sure as hell wouldn't want to miss that.Newcrest Mining is reviewing the future of some of its mines, as the recent plunge in the gold price continues to take a toll on the nation's fourth-biggest mineral export industry. Newcrest was one of several ASX-listed goldminers to reveal March-quarter results on Tuesday, and the publication of production costs revealed that numerous mines across Australasia are unprofitable at current gold prices. The gold price is hurting many miners. Credit:Arsineh Houspian While Newcrest's biggest mines are low cost, its portfolio includes stakes in high-cost mines such as Papua New Guinea's Hidden Valley, which the company owns in partnership with Harmony Gold. Tuesday's report revealed that ''all in'' costs for the mine were $2268 an ounce during the March quarter; drastically higher than the $US1410 that gold was fetching on Tuesday evening. Newcrest said a program to improve performance and ''assess the future'' of the mine was under way with ''considerable focus''.Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, September 28, 2017. REUTERS/Umit Bektas MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin told a meeting of Russia’s Security Council on Friday that Russian media outlets working abroad were facing growing and unacceptable pressure, Dmitry Peskov, his spokesman, said. “It was stressed that such pressure on Russian media is unacceptable,” Peskov told a conference call with reporters. He did not name the countries where the Kremlin was concerned Russian media were coming under pressure. Earlier this week, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Washington of putting unwarranted pressure on the U.S operations of Kremlin-backed media outlet RT, and warned that Moscow could take tit-for-tat measures. Russia’s communications regulator accused U.S. TV channel CNN International of violating Russian media law earlier on Friday and said it had summoned the broadcaster’s representatives in connection with the matter.Forever Wild in Huntsville The board of Alabama's Forever Wild land trust meets in Huntsville at the museum of art on June 25, 2015. The board voted to take the first step toward adding 134 acres to Monte Sano State Park. (Lee Roop/[email protected]) This preliminary map shows the proposed Dug Hill West addition to Monte Sano State Park at right in brown. Dug Hill Road is visible at the far right. Other tracts already added to the park by Forever Wild include the Big Cats Creek tract, Periwinkle Springs addition and the North Slope addition. All are shown in yellow. (Forever Wild) Alabama's Forever Wild land trust board took the first step Thursday toward adding 134 acres to Monte Sano State Park. Meeting at the Huntsville Museum of Art, the land trust board voted unanimously to seek an appraisal of the property. The land is on the side of Monte Sano facing Dug Hill Road. It belongs to the Land Trust of North Alabama, and Executive Director Marie Bostick said deal benefits the public three ways. "It increases the park's acreage, the land stays protected, and it allows the Land Trust to leverage the money to buy and preserve more land." The mountainside tract is covered with oak and other trees, and the surrounding park is habitat to at least two protected plant species. A second appraisal and another vote of the Forever Wild board would be required before the land purchase is approved.The idea that pesticides are essential to feed a fast-growing global population is a myth, according to UN food and pollution experts. A new report, being presented to the UN human rights council on Wednesday, is severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions”. The report says pesticides have “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole”, including an estimated 200,000 deaths a year from acute poisoning. Its authors said: “It is time to create a global process to transition toward safer and healthier food and agricultural production.” The world’s population is set to grow from 7 billion today to 9 billion in 2050. The pesticide industry argues that its products – a market worth about $50bn (£41bn) a year and growing – are vital in protecting crops and ensuring sufficient food supplies. “It is a myth,” said Hilal Elver, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food. “Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.” Elver said many of the pesticides are used on commodity crops, such as palm oil and soy, not the food needed by the world’s hungry people: “The corporations are not dealing with world hunger, they are dealing with more agricultural activity on large scales.” The new report, which is co-authored by Baskut Tuncak, the UN’s special rapporteur on toxics, said: “While scientific research confirms the adverse effects of pesticides, proving a definitive link between exposure and human diseases or conditions or harm to the ecosystem presents a considerable challenge. This challenge has been exacerbated by a systematic denial, fuelled by the pesticide and agro-industry, of the magnitude of the damage inflicted by these chemicals, and aggressive, unethical marketing tactics.” Elver, who visited the Philippines, Paraguay, Morocco and Poland as part of producing the report, said: “The power of the corporations over governments and over the scientific community is extremely important. If you want to deal with pesticides, you have to deal with the companies – that is why [we use] these harsh words. They will say, of course, it is not true, but also out there is the testimony of the people.” She said some developed countries did have “very strong” regulations for pesticides, such as the EU, which she said based their rules on the “precautionary principle”. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, which harm bees, on flowering crops in 2013, a move strongly opposed by the industry. But she noted that others, such as the US, did not use the precautionary principle. Elver also said that while consumers in developed countries are usually better protected from pesticides, farms workers often are not. In the US, she, said, 90% of farm workers were undocumented and their consequent lack of legal protections and health insurance put them at risk from pesticide use. “The claim that it is a myth that farmers need pesticides to meet the challenge of feeding 7 billion people simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny,” said a spokesman for the Crop Protection Association, which represents pesticide manufacturers in the UK. “The UN FAO is clear on this – without crop protection tools, farmers could lose as much as 80% of their harvests to damaging insects, weeds and plant disease.” “The plant science industry strongly agrees with the UN special rapporteurs that the right to food must extend to every global citizen, and that all citizens have a right to food that has been produced in a way that is safe for human health and for the environment,” said the spokesman. “Pesticides play a key role in ensuring we have access to a healthy, safe, affordable and reliable food supply.” The report found that just 35% of developing countries had a regulatory regime for pesticides and even then enforcement was problematic. It also found examples of pesticides banned from use in one country still being produced there for export. It recommended a move towards a global treaty to govern the use of pesticides and a move to sustainable practices including natural methods of suppressing pests and crop rotation, as well as incentivising organically produced food. The report said: “Chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.” It also highlighted the risk to children from pesticide contamination of food, citing 23 deaths in India in 2013 and 39 in China in 2014. Furthermore, the report said, recent Chinese government studies indicated that pesticide contamination meant farming could not continue on about 20% of arable land. “The industry frequently uses the term ‘intentional misuse’ to shift the blame on to the user for the avoidable impacts of hazardous pesticides,” the report said. “Yet clearly, the responsibility for protecting users and others throughout the pesticide life cycle and throughout the retail chain lies with the pesticide manufacturer.”The front page of the left-leaning Huffington Post didn’t shy away from what its publishers thought about Tuesday’s election. Stark, bold letters emblazoned on HuffPo's homepage screamed, “Mourning in America: NIGHTMARE: Prez Trump... America Elected A Man Who Said ‘Grab Them By The Pu**y’ Over The First Female President... Party Ends In Tears...” Poor HuffPo seemed downright stunned that any voter would choose Trump over Clinton and her “history-making story arc.” HuffPo was just one of a slew of liberal media outlets losing their minds over Republican presidential nominee – and now President-elect—Donald Trump’s victory over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night in an upset that shocked many liberal and conservative pundits alike. An incredulous Slate immediately blamed rampant white racism for Trump’s win, front-lining a story that entitled, “White Won: Trump promised an insurgent white supremacy, and white voters embraced it.” Salon’s meltdown featured a front-page article called “A Nation Gone Wrong,” claiming that Trump’s victory comes as “a global wave of rage hits America,” and grappling with deep questions like “how the hell this happened.” Picking its own jaw up off the floor, The Daily Beast immediately promised to “Stand Up To President Trump” in the coming years, seemingly unaware that half the country voted the man into office. Jezebel complained in its own editorial that "The United States has elected Donald Trump, a 70-year-old tangerine Superfund site and a menace to the peace, stability, and dignity of the country and the future of the free world, as its Commander in Chief." Over at Mother Jones, writers seemed flabbergasted that anyone would vote for a man over a woman and deny females a chance to make history, touting an editorial entitled “Hate Trumps History: A Reality TV Star Wins the White House in a Broken America.” Devastated liberal “journalists” over at MSNBC tried to keep it fairly neutral, simply reporting on their homepage, “Trump Wins Presidency in Stunning Upset.” We’re willing to bet the piece wasn’t co-written by the outlet's über-liberal pundit Chris Matthews, who was barely holding it together Tuesday night as he watched Hillary Clinton’s chances at victory circle the drain. Regardless of whether you backed Trump or how you feel about his victory Tuesday night, one thing’s undeniable – watching arrogant liberal media outlets have such an epic meltdown is just plain hysterical. Thank you for supporting MRCTV! As a tax-deductible, charitable organization, we rely on the support of our readers to keep us running! Keep MRCTV going with your gift here!Share. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. With the Marvel Universe officially coming to an end today, we decided to re-run this column about how Marvel doesn't need a reboot. The original piece from August 22, 2014 is below. With the Time Runs Out story approaching in Avengers and New Avengers, the Internet has been abuzz with claims that Marvel Comics will be using it as a means to reboot their entire comics universe. After all, it was only 2011 when DC Comics did just that with their “New 52” reboot. They deleted decades of continuity save for certain iconic stories, modernized nearly everyone’s looks and origins, assigned new artists and writers to nearly every comic, and then restarted every comic series over at #1. Marvel and DC copying each other is a tale as old as time, but this time, Marvel has good reason not to follow suit. Just to get ahead of the obvious knee-jerk comments, let me state that I am not writing about how Marvel is better than DC or vice versa. Both publishers have a lot going for them, and sure a lot of areas they could improve, but what I’m discussing in this space is the merits of Marvel rebooting or not. For those who strongly desire a Marvel reboot, the truth is that they already got one in 2012’s Marvel NOW! initiative. Well, for the most part. Marvel redesigned their characters’ looks, assigned new artists and writers to nearly all of their comics, and restarted almost every comic series at #1. Sound familiar? The one major difference between Marvel NOW! and the New 52 was that Marvel decided to keep all of their continuity. The loss of years of beloved continuity has been cited as the biggest sore spot of the New 52. Marvel clearly saw this fan response and then acted accordingly when they launched Marvel NOW! They received all of the benefits of a reboot without actually doing one; it was more of a “refresh” than a “reboot,” and thus far it has paid off fantastically. “But look at the Avengers stories -- they’re clearly setting up a Marvel reboot!” you might say, and you wouldn’t be entirely off base. The New 52 reboot was done as a time travel story called Flashpoint, and wouldn’t you know it, Marvel’s Time Runs Out is a time travel story that looks like it will have some big consequences. Meanwhile, DC’s 1985 reboot storyline Crisis on Infinite Earths involved parallel universes, just like the current New Avengers story. With time travel and parallel universes being the hallmark of huge reboots, it’s understandable to think that’s what Marvel is up to, but there’s good reason to think that’s not the case this time.The Trump administration may be quietly conceding defeat to California on car tailpipe emissions, the biggest battleground in the state’s showdown with President Trump over climate change. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt backed away last month from his threats to challenge California’s unique legal authority, known as a waiver, to set aggressive limits on vehicle emissions, including greenhouse gases. Although Pruitt left the door open to a future challenge, experts said he is running out of time to stop California from dictating national pollution standards on cars, the nation’s primary source of greenhouse gas emissions. “The auto manufacturers aren’t going to make two different kinds of cars, California and non-California, so by default they’re really required to make cars to the California standards,” said Michael Steel, a lawyer in the San Francisco office of the Morrison & Foerster firm who advises companies on environmental compliance. Because of the long lead time needed to design cars, Steel said, “It’s kind of too late” for the administration to block California’s rules. “There’s a timing issue in terms of whether you can effectively turn the clock back any later than now.” California is the nation’s largest car market, and a dozen other states, comprising more than 40 percent of the U.S. population, have adopted California’s emissions standards. Last week’s decisions by Chinese-owned Volvo to put electric engines in all its new cars, and by France to phase out gasoline and diesel cars by 2040, only strengthened California’s hand. “I don’t want to attribute any one automaker’s statements to our regs,” said Joshua Cunningham, head of the California Air Resources Board’s clean cars branch, which develops the state’s car pollution standards. “But given the broad momentum of California’s regulations and what’s happening in Europe and in China, I think the industry sees some pretty consistent signals from a lot of governments that long-term emissions requirements are going to continue to get more strict.” Pruitt had refused in his confirmation hearing to guarantee that California could continue to set its own tailpipe standards, a right that was explicitly written into the federal Clean Air Act five decades ago to help the state combat smog in the Los Angeles Basin. The state is using that authority to meet its aggressive climate goals by squeezing carbon emissions from gasoline engines and beginning a paradigm shift toward electric cars and other zero-emission vehicles. The Obama administration, also trying to tackle climate change, had worked with the state to toughen federal tailpipe standards along the same lines. Just before President Barack Obama left office, the EPA rushed out a decision, called a midterm review — a dense set of technical findings years in the making. It said the tougher emissions standards are feasible, clearing the way to impose them nationwide. Detroit automakers rebelled, saying the new rules were too onerous, and Pruitt moved quickly to revoke the midterm review. The agency has until next spring to come up with a new determination, but any changes would require the EPA to reverse its technical findings and be able to defend that reversal in court. But Pruitt held off on attacking California’s waiver, and state officials warned that they would fight him in court should he try. The waiver is legally ironclad, lawyers said, and has bipartisan political support in the state. Last month, in response to a question from House Appropriations subcommittee chair Ken Calvert, a Riverside County Republican who supports the waiver, Pruitt said, “Currently, the waiver is not under review,” while praising the state’s “leadership” on air pollution. Mike Dovorany of the CarLab, a consulting firm that helps carmakers and suppliers plan new vehicles, said while carmakers may not like California’s standards, they cannot risk failing to meet them. As long as the waiver remains, carmakers “have to plan those vehicles,” Dovorany said. “There’s no way around it.” As it is, he said carmakers are struggling to comply. The state standards will require at least 8 percent of new California car sales to be plug-in or otherwise zero emission by 2025, more than four times their current share. The way the rules work, he said, manufacturers that fail to comply would be banned from selling vehicles in California, a disaster for any carmaker. Meeting the new standard will be “extremely tough,” Dovorany said. “That’s why any coasting, if you will, on trying to plan for that compliance is just such a dangerous game for any car manufacturer.” Even the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which urged Pruitt to revisit the federal rules, said it is not pushing to revoke California’s waiver. “We’ve not asked for the agency to review that decision,” the group said when asked for its position. Peter Hsiao, head of the environment and energy attorney group in the Los Angeles office of Morrison & Foerster, said Pruitt has probably been advised by EPA lawyers that “there is no legal basis” to revoke the waiver. “I think they’re moving on to other issues,” Hsiao said. “This is one they looked at and decided not to take on.” Other observers caution against reading too much into Pruitt’s assurances. Not only did he leave open the possibility of future action, but allowing California to plunge ahead with tougher tailpipe rules would defeat the purpose of the administration’s attempt to roll back the federal rule. “If they really think the standards need to be loosened, why would they let 40 percent of the country continue to be under the California standards, which California could even strengthen?” said Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at UCLA. California officials said they are moving ahead with their new rules. “Mr. Pruitt has other priorities at this point, and we’re fine with that,” said Dave Clegern, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board. “This is the way the world is going,” Clegern added. “It doesn’t matter if the U.S. is going that way or not. It’s a huge market that’s going to be developing, and we think that all the automakers see that, and they are all doing their best to get ready for it.” China has displaced the United States as the world’s largest market for passenger vehicles. Volvo’s decision “reinforces trends toward greater efficiency and eventual decarbonization of the transportation sector,” said Drew Kodjak, head of International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research group. “China is becoming more and more aggressive in entering the global stage,” he said, calling Volvo’s move a big signal that “China is going to make a play for leapfrogging over the internal combustion engine.” Carlson warned that Pruitt’s efforts to help Detroit by weakening federal standards will backfire. “The Trump administration is essentially ceding the green economy to other countries,” Carlson said. “Trump really is investing in very old-school notions that efficiency doesn’t matter, that renewable fuels are not the way to go. There are really important economic repercussions for failing to address climate change, not just environmental repercussions.” Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @carolynlochheadHow can you turn $3.2 billion into $500 billion in a day? If you are Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, and Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon, you announce a deal that allows Exxon to explore for oil in Russia’s Arctic waters. According to Putin, who last week said, “It’s scary to utter such huge figures,” the deal could reach $500 billion. According to Exxon’s news release, all that’s been agreed so far is an investment of $3.2 billion. The only certainty is that the energy industry’s numbers game sometimes resembles the magical calculations the financial industry relied on before the 2008 crash. Take natural gas. There has been a flood of recent investment in the effort to extract gas from the Marcellus shale, a geological formation that runs underground from Virginia to New York. Drilling rights have been snapped up as everyone tries to get a piece of the hazardous action. Few seem concerned that it involves an extraction technique, known as hydraulic fracturing—it uses chemicals and explosives to release deposits of oil or gas that are trapped in rock formations—that can poison water tables. The technique, which has been around for decades, is now being applied far more frequently than before and has come under intense criticism by environmental and health groups. The investments have been encouraged by bullish numbers from, among others, the US Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration, which earlier this year estimated that the Marcellus contains an astounding 410 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The fossil fuel industry loves suggestions of bountiful supplies because that means more investment, more drilling, and more profits, and it was not thrilled when the New York Times reported in June that some Energy Department officials were doubting the estimates: “Am I just totally crazy, or does it seem like everyone and their mothers are endorsing shale gas without getting a really good understanding of the economics at the business level?” an energy analyst at the Energy Information Administration [a branch of the Energy Department] wrote in an [April 27 e-mail] (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/natural-gas-drilling-down-documents-5.html#document/p33/a25205) to a colleague. Another e-mail expresses similar doubts. “I agree with your concerns regarding the euphoria for shale gas and oil,” wrote a senior official in the forecasting division of the Energy Information Administration in an April 13 e-mail to a colleague at the administration. In August, the U.S. Geological Survey, which is part of the Interior Department, published its own estimate of Marcellus reserves, and its number was 84 trillion cubic feet—about 80 percent less than the Energy Department’s estimate. How can the figures be so different? Even under the best of circumstances, accurate estimates are difficult to get, but as the Times noted, it turns out the Energy Department outsourced much of its work to consultants with close ties to the oil and gas industry. By relying on consultants who appear to have accepted industry data at face value, the department acted much like the financial rating agencies that took Wall Street at its word and doled out triple-A ratings to mortgage securities that were doomed to fail. Thanks to the diligence of the Geological Survey, which relies on its own geologists to do the number crunching, the Energy Department abruptly announced that it will cut its estimate of Marcellus reserves by 80 percent—essentially adopting the Geological Survey numbers. The Exxon deal, meanwhile, is attention-getting not just for its roulette of numbers but because it involves drilling in Arctic waters. The risk of an accident is higher there, due to only-in-Arctic perils that include icebergs crashing into drilling rigs. And even more worrying, the consequences of a spill are far greater than in less remote regions, since cleanup would be extremely difficult in the harsh weather and winter darkness of the Arctic. More and more, industry declarations about high safety standards—Exxon said it “will use global best practices to develop state-of-the-art safety and environmental protection systems”—seem akin to AIG giving paternal assurances to investors that its derivatives business was being managed in a way that would prevent a meltdown if the housing market declined. The BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year revealed the terrifying inadequacy of oil companies’ efforts to prepare for an offshore blowout. And just last month, after coming under pressure from environmentalists, the government of Greenland, which is based in the city of Nuuk, released an almost comical containment plan prepared by a Scottish company that is drilling exploratory wells in its Arctic waters. If an iceberg is stained with oil, the plan calls for cutting off the affected areas and towing them to shore, where they would be hoisted into a heated warehouse to separate the oil from the water. Needless to say, this has never been done before and sounds like an idea hatched by the editors of the Onion. In regard to other problems, the plan is dismally honest. Noting that Greenland’s coastline is rocky, it admits that “in some circumstances oil shorelines are best left to recover naturally.” In other words, no cleanup. So it’s no surprise, given the secrecy and uncertainty and occasional chicanery in the fossil fuel industry, that the deal announced by Putin and Tillerson could amount to less than what Tillerson says—or, who knows, more than Putin hopes. Luckily for the Arctic environment, there’s a chance it will be less. This is not the first time an ambitious plan of this sort has been announced in Russia. Earlier this year—at a point when its drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico were still suspended over last year’s spill—BP reached a similar deal with Rosneft, the state-owned firm that is now Exxon’s partner. But it dramatically fell apart due to objections from a different Russian firm that BP was allied with in other projects, and the situation has deteriorated to the point that, in late August, Russian police raided BP’s Moscow office. There are other ways for such a deal to founder. If foreign oil firms are seen as doing too well in Russia, the reward can be nationalization—in 2006, Royal Dutch Shell, after spending more than $20 billion dollars on a project off Sakhalin Island, was forced to sell half its stake to a state-owned firm. Even if Putin and Tillerson find nothing to argue about, and even if no icebergs crash into an Exxon rig, the project can fizzle because nobody knows for sure whether or where oil might be found under Russia’s Arctic waters. Even the best estimates by USGS geologists are simply educated guesses about amounts of oil and their location. Cairn Energy, the Scottish company drilling in Greenland’s waters, is spending at least $600 million on wells that have so far failed to find enough oil to justify full-blown extraction. The irony (and last-ditch hope for environmentalists if exploratory drilling gets underway in Russian waters) is that western energy companies might pour billions of dollars into the Arctic and get nothing more valuable from their efforts than a belated awareness that they were victims of their own irrational exuberance.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Feb. 28, 2017, 3:06 AM GMT / Updated Feb. 28, 2017, 4:34 AM GMT By Tim Stelloh A nationwide manhunt was underway on Monday for a Mississippi man wanted for the alleged murder of his girlfriend and the random shooting of a jogger last week, authorities said. Alex Deaton, 28, is also a person of interest in the killing of a 69-year-old woman found shot to death inside a church on Thursday. During a news conference, Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey said that Deaton, who was charged with first-degree murder and aggravated assault, had no criminal history, but was armed with "at least" several handguns and should be considered "very dangerous." "Something inside of him appears to have snapped," Bailey told reporters. Local and federal authorities increased a reward for information leading to Deaton’s arrest on Monday to $27,500, the sheriff’s office said. Authorities alleged that Deaton shot the jogger, who was not identified, early Friday morning on a street northeast of Jackson in what Baily described as a "random act of violence." The Mississippi Highway Patrol said in a statement that he fired from the driver’s side window of a white SUV, striking the jogger, who was not identified, in the thigh. Heather Robinson Courtesy of family Later that afternoon, a sheriff’s deputy found the body of Deaton’s girlfriend, 30-year-old Heather Robinson, in a nearby apartment. Authorities later said she was strangled to death. On Monday, Bailey said Deaton’s last known location was 600 miles away, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where early Saturday morning he sent brief text messages to his mother and someone the sheriff only identified as a boy scout. "Since that time, I don’t know which way he’s gone," Bailey said. Some 60 miles from Robinson's apartment, in Neshoba County, Sheriff Tommy Wadell said that Deaton was a person of "great" interest in the killing of Brenda Pinter, 69, NBC affiliate WLBT reported. A white SUV was seen entering the parking lot of Dixon Baptist Church shortly after Pinter arrived at 4 p.m. (5 p.m. ET) to clean, as she does every week, her husband, Robert "Wayne" Pinter told NBC News. Brenda and Wayne Pinter Courtesy of Wayne Pinter When she didn't come home, her husband stopped by the church. There, in the office, he found her body. "I thought she had a heart attack maybe," he told NBC News. "[I] had no idea that she'd been shot." Wayne, 79, didn't know of any connection between his wife and Deaton, nor did he know why Deaton would have stopped by the church. But he said that Deaton grew up around Neshoba County. On Deaton’s Facebook page, there were photos of his children, motorcycles and, early last year, a seemingly pro-firearm, anti-Muslim meme. In June, he posted another image that says: "When a man is trying to change for the better, the worst you can do is keep reminding him of his past." It’s unclear how long Deaton and Robinson were a couple. In a statement, Robinson’s family asked for privacy and said that their "lives are forever changed and words cannot express our pain and sorrow." Robinson attended high school in Quitman, near the Alabama state line, and studied nursing at Mississippi University for Women. On her Facebook page, she posted gutsy quips about women, including this: "Real women are classy, strong, independent, loyal and loveable and one thing about them is they know they deserve better."Welcome back to the third, final, and probably most controversial installment in my Across the Aisle interview with Delta CEO Ed Bastian. If you missed part one about Los Angeles and the Pacific, find it here. And if you missed part two about getting cocky, arriving on time, and viral videos, that one is right here. I hadn’t even planned on asking about the Middle East carriers, because that wouldn’t have been near the top of my list with so much else to discuss. But when our time was up and Ed wanted to keep the party rolling so we could talk about the Middle East situation, I wasn’t going to turn it down. The airline has really ramped up the Middle East carrier rhetoric lately, so I think we can all get ready to hear a lot more about this. I’ve long believed that there’s a lot of noise in this battle, and that this really wasn’t about the Gulf hubs at all. It always seemed to me to be about future growth in fifth freedom flights that, without government intervention, will eventually allow Middle East airlines to connect the US with East Asia and Europe. (There are already a couple of questionable European routes flying.) I made sure to bring that up in the discussion, and Ed’s comments cemented by belief. Many people have brought up the hyprocrisy in calling out subsidies when other airlines receive them as well. I don’t buy some of those arguments, like, as mentioned in the interview, the Chapter 11 comparison, but there are others that seem more cloudy. That’s why I brought up China. My understanding is that some Chinese airlines are running an increasing number of loss-making flights with cheap seats over the Pacific thanks to local subsidies. As you see below, Ed has an alternative view. Brett Snyder, Cranky Flier: We’ve seen Emirates making some big cutbacks lately in the US, but as an overall strategy you still see these guys growing. Qatar just announced San Francisco. There’s more coming. Obviously Delta and others have been very vocal about the subsidization issue of Middle Eastern carriers. Where is that today, this fight, because it’s been going on for some time? Ed Bastion, CEO, Delta Air Lines: Well, we are working with a new administration. We spent a lot of time with the previous administration. We thought we had made our case to them, and I think they weren’t quite sure how to deal with the remedy. Cranky: They believed in the case. They just didn’t know what to do with it? Ed: I think that’s indeed the case. And I think they were trying to work the issue, and they ran out of time. This president ran on a platform of enforcing US trade agreements, fair trade as compared to free trade, and protecting American jobs and American interests. Given the size of the subsidies which we’ve had audited, we’ve had lawyers involved, forensic accounting involved, no-one has been able to give any evidence that they’re not subsidized. Fifty billion dollars is our expectation and we think it’s grown since then, because that was a couple years ago. So our government needs to decide what they’re going to do about it. The issue for me, Brett, is a very important issue because the US airlines are profitable, some of the most profitable airlines around the globe. It’s not going to cause us to go spiraling out of business any time soon, but it will over time. And over time it’ll be too late if we don’t do something about it now. And when you think about those three airlines combined have about 450 planes, widebodies. They have destroyed a large part of the European economics that the traditional carriers; Air France, KLM, Lufthansa… certainly other things that fit back to their businesses too. But that’s really hurt their traffic pulls Europe to Asia, Europe to Africa, Europe to the Middle East. Those profits are way off, and they’ve lost those and now they’re barely making money. They’re not growing anymore in those markets. Big social unrest as a result of that. They can’t pay their people. You go to Asia and you look at the issues that Singapore’s having. Look at the issues Cathay Pacific is having. A number of factors going on there, but the Middle Eastern carriers have had a significant impact in those markets. Cranky: It’s funny, because Singapore, the same charges were levied at them back when they started. Ed: Exactly. Well, the Middle Eastern carriers stole the business model from the Singaporeans. And then Australia where Qantas has now turned into largely a feeder airline for Emirates on an international scope. Of course they fly Australia to China and they do some local Asian flying, but the flights to Europe, the Kangaroo flights, that’s all been ceded to the Middle Eastern guys. Emirates is far larger, substantially larger than Qantas is. We don’t have to look too far. You know what’s gonna happen when you add another 500 aircraft, 540 to be specific, widebodies on order, firm orders, that are being built as we speak to be delivered over the next 5 to 8 years? Where are they gonna go? Are they gonna go to China? I don’t think the Chinese are going to let them in. Are they gonna go to Japan? I don’t think so. The Japanese aren’t going to let them in. The only other market that can sustain that level of volume is the US and they’re waving ’em in. They want to bring them over the Transatlantic undoubtedly. They want bring them through, establish Transatlantic markets they continue to poke at. They eventually want to bring them in over the Pacific, there’s no question in my mind of that. And it’s for to us to decide, ’cause if that is indeed is going to be what happens, then the US industry is going to be substantially smaller in 10 years from today than it is. And I think that’s a terrible thing for our international airlines, a terrible thing for our employees, a terrible thing for our customers, our communities and you know, they’re cheaters. They’re trade violators and they’re cheaters. And we need to hold them accountable. It’s easy when somebody pays billions of dollars to make issues go away… we’re here in Los Angeles, Emirates is the airline of the Dodgers. They’re all over Dodger Stadium. How can that be? They’ve got one flight a day, LA to Dubai. Can that sustain a sponsorship which I know is very expensive? That sponsorship costs many millions of dollars a year. Based on one flight, which they just cut back from two. How could that be? Or how could they be the sponsors of the US Open in New York, the tennis tournament, on two flights a day they got. These things have created outsize impacts not just in international aviation but the cost of sponsorships, the cost of service, and we need to do something about it. If it’s proven that they are not subsidized, fine. We’ll compete with anybody. But we can’t compete with a government that’s nation-building. That’s what they’re doing. In terms of wanting to turn their economy as they’re doing and have done into a center of global trade and commerce. That’s not right, it’s not fair, and we’re not going to stand for it. Cranky: So, the fifth freedom is the big concern, right? The ability to flow something through Europe or through Asia here? Because what they have now, I guess in theory they could add more cities to their Middle Eastern homes, but that’s probably more of a drop in the bucket
wild dates this weekend?” Separate him from the happy huckster insider caricature, and it makes more sense: a popular swing-state governor with a record to run on, a business background, and more connections to donors than any first-time presidential candidate ever. And no one outside the circles in which he’s famous for being the man working over donors or starring in Clinton conspiracy-theory fan fiction knows who he is (though it is true he had a chicken named “Hillary” who died right before the election, replaced by “Hillary Jr.”). “Anyone who first knew him 30 years ago, you would have said great fundraiser, great guy. No one would have thought of him as a plausible president,” said Bob Shrum, the Democratic consultant who knew him then, when they were working on Dick Gephardt’s 1988 campaign. “The governorship of Virginia has changed him.” And then there’s the other thought running through Democrats about 2020: “Maybe we need our own Trump.” He’s not the guy you can see as president of the United States, goes the thinking, and that’s exactly why he needs to run. As for the Clinton connections, he may not want to run Hillary Clinton’s third presidential campaign, but he can run only so far. They couldn’t be closer. He guaranteed the mortgage on their house in Washington. “Another candidate might not be able to get away with that, but Terry is such a big personality and so engaging, optimistic and happy, I see how he could pull that off,” said a veteran of the Clinton orbit. “He doesn’t have the ideal bio from which to run, but he’s a good athlete.” McAuliffe can be both kooky and confrontational, like when he sparked a mini-blowup by offering up in an interview during last year’s Democratic convention that Clinton would of course reverse herself and back the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal once she won, or the story he tells about confronting Trump at the National Governors Association dinner at the White House in February: “I looked him face to face, four inches from his eyeballs, and said, ‘Everything you have done has hurt my economy.’” Back in his Democratic National Committee chairman days, it was a reliable laugh line that he’d call every congressman “the greatest congressman in the country,” and he said he enjoys still being that guy. He takes credit for getting House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi involved in the fundraising roadshow they’ve been doing together with Eric Holder on behalf of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, saying he called her with the idea the day after Clinton lost, though both had already been part of a preliminary redistricting pitch to donors in Philadelphia the afternoon before Clinton’s convention acceptance speech. He exaggerates. He shoots his mouth off. He throws wild pitches. He’s fine with people calling him a sort of Bizarro Trump, though he doesn’t get the reference. “I have, luckily, boundless energy. I think everything is great. But yeah, I have fun,” McAuliffe said. “Listen, too many people are lemon suckers in politics today. I mean, at the end of the day, I have been successful by motivating people. People want to be with winners, not whiners.” In 2013, McAuliffe got more votes than any Democrat ever running for Virginia governor, but nonetheless squeaked out a 2.5-percentage-point win, despite outspending Ken Cuccinelli by $30 million and running right after the government shutdown that dented many Virginians’ bank accounts. Republicans’ first opposition research presentation on him, from 2013 and just as ready to go for 2020, includes “28 lies, 21 half-truths, 2 overstatements, 2 mostly-false statements” tied to his 2008 memoir “What a Party!” plus a section labeled “Special emphasis — McAuliffe the Businessman” and the statement “McAuliffe insists he’s not running for governor simply because he had time on his hands once Hillary Clinton’s campaign derailed.” Then there’s the presentation’s “What Manner of Man?” section that captures how, despite McAuliffe driving them crazy, Republicans can’t help but like him at least a little. The bullet points: • Restless, obsessive — routinely stays up all night with Bill Clinton • Sleeps no more than four hours most days • Seven or eight cups of coffee each day • Obsessive about golf • Claims to have run a three-hour marathon (1980) • Starts with a beer, before moving to something stronger Under “Limitations,” the document reads, “Be alert to McAuliffe pals in GOP ranks,” identifying those as “golfing buddies, ex-party chairs, anyone whose support can be bought.” “Terry McAuliffe is Bill Clinton without the women,” said Chris LaCivita, who was the general strategist for Cuccinelli’s campaign. LaCivita meant that as sort of a compliment, sort of not. “They don’t know what to make of me,” McAuliffe has often gushed. McAuliffe likes bragging about the record number of vetoes he’s sent back to the GOP-dominated state Legislature and said he’s proudest of restoring voting rights to felons who have served their sentences. He’s eagerly joining national fights, joining the state Climate Alliance formed after Trump announced the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and pardoning a woman who faced deportation after she was pulled over at a traffic stop because, he said, he wanted to make a statement even if he couldn’t stop the federal government from kicking her out. The Virginia Republican Party is leaning in, accusing him of pardoning the woman as a ploy for George Soros’ affections ahead of 2020 to try to rustle up some more dollars. So, “If the thought of President Terry McAuliffe makes you sick to your stomach give $5, $10, $25, or $50 to stop him now.” Just wait until they dig into his record as governor, LaCivita said. Just wait until they smack him with those Clinton ties to voters, while he’s working over his image with Beltway reporters. He won’t seem so enticing then. “Politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” LaCivita said. “If you were to ask a blind question on a poll, what do you think of this, does it sound good? Of course it sounds good. But so does ice cream every day for a week, until you’ve eaten it for seven days. It certainly sounds good, but then you’re stuck with the end result.” And Democrats are still processing the idea of this themselves. The guy who’s chased them down at parties and on the phone, running for president? “What person,” said Jay Jacobs, the megadonor and former New York State Democratic Party chair, “who runs for president doesn’t call me for money?”A 90-year-old schooner with North Shore origins is headed back home, laden with three tons of Maine-grown farm produce. The Adventure, as she's called, set sail from Portland, Maine, at first light Friday morning. The project is called Maine Sail Freight, and while it's part historical re-enactment, organizers say they're also out to make a serious point about food systems and regional economics. An 'Extraordinary' Sailing Craft — With Lots Of Cargo Space Shortly before noon Thursday, the Adventure chugs into Portland's working waterfront, with Capt. Stefan Edick at the helm. "Adventure is a 122-foot-long knockabout schooner, which means she has no bowsprit, and was a design innovation from the 1890s," Edick says. The Adventure was built in Gloucester in 1926, and Edick says she was the most successful fishing vessel to sail out of that port. Now, she's owned and operated as an educational nonprofit and listed as a national historic landmark. "She's an extraordinary sailing craft," Edick says. "She has an enormous amount of sail area, she is a fast and powerful vessel that's very maneuverable under sail." She also has a lot of storage space below decks. Once, it was used for cod, but today it's a different cargo. "We have many products from many family farms in Maine," says Severine Fleming, who manages the Sail Freight project. She's also director of Greenhorns, an advocacy group that supports America's new generation of young farmers. Soon after the Adventure's arrival, Fleming discusses with Edick how best to load up the cargo. "We're bringing dry beans, maple syrup, pickled beans, pickled fiddleheads, sea salt, seaweed, Maine-grown biscuit mix and grains," Fleming says. "So, basically, everything non-perishable." The cargo — worth about $70,000 — will be unloaded in Boston Harbor on Sunday. About a third of the goods have already been sold to customers in the area, but the remainder will be transported a few blocks by bicycle to the city's public market. The Adventure teems with workers getting the ship ready to sail. (Tom Porter/MPBN) Local For 'New' Business Models Leah Cook is with Fiddlers Green Farm, which is supplying much of the produce for the project. She says the idea is to educate people about local food systems and how relevant they are, even in a globalized economy. "I think it's important to be thinking creatively about transport and about provenance," Cook says, "so where our products are coming from and where they're going is something that's pretty important to us as Mainers who have multiple businesses producing food." Meanwhile, at the Portland waterfront, 6,000 pounds of farm goods are stacked up waiting to be loaded onto the Adventure. First Mate Bill Burke gives a safety briefing. "Some of these boxes are light, but some are heavy," he says. "We all have 10 fingers to start." Listening attentively are about a dozen volunteer stevedores who have turned out to help load. Among them is Jim Cornish, a heavily bearded farmer and teacher from the Midcoast. This project is important to him, he says, because it offers lessons from the past. "The ocean's always going to be here, and the wind's always going to blow. We don't know the same thing about fossil fuel or nuclear power or whatever else." "Do I think this is sustainable in that we're going to start moving the bulk of our food around by sail? No I don't," says Stephanie Welcomer. But the University of Maine business professor says the Maine Sail Freight project does an important job of demonstrating how reliant all food production and distribution systems are on a fossil fuel-based transportation model. "And as we know, with climate change it's important to think about how we can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels." And this, she says, involves coming up with new business models for the 21st century. This story originally appeared on Maine Public Broadcasting Network.Manchester United's controversial flotation in New York continues to provoke an angry reaction from supporters after it emerged that senior employees at Old Trafford stand to benefit from a share scheme worth up to $320m (£204m). A highly lucrative "2012 Equity Incentive Award Plan", as it is described in the Initial Public Offering (IPO) prospectus released on Monday, has raised questions among some United fans as to whether Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager, and David Gill, the chief executive, will stand to personally profit from the Glazers' decision to list the club on the New York stock exchange. United are refusing to comment on the situation. "Under the regulations of the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], we are not permitted to disclose the contents of the document," said a United spokesman. The Glazers, who are looking to raise up to $383m (£244m) by selling more than 19m shares in the Premier League club at up to $20 a piece, came in for severe criticism on Monday when it transpired they had reneged on their promise to use all the funds from a successful flotation to reduce United's £437m debts. Ferguson and Gill have both staunchly defended the American owners in the past, much to the dismay of those that have protested against the way that the club has been run since the Glazers' leveraged buyout in 2005. Only nine days ago, Ferguson described the Glazers as "great" and suggested that "the majority of real fans will look at it realistically and say it's not affecting the team". Those remarks went down badly with some supporters. Doubts also persist about how successful the IPO will prove to be, and the Equity Incentive Award Plan already looks like being a controversial element. According to the club's prospectus, United's executive committee, including Gill, are in line for a £1.25m IPO bonus once the deal is done. But the richest rewards will go to those selected to take part in the Equity Incentive Award Plan. The plan is designed to "attract, retain and motivate selected employees, consultants and non-employee directors", according to the prospectus. Some 16m shares – worth a potential $320m at the top end of the forecast IPO price – will be set aside for those selected to be part of the plan. The awards will be made using a variety of schemes and if the company is taken over, a "change of control" clause will allow United to pay out the share awards immediately. Andy Green, a financial analyst who writes the "andersred blog" on football ownership and is an adviser to the Manchester United Supporters Trust (Must), said United should clear up Ferguson's situation. "I'm not sure you can have a $288m [the mid-range valuation] benefit package for key employees and not include the manager," Green said. "I think he should probably come and tell the fans either way. If he's not benefited, fair enough. But it's certainly going to be something that's on a lot of people's minds." Green also believes Ferguson is on dangerous ground with his comments about the fans in relation to the Glazers. "I think he is risking tarnishing some of his legacy, which is a great shame because he is the greatest manager probably in English football history. But his association with all this skulduggery is sad. Also, he has rejected the fans who are understandably and correctly concerned about what is going on. Look at this IPO, it was promised to pay down the debt. It's now making hardly any impact – it's the owners taking money out and leaving the club in debt. Being concerned about that is perfectly legitimate. And then for him to say that you're not a real fan if you are concerned … well, that's quite staggering." Duncan Drasdo, the Must chief executive, is aware of fans' concerns but said that he wants to keep the spotlight on the Glazers for the moment. "I know people are asking if David Gill and Sir Alex Ferguson are going to benefit from the IPO and whether that has affected their statements. But I don't want to divert attention away from the terms of the IPO and the pressure we're trying to put on the banks."Gavin O’Connor, who directed Ben Affleck in the hit action-thriller The Accountant, has been tapped to write and helm Suicide Squad 2. The decision caps off months of Warner Bros. searching for someone to direct the sequel to its all-star movie. Mel Gibson was a frontrunner early in the year, while Jaume Collet-Serra, who directed the shark thriller The Shallows, was the favorite in the summer before he took the job directing Jungle Cruise for Disney. David Ayer directed 2016's Suicide Squad, which followed villains Deadshot, Harley Quinn, the Joker, Captain Boomerang and Killer Croc, who are forced into the service of the government in exchange for lighter sentences. Ayer is now developing Gotham City Sirens with Harley Quinn actress Margot Robbie, which focuses on the female villains of the DC Universe. It is unclear when the Suicide Squad follow-up will shoot. The cast is expected to return for the sequel, but scheduling will be an issue with the stars' packed schedules. Will Smith is currently filming Aladdin and then is set for Ang Lee's Gemini Man, while Robbie is currently filming Mary Queen of Scots. O’Connor's feature credits includes the beleaguered Natalie Portman Western Jane Got a Gun. While the director was a late-coming savior for Jane, the movie didn’t find an audience. But O’Connor did find success with Warner Bros. with The Accountant. The movie received solid reviews and earned $86 million domestically, and the studio has since greenlighted the development of a sequel, to which O'Connor is still attached to direct.Omaha police say they've made two arrests in connection with a shooting that injured a 13-year-old girl Thursday morning.According to police, the girl was sleeping over at a friend's house near 40th and Browne streets when gunfire broke out around 3:20 a.m.Paramedics took the girl, identified as Terije Carter, 13, to Alegent CUMC with a non-life-threatening injury.Authorities said two people in the area were booked on unrelated counts, but after questioning, police linked them to Thursday morning's shooting.Russell Perry, 21, and a 17-year-old boy were each booked on counts of first-degree assault and use of a weapon to commit a felony.Anyone with information on the case should call a detective at 402-444-5652. If you want to remain anonymous and be eligible for a cash reward, call Crime Stoppers at 402-444-7867. Omaha police say they've made two arrests in connection with a shooting that injured a 13-year-old girl Thursday morning. According to police, the girl was sleeping over at a friend's house near 40th and Browne streets when gunfire broke out around 3:20 a.m. Advertisement Paramedics took the girl, identified as Terije Carter, 13, to Alegent CUMC with a non-life-threatening injury. Authorities said two people in the area were booked on unrelated counts, but after questioning, police linked them to Thursday morning's shooting. Russell Perry, 21, and a 17-year-old boy were each booked on counts of first-degree assault and use of a weapon to commit a felony. Anyone with information on the case should call a detective at 402-444-5652. If you want to remain anonymous and be eligible for a cash reward, call Crime Stoppers at 402-444-7867. AlertMeThe Associated Press didn't need any help from a bunch of unshowered bloggers pecking away at their keyboards from the basement offices in which they play "reporter," thank you very much. Now it knows better. At the AP's 2009 annual meeting, Chairman Dean Singleton reminded his audience (read the speech) that the AP and its members "are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today." The collective remains "the gold standard of newsgathering and reporting throughout the world." And with 62 journalists killed, beaten, or detained in 2008, journalism "is not a profession for the fainthearted, or those who work in their pajamas." This final phrase was inaccurate—at Ars, for instance, we never break news while wearing anything less than an ascot and monocle—and surprisingly juvenile; one can feel the acid dripping from those words, even through a screen. The speech amounted to a near-total dismissal of bloggers as anything more than parasites in the news ecosystem. In the same talk, Singleton talked about how the AP "must be paid fully and fairly," then announced a new plan to pursue "misappropriation" of its content on the Internet. I'd quote more from Singleton's speech, but the AP's automated excerpting system informs me that I've already rung up a charge of $17.50 for my quotes above. Another sentence or two and I'd bump up into the $25 bracket. Fair use certainly applies here, but the AP warns darkly that "there is no specific number of words or lines that may safely be taken without permission" and that I may "want to do an internet search of 'fair use checklist' and 'copyright myths.'" To be safe, I'd best pay up. (I took my chances with fair use instead, as the AP itself does every day.) Don't rewrite us, either Over the course of 2009, it became clear that the "misappropriation" that so bothered the AP wasn't just rank copyright infringement; it also included people who "rewrite" a bit too much AP news—even though copyright doesn't protect ideas and facts, just their specific expression. At a Federal Trade Commission conference this year, the AP's Laura Malone expanded on this notion of "hot news," in which the AP has some control even over the facts found in its stories. [Hot news] protects people. It protects the news organizations who are sending their reporters out at a cost, and that cost is not just dollars and cents, that cost is also lives, that there are people who are sitting in their homes at their computers, reading what the AP has reported, at a cost, and retyping it, sending it, and reselling it, so there's the free writing that happens. There are direct competitors—the Associated Press losing its customers because they were able to purchase it at a lower cost from the person who sat in his living room and retyped the stories and stripped the Associated Press' credit off it... We're gonna put fewer reporters out in the field. We're gonna have fewer people and fewer bureaus out there. We're gonna have fewer people to read those three Chilean reports, those three Chilean reports that were gotten by people who were there on the site doing original sourcing and doing original reporting. So, I don't think it's just a footnote, though I do put it in my copyright-infringement letters, as well. I rely very heavily on hot news misappropriation. It doesn't take a "real reporter" to spot the bizarre logical contradiction in Malone's one example: her "real" English-language reporter gathered his initial news from other sources, who would presumably have the same right to go after the AP for "misappropriating" their work. The AP's "we're the center of the (news) universe" view of journalism has been undercut by reality for some time, but it has taken a while for that reality to percolate up the organizational ladder. A true, national "hot news" right would actually expose the AP and its members to all sorts of liability in a world where news is unearthed by a huge array of sources, then reported and built on by others. As Duke professor James Boyle said at the same conference, "They are assuming that this new [hot news] right will only be wielded by them. Not so. Think of political activists who break a story—for example the young conservative filmmakers who produced devastating information on the operation of the organization ACORN. They are a news source. They might think it was a great idea selectively to decide which news organizations got to report that story, at least as long as it was 'hot.' Does that sound attractive? I think not. And then think of the difficulties of proof, the possibility of chilling of speech by wrongly claiming to be its source. Implementation would be a nightmare." Making peace with the Internet That's why this week's AP policy statement on attribution was so interesting. "In the age of the Web, the sourcing and reliability of information has become ever more crucial. So it is more important than ever that we be consistent and transparent in our handling of information that originated elsewhere than our own reporting," it began. "We should provide attribution whether the other organization is a newspaper, website, broadcaster or blog; whether or not it’s US based; and whether or not it's an AP member or subscriber." Blogs! "Those who work in their pajamas" will be recognized when one of their stories bubbles up into the national media—something that happens with amazing frequency, and that often goes uncredited. The AP document provides several examples of proper attribution, again making sure to includes blogs as potential sources of real news: "Suppose Blog Y reports that the government has compiled a secret report on something, but we’re the first to find out what it says. We should still say, lower in the story, that 'The existence of the report was first reported by Blog Y.'" Now, the AP has been much better about providing both attribution and links recently—even when it comes to such crucial matters as a viral graphic depicting the "proper technique for exiting aircraft," designed by our own Aurich Lawson. The AP does recognize one useful limit to today's linked, interconnected, social news ecosystem: "It’s important to note that we shouldn’t use facts from a non-member news organization, even with credit, so frequently that we appear to be systematically and continuously free riding on that organization’s work." As a general principle, this sounds pretty fair. It's refreshing to see the AP move beyond some of its least-defensible rhetoric of the last year. The group doesn't foreswear the idea of a "hot news" right over the facts, but it does recognize just how many sources of breaking news now exist, and how much it relies on them. It doesn't admit that bloggers might operate in something other than pajamas, but it does recognize that they can serve as important story sources. Welcome to the, err, social. How far has this subtle shift in thinking gone? Back in June, the AP rolled out a new version of its famous style guide, which includes a Social Media Guidelines section that "includes information and policies on using tools like Facebook and Twitter, how journalists can apply them to their work, and how to verify sources found through them. Also included are 42 separate entries on such terms as app, blogs, click-throughs, friend and unfriend, metadata, RSS, search engine optimization, smart phone, trending, widget and wiki." Numerous individual AP writers have already taken these lessons to heart; a recent three-paragraph AP story consisted of little more than the verbatim tweet of a senior US State Department official. Fortunately for the AP, they didn't have to pay $17.50 or wait a set number of hours to reference the "hot news" contained in this particular tweet. Listing image by Flickr user thestarmamaSeveral provisions in the GOP tax plan threaten the future of renewable energy in the United States while bolstering support for nuclear reactors and the fossil fuel industry, according to a New York Times analysis. Despite the recent boom in electrical generation from wind and solar—which soared to a record 10 percent of the nation's total generation in June—and the fact that the solar industry alone employs more Americans that coal, gas, and oil sectors combined, both the House and Senate versions of the Republican tax plan propose altering the conditions that have enabled the U.S. renewable industry to blossom. "In different ways, direct and indirect, the House and Senate bills each imperil elements of" renewable energy's rise, Brad Plumer and Jim Tankersley write for the Times. The two bills will undergo a reconcilation process with the intention of sending a final version to the president's desk before the new year. During the conference panel to finalize the bill, lawmakers will review the multiple measures expected to curtail U.S. renewable energy production, as the Times details: A Senate bill provision intended to stop multinational companies from shifting profits overseas could unexpectedly cripple a key financing tool used by the renewable energy industry, particularly solar, by eroding the value of tax credits that banks and other financial institutions buy from energy companies. The House bill's effects would be more direct, rolling back tax credits for wind farms and electric vehicles, while increasing federal support for two nuclear reactors under construction in Georgia.... 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 wind industry has warned that the House language, which would reduce the wind tax credit to 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, from 2.4 cents, and change eligibility rules, could eliminate over half of the new wind farms planned in the United States. Amy Grace, a renewables analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told the Times that "in the long run, we think wind and solar will become cheap enough to compete without subsidies.... but in the short term, those tax credits have been important." Although the Senate bill would not cut the vital tax credits for wind and solar, the Senate's Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax—which aims to stop companies from shifting profits abroad—would impose restrictions on renewable energy companies that sell credits to banks and investors, cutting off the companies from vital financing, thereby jeopardizing wind and solar farms nationwide. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, is "under little pressure in either bill;" in fact, producers of oil and gas are expected to benefit from the final bill. Despite widespread protests, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has led an effort to require the federal governent to permit drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, and an amendment by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) essentially proposes lowering the tax rates on oil and gas companies' profits. As the Huffington Post explained in a report published earlier this week, Cornyn's amendment takes a cue from the Republican leaders' goal of drastically reducing the corporate tax rate, and would lower the rate for a specific type of business model that is subject to "pass-through" taxation and is often utilized by the fossil fuel industry.I am plant-based. Essentially, this means I don’t eat anything with a face or a mother. Animals find this agreeable. I’m also an ultra-endurance athlete. Essentially, this means I don’t go all that fast, but I can go all day. My wife finds this agreeable. Conventional wisdom is that “vegan” and “athlete” simply don’t get along — let’s call it irreconcilable differences. I’m here to say that is utter bullshit. “But where do you get your protein?” Not a day goes by that I am not asked this question. If I had a dollar for every time this came up, everyone in my family would be driving a Tesla. Most vegans bristle at the question. Armed for battle, they assume a defensive position and hunker down for the inevitable, age-old omnivore versus herbivore fight that always ensues. Because belief systems around food are entrenched — it’s right up there with religion and politics — emotions run high. Before you can blink, arrows are flying in both directions. Conversation becomes debate. And debate all too often devolves into mudslinging — an endless, hopelessly unproductive merry-go-round that leaves each side further entrenched in their preferred dogma and never leads anywhere constructive. I hate that — it’s why a large portion of the general public find vegans so unpalatable. Instead, I welcome the question. If someone is asking, I presume a genuine interest; simply an opportunity for a productive dialog. So let’s try to have that dialog. The productive kind. My perspective on the elephant in the room — nothing more, nothing less. We live in a society in which we have been willfully misled to believe that meat and dairy products are the sole source of dietary protein worthy of merit. Without copious amounts of animal protein, it’s impossible to be healthy, let alone perform as an athlete. The message is everywhere — from a recent (and wildly successful I might add) high-profile dairy lobby ad campaign pushing chocolate milk as the ultimate athletic recovery beverage (diabolically genius) to compelling food labels to a dizzying array of fitness expert testimonials. Protein, protein, protein — generally reinforced with the adage that more is better. Whether you are a professional athlete or a couch potato, this hardened notion is so deeply ingrained into our collective belief system that to challenge its propriety is nothing short of anathema. But through direct experience I have come to believe that this pervasive notion is at best misleading, if not altogether utterly false, fueled by a well funded campaign of disinformation perpetuated by powerful and well-funded BigFood, BigAg industrial animal agriculture interests that have spent countless marketing dollars to convince society that we absolutely need these products in order to breathe air in and out of our lungs. The animal protein push is not only based on lies, it’s killing us, luring us to feast on a rotunda of factory farmed, hormone and pesticide induced low-fiber foods extremely high in saturated fat which — despite the current populist fervor over high fat, low carb diets — I remain convinced is indeed a contributing factor to our epidemic of heart disease (the world’s #1 killer) and many other western diet and lifestyle induced infirmities that have rendered our prosperous nation one of the sickest societies on Earth. Indeed, protein is an essential nutrient, absolutely critical not just in building and repairing muscle tissue, but in the maintenance of a wide array of important bodily functions. But does it matter if our protein comes from plants rather than animals? And how much do we actually need? Proteins consist of twenty different amino acids, eleven of which can be synthesized naturally by our bodies. The remaining nine — what we call essential amino acids — must be ingested from the foods we eat. So technically, our bodies require certain amino acids, not protein per se. But these nine essential amino acids are hardly the exclusive domain of the animal kingdom. In fact, they’re originally synthesized by plants and are found in meat and dairy products only because these animals have eaten plants. Admittedly, plant-based proteins are absorbed differently than animal proteins. And not all plant-based proteins are “complete”, containing all nine essential amino acids — two arguments all too often raised to negate the advisability of shunning animal products. But in truth, a well-rounded whole food plant-based diet that includes a colorful rotation of foods like sprouted grains, nuts, seeds, vegetables and legumes will satisfy the demanding protein needs of even the hardest training athlete — without the saturated fat that (despite recent studies to the contrary I take issue with) I am convinced contributes to heart disease, the casein that has been linked to the onset of a variety of diseases including cancer, or the whey — a highly processed, low grade discard of cheese production (another diabolical stroke of genius courtesy of the dairy industry that created a zillion dollar business out of stuff previously tossed in the garbage). On a personal anecdotal level, adopting a plant-based lifestyle 8 years ago repaired my health wholesale and revitalized my middle-aged self to re-engage fitness in a new way. As hard as it may seem to believe, the truth is that my athletic accomplishments were achieved not in spite of my dietary shift but rather as direct result of adopting this new way of eating and living. I’m not alone in this belief. Just ask Oakland Raiders defensive tackle David Carter. Watch this video of strongman Patrik Baboumian breaking a World Record for most weight carried by a human being when he hauled over 1200 pounds — roughly the weight of a Smart Car — 10 meters across a stage in Toronto last year. Witness two-time World Champion Freerunner and parkour artist Timothy Shieff hopscotching off rooftops like a video game character and be amazed by this video of plant-based strength athlete freak-of-nature Frank Medrano doing things with his body you didn’t think possible. Then there’s MMA/UFC fighters like Mac Danzig, Jake Shields and James Wilks. Multisport athletes like Brendan Brazier, Rip Esselstyn and Ben Bostrom — a world renown motorcycle, mountain and road bike athlete & victorious member of this year’s Race Across America 4-man relay team; Professional triathlete & Ultraman World Champion Hillary Biscay who just raced her 66th Ironman; Ultramarathoners extraordinaire like Scott Jurek, his fruitarian compadre Michael Arnstein, and my old friend Jason Lester, with whom I completed 5 ironman distance triathlons on 5 Hawaiian islands in under a week who has since criss-crossed the USA on two feet and is currently prepping for a 100 day run across China. Then of course there is Timothy Bradley, Jr. who took down Manny Pacquiao last year (well kind of, but you get my drift). The point is this: each of these athletes, and countless others, will all tell you the same thing: rather than steak, milk, eggs and whey supplements, opt instead to eat lower on the food chain and source your protein needs from healthy plant-based sources like black, kidney and pinto beans, almonds, lentils, hemp seeds, spirulina, quinoa, and dark leafy greens like spinach and broccoli. Even if you ate nothing but fruit, you still would never suffer a protein deficiency — short of starving yourself, it’s almost impossible. Despite the incredibly heavy tax I impose on my body, training at times upwards of 25 hours per week for ultra-endurance events, this type of regimen has fueled me for years without any issues with respect to building lean muscle mass. In point of fact, I believe eating plant-based has significantly enhanced my ability to expedite physiological recovery between workouts — the holy grail of enhancing athletic performance. In fact, I can honestly say that at age 47, I am fitter than I have ever been, even when I was competing as a swimmer at a world-class level at Stanford in the late 1980’s. And despite what you might have been told, I submit that more protein isn’t better. Satisfy your requirement and leave it at that. With respect to athletes, to my knowledge no scientific study has ever shown that consumption of protein beyond the RDA advised 10 percent of daily calories stimulates additional muscle growth or expedites physiological repair induced by exercise stress. And yet most people — the overwhelming majority of whom are predominantly sedentary — generally consume upwards of 3-times the amount of daily protein required to thrive. The protein craze isn’t just an unwarranted, over-hyped red herring, it’s harmful. Not only is there evidence that excess protein intake is often stored in fat cells, it contributes to the onset of a variety of diseases such as osteoporosis, cancer, impaired kidney function and heart disease. Still not convinced? Consider this: some of the fiercest animals in the world — the elephant, rhino, hippo and gorilla— are Plantpowered herbivores. And nobody asks them where they get their protein. So ditch that steak and join me for a bowl of quinoa and lentils.Notes on police violence in America Victoria, Texas police kill 25-year-old father with PTSD outside his home By Zaida Green 1 May 2015 Twenty-five-year-old Brandon Lawrence, an Afghanistan veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, was shot by police multiple times outside his home last weekend while his family was inside. Lawrence was pronounced dead at a hospital the following morning, April 26. The two unnamed officers involved have been placed on paid administrative leave. Police responded to a disturbance call last Saturday around 11 p.m., after Lawrence and a neighbor had gotten into an argument. Lawrence told his wife, Yasmine, that
and cheaper. Last year a research group (Photonics Systems Group) working out of the University of California in San Diego (USA), specifically its Qualcomm Institute, published a paper that theorised how it might be possible to pre-empt “the distortion effects that will happen in the optical fiber” and in so doing you could also remove the interference. Nikola Alic, co-Author of the Research Paper, said: “Today’s fiber optic systems are a little like quicksand. With quicksand, the more you struggle, the faster you sink. With fiber optics, after a certain point, the more power you add to the signal, the more distortion you get, in effect preventing a longer reach. Our approach removes this power limit, which in turn extends how far signals can travel in optical fiber without needing a repeater.” Until now it has remained a significant roadblock that any increase in optical data transmission rates, beyond a threshold power level, would effectively distort the information travelling inside the cable. But the same team that last year theorised a solution to this problem has now proven their work in a live experiment. The team were able to boost the power of their transmission some 20 fold and push data over a “record-breaking” 12,000km (7,400 miles) long fibre optic cable. Amazingly the data was still intact at the other end and that was achieved without using repeaters and only needing standard amplifiers (the cost of repeaters plays a big part in the overall expense of such networks). How did they do it? Information sent down fibre optic cables is generally split into multiple channels of communication (up to 200 can be used in modern cables), which each operate at different frequencies (i.e. light can be split into different colours [red, green, blue etc.] and this is a good way of visualising how the different channels are separated). Essentially what the UC San Diego researchers did was to develop a system (frequency comb) that acts a bit like a concert conductor, which is the person responsible for tuning multiple instruments in an orchestra to the same pitch at the beginning of a concert. The engineers then used this comb to synchronize the frequency variations of the different streams of optical information (optical carriers), which can compensate in advance for the crosstalk interference (this will be familiar to those who have been reading about FTTC / VDSL2 Vectoring technology on copper cables) that can occur between multiple communication channels within the fibre optic cable. The frequency comb also ensures that the crosstalk interference is reversible. In some approaches this calculation of pre-distortion is already done with existing systems, but not across all the channels together. Apparently the experimental setup only tested the approach with 3 and 5 optical frequency channels, although the researchers claim that their system could be used in significantly larger setups with many channels. This is important to know since many of today’s primary capacity carrying cables use around 30+ channels. Stojan Radic, UC San Diego Professor, said: “Crosstalk between communication channels within a fiber optic cable obeys fixed physical laws. It’s not random. We now have a better understanding of the physics of the crosstalk. In this study, we present a method for leveraging the crosstalk to remove the power barrier for optical fiber. Our approach conditions the information before it is even sent, so the receiver is free of crosstalk caused by the Kerr effect.” The solution, assuming it propagates well into an existing commercial environment (the cost of transmitters might still be an issue), suggests that the future cost of both national and international data capacity could be about to fall. It may also delay the need to build new cables and stave off fears of a future “capacity crunch“.. at least for a little longer, which is always welcome. At the same time by improving the transmission quality with this method you also make it possible to sustain faster speeds over longer distances, although this is more relevant to international transmissions. Home users won’t be demanding more speed from 1000Mbps FTTH/P lines anytime soon (not that many people have those) and in any case domestic services are usually delivered over shorter distances where issues like the one explain above are less of a problem.MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - The daughter of a Milwaukee-area woman killed in a mass shooting at her workplace is suing the operators of an online marketplace for gun buyers and sellers that the gunman used to buy his firearm, court documents showed. Radcliffe Haughton, 45, shot and killed his estranged wife Zina Haughton, 42, along with two other women on Oct. 21, 2012, at Azana Salon and Spa in suburban Brookfield, where she worked. The lawsuit was filed on Wednesday in Milwaukee County Circuit Court on behalf of Zina’s daughter Yasmeen Daniel against the website Armslist.com. Days before the shooting, Haughton used Armslist.com to make contact with Devin Linn, a private gun seller. Linn sold Haughton a.40-caliber handgun and high-capacity magazines for $500 the day before the shooting, the complaint said. Federal law makes gun manufacturers and suppliers largely immune to lawsuits with some exceptions. One of the exceptions is when a gun supplier is negligent in the sale of a firearm. The lawsuit claims Armslist.com operators and Linn were negligent for failing to run a background check on Haughton who was not allowed to have a firearm because of a restraining order granted to Zina days before the shooting. Haughton used Armslist.com to avoid background checks, the complaint said. The lawsuit also claims Armslist.com and Linn had the obligation to exercise reasonable care in selling guns so that the public was not at risk. Daniel’s lawyer, Patrick Dunphy, and a lawyer for Armslist.com operators Broc Elmore, Brian Mancini and Jonathan Gibbon were not immediately available to comment. Radcliffe Haughton’s estate is also listed as a defendant in the lawsuit. Daniel seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages, the complaint said. A week ago, a Milwaukee County Circuit Court jury awarded $6 million to clients of lawyer Dunphy - two police officers who sued a gun store. The jury found that Badger Guns was negligent by allowing a so-called straw purchase of a gun that was used to shoot the two officers in May 2009. If the verdict against the gun store survives possible appeals, it would be the first of its kind since 2005, when the gun manufacturer and supplier immunity law was passed by Congress.September may well be the busiest month for Texas game wardens. Fishing and boating are just as popular as they were during much of the summer, and officers have to spend considerable time patrolling inland and coastal waters. But September also brings the opening of dove season, which sees as many as 300,000 Texans head afield across the state. Opening weekend, especially, draws huge numbers of dove hunters. With that many people afield, especially on Opening Weekend, Texas game wardens have a full plate. Dove season invariably produces the most hunting-related citations Texas wardens issue. So it’s no surprise that most of the cases and incidents worked by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department over the past three weeks or so are associated with their policing dove hunters. But there have been plenty of other things keeping Texas wardens busy, as the first three items in this edition of our continuing series of field reports from wardens illustrate. Val Verde County Game Wardens Mike Durand and Aaron Willoughby were kept busy over the weekend of Sept. 8-9 investigating reports of mountain lions roaming the outskirts of Del Rio. The first investigation was for a horse that allegedly had been attacked and the second involved a herd of goats. Wardens found no indications or evidence that a mountain lion is roaming and feeding on pets in Del Rio. The wardens also ruled out the chupacabra. That rash of mountain lion reports may well have been triggered by a Sept. 5 incident in which Val Verde County Game Warden Mike Durand responded to a call from the Del Rio Police Department concerning a mountain lion sitting on a hood of a car in downtown Del Rio. The lion had been cornered in a building and the PD wanted to know if it was OK to shoot it. Because of the lion’s location and behavior, it was dispatched by the Del Rio Police Department. Van Zandt County Game Wardens Trent Herchman and Steve Stapleton were contacted July 18 by a local ranch owner concerning a unique photograph taken on his remote-sensing game camera. The photo showed a female subject, who had a very distinct tattoo, holding a white-tailed deer fawn. The photograph had been taken in May, on the same date and time the ranch had been burglarized and several firearms, miscellaneous hunting equipment and a Polaris Ranger ATV were stolen. Unable to identify the subject in the photo, wardens conducted a press conference seeking public help in naming the female subject. Wardens soon received several Operation Game Thief calls, all of which identified the woman in the photo, giving her name. The pair of wardens also received a tip concerning the suspect’s location in Smith County, and went to that location accompanied by Wood County Game Warden Derek Spitzer. Wardens found the subject at the residence and questioned her. She confessed, and identified her accomplice. The investigation led to a substantial amount of stolen items being recovered, including three guns and the Ranger ATV. The case was turned over to the Van Zandt County Sheriff’s Office for prosecution, where burglary of a habitation, trespass and unlawful use of a motor vehicle were filed on all subjects. Cooke County Game Warden Darla Barr was checking for dove hunters on the Corps of Engineers public hunting areas when a vehicle approached, stopped when it saw Warden Barr’s vehicle and started to turn around and leave. This piqued Warden Barr’s curiosity, so she motioned for the vehicle, which held two occupants, to continue her way. The driver advised that he really wasn’t dove hunting even though he had a fully loaded shotgun shoved down between the passenger seat and door. A closer check of the gun found it to have been reported stolen out of Kaufman County in 2006. The driver was cooperative in giving details on how he came into possession of the stolen firearm. The shotgun was recovered and the investigation continues. The passenger, however, was cited for possessing drug paraphernalia. Case pending. Washington County Game Warden Eddie Hines recently received information on a possible hunting violation from a local cyber crimes unit. Warden Hines interviewed an individual who had posted a photo on his Facebook page of six cattle egrets – birds protected by state and federal law – that had been taken during a dove hunt on Labor Day. The individual had stated on his Facebook page that only three doves had been killed because the egrets got in the way. The subject gave a statement including how he and three other individuals had shot the cattle egrets, information on the other three hunters and the location of the violation, which occurred in Austin County. With assistance from Austin County Game Warden Sonny Alaniz, statements were obtained from the other three subjects. Citations and restitution pending on all four subjects. Game Warden Phillip Wood in July received an Operation Game Thief call concerning a butchered deer that had fallen into the road from a cooler located on top of a Jeep. The caller stated that the deer had been quartered, and that he would remain with the deer until the warden arrived. Also, the caller had followed the suspects’ vehicle and had noted the license plate number and gave a very good description of the suspects. Warden Wood was able to trace the plate to a residence nearby. After a short interview with the driver of the jeep, Warden Wood left the scene and contacted Warden Tim Walker to help with the investigation. Wardens Wood and Walker conducted a thorough investigation, spending several days tracking down individuals who also been involved in illegally taking the deer. The case was recently disposed of in county court with the shooter (driver of the Jeep) being filed on for hunting from a vehicle and waste of game. The other four individuals were filed on in JP court. The shooter received two years probation, 40 hours of community service and his hunting privileges are suspended for two years. He also faces civil restitution charges. The other four received maximum fines in JP court. The court awarded TPWD the firearm used in commission of the offense. Waller County Game Warden Kevin Glass and Harris County Game Warden Mark Bane were patrolling Waller County. Just before sunset on Sept. 7 when they heard multiple shots coming from a wooded area. The wardens made their way through the trees and observed three dove hunters having a great hunt. However, the hunters were not retrieving the doves they downed that fell into the woods. If they had, they would have found two very hot and sweaty Texas Game Wardens. After approximately 30 minutes, one of the hunters announced to his friends, “I am done. I have 23.” The wardens looked at each other to verify what the hunter had just yelled to his friend. The daily bag limit of doves is 15. Then the hunter yelled out again, “I am done. I have 23 doves.” The wardens took his word for it and announced their presence, separated the hunters, and discovered one with 20 doves, not 23. (The other two were within the daily bag limit). Warden Glass walked the hunter who was over his limit back to the hunter’s truck to retrieve his license. At the truck, Warden Glass observed dove feathers that appeared to be from the morning, and stated, “This morning’s hunt was good, wasn’t it?” The hunter promptly agreed that it was really good, and then realized what he had done, and said, “Oh, no.” He admitted that he had also shot a 15-dove limit that morning. Citations were issued for exceeding daily bag limit and fail to retrieve game. While patrolling on opening day of dove season, Cherokee County Game Wardens Eric Collins and Brian Bearden heard shots, attempted to locate the hunters and found an ATV parked in a nearby pasture. Wardens observed grains of milo on the back of the ATV, and also found the grain spread across mowed portions of the pasture. When the five hunters finally emerged from the brush, they admitted to baiting the area two weeks earlier and hunting it that day. Wardens issued citations for hunting dove over bait. As the wardens were leaving, the little son of one of the hunters came up to the wardens’ truck and knocked on the door to tell the wardens that they all had been hiding in the barn. Kids never lie. Cases pending. Palo Pinto County Game Wardens Matt Waggoner and David Pellizzari were patrolling for dove hunters on Sept. 2 when they came across a group of people sitting just inside a gate. As the wardens drove up, they observed one subject immediately put his gun down next to his buddy and put his hands in his pockets. After a search of the area and all the people, the wardens found five packages of synthetic marijuana, two empty containers with marijuana residue, and three marijuana pipes. Wardens Pellizzari and Waggoner also found two unplugged shotguns, three subjects without hunter education and one subject without a hunting license. The subject observed putting his gun down next to his buddy turned out to be a convicted felon and was arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. Multiple citations were issued to the other violators. All cases pending. Hill County Warden Douglas Volcik received a complaint Sept. 2 from a local hunting guide indicating a couple of hunters were refusing to leave the field and demanding to have their money returned to them because they felt that they didn’t have the opportunity to limit out while dove hunting. Warden Volcik and McLennan County Warden Michael Serbanic responded, escorted the subjects from the hunting area and issued citations for criminal trespass. Bell County Game Warden Brandt Bernstein checked more than 100 dove hunters opening morning, writing 23 citations to hunters in a single field. Warden Bernstein asked the owner of the property if this was a commercial day-lease hunting operation. The owner stated that to show his appreciation to people with whom he does business, he let them hunt there, and at the end of the day he gave away a shotgun. Because of the landowner’s demeanor and known previous TPWD violations, Warden Bernstein asked several of the hunters in the field what they paid to hunt. They stated they were paying $65 per day. Warden Bernstein finished making his round in the field and filed on the owner of the property for not having the required hunting lease license. Hutchinson/Carson County Game Warden Lance Lindley on Sept. 2 assisted Carson County deputies unpin a farmer who was wedged between a round hay baler door and the baler’s tire. The farmer was changing a broken belt on the baler when a hydraulic hose broke allowing the baler door to slam down on him and wedge him between it and the tire. Warden Lindley and the deputies hooked onto the door with a chain and patrol truck and slowly raised the door, unpinning the farmer who was taken to an Amarillo hospital by EMS staff. Bandera County Game Warden Mark McQueary reports a toxicology test on one of two subjects who drowned last month in Medina Lake had a blood alcohol level of.38, more than four times the.08 BAC Texas law sets as intoxicated. Wardens had assisted in responding to the drowning and utilized the side-scan sonar to locate the subjects. Over Labor Day weekend, Caldwell County Game Warden Joann Garza-Mayberry led an operation on the San Marcos River with Caldwell County constables, constable deputies, sheriff’s office deputies and DPS troopers. The group made arrests and wrote 122 citations that included minor in possession of alcohol, consumption of alcohol by a minor, possession of drug paraphernalia, littering, insufficient number of personal flotation devices, failure to identify and public intoxication. While patrolling the San Marcos River by kayak during the operation, Warden Joann Garza-Mayberry received a call from the sheriff’s office regarding an unconscious subject on the river. The caller reported the male was intoxicated, lost consciousness, fell out of his tube and was under water for a while before bystanders lifted him out of the water. The caller was unable to give an accurate location where EMS could access the victim. Warden Mayberry was able to locate the individual based on landmarks the caller provided on the river. Because of the steep pitch of the river bank where the subject was lying, he was inaccessible to medical staff. Warden Mayberry waded to the victim, placed him on her kayak, transported him to a nearby bank and provided the sheriff’s office the location of an accessible path. A sheriff’s office sergeant was able to access the location given by vehicle, and the two officers transported the male subject by truck to the waiting paramedics who took the man to an area hospital. While patrolling for dove hunting compliance near Lake Alan Henry on Sept. 2, Game Wardens Drew Spencer and Trey Kram responded to an accident involving a boat/truck collision, with injuries, at a private boat ramp. Seems a large ski boat, with occupants, was being backed down the ramp when it came off the hitch and rolled down the ramp at what one bystander estimated was about 50 miles an hour. The loose boat slammed into the grill of a large truck offloading its boat. The occupants of the unhitched boat were slammed around and suffered injuries. Game Warden Kevin Mitchell responded to an OGT call the night of Aug. 24 regarding a subject cast netting undersized blue catfish on Lake Corpus Christi. The caller indicated that the male violator was filleting the fish, placing the fillets into a box, and his wife would hide the box in their vehicle. Upon arrival at the scene, Warden Mitchell noticed the cast net and man and woman as described by the caller. The male subject denied having any fish other than the four legal blue cats in a bucket. Warden Mitchell asked for and received consent to search the subject’s vehicle in which he found 88 fillets in a shoe box. Cases pending. Washington County Game Warden Eddie Hines received a tip in mid-August concerning a subject who had shot and killed an alligator out of season. The subject made an attempt to have the reptile mounted by a taxidermist in Fannin County. Warden Hines notified Fannin County Game Warden Randolph McGee about the illegal kill. Warden McGee located the individual’s residence and contacted Collin County Game Warden Josh Ross who visited the subject’s home and learned that the subject was no longer in possession of the alligator. The subject stated that after learning that the kill was illegal, he went back to retrieve the alligator from his refrigerator and found the reptile was still alive. The subject stated that he then took the alligator down to the creek and released it – well, he “released” it after he shot it in the head with a.22 caliber rifle. Case pending.I was sipping on a pint in an Irish bar in Bangkok like a stereotypical Paddy, when I got chatting to a fellow Irishman who told me about Thailand GAA. I couldn’t believe there could be a GAA club here, but a Google search proved me wrong, and a few weeks later I found myself at a training session. I was greeted by several lads and ladies from Ireland, the UK, America and Canada, and I am still friends with many of the people I met on that first day. Local Gaelic clubs in Ireland are the focal points of the local communities, and our club in Bangkok, a long distance from Ireland, offers a similar home away from home for our members. We play for the love of the sport and to keep fit, but we also provide a social community for expats and locals, which is as important as the sport itself. We organise events throughout the year including quizzes, nights out, fun runs, and charity fundraisers. We also host what we believe is Thailand’s only 12 Pubs of Christmas, which helps us feel festive on the other side of the world from friends and family. The first tournament I experienced with the club was the Asian Gaelic Games (AGG) in Kuala Lumpur in 2014. Arriving at the venue, I could not believe my eyes when I saw what seemed like thousands of people getting ready to compete. This weekend, the games will be held on home soil in schools around Bangkok, with 700 players arriving from all over the Asia and the Middle East. Gathering Now in its 22nd year, the AGG involves teams including Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. It is the biggest gathering of the Irish community in Asia with over 1,000 people coming together to celebrate Irish culture and craic by supporting and playing Gaelic football, hurling and camogie. This is the second time Thailand GAA have acted as hosts. The club was formed in 2007 by John Campbell, Derek Martin, Padraic Ellicott and Ultan Peters, and made its competitive debut at the 2007 Asian Gaelic Games in Singapore. This year we are celebrating our 10th anniversary with a record number of members and nationalities. Currently we field five teams: two men’s and two ladies football teams, and a men’s hurling team. For the first time in our club’s history we will be fielding a team consisting of all Thai nationals this year, in an effort to further promote Gaelic Games here in Thailand and across Asia. ‘We are now working towards developing the GAA in Thailand by entering an all Thai team for the first time in our history. A big thanks is owed to Kevin MacHugh and Niall Geraghty for showing the lads the skills needed.’ We regularly play challenge matches against visiting teams, hold exhibition matches and have an intra-club tournament twice a year. We have a good relationship with the Australian Rules club in Bangkok, the Tigers, and regularly play compromise rules games. Growth The club has experienced a real upsurge in interest over the past few years, and a lot of this has been on the back of the success of our ladies team. We regularly get up to 40 players at our weekly training sessions with an equal split of men and women. We have new people attending every week, and welcome all nationalities from complete beginners to seasoned players. After developing our Thai Men’s football team, our next aim is to grow participation among the younger age groups. A number of international schools have been playing Gaelic football in recent years, and we are now looking to take the sport into some local schools. Our ladies teams travelled to Vietnam for the Indochina cup in February. We also hosted the first round of the inaugural South Asian Ladies League in April, which was a roaring success, before our ladies team travelled for the second round to Kuala Lumpur in October. Our men’s teams have participated in the Indochina Cup, hosted by The Viet Celts in Hanoi in February, The South Asian Games hosted by Saigon Gaels in Vietnam in May, and the Peninsula Cup hosted by Johor Boru in Malaysia in October. Our hurlers and camogie players also travelled to Singapore for the Asian Hurling Championship in September. As we continue to grow, we are fortunate to have the support of some local businesses including LawtonAsia Insurance Brokers, The Drunken Leprechaun, The Kiwi Bangkok, The Paddy Fields Irish Bar and Restaurant, the Irish Thai Chamber of Commerce and the St Patrick’s Society of Bangkok. The Irish Ambassador to Thailand, H.E. Brendan Rogers, has been a great supporter of the club since his arrival. After the months of hard work organising the tournament, I can speak on behalf of the other lads and ladies involved with the organisation in saying we can’t wait for a great weekend of sport and craic this Saturday and Sunday. For more information about Thailand GAA, see thailandgaa.com or follow the club on Facebook at Thailand GAA (Gaelic Football) or Twitter @ThailandGAALawmakers will have to declare whether their aides are 'official' staff or not. Republican senators put aides on exchanges All but one of the top-ranking Senate Republican leaders plan to place all of their staffers on the Obamacare health exchanges. But it’s still unclear whether the Democratic Senate leadership will follow suit. House leaders haven’t yet said whether they will put their aides on the D.C. health-insurance exchange, or keep them under their current health care plan. Story Continued Below A spokesman said on Monday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) staff will get their insurance from the “DC Health Link” under a controversial provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires lawmakers and many Capitol Hill staffers to enter the exchanges by Oct. 31. ( PODCAST: Questioning Obamacare glitches - who knew what, when?) The Kentucky Republican has designated all of his aides part of his personal office, which means his staffers will receive their insurance from the exchange rather than through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. “None of the McConnell staff will be designated to remain in the FEHBP [Federal Employee Health Benefits Program],” said Michael Brumas, a spokesman for McConnell. “Unlike the entire Obama administration — who are trying to convince Americans that the government exchanges are great — we are not exempt from the exchanges.” It’s up to lawmakers to declare whether their aides are “official office” staff or not, according to a memo sent Tuesday to all House offices by Daniel Strodel, the House’s chief administrative officer. “Official office” staff — aides paid entirely out of the member’s expense allowance — will be required to join the D.C. exchange. Members of Congress or their “designees” will decide “which staff work in the official office of each member.” But some Republican senators have made the move already. ( Also on POLITICO: Unions sitting out ACA enrollment) Staffers for Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas will also enter the exchanges, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday. Cornyn and McConnell join two other Republican leaders — John Thune (R-S.D.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) — who have decided to have their staff obtain their health insurance from the exchange. The fifth-ranking Republican, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), indicated his leadership aides would stay on the federal benefits program. “Whatever staff meets the definition of official staff, which would be almost all of my staff and me, would have to go on the exchanges,” Blunt told POLITICO. “As long as the law continues to treat official staff and committee and leadership staff differently, we’re going to follow the law.” Blunt can choose to keep his leadership aides on the federal benefits program because the health care law doesn’t require leadership or committee staffers to join the exchanges. Meanwhile, Senate Democratic leaders didn’t directly answer the question of their plans for their staff, though Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a member of leadership and the Budget Committee chairwoman, will put all of her staff on the health exchanges. ( PHOTOS: 25 unforgettable Obamacare quotes) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday gave a somewhat cryptic answer to a question of whether he planned to put his staffers on the exchanges, telling reporters: “I’m following the law as closely as I can.” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said his office is “working on it.” And Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) does not divulge internal office policies, an aide said. On the other side of the Capitol, Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) office would not say whether it will require its aides to join the exchange. “We do not have any decision to announce, and will not until the speaker talks with our staff later today,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said. Members of the Senate leadership and top lawmakers on each committee are able to choose whether their staff remains on the federal program or enters the health exchange and they have until Oct. 31 to do so, according to a memo sent to Senate staffers last week. Hill aides who don’t receive a designation of official office staff — that is, committee and leadership aides — will be allowed to continue to get their insurance under the federal program. Whether or not they are designated official or leadership, the federal government will continue to make premium payments to help offset the cost of lawmakers’ and staffers’ insurance plans. This decision is already becoming politically sensitive on Capitol Hill. It was the topic of much discussion at a Tuesday morning meeting of the House Republican Conference. The issue of health insurance for members and aides has become a serious political controversy in recent months and was interjected into the recent government shutdown. With the shutdown looming on Sept. 30, Boehner threw his support behind legislation barring the federal government from making health insurance premium payments. Boehner privately negotiated with Reid to keep the federal contribution to the program. The Senate rejected the measure, and some House Republicans were upset by Boehner’s decision to back the provision. Follow @politico(Missing cab driver Yogesh Raut) When she was on her way home in Pune from the IT company where she worked, Nayana Pujari was raped and murdered, allegedly by four men.She was traveling in a car owned by her company. The driver and a security guard assigned to escort her home were arrested, along with two friends.Ms Pujari was 27 when she was killed in 2009. Her husband, Abhijit, asked for a fast-tracked trial for his wife's case, but his petition was rejected by the Maharashtra Home department.In September 2011, when he was brought to the Sassoon Hospital for a medical check-up, the cab driver, Yogesh Raut, escaped. He didn't have to try hard. He said he wanted to use the toilet. A policeman removed his handcuffs and he was allowed to wander away unsupervised.The escape paralysed the case. Mr Raut has still not been caught. Police sources say that in narco-analysis tests conducted on him, he allegedly referred to having raped another girl. If you have seen Mr Raut (photo accompanies this article), please contact:Posted by Amie Between John Mulaney and Nick Thune I just can't get enough math jokes this Just for Laughs Festival. In an conversation I have with John, we talk about the festival, compare major world cities, and he's even nice enough to let me advise him on late-night eats in Montreal. John Mulaney's been to Montreal before, performing in a gala in the 2008 Just for Laughs festival, but he's back this year for 9 shows with and without the help of some of his comedy friends and favourite people. Since his last visit to La Belle Province, he's been writing non-stop for Saturday Night Live and appearing on Comedy Central Presents, Light Night with Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, and Human Giant. Here's the interview: John Mulaney is performing at Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival: at "Making Fun" (his solo show) When: Thursday, July 28 and Saturday, July 30 at 11:30pm, Where: Theatre Ste. Catherine (264 Ste-Catherine East) with Eugene Mirman and Pretty Good Friends When: Thursday, July 28 and Saturday, July 30 at 10pm, Where: Underworld (1403 St-Elizabeth at Ste-Catherine East) and at The Alternative Comedy Show When: Saturday, July 30 at 11:59pm Where: L'Astral (305 Ste-Catherine West) Photo from John Mulaney's website.Four bakers have been arrested in Venezuela for illegally making brownies and other pastries. It's part of a crackdown by the government, which now requires 90% of the country's wheat to be used in loaves rather than cakes. President Nicolas Maduro has threatened to take over bakeries in the capital Caracas as part of a new "bread war". He's sent inspectors and soldiers into more than 700 bakeries this week to enforce the rules. Venezuela's Superintendency of Fair Prices said two men were arrested because their bakery was using too much wheat in sweet bread, ham croissants and other products. Two more bakers were taken into custody for making brownies with out-of-date wheat. A government organisation tweeted a photo of the 54 bags in question. At least one bakery has been taken over temporarily by authorities for 90 days. This is all part of the government's attempt to combat shortages and long lines for basic products during a three-year economic crisis. The ruling Socialist Party claims businessmen are hoarding products and pushing up prices. Critics say the government's to blame because of failed price policies and currency controls. Breadmakers are blaming politicians for a national shortage of wheat, saying 80% have none left in stock. President Nicolas Maduro said earlier this week: "Those behind the 'bread war' are going to pay, and don't let them say later it is political persecution." The group representing bakers, Fevipan, has asked for a meeting with Nicolas Maduro, saying most shops can't make ends meet without selling higher-priced products. New rules brought in mean bakeries in Caracas must use 90% of flour to bake savoury bread and only 10% for pastries and cakes. They are also required to provide a constant supply of bread throughout the day from 7am to 7pm and make sure there's bread the next morning by holding over loaves from the previous day. Find us on Instagram at BBCNewsbeat and follow us on Snapchat, search for bbc_newsbeatRight as the Columbus Blue Jackets appeared to be returning to full health, the team received a double-dose of bad injury news on Monday. On Monday it became apparent that first-line center Ryan Johansen is banged up, and he's questionable for Tuesday's game against the Detroit Red Wings. Also, Blue Jackets head coach Todd Richards revealed that Brandon Dubinsky has had what he described as "setback days" in his rehabilitation from abdominal surgery. "He’s had some good days and he’s had some setback days," Richards said, according to Shawn Mitchell of the Columbus Dispatch. "That’s just par for what he is going through. But we’re expecting him to get him right back out at some point here and continue to get back on the road toward playing games" Dubinsky underwent surgery in October, and the club had been targeting Tuesday's game as his return date. Richards said that Dubinsky is both "day-to-day" and "week-to-week," which is preposterous. As a result of the preponderance of setback days, Dubinsky - who didn't skate on Monday - is apparently shutting it down, and taking a little bit of a break from the grueling rehabilitation process.The European Central Bank, which cut its key interest rates to new all-time lows today, did not discuss any further "non-standard" measures to beat the crisis, President Mario Draghi said. "We didn't discuss any other non-standard measures," Draghi told a news conference. He was referring to an artillery of special emergency measures at its disposal, such as injections of liquidity into the bank system, or buying up the bonds of debt-hit states A programme of indirectly buying up the bonds of debt-mired countries - known as the Securities Markets Programme - has lain dormant for 16 weeks. The ECB also appears reluctant to embark on further massive injections of liquidity while the effects of two previous ones in December and February amounting to over €1 trillion have still to make themselves fully felt. The size and complexity of those two operations, known as long-term refinancing operations, were such that it was not possible to assess exactly what effects they have had, Draghi said The aim of the LTROs was to avert a looming credit crunch, because the ECB hoped banks would lend the cheap funds to businesses and households and keep credit flowing in the debt-wracked euro zone economy. However, the cash does not appear to be trickling through into the real economy, recent data suggest, with lending by euro zone banks to the private sector actually contracting in May. Draghi attributed that to low demand for credit, rather than the restrictive lending policies of banks. "The credit is led predominantly by demand. When the demand is weak you won't expect credit growth," he argued, adding that it was not part of the ECB's remit to instruct banks what to do with the money. Draghi denied the ECB is running out of possible policy options to tackle the crisis. "We still have our artillery ready. We still have all our tools to pursue our objectives within our mandate," he said, while refusing to elaborate further on what other possible non-standard measures the ECB could resort to. The decision to cut rates by a quarter of a percentage point to an all-time low of 0.75% was taken unanimously by the ECB's 23-member governing council, Draghi said. The ECB's move also followed a rate cut by China's central bank and new stimulus measures by the Bank of England. The rate cut could mean lower borrowing costs for banks, businesses and consumers. Some economists say it may have only a symbolic effect, since rates are already very low. Lending activity remains weak because there
idea of "differences". When they tell us that two-thirds acceptance is a condition, then it goes without saying that one-third of the members will always have an opposing opinion that is justifiable and convincing from their point of view; otherwise why did humanity even invent voting in the first place? We will all welcome a national opposition that respects its people and guards their gains and destinies, but how can we welcome an opposition that entices some youth to throw stones at the people and Shura councils, to throw molotov cocktails and burn down the headquarters of another party to the ground? If only one-tenth of this had happened to the headquarters of the pettiest opposition party because of some demonstrations that the Islamists called for, the whole world would have risen up in anger for it and we would never ever have heard the last of this in terms of recriminations and repercussions.A traffic stop (Shutterstock) A Connecticut police officer threatened to smash a citizen’s phone for filming him apprehending Hartford residents for seatbelt violations,the Courant reports. Around 11:00 a.m. on April 14, 30-year-old William Ramos began recording officer Kevin Nesta, who was hiding behind a tree along a busy road, radioing to colleagues about ongoing cars whose passengers were not properly restrained in their seats. Nesta observed Ramos, ordered the guerrilla journalist to stop filming the public display of law enforcement, and threatened to destroy Ramos’ phone. “Turn the phone off before I smash it,” Nesta says as he walks away from his covert vehicle monitoring spot and approaches Ramos. Ramos, meanwhile, is still pointing his camera toward Nesta. Nesta, in turn, takes out his own mobile device and films Ramos right back. “Is there a problem?” Nesta demands. “There’s no problem,” Ramos replies. “I didn’t think so,” responds Nesta in an authoritative tone that is also menacing. “Is there something you want to videotape?” “No,” Ramos clarifies. “Just wondering.” “No?” Nesta inquires, “But you’re videotaping. Why?” At an impasse, the camera phone-wielding duo put away their phones and mumblingly part ways peacefully. Hartford Deputy Police Chief Brian Foley tells the Courant that Nesta has been reprimanded and retrained, and that the officer’s filmed interaction with Ramos will help colleagues on the force “understand that they can be videotaped at any time while they are on duty.” “That’s certainly not the image or the professionalism that we look for in our officers,” Foley adds. Ramos tells the Courant he has been concerned about accountability for law enforcement officers ever since his 22-year-old half-brother died at the hands of the East Hartford Police Department in April of last year. “He was tasered and he passed away,” Ramos says of his sibling, now deceased. “Those officers were very hostile toward him… It’s intimidating when they treat you so hostile.” Nesta was injured in an on-duty motorcycle accident in 2012. The Hartford police say the collision occurred when another motorist made an illegal u-turn in front of Nesta. Following Nesta’s crash, the department released a statement urging area drivers to “proceed with caution” because “motorcycle officers patrol year round.” In 2006, Nesta made headlines for drunken off-duty bar brawling.Vanessa Greco, CTVNews.ca Memory sticks containing personal voter information have gone missing from Elections Ontario, a privacy breach that could potentially affect as many as 2.4 million voters. Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa announced Tuesday that the missing data belonged to voters in up to 25 of the province’s 107 ridings. Elections Ontario, however, says it cannot confirm which ridings were affected by the breach and are extending a warning to voters in 49 different electoral districts. The two missing flash drives held the full names of voters, as well as genders, birth dates, addresses and whether or not that individual voted in the last provincial election. If a voter provided any other personal information updates to Elections Ontario around that time, the agency says that data may have been compromised as well. “There is no evidence that copies of personal information on two USB keys have been improperly accessed; however, I want to exercise the greatest degree of caution,” Essensa said in a statement released late Tuesday morning. The memory keys do not have any information about how a person voted, Elections Ontario stressed, particularly because the voting process itself is intended to preserve anonymity. Other information said to be unaffected by the breach includes: phone numbers, social insurance numbers, drivers licence information, health card information, email addresses, as well as credit card and banking information. Ontarians in 49 ridings urged to be on guard Still, Elections Ontario is asking voters to keep an eye out for suspicious activity on formal documents from the government, banks or other institutions. “I cannot confirm the security of the information,” Essensa conceded. Given that Elections Ontario employees were working with information from dozens of ridings at the time of the breach, the agency is warning voters in 49 possibly affected ridings to be on guard for any suspicious activity involving their personal information. In addition to an internal investigation, Elections Ontario has solicited the help of law firm Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP to conduct an investigation supported by INKSTER Incorporated, a forensic security company. The Ontario Provincial Police are also investigating. Meanwhile, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario has been asked to review the agency’s privacy policies in a bid to prevent a similar breach from happening again. Elections Ontario policy requires any memory sticks holding personal voter information to be password protected and encrypted. But, for whatever reason, the two sticks in question were not protected. A full list of the 49 potentially affected electoral districts is available online.Apr 8, 2014; Tampa, FL, USA; Toronto Maple Leafs left wing Mason Raymond (12) reacts as he skates with the puck as Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman Eric Brewer (2) defends during the third period at Tampa Bay Times Forum. Tampa Bay Lightning defeated the Toronto Maple Leafs 3-0. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports I’m probably alone in this, but I think Mason Raymond deserved another shot with the Toronto Maple Leafs. This isn’t to say Raymond was an essential part of the team or a game changer in any sense of the imagination. However, he did provide the Leafs with a healthy dose of speed and he was always a threat to score even if his production was slow or seemed non-existent at times. The speedy and skilled winger was also a main cog in Toronto’s counterattack, which was basically the team’s identity last season. In 82 contests for the Leafs, Raymond potted 45 points (19 goals, 26 assists) and registered a -6 ranking. Six of his goals were scored on the power play where I would argue he was underused at times. Another benefit to Raymond was his relatively cheap cost. He signed a tryout contract worth $1 million last season and although he received a major pay upgrade from the Calgary Flames this off-season, his annual salary cap hit of $3.1 million over the next three seasons is very reasonable when compared to the type of money other secondary forwards made in free agency this past week. Let me put it this way: would you rather have Raymond in your lineup or fellow former Leafs Mikhail Grabovski and Nikolai Kulemin at significantly higher costs? My main concern here isn’t that Raymond’s an irreplaceable player for the Leafs. It’s that the Leafs didn’t do enough to replace him on the team. A 45-point player can’t be subtracted from the lineup without some noticeable consequences in terms of the team’s offence. Is Petri Kontiola the answer? We’ll see, but let me say this: the KHL isn’t the NHL. A superstar there is oftentimes a disgruntled player here. Toronto had a known asset in Raymond. He could’ve been kept at some expense to the team, but this is surely better for a team that can’t afford to make too many mistakes. If the Leafs really want to improve, they need to recognize what already works for them. Raymond fell into this category.A brief sting is all employees of a Wisconsin technology company said they felt Tuesday when they received a microchip implant in their hand that will allow them to open doors, log onto computers or buy breakroom snacks by simply waving their hand. Three Square Market, also known as 32M, said 41 of its 85 employees agreed to be voluntarily microchipped during a "chip party" at company headquarters in River Falls. Melissa Timmins, vice president of sales at 32M, said she was initially apprehensive but decided to give the chip a chance. "I planned for the worst and it wasn't bad at all," said Timmins, who received a microchip in her left hand on Monday. "Just a little prick." But marketing executive Katie Langer passed, citing health concerns related to putting a foreign object into her hand, while noting the chip received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2004. "But that's still not very long term in my book, so I'd just like to know more about the long-term health effects," Langer said, adding that she is not ruling out a future implant of the $300 microchip paid for by Three Square Market. Company leaders said this is the first U.S. appearance of technology already available in Europe. The chips are about the size of a grain of rice. (July 24, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR) The chips are about the size of a grain of rice. (July 24, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR) SEE MORE VIDEOS Officials said the data in the microchip is encrypted and does not use GPS, so it cannot be used to track employees or obtain private information. The company hopes the microchips eventually can be used on everything from air travel to public transit and storing medical information. Professor Jeremy Hajek of the Illinois Institute of Technology said microchipping started years ago with veterinarians implanting the device in dogs and cats that might get lost. "And so there's a little bit of a... demeaning factor that this is what they do to little animals," Hajek said. But Noelle Chesley, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said she thinks implanting microchips into employees — and all people — is the wave of the future. Many of those at the edge of developing those technologies "believe we are going to be combining technology in our bodies," Chesley said.Our society is so hooked on adrenalin that we don't acknowledge the high price we, and our children, pay for our lifestyle. “Why do you want your child to hurry up? Because you're done and figure he’s had long enough to finish?... If you are constantly rushing from one place to the next (doctor’s appointment, haircut, playgroup, music lessons) have you taken on too much? Should you plan more downtime in your schedule so you have more time to be patient? More time for play and cuddles?” - PhdinParenting Now that kids are back in school and activities, are you noticing that life is too busy? Most of us find it wears on us, but we take it for granted that we're always rushing from one thing to the next. That we have a never-ending to-do list that keeps us from catching our breath, never mind catching a sunset together. But it costs us. And it costs our kids even more. Our society is so hooked on adrenalin that we don't acknowledge the high price we, and our children, pay for our lifestyle. There's nothing wrong with rushing once in a while. But rushing our children through life: 1. Influences the developing brain. Your child's brain is being built every day, and the shape it takes depends on his daily experience. Some neurologists hypothesize that reinforcing neural pathways in a daily context of stress creates a brain with a life-long tendency to anxiety. 2. Increases the levels of stress hormones in kids' bodies ...which contributes to crankiness, difficulty falling asleep and immune suppression. 3. Makes them feel pushed and controlled ...which triggers power struggles. Studies show that this feeling--in adults who work at jobs where they're at someone else's beck and call--sends stress hormones sky-rocketing. 4. Overstimulates them ...so they can't process everything coming at them, which undermines learning. 5. Habituates them to busyness ...so they become easily bored, craving electronic stimulation. 6. Keeps them from discovering and pursuing their own passions ...which is necessarily a slow, organic process of experimentation and dabbling. 7. Creates a chronic feeling of incompleteness ...which steals the joy of mastery. 8. Keeps children from attending to their emotions throughout the day ...so in the evening they have a full emotional backpack of feelings pressing for escape. That triggers meltdowns and can eventually lead to addictions like media consumption and treats, which distract us from our emotional baggage. 9. Constantly interrupts their developmental work of exploring the world ...so they lose their curiosity. 10. Forces them out of the groundedness of the present moment ...into the breathlessness of scrambling to keep up, which undermines their authenticity and connection to deeper meaning. 11. Overrides their natural inclination to "do it myself" ...sabotaging the development of competence. Not to mention, rushing costs us. It stresses us out, so we enjoy our children less. It makes us less patient, so it's hard to feel good about our parenting. One mom wrote to me that she realized her son wasn't dressing himself partly because she was always in such a hurry that she just dressed him, rather than helping him learn how to do it himself. Another mom wrote that after she got into a fight with her daughter, she realized she had been “too distracted, too busy, to just slow down and be kind.” We deserve more spacious lives, too. This week, notice how often you rush yourself and your child. Notice the price you both pay. What can you change to slow life down? How can you build more time into transitions so you aren't always rushing? What small daily rituals can your family use so that everyone has a chance to connect to deeper meaning, rather than just hustling through each day? Think deep breaths together, gratitude practices, moments of quiet cuddling. And maybe even stopping to watch the sunset.Harley Davidson is one of the world’s most influential and famous motorcycle manufacturers, so when they decide it’s time for something new, you just know it’s going to make waves. And make waves they have with the company’s first ever fully electric motorcycle: Project Livewire. But this is no slow electric scooter, no, this is a vehicle which exudes speed and power. Featuring a classically inspired, but nonetheless high-tech design, the vehicle represents Harley Davidson’s vision of how the motorcycle of the future should look. Made up of clean lines, black curving panels, and red trimming lights, this is a vehicle which would suit even the most hardcore of motorcycling enthusiasts. Halfway between a jet fighter and a dynamo, while still retaining a distinctive electric whine. Of course, when it comes to motorbikes, sound is just as important as looks and aesthetics. For this reason, Harley Davidson has gone to lengths to provide customers with a feeling of how the bike will sound. And boy does it sound cool. Halfway between a jet fighter and a dynamo, while still retaining a distinctive electric whine, Project Livewire sounds like a technological lighting bolt just passed you by. Despite its already refined look, the Project Livewire motorcycle is nonetheless a prototype. Harley Davidson has announced its intention to take the vehicle on a tour around the US to find out more about how potential customers feel about the bike. Everyday people will be encouraged to try their hand at riding the bike and then providing their thoughts to the company on how the motorcycle could be changed or improved. This tour will then be expanded in 2015 into Canadian and European markets. A full gallery of press shots of this amazing new beast of a vehicle can be seen below: Images: © 2014 Harley DavidsonRoad to BlizzCon #4 - mYi.StarDust - WCS 2014 Text by stuchiu Graphics by Meru, shiroiusagi Photo Credit: ESL mYinsanity Stardust 손석희 The Star by stuchiu Every Korean pro-gamer's career has an expiration date. And that is mandatory military service. Puma once called it a death sentence. A ticking clock. One that inevitably ends the career of all Korean pro-gamers. It is something that looms in the back of their minds. A constant plague, a sword that hangs above them ready to strike down at any moment. As the days, weeks, and months pass by the pressure to retire now and do military service grows as they realize that they are inevitably taking loans on their own future. Winrate 61% vs. Terran 66% vs. Protoss 63% vs. Zerg Earnings $54,700 USD in 2014 4800 WCS Points Rank #8 WCS EU Season 2 - 2,000 PointsWCS EU Season 1 - 500 Points3 Tied - 375 Points Liquidpedia Link They are as falling stars. They burn with a bright intensity as they burn their youth in search for the fulfillment of their dreams, ambitions and ideals. But once they crash, once the sword drops, once military service comes in, it is lights out. It is more than just 2 years of life; for many it is the end of youth. A hard reset of their lives knowing that all they have built up must be put on halt and the world marches on. It is fitting then that M18M changed his name to StarDust upon the end of his BW career and the end of his tenure at Air Force ACE. His star had already burned out during his BW career. 4 years with little to no results. He had burned out and all that was left was Stardust. For other players, military service is the end. For StarDust it was a rebirth. Near the end of his military service, KeSPA finally picked up SC2. And StarDust’s career hasn't been the same since. The first time we saw StarDust was on opening day of SPL. It was Air Force ACE against Samsung Khan. And StarDust played RorO on Ohana. In that game, StarDust befuddled RorO as he went for a mass air army. Anything that could be made out of a Stargate was made. Phoenixes, void rays, carriers. It was a strange game in a strange time when all of protoss had given up on any other strategy beyond Soul Train and 3 base timing attacks. And while RorO’s inexperience contributed to StarDust’s win, I can’t help but think how symbolic this game was. On the map most favorable for Soul Trains, in a meta that had given up on air-style protoss, in a match where his entire team had lost, StarDust won with a strategy of his own devising in a way unique to him. And that is the story of StarDust. A man who cut across the heavens to make a path all his own. Who’s very way of playing made you know StarDust was a man born to fly. From his debut against RorO, to his shocking finals against Jaedong, and his countless battles in WCS EU, you could see it in all his games. His burning passion for the game, his burning passion to win, to fly. And StarDust did fly. First to America for a brief stint under team LighT. And then he joined mYi upon realizing how many more tournaments there were in the EU scene. Since then the fates of mYi and StarDust have been intrinsically linked. It was mYi’s biggest pick up to date and StarDust rewarded their faith as he immediately won his first ever Dreamhack in one of the great finals of HotS. Both in and out of game, you can see StarDust’s passion and drive. He is constantly trying to improve his play. Since winning his first ever Dreamhack, Stardust has never hit a slump as he is constantly practicing and working on his play. Outside the game, he has become a paragon of what a pro-player should aspire to be. He interacts with his fans, learned English, even created his own talk show. Even spiteful names like CheeseDust were taken and twisted into an ironic epitaph. StarDust in his talk show once said that he was living his dream right now. That all he wanted to do was play the game and eventually work in eSports. And you can see that passion, that drive in him in everything he has done from the beginning of his career until now. Whether it be in Brood War, on LighT or on mYi, StarDust is a man who knows what he wants and does everything in his power to achieve it. And this weekend he wants to win. In his SC2 career, he has achieved everything he has already set out for. When he left for America from Korea he wrote: After that, I was not sure whether I should keep playing BW or SC2 as a pro or I should stop doing it. I loved playing BW much more than playing with textbooks in school, but I was not sure I can still do a good job in this area. However, after a long time of pondering, I decided to come to US and play SC2. Where other players had given it up, StarDust had pushed on. When StarDust had left America for mYi, he wrote: While living in NA I realized that EU has more tournaments, both online and offline...I needed to go EU. My goal is simple: To win a major tournament like Dreamhack or WCS. He has now won both. Upon losing in the ro16 for the first time in WCS EU he wrote: Tomorrow has come today. Two years ago, StarDust left Korea for America and joined LighT to become a pro-gamer in SC2. One year ago, he left America for Europe and joined mYi to win his first Dreamhack and WCS EU. In November, he goes to Blizzcon to challenge the best in the word for a chance to win Blizzcon and memorialize his career forever. They are as falling stars. They burn with a bright intensity as they burn their youth in search for the fulfillment of their dreams, ambitions and ideals. But once they crash, once the sword drops, once military service comes in, it is lights out. It is more than just 2 years of life; for many it is the end of youth. A hard reset of their lives knowing that all they have built up must be put on halt and the world marches on.It is fitting then that M18M changed his name to StarDust upon the end of his BW career and the end of his tenure at Air Force ACE. His star had already burned out during his BW career. 4 years with little to no results. He had burned out and all that was left was Stardust.For other players, military service is the end. For StarDust it was a rebirth. Near the end of his military service, KeSPA finally picked up SC2. And StarDust’s career hasn't been the same since.The first time we saw StarDust was on opening day of SPL. It was Air Force ACE against Samsung Khan. And StarDust played RorO on Ohana. In that game, StarDust befuddled RorO as he went for a mass air army. Anything that could be made out of a Stargate was made. Phoenixes, void rays, carriers. It was a strange game in a strange time when all of protoss had given up on any other strategy beyond Soul Train and 3 base timing attacks. And while RorO’s inexperience contributed to StarDust’s win, I can’t help but think how symbolic this game was.On the map most favorable for Soul Trains, in a meta that had given up on air-style protoss, in a match where his entire team had lost, StarDust won with a strategy of his own devising in a way unique to him. And that is the story of StarDust. A man who cut across the heavens to make a path all his own. Who’s very way of playing made you know StarDust was a man born to fly. From his debut against RorO, to his shocking finals against Jaedong, and his countless battles in WCS EU, you could see it in all his games. His burning passion for the game, his burning passion to win, to fly.And StarDust did fly. First to America for a brief stint under team LighT. And then he joined mYi upon realizing how many more tournaments there were in the EU scene. Since then the fates of mYi and StarDust have been intrinsically linked. It was mYi’s biggest pick up to date and StarDust rewarded their faith as he immediately won his first ever Dreamhack in one of the great finals of HotS.Both in and out of game, you can see StarDust’s passion and drive. He is constantly trying to improve his play. Since winning his first ever Dreamhack, Stardust has never hit a slump as he is constantly practicing and working on his play. Outside the game, he has become a paragon of what a pro-player should aspire to be. He interacts with his fans, learned English, even created his own talk show. Even spiteful names like CheeseDust were taken and twisted into an ironic epitaph. StarDust in his talk show once said that he was living his dream right now. That all he wanted to do was play the game and eventually work in eSports. And you can see that passion, that drive in him in everything he has done from the beginning of his career until now. Whether it be in Brood War, on LighT or on mYi, StarDust is a man who knows what he wants and does everything in his power to achieve it.And this weekend he wants to win. In his SC2 career, he has achieved everything he has already set out for. When he left for America from Korea he wrote:Where other players had given it up, StarDust had pushed on. When StarDust had left America for mYi, he wrote:He has now won both. Upon losing in the ro16 for the first time in WCS EU he wrote:Tomorrow has come today. Two years ago, StarDust left Korea for America and joined LighT to become a pro-gamer in SC2. One year ago, he left America for Europe and joined mYi to win his first Dreamhack and WCS EU. In November, he goes to Blizzcon to challenge the best in the word for a chance to win Blizzcon and memorialize his career forever. StarDust: Set 'em Up, Knock 'em Down Follow Stardust Twitter ModeratorPORT FOURCHON, LA—In what may be the greatest environmental disaster in the nation's history, the supertanker TI Oceania docked without incident at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port Monday and successfully unloaded 3.1 million barrels of dangerous crude oil into the United States. According to witnesses, the catastrophe began shortly after the tanker, which sailed unimpeded across the Gulf of Mexico, stopped safely at the harbor and made contact with oil company workers on the shore. Soon after, vast amounts of the black, toxic petroleum in the ship's hold were unloaded at an alarming rate into special storage containers on the mainland. Advertisement From there, experts confirmed, the oil will likely spread across the entire country's infrastructure and commit unforetold damage to its lakes, streams, and air. "We're looking at a crisis of cataclysmic proportions," said Charles Hartsell, an environmental scientist at Tufts University. "In a matter of days, this oil may be refined into a lighter substance that, when burned as fuel in vehicles, homes, and businesses, will poison the earth's atmosphere on a terrifying scale." Advertisement "Time is of the essence," Hartsell added. "If this is allowed to continue, the health of every American could be put at risk." Officials predicted that the oil could be carried as far north as Minneapolis and as far west as Honolulu. Hopes of containment are said to be scant, as the pipelines transporting the oil are numerous, massive, and buried deep underground, making it virtually impossible to dig them all up and reverse their flow back toward the TI Oceania. "Our fear is that we'll start seeing this stuff in tanker trucks headed to gas stations all over America," Environmental Protection Agency official Ralph Linney said. "And once they start pumping it into individual cars for combustion, it's all over." Advertisement "How can we possibly contain this after it's spread to 250 million vehicles, each one going in a different direction?" he added. Experts are saying the oil tanker safely reaching port could lead to dire ecological consequences on multiple levels, including rising temperatures, disappearing shorelines, the eradication of countless species, extreme weather events, complete economic collapse, droughts that surpass the Dust Bowl, disease, wildfires, widespread human starvation, and endless, bloody wars fought over increasingly scarce resources. Meanwhile, government officials, stunned to learn of the massive amounts of carbon dioxide that will be released into the atmosphere as a result of the TI Oceania tanker's successful docking, have called for a full investigation into the disaster's cause. Advertisement "I am shocked and horrified by this development," Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) said. "Rest assured, we will find the people responsible for allowing this to happen, and they will be held accountable. Every last one of them." Public opinion across the country has likewise turned from confusion to outrage, with many concerned Americans fearing that the worst may be yet to come. "It's scary stuff," said Logansport, IN native Wayne Cummings, talking to reporters from behind the wheel of an idling Ford F-150 XLT pickup. "I read somewhere that it might take years before we know the full extent of the damage, and by that time it will be impossible to do anything about it." Advertisement "All I know is, we have to think of some way to fix this problem before it's too late," Cummings said before driving off. Noting that they have acted in strict accordance with U.S. laws and complied with the orders of federal regulators, representatives from ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Chevron have all denied responsibility for the disaster.Story highlights The theft takes place as police are busy supervising New Year revelers The armed robbers force their way in and seek out iPhones and iPads "They knew exactly what they were taking," a police union official says The masked intruders assaulted store employees during the robbery The robbers, police say, were "well informed" and had carefully chosen the time and place of their heist. As police officers were busy keeping an eye on areas popular with New Year revelers, four armed and masked robbers forced their way into an Apple store in central Paris and made off with as much as $1.3 million worth of iPhones, iPads and other devices. The robbers entered through a service entrance into the store, which had closed for the day, using violence to intimidate store employees, said Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutors office. They then "calmly" went through boxes full of Apple products in the basement storeroom, seeking out iPhones, iPads and laptops, said Christophe Crepin, spokesman for UNSA Police, a national police trade union. "They knew exactly what they were taking," he said, noting that the robbery focused on the merchandise in the storeroom and left the devices on display inside the store untouched. They loaded the stolen goods, estimated to have a retail value of around one million euros ($1.3 million), into a Mercedes van parked nearby and sped off, he said. Thibault-Lecuivre declined to confirm the value of the robbers' haul, saying that Apple managers were still working out how much had been taken. Housed in an elegant Haussmann-style building in a popular shopping district, the store Apple Store at Opera is one of two in central Paris. The other is in an underground mall connected to the Louvre.The $300 state grant Devon Graves got his senior year at Cal Poly Pomona was only enough for gas and groceries—it didn’t make his $20,000 in student loans any easier to manage. Still, it meant a lot to the teen from Murrieta, a commuter town on the edge of Riverside County. “This award was a symbol of the state’s support for my education, and that symbolism meant more to me than the amount,” said Graves, who didn’t qualify for any other financial aid before becoming one of the first recipients of a taxpayer-funded Middle Class Scholarship in 2014. His parents were like many others—too cash-strapped to cover his tuition by writing a check, and too well-off to get one of the more generous grants reserved for the poor. Health problems prevented his mother from working and forced his family of five to rely on his father’s sheriff’s deputy salary, but even that hardship failed to open doors to extra help. Now, with the state’s financial fortunes beginning to worsen, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed axing the financial aid program for nearly 50,000 students to save money and help close a nearly $2 billion budget gap—even as the University of California and California State University systems prepare to hike tuition for the first time in six years. Under Brown’s plan, current recipients would continue receiving grants. Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon of Paramount criticized the governor for turning his back on middle class families and vowed to “keep college affordable” by protecting the program, which was championed by one of his predecessors. But some college-access advocates and even a top university administrator say it isn’t working as designed. Fewer students qualify for the awards than the state first projected, and many of those who do get relatively small checks under program rules that offer less to applicants whose families make more. And because there’s no income floor written into the law, a third of scholarship recipients come from low-income families making less than $80,000—even though the program was designed to help middle-income families making $80,000 to $150,000 annually who don’t qualify for much other relief. It’s those disadvantaged students whom the program wasn’t intended to serve who have the greatest need, get the largest checks and would be most harmed if it disappears. “We’re pro funding for students of all income levels,” said Dean Kulju, CSU’s director of student financial aid services and programs, “but the Middle Class Scholarship program isn’t hitting its target.” Former Assembly Speaker John Perez first pitched the financial aid program for middle class families in 2012 as an antidote to recession-era budget cuts that led UC and CSU tuition to almost double in four years. By closing a $1 billion corporate tax loophole, Perez estimated the state could reduce college fees by two-thirds for close to 200,000 families. “Too many families are getting squeezed out of higher education,” Perez said at the time. But the legislation died on the last day of the 2012 legislative session, and later that fall, voters passed Proposition 39, which closed the same loophole and instead steered the resulting savings to solar energy projects. Lacking another way to fund the scholarships, Perez worked with Brown to craft a program with smaller awards whose costs would be phased in over four years and paid for out of the state’s general fund. That scholarship program is now in its third year. It costs the state $74 million to administer, far less than what Perez first projected, and offers awards valued at up to a maximum of 30 percent of tuition—$3,690 for UC students and $1,644 for CSU students. If the program is around next year, it will begin covering up to 40 percent of recipients’ tuition. Still, data collected by the state shows the average value of awards distributed so far this year – $1,107 for UC students and $799 for CSU students—to be far lower than those ceilings because many recipients come from wealthier families who qualify only for small awards. “It’s hard to argue the program has helped with access,” said CSU’s Kulju, who noted that students aren’t notified of their awards until July, well after most enrollment deadlines. “It hasn’t been as efficient or effective as one would like.” H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for Brown’s Department of Finance, wouldn’t say why the governor chose to target the program to help close the budget gap, or whether he doubts its effectiveness. He stressed, however, that Brown’s proposed budget preserves other higher education commitments, such as promises to increase funding to UC and CSU campuses and maintain the Cal Grant program for needy students. The Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit advocacy group, has opposed California’s financial aid program for middle-income families since its inception, arguing that the state should direct all public resources to the neediest students. Its vice president, Debbie Cochrane, said she wouldn’t mind seeing the state dismantle the program so long as it uses the savings to help expand Cal Grant scholarships. That program only has enough funding to help 25,000 students annually, turning away another 300,000 applicants each year whose grades and family income qualify them to receive the support. “We should not be cutting money from financial aid,” Cochrane said. “However, where we spend the money we have matters.” Since 2001, poor California students who apply for a Cal Grant straight out of high school have been entitled to a full ride. But students who wait a year or more to enroll forfeit that right and instead must compete against thousands of other deserving applicants for assistance. The California Student Aid Commission found that some low-income Middle Class Scholarship recipients are students who sought, but failed to win, one of those competitive Cal Grants. In an interview, Rendon said he won’t stand to see the program “thrown out,” although he’s open to a “mid-course correction” that re-shapes its application criteria. “The Legislature is often criticized for not doing enough to help middle class families,” Rendon said. “Protecting this program is one of the Assembly’s top priorities.” Democratic Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León of Los Angeles, who proposed eliminating the program in 2014 to fend off the last round of tuition increases, declined to comment on Brown’s proposal. As for Devon Graves, he’s now a 23-year-old UCLA graduate student studying higher education administration and financial aid. He said Brown’s threats to eliminate the program are “concerning.” “I understand
StarCraft 2 scene, both in Korea and internationally. Their unrivalled line-up of players has not only garnered them respect and admiration from countless fans, but has also secured them over half of all GSL Code S trophies ever awarded. Their impressive list of victories makes them one of the celebrated and most successful StarCraft 2 teams in the world. This news comes in the wake of the recent additions of Kim “SaSe” Hammar and Steven “Destiny” Bonnell to Quantic’s StarCraft 2 roster. Incredible Miracle’s coach and manager, Mr. Kang Dong-hoon, had this to say in regards to this alliance: Today Quantic Gaming is proud to announce its ground-breaking partnership with the world’s top performing StarCraft 2 team from South Korea, Incredible Miracle. This partnership, dubbed, makes Quantic Gaming the official representative organisation for all Incredible Miracle players competing internationally.Founded in 2010, Incredible Miracle has since become a force to be reckoned with in the StarCraft 2 scene, both in Korea and internationally. Their unrivalled line-up of players has not only garnered them respect and admiration from countless fans, but has also secured them over half of all GSL Code S trophies ever awarded. Their impressive list of victories makes them one of the celebrated and most successful StarCraft 2 teams in the world.This news comes in the wake of the recent additions of Kim “SaSe” Hammar and Steven “Destiny” Bonnell to Quantic’s StarCraft 2 roster.Incredible Miracle’s coach and manager, Mr. Kang Dong-hoon, had this to say in regards to this alliance: “Many major foreign teams have approached me in the past, seeking to partner with me. However, all their offers were only ever focused on the short-term, and none of them offered the kind of special relationship I was interested in. I declined all of these offers straight away... but this relationship, this alliance, it is different. Quantic really wants to help my team and players, to bring them to the world stage and to the international marketplace. Quantic wants to do this in a way that both honors and respects what we have built as well as gives our players the attention and exposure they rightfully deserve. For this, I will share my knowledge and experience with my North American counterparts, so that all Quantic IM players can be the very best they can be, to reach their true potential. I feel that this is not just a business partnership, but also a friendship. A friendship which I look forward to keeping well into the future.” As a result of this partnership, all Incredible Miracle players competing internationally will do so under the “Quantic Incredible Miracle” name with the tag “QIM”. We look forward to having the Quantic roster being able to reach out and practice with their IM counterparts. Look for Quantic and IM to be interchangeable in the near future and also the possibility of more "foreign" presence in Korea, Quantic is excited to a part of this revolutionary alliance. It is hoped that the relationship between our two teams will continue to flourish and deepen as we move into the future. QUANTIC IM (QIM) TWITTER: QUANTIC IM (QIM) FACEBOOK: OFFICIAL QUANTIC SC2 (QxG) TWITTER: WEBSITE: BUSINESS/PRESS INQUIRIES: [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------ Quantic Gaming, LLC (Houston, TX USA) is a revolutionary eSports, new media, and brand representation organization that is building bridges between the competitive gaming establishment, industry partners, and publishers through professional management, social network outreach and utilization of new media platforms. Quantic Gaming fields numerous competitive gaming teams, with presences in a variety of games including StarCraft 2, Call of Duty and Battlefield. As a subsidiary of Quantic Gaming, “Quantic Media” delivers compelling production grade media to tens of thousands of viewers each week, and is comprised of one of the most elite teams of directors, producers, and commentators in the industry. Quantic Gaming provides a new conduit through which players, teams, leagues, producers, partners, casters, and the community work together to build and promote competitive gaming as an activity and as an emerging entertainment medium. As a result of this partnership, all Incredible Miracle players competing internationally will do so under the “Quantic Incredible Miracle” name with the tag “QIM”. We look forward to having the Quantic roster being able to reach out and practice with their IM counterparts. Look for Quantic and IM to be interchangeable in the near future and also the possibility of more "foreign" presence in Korea,Quantic is excited to a part of this revolutionary alliance. It is hoped that the relationship between our two teams will continue to flourish and deepen as we move into the future.QUANTIC IM (QIM) TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/QuanticIM QUANTIC IM (QIM) FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/QuanticIM OFFICIAL QUANTIC SC2 (QxG) TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/QuanticSC2 WEBSITE: http://www.QuanticGaming.com/ BUSINESS/PRESS INQUIRIES: laxx@quanticgaming.com------------------------------------------------------------Quantic Gaming, LLC (Houston, TX USA) is a revolutionary eSports, new media, and brand representation organization that is building bridges between the competitive gaming establishment, industry partners, and publishers through professional management, social network outreach and utilization of new media platforms.Quantic Gaming fields numerous competitive gaming teams, with presences in a variety of games including StarCraft 2, Call of Duty and Battlefield. As a subsidiary of Quantic Gaming, “Quantic Media” delivers compelling production grade media to tens of thousands of viewers each week, and is comprised of one of the most elite teams of directors, producers, and commentators in the industry.Quantic Gaming provides a new conduit through which players, teams, leagues, producers, partners, casters, and the community work together to build and promote competitive gaming as an activity and as an emerging entertainment medium. www.QuanticGaming.com \| @QuanticGamingBy Meltem Bulur and Sibel Ugurlu ANKARA If it were not for Turkey's help, I would not be a minister today, Sierra Leone's minister of information and communications, Mohamed Bangura has said. In an exclusive interview with Anadolu Agency on Wednesday, Bangura, an ex-refugee, said Turkey opened its door to him when he needed help the most. "If Turkey had not given me the chance to take refuge 19 years ago, I could not be sitting here as a minister today. "This is where I will commend the government for their policy of the Syrian refugees," Bangura said adding that the international community should appreciate Turkey instead of criticizing its role in Syria "when Turkey has not been part of any war". "They are now paying a price of a war in which they are not involved in," the minister said. Bangura said he came to Turkey 19 years ago, and stayed for six months as a refugee before he went to Canada following the approval of his application for political asylum. "I know what it is to be a victim of war… there are millions of people that are living in refugee camps as they had to flee their homes because of the wars and conflicts," Bangura said, calling on the international community to help cease the conflicts through diplomatic means. The Sierra Leonean minister was in Turkey on an official visit, accompanying President Ernest Bai Koroma.SAN FRANCISCO — The University of California, Davis said Monday that it had placed its police chief on administrative leave amid outrage over widely circulated videos of officers dousing student protesters with pepper spray. In a news release, campus officials said it was necessary to place Chief Annette Spicuzza on leave to restore trust and calm tensions after Friday’s crackdown on the “Occupy UC-Davis” encampment, which resulted in 10 arrests. The school has also placed two officers on administrative leave. Videos posted online show one riot-gear-clad officer spraying a line of protesters as they sit passively with their arms intertwined. Spicuzza told the AP that the second officer was identified in videos. On Sunday, UC President Mark Yudof said he was “appalled” by images of protesters being pepper-sprayed and planned an assessment of law enforcement procedures on all campuses. “Free speech is part of the DNA of this university, and nonviolent protest has long been central to our history,” said Yudof, who heads the 10-campus UC system. “It is a value we must protect with vigilance.” UC-Davis officials refused to identify the two officers who were placed on leave. Spicuzza had earlier told the AP that one had served on the force for many years and that the other was “fairly new.” Both officers were trained in the use of pepper spray under department policy. UC-Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi said she had asked the Yolo County district attorney’s office to investigate the department’s use of force. She said she had been inundated with reaction from alumni, students and faculty. The protest Friday was held in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in solidarity with demonstrators at the University of California, Berkeley who were jabbed by police with batons Nov. 9. Nine students hit by pepper spray were treated at the scene, and two were taken to hospitals and released, officials said.On June 8, 2016, Radio Free Asia reported that dozens of North Korean guest workers in Kuwait’s construction industry went on strike after their salaries were not paid. Following a lengthy standoff with their government minders, insubordinate North Korean guest workers were ordered to leave Kuwait and return to Pyongyang. The June 8 strike highlighted the growing prevalence of labor unrest amongst North Korean guest workers in the Middle East. In early April, 100 North Korean guest workers in Kuwait protested against remittance demands by the North Korean government. Earlier this year, two North Korean prisoners fled from state surveillance in Qatar, after a Qatari construction company fired 20 of their colleagues. Despite rising labor unrest and scathing criticism from human rights organizations, North Korea is likely to continue to export guest workers to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Remittances from the GCC bloc help the DPRK alleviate the economic damage wrought by UN sanctions. Kuwait has played a particularly important role in assisting the North Korean economy. Over the past decade, Kuwait has imported large numbers of skilled tradespeople and unskilled laborers from North Korea in exchange for vital investments in the DPRK’s capital-starved economy. North Korea’s exports of construction workers and impoverished military personnel to Kuwait has increased markedly under Kim Jong-un, despite UN efforts to isolate Pyongyang. Why Kuwait is a Vital Economic Partner for North Korea Even though Kuwait had more cordial relations with the Soviet Union than other GCC countries during the Cold War and was the second largest destination for Korean guest workers in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia during the 1970s oil boom, Kuwait only established diplomatic relations with North Korea in 2001. North Korea’s military assistance to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1990s and lack of diplomatic relations with Kuwait’s closest ally, Saudi Arabia, help explain the DPRK’s belated outreach to Kuwait. Even though Oman and Qatar had already forged diplomatic ties with North Korea during the early 1990s, Kuwait swiftly became North Korea’s leading GCC partner. Kuwait hosts North Korea’s only embassy in the GCC bloc. The DPRK’s representative to Kuwait, So Chang-sik, also acts as North Korea’s ambassador to Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Since 2011, North Korea’s state airline, Air Koryo, has made regular flights to Kuwait. Kuwait’s accessibility for North Korean planes has made it the principal origin point for North Korean guest workers entering the Middle East. In addition to accepting North Korean guest workers, Kuwait has made numerous investments in the North Korean economy. In 2013, Ambassador So praised Kuwait for its efforts to encourage tourism to North Korea and for providing financial assistance for Pyongyang’s 2005 refurbishment of its water treatment facilities. In exchange for these investments, North Korea has sent thousands of engineers and technicians to Kuwait to assist in construction projects. North Korean workers have also participated in the construction of Kuwaiti cultural establishments. The Times of Kuwait reported in 2013 that North Korean artists assisted in the construction of the Kuwait House for National Works Museum. This museum documented the atrocities perpetrated by Iraq during its 1990-1991 occupation of Kuwait, and the subsequent Gulf War. These cultural and investment linkages have caused North Korea to view its relationship with Kuwait as its most important partnership in the Gulf. Should Kuwait scale back its acceptance of North Korean guest workers following recent episodes of labor unrest, other Gulf countries are unlikely to compensate for lost revenue. South Korean news agency Yonhap reported on July 8 that Qatar was issuing fewer visas for North Korean migrant workers, as Doha wishes to comply with UN sanctions against Pyongyang. Oman has refrained from direct diplomatic engagement with the DPRK, preferring to negotiate with North Korea under Egypt’s umbrella. The UAE has hired between 1,300-1,500 North Korean guest workers. However, the UAE’s fierce opposition to North Korean military cooperation with Iran and the fallout from the 2013 arrest of North Korean guest workers for attempting to murder Emirati citizens could prevent Abu Dhabi from expanding its links to Pyongyang. Bahrain is also unlikely to radically deviate from Saudi Arabia’s non-existent relationship with the DPRK. Therefore, North Korea has a considerable vested interest in maintaining an economic partnership with Kuwait. To prevent future unrest, the DPRK authorities will likely vet the guest workers they export to Kuwait more closely in the years to come. North Korean Guest Workers in Kuwait under Kim Jong-un Since 2012, North Korea has significantly increased its exports of guest workers to foreign countries to gain access to hard currency. The DPRK has used remittance revenues to purchase luxury goods for Pyongyang’s elites that ensure their loyalty to Kim Jong-un. The number of North Korean guest workers rose from 65,000 at the time of Kim Jong-il’s death in 2011 to 100,000 by early 2015. Fifteen thousand North Korean guest workers reside in the Middle East, with the majority working in Kuwait and Qatar. While the construction industry has been the main source of employment for North Koreans in Kuwait, the makeup of the North Korean guest workers entering Kuwait has changed over time. During the mid-1990s, North Korean guest workers arriving in Kuwait consisted principally of tradespeople seeking a respite from food shortages and poverty at home. While many North Koreans travelling to Kuwait were optimistic that going abroad would bolster their standard of living, the realities of life were starkly different from their expectations. According to the accounts of numerous North Korean defectors who lived in Kuwait, North Korean migrant workers are only paid $120 a month compared to the minimum of $450 paid to South Asian guest workers residing in Kuwait. The vast majority of their income was diverted to the North Korean government. On orders from Pyongyang, guest workers are forced to work in sweltering temperatures on building sites. The U.K. Telegraph reported in February 2015 that after work, North Korean guest workers in Kuwait were “trapped in wired fences” to ensure that they did not interact with other Koreans. As the North Korean government has made cuts to welfare provisions to its military personnel to fund Pyongyang’s missile development programs, Kim Jong-un has authorized exports of military personnel as guest workers to Kuwait. According to Radio Free Asia, the number of civilian guest workers in Kuwait dropped from 4,000 in 2014 to 3,200 in 2015. The North Korean government compensated for this shortfall by exporting North Korean engineers working in the military. North Korean military personnel now reportedly make up 30 percent of the DPRK’s guest workers in Kuwait and are forced to wear long hair to disguise their identity. The relationship between North Korean military personnel and civilian guest workers is tense. Civilian workers typically avoid contact with North Korean active duty soldiers. Despite these tensions, exporting North Korean military personnel to Kuwait is an effective way to deter defections. Professional soldiers in North Korea are trained to be absolutely loyal to the state, and are more compliant to remittance requests by government minders. Recent increases in labor unrest in Kuwait could be harbinger for a repeat of the 1990s and early 2000s wave of defections of North Korean guest workers. Workers who defected during this period did not give their pledged remittances to the North Korean government. As defections are on the rise amongst North Korean migrant workers once again, Pyongyang will likely continue to increase its exports of military personnel to Kuwait. North Korea’s economic partnership with Kuwait and exports of guest workers to work on construction projects in Kuwait City provide vital remittance revenues for Pyongyang’s struggling economy. The DPRK’s dependency on Kuwaiti capital will cause the North Korean government to become even more repressive towards its migrant worker population in Kuwait. If Kuwait does not follow Qatar’s example and dismiss North Korean migrant workers en masse, the North Korean government’s remittance demands from guest workers in Kuwait will continue to grow, with detrimental consequences for human rights. Samuel Ramani is a DPhil candidate in International Relations at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is also a journalist who writes regularly for the Washington Post and Huffington Post. He can be followed on Twitter at samramani2 and on Facebook at Samuel RamaniImage copyright Met Police Image caption Police do not know whether Palmira Silva knew her attacker A 25-year-old man has been charged with the murder of 82-year-old grandmother Palmira Silva, who was killed in a suspected beheading in north London. Nicholas Salvador, of Gilda Avenue, Enfield, is accused of killing Ms Silva, who was found in a garden behind a house in Nightingale Road, Edmonton, on Thursday. Mr Salvador is also charged with assaulting a police officer. His case is currently being heard at Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court. Police had found Ms Silva's body after being called to the area following reports that an animal had been attacked. Officers evacuated nearby homes before the suspect was Tasered. One officer suffered a broken wrist. Mr Salvador was taken to hospital and kept under police guard before being questioned by officers and charged on Friday. Neighbours have paid tribute to Ms Silva, an Italian widow who ran a cafe in Church Street, near Edmonton Green station. Sylvia Lewis said: "She was a lovely lady, she didn't have a bad bone in her body."BEIRUT/MOSCOW (Reuters) - As President Bashar al-Assad’s army closed in on the last rebel enclave in Aleppo on Tuesday, Russia, Iran and Turkey said they were ready to help broker a Syrian peace deal. The Syrian army used loudspeakers to broadcast warnings to insurgents that it was poised to enter their rapidly diminishing area during the day and told them to speed up their evacuation of the city. Complete control of Aleppo would be a major victory for Assad against rebels who have defied him in Syria’s most populous city for four years. Ministers from Russia, Iran and Turkey adopted a document they called the “Moscow Declaration”, which set out the principles that any peace agreement should follow. At talks in the Russian capital, they also backed an expanded ceasefire in Syria. “Iran, Russia and Turkey are ready to facilitate the drafting of an agreement, which is already being negotiated, between the Syrian government and the opposition, and to become its guarantors,” the declaration said. The move underlines the growing strength of Moscow’s links with Tehran and Ankara, despite the murder on Monday of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, and reflects Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desire to cement his influence in the Middle East and beyond. Russia and Iran back Assad while Turkey has backed some rebel groups. Putin said last week that he and his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan were working to organize a new series of Syrian peace negotiations without the involvement of the United States or the United Nations. For his part, U.N. Syria mediator Staffan de Mistura intends to convene peace talks in Geneva on Feb. 8. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the U.N.-brokered negotiations in Geneva had run into a dead end due to ultimatums from the Syrian opposition in exile. But in a telephone call Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed restarting negotiations between the warring sides, the Russian foreign ministry said. GRIM EVACUATION In Syria, an operation to evacuate civilians and fighters from rebel-held eastern Aleppo has now brought out 37,500 people since late last week, Turkey said. As more buses left the city on Tuesday, Turkish and Russian ministers estimated the evacuation would be complete within two days. But it is hard to know if that goal is realistic, given the problems that have beset the evacuation so far and the wide variation in estimates of how many have left and how many remain. The International Committee of the Red Cross put the number evacuated since the operation began on Thursday at only 25,000. A rebel official in Turkey told Reuters that even after thousands left on Monday, only about half of the civilians who wanted to leave had done so. Insurgent fighters would only leave once all the civilians who wanted to go had departed, the rebel said. The ceasefire and evacuation agreement allows rebels to carry personal weapons but not heavier arms. A rebel fighter stands with his weapon near evacuees from the Shi'ite Muslim villages of al-Foua and Kefraya as they ride bueses in insurgent-held al-Rashideen, Syria December 20, 2016. REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah Estimates of the number of people waiting for evacuation range from a few thousand to tens of thousands. The United Nations said Syria had authorized the world body to send 20 more staff to east Aleppo who would monitor the evacuation. A U.N. official said 750 people had been evacuated from the two besieged Shi’ite villages of Foua and Kefraya, which government forces had insisted must be included in the deal to bring people out of Aleppo. The evacuations are part of a ceasefire arrangement that ends fighting in Aleppo, once Syria’s most populous city. Conditions for those being evacuated are grim, with evacuees waiting for convoys of buses in freezing winter temperatures. An aid worker said that some evacuees had reported that children had died during the long, cold wait. PATRIOTIC MUSIC In government-held parts of Aleppo, the mood was very different. A large crowd thronged to a sports hall in the city, waving Syrian flags and dancing to patriotic music, a large portrait of Assad hanging on one wall, in a celebration of the rebels’ defeat in the city that was broadcast live on state television. The rebel withdrawal from Aleppo after a series of rapid advances by the army and allied Shi’ite militias including Hezbollah since late November has brought Assad his biggest victory of the nearly six-year-old war. Slideshow (4 Images) However, despite the capture of Aleppo and progress against insurgents near Damascus, the fighting is far from over, with large areas remaining in rebel control in the northwestern countryside and in the far south. The jihadist group Islamic State also controls swathes of territory in the deserts and Euphrates river basin in eastern Syria. Assad is backed by Russian air power and Shi’ite militias including Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and Iraq’s Harakat al-Nujaba. The mostly Sunni rebels include groups supported by Turkey, the United States and Gulf monarchies. For four years, the city was split between a rebel-held eastern sector and the government-held western districts. During the summer, the army and its allies besieged the rebel sector before using intense bombardment and ground assaults to retake it in recent months.a free business school lesson for homeopaths Homeopaths appear to be very good at fear-mongering and repeating soothing buzzwords, and very bad at science and creating conspiracies about big business. Despite representing a multi-billion dollar industry, alt med practitioners don’t seem to understand the basic principles of business and management as they defend their remedies from skeptics asking them to provide clinical evidence for their claims. According to them, Big Pharma is unable to buy up patents to homeopathy or treatments made by other alt med disciplines and could never make a profit by reducing their R&D costs and yet, be able to buy rights to promising conventional treatments and aim to make their drug pipelines cheaper to maintain. It’s as if the principles of finance and strategic management cease to apply when pharmaceutical companies are even mentioned in the same sentence as homeopathic potions and alternative regimens. The argument that Big Pharma is on the warpath against alternative medicine is trotted out on a regular basis by the faithful defenders of naturists, homeopaths and biomedical quacks who feel free to administer all sorts of highly speculative treatments without going through the proper clinical trials and approvals by the FDA. For the latest example, let’s consider an article by homeopath Amy Lansky, who tries to defend her craft against a pharmaceutical conspiracy by terrified corporations which want to suppress her mystical cures… What if an expensive drug could be potentized to create billions of effective doses at essentially no cost? It would destroy big pharma entirely. Medicines that cost essentially nothing? Nontoxic ultra- diluted medicines that cause fewer side effects? How could [big pharma’s coffers] be sustained? Forget about the Law of Similars. It’s potentization — the process of creating effective ultradilutions — that big pharma is scared of! No wonder Baum and Ernst got the word “potentization” wrong. This one word is the small stone that could take Goliath down. Really? Medicines that cost essentially nothing would cripple the pharmaceutical industry? Big Pharma can’t buy the rights to mass produce homeopathic cures, then close down plants it would no longer need, saving a few billion dollars worth of expenses on an annual basis? If making products cheaper was the death knell for companues, big box retailers and electronics companies would’ve been dead in the water long ago. So what Lansky is basically telling us, is that cost cutting is the first step towards bankruptcy. If there was clinical proof that homeopathy works, Big Pharma would be buying their cures and saving countless billions in getting them to market. Far from being the stone that could take down a goliath, legitimate, empirically proven potentization would be a cash cow of epic proportions, eagerly embraced by CEOs and investors. There’s also a question as to why medicine that costs essentially nothing to make retails at such a high price that over the counter cold medicine is a bargain compared to oscillococcinum. At my local pharmacy, a packet of cold pills sells for $4.99 while a package of oscillococcinum comes with a $10.99 price tag. If it’s so easy to produce a potent remedy with a virtually non-existent overhead, why do its makers charge over 120% more? Why not sell it for $2.99 and undercut the competition while still enjoying the kind of profit margins even Merck and GSK would envy? You might remember the recipe for oscillococcinum featured in the last edition of the Skeptics’ Circle and recall that’s basically water sprinkled on sugar pills. Why would you possibly charge so much for it? Even the duck hearts and livers, from which the hundreds of dilutions begin, aren’t all that hard to come by. And doesn’t the fact that it’s so much more expensive than your run of the mill cold meds run counter to Lansky’s claim that homeopathy could bring Big Pharma to its knees by undercutting it? Finally, let’s go back to the last sentence of the quote. Lansky is talking about Michael Baum and Edzard Ernst, a duo of UK doctors who published a rebuke to alt med practitioners trying to hijack medicine by appeals to open-mindedness. In the article they misspelled potentization, promoting homeopaths to unleash the old and tired internet taunt of focusing on a typo and declaring that by failing to properly spell one term the authors are woefully ignorant about the topic, as they flood their replies with meaningless technobabble in the traditions of Charlene Werner and John Benneth. Now, to most of us, a typo is a typo. But for her conspiracy-mongering, Lansky is turning a simple typo in a general article into the word that Big Pharma dare not speak, kind of like a demonic invocation which summons a hellish creature made of fangs and claws. It it just me, or is that a little outlandish to put it mildly? Through to be fair, her entire argument hinges on apologetics which not only fail to take the basics of the pharmaceutical business into account, but also provide zero evidence that homeopathy actually works in any way, shape or form.Frank Seravalli TSN Senior Hockey Reporter Follow\|Archive The race to reduce concussions in the sports world has included introducing to the consumer market mouth guards, skull caps with sensors and helmets designed to counteract rotational forces. Performance Sports Group, the parent company of Bauer Hockey, unveiled the latest device on Tuesday: a band worn on the neck that it believes could ultimately reduce the number of concussions in sports by addressing the “slosh theory.” Slosh is the movement of the brain, which is floating in cerebrospinal fluid inside the skull. When the head experiences an impact, the brain sloshes inside the skull and can rotate or strike the inside walls of the cranium, often tearing brain fibres. The band constricts the outflow of blood from the head by applying light pressure to the jugular veins in the neck. That results in a mild increase in blood volume in the skull, which theoretically creates less room for the brain to move around in during trauma - almost acting as a natural cushion against potential damage. “By doing that, you more or less take up the space inside the head so the brain can’t jiggle as much,” said Dr. Charles Tator, senior scientist at Toronto Western Hospital and one of Canada’s leading concussion experts, in a video presentation. “It reduces the slosh effect. If something can be done to prevent the jiggle, as these scientists have postulated, then I think it’s something we should pay attention to.” The “potential breakthrough” is the first product to attempt to prevent concussions using the body’s natural physiology rather than an external device like a helmet. Performance Sports Group CEO Kevin Davis said in New York on Tuesday they hope to perform enough research to bring the product to market in the next year or two. The device is not sport specific and could be used in hockey, football, soccer, baseball or even running. Performance Sports Group touted two different research studies that claimed to find an 83 per cent reduction in the number of torn brain fibres in animals used in a standard concussion model when the band was utilized. At least one leading concussion expert - Chris Nowinski from the Concussion Legacy Foundation – expressed concerns about the product. Nowinski, 37, is a former WWE wrestler who is both a Ph.D. candidate and co-founder of Boston University’s CTE Center, which studies the brains of former athletes and military members after death for links to repetitive trauma. “I think it’s incredibly early to get excited about a product like this,” Nowinski said Wednesday. “There is no way enough research can be done in 12 months to bring this to market. What happens when you elevate the cranial pressure every day in a young person? “There are serious potential risks for messing with a person’s cranial pressure. There are risks of brain bleed and other long-term effects that need to be explored.” Dr. Gregory Myer, director of research for the division of sports medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, refuted Nowinski’s concerns. Myer said in a phone interview Wednesday that the blood volume in the skull while the band is worn is the same as in the “compensatory reserve,” that shifts in a person when lying down. It is something the body naturally adjusts every day. “It is supposed to feel normal,” Myer said. “The intracranial pressure itself does not change.” The change in blood volume with the band is said to be approximately the size of one teaspoon. Myer said the research so far is “still very preliminary,” but in studies conducted in the Ohio area with high school hockey players wearing the band seemed “promising.” He said research is conducted using medical imaging and brain scans to make sure the outcomes are “objective in nature." The idea for the band was partly spurred by a research study that indicated concussions occurred 30 per cent less frequently in stadiums at high altitude. At higher altitudes, the body naturally compensates with increased cerebral blood flow to aid in oxygenation. Participants who have taken part in field tests of the product reported wearing the band produces a similar sensation to buttoning a collar too tightly, or wearing a snug necktie, only temporarily. One of the principals involved in the project is Dr. Julian Bailes, chairman of neurosurgery at NorthShore University Healthsystem in Illinois, who will be played by Alec Baldwin in Will Smith’s upcoming Hollywood movie “Concussion.” Nowinski said he believed the product will produce minimal results and is primarily designed to lure parents of athletes willing to spend money in the name of potential brain protection. “I’m not sure that it will ever be proved to work,” Nowinski said. “It’s incredibly tough to study. If you put a band on someone’s neck, then run tests, there will be a big placebo effect with those who report fewer effects because they feel like it’s something that should help them.” No matter how tiny, though, any product that increases protection for the brain would be worthwhile. Bauer’s parent company vows to explore more. “Will the device do what the theory suggests? That can only be determined by research,” Dr. Tator said. “Helmets do not prevent concussions. We have to think about other strategies. Let’s try to solve this concussion problem so we can keep our kids active.” Frank Seravalli can be reached at [email protected] releasing a group dance version video for their newest hit “Only You“, miss A released four individual member dance videos for the track for fans to enjoy. During the group dance video, fans might have noticed that the members of miss A would stare off into different sides of the room rather than looking directly into the stationary camera filming their choreography. At first glance, it seemed as if the girls were distracted while filming the dance, but it turns out that the room was filled with several different cameras, giving fans a different angle of the dance for each of the members. Unlike the group dance video, the cameras also move around, giving fans a close view of each member. Similar to the popular “Eye Contact Version” videos for dance practices, the individual member dance videos for miss A’s “Only You” will help fans learn the choreography for the song while enjoying eye contact from their favorite members! Make sure to watch the individual dance videos for miss A’s “Only You” below!Nick Faldo finished the year off in fashion with a win in Jamaica No question the 1992 season was a fruitful one, of many for Sir Nick Faldo. For starters he won his third Open Championship for the second time at Muirfield Golf Links. Along with his third Champion Golfer of the Year title he won five other tournaments raking in $2,648,288 in earnings for the season. The season ending Johnnie Walker Classic was the same old scene in 1992. The top players got together to duke it out one more time before Christmas and the Holiday season. Unfortunately something else common happened on top of that. On route to his $550,000 payday for first place he came from behind to take it from the one and only man willing to give it up: Greg Norman. That’s right, can you believe it…It was Norman again who was in the driver’s seat and lost the tournament in the final stages. Even more laughable and characteristic for the scenario, it was Norman playing aggressive while his opponent played conservative. The final play came down to Faldo coming about 15 short of the hole on the green and Norman going off the back into heavy Bermuda grass. While Sir Nicholas two putted, the Bermuda grass foiled Norman and came down to a final 10 footer to keep the match going. Norman missed narrowly to the right of the hole and the title was Faldo’s. This would not be the last time these two gentlemen would meet in these circumstances. Same, Sad Shark Tale… Greg Norman arguably? has the worst luck in the history of golf when it comes to major championships. Eight different times he finished runner-up while four coming in a playoff. Although, God finally let him have the 1986 & 1993 Open Championship’s out of pity here we examine his runner-up instances. Masters – 1986 (Nicklaus roaring comeback), 1987* (PLAYOFF:Larry Mize with an amazing chip in), and 1996 (Final Rounds: Faldo 67, Norman 78) US Open- 1984* (PLAYOFF:Lost to Fuzzy Zoeller) and 1995 (Lost to Corey Pavin) British Open- 1989* (PLAYOFF: Mark Calcavecchia winner) PGA Championship- 1986 (Runner up to Bob Tway) and 1993* (PLAYOFF: Runner up to Paul Azinger)Brazilian aircraft company Embraer delivered 35 commercial aircraft and 24 business aircraft to customers in the second quarter of 2017, released the press service of the manufacturer. The company reported decrease in production of business jets, accumulating decrease of more than 20% in the first half of the year. This was largely due to the absence of the Legacy 450 from last year’s tally. However, the promising report of commercial aircraft keeps them optimistic. “The number of deliveries in the commercial aviation segment increased by approximately 35% compared to the same period of 2008. As for business aviation, this segment delivered five more aircraft than in the second quarter of 2016, although in general the company production is less than an year ago”, noted Embraer. The second quarter of 2017 marked the handover of Embraer’s 1100th business jet, a Phenom 300, 15 years after it informally entered the business aviation market with the shipment of a VIP-configured ERJ-135 airliner. As of June 30, Embraer’s portfolio of orders was 18.5 billion USD. Embraer S.A. is a Brazilian aerospace conglomerate that produces commercial, military, executive and agricultural aircraft and provides aeronautical services. It is headquartered in Sao Jose dos Campos, Sao Paulo State.In this week’s TABC label approvals there are a couple new ones from Cali breweries – Knee Deep and Helm’s have received their first label approvals. As for Texas breweries, this is the first approval from Wild Acre (out of Fort Worth) which looks to be going the bottling and kegging route. As for specific beers, the Firestone Walker Barrel Works beer sounds delicious as always. Breckenridge is also coming out with a whiskey barrel aged holiday beer. This week’s TABC Label Approvals: K = Keg B = Large format bottle bb = 16oz format bottle b = Small format
effort to resolve the situation peacefully," Bretzing of the FBI said. "However, we reached a point where it became necessary to take action in a way that best ensured the safety of those on the refuge, the law enforcement officers who are on scene, and the people of Harney County who live and work in this area." 'God has put us on this path' Earlier on the call, the occupiers seemed concerned that the FBI planned to move in Wednesday night and that it would lead to their deaths. At times, they seemed to fatalistically embrace that outcome. When one woman -- presumed to be Fiore -- asked two of them about their families, a man responded, "God has put us on this path. Our families are already taken care of; they weren't in our lives much before all this because God made sure we didn't have that to weigh us down so that we could do this." The people on the phone could be heard debating conditions for which they'd be willing to leave the refuge. Protest led to armed occupation Ammon Bundy and others started out demonstrating against the sentencing of Dwight Hammond and his son Steven, ranchers who were convicted of arson on federal lands in Oregon. But a January 2 march supporting the Hammonds led to the armed occupation of the refuge building, with protesters decrying what they call government overreach when it comes to federal lands. Bundy and other members of his group were arrested during an incident along a highway last month. Those law officers weren't wearing any body cameras, the FBI's Bretzing said.Officers from Scotland Yard arrested Mr. Assange after he went to a central London police station by agreement with the authorities. In a packed courtroom hearing lasting nearly an hour, Gemma Lindfield, a lawyer acting for the Swedish government, outlined some of the detailed allegations made by the Swedish women, both WikiLeaks volunteers. They involved three incidents in August, including one in which Mr. Assange was alleged to have had unprotected sex with one of his accusers as she was asleep. Mr. Assange has denied wrongdoing, saying that he had consensual relations with the two women, whom he met during a trip to Sweden that he made in a bid to establish a haven for himself and WikiLeaks under Sweden’s broad press freedoms. Outside court, Mark Stephens, Mr. Assange’s lead lawyer, described the allegations of sexual impropriety as “very thin indeed,” and predicted the case would “go viral” as the argument for its being a political vendetta was pressed. Mr. Assange, in a dark blue suit and flanked by two uniformed security officials, was characteristically defiant in court. When he was arrested Tuesday morning, the hearing was told, he refused requests that he submit to a photograph, a DNA swab and fingerprinting, standard procedures for all those arrested in Britain. In court, proceedings were interrupted when, having confirmed his name and date of birth, he refused to give a current address, giving first a post office box, then an address in Parkville in the Australian state of Victoria, where he lived before adopting a nomadic lifestyle since founding WikiLeaks in 2006. Photo The exchange appeared to have weighed against his bid for bail, which his lawyers had initially seemed confident of securing. The bid was supported by financial guarantees of more than $150,000 from a cast of well-known supporters who appeared in court, including the filmmaker Ken Loach and Jemima Khan, a socialite and political activist. Advertisement Continue reading the main story There was audible dismay as the judge, Howard Riddle, agreed with Ms. Lindfield that there were “significant grounds” for thinking Mr. Assange posed a flight risk, because of his “nomadic lifestyle,” his lack of ties in Britain, his network of international contacts and his access to substantial sums donated by WikiLeaks supporters. As Mr. Assange was loaded into an armored police truck in the bitterly cold afternoon and driven to Wandsworth prison in south London, one sure thing was that his long months as a self-described refugee were over. 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. Accustomed to a life in the shadows, staying with friends, paying cash and communicating mainly by Twitter, he has added a sense of mystery to the celebrity — or notoriety — that has developed around him. The passions he has aroused among followers were evident as dozens chased the police truck as it pulled into traffic, banging on its sides and shouting, “We love you, Julian!” Now the authorities he has reveled in provoking will have a new degree of control over his movements, though not necessarily over WikiLeaks. In a reaction to the events in court, a message on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed said the group was “let down by the U.K. justice system’s bizarre decision to refuse bail” to its founder, but added that the releases of secret State Department cables that began last week would “continue as planned.” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on Monday that American officials were conducting “a very serious, active, ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature” into the WikiLeaks releases, a position the Obama administration has held for months, since WikiLeaks began releasing secret Pentagon documents on the Afghan and Iraq wars in summer. Photo But the London arrest could complicate matters for Washington, backing up any criminal case it might begin against Mr. Assange behind the Swedish investigation. Sweden and Britain have extradition treaties with the United States, but both allow extradition rulings to be appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. Of more immediate concern to Washington, Mr. Assange had threatened for weeks to respond to legal action by speeding the release of secret documents. He had warned that “over 100,000 people” worldwide had downloaded an encrypted version of the 251,287 State Department documents the group holds, a small fraction of which has been released, and that “if something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically.” That warning appeared to be suspended, with one of Mr. Assange’s closest aides, Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist, saying outside the court that the organization had no plans to mount a retaliatory release. Mr. Stephens, the lawyer, also said there would be no change in WikiLeaks’s scheduled releases. “WikiLeaks will continue, WikiLeaks is many thousands of journalists around the world,” Mr. Stephens told a crush of reporters on the courthouse steps. He added, “I am sure justice will out, and Mr. Assange will be vindicated in due course.” In an interview with The New York Times in October, Mr. Assange seemed prepared for an eventual arrest, saying he occasionally savored the prospect of imprisonment on the basis that he “might be able to spend a day reading a book” away from the stresses of his WikiLeaks life. Advertisement Continue reading the main story But, he said, no legal action would deter him. “Retiring on some sunlit upland for some 15 years is not in my nature,” he said.LABOUR’S ALAN KELLY has said his party will table a motion calling for the HPV vaccine to be extended to boys. Speaking to Newstalk’s Chris Donohoe at the party’s think-in in Athy in Kildare, Kelly said he has been working with Health Minister Simon Harris on the initiative. From the years 2014 -2015, there was an 87% uptake in the HPV vaccine – the highest since the programme began in 2010. However, immunisation rates have now fallen below 50%. The health minister, along with other politicians, have attributed the fall-off in the uptake to misinformation being circulated from anti-vaccine campaigners. The move to extend the roll-out of the vaccine comes after controversial comments about the vaccine by Minister of State for Disabilities, Finian McGrath. McGrath has since said he stands over the fact that he raised the concerns of parents, but that he accepts “that such vaccines are a very important part of Government health strategy”. It was always the intention to roll out the HPV vaccine to boys in Ireland – but due to the slowdown in rates, the timetable has been delayed. Boys at risk Although it’s thought that men aren’t affected by the virus because of it’s strong link to cervical cancer, men are at risk and encouraged to get the vaccine. The HPV vaccine can prevent men from contracting genital warts as well as HPV-associated cancers. The primary forms of cancers caused by HPV are: cervical, vaginal, and vulvar cancer in women penile cancer in men throat and anal cancer in men and women. For women, the provision of the vaccine to girls in their first year of secondary school has been in place in Ireland since 2010. When it was then introduced by Minister for Health Mary Harney, the plan was originally to roll the free vaccine out to boys as well – but this has yet to happen. Health regulator, Hiqa, is carrying out a review on whether boys should get the vaccine, but the results are not expected until next year, which Labour argues is too late. A symposium in Dublin earlier this year discussed the rise of HPV in cancers other than cervical cancer, including a significant rise in some head and neck cancers. Fine Gael Kate O’Connell told TheJournal.ie there has been a “huge rise” in head, neck, anal genital cancers in men. “Young boys in this country as a result of a campaign are not being vaccinated. There is a sense of inequality there… the boys are not getting what we had planned to give them,” she said. Labour party think-in The issue is likely to be discussed further at the party’s think-in today. Kelly said he is enjoying working as Labour’s health spokesperson, but said he still has ambitions to be the leader of the party one day. Jan O'Sullivan, Brendan Howlin and Alan Kelly Source: RollingNews.ie He said the party has to “get back to its roots” and has been forced to do a lot of “soul-searching” since the devastating results of the last election which reduced their parliamentary party members by half. While Kelly said he believes they will be able to retrieve the party from the ashes, with hopes they might even double their seats in the next election, he said the party must consider carefully who they might go into coalition with, if that is an option. Whether that is Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil, Kelly said it “doesn’t make any difference”. “We would consider it,” he said. However, he said his party “wouldn’t be interested” in going into government with Sinn Féin. Poll ratings are a worry The party’s ratings in the polls have struggled to get into the double digits. Despite what other parties might say, Kelly said everyone worries about the polls. He acknowledged that Labour must see a boost in the polls by the end of the year, and hinted that if this fails to materialise, the party might have to make some changes. However, he would not be pushed on whether this meant a change in leadership, stating that Labour leader Brendan Howlin is “doing his best in what was very difficult circumstances”. Kelly said he believes numbers will return to Labour stating: “The politics of populism and eternal protest… people are going to get sick and tired of that. “You can’t always be against everything and for nothing,” he said.TSA logs 1 million users of PreCheck program The accelerated security check process began in October for pre-approved passengers on American, Delta and Alaska flights. The program, now at 14 airports, will expand to 21 more sites by year's end. "In the context, 1 million is a very, very small number," said Chris McLaughlin, assistant administrator for security operations at TSA. He added that the benefits of PreCheck to accelerate the overall system are still too small to calculate. The TSA screens an estimated 1.8 million passengers a day at 450 commercial airports. That means that in the same time that the PreCheck program screened 1 million passengers since it launched in October, the TSA has processed nearly 335 million passengers. But the TSA acknowledges that the new security program, dubbed PreCheck, has served only a small fraction of the nation's air travelers. The Transportation Security Administration reached what seems like a lofty milestone last week when it announced it had screened 1 million passengers through a new accelerated security program at airports across the country. Use of the PreCheck program has yet to have a measurable effect on decreasing… (Mark Boster, Los Angeles…) The PreCheck program operates at only 14 airports and is open to pre-approved passengers of three airlines: American, Delta and Alaska. PreCheck lets travelers who volunteer background information to the TSA ahead of time go through special screening lanes without removing shoes, belts and coats. It cuts the estimated screening time as much as 50% for those who use it. The overall system will benefit, the TSA says, because PreCheck passengers are pulled out of the regular screening lines, making them shorter. McLaughlin said PreCheck will have a bigger effect in the near future. It is scheduled to expand to a total of 35 of the nation's biggest airports by the end of 2012. Those airports serve as much as 90% of the nation's travelers, he noted. "By the end of this calendar year, we will be at a place where PreCheck will be contributing positively to the overall system," McLaughlin said. Spirit Airlines hikes carry-on fees Spirit Airlines Inc. has taken harsh criticism in the last month for its penny-pinching ways, but the Florida carrier continues to expand its network and collect sizable profit. Passenger-rights groups cried foul last week when Spirit announced that starting Nov. 6, the cost to bring a carry-on bag on a flight will be $100 when paid at the gate — more than double the $45 fee now. Spirit also raised the rates for passengers who pay for carry-on bags online or at airport kiosks. "We expect that our new $100 fee charged for those who wait until they get to the gate will ensure that customers purchase their bags before arriving at the gate," spokeswoman Misty Pinson said in a statement. Spirit also took some heat last month when the airline rejected a request for a ticket refund from a Vietnam veteran in Florida who said he bought a ticket to visit his daughter before learning terminal cancer made him too weak to fly. After days of criticism, Spirit's chief executive, Ben Baldanza, said last week that he would personally refund the ticket and make a donation to a charity for wounded veterans. Still, in the first three months of 2012, Spirit reported that revenue per available seat — a key airline gauge — increased 10% compared with the same period last year. And it is expanding. This year, Spirit has added 12 new flights and announced plans to add eight more starting in the next three months. Despite the criticism Spirit has been taking, the company's stock is a good buy, said Ray Neidl, airline analyst at Maxim Group in New York.'Redeployment' Explores Iraq War's Physical And Psychic Costs Redeployment by Phil Klay Paperback, 291 pages \| purchase close overlay Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How? Here's an old joke you may have heard: "How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a light bulb?" Answer: "You wouldn't know, you weren't there." This joke gets told in Redeployment, a stingingly sharp short story collection that itself addresses the gap between the American soldiers who've fought in Iraq and those of us back home. It was written by Phil Klay who does know because he was there. After graduating from Dartmouth, he enlisted in the Marines and served as a public affairs officer in Anbar province during the 2007 troop surge. Klay's time there gave him something valuable that, consciously or not, he was surely looking for — great material. Of course, countless writers start with great material and reduce it to mulch. Klay takes his experience and clarifies it, lucidly tracing the moral, political and psychological curlicues of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Like Tim O'Brien in his great Vietnam book, The Things They Carried, Klay is conscious of how lived life gets translated into stories. His first-person tales take us inside an array of characters, from a Marine who tells us about handling dead bodies to a chaplain offering guidance to soldiers whose closeness to violent death makes them skeptical about God. In the blackly hilarious story "Money As A Weapons System," a provincial reconstruction official tries to rebuild the area near Tikrit only to have a fortune in American aid be lost to local corruption and an American millionaire's demented mission to teach the Iraqis baseball. The wrenching title story, "Redeployment," begins the whole book with two short, chilling sentences — "We shot dogs. Not by accident." — and weaves this into a metaphor for both the war and for returning home. Enlarge this image toggle caption Hannah Dunphy/Courtesy of Penguin Press Hannah Dunphy/Courtesy of Penguin Press Now, writers in earlier times often took a grand, even godlike view of war — think of Leo Tolstoy in War And Peace — or at least they stayed comfortably inside the action in novels like Norman Mailer's The Naked And The Dead or James Jones' The Thin Red Line. War stories these days tend to be fractured and self-conscious, as if a grand overview would be false. Klay quite pointedly doesn't offer a big vision, only a mosaic of smaller ones. In fact, what makes him so good is the way he can carry us from the battlefield to the strip bar, from the funny to the harrowing to the heartbreaking. This may have something to do with the nature of America's most recent wars. Where World War II felt conceptually clean — our soldiers were fighting an evil enemy's army — the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been anything but. They've involved moving among civilians you're theoretically trying to save but who may try to kill you — and whom you may kill back, sometimes accidentally. Such warfare is more surreal than clean. And it feels even more disorienting when, stoked by video games, knocked out by Ambien and speaking in the obfuscating patois of military acronyms, the soldiers are performing a dangerous and brutal mission they suspect their country doesn't really believe in and would rather not think about. Heck, Americans won't even go to movies about our ongoing wars. Klay makes you feel the physical and psychic cost demanded of our soldiers in Iraq. And he may be even better on what it means to return to an America that pays gaudy lip service to honoring the troops yet doesn't try to understand their service. Because we have a volunteer army, our soldiers and vets remain weirdly invisible to their fellow countrymen Related NPR Stories Reminder From A Marine: Civilians And Veterans Share Ownership Of War Some of Redeployment's keenest moments show us returning soldiers' frustrations in trying to communicate their disturbing, often ineffable experience to people who greet them with clichés, however well-meaning. As one vet tells us, "There's a perversity in me that, when I talk to conservatives, makes me want to bash the war, and when I talk to liberals, defend it." Redeployment is so wonderfully written, it's a pleasure to read. Yet it's hard not to be saddened by what an ill-conceived mess the war in Iraq proved to be. After so much money and sacrifice, you'd hope to wind up with stories happier than the ones Klay tells us. Which isn't to say that he smacks us with an obvious or strident political message. On the contrary, you're struck by the gnawing, sometimes stunned ambivalence that Klay's characters feel about the whole enterprise. His vets usually wind up feeling diminished, even soiled by what they had to do in Iraq, but also superior to the America they were doing it for. "You risked your life for something bigger than yourself," one explains. "How many people can say that?"A Canadian oil multinational has been accused of violating human rights and environmental destruction in Colombia. Toronto-based Pacific Exploration & Production is allegedly violating labour regulations, causing environmental damage, and negatively impacting the survival of local Indigenous communities near the Rubiales-Pirirí and Quifa oil concessions in Colombia, according to a damning report by a coalition of South American lawyers and international NGOs, released Tuesday. The groups, consisting of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Project for International Accompaniment and Solidarity in Colombia (PASO), and José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective (CCAJAR), also found that Pacific had financial backing from Export Development Canada, bringing the Crown corporation's due diligence into question as well. The company has categorically rejected the allegations as it undergoes insolvency proceedings in Canada. Pacific has handed the operations in question over to Colombia's Ecopetrol company, leaving human rights lawyers to wonder whether anyone will ever be held responsible for what they argue are a long list of rights violations. "Who will assume responsibility at this point and provide remedy for social and environmental damage incurred over the course of the past years?" the NGOs demanded in a Tuesday press release. "The situation indicates that both Colombia and Canada have failed to meet their obligations to ensure that companies respect human rights and that victims are able to obtain redress. They must act now." Documented human rights abuses The report's researchers interviewed and surveyed residents of rural settlements near the oil operations, along with staff at Pacific and its subcontracted partners, and local, national, and international authorities. They found that 81 per cent of employees did not believe their employer allowed for free and voluntary union membership, and that the subcontracting models used by Pacific amounted to illegal outsourcing. They further found that the company had contracted a private security company which hindered the movement of free trade unionists, members of Congress, and community leaders, and has disturbing "co-operation agreements" with the Colombian Prosecutor General's Office and National Police that have not been made available to the public. “The Canadian embassy was alerted right from the beginning of the investigation," said Geneviève Paul, a program officer for Above Ground who was involved in the research through her former work for FIDH. "It’s really concerning because the activities are taking place in the broader context of a free trade agreement with Colombia.” Above Ground is an Ottawa-based NGO that helps provide Canadian court access to those harmed by Canadian companies overseas. Paul said Above Ground is also concerned with the report's allegations that while Pacific may have followed protocol in its consultation with local Indigenous communities, these communities lacked information on the impacts the oil industry would have on their territories. A Pacific Exploration & Production oil operation in Colombia. Photo courtesy of Pacific Exploration & Production. Dramatic increase in earthquake activity In an email statement to National Observer, Pacific said that it "completely and categorically" disagreed with the report's findings. Pacific is part of a select group of 28 companies admitted to the international Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights initiative, and has strict sustainability and ethics guides. And while Pacific's Rubiales and Quifa oil fields were first in the world to be certified for responsible oil production under the EO100 – Equitable Origin (EO) standard for sustainable barrels in 2014, the report accused it of discharging 300,000 barrels of improperly treated wastewater into Rubiales Creek, contaminating local water sources. It also claimed that the company failed to comply with its environmental license by discharging 47 per cent more water than was allowed, and may have contributed to an enormous spike in seismic activity as a resulted of its wastewater injection underground, though no causal link could be proven. On July 1, Pacific turned its operations at the Rubiales concession over to a Colombian majority state-owned company called Ecopetrol, a working partner of several years. While Pacific has now entered into insolvency proceedings in Canada to avoid bankruptcy, Ecopetrol is taking the reigns on its oil fields, leaving mitigation for environmental and human rights abuses up in the air. Company financed by Crown corporation Above Ground's Geneviève Paul also criticized Export Development Canada — a federal Crown corporation that operates as an investment bank, providing loans and other financials services to Canadian companies that do business abroad — for financially backing the company. “It’s shocking in many regards," said Paul. “We’re very concerned there didn’t seem to be a any strong due diligence done before Export Development Canada's (EDC) decision to finance Pacific and Ecopetrol.” In 2014 and 2016 both companies were financed by Export Development Canada, swinging the spotlight onto the Canadian government as well. The report — and Above Ground — argue that EDC, which reports to the Minister of International Trade, did not perform due diligence before giving cash to the corporations. EDC declined to comment on the report until it had time to give it proper review. But in a statement, Global Affairs Canada said the government was "actively assessing" Canada's approach to corporate social responsibility. "Canadians expect all of our businesses operating abroad to respect human rights, labour rights, all applicable laws, and to conduct their activities in a socially and environmentally responsible manner," the department told National Observer. "We are committed to demonstrating real leadership around the world on corporate social responsibility." The report was presented on Tuesday in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, and includes recommendations how the Canadian government can ensure human rights are respected in areas near the extractive projects of its companies. Above Ground will be taking the report to the appropriate authorities in Canada as well. The federal Global Affairs Department also noted that EDC operates at arm's length from government even though it reports to Parliament through the minister of international trade. "EDC conducts its risk assessments and due diligence on each transaction, independently of the government, and makes its own decision on each proposed transaction," the department said. "With respect to Colombia, in recognition of the historic signing of a permanent ceasefire on June 23, 2016, the international development minister (Marie-Claude Bibeau) this month announced over $57 million for five initiatives. This funding will specifically support peace implementation and help Colombians who have been directly affected by the conflict, especially women and youth." Editor's note: This story was updated at noon on Wednesday with comments from Global Affairs Canada.Danny Clark is two years away from becoming a member of the Ohio State football program, but the four-star quarterback already knows what number he wants to wear with the Buckeyes. No. 2. Why? Because of the last quarterback to sport the number in Columbus: Terrelle Pryor. Pryor, now a wide receiver with the Cleveland Browns, had a troubled end to his career at OSU, but he clearly had a positive effect on Clark, a 2017 recruit out of Massillon, Ohio. This guy is the reason I started playing qb.Changing back to #2 this year.I’ll wear #2 at OSU. @TerrellePryor #legend pic.twitter.com/98I2qwLo93 — PROTOTYPE (@DClarkQB) July 1, 2015 Pryor has apparently been reflecting on his time at Ohio State recently. He tweeted out a photo of some of his game-worn Buckeye jerseys yesterday.Every once in a while we all have things we need to get off our chests. It’s good for the soul. Every Monday morning our MMA World Senior Editor Stephen Rivers takes the opportunity to cleanse his with a takeaway from the weekend’s MMA news and events. Don’t Call Chambers’ win a fluke By the end of the 2nd round of her fight with Kailin Curran in Adelaide on Saturday, most fans could have forgiven Alex Chambers for checking out. She had been put under relentless pressure by a bigger, stronger, more athletic opponent. Chambers needed a finish and it was hard to imagine that she would get one, but she did, finishing Curran with an armbar with two minutes left in the fight. Why then were so many people labeling this a lucky win? When Anderson Silva found a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, having been dominated by Chael Sonnen for the best part of five rounds in 2010, he was deemed a true warrior and a great champion. This wasn’t so different, even if some viewed it as such. Thankfully that was not lost on her employers, who were impressed enough to award Chambers a $50,000 performance of the night bonus. The award was richly deserved. It’s just a shame that not everyone saw it that way. Calling it a fluke discredits a gutsy and determined performance from a fighter who refused to accept she was beat and had the skill to do something about it. A Late Stoppage – More than bad refereeing When reviewing the Mark Hunt vs Stipe Miocic main event from the weekend, most people agree that the fight could have been stopped earlier than it was. Had referee, John Sharp, stopped it in the third round few would have complained. Had he done it in the fourth most would have agreed. By the time he eventually did stop the fight in the fifth most of us were just thankful it was finally over. Sharp got it wrong and let a fighter take more punishment than he needed to, but he isn’t the only one to blame. This is not the first time that we’ve seen referees in this position give a tough fighter every chance to try and win the fight. Knowing that this can happen, Hunt’s corner are every bit as culpable by refusing to pull him out. MMA is a tough, macho, testosterone fueled sport but the tough guy egos can only be taken so far. Early stoppages can rob a fighter of a marginal chance to win a fight, but late ones can shave years off their careers, or worse. On Saturday a referee, a doctor, and a fighter’s corner combined to create an ugly and uncomfortable spectacle. Fight Pass is Worth Your Money Once again a UFC Fight Pass exclusive event delivered the goods. Bar the one sided beat down in the main event, it was an excellent show with great pacing and exciting finishes throughout. Sadly, there are many who did not get to see the show as it aired on the UFC’s online platform. You only have to take a quick look at Dana White’s twitter replies to see fans bemoaning any suggestion that they should pay a monthly fee for the package if they want to see every single UFC fight that is broadcast. Living in the UK where we receive even the biggest UFC pay-per-views on free sports channels, perhaps we have just been spoiled and now come to expect everything for free. Numerous times over the weekend I had people complaining to me on twitter that they could not watch the show, asking, “why should I have to subscribe and pay to watch it?”. As Dana will always say himself, you don’t have to subscribe to it. If that’s not your priority, spend your money elsewhere. If it is and these fights mean that much to you, when you consider the vast amount of content available on Fight Pass the question should be, “why wouldn’t you want to subscribe to it?”. Main PhotoThe GH4 has an extremely beefy quad core processor on-board to handle all that 4k video goodness. The number of processors really is irrelevant as it is more marketing speak than anything...however, given the high bit-rate support that it provides for 4k, we can make a fairly well educated assumption that it is considerably more beefy than anything else out there that does not handle 4k video, never mind other devices that do actually handle 4k but with lower bit rate. I suspect Panasonic are using this additional horse power for general CDAF that does not benefit from DFD. Panasonic could in theory also use this horse power to provide some level of software stabilisation in camera... as a thought. It's also a good way for them to get around noise at higher ISO's. I was at the Dublin Photographic show and speaking with the Panasonic rep, the processor in this thing is a couple of generations leap over what is out there. Click to expand...The Wizards have lost four straight games, and three of them could’ve potentially went the other way if a few things were tweaked. Although the Eastern Conference is weaker than ever, Washington must find ways to close out games and it wouldn’t hurt if they started out tonight in New York against the Knicks. The game tips off at 7:30 PM from Madison Square Garden. Key Match Up: Carmelo Anthony has gotten plenty of criticism over the course of his 10-year career, and it hasn’t stopped in the final year of his contract with the Knicks. The Knicks have been riddled with injuries, but Anthony has done his best to step up when his team’s needed it the most. He’s inevitably gotten some blame for New York’s struggles, but he’s done a better job at doing more than just scoring the ball. Anthony is leading his team in rebounds with over 9 per game and he’s done the little things which he hasn’t necessarily been doing since the start of his career. Without Tyson Chandler, Carmelo Anthony is being forced to do some of the things which often go unnoticed. He’ll definitely get the brunt of the blame, but injuries have plagued the Knicks and Anthony has played some of the best statistical basketball of his career. With that said, Trevor Ariza has to find a way to make Anthony take tough shots from the perimeter. Anthony is obviously one of the best scorers in the NBA, but forcing him to take jump shots instead of getting points in the paint will take away some of the other things in his game. Anthony is very good at following his own misses, which allows the Knicks to get some offensive rebounds, so Ariza must do his best at stopping Anthony from getting to the basket. Without much help, the Knicks will rely on Anthony for the majority of their baskets and if he’s contained New York’s chances of winning essentially go out the window. Notes: Raymond Felton sat out the last time these two teams matched up, and he won’t be available tonight either. That means we’ll get to see Pablo Prigioni try and defend John Wall (!!!). Nene will likely be a game-time decision tonight. He’s missed the last few games with a sore achilles. The Knicks have the fifth worst defensive rating in the league. New York has already lost 8 times at MSG. They’re 4 games below.500 at home. Yikes. Prediction: Washington has had their problems on the court, but the Knicks seem to be completely disarrayed on and off the floor. J.R. Smith is constantly bickering with head coach Mike Woodson, and Carmelo Anthony’s free agency situation has become a bigger storyline than the Knicks play on the court. John Wall has emerged as one of the best point guards in the NBA, and if the prior game against the Knicks is any indication as to how this game will pan out, Pablo Prigioni and Beno Udrih won’t stand a chance at defending him. Wall scored 31 points along with 7 assists en route to a Wizards victory over the Knicks in Washington, but the Wizards have struggled historically at MSG. Tonight could be categorized as a ‘must win’ game for the Wizards and I think they’ll managed to beat the lowly Knicks at home. New York is in shambles and the constant trade rumors haven’t helped their case. In fact, this might be the last time we’ll see Mike Woodson coaching the Knicks if they get blown out by the struggling Wizards at home.Dropbox already lets you automatically upload your photos and videos to the cloud, but now the file-syncing service is getting a little friendlier with screenshots as well. Beginning today, all the screenshots you take on your computer can be automatically saved to your Dropbox account, the company announced. On top of this, Dropbox will create a link to your screenshot and copy it to your clipboard, so you can easily share your image. "Whether you're capturing screenshots of websites, favorite dog videos, or video calls with your buddy in São Paulo, now Dropbox can help keep your computer a little more organized," Dropbox said in a blog post. Meanwhile, the latest version of Dropbox comes with a handy new photo importer for Mac users. The tool lets you copy all your photos from iPhoto directly to your Dropbox, creating a new folder for each of your events. "A lot goes into keeping all your photos in one place and always having them handy to share, and we hope small improvements like these return that time to you," Dropbox said. "This way you can focus on taking photos and screenshots—and let Dropbox take care of the rest." The update comes after Dropbox last week joined Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and other tech giants in the fight for government transparency. The file-sharing company today filed a legal brief with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court arguing that it should have the right to publish the number of national security-related requests it receives. For more, see PCMag's full review of Dropbox as well as Get Organized: 5 Tips for Using Dropbox for Organization.There’s no love lost between Microsoft and Google: The two have been feuding for more than a decade, with Microsoft regularly calling Google out for anti-competitive behavior in search. As AllThingsD pointed out earlier today, one issue that’s cropped up again is the lack of a Windows Phone app for YouTube. On Microsoft’s public policy blog today, Microsoft VP & Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner has an extensive post complaining about YouTube’s lack of support for its mobile platform, and how that affects its users. The gist is that Microsoft has been trying for years to get a proper YouTube app working, and has developed its own app to bring a high-quality experience to Windows Phone devices. But YouTube has prevented Microsoft from making the same features available to iOS and Android users available on its platform. Microsoft has never been shy about building apps for its devices when developers don’t have the resources to do so, or its platforms are low on their priority list. It’s worked hand-in-hand with a number of developers to get their apps on Xbox Live (including YouTube), and has even built apps for companies like Twitter and Facebook to get them on Windows Phone. But according to the blog post, Google isn’t even allowing Microsoft to do that. That’s likely because YouTube wants to control the entire app experience, something it won’t necessarily be able to do on the Windows Phone platform, especially if it’s an app built by Microsoft. It wants to be able to serve up ads and provide the same richness of experience that’s available on the other platforms it’s built apps for. That was part of the reason that it pulled support for Apple’s internally built YouTube app, and created its own version. But for whatever reason, though, Microsoft believes the higher-ups at Google are dictating that a similar app shouldn’t be available on Windows Phone. Heiner writes: “Microsoft has continued to engage with YouTube personnel over the past two years to remedy this problem for consumers. As you might expect, it appears that YouTube itself would like all customers – on Windows Phone as on any other device – to have a great YouTube experience
—assuming users are willing to trust that centralized hub with access to their most sensitive data. If, on the other hand, you want backdoors that are compatible with a decentralized peer-to-peer communications network that uses software-generated keys running on a range of different types of computing hardware, that’s going to be a much bigger problem. So when Mike Rogers asks his technical experts whether Apple could realistically comply with a mandate to provide backdoor access to encrypted iPhone data, they might well tell him it’s technically doable—but that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be serious problems implementing such a mandate generally. In short, Rogers’ dismissive attitude in the exchange above seems like prime evidence that a little knowledge can indeed be a dangerous thing. He’s got a lot of “world class cryptographers” eager to give him the—very narrowly technically accurate—answer he wants to hear: It is mathematically possible to create backdoors of this sort, at least on certain types of systems. The reason the rest of the cryptographic community disagrees is that they’re not limiting themselves to giving a simplified five-minute answer to the precise question the boss asked, or finding an abstract solution to a chalkboard problem. In other words, they’re looking at the bigger picture and recognizing that actually implementing these solutions across a range of data storage and communications architectures—even on the dubious premise that the global market could be compelled to use broken American crypto indefinitely—would create an intractable array of new security problems. We can only hope that eventually one of the in-house experts that our intelligence leaders actually listen to will sit the boss down for long enough to break the bad news.To mark the anniversary of Shakespeare's death, the RSC's Artistic Director Gregory Doran presents some startling facts about Britain's most famous playwright: Credit: LEFTERIS PITARAKIS 1. Shakespeare caused an air crash On October 4th 1960 a Lockheed Electra aeroplane setting off from Boston Airport stirred up a flock of 10,000 starlings on the runway. It flew straight into the avian cloud which choked the engines and brought the aeroplane down. The crash claimed 62 lives. The starling is not a species that is native to North America. It was introduced in 1890 by a Shakespeare nut called Eugene Schieffelin. He wanted Central Park in New York to be home to all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare. The thrushes and blackbirds struggled to acclimatise, but the starlings thrived. By the late Twenties they had reached the Mississippi and by the Forties had arrived in California. Now they are found from Alaska to Florida, and have ousted many native species, driving off bluebirds and woodpeckers, and forming gigantic flocks of up to a million birds. So Schieffelin’s romantic gesture not only brought about an air crash, but an ecological disaster too. But where does Shakespeare ever mention starlings? There is only one reference. It comes in Henry IV Part One when Hotspur, forbidden by the king to mention the name of Mortimer, declares that he will train a starling to say his name and sing it continually in his majesty’s ear. 2. Adolf Hitler wanted to stage a Shakespeare play In one of Hitler’s 1926 sketchbooks, there is a design for the staging of Julius Caesar. It portrays the Forum with the same sort of “severe deco” neoclassical architecture which would later create the setting for the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. Hitler’s admiration for the Roman Empire was immense, after a visit to the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla. And his drawing of the Forum suggests his appetite to create a platform worthy of his oratorical skills, paralleling Brutus and Mark Antony, and establish an arena in which to glorify the thousand year Third Reich. His chief architect, Albert Speer, designed the grandstand of the Zeppelinfeld, in which his Fuhrer could realise these ambitions. In 1937, Orson Welles opened his Mercury Theatre Company in New York, by directing a production of Julius Caesar which evoked both contemporary Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. 3. Shakespeare’s theatre stank When Thomas Platter visited London in 1599 and saw a production of Julius Caesar at the newly opened Globe Theatre, he also watched a session of bear-baiting. The Globe Theatre is a reconstruction of the original theatre built by Shakespeare’s company of players, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The original Globe was destroyed by fire in 1613. Afterwards he went behind the theatre and saw the dog enclosure, where there were 120 English mastiffs, and stalls containing 12 large bears, one of which was blind, and several bulls. He comments on the stench: “And the place was evil-smelling because of the lights (offal) and meat on which the butchers fed the said dogs”. The Hope Theatre which was built on Bankside (just two months after the nearby Globe Theatre burned to the ground in June 1613), alternated bear-baiting and plays. In Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, the stage-keeper complains about having to share the arena with the bears, and to the shocking smell: “the place be as dirty as Smithfield” he says, “and as stinking every whit”. • Gregory Doran interview: Getting the RSC just as he likes it 4. The great actress, Sarah Bernhardt, modelled for a statue of Lady Macbeth Next time you pass the Gower Statue of Shakespeare, which stands in front of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, take a closer look at one of the four supporting figures which surround the plinth. These bronze characters represent four elements of Shakespeare’s genius: Falstaff chortles for Comedy; Henry V holds the crown aloft for History, Hamlet with Yorick’s skull broods for Philosophy, and Lady Macbeth wrings her hands for Tragedy. Lord Ronald Gower sculpted this assemblage in his studio in the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris. When the great actress “the divine” Bernhardt visited him one day, she advised him precisely how Lady M. should wring her hands. She would play the part later, in 1899. When the statue was originally unveiled in 1888, it was positioned on the other side of the building, behind the Swan Theatre, and faced the church. 5. Mozart nearly wrote an opera of The Tempest We know that Giuseppe Verdi spent much of his later life trying to write an opera of King Lear, but it is a lesser-known fact that Mozart contemplated writing a version of The Tempest. Verdi struggled with his Re Lear project for many years. He told one of his two librettists, “This will be our masterpiece”. The four-act libretto, by Antonio Somma, still exists. But, finally defeated, Verdi offered the material to fellow composer Pietro Mascagni. Mascagni asked him why he did not write it himself. He replied : ‘The scene in which King Lear finds himself on the heath scared me’”. Frederick Delius wanted to write an opera of As You Like It. Tchaikovsky rejected the idea of writing an opera of The Merchant of Venice, but toyed with the idea of writing one based on Othello. But perhaps the most intriguing Shakespeare interpretation that never was, must be the opera of The Tempest that Mozart was apparently commissioned to write. 6. Shakespeare was the father of twins Even so my sun one early morn did shine With all triumphant splendour on my brow: But out alack he was but one hour mine, The region cloud hath masked him from me now. Sonnet 33 On February 2nd 1585 Shakespeare’s twins were baptised. Their names were Hamnet and Judith. It was the feast of Candlemas, the day when traditionally the Christmas decorations were taken down. The first folio of Shakespeare's work was published in 1623 Fifteen years later on Candlemas 1600, Twelfth Night was performed at Middle Temple. In that play another pair of twins are separated in a shipwreck, and assume each other have perished beneath the waves. But at the end, Shakespeare reunites them in one of the most moving moments in the entire canon. His own son, Hamnet, Judith’s twin, had died aged 11 in the late summer of 1596. It must have been a poignant reminder to Shakespeare that, although he could effect the reunion of the twins on stage, his daughter Judith, just turned 15, would never spend another birthday with her twin. 7. Catherine the Great translated Shakespeare In 1786, Queen Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias, did her own adaptation of Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor, titled “What it is to have Linen and Buck-baskets”. She had swept away the Winter Palace of Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva river, in St Petersburg, to make way for her splendid new Hermitage Theatre. It was here that her adaptation was performed: the first Russian play to credit Shakespeare’s influence. Catherine also translated Timon of Athens. Other world leaders have attempted to translate Shakespeare’s plays too. Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, translated both Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili. • Laughable maybe, but never lacklustre: words of the Bard 8. The first ever amateur performance of a Shakespeare play took place in 1623 In the Folger Library in Washington is a handwritten manuscript of an adaptation of two Shakespeare plays, which was performed by a household in Pluckley in Kent in 1623. Sir Edward Dering put together the two parts of Henry IV for a private performance at his home, Surrenden Manor. He paid the local rector to write out the play, and laid out the princely sum of 17s and 8d “for heads of hair and beards”, which were presumably wigs and false beards for Falstaff and the rest. And interestingly enough, this same amateur theatre enthusiast, was the first person we know of to buy a First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays when it hit the bookstalls in 1623. On December 5th he must have been admiring the stock of the publisher Edward Blount at the sign of the Black Bear, or possibly William Aspley’s shop at the Tiger’s Head, or John Smethwick’s shop “under the dial” in St Dunstan’s churchyard on Fleet Street. For these men were partners in the publication of an important new book, which had just been printed. And young Sir Edward decided he must buy not one copy, but two, at the substantial cost of £2 (oh, and he threw in a volume of Ben Jonson’s works at just 9s). The Folio had been listed in a catalogue at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the previous year, but the first impression only rolled off the press in the February 1623, and continued to be printed through to November, just a few days before Sir Edward bought his copies, which might therefore have been literally hot off the press. The only item which cost Edward Dering more that trip up to London was a beaver hat and band which set him back £2 6s. In the same account book he also records his payments to his workforce, and one John Barton gets his half year wages, £2 15s. Just 15s more than his Folios cost him. 9. Shakespeare was performed on the stump of a giant redwood tree In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain describes how two swindlers posing as English actors on their way down the Mississippi stage a night of Shakespeare in the court house of a one-horse town in Arkansas. When the audience drift away before the end, one of them declares: “Arkansas lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare! “ Shakespeare followed the Gold Rush west in the 1840s. There are stories of pioneer companies of actors playing among the ore-rich gulches, to mining camps full of desperados and sharpers of all nations. There, in a cluster of dingy canvas tents and log cabins, they would set up a stage in some saloon or store, with candles in bottles to serve as footlights. But if they expected an audience unresponsive to Shakespeare and the classics they were wrong. If they paraphrased lines, the miners would shout out the right ones, and fire their pistols, or fling daggers. But if they performed the Bard well, the miners would thunder their applause and throw buckskin purses full of gold dust. An actor called McKean Buchanan was a great favourite with the miners in these mountains. He played Macbeth and Richard III in a slouch hat with a great drooping feather, a long black cape and a huge yellow gauntlet, and would roar his way through every role. He was said to devour portions of the scenery. On tour in California, in Calaveras Grove, a suitable theatre could not be found, so he was persuaded to perform on the stump of a giant redwood tree. The stump, of the great Discovery tree, is still there. • Why Shakespeare should be child's play 10. Shakespeare was described as “Our Star of Poets” “Take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine, That all the world will be in love with night” Jonson called Shakespeare “Our Star of Poets”, and though there are satellites named after Shakespeare characters, there is no star named after Shakespeare himself. William Lassell began the practice of naming planets' satellites after Shakespeare’s characters in 1851, and there are moons called Titania, Oberon and Puck; Prospero, Ariel, Caliban and even Sycorax (Caliban’s mother); but not a single astral body - moon, satellite or star - named after the man himself. As the Hubble telescope reveals ever greater depths of space, perhaps a new star can be found which will bear Shakespeare’s name in time for the quatercentenary of his death in 2016. The Royal Astronomical Society take note. 11. Google have hounoured Shakespeare with a Doodle To mark the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death on April 23, Google has unveiled a new doodle, celebrating the playwright and some of his most famous plays, including The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Gregory Doran is Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His book, The Shakespeare Almanac, is published by HutchinsonPower Failure: The Inside Story of Climate Politics Under Rudd and Gillard By Philip Chubb \| Black Inc. \| $29.99 Dear Labor Party branch-stackers, here’s a book for you. Stop your letterboxing and number-crunching for a moment. Hold fire on those bulk party memberships and dodgy donations. Postpone your meetings with the union and faction heavies. The preselection nomination form can wait for a day or two because you’ve got some homework to do. I want you to pick up Philip Chubb’s account of the Rudd and Gillard governments and find a quiet spot. Somewhere out the back of a backbencher’s electoral office will be fine. Make yourself comfortable between the photocopier and the pile of old bumper stickers and then start reading. The story you’ll read begins something like this. Once upon a time there was a government with hope and purpose and vision. It was freshly elected with a strong mandate from the people. It had energy and resolve. It was all set to do the difficult things to address one of the greatest problems facing the planet… It’s a story that will probably make you nostalgic – if you’re old enough to remember 2007, that is. You’ll recall those days when a much-loved prime minister said he was here to help and crowds cheered and fellow party members walked a little taller because Australia was playing its part in combating climate change. You might even get a little choked up as loveable Mr Rudd signs the Kyoto Protocol and receives a standing ovation before world leaders in Bali. As you read on, curled up on the stack of old campaign posters with your cup of whatever branch-stackers drink these days, you might begin to realise that this tale isn’t a happy one. The promising “Ruddslide” will eventually look more like a disastrous avalanche, with the wreckage of climate change policy mangled among so many other Labor initiatives. But read on, you must, even as the book forensically recounts stuff-ups and miscalculations and as the government loses its way, its mandate and the support of the Turnbull-led Coalition for serious action on climate change. You must read every word, even though you know how it ends. Chubb’s book is unrelenting. I picked it up thinking Labor had good intentions but had messed up the implementation of climate change policy. By the time I put it down I was worn out, close to concluding that Labor was a basket case, a party unable to turn an overwhelming mandate into policy and incapable of ruling itself, let alone standing united against a carping opposition. But this is an important book because it methodically chronicles Labor’s failures and, in the process, serves as a how-not-to manual for anyone interested in social reform. Those party hacks of tomorrow, the people who will have the thankless task of steering policy through the cesspit of party politics and on into legislation, should read it in order to learn from the mess that was Labor’s handling of climate policy in the years between 2007 and 2013. Along the way, Power Failure explains how as a nation we lost our sense of global purpose; how we stopped caring about rising sea levels and started swallowing spin about the rising cost of living; how we were ground down by the unceasing negativity of certain politicians and the whining of the coal industry. Chubb demonstrates, rather poignantly, that we turned away despite the appalling heatwaves and bushfires of 2009, in which so many people died, including some of Chubb’s friends in the semi-rural region near Melbourne where he lives. Where did it go wrong? Was it the breaking of the drought? Was it the failure at Copenhagen? Was it the sophism of Andrew Bolt or the scepticism of the Murdoch press? Or should we blame the rise of the dries in the Coalition, led by that master of negativity, Tony Abbott? While Chubb clearly considers these and many other factors to be important, it’s obvious he reckons the main problem was the leadership style, and ultimately the personality, of Kevin Rudd. Rudd emerges as the chaotic, controlling, egotistical, centralising workaholic that we all got to know, ever so slowly, after the coup of 2010. He was clearly, according to Chubb, the wrong man for the job. For example, when Malcolm Turnbull was opposition leader Rudd knew that coalition support was vital to achieve lasting change. And yet he couldn’t resist the temptation to ridicule Turnbull in an effort to wedge and marginalise him. It might have felt good at the time but he was wrong to assume that the opposition would “fall right in line behind him” as soon as he stopped the game-playing. He failed to realise that Turnbull had his own battle to win, against the climate sceptics of his own party. Rudd alienated the Greens as well. Based on the assumption that Coalition support would hold, he left Bob Brown and his colleagues out of the discussion so that when the matter reached the Senate they were thoroughly marginalised. This doesn’t excuse the Greens’ decision to vote down the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in 2009 but it does help explain it. Rudd underestimated Abbott – but he was not alone in doing that. He amassed power around himself. He micro-managed climate change policy. He stopped listening to dissenting voices by limiting access to advisers. He was paranoid about leaking by colleagues, such as resources and energy minister Martin Ferguson, whom he considered a climate sceptic. Simply put, “Rudd was the wrong kind of leader to attack a wicked problem like climate change.” After the failure of the CPRS and the collapse of the climate summit in Copenhagen soon after, Rudd suffered a breakdown. As Chubb says, he “became quite detached from reality.” He quotes Wayne Swan saying “he’d attached all his emotional energy to it,” and Gillard concurring: “I think it hit him very hard personally.” Rudd gave up on climate policy and redirected his energy to reform of the health sector. He failed to understand the effect this would have on all those who had worked so hard to create the policy and on the voters who still cared enough about the issue. Gillard’s ascendancy quickly followed. And this is where the negativity gives way to some measure of optimism. Chubb clarifies, if not corrects, the narrative that blames Gillard for the party’s decision to drop its commitment to act on climate change. She emerges as the pragmatist who only advocated shelving the policy while the party was paralysed by Rudd’s indecision. Once in office she certainly made errors, such as the early decision to shunt the matter off to a convoluted community forum and her overly formal deal with the Greens – and, of course, that statement that she would not introduce a tax on carbon. Initially she was not across the detail, but before long she was fully engaged. Her policy response, the Clean Energy Future package, was ultimately successful. It passed both houses of parliament, but at horrendous political cost. Gillard was everything Rudd wasn’t. She negotiated herself into office in the hung parliament. She created a cross-party mechanism for revamping the policy, even extending an invitation to the Coalition to participate. She dealt her own cabinet and caucus into the decision-making. She told them what she was doing. She at least tried to popularise the issue, although not energetically enough, and when she did, she was mostly drowned out by competing voices and a virulent media. She is acknowledged for her achievements at wrangling something from near-impossible conditions. Power Failure is lucid and readable. But this is not what you’d call a “don’t tell – show” account. The people and the places documented in the story don’t come alive in their particularity. (On one occasion we do get a visual sense, just briefly, of Kevin Rudd having a panic attack at a meeting at the Lodge, which he has to leave. We see him as he is calmed by an adviser as they take a walk.) It lacks those moments that Chubb managed to generate in his seminal television series Labor in Power, when the likes of Graham Richardson and Bob Collins took us behind the scenes and revealed the human stories behind the momentous decisions. Instead, this book’s strengths are in its cogent analysis of an obscenely complex area of policy and its crisp navigation through the opinions of named and unnamed sources. It is also a book that tells in another sense. Before long, Chubb dispenses with the academic and journalistic nicety of letting the reader decide and just tells us who was right and wrong. And that means Rudd gets a walloping. But perhaps Chubb is entitled to. After all, he did interview just about everyone on the Labor side of politics and scores from the public service who were involved in the events he recounts. He even sought out and interviewed people in the Latrobe Valley as a counterpoint to the policy wonks and party apparatchiks. As he observes, Labor should have done the same. If they had spoken to the people of Gippsland they would have learnt lessons about dealing with the privatised power companies, which rattled the government with negative advertising and inflated claims about the cost of carbon pricing. Chubb’s advice is cogent. But there is one piece of advice that might already have been proved wrong. He intimates that Gillard was wrong to admit on national television that her market-based mechanism to price carbon amounted to a tax and therefore a broken promise. He quotes Barrie Cassidy’s piece in the Drum that showed how easily Gillard could have shrugged off the suggestion that it was a tax. She could have said, “This is a charge on the country’s biggest polluters. It is no more a tax than your regular power bills.” This sounded to me like good political advice – leaving aside the dubious ethics – until Abbott and Joe Hockey did exactly the same following the 2014 budget. Their claims that they weren’t increasing taxes only made their broken promises seem worse. This book is full of useful advice. I hope the politicians of tomorrow won’t turn straight to the table at the back that sets out the dos and don’ts of implementing policy. This thoughtful distillation of the book’s findings is not for you. Not yet. No, your task is to read every depressing and stimulating page in the hope that you will emerge with a little less hubris and a little more insight. You need to know that others have gone before you and, thanks to this book, we are able to learn from their mistakes. •North Melbourne has pulled out all stops to prevent Ben Cunnington from becoming a free agent by signing the star midfielder to a new deal until the end of the 2020 season. Cunnington said he was delighted to receive a three-year extension on his existing contract. "It's exciting, we were just going about the pre-season as usual knowing that I had a contract for this year and next year, when the club approached me and my manager about a new deal," Cunnington told The Herald Sun's Glenn McFarlane. "It's worked out really good for me. I never wanted to leave, and now I won't have to deal with all that free agency stuff (next year) and all the media and speculation that goes with it. "You look at the guys who signed up last year, 'Ziebs' (Jack Ziebell) and 'Goldy' (Todd Goldstein), and now I've done it. Hopefully, we can get a few young guys jumping on board as the club is going in a good direction." The 24-year-old won a Syd Barker Medal in 2014 and came runner-up to Todd Goldstein last year. "I've always been brought up to be loyal in whatever you do, and North has been very good to me," Cunnington said. "This place is a part of home for me. "It is a great family club. The culture is really good. I want to be here for as long as I can, and this deal means it will probably end up with me being a one-club player, which is what I've always wanted." Having played in two consecutive preliminary finals, Cunnington believes North is well placed to go one further and secure a fifth flag for the club. "We definitely feel we are around the mark at the moment. Looking back at our first prelim final (against Sydney in 2014), that was such an adrenalin rush and everything happened so quickly. "But last year we genuinely felt we had West Coast covered (at stages), even though they were a bit too good in the end. We look back and feel we could have won that game against them. "That's what we play footy for (to win premierships). And if we can finish in the top four this year, it will help us even more. "We don't think we are too old," he said. "Everyone talks about the older guys, but 'Boomer' (Brent Harvey), 'Wellsy' (Daniel Wells) and 'Waitey' (Jarrod Waite) are training the house down and still among our best players. "But we have also got a lot of young guys coming through. This year I reckon all the young guys have been really impressive, straight from the time we started running and once we brought out the balls, you can see how smart they are as footballers too. "All of them have shown a bit during the NAB Cup and they are going to get their chance to play."Iran's leaders don't worry we'll nuke them. They worry we'll never trust them. Fabrice Coffrini / Reuters U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman in Geneva on October 15, 2013. Octogenarian billionaire and GOP megdaonor Sheldon Adelson caused a ruckus Wednesday by suggesting that the U.S. lob a nuclear missile into the Iranian desert. The idea, as Adelson described it, was to issue a warning shot that would show Tehran “we mean business” in nuclear negotiations. American media outlets hyped Adelson’s characteristically hawkish fantasy. But Iran appeared unperturbed by his talk of a nuclear first strike. That’s because the real furor in Tehran now is over another provocative remark, this one from Wendy Sherman, a senior State Department official who is America’s lead negotiator in talks with Iran. In recent testimony to Congress, Sherman said that the U.S. had to be cautious about cutting a deal with Tehran, because recent experience with the Iranians over their nuclear program—which Iran has repeatedly concealed—shows that “deception is part of the DNA.” “Sherman’s DNA comment has created a big stir in Iran,” says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Adelson not so much.” How could a diplomatic slight like Sherman’s outweigh Adelson’s talk of a nuclear first strike? One reason has to do with the messengers. Adelson may bankroll Republicans, but he’s not setting American policy. And no one takes seriously his fantasy of a nuclear shot across Tehran’s bow. Sherman, by contrast, speaks directly for the U.S. government. That’s why conservative leaders and media outlets in Iran are lashing out at what they call Sherman’s insult, uttered at a Senate hearing earlier this month. One hard-line paper is calling for a boycott of the talks if she’s present. A cartoon published by Iran’s Fars news agency depicts Sherman as a broom-riding witch. To some degree, the fuss over Sherman’s words is a function of internal politics in Iran, where conservatives are looking for reasons to undermine talks with America. (The three-week delay in seizing on Sherman’s words suggests orchestrated outrage.) Jason Reed / Reuters But the flap also goes to a core problem with the nuclear talks: mutual distrust. The U.S. worries that Iran is feigning flexibility to win relief from sanctions, with no real intent to halt its nuclear program. Iran thinks America sees the nuclear issue as a stalking horse for regime change. The parallel suspicions could make a deal impossible. This is why Sherman trumps Adelson in Tehran. Iran’s leaders are smart enough to know America’s not going to nuke them. They’re also smart enough to know that suspicion of them may be, well, in our DNA. At a press briefing earlier this week, a State Department spokeswoman downplayed the anti-Sherman campaign, saying the U.S. and Iran have a three-decade history of mistrust that both are now trying to overcome. “This mistrust has deep roots, and we don’t think it can be overcome overnight,” said spokeswoman Marie Harf. “Maybe,” asked a reporter, “this is something that stem cells can fix?” Or maybe it simply can’t be fixed.KOCHI: A controversy is raging over the delay in starting operations at the new international terminal (T3) at the Cochin international airport which was declared open for commercial operations by Chief Minister and CIAL chairman Pinarayi Vijayan on March 11. The real reason for the delay in starting actual operations is the shortage of adequate number of additional CISF personnel for security at the new terminal. However, sources said that the non-representation of the Central government and the BJP for the formal inaugural function of the terminal on March 11 has caused heartburns among them which is resulting in the delay in starting the operations due to a ‘Central hurdle’. It is learnt that the local BJP leadership had expressed its unhappiness to the CIAL bosses over the exclusion while people like CPM district secretary P. Rajeev were given a seat on the dais. No Union minister was invited to the inauguration of the terminal which had got a lot of clearances from the Central government and its support at the right intervals. However, a CIAL spokesperson discounted the possibility of Central government making any such move. “That cannot be the case. It is true that the commencement of terminal operations are delayed due to the delay in deploying 362 additional CISF personnel at the T3. However, yesterday they have released 23 personnel from Bhilai steel plant and we hope that the rest will join soon,” he said. The spokesperson also said that only CIAL chairman, director board members, officials and people’s representatives from the area and union representatives were taken on the dais of the inaugural function. “P. Rajeev, V.D. Satheesan and Hibi Eden represented labour unions. It was purely a CIAL function and ministers participated in their capacity as director board members,” said the spokesperson.Today's Google Doodle celebrates Robert Koch, the father of bacteriology. He received the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, and he had previously identified the microscopic culprits behind anthrax and cholera. But more importantly, Koch was the scientist who figured out how to study bacteria in the first place. He first isolated cultures of bacteria on potato slices, then became one of the first to adopt the Petri dish (today's Google Doodle includes images of both). Koch also pioneered the use of agar, which is still the medium used for most bacterial cultures today, over a century later. Without his work, we couldn't study how bacteria grow, how to fight them, or what potentially useful chemicals they produce. Koch also laid the groundwork for modern epidemiology, spelling out four criteria for linking a disease to a pathogen. The organism must always be present, in every case of the disease. The organism must be isolated from a host containing the disease and grown in pure culture. Samples of the organism taken from pure culture must cause the same disease when inoculated into a healthy, susceptible animal in the laboratory. The organism must be isolated from the inoculated animal and must be identified as the same original organism first isolated from the originally diseased host. He used those criteria to discover the bacteria that caused of anthrax (in 1876), cholera (in 1884), and tuberculosis (in 1882). Using Koch's methods -- and inspired by his proof that it could be done -- other scientists soon found the bacteria responsible for several other diseases, ushering in what has been called a Golden Age of Bacteriology around the turn of the 20th century. Those discoveries were vital, because if you want to prevent or cure a disease, you need to understand what causes it and how it spreads. Once Koch had discovered what caused tuberculosis, a cure seemed like the logical next step. And in 1890, he surprised everyone by announcing that he had discovered exactly that. The Tuberculin Fiasco "If the importance of a disease for mankind is measured by the number of fatalities it causes, then tuberculosis must be considered much more important than those most feared infectious diseases, plague, cholera and the like. One in seven of all human beings dies from tuberculosis. If one only considers the productive middle-age groups, tuberculosis carries away one-third, and often more," he said during his 1905 Nobel Prize lecture. And by 1890, Koch himself already had a reputation as a brilliant medical researcher, so it's no surprise that people lined up for his inoculations. The problem was that Koch, himself, had been so driven, and so optimistic, that he had rushed his "cure" to market without enough testing or scrutiny. It was only once the first patients started dying, and Rudolf Virchow's autopsies turned up live tuberculosis bacteria in their remains, that everyone began to realize Dr. Koch's miracle cure really wasn't one. He had tested tuberculin, which consisted of proteins he'd extracted from the tuberculosis bacterium, on guinea pigs, but only on a handful of people - including his then-mistress, 16-year-old Hedwig Freiberg, who for some reason later married him anyway. He'd seen some evidence that humans suffered worse side effects than guinea pigs, including fever, nausea, and joint pain, but dismissed the problem in his haste to get the drug to market. Many people at the time accused Koch of trying to profit from a scam -- which was a common ploy in the days before pharmaceutical regulations -- but given his later work and his track record of successful research before and after the tuberculin debacle, it seems much more likely that he was actually just overly hasty. The 1905 Nobel Prize underscored the value of Koch's work, however. It recognized his 1882 discovery of the pathogen that actually caused the deadly disease, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Without that discovery, it would have been impossible to even contemplate a real search for a cure. Human Guinea Pigs The story of Koch's groundbreaking career does underscore how dangerously unregulated medical research was at the turn of the last century, however -- and how high the human toll could be. In early 1906, just a few months after receiving his Nobel Prize, Koch and his wife traveled to eastern Africa, where an epidemic of sleeping sickness, or trypanomiasis, had ravaged the population since 1902. In 1903, about two million people died of sleeping sickness in the Lake Victoria region. That included 20,000 people in Uganda's Sese Islands - two thirds of the population. Koch's job was to study how the disease spread and figure out what could be done to contain it. His research team set up camp in the Sese Islands and set to work testing experimental drugs on the local villagers. One of them was Atoxyl, an arsenic compound which caused vertigo, sickness, and colic. Several people were permanently blinded; it turns out that Atoxyl damages the optic nerve. Koch's team tested a number of other arsenic compounds as well. A few of them appeared to relieve the symptoms of sleeping sickness in the short term, but the team could never get all the parasites out of their patients' blood. In very simple terms, that's because the arsenic compounds were making the human patients sicker faster than they were killing the parasites. Although Koch's journals indicate that people traveled to the camp voluntarily, it doesn't seem that they realized they were being experimented on. And that underscores an uncomfortable fact about most of the early breakthroughs that have shaped modern medicine: those breakthroughs often happened at the expense of vulnerable people, and the African subjects of British and German colonial rule in east Africa were as vulnerable as could be. Of course, the reality of turn-of-the-century clinical testing doesn't make Koch's contributions to modern science any less significant, or his work any less impressive. But it's important to remember that scientific discovery doesn't take place in a social or historical vacuum, and we have to look critically at how the metaphorical sausage gets made.Xiaomi has launched a new Air Purifier, adding to the growing number air purifiers it has
only get "Jerry" on your Starbucks cup so many times before you take action—have all always just last-named me. And because I've always just gone by that one name, I've long been fascinated by people who have one or more additional monikers by which they're known. My own lack of a nickname, in time, gave birth to an obsession with everyone else's. All of which brings me to this: While I am eternally grateful to Basketball-Reference for a great many things, the nicknames listed on their web site are largely trash, and I've told them so. How many people on the planet do you think have ever called Dwyane Wade "Pookie," for example? Who knows Paul Pierce as "P-Double"? Don't they know "Linsanity" was the phenomenon surrounding Jeremy Lin's spectacular rise to prominence, not his nickname? And why are the nicknames only on the player pages and not in some sort of database? I understand these questions might matter to me more than other people, but also they really matter to me. Read More: The Brief, Brilliant Football Career of Allen Iverson As the NBA's self-appointed Directed of Nickname Operations, I have taken it upon myself to compile a taxonomy of NBA nicknames. That link contains what is not quite a completely comprehensive list, but a decent start at one; I have compiled it myself and with the help of some friends, and there is a good chance I am updating it as you read this. But the study of nicknames is more than dumping "Pookie" into a spreadsheet. There is a history to this field, and honestly the history is better than the present. NBA nicknames use to be, like, a lot better. Maybe it's because people now try too hard to come up with nicknames for certain players—think of beat writers trying to make their preferred moniker happen, or Basketball Twitter screaming about how "[Player X] needs a nickname!"—or because more and more players now try to come up with their own nicknames as a branding thing—we see you, Kobe Bryant/Dwyane Wade/Harrison Barnes—or because the SportsCenter lingo of using initials or hyphenations caught on and became easy shorthand. Whatever the reason, there's a distinct lack of originality in contemporary nicknames. We need to do better. The way I see it, there are 11 different kinds of NBA nicknames, only some of which are actually good: Initials, Hyphenates, Abbreviated Names, Replacement Names, Body/Origin Descriptors, Game Descriptors, Self-Given Nicknames, "The" Nicknames, Pop-Culture Nicknames, Group Nicknames, and (for lack of better terminology) Original Nicknames. Let's break them down one by one. When you revert to the default. Photo by Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports Initials: This is basically the default version of nicknaming these days, which is a sad state of affairs. Initials can and have been used for superstars (MJ, LBJ, KD, KG, etc.), All-Stars (AI, LJ, LMA, KJ, etc.), and role players (VDN, MKG, MCW, KCP, CDR, etc.) alike. It's lazy. For all but a few players, like the ones who have three names—or more, like Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, who you sadly do not know as LRMAM—or Andrei Kirilenko, whose AK-47 combined his initials and uniform number and was objectively perfect. We must do better than this. Karl-Anthony Towns can't just be KAT forever. Hyphenates: There is no earthly reason that Tracy McGrady, Dwyane Wade, Deron Williams, Derrick Rose, and Jason Kidd should all have basically the same nickname. T-Mac, D-Wade, D-Will, D-Rose, J-Kidd? Ugh. I blame C-Webb. It should be noted that some hyphenates, like Z-Bo and Q-Pon, do actually work, but the rest are practically begging for people to get more creative. Abbreviated Names: This is definitely the most popular kind of nickname, and for good reason. It still immediately conjures up the player, but it's just easier to say than his real name. Why call the two-time reigning MVP Stephen, when Steph is much easier? Who wants to say Shaquille or Carmelo when Shaq and Melo are sitting right there? Zo, Sheed, Toine, Dame, Pip, Peja, Spree, Cooz, Nique, Spoon, Dice, McBob, Mash, Mase, GOOGS—these are not just good nicknames; they're also fun to say. You can (almost) never go wrong with an abbreviated name. Almost. Sometimes you wind up with something like Kandi Man, which becomes easy to parody. "The Kandi Man Can't" is just sitting right there. Replacement Names: You know how this works. A child gets a nickname growing up, and it sticks. He becomes an NBA player and almost nobody realizes that the name they know him by isn't his actual name (or if they do, they don't use his real first name anyway). Penny Hardaway, Spud Webb, Reds Holzman and Auerbach, Popeye Jones, Doc Rivers, Muggsy Bogues, Speedy Claxton, Tiny Archibald, Satch Sanders, Moochie Norris, Fat Lever, Campy Russell, Tree Rollins, Bimbo Coles, and the immortal Smush Parker are all terrific examples. This kind of thing rarely happens anymore, though, unless you count Jimmer Fredette. Which I don't. Why has this kind of nickname fallen off? Can we just agree to blame the childhood friends of future NBA players, or is that unfair? Sometimes it's like you're not even trying. Photo by David Richard-USA TODAY Sports Body/Origin Descriptors: There used to be some pretty creative nicknames of this variety: the Hick from French Lick, the Round Mound of Rebound, Wilt the Stilt, the Big Fundamental. There's an entire subphylum of Shaq nicknames built around the word Big—Big Aristotle, Big Shaqtus, Big Shamrock, Big Daddy, and so on. The improved technology and training regimens available to players these days has yielded fewer players of outwardly distinctive body types, though, so it's somewhat tougher to come up with shape-related nicknames for players coming into the league. Nowadays, it's more about working the country the player hails from into the mix. Greek Freak, Big Daddy Canada, and Three 6 Latvia (the latter admittedly only used by an elite cadre of Knicks fans for Kristaps Porzingis) are good shit, but other post-2000s descriptors like Haitian Sensation and Brazilian Blur are too easy. This is America and we should still be able to come up with stuff like Zeke from Cabin Creek and the Enormous Mormon. Game Descriptors: My tolerance for this type of nickname varies. Stacey "Plastic Man" Augmon is perfect and I wouldn't mind if it were reused on a different player every 20 years or so. Junkyard Dog was perfect for Jerome Williams, and Iso Joe could not possibly fit Joe Johnson better. Clyde the Glide, Nick the Quick, Thunder Dan, Pitchin' Paul, Air Canada, Chocolate Thunder, the Grindfather, and even J.R. Swish all range from "pretty good" to "very good." You can miss me with any and all variations of "Big ____," though. That goes for Mr. Big Shot, Big Shot Bob or Rob, Big Game James, and whatever else in that vein is out there. There is opportunity here to come up with some really inventive stuff. Even something like Lillard Time, which isn't so much a nickname as just a description of what happens when Damian Lillard takes over crunch time of any given game, is so much better than "Big Shot" or "Big Game" or "Big Time" anything. Self-Given Nicknames: There is no way around this: You. Do. Not. Get. To. Choose. Your. Own. Nickname. Nicknames are bestowed upon you, and that's it. So fuck Black Mamba. Fuck Black Falcon. Fuck Way of Wade and Swaggy P and definitely fuck The Servant, which Kevin Durant tried to make happen when he didn't like the (very good) nickname the internet briefly gave him (more on that later). Self-given nicknames are straight-up garbage and should never be used. The exception here is "the Kobe Stopper," because Ruben Patterson is a legend. Respect. "The" Nicknames: This is a mixed bag. There have been a whole lot of really good "the" nicknames: the Answer, the Mailman, the Glove, The Dream, The Admiral, The Worm, The Matrix, and arguably the best nickname ever, The Truth. But there have also been some really shitty ones: The Jet, The Big O, The Chosen One, The Big Ticket (and The Kid), The Machine, and The Brow. When you give someone a "the" nickname, they damn well better actually be THE [whatever you're using]. There's obviously more than one captain, so just don't call a guy The Captain. As definitely don't name a guy Il Mago—that's Italian for "The Magician" and was used to refer to Andrea Bargnani—if his only magic power is making his team worse. Splash down. Photo by Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports Pop-Culture Nicknames: These can be actually taken from popular culture, like Skywalker, Mighty Mouse, Bad News Barnes, X-Man, Super Mario, Chef Curry, or Sideshow Bob. They can also arise when a player wades into popular culture, as in Larry Johnson's nickname of Grandmama, which was the result of some weird commercials in which Larry Johnson dressed up as an elderly woman who dunks. Ray Allen played a character named Jesus Shuttlesworth in a Spike Lee movie; interns attached latex old-guy makeup to Kyrie Irving until he was Uncle Drew. The best of these nicknames, though, happen organically. Basketball Twitter calls Nik Stauskas "Sauce Castillo" because the closed captioning on a Kings game got messed up one night. There is no compelling reason for Stauskas to even have a nickname, so this says something about the passion involved here. The important thing with pop-culture nicknames, as with all other types, is not to force it. You don't get to have Kristaps become Godzingis just because you say it a lot. Trust me on this. I tried to make Vucci Mane happen for Nikola Vucevic and I know it will never work. Group Nicknames: These most often come about when a team captures the public consciousness for a distinctive reason. Think of the Bad Boys Pistons, the Showtime Lakers, the Jail Blazers, or the Grit N' Grind Grizzlies. They can also apply to a smaller group of players, like Run T-M-C, the Twin Towers, the Splash or Stache Brothers, the Death Lineup (not the "Uh-Oh Lineup," the name they tried to adopt for themselves; see "Self-Given Nicknames"), Lob City, the Rolls Royce Backcourt, or the Flying Death Machine. When one of these catches on, it's usually because it's good enough to be worthy of the group it describes. With the exception of every good bench unit in NBA history adopting the moniker "The Bench Mob," basically all of these are good. I'm very excited to see what nickname sticks for the new-age Death Lineup featuring Kevin Durant in the role of Much Better Harrison Barnes. Original Nicknames: The Holy Grail. This is what we need to get back to. Nicknames should arise organically, catch on, and then stick. Larry Legend, Magic, Iceman, Dr. J, Reign Man, Born Ready, White Chocolate, Tuff Juice, Dollar Bill, Boogie, Agent Zero, Psycho T—these nicknames are blessings, every one of them. A couple years ago, we almost had one of the most perfect nicknames to ever arise: Kevin Durant was going to be Slim Reaper. There was an amazing photoshop and everything. Then KD shot it down and seriously tried to get people to call him The Servant. It remains the weakest move Durant has ever made, but he has moved on and so must we all. We cannot afford to be discouraged. The work of saving NBA nicknames is simply too important. Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.This post may contain affiliate links; please read the disclosure for more information. The ongoing war on selfie sticks at Walt Disney World has taken a more drastic turn. You may remember when we told you that the sticks were not allowed to be taken out on any rides or attractions a few months ago, well, now selfie sticks won’t even be allowed through security… By July 2015, guests will not be permitted to even bring these items into any of the Walt Disney World theme parks due to safety concerns imposed by the items being brought onto rides (and the rather careless ways some guests use them when not on attractions). Guest relations cast members will be assigned to the security screening areas in front of all of the parks to assist the security cast in dealing with guests trying to bring their “selfie sticks” in. If found, guests can opt to take the stick with them and leave, or they can check it with the guest relations cast member who will have the item stored, give the guest a ticket, and request that they retrieve the item upon leaving the park later that day. We don’t have an exact date for when this policy will be going into effect, but it should be sometime very soon, before July 2015 in fact. Stay tuned for more details as they become available. UPDATE: Disney has confirmed that selfie sticks have indeed been banned from the Walt Disney World theme parks effective June 30th, 2015. Hong Kong Disneyland and Disneyland Resort Paris will also be following suit.QUESTION: Hi Martin, I have only just found you and started reading your articles this last month after your interview on … radio.. It is a pain in the Butt we are not taught any of this in school, but I still have an HUGE aversion to a fractional reserve system where a private group or cartel is allowed to create debt based money out of thin air and then lend it to the public and nations as a loan at interest where by always creating more debt in the system than available currency to repay. This is a wealth transfer back to ever holds that power it seems, but maybe I’m wrong.. It seems we should have a currency of some sorts that the public can use to transact in that does not bear interest and create a sucking motion of our wealth and production back to the banksters and some type of lending system along side that.. If the system needs to have a fractional reserve system, then ok, but who is to get these free benefits of its creation and the attaching of interest to it? A cartel of banksters? The Government? Can I just lend out currency created out of thin air myself at interest? lol ANSWER: I understand that there are people who have spun this whole fractional banking thing into some evil conspiracy and preach that it must end without understanding that such a move would be to collapse the entire economy sending us into a Dark Age. Such an event would bring the end of civilization which is created by a synergy of people coming together – that means sharing resources including capital. The banks do not create money out of thin air with some endless supply and just keep all the profits (interest). If they keep about 8% as reserves to facilitate the normal amount of cash withdrawals, then this becomes the fractional basis of banking. End fractional banking and the entire real estate grid would collapse. They are fighting with windmills. Let’s look at this propaganda closely. How do they create money out of thin air? A bank must have deposits and then can lend out ONLY what has been deposited. They do not just create $100 and lend you something and pocket the interest. That is just not possible. People seem to be exaggerating this whole thing to sell precious metals on the theory that only gold is tangible money and real. Nice propaganda to dupe a lot of people, but this is sophistry if not criminal fraud. The NY Money Center banks have transformed banking into wild trading houses and they front-run their customers who are no longer cherished client relationships. They live from deal to deal and are not interested in traditional banking. This is all about the quick buck that has become transactional banking. They DO NOT systemically manipulate the precious metals. If that were true, then why bother even buying something that can never go up? This is an excuse to cover-up bad or fake analysis. The metals will rally when it is TIME, and NOT before. Everything has to be aligned to get the rally. The first step in the evolution of banking after simply a depository service was really GIRO banking. GIRO banking simply evolved to facilitate trade. If you had and account and I had an account at the same bank, the difference between a GIRO bank and a simple depository was rather significant. The GIRO bank was a facility where I could just write you a check and transfer the money from my account to yours. Checking was a major advancement in banking. A depository bank would mean you would have to withdraw money to then physically hand it to me since there was no ability to transfer between accounts. This presented huge problems with tangible coins, which could be counterfeit or clipped. You would have the burden of certifying each coin. Illustrated here is a coin from ancient Lydia 7th century BC with nine counter-marks by money-changers all certifying that they tested the coin. Fractional banking emerged as it became clear that the average maximum amount of money people would demand to be withdrawn in the normal course of business was roughly 8%. This is NOT evil and it is NOT the source of all out problems. This is nonsense sold by those who are still living in the past and cannot grasp that we are no longer in a BARTER economy exchange commodities as money. Money is the total productive capacity of the people. Japan rose from the ashes without gold or commodities to the second largest economy in the world on the back of its people. China may have been buying gold AFTER it rose, but it was its people that produced and brought it wealth. Russia has gold and oil, but it has restricted its growth replacing communism with an oligarchy rather than the freedom of its people to compete and produce, which is why it did not perform as did China. Russia has the natural resources, but it MUST change philosophies or it will not survive long-term as was the fate of Spain when the natural resources from the America ran out. Fractional banking absolutely does NOT create money out of thin air. If you deposit $100 and leave that in a savings account, the bank is paying you interest and it lends 90% of that money to another person. It is not that they are really printing money out of thin air for that would mean it does not need a deposit to begin with. That is just a gross misrepresentation. The money on deposit is LEVERAGED but not created without some monetary base. As for those who misunderstand the issue and propose government should run the banks and decide who gets credit, well Venice had such as system and the bank was a government monopoly. That still failed for corruption. Then there was Wisselbank of Amsterdam which there too the bank failed and the city had to promise to repay since it lent itself all the money when it was supposed to be just a depository bank. It is amazing how people constantly propose the same ideas that have failed over and over again. So have a nice time Iceland – I will short the country. This is the same nonsense spread about “paper gold” and futures are evil. The futures market has been around since Babylonian days. A farmer has the risk of growing a crop and then not knowing what the price the market will be. He sells his crop for FUTURE delivery. Yes, technically, it does not yet exist. That does not suppress the price. It creates a viable market by eliminate the risk to grow the crop. For a miner, they will not mine even gold unless they know they can sell it yes for paper money. Even if you are buying life insurance in case you die to take care of your family we have risk of a future event in play. Your company can also insure you as a key-man. There is only one life here, but there can be multiple contracts benefiting different people in the event of your death. This too is propaganda for it is really DEATH insurance not insuring you against living forever. But they cannot sell DEATH INSURANCE so they flip it and call it LIFE INSURANCE. Leasing gold allows someone to own it and earn money. Otherwise, gold pays no income or interest and would be a dead asset. This is why institutions cannot buy gold for they need income. Many people lease gold to own it but have to have some income from that money. This is not “paper gold” intent upon suppressing the market. Without the futures market, gold would not be traded and it would shrink from any viable international status. It would become indistinguishable from rhodium or another untradable metal. It is NOT fractional banking that is the problem. Listen to some of these people rant and rave about fractional banking and you see how uneducated they truly are about finance. If you ended this system, the entire world economy would end. All real estate would collapse for how can there be a mortgage? You retirement fund would vanish. Nothing would exist economically. Like paper gold they usually also want to end, you would quickly see gold would lose all value if there is no market to trade. Stocks are more LIQUID than real estate BECAUSE there is a central place to trade. Eliminate “paper gold” and you eliminate the ability to trade and then gold would lose its liquidity and thus its value. Let’s stay focused on the problem – transactional banking. The money center banks have become greedy and prefer to trade with other people’s money and constantly blow up because they are terrible traders. They blackmail government because government needs to sell its debt. This is the problem – NOT fractional banking.Toronto passes Vancouver as Canada's most expensive city Wednesday, July 13, 2011 By James Kwantes, Vancouver Sun Toronto has surpassed Vancouver as the most expensive place to live in Canada, according to an annual report released on Tuesday. The following are the 20 most expensive cities, according to Mercer. See Mercer's 20 most expensive cities for 2011 here. VANCOUVER — Take heart, Vancouver residents who complain about sky-high housing prices and the cost of West Coast living: it’s now more expensive to reside in Toronto. Rising rents driven by a tightening rental market vaulted Toronto to No. 59 on the Mercer 2011 Cost of Living Survey, ahead of Vancouver, which is in 65th spot. In last year’s ranking, Vancouver was in 75th spot and Toronto was No. 76. The cost of rental accommodation is a major component of the annual survey, and vacancy rates in the two cities have been moving in opposite directions. Vancouver’s vacancy rate in April was 2.8 per cent, up from 2.2 per cent a year earlier and above the 10-year average of 1.3 per cent, said CMHC analyst Richard Sam. In Toronto, the vacancy rate was 1.6 per cent in April, down from 2.7 per cent a year earlier. Those trends were reflected in average rent hikes in both cities. Toronto logged a three-per-cent average rent increase on existing units, nearly double Vancouver’s 1.6-per-cent average rent hike. As of April 2011, Toronto residents paid an average apartment rent of $1,045 a month, compared to $989 for Vancouver residents. Factors driving vacancy rates up in B.C. included renters moving to home ownership, people leaving for better job prospects elsewhere and a decrease in migration to the province, Sam said. “Interprovincial migration was down and it was down on the international side as well, and that has an effect on vacancy rates,” he said. In Toronto, strong immigration, a buoyant economy and declining demand among first-time homebuyers helped push down vacancy rates, he said. “The increase in average rents was driven by economic and migration factors, which are stronger in Toronto than in Vancouver,” he said. The Mercer survey tracks expenses such as rents, food, transportation, household goods and clothing in 214 cities in five countries. Real estate prices are not directly included in the rankings, which governments and multinational companies use to determine compensation allowances for expatriate employees. Mercer hires a real estate brokerage and relocation agency in each city to gauge the local rental market, said Luc Lalonde, Mercer principal. One factor lifting the rankings of all four Canadian cities in this year’s survey was the surging loonie. New York is the base city for the survey and the U.S. dollar is the benchmark currency, so Canadian dollar strength increases the comparative cost of goods in Canada. “The currency played an important role in why Canadian cities jumped in the rankings,” Lalonde said. Calgary cracked the top 100, jumping from 109th to 96th. Montreal moved from No. 98 to No. 79, while Ottawa moved ahead 22 spots, from 136th to 114th. Because of its record high accommodation costs, the Angolan capital of Luanda topped the list for the second year, with Tokyo and N’Djamena, Chad in second and third place. The Top 10 includes only three European cities with Moscow at No. 4 and Switzerland’s Geneva and Zurich at Nos. 5 and 7. London, ranked at 18, is the most expensive city in the United Kingdom, followed by Aberdeen, Glasgow, Birmingham and Belfast. [email protected] Blog: vancouversun.com/yourmoney Twitter: For more on this story, go to vancouversun.com/business. 1. Luanda, Angola 2. Tokyo 3. N’Djamena, Chad 4. Moscow 5. Geneva 6. Osaka, Japan 7. Zurich 8. Singapore 9. Hong Kong 10. Sao Paulo, Brazil 11. Nagoya, Japan 12. Rio de Janeiro 12. Libreville, Gabon 14. Sydney 15. Oslo, Norway 16. Bern, Switzerland 17. Copenhagen 18. London 19. Seoul 20. BeijingThis may be the beginning of the end. Thursday evening, Jim Moore posted to a Skylanders Facebook group that he had found Ro-Bow at a Toys R Us in Virginia. Naturally, there were a lot of questions, but all would be answered in time. As you can see from the pictures above, Jim does in fact have Ro-Bow in hand. He has also reported that the store only got four Lost Imaginite Mines Adventure Packs. Pack Info: UPC – 047875880696 “R”Web# – 279146 (reported US number, see comments below) “R”Web# – 177202 (per the UK listing) So it looks like Ro-Bow is on his way to the United States in the typical Skylanders trickle fashion. Follow us on Twitter and we'll be sure to track any further sightings that are reported. . . . Now who was it that said the Q4 Adventure Pack might be the Lost Imaginite Mines…?It takes anywhere between 2 and 10 hours to create each blog post. If you found this blog useful, and if you’d like to see more, you can support me on Patreon for less than the cost of a coffee In classical music, we’re regularly discussing how to attract new audiences, particularly from the huge number of adventurous pop music fans who are willing to try something different. Alan Davey, controller of BBC Radio 3, in his recent article for the Guardian, talks about offering audiences genuinely unique experiences: create engaging work and present it engagingly and people will engage. Not only that, but these experiences will hopefully act as a kind of gateway to contemporary music. But for an outsider, it’s difficult to know how to get started. As an pop music listener wanting something new, how does one discover contemporary music? Online, and perhaps in most cases, by accident. This was the case for my other half, pop music writer Sam Walton (Loud and Quiet regular and more recently blogger of “Twenty Years Ago Today”, about significant pop music from 1997), who began his journey into new music after reading an interview with Radiohead 20 years ago in which they signposted their fans towards Steve Reich. He’s helped me to create a list of nine comparisons between contemporary classical music and pop, intended for curious pop music listeners, in which each counterpart piece has some artistic commonality with the other. While this blog normally hosts entries intended for the initiated contemporary classical music listener (and, for the most part, the composer), this post has the adventurous pop music listener in mind, the suggestions aiming to be portals to previously unencountered music. I’ve tried to pick a mix of work: young people who are active and changing the new music landscape, an older generation at the height of their power, two who would be with us working still had they not died tragically young, and plenty of brilliant women. And I also provided a “What’s next” for each suggestion: I’m mostly freestyling here in my associations, but I hope they’re of interest. There are a lot of different avenues that contemporary classical music has gone down, so if one sub-genre doesn’t appeal to you, all is not lost. You might notice a lack of minimalist composers here: minimalism (Reich, Glass, Nyman, etc.) is fairly omnipresent these days; I wanted to expose some of the other sub-genres available to curious listeners. If you’re interested in knowing more about the music you hear here, I recommend a few things: 1. If you love Godspeed you! Black Emperor, you might love Claude Vivier’s Zipangu. I love Vivier’s music. I love his strange musical voice, so unlike anyone working at the time in his native Canada, or indeed the rest of the world. His Zipangu, for string orchestra, has a lot of the big unisons and dynamic contrast that will appeal to Godspeed fans, as will his drones and underlying distortion (listening to the work, it’s somehow easy to forget that it’s just strings we’re listening to, such is their power). Godspeed: Vivier: What’s next if you like this? Try Olga Neuwirth’s Clinamen/Nodus 2. If you love Flying Lotus then you might love Beat Furrer’s Spur Furrer’s got such a great sense of bouncing movement and pulse here, a pulse that divides and shifts ever so slightly, making it a great companion for Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma. I love the way the light texture allows so much space to enjoy the feeling of being thrust into the future: just hold on to the piano part for dear life, and enjoy the ride — and by ride, I mean the subtle way in which the roles of the other instruments shift playfully. Flying Lotus: Furrer: What’s next if you like this? Try Patricia Alessandrini’s menus morceaux par un autre moi réunis 3. If you love Joanna Newsom you might love Hans Abrahamsen’s Let me tell you Abrahamsen’s writing is spacious and beautiful, his melodies soar and the orchestration is lush and unusual. Nothing suits his compositional voice better than the soprano Barbara Hannigan – the purity, flexibility and emotion she is capable of gives weight to the music and the text, which comes from Paul Griffiths’ let me tell you, in which Ophelia tells the story of Hamlet from her perspective. Newsom: Abrahamsen: What’s next if you like this? Try Thierry Tidrow’s Die alten, bösen lieder 4. If you love Autechre you might love Elena Rykova’s 101% Mind Uploading Here we have a unique way of “operating” on a piano combined with Rykova’s quirky sense of theatre: three percussionists dressed in hospital scrubs set up around a concert grand piano with its lid removed. But this isn’t prepared piano like John Cage imagined it. The piano is prepared, yes: but the percussionists also use their hands and various objects (mallets, e-bows, metal rods, etc.) to strike, pluck and strum the strings of the piano. Other percussion is also used, playing into the resonant of the instrument, to great effect. For Autechre fans, the comparison is perhaps an obvious one given the use of prepared piano, but I also like the quasi-theatrical tendencies of both, with Autechre always insisting on performing in the dark. Autechre: Rykova: What’s next if you like this? Try Evan Johnson’s Positioning in Radiography 5. If you love Nirvana you might love Cassandra Miller’s for mira This is an obvious choice in many ways, as Miller takes the material for her piece from a performance by Kurt Cobain of “where did you sleep last night” – itself a cover of Depression-era blues musician Lead Belly. What I love about Miller’s’ writing here is the dramatic way she repeats, manipulates and plays with the material. It might take a couple of listens, but I find the swooping glissandi and irregular cadences infectious, I often get this piece stuck in my head. Cobain: Miller: What’s next if you like this? Try Simon Steen-Andersen’s Study for String Instrument 6. If you love Asa-Chang & Junray you might love Peter Ablinger’s Speaking Piano Here, Ablinger uses a spectral analysis and a computer controlled piano to recreate the sound of the speaking voice (in this case, an angry letter from the grandaddy of 12-tone composition, Schönberg). It wasn’t his only experiment in combining the human voice and piano, he also did a series of “accompaniments” of famous voices, which you can hear here. These are far less gimmicky and more musically interesting, not to mention historically so: he uses recordings of speakers such as Bertold Brecht, Gertrude Stein, Mao Zedong, Pier Passolini, etc. Asa-Chang and Junray: Ablinger: What’s next if you like this? Try Martin Iddon’s ampelos 7. If you love Underworld’s REZ then you might love Gerard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum The opening movement of Vortex is all energy and forward propelled movement. Combined with Grisey’s so-called spectral approach to composition (his compositional building blocks are the harmonics resulting from a given fundamental, see here for a more detailed explanation), these aspects make it a great pairing with Underworld’s use of arpeggio, drive and spectral-like harmonies. Underworld: Grisey: What’s next if you like this? Try Georg Friedrich Haas’ String Quartet No. 2 8. If you love Deafheaven, you might might love Simon Loeffler’s b The new music track here is — perhaps unusually — the more rhythmic of the two, but they both go heavy on the distortion. Loeffler’s work uses a looped feed of guitar effect pedals (two for each performer) and light switches (four for the group) to modify the patterns of distorted sounds. This is complemented by the rhythmic tap-dancing of the players feet on the pedals. The piece is very virtuosic and I find it very exciting (especially live). The piece stays in the same sound world (necessitated by a setup that has a fixed — if not surprisingly large — number of sound possibilities) in a way that Deafheaven do not (there’s a beautiful contrast between screaming distortion and an almost lullaby-like quality later on the track of theirs shared here), but I love the contrast between the virtuoso foot pedalling at the beginning and the mournful falling glissandi that appear around minute 3. Deafheaven: Loeffler: What’s next if you like this? Try Chaya Czernowin’s Sahaf 9. If you love Busta Rhymes then you might love Timothy McCormack’s Apparatus In case it isn’t glaringly obvious, I’m comparing these two artists for their approaches to virtuosity. McCormack’s music is complex but I find it incredibly playful and when performing it, relish the challenge of being able to execute the actions his notation requires while still maintaining a kind of lightness and an easy approach to the interaction between players. His Apparatus is particularly playful for it’s brevity: at only 30 seconds long it’s a great way to surprise an audience. Listen to it a couple of times to get into McCormack’s soundworld. Busta Rhymes: McCormack: What’s next if you like this? Try Enno Poppe’s Trauben Share this: Facebook Twitter Tumblr EmailThe Vermont congressional delegation “today introduced legislation to let the state implement a single-payer health care system that could become a model for the nation,” according to a joint press release. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced a Senate bill and Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) filed legislation in the House that would let Vermont and other states provide better health care at less cost beginning in 2014. Under the proposal, states “would be able to seek waivers from the U.S. Health and Human Services Department three years sooner than allowed under the new federal health care law.” States could qualify for waivers only for plans that are at least as comprehensive and affordable as the federal model and cover at least as many people. States could not offer lower quality or less affordable coverage. A fact sheet with more details on this plan is linked here. AdvertisementsThe Nazis in color: Rare Kodachrome snaps by Hitler's beloved personal photographer give an insider's view of despot's reign Advertisement Rarely seen color photographs of the Third Reich by Der Fuhrer's own beloved personal photographer Hugo Jaeger give a startling glimpse into the larger than life celebrations from Hitler's heinous reign. Jaeger collected took nearly 2,000 as he traveled with the loathed dictator during the late 1930s and 40s. Hitler loved the photographer's work and even commented on first seeing Jaeger's photos: 'The future belongs to color photography.' Thankfully, the future did not belong to Hitler. Though, the prints survive because Jaeger successfully buried his film, as the Americans closed in at the end of the war
police shootings of four black and Latino men by San Francisco police in recent years. They were hospitalized Friday for medical personnel to monitor their deteriorating health. Also on Friday, protests erupted inside City Hall that later turned violent and led to the arrest of 33 activists on suspicion of misdemeanor trespassing and refusal to disperse. They have all reportedly since been released from custody. The five hunger strikers called off their effort in response to pressure from community members who urged them to not further risk their health. “This doesn’t mean that our fight is over,” said Yayne Abeba, a spokesperson for the hunger strikers. “It just means they will no longer be doing the hunger strike.” Instead, the group is calling on the community to hold a citywide strike beginning at 8 a.m. Monday at City Hall. Abeba said the “general strike” includes not going to work, school or visiting businesses in an effort to essentially bring San Francisco to a halt. Meanwhile, Friday’s protest left City Hall with smashed front windows and destroyed metal detectors at the side facing Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place. “Thousands of peaceful individuals have long expressed their views in protest on our front steps,” City Administrator Naomi Kelly said in a statement. “However, [Friday’s] actions crossed the line, causing thousands of dollars in property damage and impacting weddings and elections activities.” Repairs are slated to begin Monday. The full costs of the damage won’t be known until after the repairs are completed, but will likely cost thousands of dollars in labor and material costs due to the landmark status of City Hall, according to the city administrator’s office. Bay City News Service contributed to this report. Click here or scroll down to commentAs 2016 is set to be the warmest year on record, Alaskans are seeing an "astounding" rise in temperature. Throughout October, average temperatures in Alaska ran 6.7 degrees above normal. Barrow, the northernmost community in the U.S., set its warmest October on record. Its monthly average came in at 30.1 degrees Fahrenheit, an astonishing 12.9 degrees warmer than the 1981-2010 average. Oct. 10 was the warmest October day ever, with a high of 44. Every October since 2001, Barrow has been warmer than normal. Three other Alaskan coastal communities—Nome, St. Paul and Kotzebue—all set monthly records this October. Oct. 12 was the warmest October day ever in Nome by far—20 degrees above the previous record. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. This year, the sea ice tied for its second-lowest extent after a record-early spring melt set in. And it's having a lot of trouble reforming for the winter. Zach Labe, University of California-Irvine In October, the sea ice covered 2.5 million square miles, the lowest October ever seen. It remains low in the Beaufort, Chukchi, East Siberian and Kara Seas, where water temperatures were above normal. It's the slowest regrowth of Arctic sea ice on record. Older, thicker ice is disappearing. As more sea ice melts each summer, the ice that reforms in winter is new, thinner ice. "The older ice is becoming weaker because there is less of it, and the remaining ice is more broken up and thinner," said Walt Meier, a sea ice researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Thirty years ago, old ice comprised 20 percent of the sea ice cover; today it is just three percent. There is a direct link between global carbon emissions and the loss of Arctic sea ice. For every metric ton of CO2 put into the atmosphere, 30 square feet of sea ice is lost. That's the conclusion of researchers Dick Notz and Julienne Stroeve in a landmark study published last week. With new oil discoveries in Alaska and a fossil-fuel friendly president about to enter the White House, the future looks even darker. Here are seven key concerns when it comes to drilling in the Arctic: 1. Smith Bay: Caelus Energy announced what it called a "world-class" find in Smith Bay that could prove to be one of the largest oil fields in Alaska. The site, just 50 miles from Barrow, could produce 200,000 barrels per day of light, highly mobile oil, the company said. 2: Moose Pad: Hillcorp Alaska is set to drill up to 44 wells in an area 25 miles from Prudhoe Bay. The company expects to begin drilling in 2018. 3. Liberty Field: Another Hillcorp site in the North Slope, this one on the outer continental shelf, could add up to 70,000 barrels of oil per day to the 40-year old trans-Alaska pipeline. 4. North Slope and Beaufort Sea: Alaska is conducting a lease sale now on state-owned land on the North Slope and state-owned waters of the Beaufort Sea. 5. Beaufort and Chukchi Seas: Alaska Gov. Bill Walker has asked the U.S. Department of the Interior to include the two Arctic seas in the federal offshore leasing program. These include areas where Shell drilled in 2015. 6. Fiord West: Last month, ConocoPhillips ordered a monster new drilling rig that can radiate outward to reach oil within 125 square miles from a single site. It will use the rig to develop the Fiord West field on the North Slope. 7. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: A political battleground for decades, with the control of the federal government now squarely in Republican hands, "pro-development Alaskans could already taste oil," wrote Alaska Dispatch News following the election. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who chairs the energy committee, said that she "is a champion of access to federal lands and waters.""I think that what this country needs at a very dangerous time is responsible leadership in the real world," Leon Panetta said. \| AP Photo Leon Panetta endorses Hillary Clinton Leon Panetta made official his endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president on Thursday, remarking upon her experience and credentials to tackle global issues while dismissing worsening conditions around the globe that critics have attributed to her time at the State Department. "I’ve endorsed Hillary Clinton, and I've also helped provide advice on defense and foreign policy issues," said Panetta, who served as both director of the Central Intelligence Agency and as defense secretary in the Obama administration, in an interview on MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports." Story Continued Below "I think that what this country needs at a very dangerous time is responsible leadership in the real world," Panetta continued. "Not in a fantasy world, but in the real world, and she is somebody who has that experience, and for that reason, that's why I support her." He also took a shot at the Republican currently leading the polls. Asked whether Donald Trump was justified in raising the issue of Bill Clinton's past sexual misconduct in light of his wife's campaign claiming he is sexist, Panetta remarked that he thought the American people would rather hear more substance. “I’d like to hear from Donald Trump a little bit of the substance of what the hell he’s talking about," he said. "I think that’s what we ought to be hearing more about.” Pressed by Mitchell on the issues that have seemingly only worsened after Clinton's time as secretary of state, like the rise of the Islamic State and the continued belligerence of North Korea, Panetta said she was qualified because she "understands the challenges that are there." "She understands the world we live in, she understands the complications of it," he said. "Of course, you know, look, going back to Republican administrations as well as Democratic administrations, there is a responsibility for both the good things that happened as well as the bad things that happened. But in the end the real question is, does someone have the ability to be able to deal with other world leaders, to be able to represent our national security interests in dealing with those countries and has the credibility to be able to engage in that kind of world?" Those qualities are "critical" in a world in which the United States is facing so many threats, he added. It's not the first time Panetta has at least voiced support for Clinton's candidacy. In October 2014 while promoting his book, "Worthy Fights," Panetta said he would "absolutely" back his former administration colleague if she ran a second time. Recounting his endorsement of Clinton in the 2008 cycle, Panetta wrote in his book that he "admired her intelligence, tenacity, and decisiveness" and hosted events for her in his home state of California. "Yes, we had disagreed on occasion," he wrote. "I had favored deficit reduction over what I regarded as an uncertain course on health care reform, and she initially watched over my work as chief of staff to make sure I was sufficiently protective of her husband — but we had come to trust each other, and there were few people in politics whose acumen I more admired."K.C., who writes the blog A Girl and Her Bike, is a girl with a bike. She's also a District of Columbia police officer. But the second part's not so obvious when she's riding on a Capital Bikeshare bike, out of uniform and just trying to get home from work. Which is probably why some jackasses stopped behind her at a red light decided it would be fun to bump her bike with their car. At very least, they probably thought it wouldn't get them arrested. Suckers! Instead, the bumper bump turned the Girl on a Bike into a Pissed-Off Police Officer Out to Punish Evildoers on a Bike, as K.C. first flashed her badge and then chased down and caught the fleeing car on her bicycle (with the help of other D.C. officers). It's a hair-raising story: I'm not sure why I decided to go after him. I was on a CaBi, in civilian attire, off-duty. Instinct I guess? I did though. I followed him up Kenyon where he had gotten stuck in traffic & the light at 14th St. NW. I guess he saw me coming after him, because all of a sudden his reverse lights came on (he couldn't go anywhere else), and he started driving backwards towards me. I thought he was going to try to escape down the alley, but I guess he figured it was a dead-end. … I managed to get out of the way without him hitting me, but it was very close. So close I was able to hit his side mirror as he went by. The light had changed at 14th & the traffic had begun clearing, so he gunned it and managed to flee out of the block, down 14th St. It was at this time I grabbed my radio (it was in my bag) and broadcasted a look-out and that I needed help. Read the rest at A Girl and Her Bike. K.C. says several times on her blog that she's not a superhero just because she has a badge, but frankly, if you have to SAY it … And it gets even badder of ass. The driver, Mr. Harrison, wasn't just the kind of charming fellow who likes to ram his car into bicyclists. He was the kind of charming fellow who likes to ram his car into bicyclists in his time off from dealing drugs. How do they know this? Because the criminal genius that he is, made a phone call to his girlfriend from the DC Jail. Phone calls which are RECORDED and MONITORED. And he asked her if she wouldn't mind hiding his drugs and gun for him. Yeah. Super Smart. An emergency search warrant was obtained and his room searched. Sure enough, a gun was recovered. The assault happened back in February, but A Girl and Her Bike is revisiting the story (with more details) now. Harrison pled guilty to felony possession of a firearm, felony fleeing, and misdemeanor assault on a police officer, but not vehicular assault — those charges were dropped. So right now, he could go through his whole trial without any acknowledgment that his original crime was using a car to threaten the safety or life of a bicyclist (who, yes, also happened to be a police officer, but right now that's the only part he's getting charged for). K.C. has a call to arms: Mr. Harrison's sentencing hearing is scheduled for August 19th at DC Superior Court. I want to pack the courtroom with cyclists. As the victim of a crime, I am able to present a "Victim Impact Statement" to the judge. You better believe that I intend to bring up the fact that I am a cyclist first and foremost, and that this whole saga began when a driver decided to literally push around a cyclist with his motor vehicle. It was just a matter of luck that this cyclist also happens to be a police officer as well. It is Not Okay for drivers to bully cyclists on our streets. His actions were not only irresponsible, but CRIMINAL. He didn't "accidentally" hit me–he made a conscious decision to hit a human being with a 2-ton vehicle. That is assault. These sorts of things have to STOP. If you're a bicyclist in D.C., consider going over to the Superior Court (500 Indiana Ave., NW) on August 19 and showing this badass lady that you've got her back.We’re suckers for nostalgia. When Major League Baseball finally curbed its draconian highlight policy and released a few dribs and drabs of video, we rejoiced at being able to watch Cecil Fielder hit moon shots and Bo Jackson play like a superhero. When MLB finally began showing full games on YouTube, we quit our jobs, crammed a thousand Pop-Tarts into our mouths, and watched Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson break batters’ hearts. Given what happened to some of baseball’s brightest stars this year, it’s easy to understand our desire to cling to the past. Ryan Braun, one of the 10 best players on the planet, got busted for PEDs. Matt Kemp, the all-world outfielder Braun beat out for MVP honors just two years ago, was pummeled by injuries. Younger players suffered setbacks as well: Matt Harvey, the pitcher who evoked comparisons to Dwight Gooden and Tom Seaver, snapped one ligament and became linked to Tommy John instead. Manny Machado, the third baseman who reminded us of Brooks Robinson, got knocked out by a brutal knee injury and was told to feel fortunate that he’d only be out for six months. Even the game’s best talents can fall from grace that quickly. Welcome to the second edition of Grantland’s MLB Trade Value Rankings, where we’ll try to make sense of it all by addressing the question that fuels so many bar-room debates: Would you trade this guy for that guy? Answering that requires engaging in a thought experiment. We must first assume that every team has made every player available via trade. Then, we must take contracts into account. Baseball players tend to peak in their mid-to-late twenties, but that’s also when they start to get expensive. That means baseball’s ideal commodity is either a player who’s already performing like a star in his early twenties, or a player who has signed a long-term deal that locks him up through his arbitration years plus a few years of would-be free agency, saving his team money and pledging his prime seasons to that same club. Or better yet, both. More Trade Value Rankings Bill Simmons on the NBA Bill Barnwell on the NFL Jonah Keri on MLB All Trade Value! This year’s rankings reflect the many rapid and seismic changes in player value that have occurred over the past 12 months. They also reflect the changing landscape for available talent. Fewer stars are making it to free agency, as teams are spending huge dollars to prevent them from bolting. In the past two years, we’ve seen big-revenue teams like the Red Sox, Giants, Tigers, and Cardinals re-up star players who are well into their thirties. Medium- and small-revenue clubs are starting to do the same. The Mariners and Reds — and even the lowest-revenue team in the majors, the Rays — have shelled out nine figures to keep superstars from testing the open market. That has made finding elite available players a monumental challenge, even for teams with gobs of money to spend; just ask the 2013 Yankees. The sport’s massive influx of cash, including the additional $26 million per season every team will get from the national TV contract kicking in next year, only compounds the issue of teams having overstuffed war chests and nowhere to spend the money. To reflect that new reality, we’re dialing back on cheap youngsters with star potential and cranking up the guys who are already stars. The assumption: GMs would give up 18 prospects and a first-born child to get their hands on one of these 50 beasts. As such, it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker if a stud player offers only a couple years of service time or is signed to a mega-dollar deal; that will affect his relative standing, but it won’t keep him off the list entirely. The result of this many-pronged exercise is not a list of baseball’s 50 best players. Rather, it’s a look at the sport’s 50 most attractive trade candidates. A team like the Dodgers, which didn’t think twice about spending a quarter-billion dollars and a bunch of prospects to get one and a half good players, will attach different value to different players than a team like the Marlins, which is in rebuilding, penny-pinching mode. We spoke to talent evaluators from teams in both leagues and big and small markets alike to get their take on the 50 most valuable trade commodities in the game, and to reconcile those different points of view. But in the end, this is still our list. Last year, we were more bearish than most on Jered Weaver (good call), and more bullish than most on Jason Heyward (bad call). (You can review all of last year’s hits and misses here and here.) One final note on lingo: If we talk about someone as a “four-win player,” that refers to Wins Above Replacement, not to a player’s win-loss record, which is a deeply flawed and often misleading stat. For a primer on WAR and the other advanced stats that appear in these columns, check out Grantland’s baseball dictionary. Last year’s ranking appears in parentheses after each player’s name. So with a tip of the cap to Trade Value predecessors Bill Simmons and Bill Barnwell, as well as the multiple writer-friend consiglieri/sounding boards who lent a hand this year, here we go: Trade Value Rules 1. Contracts matter. Max Scherzer is a better pitcher than Gerrit Cole, but Scherzer will be eligible for free agency at the end of next season, while Cole isn’t even arbitration-eligible yet and will be under team control through 2019. 2. Age matters. Bartolo Colon and Jose Fernandez put up fairly similar numbers in 2013, but Colon is 40 and likely won’t be pitching for too much longer, while Fernandez is just 21 and could very well get better. 3. It’s all relative. Pretend every team started shopping every player as a trade candidate. Who would attract the biggest return from any one of the other 29 clubs? For instance, if we’re comparing the trade value of Paul Goldschmidt and Andrelton Simmons, we’re not concerned that the Braves have an excellent first baseman of their own in Freddie Freeman, or that the Diamondbacks already have a promising young shortstop in Didi Gregorius. What we want to know is this: If every team were allowed to bid on Goldschmidt and Simmons, which player would net the greater return? 4. Positional scarcity matters. If a shortstop and first baseman put up comparable offensive numbers, the shortstop is the more valuable player, since it’s much tougher to find a player with the defensive chops to handle short than it is to find one who can man first. That’s already reflected in Wins Above Replacement (which you’ll see referenced throughout these rankings), but it bears repeating. 5. Defense, park factors, and other variables not immediately apparent in superficial stats matter. These are not fantasy baseball rankings, so a player who hits 30 home runs isn’t necessarily more valuable than one who hits 20, or even five. 6. Major leaguers only. Baseball teams place great value on top prospects, since those players offer the twin virtues of great potential and low price. But going through every minor league level for every team can muddy matters for non-prospect hounds. So we’ll stick to players who have appeared in at least one major league game. That means Xander Bogaerts and Wil Myers are eligible for this list, but Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano (both of whom would otherwise be strong top-50 contenders) are not. 7. The list runs in reverse order. If Felix Hernandez is no. 20 on this list, it means the Mariners wouldn’t trade him for anyone ranked 21 to 50, but would have to at least consider swapping him for the players ranked 19 to 1. Click here to read Part 2. See Ya: Players Who Fell Out of the Top 50 Jered Weaver (no. 50 last year) won 20 games in 2012, but looked like a prime regression candidate in 2013 due to injury concerns and a diminishing fastball, and did indeed decline … Wade Miley (49) nearly won NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2012; he pitched pretty well in 2013, but not well enough to remain ranked … Chase Headley (48) took a big step back in 2013, and now has just one year left before free agency … Matt Holliday (47) is still one of the best hitters in the game, but he’s also entering his age-34 season and makes a lot of money, and thus falls a smidge short of making this year’s list … Elvis Andrus (46) signed a $120 million contract extension, then suddenly became one of the worst hitters in the league; he’s only 25, so there’s plenty of time for a rebound, but he’s not top-50 material right now. Meanwhile, it’s time to retire Keith Law’s brilliant “Sliced bread is actually the best thing since Matt Wieters“ (41) meme … Desmond Jennings (39) improved his power, batting eye, and contact skills in 2013 and offers four more years of team control, so leaving him off this (stacked) list could wind up looking really stupid … Justin Upton (38) might have already delivered his best season, and his brother was the worst outfielder in the NL last season, ruining another excellent meme … Austin Jackson (37) is a perfectly fine ballplayer who’s just two years away from free agency … Adam Jones (36) cracked 30 home runs in each of the past two seasons, which is why he’s won two straight Gold Gloves that he absolutely did not deserve; he’s a very good player, but his shaky defense and too-frequent outmaking — combined with a loaded field this year — knocked him off the list … Alex Gordon (34) is yet another twentysomething outfielder knocked out of the top 50, in this case largely due to some major regression on balls in play. Mike Moustakas (32) needed a big jump in his second-half numbers just to end up at.233/.287/.364 in 2013 … Ben Zobrist (30) has just two option years left on the deal he signed with the Rays while under the influence of Andrew Friedman’s mind control; Zobrist will continue to haunt those who hate the WAR stat until the end of days … Johnny Cueto (28) got hurt … Jose Bautista (25) did too, again; he could still hit a zillion home runs if he could stay upright for 150 games, though … Starlin Castro (24) started hitting like Rey Ordonez, but at least he decapitated fewer people with throws into the third row … Matt Kemp (22) went in the span of two years from being the best player in the league to someone the Dodgers would give away for a discounted price; effing injuries, man … Brett Lawrie (21) and Dylan Bundy (20) are Exhibits A and B for why we shouldn’t overrate prospects until they actually start producing; and yes, I’m a terrible, Canadian-loving homer … Aroldis Chapman (17) crushed statheads’ collective dreams by remaining in the bullpen; even the best relief pitchers aren’t as valuable as the best starting pitchers or position players (shout-out to angry Craig Kimbrel fans; love you guys!) … Jason Heyward (10) still looks capable of becoming a star, but with just two years left until free agency, that might happen after he’s left the Braves. This Year’s Honorable Mentions Shelby Miller, SP, St. Louis Cardinals (not ranked last year): Through his first 14 starts of 2013, Miller struck out 96 batters, walked just 19, allowed just six homers, limited opponents to a.204/.256/.307 line, and posted a 2.08 ERA, looking like the best rookie in the league. He faded in the second half, which isn’t that unusual for a pitcher tossing more innings than ever before. Then the Curious Case of the Disappearing Shelby happened, with the Cardinals opting to use Bob Forsch, Dane Iorg, and a plate of toasted ravioli rather than put Miller in a postseason game. Manager Mike Matheny claimed it was because the Cards were saving Miller for a long-relief spot, only that never happened and Miller got progressively more rusty until it became untenable to use him. OK, now read this surreal New York Times wedding announcement (ATTENTION, KATIE BAKES!). Not exactly reassuring. Maybe we’re overreacting to Miller’s role (or lack thereof) in a small number of high-profile games. But when it comes to pitchers, it’s best to bet the under on both health and sustained success. Position players are more reliable commodities, which is why you’ll see more of them ranked highly on this list. And it’s why Miller will need to prove himself again to instill real confidence. Michael Wacha, SP, St. Louis Cardinals (NR); Sonny Gray, SP, Oakland A’s (NR); Julio Teheran, SP, Atlanta Braves (NR): Here we have three more 2013 rookie pitchers who also nearly made the cut. Wacha and Gray both looked unhittable at times after their summer call-ups — quite literally in Wacha’s case, as he went 8⅔ innings before allowing a hit in his final start of the regular season. Consider their Honorable Mention status a case of healthy skepticism until we see another successful and injury-free year. For Wacha, that includes seeing if he can develop a viable breaking pitch to go with his excellent fastball-changeup combo. As for Teheran, he got lost in the shuffle of a loaded NL Rookie of the Year race but still pitched well for the Braves, firing 30 starts with a 3.20 ERA and a strikeout-to-walk rate near 4-to-1. Derek Holland, SP, Texas Rangers (honorable mention last year); Mike Minor, SP, Atlanta Braves (NR): These excellent left-handers figure to help their teams at a low cost for the next several years. The Braves control Minor’s rights through 2017, giving them a durable lefty with excellent command to team with Teheran, Kris Medlen, and Brandon Beachy to form one of the most promising young rotations in the game. Holland is coming off a breakout season in which he ranked among the league leaders in innings pitched, strikeouts, and ERA. He’s also one of three Rangers starters signed to a team-friendly contract, along with Martin Perez (who nearly made the cut here) and Yu Darvish. Considering what pitchers like Jason Vargas and Phil Hughes are making on the open market these days, the $28.5 million Holland is guaranteed seems like a steal. Brandon Belt, 1B, San Francisco Giants (NR); Eric Hosmer, 1B, Kansas City Royals (NR): Both players should be valuable building blocks moving forward, as they’re under team control through 2017 and possess diverse and impressive skill sets. A segment of Giants fans have had it out for Belt from the beginning, not appreciating his on-base skills or slick defense. Belt might never hit 25 homers as long as he plays in the home run graveyard that is AT&T Park, but he has developed into one of the best all-around first basemen in the game. Meanwhile, like many of his Royals teammates, Hosmer had a miserable first half in 2013, then delivered a big second half, hoisting his season line to.302/.353/.448. He’s just 24 years old, and he has produced the kind of minor league track record and steady improvement in the majors that suggest big things ahead. Christian Yelich, OF, Miami Marlins (NR): Will he hit lefties? He didn’t during his otherwise stellar minor league career, and he hit just.165 against them in his first taste of the big leagues. Still, the tools are there for this precocious prospect, who turns 22 on Thursday. The Marlins might have another top homegrown player on their hands. Starling Marte, OF, Pittsburgh Pirates (NR): He’s probably no. 51 on the list. In his first full season in the big leagues, Marte cranked out 48 extra-base hits, swiped 41 bases, and played terrific defense in left field. He also can’t test free-agent waters for five more years. He missed a top-50 spot primarily because he strikes out nearly five times more often than he walks. Still, he’s only 25, so there’s room for improvement. Andrew McCutchen could have a star as his outfield wingman through 2018. Alex Cobb, SP, Tampa Bay Rays (NR): Consider Cobb this year’s going-off-the-reservation pick. Cobb looks like James Shields right before Shields developed into a top-of-the-rotation starter. Cobb wields command over three plus pitches: a fastball with good movement, a hammer curve, and a heartbreaking changeup. That’s the Shields starter kit. Cobb’s aggregate 2013 numbers don’t jump off the page because he missed two months after getting hit in the head by a screaming line drive back to the mound against the Royals, but he recovered well, ending the year by striking out nearly a batter an inning while ranking among the league leaders with a 56 percent ground ball rate. He did all of that while pitching in the AL East, which ranked as the highest-scoring division in baseball last season. The Rays control Cobb’s rights for four more years, and Cobb could be poised for a big breakout in 2014, assuming he gets to 200 innings. Group 1: Please Send Hate Mail to [email protected] 50. Ryan Braun, OF, Milwaukee Brewers (6): What the hell should we do with this guy? A year ago, Braun’s blend of power, speed, durability, perennially high batting average, and relative youth made him look like a great future bet for the Hall of Fame. Now, after a season marred by a 65-game PED suspension, no one knows what to expect. Is Braun still a major bargain at $113 million over the next seven years (with a $15 million mutual option in 2021) given his incredible track record from 2007 through 2012 and the jarring lack of available big-time players? Or do we now have to question everything Braun has accomplished to this point and assume that at age 30, without the benefit of performance-enhancing drugs, he’s a potential albatross with the added burden of being a possible distraction to his team? Here’s what an AL executive had to say about Braun: I love Braun. I think he’s easily a top 5-10 guy if you only consider the performance and contract. There are some real concerns, though: Is the 100-point drop-off in his slugging in 2013 related to the rules he broke? Is it more small-sample related, and was he just unlucky? Was he under incredible pressure, hurting his performance, and now that the pressure might be off a bit, will he bounce back? Will we see the 2011 and 2012 Ryan Braun again? He projects to be a star again … but of course projection systems don’t take what he did into account. The note about pressure, and what projection systems struggle to consider, seems germane here. As much as we dedicate ourselves to studying the quantifiable around these parts, it’s naive to think that off-field issues don’t affect player performance. It’s also extremely difficult to predict how those issues might affect a given player. Our semi-educated guess says that Braun is and will be a very good player with or without help, and that he’ll be able to tune out everything around him well enough to become an excellent player again in 2014. But no one can say for sure what’s going to happen. Ranking him here amounts to a median projection between the disaster scenario and a return to an MVP-caliber level. A year from now, he’ll likely rank either much higher or much lower, but not particularly close to this spot. (We weren’t kidding about the hate mail, or any other kind of mail. Send your favorite Braun-related insults, feedback on guys we missed or shouldn’t have added, and any other Trade Value comments to the above email address.) Group 2: Don’t Know Them? You Will Soon 49. Jean Segura, SS, Milwaukee Brewers (NR): A bunch of young shortstops made this list, because finding players who can handle the defensive rigors of the position while also hitting well is tougher than at other spots in the field, and because we’re seeing a boom in shortstop prospects. Segura would’ve ranked higher had we done this list at the All-Star break, as he hit.325/.363/.487 in the first half, with 30 extra-base hits (including 11 homers) in 372 at-bats. He tanked in the second half, hitting just.241/.268/.315, with 12 extra-base hits (one homer) in 216 at-bats. Segura hit well in the minors (.313/.367/.439 in 1,755 plate appearances) and is just 23 years old, which allows us to be optimistic that he’ll improve on his 2013 second half. If he can provide even league-average offense to go with sound defense and 40-steal speed, he’ll be a key piece to a potentially dangerous Brewers lineup. 48. Kyle Seager, 3B, Seattle Mariners (NR): His numbers don’t jump off the box score, but when evaluating any Mariners hitter, we need to account for park effects. The M’s brought in the fences before the 2013 season, which for one year turned Safeco Field into something close to a neutral park. Still, the (relatively small sample of) data we have suggests that Safeco still suppresses home runs. So, for a player in his age-24 and age-25 seasons to rack up 42 total homers in that environment, especially given the scarcity of quality big league third basemen … that’s impressive. And while Seager may not have the big name normally attached to a top Trade Value player, other teams aren’t sleeping on the guy. As one NL executive said: “This guy is really underrated; they don’t have anybody in that lineup and it’s a tough hitter’s park, and all he does is put up numbers.” An AL exec, meanwhile, called Seager “one of the best young pure hitters I saw this year.” Group 3: Affordable Power 47. Edwin Encarnacion, 1B/3B/DH, Toronto Blue Jays (NR): Alex Anthopoulos might be struggling to build a pitching staff, but the guy sure knows how to lock up power hitters at a discount. Even with injuries, Bautista’s five-year, $65 million deal looks like it’ll go down as a bargain once it’s up. And one season into Encarnacion’s three-year, $29 million contract (with a club option for $10 million in Year 4), it’s clear the Jays got another steal. Encarnacion brings zero defensive value, but he’s a legitimate 40-homer hitter at a time when that kind of power is exceedingly rare. Here’s the leaderboard for most home runs hit in 2012 and 2013: Home Run Leaderboard for 2012-13 Rank Player Total Homers 1. Miguel Cabrera 88 2. Chris Davis 86 3. Edwin Encarnacion 78 4. Adam Dunn 75 5. Four players tied 66 Prettay, prettaaaaaaayyy good. 46. Adrian Beltre, 3B, Texas Rangers (HM): Beltre was underranked last year. He might not seem particularly cheap, with $51 million owed over the next three seasons, but think about the woeful lack of viable third-base options available on the open market, then consider what a big-money team might pay Beltre. Since leaving Safeco Field, a ballpark that seemed custom-engineered to destroy right-handed power hitters like Beltre, he’s produced four straight seasons of numbers worthy of fringe MVP consideration: WAR Leaderboard for 2010-13 Rank Player Total WAR 1. Miguel Cabrera 27.3 2. Robinson Cano 25.4 3. Joey Votto 25.1 4. Andrew McCutchen 23.9 5. Adrian Beltre 23.6 Though Beltre turns 35 just after Opening Day in 2014, few players have aged more gracefully in the past few years. One could argue that he’s not quite the same defensive wizard that he used to be, but as long as he keeps hitting.300-plus and slugging.500-plus, he’ll be a highly desirable player. 45. Carlos Santana, C/1B/DH, Cleveland Indians (43): He’s one of the worst defensive catchers and one of the worst baserunners in baseball. Those two things don’t matter much when you hit like Santana does. Santana hit.268/.377/.455 in 2013, piling up 642 plate appearances. He got all of those at-bats thanks to a formula the Indians have been following for years: Give Santana enough starts behind the plate to make his offense shine compared to his weak-hitting peers at catcher, but DH him a bunch and give him a few starts at first base so he doesn’t have to take a bunch of days off like a typical catcher would, and so that his shaky defense doesn’t hurt the team too much. It’s a delicate balance, with the Indians slowly scaling back on Santana’s catching time; his 84 games played at the position
have to contend with Auckland's notorious early-season grass wickets. But he has a bit of recent form under his belt. Crowe played a charity match in Australia last month. He scored a half century amidst some illustrious company that included West Indian Carl Hooper, England's Adam Hollioake, South African Herchelle Gibbs and Australians Darren Lehmann, Adam Gilchrist, Stuart Clark, Merv Hughes, Andy Bichel, Wayne Holdsworth and Australian female representative Alyssa Healy. Crowe believes he has the potential to play the four-day game for Auckland, feeling he has the ability to occupy the crease. He will bat at No 3 for Cornwall.An alleged bank robber led police on a high-speed chase Tuesday morning to the suburbs and back, ending in a BBQ restaurant parking lot where a customer helped bring him down.Shortly before 11 a.m., the man, who has not been charged, showed a gun at a TCF Bank, 3333 W. 26th St., in Little Village. He took cash and then got into a vehicle.The suspect led Chicago police and Illinois State Police on a chase along Interstate 55 and Interstate 294 through Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods, and then to southwest suburban Lyons, and then back to the city's Southwest Side.At one point, the driver hit a semi truck in the 3200-block of South Ashland Avenue in the Bridgepoint neighborhood.The driver then jumped out of the vehicle and to a restaurant called BBQ Patio, located near 31st and Ashland.A witness said that when the man tried climbing a fence to get away, a customer pulled him down off the fence and subdued him."Our customer dragged him down, hit him and before you know it all the police officers came and put him down," said Lori Grzesiak, of BBQ Patio.As many of you actively watching the btcd project are likely already aware, the project was recently migrated to a new organization on github named btcsuite. During this process, the core dependency packages were also combined into the main btcd repository. Yeah, that’s me driving that truck … or at least it sure felt like it! Why was the migration done? The main motivation was that the entire btcd codebase is maturing to the point it deserves its own organization. We want to make it clear that the code is intended to be a community project and have multiple contributors. In addition, since the code was already being moved, we took the opportunity to combine several of the core package repositories into the main btcd repository which has several benefits discussed below. Some benefits of these changes are: Issue tracking is now consolidated into the btcd issue tracker and is therefore easier for all parties involved to stay on top of them Pull requests that require changes in more than one of the core packages are now feasible which improves the QA loop since it allows the continuous integration builds to complete and provides a unified view of all relevant changes Reconstructing older versions is now much easier to do The initial download and compile of btcd is now faster since there are less repositories to download Alt-coin developers who want to try out experimental features have a lot less work and renaming to do now since most of the core packages were renamed to names which do not include the btc prefix Fetching updates to the btcd repository now also updates all of the core dependency packages which means it’s no longer possible for a user to unintentionally update btcd while not updating the core dependency packages What about the cons? The only notable con we can think of is the following: When a 3rd-party wants to use one of the sub-packages, say the txscript package, they have to download the entire btcd repository instead of only the txscript repository. However, we don’t feel like this is a big issue since the resulting binary will only contain the necessary deps and nothing more. It’s simply a matter of binary maintainers downloading more data than they would have to with a different repo per package for the initial build. Overview of New Package Locations and Names All of the old packages have been moved from the Conformal organization to the btcsuite organization. In addition, the following packages have been renamed and merged into the main btcd repository: Old Package New Package Description btcwire wire Implements the Bitcoin wire protocol btcnet chaincfg Defines chain configuration parameters for the three standard Bitcoin networks and provides the ability for callers to define their own custom Bitcoin networks btcdb database Provides a database interface for the Bitcoin block chain btcchain blockchain Implements Bitcoin block handling and chain selection rules btcscript txscript Implements the Bitcoin transaction scripting language btcec btcec Implements support for the elliptic curve cryptographic functions needed for the Bitcoin scripts btcjson btcjson Provides an extensive API for the underlying JSON-RPC command and return values btcws btcws Provides custom types for btcd websocket extension commands (registers the extension commands with btcjson) New Maintenance Entity To date, Conformal Systems LLC has maintained btcd and its related projects. Moving forward, maintenance and ongoing development for the btcsuite project will be performed by Company 0 LLC. New Release of btcd – Version 0.10.0 The blog post also coincides with a new release of the main btcd daemon. The detailed release notes and updated Windows binaries are located here.The Babolovsky Park is located behind the Catherine park and the Alexander park in the town of Pushkin. The palace was built during the reign of Catherine II (year 1785) as a one-storey summer residence and a bath-house. The gothic style of the red brick building is in accordance with the fashion of that era and fits perfectly into the park landscape. The Babolovsky palace was a one-storey summerhouse. There were seven rooms, each of them giving on to the park. When looking through the gap in one of the walls of the octagonal tower, one can see a huge granite basin, a colossal monolithic pool carved from a single piece of red granite, about 2 m (approx. 6.5 ft) high and more than 5 m (approx. 17 ft) in diameter. Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I of Russia, liked this place, and it is rumored that he held rendezvous with his lovers here. Alexander ordered a renovation of the palace and had a giant granite bath made instead of the white marble one. It was crafted by a famous stonemason from St Petersburg named Samson Sukhanov. In 1818, a chunk of granite weighing more than 160 metric tons was delivered to Babolovo from one of the Finnish islands. The only thing that craftsmen had to do was to cut off all of the excess rock. The work took 10 years to finish and the quality was unsurpassable. As a result, a polished granite bath 196 cm (6.5 ft) high, 152 cm (5 ft) deep, and 533 cm (17 ft) in diameter with a mass of 48 metric tons was hewn. The volume data indicates that 8000 buckets of water, which is about 12 metric tons, could fit inside. After the stonecutting works were finished, an octagonal tower was built around the bath. All around it on the inside there were cast-iron footways suspended on beams with handrails, stairs leading down and observation decks. Today the cost of the Babolovsky palace and the adjoining territory reconstruction is estimated at 100 million dollars, but a sponsor is yet to be found.Who doesn’t love something bright, shiny and new? Grumps, that’s who. And I know you guys aren’t grumps. So join me in this semi-regular piece covering some of the more interesting openings and upcomings on the SLC restaurant scene. Grumps, this is your formal warning to close your browser here please. Everyone else, lets get excited about the ever burgeoning SLC food scene. 3 Cups – So goes their homepage blurb: “The brainchild of nine-year Coffee Garden veteran Derek Belnap, 3 Cups is a fresh and modern neighborhood joint for coffee, pastries and gelato. Currently brewing beans from Salt Lake City-based Blue Copper Roasters and serving house-made sweets and savories by our pastry chef Amber Billingsley, formerly of Vinto.” Got that? The drop dead perfection of Amber Billingsley’s mastery of all things sweet combined with the excellence of Blue Copper coffee – do you really need any more excuse to check these guys out? Actually, that was rhetorical, I have nothing more. If those two points alone don’t have you scampering to Holladay (hooray for more non downtown SLC openings!) right now, you are a lost cause. Again, close your browser now please. 4670 S. 2300 E. Holladay, 84117 (385) 237-3091 www.3cups.coffee All Chay – Remember the pho crave? Check your basement, there’s probably a pho operation down there. Vegans however had to watch everyone gleefully slurping down all those noodles loaded with funs tuff like tendon and marrow and weep. Presumably that’s the driver behind this new vegan Vietnamese restaurant in Rose Park. Vegan’s rejoice, order a banh mi and dunk it in your pho, safe in the knowledge only plants we’re murdered in the name of your satiation. Reports so far (see Yelp link below) are very, very good, even from meat eaters. 1264 W 500 N. Salt Lake City, UT 84116 (801) 521-4789 http://www.yelp.com/biz/all-chay-salt-lake-city Bruges Waffles And Frites – Just hitting my desk as finishing up this piece, news of a third location. Full details via KSL. Current Fish And Oyster – Expect to hear a lot about this place, with very good reason. A joint effort between Mikel Trapp (Cafe Trio) and the La Salle Group (Oasis Cafe, Faustina, Kyoto, Caffe Niche) the restaurant seeks to fill a noticeable gap in the dining market – a modern seafood restaurant amidst an ocean of sushi. It’s an ambitious project to say the least – a reputed million bucks went into the revamp and build out of the grand space; the press release calls the design ‘elegant grunge’ which sounds about as delightful as refined mud, but take it from me, it’s a plush space that eschews many contemporary overplayed design affectations for its own special ambiance. The no expense spared approach applies to the assembled team too. Logen Crew (formerly Fresco) is head chef, Alexa Norlin (formerly Cafe Trio, Fresco) is pastry chef while James Santangelo and Amy Eldredge (formerly Bar X) are heading up the boozy bits. GM Hillary Merrill has bags of experience too, previously running a tight ship at Faustina for years. Of the menu Crew wrote, “We extracted what we feel are the golden nuggets from each region in creating this menu. We are not trying to recreate the wheel here. We just want to offer our favorite classic American seafood preparations and add our contemporary spin on some new tastes with innovative dishes. Oysters are huge for us. We like to highlight regions and educate people about different profiles and pairings and watch with delight as our guests discover some new favorites.” I’ll take a deeper look at Current in a future article; suffices to say I enjoyed a fine meal during the restaurant’s soft opening week (on the house) and the signs so far excellent. 279 E 300 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84111 (801) 326-3474 www.currentfishandoyster.com Hoof and Vine – Like a star falling into a singularity, high end steakhouses seem irresistibly drawn towards downtown SLC. Not so with this latest restaurant from the owners also behind South Valley restaurants Tiburon, The Wild Rose and Epic Casual Dining. Still, even though out in the Southern burbs’ prices wouldn’t be out of place in the city, check out the menu here. Prices do however include salad and side unlike other joints, plus curiously in a nod to the 90s – a sorbet course. Hub And Spoke – Scott Evans’ latest restaurant opened late last week. His modern take on a classic American diner moves into the empty East side space via Finca’s migration downtown. Like all of Evans’ restaurants, it’s safe to say there was some buzz and excitement surrounding the opening. Here’s what Evans had to say via email on the opening: “After we planned Finca’s move to a larger space downtown, we wanted to rethink the existing space and find a unique restaurant concept that would add something new to the SLC dining scene and fit well into the neighborhood. I’m often inspired by my travels, and this time I drew on my experiences dining in places like Brooklyn, Portland and San Francisco where there is a diverse offering of breakfast and all-day dining restaurants. I wanted to bring a unique take on the all-day diner with a casual but modern interpretation – using fresh, local ingredients to create a menu with familiar flavors used in unique ways. Like Pago, Finca, and East Liberty Tap House, Hub & Spoke Diner will use high-quality, locally-sourced ingredients as the foundation for the menu – all fresh, nothing frozen. That means we’ll be using local, organic eggs, making our bakery items in-house, from scratch daily, including our breads, pastries, scones, pies, cakes, and other deserts, and making house-made sausage, house-smoked bacon, and a variety of ice-cream shakes and boozy shakes. Hub & Spoke will have a full espresso bar and coffee shop inside the restaurant and an extended beverage list featuring a selection of wines, beers, and spirits that don’t sacrifice taste for value. The menu was crafted by our award-winning team with Phelix Gardner as Executive Chef, Max Nelson as Chef de Cuisine, and Courtney McDowell as pastry chef. We’ll have new twists on classics like our Banana Flapjacks, Reuben Sandwich, Country Fried Steak & Eggs, and Chicken Pot Pie, as well as our own take on what we think a modern diner with global and local influences should have, like our Breakfast Bahn Mi sandwich – a breakfast twist on the Vietnamese pork sandwich on baguette, Kentucky Hot Brown with fried eggs – turning the open face broiled turkey & bacon sandwich with béchamel sauce into a breakfast item, Navajo Taco Salad with pinto beans, pork, cheddar, pico, sour cream and romaine on traditional Navajo fry bread, and Kale Tabbouleh Salad adding kale to the popular Middle-Eastern Tabbouleh combination of bulgur wheat, mint, cucumber and tomato. On a more personal note – the name Hub & Spoke Diner is a nod to my paternal grandfather, George Evans, who was also a restaurateur. He owned and operated The Hub Cafe in the small town of Brainerd, Minnesota in the 50’s and 60’s, which provided a living for his family of 10, including my dad. My dad grew up working at the The Hub, and although he didn’t pursue a career in restaurants, he was always comfortable in restaurants and loved food and dining out. I didn’t see my dad often, since he lived in California while I was growing up, but one of the things we bonded over was our love of food. From a young age, he took me to a variety of different restaurants across the Los Angeles area and gave me exposure to many different styles of food and cuisines – from ethnic food carts to fine dining restaurants. My grandfather and father passed away years ago, so they won’t be able to see this diner, but I like to think that their passion for food was somehow passed down to me through the generations. And, since restaurants, food, and wine have become not only my passion but my career, this is a little thank you back to them for giving me that genetic inclination“. 1291 S 1100 E Salt Lake City, UT 84105 (801) 532-0777 www.hubandspokediner.com Hot Dynasty – Over in South Salt Lake and the ever expanding China town development comes this latest restaurant – focused on the arresting flavors of Szechwan cuisine. A gigantic menu of over 220 items is offered in addition to wine and beer and boba too. 3390 S State St, South Salt Lake, UT 84115 (801) 809-3229 www.hotdynasty.com H&D BBQ – Moving into the former Cucina Vanina space is this new BBQ joint from brothers James and Garrett – award winning pit masters (the former of which is also an R&R BBQ alumni). The menu is one of the larger ‘q menus in town, offering a smorgasbord of six smoked meats in total; a trio of which are available piled on a burger if you wish – pictured below – the three meat Bosatch burger: Laid Back Poke Shack – This new concept on Highland Drive is already garnering some excellent reviews. The order of the day is Poke, served in bowls, quick casual fashion. There’s also a hefty dash of mix and match customization too. So go right ahead and order kahlua pork and ahi as pictured below. 6213 S Highland Dr. Holladay, UT 84121 (801) 635-8190 Penny Ann’s Cafe – Everyone loves a sequel right? Folks living in the South of the valley should be especially stoked by this one, the second iteration of the Willey family’s ode to the classic American diner. By all accounts the new location is already a mega hit. Paul (Willey) was kind enough to update me on the new restaurant so far: “We are now offering breakfast all day and lunch from 11am-3pm Monday-Friday. We truly are a family run cafe. My brother Warren, who is our Executive Chef is overseeing the quality at both locations. He is formally of the Westgate Grill in Park City which has now changed its name to the Edge. Along with Warren, sisters Penny Ann, Cindy and brother Paul work with Mom and Dad to serve up fresh homemade dishes in comfortable and inviting cafe setting. Even our nieces Meaghan, Tiera, and Rianna have joined in on the fun. And our kitchen and serving staff has been amazing with the transition of opening up our new location. Last year we won Best of State Best Breakfast and we are known for our “Heavenly Hot Cakes” and pie. At any given time we have over 10 flavors including: Key Lime, Chocolate Peanut Butter, Chocolate Mousse, Coconut Cream, Banana Cream, Lemon Raspberry and Old Fashioned Buttermilk to name a few. We have been so grateful for the positive response we have received from the Draper community and surrounding areas. We hope to continue our expansion and open a 3rd location in the next 12-18 months. ” Place your bets now (or bribes for true aficionados) for that third location… 280 E 12300 S, Draper, UT 84020 (801) 662-0009 www.pennyannscafe.com Pleiku – Fans of Main Street’s Cindy Lee Cafe’s budget friendly cuisine have probably already commiserated the loss of the downtown staple; in its place a thoroughly modern replacement, both in remodel (see below) and menu. Pleiku is the latest restaurant from the folks behind Pipa (also no more) and serves up a variety of small and large Vietnamese influenced plates. 264 S Main St, Salt Lake City, UT 84101 (801) 359-4544 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pleiku/112668785447572 Porch – More info to follow as soon as we have it but coming to Daybreak’s Soda Row in late April is Porch – the latest restaurant from the good people behind Meditrina. The concept is “upscale Southern comfort food” and anyone familiar with Meditrina’s effortlessly edible tapas, will no doubt be excited. Salt & Smoke Meats – From former owner and chef of Vienna Bistro – Frody Volgger – comes this artisanal butchers shop in South Salt Lake. Details are still limited, and the website isn’t quite there yet, but look at that meat display below. If you weren’t thinking of grilling seasons yet, I bet you are now. 155 W Malvern Avenue, South Salt Lake, UT, 84115, (801) 680-8529 www.saltandsmokemeats.com Taqueria 27 – Todd Gardiner’s high end taco movement recently saw its third opening. The downtown location joins the existing roster of locations on Foothill and Holladay. Handily located next door to Beer Bar and Bar X and open to midnight on Friday and Saturday – hint hint hint – the new T27 will undoubtedly fuel some great nights out downtown. 149 East 200 South, Salt Lake City, UT 385-259-0940 www.taqueria27.com The Food Truck League – Not much concrete info on this one yet, but keep your eyes peeled around the 2200 South area of Highland Drive. Coming in May is an effort to routinely gather food truck operators for a weekly mini festival of food on wheels. More info here http://thefoodtruckleague.com/ Zaferan Cafe – Finally, and ending appropriately at Z, a new Persian restaurant in Cottonwood Heights. And, as I’ve blathered on enough, I’ll let them explain and show you in their own words – happy dining all! 2578 E Bengal Blvd, Salt Lake City, UT 84121 (801) 944-6234 www.zaferancafe.comBy AK Press \| April 3, 2015 It’s been almost two weeks since the fire at our warehouse and we know some of you have been waiting for an update and wondering how you can plug into the relief efforts. Very briefly, here is where things stand: our building is still red-tagged by the City of Oakland. We are hopeful that, after more inspections and some repairs are completed, we’ll be able to stay. In the meantime we have been able to get some access to our stock and so we have been able to send out orders for titles that weren’t damaged. We are still waiting for insurance inspectors to come and review the damage in our unit, and until that happens, we can’t make any more progress with clearing out destroyed stock. So at this point there is just a lot of waiting, which we can’t do much about, and it means it’s going to be a while still before our work can return to any semblance of “normal.” We can’t thank you enough for all of the support we’ve gotten in the last two weeks. Your generous donations to our crowdfunding campaign add up to almost $45,000 so far, and that money will be shared with 1984 Printing and our neighbors in the building who have been displaced by the fire. We plan to give out the first round of checks this week. We’re not quite to one-third of our goal, so if you can still donate, please do! Recovering from the fire is going to be a long and difficult process, and your support will help us all get back on our feet sooner. Besides donating, here are a few things folks can do to help (since some of you have been asking!): Spread the word about our fundraiser, even if you can’t give yourself. Organize a benefit. Maybe you’re in a band; maybe you can organize a film screening or a house party. Make it a benefit for our fire relief fund and let us know about it, and we’ll happily share it on our events calendar. Please understand that we are stretched pretty thin labor-wise at the moment so we probably can’t send a collective member to your event, but we’ll be ever-so-grateful for your help! Bookstores and other retailers: this might be obvious, but if you owe us money, now would be a great time to pay up! We’ve also heard from stores that want to have benefit events or donate a percentage of a day’s sales to our fund, which is amazing and we certainly appreciate the mutual aid! And finally, yes, you can still place orders with us! Just understand that there will be slight delays shipping things out, so we appreciate your patience. If you’re into this sort of thing, we suggest ordering e-books (which require almost no work to process and you can download instantly). And if you’re able to support us more consistently, we would love it if more folks signed up as Friends of AK Press. Thanks again, so much, for your support. -The AK Press Collective Be Sociable, Share! Topics: AK News \| No Comments » Comments You must be logged in to post a comment.Browse > Home Vatican / Benedict Confirms Epic Kegger At Apostolic Palace During Francis Visit To U.S. Benedict Confirms Epic Kegger At Apostolic Palace During Francis Visit To U.S. VATICAN– Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI confirmed Monday that he will make his first visit to the Apostolic Palace in September to host and attend a raging kegger. The news comes just hours after Pope Francis announced plans to attend a meeting on the family in Philadelphia, or as Benedict called it, “Snoozapalooza.” In a statement made to friends gathered Monday, Benedict said, “I wish to confirm that in September of 2015, I will throw the most epic, off-the-chain party the Vatican has seen since the 15th century.” Benedict has already traveled to South Beach, San Diego, Las Vegas, Brazil and elsewhere in the 20 months he has been retired, and his rager at the Apostolic Palace will come at a pivotal moment for the Roman Catholic Church. “I believe that Benedict knows what a stressful time it has been for the faithful these past few months,” said an anonymous source. “With so many Catholics trying to explain to friends and co-workers, as well as themselves, what actually happened at the Synod on the Family, Benedict thinks it’s time to unwind with an ‘Irish Car Bomb’ or two, a couple games of ‘Whiskey Pong,’ and some ‘keg stands.’” The source went on to remind everyone invited to keep the “bender” on the “D Lo” until “papa’s” gone.A jury found Baltimore police instructor William S. Kern guilty Thursday of reckless endangerment for shooting and critically wounding a recruit during a training exercise at the Rosewood Center in Owings Mills. Jurors found the veteran officer not guilty of the more serious charge of second-degree assault but concluded that Kern had been criminally reckless when he grabbed his loaded service gun and fired at a man he was training. He could receive a prison sentence of up to five years. Kern, 46, testified in his own defense Thursday before jurors began their brief deliberations. He said he never meant to hurt Raymond Gray when he pointed his gun at the University of Maryland police recruit Feb. 12 and pulled the trigger. The instructor said he thought he was holding a "simunitions" training pistol that fires paintball-like cartridges and intended to use it to remind trainees how dangerous it can be in real-life situations to congregate near doors, windows and hallways. "I realized it was not my simunitions weapon immediately," Kern said, fighting back tears. He said he was carrying his service weapon for the security of the trainees and himself. "The sound that it makes — it's a very distinctive sound." But Baltimore County prosecutors argued that Kern broke city police guidelines by bringing his gun into simunitions training. They said in court this week that he had an "unhealthy attachment" to his gun, had pulled it out by accident before the shooting and was reluctant to give it up afterward. "He needs to be held responsible for his actions of that day," Deputy State's Attorney John Cox said in closing arguments. In his testimony, Kern said Baltimore City instructors routinely carry live weapons during training. Kern said he had been holding his training gun in his right pocket, inches away from the holster that was carrying his service weapon. After the live round went off, Kern said, he immediately ran toward the recruits, forced open a door and found Gray with a wound to his head. He called out to two recruits with medical training and then ran upstairs to find another instructor before going outside to get reception on his cellphone so he could call 911. His defense attorney played a tape of the ensuing 911 call for jurors Thursday. Throughout the more than four-minute call, Kern can be heard in frantic and concerned tones asking for help. At one point, he drove an unmarked car to the front of the Rosewood Center so he could direct ambulances to the shooting scene as quickly as possible. The state-owned facility formerly housed patients with developmental disabilities. "I got an officer shot in the head. I got an officer shot in the head," Kern says on the 911 recording. "Yes, somebody was accidentally shot in the head during a training exercise. I need a medic here now!" Gray, of Baltimore, lost sight in one eye and was hospitalized for months before moving to an out-of-state rehabilitation center. He did not appear in court. Members of his family sat through the trial but declined to comment after the verdict. Dwight A. Petit, who represents the family in a civil suit against the city and county, said he was disappointed that Kern was not convicted of the more serious charge. Second-degree assault carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. "There is no doubt he was reckless," he said. "The problem with assault is people are looking for intent" rather than the disregard for the safety of others. The charge does not require evidence of intent, he said. Much of the testimony in the trial revolved around the rules surrounding guns in city police training. Kern said that he and a fellow training officer had agreed that one of them would carry a live weapon at all times during the training because the Rosewood facility was not secure. "I was armed because I did not feel safe," Kern said. He said police had to keep a door open to prevent themselves from being locked in, and he pointed out that there is a drug rehabilitation center nearby. But Officer Efren Edwards, a fellow instructor, denied such an agreement. He testified that departmental guidelines prohibit live weapons at such exercises. Baltimore police say commanders were not aware of the exercises and that the city did not have permission to use Rosewood for training. Kern, through his attorney Shaun F. Owens, declined to comment after the verdict. Owens said throughout the trial that his client should not be held criminally responsible for the shooting. "There was no question whatsoever that this was purely an accident," he said. Kern is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 17. [email protected] twitter.com/janders5The song that began it all. Contemporary ears might have started to adjust to heavier sounds thanks to the likes of Hendrix and Cream, but this was something else. An opening fanfare of imperial brass and shrieking guitar cuts to a harsh one-chord riff, over which a robotically distorted Greg Lake delivers the immortal lines: “Cat’s foot, iron claw / Neurosurgeons scream for more / At paranoia’s poison door / Twenty-first century schizoid man!” If proof were needed that the utopian gestures of the late 60s had been trampled into the dirt, then this was it: a synapse-blasting onslaught of boundary-wrecking jazz rock, somehow both austere and strangely groovy. The crunching verse/chorus is astonishing, but there’s also that swinging instrumental break in the middle, its rapid accelerations and sudden stops an exercise in gleeful precision that leaves the listener giddy and disorientated. King Crimson’s signature tune to this day, 21st Century Schizoid Man captures all their defining qualities: non-rock instrumentation used in inventive and powerful ways, technical proficiency harnessed for dramatic effects, striking imagery sparingly deployed. Most importantly, it shows an appreciation of what makes music exciting rather than merely impressive. 2. Epitaph (1969) King Crimson’s debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, wasn’t just a scorched-earth assault on the traditional blues rock order. There were also passages of real emotional depth, and Epitaph is a prime example. It’s an epic composition that rages at the gods without becoming overwrought, a poignant updating of Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth for the Vietnam era. Peter Sinfield’s fanciful and allusive lyrics could sometimes strain for meaning on the band’s early albums, but Epitaph’s depiction of the senselessness of war is genuinely affecting. Against a roll of timpani, Robert Fripp plays a beautifully sad guitar line that belies his image as some kind of cranky mad scientist. There’s a drop-down to a tense pre-battle silence, broken only by a stark, double-tracked snare and Lake’s weary vocal. But it’s the moment when the song moves into its mournful middle section, with a gigantic swell of Mellotron, that packs the biggest punch. Hyde Park, 1969: the counterculture's greatest day. And the Rolling Stones came too Read more 3. Cat Food (1970) It’s not all doom and gloom in King Crimson’s world – there’s a lithe and playful side to their songwriting that is often overlooked, and it’s epitomised by Cat Food, the single from their second album. With the band having effectively fallen apart after their debut, Fripp persuaded the former members to help make another record, with this snarky half-cousin to the Beatles’ Come Together the highlight. Over a slinking bassline, Lake delivers Sinfield’s witty critique of consumerism with panache: “Everything she’s chosen is conveniently frozen / Eat it and come back for more!” Instrumentally, the star of the show is guest pianist Keith Tippett, who drops jazzy, atonal clusters of notes throughout, in a similar vein to what Mike Garson would do with David Bowie a few years later. There’s a fantastic clip of the band playing this song on Top of the Pops, Lake’s good looks and the band’s mod-meets-Victoriana image suggesting an altogether different trajectory from the one they ultimately took. 4. Ladies of the Road (1971) There’s another side to King Crimson which is underappreciated: the self-mythologising swagger of being in a big-name band, something more readily associated with the likes of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. King Crimson’s take may be more mocking than aggrandising, but it’s definitely there on tracks such as Ladies of the Road. Fripp’s lazy, meandering playing creates a deliciously salacious atmosphere as new singer Boz Burrell plays the part of a stoned lothario, delivering a stream of politically incorrect lyrics. (Interesting to note that Fripp preferred vocalists with a little grit in their voices – a sharp contrast to the more affected performers of the prog era.) There’s some rasping, predatory sax from Mel Collins and slapback echo added to Burrell’s voice, before an incongruous lullaby of a chorus recalls the Beatles once again. Fripp’s tottering, teasing guitar is a million miles from the more angular sound with which he’s become associated, and by the end, Burrell has practically transformed into Robert Plant. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bill Bruford on stage with King Crimson. Photograph: Ian Dickson/Redferns By 1973, Fripp had completely reconfigured the band once again, bringing together a group of players that he hoped would fulfil his vision of an intelligent, improvisational rock band. Improvisation had always been an important part of King Crimson’s sound, but Fripp had become increasingly interested in it as a primary method of composition. (Though as incoming drummer Bill Bruford noted, this was far from an easy process – in his former band Yes, every tiny detail had been debated and discussed whereas in King Crimson, “almost nothing was said”.) Why King Crimson are still prog-rock royalty Read more The title track of their fifth album would act as a statement of intent around this new manifesto. It starts with a percussion sequence reminiscent of Terry Riley’s early experiments in systems music, before the urgent pulse of a violin fades up. Fripp’s guitar swoops in the background before exploding out of the speakers with a slow-twisting colossus of a riff. The complex, Mahavishnu Orchestra-like section that follows feels looser and less planned than before, Fripp’s guitar running amok like a crazed tailor trying to stitch the song together. A spooky section of violin throws the listener into limbo, challenging us to stay the course, but our reward is a superb coda that pivots on a sonorous fuzz-bass motif as a TV rants in the background. It feels like something significant has happened, we’re just not exactly sure what. The band’s next album, Starless and Bible Black, would be based almost entirely on live jamming, although with its skilful edits and overdubs, it wasn’t always easy to tell. It also showed that improvisation didn’t necessarily mean wild excursions into the musical outfield – it could also produce intimate, finely detailed songs such as The Night Watch, which takes its title from the Rembrandt painting. It begins with a gradually ascending sweep of melody, lush and mechanical, before John Wetton’s soulful, weather-beaten voice brings to life what is essentially a condensed art history lesson (courtesy of the band’s latest lyricist, Richard Palmer-James). It pivots around a swooning guitar motif, which Fripp then betters with one of his most lyrical solos. It’s not a conventionally structured song but it leaves you feel as though you’ve just heard a brilliantly read short story. King Crimson had slimmed down to the power trio of Fripp, Wetton and Bruford by the time they came to record what would be their swansong to the 1970s. But what a way to go out. Red is a consistently intense album, and its title track is a magnificent opener that plunges the listener into a world of fear and loathing. With Fripp sometimes barely functional during the recording sessions, the brutal, grinding riff that drives the song remorselessly along feels like a direct line to the guitarist’s id. The angular and dense sound that the band achieve on this track is the epitome of a new kind of heaviness in music, with the originators of both math rock (Slint, for instance) and prog metal (the likes of Tool) forever in its debt. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adrian Belew playing with King Crimson in 2000. Photograph: Silke Paustian/EPA Just as any best of King Crimson must include 21st Century Schizoid Man, so too must it feature Starless, both tracks neatly bookending their 70s’ studio albums. While Schizoid Man lays out the band’s essential qualities up front, Starless feels like a summation of everything they’ve learned along
have automated tests in your project, it will also make targeting the elements a lot faster. That will save some time for you and your colleagues writing them. Adding IDs to elements added in XML files is pretty straightforward. But what about the dynamically added elements? Well, it turns out to be really simple too. Just create an ids.xml file inside your values folder and type in the required fields. It can look like this: <resources> <item name="item_title" type="id"/> <item name="item_body" type="id"/> </resources> Then in the code, you can use setId(R.id.item_title). It couldn’t be simpler. There are a couple more things to pay attention to when optimizing UI. You should generally avoid deep hierarchies while preferring shallow, maybe wide ones. Do not use layouts you don’t need. For example, you can probably replace a group of nested LinearLayouts with either a RelativeLayout, or a TableLayout. Feel free to experiment with different layouts, don’t just always use LinearLayout and RelativeLayout. Also try creating some custom views when needed, it can improve the performance significantly if done well. For instance, did you know that Instagram doesn’t use TextViews for displaying comments? You can find some more info about Hierarchy Viewer on the Android Developers site with descriptions of different panes, using the Pixel Perfect tool, etc. One more thing I would point out is capturing the views in a.psd file, which can be done by the “Capture the window layers” button. Every view will be in a separate layer, so it’s really simple to hide or change it in Photoshop or GIMP. Oh, that’s another reason to add an ID to every view you can. It will make the layers have names that actually make sense. You will find a lot more debugging tools in Developer options, so I advise you to activate them and see what are they doing. What could possibly go wrong? The Android developers site contains a set of best practices for performance. They cover a lot of different areas, including memory management, which I haven’t really talked about. I silently ignored it, because handling memory and tracking memory leaks is a whole separate story. Using a third party library for efficiently displaying images will help a lot, but if you still have memory issues, check out Leak canary made by Square, or read this. Wrapping Up So, this was the good news. The bad new is, optimizing Android apps is a lot more complicated. There are a lot of ways of doing everything, so you should be familiar with the pros and cons of them. There usually isn’t any silver bullet solution which has only benefits. Only by understanding what’s happening behind the scenes will you be able to pick the solution which is best for you. Just because your favorite developer says that something is good, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best solution for you. There are a lot more areas to discuss and more profiling tools which are more advanced, so we might get to them next time. Make sure you learn from the top developers and top companies. You can find a couple hundred engineering blogs at this link. It’s obviously not just Android related stuff, so if you are interested only in Android, you have to filter the particular blog. I would highly recommend the blogs of Facebook and Instagram. Even though the Instagram UI on Android is questionable, their engineering blog has some really cool articles. For me it’s awesome that it’s so easy to see how things are done in companies which are handling hundreds of millions of users daily, so not reading their blogs seems crazy. The world is changing really fast, so if you aren’t constantly trying to improve, learn from others and use new tools, you will be left behind. As Mark Twain said, a person who doesn’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.How many of Trump's followers are fake? 08 September 2017 Like Tweet Share The President of the United States of America likes to boast about how many Twitter followers he has. But who are they? I was curious, so on Thursday 31 August 2017 I used the Twitter API to download the unique account IDs of one million of Donald Trump’s most recent followers. After waiting a day or so to give any new users time to set up their profiles and send their first tweet, I downloaded the metadata (username, number of tweets, profile picture, etc.) associated with each of these IDs. Here’s what I learned. Of the 1,000,000 accounts in my sample: Around 700,000 followed Trump within a few hours of being created. The chart below shows a plot of 1/1000th of the dataset. You can clearly see that most of the accounts fall on the lower frontier, i.e. are less than 12 days old (note the log scale). Around 490,000 have no basic profile information. These accounts have no profile picture added, no description, location or URL entered, and have not changed their default theme / background. Around 390,000 are silent. These accounts have never tweeted, nor have they ever retweeted or liked anyone else’s tweets either. The fact that most accounts are new isn’t massively surprising in and of itself; Twitter suggests people to follow as part of the signup process, and the President of the United States is a pretty obvious candidate for inclusion. Interestingly, however, even for the oldest cohort of this type of account in my sample, most still didn’t add any profile information or send any tweets even after 11-12 days of being on Twitter. Based on these figures, my guess is that only 51% of recent Trump followers are real. Although this number is pretty rough and ready, it’s consistent with other estimates from services like TwitterAudit. In reality there are real accounts with no profile information, and fake accounts that are superficially convincing - and armed with more time and firepower there are increasingly sophisticated ways to discriminate between them. But for a quick analysis, using the absence of basic profile information as a predictor is good enough. Other fun facts: My sample contained around 140,000 accounts with usernames ending in 8 digits. This is the default naming convention that Twitter uses during signup if you skip the step to choose your own username. My sample also contained around 7,000 accounts that follow Trump and no one else (which is a pretty offensive waste of a Twitter account IMHO). And finally, around 500 accounts were deleted during the time I waited between downloading the original list of IDs and going back to retrieve the associated metadata. In any event, the bottom line is that it looks like Trump is currently gaining around 90,000 followers per day. At this rate, he’s set to gain more than 2.5 million followers per month. And half of them are probably fake. If you want to replicate this analysis, either for Trump or for anyone else on Twitter, then I recommend hitting the following API endpoints: The first of these will return the unique account IDs belonging to your target account’s followers, starting with the most recent (these are numeric identifiers, not the @usernames you see on the front end). The second will convert blocks of IDs into fully-hydrated user objects, including @usernames and other profile info. The API is rate limited, so you’ll also need to be patient if you want to pull a large sample to work with. GET followers/ids returns up to 5,000 IDs per call, and allows 15 calls per 15 minute window, so retrieving 1,000,000 IDs takes around three-and-a-half hours. GET users/lookup operates on blocks of up to 100 IDs, and allows 300 calls per 15 minute window, so converting 1,000,000 IDs takes around eight-and-a-half hours. Have fun!Unless you live under a rock if you live a low carb lifestyle you know what an oopsie roll is. BUT did you know how versatile they are? Here’s a Super Oopsie Roll Roundup! First let’s start off with the traditional oopsie roll recipe. While you can add/or subtract flavoring, seeds, etc here’s the basic recipe: 1. Basic Recipe I had the recipe listed here with a link to the person that says they are the originator of the recipe but they insisted I remove it. So here is a link to another site where you can grab the recipe. It is available all over the Internet and on low-carb Facebook groups and pages; they never vary and you will find that those same ingredients are the basis of all the other recipes in this roundup. My only word of advice when making them, be sure to beat the egg whites VERY stiff. That will make the difference in your finished rolls. ~Marge See how easy they are to make: Start with a simple to throw together recipe. Just be absolutely sure to beat the egg white super stiff! That’s the secret to success! Then you can take the recipe and transform it into all sorts of wonderful creations! #2. Oopsie Pizza Crust The crust doesn’t get crunchy but it tastes like a REAL pizza! #3. Parmesan Oopsie Breadsticks Did someone actually say they missed Olive Garden bread sticks??? #4. Oopsie Noodle Lasagna Don’t go without lasagna another day! Grab this recipe today to serve tomorrow! #5. OOPS! OOPSIETÅRTA. OOPS! Just look at this Oopsie to DIE for dessert!!! I want to lick my monitor every time I look at it! #6. Oopsie Medallions W/Raspberry and Almond Cream Having a tea? Serve these individual Oopsie medallions with raspberry and almond cream and your guests won’t stop raving about them! #7. Low Carb Buffalo Chicken Casserole You aren’t going to want a pot pie with a traditional crust after trying this low carb buffalo chicken casserole! #8. Low Carb Eggs Benedict on Oopsie Rolls #9. Oopsie French Bread Enjoy french toast without the guilt of carbs! I like to put lots of butter and sugar-free Aunt Jemima syrup over mine! #10. Oopsie Batter Waffles Because sometimes plain old pancakes won’t do. You can also make these oopsie batter waffles with or without sugar free cocoa added to the mix and sandwich some sugar-free ice cream in between two quarters for a wonderful take on an ice cream sandwich! STAY TUNED FOR PAGE 2 FOR MORE AMAZING OOPSIE ROLL RECIPES! DISCLAIMER Please be advised. the information that is shared herein is intended for informational purposes. Any advice and/or product(s) mentioned should not be used to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always consult your healthcare professional if you are currently taking medication, pregnant, trying to get pregnant, nursing, or if you have any other health condition before taking any products mentioned or applying any information contained herein. Share this Post! Facebook Google Twitter Pinterest Email Print RelatedProduct Launch Recap: Primitive for macOS Michael Fogleman Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 8, 2016 A few weeks ago, I launched a side project. Here are the numbers. 70% of the Total Revenue was in the first 3 days, thanks to being on the front page of Hacker News. I’m almost always working on a side project. Usually it just ends up on my GitHub profile or my portfolio, but every now and then I take it a little further. Primitive started out like any other project. I hacked on it for a couple weeks in September and hosted it on GitHub under a MIT license. It’s command-line driven and cross-platform. But, people seemed to really like it, so I figured it was a good candidate for further exploration. Taking note of my wife’s recent spending was just the extra kick in the butt I needed to do it. So I set out to turn Primitive into a native macOS application with a nice GUI so I could sell it in the app store. I kept the core logic in Go and wrote the GUI in Objective-C. I spent about 10 days on it and it was looking good enough for an initial release. I bought a domain and carefully crafted the Primitive for macOS website, knowing that sexy examples were crucial. I submitted the app for review and was delighted when it was approved within one day — much faster than in my previous experience, although it’s been a while since I’ve done any iOS or Mac development. The timing was just right for a Tuesday morning post on Hacker News… Show HN: Primitive for macOS. Woohoo, front page. And it stayed there for about 24 hours, wow! Bandwidth usage on my Linode instance peaked at 100 Mb/s! After the 30% Apple tax, Primitive has brought in $5990 so far. 70% of that was in the first three days. Recently, I’m getting about $20–30/day. Not bad! I could probably be doing more to promote the app, but I’m not really sure how. (Perhaps a post-mortem on Medium? Haha!) The Hacker News bubble. I received several feature requests after launching. So, I released v1.1 one week after launch, including a really cool “drawing mode” that makes the app more interactive and user-driven. I still have a backlog of features to implement. I doubt implementing them will make much difference in sales, but they’re still interesting and I want to provide a top-notch product, so we’ll see if I can get some of them in the app. Google Analytics numbers for primitive.lol — typical shark fin viral peak. Money is nice, but perhaps the best part of all this has been the overwhelmingly positive feedback. Excellent ratings in the app store and fan mail make it all worthwhile. It’s easy to be overly critical of one’s own work, and I often look back at my projects with an eye toward what I could’ve done better, but it seems like I made something that people really do like. This is where it’s at. By the way, I wasn’t really sure what price tag to put on the app. My initial thinking was “definitely under $5” since it’s fairly limited in utility, but after scoping out other prices in the store and thinking about my audience, I decided that $4.99 vs. $9.99 probably wouldn’t cut sales in half. So that’s what I went with. I wanted to maximize profit but I also wanted my customers to feel good about their purchase. I kept this in mind as I developed the GUI, trying to make the initial up-front experience easy and gratifying. Also, I did a Black Friday sale and dropped the price to $5.99 for a day. Sales did go up, but it wasn’t a huge event by any means. Rank History is sort of all over the place. I’ve asked myself: “Should I pander to Apple and add touch bar features, in hopes that they will feature my app?” But I haven’t yet. I also considered running an ad on Twitter, but, meh. In the end, this is just yet another side project. I’ve already mostly moved on mentally, thinking of the next project. That’s just my style, I guess. Until next time… Thanks for reading! https://primitive.lol/Perhaps the company’s biggest coup, though, was winning over Union Square Cafe when that perennially popular New York restaurant reopened in December. Danny Meyer, the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group, was on the OpenTable board for almost two decades and one of its best ambassadors. In the mid-1990s, when Mr. Meyer was working to open his second restaurant, Gramercy Tavern, he tried starting a similar system himself. He didn’t even think about using it to allow customers to make reservations online; rather, it was to be an answer to a perennial problem. “I was tired of this recurring problem we had in the restaurant, where people would always be yelling up and down the stairs, saying, ‘Who’s got the reservation book?’ ” Mr. Meyer said. “One time a fraternity brother of mine pulled a prank and took the book out of the restaurant entirely — it was not a nice prank.” So when he opened Eleven Madison Park in 1998, OpenTable was taking the reservations. When Blue Smoke opened in 2002, the only way to make a reservation was via OpenTable; a phone line was discontinued. “I’ll never forget it,” Mr. Meyer said. “An online blog called Daily Candy announced that step and within hours, we had filled the entire restaurant for a month.” But OpenTable had its limitations. Until recently, for instance, it would not link the reservation systems at the Union Square group’s restaurants. A free-spending diner who patronized Union Square Cafe for years could show up at Gramercy Tavern for the first time, and the host would not know him. Mr. Meyer said that, to some extent, OpenTable had been criticized unfairly. After all, it still seats far more diners in restaurants like his than any other service, and serves all the Union Square group restaurants except Union Square Cafe and the new Martina, which doesn’t take reservations. Nonetheless, he said, “the latest round of assaults from start-ups looking to eat their lunch is more than they’ve ever faced before.”Want to get a pay raise? Consider investing in a self-driving car. A new report released Friday suggests that with the increased mobility brought about by autonomous cars, more people will be able to pursue higher education, which will directly affect their income. In fact, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders says that over one million extra people in the United Kingdom could pursue a college degree thanks to the technology. Over a ten year period, this group would see an average salary increase of $10,691 per year. “The benefits of connected and autonomous vehicles are life-changing, offering more people greater independence, freedom to socialize, work and earn more, and access services more easily,” Mike Hawkes, chief executive of the society, said in a statement. The survey found autonomous cars would let more people, especially those with mobility-related disabilities, pursue hobbies outside the home. In the survey, 65 percent of young people said their ability to travel was restricted. With self-driving cars, 15 percent of that demographic said they could pursue more job opportunities, and 11 percent said they would have more educational choices. Futurists have discussed a number of social changes that could be brought about by fully autonomous driving. Jeffrey Tumlin, director of strategy at Nelson/Nygaard, told Inverse in an interview in November that the technology could allow for radical new designs, enabling businesses on wheels hailed by a smartphone app. It’s possible that higher education institutes could also take advantage. However, other surveys have shown a lack of trust around autonomous driving. A Klashwerks survey conducted in January showed people don’t want to spend more time in their cars than necessary, putting a damper on visions of people conducting large amounts of work during their journeys. Nonetheless, self-driving cars offer increased travel opportunities for those that find driving a car difficult — 57 percent of respondents to the survey said that they thought the technology would improve their quality of life, and 49 percent said they would get in an autonomous vehicle if one were available today. All that’s left is for Tesla and others to finally crack the issue and bring autonomy to public roads. INVERSE LOOT DEALS Meet the Pod The first bed that learns the perfect temperature for your sleep, and dynamically warms or cools according to your needs. Buy Now Check out the SMMT’s video report here:PENSACOLA, FL – On Friday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump flexed his political muscle by drawing one of his largest crowds since securing his party’s nomination in the pivotal battleground state of Florida. In what has traditionally been a very Republican-voting region of the state, Trump backed up his January capacity appearance with another strong showing. It was evident early on, as thousands lined up to get into the Pensacola Bay Center three hours before the rally began to see the presidential hopeful. Trump hammered the usual planks of his campaign stump speech – trade, national defense, immigration, and the flaws of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. He drew perhaps his biggest applause when he told the crowd what he would do to Iranian boats that threatened U.S. ships. “With Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water,” he proclaimed. In taking aim at his opponent Hillary Clinton, Trump described her ability to avoid prosecution for her use of a private email server while secretary of state as her “single greatest achievement.” He went on to speculate Clinton could get away with much more and avoid prosecution. “She could walk into this arena right now and shoot somebody with 20,000 people watching, right smack in the middle of the heart, and she wouldn’t be prosecuted, OK?” he said. “That is what’s happened to our country.” Those remarks led to the crowd chanting “lock her up,” to which Trump said he had something else in mind for his opponent. “We’re going to do better than lock her up,” he said. “We’re going to win on November 8.” Trump also vowed to have a 350-ship navy, which could be seen as welcome news for the region that has a strong naval presence. Pensacola is home to several U.S. Navy installations and the famed Blue Angels, which is the flight demonstration squadron of the Navy. Among those in attendance to support Trump were both the Republican nominees for Florida’s first and second congressional districts, Florida State Rep. Matt Gaetz and Dr. Neal Dunn. Both Gaetz and Dunn are heavy favorites to win their bids for each of those open seats. Others there to show support for Trump were Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL), the outgoing member of Congress for Pensacola, and Trump advisers Gen. Michael Flynn and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The event was not without protesters. Although it was late in the rally, a handful protesters managed to interrupt Trump’s speech, but they were escorted out by security and followed a group of people sporting “Bikers for Trump” T-shirts. While Trump will likely dominate in Florida’s dark-red GOP panhandle region, his appearance in Pensacola could prove as an important step in getting out the vote. Although Pensacola and other cities in this region of the state lag behind the more populous parts of Florida that include Orlando, Tampa, and Miami, a stronger-than-usual turnout by Republican voters would be a feather in the cap for a campaign that is in a dead-heat with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for the state, according to polling. Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poorTesting reveals Facebook iOS app drains battery life, even when it isn’t being used, and that using Safari instead will make an iPhone last longer Facebook is one of the most downloaded apps on iOS but it has long been cited as a cause of fast-draining iPhone batteries. Last year it was accused of using background tricks to stay active even when it wasn’t being used. Facebook admitted bugs existed, and fixed them, but questions of the app’s impact on battery life remained. Similar concerns about Facebook’s Android app led to the discovery that deleting the app saves up to 20% of a phone’s battery. After that revelation, I set about seeing if the same was true for iPhone users. I discovered that uninstalling Facebook’s iOS app and switching to Safari can save up to 15% of iPhone battery life. Facebook Twitter Pinterest An alternative to uninstalling Facebook is using the hump from Apple’s Smart Battery case. Photograph: Apple Using an iPhone 6S Plus for a week without the main Facebook app installed, I recorded the battery life at 10.30pm each day for a week comparing it to a daily average taken from a week with the app. I charged the phone overnight, taking it off the charger at 7.30am, and used it normally. I accessed Facebook for the same amount of time, and for the same purposes, using the social network’s excellent mobile site within Safari, as I had done using the app. I also left the Facebook Messenger app installed. On average I had 15% more battery left by 10.30pm each day. I had also saved space, because at the point I had deleted the Facebook app it had consumed around 500MB in total combining the 111MB of the app itself and its cache on the iPhone. To make sure that this wasn’t an isolated incident, I also recruited several other Facebook-using iPhone owners to conduct a similar test. They all found similar results, with increased battery life when using Facebook in Safari having uninstalled the main Facebook iOS app. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spot the difference: one is the Facebook app, the other the Facebook mobile site. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian Using Facebook in Safari was almost as good as the app. You can even place a shortcut to Facebook in Safari on the homescreen that looks almost identical to the app’s icon (the white is a little less bright but you need eagle eyes to see). The only restriction was the Share-to function, which does not exist for websites, meaning that to share photos I had to manually hit the “post photos” button on the mobile site. Features of the app, such as Instant Articles, are also not available. Tapping a link on the Facebook mobile site opens a new Safari tab. The results will vary for the smaller iPhone 6S, as it has a smaller battery and shorter battery life overall, but judging by the 6S Plus experience, removing the Facebook app in preference of using the social network in Safari will extend the battery life of any iPhone. A Facebook spokesperson said the company was investigating the matter. This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative. The links are powered by Skimlinks. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that Skimlinks cookies will be set. More information.Share Email 0 Shares For Immediate Release June 23, 2011 Contact Erica Chabot [email protected] Comment Of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee, On Supreme Court Decision In Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. Get all of VTDigger's daily news. You'll never miss a story with our daily headlines in your inbox. “Today the Supreme Court has overturned a sensible Vermont law that sought to protect the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship. This divided ruling is a win for data miners and large corporations and a loss for those of us who care about privacy not only in my home state of Vermont but across the nation. States like Vermont must be able to protect the privacy of sensitive information exchanged between a doctor and patient. This decision undermines that ability, and risks unduly influencing doctors in their future prescription choices. “This decision is another example of this Court using the First Amendment as a tool to bolster the rights of big business at the expense of individual Americans. I am reminded of the Court’s decision in Citizens United, where this Court overturned a century of campaign finance law to give corporations more power in our elections. “Vermonters value their privacy, but today’s decision will affect more than just Vermont. State legislatures should be allowed to protect their citizens’ privacy rights over corporate interests in profits.” # # # # # Background The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision today in Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. overturned a Vermont statute which prevented data miners from selling prescription information to pharmaceutical companies. Justice Breyer wrote the dissent, which was joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan. Notably, Justice Breyer wrote, “Until today the Court has never found that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting the use of information gathered pursuant to a regulatory mandate.” He further warned, “At best the Court opens a Pandora’s Box of First Amendment challenges to many ordinary regulatory practices that may only incidentally affect a commercial message. See, e.g., supra, at 7–8, 9–11. At worst, it reawakens Lochner’s pre-New Deal threat of substituting judicial for democratic decision making where ordinary economic regulation is at issue.” (Citations omitted).#2514 23:01 5/11/2017 Novote por eso pero conozco diputados famosos o simplemente de los que estaban en el parlament y ahora no pero a la que llegaran al poder al igual que la alcalde que primerp defedia los okipas y ahora okupas y en una noche te han tapiado la casa o piso excepto si eres de un pais a lo Rumania Pskistan o Marrueco ha o domiinicano. Estos tambien okupan sin problema ademas de muchos traficar y entonces no te tapian la casa hasta que al cabo de un par de años con las caceroladas dr lps vecinos te cogem y te tapian porquue vas preso pero ya has hecho qur algunos ganen lo que uno en tofa una vida. El poder corrompe por motivos que no voy a decir ahoraArchaeologists have recently discovered the most complete ancient crossbow to date in the terracotta army pit one in Xi'an, Shaanxi province. The most complete ancient crossbow to date was discovered in the terracotta army pit one in Xi'an, Shaanxi province. [Photo/Chinanews.com] Among hundreds of pieces of crossbows unearthed in the past, this one is said to be the best-preserved in general, with a 145cm arch and a 130cm bow string. The bow string has a smooth surface which experts believe to be made from animal tendon instead of fabric and the trigger mechanism is made of bronze, according to Shen Maosheng, head of the archaeological team. Shen also points out that this new discovery sheds light on how Qing, two wooden sticks usually discovered alongside the weapon, were used to maintain and transport the crossbows in ancient times. Although ancient documents often mentioned Qing, its function had never been clearly identified until this recent discovery. "When we dusted off the sticks, we found three holes equidistant from each other and concluded that they were probably used to hang up ropes that fastened the crossbows when they were not in use," Shen said. "It was a great way to keep the arch and string in shape and thus maintain their power in the long run. Besides, Qing was practical to help fix the crossbows during transportation." The best crossbows' shooting range could double that of an AK47, reaching almost 800m, Yuan Zhongyi, former curator of Museum of Qin Terra-cotta Warriors told Huashang Daily. The discovery of the complete set of crossbows will help scientists to create the most precise model of the weapon and calculate its shooting range more accurately.There's only been one campaign in the history of Kickstarter to have more support than you guys have shown us in the last 6 days. You make us smile so hard our faces ache. And you did it on Elan's Birthday...so now we all get a present: The NSFW Deck will now officially be a complete stand-alone game. 56 Cards that function exactly the same as the standard deck but with NSFW artwork to that we couldn't put in a deck you'd play in civilized company. You can play the NSFW deck with up to four players, or combine ANY TWO decks together to play with up to 8 players. (Yup, we've updated the rules of the standard deck to accommodate 8 players with two decks as well!) When we're done eating all this cake, we'll announce the next stretch... You make our hearts ooze. (Especially Elan's who is now really really really old.) -The Exploding Kittens TeamWhat’s wrong with Glee? That’s got to be the question on the minds of Fox executives after viewing the latest ratings on this show, which used to be one of the hottest properties on television. TV By the Numbers reports that Glee only had a 2.4 share among adult viewers, or a total of 5.9 million viewers. That’s a new series low. Why is this show, which got a stunning 19 Emmy nominations in its first glorious season, struggling so hard to keep its audience now? Does Glee have a future? There are a lot of possible theories as to why the show is currently in decline, but these are the ones that seem to be most plausible. 1. It’s competing with ratings juggernaut NCIS. More people are recording Glee and watching it later; the ratings inevitably go up to respectable levels when DVR ratings are factored in. 2. People are becoming tired of badly written, preachy storylines that feel more like sermons than comedy. The writing for this week’s domestic violence story was so heavy-handed, Sue even made fun of that very preachiness in her first lecture to the girls. 3. There are too many characters. It’s hard to invest in the personal stories of over 30 characters, many of which are very woodenly played by Glee Project winners who are much better singers than actors. Unfortunately, plans to graduate over half the cast would seem to indicate they are about to prune strong cast members like Lea Michele and Chris Colfer rather than the weaker, newer people from The Glee Project. Article Continues Below 4. The narratives often do not make much sense, or they contradict what has happened before. This season, the writers ignored Kurt’s National Cheerleading Championship and several other canon accomplishments in order to convince us that his resume was entirely blank. They allowed him to fail repeatedly in efforts to beef up that resume with an unsuccessful Class President campaign and a humiliating audition for the school musical. Then they had him get a rare, coveted NYADA audition on the strength of the resume that they repeatedly told us was empty. This week, he managed to impress the NYADA dean because he “took a risk” on a song from a fairly mainstream, Tony-winning musical, while Rachel failed spectacularly on a song she’s been singing her entire life. 5. Many of the characters are either completely used up, or unrecognizable from their first season. Will was depicted as Teacher of the Year in the first season; now he’s such a bad Spanish teacher, he had to take night classes to learn the language. Sue has mellowed so much she’s the person leading the lectures on violence against women. This woman once wanted to shoot Brittney out of a cannon. Sue has lost her meanness mojo, and she’s not nearly as entertaining. 6. Glee has forgotten how to be funny. It used to be a very subversive satire; it has become a PSA factory. Can this show be saved? It’s hard to tell. Maybe the novelty has worn off, or maybe the writers need to pay more attention to establishing internal logic and continuity within the storylines. Maybe they need to stop casting it with people who won a reality show. Maybe they need to slow down the weekly Blaine solos and let somebody else sing for a change. One thing is clear – with the majority of the student cast members now playing characters who have graduated, change is coming for Glee. The decisions they make as they decide how to incorporate the lives of the graduated seniors with the world of a McKinley High School show choir are likely to make or break Glee for good in season 4. My own suggestion: I think they need to cut bait on Lima entirely and base the entire thing in New York featuring their four most effective cast members – Monteith, Michele, Rivera, and Colfer. Call it Glee: The College Years. At least the cast won’t be quite so big. Check out my detailed recaps of Glee and other television shows at my blog.Hello! Things are going very well on the Greenlight campaign, we are currently outdoing almost every other game in the rankings! Here's the statistics from last night: Huge thanks to everyone who voted. If you haven't voted yet, please do. If we get green-lit, I will consider entering their early access program and I will be able to distribute Steam keys for every backer. Not to mention, the revenue from such a release would be a huge boon to development. Poster deadline: 12 July 2013 I can't remember if I set a hard deadline for replies for the surveys, but if you haven't yet chosen your poster and entered your address in the survey yet, you have until Friday. We really need to get exact numbers so we can start printing and posting them. If you have changed your address since entering the survey, or will move in the next 30 days, please update me on the [email protected] email. Development I'm currently working on getting the 0.29 alpha ready for release on all three platforms. Quite a few bugs to iron out at the moment. Currently the male colonist explodes if he attempts to use a work bench... ...I might just make it a feature. -SiNot everyone is lucky in love, or in life. Sometimes that's just the way it is—highs and lows, ebbs and flows. But if you're striking out on OkCupid, here's an idea that will not help you at all: Crowdsourcing your romantic woes on Reddit. Reddit is great for some things—startling videos, startling racism, celebrity Q&A, pictures of people popping cysts. But it's our job as your friends and legal counsel to tell you that asking Reddit for online dating advice is a categorically horrible idea. It's already happening right now, and the results are bad. Very bad. Advertisement Here's a look at the panoply of bleak questions: Do you think you would have better luck if age were not shown? Who has had any actual success on OkCupid? Help? Women seem to drop off the face of the earth after the first date. Ladies Of OKC: Do You Find It Offensive When Men Ask For A Full Body Picture? Also, How Should A Man Ask For One? Advertisement There are the sorry, blisteringly insecure requests for OkCupid profile critiques, where guys link directly to their profiles and ask what's going wrong. Because nothing's more attractive than a lack of self-confidence so strong it actually bends light. It's unfortunate, because none of these people really seem to have anything wrong with them. Some are even pretty good looking! So why the compulsion to ask Reddit, of all places, with help finding true love? The questions do turn up some great tips, such as "DO put your astrological sign in—it's a great opener." And: "DON'T use hostile language to describe the opposite sex." Sage advice. The site has good intentions—right? But if you're at this stage of needing help, you're probably beyond the point of being helped. Advertisement Note: It's not just lonely guys posting—but they would likely figure in to the "feedback" sought by the Redditor on the left. Hmm, what possible comments could you receive from an internet hivem
of the Affordable Care Act that requires employers who offer insurance plans to include coverage of “the full range of Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods [and] sterilization procedures.” These groups can, in fact, avoid paying for, administering, advertising, or otherwise dealing with this birth control coverage in any way. They can file a notice stating their objections and transferring total responsibility for coverage to a third party. In other words, groups like Notre Dame or the Little Sisters of the Poor just need to sign a two-page document saying that they don’t want to provide coverage for contraceptives, and someone else will do it for them. But a number of groups think this is still morally compromising, for this reason: If they sign a form saying they don’t want to provide birth control coverage, they’re implicitly saying that it’s okay if someone else does. In the Little Sisters of the Poor case, the Obama administration argued that religious groups are framing their moral concerns incorrectly. Third-party administrators won’t become responsible for coordinating birth control coverage because a religious non-profit signs a piece of paper saying it objects. That coverage would happen in spite of an organization’s objections. (This semantic clarification isn’t applicable to the Little Sisters: Their third-party administrator also has objections to covering birth control, so none of the Little Sisters’ employees would get coverage, regardless.)Experience speaks for itself. Former Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender J.S. Giguere, who played under Mike Babcock during his time with the Anaheim Ducks, told Sportsnet's Dean Blundell & Co. on Friday that he believes the new Maple Leafs head coach will be able to turn around the team's big names. From Mike Johnston at Sportsnet: Giguere, who was coached by Babcock for two seasons in Anaheim, feels the new Leafs bench boss will be able to spark Kessel and Phaneuf better than previous Leafs coaches and see them return to the calibre of players who warranted $64- and $49-million contract extensions, respectively. The netminder, who won 262 games in his NHL career, had nothing but praise for his former coach. "He’s very smart that way, very ahead of the times, and it should be pretty refreshing for the players," said Giguere. "I remember when I had him as a coach, we all respected him. "He’s a great coach, he’s super intense and I think the Leafs can use that," continued Giguere. "There’s no doubt about that. At the end of the day, if you’re serious about winning and you’re serious about getting better and improving as a team, well he’s the guy for it." Giguere went on to compare Babcock to former Maple Leafs coach Randy Carlyle, whom he also played for in Anaheim. "Randy is definitely more of an in-your-face type of coach, you know yelling at you and stuff like that. Even though he’s a good coach, that wears very thin on the players very fast,” Giguere explained. “I think Babs uses lots of psychology. He tries to get in your head, but he has a different way for every player." Giguere retired from hockey in August of 2014.The mood was light after practice on Wednesday as Minnesota United has seemingly begun to find somewhat of a groove in Major League Soccer. Loons head coach Adrian Heath said the team was becoming more settled both on and off the field. And allegedly Jerome Thiesson and rookie Abu Danladi have dovetailed to form a blossoming comedy duo — watch the full interview with Adrian Heath for the details on that and why his mantra is “work hard, play hard.” “I think the chemistry in the group… the camaraderie, everything is better now. You see the friendships, bonding with different groups. Suddenly now we are finding out who the jokers are in the group… That’s something that takes time,” Heath said. “I think I’m getting a better handle of what we’ve got, who plays best together and I think that’s manifesting in the results we’ve got.” Minnesota came away from its draw with Houston with some injury concerns. Heath said he knows minimal about Rasmus Schuller’s injury and will test it out in the coming days. Schuller started on the left wing last Saturday but Heath said the Finn had license to float and cause trouble in the middle for the opposing side, a tactic, he said, we could see again in the future. Bobby Shuttleworth left the game prematurely after taking a knee to the head. Heath confirmed that Shuttleworth is, in fact, in the concussion protocol but feels better than he has after previous concussions. Heath said he wasn’t surprised by Molino’s top-notch performance against Houston and called the winger the best at what he does in the league. Heath added that he has “no doubt” Molino will end up with double-digit goals and assists this season. “Some people think we gave up a lot for him, I think we got him cheap,” Heath said. “As much as I thought some of his play was excellent, it doesn’t surprise me and it’s what I expect.” Heath said he’s glad United is coming up on a three-game homestand and wants to make TCF Bank Stadium a “fortress.” Last time at home the Loons smashed a listless Real Salt Lake, 4-2. However, RSL won both its matches since that time versus Vancouver and Colorado, respectively, making that result look even better, according to Heath. Talk of Danladi taking on a larger role in the team have increased in recent weeks. Heath said he sees the UCLA product “ultimately playing through the middle” but has shown good positioning and discipline when deployed out wide. — Marc Burch discusses what it will be like for him and Sam Cronin to face their old team just weeks after being traded. RelatedMedia playback is not supported on this device Warren Gatland praises 'outstanding' form of Sam Warburton Wales flanker Sam Warburton has been praised as "outstanding" in the first two rounds of the Six Nations by British and Irish Lions coach Warren Gatland. He lost the captaincy to Alun Wyn Jones at the start of 2017. "He's been outstanding in the first couple of games in the way he's competed (at the break-down) and brought physicality," said Gatland. Warburton has been playing at blind-side flanker alongside Justin Tipuric. Gatland says Warburton, the Lions captain in 2013 in Australia, has shown the sort of attributes that will be needed on the 2017 tour to New Zealand. "New Zealand have got three or four open-sides that are very strong at the break-down and you've got to be able to have someone who can do that," said Gatland. Sam Warburton has featured in both of Wales' 2017 Six Nations games "I'm not saying you don't have someone at seven who can carry and play a bit wider, there are options for that as well but you get potentially poor weather conditions in New Zealand and someone who's able to get on the ball, slow things down, Sam's able to do that. "For him the challenge is to stay injury-free because he's picked up a few injuries, the challenge for him and a lot of players is getting a run of games under his belt." But Gatland also highlighted the strength of Wales's next opponents Scotland in the same area of the pitch, after their narrow defeat to France in Paris, despite injuries to flankers John Barclay and John Hardie. "The break-down area is pretty critical and I thought on Sunday it was one area Scotland were very strong against France, it kept them in the game because of the turnovers they got, the penalties and they competed very hard at the break-down, it was a real strength of the Scottish performance." Hamish Watson pulled off two terrific tackles to ensure Scotland beat Ireland in their opening Six Nations fixture Former Ireland and Lions captain Brian O'Driscoll believes that Scotland open-side flanker Hamish Watson is currently worth a place in the Lions match-day squad of 23, with their win over Ireland boosting their chances of improving their Lions representation. "I've been really impressed with Watson at seven, the first couple of games, (lock) Jonny Gray's been great, (full-back) Stuart Hogg's had a quality couple of games," O'Driscoll told BBC Wales Sport. "If they can pick up another victory at least, I think you'll have more of a showing from the Scottish team, (wing Tommy) Seymour as well has an outside chance, so maybe you'll have more than you've had in recent years."President Sarkozy rekindled the eternal flame for Holocaust victims French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for an end to Jewish settlement construction on Palestinian land, in an address to Israeli MPs. He told the Israeli Knesset that without this there would be no lasting peace in the Middle East. On the first French state visit to Israel in 12 years, he said a peace agreement would allow the two peoples to live in peace and security. Mr Sarkozy also told MPs that France would not accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Earlier on Monday the French president and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, where he rekindled the eternal flame. Mr Sarkozy has met Israeli leaders and will go on to hold talks with top Palestinians. Dual capital "There can be no peace without stopping settlement," Mr Sarkozy told members of the Knesset. He encouraged Israel to support a proposal, "backed by many members of your Knesset", for the adoption of a law that would encourage settlers to leave the West Bank in exchange for compensation and relocation in Israel. Israel is pushing ahead with plans to build hundreds more homes in the occupied West Bank, infuriating Palestinians and drawing international criticism. The French president also called on Israel to ease restrictions on Palestinians' movement within the West Bank. But he acknowledged that "the Israeli people have the right to live in security", and declared: "There can be no peace if Palestinians themselves do not combat terrorism." And, addressing one of the most contentious issues in the conflict, he said a lasting peace settlement had to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. 'Friend of Israel' Correspondents say the French president's admiration for Israel is in contrast to his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who was widely seen as pro-Arab. Mr Sarkozy was greeted on his arrival at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv on Sunday by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli President Shimon Peres. Speaking at the airport, Mr Sarkozy said: "I have always been and will always be a friend of Israel... "An agreement is possible, tomorrow, and that agreement would allow the two peoples to live side-by-side in peace and security." "I am more convinced than ever that the security of Israel will only be truly guaranteed with the birth of a second state, a Palestinian state." From the airport, France's first couple headed to Jerusalem for talks with Mr Peres, followed by dinner with Mr Olmert. After addressing the Knesset, Mr Sarkozy plans to travel to the West Bank town of Bethlehem for talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday. E-mail this to a friend Printable version Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these?The long road to Mad Men's conclusion enters its final stretch on April 5, when Matthew Weiner's landmark AMC drama kicks off its last seven episodes. To mark the goodbye, The Hollywood Reporter spoke with 24 key players for the March 20 cover story, a definitive oral history of the show that made basic cable prestigious and changed the way most viewers look at TV drama. Obviously, not everything made the final edit. So as the series comes to a close, here's what seven members of the cast (January Jones, John Slattery, Elisabeth Moss, among others) had to say about their biggest episodes — and some of the more absurd moments on- and offcamera that helped make them so memorable. Read more The Uncensored, Epic, Never-Told Story Behind 'Mad Men' "Tea Leaves": Season 5, Episode 2 After being M.I.A. in the premiere, Betty (Jones) re-emerges having gained a considerable amount of weight. Jones & Co. manage to keep the dramatic change in her character's appearance a secret until the night the episode airs. Paparazzi did get one picture of me. They climbed a fence right outside of our base camp at work, as I was in the prosthetics and the weight-gain suit. After it came out, Matt had people shielding me with umbrellas everywhere I walked. It was really annoying. But nobody really put it together. I think they thought I'd just gained a lot of weight from being pregnant. It took a lot of time the first season, just getting it right — five or six hours every time we did the prosthetics. It took another hour and a half to take it off. When we first started doing it, I was very late in my pregnancy. Then we did it right after I gave birth. Being pregnant in that and having to nurse … it was so uncomfortable. I think one of my earliest call times for hair and makeup was 2:30 a.m. Then I had to sit there for six hours. But when Matt called to tell me the idea for that storyline, I just loved it. I thought it would be so shocking to the audience. I'm game for things like that, but I did not think about the logistics at the time. By the second season, I think we got it down to four hours. We never went back to pre-heavy Betty. I stopped wearing prosthetics, but I always wore some padding for the rest of the show. I think that's realistic. She's still curvy — at least curvier than I am. — January Jones Read more Tim Goodman Picks His 10 Favorite 'Mad Men' Episodes (So Far) "My Old Kentucky Home": Season 3, Episode 3 A standout for the absurd shenanigans of its central party scene, the episode features Roger Sterling (Slattery) channeling Al Jolson's absurd blackface routine and Trudy (Alison Brie) and Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) showing off a perfectly choreographed Charleston. Every year we got together for a reunion party to kick off the season. Matt was having a drink and he tells me, "You're going to sing 'My Old Kentucky Home' in blackface at this country club party on Derby Day." It wasn't until I got in the car to drive home that I thought, "What the f— did he just tell me?" I remember calling Jon Hamm. I said, "Is there a way to say I don't want to do this?" Because I didn't really want to do it. But then I thought, you can't really draw the line. You can't say, "OK, I'll ride the girl in in her underwear singing cowboy songs, but I draw the line at blackface." The day comes, and we were on location in Pasadena at this big mansion doubling for this country club. We jump in the van and shoot over to the set, the van door opens and the first person I see is a very large African-American L.A. motorcycle cop. He looks at me like "What the?" He doesn't know what to make of me. And I'm like, "Hey! How you doing?" I walk right past him and then up onto this stage. I wish that they had shot the other side first or simultaneously because there were 200 extras and all our people watching as I belt through the first version of this song. There was a sea of mouths hanging open. I particularly remember Rich Sommer's [Harry Crane] face looking like, "What the hell am I watching?" — John Slattery Nothing is off-the-cuff over there. It's very meticulously planned out. For that episode, I got a call a month before saying that they wanted me to go take Charleston lessons with Vincent. I thought, "I guess that means I'm going to be in another episode." (Laughs.) Even once the character was recurring, I didn't have a contract. Every episode of every season was just kind of episode-to-episode for me. Vinnie and I took lessons twice a week with the Dance Doctor in Santa Monica. Of course we learned very specific choreography — and then when we shot the scene at midnight or something, we kind of had to change the choreography all around because of the orientation of the dance floor and the cameras. It's one of my favorite scenes that I've ever been able to shoot in anything, and it was such a great moment for those characters, too. — Alison Brie "The Suitcase": Season 4, Episode 7 Considered by critics and fans as one of the series' standout episodes, the hour focuses almost exclusively on Don (Hamm) and Peggy (Moss) as they burn the midnight oil, working on deadline for the Samsonite account. Read more 'Mad Men' Season 7 (Part 2): Review It was such a gift, that episode. It was so beautifully written and it came at a really great time in the series, definitely a turning point for me as far as my place in the show. It was odd in a way because it is such an ensemble atmosphere, and all the sudden it was just me and Jon for pretty much the whole time. Mark Moses [Duck Phillips] came in for the fantastic scenes that he did, but it was pretty much just the two of us. It's weird for me to say that it's my favorite episode, because I'm in it so much, but I think that it's beautiful. It's like a two-hander play. — Elisabeth Moss "The Runaways": Season 7, Episode 5 The culmination of several years of increased paranoia for the character, Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman) suffers a psychotic break, cuts off his own nipple and presents it to Peggy in a box. He is never seen again. At the start of the last season, Matt would call people in and try to explain what's going to be going on with their characters. He told me everything. It was probably the most extensive macro conversation I ever had with him. Before that it was kind of, "These are your lines, learn them." If someone calls me into their office, in any situation, I immediately expect the worst. I was also constantly paranoid and scared on that show. It was the most exciting job I ever had because I was constantly scared to death every day that I showed up to work. Matt was very particular about that prosthetic nipple. Props came up with one version of it, and he wanted another. Everything you saw onscreen was always carefully thought out by him, explained and discussed to a great extent before it ended up being on the camera. It was a weird day. On one hand, you're doing something heavy. But it's also ridiculous. When the camera is on, it's this terrible serious thing. When it's off, I'm holding a bloody nipple. — Ben Feldman "A Little Kiss": Season 5, Episode 1 After being off the air for a year and a half, 'Mad Men' returns with a new leading lady for Don and a surprising musical number. Megan (Jessica Pare) coos her way through French tune "Zou Bisou Bisou" and promptly lights the Internet on fire. Coming into my first season as a regular, as Mrs. Draper, and having to do a literal song-and-dance routine for all of these people whose work I'd admired for years … it was really stressful. I had a lot of anxiety. But I was given some really great people to work with, a great choreographer, and we worked really hard on it. We didn't have a ton of time to prepare so it was pretty intensive. I was so close to it at that time that I wasn't thinking about how people would react. I just wanted to make sure that I would hit my marks. So the reception was a surprise. It shouldn't have been. Many a more seasoned actor would have seen it coming. It was so exciting to have people talk about something I was involved in. It was a real f—ing lucky break. — Jessica Pare "Waterloo": Season 7, Episode 7 After witnessing the moon landing, Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) dies — only to return in a dream sequence to sing and dance to "The Best Things in Life Are Free" to a melancholy Don. There was a fleeting thought that maybe people might think it was a reach, a little wild. But I soon forgot that because I trust Matt completely. The day we filmed, it was like the Super Bowl. People came out from wherever they were — the cast, the crew, my daughter was there to watch the whole number being filmed. It was quite touching. And I'll never forget Jon Hamm, how helpful he was. He stood there for eight hours as we were filming on the other side of the camera. He was rooting for this scene to be really done well, and smiled at me when a good take came. Many people would say, "Oh, I'm not going to be there all day long, put a warm body over there." But Jon was there for every moment. It was the last day of seven years for me. I'm quite pleased with how it made out. — Robert MorseTime for the final part of my preview of the Final Olympic Qualifying Regatta – The Lightweights. LM2X Qualifying places available: 2 13 Doubles This is the only event at the regatta which involves the defending champions. Rasmus Quist and Mads Rasmussen of Denmark are two of their nation’s most successful rowers, world champions in 2006 and 2007 Olympic bronze medallists in 2008 and then champions 4 years later. After London they took a break from racing together and then their return was delayed through injury. When they finally did return to competition last year their performances weren’t exactly scintillating, 18th in Varese and 21st in Lucerne. Their performance so far this season has been more encouraging, they reached the A-final in Varese. But, it will take a significant increase in their performances so far to ensure they reach their 3rd Olympic Games and try and defend their title. The form crew of 2016 in this event are the Belgians, Tim Brys and Niels Van Zandweghe. Bronze medallists in Varese and 5th at the European Championships. Brys spent last season in the LM1X finishing 4th in Varese and winning the B-Final in Aiguebelette. 20 year old Van Zandweghe raced at the U23 World Championships last year making the A-Final in the LM4X. The surprise of 2015 in this event was the failure of the Kiwis to achieve direct qualification. This year there is a new combination, Adam Ling and Toby Cunliffe-Steel. Ling is the reigning LM1X world champion and was in the 2014 double with Alistair Bond that didn’t do better than a C-Final. Cunliffe-Steel is making his senior debut after racing at two U23 World Championships. This is an interesting and exciting new combination but they are also an unknown quantity. Another highly experienced double are the Portuguese, Pedro Fraga and Nuno Mendes. These two have been racing together off and on for 10 years and are attempting to qualify for their 3rd Olympics. Their performance in London was one of the highpoints of their partnership when they reached the A-Final and finished 5th. Since reforming as a double in 2015 they haven’t recaptured that sort of form. So far in 2016 they have two B-Final placings, 11th in Varese and 8th in Brandenburg. The Spanish are another double that have a good chance of qualifying. Adria Mitjavila and Rodrigo Conde Romero raced in Varese and finished an excellent 5th. They are a very young crew, 21 year old Mitjavila finished 6th at the U23 World Championships last year and Conde Romero is just 18 and finished 6th in the JM4- in 2015. Rio may have come a couple of years too soon for the young Spaniards, but if their progress continues at this rate they could be very serious contenders for the Tokyo Olympiad. Hungary’s Peter Galambos was one of the top Lightweight single scullers in 2012 and 2013 finishing with a silver medal in 2012 and bronze the following year. But, the challenge for him was to find a partner to form a double that could be competitive in Rio. In 2015 he formed a partnership with Daniel Matyasovszki. So far their best performance has been a 7th place at the Bled World Cup last year. At the Europeans Galambos was absent and Matyasovszki raced the single finishing 9th. My picks….Belgium and New Zealand LM4- Qualifying places available: 2 11 crews Germany have shown the best form in the field so far in 2016. The crew of Jonathan Koch, Lucas Schaefer, Tobias Franzmann and Lars Wichert raced at both Varese and Brandenburg. At her World Cup they finished 5th and on home water they took bronze. Qualification should be straightforward for the Germans as their current form is significantly ahead of the rest of the competition. The fight for the 2nd qualification spot is going to be much closer. Leading the chase will most likely be the Spanish. Ander Zabler, Patricio Rojas Aznar, Marc Franquet Montfort and Imanol Garmendia finished 6th in Brandenburg and are 3 of the crew that finished 14th last year. Also fighting for the 2nd spot will be the Poles, Jerzy Kowalski, Lukasz Siemion, Tomasz Zagorski and Pawel Cieszowski had a good performance at the first world cup finishing 8th, but at the Europeans they crashed out at the Repecharge stage. My picks…Germany and Spain LW2X Qualifying places available: 2 7 crews. 2 from 7 in this event. The form crew this season are the Dutch, Ilse Paulis and Maaike Head. They were the fastest European crew in Varese and they reinforced that position taking the win in Brandenburg. If they show the same speed in Lucerne then they should secure one of the precious spots in Rio. The Italians, Laura Milani and Elisabetta Sancassani are an experienced duo. They were World Champions in 2013 and European Champions in 2014, in 2015 Milani became ill during the world championships and they ended up being classified 24th. So far this year they raced at Varese finishing 8th. With the experience they have they cannot be discounted as potential qualifiers. The Australians have a new combination for 2016 with Hannah Every-Hall and Georgia Nesbitt. 38 year old Every-Hall is one of the most experienced members of the Australian squad. She won her first world championship title in 2002, she then took a break until 2010 and made the A-Final in both 2010, 2011 and 2012. Another 2 year break saw her return to competition in 2014 and a World Championship silver medal in the LW4X. Her partner, Georgia Nesbitt, is 15 years her junior, she made her senior debut in 2013 finishing 4th at the Sydney World Cup. In 2014 she won U23 bronze in the LW2X and in 2015 she was Australia’s representative in the LW1X finishing 8th. This looks a very strong combination and should qualify. The Greeks also have a new combination of youth and experience. Anastasia Vontzou is only 16 but has already competed at U23 level finishing 6th in the W4X last year just 2 weeks after turning 16! She’s partnered by 33 year old Gerorgia Dimakou who raced in this boat class last year finishing 15th. The Swiss, Frederique Rol and Patricia Merz, had a really strong performance in Brandenburg just missing out on the medals. They raced at Aiguebelette last year finishing 16th after a strong bronze medal at U23 level. They may struggle to break into the top 2 in Lucerne but could well be ones to watch for 2017 and beyond. My picks: The Netherlands and Australia. Bring on the racing AdvertisementsWhy is this election so significant? The general election of December 20 is already being viewed as a game-changer, no matter what the outcome. This is because, for the first time since Spain embraced democracy in the late 1970s following the Franco dictatorship, two emerging parties are posing a serious challenge to the Socialists (PSOE) and the conservative Popular Party (PP). Until now, these two had simply been taking turns in government, with the ruling party seeking temporary arrangements with small groups if it did not enjoy an absolute majority. Voter intention surveys show a new fragmented scenario in which all four parties enjoy similar levels of support. This will force the winner to reach long-term deals with other groups in order to govern for the next four years. In keeping with this feeling of history being made, turnout is expected to reach as high as 80 percent, similar to the 1982 election that gave a landslide victory to the PSOE and effectively institutionalized the two-party system. Who are these new challengers? The protracted economic crisis spawned a new anti-establishment party called Podemos, which touched a chord with disgruntled voters and received unexpected levels of support at the European elections of May 2014. Although it started out as a leftist group that openly expressed support for the Venezuelan regime and for the Syriza party in Greece, its leader Pablo Iglesias has since steered Podemos towards the center of the political spectrum, where it hopes to take the Socialists’ place. Meanwhile, a Catalan party called Ciutadans (Citizens) – which had been around since 2006 but was regional in scope – made the jump to national politics with a similar message of institutional reform. Now known as Ciudadanos, this party is taking votes away from both the PSOE and the PP with a mix of progressive social policies and pro-market economics. Who are the main candidates? POPULAR PARTY (PP): Mariano Rajoy, 60, is trying to win the re-election on the strength of Spain’s budding economic recovery. With a long political career that includes ministerial positions from 1996 to 2003, the incumbent is refusing to acknowledge the rise of the emerging parties, and declined invitations to participate in four-way debates. While the entire opposition is casting him as the symbol of institutional corruption following a raft of graft cases affecting his party, Rajoy presents himself as a bulwark of stability against new, untried parties that were created, in his words, “a quarter of an hour ago.” SOCIALIST PARTY (PSOE): Pedro Sánchez, 43, was elected in primaries held in 2014 to breathe new life into a party that had sustained a crushing defeat at the 2011 election. Aware that he is losing votes to both Podemos and Ciudadanos, Sánchez is portraying his party as the only credible alternative to the PP, and one with a long record of service that includes the passing of landmark legislation such as the abortion law, the disability law and the same-sex marriage law. But Sánchez is still struggling to contain the fallout from the previous Socialist administration’s handling of the economic crisis, as well as claims by both emerging parties that the PSOE and PP are part of the same self-serving political elite. Sánchez, for his part, describes Iglesias as a far-left choice and Rivera as a younger version of Rajoy. PODEMOS: The pony-tailed Pablo Iglesias – named after the 19th-century founder of the Socialist Party – emerged in 2014 as Spain’s most charismatic politician. A university lecturer by trade, his long experience in political talk is evident in his easy attitude in front of a camera and well-crafted rhetoric. After making world headlines with his passionate attack against Spain’s corrupt “caste” and promises of a new way of doing politics, Podemos experienced a meteoric rise in popularity, then began losing steam. Iglesias, 37, quietly began dropping some of his most radical proposals and turned Podemos into a more mainstream party that center voters could relate to. But his rivals keep bringing up the party’s early ties to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez in a bid to cast Podemos as an extreme choice. CIUDADANOS (C’s): Albert Rivera, 36, is the youngest candidate to the prime minister’s office yet has almost a decade’s worth of accumulated experience in the Catalan parliament, where he represented Catalans who do not support separatist views. Ciudadanos performed well at the regional elections of 2012, and became the second most-voted force at the recent September election. In the meantime, Rivera has successfully transformed Ciudadanos from a regional party into a national organization whose proposals cut across the left-right divide, attracting voters from both sides. Rivera, like Iglesias, emphasizes the need for a new generation of politicians who will bring greater transparency and democratic renewal to the country’s institutions. He has talked about the need for a “second transition” to a more mature democracy based on talent, productivity and knowledge rather than cronyism. OTHERS: Running far behind these four are small groups such as Union, Progress and Democracy (UPyD) and the United Left, as well as regional ones that may secure some national representation, such as Catalonia’s Democracia i Llibertat (the new name for Catalan premier Artur Mas’ Convergence party, which has teamed up with smaller organizations) or the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). How is this campaign different from those of the past? Change is already underway with a campaign that is much more focused on television appearances and social media presence than on political rallies. Candidates are multiplying their appearances on entertainment shows, and all but Rajoy have also participated in election debates such as the one organized by EL PAÍS, which for the first time pitted more than two contenders against each other and took questions from the audience. When and how will people vote? Polling stations open at 9am and close at 8pm. Spaniards are choosing 350 congress members and 208 senators in the 12th general election to be held in democratic times. Voters have to choose from closed lists offered by each party – one list for Congress and one list for the Senate. Ciudadanos is proposing a change to the voting system to give voters more power over who they choose and to make candidates more accountable to their constituency. Security will also be tight as this is the first election in which Spain is on a level 4 terror alert. The country has been on high alert ever since the Jihadist attacks against the Paris publication Charlie Hebdo. This is also the first time that Spain has held a general election since Felipe VI became the new king of Spain. What are the likely outcomes? The latest opinion poll shows the PP winning again, but losing its absolute majority. According to a Metroscopia poll carried out between December 7 and 10, the PP will win 25.3% of the vote, which means between 105 and 112 seats in Congress. But it will have to reach a deal with another party if it is to continue in power. If the poll is accurate, the Socialists will place second, earning 21% of the vote and between 85 and 94 deputies, with Podemos third (19.1%, 55 to 64 seats) and Ciudadanos fourth (18.2%, 53 to 67 seats). The latter pair have been regularly switching places in the polls in the run up to the elections. And the race is even tighter in the cities. The latest survey shows that in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville and Alicante, their combined 106 congressional seats would be divided more or less equally between the PP, the Socialists, Ciudadanos and Podemos. But the Spanish voting system is skewed in favor of the two top-performing parties, which will play in the PP and PSOE’s favor even if the challengers do well in the big cities. According to a survey by the Center for Sociology Research (CIS), the PP and Ciudadanos could reach a deal that would secure an absolute majority in Congress. An agreement between the PSOE and the PP could also achieve the same, but this is a highly unlikely scenario. How will the political landscape change after December 20? The two-party system in place since the 1980s led to a finger-in-the-eye style of politics in Spain, in which the governing party typically repealed (or tried to repeal) legislation enacted by its rival. This has been particularly true of education laws, which change every few years as governments come and go. Both Podemos and Ciudadanos have criticized this attitude, and promise to introduce a broader vision that puts citizen concerns ahead of partisan interests. If either one becomes a partner in government, they could be in a position to enforce changes.« The Party is Over For Tight Oil but Raymond James Says, “Party On, Dude!” Posted in The Petroleum Truth Report on September 12, 2015 The party is over for tight oil. Despite brash statements by U.S. producers and misleading analysis by Raymond James, low oil prices are killing tight oil companies. Reports this week from IEA and EIA paint a bleak picture for oil prices as the world production surplus continues. EIA said that U.S. production will fall by 1 million barrels per day over the next year and that, “expected crude oil production declines from May 2015 through mid-2016 are largely attributable to unattractive economic returns.” IEA made the point more strongly. “..the latest price rout could stop US growth in its tracks.” In other words, outside of the very best areas of the Eagle Ford, Bakken and Permian, the tight oil party is over because companies will lose money at forecasted oil prices for the next year. Global Supply and Demand Fundamentals Continue to Worsen IEA data shows that the current second-quarter 2015 production surplus of 2.6 million barrels per day is the greatest since the oil-price collapse began in 2014 (Figure 1). Figure 1. World liquids production surplus or deficit by quarter. Source: IEA and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc. (click image to enlarge) EIA monthly data for August also indicates a 2.6 million barrel per day production surplus, an increase of 270,000 barrels per day compared to July (Figure 2). Figure 2. World liquids production, consumption and relative surplus or deficit by month.
over again with him at the helm in pretty much all five of these games he has played in. And, if you were to ask me how many of these games was he supplemented with a dominating rushing attack, I think a fair answer may be that he really hasn't at all. Through two games, the Cowboys have run the ball on 60 different occasions. Forty-one of those have gone to the No. 4 overall pick, Ezekiel Elliott, and all 60 plays combined have accumulated 203 yards. I don't know about you, but I would like to think that 60 plays gets me closer to 300, and the staggering reality is that the running game has supplied just 3.4 yards per carry. It has not been close to what was advertised: that this team would be able to bulldoze its way down the field repeatedly, with opponents waving white flags. That was a silly offseason idea that just doesn't materialize very often in this league. The NFL doesn't have teams run to championships; teams use the run game as part of a bigger mosaic. One that always includes a QB that can make sound decisions and then execute his duties with precision and timing. Dak Prescott is doing all of that. In fact, if the 2016 NFL Draft were held today, I think we all see that Prescott goes higher than just about anyone else in the draft - including Zeke. I know it is crazy and I know I am contradicting what I saw from 200 of his Mississippi State snaps from 2015, but we have gathered new information. He has proven he is capable of playing well in the NFL and in Dallas. Anytime this topic comes up, the self-loathing factions of Cowboys fandom as well as all of those who enjoy the Cowboys failing are quick to speak up and mock any declarations of positivity around here. I get it. You have seen dynasties, and this is a team that struggled to get to 1-1 against equally mediocre teams. This defense is spotty. The "all-time great" offensive line and running game are not hitting on even half of the cylinders right now. But, amidst all of this and the normal circus routine from the owner/general manager is a sparkling gem. If you have a rookie QB who can play, you might have the key to the next period of competing for playoffs and beyond. I have spent the last few years feeling like we were approaching the final act of Tony Romo's career. I am not in a big hurry to get there, but the realities cannot be ignored.His body has been battered and used up in so many ways. He may have more to give, but I think the train has left the station in terms of ever assuming the QB situation is settled with #9 under center for years at a time. To replace a guy like Romo should take some massive assets. Perhaps assets that need to go elsewhere. The irony of replacing an undrafted free agent with another QB who was taken after the 4th round seems like lightning striking twice. Look, Prescott has a long, long way to go. But, did you see him standing tall in the pocket, surveying the field while his pass protection battled around him? Did you see his eyes stay up as guys are hanging on him? Did you see him know to take off and run for the end zone when nothing else looked appealing? Did you see him know to take the sack rather than throw the ball up for grabs? I'm sorry, but there is nothing wrong with admitting this guy has already surpassed your wildest dreams. You take a guy that low and he is supposed to be hidden from the field for the first few years and then attempt to be a backup QB for a few more years. That's it. So, this is already casino money on Prescott. He has won a game and put the team in position to win the other. The upgrade at the position from 2015 and really every other Romo-backup is obvious. They believe he can win. And so does he. Yes, there are many other things we could discuss about this win in Washington. We could talk about the defense standing tall and forcing field goals and getting stops when it mattered most. We could talk about Alfred Morris and Justin Durant, two low-price veterans factoring in big or the defense getting an end-zone takeaway that meant the world in that game. But, we have all week to get to that. I want to entertain the idea that the Cowboys have found a QB worth talking about to consider the future after Romo. There are no guarantees where this journey leads, but I feel like I have seen the future, and it is worth being excited about. Don't be self-loathing. It is OK to dream that you have found the next guy. I'm not saying he is Russell Wilson, I swear. But, he has a chance to be very good, it appears. And that is the No. 1 reason why you should be smiling today.Donald Trump on Tuesday fired back at Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — demanding she apologize after lashing out at him, calling her remarks “a disgrace to the court.” “I think it’s highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly,” Trump told The New York Times. “I think it’s a disgrace to the court, and I think she should apologize to the court. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.” Ginsburg outraged Republicans and surprised even many of her fellow liberals when she twice slammed Trump as unfit to be president. “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president,” Ginsburg said in remarks published over the weekend. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.” On Monday, she doubled down on her critique of the presumptive GOP nominee, attacking him for not releasing his tax returns. “He is a faker,” she told CNN. “He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that,” she sniffed. The Manhattan tycoon responded by saying he hoped the 83-year-old Ginsburg would abandon the bench soon — and predicted her remarks would backfire and energize his supporters. “It’s so beneath the court for her to be making statements like that. It only energizes my base even more. And I would hope that she would get off the court as soon as possible,” he said. Conservatives took to Twitter to bash the jurist, a leftist icon for her outspoken views. “Appalling to see a Justice be so shamelessly biased. A stain on Court’s illustrious history,” wrote actor James Woods. “Sorry, Justice Ginsburg, but those comments were waaaay over the line,” added Walter Olson, a blogger fellow at the Cato Institute And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it was “totally inappropriate” for Ginsburg to slime Donald Trump. “It raises a level of skepticism that the American people have from time to time about just how objective the Supreme Court is, whether they’re over there to call the balls and strikes, or weigh in on one side or another,” he said. Even Democrats, such as Howard Wolfson, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton and Mayor Bloomberg, also questioned her judgment. “I ❤️ [heart] RBG but I don’t think our Supreme Court justices should be publicly offering their opinions about POTUS candidates,” he tweeted. Ginsburg had jokingly suggest it was time to move to New Zealand if Trump won the White House — and social media wags were quick to wish her good riddance.Aides to French far-right leader Marine Le Pen put in place a "sophisticated offshore system" to hide money, Le Monde newspaper reported on Tuesday in the latest disclosure from the Panama Papers. The aim of the system, which sent funds to Hong Kong, Singapore, the British Virgin Islands and Panama, was “to get money out of France, through shell companies and false invoices, to evade French anti-money-laundering authorities,” the paper reported. One of the key figures in the system set up by the National Front (FN) is Frederic Chatillon, head of a company called Riwal which carried out communications work for some of the party’s candidates, the report said. “In 2012, just after the presidential election, Frederic Chatillon… made arrangements to withdraw 316,000 euros ($360,000) from Riwal and to move it out of France,” Le Monde said. The money then took a complex route, involving the acquisition of a Hong Kong-based shell company called Time Dragon, whose parent company is in the British Virgin Islands and overseen by Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers. Chatillon said late Monday the system was “perfectly legal”. The FN itself had said Monday it was “not implicated in the Panama Papers”. Marine Le Pen, who took over the leadership of the FN from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, is aiming to run for the French presidency in elections next year.A baby boy had a miracle escape when his father's car careered out of control on a motorway, skidding on its roof and scraping just inches by a lorry. The four-month-old was strapped into a baby seat when the family car flipped as it travelled on the outside lane of the M5 in the West Midlands. After colliding with a passing vehicle, the Volvo saloon was turned upside down and sent flying across two lanes. A baby boy had a miracle escape when his father's car careered out of control on a motorway, skidding on its roof and scraping just inches by a lorry (pictured) In doing so, it skewed right across the path of a 18-wheeler, clipping its bumper as it sent sparks flying from the tarmac. However, the two vehicles somehow managed to escape what would have been a horror collision. The white car then continued to skid across the road surface, swerving on to the hard shoulder before ploughing into roadside shrubbery. The terrifying crash was caught on the dashboard camera of the lorry the car so nearly hit. Its shocked driver pulled over to check on those on board. Astoundingly, all had survived - including a baby boy found hanging upside down from his car seat in the front of the vehicle. DO YOU KNOW THE FAMILY INVOLVED? If so, email [email protected] The dashcam drama was released by haulage firm Owens Group, based in Llanelli, South Wales, today. Mike Colborne, 48, health and safety manager at Owens Group, said the white car's driver had his wife and four-month old baby in the car. He said: 'Our driver helped as best he could and phoned the police. Everybody was able to get out. 'We now have the forward-facing cameras in all our vehicles. We were trialling it at the time and that was enough for us. The four-month-old was strapped into a baby seat when the family car flipped as it travelled on the outside lane of the M5 in the West Midlands. After colliding with a passing vehicle, the Volvo saloon was turned upside down and sent flying across two lanes It is just inches from the camera as sparks fly across the road with the car skidding on its roof towards the hard shoulder 'It is totally down to protecting the driver and the company.' The Owens haulage lorry can be seen driving along in the inside lane when a white Volvo saloon suddenly slides into shot on its roof. It is just inches from the camera as sparks fly across the road with the car skidding on its roof towards the hard shoulder. But it then hits a blue hatchback car which then smashes head-on into the central reservation in a 360-degree turn. But it then hits a blue hatchback car which then smashes head-on into the central reservation in a 360-degree turn The white car then continued to skid across the road surface, swerving on to the hard shoulder before ploughing into roadside shrubbery It comes to rest upside down on the motorway's grass verge - with the baby unhurt. The company has now released the footage to illustrate the benefits of having a forward-facing dashboard camera attached to each of its vehicles. Mr Colborne said the lorry involved happened to be the only one fitted with a camera at the time as the company took part in a trial.Firefighting Planes Battle Wildfires And Old Age Enlarge this image toggle caption David McNew/Getty Images David McNew/Getty Images As wildfires continue to burn in the West, the U.S. Forest Service is going to battle this summer with fewer air tankers. The number of planes that drop retardant on fires has shrunk significantly over the past 12 years. In Boise, Idaho, the shortage of air tankers has led to some unexpected repurposing of aircraft. "This particular aircraft was used as Air Force One at one point," explains pilot Lyle Ehalt, standing next to his shiny white-and-green tanker at the Boise Airport. Ehalt, who flew the air tanker over a nearby grass fire, says the plane used to carry President Gerald Ford. It eventually ended up in Saskatchewan and was turned into an air tanker. The plane is back in the U.S. this summer, on loan from Canada. A Shrinking Fleet In 2000, the Forest Service had contracts with private companies for 43 air tankers. Today, that number is nine. This is a national security issue.... It's one that demands national attention and national direction. "This is something that we are working very hard to rectify," says Forest Service spokeswoman Jennifer Jones. She says structural failures led several models to be retired. Last summer, the Forest Service fired one of its vendors. A fatal crash in Utah claimed the lives of two pilots in June. Besides the loss of life, the accident meant one less plane in an already-shrinking fleet. Contracting Bigger, Faster Planes Jones says the Forest Service has appealed to Congress for funding for more tankers. "We are deeply committed to modernizing and improving our large air tanker fleet, and we've been taking a number of steps toward that goal," she says. Two weeks ago, the Forest Service awarded contracts that will add a total of seven newer tankers this year and next. Dan Snyder is the president of Neptune Aviation Services in Missoula, Mont. His company was given one of those contracts to build bigger, faster planes, which he says can carry more fire retardant and reach fire zones in half the time needed by older aircraft. "If you can catch a fire in the initial attack phase, it saves that fire from growing into the megafires where it becomes a project [in which] you're constantly trying to deal with it for weeks on end," Snyder explains. A Change In Strategy? But Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, is disappointed by the new contracts, which he sees as nothing more than a Band-Aid. "This is a national security issue. It's a public safety issue," Hall says. "It's one that demands national attention and national direction." Hall led a panel that audited the nation's firefighting fleet. His group found a system that needed major upgrades. That was 10 years ago, and he says very little has changed since then. Hall hopes he's wrong, but thinks it could take a Katrina-like disaster to get the country's attention. But Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who oversees the Forest Service, says the tanker issue is on Washington's radar. But he adds, "There also has to be a degree of patience, because it's not easy to make up for, literally, decades of a different strategy." That strategy has involved more passive forest management that's led to the buildup of fire fuels and an old, shrinking tanker fleet. But Vilsack is confident that firefighters will have all the aerial support they will need this summer. Extra helicopters have been made available. Just last week, the Forest Service began activating National Guard aircraft.One constant in the history of Western philosophy seems to be a certain conception of matter as an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside. In other words, the genesis of form and structure seems to always involve resources that go beyond the capabilities of the material substratum of these forms and structures. In some cases, these resources are explicitly transcendental, eternal essences defining forms which are imposed on infertile materials. The clearest example of this theory of form is, of course, religious Creationism, in which form begins as an idea in God's mind, and is then imposed by a command on an obedient and docile matter. But more serious examples also exist. In ancient philosophies Aristotle's essences seem to fit this pattern, as do those that inhabit Platonist heavens. And although classical physics began with a clean break with Aristotelian philosophy, and did endow matter with some spontaneous behavior (e.g. inertia), it reduced the variability and richness of material expression to the concept of mass, and studied only the simplest material systems (frictionless planetary dynamics, ideal gases) where spontaneous self-generation of form does not ocurr, thus always keeping some transcendental agency hidden in the background. Yet, as Gilles Deleuze has shown in his work on Spinoza, not every Western philosopher has taken this stance. In Spinoza, Deleuze discovers another possibility: that the resources involved in the genesis of form are not transcendental but immanent to matter itself. A simple example should suffice to illustrate this point. The simplest type of immanent resource for morphogenesis seems to be endogenously-generated stable states. Historically, the first such states to be discovered by scientists studying the behavior of matter (gases) were energy minima (or correspondingly, entropy maxima). The spherical form of a soap bubble, for instance, emerges out of the interactions among its constituent molecules as these are constrained energetically to "seek" the point at which surface tension is minimized. In this case, there is no question of an essence of "soap-bubbleness" somehow imposing itself from the outside, an ideal geometric form (a sphere) shaping an inert collection of molecules. Rather, an endogenous topological form (a point in the space of energetic possibilities for this molecular assemblage) governs the collective behavior of the individual soap molecules, and results in the emergence of a spherical shape. Moreover, the same topological form, the same minimal point, can guide the processes that generates many other geometrical forms. For example, if instead of molecules of soap we have the atomic components of an ordinary salt crystal, the form that emerges from minimizing energy (bonding energy in this case) is a cube. In other words, one and the same topological form can guide the morphogenesis of a variety of geometrical forms. A similar point applies to other topological forms which inhabit these spaces of energetic possibilities. For example, these spaces may contain closed loops (technically called "limit cycles" or "periodic attractors"). In this case the several possible physical instantiations of this space will all display isomorphic behavior: an endogenously generated tendency to oscillate in a stable way. Whether one is dealing with a socio-technological structure (such as a radio transmitter or a radar machine), a biological one (a cyclic metabolism), or a physical one (a convection cell in the atmosphere), it is one and the same immanent resource that is involved in their different oscillating behavior. Since this is a crucial issue in Deleuze's philosophy let me explain this point in a little more detail. Deleuze calls this ability of topological forms to give rise to many different physical instantiations, a process of "divergent actualization", taking the idea from French philosopher Henri Bergson who, at the turn of the century, wrote a series of texts where he criticized the inability of the science of his time to think the new, the truly novel. The first obstacle was, according to Bergson, a mechanical and linear view of causality and the rigid determinism that it implied. Clearly, if all the future is already given in the past, if the future is merely that modality of time where previously determined possibilities become realized, then true innovation is impossible. To avoid this mistake, he thought, we must struggle to model the future as truly open ended, and the past and the present as pregnant not only with possibilities which become real, but with virtualities which become actual. The distinction between the possible and the real, assumes a set of predefined forms (or essences) which aquire physical reality as material forms that resemble them. From the morphogenetic point of view, realizing a possibility does not add anything to a predefined form, except reality. The distinction between the virtual and the actual, on the other hand, does not involve resemblance of any kind (e.g. our example above, in which a topological point becomes a geometrical sphere) and far from constituting the essential identity of a form, it subverts identity, since now forms as different as spheres and cubes emerge from the same topological point. To quote from what is probably his most important book, "Difference and Repetition": "Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. In this sense, actualization or differenciation is always a genuine creation." And Deleuze goes on to discuss processes of actualization more complex than bubbles or crystals, processes such as embryogenesis, the development of a fully differenciated organism starting from a single cell. In this case, the space of energetic possibilities is more elaborate, involving many topological forms governing complex spatio-temporal dynamisms: "How does actualization ocurr in things themselves?...Beneath the actual qualities and extensities [of things themselves] there are spatio-temporal dynamisms. They must be surveyed in every domain, even though they are ordinarly hidden by the constituted qualities and extensities. Embryology shows that the division of the egg is secondary in relation to more significant morphogenetic movements: the augmentation of free surfaces, stretching of cellullar layers, invagination by folding, regional displacement of groups. A whole kinimatics of the egg appears which implies a dynamic". In "Difference and Repetition", Deleuze repeatedly makes use of these "spaces of energetic possibilities" (technically refered to as "state spaces" or "phase spaces"), and of the topological forms (or "singularities") that shape these spaces. Since these ideas reappear in his later work, and since both the concept of "phase space" and that of "singularity" belong to mathematics, it is safe to say that a crucial component of Deleuzian thought comes from the philosophy of mathematics. And, indeed, chapter four of "Difference and Repetition" is a meditation on the metaphysics of the differential and integral calculus. On the other hand, given that "phase spaces" and "singularities" become physically significant only in relation to material systems which are traversed by a strong flow of energy, Deleuze philosophy is also intimately related to that branch of physics which deals with material and energetic flows, that is, with thermodynamics. And, indeed, chapter five of "Difference and Repetition" is a philosophical critique of nineteenth century thermodynamics, an attempt to recover from that discipline some of the key concepts needed for a theory of immanent morphogenesis. At the beginning of that chapter, Deleuze introduces some key distinctions that will figure prominently in his later work, specifically the concept of "intensity", but more importantly, he reveals in the very first page his ontological commitments. It is traditional since Kant to distinguish between the world as it appears to us humans, that is, the world of phenomena or appereances, and the world as it exists by itself, regardless of whether there is a human observer to interact with it. This world "in itself" is refered to as "nuoumena". A large number of contemporary thinkers, particularly those that call themselves "postmodernists", do not believe in nuomena. For them the world is socially constructed, hence, all it contains is linguistically-defined phenomena. Notice that even though many of these thinkers declare themselves "anti-essentialist", they share with essentialism a view of matter as an inert material, only in their case form does not come from a Platonic heaven, or from the mind of God, but from the minds of humans (or from cultural conventions expressed linguistically). The world is amorphous, and we cut it out into forms using language. Nothing could be further from Deleuzian thought than this postmodern linguistic relativism. Deleuze is indeed a realist philosopher, who not only believes in the autonomous existance of actual forms (the forms of rocks, plants, animals and so on) but in the existance of virtual forms. In the first few lines of chapter five of "Difference and Repetition", where Deleuze introduces the notion of "intensity" as a key to understand the actualization of virtual forms, he writes: "Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given...Difference is not phenomenon but the nuoumenon closest to the phenomenon...Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned...Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity". {2} Let me illustrate this idea with a familiar example from thermodynamics. If one creates a container separated into two compartments, and one fills one compartment with cold air and the other with hot air, one thereby creates a system embodying a difference in intensity, the intensity in this case being temperature. If one then opens a small hole in the wall dividing the compartments, the intensity difference causes the onset of a spontaneous flow of air from one side to the other. It is in this sense that intensity differences are morphogenetic, even if in this case the form that emerges is too simple. The examples above of the soap bubble and the salt crystal, as well as the more complex foldings and stretchings undergone by an embryo, are generated by similar principles. However, in the page following the quote above, Deleuze argues that, despite this important insight, nineteenth century thermodynamics cannot provide the foundation he needs for a philosophy of matter. Why? Because that branch of physics became obsessed with the final equilibrium forms, at the expense of the difference-driven morphogenetic process which gives rise to those forms. But as Deleuze argues, the role of virtual singularities can only be grasped during the process of morphogenesis, that is, before the final form is actualized, before the difference dissapears. This shortcoming of nineteenth century thermodynamics, to overlook the role of intensity differences in morphogenesis, to concentrate on the equlibrium form that emerges only once the original difference has been cancelled, has today been repaired in the latest version of this branch of physics, appropriatedly labeled "far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics". Although Deleuze does not explicitly refer to this new branch of science, it is clear that far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics meets all the objections which he raises against its nineteenth century counterpart. In particular, the systems studied in this new discipline are continuously traversed by a strong flow of energy and matter, a flow which does not allow the differences in intensity to be cancelled, that is, maintains these differences and keeps them from cancelling themselves. It is only in these far-from-equilibrium conditions that the full variety of immanent topological forms appears (steady state, cyclic or chaotic attractors). It is only in this zone of intensity that difference-driven morphogenesis comes into its own, and that matter becomes an active material agent, one which does not need form to come and impose itself from the outside. To return once more to the example of the developing embryo, the DNA that governs the process does not contain, as it was once believed, a blueprint for the generation of the final form of the organism, an idea that implies an inert matter to which genes give form from the outside. The modern understanding of the procesess, on the other hand, pictures genes as teasing out a form out of an active matter, that is, the function of genes and their products as now seen as merely constraining and channeling a variety of material processes, ocurring in that far-from-equlibrium zone, in which form emerges spontaneously. To complete my characterization of Deleuze theory of the genesis of form, I would like to explore the way in which his more recent work (in collaboration with Felix Guattari) has extended these basic ideas, greatly increasing the kind of immanent resources that are available to matter for the creation of form. In particular, in their joint book "A Thousand Plateaus", they develop theories of the genesis of two very important types of structures, to which they refer with the terms "strata" and "self-consistent aggregates" (or alternatively "trees" and "rhizomes"). Basically, strata emerge from the articulation of homogeneous elements, whereas self-consistent aggregates emerge from the articulation of heterogeneous elements as such. {3} Both processes display the same "divergent actualization" which characterized the simpler processes behind the formation of soap bubbles and salt crystals. In other words, in both processes we have a virtual form (or abstract machine, as they now call it) underlying the isomorphism of the resultant actual forms. Let's begin by briefly describing the process behind the genesis of geological strata, or more specifically, of sedimentary rock, such as sandstone or limestone. When one looks closely at the layers of rock in an exposed mountain side, one striking characteristic is that each layer contains further layers, each composed of small pebbles which are nearly homogeneous with respect to size,shape and chemical composition. It is these layers that are referred to as "strata". Now, given that pebbles in nature do not come in standard sizes and shapes, some kind of sorting mechanism seems to be needed to explain this highly improbable distribution, some specific device which takes a multiplicity of pebbles of heterogeneous qualities and distributes them into more or less uniform layers. One possibility uncovered by geologists involves rivers acting as sorting machines. Rivers transport rocky materials from their point of origin to the place in the ocean where these materials will accumulate. In this process, pebbles of variable size, weight and shape tend to react differently to the water transporting them. These different reactions to moving water are what sorts out the pebbles, with the small ones reaching the ocean sooner than the large ones. This process is called "sedimentation". Besides sedimentation, a second operation is necessary to transform these loose collections of pebbles into a larger scale entity: a sedimentary rock. This operation consists in cementing the sorted components, an operation carried out by certain substances dissolved in water which penetrate the sediment through the pores between pebbles. As this percolating solution crystallizes, it consolidates the pebble's temporary spatial relations into a more or less permanent "architectonic" structure. These double articulation, sorting and consolidation, can also be found in biological species. Species form through the slow accumulation of genetic materials. Genes, of course, do not merely deposit at random but are sorted out by a variety of selection pressures which include climate, the action of predators and parasites and the effects of male or female choice during mating. Thus, in a very real sense, genetic materials "sediment" just as pebbles do. Furthermore, these loose collections of genes can (like sedimented pebbles) be lost under some drastically changed conditions (such as the onset of an Ice age) unless they become consolidated together. This second operation is performed by "reproductive isolation", that is, by the closure of a gene pool which occurs when a given subset of a reproductive community, becomes incapable of mating with the rest. Through selective accumulation and isolative consolidation, a population of individual organisms comes to form a larger scale entity: a new individual species. We can also find these two operations (and hence, this virtual diagram) in the formation of social classes. Roughly, we speak of "social strata" whenever a given society presents a variety of differentiated roles to which not everyone has equal access, and when a subset of those roles (i.e. those to which a ruling elite alone has access) involves the control of key energetic and material resources. In most societies roles tend to "sediment" through a variety of sorting or ranking mechanisms, yet not in all of them ranks become an autonomous dimension of social organization. In many societies differentiation of the elites is not extensive (they do not form a center while the rest of the population forms an excluded periphery), surpluses do not accumulate (they may be destroyed in ritual feasts), and primordial relations (of kin and local alliances) tend to prevail. Hence a second operation is necessary: the informal sorting criteria need to be given a theological interpretation and a legal definition. In short, to transform a loose ranked accumulation of traditional roles into a social class, the social sedimement needs to become consolidated via theological and legal codification. {8} Is there also a virtual diagram behind the genesis of meshworks? In the model proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, there are three elements in this other virtual diagram, of which two are particularly important. First, a set of heterogeneous elements is brought together via an articulation of superpositions, that is, an interconnection of diverse but overlapping elements. And second, a special class of operators, or intercallary elements, is needed to effect this interlock via local connections. Is it possible to find instances of this diagram in geology, biology and sociology? Perhaps the clearest example is that of an ecosystem. While a species may be a very homogeneous structure, an ecosystem links together a wide variety of heterogeneous elements (animals and plants of different species) which are articulated through interlock, that is, by their functional complementarities. Since one of the main features of ecosystems is the circulation of energy and matter in the form of food, the complementarities in question are alimentary: prey-predator or parasite-host being two of the most common. In this situation, symbiotic relations can act as intercallary elements aiding the process of building food webs by establishing local couplings. Examples include the bacteria that live in the guts of many animals allowing them to digest their food, or the fungi and other microorganisms which form the "rhizosphere", the underground food chains which interconnect plant roots and soil. The world of geology also has actualizations of these virtual operations, a good example being that of igneous rocks. Unlike sandstone, igneous rocks such as granite are not the result of sedimentation and cementation, but the product of a very different construction process forming directly out of cooling magma. As magma cools down its different elements begin to separate as they crystallize in sequence, those that solidify earlier serving as containers for those which acquire a crystal form later. In these circumstances the result is a complex set of heterogeneous crystals which interlock with one another, and this is what gives granite its superior strength. Here the intercallary elements include anything which brings about local articulations from within the crystals, including nucleation centers and certain line defects called dislocations, as well as local articulation between crystals, such as events ocurring at the interface between liquids and solids. Thus, granite may be said to be an instance of a meshwork. In the socio-economic sphere, pre-capitalist markets may be considered examples of cultural meshworks. In many cultures weekly markets have traditionally been the meeting place for people with heterogeneous needs and offers. Markets connect people by matching complementary demands, that is, by interlocking them on the basis of their needs and offers. Money (even primitive money such as salt blocks or cowry shells) may be said to perform the function of intercallary element: while with pure barter the possibility of two exactly matching demands meeting by chance is very low, when money is present those chance encounters become unnecessary, and complementary demands may find each other at a distance, so to speak. Thus, much as sandstone, animal species and social classes may be said to be divergent actualizations of a virtual process of "double articulation" which brings homogenous components together, granite, ecosystems and markets are actualizations of a virtual process which links heterogenous elements through interlock and intercalation. These virtual processes are, according to Deleuze, perfectly real, a real virtuality which has nothing to do with what we call virtual reality. And yet, because this real virtuality constitutes the nuomenal machinery behind the phenomena, that is, behind reality as it appears to us humans, because this real virtuality governs the genesis of all real forms, it cannot help but be related to virtual realities, not only those created by computer simulations, but also by novelists, filmmakers, painters and musicians. Deleuze's work is, from the beginning, concerned as much with physics and mathematics, as it is with art. But it seems to me, only when we understand the Deleuzian world of material and energetic flows, and the forms that emerge spontaneously in these flows, can we begin to ask "what is a novel or a painting or a piece of music" in this world? In other words, the movement should be from a rich material world pregnant with virtualities, to literature or art, and not from literature (and texts, discourses, metaphors) to a socially constructed world where matter has once again, become an inert receptacle for external forms. It is in this sense, that Deleuze's work constitutes a true challenge to language-obsessed postmodernism, a neomaterialism which promises to enrich the conceptual reservoirs of both science and art and that one day could lead to a complete reconceptualization of our history as well as of our alternatives for the future.~"For they came to the seat of Morgoth in his nethermost hall that was upheld by horror, lit by fire, and filled with weapons of death and torment. There Beren slunk in wolf's form beneath his throne; but Luthien was stripped of her disguise by the will of Morgoth, and he bent his gaze upon her. She was not daunted by his eyes; and she named her own name, and offered her service to sing before him, after the manner of a minstrel. Then Morgoth looking upon her beauty conceived in his thought an evil lust, and a design more dark than any that had yet come into his heart since he fled from Valinor. Thus he was beguiled by his own malice, for he watched her, leaving her free for awhile, and taking secret pleasure in his thought. Then suddenly she eluded his sight, and out of the shadows began a song of such surpassing loveliness, and of such blinding power, that he listened perforce; and a blindness came upon him, as his eyes roamed to and fro, seeking her."--The Silmarillion, of Beren and LuthienHow to draw a god; step one, accept the inherent futility of the endeavor
energy that you could have used to be trying to win the bike race. I think eliminating that and putting yourself in a situation of happiness whether it be training or racing or just general living is hugely beneficial." The breakthrough Giro Lloyd's performance at the 2010 Giro confirmed his climbing talent, and came as a true surprise after the Amstel accident the year before. Lloyd believes that his secret that year was actually carrying extra weight to guard from the cold and give him the kick when he required it. "To be honest I came into that Giro a lot heavier than I've been before. Having experienced the Giro before, it can be very hot one day and then potentially freezing in the mountains the next so I wanted to rely off the power that I knew that I had. I think the main thing was being comfortable in the flatter stages and having a bit more punch and a bit more power when it did actually come to the crunch situation." After his Giro performance Lloyd's career took a turn for the worse when he was hit by a car in training in December 2010. Soon to follow was Lloyd's sudden departure from Lotto in the first half of 2011. Lloyd had made a return to racing at the Vuelta al Pais Vasco but failed to finish the race, and then did not start the Volta a Catalunya despite the insistence of his Lotto team. On their parting, Lotto cited behavioural reasons and specifically denied performance enhancing drugs were an issue. When given the opportunity to give his version of events Lloyd was understandably coy, but gave a strong indication that he was simply being asked to do what his body could not. "With Lotto I think when you are in a race program that is quite loaded, especially after success the year before, often enough you can tend to slip into an environment where you treat yourself like a robot. But only because you're being told by teams or directors that you have to do these specific races," explained Lloyd. "And then it gets to that point where you're not really considering your body and the way that it works, in the way that it should. "You're more concerned about the performance in races and often enough that means that the damage is magnified a certain percentage that you can't get back … unfortunately with the sport that we're involved with the season is quite loaded particularly from a climbers perspective and the races that you have to do, because it's part of your job, so I do understand Lotto's perspective. I don't have any sort of beef with my teams in the past because they've understood my situation." Lloyd was back in action over the following two years with Lampre-ISD, a WorldTour team now known as Lampre-Merida. Consistent performances at the Australian Nationals in 2012 and 2013, second and 19th respectively, showed that Lloyd's aerobic engine remained firing, but his lack of consistency over races longer than one day also stood out. After he pulled out midway through the 2012 Tour de France, Lloyd went on to finish just two of the following eight races until his season drew to an end. Lloyd was on a knife-edge. The next step? 2013 has been similarly frustrating for Lloyd having raced the Australian Nationals, the Tour Down Under and then failing to finish the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya. But the time out from racing since March has meant taking the time necessary to assess and finally fix his spinal issues. "It's seldom that people take longer breaks off to really knuckle down and find their problem areas," he said. "But having established that, I'm looking forward to getting out there and being happy and comfortable with the whole thing. So it has been a really good experience to just get it all done." With a recent bevy of MRIs and x-rays revealing that Lloyd's body has actually recovered quite well, he has subsequently been able to avoid surgery. With a new body and a new fiancée, Lloyd is chasing a new life. But some pillars of old will remain, of which professional cycling will hopefully be one. His options may appear scarce at current, but Lloyd is playing the long game. "I think the most important thing is to look at the options when they come about," he explained. "Most people will be eager to snap up a position on a bigger team just because it is a bigger team, whereas I'm not looking for that at all. I'm more concerned as to whether the situation would be beneficial not only for me but for them in the long run. "I've still got my place in Varese [Italy] and the people there are great, and I've got a lot of support from the AIS and the Australian Sports Commission. I'm looking forward to spending time over there with my fiancé who is coming over and we'll be happy either way. "I wouldn't hesitate to go to any team whether it be an internationally based team, an Anglo-Saxon, an Italian, a Spanish or a French team. It wouldn't bother me as long as I felt that it was the right way to go."The Chicago Cubs have rewarded reigning National League MVP Kris Bryant with a $1.05 million, one-year deal, league sources confirmed Thursday night to ESPN's Jerry Crasnick. The contract makes him the highest-paid player in his second year of service time in MLB history. Bryant, who won't be eligible for arbitration until next year, was arguably the best offensive player on the best team in the game and showed exceptional defensive versatility by playing in both the infield and the outfield as the Cubs ended a 108-year World Series title drought. The 25-year-old's deal surpasses the 2014 contract of Los Angeles Angels center fielder Mike Trout, who re-signed then for an even $1 million. Although Bryant has played two full seasons, he has not hit second-service-year eligibility because of the controversial delay by the Cubs on his initial call-up as a rookie. Kris Bryant hit.292 with 39 homers and 102 RBIs in just his second year in the majors, helping the Cubs to their first World Series title since 1908. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast The Cubs gained an extra year of service out of Bryant before he can become a free agent when they kept him in the minors for 11 days before his debut on April 17, 2015. That spring, Bryant became the first player in at least a decade to lead the Grapefruit League and Cactus League in home runs and not make an Opening Day roster. MLB players can become eligible for free agency after their sixth year of service time. FanRag Sports earlier reported Bryant's new contract. Bryant hit.292 with 39 homers and 102 RBIs in just his second year in the majors, helping the Cubs to their first World Series title since 1908. Bryant was the unanimous 2015 NL Rookie of the Year after he hit.275 with 26 homers and 99 RBIs. Information from The Associated Press and ESPN's Jesse Rogers contributed to this report.Posted by Larry Rodriguez on Sep 13, 2017 Motorcycle Riding: Legal and Safety Consideration to Take Into Account Before You Get Started Watching a MotoGP race might get you exhilarated enough to consider getting one of those power machines just for fun. However, before you commit your money to the purchase of a motorcycle, there are several legal and safety considerations you have to take into account. For starters, a motorcycle rider needs to be licensed. While a friend could help you get the basics, for you to ride legally you need to attend a riding school. Motorcycle riding is certainly a lot of fun but it is also extremely dangerous both the rider and other road users when the rider is not competent enough. As an ordinary rider you might never even remotely approach the kind of speed that MotoGP riders do but bikes tend to be pretty fast. Unlike a motor vehicle, however, there is very little to protect you in the unfortunate event of an accident. Safety considerations are therefore of critical consideration when you decide to start motorcycle riding. There is standard gear that you must have before you start riding. For every rider, a helmet is mandatory. Should you fall off the bike when riding at a high speed, it could be the only thing that saves your skull. Regardless of where you stay, chances are that sooner or later you’ll be caught in a downpour when riding and you must therefore invest in a rain suit. Even on the sunniest of days, motorcycle riding exposes your body to extreme cold. Unless you have the correct gear, this could have long term consequences including catching pneumonia. To guard against the extremities of the wind you must cover your body with a warm jacket and also wear recommended gloves and riding boots. Safety considerations and regularity of use should also influence the kind of bike you buy. For the young and hot-blooded who only intend to use the bike just once in a while (probably for a single day of the weekend) a sports bike would be ideal. However, if you are buying a bike to use for daily commuting, the exposure will increase inevitably and depending on the distance you are covering and the weather in your area, constant use a motorcycle could have long term consequences. If you are in the latter category, a regular bike would be more ideal. And regardless of the bike you purchase, the correct gear is mandatory.Have you noticed the creeping casualness that permeates all MMOs these days? When is the last time you died in a starter zone? What happened to 40 person raids that have dwindled to 5? Do you feel any sense of achievement in the race to end game, or is the end game the only achievement? It all started with the drive to make MMOs, which in the EQ and Ultima days were a niche and hard core game, more accessible. Accessibility was the mantra when I was leading the World of Warcraft team. We labored over the user interface for the game, going through many iterations, to find one that would be easy and intuitive for players new to the genre. We created a massive number of quests to lead the player through the world, making sure that they never had to think about what to do next. advertisement advertisement But even that wasn’t enough. As WoW grew in population, reaching ever more casual gamers, new expansions introduced even more refinements. Quest trackers were added, and xp was increased so that it was easier to level through all the old content to get to the “new stuff” of the expansion. Gear from the a new expansions first quests made raid gear from previous expansions a joke. And the level curve became faster and faster until we reached a point where everyone is just in a race to get to max level, and damn everything else in between. Why care about level 20 gear when you would blow by levels so fast it was obsolete before you even logged off for the night? And it worked. Players came in droves, millions of them. But at what cost? Sometimes I look at WoW and think “what have we done?” I think I know. I think we killed a genre. There are many reasons I feel this way, but I’d like to discuss one in particular, the difficulty curve. The main thing we lose when lowering the difficulty curve is a sense of achievement. When the bar is lowered so that everyone can reach max level quickly, it makes getting to max level the only sense of accomplishment in the game. We lose the whole journey in between, a journey that is supposed to feel fun and rewarding on its own. Nobody stops to admire a beautiful zone or listen to story or lore, because there is no time to do so. You are fed from a fire-hose of quests that you feel compelled to blaze through, whose content is so easy and quick to accomplish, that you are never in one place long enough to appreciate the incredible world around you. We feel bored by these quests, simply watching numbers on our quest trackers count down to completion before we are fed the next line of quests. And you don’t feel satisfied from playing the game because it never challenged you. And since these quests are so easily and quickly accomplished, the developer is not motivated to spend any time creating rich quests or events for players, since they will only be done once and discarded in the blink of an eye. Developers have no choice but to rely on kill 10 rats, fedex or escort for nearly every quest, and to do so with the least amount of work possible, lacking in depth or story. Its simply not worth it to do anything more. This makes the situation even worse, as not only do we not have a sense of accomplishment, but we enjoy these quests chains less and less as they become simpler and more cookie-cutter. The moment to moment gameplay suffers. And its this focus on throwaway quests as “content” that is putting MMOs into a very deep bind. As content gets easier in order to appeal to a wider market, it at some point also pushes that market away. We feel bored by the same formula over and over. We never explore the world, having been indoctrinated to just follow a laundry list of tasks. There is no thinking, and not much choice, as the ideal path is spoon fed to you in a linear fashion (ironic how open world MMOs have become linear quest fests). It may be great for relaxing and having a fun couple hours of gameplay, but it doesn’t last. No wonder we have such a huge crowd of jaded and bored MMO players. Every MMO that follows the WoW formula is a trivial exercise, dominated by rote and convention, trading off the joy of the journey for a series of meaningless tasks. And when we race to the end, we expect some kind of miracle end-game that will keep us playing. It never does. It’s not the end game that we should be worried about, its the journey. An MMO should be savored, a lifetime of experiences contained within a single, beautifully crafted world. The moment to moment gameplay should be its own reward. You should feel like you could live your whole life there, not by having infinite quests, but by having a living world that makes you feel good just for being in it and experiencing all it has to offer at your own pace. Its not about the competition to max out your character, its about a way of life and a long term hobby with enduring friends. In our own game, Firefall, we try to focus on the journey, not the end. We work hard to create a beautiful world, and you never out-level a zone since the dynamic events scale to players. Our quests and missions are dynamic, letting us put more work into making the event fun to do and letting you do it as often as you like and because you are challenged by them. Our combat focus is tuned for skill and moment to moment fun, and because it require dexterity and aiming, you can always challenge yourself to do better. We also have an intricate progressions system, one that focuses on lots of tinkering on the journey to maximizing your battleframes. Our crafting and resource system is one of the deepest and most complex of any MMO, having more in common with the well loved crafting system of the original Star Wars Galaxies than the simplified crafting systems of current MMOs. Firefall is not a trivialized distillation of an MMO. We found that adding a little difficultly and depth has actually made the game more fun, not less. Maybe, just maybe, as an industry we’ve made things too easy, and its time to get back to games being challenging as well as fun.Two Indian businessmen were staying in Beijing to conduct some business related to their Haryana-based tea company. Unfortunately, during their stay in China, the two men also decided to have some “fun” as well. While staying at a Beijing hotel, the two men reportedly molested a 17-year-old schoolgirl, who tragically walked into the wrong elevator. The young girl was visiting her older sister with her parents and had traveled from Taiwan. According to security footage from July 8th, the two men entered the elevator on the 10th floor. The girl, who had already been riding down to the lobby, was suddenly bombarded with questions from the men, asking her for pictures. As the elevator reached the lobby, the men forcefully prevented her from getting out, as they swiftly re-swiped their room cards and the elevator jolted back up to the 10th floor. On the way up, the men molested the girl. When the elevator stopped back at the lobby, the girl managed to escape and immediately reported the incident, according to India Today. Police were called to the hotel to investigate. After watching the security footage, the men were kept in detention until July 14th and then deported back to India. Authorities have not said if the men will face charges. Back in April, a surveillance video went viral showing a woman being attacked and nearly kidnapped inside a Beijing hotel while multiple passersby noticed and did nothing to rescue her. With bystanders infamously reluctant to help in China, the high-profile incident spawned a series of videos starring women standing up for themselves in public places — like elevators. Of course, it isn’t quite so easy in real life. By Robin Winship [Images via India Today] Share this: Pocket Telegram PrintMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption An American man who killed one person after opening fire at a hotel in Israel's southern resort city of Eilat has been shot dead by Israeli police. An American man who killed one person after opening fire at a hotel in Israel's southern resort of Eilat has been shot dead by Israeli police. His motive for the shooting was not immediately clear, police said, and he has not been publicly identified. Israeli media reported that he had been an employee of the hotel who had an argument with a colleague. The incident happened at the Leonardo Club hotel, on the Red Sea coast, one of Israel's most popular tourist spots. According to police the man took a gun from a hotel security guard and began shooting in the hotel lobby, killing one person. He then barricaded himself inside the hotel kitchen, where he was surrounded by Israeli anti-terror police, police said. "He opened fire during the negotiations with police. They fired back and killed him," police spokeswoman Luba Samri told AFP news agency. 'A normal guy' The head of a work-study scheme for Americans visiting Israel, Ofer Gutman, told the Associated Press news agency the man was a 23-year-old from New York who was taking part in his programme. "He was a normal guy... There was nothing that indicated what would happen in the end," Mr Gutman said. He said the programme, called Oranim, and the hotel had terminated the man's work there and he was due to be assigned a new job. Guests in the hotel dining room reported hearing gunfire while others were told to stay inside their rooms, Israel's Haaretz newspaper said. The hotel was at full capacity during the incident, with foreign and Israeli tourists taking a break over the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.Surgeons in China who said they performed the first successful penis transplant had to remove the donated organ because of the severe psychological problems experienced by the man and his wife. The case appears to be the first such transplant reported in a medical journal — European Urology, published by the European Association of Urology. The Chinese doctors could not be reached for comment, and their report does not explain how the 44-year-old man lost his penis. It says only that “an unfortunate traumatic accident” left him with a small stump, unable to urinate or have sex normally. Surgeons led by Dr. Hu Weilie at Guangzhou General Hospital performed the complex 15-hour microsurgery to attach the penis in September 2005, a hospital spokesperson said Tuesday. The penis had been donated by the parents of a 22-year-old brain-dead man. The operation was successful but Hu and his team removed the transplant two weeks later. “There was a strong demand from both the patient and his wife” for a transplant, and the operation “was discussed again and again” and approved by the hospital’s ethics committee, Hu wrote in the peer reviewed journal European Urology. The patient had been unable to have intercourse or urinate properly since the accident that occurred 8 months before the surgery was performed. “Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off,” Hu said in the report which was published online, without elaborating. “This is the first reported case of penile transplantation in a human,” Hu added. Ten days after the operation, which had been approved by the hospital’s medical ethical committee, the recipient had been able to urinate. There had been no signs of the 10-centimeter (4-inch) organ being rejected by the recipient’s body. But Hu said more cases and longer observation are needed to determine whether sexual sensation and function can be restored. “The patient finally decided to give up the treatment because of the wife’s psychological rejection, as well as the swollen shape of the transplanted penis” Hu added. Similar to hand, face transplants In a commentary in the journal, Yoram Vardi, of the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, said the successful surgery represents an additional step in contemporary medicine. But he added that careful patient selection is required as well as thorough informed consent of the patient and his family. “Satisfactory consideration of these issues must be taken into account so that this approach can be considered a serious therapeutic option in the future,” Vardi added. Despite how shocking and radical the operation sounds, it involves standard microsurgery techniques to reconnect blood vessels and nerves. From a medical point of view, “the main hurdle is the functional recovery,” said Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, chief of plastic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. From arm and leg reattachments, it’s known that nerve regrowth occurs at a rate of about an inch a month and often is insufficient to allow normal use, he said. However, the ethical and psychological challenges in such cases can be even more paramount, as this and other recent transplants involving hands and faces illustrate. “Some of the considerations for a penile transplant are the same as for a hand or face transplant,” such as the need to take lifelong immune-suppressing drugs to prevent rejection of the new organ, Lee said. Psychological issues The drugs can cause kidney and other damage, acceptable risks when the transplant involves a vital organ such as a liver or heart, but more ethically perilous when the operation is aimed at improving quality of life rather than extending it, Dr. Yoram Vardi, a neurology and urology specialist at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, writes in an accompanying commentary in the urology journal. Psychological issues are keenly important. The world’s first hand transplant recipient stopped taking immune suppression drugs and later requested that the hand be amputated. Lee recalled speaking with the recipient of the world’s first double-hand transplant in France, who told him it took months for him to accept his new hands and stop referring to one as “it.” Fourteen days after the penis transplant, the recipient and his wife requested that the organ be removed “because of the wife’s psychological rejection as well as the swollen shape of the transplanted penis,” the surgeons report in the journal. Lab examination showed no sign of rejection, the doctors report. If adequate attention had been paid to the need for counseling and other psychological concerns surrounding the transplant, “the need for penile amputation could probably have been avoided,” Vardi wrote in his commentary.Get the biggest politics 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 One of Chancellor George Osborne’s senior advisers on economic policy has been captured on video smoking crack cocaine in a drugs den. Prof Douglas McWilliams, who last year estimated we would all be £165 a year better off by the election, is seen inhaling it through a glass tube at a flat in North London. The executive chairman of influential City think-tank the Centre for Economic and Business Research then slumps dazed on a sofa after repeatedly smoking on the makeshift crack pipe involving a miniature Martell Cognac bottle. Red-faced and slurring his speech, he later told the dealer he had “too much” and that he had spent the day on a binge. Two rocks of the deadly drug can clearly been seen on a table beside the dazed professor. The grainy footage, seen by the Sunday Mirror, will heap embarrassment on the Chancellor and raise serious questions about his choice of adviser. A source said: “Last Sunday McWilliams turned up at the den around 10pm and was there about a hour and a half. There were two rocks of the drugs. He smoked it over a table and then sat there all spaced out. “He was in a suit and started talking about the economy and all that for about 20 minutes. He kept mentioning someone famous he worked with but didn’t make much sense. He was asked if he wanted any more and said ‘I’ve had too much’.” (Image: Matt Sprake) The revelation comes just two weeks before the launch of McWilliams’ highly acclaimed new book Flat White Economy which tells how London has swapped the City’s champagne and supercars lifestyle for bicycles and boho flats. Last April he bragged that his forecast of how much better off everyone would be gave the Chancellor “rather more scope” for cutting taxes in the spring budget. McWilliams, 63, said: “The Government, and especially George Osborne, have credibility in the City partly because both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls do not.” Now his own credibility lies in tatters. (Image: PA) Our source said McWilliams had been a regular at crack dens in Hornsey, North London for several months. He said: “He is out of control and a real addict. He’s a regular at the address. He also goes to another house nearby. He just turns up.” McWilliams specialises in economic forecasting and analysis. He advises 25 of the FTSE companies, including top retailers, legal firms and accountants. A former Professor of Commerce at Gresham College, McWilliams is described on the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) website as “one of the most widely quoted economists”. He set up the think-tank in 1992 having previously served as Chief Economic Adviser to the CBI. McWilliams, married to wife Ianthe for 35 years, has also advised London Mayor Boris Johnson on housing and is a regular on Twitter. On Christmas Day he tweeted about an Office for National Statistics decision to include earnings from drugs and the sex trade in economy figures. He wrote: “Prostitution and illegal drugs help UK overtake France in global wealth league.” Yesterday morning at his five-storey London mansion he said: “I’m not going to comment. You are not going to get a story from me.”BEIJING -- Out of fear that history might repeat itself, the authoritarian governments of China, Cuba and Burma have been selectively censoring the news this month of Iranian crowds braving government militias on the streets of Tehran to demand democratic reforms. Between 1988 and 1990, amid a lesser global economic slump, pro-democracy protests that appeared to inspire and energize one another broke out in Eastern Europe, Burma, China and elsewhere. Not all evolved into full-fledged revolutions, but communist regimes fell in a broad swath of countries, and the global balance of power shifted. A similar infectiousness has shown up in subtle acts of defiance by democracy advocates around the world this week. In China, political commentators tinted their blogs and Twitters green to show their support for Iranians disputing President Ahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection. The deaths of at least 20 people in violent clashes in Tehran have drawn comparisons online to "June 4," the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing in 1989. And a pointed joke about how Iranians are luckier than Chinese because sham elections are better than no elections made the rounds on the country's vast network of Internet bulletin boards. "The Iranian people face the same problems as us: news censorship and no freedom to have their own voices," 28-year-old blogger Zhou Shuguang said in a telephone interview from the inland province of Hunan. Zhou said he and several friends were among those who had colored their online pictures green, the signature color of the Iranian opposition. In Cuba, President Raúl Castro's government has imposed a complete blackout of news surrounding the Iranian elections. But word of developments is trickling through, anyway. Havana-based blogger Yoani Sánchez, 33, who e-mails friends outside Cuba to get her entries posted online, said the Iranian protests -- in particular, the reportedly widespread use of Twitter, Facebook and cellphones -- have served as "a lesson for Cuban bloggers." "Seeing those young Iranians use all the technology to denounce the injustice, I notice everything that we lack to support those who maintain blogs from the island," Sánchez wrote. "The acid test of our incipient virtual community has not yet arrived, but maybe it will surprise us tomorrow." "Today it's you," she told the Iranian protesters in one posting. "Tomorrow it could well be us." In Burma, the junta's mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, has drowned out news from Tehran with articles on bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan. But some of the nearly 200 journals published privately in Rangoon and Mandalay have seized on the topic as a way to pass subversive messages to readers. "What we, the private media, are trying to do was to put in as much stories and pixs of what's going on in Teheran in our papers. So far we were successful," the editor of a Rangoon-based weekly publication said in an e-mail. "The upcoming paper of mine... will carry, albeit if it's not censored, news stories of the events in Teheran and a feature on 'Elections and Democracy,' trying to draw some parallels between the one in Iran and the upcoming one here," a reference to elections, scheduled for 2010, that many critics dismiss as a sham. Unlike in Iran, however, the experience of past failed protests has yielded a measure of pragmatism in Burma. Overtly political opposition groups, such as Generation Wave, and numerous apolitical networks have in recent months focused on a more evolutionary strategy of change, reaching out in particular to Burma's rural masses.A slew of new traffic cameras expected to begin issuing tickets on Monday to drivers in the District will not go live as planned, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. Last month, D.C. police unveiled 100 “next-generation” traffic cameras to target a growing number of motorist violations ranging from failure to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks to blocking the box. The cameras were expected to issue warning tickets for a 30-day period and to begin issuing real tickets on Monday. However, not all of the cameras have apparently been active for a full 30 days, leading to a delay in their rollout. “The warning period will be extended,” police spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump said in an email statement Sunday. “We are still issuing warning tickets. Warning tickets will continue to be issued until every location has 30 days of tickets.” Ms. Crump did not provide any estimate on when live tickets will begin to be issued. She also did not clarify whether each individual camera would begin to issue real tickets after it has been operating for 30 days or if all 100 cameras would delay ticketing until every new camera reaches the 30-day mark. It was also unclear why some cameras have not been actively issuing warning tickets. The department announced the dates the cameras would issue warning tickets and the date they would begin issuing actual violation notices in a Nov. 22 press release. Police have issued no public statement about the delay of the cameras nor does the department state on its website, where the operation of the new cameras is explained, that the devices are still only issuing warnings. The lack of transparency from the police department is troubling to AAA Mid-Atlantic spokesman John B. Townsend II, who says the mixed messages may bewilder drivers. “The benefit of that is it gives more people time to get familiar with the technology, to see the tickets,” Mr. Townsend said of the delay. “This may end up being more confusing for motorists.” Mr. Townsend said he has also gotten complaints that not all the cameras appear to be posted at the locations the department lists on its website. At a news conference held on the cameras last month, Assistant Police Chief Lamar Greene noted that some of the cameras are mobile and can be moved. It is unclear if the police department has moved any of the cameras or if some are not in place yet. Once they do begin to issue real tickets, the new cameras will boost the number of automated traffic enforcement devices operated by the department to nearly 300. D.C. police began using traffic cameras in 1999 and already operated 197 other cameras that ticket drivers who speed or run red lights. In addition to combating what police call “aggressive and dangerous driving habits,” the cameras will also generate income for the city through new fines ranging from $50 to $250 per violation. The new cameras will be used to target five traffic issues. Sixteen cameras trained on crosswalks will record drivers as pedestrians step into the crosswalks, and violations will be issued for drivers who fail to stop for the pedestrians when they have the right of way. Twenty gridlock cameras will also capture the license plates of vehicles that fail to clear crosswalks or intersections before a traffic signal changes and block traffic. Another 32 cameras will be placed at stop signs to ticket drivers who do not come to a complete stop, and 24 speed cameras will be placed at intersections. Additionally, police are trying to curb the amount of commercial traffic in some neighborhoods and are installing eight cameras that will be able to detect oversize trucks that are not allowed to use small neighborhood streets. Ms. Crump said the department is working to ensure that “all possible warning tickets are mailed prior to issuing live tickets.” Speed and red-light camera tickets have been a boon for the city in past years. Revenue from the cameras jumped from $42.9 million in 2011 to $95.6 million in 2012, according to figures provided by the city. Mr. Townsend said the city collected another $50 million through traffic enforcement in the first half of fiscal 2013. According to the District’s fiscal 2014 budget, the city expects to collect an additional $31.7 million from these new traffic cameras this fiscal year. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.ANYONE PAYING attention to the mushrooming investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election campaign and President Trump’s possible ties to Moscow will have noticed that this is not a simple story. At issue are complex questions of espionage, counterintelligence, unlawfulness, secrecy, sovereignty and coverup. It will be hard enough for the ongoing probes by the FBI, Congress and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to sort out the mess and come up with the truth and reach credible conclusions. That is why the latest maneuverings of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) are disturbing. Mr. Nunes, it should be recalled, announced in April that he would step aside from the panel’s investigation into the Russia affair. He recused himself after odd feints that appeared to be nothing more than an effort, in conjunction with the White House, to confuse the probe by highlighting Trump’s dubious claim that he was wiretapped by the outgoing administration. Now it appears Mr. Nunes isn’t quite stepping away, and that is reason for new concern. In the latest twist, Mr. Nunes was reported on Wednesday to have issued a series of committee subpoenas to the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency for information on “unmasking.” U.S. intelligence rules provide procedures for when intercepts of foreign nationals pick up the names of American citizens; they can be unmasked only if the procedures are followed. The claim Mr. Trump and others have made is that the Obama administration improperly unmasked names of Trump associates in intercepts recorded during the election and transition. The Nunes action seems unnecessary; if anything improper was done, the committee is capable of checking into it. This is not a separate matter from the Russia story, and Mr. Nunes’s recusal means he should keep his hands off it. Suspiciously, right after Mr. Nunes issued the subpoenas, Mr. Trump tweeted, “The big story is the ‘unmasking and surveillance’ of people that took place during the Obama Administration.” No, it is not. The “big story” is whether Russia brazenly attempted to tilt the U.S. election by damaging Hillary Clinton through a cyberattack and other means, thereby helping Mr. Trump to victory, and whether members of the Trump campaign colluded in that effort. It’s about Mr. Trump’s ill-explained and gratuitous attempts during the transition and since to do the bidding of Russian President Vladimir Putin, including trying to unwind the sanctions against Russia imposed by President Barack Obama after the election meddling was discovered. The “big story” is why Mr. Trump has frantically attempted to shut down the Russia investigations, including through the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey. It’s about getting an answer, once and for all, about Mr. Trump’s finances and any undisclosed links with Russia. The unmasking that’s important is the truth behind all this. Now it is in the hands of the investigators, and they must be left to do their work properly and without interference by Mr. Trump — or Mr. Nunes.Adrian Peterson is back on the Vikings after a long, weird standoff. I guess he realized the Vikings had all of the leverage after all. I’m torn on him personally. What he did was absolutely awful and he doesn’t seem to realize quite how terrible it was. But as bad as it was, he grew up in a household and culture that favors this kind of action and what he believes is part of a systemic problem. He did a bad thing and doesn’t think it was bad because it was always the way of things. It’s depressing and I feel sorry for him as much as I despise what he did. I also don’t blame him entirely for demanding money. I’m usually on the side of the players when it comes to contract demands because the NFL treats players terribly, but he did seem like he was holding the team hostage with no gun instead of sucking it up and realizing he wasn’t the golden child anymore. I hope he’s learned from his errors, because watching Peterson play was always a pleasure and if anyone can break the traditional trend of 30 year old RBs falling off a cliff he can. Dude runs with purpose.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Oct. 9, 2015, 11:43 AM GMT / Updated Oct. 9, 2015, 3:53 PM GMT / Source: Associated Press By The Associated Press JERUSALEM — Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian demonstrators along the Gaza border Friday, killing five of them, as a rash of stabbing attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories, including the first apparent revenge attack by an Israeli, raised fears of wider unrest. Recent days have seen a string of attacks by young Palestinians with no known
enabling him to eat several of Chief Wiggum's peppers. After winning the chili eating contest, the peppers make Homer hallucinate. In a bizarre fantasy world, he encounters a snake, butterfly and tortoise, and accidentally destroys the sun. He arrives at a large Mayan pyramid and meets his spirit guide in the form of a coyote, who advises him to find his soulmate and questions Homer's assumption that Marge is his. Meanwhile, Marge hears of Homer's strange behavior and believing this was due to drinking alcohol, drives home without him. The next day, Homer awakes in a golf course. Returning home, he finds Marge angry with him for his embarrassing behavior at the cook-off and asks for forgiveness, but she refuses. Homer makes note of the two's fundamental personality differences and questions if she is truly his soulmate. While roaming the streets at night, he thinks a lonely lighthouse keeper is his soulmate, but finds the lighthouse is operated by a machine. Seeing an approaching ship, Homer destroys the lighthouse's light hoping its passengers will stop and befriend him. An apologetic Marge arrives, having known exactly where Homer would go, and the pair realize they really are soulmates despite their differences. Marge fixes the light so the ship does not run into them, but it runs aground nearby, spilling its cargo of hotpants. Springfield's citizens happily retrieve them as Marge and Homer embrace. Production Edit Cultural references Edit Reception Edit In its original broadcast, "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)" finished 34th in ratings for the week of December 30, 1996 – January 5, 1997, with a Nielsen rating of 9.0, equivalent to approximately 8.7 million viewing households. It was the highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, beating Millennium.[11] The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, said: "Homer's chili-induced trip is brilliant, complete with the surreal tortoise and Indian spirit guide."[1] The episode was placed eighth on AskMen.com's "Top 10: Simpsons Episodes" list,[12] and in his book Planet Simpson, Chris Turner named the episode as being one of his five favorites, although he found the ending too sentimental. In 2011, Keith Plocek of LA Weekly's Squid Ink blog listed "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)" as the best episode of the show with a food theme.[13] IGN ranked Johnny Cash's performance as the 14th-best guest appearance in the show's history.[14] Cash also appeared on AOL's list of their 25 favorite The Simpsons guest stars,[15] and on The Times' Simon Crerar's list of the 33 funniest cameos in the history of the show.[16] Andrew Martin of Prefix Mag named Cash his third-favorite musical guest on The Simpsons out of a list of ten.[17] Fred Topel of Crave Online named it the best episode of the entire series.[18]The 2015 Milwaukee Film Festival is one month and four days away. That’s one month and four days to prepare for an onslaught of films ranging from the highbrow and challenging to the rowdy and crowd pleasing. And they don’t get much more rowdy or crowd pleasing than the Cinema Hooligante films. Cinema Hooligante is a midnight-movie-indebted program teeming with all things bloody, raunchy, fantastical, terrifying, and awesome. Milwaukee Record is proud to sponsor this year’s lineup, which is so good Milwaukee Film may need a bigger fest. Highlighting the program are 35mm screenings of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 fish tale Jaws (“It’s a tiger shark!” “A whaaaaat?”), and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 hotel promo film The Shining (“Danny isn’t here, Mrs. Torrance”). Jaws is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and The Shining its 35th. If you’ve seen both films countless times, it’s time to enjoy them on the big screen and in glorious 35mm. If you haven’t seen them, buckle up (and stay away from the water and/or Snow Cats). There’s plenty more where that came from. “I’m incredibly proud and excited to present films of this caliber in what is certainly the coolest program of the festival,” says Jaclyn O’Grady, Programming Manager and Cinema Hooligante Co-Programmer in a press release. “One highlight for me is They Have Escaped, a shocking Finnish thriller about a road trip gone awry, which will leave you absolutely reeling when the credits roll.” “This program is always so much fun to put together; we get to juxtapose so many different, interesting films against each other,” says Kristen Coates, Operations Director and Cinema Hooligante Co-Programmer in the same press release. “One film that I’m especially excited to show our audiences is White God. It has a stunning visual feel and is a story unlike any other I’ve seen.” The 7th annual Milwaukee Film Festival takes place September 24-October 8, 2015 at the Landmark Oriental Theatre, Landmark Downer Theatre, Fox-Bay Cinema Grill, Times Cinema, and Avalon Theater. Passes and ticket 6-packs are currently available at discounted rates at mkefilm.org/tickets. Check out the full Cinema Hooligante lineup below, courtesy of Milwaukee Film. Bang Bang Baby (Canada / 2014 / Director: Jeffrey St. Jules) A demented blend of 1950s sci-fi and musicals, Bang Bang Baby is a brazenly original, genre-twisting fever dream of a film. Stepphy (Jane Levy) is a high school girl with dreams of breaking out of her sleepy hometown, and her acceptance into the American Ingénue Singing Competition seems to be the ticket. But her alcoholic father (Peter Stormare) refuses to let her go, and it’s only the arrival of heartthrob singer Bobby Shore into town that gives her a chance — that is, if she can keep Bobby from noticing the freakish mutations and hallucinations being brought forth by a factory leak in the town. Extraordinary Tales (Luxembourg, Belgium, Spain, USA / 2015 / Director: Raul Garcia) This ghoulish anthology film celebrating the macabre works of Edgar Allan Poe is broken into five distinct animated segments (including classic works such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”). Aided by narration from some of horror’s most beloved luminaries (Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi and Guillermo del Toro, to name a few), Poe’s psychological adventures are brought to startling life, each story receiving its own particular animation style uniquely suited to its creepy tone. If your spine is in the market for shivers, this is the choice for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amniFA0UEKc Jaws (USA / 1975 / Director: Steven Spielberg) Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water, Jaws comes to the Milwaukee Film Festival. Often imitated but never replicated, Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning cultural phenomenon remains the apex predator of summer blockbuster filmmaking. A story of the small town of Amity (which, as you know, means “friendship”), the great white shark that’s terrorizing it, and the trio of dudes tasked with putting a stop to it hasn’t lost a step over 40 years later. If you’ve only ever seen this classic from the comfort of home, you’re going to need a bigger screen. Nina Forever (United Kingdom / 2015 / Directors: Ben Blaine, Chris Blaine) We all have baggage; it just so happens that Rob’s returns from the dead, gorily erupting through the bed sheets any time he attempts to sleep with his new girlfriend. Left physically and emotionally wounded after a car accident that robbed him of his beloved Nina, Rob is finally taking timid steps toward re-entering the world with the help of his supermarket co-worker Holly, only to find that Nina has a penchant for violently reappearing with sarcastic words of support mid-coitus. This sly horror-comedy-romance provides a fresh take on the genre, a sexy, blood-drenched ode to the ways our past continues to haunt us. The Shining (USA, United Kingdom / 1980 / Director: Stanley Kubrick) All digital and no 35 mm screenings make Jack a dull boy, so feast your eyes on this special 35 mm screening of Stanley Kubrick’s legendary horror tale. Snugly nestled away in the mountains, the Overlook Hotel offers plenty of vacancies. And when the Torrance family gets snowed in for the winter, recovering alcoholic father Jack (Jack Nicholson at his most iconic) gets a little stir-crazy. Take a shot of red rum, avoid all elevators and twins, and, whatever you do, don’t go into Room 237. This tale of conspiracy and insanity will lead you into a mental hedge maze you won’t soon escape. They Have Escaped (H e ovat paenneet) (Finland, Netherlands / 2014 / Director: J-P Valkeapää) What begins as a tale of two teenage outcasts finding one another at a halfway house and subsequently running away together slowly morphs into a primal fairy tale that will challenge your senses and expand your mind. Joni and Raisa have run out of chances when they meet and see in one another a kindred chaotic spirit, so of course their intense bond leads to them leaving civilization altogether and embarking on a wild, nightmarish journey of drug use and feral living. Intimate and intense, They Have Escaped defies expectations, a movie that will uproot your sense of reality and leave you reeling. Turbo Kid (Canada, New Zealand / 2015 / Directors: François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell) In the post-apocalyptic future of 1997, acid rain beats down on the barren landscape while evil warlord Zeus kidnaps people in order to harvest them for their precious water. In steps reluctant hero The Kid, a youngster content to tool around on his BMX bike and read old Turbo Man comic books all day. But when his only friend is taken hostage, he must embrace his destiny and become the hero he’s only ever read about. The retro-futuristic Turbo Kid is a cult classic in the making, combining ’80s movie nostalgia with geysers of blood to make something you’ve never seen before. White God (Hungary / 2014 / Director: Kornél Mundruczó) Imagine The Birds told from the animal’s perspective and you’re only scratching the surface of this remarkable Hungarian thriller, a morally challenging cautionary tale tackling cultural and political tension amid an all-out dog revolt. Lili is forced to abandon her beloved mutt, Hagen, due to the state’s strict breeding protocols, but she refuses to give up hope that they will be reunited. As Lili searches, Hagen is subjected to the cruelties of man and so slowly amasses an army of the unwanted to exact revenge. A remarkable feat of filmmaking, White God suggests instead of going to heaven, all dogs might unleash hell on Earth.CLOSE A look back at the top moments from this past weekend in the NBA. USA TODAY Sports Indiana Pacers forward Paul George (13) looks on against the Orlando Magic during the first quarter at Amway Center. (Photo11: Kim Klement, USA TODAY Sports) Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, the Los Angeles Lakers new president of basketball operations, talked on the phone soon after Johnson assumed his new position. They talked about plenty, but more notable is what Bird said didn't come up. "I wasn’t motivated to move Paul George at the deadline,” Bird told the Los Angeles Times. “I can’t remember if it was even brought up or not. I don’t think it was. It’s all fake news anyway. You know that. Somebody’s gonna start it and (it) just was a snowball effect. (The phone call) was not about Paul George.” USA TODAY's Sam Amick reported before the deadline that George "would love nothing more than to sign with his hometown Lakers if the future is bleak in Indiana." Johnson and Bird battled on the court for years, and now they could be vying for the same pieces to build their respective teams. Johnson isn't the only player from Bird's era now in the front office. Bird's longtime teammate Danny Ainge heads up the Boston Celtics, but the two have never made a deal. GALLERY: Larry Bird through the years “Talked to Danny about a lot of trades, but never did one," Bird told the Times. "I just feel it’s gotta be a fair deal for both sides and we never got there. Maybe he thought it was fair, but I didn’t think so.” First-year Lakers coach Luke Walton says he doesn't expect a renewed rivalry between Bird and Johnson in the front office. “I’m sure media will build it up to be that," he told the Times. "Fans will enjoy reading about it. It’s not like Larry and Magic are competing on the phone and trying to duel against each other.” Matthew VanTryon writes for The Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network.The Anniston Star is reporting that two members of the sovereign citizens movement appeared in court today, with a judge suggesting one should be silenced with masking tape when he would not follow orders. Calhoun County Circuit Judge Bud Turner moved for trial against Everett Leon Stout, 73, and Miriam Claire Shultz, 69, his common law wife, who were arrested last year following an investigation by the FBI, the Calhoun County District Attorney's Office and Oxford police. Oxford Police Chief Bill Partridge described the couple as "paper terrorists" last year, after investigators said the two attempted to buy a $300,000 recreational vehicle and pay for it with a fabricated account. When the two were refused, they filed a "million dollar lien" against the business, then offered to withdraw it in exchange for money, resulting in the extortion charge. Partridge said the two targeted 13 different businesses with a similar scheme. Their motive was "purely financial" in going after high dollar businesses, he said. Miriam Claire Schultz Shultz pleaded not guilty, the Star reported. Stout, shackled and wearing orange-and-white-striped jail uniform, attempted to represent himself. After he made several statements declining offers of counsel, the judge said, "If he says anything else, get some masking tape and put it on his mouth." The two were charged last year in Etowah County after investigators said they recorded false documents against a circuit clerk, municipal prosecutor, federal judge and federal probation officer. Sovereign citizens, experts say, are individuals who do not believe in federal laws, taxation, or state or federal entities but use court filings to tie up the legal system. The movement is largely fragmented but stretches nationwide. They are also known for filing false documents in probate court with large liens to disrupt the credit histories of public officials. For more details, read The Star's story here."Famous Blue Raincoat" is a song by Leonard Cohen. It is the sixth track on his third album, Songs of Love and Hate, released in 1971. The song is written in the form of a letter (many of the lines are written in amphibrachs). The lyric tells the story of a love triangle between the speaker, a woman named Jane, and the male addressee, who is identified only briefly as "my brother, my killer."[1] Background [ edit ] The lyrics contain references to the German love song "Lili Marlene," to Scientology, and to Clinton Street. Cohen lived on Clinton Street in Manhattan in the 1970s when it was a lively Latino area.[2] In 1994 Cohen said that "it was a song I've never been satisfied with".[1] In the 1999 book, The Complete Guide to the Music of Leonard Cohen, the authors comment that Cohen's question, "Did you ever go clear?", in the song, is a reference to the Scientology state of "Clear".[3] In the liner notes to 1975's The Best of Leonard Cohen, which includes the song, he mentions that the famous blue raincoat to which he refers actually belonged to him, and not someone else: I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn't go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne's loft in New York City sometime during the early seventies. I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end. Ron Cornelius played guitar on Songs of Love and Hate and was Cohen's band leader for several years. He told Songfacts: "We played that song a lot before it ever went to tape. We knew it was going to be big. We could see what the crowd did — you play the Royal Albert Hall, the crowd goes crazy, and you're really saying something there. If I had to pick a favorite from the album, it would probably be 'Famous Blue Raincoat.'"[4] The original recording starts in the key of A minor, but switches to C major during the choruses. Cohen said, "That's nice. I guess I got that from Spanish music, which has that."[5] Cover versions [ edit ] "Famous Blue Raincoat" has also been recorded by numerous other artists, including Jonathan Coulton, Tori Amos and Aurora.[6] It provided the title to Jennifer Warnes' album of cover versions of Cohen's songs. When I Need You Comparison [ edit ] The melody of the "hook" line or chorus of "When I Need You" by Leo Sayer is identical to the part of "Famous Blue Raincoat" where the lyrics are as follows: "Jane came by with a lock of your hair, she said that you gave it to her that night, that you planned to go clear." The melody of these lyrics matches the lyrics of "When I Need You" as follows: "(When I) need you, I just close my eyes and I'm with you, and all that I so want to give you, is only a heart beat away." In a 2006 interview with The Globe and Mail Cohen said: I once had that nicking happen with Leo Sayer. Do you remember that song 'When I Need You'?" Cohen sings the chorus of Sayer's number one hit from 1977, then segues into 'And Jane came by with a lock of your hair', a lyric from 'Famous Blue Raincoat'. 'Somebody sued them on my behalf … and they did settle', even though, he laughs, 'they hired a musicologist, who said, that particular motif was in the public domain and, in fact, could be traced back as far as Schubert.[7]About The Author A former public and media relations executive for Toys “R” Us, Sears and Kmart, is currently director of a PR/social media agency in New York called Fresh Fluff … More about John… The Art Of Launching An App: A Case Study Smashing Newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our editors’ picks twice a month. Your email Subscribe → You’ve made your first app! Now what? Anyone in the app business knows that marketing an app is tough. And according to a recent article on TechCrunch, “Getting a mobile app noticed in the increasingly crowded mobile app market is more difficult than ever.” Some titles and concepts are truly unique. Angry Birds? Its title and screenshot alone were enough to catapult it to number one in Finland. The app world is becoming like one giant forest, millions and millions of trees. Sure, there are SEO tricks, word-of-mouth marketing tools and built-in demographic identifiers that might help move your product up the ever-growing search list of apps, whether the list is for books, games or lifestyle tools. Moreover, thousands of companies in the market today make extravagant claims of being able to get your app noticed. You’ve made your first app! Now what? Anyone in the app business knows that marketing an app is tough. And according to a recent article on TechCrunch, “Getting a mobile app noticed in the increasingly crowded mobile app market is more difficult than ever.” Some titles and concepts are truly unique. Angry Birds? Further Reading on SmashingMag: Its title and screenshot alone were enough to catapult it to number one in Finland, according to Mikael Hed, CEO of Finnish game studio Rovio, which develops the game. Some apps are downright genius. Who doesn’t loath maintaining a to-do list? But now with Clear, it’s astonishingly fun! Who in the media wouldn’t cover something this clever? These two special cases were a shoe-in for the coveted feature page. Meet Smashing Book 6 — our brand new book focused on real challenges and real front-end solutions in the real world: from design systems and accessible single-page apps to CSS Custom Properties, CSS Grid, Service Workers, performance, AR/VR and responsive art direction. With Marcy Sutton, Yoav Weiss, Lyza D. Gardner, Laura Elizabeth and many others. Table of Contents → OK, so we have two apps that have leaped the giant “feature” hurdle and scored attention, much to the envy of countless wannabe developers. But not every app is an Angry Birds or Clear. And any developer surely knows that they are in extraordinary company — 91,754 iOS apps and 122,220 Android apps were released between 16 May and 8 September 2011, according to a recent Mobilewalla report. The researchers also found that during 2011, the number of available iOS apps increased from 338,000 to 589,148, while Android apps also more than doubled, from 115,000 to 319,774. (Image credit: florianplag The app world is becoming like one giant forest, millions and millions of trees. So, if one of those trees falls and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Sure, there are SEO tricks, word-of-mouth marketing tools and built-in demographic identifiers that might help move your product up the ever-growing search list of apps, whether the list is for books, games or lifestyle tools. Moreover, thousands of companies in the market today make extravagant claims of being able to get your app noticed. Many developers fall into the trap of allocating tight budget dollars to quick “tech” fixes in a desperate attempt to lift their app above the crowd. However, in this age of digital distraction, one mechanism to help that tree stand out is a tried-and-true PR marketing campaign. And the best initiatives are those that involve choosing strategic partners, creating clever story angles that dovetail with newsworthy occasions, and running a cause marketing campaign and contest. This case study will cover some of these tactics and offer some of the lessons we learned along the way. Case Study: David and Goliath According to a recent article in Publishing Perspectives, “The children’s market is a huge opportunity within the digital publishing arena.” Jumping Pages, a children’s app developer, decided to enter this market with an expertly produced book app for children, the first interactive app version of the epic tale of David and Goliath. Based on the work of the team of artists, animators and programmers, the iPad app is filled with vivid graphics and 3-D and 2.5-D animation that runs with interactive components at the same time on the same panel. The reader is able to interact with hundreds of original assets: shoot arrows, catapult burning weapons, populate flowers. Shake the iPad to awaken the sleeping Goliath; sway the iPad to swing a hanging lantern; turn the iPad to change the character’s points of view. The quality of the work was undeniable, so it was imperative to the developer that the app get attention. But how would the app be differentiated to the consumer, considering that a David and Goliath book app for kids already exists. Strike one. Moreover, regardless of its quality, the likelihood of the app landing on a feature page was slim, considering that most retailers are reluctant to highlight stories with religious overtones. Strike two. A final dilemma was how to make a story that has been around forever feel relevant in the crowded world of kids book apps. Strike three? Not so fast! Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid From a production standpoint, the David and Goliath for iPad app was ready to launch in July 2011. The only thing that wasn’t ready was a plan of action on how to make some noise for a story that, for all intents and purposes, already exists as an app. This scenario holds true for many developers who are ready to submit improved versions of models that exist in various categories; there is a plethora of apps for weather, productivity and games (Who’d like to wager on the best poker app?). Many developers spend countless hours designing, programming and shaping their apps. They become so immersed in the product that they often drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak, and believe that their superior work will speak for itself and that word of mouth about their amazing app will spread quickly. Many developers with this mentality simply see no need to create a cool marketing plan around the app. Sounds like buying a lottery ticket. (Image credit: stevendepolo) Being proud of and confident in your product is nice, but better to be realistic about how to introduce it into the marketplace. Thus, after careful thought and shuffling around scarce budget dollars, Jumping Pages re-examined the landscape and decided to be smart about launching. The company set out to create a targeted and focused consumer marketing strategy. It decided it needed to implement an effective campaign in order to rise above the other book apps that were entering the fray in increasing numbers and to set itself apart from a version of the story that was already available. And because of budgetary constraints, it had no time for a protracted strategy. It’s first swing had to be a hit. Finding the Perfect Partner First, the company wanted an effective “marketing” partner, a narrator for the story who would help sell it. Ideally, the narrator would have a back story that was relevant both to the biblical tale and to the targeted demographic, and who would have broad media appeal (in order to be newsworthy). Jumping Pages reached out to baseball star and 2006 World Series MVP David Eckstein to narrate the app. As many sports fans know, Eckstein has had a noteworthy career, overcoming his relatively short stature to achieve glory at the Major League level. Hence, the back story: a modern-day David whose life story mirrors that of the biblical David. Upon arranging for his participation and partnership, the company moved the launch date of the app to October to coincide with the start of the World Series. Coincidentally, October 2011 marked the five-year anniversary of Eckstein’s World Series MVP performance; so, Jumping Pages created an “MVP Edition” of the book (same app, different narrator), which would be released to dovetail with the newsworthiness of the fall classic. Newsworthiness Needed Being newsworthy is key, particularly when you’re trying to generate media coverage. Many developers view the mere existence of their cool app as being newsworthy in itself, but while the launch might be exciting to the developer, 99 times out of 100, it means nothing to a reporter or blogger. The main objective of a reporter is to speak to their audience’s interests and tie those interests to current events — presidential election, Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, the Final Four, the Oscars. Timing is everything when pitching a story. (Coincidentally, given the baseball spin, this article is timely because the annual spring opening of the Major League Baseball season in the US is a newsworthy event.) Pinpointing an Audience Additionally, in order to successfully market a new app, particularly a kid’s app, the developer has to strike a balance between reaching kids and their parents. David Eckstein fits the bill — a baseball hero to dads and sons who enjoy baseball together. Moreover, Eckstein was featured in the film Champions of Faith, so he appeals to those interested in biblical narratives. Had Jumping Pages stuck with its original version of the app, the launch would have been too general, and the company would not have had an opportunity to reach a specific demographic. Many app developers feel that their apps are good for everyone — all moms or all kids, for example. Whittling down your audience to a very precise demographic is imperative. Reaching a niche audience, one that will respond positively to your app, is enough to spark word of mouth. Triple Play and “A” Reviews With David’s cooperation, Jumping Pages had a narrator whose back story matched that of the story’s protagonist — a star athlete tied to an newsworthy sporting event and who resonates with a specific demographic. Eckstein made for a triple play and thus gave the developer an opportunity for multiple story angles. The app was featured in over two dozen outlets using a variety of angles to appeal to enthusiasts of sports (Yardbarker), religion (The Christian Post), baseball (MLB.com) and technology (Wired and GeekDad). Also, the timeliness of the World Series gave app reviewers a reason to talk about the app in October. The strategy was effective, and reviews were posted far more quickly than normal. All developers appreciate how important early reviews are, given the usual time lag. The app was praised: “like watching a Disney production,” “… animation is picture perfect and it made me want to read the story again and again,” “…is outstanding with fantastic, vibrant animations and images….” It continues to receive impressive reviews. Cause, Demo and Contest In addition, through Eckstein’s involvement, Jumping Pages had an opportunity to incorporate a cause marketing component into the launch. Eckstein’s charity of choice, Bags of Hope, helped promote the app to its members and Facebook fans. Next, with Eckstein’s involvement, a public reading and demo of the app was arranged, part of a post-launch strategy that would keep the app top of mind during the approaching holidays. A demo and reading of the app featuring Eckstein and his wife, Ashley, took place on November 30th in a Manhattan Apple store, during the start of the hectic holiday shopping season. Finally, Jumping Pages sought a contest partner to run an iPad giveaway (iPad being the number one requested gift for the holidays and the platform of the David and Goliath app). It approached Smart Apps for Kids, a leading review website for children’s apps, to be a partner. The contest, which ran the week before Christmas, garnered over 1,500 new fans for Jumping Pages’ Facebook page and generated excitement for the app and for the developer during the critical last-minute holiday shopping period. Hits the Mark on the First Shot The founding of Jumping Pages and the launch of the David and Goliath app were a success. The high praise, along with the company’s achievements in development and marketing, have enabled the company to move forward on two forthcoming apps: an original interactive story that teaches kids and parents respect for the home, and an interactive musical app for kids, both set for release in the spring of 2012. Rather than haphazardly launch its app or throw precious dollars at risky online maneuvers, Jumping Pages has demonstrated that a thoughtful, strategic and patient approach usually works best. Many app developers rush their product to market without considering the consequences. These days, with the overwhelming amount of information and the number of apps, the more carefully a developer plans their strategy, the more likely their product will launch successfully. And like David, they usually have just one shot at getting it right! Thanks to its partnerships, creative story angles, newsworthy connection, cause component, contest and patience, Jumping Pages did it right. Lessons Learned Keep these points in mind when planning your strategy: Partnership. Launches work best in pairs! Choose a partner whose background gels with your app. For example, Ruckus Media just announced a unique partnership with New York City’s PBS station for the “Cyberchase” app in its math series. . Launches work best in pairs! Choose a partner whose background gels with your app. For example, Ruckus Media just announced a unique partnership with New York City’s PBS station for the “Cyberchase” app in its math series. Relevance. Find a way to tie your app to a current news or seasonal story. News outlets themselves know this better than anyone: just this month, the Washington Post launched a presidential election iPad app. . Find a way to tie your app to a current news or seasonal story. News outlets themselves know this better than anyone: just this month, the Washington Post launched a presidential election iPad app. Audience. Don’t play to a stadium. Rather, cater to an small meaningful audience. Talking about specific audiences, there are even apps for nose-pickers — as well as lawsuits for alleged patent infringement on those nose-picking apps! . Don’t play to a stadium. Rather, cater to an small meaningful audience. Talking about specific audiences, there are even apps for nose-pickers — as well as lawsuits for alleged patent infringement on those nose-picking apps! Cause. Share the wealth by helping a needy organization that fits your app’s demographic. This one really woke me up: did you know you could donate $0.25 to charity every time you hit the snooze button? . Share the wealth by helping a needy organization that fits your app’s demographic. This one really woke me up: did you know you could donate $0.25 to charity every time you hit the snooze button? Relationship. Incorporate unique ways to address and engage your audience. Self Magazine, a leading women’s lifestyle publication, is unveiling a mobile app game of its annual Self Workout in the Park, featuring fitness, health, fashion games with avatars, virtual goods and puzzles. (al) (fi)When the Brits first clapped eyes on the Routemaster bus in 1954, they were understandably reluctant to jump on board. The ‘Double Decker” looked decidedly top-heavy. So the Associated Equipment Company filmed an unladen Routemaster tear-assing around a race-track whilst remaining vertical. Fantasia’s dancing hippos looked equally graceful, but point taken. The British subjects (who didn’t really have a choice anyway) clambered on the “London Bus” for the next 61 years. It’s something to keep in mind when you grab a Springfield Sub-Compact XD, a pistol with more than a passing resemblance to a Double Decker... Unlike the UK’s two-story public conveyance, the Springfield Sub-Compact XD is ill-proportioned in all directions. Though glove-friendly, the trigger guard looks like the stretched image on one of those early 16:9 TVs. Without a pinkie extension (pictured), the grip belongs on a half-scale mock-up. Compared to the drop-dead sexy Ruger SR9c, the Springfield Sub-Compact XD is, as the Italians would say, super brutto. Eccoci qua. Here we are. And we are not alone... Here’s a profile of another compact killer: the Glock 26. Compared to the Glock (above), the Sub-Compact XD doesn’t, aesthetically. Of course, neither polymer pistol is what you’d call a beauty queen. Both guns (and Smith & Wesson’s M&P) make a cinder block look like museum-quality sculpture. That said, the Springfield Sub-Compact XD has its advantages over its natural born enemy. For one thing, the XD’s mag release is ambidextrous; if you’re left-handed, the XD Sub-Compact wins. For another, the Sub-Compact XD has a grip safety. (Debate that amongst yourselves.) A lot of shooters find the Springfield’s grip angle more comfortable than Herr Glock’s Glock. Some gunslingers appreciate the Springfield’s erect nipple (a.ka. the chamber loaded indicator). The Sub-Compact XD also has a rail for a micro-light and carries more ammo than its Austrian rival. How great is that? I’m not sure. Thirteen rounds (XD) vs. ten bullets (26) doesn’t seem like a life-or-death difference to me. Comparing the 13-round Springfield to an eight-round.45 offers a more compelling comparison. But one thing’s for sure: if you plan on tactical reloads with the XD Sub-Compact, or any sub-compact gun, it’s only a matter of time before you pinch your hand whilst inserting a fresh complement of cartridges. And when I say “pinch” I mean “cause an injury that may require stitches and leave a lifelong scar” and a dangerous aversion to tactical reloads. Alternatively, you could load-up the Sub-Compact XD with the 15-round magazine (with free! grip extension) and forgag the reloading deal. But then you’d have a gun with a handle only marginally smaller than the full-sized XD’s; a firearm that won’t imperil your palm and holsters nineteen rounds of ballistic reassurance. All things being equal (which they never are), it’s a moot point. Ask any diehard (they hope) self-defense shooter: accuracy trumps capacity. In the hitting what you aim at department, the Springfield Sub-Compact XD does not disappoint. It really is as good as the Glock 26. Or better. With its extra weight (26 ounces vs. 20), the Sub-Compact XD manages recoil more confidently than the Glock. Although the Springfield’s bore axis is dramatically higher than its Austrian counterpart, the weight helps settle things down quickly, enabling accurate “follow-up” shots. Truth be told, either gun can be mastered with regular practice. But the heft is an important consideration for a newbie, who probably won’t train more than once a month, whose life might one day depend on accurately firing a 9mm firearm with a short barrel. The bottom line is the same for either firearm: superb accuracy at combat distances. One-inch groups at six yards are eminently doable. In terms of shooting on the move, the chances of hitting center mass are as good with the Springfield Sub-Compact XD as they are with the baby Glock—or just about any other small(ish) gun you can name. The Springfield Sub-Compact XD vs. Glock 26 debate is destined to rage amongst the gunnoscenti for years
and where the quality of research would be ensured before approval and subsequent publication. These procedures constituted the first incidences of what we now know as “peer review” – an established procedure deeply valued, today, as a means to filter out or approve new information as recommended and which is currently used almost entirely by all scientific journals. By setting up the first scientific periodical where a public archival record was maintained to preserve the precedence of intellectual effort, Oldenburg had established a public platform for authors to freely present and share their knowledge and for readers to replicate the experiment, scrutinize the results, and verify them. Indeed, Oldenburg’s efforts are largely the foundations of the crucial features that govern today’s scientific journals. Featured Image Credit: The Royal Society AdvertisementsDear 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. Israel said on Friday that it will reject any French initiative to re-start peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Jerusalem reacted shortly after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that his government will recognize a Palestinian state if its efforts in coming weeks to try to break the deadlock between Israelis and Palestinians fail. "France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and make happen the two-state solution," he said.A French diplomatic source added that Paris intended to launch this conference by the summer.The Middle East peace process has stalled because of differences over borders and settlements. There have been no serious moves to resume the peace talks between Israel and Palestinians.If this last attempt at finding a solution hits a wall, "well...in this case, we need to face our responsibilities by recognizing the Palestinian state," Fabius said.As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Fabius added that France had a responsibility to try to keep up efforts to find a solution between Israel and the Palestinians."We see that unfortunately colonization continues and that recently, the Israeli prime minister went so far as to reproach the UN secretary-general for encouraging terrorism on the basis that he had reminded of colonization's illegality and asked that it cease," Fabius said.UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday described Israel's settlements as "provocative acts" that raised questions about its commitment to a two-state solution, nearly 50 years after occupying lands the Palestinians seek for a state.The United States, European Union and the United Nations have issued unusually stern criticism of Israel, provoking a sharp response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and raising Palestinians' hopes of steps against their neighbor.A diplomatic source in Jerusalem told The Jerusalem Post’s Hebrew-language sister publication Ma’ariv that Paris is essentially encouraging Palestinian intransigence by signaling its willingness to recognize statehood, thus prejudicing the outcome of negotiations.“The foreign minister’s statement offers incentive to the Palestinians to reach a deadlock,” an Israeli official said. “It is not possible to conduct negotiations or to achieve peace in such a manner.” Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Vieira has no experience as a professional head coach. He retired as a player in 2011, from the English club Manchester City, after a career in which he won league titles with Arsenal, Inter Milan and Juventus — although the Juventus title was vacated after a refereeing scandal — and in which he lifted both the World Cup and European Championship trophies with France. Since retiring, he had worked for Manchester City in a variety of roles, most recently as the organization’s under-21 coach. Now, he said, he is eager for another challenge. Vieira said he had job offers in the Premier League, in England’s second-tier Championship and in France’s Ligue 1. But he opted for a three-year contract in New York. “To manage a first team, to manage a team with big potential, to build a successful football club, this is what I wanted to do,” he said. Two weeks ago, his former France teammate Zinedine Zidane was also appointed to his first managerial job, at the Spanish juggernaut Real Madrid, with virtually the same qualifications as Vieira. They exchanged wishes of good luck, Vieira said, and while Vieira’s new post is much lower down the global soccer hierarchy, it was surely not the easiest job available to him. Dozens of foreign managers have been put in charge of M.L.S. teams without any prior experience in the league, as a coach or player, and only a few of them were able to adapt to the league’s quirks — salary caps, roster limits, cross-country travel — and find success, especially initially. Vieira, by his own admission, “may not have the best knowledge of the league,” but he expressed confidence that he could overcome that shortcoming. “I think what is important is to be aware of the difficulty that I can find,” he said. “I have to be conscious of it, and I have to plan for it.” Vieira argued that soccer was the same everywhere. “I will have to adapt myself,” he said. “The game doesn’t change. The logistic side of it will change, but I have good people around me who know the league really well. Those people will help me. Hey, I’m quite a good listener.”A SENIOR staffer of Verity Barton is on indefinite leave on full pay after winning a bullying complaint against the Gold Coast MP. The case was heard by WorkCover Queensland, which ruled in the employee’s favour against the gaffe-prone politician, who has also been banished to the back row of the Parliament. The youngest woman ever elected to Queensland Parliament in 2012 was once considered a rising star but Ms Barton now shares the back row with disgraced former Labor MP Billy Gordon. RELATED: SENIOR STAFFER ACCUSES MP OF BULLYING RELATED: POLICE DROP UNLICENSED DRIVING CASE AGAINST BARTON media_camera Allegations of bullying by Verity Barton against a senior staffer have been upheld. The Bulletin can confirm allegations of bullying against a senior staffer have been upheld, with the woman too distressed to return to work. She will remain on full pay indefinitely. Dubbed the Steven Bradbury of politics, Ms Barton was catapulted in to the 2012 election at the 11th hour after two previous candidates were dumped following unrelated scandals. She won the seat and retained her position in the January bloodbath that returned Labor to power. She was hauled over the coals by party officials in the lead-up to the January poll when it was revealed she had been twice suspended from driving over unpaid road tolls and fines. Ms Barton claimed she had not paid the fines due to “an oversight”. Asked at the time whether she had any more skeletons in her closet, Ms Barton denied any more wrongdoing. However, just weeks later evidence of a third driving suspension emerged. Ms Barton has also been the subject of a detailed dirt file from within her own party, with a lengthy list of gaffes and grievances. media_camera Verity Barton, has reportedly been banished to the back row of the Queensland Parliament with disgraced former Labor MP Billy Gordon. Pic: Mark Cranitch. She faced a public backlash in cyberspace over comments she made describing public transport passengers as “icky”. Yesterday a LNP spokeswoman confirmed the bullying investigation had been finalised but would not elaborate. A spokesman for Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk did not return phone calls. Join us on FacebookJan 6 — Lead East Ramapo School Board Monitor Dennis Walcott spoke mostly in monotone during his interview on Tuesday. But midway through the interview Walcott began clapping his hands in emphasis. “I’m here for one reason and one reason only, to make sure that the children of the district are getting a quality education,” he said. “I’m working with the individuals. I’m not running for Oval Office, I’m not trying to curry favor anywhere; it’s just on behalf of the students.” Walcott’s interview with the Journal News Editorial Board on Jan 5 was the first major public follow-up to “Opportunity Deferred: A Report on the East Ramapo Central School District,” issued by his team of state-appointed monitors in mid-December. The report included 19 recommendations — the most contentious of which was implementation of a full-time monitor with veto power over the school board. The Orthodox community — as well as New York State Senator John Flanagan, R-Suffolk — screamed “anti-semitism.” It wasn’t clear who the anti-semite was supposed to be… Walcott? All of the monitors? New York State?… but the thinking went: There are New York districts performing worse than East Ramapo. Why should East Ramapo be the subject of such overwhelming state intervention? Walcott said that the volatile East Ramapo is unique because of the division between the large Orthodox population sending their children to private Yeshivas and the smaller population of mostly racial minorities in the district sending their children to public schools. “I agree that you have districts that are in worse shape educationally, but I think the challenges this district faces are unique to any other district. You have populations that are growing. You have an English language learner population that’s growing. You have a community with private school students that are growing like crazy [in number]. And as a result of that, there will be challenges — not just now, but in the future — that need to be addressed… You have a community and a district that unfortunately is still very separated, and you have to find a way to bring them together. And I know you have extremes on both sides. And the question is how you bring those extremes together in service of what’s in the best interests of the students.” Walcott’s report recommended appointing a monitor with veto power over the board as a first step in bringing those extremes together. “I think [the veto’s] something that’s extremely important because we can’t allow what happened in the past, in the selling of buildings or other issues that have surfaced, to resurface again, and harm the students in the long run,” Walcott said. Walcott was not specific about what feared the East Ramapo School Board, led by Yehuda Weissmandl, might do. He emphasized early in the interview that he thinks “Mr. Yehuda’s been a great leader” and “has set a very good stance in terms of working with the various communities and working with the interim superintendent and making sure some of the past issues were addressed.” The board has made strides; a monitor on the ground with veto power, though, would help rebuild the institution. That was the gist, that the monitors should be a support, rather than a crux, for the board and the community. “The board is very frail,” Walcott said, voice still unwavering, carefully choosing his words. “[It’s] very tenuous, and it shouldn’t rely on one individual.”Corrie de Jager, a Pretoria-based lawyer, joins Duncan McLeod in this episode of the TechCentral podcast to talk about a “ground-breaking” invention that, he believes, will literally change the world. De Jager, with a team of scientists, academics and other experts, have developed a “membrane-less” method of separating hydrogen from water, potentially making it possible to produce hydrogen on a mass scale at a cost of just 5-10% of existing techniques. If they’re right – and De Jager explains in detail in the podcast how the technology works – it could help pave the way to the green hydrogen economy of the future. The technology does not require the use of a membrane to separate the hydrogen and oxygen produced through the electrolysis process Hydrox Holdings’ solution was recently awarded a patent in the US, and the team is now ready to commercialise the technology, which could, De Jager explains, revolutionise the car industry, paving the way for completely clean transportation. Its Divergent Electrode Flow Through Technology (DEFT) is a “game-changer in the production of hydrogen in that it takes a unique approach to electrolysis and does not require the use of a membrane to separate the hydrogen and oxygen produced through the electrolysis process”, the company explains. This is important because hydrogen is an excellent source of clean (carbon-free) energy. However, the methodology of producing hydrogen is capital-intensive, making hydrogen extremely expensive and cost-inefficient as a regular energy source. Cheaper and more accessible hydrogen should enable increased development of hydrogen technologies and increased applications for this type of energy as an alternative “off-grid” solution. TechCentral first interviewed De Jager in January 2013. Since then, De Jager says Hydrox had made significant progress with its prototypes — there has been extensive development, testing, measuring and continual evolution. The company is now looking a “big brother” to take the solution to market — are you listening, Elon Musk? Content hosted by iono.fm How to subscribe to TechCentral’s podcasts There are many ways to enjoy TechCentral’s podcasts, beyond simply streaming them from our website. A good way is by subscribing to them using an app on your phone, allowing you to listen in the car, at the gym or wherever you happen to be. The TechCentral Podcast RSS feed is available via iono.fm. Note that this is a separate feed to the weekly TalkCentral podcast, the RSS for which is available here. If you’d like both podcasts in one RSS feed, that’s here. Use the RSS feeds to subscribe to either podcast (or both podcasts) in your favourite reader (we recommend Pocket Casts for Android, iOS and Windows Phone — look for “TechCentral” in its search engine to find both shows). We are also available through iTunes. Simply open the iTunes app on your iPhone and search for “TechCentral” to find the two podcasts. — (c) 2017 NewsCentral Media- Advertisement - A late 2007 New York Times editorial urged the arrest of Ahmad Harun, Sudan's interior minister from 2003 to 2005, who funded and armed the janjaweed militias that are said to have murdered 200,000 people and driven 2.5 million from their homes. Harun has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court. The editorial calls for Harun to be surrendered to The Hague for prosecution. It stresses that "holding government officials responsible for the genocide in Darfur is crucial... not only as a weapon of this genocide but as a way to fight the next one." Every word in the editorial was true, and the Times is to be commended for calling for justice to be meted out to government officials who instigate, fund, and enable the murders of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and other crimes against humanity. What I have a problem with is the obvious exception made in the administration of justice when it comes to crimes committed by American government officials. (Image by Unknown Owner) Details DMCA - Advertisement - Estimates of deaths in Iraq as a direct result of the American invasion vary widely, and have been routinely suppressed and creatively spun by the Bush administration. The lowest estimates are in the area of 85,000 civilian dead, but those estimates only count civilians killed by military violence that are reported by at least two approved international media sources. The authors of such estimates openly acknowledge that thousands of deaths go unreported in their findings, and also that they do not use any valid scientific method to arrive at their numbers. - Advertisement - The highest credible estimates are over one million Iraqi dead. That Sept. 2007 study, conducted by ORB, the reputable British polling agency, found that about 1,033,000 more people have died violent deaths in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 through August 2007, than would have died had the invasion not occurred. The number of Iraqi refugees who have fled to neighboring countries has now reached 2.2 million. The number of displaced Iraqi citizens driven from their homes to other locations inside Iraq has risen to more than 2 million. A side-by-side comparison of the alleged crimes of Ahmad Harun and those that can be attributed to Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq is very telling: Harun is responsible for 200,000 deaths and 2.5 million displaced citizens. Bush is responsible for 1,000,000 deaths and 4.2 million refugees. Uncalculated and untold civilian wounded. Even if the math is off a bit - hell, even if you cut Bush's numbers in half - he still beats Harun in total lives ruined. Joshua Holland of AlterNet points out : "These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century -- the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s." On the orders of George W. Bush, hundreds of thousands of small arms and more potent weapons have been distributed to the Iraqi military, police, and even militias, and now we are arming and funding both Shia and Sunni warlords and their gangs, many of whom have until very recently been insurgents fighting and killing American soldiers and Marines. - Advertisement - We are actually paying them not to shoot at us. And George Bush and John McCain say Obama is the one "negotiating with terrorists." General David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee on last Sept. 11, that Iraq has already made a $1.6 billion arms deal with the U.S., and has plans to buy $1.8 billion more. A Government Accountability Office report concluded that nearly 200,000 weapons bought by American taxpayers and intended for issue to Iraqi security forces are missing. It is feared that the infusion of arms will provide the means for a full-scale civil war and unfettered genocide, and that the U.S. may be arming their past and future enemies. As Salon's Mark Benjamin reports, weapons proliferation expert William Hartung of the New America Foundation says, "I think this is kind of crazy... Now we are making deals with some of these Sunni groups. Well, what if they turn around and go back to being insurgents after we have built them up? I think the danger of these arms being misused, even in the short term, is fairly high." After WWII, we tried and convicted many Japanese as war criminals for waterboarding Allied prisoners. Some of them were executed for their crimes. Waterboarding was considered by many to be one of the worst forms of torture imaginable. In the war crimes trial of one Japanese officer, Judge Advocate General, Lt. Col. Allan Browne said the charge "...includes the savage and barbarian water treatment and far exceeds in beastiality the 'run of the mine' brutality established in this case." The Japanese officer was sentenced to 22 years at hard labor. Another Japanese soldier who waterboarded a Filipino Lawyer got life. Next Page 1 \| 2Can we just start with the revelation that Bruno’s real name is Peter?! Peter Gene. That makes me chuckle. I love it. Okay, now we can move on… It was a big night here in my hometown of Charlotte, NC on September 14! A lot of my friends were divided between going to hear Brené Brown speak and going to watch Bruno Mars perform. All About Brené Brené is an author and research professor at the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work. Her research and books center around our ability to be vulnerable and our experience of empathy, shame, and connection. She is most well known for her TED Talk on the power of vulnerability. As a therapist, it is basically required that I buy into her work and truthfully, I totally am bought in. It isn’t necessarily that she’s saying anything new if you will, but couple all of the research she has done on human connection with her relatable, story-telling style and it seems to resonate with people differently. I have had many clients experience “aha” moments of clarity, validation, and encouragement in Brown’s words, and I’ve experienced this personally. I saw her speak last year and she was hilarious and inspiring. She makes people truly feel like they can take risks and especially when you’re sitting in a room with a ton of other people wanting to receive the same message, you leave feeling like you all want to hug and high five and probably sing Kumbaya through tears. For people who recognize their own mask they wear to hide their true selves and for people who value authenticity, Brown feels like a friend and a cheerleader and an advocate for intentionally living. I would’ve loved to experience her message this year in particular, though, during a time of such dissonance and injustice in our world that is way more palpable given the President in office and those whom he’s emboldened. Apparently, people left Brown’s talk not just wanting to sing Kumbaya, but being propelled to action — and for a group of mostly middle-aged white people (primarily women) to be invigorated or ignited in this way is a good, good thing. What thrilled me to hear from friends who attended was that she didn’t leave room for interpretation at a superficial level. She went where those of us who sit in our (white) privilege needed her to go since there are many people who can only hear it from another person who looks like us. My friend Justin Perry (husband, father, social worker, tireless activist for African-Americans and other marginalized groups, co-chair of One Meck) shared this after attending Brown’s talk: “Her ability to speak and challenge us all to see the humanity in each other even when difficult is a gift.” Her ability to speak directly to the dehumanizing of African Americans to an overwhelmingly white audience and articulate the need for the movement for black lives; as well as the responsibility that her husband and male family members who wear khakis and polo’s have to confront the realities of Charlottesville was incredible. Her ability to discuss concepts such as shame, vulnerability, belonging, as well as standing alone from a clinical, as well as social justice manner, definitely speaks my love language.” For there to be genuine and lasting change, those of us in the majority have to have awareness and acknowledge systemic racism and how we are complicit in perpetuating it. That in and of itself can feel uncomfortable and vulnerable and helpless, of course, but without each of us honestly and vigorously checking ourselves (and those around us) on this daily, we remain the problem. Taking the easy way out by staying quiet or inactive makes us complicit in the consistent injustice towards minority groups. Learning to tolerate the discomfort we might feel in our own self-reflection or in starting a dialogue with our peers or family members or in taking to the streets during a protest is the only way we will all belong together and move forward. Brown’s latest tour and book, Braving the Wilderness, discusses what it means to belong in this age of increased division. Random House, her publisher, describes how Brown “argues that we’re experiencing a spiritual crisis of disconnection… [She] offers us the clarity and courage we need to find our way back to ourselves and to each other. And that path cuts right through the wilderness.” They go on to say that Brown’s primary message is that “true belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are…True belonging requires us to believe in and belong to ourselves so fully that we can find sacredness both in being a part of something and in standing alone when necessary. But in a culture that’s rife with perfectionism and pleasing, and with the erosion of civility, it’s easy to stay quiet, hide in our ideological bunkers, or fit in rather than showing up as our true selves and brave the wilderness of uncertainty and criticism. But true belonging is not something we negotiate or accomplish with others; it’s a daily practice that demands integrity and authenticity. It’s a personal commitment that we carry in our hearts.” The ’24K Magic’ tour This is my segue to singer-songwriter, Bruno Mars. He has done many interviews in which he has been very open and raw and non-apologetic for sticking to what he came for and not selling out (i.e. being his true self): “I’m here to do music. And I want to be able to look back and say, ‘Yeah, I did it the way I wanted to do it.’ Whether it triumphs or fails, I can live with that.” He has also discussed having to find his way when he moved to L.A. from Hawaii: “I only started writing songs when I moved up to L.A. because when I was in Hawaii, I never really needed to…But it stemmed from just learning that you have to do everything by yourself. It’s not like what you see in movies, where you walk into a record company and you’re given all these great songs to sing. You have to write the song the world is going to want to hear and play it over and over again. I learned that the hard way here in L.A.” (biography.com). “You have to do everything by yourself.” Isn’t that where it all starts? Of course, we all need our villages and are fulfilled by being that for someone else, but internal reflection and commitment is the root for each of us and how we are then able to show up for others, especially for those who are not heard as easily or are even disregarded. This is so desperately needed and nearly impossible when we don’t have a connection to our true selves. In an Music nostalgia and the influence of live music is palpable and powerful and renders its own vulnerability as it creates experiences for people. Mars does this brilliantly. His performances and shows are evidence of him (and his band) having a blast and leaving it all on the stage. Leaving a piece of ourselves everywhere we go is how we each belong to the greater whole. What is the piece of yourself that you want to leave? As long as you are secure in your values and in doing what is right, that mark will be genuine and, if you’re lucky, perhaps you will even leave people wanting more. Or at least you will leave them changed in some way – whether it is in the way they think, in their mindfulness of their own implicit biases, or in the ways they’d like to grow. This is the 24k magic of the potential of living in a just and equal world. I chose to get my uptown funk on with Bruno this time around. I didn’t belong there. I absolutely belonged there. I danced like I’d rather be nowhere else. I looked around at yet another largely white crowd and prayed for an awareness, while we were entertained by this Boricuan and Filipino musician who doesn’t look like us, that we would take that feeling we had that night and carry it into our own personal wilderness: to “dance like no one is watching” by showing up, speaking out, fighting, resisting, spreading love. This week is the one-year anniversary of the Keith Lamont Scott shooting here in Charlotte, NC and the uprising that resulted. “We need to continue to ask ourselves how we are braving our wildernesses to help address issues of racism, poverty, school segregation, and the housing crisis.” Brown writes, “The wilderness is an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.” We need to keep working and learn how to stand confidently in our own shoes so that we can stand (and dance) together. What is the piece of yourself that you want to leave?With the start of the Minsk ceasefire less than 48 hours away, a column of 38 BTR-80 armored personnel carriers (APC) was observed traveling north along the M18/E105 highway in Crimea on February 13, 2015. Their destination, as far as the videos show, is to Dzhankoi, a city lying just a 40km drive from the Ukrainian border. Russian military exercises for the Black Sea Fleet were ongoing at the time of the convoy, ending on February 14. This column of BTR-80 vehicles, many of which are marked with specific identifying numbers and markers, was first observed in two separate videos traveling north along the M18/E105 highway between Krasna Zor’ka and Novoandriivka, then later about 70 kilometers north on a major street in the city of Dzhankoi. In all three videos, the column of BTR-80 vehicles are headed north towards Dzhankoi. It is unclear if these 38 vehicles were involved in the military exercises, but one Crimean news source believes so. A three videos that emerged on February 13 show the north-bound convoy appeared on February 13, 2015. The first video shows a driver headed north along the M18/E105 highway, passing a long column of BTR vehicles before reaching a point in which the separate lanes of the highway merge. In the image below, two key points–the merging of the separate lanes into one and a distinct tower to the right of the driver–are both present at 45.190737, 34.078051: A separate video showing the same scene was also posted today, in which a driver traveling south (the opposite direction of the video above) captures the same scene. The same tower is visible, along with a truck that is visible at the very end of the first video: In the Dzhankoi video, the perspective is from a large apartment building looking down on a street in Dzhankoi, showing a large convoy of BTR-80 vehicles. Highway M18/E105 turns into Radyans’ka Street, which is where the BTR column is located on the video. The video is shot from an apartment building located at 45.700278, 34.401819, which can be clearly identified when comparing a scene from the video with a photo on Panoramio showing the gas station to the south of the apartment building: When taking these three videos into account, we can see the route taken by the convoy. At 0:45 seconds in the first highway video, we see the kilometer marker “632,” and at the end of the video where the lanes merge, the number “628” appears. We can thus assume that the video shows 4-5km of highway, giving us a better starting point for the route. The origin point of the convoy was likely Simferopol, or the convoy moved through the city before heading north on M18/E105. The movement of military hardware through Russian-annexed Crimea is not necessarily indicative of aggression or conspiratorial machinations. The timing of the military exercises may be curious, as some have called it “saber-rattling,” but Russia has long emphasized the importance of the readiness of its forces in Crimea and these exercises are not out of out of the ordinary over the past year. However, saber-rattling or not, the Bellingcat Vehicle Tracking Project enables us to track these individual BTR-80 units in the future with any additional sightings in Crimea or, if the upcoming ceasefire does not hold and the situation seriously deteriorates, eastern Ukraine. Update: Information added in the first and final paragraphs regarding the Black Sea military exercises.The Trendnet TS-S402 is a discontinued network storage enclosure that was sold to individuals for personal data storage. Like every Internet-of-Things (IoT) device, it runs on software programmed and/or configured by the manufacturer before shipping it to the end-user, i.e. the firmware. Firmware versions 2.00.10 and below of this particular device have a serious vulnerability allowing remote root access. This target thus provides an excellent exercise for reverse engineering while providing an example of a vulnerability that is unfortunately way too common in IoT: backdoors by design. In this post, we will introduce Binwalk and provide the background necessary to do the same on a large variety of firmware for consumer-level devices, using the TS-S402 as a practical example. A video of this post is also available. The Trendnet TS-S402 Before reversing any device, it’s important to actually understand its functionalities, components and any other piece of information that may help along the analysis of its firmware. The webpage of the product highlights the following features: Access your data from the Internet (FTP) and on your local network Microprocessor : Marvell 88F5182 : Marvell 88F5182 IDE Controller : ITE IT8211F : ITE IT8211F Real Time OS : Embedded Linux (Kernel Version 2.4.25) : Embedded Linux (Kernel Version 2.4.25) File Protocols: Microsoft Networks (CIFS / SMB) Internet (HTTP 1.1) FTP, FTPS (SSL FTP) Why are these facts important? Not all of the will be useful, but some may provide you with an overall idea of what to expects once you start analyzing the firmware file. In many cases, especially with consumer-level devices, reversing firmware is fairly straightforward and common open-source tools will do the heavy lifting for you. But if you move on to industrial firmware, awareness of the device is important as you will be faced with unheard operating systems, libraries and unknown file formats. In this case, we can expect to see a Linux-based Operating System (OS) hosting a HTTP and FTP server, along with Samba compatibility. The manufacturer is even generous enough to provide the underlying microprocessor, which can be helpful when conducting even deeper analysis for vulnerabilities in the binaries. Reversing the Firmware The vulnerability we are looking for is present only in versions 2.00.10 and below of the firmware, which you can download from the repository of the company. Unzip the archive and you’ll to obtain the following files: TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin readme.txt release_TS-S402.txt REMOTE_PACKAGE_2_20.bin It’s always a good idea to read the release notes and README files. Doing so may save you time and headaches trying to figure things out. If you’re into bug hunting, the release notes can be useful to list the changes and patches included in this version, providing potential hints to patched vulnerabilities of previous versions. The two “.bin” files contain the programs and OS of the device. In this case, based on the filename, the TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin is the main firmware file and thus, the focus of this post. The first step is always to check if we can determine the file type by using the file command. If we are lucky, it is a known file type and some application exists to extract the relevant files/information out of it. Using the file command (Shell) root@ReSyst:/targets/trendnet/ts-s402# file TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin: data 1 2 root @ ReSyst : / targets / trendnet / ts - s402 # file TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin TS - S402_FW_2_00_10.bin : data However we are not so lucky. The file command returns “data”, which means it found the file to be binary data without any specific structure or format. So we will need to use a more powerful tool: binwalk. Binwalk is very useful reverse engineering toolkit which can analyze and extract files from unknown binary files. However note that it can also return quite a few false positives. The only way to recognize them is with experience and trial-and-error. If not already done, install binwalk with apt using sudo apt-get install binwalk and run the following command: Analyzing the TS-S402 Firmware with Binwalk (Shell) binwalk -x lzma TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin 1 binwalk - x lzma TS - S402_FW_2_00_10.bin The command above asks binwalk to check out the TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin file and try to find interesting files or structures inside it. We use the “-x lzma” argument to eXclude any findings about LZMA-compressed data: these are false positives in this case. You will obtain the following result: Binwalk result for the TS-S402 (Shell) DECIMAL HEXADECIMAL DESCRIPTION ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 32 0x20 gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: 2009-04-21 04:22:15 1 2 3 DECIMAL HEXADECIMAL DESCRIPTION -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- - 32 0x20 gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified : 2009 - 04 - 21 04 : 22 : 15 In other words, there seems to be a 32-bytes header followed by a GZip-compressed file. At this point, we want to carve this gzip file out of the binary file for further investigation. You can use the dd command to do so, but binwalk provides the -e option to Extract files for you. Extracting files from TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin binwalk -ex lzma TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin 1 binwalk - ex lzma TS - S402_FW_2_00_10.bin The carved files will be outputted to a directory labelled _TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin.extracted, in which you will find a single file called 20, which is the offset of the file in the larger firmware. Using the file command again, we now get a more interesting result: Using file on the extracted file from TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin root@ReSyst:/targets/trendnet/ts-s402/_TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin.extracted# file 20 20: POSIX tar archive (GNU) 1 2 root @ ReSyst : / targets / trendnet / ts - s402 / _TS - S402_FW_2_00_10.bin.extracted # file 20 20 : POSIX tar archive ( GNU ) This time, the file command clearly recognized a TAR archive, meaning we can simply untar the file with the command below: Untar archive from TS-S402_FW_2_00_10.bin tar -xvf 20 1 tar - xvf 20 This archive contained even more files: a uImage and a filesystem: uImage rootfs.armeb.squashfs The uImage is the boot loader of the firmware and you will often find this file or something similar in most Linux-based firmware. Analysis of the uImage will be left
. “The best compliment I ever get is when somebody tells me they learned something but also that I come across as a friendly and comfortable broadcaster and they felt like they were a part of it,” he said. “Because Dave and I joke around on the air, off the air, on the way to the game, after the game, I want to be really careful that we’re not joking around at the wrong time.” For an analyst, someone who is always looking to add some insight to what is happening on the field, the hardest thing to do sometimes is hold back. @CJNitkowski I was always interested to know, what are the differences in doing a national and local broadcast behind the scenes? — Chris ⚾ (@Chris_the_twin) May 1, 2017 @CJNitkowski I don't understand why people need to chit chat on their phone once they board a plane. — Ed Pfaeffle (@edpkp81) April 29, 2017 “When it’s quiet, five seconds feels like five minutes, but it’s OK to lay out,” Nitkowski said. “I have to be disciplined. I always feel like I could add something, whether it’s really insightful or maybe run of the mill. I have to be comfortable with silence especially on TV. I know there are times I could probably be a little better at backing off.” Nitkowski, 44, who has two kids in high school and another in third grade, lives in Atlanta, but says moving back to Texas (he lived in Sugar Land for 10 years) is possible if he finds a permanent home with the Rangers. “I think this is the second-best job in the game. Putting on a uniform and playing will always be No. 1,” he said. “I get excited every time.”Before you get into this, I am sorry, this post is long, it may or may not make a lot of sense, and I am sure a lot of people would argue with what I have said. Carry on. Indestructible miter. A bold claim I know. Indestructible and miter are words that do not often go together. The miter opened up, this mitre won’t close, why did I choose to use these damn miters, all a lot more common to hear. But bear (bare?) with me here, what you are about to see below is an adapted version of a joint that was introduced to me as “the indestructible miter.” Or if you would like to take it down a few notches on the “awesome scale” the plywood L-tenon. It is exactly as it sounds. Plywood and indestructible are again two words we are not used to hearing together, but it is the perfect material for an L-Tenon. Why you may be asking? Alternating grain direction for maximum strength. It is really just that simple. Miters are difficult to join because of the amount of end grain in the joint (end grain has no glue strength). This is why typically we cut keys or splines in a miter joint is to gain some “face grain glue surface.” But isn’t half of plywood end grain? Sounds like you are going against your own advice…. You got me, it’s true, but the other half is perfect face grain to face grain glue surface. And the end grain portion on the one side of the miter is the face grain on the other part of the board. Tricky no? But there’s another part to this equation. Keys / splines and most other miter “joinery” has very little “depth” into the actual boards. This may be okay for little boxes, or a casepiece, but chairs are under stress, a lot of stress, and they need something a little more substantial. The “L-Tenons” allow me to route deep (in this case around 2″) mortises into both parts. What I end up with is a 2″ worth of tenon (and a longer bit could get me more) into either side of the miter. Quite a bit of depth all things considered. Couple this with the alternating grain and you have a joint that is “indestructible,” relatively speaking anyways. This may be a lot to take in at this point, hopefully the pictures will clear it up some. For the record these are a bit of a variation on your standard “Plywood L-Tenon” as they are obtuse angles and canted as well. Testing as to the actual strength will commence once the stool is together. Stay tuned.Soon, the world’s leading particle physicists will be using an instrument built by Cal Poly students. Professor Jennifer Klay and a team of Cal Poly physics students are building a new detector for the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The work is done in collaboration with students and faculty at Chicago State University and funded by a $190,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The detector is a crucial piece of equipment for ALICE, one of four experiments running at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. The most famous finding from the LHC in recent years was the discovery of the Higgs boson. Detectors allow scientists to make discoveries such as the Higgs. Inside the LHC, two high-energy particle beams travel close to the speed of light and then collide. Some of the thousands of particles produced in the collision are extremely rare. The detector the students will build has a trillionth of a second to decide whether the particle it senses is important enough to record as data. “This is the fastest detector in the system,” Klay said. “It’s a critical detector for ALICE because it tells you whether any given collision is worth investigating further.” Constructing the detector will take three years and require precise testing. The finished product will fit on a typical office desk. “Working on hardware development is a Learn by Doing, hands-on process,” Klay said. “For an undergraduate only institution to build a detector is pretty rare.” In 2019, the students will travel to CERN to install the detector. “They will get to work with world-class scientists and know that they were instrumental in enabling the next 10 years of data collection,” Klay said. “That’s an amazing opportunity for them and a great jumping off point for a career or graduate school.” Students at San Luis Obispo High School will also be involved in the project, thanks to physics teacher and Cal Poly alumnus Kevin Coulombe, who traveled to CERN as a student.Study by LGBT association Gay Center reveals the turmoil of dozens of young gay boys and girls. Last week a Roman 14-year-old boy jumped from his window after leaving a dramatic letter to his parents One Italian gay teen in three has considered suicide in the last 12 months, a survey by Roman LGBT association Gay Center has revealed. Gay Center’s president Fabrizio Marrazzo told Gay Star News: ‘We interviewed 4,000 teenagers and more than a thousand told us they have thought about suicide at least once in their lifetime. ‘Homosexuality can be a hell when combined with bullying at school or with families not accepting their sons and daughters.’ The study comes after the case of a 14-year-old boy who committed suicide last week in Rome. The unnamed teenager jumped from a window, at home, after leaving a letter to his parents. He wrote: ‘Nobody accepts me’. The boy left a list of 12 guys who have been allegedly bullying him in the last months. Now, the Roman magistrates are investigating for manslaughter and will try to find out the reasons behind this suicide. However, Marrazzo told GSN: ‘This was just a case. Every year, dozens of Italian LGBT teenagers commit suicide and their families don’t reveal the truth. ‘Every year, Gay Center receives at least 20,000 contacts, the 60% of the phone calls are really dramatic. ‘Now, in summer, a very common problem is that of gay students coming back to their villages from the cities, for holidays, and finding discrimination at home and among their friends and relatives. ‘Every year, dozens of LGBT young people are literally kidnapped by their families: their mobiles confiscated, their freedom reduced and sometimes they can not attend school or university.’ Gay Center manages a gay help line on 800713713 (from Italy only).(Via Monumental Network) In a three-paragraph interview with ESPN the Magazine, Wizards creative liaison Wale managed to say several truly remarkable things. Among them: * “I want to be a shot in the arm to DC basketball. My job is to provide a spark, at all costs.” * “I’m talking to Kanye about designing new uniforms.” * “I want to create the “Lake Show,” create what the Bulls had.” * “I want to take the personality of our stars — John, Otto, Marcin — and create what Kemp and Payton had, what LeBron and D-Wade had.” * “Even if you’re coming to a game for the wrong reasons, like trying to win a pair of shoes or something, I want you into it.” To repeat the second item for a second, what it says is that Wale is talking to Kanye about designing new uniforms. That would be something. Wonder what Kris Humphries might think. Among other things. The story’s introduction also said Wale’s role “is to bring fun back to the Verizon Center,” describing him as a “long-suffering Wiz fan.” Of course, some Wizards fans have been skeptical about Wale’s role. Haters gonna hate. Others have pointed out this quote from way, way back in 2009. “Yeah, but I gotta be honest, I’m not the biggest Wizards fan,” Wale said then. “I usually root for the Nuggets and the Cavs.” Wale’s previous comments about his liaison role, to the team’s Monumental Network, were a bit less grandiose than the whole Kanye uniform thing. “Whatever I can do to provide,” Wale said in the fall. “Even if I gotta come out there as G-Wiz, or he’s gotta take a day off, I come out there and do a couple of front flips, and dunk it and whatever, I’m here for that. … You might see me. If one day [G-Wiz] has got that extra swag, he’s got that extra bop with him, it might be me under there.” G-Wiz and Kayne have similar Q Scores, I believe. (Via Ted Leonsis)Earlier today, an unmanned Russian rocket exploded minutes after take-off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. As The New York Times reports: The Proton-M rocket rose just above its launch tower during the early morning launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, wobbled and then tipped over into the desert in a ball of fire. For Western commercial clients of Russia's space launch services and for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration the Proton-M's short flight on Tuesday, the fourth Proton failure in three years, was sure to raise questions about safety. In recent years, NASA has relied on Russia to provide transportation for American astronauts headed to the International Space Station. But those space flights have been powered by a Soyuz rocket that has a strong safety record. The Russian space agency did not immediately offer an explanation for the crash.Plot Edit Young couple Katie and Micah move to a new house in San Diego. Katie claims an evil presence has been haunting her since she was a child, so Micah sets up a camera in their bedroom to record any paranormal activity that occurs while they sleep. A famous psychic Dr. Fredrichs, who reveals that Katie is being haunted by a demon that feeds off of negative energy and is intent on tormenting Katie, advises them not to communicate with the demon and to contact demonologist Dr. Johann Averies if needed. Katie seems interested, but Micah does not take this seriously. The camera manages to capture many strange occurrences, which are minor at first, such as noises, flickering lights, and doors moving on their own. However, Micah taunts and mocks the demon, worsening the situation. During the thirteenth night, the demon angrily screeches and there is a loud thud, causing the entire house to vibrate. Voice recorder tests are conducted by Micah the following morning, which reveal demonic grunting when Micah asks if it would like to use a Ouija board. During the fifteenth night, Katie, in an apparent trance, stands beside the bed and stares at Micah for two hours before going outside. Micah tries to convince Katie to go back inside, but she refuses and appears to remember none of it the next day. Micah brings home a Ouija board, which infuriates Katie. When they leave the house, the camera records an unseen force moving the planchette to form an unknown message on the Ouija board, which then spontaneously catches fire. Katie sees the video and pleads with Micah to contact the demonologist, but again he refuses. During the seventeenth night, Micah sprinkles baby powder in the hallway and outside the bedroom door. The couple are awakened by creaks, and find non-human footprints leading to the attic, where Micah finds a burnt photograph of a young Katie (same picture from the second film). Katie finally calls the demonologist, Dr. Averies, but he is out of the country. The events of the seventeenth night have psychologically terrified the couple, which in turn has strengthened the demon. Over the next few nights, the paranormal activity is excessive and intense. They eventually call Dr. Fredrichs back to the house, but he is overwhelmed by the demonic energy upon entering. He apologetically leaves despite their pleas, stating that his presence only makes the demon angrier. The bleak reality causes the couple to lose all hope, which makes the demon strong enough to be able to pull Katie out of the bedroom and bite her, causing her to become fully possessed. Micah discovers the bite mark and—deciding events are too out of control to remain in the house—he packs to head to a motel. Just as they are set to leave, the possessed Katie insists they will be okay now. The following night, Katie gets out of bed and stares at Micah for two hours before going downstairs. After a moment of silence, Katie screams for Micah; he abruptly rushes to help her. Afterward, Micah exclaims in pain, Katie stops screaming, and then heavy footsteps are heard coming upstairs. Suddenly, Micah's body is violently hurled at the camera, which is knocked off the tripod, revealing a demonic Katie standing in the doorway. She slowly walks into the room, stained with blood, and crawls to Micah's body, then looks up at the camera with a grin. As she lunges toward the camera, her face takes on a demonic appearance just as the scene cuts to black. Epilogue text states that Micah's body was discovered by the police on October 11, 2006, and Katie's whereabouts remain unknown. Alternate endings Edit Once Paramount acquired the film, the original ending was scrapped, and two new endings were developed for the film, one of them being the one seen in theaters (the scrapped ending was shown at only one public viewing).[11][12] Original Edit Katie returns to the bedroom and sits down against the bed with the knife in her hand, rocking back and forth, for almost two days straight. Her friend Amber calls and leaves a message, saying that she is concerned because she hasn't heard from Katie or Micah. Amber eventually comes looking for her, but when she enters the house, she is heard screaming after seeing Micah's body. The creature possessing Katie leaves her body, scaring Amber out of the house before returning to Katie, who resumes rocking back and forth. Police officers arrive at the house about a half hour later and discover Micah's body as well. They call to Katie, who wakes from her catatonic state and seems confused. Katie comes out of the bedroom with the knife still in her hand. The police ask her to drop the knife. Following a heated confrontation, a door behind one of the police officers slams shut, startling one of the officers, which causes him to shoot Katie, killing her. The film ends with the police investigating the area and finding nothing but the camera, still running. Paramount alternate ending Edit In this ending, available as an alternate ending in the home releases of the film, Katie returns to the bedroom after the screaming and noise of her and Micah struggling downstairs. She is holding a knife and covered in blood. She closes and locks the bedroom door. Katie walks over and smiles at the camera before cutting her own throat. The screen then fades to black. Unfilmed alternate ending Edit A third alternate ending was written in which a possessed Katie would corner Micah and bludgeon him to death with his camera, while viewers watch from the camera's point of view. This version was deemed too complicated and too brutal to shoot.[13] Cast Edit Katie Featherston as Katie Micah Sloat as Micah Mark Fredrichs as Dr. Fredrichs Amber Armstrong as Amber Ashley Palmer as Diane Spencer Marks as Dr. Johann Averies Production Edit Attempting to focus on believability rather than action and gore, Peli chose to shoot the picture with a home video camera. In deciding on a more raw and stationary format (the camera was almost always sitting on a tripod or something else) and eliminating the need for a camera crew, a "higher degree of plausibility" was created for the audience as they were "more invested in the story and the characters".[14] Peli says that the dialogue was "natural" because there was no real script. Instead, the actors were given outlines of the story and situations to improvise, a technique known as "retroscripting" also used in the making of The Blair Witch Project.[14] In casting the movie, Peli auditioned "a few hundred people" before finally meeting Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat. He originally auditioned them individually and later called them back to audition together. Peli was impressed with the chemistry between the actors, saying, "If you saw the [audition] footage, you would've thought they had known each other for years."[14] During a guest appearance on The Jay Leno Show on November 3, 2009, Sloat and Featherston explained they each saw the casting call on LACasting. Featherston noted they were originally paid $500 for their work. The film was shot out of sequence due to Peli's self-imposed seven-day shooting schedule,[15] though Peli would have preferred the story unfold for the actors as he had envisioned it. Sloat, who controlled the camera for a good deal of the film, was a former cameraman at his university's TV station. "It was a very intense week", Peli said, stating that the film would be shot day and night, edited at the same time, and would have the visual effects applied to it as the acting footage was being finalized.[14] Multiple endings were conceived, but not all of them were shot.[16] The film was screened at 2007's Screamfest Horror Film Festival, where it impressed an assistant at the Creative Artists Agency, Kirill Baru, so much that CAA signed on to represent Peli. Attempting to find a distributor for the film and/or directing work for Peli, the agency sent out DVDs of the movie to as many people in the industry as they could, and it was eventually seen by Miramax Films Senior Executive Jason Blum, who thought it had potential. He worked with Peli to re-edit the film and submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival, but it was rejected. The DVD also impressed DreamWorks executives Adam Goodman, Stacey Snider, and finally Steven Spielberg, who cut a deal with Blum and Peli.[15] DreamWorks' plan was to remake the film with a bigger budget and with Peli directing, and only to include the original version as an extra when the DVD was eventually released. "They didn't know what to do with [the original]", said Blum; they just wanted to be "in business" with Peli.[15] Blum and Peli agreed, but stipulated a test screening of the original film before going ahead with the remake, believing it would be well received by a theatrical audience.[15] During the screening, people began walking out; Goodman thought the film was bombing, until he learned that the viewers were actually leaving because they were so frightened. He then realized a remake was unwise.[15] Paramount Pictures, which acquired DreamWorks in 2005, bought the domestic rights to the film, and worldwide rights to any sequels, for US$350,000.[17] When the film was taken in by Paramount, several changes were made. Some scenes were cut, others added, and the original ending was scrapped, with two new endings being shot.[18] The ending shown in theaters during the film's worldwide release is the only one of the three to feature visual effects, and it differs from the endings previously seen at the Screamfest and Burbank screenings.[19] The theatrical release was delayed indefinitely because Paramount had put all DreamWorks productions on hold. Meanwhile, a screening for international buyers resulted in the sale of international rights in 52 countries.[15] Only after Goodman became production chief at Paramount in June 2009 did the film finally get slated for a fall release.[15] Release Edit Reception Edit Related media Edit Parodies EditPhotographer Poulomi Basu’s mother, a widow, does not wear the color red. In India, the country of Basu’s birth, red symbolizes both purity and sin and is also used to mark auspicious occasions. Traditional Hindu culture dictates widows dress only in saris made of white—the hue of mourning and death—for the rest of their lives. Further, they are forbidden from attending celebratory events or remarrying. In the 16 years since her father’s death, 33-year-old Basu has convinced her mother to replace her white saris with brighter cloth, yet she still won’t touch red or vibrant pinks. Basu has managed to turn the tide of an oppressive tradition in the life of one of the most important people in her world; her mother. “Start one by one,” says Basu of her approach to affecting change. “As I grew up, I realized how customs and traditions are used as forces to bring women to subservience and control them,” and this includes the use of color, she says. With her series, “A Ritual of Exile,” Basu studies red as related to the blood of menstruation. Her long-term goal is to help end the entrenched Hindu practice of Chaupadi, which pushes menstruating women into isolation and into a normalized cycle of violence perpetuated by custom, tradition, and religion. Photographed in neighboring Nepal, the work reveals the extreme situations women in rural regions endure for one week each month over the 35-45 years of their menstrual cycle. Viewed as unclean, untouchable, and having the power to bestow calamity upon people, livestock, and the land when bleeding, women are banished from their homes. Some stay in nearby sheds, while others must travel 10-15 minutes away from home on foot through thick forests to small secluded huts. While banished the women face, and frequently die from, brutally hot temperatures, asphyxiation from fires lit to keep warm during winter, the venom of cobra snakes, and rape. Basu began her ongoing project in 2013, visiting Nepal an average of two weeks per year. Access is difficult, often depending on gatekeepers like husbands, mother-in-laws, school teachers, and the temporarily ostracized women. Often walking six to eight hours over mountainous terrain to reach the villages where Chaupadi takes place, Basu has had time to reflect. “I could not believe how much pain was within that beauty and that landscape we associate with freedom and adventure and escape,” she explains. For Basu, the heightened and turbulent countryside of Nepal—whether it’s a brilliant sky filled with stars or the clouds of a brewing storm—has come to symbolize the pain women are experiencing there. “My work is very quiet because a lot of [it] is about the silent struggles and silent protests” that come with oppression of women in a patriarchal society, Basu notes. The story of Lakshmi, a woman in her mid-30s with three children comes to Basu’s mind. Her husband left five years ago and has never returned. Still, Lakshmi dutifully goes into exile while bleeding. Her movements are enforced by her mother-in-law. Lakshmi is obligated to bring her children with her into the remote wilderness. Next, she tells the story of a school teacher, one of the only women she met in in the villages who does not practice Chaupadi. When her best friend died after being raped in exile, her husband supported her decision to abandon the tradition. In the grand scheme of things, says Basu, this is an uplifting moment in the story of Chaupadi. One of her favorite images shows Chandra Tiruva, 34, and her child, Madan, 2, sharing a hut with Mangu Bika, 14. The women, observing Chaupadi at the same time, are sleeping closely together. It’s such a tender moment,” says Basu. “Even within their exile the child is reaching out for the mother’s breast. It’s a moment of peace and love within that space.” Basu knows the feeling of having others make decisions for her and the anger and frustration it evokes. “I was not allowed to enter a kitchen when my period started and religious festivities were off limits every time I bled,” she recalls. She is also familiar with the strength of a mother who will do all she can to help a daughter break a cycle of misery and injustice. After her father died, Basu’s conservative older brother became the head of the household. Basu decided to leave home, and with unexpected financial help and support from her mother, relocated to Bombay. This proved to be a major catalyst for the life free from traditional constraints she now leads. "Not many people have the choice I did," admits Basu. “If [my mother] had cried and broken down and said I couldn’t go, I wouldn’t have left.” In the images she makes, Basu recognizes the emotional connection she draws between her own experiences and the mothers who instinctually protect their children in the face of extreme circumstances. Regardless of the fact that Chaupadi was declared illegal by Nepal’s Supreme Court in 2005, the women Basu photographs have been trained to accept the tradition without complaint. Yet keeping quiet doesn’t mean they’ve accepted Chaupadi for their daughters. A few have clandestinely said to Basu, “Won’t you take my daughter? Take her to the city with you. Just take her and run.” The road to revolution is not easy, Basu says.Team of Israel celebrates on 13 May 2009 after winning a semi-final and avancing to the final round at Eurovision 2009. Sergei Ilnitsky EPA At first, “Happy” seems standard Eurovision fare, remarkable only for an especially tuneless chorus. The front woman gamely warbles lyrics like “Here comes the Sunday depression/I want, I want a cucumber.” Backing dancers hop aimlessly around: one performer, clad in wrap-around shades, seems to do nothing but pout at the camera. Then, during the third verse, something happens. Members of the Israeli europop ensemble PingPong pull out flags and wave them around – not just their own Star of David, but the Syrian tricolor as well. “And now I have a new boyfriend from Damascus,” the front woman sings. Coming just months after peace talks between Syria and Israel collapsed in 2000, it sent a bold message to the Israeli government. PingPong was disowned by the Israel Broadcasting Authority and forced to pay for their own travel to the contest in Stockholm. PingPong may have finished third to last – and been voted among the worst Eurovision entries of all time – but the affair showed how seriously Israel takes its involvement in the self-proclaimed “world’s biggest entertainment show.” In fact, the annual contest is a microcosm of Israel’s attempts to paint itself as a liberal, outward-looking bastion of European values in the heart of a hostile, backward region. Eurowashing Though the Israeli authorities cried foul over PingPong’s crude political message, in 2007 they were quite happy for the Teapacks to pass overt comment on relations with Iran. The message – in English – to Iran’s then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about his escalating nuclear program is clear: “The world is full of terror/if someone makes an error/he’s going to blow us up to biddy biddy kingdom come/there are some crazy rulers/they hide and try to fool us/with demonic, technologic willingness to harm.” “Biddy biddy” aside, the lyrics to “Push the Button” could almost have been scripted by a Tel Aviv spokesperson. But it is the second verse, part of which is sung in French, which best sums up Israel’s self-portrayal on the Eurovision stage. “I don’t wanna die/I wanna see the flowers bloom, don’t want to go kaboom, kaboom/I don’t wanna cry/I wanna have a lot of fun just sitting in the sun,” intones the frontman as his bandmates clown around him. Israel is presented as a wacky, hippy utopia, where the “flowers bloom.” Their Iranian enemies, it is suggested, are trigger-happy nihilists who want to make it all “go kaboom.” The same goes for entries without overtly political messages. Most obviously, in 1998 transgender woman Dana International won the title and international plaudits for Israel. The performance has been held up ever since as evidence of Israel’s progressive society, a prime example of pinkwashing, whereby Israel uses its supposed LGBTQ+ tolerance to deflect criticism of the occupation. (Israeli apologists who cite Dana International towards this end seldom mention the protests and death threats she incurred from ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews.) The singer has since appeared on Israel’s answer to the television show American Idol in a t-shirt branded with the Hebrew abbreviation for the Israeli military, lending her support to the occupying force after it killed 10 activists trying to break the siege on Gaza in the infamous flotilla raid that was condemned as an act of “incredible violence” by the United Nations. At times, when Israel’s brutal occupation has been at the forefront of public consciousness, the purportedly apolitical music contest has been criticized for allowing the state a platform to push its agenda. During the winter 2008-2009 Israeli offensive on Gaza, Palestinian artists and intellectuals signed an open letter calling on Mira Awad, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, to withdraw from the song contest. “Israel’s image as a ‘democratic,’ ‘enlightened’ and ‘peace loving’ state is what allows the international community to support it. Your participation in the Eurovision is participation in the Israeli propaganda machine,” the letter states. “Every brick in the wall of this phony image allows the Israeli army to throw 10 more tons of explosives and more phosphorus bombs.” Israel in Europe Awad went ahead and performed as part of an “Arab-Jewish duo,” offering vague blandishments about a “dialogue towards peace” and standing alongside her Jewish-Israeli partner to sing “there must be another way” as the dust settled on the bodies of hundreds of Palestinian children in Gaza. Year after year, Israel makes an appearance at this European pop fest, presenting itself as a modern, tolerant, Europeanized state. But what makes this Middle East country eligible for the contest? There is a technical answer. Israel is entitled to participate as a member of the European Broadcasting Union, and since it lies within the European Broadcasting Area whose remit extends to parts of the Middle East and North Africa. This encompasses Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia – and Palestine, of course. But only one of these Arab states ever entered. When Israel missed the contest due to budgeting concerns and the date conflicting with a national holiday back in 1980, Morocco entered a song calling for peace and “a place with no color discrimination,” while Lebanon nearly entered in 2005 only to withdraw when told their broadcasters could not skip the Israeli entry. So Israel has the same legal right to participate in Eurovision as Syria – but it uses this technicality to integrate itself into European networks of cultural exchange. Much the same occurs in other cultural arenas, notably on the soccer field, where Israel has long participated in European contests. Its attempts to participate in competitions closer to home ended in farce – in 1958, Israel won the African and Asian World Cup qualifiers without playing a match as virtually all its competitors dropped out in protest. After 20 years without full membership in any regional soccer organization, Israel acceded to the Union of European Football Associations in 1994. In 2013, it hosted the European under-21s soccer tournament, despite opposition from international soccer stars who claimed that Israel had killed Palestinian civilian soccer players in November 2012. The deaths occurred a few days before Israel launched the second of three recent major assaults on Gaza. In the midst of the onslaught, Israel seriously damaged two stadiums. These protests won a promise from world soccer leader, FIFA President Sepp Blatter, to rebuild one of the bombed stadiums, but little else. Cultural boycott Attempts to frustrate Israel’s manipulation of the Eurovision platform might not have forced it out of the contest, but reactions show how Tel Aviv values these opportunities to prove Israel’s European credentials. When Eurovision went to Malmo in Sweden, which has a Muslim population of around 20 percent, protests from pro-Palestine groups prompted the Israeli embassy to warn the city over security, drawing a sharp rebuke form city officials discounting any special security measures for individual contestants. Most telling was Israel’s response to the Hungarian entry in 2015. The slow-burning peace ballad “Wars for Nothing” offered typically vague, feel-good sentiments, but a caption appearing on the display screens behind the singer ran: “2014 – Gaza – two-thirds of the victims were civilians, including more than 500 children.” The Israeli ambassador stepped in to demand the Hungarians excise the criticism of Operation Protective Edge, and the final performance went ahead without any political reference whatsoever. Leading activists from the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement recognize the importance of cultural representation. “Israel overtly uses culture as a form of propaganda to whitewash or justify its regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid over the Palestinian people,” they state in their call for a cultural boycott. Boycotting fizzy drink machine manufacturer SodaStream or water distributed by Eden Springs can have an important economic impact on Israeli businesses, but cultural boycotts apply pressure elsewhere – most importantly, on Israeli citizens with the power to influence their government’s actions. The Palestinian flag was recently banned from Eurovision on the grounds that the contest is “non-political.” But like all mass culture, Eurovision is part of what philosopher Louis Althusser called the “ideological state apparatus,” aligning the individual in relation to society and conditioning them to its exploitative nature. A singer draped in Israeli flags crooning before an audience of between 100 to 600 million is a profoundly political act, normalizing and reifying the occupation both at home and abroad. And as white South Africans were bitterly stung by their exclusion from world sport, so a boycott excluding Israel from European cultural platforms like Eurovision and European soccer competitions would serve as a humiliating and potent wake-up call to ordinary Israeli citizens regarding the actions of their government. Arab Idol Israel’s insistence that it belongs in Europe and in Eurovision masks a tacit acceptance that it will never belong in the Middle East. An Israeli entrant on Arab Idol would be as negatively received as the Israeli national team in Asian soccer contests. Two of the American Idol Arab clone’s four winners to date have been Palestinian, and the victory of Gaza’s Mohammed Assaf in 2013 – singing “Raise the Kuffiyeh” – sparked wild celebrations across Palestine and in refugee camps in the diaspora. In a rare exception, joyous Palestinians were depicted on the Western evening news doing something other than protesting, stone-throwing or dying. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas subsequently offered Assaf an ambassadorial position of “diplomatic standing.” To the youths dancing, chanting Assaf’s name and waving Palestinian flags in the streets of Gaza City, his victory was evidently political, a reminder to the world that Palestine continues to endure. Israeli leaders recognize this power as present in all pop culture, even hidden below the tinsel and cheesy synthesizers of Eurovision. They abuse the show’s “non-political” veneer to suggest that political change is illegitimate – or even impossible. Matt Broomfield is a freelance journalist. He regularly reports for the Independent and writes for VICE, Dazed and activist media, as well as publishing poetry and fiction. Twitter: @hashtagbroom. Website: mattbroomfield.contently.comA Beijing court has ruled a Chinese company has the right to make leather products branded “IPHONE”. Apple appealed an earlier decision to the Beijing Municipal High People’s Court to stop Xintong Tiandi Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. from using the “IPHONE” name, which the Chinese company first trademarked in 2007 for the leather product category – this category, and the company’s current assembly of products (as seen on their website) includes leather phone cases, passport covers and handbags. Though Apple holds the trademark to the “iPhone” name for computer software and hardware, on March 30 the court upheld an earlier ruling, from 2013, which found that Apple could not prove that “IPHONE” was already a well-known name in China in 2007, when Xintong Tiandi trademarked it for its leather goods. As such, the 2013 ruling reads in part, “the general public will not link the trademark in dispute with Apple to harm its [Apple’s] interests.” Apple did not start selling iPhones in China until 2009. Xintong Tiandi posted a statement on its website after the decision was handed down, which said in part: “The ‘iphone’ brand can blossom widely outside Apple.” This is not the first time Apple has been stung by a trademark dispute in a Chinese court, with a 2012 ruling ordering Apple to pay $60 million to a tech firm from the southern city of Shenzhen in order to use the “iPad” name in China. However, the timing of this case comes at a sensitive time for Apple in China, with the world’s second largest economy being a key market for the Cupertino-based tech giant, but sales in Greater China falling 26 percent year-on-year for the first quarter of 2016. In recent times, Chinese
Manchester United’s decision to sack David Moyes was supported by Sir Alex Ferguson, who will play a key role in the hunt for a new manager. Ferguson hand-picked Moyes as his successor, but his support for his fellow Scot had waned considerably in recent months and he is understood to have approved of the decision to dispense with him less than ten months since he formally took charge at Old Trafford. Carlo Ancelotti, the Real Madrid coach, and Louis van Gaal, the Holland coach, are thought to head the list of candidates to succeed Moyes, although United’s players have privately expressed concerns about the prospect of the autocratic Van Gaal taking over. Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, the Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund coaches respectively,…I’ve been the IBJ sports biz reporter for more than 15 years, and this month I learned something new—and amazing—about one of the biggest sports happenings involving Indianapolis in the 2000s and about one of the most well-known people on the Indiana sports scene. Here’s the tease: Indiana Pacers play-by-play radio broadcaster Mark Boyle is one tough dude. And I mean tough with a capital T. But first, let’s go back to how this revelation began. The IBJ’s second annual Interview Issue finds its way into area mailboxes (digital and post office receptacles) this weekend. The great part about doing question-and-answer features for a special issue like this is that while you target a few specific topics, you also ask a bevy of general interest questions. The answers to those questions are where you often learn the most interesting and unexpected things about people you’ve known—or known of—for years. After taping a 30-minute question-and-answer session with Boyle at a northwest side coffee house, I turned off my recorder and began chatting with him about various subjects. Why did I turn off my recorder?! My mental recorder was still on when Boyle began telling me about some back stiffness he was having. Why was he having back pain? I asked the same question. Well, Boyle tells me matter-of-factly, that he broke five vertebrae in his back a few years ago. Well, that sort of revelation is an ear opener. “How did that happen?” I asked. “In the brawl in Detroit,” he responded. Come again. “Are you talking about the famous brawl between the Pacers and Pistons in 2004? Malice in the Palace?” I asked. As we stood up, Boyle began to recount the tale. Why did I turn my recorder off?!! And why didn’t I turn it back on?!!! At least after 26 years in this business, I’m smart enough to run to my van and jot down notes of an interesting conversation. Boyle explained that he and Slick Leonard were sitting courtside calling the Pacers-Pistons game in Auburn Hills when the brouhaha started on that ill-fated November night. Boyle began to get an uneasy feeling when then Pacers forward Ron Artest was laying on the scorers’ table shortly after an on-court scuffle with Pistons’ forward Ben Wallace late in the game. Artest even put on a pair of headphones and began talking to Boyle. The mic attached to the headphones was turned off—for obvious reasons. Boyle began asking himself why NBA officials didn’t get Artest off that bench. Or better yet, why didn’t Pacers assistant coach Chuck Person, who was hired specifically to look after Artest and keep him out of trouble, do just what he was hired to do—at the very moment the Pacers most needed him to do it? “Then the cup flew in,” Boyle recalled. A fan heaved a drink at Artest as he layed on the table right in front of Boyle and Leonard. Boyle was already waiting spring-loaded in his chair for something bad to happen. And boy did it. Artest leapt up on the table, turned toward the fans and jumped toward the seating area. Boyle jumped up to block Artest. Mark Boyle is relatively thick—and athletic—by radio broadcaster standards. He walks five miles a day and looks as if he’s done a few push-ups in his day. But make no mistake; he’s no match for Artest, who at 6-7 and 260 pounds—maybe a bit more—during his playing days is, as they say in sports, a full-grown man. He was thickly muscled from head to toe. Despite Boyle’s best efforts to wrap up Artest, the broadcaster was mowed down and landed flat on his back on the concrete floor. The rest was a blur, Boyle explained, but he was able to get up and get out of harm’s way from there. Artest meanwhile went into the stands to battle whatever fans he could find willing to throw down. Boyle recalled his wife later musing: “‘If you could have stopped Ronnie from going into the stands, none of this would have happened.’ I say, “Well, Jesus, if I could have stopped Ron from going into the stands, I would be playing in the NFL.” Boyle, a cut on his head and face—possibly from Artest stepping on it—made his way to the Pacers locker room, where the team’s trainers treated him. Later, after Artest entered the locker room, the Pacers’ forward asked Boyle what happened to him. Boyle told Artest that he ran him over on his way into the stands. Boyle recalls that Artest was concerned and apologetic—but apparently oblivious to what he had done to the broadcaster. On the flight home—the Pacers broadcasters fly on the same charter plane as the players and coaches—Boyle’s back began to tighten and hurt. Pacers trainers affixed a large and rather awkward ice pack to his back. Most of the players sit in the front of the plane, but Artest always chose to sit in the back with the broadcast team and other Pacers support staff. As Boyle walked up and down the aisle at the back of the plane, Artest again asked Boyle what happened to him. “I said, ‘Damn it Ron. I already told you. You ran over me,’” Boyle exclaimed. Artest had many skills and attributes that made him a great basketball player. Apparently a long-term memory wasn’t one of them. As for Boyle, his broken back was confirmed later that week. Despite the injury, he continued his broadcast duties. Players apparently aren’t the only ones to play injured. There was never an inkling, on Boyle’s part, of filing a lawsuit against Artest or anyone (or anything) else concerning the incident. And there appear to be no hard feelings. When Boyle saw—and still occasionally sees—Artest following the incident he would occasionally joke with the former Pacer about sending him a medical bill. And that’s all it is; a joke. Boyle for his part still appears quite affectionate toward Artest. “For all his quirks, he’s a really nice, caring person,” Boyle said. Read more interesting takes from the life of Mark Boyle in this weekend’s IBJ Interview Issue. You can also read my question-and-answer interviews with veteran motorsports reporter Robin Miller, Indiana Fever Coach Stephanie White, Lucas Oil Products Co. founder Forrest Lucas and WTTV-TV Channel 4 anchor Debbie Knox. In all 33 of the area’s most intriguing people will be featured in the issue. I hope you learn as many fascinating things about these folks as I have in the last few weeks.Ekko the Boy Who Shattered Time We’re about to send League’s next champion out to PBE! Ekko’s a powerful skirmishing assassin who thrives in extended fights, using his mobility and crowd control to slow and stun enemies as he whittles down his targets. And if he starts to lose a fight, the brilliant boy from Zaun can rewind time a little and try again. Abilities Passive: Z-Drive Resonance Ekko's damaging spells and attacks build up Resonance stacks on his enemies. Every third attack against the same target triggers Ekko’s passive, dealing bonus damage and slowing his enemy. If he triggers his passive on an enemy champion, Ekko also gains a strong movement speed buff. Q: Timewinder Ekko throws a device in a target direction, damaging all enemies along its path. Once it reaches max distance or hits an enemy champion, the device expands, creating a field that slows all enemy and neutral units. After a moment, the device contracts and rushes back to Ekko, dealing extra damage to all enemies in its path. W: Parallel Convergence Passive: Ekko’s basic attacks deal bonus damage to low health targets. Active: Ekko opens a time rift, creating an alternate reality copy of him that tosses a device to a target location. After a delay, the device expands into a broad slowing zone. If Ekko enters the sphere, it detonates, granting him a shield while stunning all enemies inside. E: Phase Dive Ekko dashes a fixed distance towards a target area. Once his initial dash has ended, Ekko gains greatly increased range on his next basic attack, and blinks to his target to deal damage and apply on-hit and spell effects. R: Chronobreak Ekko rewinds time, briefly turning untargetable and invulnerable before reappearing wherever he was a few seconds ago. Once he reappears, Ekko recovers a portion of the health he lost over those few seconds while dealing tons of damage to all nearby enemies. Laning Ekko’s early game revolves around his ability to create windows of opportunity with Timewinder. Its decent range and sheer size makes it a powerful zoning and passive generation tool, although if Ekko isn't judicious with his casts, he’ll quickly run both out of mana and into trouble. Aside from farming, Ekko’s Q also provides poke against his lane opponent, particularly when he Phase Dives, repositioning himself to strike his target with both rounds of Timewinder. Smart positioning should gift Ekko with a perfect window to hustle in with Phase Dive’s blink and pressure his target with mounting Z-Drive Resonance stacks. And, after diving on top of his opponent and triggering his passive, Ekko can simply run out, making the most of his speed boost as he heads to safety. Ekko’s role as a solo lane skirmisher becomes increasingly apparent as he starts leveling up and unlocking his full repertoire of abilities. Accurate Parallel Convergence casts - especially used against enemies slowed by Timewinder - give him great trading windows: landing it on his lane opponent gives Ekko the chance to phase in and trigger W’s stun for a couple of free attacks. Even if his target avoids the crowd control, they’ll still have a hard time successfully trading thanks to Parallel Convergence’s shield. Once his opponents see potential power of the ability, Ekko can get psychological, using his W casts to zone his enemies away from last hitting or force them towards an approaching jungler. He can even wrangle a couple of defensive uses out of Parallel Convergence, like triggering the ability’s explosion just so he can shield himself from otherwise lethal damage, or casting the ability directly on himself as enemy junglers come in to gank. This forces his would-be killers to choose between backing off, and stunning themselves within arm’s reach of the boy from Zaun. Ekko’s skirmishing and trading turns stronger still after he unlocks Chronobreak, gifting him the chance to heal up and try again after unfavorable trades, or use the ability to blink inside Parallel Convergence’s stun sphere to trick his lane opponent. Chronobreak comes packed with plenty of utility, too - if he’s nimble enough, Ekko can simply hit his ult to escape from deadly gank situations, or just return to lane if he’s a speedy shopper after recalling. Skirmishing Ekko lacks the raw power to burst his targets down, so relies more on his cunning than his strength. As the two teams start gathering, he needs to look for opportunities to skirmish, harassing and chipping away at his targets from relative safety. Timewinder’s an important component here, offering Ekko his best method for developing his Z-Drive Resonance stacks as his enemies group. All the same, he has to be careful to avoid being poked out himself or caught by enemy crowd control abilities - as slippery as Ekko is, he’s not a resilient champ, and will quickly bite the dust once caught. But if a pick opportunity presents itself - if an enemy is already wounded or they’re far enough away from their disruptive allies - then Ekko has all the tools, gadgets and gizmos he needs to get in, secure the kill and fall back in relative safety. Here’s where Parallel Convergence comes in. By placing the ability’s sphere between his target and their allies, Ekko effectively zones them, forcing them to either move farther from safety, or willingly enter into Ekko’s trap. Either way, an accurate Timewinder should slow the target enough for the boy from Zaun to Phase Dive in and start bludgeoning his target. Once he’s reduced their health enough, Ekko’s damage amps up pretty significantly thanks to Parallel Convergence’s passive, making low health enemies especially enticing. And once he’s done his work, he needs to quickly make his way to safety; if he’s up past his neck in trouble, he can push his big red button and Chronobreak to reappear with his team. Teamfights Ekko takes on a different role in large-scale teamfights, thriving in situations when he can follow up on high-impact area of effect abilities. After setting up his team’s initiation with Timewinder, Ekko follows up with Parallel Convergence before Phase Diving into his sphere to stun his enemies and shield his butt before he starts swinging his club. Then it’s a matter of timing: Ekko needs to carefully balance the level of his health against the impact of his ultimate. Trigger Chronobreak too early and he’ll end up back in his own team’s backline; too late and he’ll already have met his maker. But when Ekko Chronobreaks correctly, when he reappears in the heart of the enemy team with topped up health and a devastating amount of area of effect damage, then his team all but wins the fight. Synergy Works well with: Gnar - the Missing Link Mini Gnar and Ekko work together well enough - their combined long range slowing damage from Timewinder and Boomerang Throw fully capable of poking down most enemy champions. But Ekko thrives when Gnar goes Mega, blinking in with Phase Dive to follow up the Gnar! crowd control train with Parallel Convergence before casting Chronobreak to rewind time and roll in once again on whoever Mega Gnar hasn’t yet battered to death. Vi - the Piltover Enforcer Similar to Gnar, Vi has plenty of lockdown that Ekko can take advantage of as he dashes in to claim kills. However, unlike the Missing Link, Vi packs a punch of her own, and when she starts roaming with Ekko, the two pair into a devastating duo with enough firepower and crowd control to take down most enemies with ease. Draven - the Glorious Executioner Draven might be one of League’s most powerful early game marksmen, but he sorely lacks the crowd control he needs to hold his enemies down as he can slings his axes. That’s where Ekko comes in. By roaming bot and placing Parallel Convergence between the enemy marksman and their tower, Ekko forces his target towards Draven or into his trap. And even if they somehow sidestep Parallel Convergence, Ekko can fire out Timewinder for a heavy slow. Either way, the blood brother with the glorious ‘stache gets a kill. Struggles against: LeBlanc - the Deceiver Chronobreak’s a powerful tool, particularly when Ekko plans his ult use ahead of time. However, in the face on high damage, bursty champions, Ekko can often lose trades so hard that he’s forced to use Chronobreak just to stay alive. LeBlanc, with her high damage and low cooldown abilities, can often force Ekko’s hand, removing one of his strongest trading abilities from his repertoire for a good while. Fiora - the Grand Duellist Ekko copes just fine when he can actually dart in and out of combat, applying damage before suffering too much back. Unfortunately for him, Fiora has a few ways to overpower the trade and win most duels. After parrying Ekko’s gambit with Riposte, Fiora can force the fight with two casts of Lunge before using Burst of Speed to hack poor Ekko down. Even if Ekko tries to Chronobreak away, Fiora can stick with him with a well-timed Blade Waltz. Graves - the Outlaw Parallel Convergence and Timewinder both slow enough for Ekko to catch up with most enemies, but Graves has a few tricks up his shotgun to help him keep distance and win trades. Smoke Screen will effectively nullify Ekko’s second dash if placed correctly, and even when Ekko’s able to close range, Graves can fire out a max damage Buckshot before using Quickdraw to kite away.Stephanie Zubiri-Crespi and Patricia Prieto swear by the benefits of olive and argan oils Published 12:00 PM, October 23, 2017 MANILA, Philippines – Organic skin care products usually come with a hefty price tag. Luckily, Watsons offers a much affordable alternative to budget-conscious Pinays who want to go green. Synthetic products usually contain harmful ingredients like parabens, mineral oil, and silicone to extend its shelf life and prevent bacteria growth. While some of these ingredients help remove excess oil and dirt to your hair, leaving it shinier and smoother, they may also cause irritation, dryness, and even strip out your skin’s natural moisture. During the Watson’s Only Natural event on October 17, author and TV host Stephanie Zubiri-Crespi and lifestyle blogger Patricia Prieto talked about the importance of checking the label on your skin care products. Stephanie revealed that she only started to pay attention to the ingredients list on her favorite hair and skin after she became a mom. “Before, you don’t really care, you buy stuff, it works. But then, when I became a mom, I became aware of how much toxins really goes into your body. First it starts with food, then you realize, skin pala absorbs everything… If you don’t pay attention it will just keep building up until you get old and one day na lang you have tumor, cancer, inflammation and its caused by all these build ups.” When it comes to natural products, Stephanie swear on the wonders of olive oil for skin care regimen. “I always get drawn to olive oil. Even before and even someone like Giada de Laurentiis, she drinks olive oil. [You can also use it] for your stomach, for your stretch marks. Olive oil are one of the things that’s readily available and it works very well for me,” she said. As for Patricia, argan oil is her elixir of choice. “I like argan oil. What I do is when I get a massage, that’s the best way, [to get it into your skin]. I make it my massage oil and it feels so nice and it smells so good. My skin feels so much nicer after using it.” Quality skin care doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. According to Stephanie and Patricia, it’s all about finding products that work for your skin type. Naturals by Watsons is exclusively available at Watsons and SM Store Beauty Section. – Rappler.com Are you a fan of natural products? Check out our best deals and offers on beauty and health here.Arsène Wenger believes that any team have their own identifiable personality and his certainty that this latest offspring has the character to again win the Premier League remains evident in every nuance of his decision-making. The start of Arsenal’s FA Cup defence looms but, just as he did at the beginning of the European campaign in September, the Premier League is being prioritised both in the team’s preparation and selection. And so, having beaten Newcastle United on Saturday to extend their lead over Leicester City at the top of the Premier League table to two points, Wenger promptly granted the players a mini mid-season break. Arsenal do not play again in the league until visiting Liverpool on January 13th and, even with the potential additions for the match of Alexis Sanchez and Mohamed Elneny, it is clear that key players will now be rotated for the FA Cup third-round match against Sunderland. Petr Cech, Hector Bellerin, Laurent Koscielny, Nacho Monreal, Aaron Ramsey, Mathieu Flamini, Theo Walcott, Mesut Özil and Olivier Giroud are among those likely to be given some form of respite, albeit with a small warning from Wenger. “I will give them a couple of days, an extra rest but you never know what shape they come back in,” he said. “It depends what you do when you have a rest. You can come back more tired.” The smile on Wenger’s face suggested that he trusts these players, particularly as there was an added satisfaction in how they had grafted to what was a third win in four festive fixtures. “Another aspect of our team was tested,” Wenger said. “You fight not to concede a goal. You must not panic and wait for your chance. We have been more questioned on that aspect than how way we play football.” He is right, even if that familiar narrative about Arsenal being soft-centred and lacking in proven winners has become increasingly redundant. Within this current squad, Arsenal now have players who have won the World Cup, the Club World Cup, the Champions League, the Copa America, the Premier League, the Spanish league, the Italian league, the French league and the domestic cup competitions in England, Spain and Germany. Olivier Giroud, for one, is adamant that this experience will be significant in the coming months. “To be champions in a season you need talent, of course, but you need a bit of luck and sometimes you cannot play a fantastic game,” he said. “The Montpellier experience will fully help me. The older players need to bring confidence to the youngest and lead them. Sometimes they listen, sometimes they don’t care. All together we are going to do it.” That Arsenal are learning to win in different ways was repeatedly evident in 2015 in victories over Manchester City, Manchester United and Bayern Munich but then also in both the FA Cup final and their Champions League eliminator against Olympiakos. “I think a team always has a charisma,” Wenger said. “If you look at the team as a unit it is like a person. When you are a long time in the job, you can feel if there is something in there or not. They are more experienced. When we moved into the stadium here, when many players were 23 or 24, on their day we could play everybody off the park but when you had to dig deep, come out with your knowledge and your experience, it was a bit more difficult. It is different.” If a team can really be likened to one specific individual, it is easy to see how the Arsenal side of George Graham was embodied by Tony Adams before Wenger’s greatest teams evolved from the character of Patrick Vieira to then Dennis Bergkamp and Thierry Henry. In Özil, Sanchez and Cech, Arsenal do again have three truly world-class players whose personalities are becoming imprinted on the collective outlook. While Ozil was the catalyst against Bournemouth last week, it was Cech who made a crucial contribution on Saturday to deny Georginho Wiijnaldum before Koscielny scored his scruffy late winner. Recent Arsenal teams rarely converted such lacklustre performances into three points and, in what is his 20th season in English football, Wenger is adamant that the gap between top and bottom has never been smaller. “Everyone can lose everywhere,” he said. “Is this the worst league ever? Or is it the best league ever? I haven’t analysed it but you can go both ways. It’s something which is new.”WA schools are banning fidget spinners and cubes in classrooms because it’s driving students and teachers to distraction. The fad “educational’’ gadgets designed to be a stress-reliever to help children with learning difficulties concentrate has become a disruption in class. Trinity College Junior School principal Martin Tucker addressed all students this week about the hand-held toys which have been booming in popularity among students this term. “The boys can use them in the playground, but not in class. If they have them in the classroom, their teacher will confiscate them,’’ Mr Tucker said. “The fidget spinners can, however, can be used by children with special needs at the college’s Mary Rice Centre or under supervision.’’ Play Video It’s understood Maylands Peninsular Primary School this week ruled the gadgets would no longer be tolerated in class. An inner-suburban high school has called a meeting for tomorrow to determine its policy on the toys, which are selling so fast local retailers have drawn up waiting lists. Mandie Shean, a psychologist and lecturer at Edith Cowan University, said the problem was the “so-called mindless” aids was that they actually required some thought, diverting students’ attention from their lesson. “The concern would definitely be attention distraction,” she said. The spinners consist of bearings in a three-pronged plastic device which can be flicked and spun round. The cube has six sides, each of which has something different to fidget with. An Education Department spokesman said it was up to schools to make their own rules in reaction to the fad. Camera Icon Fidget Spinners are increasing in popularity at Perth schools. The craze has now been banned in the classroom. Pictured are students Issac Quandros (10), Ryan Murphy (10) and Nicholas Day (10) at Trinity College in East Perth. Picture: PerthNow, Justin Benson-Cooper “Public school leaders make their own decisions regarding what items are permitted on school grounds and in classrooms,’’ she said. “We are aware that some schools have education plans that include fidget spinners for specific students. Schools are not required to inform the department of these matters.’’ Consumer Protection this week launched a safety investigation into some models of fidget spinners which contain button batteries. A Wangara-based supplier has voluntarily agreed to recall a fidget spinner and a Geraldton retailer has ceased to sell the items but has already sold 141 units.The image of the Swamp Horror from Hordes: Domination was the one that stayed with me. A hideous creature emerging from the depths to drag down unsuspecting warriors… Of course… the studio pose of this beast taken to land, and shambling out across the open is also interesting in its own right. But I wanted more. Here’s our standard horror. All the pieces you need for this repose are right here. Of course, you’ll definitely need a jeweler’s saw, files, green stuff, and probably a dremel if you want to attempt your own Swamp Horror repose. Making the longer tentacles is a matter of joining together different sections of tentacles from the main frame. Start by cutting along the Orange lines in the picture here. These pieces will be joined together to form a single longer tentacle. It may take a bit of filing to get an angle that maintains a curve that keeps the tentacle looking natural.. I’d definitely recommend pinning the two pieces. You’re going to have to do some green stuffing to hide that join. It would suck to have it all break from a little shearing force. Here are the tentacles after they’ve been green-stuffed. I also added a bit of length onto the bottom with green stuff. It doesn’t require too much detail since it will be hidden under the “water.” The tentacle on the left is the one shown above, and was made from the right half of the Swamp Horror body. The one on the right is made the same way, but comes from the left half of the Swamp Horror body. In all you should be able to make six different tentacles of varying lengths from a single Swamp Horror kit. Keep making more tentacles by repeating the above techniques on other parts from the kit. Here’s a medium length one. You can even get some use out of the tiniest bits by having them just barely breaking the surface. To really make your Horror look like it is emerging from a swamp, you may want to make a recessed base. I did this by carefully cutting away the inside of the base with an exact-o. Patience is key here. Take your time and use minimal pressure to keep from damaging the ring of the base, or injuring yourself. Once you’ve turned your large base into just a ring, replace the bottom with some thin plasticard. Make sure you glue evenly around the edge or the water effects may leak out when you finally get around to adding them. Once you’ve made enough tentacles, it’s time to move back to the rest of the body. Glue the head, mouth, and what’s left of the halves together as normal. I dremelled away quite a bit of material from the bottom so that the head would sit at a slight angle in the base. This gives it a bit more motion and makes the creature look like it’s peering up at something taller than it is. The head was affixed to the base with Green Stuff to accentuate that angle more and give it some more volume. Then comes the part that will probably be most challenging – sculpting tentacle mass back on to the head with Green stuff. After I’d made the basic shapes, I waited for them to cure about half way. Then I went back with a round tool to form the folds and ripples on the skin. One of the keys to using green stuff is knowing the right time to work with it. If you want smooth edges it’s best to work with it once it has cured a bit. So once you finish the head and tentacles it’s time to move onto painting. Although it’s important to note that I didn’t glue the two longest tentacles to the base. I kept them separate to make painting easier. They weren’t glued on until right before I added the water. Like any conversion, it was as much work as it was fun. But I’m really pleased with how it came out. ~So there you have it… a very different Swamp Horror from the stock pose. Hopefully I’ll have a painting article up to follow soon.Derek Lynse (Photo: Maricopa County Sheriff's Office) Phoenix police have arrested a Pinal County Sheriff's Office deputy after a possible incident of domestic violence, according to a police spokesman. Derek Lynse, 26, was arrested about 9:30 p.m. and faces one count of domestic-violence criminal trespass, a misdemeanor, Phoenix police Sgt. Trent Crump said. The charge stems from an incident that took place at a private residence near 47th Avenue and Bell Road, Crump said. Crump said the incident involved trespassing during a domestic incident. Lynse was placed on administrative reassignment pending the investigation, Pinal County Sheriff's Office Deputy Chief Tim Gaffney said. The case will be investigated by the Phoenix Police Department along with a professional-standards investigation by the Pinal County Sheriff's Office, officials said. Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1tnIqbYDemocratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks during the Presidential Debate at Hofstra University on September 26, 2016, in Hempstead, New York. The first of four debates for the 2016 Election, three Presidential and one Vice Presidential, is moderated by NBC's Lester Holt. As Florida looks again to be one of the crucial states that will decide the next President of the United States, one South Florida media outlet is putting its support behind a specific candidate. The Miami Herald on Friday published its endorsement for Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton, choosing the former Senator and Secretary of State over Republican Party nominee and businessman Donald Trump. In their endorsement, the paper cited what they say is Clinton’s experience while calling Trump a “damaged human being.” “Ms. Clinton is a pragmatic, tough-minded woman of accomplishment and political conviction with a demonstrated mastery of policy,” the paper wrote. “Mr. Trump is the elite, one who has managed to talk a good game to fire up frustrated and frightened mostly white Americans with a campaign of hate and xenophobia.” The Herald endorsed President Barack Obama both in 2008 and 2012. The other major newspaper in the area, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, endorsed Clinton last month after supporting Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.CLOSE Lisa Conley gives the scoop on what we are working on today. Buy Photo The Collier School Board unveiled a new logo at a news conference Jan. 28, 2015. (Photo: Carolina Hidalgo/Naples Daily News)Buy Photo Three parents sued the Collier County School Board on Wednesday over new textbooks slated for public classrooms next fall. Along with factual errors, flaws and omissions, the parents said in the court filing, the board selects books and reviews the materials "behind closed doors to the exclusion of the public." The suit, filed in the 20th Circuit Court for Collier County, calls for an "emergency injunction" on the books and the School Board's selection process. The suit contends the board violated state transparency laws and education standards. "The selection process for the textbooks that the board is trying to push through is flawed," Eric Konuk, 55, said. Konuk, the father of four children in the school system, is one of the parents who brought the suit. The two other named plaintiffs are local lawyers who filed the suit with the Florida Citizens Alliance. The issue at heart is a new batch of textbooks, the first major change in almost 10 years of curriculum. The school district’s Instructional Materials Committee has been meeting since the start of the school year to decide which textbooks made the cut. The materials selected by the committee were approved by the state and have been available for public review since March. The School Board unanimously approved the committee's recommendations in April. Seven people, including the three named in the suit, have filed formal protests through the School Board's official channels. They have identified 222 words and passages they think are problematic in the incoming textbooks, from upper-level law and history books to elementary social studies materials. School Board attorneys declined to comment because they haven't had time to read through the lawsuit. But board member Eric Carter said most of the issues parents have flagged are either easily vetted or inherently subjective. He cited one complaint a parent made, arguing that women did not fight in the Revolutionary War. Carter quickly referred to the night of Nov. 16, 1776, when Margaret Corbin took a bullet to the shoulder while she was stuffing cannons for colonial residents. NEWSLETTERS Get the News Alerts newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Get alerted to the latest stories to stay on top of the news. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-844-900-7105. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for News Alerts Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters "That took three minutes on Google," he said. Keith Flaugh, with Florida Citizens Alliance, didn't lodge an official protest with the School Board but said he spent 20 hours with a 900-page book and identified 120 issues. “The whole book is slanted toward teaching our kids we’re a democracy," he said. "But that’s not true. We’re a constitutional republic.” While technically accurate, Carter said, issues like that are more confusing than correct, especially considering modern terms such as the People's Republic of China. "It’s splitting hairs here," he said. "I just don’t think that it's this big of a deal." Brantley Oakey, a lawyer and parent named in the suit, said in a blog post that one law book passage gives undue deference to the Affordable Care Act and that another section "condition(s) our children to believe in the Marxist idea of positive rights." But the issues they have raised aren't political, Flaugh said in a written statement circulated Wednesday. "It is about our children's future, following Florida laws and adopting factual, unbiased textbooks that are not used to indoctrinate our children." On Thursday, the School Board will host a special hearing for all seven parents to present their cases for further review. It will begin at 4 p.m. at the the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Administrative Center, 5775 Osceola Trail, North Naples. But even the format of the hearing is unfair, the parents argued in the court filing, because it gives them 10 minutes each to explain hundreds of pages of what they consider problems. Read or Share this story: https://www.naplesnews.com/story/news/education/2017/05/31/group-sues-collier-county-schools-over-textbook-selection/358000001/1 October 23, 2013 1 July 15, 2015 2 2 3 Even if Weight Loss Would Solve it All 3 Even if Weight Loss Would Solve Every Problem 4 4 5 Weight loss is touted as a miracle cure. We’re promised that it will make us healthier, happier, more attractive – that the life of our dreams is just a diet away. We are told that being fat is the cause for everything bad in our lives – single and want to be in a relationship? It’s because you’re fat. Have mobility problems? It’s because you’re fat. Have diabetes? It’s because you’re fat. Hit by a truck? It’s because you’re fat. Abducted by aliens? It’s because you’re fat. 5 Weight loss is touted as a miracle cure. We’re promised that it will make us healthier, happier, more attractive – that the life of our dreams is just a diet away. We are told that being fat is the cause for everything bad in our lives – single and want to be in a relationship? It’s because you’re fat. Have mobility problems? It’s because you’re fat. Have diabetes? It’s because you’re fat. Hit by a truck? It’s because you’re fat. Abducted by aliens? It’s because you’re fat. 6 6 7 For today let’s put aside the fact that there are people of all sizes dealing with health challenges, unwanted singleness, diabetes, auto accidents and alien abduction. Let’s set aside that there isn’t a single study of people who have lost weight long term showing that they were healthier for it. Let’s not even get into a discussion about alien abduction (it’s beyond the scope of this blog). 7 For today let’s put aside the fact that there are people of all sizes dealing with health challenges, unwanted singleness, diabetes, auto accidents and alien abduction. Let’s set aside that there isn’t a single study of people who have lost weight long term showing that they were healthier for it. Let’s not even get into a discussion about alien abduction (it’s beyond the scope of this blog). 8 8 9 Even if becoming thin would solve every single problem in every single fat person’s life, the truth is it doesn’t matter. Because we
with animal poachers when they land on a world where San Francisco is a preserve for dinosaurs. 22 10 "Greatfellas" Allan Eastman Story by : Sean Clark & Scott Smith Miller Teleplay by : Scott Smith Miller May 31, 1996 ( ) K0804 Rembrandt is confused with his double on a world where alcohol prohibition was never repealed and gangs dominate society. He discovers his counterpart is a federal agent. 23 11 "The Young and the Relentless" Richard Compton Story by : T. Edward Anthony & Michael X. Fernaro & Von Whisenhant Teleplay by : T. Edward Anthony & Von Whisenhant June 7, 1996 ( ) K0814 Quinn impersonates his recently deceased double on a world where the young dominate society and middle-aged people are prohibited from working and are subject to curfews. Season 3 (1996–97) [ edit ] Again, Fox aired this season's episodes out of order. For instance, "Double Cross" was filmed as the premiere for Season Three. In this episode, the audience learns why the Sliders will now be able to slide anywhere between San Francisco and L.A. However, Fox opted to air "Rules of the Game" first, since it was a more action-oriented episode.[4] The proper viewing order is as follows:[5] No. overall No. in season Title Directed by Written by Original air date Prod. code 24 2 "Double Cross" Richard Compton Tony Blake & Paul Jackson September 27, 1996 ( ) K1801 Quinn offers to assist a scientist named Logan St. Claire (Zoe McLellan), his female double on this Earth, fix her sliding technology in exchange for using the equipment to find his home coordinates. However, Arturo later discovers Logan does not have good intentions for the use of sliding technology. 25 1 "Rules of the Game" Oscar L. Costo Josef Anderson September 20, 1996 ( ) K1805 The sliders land in the middle of a real live-action war game that they must finish in order to escape. 26 10 "Dead Man Sliding" Richard Compton Nan Hagan November 29, 1996 ( ) K1804 Quinn's double is wanted for murder and Quinn is arrested instead. He is sentenced to death, and the other sliders decide that finding Quinn's double is the only way to save Quinn. 27 3 "Electric Twister Acid Test" Oscar L. Costo Scott Smith Miller October 4, 1996 ( ) K1809 The sliders land in a barren wasteland with bizarre electrical activity that attracts tornadoes. They are confronted by the community anti-technology, who are similar to Amish people. The chief discovers the Sliders project and he decides to keep Wade as hostage; while keeping Quinn, Arturo and Rembrandt away. 28 4 "The Guardian" Adam Nimoy Tracy Tormé October 11, 1996 ( ) K1803 The sliders land on a world identical to Earth Prime except that the events that occurred in 1984 on Earth Prime are occurring in 1996 on this earth. 29 5 "The Dream Masters" Jefery Levy Story by : Scott Smith Miller & Melinda M. Snodgrass Teleplay by : Melinda M. Snodgrass October 18, 1996 ( ) K1807 The group arrives on a world where terrorists discovered drugs that can invade people's dreams, and one of them chooses Wade as his next target. (This is the first of two episodes without a sliding scene.) 30 6 "Desert Storm" Jim Johnston Matt Dearborn November 1, 1996 ( ) K1810 The sliders become involved in a struggle for control over a woman who can detect water on a desert world. 31 7 "Dragonslide" David Livingston Tony Blake & Paul Jackson November 8, 1996 ( ) K1816 A wizard wants to capture Quinn on a world where the Mallory family has special powers. 32 8 "The Fire Within" Jefery Levy Josef Anderson November 15, 1996 ( ) K1814 Quinn and Arturo communicate with a fire-based lifeform. 33 9 "The Prince of Slides" Richard Compton Eleah Horwitz November 22, 1996 ( ) K1808 The sliders land on a world where men get pregnant. Rembrandt is mistakenly confused for his double and is impregnated with his double's son. 34 11 "State of the Art" John T. Kretchmer Story by : Schuyler Kent Teleplay by : Nan Hagan December 6, 1996 ( ) K1813 On a world where the human population has been replaced with androids, a scientist wants to transplant Quinn and Rembrandt's brains into android hosts. 35 12 "Season's Greedings" Richard Compton Eleah Horwitz December 20, 1996 ( ) K1806 The sliders land onto a world dominated by commercialism, and get jobs working in a giant mall two days before Christmas. They later discover that the workers are basically indentured servants, and Arturo attempts to prevent one worker from abandoning her infant child. 36 13 "Murder Most Foul" Jeff Woolnough David Peckinpah January 3, 1997 ( ) K1815 Arturo is brainwashed into believing he is a great literary detective named Reginald Doyle (this world's equivalent of Sherlock Holmes). 37 14 "Slide Like an Egyptian" Adam Nimoy Scott Smith Miller January 17, 1997 ( ) K1817 The group lands on a world where ancient Egypt retained slavery and Egyptian pharaoh rule has become predominant. They must escape from a pyramid while being hunted by a large scarab beetle. 38 15 "Paradise Lost" Jim Johnston Steven Stoliar January 31, 1997 ( ) K1818 The sliders land on a world where a giant worm eats people. 39 20 "The Last of Eden" Allan Eastman Josef Anderson March 28, 1997 ( ) K1820 Quinn and Wade get stuck in an underground city. This episode is flashback of Rembrandt and Wade's memories. It is an adaptation of H. G. Wells story Time Machine. 40 16 "The Exodus (Part 1)" Jim Charleston Story by : John Rhys-Davies Teleplay by : Tony Blake & Paul Jackson February 21, 1997 ( ) K1825 When the sliders land on an earth that is about to be destroyed by the radiation of a pulsar, a military unit forces them to help them fix their sliding technology so they can transport people to a parallel world. Guest starring Roger Daltrey as Colonel Rickman. 41 17 "The Exodus (Part 2)" Jefery Levy Josef Anderson and Tony Blake & Paul Jackson February 28, 1997 ( ) K1824 Quinn and Maggie find an alternate earth to which they can transport 150 survivors from the previous earth; Quinn finds the coordinates of Earth Prime. However, Rickman has a hidden agenda for the survivors. This was the last show filmed with John Rhys-Davies. 42 18 "Sole Survivors" David Peckinpah Steven Kriozere March 7, 1997 ( ) K1819 Quinn is infected with a bacterium that turns people into zombies. 43 21 "The Other Slide of Darkness" Jeff Woolnough Nan Hagan & Scott Smith Miller April 11, 1997 ( ) K1802 The sliders find Rickman on a superstitious world. 44 19 "The Breeder" Paris Barclay Eleah Horwitz March 14, 1997 ( ) K1823 Maggie is infected with a parasite that takes control of her body and attempts to find a mate. 45 24 "Stoker" Jerry O'Connell Josef Anderson May 9, 1997 ( ) K1826 Wade makes friends with vampire musicians who want to steal the timer. Credits include Tommy Chong and Danny Masterson. 46 22 "Slither" Jim Johnston Tony Blake & Paul Jackson April 25, 1997 ( ) K1829 Quinn and Rembrandt are separated from Wade and Maggie after their plane crashes in the jungle. They attempt to reunite by assisting people attempting to capture deadly snakes. 47 23 "Dinoslide" Richard Compton David Peckinpah May 2, 1997 ( ) K1827 The sliders return to the world with the 150 survivors from The Exodus to find that it is inhabited by dinosaurs. 48 25 "This Slide of Paradise" Jim Johnston Nan Hagan May 16, 1997 ( ) K1828 Rickman and the sliders are trapped on an island with a scientist who has created a race of human-animal hybrids. The scientist is played by Michael York (see also The Island of Dr. Moreau). This is the last show in which Sabrina Lloyd is seen. Season 4 (1998–99) [ edit ] No. overall No. in season Title Directed by Written by Original air date Prod. code 49 1 "Genesis" Reza Badiyi David Peckinpah June 8, 1998 ( ) K2801 Three months after being separated from Rembrandt and Wade, Quinn and Maggie return to Earth Prime to find it has been conquered by the Kromaggs. 50 2 "Prophets and Loss" Mark Sobel Bill Dial June 8, 1998 ( ) K2805 The sliders land on a world dominated by a religion where people wish to travel to the other side through a vortex. After one of the leaders witnesses the sliders arrive on this earth, and after the sliders learn that people are being killed on this earth instead of transported to a parallel world, the timer is confiscated. Connor Trinneer guest stars. 51 3 "Common Ground" Reza Badiyi Chris Black June 15, 1998 ( ) K2810 Maggie saves the life of a Kromagg on a world where Kromaggs are conducting experiments on humans. 52 4 "Virtual Slide" Richard Compton Keith Damron June 22, 1998 ( ) K2807 The sliders land on a world where everyone uses virtual reality all the time. 53 5 "World Killer" Reza Badiyi Marc Scott Zicree June 29, 1998 ( ) K2804 The sliders land on a world where Quinn's double slid the entire population except himself. 54 6 "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" David Peckinpah Story by : Chris Black & David Peckinpah Teleplay by : Bill Dial & Marc Scott Zicree July 6, 1998 ( ) K2811 Quinn locates his brother Colin on a world significantly less advanced than Earth Prime where the society is similar to that of the Amish. Charlie O'Connell joins the cast as a regular. 55 7 "Just Say Yes" Jefferson Kibbee Richard Manning July 13, 1998 ( ) K2809 Maggie and Colin are given drugs in a society where drug use is mandatory and people can be arrested for non-possession. 56 8 "The Alternateville Horror" David Grossman Chris Black July 20, 1998 ( ) K2803 The Chandler Hotel appears to be haunted, but Quinn has a more scientific explanation for what's happening. 57 9 "Slidecage" Jerry O'Connell Marc Scott Zicree July 27, 1998 ( ) K2815 Quinn and Colin attempt to slide to Kromagg Prime but end up in a slidecage designed to prevent the Kromaggs from returning to that earth. 58 10 "Asylum" Michael Miller Bill Dial August 17, 1998 ( ) K2813 When Quinn is injured, the only one who can save him is a doctor who has been taught Kromagg healing techniques—but who is also wanted for providing assistance to the Kromaggs. 59 11 "California Reich" Robert M. Williams, Jr. Scott Smith Miller August 24, 1998 ( ) K2802 On a racist world, Rembrandt is forced into slavery. 60 12 "The Dying Fields" David Peckinpah William Bigelow August 31, 1998 ( ) K2812 The sliders land on a world used as a Kromagg training camp, where Kromaggs hunt humans. 61 13 "Lipschitz Live!" Jerry O'Connell Keith Damron November 30, 1998 ( ) K2814 The sliders are separated on a world where in every public place, there is a television set showing a talk show called Lipschitz Live!. Quinn becomes a guest on the show to announce his location to the others. 62 14 "Mother and Child" Helaine Head Richard Manning December 7, 1998 ( ) K2819 The sliders rescue a human woman and her half-human/half-Kromagg infant son. 63 15 "Net Worth" Paul Lynch Steven Stoliar January 11, 1999 ( ) K2806 The group is separated on a world divided between computer experts and ruthless scavengers. 64 16 "Slide by Wire" Robert A. Hudecek Chris Black January 18, 1999 ( ) K2820 Maggie's double impersonates her and slides with Quinn, Rembrandt, and Colin. Meg Foster guest stars. 65 17 "Data World" Jerry O'Connell Joel Metzger March 19, 1999 ( ) K2808 Archibald Chandler of the Chandler Hotel turns the sliders into computer data and makes them follow his wishes. By luck Mac the hacker helps the sliders. 66 18 "Way Out West" David Peckinpah Story by : Jerry O'Connell Teleplay by : Chris Black March 26, 1999 ( ) K2821 On a world resembling the "Old West", the sliders encounter Kolitar, the Kromagg from "Slidecage" 67 19 "My Brother's Keeper" Reza Badiyi Doug Molitor April 2, 1999 ( ) K2816 Quinn is mistaken for his double's clone on a world where clones are kept as organ donors. 68 20 "The Chasm" Robert A. Hudecek William Bigelow April 9, 1999 ( ) K2817 The sliders land in a village with technology that drains the happiness of one person to make the rest of the villagers happy. 69 21 "Roads Taken" Jerry O'Connell Story by : Marc Scott Zicree Teleplay by : Bill Dial April 16, 1999 ( ) K2822 A "bubble universe" envelops Quinn and Maggie. 70 22 "Revelations" Robert M. Williams, Jr. Story by : Marc Scott Zicree Teleplay by : Bill Dial April 23, 1999 ( ) K2823 After finding a science fiction novel that resembles the Kromagg Prime's conflict between the humans and Kromaggs, Quinn and Colin hope that the author can help them find Kromagg Prime and meet their birthparents. Cast includes Ken Jenkins, and Jerry Hardin guest stars as science fiction writer, Isaac Clark. Jerry and Charlie O'Connell's last episode. Season 5 (1999–2000) [ edit ] No. overall No. in season Title Directed by Written by Original air date Prod. code 71 1 "The Unstuck Man" Guy Magar Story by : Keith Damron & David Peckinpah Teleplay by : Chris Black & Bill Dial June 11, 1999 ( ) E0801 A scientist named Dr. Oberon Geiger uses Colin, Quinn and Quinn's double as guinea pigs for an experiment that combines people and parallel worlds. Joining the cast is Tembi Locke as Dr. Diana Davis, and Robert Floyd as the'merged Quinn'. 72 2 "Applied Physics" David R. Eagle Chris Black June 18, 1999 ( ) E0804 Diana attempts to separate Quinn and his double, while the combined version experiences violent flashbacks from Quinn's life. 73 3 "Strangers and Comrades" Richard Compton Keith Damron June 25, 1999 ( ) E0809 The sliders land on a barren wasteland and are forced to participate in a neverending battle with the Kromaggs. 74 4 "The Great Work" Reza Badiyi Robert Masello July 9, 1999 ( ) E0806 The sliders seek assistance from reclusive monks who later refuse to let them leave. 75 5 "New Gods for Old" Richard Compton David Gerrold July 16, 1999 ( ) E0810 Mallory is shot with a laser beam and ends up paralyzed, and looks for help from a group of spiritual healers. 76 6 "Please Press One" Paul Lynch William Bigelow July 23, 1999 ( ) E0808 Maggie is kidnapped by a corporate conglomerate. 77 7 "A Current Affair" David R. Eagle Steven Stoliar July 30, 1999 ( ) E0805 A tabloid newspaper spreads a rumor that U.S. President Jefferson Williams is having an affair with Maggie. 78 8 "The Java Jive" Jeff Woolnough Jennifer McGinnis & Janet Saunders August 6, 1999 ( ) E0807 The sliders land on a world where caffeine is outlawed. 79 9 "The Return of Maggie Beckett" Peter Ellis Chris Black August 13, 1999 ( ) E0812 Maggie is mistaken for her astronaut double and is kidnapped by conspirators. 80 10 "Easy Slider" David Peckinpah Story by : Jennifer McGinnis & Janet Saunders Teleplay by : Tim Burns August 20, 1999 ( ) E0813 On a world where gas powered vehicles are outlawed due to the pollution that they generate, Mallory becomes friends with a group of motorcycle riders. 81 11 "Requiem" Paul Lynch Michael Reaves September 10, 1999 ( ) E0802 Rembrandt receives visions from Wade. 82 12 "Map of the Mind" Paul Raimondi Robert Masello September 17, 1999 ( ) E0811 Diana and Mallory become trapped in a mental institution. 83 13 "A Thousand Deaths" David Peckinpah Keith Damron September 24, 1999 ( ) E0815 The sliders arrive on a world where the local population participates in deadly arcade simulators. 84 14 "Heavy Metal" Guy Magar Chris Black October 1, 1999 ( ) E0814 The sliders exit a vortex in the middle of the ocean, and must join the crew of a pirate ship in order to get back to California. (This is the second of two episodes without a sliding scene.) 85 15 "To Catch a Slider" Peter Ellis Story by : Chris Black & Bill Dial Teleplay by : Bill Dial January 14, 2000 ( ) E0816 The sliders must find a gem needed to repair their malfunctioning timer. 86 16 "Dust" Reynaldo Villalobos Story by : Chris Black Teleplay by : Tim Burns & Bill Dial January 21, 2000 ( ) E0817 The group lands on a world where Rembrandt is regarded as a deity. 87 17 "Eye of the Storm" David Peckinpah Story by : Chris Black & Eric Morris Teleplay by : Chris Black January 28, 2000 ( ) E0803 In their final encounter with Dr. Geiger, the scientist reveals that he can separate Mallory from his double Quinn. 88 18 "The Seer" Paul Cajero Keith Damron February 4, 2000 ( ) E0818 On a world with a television program based on the sliders' adventures, a psychic predicts the sliders' fate; they die in their next slide, and he begs Rembrandt, Maggie, Diana and Mallory stay. Although once again they do not want to stay. Their timer is destroyed and they have to find another way out, but there's a catch, only one can go. Rembrant infect himself with the Kromagg killing virus, and he goes, so that he is the only one to risk death. The episode (and the entire series) ends on a cliffhanger, with the rest of the characters wondering what's Rembrandt's fate. Home releases [ edit ] At present, the following DVD sets have been released by Universal Home Video.[6] DVD set Episodes Release date Sliders: The First and Second Seasons 23 August 3, 2004 Sliders: The Third Season 25 July 19, 2005 Sliders: The Fourth Season 22 March 25, 2008 Sliders: The Fifth and Final Season 18 January 17, 2012 Sliders: The Complete Series 88 December 2, 2014 Notes [ edit ] Episode titles for season one were not shown on screen; they come from production scripts. The episodes "Last Days" and "The Weaker Sex" are missing from streaming service.When it comes to cheese, there are certain qualities we look for. First, flavor. Second, texture. And third, we want to know how well it's going to melt in our grilled cheese sandwiches. Not all cheeses are made for melting. Some, like halloumi, are great on the grill. Others, like feta, are best for crumbling. And then there are cheeses like mozzarella that turn into a stringy mess when melted -- making pizza into the meal we love so much. But when you come across a cheese that was made for melting, like Gouda, you learn how great cheese really is. Cheeses like these turn into a flowy, soupy, creamy dream when met with a little heat. They maintain their great flavor, but their texture transforms into something we'd happily drown in. These cheeses are the cheeses you want to make fondue with, stuff in grilled cheese sandwiches, top burgers and make nacho cheese out of. These cheeses were born to melt. There are a couple of "rules" you'll want to be aware of before you start melting. First, understand that not all cheese melts equally. Because of the varying moisture content in different cheeses you just can't swap parmesan for cheddar in a recipe; it just won't work. The drier parmesan will melt as individual shavings, but it won't ever become a melted mass like a semi-hard cheddar. Stay away from these cheeses because they will never melt: halloumi, feta, cotija, ricotta, creamy goat, queso fresco. And be wary of these because they will always be stringy: cheddar curds, mozzarella, provolone. Once you've got yourself the right kind of cheese, you have to treat it nicely. Even the best cheese for melting can go wrong if thrown into too fierce of a fire. (The temperature shock can cause the fat to separate from the solids.) To ensure success, bring the cheese to room temperature, shred it before melting, and use low heat. And now, for the real important information, the 10 best cheeses for melting: Cheddar J Shepherd via Getty Images Think grilled cheese, burgers, nachos, etc. Swiss ballyscanlon via Getty Images FONDUE. Havarti Lisa Romerein via Getty Images Muenster James And James via Getty Images Brie Adrian Burke via Getty Images Gruyere Gouda Dorling Kindersley via Getty Images Fontina Snap Decision via Getty Images Blue Lluis Real via Getty Images American Kraft OBVS.Share this Article Facebook Twitter Email You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. University Stanford University A new kind of AI algorithm—designed to work with a small amount of data—may be able to assist in the early stages of drug development. Artificially intelligent algorithms can learn to identify amazingly subtle information, enabling them to distinguish between people in photos or to screen medical images as well as a doctor. But in most cases their ability to perform such feats relies on training that involves thousands to trillions of data points. This means artificial intelligence doesn’t work all that well in situations where there is very little data, such as drug development. Vijay Pande, professor of chemistry at Stanford University, and his students thought that a fairly new kind of deep learning, called one-shot learning, that requires only a small number of data points might be a solution to that low-data problem. “We’re trying to use machine learning, especially deep learning, for the early stage of drug design,” Pande says. “The issue is, once you have thousands of examples in drug design, you probably already have a successful drug.” The group admitted the idea of applying one-shot learning to drug design problems was farfetched—the data was likely too limited. However, they’d had success in the past with machine learning methods requiring only hundreds of data points, and they had data available to test the one-shot approach. It seemed worth a try. Much to their surprise, their results, published in ACS Central Science, show that one-shot learning methods have potential as a helpful tool for drug development and other areas of chemistry research. One-shot learning and drug development Other researchers have successfully applied one-shot learning to image recognition and genomics, but applying it to problems relevant to drug development is a bit different. Whereas pixels and bases are fairly natural types of data to feed into an AI algorithm, properties of small molecules aren’t. To make molecular information more digestible, the researchers first represented each molecule in terms of the connections between atoms (what a mathematician would call a graph). This step highlighted intrinsic properties of the chemical in a form that an algorithm could process. With these graphical representations, the group trained an algorithm on two different datasets—one with information about the toxicity of different chemicals and another that detailed side effects of approved medicines. From the first dataset, they trained the algorithm on six chemicals and had it make predictions about the toxicity of the other three. Using the second dataset, they trained it to associate drugs with side effects in 21 tasks, testing it on six more. In both cases, the algorithm was better able to predict toxicity or side effects than would have been possible by chance. “We worked on some prototype algorithms and found that, given a few data points, they were able to make predictions that were pretty accurate,” says Bharath Ramsundar, a graduate student in the Pande lab and co-lead author of the study. However, Ramsundar cautions that this isn’t a “magical” technique. It was built off of several recent advances in a particular style of one-shot learning and it works by relying on the closeness of different molecules, as indirectly indicated by their formula. For example, when the researchers trained their algorithm on the toxicity data and tested it on the side effect data, the algorithm completely collapsed. “Right now, people make this kind of choice by hunch… This might be a nice compliment to that: an experimentalist’s helper.” Machine learning in the future People concerned about AI taking jobs from humans have nothing to fear from this work. The researchers envision this as groundwork for a potential tool for chemists who are early in their research and trying to choose which molecule to pursue from a set of promising candidates. “Right now, people make this kind of choice by hunch,” Ramsundar says. “This might be a nice compliment to that: an experimentalist’s helper.” Beyond giving insight into drug design, this tool would be broadly applicable to molecular chemistry. Already, the Pande lab is testing these methods on different chemical compositions for solar cells. They have also made all of the code they used for the experiment open source, available as part of the DeepChem library. “This paper is the first time that one-shot has been applied to this space and it’s exciting to see the field of machine learning move so quickly,” Pande says. “This is not the end of this journey—it’s the beginning.” Source: Stanford UniversityA landmark agreement has been signed between the government of French Polynesia and the Seasteading Institute that lays the foundations for the establishment of a floating city in the country’s waters. Signed on Friday, 13th January, the agreement will see the government and non-profit cooperate to develop a legal framework for what they are now calling The Floating Island Project. Although located within the territorial waters of French Polynesia, the floating island will have its own governing framework and economic regulations, allowing it to attract businesses with offers of low – if any – taxation and little red tape. However, it should also offer significant benefits to the nation, by not only bringing jobs and preventing a brain drain on the archipelagos, but also offering resilience to rising sea levels associated with climate change. “Our seasteading collaboration with French Polynesia was initiated by the Tahitians themselves and will bring jobs, economic growth, and environmental resiliency to the region,” explained Randolph Hencken, executive director of the Seasteading Institute. “Signing the memorandum of understanding with French Polynesia is an important first step, and a huge milestone for seasteading.” The agreement is a vital step in what has already been a long journey towards the development of such a floating city. Back in September, a delegation from the Seasteading Institute examined multiple sites around French Polynesia, as well as meeting with several of the nation’s senior ministers. Now a memorandum of understanding (MOU) has been signed, the next steps will be to complete and extensive environmental assessments of the ocean and seabed, as well as the completion of an economic analysis by the Seasteading Institute to demonstrate the financial benefits to the nation. “The Seasteading Institute and the government of French Polynesia will draw from the best practices of more than 4,000 existing Special Economic Zones around the world to create a ‘Special Economic SeaZone,’” added Hencken. “The SeaZone will combine the advantages of French Polynesia’s geopolitical location with unique regulatory opportunities specifically designed to attract businesses and investors.” When construction finally begins on the floating islands, it will be funded by investors in the Seasteading Institute, with a total anticipated cost somewhere between $10m and $50m. The floating platforms that will house the city have already been designed by Dutch engineering firm Blue21, meaning the focus now is on making the concept work for the area. The organisation plans for many businesses on the floating island to be areas of clean-tech, meaning there are likely to be numerous skilled jobs available to the people of French Polynesia. “We need to create new clean-tech and blue economy jobs for our youth, and this project has the potential to be a real game-changer locally,” said Marc Collins, former Minister of Tourism for French Polynesia. “This project could help us retain our bright minds, who would otherwise emigrate for work.” However, with many of the country’s islands under threat from rising sea levels, the project also could provide a long-term survival solution for the nation. “Polynesian culture has a long history of seafaring across the Pacific Ocean that will contribute to this ambitious project. More than most nations, our islands are impacted by rising sea levels, and resilient floating islands could be one tangible solution for us to maintain our populations anchored to their islands,” added Collins. “For many Polynesians, leaving our islands is not an option.”The Explorer Threads, processes and concurrency in Python: some thoughts by Michele Simionato July 26, 2010 Summary Removing the hype around the multicore (non) revolution and some (hopefully) sensible comment about threads ad other forms of concurrency. Advertisement Threads, processes and concurrency in Python: some thoughts I attended the EuroPython conference in Birmingham last week. Nice place and nice meeting overall. There were lots of interesting talks on many subjects. I want to focus on the talks about concurrency here. We had a keynote by Russel Winder about the "multicore revolution" and various talks about different approaches to concurrency (Python-CSP, Twisted, stackless, etc). Since this is a hot topic in Python (and in other languages) and everybody wants to have his saying, I will take the occasion to make a comment. The multicore non revolution First of all, I want to say that I believe in the multicore non revolution: I claim that essentially nothing will change for the average programmer with the advent of multicore machines. Actually, the multicore machines are already here and you can already see that nothing has changed. For instance, I am interacting with my database just as before: yes, internally the database may have support for multiple cores, it may be able to perform parallel restore and other neat tricks, but as a programmer I do not see any difference in my day to day SQL programming, except (hopefully) on the performance side. I am also writing my web application as before the revolution: perhaps internally my web server is using processes and not threads, but I do not see any difference at the web framework user level. Ditto if I am writing a desktop application: the GUI framework provides a way to launch processes or threads in the background: I just perform the high level calls and I not fiddle with locks. At work we have a Linux cluster with hundreds of CPUs, running thousands of processes per day in parallel: still, all of the complication of scheduling and load balancing is managed by the Grid engine, and what we write is just single threaded code interacting with a database. The multicore revolution did not change anything for the way we code. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people developing for embedded platforms will just keep using platform-specific mechanisms. The only programmers that (perhaps) may see a difference are scientific programmers, or people writing games, but they are a minority of the programmers out there. Besides, they already know how to write parallel programs, since in the scientific community people have discussed parallelization for thirty years, so no revolution for them either. For the rest of the world I expect that frameworks will appear abstracting the implementation details away, so that people will not see big differences when using processes and when using threads. This is already happening in the Python world: for instance the multiprocessing module in the standard library is modeled on the threading module API, and the recently accepted PEP 3148 (the one about futures) works in the same way for both threads and processes. Enough with thread bashing At the conference there was a lot of bias against threads, as usual in the Python world, just more so. I have heard people saying bad things against threads from my first day with Python, 8 years ago, and frankly I am getting tired. It seems this is an area filled with misinformation and FUD. And I am not even talking of the endless rants against the GIL. I do not like threads particularly, but after 8 years of hearing things like "it is impossible to get threads right, and if you are thinking so you are a delusional programmer" one gets a bit tired. Of course it is possible to get threads right, because all mainstream operating systems use them, most web servers use them, and thousands of applications use them, and they are all working (I will not claim that they are all bug-free, though). The problem is that the people bashing threads are typically system programmers which have in mind use cases that the typical application programmer will never encounter in her life. For instance, I recommend the article by Bryan Cantrill "A spoon of sewage", published in the Beautiful Code book: it is an horror story about the intricacies of locking in the core of the Solaris operating system (you can find part of the article in this blog post). That kind of things are terribly tricky to get right indeed; my point however is that really few people have to deal with that level of sophistication. In 99% of the use cases an application programmer is likely to run into, the simple pattern of spawning a bunch of independent threads and collecting the results in a queue is everything one needs to know. There are no explicit locks involved and it is definitively possible to get it right. One may actually argue that this is a case that should be managed with a higher level abstraction than threads: a witty writer could even say that the one case when you can get threads right is when you do not need then. I have no issues with that position: but I have issue with the bold claim that threads are impossible to use in all situations! In my experience even the trivial use cases are rare and actually in 8 years of Python programming I have never once needed to implemenent a hairy use case. Even more: I never needed to perform a concurrent update using locks directly (except for learning purposes). I do write concurrent applications, but all of my concurrency needs are taken care of by the database and the web framework. I use threadlocal objects occasionally, to make sure everything works properly, but that's all. Of course threadlocal objects (I mean instances of threading.local in Python) use locks internally, but I do not need to think about the locks, they are hidden from my user experience. Similarly, when I use SQLAlchemy, the thread-related complications are taken care of by the framework. This is why in practice threads are usable and are actually used by everybody, sometimes even without knowing it (did you know that using the standard library logging module turns your program into a multi-threaded program behind your back?). There is more to say about threads: if you want to run your concurrent/parallel application on Windows or in any platform lacking fork, you have no other choice. Yes, in theory one could use the asynchronous approach (Twisted-docet) but in practice even Twisted use threads underneath to manage blocking input (say from the database): there is not way out. Confusing parallelism with concurrency At the conference various people conflated parallelism with concurrency, and I feel compelled to rectify that misunderstanding. Parallelism is really quite trivial: you just split a computation in many independent tasks which interact very little or do not interact at all (for the so-called embarrassing parallel problems) and you collect the results at the end. The MapReduce pattern of Google fame is a well known example of simple parallelism. Concurrency is very much nontrivial instead: it is all about modifying things from different threads/processes/tasklets/whatever without incurring in hairy bugs. Concurrent updates are the key aspects in concurrency. A true example of concurrency is an OS-level task scheduler. The nice thing is that most people don't need true concurrency, they need just parallelism of the simplest strain. Of course one needs a mechanism to start/stop/resume/kill tasks, and a way to wait for a task to finish, but this is quite simple to implement if the tasks are independent. Heck, even my own plac module is enough to manage simple parallelism! (more on that later) I also believe people have been unfair against
enemies? Like most other Democrats, Obama not only avoids complaining about regular defense spending, but backs the ongoing plan to expand the ground forces, which will add $15-20 billion in annual defense costs in the name of better executing future occupations like Iraq. I understand the political calculus here, but let’s not give the guy too many medals for political courage. Democrats like Obama and Menendez also argue that Iraq is a reason that we are shortchanging state-building efforts in Afghanistan. This talking point illustrates the trouble with conventional foreign policy thinking on the so-called left. By saying that Afghanistan needs the medicine Iraq is getting, Democratic foreign policy leaders are rushing to repeat a mistake they rightly condemn. As Harvey Sapolsky, Chris Preble and I have argued, this thinking shows that the hubris that brought us into Iraq is essentially intact. Defending American interests in Afghanistan requires nothing more than the absence of haven for international terrorists and an example made of those who offer it. The latter is a lesson well taught. Should it fail, a small ground force can target terrorist camps and supporters via raids and air strikes guided by intelligence, even if Taliban militias gain power in some regions. Those missions never required that Afghanistan become a modern nation, democratic, or even stable. Instead of this realistic approach, the next President will probably expand a second no-end-in-sight war, one meant to assert the control of a statelet in Kabul over an unruly territory offering little historic basis for the word “nation.” Afghanistan is full of arms and grievances. It lacks the basics of statehood: a road network, a national energy grid, widespread patriotism, and tax collection. The notion that a 30 or 50 percent increase of Western forces and investment can transform Afghanistan into a peaceful, centralized state shows idealism of stunning tenacity. Obama talks more sensibility about these matters than John McCain, but he should apply some cost-benefit analysis to that spending too.Cody McCormick has still been around the rink. ©2016, Dan Hickling, Olean Times Herald BUFFALO – The blood clots Cody McCormick developed halfway through 2014-15 will force the rugged Sabres forward to retire, general manager Tim Murray said Monday. “Cody McCormick is not going to jeopardize his life or his family by trying to play again,” Murray said inside the First Niagara Center. “We support him in that. He was around this winter and did some other things when players were rehabbing. So I don’t know if that’s going to be a future thing or not. That’s something that he dabbled at and seemed to like.” McCormick, 32, hasn’t played since he was briefly hospitalized when clots spread to his lungs after he blocked a shot in January 2015. The popular veteran, the Sabres’ most frequent fighter during his five-year run, has one year left on the three-year, $4.5 million contract he signed July 1, 2014. In December, McCormick, always an accountable and friendly presence, told the Times Herald he felt normal and was taking a “precautionary dosage” of blood thinners. “I want to evaluate how much risk there might be to playing,” McCormick said then. “And if there’s any risk, it’s not worth it for me to try to play with where I’m at in life and put my family in the position where they would worry about me every game.” Murray said the Sabres could place McCormick on long-term injured reserve or reach a financial settlement. “We haven’t gone down that road yet,” he said. “I guess depending on what we do or (are) able to do with free agency might determine that. Right now, there’s no reason to question it because we’re not at that point.” McCormick often goes on the ice before practice with rehab coordinator Dennis Miller and helps injured players go through drills. xxx Murray said the Sabres have no plans to exercise a buyout on the final three seasons of winger Matt Moulson’s five-year, $25 million contract. The three-time 30-goal scorer endured a brutal season, scoring only eight goals. “He knows he has to work hard this offseason and he’s very disappointed in himself, his own season,” Murray said. “It was a tough season for all of us to watch, and hopefully he can regroup and come back next year and be better.” During an appearance on WGR in early March, Murray ripped Moulson, saying he “has neglected some things in the last couple years as far as how workouts are changing, how we as an organization are changing with our young players and even our players on the team.” Those comments ticked Moulson off, and he told Murray during their “long talk” Sunday, the GM said. “We talked about that yesterday, and that’s fine,” Murray said. “He works hard. It was not a question of him working hard; it was a question of him maybe changing his workout regime and stuff like that. He feels strongly in the way he works out and the effort he puts into it. He was very strong to that in the exit interview. He tells us he’s going to work extremely hard to get his game back.” xxx The Sabres haven’t had “much discussion” yet with defenseman Rasmus Ristolainen’s agent about a new contract. Ristolainen, 21, is a restricted free agent and was the team’s best defenseman most of the season. The sides, of course, plan to talk. “Once we find out their expectation, that’ll help us decide on a long-term or bridge (contract),” Murray said. Ristolainen enjoyed a breakout season, compiling nine goals and 41 points while skating a team-high 25 minutes, 16 seconds a game. The Finn, the only Sabre to play all 82 games, was also a team-worst minus-21. xxx Murray said defenseman Cody Franson, who suffered a season-ending injury Feb. 19, has a “tiny vision thing, I believe.” Franson was feeling good and pretty close to returning, Murray said. xxx The Sabres placed forward Cal O’Reilly on waivers Monday and expect him to join the Rochester Americans today. Could he get claimed? “Waivers, that’s always a chance,” Murray said. “I don’t worry about it, because it means a team wants him. I would rather he not get claimed.” O’Reilly, 29, is the Amerks’ captain. The AHL affiliate has three games left. O’Reilly played 20 games with the Sabres, compiling three goals and seven points. He has a one-way, $700,000 contract next season, so teams could pass on him. Update: O’Reilly has cleared.Burton will play in League One next season, the highest level in which they have ever competed Ten-man Burton Albion secured the League Two title with a superb comeback victory at lowly Cambridge United. The Brewers, knowing a win would ensure top spot irrespective of how second-placed Shrewsbury fared, led through Stuart Beavon's header but Tom Elliott headed the hosts level. Robbie Simpson's penalty put the U's ahead after Harrison Dunk was fouled by goalkeeper Jon McLaughlin, who saw red. But a stunning Phil Edwards strike made it 2-2 and Kevin Stewart's shot won it. Nearly 1,900 Brewers fans celebrated a thrilling victory in style, but they seemed to be celebrating almost from the off after hearing Shrewsbury trailed to a third-minute goal at home to Plymouth. As it transpired, Burton boss Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink would have led his side to the title even had they lost, something that seemed likely when their 10 men trailed 2-1 with 20 minutes left. Away-day success Burton Albion lost only twice in their last 15 away matches on their way to becoming League Two champions and managed a total of 12 league wins away from the Pirelli Stadium. It had started well for the side already assured of promotion to League One for the first time in history, with Beavon's clever header from Damien McCrory's fine left-wing cross deservedly putting them ahead. But Elliott headed the hosts level on 25 minutes and the U's began to get on top after the interval, as Simpson, Liam Hughes, Tom Champion and Sullay Kaikai all had chances. And the pressure told when a poor header by George Taft led to McLaughlin bringing down Dunk and Simpson just about beat replacement keeper Scott Shearer from the penalty spot. However, the Brewers regrouped and right-back Edwards equalised with a stunning 30-yard strike. Stewart then sent the travelling support crazy with two minutes left, hitting an unlikely winner with a fine left-footed shot. Stuart Beavon (right) scored seven goals for Burton this season, with six coming in the league Former Chelsea striker Hasselbaink took over as Brewers boss in November 2014All ranking projects are beasts, and the deeper we go, the more beastly they become. Ranking players at one position against players at another is easy enough. Shuffling the positions together to form a top 500 list can be unwieldy. Adding in the "dynasty" tag is the ultimate complication. Before we hit the top 25, let's talk about methodology. Not all dynasty leagues are created equal - the term is understood to mean that owners keep most/all of their roster year-to-year. To some, it also means the league is very deep (over 800 players rostered). However, I get plenty of questions on twitter about 10-team, 23-player roster dynasties. For the purposes of this ranking, I'm going to use an industry league as the model. It's a 20-team, 45-player roster format. It's up to you to mentally adjust the rankings to fit your own league depth and settings. By the way, if you are interested in more MLB rankings columns, head on over to our 2017 fantasy baseball rankings dashboard. Throughout the offseason, you will find tiered positional rankings, keeper values articles, our team prospect breakdowns, fantasy baseball prospect rankings, and more - all in one easy place. My Dynasty Rankings Approach For scoring, we'll use standard 5x5 stats. Since we're concerned with 2017 and beyond (a lot of the beyond), I tend to prioritize raw talent over counting stats like runs and RBI. A good player will get his opportunities over time. A bad player will eventually lose a favorable lineup role. I'm mostly interested in how a player will perform over the next five years. While players with even longer term value should be acknowledged as possessing such, a LOT of things can go wrong between now and 2022. I might pay a penny for a dollar of 2022 value. That reflects my own personal preferences. I also place a disproportionate value on 2017 expectations. For established major league players, over half of my ranking reflects what they'll do this year. There are many exceptions for the young, old, and infirm. Fortunately, we're using the same information to form our expectations about 2017 and beyond. So while other dynasty rankers may tell you they're doing an even 20 percent valuation of the next five seasons, it works out about the same as my method. There will only be a few notable differences. Perhaps you've heard TINSTAAPP - There's No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect. There's a dynasty corollary - there's no such thing as a reliable pitcher. Relative to position players, all pitchers have a massively elevated risk of injury, especially the career altering variety. As such, their dynasty value takes a big hit. Not even Clayton Kershaw is safe. While, pitchers are riskier dynasty investments, you do need a full complement of hurlers to win a league. In general, I recommend building the foundation of your roster with hitters then diversifying to pitchers. It's also easier to find a free Robert Gsellman or Michael Montgomery than a comparably talented hitting prospect. One last note...because this is such a large project, I have decided to take an iterative approach. Today, we talk about the top 25. Next week, I'll release the next 25 or 50 names. When I do so, I may have edits to make to the top 25. This will continue until we have a very long list of players. By then, the top of the list should polished smooth and shiny. Shall we? Top 25 Dynasty Assets for 2017 I think you can see the general cadence of the list. First we have the very young, very awesome bats, all aged between 22 and 25. Then we move onto the very good veterans with a couple under-established youngsters shuffled in. Trout's number one ranking requires no explanation. He's too consistently good to rank anywhere else, even if there are a couple players who might be better than him sometime around 2025. Just like in re-draft, the distance between Trout and the rest of the field is huge. Coors Field offers an exception to the talent over counting stats rule. Arenado has posted consecutive 40 home run, 130 RBI seasons without even going wild. The lack of stolen bases is a shame, but he has upside to push 150 RBI in a perfect year. That's category shattering potential. There's still nothing wrong with preferring Betts, Machado, Bryant, or Correa. In fact, Correa's a good buy low opportunity after injuries slowed him in 2016. To my eye, Harper's ranking is a tad high. For a brief moment, he burned brighter than any other player in baseball. The overall resume still reads as "good player with massive upside." There's volatility here. If I was merely considering the most likely outcome (the modal projection), Harper would be ranked between Goldy and Lindor. The super-high ceiling drags the average projection up to the #7. Your personal valuation of Harper should reflect your risk preferences. Following Harper are four very good shortstops. Take your pick of profile. Seager and Bogaerts have the steady, high floor approach. Turner snags oodles of stolen bases and will have three eligibilities in 2017. Story may lead all shortstops in home runs over the next five seasons. Here's where things get interesting. The next five players - Altuve, Goldy, Lindor, Yelich, and Mazara - offer the gamut of strategic choice for owners. Contend now with Goldschimdt, build for later with Mazara, or try to walk the line with the other trio. Rizzo's ranking probably looks bearish at first glance. And honestly, it might be. I know I'd pick him after Goldschmidt but before Kershaw. Speaking of Kershaw, the appropriate place to take him is adjacent to older stars like Donaldson and Cabrera. Rounding out the list are four reliable veterans and Villar. While the Brewers utility star is a regression risk, he should hit and run enough to provide big value over the next three years. As a late bloomer, he may fade faster than the typical 25-year-old. This is another instance where risk tolerance will decide your path.The Senate on Tuesday approved legislation allowing families of Sept. 11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia, defying a White House veto threat as well as threats of economic retaliation from Riyadh. By voice vote, senators approved the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The bipartisan sponsors of the bill, Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, are now calling on the House to follow suit. “It’s up to the House,” Cornyn said, while insisting the legislation would not damage the U.S.-Saudi relationship despite what he described as “saber-rattling.” Schumer said any foreign government that aids terrorists who strike the U.S. "will pay a price if it is proven they have done so." Saudi Arabia’s government has threatened to pull billions of dollars from the U.S. economy if the plan is enacted. The legislation gives victims' families the right to sue in U.S. court for any role that elements of the Saudi government may have played in the 2001 attacks that killed thousands in New York, the Washington, D.C. area and Pennsylvania. Relatives of Sept. 11 victims have urged the Obama administration to declassify and release U.S. intelligence that allegedly discusses possible Saudi involvement in the attacks. In a statement on Tuesday, a group of them applauded the passage in the Senate and said it “reaffirms the commonsense principle that no person, entity or government enjoys blanket immunity from legal responsibility for participation in a terrorist attack that takes lives or causes injury inside the United States of America.” But while the bill is a bipartisan measure, the Obama administration has threatened to veto. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest reiterated that message on Tuesday, saying: “It’s difficult to imagine the president signing this legislation.” Earnest warned of “unintended consequences,” saying the bill would “change longstanding international law regarding sovereign immunity and the president continues to harbor serious concerns this legislation would make the U.S. vulnerable in other court systems around the world.” Schumer said Tuesday that the White House concerns, though, “don’t stand up.” He even warned the Senate could override a presidential veto. The House already is planning to move on the bill. A House Judiciary Committee aide told Fox News the panel intends to hold a hearing on the Senate version of the bill in the near future. Many Senate Democrats backed the bill, including Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, putting them at odds with the White House. Some lawmakers also have voiced reservations. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, warned that the legislation, if passed, would alienate Saudi Arabia and undermine a longstanding yet strained relationship with a critical U.S. ally in the Middle East. Fox News' Kara Rowland and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Dario Balca, CTV Toronto Police in Barrie are investigating after a handgun was stolen from a Peel Regional Police officer’s car on Sunday. Investigators say the officer’s duty belt was stolen from his car in front of his home on Rose Street in Barrie. The belt contained a Smith and Wesson.40 calibre pistol, 46 rounds of ammunition, pepper spray, a baton and handcuffs. The incident occurred sometime between 8 p.m. on Friday and 5 a.m. on Saturday, police said. “The primary focus is the retrieval and location of this equipment,” said Det. Brett Haynes of the Barrie Police Service. The car in question is the officer’s personal vehicle and not a patrol car. Peel Regional Police says they are conducting an internal investigation into whether or not the officer broke any rules by having the weapon in his own car. Investigators say force was used to get into the car. Police are asking anyone with information to contact Barrie Police or Crime Stoppers. With a Report from CTV BarrieNEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Pay cuts could be coming to a corner office near you, even if you're not the CEO of a troubled bank. The new federal rules limiting executive compensation announced by President Obama Wednesday may affect only a handful of the nation's most battered financial institutions currently. But experts say the moves could be a sign of more government action on the issue of executive pay in the future. Executive pay activists say the attention being given to the $18 billion in Wall Street bonuses at the same time many financial firms are losing money and tapping hundreds of billions of federal funds is making it easier for politicians to justify why salaries should be cut. Alexander Cwirko-Godycki, research manager for executive compensation research firm Equilar, said that the U.S. public, not just Corporate America, has been reluctant to accept anything that smacks of pay caps in the past. But he said that the mood is now changing. "In this case, it's the first time it's palatable to most people. There's a total lack of trust on Main Street for Wall Street," he said. This time, it's different To be sure, this is not the first time Washington has tried to put caps on executive pay. But activists seem to be more encouraged that change will actually be effective this time "This is different. The arguments against curbs don't make sense any longer. My friends will bring up the issue even before I do. Opinion has been galvanized," said Robert McCormick, chief policy officer for Glass Lewis & Co., a research firm advising institutional investors. McCormick said it is almost certain that so called "say on pay" rules will pass Congress and be signed into law this year. In fact, Obama was a co-sponsor on such a measure when he was in Congress. These rules allow for nonbinding shareholder votes on pay packages, and experts note that they have helped curb compensation in other countries, such as the United Kingdom.. But some are hoping for even more far reaching measures to combat excessive salaries and bonuses. Nell Minow, co-founder of The Corporate Library, an indepedent corporate governance research firm, said a government-mandated change in rules on the election of corporate directors would be a far more effective way to rein in pay. "The only thing that will make any difference is the ability to for shareholders to get rid of bad directors who vote for these bad pay packages," she said. "That way, once in a while, a director is going to say, 'Gee, I could vote for this pay plan, but maybe the shareholders wouldn't like it.'" 2008 pay numbers could spark another outcry Minow and Cwirko-Godycki both expect modest declines in average executive pay when the numbers for 2008 are reported in the coming month. But they think the drop is likely to be nowhere near as much as the forecast 12% decline in corporate earnings among S&P 500 companies, let alone the 38% decline in the value of their stocks. And one expert, former compensation consultant Graef Crystal, who has been calling for changes to pay packages for the last 20 years, says he actually thinks CEO pay will be up in 2008. Crystal said he's afraid that even if cash compensation is curbed somewhat, an increase in the issuance of stock and options will more than make up for the lower salaries. "Executives don't like to go quietly in the night. Their idea of a Draconian sacrifice is to make the same money they did last year," he said. But Minow said the fact that financial firms are likely to be forced to cut pay will remove one of the prime drivers of higher executive pay across corporate America. "What happened was, you were the CEO of a big manufacturing company, you're visited by your investment banker. He's no smarter than you. He's not running a company larger than yours. But he's making three times as much money as you did. That made a lot of CEOs mad."45User Rating: 4 out of 5 Review title of Will For the most part, it works the way I need it to and it does notifications and things accordingly. There's only one major issue I'm having and it wasn't a problem until the most recent update. The home screen tile used to function almost perfectly; it showed a preview of the most recent message of the current team and it had a small numbered circle to indicate how many unread messages you had. Then after opening the app and looking through them, the app tile would go back to simply showing the Slack logo. Now the app tile basically doesn't register that messages have been read so it continually shows a preview of the last time it push notified along with the number of unread messages at that time, regardless of how many times I try open and close the app. This behavior annoys me. Please fix it soon as it's otherwise been very good until this recent update.Impact Grand Champion Drew Galloway was interviewed for this week's Extra Mustard at Sports Illustrated. Below are a couple of highlights: John Cena: "I used to be around John Cena all the time in WWE, and I watched him and the way he worked. John is a guy who has been at the top longer than anyone else in history, and I'm lucky to have the opportunity to train at Cena's gym and go to him for advice. The questions I ask him deal with how to conduct myself as a businessman and how to truly get over in wrestling. My goal is to actually top him, and be bigger and busier than John Cena." See Also Funny Fan Reactions To Roman Reigns In The Royal Rumble (Video) Roman Reigns: "Roman looks great, has incredible stage presence, and he is solid in the ring. The issue is he's been positioned as the 'chosen guy,' and when you spoon feed that to the fans, generally they don't respond favorably. But he gets a huge response either way, which means they care and speaks to his overall talent much like Cena." Galloway also discussed leaving WWE, possibly returning to WWE someday, AJ Styles and more. You can read the full interview by clicking here. Source: Sports IllustratedChicago To Sue Feds Over Funding Threats To Sanctuary Cities Enlarge this image toggle caption Matt Marton/AP Matt Marton/AP Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing back against the federal government. On Monday, the city is filing suit against the Department of Justice, which announced it would withhold millions of dollars in police grant money from so-called sanctuary cities. Emanuel is suing because he says new rules for a federal crime-fighting grant go against the Constitution and the city's values. "Chicago will not let our police officers become political pawns in a debate," Emanuel said. Last week, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said grant applicants have to share information about undocumented immigrants to federal officials if they want the funding. But Emanuel said he refuses to choose between immigrant rights and having well-funded community police. "We're going to act immediately," Emanuel said, "to make sure that there's a ruling by the court, as there's been on other issues as relates to immigration and refugee policies — where the court has basically stopped the Trump administration in its tracks." Chicago was expecting to get $3.2 million from the grant to help with crime fighting this year. "The Department of Justice cannot commandeer local law enforcement to carry out federal immigration law functions," said Ed Siskel, the city's lawyer. "We cannot be forced to violate our residents' constitutional rights." Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson also expressed concern about the application guidelines. "Our job is to investigate crime, our job is not to investigate immigration status or documentation," Johnson said. Attorney General Sessions sent letters to four other cities last week warning them that they also wouldn't be eligible for funding: Baltimore, Albuquerque, N.M, and San Bernardino and Stockton in California. A spokesman for the Department of Justice declined to comment.Efficient and Secure Browsing on Safari Apple Safari is as good a browser as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. It’s just not as popular since it’s primarily used on the Mac OS. It is productive, it is reliable, fast and it keeps getting useful updates that make it a little better each time. Your experience with Apple Safari may have been good so far, but you can improve it even more by installing extensions. Extensions, for the uninitiated, are programs that attach to your browser and enhance it by letting it perform additional tasks. Most of them work in the background and are very easy to activate. In this article, we’ve gathered a list of what we think are must-have Safari web extensions. These will add some killer functions to your Safari browser and help you turbocharge your productivity. Safari Restore The Safari Restore plugin is perhaps the most useful extension in our list. Like the name suggests, Safari Restore will restore your previous browsing session before you closed your browser. In other words, all open tabs at the time of closing the browser will be reopened if you use Safari Restore. If your Safari browser crashes regularly or if you want to pick up a browsing session where you left it off afterwards, Safari Restore is the plugin for you. You can download Safari Restore here. Also Read : How to Protect Your Privacy and Make Safari Secure in 10 Minutes ClickToPlugin ClickToPlugin will greatly speed up your browser. What the extension does is it prevents Flash, Silverlight and Java from loading on webpages. The extension will replace this kind of content with an image that tells you what kind of content was stopped from loading. If you wish to load that content, you can click on the image and it will load in a jiffy. Download ClickToPlugin here. TabLinks If you need to quote sources in your work, you need TabLinks. TabLinks will generate a list that contains the addresses of all the tabs currently open in Safari. You can use this list to quickly get sources or for your records later. Get TabLinks here. Related Reading: 30 of The Best Firefox Addons For Better Tabbed Browsing AutoPagerizer If you get tired of constantly clicking the “next” button while scrolling through search engine results to your query, AutoPagerizer is the plugin for you. AutoPagerizer, simply put, automatically converts separate pages into one long page. You can get AutoPagerizer here. Gmail Counter Do you use Gmail and get a lot of emails? If you want to keep track of your emails better or want to avoid navigating to Gmail unless it’s really important, you might want to check out Gmail Counter. Gmail counter notifies you when you get an email and tells you how many new emails you’ve received. Get the Gmail Counter extension here. See Also: 10+ Gmail Add-ons and Services That Make Emailing More Productive AdBlock If you get tired of all those ads everywhere on the web, get AdBlock. AdBlock will stop most ads from loading, giving you a faster and less frustrating browsing experience. It will let you control which site has its ads blocked and which site doesn’t, so you won’t miss anything important. Get AdBlock here. Translate Translate is perfect for those of you who occasionally end up on foreign websites, have foreign friends or are learning a foreign language. The Translate extension uses Google translate to translate all content on a page to a desired language. Get Translate here. Related Article : Add Google Translate to Any Browser for Instant Translation Keeppy extension Keeppy will let you capture and parts of a web page- including images, links and text- or entire webpages. You can send captured content to your friends or keep it for later for compiling. You can get Keeppy here. Last Pass You, if you are a typical web user, probably spend large parts of your time filling out web forms or typing your account info to login to websites. With Last Pass, the process is automatic and instantaneous. Last Pass stores your personal data and passwords in a secure way. You can get Last Pass here. ResizeMe If you regularly have several Safari browser windows open, you will want to take a look at ResizeMe. ResizeMe lets you resize the safari window in 6 ways, allowing multiple windows to be viewed in an organized fashion. Get ResizeMe here. Finally… All of these extensions are designed to make your life easier. They can be installed in a couple of minutes and won’t cost you a dime to use (most of them, at any rate). They are also light and, if you were wondering, they won’t slow down your browser. We think these plugins will greatly enhance your productivity, whether you use your Safari browser at home or work, and save you time and add to your efficiency. While we did our best to make this list as comprehensive as possible, chances are your favorites didn’t make it to this list. Do let us know your preferred extensions in the comments below.One of the greatest warships of the Middle Ages has been found buried in a river – after being spotted in an aerial photograph. The Holigost – or Holy Ghost – was the second of four 'great' ships built for Henry V's royal fleet. The 600-year-old vessel, which helped Henry V wage war on France, was spotted in the mud of the River Hamble in Hampshire by historian Dr Ian Friel. This is the original image which prompted the search for the Holigost after Dr Ian Friel spotted a U-shaped outline (circled blue) on the bank near to Henry's flagship The Grace Dieu (circled green). The photo is enhanced with false colour because of an archaeological recording technique used during the 1970s One of the greatest warships of the Middle Ages - The Holigost - has been found in a river after being spotted in an aerial photograph. Pictured: A carrack from the 1400s as depicted in Jean de Wavrin's Chronicles of England The wreck is in an area described as a medieval breaker’s yard, next to Henry’s flagship the Grace Dieu, which was identified in the 1930s. Historic England is taking steps to protect and investigate the vessel, which Dr Friel identified when he was revisiting documentary evidence for his new book, Henry V’s Navy. Archaeologists are likely to use sonar, remote sensing and drone technology to learn all they can about the vessel. Future scientific research on the ship could reveal information about 15th century ship building and improve understanding of naval warfare of the time, dock building and docking practices. Dr Friel said: 'I am utterly delighted that Historic England is assessing the site for protection and undertaking further study. 'In my opinion, further research leading to the rediscovery of the Holigost would be even more important than the identification of the Grace Dieu in the 1930s. 'The Holigost fought in two of the most significant naval battles of the Hundred Years War, battles that opened the way for the English conquest of northern France.' The wreck was first spotted by Dr Ian Friel more than 30 years ago while he was studying grainy aerial photographs taken by English Heritage of the area where the Grace Dieu had been discovered. The Holigost – or Holy Ghost – was the second of four 'great' ships built for Henry V's royal fleet The Holigost, dimensions pictured (above), was a major part of Henry V's war machine as he sought to conquer France, in a conflict most famous for the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 There, close to the timbers of the famed English carrack, he spotted a U-shaped outline, barely visible beneath the surface at low tide, which he believed was another of Henry's ships. A subsequent search through records from the time revealed the Holigost had been laid up at the site, at the stretch of the river at Bursledon. The historian - who at the time was working at the Archaeological Research Centre at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich - then visited the site, where he and archaeologists discovered something hard beneath the surface. But, despite being convinced that the wreck was there, there was never enough funding for a full investigation. Dr Friel has now persuaded Historic England to investigate the shipwreck. He spotted it while studying aerial pictures of a medieval breaker’s yard at next to Henry’s own flagship The Grace Dieu, which had been identified in the 1930s. The River Hamble is pictured above The 600-year-old vessel was seen buried in the mud of the Hamble (shown on the map) in Hampshire by historian Dr Ian Friel The Holigost was a major part of Henry V's war machine as he sought to conquer France, in a conflict most famous for the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. It had a crew of 200 sailors and carried large numbers of soldiers to war, took part in operations between 1416 and 1420, including two of the most significant naval battles of the Hundred Years War which broke the French naval power. It was the flagship of the Duke of Bedford at the battle of Harfleur in 1416 and in the thick of the fighting off the Chef de Caux in 1417. The ship - which was built using more than 3,700 trees - carried seven cannon, as well as bows and arrows, poleaxes and spears and 102 'gads', which are fearsome iron spears thrown from the topcastle to penetrate body armour. The ship, whose name comes from Henry's personally devotion to the Holy Trinity, was originally rebuilt from a Spanish vessel called the Santa Clara that was captured in late 1413 or early 1414 and then acquired by the English Crown. It was the flagship of the Duke of Bedford at the battle of Harfleur in 1416 and in the thick of the fighting off the Chef de Caux in 1417. Pictured: The royal fleet of King Edward I as depicted in Chronicles of England Dr Friel identified the wreck when revisiting documentary evidence for his new book. Pictured: A carrack carrying John of Gaunt to Lisbon as seen in Chronicles of England (left) and an oil portrait of Henry V (right) Like all the great ships, it was built to further Henry's war aims, but its decoration and flags also reflected both his personal religious devotion and his political ideas. Unusually, this included a French motto Une sanz pluis - 'One and no more' - which meant that the king alone should be master. The ship was a clinker-built - using overlapping planks of timber - of around 740-760 tons. Despite huge expenditure on maintenance work, the Holigost began to succumb to leaks and timber decay. In 1423 a 'dyver' named Davy Owen, probably a Welshman, was employed to dive under the ship to stop up cracks, perhaps, the earliest-known instance in England of a diver being used in ship repair. Duncan Wilson, Historic England chief executive, said: 'The Battle of Agincourt is one of those historic events that has acquired huge national significance. 'To investigate a ship from this period close to the six hundredth anniversary is immensely exciting.It’s been almost 30 years since Ontarians were told they would be able to buy beer in a grocery store, and it’s finally about to happen. The big news — that brews are coming to your grocery stores and possibly in time for the 2015 holiday season — was revealed weeks ago. But like a Price Is Right bit, the Ontario government announced Thursday, wait, there’s more! A lot more, at least a lot more than expected in a province where a labyrinth of agreements, regulations and interest groups have obfuscated the path to reform for decades. “The days of monopoly are done,” Premier Kathleen Wynne said at a news conference Thursday. She said the suite of reforms are also just the beginning, as the province sets out to reform wine and spirit sales as well. The government’s plans to reform booze sales and overhaul its electricity sector are expected to wring $5 billion out of existing assets for the provincial Trillium Trust, which funds infrastructure and transit. Craft brewers and organizations representing spirits producers welcome the news, even MADD Canada got on board with the province’s social responsibility plans for supermarket sales. The Beer Store said in a statement it will “continue to work with” the Ontario government to
Another Facebook account associated with Willis was flooded with comments about her alleged involvement in other hoaxes and descriptions of her alleged drug use. In one post, Willis is pictured with her 14-year-old niece alongside drug paraphernalia. Police offered no official explanation when they announced Monday that she was not pregnant at the time of the shooting. In a statement, police said they “have been given information we have found to be false. Hours and days have been wasted following leads known to be lies when they were provided to our officers. From the very beginning of this investigation, we have met significant resistance that is uncommon from victims of crime wanting a resolution.” According to police, at least two suspects entered the home where Willis was hosting the party on July 8. About a dozen people were in the house when the attackers opened fire, though Willis’ fiancé was outside talking to a neighbor at the time. No arrests have been made in the case.American foreign policy may look like it's in shambles sometimes, but the world doesn't seem to think so. According to Gallup's US Global Leadership Project, a gigantic survey of over 130,000 people in 130 countries, approval of the United States' leadership bounced up five percentage points in 2013. That's a lot. Gallup used its survey data to estimate the percentage of people in each of these 130 countries who say they approve or disapprove of "the leadership of the United States" — basically, of President Obama. The chart above shows the median of those 130 global approval and disapproval ratings. So these findings tell us that, in more countries than not, the United States was more popular in 2013 than it was in 2012. The world is a big place so a piece of data that encompasses 130 countries is naturally going to be driven by many, many factors big and small. But digging into the data turns up three interesting trends, each of which helps to explain the increase in approval. Europeans economies are rebounding The rise in popularity was concentrated in two regions: Europe and Asia. It's hard to find a single factor that explains the trend in Asia, but Gallup smartly suggests that Europe's economic recovery has something to do with the uptick in approval there. Of the 17 countries that saw a double-digit increases in their approval of US leadership, over half were in Europe: The Eurozone started pulling out of its deep economic slump in 2013, and growth in the rest of Europe sped up fairly rapidly by global standards. This has coincided awfully closely with warming European opinions of US leadership. Perhaps European attitudes improves because stronger economies simply make people more optimistic. It's also certainly plausible that Obama's image would benefit from the European uptick, given the close links between the European and US economies, particularly in causing the crisis. The drone war is declining In Asia, the US leadership approval rating made double-digit gains in four countries: Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Of these, Pakistan is the most surprising — the drone campaign has made us rather unpopular there. But the number of strikes dropped by roughly half from 2012 to 2013. Sure enough, over the same period, Pakistani approval of American leadership increased by ten percentage points, from 12 to 22 percent. Almost double! Likewise, US combat operations in Afghanistan slowed considerably in 2013, and the national approval of American leadership there climbed over 35 percent for the first time since 2010. The ongoing US military withdrawal from South Asia may end up being pretty good for America's image abroad. US relationships in Central America are improving The US also saw double-digit improvements in Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica. In Mexico, that looks mostly like it was a recovery from an earlier collapse in approval, from 2010 to 2012. Some observers think the fall-off was caused by Arizona's 2010 law requiring police to check the immigration status of persons that they have "reasonable" cause to believe aren't legal immigrants. Mexicans saw this law as a license to discriminate against immigrants, sending approval rates down. Panama, on the other hand, brings us back to the economy. In 2012, the US implemented a long-in-the-works free trade agreement with Panama. The country's economy grew by about nine percent in 2013. The extent to which the treaty fueled that growth isn't clear, but it's reasonable to think many Panamanians may have seen a connection.Felipe Massa will not race tomorrow in the Hungarian Grand Prix after he suffered a heavy accident having been hit in the head by a spring, from Rubens Barrichello's car. Massa was travelling at around 175mph on the run down to Turn 4 when a spring from the Brawn's rear suspension bounced up and hit him on the helmet, ripping one corner of his visor off and cutting Massa'a eye. The Brazilian remained conscious but had to be heavily sedated and was sent off for examination at the Budapest central Hospital. I've spoken to someone who has held the spring in question and it is around five inches long, coiled metal and quite heavy. Massa is incredibly lucky to have survived an impact like that with only light injuries. The incident comes less than a week after Henry Surtees was struck on the head by a wheel and killed at Brands Hatch in a Formula 2 race and the mood in the F1 paddock is quite sombre at the moment.Newsweek is reporting it has found the inventor of Bitcoin. In an article published in its March issue — its first print issue since going all-digital at the end of 2012 — Newsweek senior writer Leah McGrath Goodman tracked down a man in California who matches the name of the inventor of Bitcoin, "Satoshi Nakamoto." Long thought to be a pseudonym, or even a group of people, Goodman reported that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto told her he was involved in Bitcoin, but not anymore. Today, Nakamoto is telling people that Goodman and Newsweek got it wrong and that he didn't understand her questions. Goodman joins Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson to discuss her reporting and whether she has doubts now that Nakamoto has recanted. Interview Highlights: Leah McGrath Goodman How she honed in on Satoshi Nakamoto "I was working with two forensic researchers, and I had also sought some advice from various academics along the way. And we through all of the possibilities from that Satoshi Nakamoto might be a cipher, whether or not it was a pseudonym. We were assuming that it might be the real name, but maybe this is not someone who goes by that name. But at first it just was a huge field of candidates to be quite honest, and it was all about eliminating. And this was the person who was always the strongest lead; he was from the start the strongest lead that we had. In the beginning I actually overlooked him, and it was another researcher who kind of said, 'What about this guy? Have we really looked closer?' And we did, and then it began to build." Why she believes the man she found is the founder of Bitcoin "His family told me that he would deny it. In fact, I was very surprised when he acknowledged it to me when I met with him." "When I met with him, I told him I'm here to talk to you about Bitcoin. At the time there were two police officers there. In fact, I think that initially their intention was to just escort me away, but when I said 'Bitcoin,' one of them was interested and let me continue talking. And I said, 'You know, people think you were the founder of Bitcoin.' And I asked him a few questions about, whether or not it was true, and he said, 'I cannot talk about that. I'm not connected with it anymore.' The exact quote is in the story. And I reasserted, 'We are talking about Bitcoin here, correct?' And he said, 'Yes,' but he went on the say that he would not elaborate at all or answer questions. And, in addition, my last question to him was, 'If you are in anyway not connected, you need to tell me now,' and he said, 'I cannot do that.'" On the interviews with Nakamoto's family members "The interviews were very interesting in that the family members and the Bitcoin developers talked about this man very much as one and the same person. I mean, just down to these details, like that he would call people idiot when he felt intellectually affronted by a mistake. The names that they would use, the words they would use that he would use. It was one of those things where on the slot machine every lemon was lining up, and up until the moment I spoke with him, I was very open to the idea that he would laugh and say, 'That's ridiculous. No it's not me. I can see why you think it might be, but it's not.'" On whether she has doubts now that he has denied being the founder "I don't have doubts because I know what our conversation consisted of, but I do wonder why now he is coming out and saying this, and to other journalists and not to me. I spoke privately with a few journalists on the West Coast last night right after the — I believe the car chase, and a number of them said that they were puzzling themselves. They didn't know what to believe. They weren't sure to believe him, and they felt that the fact he got in a car and was in a car chase didn't make it look very much like somebody who was being straight. So I think there are a lot of questions, and I am just as eager for answers as everybody else." On the question of why he doesn't have hundreds of millions of dollars "That's the $64,000 question. One of the researchers, I think it was Barbara Matthews, she pointed out, "It's actually consistent if he's living a humble life because he hasn't spent the Bitcoin yet. To this day he hasn't touched it." On what life been like over the last 24 hours "I have had quite a few emails. There are people who say, 'Why do we care who he is,' and then there are others who say, 'He needs to be able to remain anonymous' and it's very interesting to me that there is this idea that something that now so many people are involved in, you know, this one world currency that's being used globally, that we're not allowed to ask who started it and what their motivations were. The Bitcoin foundation website has talked about how this is a non-political currency, but the Bitcoin developers who knew Satoshi Nakamoto made it quite clear that they felt that it was completely politically motivated and came from the idea that central banks more or less need not have a monopoly and there should be something that moves outside of the central banking system in the wake of the financial crisis. As you recall, the original proposal for Bitcoin came out in late 2008, and it was launched at the height of the meltdown." GuestIt looks like Thor 2 has its big bad, and the face behind the new villain is none other than Dr. Who alum Christopher Eccleston. The man who brought the Who franchise back from its sixteen-year hiatus is in final talks to play Malekith the Accursed, ruler of the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim. After the exciting news of the upcoming Marvel movies title screens at SDCC, we knew some underworld baddies would play a role in the new Thor film. Some speculated it would be the beginning of Ragnarok, with Surtur making his first appearance. That isn’t out of the question yet. If the film follows the books in any manner, expect to see the introduction of Balder, some God on Elf boot stomping, and the return of everyone’s favorite trickster. Thor 2 is expected to hit theaters November 6, 2013. [via Screen Rant]Gogo is alleging it faces intense competition from competitors with Southwest and JetBlue contracts, and asked a judge to dismiss a class-action lawsuit charging that Gogo has an in-flight Wi-Fi monopoly and can dictate prices. Citing Southwest’s contract with Row 44 and JetBlue’s agreement with ViaSat, both satellite-based Wi-Fi providers, as well as competition from Panasonic Avionics, Thales, and OnAir, Gogo claimed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California that the in-flight Wi-Fi market is wide open. “These admissions [from the plaintiffs] show that the new market for inflight Internet service is dynamic and competitive, and that Gogo has neither foreclosed competition nor excluded competitors, and does not have the monopoly power to control the market,” Gogo’s dismissal motion states. “On this basis alone, Plaintiff’s complaint should be dismissed.” Gogo noted that at the end of 2010, only 16% of commercial aircraft in North America and 6% worldwide were equipped with inflight Internet, and that in fact competition has forced it to upgrade its ATG (air to ground) system and to developed a satellite system, as well. Gogo currently powers inflight Internet for all AirTran Airways and Virgin America domestic flights, and on select flights for Air Canada, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Frontier Airlines, United Airlines and US Airways. Amercan Airlines announced yesterday that it will start offering international Wi-Fi on the inaugural flight of its Boeing 777-300ER on January 31, 2013, but it hasn’t revealed who the provider is yet. A plaintiff, James Stewart, filed a lawsuit on October 12 alleging Gogo has exclusive contracts with airlines and wields monopoly power to control inflight Internet pricing. The suit seeks class-action status. Gogo argues that the lawsuit fails to prove that it controls the emerging inflight Wi-Fi market and should be dismissed.Two Frederick County residents have been charged in connection with Monday’s death of a 31-year-old heroin overdose victim. In the early morning hours of April 1, 2014, the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office responded to a residence on Apple Pie Ridge Road and found Andrew B. Lowder, 31, deceased from an apparent heroin overdose. His remains have been transported to the Office of the Medical Examiner in Manassas for examination and autopsy. Further investigation into the death by the Northwest Virginia Regional Drug Task Force resulted in two arrests later Monday afternoon. Brandi Marple (no picture available), 28, of Frederick County, Va., and Dennis K. Getz, 37, of Frederick County, Va., were taken into custody without incident and each charged with one felony count of distribution of heroin. They were transported to the Northwest Regional Adult Detention Center. Lowder’s death brings the region’s heroin-related death toll to 11 since Jan. 1, 2014. “Area law enforcement is committed to pursuing these deaths in order to arrest those responsible for bringing heroin into the region,” said Virginia State Police Supervisory Special Agent Jay Perry, NVRDG Task Force coordinator. “Several of these deaths have resulted in an arrest being made within 24 hours of initiating an investigation. But, we cannot arrest our way out of this epidemic.” “It’s going to take community action in order to stop the demand for the drug. We encourage parents, community leaders, and educators to talk with their children, students and neighbors about heroin’s highly-addictive, deadly risks. If you suspect someone you know is using heroin, then please seek out treatment for that individual. If you see drug activity taking place, then please notify your local police or sheriff’s office. Together we can help save lives and our communities,” continued Perry. The NVRDG Task Force includes the following law enforcement agencies: Clarke County, Frederick County, Page County, Shenandoah County and Warren County sheriffs’ offices; Town of Front Royal and Strasburg police departments; City of Winchester Police Department; and Virginia State Police.By now, Del. Samuel I. Rosenberg says he expected big news from the Housing Authority of Baltimore City — that it had found a way to resolve the millions of dollars in court-ordered judgments it owes former public housing residents who suffered lead paint poisoning as children. Housing Commissioner Paul T. Graziano told him in early January that the agency was "close to an agreement with the feds to work this thing out," Rosenberg recalled. Based on Graziano's assurance, Rosenberg says, he held off pursuing a remedy in the legislature when the General Assembly's annual session began days later. But with the session winding to a close and no deal in sight, the vice chairman of the Ways and Means Committee says he's been let down. "I would have considered what options I had as a legislator, through the introduction of a bill, to try and move the issue forward — to have a positive impact," the Baltimore Democrat said. It would be "very difficult" to raise the issue now, given that the 90-day session is so far along, he added. Nearly a year after Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake pledged to find a solution to the unpaid lead judgments — an issue that housing officials have said threatens to bankrupt the agency — Rosenberg isn't the only critic growing increasingly frustrated. Other legislators say they are losing patience. An attorney for plaintiffs who suffered lead poisoning says the housing authority is acting in bad faith. Housing officials and the mayor's office insist that efforts to resolve the matter continue. But as time passes, the inability to do so is creating further problems. According to documents obtained by The Baltimore Sun, state officials effectively blocked a $1.65 million loan to the city for affordable housing over concerns that the money could be seized by lawyers trying to collect for clients in lead poisoning cases. "This thing has been going on for a year," said Sen. James Brochin, a Baltimore County Democrat. "It's poor kids who are brain-damaged as a direct result of the Baltimore City Housing Authority's negligence. It's a year later and the kids are still suffering and nobody wants to help." Graziano was unavailable for an interview Wednesday or Thursday. In a brief statement, he said he recalled meeting with Rosenberg to discuss legislation the delegate was considering. But Graziano's statement makes no mention of an imminent agreement with the federal government, merely that he expressed a "desire that a fair and equitable resolution be reached in partnership with [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] and our other federal partners." Mayoral spokesman Ryan O'Doherty said efforts to address the court-ordered judgments are continuing and that the housing authority is "pursuing all viable options." O'Doherty did not provide details. A spokeswoman for HUD, which largely funds the Baltimore housing authority's $300 million annual budget, said it is up to Graziano's agency to negotiate and agree upon settlements, which must then be approved by a federal housing lawyer in Philadelphia. Scott Nevin, a private lawyer who represents plaintiffs in 23 pending lead-poisoning lawsuits filed against Baltimore's housing authority, said he approached Graziano's staff in January to initiate settlement talks. Authority lawyers expressed interest but said they would need federal approval, Nevin said, yet they would not tell him who in the U.S. government could give that approval. "The housing authority is just dragging its feet and playing a shell game," Nevin said. The lead paint judgments — a legacy of substandard public housing that exposed vulnerable children to highly toxic lead paint flakes and dust — have cast a shadow over the housing authority since a Baltimore Sun article nearly a year ago brought the issue to light. Today the authority owes $8.7 million in court-ordered judgments. About 185 cases are pending in the courts, and Graziano says those could cost the agency $800 million, a figure dismissed by plaintiffs' lawyers as a gross exaggeration. Graziano, who came to Baltimore in 2000, has pointed out that the cases date to the early 1990s, before passage of the state's 1994 lead paint risk reduction law. He has said that his agency has been "fully compliant" with that law. A driving force behind the law was Rosenberg. In a letter to the mayor last April, he and two fellow legislators criticized the housing authority for using "frivolous and delaying legal tactics" to avoid paying the judgments, even in cases where the authority agreed to the amount. Since 2005, the authority has paid lawyers more than $4 million to fight such claims. "Many of these victims will endure lifelong disabilities due to the negligence of HABC, an entity that is not above the law and is legally obliged to comply with court orders," the lawmakers wrote. Rosenberg said Graziano had requested the January meeting and suggested that a resolution was "not months away but in the near future." "It left me with the impression that they were having fruitful discussions with HUD that would have resulted in money being available to meet their legal liabilities," Rosenberg said. "Therefore, there was no need for me to do anything at the legislature." Rosenberg said he did not have a specific legislative remedy in mind. Technically, the housing authority is an independent entity that gets most of its money from Washington, not the state. Graziano, its director, wears a second hat as the mayor's appointed housing commissioner. For months, the housing authority has contended that it cannot and will not pay all of the court-ordered judgments. Yet in recent months there have been developments affecting several judgments. Last fall, the authority paid three judgments totaling $907,000. In January, the Baltimore housing authority scored a legal victory when the Court of Special Appeals, the state's second-highest court, overturned a $2.6 million jury award to a brother and sister who contend they were poisoned by lead in the early 1990s. The siblings have asked the Court of Appeals to review the ruling.SRINAGAR: Almost all Kashmiri separatist groups have called for a complete shut down on July 4 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to visit Srinagar where he will hold a security review meeting with the top brass of army, police and intelligence at the Army headquarters.This will be Modi’s first visit to Kashmir valley after taking over as the Prime Minister of the country. The PM is likely to announce a package for the Kashmiri youth in the shape of employment in central government offices.He is also scheduled to commission a power project in Uri and also visit the Hindu shrine at Katra in the winter capital Jammu.Opposing Modi’s visit, Hurriyat Conference led by Syed Ali Geelani and Hurriyat Conference Jammu and Kashmir have said in separate statements that "Modi is coming here as a prime minister of that country which has usurped the right of self-determination of the people of Jammu and Kashmir and subjugated them.”“Those who will welcome Narendra Modi on his arrival are the paid agents of India and the worst enemies of the ongoing freedom movement,” HCJK said in a statement on Tuesday. JKLF chief yasin Malik has also called for a complete shut in the valley on July 4.V for Vendetta is in the awkward position of being a film that was maligned by its original creator, the incomparable Alan Moore. And while I have deep respect for Moore as a writer, I can’t help but disagree with his criticism of this film. Especially now. Not after the massacre that has occurred in Orlando, Florida. A note before we begin. V for Vendetta is a political tale no matter how you cut it. It is also a tale of great personal importance to me, both for its impact when it came out and in light of recent events. With that in mind, this piece is more political and personal than the previous two, and I ask that everyone keep that in mind and be respectful. Alan Moore’s experience with the film adaptations of From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had soured him on Hollywood’s reworking of his stories. His complaints about V for Vendetta centered around a few points, the first being that producer Joel Silver had stated in an interview that Moore had met with Lana Wachowski, and was impressed with her ideas for the script. According to Moore, no such meeting took place, and when Warner Brothers refused to retract the statement, Moore broke off his relationship with DC Comics for good. His other irritation had to do with the alteration of his political message; the graphic novel was a dialogue about fascism versus anarchy. The Wachowskis’s script changed the central political themes so that they more directly aligned with the current political climate, making the film more of a direct analog to American politics at the time. Moore deplored the change to “American neo-liberalism versus American neo-conservativism,” stating that the Wachowskis were too timid to come right out with their political message and set the film in America. He also was aggravated that the British government in the film made no mention of white supremacism, which he felt was important in a portrayal of a fascist government. As a result, he refused his fee and credit, and the cast and crew of the film held press conferences to specifically discuss the changes made to the story. (David Lloyd, the co-creator and artist of the graphic novel, said that he thought the film was good, and that Moore likely would have only been happy with an exact comic-to-film adaptation.) Two things. To start, Alan Moore’s particular opinions of how art and politics should intersect are his own. I respect them, but I don’t think it’s right to impose them on others. There are many reasons the Wachowskis might have decided not to set the film in the United States–they might have felt it was disrespectful to the story to move it, they might have felt that the analog was too on-the-nose that way. There are endless possibilities. Either way, their relative “timidity” for setting the film in England doesn’t seem relevant when all is said and done. As for the alterations to the narrative, they make the film different from Moore’s tale, of course–which is an incredible story in its own right, and a fascinating commentary on its era–but they work to create their own excellent vision of how these events might unfold. (I also feel the need to point out that though no mentions of racial purity are made, we only see people of color at Larkhill detention centre, which seems a fairly pointed message in terms of white supremacism.) V for Vendetta is a film that has managed to get more poignant over time, rather than less, which is an achievement in its own right. In addition, while many of the political machinations may have seemed to apply to American politics at the time, that wasn’t the sole intention of the film. Director James McTeigue was quick in interviews to point out that while the society they depicted had much in common with certain America institutions, they were meant to serve as analogs for anywhere with similar practices–he stated explicitly that while the audience might see Fox News in the Norsefire Party news station BTN, it could easily be Sky News over in the UK, or any other numbers of venues that were like-minded. Much of the moral ambiguity inherent in the original version was stripped away, but a great deal of the dialogue was taken verbatim nonetheless, including some of Moore’s best lines. The Wachowskis’s script focused even more on the struggle of the queer population under the Norsefire Party, which was startling to see in a film like this even ten years ago–and still is today, if we’re being frank. Gordon Deitrich, Stephen Fry’s character, is altered entirely into a talk show host who invites Natalie Portman’s Evey to his home under false pretenses at the start of the film–because he has to hide the fact that he is a gay man. The V in this film is a far more romantic figure than the comic makes him out to be, Evey is older, and also pointedly not a sex worker, which is a change that I was always grateful for (there are plenty of other ways to show how horrible the world is, and the film does just fine at communicating that). You could argue that some of these changes create that Hollywood-ization effect that we so often mourn, but to be fair, giving an audience a crash course in anarchy and how it should oppose fascism–in a story where no one is a definitive hero–would have been a tall order for a two-hour film. Fans have always been divided on this movie. It has plotholes, sure. It’s flawed, as most movies are. It’s different from its progenitor. But it’s a film that creates divisive opinions precisely because it provokes us. It confronts us. And it does so using the trappings of a very different sort of film, the sort you would normally get from a superhero yarn. The Wachowskis tend to gravitate toward these sorts of heroes, the ones who are super in everything but the basic trappings and the flashy titles. The fact that V has more in common with Zorro or Edmond Dantes than he does with Batman or Thor doesn’t change the alignment. And the fact that V prefers to think of himself as an idea rather than a person speaks very specifically to a precise aspect of superhero mythos–at what point does a truly influential hero go beyond mere mortality? What makes symbols and ideas out of us? Like all stories that the Wachowskis tackle, the question of rebirth and taking strength from confidence in one’s own identity is central to the narrative. With V portrayed in a more heroic light, his torture (both physical and psychological) of Evey–where he gets her to believe that she has been imprisoned by the government for her knowledge of his whereabouts–is perhaps easier to forgive despite how horrific his actions are. What he does is wrong from a personal standpoint, but this is not a story about simple transitions and revelations. Essentially, V creates a crucible for someone who is trapped by their own fear–an emotion that we all want liberation from, the most paralyzing of all. Evey is unable to live honestly, to achieve any amount of personal freedom, to break away from a painful past. The entire film is about how fear numbs us, how it turns us against one another, how it leads to despair and self-enslavement. The possibility of trans themes in V for Vendetta are borne out clearly in Evey and V’s respective transformations. For Evey, a harrowing physical ordeal where she is repeatedly told that she is insignificant and alone leads to an elevation of consciousness. She comes out the other side a completely different person–later telling V that she ran into an old coworker who looked her in the eye and couldn’t recognize her. On V’s side, when Evey tries to remove his mask, he tells her that the flesh underneath that mask, the body that he possesses, is not truly him. While this speaks to V’s desire to move beyond mortal man and embody an idea, it is also true that his body is something that was taken from him, brutalized and used by the people at Larkhill. Having had his physical form reduced to the status of “experiment,” V no longer identifies with his body. More importantly, once he expresses this, Evey never attempts to remove his mask again, respecting his right to appear as he wishes to be seen. That is the majority of my critical analysis regarding this film. At any other time, I might have gone on at length about its intricacies. But today is different, and I can’t pretend that it is not. Talking about this film in a removed fashion is a trial for me most days of the week because it occupies a specific place in my life. I saw it before I read the graphic novel, at a time before I had completely come to terms with being queer. And as is true for most people in my position, fear was at the center of that denial. The idea of integrating that identity into my sense of self was alarming; it was alien. I wasn’t sure that I belonged well enough to affirm it, or even that I wanted to. Then I went to see this film, and Evey read Valerie’s letter, the same one that V found in his cell at Larkhill–one that detailed her life as a lesbian before, during, and after the rise of the Norsefire Party. After her lover Ruth is taken away, Valerie is also captured and taken to Larkhill, experimented on, and ultimately dies. Before she completes this testament to her life written out on toilet paper, she says: It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place. But for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one. I was sobbing and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t stop. It took time to figure it out. It took time to come to terms with it, to say it out loud, to rid myself of that fear. To talk about it, to write about it, to live it. To watch the country that I live in take baby steps forward, and then huge leaps backward. My marriage is legal, it’s Pride Month, the city that I live in is full of love and wants everyone to use whatever bathroom works best for them. And then this weekend, an angry man walked into a gay club in Orlando and killed 50 people. But for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one. I know why I’m sobbing now. I can’t stop. And I think about this film and how Roger Allam’s pundit character Lewis Prothero, “The Voice of England,” tears down Muslims and homosexuals in the same hateful breath, about how Gordon Deitrich is murdered not for the uncensored sketch on his show or for being gay, but because he had a copy of the Qur’an in his home. I think about the little girl in the coke bottle glasses who gets murdered by the police for wearing a mask and spray painting a wall, and I think about how their country has closed its border to all immigrants. Then I think about a man who is running for President who used Orlando as a reason to say “I told you so.” To turn us against each other. To feel more powerful. To empower others who feel the same way. And I think about this film, and the erasure of the victims at Larkhill, locked up for any difference than made them a “threat” to the state. Too foreign, too brown, too opinionated, too queer. Then I think about the fact that my wife was followed down the street today by a man who was shouting about evil lesbians, and how ungodly people should burn in fires. I think about the rainbow wristband my wife bought in solidarity today but decided not to wear–because it’s better to be safe right now than it is to stand tall and make yourself a target. And I think about the fact that this film is for Americans and for everyone, and the fact that it still didn’t contain the themes of the original graphic novel, and I dare you to tell me that it doesn’t matter today. That we don’t need it. That we shouldn’t remember it and learn from it. We need these reminders, at this exact moment in time: Do not let your leaders make you afraid of your neighbors. Do not be complacent in the demonization of others through inaction. Do not let your fear (of the other, of the past, of being seen) dictate your actions. Find your voice. Act on behalf of those with less power than you. Fight. And above all, love. Love your neighbors and strangers and people who are different from you in every conceivable way. Love art and mystery and ideas. Remember that it is the only truly triumphant response to hate. I don’t think I needed a reminder of why this film was important to me, but today… today it hurts even more than the first time I saw it. A visceral reminder of my own revelation, all wrapped up in a tale about a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask who wanted governments to be afraid of their people, who wanted revenge on anyone who would dare hurt others for being different. A tale of a woman who was reborn with a new capacity for love and a lack of fear, who read Valerie’s last words in a prison cell and gained strength from them: I hope that the world turns and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you. The most empowering words of all. Emily Asher-Perrin wishes everyone a safe Pride, full of all the love they deserve. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.The G1 Climax is here! Awaiting us are 19 shows throughout one month, which promise to include some of the best wrestling we will see all year. Add to that all the drama that comes with the tournament points tallies, as feverish speculation ramps up the further into the tournament we go, with every New Japan fan will be working out just who needs to beat who in order to advance to the Final. This is a big preview that will run down the biggest and most important matches on the tournament, the recent history of certain match-ups and highlight some of the more interesting non-G1 undercard matches. There’s nothing quite like the G1 in all of wrestling, so enjoy the unique month-long journey. For an in-depth G1 Climax 25 preview in audio, be sure to check out this week’s Voices of Wrestling podcast from Rich & Joe! Follow our YouTube Channel this month, as well, as we’ll feature a daily recap show of every event during this year’s G1 Climax 25. The Contenders At Dominion, Kazuchika Okada reclaimed the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, and with it, his place at the top of New Japan. He enters G1 Climax as the defending champion, and a two-time winner from just three attempts. Okada has a ton of momentum, but the favourites to win their respective blocks are Shinsuke Nakamura and AJ Styles. Both lost in big matches at Dominion, but are very good candidates to battle Okada in the main event of Wrestle Kingdom 10. Hiroshi Tanahashi can never be counted out, and a showdown against Okada in the Tokyo Dome would be a fitting way to end their classic series of matches. Kota Ibushi figures to be a solid contender, but it would be surprising if he went all the way. Tetsuya Naito is the tournament dark horse; he has been given new life thanks to his new heel ‘Los Ingobernables’ persona, which could propel him to a strong showing. July 20 – Sapporo G1 Tour Guide: The only stop in Hokkaido on the tour. Sapporo hosted the 1972 Winter Olympics, and holds the Sapporo Snow Festival annually, where, according to the official website, “Sapporo is turned into a winter dreamland of crystal-like ice and white snow.” Hiroshi Tanahashi vs Kota Ibushi: A huge first-time match-up to main event Night 1. Ibushi is in many ways Tanahashi’s successor; the hair, the rock-star attitude, the big high-flying finisher. This is an important match for both to prove
the country. While youth unemployment has long been a chronic issue here, experts say the British government’s debt-reduction commitment to rein in social spending appears to be making the problem worse. Insufficient job training and apprenticeship programs, they argue, contribute to the large pool of permanently unemployed young people in Britain. “It is patently wrong for young people to have such a poor start in life, when there is so much more we could be doing,” said Hilary Steedman, an economist at the London School of Economics. “Just because they did not go to university does not mean they don’t want to work.” Many young people here spend endless months applying for technical jobs for which they do not have adequate training. In many cases, months turn into years, with people remaining on the dole indefinitely. In the most recent fiscal year, the government paid £4.2 billion ($6.6 billion) in benefits to this age group, at least some of which might be better spent on job training, some experts argue. “A well-financed apprenticeship program is an important social investment that can enhance the competitive capacity of an economy,” said John P. Martin, an economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, who studies labor market issues across Europe. Photo Ms. Steedman, a specialist in vocational training, said that Britain lags far behind countries like Germany, Austria and the Netherlands in its use of training programs to introduce young people to permanent work. Fewer than one in 10 employers in Britain offered apprenticeships in 2010, she said, compared with at least a quarter of employers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And while government financing for such programs has increased in the last few years, Ms. Steedman said that much of the money went to training existing workers 25 years and older rather than building the skills of 18-to-20-year-olds. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “It’s completely perverse,” she said, pointing out that 40 percent of the 500,000 or so apprenticeships go to people age 25 or older. “Companies are subsidizing 25-year-olds who already have jobs.” Ms. Edwards, for her part, completed two years at Greenford College, in London, before leaving last March because she could no longer afford the cost. She had hopes of pursuing a career in mental health, but now has narrowed her ambitions to taking care of children or the elderly. Despite her inability to find a job, she keeps trying almost daily, filling out résumés online, handing them out in person and stomaching the shame she feels in having to accept government benefits. “I don’t want to get paid by the government,” said Ms. Edwards, who lives in West London. “But what am I supposed to do? People can’t get jobs.” 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. James Lawson, 18, is also desperately looking for a job. He lives in a rent-subsidized youth hostel in the Hammersmith section of West London, and barely gets by on the £103 ($163) in unemployment benefits he receives every two weeks. With his limited education and experience Mr. Lawson sees an apprenticeship as his only hope. He recently completed an information technology training course at a local academy. But the training led nowhere, so now he is resting his hopes on securing an apprenticeship at the British military contractor BAE Systems that promises — if he can secure one of the few positions — to provide him training as an electrical engineer. “I wake up every morning and say to myself, ‘I don’t have a job,’ ” he said. “But I have to stay positive — even if it means taking a thousand noes to get that one yes.” Neither Mr. Lawson nor Ms. Edwards participated in last summer’s riots. They both say, however, that they understand the frustrations that pushed many of their peers to break the law. Photo One 19-year-old who admits he looted during the July disturbances says he has now joined a gang and taken to petty burglaries to make ends meet. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “I just don’t care anymore,” he said, declining to identify himself. “I am sick of living like rubbish.” Even those who stayed in school are struggling to find work. Tam Chowdhury, 25, graduated from Southbank University in London in 2010 with a criminology and law degree. Out of the 105 positions she applied for, she said, she secured just two interviews. “Even if you have qualifications, it can be really tough,” said Ms. Chowdhury, who works at Tomorrow’s People, a charity in London that provides training and preparation for disadvantaged young people looking to enter the job market. While the recession is clearly making it harder for the young in Britain and across Europe to find work, economists argue that without a strategic partnership between the government and the private sector that trains those who want to be trained, youth unemployment in many countries will remain high even after the economy recovers. Mr. Martin, of the O.E.C.D., said that the European countries that supported apprenticeship programs — Germany, Austria and the Netherlands — had also managed to sustain robust manufacturing and export industries. In other economies, the cooperation among employers, government and unions is not as strong. “In England, for example, many employers prefer to poach skilled labor,” Mr. Martin said. None of which comes as news to Stefan Radanovic, 19, who says he has applied for hundreds of jobs in customer service or sales. He is looking for a job in the music industry but is willing to do anything to help support himself and his single mother, with whom he lives in the Ealing district of West London. Mr. Radanovic presents a confident and polite appearance — all he wants, he says, is a chance — although he understands why he has not yet received one. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “I don’t blame them,” he said of the countless employers who have ignored his résumé. “They just don’t want to train you.”The Big 12 is painting itself into a corner. Its reported list of expansion finalists has devolved into a study of, "Which one of these doesn't belong?" Rice, with an enrollment of less than 7,000, is supposedly on the same footing with UCF, which has the largest enrollment in the country at 51,000. The list also reportedly includes a military academy (Air Force), Mormon flagship (BYU) and the land-grant university from the state of Connecticut (UConn). What little we know about the qualifications to join the Big 12 -- "somebody on an upward trend," according to commissioner Bob Bowlsby -- is just ambiguous enough to further complicate the process. Temple is out? Wait, who knew it was in? At this point in the proceedings, the Big 12 needs to invite Houston and BYU or explain why not. Either that or don't expand at all because little else makes sense. In that case, the Big 12 may have to hold a press conference to address what didn't happen. BYU is clearly the best football option with a brand, a budget and a history (1984 national championship). Houston has the endorsement of the state governor and lieutenant governor, as well as the University of Texas president and chancellor. We may look back on Saturday as the day the Cougars both played their way into the Big 12 and the College Football Playoff. It wasn't just the result against Oklahoma, it was the eventual dismantling of the Sooners in front of a sold-out crowd. At several positions, the Cougars had better athletes. Blue-chip defensive tackle Ed Oliver is the first five-star prospect to ever sign with a Group of Five school. Big 12 recruiting is slipping in Texas. The Oliver signing would suggest it certainly isn't slipping in Houston. The TV rating for the OU game was 50 percent higher than the highest-rated game in Houston market last season (Alabama-Texas A&M). It was 78 percent higher than the highest Big 12 game (Oklahoma-Texas). Houston is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on facilities upgrades in athletics and across campus. The Houston Chronicle recently reported the school has been preparing for this moment for years, pitching itself to other conferences as well. The conquering of OU doubled as an elaborate slideshow presentation for the Big 12 presidents. How do you not take the Cougars at the moment? The Austin American-Statesman quoted CBS's Jim Nantz, a Houston grad, as saying, "Can't we bolster the Big 12? I think it'd be a lock." If all of it seems to be somewhat of a knee-jerk reaction, consider the following: TCU had won three conference titles and a BCS bowl (2010 Rose) in the six years prior to joining the Big 12. If Houston takes the American Athletic Conference this season, as projected, it will have won two. It already has a New Year's Six bowl win (2016 Peach). In its last round of expansion, the Big 12 already made the dubious choice of West Virginia over Louisville. In other words, the Big 12 can't made the same "mistake" twice. The process is already turning into a waste of time for the likes of Rice, SMU and Tulane. Do any of those have a real chance? One source inside the conference said those high academic schools were included on the finalists list to appease some Big 12 presidents. Another source from a school trying to make the cut said the process is "bizarre in every way." A source close to the situation said it was impossible to handicap expansion at the moment. The league standing pat remains a distinct possibility. There are complications to any expansion. The Big 12 presidents would have to approve BYU over concerns voiced by the LGBT community. There are powerful University of Texas folks who still look down their noses at Houston, an old Southwest Conference foe. It has been suggested the ambiguity of the process has confused not only the participants but also the public. In the same sentence back in July, Oklahoma president David Boren said expansion is "not a definite decision" but the board would "very seriously consider this possibility." The next key date is Oct 16-17 when the Big 12 presidents will meet. If they don't add Houston and BYU then, the CEOs may have to hold a presser addressing what didn't happen. More Jim Harbaugh shenanigans: The Football Writers Association of America has voiced its concern to Michigan over the apparent end of a long-standing college football tradition. On Saturday in the Michigan press box, media members in attendance were not given a "flip card," a document distributed for decades identifying the depth chart for both teams. Harbaugh had said earlier in the week he will not release a depth chart. Flip cards are considered a professional courtesy for both the media and the opponent. They help the media accurately describe accounts of the game -- essentially publicizing the program. Last week's opponent, Hawaii, did release a two-deep in its notes, as does basically every program in the country. Never mind the media, this practice at least attempts to deceive the opponent. Let's hope for the sake of free and open flow of information this move doesn't become as commonplace as the closed lockerrom. If Harbaugh continues to get his way, imagine what sort of information won't be shared during Ohio State week. It's impossible to underplay Nick Chubb's accomplishment: Eleven months after shredding his knee, Georgia's inspirational tailback not only played against North Carolina, he carried 32 times on a knee underwent major surgery to repair three ligaments and cartilage. "It was bad, never been in that position," Chubb told reporters. "I was down, a lot of pain. I could have done two things -- either laid down and never got up or what I did, and pushed myself." Those 32 carries were the most by a Power Five back in Week 1 and third-most nationally. Here's hoping Chubb finishes more like Herschel Walker than Marcus Lattimore. Two-loss team in the CFP? With four teams in the top 11 losing in Week 1, perhaps this is a possibility. Essentially, LSU, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Ole Miss have to win out to have a chance. While few were giving the Vols and Rebels a chance, when the Tigers and Sooners lost it marked the first time two top five teams were defeated in Week 1 since 1972. Quandary for a big bowl: You better believe Cotton Bowl folks have taken notice of Houston's possible ascension into the CFP. The Cotton has to take the designated Group of Five qualifier this year for its New Year's Six game. If Houston qualifies for the CFP, that means the Group of Five gets no automatic qualifier. Cotton Bowl folks won't say it, but that increases the likelihood of better attendance and notoriety for the game with two Power Five schools. Clay Helton critics have quickly emerged: USC's "new" coach is now 6-5 counting his time as an interim coach going back to 2013. Helton is beginning his first season as full-time coach now with a three-game losing streak. The Trojans have been outscored by a combined 120-49 against Stanford (2015 Pac-12 championship game), Wisconsin (Holiday Bowl) and Alabama (Saturday). The top coaching free agent: Art Briles has retained super agent Jimmy Sexton, CBS Sports confirmed. That presents an interesting dynamic. It's hard to find an anyone in FBS who believes Briles will get a job in the highest level of college football following the Baylor scandal. But with Sexton pulling the strings, does that create a college opening for Briles that otherwise wouldn't be there? All it takes is one president to say "yes." And the rest: Twenty-nine new coaches in FBS this season; their combined record in Week 1 was 20-9. Best win? Georgia's Kirby Smart getting by a ranked North Carolina. Worst loss: Matt Campbell at Iowa State losing his opener to FCS Northern Iowa... That defensive two-pointer by Notre Dame against Texas? Some perspective: There were only five such plays all of last season. Since 2013, there have been a total of 15... The season scoring record has been broken several times in the last few years. That includes last year's all-time record of 29.4 points per game. Be forewarned: The average for Week 1 was 32.6 points... Week 2 letdown: After the best opening week ever, there are exactly no games between ranked teams this week in FBS playMy own personal project car; bought unfinished with many parts missing,it has been built up over a few years using parts from over 25 different cars. A lot of the parts either on the car or with the car turned out to be off a 4×4 or an XR, originally a Diamond white car at some point it had been resprayed in Moonstone blue. The Cosworth seems to have spent a lot of its life off the road so the shell was in very good condition the only issues being a damaged rear panel and front bumper. Fully dismantled and a strip down to bare metal revealed no repairs or dodgy filler work, and with a genuine Ford rear panel purchased the shell was soon prepped and into primer. The next decision was the colour- Effeti orange mica Various parts for the interior had to be sourced due to either being missing or damaged. The engine was in the car but a lot of the ancilliaries were missing; the main part being the ECU and loom, After dismantling the engine and finding some scoring a rebuild was needed, also a rebore, regrind and replacing the pistons pumps etc. Whilst rebuilding a cometic gasket some green injectors, 3 bar map sensor and -31 actuator made it on to the car along with a 4×4 intercooler. The usual Samco hoses, stainless and alloy parts found their way into the build along with a few new genuine Ford parts. In keeping with the rest of the build the underside and the suspension was also treated to repainting along with all new brakes, shocks, poly bushes etc. The original Cosworth’s interior had unfortunatly not been treated too well with the usual Recaro wear on the bolsters plus cigarette burns etc, the door cards had also suffered a hard life with various splits and holes drilled in them, As good replacement seats cost an arm and a leg the decision to retrim was the best option plus helps to add a bit of individualism to the car to match the exterior. The seats were re-upholstered in alcantara by my very talented better half, the door cards were repaired and also recoverd with the same material to match the seats. A genuine RS 500 lower rear spoiler and bumper grills were sourced. A set of replica RS 500 splitters were added with a view to swap to the real items when they become available. Unfortunatley the car never quite made it onto the road despite only needing an Mot, tune and road tax. With the arrival of my daughter the Cossie entered storage where it stayed tucked away for 4 years. The car finally came out of storage but being left for years has led to running issues and a roof collapse of the storage area has left the Cosworth in need of a little work. Due to damage paintwork on almost every panel a full respray is needed, with whis in mind the Cosworth has been stripped down to a rolling shell. Unfortunatly the original Effeti orange mica has now been discontinued but luckily Jason from www.turnersupplies.co.uk a paint tinting specialist came to the rescue and managed to replicate the colour. A few calls to my contacts and a rare genuine new roof skin has been sourced to replace the damaged one. Comments commentsAnthony Evans/Tess Holliday's Facebook People just can't stop talking about Tess Munster/Holliday, and TBH, neither can we. In case you missed it, last week she made history by being the "largest" model (size 22, to be exact) to land a major modeling contract, and the internet has a lot to say about it. (Spoiler alert: most of it is mean.) Before we dive any deeper here, let's make one thing clear: There's more to Tess than just her body, and we know that. We're not here to start a body war on fat vs. skinny, either. We're here to discuss exactly why people are shaming Tess for being a very happy and very successful plus-size model, and if her popularity is, in fact, glorifying an unhealthy lifestyle. The short answer? No. Laci Green from MTV's "Braless" makes a solid case on why Tess makes so many internet haters uncomfortable in her latest episode. If their "Oh no, a plus-size model is in a magazine therefore everyone is going to want to be unhealthy!” logic is going to be applied to Tess, then they should also be worried about all the underweight models we see on a daily basis. Today, most images we see of women are 10-30 percent underweight, so if being unhealthy is the main concern, the masses should have been upset a long (long!) time ago. Another great point by Laci: You can't tell how healthy someone is just by looking at them. It's well-known fact that extra weight increases health risks, but there could be underlying health conditions that someone is dealing with that you don't know about—not to mention that the type of fat also has a lot to do with it. Visceral fat, which wraps around your organs, is higher risk than subcutaneous fat, which is under your skin. The real problem here seems to be that people can't accept that a size 22 girl that promotes an image of self-love and confidence. She even—GASP—willingly posts pictures of her body in nothing but underwear for the world to see and isn't ashamed about it. And why should she be? Her positive self-image seems to conflict with the norm because we learn from a young age (4 years old, actually) to be prejudiced against fat people. Tess pushes us to rethink everything we know about traditional beauty standards (I mean, she started the hashtag #effyourbeautystandards for a reason) and helps diversify what real women's bodies in magazines look like. All in all, we couldn't be more stoked that Tess is sticking true to who she is and not backing down, but let's remember, folks: There's so much more to women (and their happiness and success) than what their bodies look like.FX No, It's not 'American Horror Story: Freak Glee Show' though wouldn't that make a fun mashup? Here's The Story Behind That 'Life On Mars' Performance On 'American Horror Story: Freak Show' Now that we've had almost a full day to reflect on last night's freaky "American Horror Story: Freak Show" premiere (personally, I spent the first half of my day wary of a balding clown), it's time to explain one of the episode's WTF scenes that had us scratching our heads in amusement: a blue eye-shadowed Elsa Mars performing David Bowie's "Life On Mars." The show's timeline is set in the 1950s so the song's inclusion only added to the surrealness of the episode. Did the freak show's leader and her misfit orchestra originally pen the tune and David Bowie stole it? Will the Brit grace our TV screens like Stevie Nicks on last season's "Coven"? Is Ryan Murphy blending the series with "Glee"? Maybe not. According to Ryan Murphy, the series is paying tribute to the "show within a show" style a la the musical "Moulin Rouge" that placed colorful pop hits in the year 1900. The director/writer told E! News that the choice was partially a tribute to "Moulin Rouge." "I really wanted to do an homage to my friend and idol Baz Luhrmann [who directed 'Moulin Rouge'] who does such amazing things with music and period," he said. "We didn't want to do 'Happy Days,' we didn't want to do all 50s music." Murphy also details that they wanted to feature musicians who identified as "odd" or outsiders, and they've worked on six "haunting" musical numbers so far, featuring artists from Lana Del Rey to Kurt Cobain. Well, we are definitely sold on this idea because Lana + "AHS" = perfection! With past seasons of entirely disturbing and terrifying scenes, a few bizarre musical numbers is unexpectedly awesome. And this doesn't mean Ziggy Stardust can't make an appearance, so I'll be waiting.Linux Lord Linus Torvalds is thinking about making Google's Chromebook Pixel his main computer – once he installs a proper Linux distribution on the machine, that is. Posting on Google+, Torvalds lauded Google's newest creation, writing "... the screen really is that nice" [his emphasis] and that "I think I can lug around this 1.5kg monster despite feeling fairly strongly that a laptop should weigh 1kg or less." He even thinks the 12.85-inch, 2560-by-1700, 239 pixels-per-inch display and its a 3:2 aspect ratio is so good that it puts the efforts of all other laptop-makers to shame, offering the following opinion on the current laptop computer market: One thing that the Chromebook Pixel really brings home is how crap normal laptops have become. Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more? No wonder the PC business isn't doing well, when they stick to just churning out more crappy stuff and think that "full HD" (aka 1080p) is somehow the epitome of greatness. Torvalds doesn't think Google's computer is perfect; he wants more than Chrome OS because "For a laptop to be useful to me, I need to not just read and write email, I need to be able to do compiles, have my own git repositories etc.." A full Linux install is therefore on the horizon, although Torvalds hasn't said which distribution or desktop he favours on this occasion (although he has recently said he's using Gnome again). With the Pixel packing a Core i5, he's got lots of choices when he decides to make the jump. ®11/11 Singles day + BEIJING: Indian masalas are spicing up the Chinese palate like never before with large numbers of them buying Indian food products during the annual shopping event, the Singles Day, on Saturday.The shopping carnival saw online markets doing business exceeding $30 billion as millions of consumers bought a wide range of goods, most of which are manufactured in China. Some foreign-made goods including those produced in India, Europe and the US were hawked and purchased.Indian grocery items, ready-made food and Ayurvedic cosmetic brands like Amul, MDH Masala, Gits, Tata Tea, Haldiram, Dabur, Patanjali and Himalaya, were snapped up on Alibaba’s Taobao.com, jd.com and several other Internet marketplaces.The online market attracts a large chunk of the Chinese population with attractive discounts on the occasion, that is also known asbecause it involves the repeated use of 1 or single four times. However, buyers include both married and singles. The 24-hour buying frenzy has emerged as the world’s biggest shopping day eclipsing Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States. Alibaba reported that its one-day sales reached $25.35 billion on Saturday, a rise of 39 percent from last year. The company said it had sold goods including apparel, mobile phones, imported lobster and infant formula from 140,000 brands during the day.JD, which started the discount sales on November 1, said it had sold nearly $20 billion in goods over an 11-day period. It sold 55 million facial masks and 500,000 Thailand black tiger shrimps, JD said. There are several other online shopping firms which have not released all their figures yet.“There is a lot of attraction for Indian foods and many other products all over China. They are sold by hundreds of Chinese traders through online stores and physical shops. Almost every city in China has a shop selling Indian goods, and some like Shanghai, Guangzhou, Yiwu and Beijing have two or three each,” a Guangzhou-based Indian businessman told TNN.The most sought-after Indian goods are spices followed by cosmetics. Textiles and home decoration pieces are also on sale. Buyers include the vast community of expatriates including Indians, Pakistanis, Japanese, Arabs, Africans and even Europeans who are fond of curried food. More than a million expatriates live in different Chinese cities.There are more than 100 physical stores selling Indian products in different Chinese cities. These shops, most of whom are run by local traders, also sell online.Indian products usually sell at a premium ranging from 100 percent to 300 percent over the printed prices but this does not deter buyers who want quality products from India.“The quality of Indian spices like cardamom and cumin seeds is far superior in India as compared to those sold in local Chinese markets. People start realizing it once they use them. Turmeric has become very popular in China,” the businessman said.Chinese have emerged as the world’s biggest international travellers, which has resulted in an enlarged worldview and a desire to taste the foods of different countries. Thousands of restaurants in Chinese cities now feature “chicken curry” on the menu. They use ready-made spice mixtures comprising turmeric and other Indian masalas. Many Chinese housewives also cook curry at home.A wide range of packaged Indian sweets is also on sale at the online markets. They are mostly purchased by foreigners including Arabs, Europeans, and Americans with a sweet tooth because the average Chinese does not have an affinity for intensely sweet eatables.The Singles Day has also given a boost to China’s clout as an international hub for mobile payments and intelligent logistics, the local media quoted Matthew Crabbe, Asia Pacific research director at consultancy Mintel as saying. The Alipay mobile wallet saw deals at a peak rate of 256,000 transactions per second in China and many foreign countries, according to Alibaba. Robots and algorithms accelerated parcel distribution, it said.Lyme disease, a mysterious tick-borne illness, is the fastest spreading vector-borne disease in the United States, and over the past decade, the tick that carries Lyme has been spreading across Canada with alarming speed. TICKED OFF: THE MYSTERY OF LYME DISEASE is a fascinating and eye-opening documentary that explores a disease that has devastating effects, is often misdiagnosed and mistreated, and continues to be mired in a medical controversy. More than 30,000 cases are reported in the USA every year, but the real number could be as high as 300,000. And despite hard evidence that the Lyme-carrying, deer tick has already established populations across Canada, some people claim that patients here are still being told that they cannot contract Lyme in this country. Doctors agree that if it’s caught early Lyme disease can usually be cured with two to four weeks of antibiotics. There are others who believe that if it’s not caught early, the infection can develop into a debilitating condition they call Chronic Lyme. Yet unlike West Nile, Encephalitis or SARS, where the medical profession and scientists joined forces to find better treatments or a cure, many patients, who claim to have chronic Lyme, say that they are being denied treatment and left to suffer. So why is this happening? From the micro world of the tick and its disease-causing bacteria, to the macro world of human suffering and medical science, TICKED OFF: THE MYSTERY OF LYME DISEASE investigates the story behind this current medical mystery. Purchase this film online.Australia can make deep cuts to its carbon emissions and become entirely powered by renewable energy by mid-century, all for a relatively low cost, a new study has found. The report, which was released this week, was prepared by researchers at the Australian National University in Canberra on behalf of WWF-Australia. It argues that the country's renewable energy potential is 500 times greater than the current installed capacity, and notes that forecasting by the Government's Treasury Department regarding the cost of large-scale renewable energy plants is outdated. "The costs of some carbon-free technologies, including solar and wind power, have fallen much faster than expected," the report states. "For example, large-scale solar panel power stations are already only half the cost that the Treasury's 2008 and 2011 modelling studies estimated they would be in the year 2030." The report also highlights that Australia's economy can continue to grow while achieving ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emission over the short and long-term, and says the country could achieve net-zero emissions by offsetting limited fossil fuel use in remote areas with farming and forestry initiatives. It's no secret that Australia has a wealth of potential renewable energy at its disposal. The problem is, the country's also abundantly rich in coal. It's one of the world's largest coal exporters, and at home, coal is used to produce around 65 percent of electricity. What's worrying is that Australia emits more carbon dioxide per capita than any other developed western nation, and the electricity sector accounts for about one-third of those emissions. And despite reports like this, which demonstrate the feasibility of renewable energy and the urgent need to reduce emissions, the Federal Government seems unprepared to take meaningful action. In October 2014, the country's Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, said, "coal is good for humanity" and is "an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world." And more recently, the Government's much-anticipated Intergenerational Report has been slammed by critics for failing to acknowledge the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change. As Greg Jericho wrote for The Guardian, the report "dismisses climate change as no big thing" and "absurdly it contains no budgetary or economic impacts of climate change beyond 2020, and the document is at pains to make it clear one nation cannot change the climate." And other big emitters such as China, the US, and Brazil, have started to call Australia to task for its lack of effort on climate change mitigation, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. While it's great to float the idea of a 100 percent renewable Australia, the major hurdle is leveraging this knowledge to guide transformative policies. A starting point could be to provide a regulatory framework that encourages rather than thwarts investment in large-scale renewable energy. It would also be good if the country's post-2020 emissions reduction targets matched those of other developed countries. In another report released this week, the Climate Change Authority, an independent Australian body, recommended that the government adopt an ambitious 30 percent reduction target on 2000 levels by 2025, and says it should aim for 40 to 60 percent reductions by 2030. "If Australia were to pledge the recommended 30 per cent target at the Paris conference [later this year] this would likely be considered the behaviour of a good global citizen, and go some way to answering those who have questioned Australia's commitment to climate change policy in recent times," Climate Change Authority chair, Bernie Fraser, told The Sydney Morning Herald. Sources: The Sydney Morning Herald, The GuardianSonar equipment to be positioned off Port Stephens in ‘nursery for juvenile great whites’ will be able to send information to lifesavers via SMS messages A new shark detection technology named “clever buoy” will be trialled off the coast of Port Stephens, 200km north of Sydney, in the hope it will give insight into the spate of recent attacks on the New South Wales north coast. The collaboration with Australian company Shark Mitigation Systems will use sonar technology to detect the distinctive movement patterns made by sharks and transmit the information to local beach authorities via SMS messages. Shark nets don't enclose swimmers – they catch and kill sharks \| Leah Gibbs Read more The primary industries minister, Niall Blair, said the government will partner with the University of Technology, Sydney, on a research project that will position a “clever buoy” about 1km off the coast of Hawks Nest at Port Stephens. Video cameras will be dropped into the waters for a four-week period and the images obtained will be compared to the data received from the buoy to see how effective its sonar beam is at detecting white sharks. The cameras will confirm if the objects detected are big fish or sharks. “It is recognised as a nursery for juvenile great white sharks, and aerial surveys have confirmed it is a congregation site,” Professor William Gladstone, who designed the trial, told Fairfax media. “If it works effectively and reliably you could deploy a number of them to cover the beach entrance with sonar beam. The message would go back to the lifeguards if a shark enters, and they would decide what do to,” Gladstone said. There have been six shark attacks in less than two years in the New South Wales near the north coast town of Ballina.Siddhartha Mukherjee Author, cancer physician and researcher Last published: ‘The Gene: An Intimate History’ We need a manifesto—or at least a hitchhiker’s guide—for a post-genomic world. The historian Tony Judt once told me that Albert Camus’s novel The Plague was about the plague in the same sense that King Lear is about a king named Lear. In The Plague, a biological cataclysm becomes the testing ground for our fallibilities, desires, and ambitions. You cannot read The Plague except as a thinly disguised allegory of human nature. The genome is also a testing ground for our fallibilities and desires, although reading it does not require understanding allegories or metaphors. What we read and write into our genome is our fallibilities, desires, and ambitions. It is human nature. — From The Gene: An Intimate History (Allen Lane, 2016) A 12-part series of portraits selected for Lounge by Rohit Chawla, who has photographed over 200 authors at the Jaipur Literature Festival over a decade.There's a good reason that Nintendo showed off video game footage culled from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of third-party games, not the Wii U, at last week's E3 unveiling of the console. According to a new report, Wii U games just weren't looking so hot on current hardware. Not surprising, given that the console isn't due until next year, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime's explanation for the lack of actual Wii U footage from third-party developers. According to a Wii U white paper published by Hit Detection, the consulting company founded by former Newsweek journalist N'Gai Croal, the kits in developers' hands are just not up to current-gen snuff, but they are working. From the report: Developers have underclocked development kits, and worked hard to deliver titles running on that hardware to demonstrate live at E3. However, due to titles not looking much better than what is currently available on Xbox 360 and the PS3, Nintendo decided late in the game to not show those titles and focus instead on tech demos. In particular, THQ stated that Darksiders II was running on development hardware and could have been shown. Also, Epic vice president Mark Rein tweeted during E3 that Gearbox's Aliens: Colonial Marines was being made for Wii U with Unreal Engine 3, showing that Epic is bringing its tech to Wii U. Advertisement Fortunately, additional developer feedback implies that the Wii U is at least more powerful than the PS3 and 360, perhaps 50% or more, based on estimates. It's potentially promising for Nintendo fans that some third party games may look close or on par with current console competition at this stage of development. Given Nintendo's hesitation in revealing final hardware specifications for the Wii U, we'll just have to wait and see what the system is capable of as we get closer to its 2012 launch.PHOENIX (Reuters) - Kansas and Arizona filed a lawsuit against the U.S. federal government on Wednesday, seeking court approval for states to require proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote. The lawsuit brought by the two Republican-led states accuses an agency of President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration of preventing them from enforcing state laws that require proof of citizenship as a way to prevent illegal immigrants from voting. The suit, part of an on-going battle over voter registration laws being waged nationwide, demands that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission modify federal voter registration forms to allow states to require proof of citizenship. The federal form now asks for a verbal pledge that the applicant is a U.S. citizen but does not require documentation as proof. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the
three phases but the timeline is yet to be fixed. It took a decade of planning before Chief Minister Anandiben Patel performed the groundbreaking ceremony of the Metro rail project in the industrial suburb of Vastral, Ahmedabad on Saturday evening. The first phase will have two routes - East-West Corridor and North-South Corridor. The deadline of completion for this phase has been fixed for December 2018, a year after the Assembly elections.Share. Does Peter Parker's Stark tech suit negate the need for that super power? Does Peter Parker's Stark tech suit negate the need for that super power? We've seen Spider-Man do many amazing things since he became part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but one specific power of his has not been depicted in either Captain America: Civil War or Spider-Man: Homecoming: his Spider-sense. In the comics and in past animated and live-action incarnations of the character, Peter Parker would get a tingling sensation at the base of his skull when a threat was detected in his immediate surroundings. This near-precognitive power kept the wall-crawler safe from being surprised or ambushed. And yet in his two appearances so far in the MCU, Tom Holland's Spidey has yet to show any signs that he possesses this ability. Indeed, the Spider-sense certainly should've warned Peter in Spider-Man: Homecoming that his pal Ned was in his bedroom and thus help keep his secret identity from being revealed, but it didn't. (See the clip from that scene below.) Exit Theatre Mode I recently asked Marvel Studios president and Homecoming producer Kevin Feige if the Spider-sense exists in the MCU or if the need for such a super-power was negated thanks to Spidey's costume now being decked out with AI and other Stark tech that aids him in exploring his surroundings. "No, I think he has it. And I think he has it with or without that suit," Feige told IGN. "I think how we explore it in a cinematic sense will change. I mean, that was sort of a big showy part of previous versions and we thought that we'd make it more of an internal, sort of second nature thing for him." Feige continued, "But there are ways coming up that will slowly hint at that and also just make it part of his, you know, his natural abilities. But we don't know that if it will be -- I think we'll explore it further down the line, but [it's] definitely him not the suit." Exit Theatre Mode For more of our Spider-Man: Homecoming coverage, check out our rave review of the film, watch Tom Holland take our Spidey gadgets quiz, and see Holland reenact a Homecoming fight scene using LEGOs.Marijuana edibles can be tricky. Candies, brownies, teas or other THC-infused foods and beverages can take an hour or more to have the desired effect and a typical “newbie” mistake is to take a second dose because the first one “doesn’t seem to be doing anything.” When both doses kick in, the consumer can unhappily get caught off guard by the results. To meet the customer demand for predictable and fast acting edibles, entrepreneurs have been developing new cannabis-infused products, and the upside to success is significant. Legal cannabis sales topped $4B in 2016 and may reach $11B in 2019 according to the newly-published Marijuana Business Factbook 2017. Fast-acting edibles are an important segment of products catering to this growing pie. Last year, Peter Barsoom, founder of the Colorado marijuana edibles company 1906, introduced a line of "rapid delivery" edibles that take effect in 15-20 minutes, using a proprietary lipid microencapsulation process that allows the THC to “bypass the stomach and get into the small intestine faster. It also allows more of the THC to get into the blood,” he said. A rapid effect is important he said, because, “people don’t have six hours to set aside for a date with an edible.” Barsoom founded the company in 2015 and after a year of R&D launched a line of chocolates named for the effect they have – including “Go” for energy and “Pause” for relaxing. “Our competitors are Chardonnay, Xanax and Coffee” Barsoom said, “not other edibles.” Fast-acting edibles are critical to the industry because they will help to normalize the use of marijuana, according to Michael Devlin, Co-Founder of Zoots Premium Cannabis Infusions. The new delivery method will enable cannabis to be consumed more like alcohol in social settings. With alcohol, he said, the intoxicant is (usually) consumed relatively slowly over time, and the act of consumption itself is a social experience. People have a few glasses of wine over a long dinner for example, or drinks throughout the night at a party. The current time delay in feeling the effect of the THC, makes the consumption of cannabis infused items a "take the full amount all at once, and early in the event" type of experience he said. As more low-dose, fast acting cannabis products come to market, “consumption events will be nearly identical to those of alcohol,” according to Devlin. This will help it to “fit within the fabric of our culture,” he said. 1906 focuses on three areas to market its products. The first is educating budtenders in dispensaries and making them brand ambassadors. “Buying cannabis usually involves a one on one conversation with a budtender about the effect you are looking for,” so it is important for sellers to be familiar with the 1906 products and recommend them, Barsoom said. The second marketing tactic involves private parties where consumers can learn about and sample the brand. Getting the product into the press is the company’s other marketing emphasis. 1906 is coming out with new products including chocolate covered espresso beans, Altoid-like candies, and tablets to swallow, all along the same naming lines of Go, Pause, etc. Barsoom says the company of 10 employees is also gearing up to enter the legal recreational cannabis markets in California, Nevada and Massachusetts next year. There are additional ways to get the THC effect faster according to other edible-makers. Christie Strong, Marketing Communications Manager at Kiva Confections, a California-based cannabis edibles company says that letting an edible like a mint or chocolate melt under the tongue helps speed the process. When a product is eaten it takes a long time to take effect, because it has to be digested, she said. Dissolving the edible under the tongue helps the THC enter the bloodstream faster. As more consumers enter the market, Barsoom expects smoking to become the less popular cannabis consumption method, “but,” he said, “just about everyone likes chocolate.”Video from Syria purportedly shows the capture of the Islamic State's 'Bulldozer.' A TWENTY stone terrorist nicknamed The Bulldozer has been captured by the Syrian Army according to this astonishing footage. The enormous extremist can be seen lying topless on the back of a truck with his hands bound behind him according to the Department of Film and Sound Young Journalists Club, The Sun reported. In the footage, he is stripped of his upper clothing and then has his hands tied behind his back before being thrown in the back of a truck. His captors can be clearly heard taunting him before he is driven off to an undisclosed location. It was not yet clear where the footage was shot or where he currently is. However, The Bulldozer was known to carry out his sick punishments in places including the IS held city of Mosul, Iraq. The city, which is the terror group’s capital in Iraq, is facing a looming battle with government forces set to launch an attack to retake the city later this year. He has also been filmed in Syria and Yemen, plying his sick trade. THUG OF TERROR The obese thug rose up the ranks of ISIS, garnering a vicious reputation for decapitating unarmed men and hacking off the limbs of children. He has also been photographed wielding a 50kg machine gun after which he was given his diabolic nickname. In one of his more brutal depictions, the fat, masked coward was seen executing a 15-year-old boy for listening to Western pop music. The brute forms part of a group dubbed the “Chopping Committee” that murders innocents in towns conquered by ISIS. WHO IS THE BULLDOZER? Little is known about the identity of the man dubbed The Bulldozer, however some international media have speculated he is an Iranian national. The real name of the evil killer is not yet known as he has so far only been photographed wearing a mask, like British killer Jihadi John. What is known about him however, is how brutal his crimes are. The masked militant has always been shown dressed top to toe in black. Along with carrying a massive machine gun, the militant was renowned for carrying out his brutal punishments with a massive sword. The Bulldozer knows no mercy and has been accused of cutting the limbs off children. Last October, a young boy known as Omar revealed to Britain’s Channel 4 how he lost a hand and foot after he refused to join Islamic State. The teen, whose name has been changed, told the broadcaster he has “given up on life” after The Bulldozer took his hand and foot. The boy was fighting with the Free Syrian Army and was running ammunition and food to fighters when Islamic State moved in on Deir Ezzor province. The Bulldozer reportedly hacked off his limbs as punishment.More People, Less Driving: The Imperative of Curbing Sprawl Experience with case studies has made it clear to many urban planners and environmentalists that to maximize the benefits of transit investments, and to slow growth in traffic congestion, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and carbon emissions, you have to focus on land use. This knowledge has begun working its way into the policymaking world, to the extent that local and state legislatures are beginning to craft rules that explicitly factor the carbon impact of land use effects into decisions about new development and infrastructure construction. In a few years time, the federal government may follow. But there’s not as much in the way of hard studies of the effects of land use as we might like — mainly because it’s been a non-issue, so far as most of the country is concerned, for much of recent history. Aiming to address this (and acting under a congressional mandate), the Transportation Research Board recently completed a study that has now resulted in a very large report: "Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO Emissions." The report is actually five mini-papers, and at nearly 200 pages long it makes for a lot of reading. But the findings reported in the introduction give an idea of what it’s all about. The authors conclude that compact development is likely to reduce VMT: "The effects of compact, mixed-use development on VMT are likely to be enhanced when this strategy is combined with other policy measures that make alternatives to driving relatively more convenient and affordable." No surprises there. Finding No. 2 is: "The literature suggests that doubling residential density across a metropolitan area might lower household VMT by about 5 to 12 percent, and perhaps by as much as 25 percent, if coupled with higher employment concentrations, significant public transit improvements, mixed uses, and other supportive demand management measures." They note that were you to move the residents of Atlanta to an area built like Boston, you’d lower the Atlantans’ VMT per household by perhaps 25 percent. Better land use results in reductions in energy use and carbon emissions, the authors report, from both direct and indirect causes. (Direct causes would be a reduction in VMT; indirect include things like longer vehicle lifetimes from reduced use and the greater efficiency of smaller or multi-family housing units.) But one of the crucial pieces of data included in the report is this: As many as 57 million new housing units are projected to accommodate population growth and replacement housing needs by 2030, growing to between 62 and 105 million units by 2050 – a substantial net addition to the housing stock of 105.2 million in 2000. Critics of smart growth efforts or rail and transit investments often wave off the potential gains from building differently by noting that so much of the current housing stock is of the sprawling, single-family home, auto-oriented sort. Convincing the people who currently live in such places to give that up for something different, they say, is sure to be an extremely difficult sell. But that’s not the issue. No one is suggesting we rip down all of suburbia. Rather we, or at least I, am pointing out that between now and mid-century, the country will very nearly have to build itself all over again to accommodate population growth. In addition to the 100 million homes now in America, somewhere between 62 and 105 million more will be built. The critical question is what the balance of that new construction will look like. The TRB report suggests that if 75 percent of this new construction is of a more compact variety, that emissions could be reduced 10 percent or more from the baseline scenario (and that is not taking into consideration the deployment of cleaner electricity generation and other potential sources of savings). Ed Glaeser argued — and this is kind of hard to believe — that land use shifts from building high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston would not provide much in the way of benefits, since, he guessed, only 100,000 or so people in each city would move from the suburbs to the central city. But this entirely misses the point. Houston and Dallas may each double their current housing stock between now and 2050. Where are those homes going to go, with what climate impacts? That’s the critical question. Demographic shifts and changes in energy prices are sure to encourage some households that are currently living at low densities to move to more compact developments, and that’s a good thing. But that’s not the main reason to begin focusing on the significant available savings from smarter land use decisions. The main reason is the growth that America will continue to face. It’s difficult to imagine that the nation can double its housing stock while building in a sprawling fashion without facing major environmental costs and economic difficulties. Land use patterns will need to change. And as this report documents, there will be considerable advantages to facilitating that change.If you were paying attention last week, you’ll recall from my newsy little post on Friday, that Pope Francis has charged Catholics with asking the Holy Spirit for “the grace to be annoying.” His words. Not mine. “Today we can ask the Holy Spirit to give us all this Apostolic fervor and to give us the grace to be annoying when things are too quiet in the Church, the grace to go out to the outskirts of life. The Church has so much need of this!…So let us ask the Holy Spirit for this grace of Apostolic zeal, let’s be Christians with apostolic zeal. And if we annoy people, blessed be the Lord.” I know what you’re thinking: Easy, peazy lemon squeazy, right? Not right. Admittedly, that was my first reaction too. “Yes!” I thought. “Finally a grace that comes naturally to me. I don’t even have to pray for this one.” The more I mulled it over though, the more I realized I was making the same mistake as that infamous Sicilian. You see, to be annoying doesn’t mean to be obnoxious or insensitive or the evangelical equivalent of a bull in a china shop. Those things are easy, peazy, lemon squeazy. At least for some of us. But to be a holy pain in the you-know-whatsis? To be a joyful, peaceful, effective, and utterly confounding witness to the Gospel? Well, that does require grace, plus a whole lot of hard work. The pope already told us how to get the grace—implore the Holy Spirit. But what about the hard work? What practical things can we do to become the most annoying of annoying Catholics? 1. Laugh When the world thinks of Serious Christians, this is what it expects to see: That’s not crazy. When you’ve bought in to the idea that the big bad Catholic Church exists for the sole purpose of raining on people’s happy parade, of course you expect those living according to her teachings to be all sour-faced. And of course you’re going to be equally baffled when you encounter Serious Christians who look like this: So, be baffling. Make like Pope Francis and radiate the joy you’ve found in Christ. Smile. Laugh. Be merry. Mystify the world with the unmistakable light beaming through you and have a darned good time doing so. 2. Be Real Smiling is important. But so is honesty. Life isn’t happy, happy, joy, joy all the time, and the walk of faith is a tad more difficult than a walk in the park. Struggles come. So do doubts and fears and gut-wrenching confrontations with our own weakness. It’s okay to admit that. In fact, it’s more than okay. That doesn’t mean you should treat life like it’s one, big Oprah show, broadcasting your own and your family’s demons for every Facebook friend to see. But when you need prayers, ask for them. When you’ve screwed up, own it. When people struggling with their own marriages ask you why yours is so perfect, be honest and tell them it’s not. Basically, just remember… Seriously, just learn to be comfortable with your own humanity. Don’t invest all your energy in trying to hide your frailties and imperfections from the world. People will learn more from the real you than they will from the fake you. The real you is the one transformed by grace. It’s the one that reveals the face of Christ. It’s the one that brings unbelievers up short. Bring ‘em up short. 3. Defy Expectations Want to throw someone outside the Church for a loop? Then say something interesting. Or intelligent. Or witty. Talk about craft brewing on Facebook. Mention in an off-hand way the funny joke Tom Bodett cracked on “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.” Sing the praises of J.J. Abrams. Wax poetic about Manfred Honek or Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Talk about your organic garden. Condemn faceless corporatism. Speak out against drones. Or the death penalty. Or torture. Heck, just go watch Firefly. See, the world loves boxes. And the box into which it puts committed Catholics has “Bitter Clingers” and “Illiterate, Single-Minded, Towing-the-Republican-Party-Line Boob” stamped on it. Don’t let them put you in that box. Be the interesting, dynamic, well-rounded, whole person God made you to be. Find the good in the culture and celebrate it. Make people think. Make people wonder. Make people confront their own prejudices. Who knows where that confrontation will lead? 4. Know the Faith Here’s where the rubber starts hitting the road. If you want to earn a slot on the list of World’s Most Annoying Catholics, you better know what “Catholic” means. That requires knowing more than the Creed. It also requires knowing the history of the Church and the reasons we believe what we do. It requires knowing the “why” behind the hard teachings—on marriage, contraception, chastity, and homosexuality’—and not being brought up short when the wicked of the world prosper and the good shed tears. As another Pope once said said, “Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15). No excuses. 5. Share Your Faith Laughing and smiling and NPR references will only get you so far in the evangelization game. You also have to talk about Jesus—about who he is and how he’s blessing you, instructing you, and stretching you in the day. That doesn’t mean every conversation has to include the Four Pillars of the Gospel. But when you see a co-worker struggling, ask him how you can pray for him. Invite that childhood friend who just moved back to town to come to a talk at your parish. Share CatholicVote posts (and other great stuff) on Facebook. And no, it doesn’t matter if half the people in your newsfeed have already shared it. For some of your friends, it will be the only non-baby picture they see all day. Don’t post for the choir. Post for those who haven’t yet heard the singing. Regardless, whatever you do, just try to talk about Jesus like you talk about any other person in your life. You don’t have existential crises over mentioning your husband or best friend in a conversation. So don’t have one over mentioning Jesus. 6. Grow a Backbone Sharing the Gospel isn’t all funny stories about what you said to Jesus after your morning rosary. It’s also having the hard conversations no one wants to have: Confronting your brother about his live-in girlfriend, challenging your marriage-weary daughter to go back to her husband, not politely backing down when someone at the gym misrepresents the Church’s teachings on homosexuality. Yes, those hard conversations have to be handled with gentleness and tact. It’s not just about saying what needs to be said, but also saying it at the right time and in the right way. We do want our words to actually be heard. But evil is happening all around us. And St. Michael isn’t the only one who needs to be wrestling demons. Right now, people are dashing their bodies and souls against the loving laws of God. And if we just stand by, refusing to do nothing more than silently watch as they dash away, we may be universally recognized as “nice,” but come Judgment Day we won’t necessarily be recognized by the One who counts. 7. Love After writer Andrew Sullivan was diagnosed with AIDS, he was shocked when Pat Buchanan sent him a kind note, saying how very sorry he was to hear the news and promising to remember Andrew in prayer. At that moment, Sullivan came to understand that “Love the sinner, hate the sin” isn’t just a saying for many Christians; it’s a way of life. Be that Christian. Love everyone. Smile at the clerk in the grocery store. Visit the elderly neighbor up the street. Give to the poor. Talk to the homeless. Call your mom. Babysit your best friend’s kids so she can take a nap. Make a meal for the lesbian at work whose partner just died. Send a note of congratulations to your socialist cousin who just earned his Ph.D. Tell your pro-choice college roommate who’s struggling with infertility that you’re praying for her. Praise the hard work of the gay couple that runs your favorite coffee shop. Gay, straight, rich, poor, young, old, liberal, conservative, stranger, family—it doesn’t matter. Do unto others. You know the rest. 8. Pray As always. Last but decidedly not least. If you want to be a holy pest, you’ve got to pray. You’ve got to go Mass, go to Confession, say those rosaries, and have nice long one-on-one chats with God. In all that, you’re not just giving Sister a run for her money. More fundamentally, you’re giving God every possible opportunity to pour his grace into your heart and transform you from within. In the end, for each of us, that grace will accomplish everything we can’t—not only making us the most annoying Catholics on the block, but also working a transformation in those for whom we pray, a transformation they won’t see coming, and which will at first annoy them beyond their greatest imagining. But ultimately bless them just the same. *** So there you have it. Eight easy steps to becoming an annoying Christian. There probably are more. Add them to the com-box if you like. Then, get crackin’. There is no shortage of people who need annoying in this culture of ours, and time is a wastin’. There’s got to be a meme for that. The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of CatholicVote.orgLaverda-based sidecar motorcycle - Click above for high-res image gallery When most people think of sidecar motorcycles, visions of World War II-era BMWs likely spring to mind. For others, however, "sidecar" may be translated a bit more literally. Take François Knorreck of Italy. After some 10,000 hours of work over a ten-year period and at a cost of 15,000 euros, Knorreck created a unique sidecar motorcycle called the Snaefell – likely named after the tallest peak on the famed Isle of Man. Half the machine is based on the guts of a Laverda motorcycle, while the other half uses bits from a Volkswagen GTI Audi 80 and a Citroen Xantia Equally as interesting is this mashup that combines what appears to be an older British motorcycle with a cut-down Citroen 2CV sidecar. It seems both machines are in fully working order with the older 2CV still sporting what we assume is an inoperative a steering wheel. Check them both out in the gallery below.Not that Paul Krugman is directly arguing for a universal basic income here but it's a possible solution to the point that he's making. And, I would argue, a good solution to the point that he's making. And I, as usual, think that a universal basic income is a good answer to many questions, not least that we get to fire a couple of million bureaucrats if we bring one in. The underlying analysis is that in general we don't think that the distribution of market income in the US is anything very special. It's not in fact as we usually measure it. What people end up getting through their own efforts and whatever happenstances of luck and the lucky sperm club isn't out of line with what happens in other countries. However, the inequality of how people actually live their lives is rather higher in the US than it is in most other rich countries. The conventional answer being that the US just does less tax and redistribution than everyone else. Enter Branko Milanovic (with Janet Gornick) and this paper where we get this chart of the conventional wisdom: It's the tax and redistribution level that makes the US different, not the market income inequality. However, we also know that the US has very much higher wage dispersion than other countries. So that's rather in tension with this finding. So, why not go look at inequality only of people still in work? Take out those on pensions and we'll get to see more about that wage inequality. Which gives us this: Now the US is different in its market income distribution. And it accords better with what we think about the wage distribution from other sources. I have to admit that I'm not entirely convinced by this. In the Luxembourg Income Study numbers (where Milanovic now is and Krugman is soon to join) there's a couple of assumptions made which I'm not entirely sure are valid. Voluntary pensions (ie, private sector pensions) are counted as market income and state pensions (ie, Social Security) are counted as part of the redistribution that is done (that is, they turn up in the disposable income figures but not the market income ones) and different countries have different balances between public and private provision of pensions. So I'm not certain that that's really quite the way to do it. Is Social Security really part of the redistributory state? Are almost all German pensions so (from memory, because most of them are public schemes then most of them are counted as being so)? My other uncertainty is that our sample sizes are so different. We're comparing the 300 million people of the US against units as small as 5 million (say, Norway or Denmark). And we would rather expect to see greater dispersion of market incomes in the larger sample anyway. Now, in the usual figures we can check this fairly easily. State level gini index is generally lower than that for the US as a whole. But not by much, perhaps 0.01 points (this is using a different calculation method than the LIS one). Eyeballing county level it looks a bit lower again but also not by much. But we don't know whether this is also true of those incomes among the non-pensionable population. The expectation is that probably they are but we're not certain of this. But those quibbles aside we then get Krugman's conclusion: This result has strong relevance to policy debates. There has been considerable discussion lately of the “new” conventional wisdom on labor which argues that interventions to strengthen workers’ bargaining power can reduce inequality and raise wages with little or no damage to the economy. If it were really true that all international differences in inequality were due to after-market, tax-and-transfer interventions, this would cast doubt on the new view. But it turns out that market income distributions differ quite a lot – and the US emerges as among the most unequal. So let's assume two things. Firstly, that this result is true and secondly, that it's something that we need to do something about. I'm not convinced of that second: inequality isn't something that bothers me very much. It might bother you, might bother Krugman, but not me. But let's say that we should do something about it. Well, what? The thing that would strengthen workers' bargaining power the most would be the introduction of a universal basic income. This would raise the reservation wage considerably: it would mean that employers have to pay significantly higher wages in order to persuade people to come in and do some work. Something like the level suggested by Charles Murray would do very well. An unconditional $10,000 a year to every adult American. Oh, and, as above, we get to fire a few million bureaucrats who currently administer the vast number of piecemeal programs that make up the current American welfare state. What's not to like?Executives at Oculus have been pretty open about the books that inspire them. Both Ready Player One and Snow Crash have been name-dropped by the company's founders on multiple occasions, and the former novel is almost required reading at the company: every new employee gets a copy. It's supposed to get employees motivated about building great virtual reality experiences -- but it seems like the team at Oculus gets inspiration from more than just science fiction. Between game demos, one could read about the perils of game addiction in Edward Castronova's Exodus to the Virtual World, or bone up on the value of games as an artistic medium in Tom Bissell's Extra Lives. There were books on the effect of virtual reality on the human psyche, the lives of pro-gamers, how commerce in video games is effecting our real-world economy, and more. It's not an official reading list by any means, but it's clear that Oculus' set dressers chose the conference's display books carefully. Through the course of three days, we counted sixteen different books on gaming or VR, all catalogued in the gallery above. If you're looking for something to read now that Oculus Connect 3 has come to an end, take a look -- there are plenty of options.“Glory to Rome” wasn’t shipped in a day. Ed Carter only asked for $21,000 on crowdfunding site Kickstarter to produce a deluxe version of “Glory to Rome,” one of several board games made by his company, Cambridge Games Factory. But there were far more board game enthusiasts willing to put money into his project than Carter expected. At the end of a 21-day funding period in the summer of 2011, more than 1,600 people had pledged $73,102. That should have made fulfilling the orders easy. Instead, that was when Carter’s nightmare started. Carter’s company makes cheaply-produced strategy board games. For Carter, who works as an independent consultant, it’s a hobby. The Kickstarter campaign was meant to take it up a notch with a lavishly produced game. In addition, Carter offered the project’s backers (i.e., customers) free shipping on their games if they agreed to collect them from a nearby game store; that way he hoped to build relationships with the stores and avoid paying distributors to sell future games. His background as a retail consultant who had worked in China was meant to be an asset. But what that meant was that Carter was, in his own words, “too clever by half.” Carter cut out middlemen and went directly to a Chinese producer. But soon after he made the link, his Chinese-speaking head of operations quit over disagreements about free shipping and his relationship with a Chinese girl fell apart, leaving him with nobody who could speak Chinese. Small mistakes compounded his woes: it hadn’t occurred to Carter to add “no step” to the shipping documentation, which would have told handlers not to put anything heavy on top of the fragile game boxes. Stacking one pallet on top of another crushed them. Free shipping eventually came back to haunt him: Large orders to countries like the US were fine, as were a couple of boxes to Brazil, but sending 100 games to Australia meant fat expenses but not enough to benefit from economies of scale. Carter’s work suffered. The company he contracted at, Staples, was making cuts and Carter found himself without a job. His savings were being ploughed into the game, which he says eventually cost him between $100,000 and $120,000. Running out of cash and faced with expenses from every avenue, Carter stopped making the mortgage on a house he owned outside Boston, which was also his company address. He eventually lost the house. (Carter, who lives in Amsterdam, admits that had he lived in the Boston house, he might not have sacrificed it for the game.) Meanwhile, Carter’s Kickstarter backers were getting anxious. Nearly a year after the campaign closed, they still hadn’t seen their games. An entire US state was “forgotten” when shipping did start. By March, Carter was facing tremendous pressure on his Kickstarter updates page. In response to a post about losing his house, one commenter wrote: I’m sorry, but fuck off with your guilt trip at the beginning of your update. As someone who has sat quite [sic], my only crime is donating money to help get this project off the ground. I see no reason why you should be blaming us for your downfall. Most of this update was unnecessary and I’m done with this company. All that for a board game. Still, Carter says he might consider doing it again. “I’m doing this because the corporate world is one of the best games ever invented.” says Carter, who has shipped most of the units and now has a new job. “In the middle of the hell, there were plenty of times when I wished I hadn’t kicked it off. But given where it’s landed, I learnt stuff. And the game itself is beautiful.”The 2001 Bangladesh-India border dispute conflict took place in the third week of April 2001 between troops of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR), which is now known as the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), and the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) on the poorly marked international border between the two countries.[12] Background [ edit ] The Partition of Bengal in 1947 left a poorly demarcated international border between India and Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Ownership of several villages on both sides of the de facto border were disputed and claimed by both countries. The dispute over the demarcation of the Indo-Bangladeshi border worsened due to the existence of over 190 enclaves. One of the disputed areas was a small sliver of land near the village of Padua/Pyrdiwah, on the border between Bangladesh and the Indian state of Meghalaya,[13] which during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War was used by Indian security forces to train the Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini, who were fighting the Pakistani Army. After its liberation, Bangladesh staked its claim to the area in which the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) had established a post in since 1971.[13][5] The village is one of the Indian exclaves on the border between Bangladesh and the Indian state of Meghalaya.[14][15] There are 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh claimed territory and 50 Bangladeshi ones in Indian claimed territory. Pyrdiwah village is an adverse possession – a village inhabited by Indians but one that is legally owned by Bangladesh (till the border agreement is ratified and the populations exchanged).[3][16][17] The people of the village are ethnically Khasi.[5] In a personal interview published much later the then director of the BDR, Maj.Gen Fazlur Rahman, who was later dismissed from service by the rival government after the election, claimed that the BSF had begun to construct a link road between their camp in Padua and another camp 10 km away, through the No man's land and Bangladeshi territory.[7][18] Conflict [ edit ] The 15–20 April fighting was the worst since the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. It took place around the village of Pyrdiwah (also known as Padua), in the Indian state of Meghalaya[13] which adjoins the Tamabil area of the Bangladesh border in the Sylhet district. In that area, 6.5 kilometres of the border had remained in dispute for the past 30 years, but a Status quo had been maintained for that period.[13] On 15 April 2001,[3] approximately 1000 Bangladeshi soldiers[4] attacked and captured Pyrdiwah village, breaking the Status quo and forced Indian civilians there to flee.[2][5] The Indian BSF post in Pyrdiwah village was surrounded, trapping 31 BSF personnel within. However both sides held their fire and began negotiations. The Bangladeshi soldiers claimed, the village had been illegally occupied by India since Bangladesh's war of independence in 1971.[13][19] The Bangladeshi soldiers stated that they were acting on orders from their government and insisted that the BSF personnel vacate the village. The next day, on 17 April, Director-General of the Bangladesh Rifles, Fazlur Rahman gave details of the Pyrdiwah thrust and stated "We have just completed a mission to restore our territory and sovereignty." This incident was resolved later without any bloodshed.[3] Immediately after the incident at Pyrdiwah, BSF troops along the Bangladesh border were put on alert and intensified border patrolling.[3] A few days later, a small contingent of BSF troops entered Bangladeshi territory at the village of Baraibari, more than 200 km to the west of Padua. Unlike Pyrdiwah, which was an adverse possession – a village inhabited by Indians but one that actually belonged to Bangladesh (pending ratification of the border agreement) – Boraibari bordering Assam lay across a fence. Also, unlike Pyrdiwah, which was neither fenced nor had any pillars to clearly demarcate it, Boraibari was a large village with a population of at least
favorite, so keep your fingers crossed and hope that yours is the best. He is the sole judge in this contest and his word is law. *Note: if you downloaded the full version of the track before we posted the version with only the solo section, please make sure you download the new one. Only entries submitted using the correct version will be considered. This contest will remain open until July 29th, 2016 at 11:59pm EDT. Contest is open only to residents of the U.S. (sorry — shipping is expensive and customs can be a pain). Please read the official rules before submitting an entry. Good luck and good shred to you! For comparison, we’ve posted the album version of “The Price is Wrong” below with Mark’s solo included. Periphery III: Select Difficulty comes out July 22nd on Sumerian Records.There is no humane way to kill a whale at sea. - Sir David Attenborough. Whaling is the term used for hunting whales in boats which, nowadays, are armed with exploding harpoon guns. The killing of a whale by even the most modern methods is cruel beyond description. An exploding harpoon, meant to kill quickly, rarely does more than rupture the whale's organs. The stricken creature thrashes and gushes blood through its spout as it begins to drown in its own haemorrhage. The phenomenal blood loss causes the ocean to change colour as the majestic animal slowly bleeds to death. Winched to the side of the whaling ship, a probe is jabbed into the whale and thousands of volts of electricity are run through it in an attempt to kill it faster. The once-mighty ruler of the sea screams as it dies. The History of Whaling When whaling first started in the Arctic, there were so many whales that sailors said you could have walked to the shore on their backs. People have been hunting whales for over 2,000 years, and it has been part of the culture of the people of the Faroe Islands since the 10th Century. Inuit people who relied on whaling for subsistence, treated the whale with reverence and respect. Commercial whaling began in New England in 1712, but ceased due to the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, before resuming in 1815. At the dawn of the industrial age, whales were an important natural resource. American whalers killed right whales at an average of almost 15,000 annually. By 1846 there were 735 US whaling vessels, an 80% share of the worldwide total. Some industries and towns have grown up around whaling: Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire was founded by Quaker whalers from Nantucket, Massachusetts. Moby-Dick The 1851 book Moby-Dick by Herman Melville was said to have been inspired by the sinking of the 240-ton whaler, Essex, which had sailed from Nantucket, Massachusetts, to search for whales in 1820. (It was this book which coined the term Nantucket Sleigh Ride, which refers to the 'ride' the whaling boat gets as the harpooned whale tries to escape.) Some 15 months later the Essex was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an 80-tonne sperm whale in a remote part of the South Pacific. In the same year that Moby-Dick was published, the Ann Alexander was sunk in the Pacific, caused by two head-on charges from a harpooned sperm whale. Nowadays collisions are usually fatal to the whale, because modern ship hulls are stouter than older versions. Harpooning The invention of an improved harpoon gun in 1865 gave a new impetus to whaling, and this has culminated in the extraordinary success of operations in the Falkland Islands dependencies and the Ross Sea. This, together with the invention of floating 'factory ships' which allowed the reintroduction and development of pelagic whaling by methods more efficient than those formerly practised, has resulted in new dangers for the whales. Experience has shown that whales do not readily return to an old locality, even when they've been free from pursuit for many years. The Industrial Revolution brought about steam ships, explosive harpoons and the attendant ability to kill thousands more whales. Petroleum was discovered towards the end of the 19th Century and kerosene took the place of whale oil in lamps. Fashions changed and the rise of the car replaced horse-and-buggy transportation. The US ceased whaling altogether in 1924. Glycerin Worldwide whaling continues due to different market demands: whale oil is used in soap and margarine thanks to the discovery of a process called hydrogenation. Two World Wars were supplied with explosives made from glycerin, a derivative of whale oil. Over-exploitation It is hard to comprehend how the whaling industry allowed its raw material to be so disastrously over-exploited. When they have reduced a species virtually to the point of extinction, they call a halt in the name of 'conservation'. The fact that no species have actually become extinct is more due to good luck than good management. At this moment in history only three species of great whale still exist in sufficient numbers to be hunted at all: sei, fin and sperm. Dundee Whaling ships set sail for the arctic waters from Dundee in Scotland between the mid-18th Century and the end of the 19th Century, during which time what was left of the Greenland Right whale species was driven so far north that continuing to hunt them became uneconomical. The last year saw 21 ships return with no catch at all, and 19 failed to return. So they headed southwards towards the oceans of the Antarctic, and carried on whaling until 1962. Two ex-whalers, Don Lennie and George Cummings, were interviewed by Dr Alice Roberts for the BBC series Coast and they described the terrible conditions and harrowing aspects of the job: 'It wasn't a pleasant way to make a living but it was the only job we knew then, we had families to feed. If we'd have heard the whales scream, we wouldn't have been able to stand it'. 'Whale' Meet Again Due to rationing during and after World War II, whale meat was made available, but it didn't prove popular, as Vera Lynn's popular song 'We'll Meet Again' was jokingly sung by frequent indulgers bemoaning 'Whale Meat Again'. Whale Parts Baleen : Baleen are the plankton-straining ribs in the mouths of most whales (except the sperm whale). They used to be used for corset stays; skirt hoops; carriage springs; horse-whips; brushes; ornaments; umbrella spokes; and fishing rods. Bone : Bone from the body of the whale is generally ground up and used as fertiliser. Ambergris : Ambergris is known as 'floating gold' because of its high value. It forms in the whale's intestine, perhaps due to some irritation, and is released into the sea when the whale vomits, in the form of lumps, and it can travel thousands of miles as it floats for up to a decade in the ocean. Because it is effectively whale effluvia, it is unknown whether whales would have been killed specifically for this product. The largest piece ever found, weighing 400kg, was taken from the intestine of a whale which had been harpooned. Normally, the lumps are rarely more than 20cm in diameter. It requires a lengthy period being washed around in the sea to make it valuable, as it starts off white, sticky, and foul-smelling, just as you would imagine whale vomit to be. The action of sun and salt water over a long period of time - years in some cases - turns it dark grey and brings out the scents that makes it valuable to the perfume industry. The perfumers say that the product isn't used as a matter of course in any perfumes these days, but when available it does feature in some of the more expensive brands. In August 2006, a family on holiday in North Wales found a lump of ambergris on the beach which could be worth £3,500, as the current market value is £10 per gram (£280 an ounce). Spermaceti : Spermaceti is an oil found only in the nose of the sperm whale. Smokeless candles are made from the congealed oil, and are thought to be the finest quality candles ever made. Whale Meat : Whale Meat is edible and some cultures relish it as a delicacy. Whale meat used to be used in the manufacture of petfood in the UK but this was discontinued in 1972. Whale Oil: Whale Oil was extracted from the blubber. It was highly-prized as the best quality oil for lamps and was used in later manufacture of soap, ice cream, cosmetics and margarine; by-products include glycerin. Space Oil When NASA discovered that sperm whale oil did not freeze in outer space, they used it as a lubricant in their space programme, including the ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) for expeditions to the Moon and Mars, where the surface temperature is very cold indeed. The discovery was so significant that Sir Patrick Moore devoted a whole programme of The Sky At Night to talk about the implications, and invited marine biologists and cetacean experts to join the discussion. Outlawed The International Whaling Commission (IWC) was formed in 1946, and it banned commercial whaling completely in 1986, except for subsistence hunting by the native peoples of Alaska and Siberia. Whaling was outlawed in the 20th Century because there were fears that whale-hunting was driving many species to extinction. The West Pacific grey whale was the most threatened, as the species teetered on the brink of extinction with only around 100 of them remaining alive. In 2005, grey whales numbered around 26,000, and the species is no longer on the endangered species list. There are still some countries hunting whales for'scientific research', which is allowed through a loophole in the original ban. Those countries are: Japan The IWC received a proposal in 2005 from the Japanese whaling research programme to almost double its catch of minke whales and start hunting humpback and fin whales. Every year Japan already kills hundreds of sperm whales, minke whales, sei whales and Bryde's whales. Over 90% of the female minke whales caught and killed in 2005 were pregnant. Officially, Japan only hunts whales for scientific purposes, but as far as anybody actually knows, the only scientific experiments involved are what happens when a harpoon interacts with a whale. Additionally, any whale that is killed in a science experiment has to be disposed of. Whale meat costs about the same as pork or beef in Japan, so the next step is to dispose of the remains via the food chain, a market valued at four billion yen (£18million) per annum. There is a need to increase whale-hunting activities in order to analyse the ecosystem of the Antarctic Ocean. - Kyodo news agency bulletin. Izu is the third peninsula from the right on the bottom of the main island of Japan and once a year the fishermen round up all the sea mammals in their area and kill them with spears and clubs. Norway The country of Norway is a bit of an enigma. They have a whale-watching programme, to bring in the tourists. They also hunt whales, flouting the IWC ban. Norwegian whalers didn't do much to boost the image of their country's tourism industry in July 2006, when they speared a whale before the eyes of Cetacean-spotters on a whale-watching expedition. Around 80 tourists had paid for the trip from Andenes, in northern Norway, but while they were admiring one of the great mammals of the sea, a Norwegian whaling boat approached and speared the whale in front of their eyes. It was a fantastic sight to see a whale swimming and breaching. On the way back to Andenes, though, we saw the whale shot and raised onto the deck. The blood was running, it wasn't a pretty sight. I know that's part of life, but I don't think we expected to see anything like that. - A whale-watcher who witnessed the whale's death. Geir Maan, captain of the whale-watching boat Reine, called the incident 'unfortunate'. He said he was surprised when the whalers went ahead and shot a whale so close to his tourist vessel. Jan Kristiansen, representing the whalers, said: Many of the whaling boats had been tied up at the dock for several days, waiting for better weather. When it finally came, we had to make the most of it. We don't have anything against the whale safari (watching) boats, but it's important you understand that it's the extreme opponents of whaling that travel out to see the whales. We can't prevent them from being against the hunt, and they can't prevent us from hunting. Norwegians currently catch 800 north Atlantic minke whales a season in waters adjacent to Scotland, which are an important summer feeding ground for the minke whale. The Norwegians are not subject to the IWC ban, because their representatives objected to the introduction of it. They have future plans to raise their seasonal haul to 1,800 whales. Iceland In 2003, Iceland, under the name of'scientific whaling', hunted and killed 38 minke whales, and 61 minke whales have been caught since then. The Icelandic Government proposed to resume commercial whaling and intended to catch 500 (200 minke, 200 fin and 100 sei) whales over the next two years, but cut back its quota after home and worldwide protests, though the government also took into account that commercially-sold whale meat had been left uneaten in the nation's freezers. Iceland and Eco-tourism Iceland is an island of almost 40,000 square miles, and it is now one of Europe's most popular travel destinations, thanks to its history and culture. It offers a wealth of natural wonders, and is a hotspot of geothermal activity with plenty of natural hot water springs. Icelanders have recently taken responsibility for preserving nature after seeing the effects of deforestation and soil erosion. Eco-tourism - such as ornithology and whale-watching - has become one of the nation's most important sources of income. Therefore, a way to stop Iceland resuming whaling for income from export is to visit the country, where you can also enjoy hiking, rafting, bicycling, sport-fishing, horse-riding and skiing. If you're not a sporty-type, you can visit one of the 100 fjords along the coastline, see how many of the 10,000 waterfalls you can count, or just look up and gaze in awe and wonder at the magnificent Aurora Borealis. Ex-whalers The countries which used to have whaling fleets but no longer hunt whales commercially are: the USA; Australia; Brazil; Peru; Spain and Great Britain. William Scoresby, Britain's most prolific whaler, was responsible for the deaths of over 500 Arctic whales during his career. Australia Whaling fleets were responsible for the slaughter of 29,000 blue whales in one year in the 1930s. That species is now protected, but not before its numbers had dropped from 200,000 to 6,000. Australia continued to hunt whales until 1978, processing them at Cheyne's Beach whaling station at Frenchman's Bay, Albany in Western Australia, and Byron Bay in New South Wales. Since 1980 the capture, injury or interference with any cetacean within Australia's 200-nautical-mile fishing zone has been illegal, and the importation of whale products has been banned since 1981. Since the whaling ban, the number of humpback whales spotted migrating up the east coast of Australia has quadrupled. Whale and Dolphin Conservationists The Sea Watch Foundation is an organisation that was set up to find out more about whales and dolphins in British and Irish waters by involving the public in the study of living wild animals. Earthtrust is a US-based non-profit organisation which runs a number of programmes related to whale and dolphin conservation. The Mammal Society is an organisation that is dedicated to the preservation of UK mammals. The website has details of how some of the whales and dolphins around the UK's coasts can be seen. The Marine Connection is a London-based charity is working towards the welfare, conservation and protection of dolphins and whales worldwide. The Marine Conservation Society is leading environmental UK charity dedicated solely to protecting the marine environment and the creatures who live there. The Ocean Alliance includes the Whale Conservation Institute and the Voyage of the Odyssey, and is dedicated to the welfare, protection and conservation of whales and the preservation of their marine environment. Countries can promote whale conservation by creating sanctuaries and providing tourists with access to them, thus garnering additional income. The Dominican Republic makes £3.3million per annum from eco-tourism, and the recent creation of the Silver Bank Humpback Whale Marine Sanctuary has boosted their tourist industry substantially. The Mexican government has established whale sanctuaries and the Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve. The US has proposed a new speed limit for boats in corridors where right whales are sighted: Ship strikes are the most significant human impact on right whales. Each year there at least one or two strikes. The planned rule calls for ships that are 65 feet (20 meters) or longer to reduce their speed to 10 knots — about 11.5 miles (18.5 kilometers) an hour — on specific routes during calving season. - Donna Wieting, deputy director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Protected Resources. Bowhead Whales Bowhead whales are thought to be the longest-living mammals on Earth. Alaskan native whale hunters have recovered from bowhead whale carcasses both ivory harpoons with metal tipped blades, and also some stone points, neither of which have been in use for at least 100 years. Using a method of determining the age of living things by studying changes in levels of aspartic acid, an amino acid found in the eye lens and teeth, it has been determined that one particular specimen would have been between 177 to 245 years old when it died. Orca - the Social Whales Almost 60 orca 'killer' whales were captured or killed between 1965 and 1976. Removing a significant portion of the population, estimated at one-third to one-half of the entire community, devastated the group, leading to its current tenuous existence as it struggles to recover. Orcas usually feed on penguins, seals and sealions, sometimes tossing them high out of the water before eating them, as if playing with their food. Yet, in a remarkable piece of film footage taken by the National Geographic, an orca was filmed 'escorting' an unharmed sealion pup back to the colony on the shoreline, then swimming off. Orcas can be sociable with humans: in March 2006 the late orca Luna was killed by a tugboat. Suzanne Chisholm of Mountainside Films and her husband Michael Parfit spent more than two years with Luna in Nootka Sound, working on a book and documentary about the friendly creature. The Southern Resident Community of orca whales was given the highest level of protection in November 2005 by NOAA Fisheries when they were listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The Most Famous Sperm Whale Ever Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet... - Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Those Opposed to Whaling The World Wildlife Fund The WWF identifies the great whales as a flagship species. It campaigns to stop illegal whaling and monitors the trade in whale meat. The WWF also runs a marine conservation programme to address other issues relating to the health of the world's oceans. Greenpeace Greenpeace fights to stop commercial whaling through political work, peaceful public demonstrations, and by taking non-violent direct action against the whaling boats at sea. Greenpeace members support the creation of whale sanctuaries where whale pods can breed, feed and continue their slow recovery. Greenpeace spokespersons reject the claims by nations who say they hunt whales to conserve their fish stocks. For millions of years,fish and whales have co-existed quite happily. In recent years vast armadas of factory fishing fleets have collapsed global fish stocks. Drift nets, bottom-trawling and long lines scour and devour everything in their paths. Blaming whales for collapsing fisheries is like blaming woodpeckers for deforestation. - Greenpeace spokesperson. Ben Bradshaw At the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in June 2006, after a vote led by Japan, Iceland and Norway to reverse the 20-year ban on commercial whaling, Britain's Fisheries Minister Ben Bradshaw described it as 'a wake-up call to the world'. Star Trek IV Star Trek - The Original Series characters starred in several movies, and the fourth film involves whaling. In the 23rd Century, an alien probe disables all Earth's technological systems and the outlook is grim. Spock manages to interpret the probe's language as whalesong, and as all the whales on Earth have been hunted to extinction, there can be no reply to send the probe on its way. The Enterprise crew, on board a Klingon Bird-of-Prey, travel back in time to 1986 to retrieve the only creatures that can save 23rd Century Earth - a pair of humpback whales named George and Gracie, and the crew save the whales from a whaling ship in the nick of time. If you haven't seen the film, Captain Kirk and his crew lose the Enterprise at the end of Star Trek III when the Klingons board, and, rather than have the Enterprise fall into enemy hands, they set it to self-destruct. The crew survive by 'beaming' over to the Klingons' ship, and escape to the planet Vulcan with Spock, whose mind, which is being looked after by CMO Leonard 'Bones' McCoy inside his own head, can be rejoined with Spock's body. Just Before Whales Leave the Planet When staunch Elvis Presley fan Junichiro Koizumi, the Prime Minister of Japan, was visiting Gracelands with US President George W Bush, anti-whaling protestors dressed as Elvis impersonators and sang a protest song about whaling to the tune of 'Don't Be Cruel': You know I won't be found, Swimming in the deep blue sea, The Japanese are coming 'round, They're going to harpoon me. Don't be cruel to a whale that's true. Baby, it makes me sad My blubber's not so tasty Why treat whales so bad? To risk extinction is crazy Don't be cruel... To a whale that's true. Please don't kill for blubber Baby it's the planet I'm... thinking of. Tom Smith In June 2003 New Zealander Tom Smith, 38, attempted to rescue a trapped humpback whale which had been caught up in a craypot line. This wasn't his first rescue attempt, and he had been taught safety procedures. However, while trying to cut the line to free the whale, it brought its tail down on top of its would-be rescuer and he was killed. Whale Strandings In Victorian times a whale stranding was rare, like the one which ended up on Cleethorpes beach. In 2004, some 780 whales ended up stranded on Britain's beaches, with most of them dying. A decade previously, the reports of beached whales was half that figure. Even if a whale can be successfully steered back out to sea, it usually beaches itself further up the shore. Explanations for this behaviour range from global warming; navigational error (confusion of the whale); military sonar; and high-tech fishing nets. We believe that the numbers of animals we see stranded probably represent 10% of what is being killed out there [at sea]. - Richard Sabin, of the Natural History Museum, London. If you find a dead stranded whale or dolphin: In England: Wildlife Trust/Seawatch volunteers usually do the initial assessment. The Natural History Museum should be contacted and they may take the corpse away for analysis. Tel: 020 794 25 155. In 2006 the UK Government announced plans to reduce the funding for post-mortems on cetacean carcasses washed up on British shores. In Scotland: The Scottish Agricultural College Tel: 01463 243 030. In Wales: The Marine Environmental Monitoring Tel: 01348 875 000. The authorities will deal with the remains - times have moved on since the unfortunate incident in 1970 in Portland, Oregon, and whale carcasses are no longer blown up. If you find a live stranded whale or dolphin contact: In England and Wales: BDMLR Tel: 01825 765546 or the RSPCA Tel: 0870 5555999. In Scotland: The Cetacean Research and Rescue Unit Tel: 01261 851696 or the SSPCA Tel: 08707 377722. The Thames Whale On Friday, 20 January, 2006, a man on a train called the RNLI from his mobile phone and told them that he had just seen a whale in the River Thames, but was unsure whether or not he was hallucinating. He wasn't. Once the media got hold of the story, it became worldwide news. Witnesses stated the Northern bottle-nosed whale, an endangered species which is usually found in the north Atlantic, was an adult measuring up to 18 feet (six metres) long. Guessing the creature weighed about seven tonnes, they realised a rescue attempt was an almost impossible task, but a two-day battle ensued. The British Divers Marine Life Rescue led the rescue operation, while a vet from the RSPCA monitored the whale's vital signs. This is particularly bizarre. Last November I was out in New Zealand to do some whale-watching; we saw a couple of whales but never got as good a view as the one I've seen in London. Eyewitness Vincent Petersen. Tragically, as in many similar such cases, the whale could not be saved. It died after suffering convulsions soon after it had been winched onto a barge which was to transport it back to deeper waters. Whale-watching In Devon and Cornwall, Seaquest organises regular cetacean surveys, and often run events in collaboration with the Wildlife Trusts. It's not uncommon to get a good sighting of whales from high vantage points above the sea such as Berry Head or at Marsland Mouth. Whales, orcas, porpoises and dolphins have been spotted from Spurn Point on the Humber Estuary and there is an appeal for volunteers to set up a Humber Whale Watch group to log them. Many people think whaling has no place in the 21st Century, but some people and communities rely on its practise for survival. Without conservation, the Earth's oceans may end up with no whales at all, an unbelievably cruel legacy to bequeath to our descendants. There are ways that whale conservation can be maintained while still allowing people to earn a living. The only sustainable whaling industry is whale-watching. There are organised whale-watching trips from Tobermory, a fishing port which now relies heavily on tourism, on the north of the Isle of Mull, Argyll, Scotland. Remember though, that the whales are in the wild and may be a little camera-shy. Tourism is a lucrative industry; people who go places to whale-watch will also spend their holiday money in that country, and so will boost their economy. This would be a legacy our great-grandchildren could be proud of, because they would also be able to go whale-watching. One photographer, Doc White, who managed to capture images of a blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived, described the experience as: The closest to the Holy Grail I have come.Back in June HMD Global announced series of Nokia devices in India including Nokia 6. It went up for pre-registrations in the country via online retailer Amazon last month. The company has now revealed that it has received 1 Million registrations for the first sale on 23 August. It must be noted that by registering on Amazon you are eligible for participating in the sale only. To buy the Nokia 6 on 23 August, you will need to be very quick and should be logged in hours before sale. It is launched with a price tag of Rs. 14,999. Nokia 6 users will get following launch offers when it goes on sale on 23 August: Prime members get Rs. 1000 back when they purchase the device using Amazon Pay balance 80% off on Kindle eBooks up to Rs.300. Vodafone consumers get 10GB data per month @ Rs. 249 per month for 5 months Rs. 2500 off (Rs. 1800 on hotels & Rs.700 off on domestic flights) on Makemytrip Nokia 6 features a 5.5 inch Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) 2.5D Curved Glass screen protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 3. It is powered by a 1.5GHz Octa Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 Processor coupled with 3GB of RAM. For graphics, it comes with Adreno 505 GPU. Nokia 6 comes with a 16 Megapixel Autofocus rear camera with LED Flash. For selfies, it comes with a 8 Megapixel front camera. It comes with 32GB on-board storage which can be further expanded up to 128GB using MicroSD Card. Nokia 6 Key Specifications: Screen: 5.5-inch IPS LCD, 1920 x 1080 pixels, 2.5D curved glass, and Corning Gorilla Glass 3 5.5-inch IPS LCD, 1920 x 1080 pixels, 2.5D curved glass, and Corning Gorilla Glass 3 Software: Android 7.0 Nougat Android 7.0 Nougat Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 with 64-bit octa-core CPU and Adreno 505 GPU Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 with 64-bit octa-core CPU and Adreno 505 GPU Memory & Storage: 4GB LPDDR3 RAM, 64GB internal storage, and microSD card slot (up to 128GB) 4GB LPDDR3 RAM, 64GB internal storage, and microSD card slot (up to 128GB) Rear-Facing Camera: 16MP (1.0um sensor and f/2.0 aperture), phase-detection autofocus, dual-tone LED flash, and 1080p video recording 16MP (1.0um sensor and f/2.0 aperture), phase-detection autofocus, dual-tone LED flash, and 1080p video recording Front-Facing Camera: 8MP (1.12um sensor and f/2.0 aperture), 84-degree wide-angle lens 8MP (1.12um sensor and f/2.0 aperture), 84-degree wide-angle lens Connectivity: Dual-SIM with 4G LTE, dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 (with A2DP and LE), GPS, USB OTG, and 3.5mm audio jack Dual-SIM with 4G LTE, dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 (with A2DP and LE), GPS, USB OTG, and 3.5mm audio jack Audio: Dual Stereo Speakers, Dual Smart Amplifiers, and Dolby Atmos Nokia 6 Price in India is Rs. 14,999. It comes in Matte Black, Silver, Tempered Blue and Copper colors. It is up for pre-registrations on Amazon India, it will go on sale from 23rd August.Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a nineteenth century existentialist philosopher, and arguably both the father of existentialism and modern psychology. He is a grossly misunderstood figure, whom some argue was a mystic, an anti-rationalist, or, as is more reasonable, an anti-philosopher. Often his overtly religious writings are overlooked or de-Christianized in favor of the pseudonymous authorship. An idiosyncratic style, along with a complex authorial method, go far in confounding the unwary reader. This site features a commentary on the writings of Kierkegaard. Information on every published work and article (including many unfinished writings and journal entries) is presented here with publication data, quotes, detailed commentary, and images. There are also supplementary materials to aid in your research. A good place to start is to go straight to the Commentary itself where you can view abstracts of the works before diving in. Discussions of Kierkegaard have, then as now, been diverted to consider his singular personality. People understand me so little that they fail even to understand my complaints that they do not understand me. Kierkegaard the eccentric... To my contemporaries my significance depends on my trousers; it may be that to a later era my significance will also depend a little on my writings. Kierkegaard the existentialist... The whole of existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation. It's all inexplicable, myself most of all. For me all existence is contaminated, myself most of all. Great is my distress, unlimited. No one knows it but God in heaven and he will not comfort me. No one but God in heaven can console me and he will not take pity on me. Kierkegaard and Plato's maieutic approach... The fact that several of Plato's dialogues end with no conclusion has a far deeper reason than I had earlier thought. For this is a reproduction of Socrates' maieutic skills, which activate the reader or listener himself, and therefore end not in any conclusion but with a sting. This is an excellent parody of the modern rote-learning method that says everything at once and the quicker the better, which does not awaken the reader to any self-activity, but only allows him to recite by heart. Kierkegaard the Christian... I shall work on coming into a far more intimate relation with Christianity; up to now I have in a way been standing altogether outside it, fighting for its truth. I have borne the cross of Christ in a quite external way, like Simon of Cyrene. Last update: July 23, 2012.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Mr Malago was in tears as he announced the end of the bid Italy's Olympic Committee has officially withdrawn its bid to stage the 2024 Games in Rome after the city council voted to oppose the candidacy. Rome's Mayor Virginia Raggi, from the populist Five Star party, had said the city had to prioritise matters such as rubbish collection and corruption. It means only Paris, Los Angeles and Budapest are left in the running after Boston and Hamburg also abandoned bids. The International Olympic Committee is due to make a decision next September. Committee chief Giovanni Malago said the decision meant Italy had been "made to look like fools" and would miss out on investment. Rome's protest mayor Raggi finds it tough at the top When in Rome shake up the politics Image copyright AFP/Getty Images Image caption Mayor Raggi wants Rome to focus on improving waste collection However, the Five Star party had repeatedly said it opposed bidding for the Games before winning control of Rome in June. The Italian government had supported the bid and the broader Rome municipality, which includes many other small town councils, had indicated it would support the bid to overcome Five Star's opposition. But Mr Malago said he would not go ahead without the main city council's backing. Rome also applied to host the 2020 Olympics but pulled out of that race in 2012 because then prime minister Mario Monti feared Italy could not afford it.Shred long and prosper. That’s what skiers and riders will do in Vermont after winter storm Vulcan dumped up to two feet of snow on the Green Mountains last week. Vermont resorts not only enjoyed a weekend of stellar conditions, great lift tickets sales and a boost in season pass sales for the 2014-15 season, but can now plan to stay open for a long and prosperous spring ski season due to the deep snowpack. “We had 30 inches of snow and are now hoping to stay open until Sunday, May 4th,” said John Bleh of Sugarbush Resort. “This recent storm has really made this possible and should make for some awesome spring skiing.” “Killington banked 24 inches in 24 hours during Winter Storm Vulcan, with a storm total of 26,” said Michael Joseph, Communications Manager for Killington Resort. “With The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore broadcasting live from Killington throughout the storm, the vibe was electric both on the trails and in the community. Two feet of fresh on top of strong base depths rallied skiers and riders for one of the best weekends of the season, and set up terrain from trees to parks for optimal conditions.” Both Killington Resort and Jay Peak Resort reported plans to stay open late into the season with the help of Vulcan snowpack. “Jay Peak will be aiming for the ultimate surprise gift for moms with a tentative closing date of Mothers’ Day May 11,” said JJ Tolland of Jay Peak Resort. “Grab some early turns with mom in the morning followed by brunch, and then head out for nine holes in the afternoon when the Jay Peak golf course opens for the season.” Middlebury College Snow Bowl reported the two best non-holiday weekdays of the season and a major spike in 2014-15 season pass sales due to the storm. Quechee Ski Area saw 20 inches of snow added to their base pushing their tentative closing date to late March. “Mount Snow received seven inches of snow from the most recent storm that came through New England and is now just six inches shy of its season snow total from 2012/2013, which was 177 inches,” said Dave Meeker, Communications Manager for Mount Snow. “With a deep base thanks to a record setting 72 inches of snow in February, the spring skiing season is going to be one of the best in years.” Magic Mountain also reported a nice addition to their already deep base, which allowed for more trails and glades to open over the weekend. Saturday’s spring skiing conditions were some of the best of the year and Magic reports an +83% increase in paid visits year over year for the four day period, Thursday through Sunday. Check out Killington’s top ten photos from the storm and keep up-to-date with tentative closing dates for Vermont ski and snowboard resorts at skivermont.com. Cochran’s Ski Area: March 23, 2014 Suicide Six Ski Area: March
last week in which Saban said, "we had him." But a failed physical due to a torn labrum and damaged rotator cuff suffered in the final game of the 2005 season with the San Diego Chargers prevented the Dolphins from making the move. "I know that I commented a lot about this before, but the Drew Brees scenario really soured me a little bit because we really wanted to get him, we had him," Saban said in an interview posted to campusinsiders.com. "Circumstances... The physical didn't allow us to have him on our team and then he went and had tremendous success. We didn't have a quarterback that year so we didn't have success. That really sort of rubbed me the wrong way. I just felt like I could control my destiny better at Alabama. Now, the way I handled all that, even though while we were playing our games in Miami and I was getting asked all these questions, I was not considering this job. My commitment was to our players, alright, and our team at Miami to try to finish the season successfully." Brees has addressed this situation in the past, including in his book, "Coming Back Stronger." Brees took free agent visits to Miami and New Orleans and underwent physicals before he placed a final call to Saban to help make a decision. Brees asked, "Coach, I know what your doctors believe about me. My question is, what do you believe? Do you believe that I can come back and be better than I was before and lead your team to a championship?" "Nick Saban paused," Brees wrote. "That was really all I needed to hear. His pause told me everything." Added Saban, "I would still love to have you, but I have to trust what our people are saying..." This was not the first time Saban has lamented about Brees and Miami. He said something similar in a 2012 interview when he said the team wanted Brees ahead of Daunte Culpepper. Considering where the two landed, with Brees winning a Super Bowl and Saban additional national titles at Alabama, it's fair to say things turned out reasonably well for both.How smart do you want your smartphone to be? In designing Cortana, the voice-activated “virtual assistant” built into its mobile software, Microsoft is betting that most people are not yet ready to hand too much control of their lives to an artificial brain. A soft-voiced presence with a slightly sassy attitude drawn from a video game character, Cortana is quite capable of reading your email to see if you have a flight coming up, then using the information to tell you when it is time to leave for the airport. But Microsoft will not let “her” take the liberty. Instead, the system asks permission, like a discreet human assistant who does not want to assume too much — a step that also helps to confirm the software is on the right track in anticipating your wishes. “At the moment it’s progressive intelligence, not autonomous intelligence,” says Marcus Ash, group program manager for Cortana, which is enabled on phones with the Windows operating system, including Microsoft’s Lumia devices. People do not want to be surprised by how much their phones are starting to take over, he says: “We made an explicit decision to be a little less ‘magical’ and a little more transparent.” Niceties like this could soon be a thing of the past. The race is on between some of the biggest tech companies to come up with omniscient guides capable of filtering the complex digital world. Like the browser wars of the 1990s, the outcome will help to set the balance of power in the next phase of the internet. By channelling attention and making decisions on behalf of their users, virtual assistants will have enormous power to make or break many other businesses. Many companies — from carmakers to entertainment concerns — aim to develop voice-powered assistants of their own to keep their customers loyal. But the future may belong instead to a handful of all-knowing assistants, much as Google’s search engine managed to suck in so many of the world’s queries on the web. Though it has not reached the point of mass adoption yet, the potential of this new form of artificial intelligence has all the tech companies scrambling. Along with Microsoft, they include Apple, with the Siri question-and-answer service on its iPhones and iPads, Google, whose Google Now service tries to anticipate its users’ information needs, as well as Facebook, Amazon and Baidu, which are experimenting with mobile and desktop applications. The tech world is in the grip of an “AI spring”, says Oren Etzioni, head of the artificial intelligence research institute backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Of all the new fronts this has opened up, the development of virtual assistants has become “one of the most exciting,” he says. The consequences will stretch far beyond the ability to speak a question into your smartphone and get an immediate answer, or to have warnings about heavy traffic “pushed” to you at the time you normally leave for work. If the virtual assistants catch on, they are likely to take over many of the decisions that litter everyday life as they try to anticipate their users’ needs. And they are likely to have minds of their own. Reconfiguring services “It’s really a meta-layer of machine intelligence that’s sitting on top of all the services,” says Mitch Lasky, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark and an investor in mobile software company Cyanogen. “If I ask Siri to find me a taxi, it may not go to Uber — and I may not be able to force it to.” For the many companies that have come to rely on customers accessing their services over smartphones, the consequences could be significant. The industry is still suffering from the hangover from the Siri let-down Given the limitations that virtual assistants have shown up to now, it might seem premature to start worrying about a time when they suddenly take it on themselves to pre-empt their users’ needs and desires. Apple’s launch of Siri in 2011 was a catchy demonstration of advances in speech recognition software and question-and-answer systems. But it also served as a demonstration of the limits of the technology, as users quickly found that the system could only handle certain types of query. “The industry is still suffering from the hangover from the Siri let-down,” says Tim Tuttle, chief executive of Expect Labs, a company that makes a voice-activated assistant that can be used to power other companies’ applications. He and other experts in the field say that the technology has come a long way in a short space of time. Virtual assistants rely on a number of different technologies. One involves speech recognition. Google says it has reduced the error rate for recognising words in its own mobile app to less than 8 per cent — a level at which it says the service has become a practical alternative to entering text. Apple has also made considerable headway in overcoming the early disappointment by adding more capabilities to Siri and helping users better understand what it can and cannot do. A second front has involved the predictive technology for anticipating what a user will want to know next. This draws on contextual data — aspects such as the location and time of day — as well as personal information. Knowing what other people have found useful is also valuable, says Aparna Chennapragada, a director of product management for Google’s mobile app: “For most people in your situation, what are the top five things you need?” The tech companies do not release much information about the extent to which the virtual assistants are catching on. But what there is suggests that users are starting to show interest — even though, as Mr Etzioni cautions, it is probably too early to call it “an inflection point” for the technology. Chinese search company Baidu, for instance, puts the proportion of its searches that are conducted by voice at nearly 10 per cent. And Google says the number of times its users spoke a search query into their smartphones doubled last year, though it does not disclose a figure. The pick-up in use has some predicting that it will not be long before talking to gadgets becomes second nature — particularly as computer intelligence spreads to many new types of device where entering text is impractical, from smartwatches to televisions and cars. Voice interactions like these “will be the gateway for all applications and the way into everything,” says Mr Tuttle. If virtual assistants live up to the industry’s hopes, then whoever has control of this new gateway will end up with considerable power. Bespoke or all-round assistance? A key question determining the outcome will be whether the general-purpose digital assistants of the tech giants become dominant in steering people through this new world, or whether users will gravitate to more narrowly focused intelligent guides to help them navigate specialist applications. The big tech companies “want one intelligent interface to rule them all”, says Mr Tuttle. But that “is not what all the other app makers and device makers want at all.” Some companies are already starting to experiment with embedding virtual assistants inside their own mobile apps. In the US, pizza chain Domino’s has even run a television advertising campaign to promote “Dom”, a digital assistant that guides customers through the process of ordering a pizza on their smartphones. Like others trying out the technology, Domino’s hopes that personality will play a part in drawing in customers: “He’s fun, but very focused on the pizza ordering experience,” Dennis Maloney, head of multimedia marketing, said when Dom was unveiled to the world. “Consumers want to interact with brands on their phones,” he predicted, leading general-purpose assistants such as Siri to “redirect” users to specialist guides like Dom when they want to deal with a particular company. “The individual app makers can always understand and navigate content in their own apps better,” adds Mr Tuttle. His company’s technology is already being used to help TV viewers search through video-on-demand services and will soon be embedded in cars, whose makers he describes as loath to surrender their customers to Google and Apple. But as ways of interacting with smartphones and the many new devices of the “internet of things” change, that kind of brand loyalty may start to erode. Mr Etzioni describes the kind of instruction that the next generation of personal assistants will be asked to handle: “Book me a table for three in an excellent restaurant downtown with easy parking.” To fulfil that desire, the technology would need not only a high level of natural language recognition, but the ability to draw information from different services (a restaurant review site, a maps app) and issue instructions through a reservation system. This kind of “more sophisticated service composition” could start to appear on smartphones in a little more than a year from now, he adds. This points to a post-app world, where pieces of information and service components that currently reside in standalone apps are stitched together to resolve life’s many small, daily problems. The acute need to find the right app will become secondary to the need to complete the task For users, it would happen invisibly: they might not know, or care, which services had been called on to handle their requests — though the company determining which apps to call on to fulfil their needs would hold considerable sway. “The acute need to find the right app will become secondary to the need to complete the task,” says Dag Kittlaus, one of the creators of Siri. Mr Kittlaus is now co-founder and chief executive of Viv Labs, a start-up that is trying to build an assistant to handle tasks like this. “Intelligent assistants will likewise break free of the notion of an app,” Mr Kittlaus predicts. “Your car can be intelligent. Your refrigerator can be intelligent. Your phone can be intelligent.” As a result, there will be no need to find an app, tap to open it and search inside for what you need: “If you need something, you will simply ask for it.” Like many ideas in tech, this combining of services on the fly like this is not new. At the height of the last tech boom, Microsoft imagined achieving something similar with a proprietary technology it called Hailstorm. The idea, coming at the height of the company’s power, terrified many in the tech world, who saw it as a way to force others to accept Microsoft’s terms of trade for all digital interactions. Outsiders such as Mr Etzioni now credit the software company with having developed a more open view of the world. “It’s an underdog thing — we’re a little bit more humbled than Microsoft was in the past,” says Mr Ash. “Cortana is not disruptive from the point of view of services,” he adds, but is designed to act as an open platform. Pulling in data The terms on which app makers would allow their services to interact have yet to be determined, but the first elements of the technology to make this possible are starting to emerge. Last month, Google released an experimental API that lets other companies insert their own content into its Google Now service, so that their information can also be “pushed” at users when it is most likely to be needed. Most of the big tech companies are also working on methods for “deep linking” content inside standalone apps to make it possible to automatically find — and use — the information in other contexts. This may not turn the world of closed apps into the wide-open world of the hyperlinked web, but it still points to a time when the walls between apps will start to break down. In this new world, information would flow continuously, reflecting the nature of computing when users are surrounded by always-connected devices, says Google’s Ms Chennapragada: the idea of opening a web page to read something would feel very old-fashioned. Feeding the process would be new types of real-time and “actionable” information — the kind that helps virtual assistants make quick decisions as they assume more of their users’ everyday tasks. Offering up the right nugget of information or the right offer at the right time will be key to oiling the wheels of this new economy. For many publishers and ecommerce companies this would be a very different world, requiring entirely new methods to reach customers. But if the Cortanas and Siris end up ruling the digital roost, they are likely to have little choice.Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted recently that “if I wanted to, I could take Kiev in two weeks.” Unfortunately, as the Obama administration and our allies have stroked their chins, the Russian-backed separatists have been pummeling Ukrainian forces, to whom we have denied defensive weapons and intelligence data. The Post reports today: President Obama speaks during a joint news conference with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves after their meeting in Tallinn, Estonia, on Wednesday. (Valda Kalnina/European Pressphoto Agency) Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Wednesday announced a cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, although major questions remained about whether it would be implemented. The surprise decision comes as Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine have made rapid strides to retake territory in the last week, after apparently receiving an infusion of support from Russia, which the Kremlin denies. The cease-fire may not hold, as “Poroshenko appears likely to come under fire from Ukrainian hard-liners who have put heavy pressure on him to stop at nothing short of a full military victory in the east.” However, without a victory on the battlefield Ukraine is operating from a position of weakness at the negotiating table. The only question remaining is what Poroshenko must sacrifice to halt Russian-backed rebels’ advances. (“The Russian leader called for ‘statehood’ for the separatist regions of eastern Ukraine in an interview broadcast Sunday, although his spokesman later said that what Putin meant was autonomy within the Ukrainian state. Russia has also sought guarantees that Ukraine would never be able to join the NATO defense alliance.”) Russia and its separatist allies have every reason to push a hard bargain. Russia enveloped Crimea and sent forces to invade Ukraine. Separatists shot down a civilian airliner. In response, the Obama administration and the European Union issued many huffy declarations and some middling sanctions. Barely a pinprick. As in Syria, our failure to help allies win on the battlefield consigns them to defeat at the bargaining table. It need not have been this way. Executive director Christopher J. Griffin and senior policy analyst Evan Moore of the conservative Foreign Policy Initiative argue that we could have enacted sector-wide sanctions on Russia’s gas industry and financial industry, piled on additional sanctions against specific human rights abusers and put in place an “airtight” arms embargo. More important, as Republicans demanded months ago, the administration should at the very least have provided “Ukraine anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to enable their military to stand up to Russia’s” in addition to trainers and intelligence to aid defense of their homeland. The authors continue: In addition, the Ukrainian government has indicated that it plans to request NATO membership, pending approval by the country’s parliament. NATO has already expressed its support for Ukrainian accession, provided that Kyiv meets the conditions for joining the alliance. As Ukraine pursues NATO membership, the United States and Europe should make clear that they will support Kyiv’s aspirations. … Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania have requested that NATO forces be permanently stationed on their territory. As a step towards accommodating their request, NATO Secretary General Rasmussen told reporters that the alliance would create a “spearhead” rapid deployment force at the summit next week. However, this “more visible” NATO presence near Russia is envisioned as a rotation of member state forces, not a permanent deployment.... Western leaders should not shy away from taking appropriate action to protect NATO members and deter further Russian aggression. They also recommend expansion of NATO for Ukraine, Sweden, Finland and others. We should begin a Membership Action Plan (MAP) “to make MAP a reality for Georgia, while also pressuring Tbilisi to desist in its politicized prosecutions of former government officials. This step, essential for Georgia’s long-term security, sends a vital message of reassurance to Ukraine’s parliament as it debates seeking membership, and puts Moscow on notice that it cannot veto its neighbors’ NATO aspirations.” Now that there is a cease-fire, it remains doubtful that the president would do any of this. It would be “provocative.” Instead, expect President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to “welcome” negotiations and urge accommodation of Russian demands. This is how the administration operates — withhold support for friends, issue empty threats to foes, allow aggressors to advance and then cement their gains in a negotiated deal. This is pure appeasement. We’ve seen this routine in Syria, to the surprise of those who actually believed Obama had ruled out appeasement, and are likely to see it play out in Iran. After all this “progress,” the administration probably will try to get a deal that essentially preserves Iran’s ability to go nuclear at some time in the future. But, but Obama said he didn’t bluff! He said it would be unacceptable! Yeah, right. Obama says a great many things (including a vow today to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State), but that has little to do with what he does. Our foes and friends know it. And that is why he is presiding over the dismemberment of Ukraine.The Ikoyi district, one of the most affluent neighborhoods of Lagos, Nigeria, features rare open green space in the city of about 20 million people. (Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images) Why are some African governments better at enacting polices that benefit the country as a whole while others engage in pork barrel politics that only benefit specific communities or interests? That’s the main question driving Carl LeVan in his new book, “Dictators and Democracy in African Development: The Political Economy of Good Governance in Nigeria” (see ungated excerpt). Most comparative studies of Africa blame poor government performance on ethnic diversity, foreign debt, authoritarianism or resource-dependent economies. Carl’s answer is different. In this third installment of this year’s African Politics Summer Reading Spectacular, Carl answers a few questions about his book. KYD: Your book closely examines trends in Nigerian policy, arguing that good government performance depends on how political power is distributed. I know you also look briefly at Ghana and Zimbabwe as well. Why did you choose to focus on Nigeria? How well does Nigeria represent the rest of the continent? CL: The challenges to good governance in Nigeria are in many ways characteristic of the complexities in other African countries. It’s a country where colonial rule created regional disparities and artificially enhanced the power of certain ethnic groups (in Nigeria, the Hausa-Fulani). It has a dark history of military rule and coups, and its post-independence economic development has been full of promises betrayed by elites. It is also incredibly diverse; Nigeria is home to an estimated five percent of the world’s languages! Lastly, it is a country where economic and political changes over the last 10 to 15 years suggest it is really charting a new course. It’s part of a group of countries on the continent that have overcome those historical and structural problems, often on its own terms and through its own model of development. What makes Nigeria especially challenging to study is that so many of these complexities come together all at once in one place. I wanted to find a way to honor those nuances but to also generate a new narrative about the drivers of its “ups and downs.” While many African countries have an element of regional balancing, I think Nigeria’s north/south balance is especially compelling, so this is arguably a limit to generalizing from the Nigerian example. KYD: Your book’s argument draws on a theory of “veto players,” a term coined by political scientist George Tsebelis, who defines veto players as “individual or collective actors whose agreement is necessary for a change of the status quo.” You use veto players theory to go beyond classifying political regimes as either democracies or dictatorships. Your book is one of the few studies that have done so studying a country in Africa. How can veto players theory transform the study of African governance? CL: There’s an empirical problem and a conceptual problem: Empirically, we see that some dictatorships provide public goods and generate economic growth, while some democracies — even sustainable ones — do not. This is not unique to Africa, as scholars like Adam Przeworski have shown. Conceptually, the distinction between democracy and dictatorship tells us enough, and terms like “electoral authoritarianism” or “neo-patrimonialism” have only made it harder to understand the relationship between regimes and government performance. I think that veto players can help us understand some of the structures underlying such regimes. As a model, it beckons us to ask, who has leverage? So the book has a pretty serious discussion, going all the way back to Hannah Arendt, which argues many of the brutal regimes we associate with individual rulers actually governed through coalitions and institutions. This is the focus of the new research on comparative authoritarianism by Jason Brownlee, Jennifer Gandhi and others. KYD: You find that an increase in the number of veto players impedes “the delivery of national collective goods because it is more difficult for political actors in these regimes to coordinate their interests for the broader common good.” For example, in Nigeria, you show that each additional veto player is associated with a 7 percent increase in inflation and a 3 percent increase in the budget deficit. Yet much of the scholarly literature shows ethnic diversity explains cross-country differences in public policies and blames ethnic diversity as the major obstacle for poor economic governance in Africa, including high government deficits. How do you reconcile these two empirically supported findings? CL: Ethnicity is obviously still an important part of African politics. But I started my research tracing my dependent variable (outcomes such as court performance, fiscal discipline and classroom size) over time. I then wondered: How can there be so much variation in public policy performance since the 1960s, if the number of ethnic groups is basically the same? That’s the kind of question generated by a single-country study, and that has led scholars like Dan Posner to ask, what makes ethnicity salient or politically useful? We’ve studied this question through voting behavior, politicians’ strategies and electoral incentives. My book situates ethnicity essentially within the coalition-building process of veto players. One thing that has held Nigeria together, and that the nation has learned, I think, is that any sectional attempt to dominate politics doesn’t last — it just faces too much pressure from other segments of society. Some of this pressure is from ethnic groups and traditional organizations, which are still largely geographically concentrated in their respective “home” regions. But no single group is large enough to dominate the others, leading to coalition building across regions. Moreover, ethnicity is increasingly not necessarily the basis of those coalitions. This is essentially what I argue in an essay coming out this summer in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies. A big question for Nigeria’s future is whether we’ll also see more sectional interests based on emerging economic differences, with the rise of a new middle class, and with much of the recent economic growth lacking an even geographical dispersion. KYD: Just a couple of weeks ago, we featured Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly’s book, “Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change.” Their book and that post suggest a great deal of political power is also held in the hands of ordinary people, even if popular protests only slowly or incompletely deliver political change. Your focus on veto players — actors who can block or facilitate policy change — almost by definition focuses on political elites. What does that mean for popular protests aimed at initiating political change? CL: I think I’m going to assign that book in my class next spring! Scholars who use veto players typically focus on formal institutions, in part because most such studies seek to explain patterns across different countries. Yet I also noticed a useful discussion in the literature about when and whether people’s preferences are channeled through those institutions. For example, one might look at the tea party in the United States and plausibly argue that its interests are now represented (or perhaps “captured”) by certain members of Congress. But there are also social movements that make political and social demands while maintaining self-control over their forms of participation. Nigeria’s pro-democracy movement in the 1990s is an interesting example, because like other social movements, it was difficult to sustain, and it really struggled to maintain its integrity in the face of military governments that wanted to co-opt its members. I’m trying to push that theoretical discussion by describing conditions when we can juxtapose such broad-based social forces with, say, a particular faction of the military. And that’s precisely what I think happened in the early 1990s, and again right after Nigeria’s transition in 1999. So I take institutionalist tools of political science, and I integrate insights from classic works on state-society relations in Africa by Goran Hyden, John Harbeson, Claude Ake and others. The idea that social movements or other “informal institutions” have to coordinate their interests is also influenced by ideas from federalism; Rotimi Suberu is doing extremely important research along these lines. Voters wait in line during the March 2015 presidential election in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria. (Carl LeVan) KYD: In Nigeria’s election earlier this year, former head of state Muhammadu Buhari was elected president. Granted, it’s still early. But do you have predictions for the coming years in terms of whether we should expect the Nigerian government to pursue public policies for the benefit of the country as a whole? CL: Buhari’s presidential campaign capitalized on two frustrations: escalating violence by Islamic insurgents based in the northeast, and widespread corruption that has prevented benefits of recent economic expansion from trickling down. Then within days after being sworn in, his transition team reported that the country is $60 billion dollars in debt, and the governors asked for a huge financial bailout. It immediately reminded me of the way I discuss Buhari’s first weeks in office in 1984 in my book, when he said his predecessors had failed to “cultivate financial discipline” and relied too much on external borrowing. He refused to bail out the states then, and it looks like he’ll do the same now. Now of course, he faces electoral accountability — perhaps the strongest since independence, given that the 2015 elections went pretty well. But it’s going to be difficult to reduce corruption and deliver the public goods demanded by voters. His administration inherited a sharp drop in oil prices, and that will make it all the more difficult to move forward with his (apparent) plans to remove the oil subsidy — when he does, then Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly should give me a call! There will be huge protests, just like in 2012. The other problem is that some very powerful people, including the cartel-like group that benefits from the oil subsidy by selling Nigeria the refined oil it has to import, will resist change; they are making too much money. Fiscal discipline is a priority for Buhari, and this is difficult under any regime. But Nigeria’s problem isn’t simply spending — it’s spending on budgetary priorities that do not reflect citizen demands and that are not sustainable in the long term. One of the main rebel groups in the oil-producing south, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, this weekend threatened to pick up arms again if the National Assembly doesn’t cut back some of its perks and spending on itself. While such threats might seem well-intentioned, they could also inadvertently strengthen Buhari’s hand, since he needs the Assembly in order to keep tabs on the pulse of the people in different parts of the country. If he tries to ignore the “honourables” (as they are called), we can probably expect some new veto player behavior from the Assembly sooner rather than later. **** Carl LeVan is assistant professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington. He has a forthcoming collection of essays (co-edited with Joseph Fashagba and Edward McMahon) on subnational legislative politics in Africa, and an article (written with Todd Eisenstadt and Tofigh Maboudi) on participatory constitution-making, which will appear in the American Political Science Review. He blogs at Development4Security and you can find him on Twitter as @Dev4Security. See our earlier posts in this year’s African Politics Summer Reading Spectacular:'yes'. The Huawei Mate 9 scored a nearly 50% better battery life results than the competition and it beat the iPhone 7 Plus by offering a third more battery life. In our custom test where we put the phones through typical use case scenario, the 4,000 mAh battery on the Mate 9 kept the phone running on and on, and then on again. It scores a whopping 12 hours and 14 minutes, while the iPhone 7 Plus (one of the better achievers) scored just 9 hours and 5 minutes and the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge got 7 hours and 18 minutes, nearly half the battery life of the Mate 9. Luckily, this coincides with excellent stand-by time and we are indeed getting two days of battery life with the Mate 9, which definitely feels freeing. You no longer need to charge your phone every night, and that's good not just because it keeps you from thinking about one more device to charge, but because you put fewer cycles on the battery and it will last you more in the long run. Excellent job, Huawei! Battery life (hours) Higher is better Huawei Mate 9 12h 14 min (Excellent) Apple iPhone 7 Plus 9h 5 min (Excellent) Google Pixel XL 7h 19 min (Good) OnePlus 3T 5h 41 min (Average) LG V20 6h 23 min (Average) Samsung Galaxy S7 edge 7h 18 min (Good) View all The answer is a resounding When it comes to re-charge times, the Huawei Mate 9 has quite the large battery to replenish, and it took it 2 hours and 24 minutes to get the 4,000 mAh cell from 0 to 100% using the stock wall charger. While not fast by any means, this charge rate is still faster than the one on the iPhone 7 Plus, which took an even longer 3 hours and 17 minutes to accomplish the same task. Admittedly, other phones with quick charging are much faster getting juiced up: the Galaxy S7 Edge does this exercise in just 1 hour and 40 minutes, while the OnePlust 3T takes just an hour and 25 minutes to get its battery fully charged with Dash Charge technology. Charging time (minutes) Lower is better Huawei Mate 9 144 Apple iPhone 7 Plus 197 Google Pixel XL 118 OnePlus 3T 85 LG V20 86 Samsung Galaxy S7 edge 99 Huawei Mate 8 156 View all Nonetheless, if you are looking for a reliable and powerful phone with a great battery life, the Huawei Mate 9 certainly delivers. It's also one of the first high-end Huawei phones that you can officially buy in the United States. Currently, the Mate 9 is on sale at Amazon for a very alluring full retail price of $600, compared to $770 for similar iPhone 7 Plus or Google Pixel XLA 21-year-old Kingaroy man has been charged with a tainted property offence relating to a substantial amount of Bitcoin he had obtained as a result of computer hacking offences he allegedly committed earlier this year. The man was charged on March 19 for hacking and fraud offences he committed against the US-based online gaming company’s computer network. Yesterday, members of the Cyber and Identity Crime Group, part of the Fraud and Cyber Crime Group with the assistance of Maryborough Police located the man at a Hervey Bay address. Police will allege the man had possession of approximately $110,000 worth of Bitcoin (a digital currency) he allegedly obtained from these offences and will now be considered proceeds of crime. He was charged with tainted property and breach of bail offences and will appear in the Hervey Bay Magistrates Court on 24 July 2014. If you have information for police, contact Policelink on 131 444 or provide information using the online form 24hrs per day. You can report information about crime anonymously to Crime Stoppers, a registered charity and community volunteer organisation, by calling 1800 333 000 or via crimestoppersqld.com.au 24hrs per day.Beer freezes at around 13 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's Bill Diamond's job to make sure that doesn't happen. Not on his watch, at least. Mr. Diamond, 56, is a train conductor for Union Pacific Railroad Co. at the Proviso Yard in west suburban Northlake. He's been on the railroad for 37 years, after a summer job to save money for college turned permanent. For the past 12 years he's been in charge of the yard's biggest customer, delivering cars of Grupo Modelo S.A.B de C.V. beer—Corona, Modelo Especial, Pacifico and Victoria—that have snaked their way by rail from Piedras Negras, Mexico, to a nearby warehouse, or “the beer house,” as they call it, operated by Grand Worldwide Logistics Corp. of Chicago. These days, or rather nights, as temperatures plunge, Mr. Diamond's job gets a bit more complicated. “As long as they keep moving they may get slushy, but they won't freeze,” he says of his precious cargo. It's 4:43 p.m., 10 degrees outside, and he's antsy. Tonight he's got 16 carloads of beer—roughly 64,000 cases with a retail value of about $960,000—that need moving. But 43 minutes into his 12-hour graveyard shift, he and his switchman, Matthew Groesch, still are waiting for the day shift to group the cars by destination. “We're losing time,” he says, taking a sip from a cup of Lipton tea. “Weather plays a very important factor in our job.”Americans’ chances of reaching extreme old age are much lower than previously thought, new research shows. The findings by a team of demographers at the social science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago contradict a long-held belief that mortality rates level off above age 80. They also explain why the number of Americans age 100 and above is less than half of what the Census Bureau predicted as recently as six years ago. The research is based on a new way of accurately measuring mortality among people 80 years of age and older, an issue that has proven remarkably elusive in the past. Instead of using self-reports of age to gauge mortality rates, the new study compared previous projections against real, observed death rates. The work will be significant in arriving at more accurate cost projections for programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which are based in part on mortality rates. The research, done by Leonid A. Gavrilov and Natalia S. Gavrilova and published in the current edition of the North American Actuarial Journal, is based on highly accurate information about the date of birth and the date of death of more than nine million Americans born between 1875 and 1895. The data is publicly available in the Social Security Administration Death Master File. “It is a remarkable resource that allowed us to build what is called an extinct birth cohort that corrects or explains a number of misunderstandings about the mortality rate of our oldest citizens,” said Leonid Gavrilov. A stark example of the problem of estimating the number of people over 100 came recently when the U.S. Census Bureau revised sharply downward the number of living centenarians. Six years ago, the bureau predicted that by 2010 there would be 114,000 people age 100 or older. The actual number turned out to be 53,364. The projection was wrong by a factor of two. The newly published paper, titled “Mortality Measurement at Advanced Ages: A Study of the Social Security Administration Death Master File,” explains the discrepancy and is likely to make a difference in the way mortality projections for the very old are done in the future. The key finding is straightforward—the rise in death rates that occurs as people grow older is the same for the oldest Americans as for those who are younger. Previous studies had supposed that the mortality rate flattens out above age 80. But the new NORC research reveals that the expected mortality deceleration does not take place. Anne Zissu, chair of the Department of Business NYC College of Technology/CUNY, said the research provides “an essential tool” for developing models on seniors’ financial assets. Zissu said the research “will alter our financial approach to this valuation of mortality/longevity risk. Demographers and financiers need to work on this issue together, and their models must adapt to each other.” The mortality rate for people between the ages of 30 and 80 follows what is called the Gompertz Law, named for its founder, Benjamin Gompertz, who observed in 1825 that a person’s risk of death in a given year doubles every eight years of age. It is a phenomenon that holds up across nations and over time and is an important part of the foundation of actuarial science. For approximately 70 years, demographers have believed that above age 80 the Gompertz Law did not hold and that mortality rates flattened out. The work done by the Gavrilovs, a husband
which have gone through the roof during the ObamaCare years, plunged yesterday after I ended their Dems windfall! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 14, 2017 "On Thursday, the administration announced it would stop paying subsidies to health insurance companies that help cover costs for low-income people. 'That money is a subsidy for insurance companies,' Mr. Trump said on Friday. 'Take a look at their stocks. Look where they are. They’re going through the roof.' On Friday, stocks for Centene, Molina and Anthem, insurers that have participated in state marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act, slumped by more than 3 percent. Health care providers were also affected. Shares in Acadia Healthcare declined by more than 3 percent and in Tenet Healthcare dropped by just over 5 percent. While Mr. Trump appeared to celebrate this on Saturday, he has pointed to rising stocks as a sign of success in the past. 'It would be really nice if the Fake News media would report the virtually unprecedented Stock Market growth since election,' he tweeted on Wednesday. 'Need tax cuts.'" Reince Priebus. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) RUSSIA WATCH: — Priebus probed. Trump's former chief of staff spent all day Friday answering questions from members of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's team. The Post's Roz Helderman: "The interview, which took place at the special counsel’s office in Washington, is a sign that Mueller’s investigation is now reaching into the highest levels of Trump’s aides and former aides... Mueller’s team has also indicated an interest in interviewing a series of other current and former White House aides, including White House counsel Don McGahn and director of communications Hope Hicks... During his six months as Trump’s top gatekeeper, Priebus oversaw a White House that was at times chaotic and freewheeling. Aides wandered in and out of important meetings, and Priebus sought to manage his often difficult boss by trying to be physically present with Trump as frequently as possible. For that reason, Priebus was present at key moments that have drawn Mueller’s interest, including as Trump worked to limit the growing questions about Russia’s possible role in his election and in the discussions that led to Comey’s firing." — Trump campaign covers Jr.'s legal bill. To the tune of $238,000 in the third quarter alone. Bloomberg's Bill Allison: "Trump’s campaign made two payments -- one in mid July, the other in early August -- to the law firm of Alan S. Futerfas, a lawyer for the president’s son, who is facing scrutiny over a 2016 meeting he had with a Russian lawyer while seeking damaging information about Democrat Hillary Clinton. The third-quarter disclosures with the Federal Election Commission didn’t specify what the legal expenses were for... Trump’s campaign paid $1.1 million for legal services from July to September, up from $677,827 in the second quarter and $249,344 in the first, according to the disclosures. The bulk went to Jones Day, the campaign’s law firm, and $25,885 was paid to the Trump Corporation, now run by Trump Jr. and his brother, Eric." Kushner Plan for Fifth Avenue Tower Is Being Blocked by Partner An ambitious plan by Jared Kushner’s family to recast its indebted Fifth Avenue office building as a luxury architectural trophy is collapsing, setting off a chain of events that may imperil the Kushners’ ownership of a property central to their real estate empire. Bloomberg POCKET CHANGE Wells Fargo’s profits tumble as mega bank struggles to rebound from sales scandal Wells Fargo was already dethroned as the world's most valuable bank following the scandal, but now it's slipping further behind. Renae Merle BofA profit rises on higher rates, lower costs Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) beat expectations with a 15 percent rise in third-quarter profit on Friday as the second-largest U.S. lender kept a tight leash on costs and benefited from higher interest rates. Reuters DAYBOOK Today The American Bankers Association’s annual convention continues. The Council on Foreign Relations holds an event on the United States’ trade policies. Georgetown’s Center for Law, Economics and Finance holds a panel discussion on financial stability. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation holds an event on “America Working Forward” Coming Up Bloomberg Government holds an event on the future of multifamily housing on Tuesday. The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee holds a hearing on “Consumer Data security and the Credit Bureaus” on Tuesday. Georgetown Law hosts the 1st Annual FinTech Week starting on Wednesday. The Brookings Institution holds an event on Trump’s deregulatory agenda on Friday. THE FUNNIES From The Post's Tom Toles: "Trump is the big star of Let's Break a Deal!:" BULL SESSION How SNL took on Harvey Weinstein: Watch a Baltimore school choir’s spine-tingling performance of 'Rise Up:' The moment a California family discovered their dog survived the wildfires: Kellyanne Conway is a terrifyingly quotable Pennywise the Clown in SNL’s biting sketch, writes The Post's Aaron Blake:25 Things first-year college students should NEVER do: 1. Drink that Punch You don't know what's in it. The people handing it to you don't know what's in it. Oh, and the fruit floating on the top... it'll get you wasted too. 2. Assume You Know Assumptions are lazy thoughts. They are based on fear and ignorance. Challenge them. You'll be shocked to discover how wrong (or right) you've been. BONUS: Invite others to challenge their assumptions about you. 3. Look Down at Your Phone While Walking You'll walk into bikers, buses, and trees. You'll miss out on making eye contact with new friends, old friends, and attractive strangers. Look! See that cute guy or girl from English class walking by trying to get your attention? Forget it. You just walked into a tree... 4. Expect Your Roomie to Be Your Bestie Friendship is a bonus. Hope for it, but don't require it. A roommate is a roommate. When you don't require friendship, you can have honest conversations. Ironically, this is how you will develop a lasting friendship. 5. Go Home Every Weekend When you're home, you are not at school meeting new people and getting involved. That's not college. That's home. 6. Be Surprised if You Get Homesick or Herpes (not related) According to the Higher Education Research Institute, 66.6 percent of first year students admitted feel lonely or homesick. According to the CDC, about one in five college students graduate with herpes. If you feel homesick or it burns when you pee, turn to the people in your corner (when done peeing) and get help. 7. Go to Cancun on Credit Cards Pay cash. Spring break tans last about a week (spray tans last longer). Credit card payments can last years (much longer than spray tans). ALWAYS pay your bills (at least the minimum). Bad credit can mean no car, apartment, or home in the future. 8. Get Stuck Behind the Fifth Wall Physically your body is on campus, but emotionally you're connected to friends, family, long distance partners, and strangers off campus. Use technology to meet new people on campus, not to hide from them. 9. See Your Long-Distance Sweetheart EVERY Weekend Whenever you get the urge to text, talk, or see them, only do it half the time. Spend the other half of the time texting, talking, and visiting with people you didn't know before you arrived on campus. 10. Walk in the Shower Barefoot If the floors could talk, they would scream. WEAR SHOWER SHOES!!! 11. Text, Tweet, or Post It While Drunk or Angry You will sober up and cool down, but your pics, posts, and texts will last forever. There's no such thing as "temporary" online (or on Snapchat). 12. Eat Pizza, Cookies, and Wings at 3 a.m. Every Night You'll miss classes, gain weight, and go broke. The freshman 15 can quickly turn into the freshman 50. 13. Take 8 a.m. Classes (unless you have no choice) Rookie mistake. You will never get up. Especially after you've been up until 3 a.m. eating pizza, cookies, and wings every night. 14. Get Naked Online Assume your mom, dad, brother, sister, friends, grandparents, priest, rabbi, imam, neighbor, future employers, future husband or wife, professors, and that creepy guy or girl sitting next to you in class will see it. 15. Ask Mom or Dad to Fix it It's your mess. Clean it up. Take 24 hours to process big emotions. Take time to marinate. It's how you become seasoned. Exception: if it's dangerous or criminal, get help immediately. 16. Keep Secrets Secrets turn into shame. Shame turns into regret. Regret means living in the past. Living in the past means avoiding the present and future. Give voice to secrets and avoid the shame. 17. Be a Perfectionist Perfectionists always fail. Imperfectionists are always perfect. Celebrate the act of doing. Use the outcome NOT to measure success, but rather to learn, grow, and work to be your personal best. Suggested reading: Mindset by Carol Dweck & The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown. 18. Expect College (and life) to Just Happen Weather happens. College experiences are created. What's your plan? A plan includes people, places, and patience. 19. Ignore Your Gut Don't walk alone. Don't take drinks from strangers. don't trust people you just met (even attractive people with good hygiene). Follow your gut. It protects you. People who don't respect your gut are not people you need in your life. 20. Hide Bad Grades Celebrate your Cs, Ds, and Fs by getting help in September or October. Get help before you need it. December is too late. Getting help always makes you look smart. 21. Get Drunk and Hook Up Drunk is dangerous. There is no such thing as consent when incapacitated or too drunk. Not my opinion. It's a fact. 22. Limit Yourself to One Group of Friends Work to create three different groups of friends. When one group of friends does something stupid, illegal, or out of alignment with your values, you'll always have somewhere else to go and other people to go with. 23. Try to Be Liked by Everyone College isn't about who likes you (that was high school). College is about what you want. So, what do you want? What's your plan to get it? 24. Think You're Alone (You Are Never Alone) According to ACHA-NCHA data, 32.6 percent of college students felt so depressed that it was difficult to function and 46.6 percent of college students felt things were hopeless. The good news: you are never alone. You have therapists, counselors, advisors, residence life staff, professors, support staff, spiritual leaders, hotlines, friends, family, and students who can help you. I'm here too. Need help now? Call the National Hopeline: 1-800-Suicide.THURSDAY, Oct. 4, 2012 — Long-acting methods of birth control — such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) and implants — can dramatically reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions if they are provided at no cost to patients, says a new study, which appears online in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Researchers report that open access to long-term contraceptive options could cut the numbers of unintended pregnancies at rates between 62 and 78 percent. "A lot of women don't know about these methods [IUDs and implants]," says Gina Secura, the project director of the Contraceptive Choice Project at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, which conducted the study on 9,256 women between the ages 14 to 45. "For the pill, patch, and ring, we saw much more unintended pregnancy in young women." In the five-year long study, participants received counseling on available birth control options, which included short-acting hormonal methods like the pill, patch, and ring in addition to long-acting devices. Around 75 percent of the women in the study chose IUDs or implants. Secura says the majority of women under 20 selected implants, while those in the older age cohort favored IUDs. Teens enrolled in this free birth control program had an annual birth rate of 6.3 per 1,000 participants, compared with the national rate of 34.3 per 1,000 for girls in the same age demographic. The authors say the abortion rates among study participants were also significantly lower than typical rates in St. Louis, where the study was conducted. IUDs and implants are clinically reported to have the lowest failure rates among reversible contraceptives currently on the market. According to a 2011 study published in the journal Contraception, both devices are more than 99 percent effective, compared with 91 percent for birth control pills and 82 percent for condoms. Each year in the United States, around 50 percent of pregnancies are unplanned, half a result of skipping or misusing contraceptives. In the duration of the study, the authors report annual abortion rates among study participants ranged from 4.4 to 7.5 per 1,000 women per year. They say the national rate is currently 19.6 abortions per 1,000 women in 2008, which are the most recent figures available. But while IUDs and implants are said to be nearly foolproof birth control methods, they are also the most expensive among reversible options. In the United States, IUDs and implants can cost as much as $800, which includes the price for insertion. Though these devices are a good investment over the duration of time for which they are effective — an average of three to five years — they also typically must be paid for in full at the time of insertion, a financial burden for many patients. "The longer you use it the more cost-effective it is," says Secura. "It's women who are using other [hormonal] methods who are stopping sooner." But Secura also says healthcare providers are not typically educating and encouraging their patients to consider IUDs and implants as a viable option. "There's some retraining that needs to happen," she says."We'll see a shift as women demand them and providers become more familiar with evidence-based practices."Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) insinuated on Sunday that the nuclear deal struck with Iran and the diplomatic breakthrough that led to the release of four American hostages would not have happened had Hillary Clinton been president. The statement on "Meet the Press" came just hours after the International Atomic Energy Agency verified that Iran had complied with the conditions of the deal struck with world powers last summer, and as the hostages were en route back to the United States. “If you think back to, I think it was 2007, during the campaign in which Secretary Clinton ran against Barack Obama, she was critical of him. A question was asked to Obama and said, "Would you sit down and talk to the Iranians?" And he said, "Yeah, I would." Point being that you talk to your adversaries. You don't run away from that,” Sanders said. “Secretary Clinton, I think, called him naïve. Turns out that Obama was right. So clearly, we have many, many issues and many concerns with Iran. But clearly also, we want to improve our relationships with this very powerful country.” Here is the exchange from 2008: The charge from Sanders -- that Clinton philosophically opposed the type of rapprochement that led to the nuclear deal and the prison swap -- ratchets up a relatively dormant foreign policy riff between the leading Democratic candidates (who have, to this point, primarily been duking it out on economic issues). But it also ignores the role that Clinton played in laying the foundations for the Iran nuclear deal. It was during her time as secretary of state that the diplomatic shift towards Tehran began to take place. And it was her top foreign policy aide (and current campaign adviser) Jake Sullivan who began meeting in secret with Iranian officials in Oman. Both Clinton and Sullivan “were key players in the Iran deal,” as the Wall Street Journal reported. The Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment. But Clinton remains hawkish on Iran to this day, even calling for additional sanctions against Iran for its ballistic missile program in the aftermath of the prisoner swap. And Sanders’ campaign clearly senses some space between her and the Democratic base on the broad issue of how much to rely on diplomatic engagement when it comes to Iran. Related on HuffPost:Image caption The victim was shot in the ankle at his caravan in the Lagmore area A 14-year-old boy accused of trying to shoot a man dead has been granted bail so he can start the new school year. High Court judge Mr Justice McCloskey said the GCSE student's education would be seriously disrupted if he was kept in custody. The teenager is charged with attempting to murder the man in an attack at a caravan in west Belfast. He is also accused of possession of a firearm, criminal damage, and possession of an offensive weapon. The charges relate to a shooting incident in the Lagmore area on 8 August which has been linked to a feud within the Traveller community. Four people are alleged to have gone to John Delaney's home and attacked it with machetes before two shots were fired inside. One is believed to have been aimed at head height, with that bullet recovered from a wardrobe door. Although three men have also been charged with attempted murder, the prosecution claim a fourth attacker armed with a gun and wearing a balaclava was the 14-year-old. He denies the allegations, with his lawyers pointing to significant differences between his appearance and that of the gunman. During a second application for bail, it was disclosed that another man has been arrested on suspicion of attempting to intimidate witnesses in the case. Crown counsel Kate McKay said: "This man has allegedly taken it upon himself to gather a petition which is effectively to prevent the prosecution of this applicant and has got people to sign it. "He has made threats in relation to that." 'Enthusiastic student' Neil Rafferty, defending, stressed that this man was unconnected to his client, but seemed to have dissident republican links. The barrister also contended that the teenage suspect's education would be prejudiced by continued detention because he is about to start his GCSE studies. Granting bail, Mr Justice McCloskey noted that the accused is regarded as an enthusiastic student with an impressive attendance record. "In short, he is a 14-year-old who has reached a level of education, who is a serious student, and whose education would be very seriously disrupted if he were to remain in custody," the judge said. As part of his release conditions, the accused must be driven to and from school and is banned from leaving it during class time. He was also excluded from the Dunmurry area and prohibited from contacting any witnesses or co-accused in the case. Mr Justice McCloskey also stated: "Whatever happened in this incident, if the applicant was involved... to involve a 14-year-old in an exploit of this kind is simply shameful."Chris Huhne attacked the "lies" of the No to AV campaign Newsnight last night, and said engaging in the "politics of the gutter", reports Shamik Das. Chris Huhne attacked the “lies” of the No to AV campaign last night, saying he was “shocked” that his Tory coalition partners – including cabinet colleagues Baroness Warsi and George Osborne – could “stoop to a level of campaigning we have not seen in this country before”, engaging in the “politics of the gutter”. The energy and climate change secretary was debating the Alternative Vote on yesterday’s Newsnight, up against Conservative MP George Eustice, whom he accused of telling a “straightforward lie” over the claim that electronic voting machines would be used in UK general elections under AV. He said: “Absolute nonsense… The Goebbels point was very simple. It was that the No campaign was claiming that we were going to need special election counting machines in order to have an AV vote, absolutely untrue, not used in Australia or anywhere else. “No, this was a straightforward lie. No sensible person can have made that point knowing it was true, because there is no country currently which actually has AV uses machines, and therefore this was a straightforward lie. “Let me finish the point about Sayeeda Warsi. I made that point precisely because I think this is politics of the gutter being played here by the No campaign and I think we need to try and clean this up. But on the BNP point.” Watch the key exchange: Earlier, Huhne said: “The reality is that every single new democracy that has tried an election system over the last 30 years has gone for other systems not for the system that we use in britain and I think that’s a real wake up call… “It is a small step which gives you a serious imporvement because it means that there will be fewer MPs with jobs for life, people will have to reach out beyond their tribal base, they will, in fact, have to work harder, which I think is, in the wake of the expenses scandal, quite an important part of what the advantages of the alternative vote system are. “And frankly, if the world was going to fall in, why on earth has it been so successful in Australia? Eighty years they’ve had it now, and they’ve had only two hung parliaments.” And of the spat with Warsi and the damage being done to the coalition, he later said: “Well I’m frankly shocked that coalition partners can stoop to a level of campaigning we have not seen in this country before. I think it is damaging, I think that there’s no doubt about it, I don’t, I can never remember – I’ve been involved in every single British election campaign since the early 1980s – and I can never remember a campaign which has stooped as low as the no campaign, in dredging up stuff which is downright lies… “I have not had the courtesy of a reply to my letters to Saeeda challenging her to come up with some evidence about this [voting machines claim], and you’ve [Mr Eustice] not come up with any evidence, you’ve not even bothered to reply to a letter that I sent you challenging you about this.” Elsewhere today, former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown called on David Cameron to distance himself from the increasingly personal attacks on Nick Clegg, and said the No campaign had become “deeply and appallingly personal” and that “no British prime minister” should be linked to it. URGENT APPEAL: We need to raise £10,000 in the next few weeks to keep holding the right to account. Help us build a better media and back the crowdfunder to keep Left Foot Forward's progressive journalism alive.Ottawa police say they have charged a man in what is being a called a random hammer attack in the city’s core earlier this week. In a statement released late Friday, police said they had arrested 31-year-old Jeffrey Weber in connection with the Tuesday night attack on a man who was walking on Somerset Street, just west of Bank Street. The 51-year-old victim, who wasn’t named, was taken to the Ottawa Hospital with severe facial and head injures. The suspect, who was also carrying a large kitchen knife in a plastic package, ran off. Police said Weber was “in a secure facility” and was to appear in court by video Saturday to be charged with aggravated assault and possession of a dangerous weapon. The victim is still recovering in hospital, police said. With files from Meghan HurleyCanada’s ‘Welcome Refugees’ Policy is Catching up With Them This is the kind of future that Canada can expect if they keep importing Muslim “refugees”… Bombing at Egypt’s main Coptic Christian cathedral kills 25 … Schoolgirls in Nigeria Kill 56 in Suicide Bombings … And in America… Remember Islamberg? FUQRA FILES EXCLUSIVE: FBI Links Jihadi Cult to Al-Qaeda … How far will Islamists go in their deceptions for the jihad? This far… Saudi Prof: OK to Dress Like a Priest, Rabbi for Attack on Enemy … As for women’s rights in the House of Islam, we have this: Woman Leader of Iranian Female Militia: Gender Equality Illegal … Finally, and sinisterly, we thought the election was over, but the Democrats and Obama himself are now going all out to derail Trump before he is even inaugurated… Judge Jeanine: The election is over, Mr. President … Dave This time last year Canada began ‘welcoming’ thousands of Syrian refugees who were flying in by the planeload as the young new Prime Minister had promised when he was elected weeks before. As a result, Justin Trudeau became the darling of the world’s humanitarians who were clamoring for America to do the same! Now, one year on, my alerts today are filled with stories like these—panic sets in as one year of government support ends and Syrians can’t find jobs to support their families! read more Image Source: DonkeyHotey/Flickr License: CC BY 2.0Al-Gwhizzawi told me he thought he would be safe with the Americans 'and have rights' and be treated 'with respect.' He was wrong. While staying at his in-law’s village in Afghanistan in December 2001, Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi, my client at Guantánamo, knew little of Bush and Cheney. Later, when vigilante thugs turned him over to the Northern Alliance for an American bounty, Al-Ghizzawi knew nothing of Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, John Yoo or Matthew Waxman – the man who would become Al-Ghizzawi’s personal war criminal and who is now a professor at Columbia Law School. So, it was understandable that when Al-Ghizzawi heard American troops were coming, he tried to get himself turned over to them. As Al-Ghizzawi later told me, he thought he would be safe with the Americans “and have rights” and be treated “with respect.” Al-Ghizzawi convinced the Americans to take him when they learned he spoke English. That was all the troops knew about him. Ignorance of who he was or why he was there, however, proved no impediment to torture. In the early years, “the Americans treated me very brutally and disrespectfully, worse than the Northern Alliance … and the Northern Alliance was very bad,” Al-Ghizzawi recounted to me. “But now the torture is much different. Now the torture is my life every day in this prison, alone without my family, dying, with no rights and no charges.” His American jailers spared Al-Ghizzawi the very worst of the worst in the long list of torture techniques now in use. He was not murdered or waterboarded. He did not have a razor blade taken to his penis, nor was he hung from the ceiling by his arms. One might describe Al-Ghizzawi’s torture as a kinder, gentler torture. In American custody, Al-Ghizzawi was only beaten with chains; bound to chairs in excruciating positions for endless hours; threatened with death and with rape; stripped and subjected to body-cavity searches by non-medical personnel while men – and women – laughed and took pictures. Among many other brutalities and indignities, Al-Ghizzawi was also posed naked with other prisoners; terrorized with dogs; forced to kneel on stones in the searing heat; left to stand or crouch for extended periods; deprived of sleep; subjected to extreme cold without clothes or covering; denied medical attention; and kept in isolation for years. Again, as I said: a kinder, gentler torture. Now, of course, Al-Ghizzawi knows all about Bush and his enabling minions. He knows that lawyers invented legal theories to justify the inhumane and indefensible treatment he received. He knows the role that lawyers such as Bybee, Yoo and Matthew Waxman played. At the end of 2004, Waxman, then assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, who is currently trying to reinvent himself as one of the good guys, learned that Al-Ghizzawi and others were found not to be “enemy combatants” (EC) or threats to the United States by the military’s own combatant status review tribunals (CSRTs). Waxman set into motion a “do-over” CSRT, to make sure that Al-Ghizzawi’s suffering continue, lest Waxman and the Bush administration suffer the embarrassment of being exposed for holding numerous innocent men for years for no reason. Note this declassified portion of an e-mail chain between Waxman and others: “Inconsistencies will not cast a favorable light on the CSRT process or the work done by [Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants]. This does not justify making a change in and or (sic) itself but is a filter by which to look …. By properly classifying them as EC, then there is an opportunity to (1) further exploit them here in [G]TMO and (2) when they are transferred to a third country, it will be controlled transfer in status.” Every time I visit, Al-Ghizzawi asks me, “What happened to America?” I try to explain the unexplainable. I tell him that the American government now believes that torture is permissible; that we can hold people forever without charge; keep people in isolation for years; bar communications with family members; force-feed those who want to die and refuse to provide medical treatment for those who want to live. I explain that the American people, whose nation once stood as a beacon of human rights, neither care about this nor want to hear about it. I also assure him that I am collecting the names of those responsible. Attorney Seth Farber contributed to this article.IDW gave a couple of Tantalizing teasers for Issue 36 of their ongoing Star Trek series set in the Alternate J.J. Abrams portion of the Star Trek Multiverse. In issue 35 (See Q Pops in on Kirk, Spock and the rest of the Enterprise!!!), we discover that Q has learned of the alternate reality that Spock went to in Star Trek 2009, after a cameo from a beloved Trek character from the Original Series (Trelane Maybe???), and is curious enough to rend the fabric of time/space apart and hop over to check it out for himself. The writers tease that there is something about Kirk–let’s call him Kirk Beta, since he’s from the alternate timeline–anyway, something about Kirk Beta just drives Q up the wall, and this much is certain: we would all LOVE to know just what it takes to get under Q’s skin. “Like so many fans, Q captured my attention as soon as he appeared on the deck of the Enterprise. We’re excited to explore just how Q will react to our Captain Kirk…and how Kirk will handle one of the most powerful, witty characters ever to appear in the Star Trek universe. We’re also very eager for everyone to see the stellar work Tony Shasteen is doing!” – Sarah Gaydos, IDW’s Star Trek comic book editor In Part two, Q thrusts Kirk, crew and the Enterprise into the future to a distant alien outpost that is going to be very familiar to Trek fans… a place we know as Deep Space Nine. But in this alternate future, what has become of what in the prime reality, started life as an ore refining facility manned by slaves? And also, what has become of one Benjamin Lafayette Sisko? IDW publishes this ongoing series in collaboration with Roberto Orci, co-writer (with former partner Alex Kurtzman), of Star Trek 2009 and Star Trek: Into Darkness. Orci was recently tapped to set in the center seat as director of the yet-unnamed Star Trek III, due out in the fall of 2016 to coincide with Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary. (See Star Trek 2009 & Into Darkness Writer, Roberto Orci, Named Director of Star Trek III) Orci oversees the storylines for Kirk and crew in comic form for IDW. This issue, as with #35 is written by Mike Johnson, with cover Art by Tony Shasteen. “Part of the fun of the new Star Trek movie franchise is seeing how beloved characters are different in the new timeline. But one iconic adversary remains unchanged: Q. His fascination with humanity and his penchant for mischief remain the same across the multiverse, and now he’s come to take the Enterprise crew on an adventure that will bring new meaning to the phrase ‘no-win scenario.” -Mike Johnson Issue #36 of Star Trek, running 32 pages and published by IDW, can be found at your nearest comic shop retailing for $3.99 this August. Make sure you beam into your local comic shop, or to find one near you, go to www.comicshoplocator.com“We want to be one of the top 50 craft brewers in the world,” said Dr. Pearse Lyons. It’s as simple as that for one of Ireland’s most successful entrepreneurs. His ambition knows no bounds. It’s been a busy few years for Alltech in terms of growth. The company has sold off particular business units that were no longer of key focus and has also acquired a number of other companies to accelerate its growth. However, last week’s announcement was the first time that it purchased a brewery or two for that matter to boost its beverage division. Alltech announced on 21 July that it has acquired The Station Works Brewery in Newry Co. Down and Cumberland Breweries Ltd, in Great Corby, Cumbria, England. The two breweries had been operating under the same ownership and had been positioning itself in the Irish market over the past number of months, on foot of its Finn Lager brand. Station Works had invested well on the branding and big hopes were being placed on its new Foxes Rock ale. So what’s in it for Alltech? It gives them a foothold into Europe in terms of production and adds a few more beers to their portfolio. The distribution chain for Alltech is quite strong in Ireland but this deal potentially opens up the British market too. The Finn Lager could even be an attractive brand State-side. Foxes Rock could prove popular with the horsey-set (e.g. Leopardstown Races), which fits in with Alltech’s sponsorship strategy. More importantly it gives them two breweries with a combined output of 40,000 hectolitres. This gives them a platform to develop a new range of products or brew existing ones in Europe that could be sold to the local market as well as exporting further afield. Some craft beer enthusiasts may find it difficult to accept Alltech as a “craft brewery” due to the fact that it’s part of a very large company. They’d point to the typical caveats of small, independent and traditional. As far as I’m concerned the brewery is craft. Yes, it may have corporate leanings but it’s also part of one of the biggest Irish family-owned start-ups. It’s a company that follows a path of increasing organically and through acquisitions, it’s the latter that mightn’t sit easily with everyone. The big question is where next for Alltech? In order to achieve the target of being in the top 50 of craft breweries worldwide, surely more take-overs can be expected. Wonder if any will come from those that have participated in the Alltech Brews and Food in recent years? There were more than a few of them that came from far and wide. Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on Google+Ramsey County residents with strong feelings about the possibility of a new countywide tax funding a Minnesota Vikings stadium in Arden Hills will get their two minutes of fame tonight. The Ramsey County Charter Commission is hosting the first of two public hearings on proposed ballot language that could possibly go before voters in November 2012. The language would ask whether they favor writing a ban into the charter – the county’s constitution of sorts – against using sales tax revenue to build professional sports stadiums. The hearing is likely to generate strong opinions on both sides, though charter commission chairman Richard Sonterre said it will not be organized as a debate and the commission will take no action tonight. Anyone booing or cheering will be asked to be quiet or leave the room. The hearing is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. at the New Brighton Community Center. A second hearing will take place at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 11 in the third-floor chambers at the Ramsey County Courthouse in St. Paul. Sonterre said each resident who chooses to speak will be expected to provide his or her name and address and will be allowed to make remarks once, for up to two minutes. Ramsey County residents will receive priority, and non-county residents will be able to say their piece if time allows. If all the county residents in attendance have been heard, the hearing will close within about two hours, he said. The 17-member charter commission will vote on whether to proceed with a November 2012 ballot referendum at or before its next regularly scheduled meeting Nov. 14. Art Coulson, a spokesman for Ramsey County, said the Board of Commissioners – which is a separate body from the charter commission – would have no power to prevent the question from getting to voters unless the ballot language called for something illegal that trumped state law, such as legalizing marijuana. It’s unclear what impact a referendum would have a year from now, as some suspect a stadium decision will be made by then. The Vikings’ current $1.1 billion stadium proposal calls for $350 million in county money, generated by a 0.5 percent countywide sales tax, on top of $300 million from the state and the balance coming from the team. The proposal exempts the sales tax from a public referendum, which state law requires for such revenue measures. It’s uncertain whether Gov. Mark Dayton will call a special legislative session this year for lawmakers to vote on a stadium package, as negotiations are ongoing. A “risk analysis” from the Metropolitan Council examining the Arden Hills site – on the old Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant – is expected by mid-October. Frederick Melo can be reached at 651-228-2172.Photo Credit: SPORTDAD Sports Photography One week remains in the 2014 CUFLA regular season and much is to be decided. Six teams in each division qualify for the post-season and the battle for those final spots are still up-for-grabs. In the East Division, McGill (11-0) clinched the division two weeks ago. Bishop’s (
rick of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury speaks at a prayer rally Friday. (Jesse Costa/WBUR) Local activists are holding events throughout the weekend to reflect and discuss this week's deadly shootings in Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas. Members of the local Black Lives Matter movement are set to gather in the South End Friday night for what organizers call a "healing event." With music and poetry, it's meant to give members of Boston's black community a space to process the recent incidents. "To come together to heal, to mourn, to celebrate the fact that we’re still here, we're still resisting and to talk about what our next steps are," Daunasia Yancey, of Black Lives Matter Boston, told WBUR. Earlier Friday, interfaith religious leaders gathered to pray at the Twelfth Baptist Church, in Roxbury. They included the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, the Rev. Laura Everett, executive director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, and the Rev. Nancy Taylor, of Boston's Old South Church. With reporting by WBUR's Zeninjor Enwemeka, Fred Thys and Delores Handy and The Associated PressYou know that old saying, that nothing good ever comes after “I’m not anti-[insert classically marginalized group here], but...”? Fabricio Werdum may need a refresher course. The former UFC heavyweight champion had been looking high and low for a last minute opponent for UFC 207 (he’s since been removed from the event), but that search seems to have led him into some strange beef with Junior dos Santos instead. Not long after the opponent search ended JDS went public, saying that he’d stepped up for the bout, but that Werdum had turned it down. Werdum is not only denying that claim, but in an interview with MMA Fighting he made some strange insinuations about why JDS wanted to fight him at all: “What ‘Cigano’ said was a bit weird,” Werdum said. “‘Cigano’ has been chasing me for a long time. You usually go after the belt, not a fighter. I think that’s weird. I wasn’t offered this (fight). He’s saying I turned it down. I’d fight him just to end this story of him chasing me.” “Some people think he’s jealous because I became champion beating his ‘dad’ Cain Velasquez, but I don’t think that’s the case,” he continued. “I think he didn’t come out of the closet yet. I don’t have anything against homosexuals, but ‘Cigano’ needs to get out of the closet. He must have something because he won’t forget me. I already told him I’m married. Nothing against gays, but everyone does their own thing.” Is that the truth behind it all? Guys that want to fight Fabricio Werdum are secretly gay? Seems unlikely. Maybe ‘Werdum Face’ is an undeniable aphrodisiac to some men. Maybe Cain Velasquez has a spot on Maury incoming (I really don’t think he’s the father). Or, maybe a spot on a NYE PPV with Ronda Rousey and a fight that would very likely put JDS at the front of the title challenger list is worth enough to risk making Werdum a little bit uncomfortable. We may never know.Spanish climber Edurne Pasaban has just one more tough climb to make Two of the world's top female climbers are vying to become the first woman to conquer the world's 14 highest mountains. The rivals and their teams are each preparing to make an assault on their final peaks - and either could win. Spanish climber Edurne Pasaban has just one more climb to make after scaling a deadly Himalayan peak on Saturday. But her chief rival, South Korea's Oh Eun-sun, is also on the slopes of her 14th mountain. Competition between the two climbers is mounting in the final weeks of the race to scale all the world's peaks higher than 8,000m (26,250ft). Climbing into history Pasaban climbed one of the most lethal Himalayan peaks, Annapurna, on Saturday, leaving her with just one more to scale to become the first woman to bag all the world's 14 "eight-thousanders". The 36-year-old Basque from northern Spain reached the top of the 8,091m mountain alongside several other Spanish climbers, a spokesman for her team told AFP news agency. Only Tibet's daunting 8,027m Shisha Pangma stands between her and a place in climbing history. FIVE OF THE TOUGHEST Everest 8,850m (29,035ft) K2 8,611m (28,251ft) Kangchenjunga 8,586m (28,169ft) Lhotse 8,516m (27,940ft) Makalu 8,463m (27,766ft) However, Oh is now on the slopes of Annapurna, which would be her 14th and last summit. But the 8,091m peak is particularly dangerous, being both technically difficult and avalanche-prone. It has a much higher death rate than Everest, the world's highest peak. Oh, 44, is acclimatising at Base Camp Two on the mountain and expects to make an attempt on the summit on Saturday. Oh currently seems to hold the advantage, although Annapurna, in Nepal, is the tougher climb. It has claimed 130 lives and has already defeated the South Korean, when she was forced to turn back in fog and blizzards last year. Pasaban, who is single and has no children, also knows all about Annapurna: she was defeated once before, in 2007, when bad weather forced her and her team to turn back 1,000m from the summit. Oh Eun-sun (L) and Edurne Pasaban are neck-and-neck If Pasaban wants to seal her place in the record books, she must hurry back down Annapurna and across the border into Tibet to begin her assault on Shisha Pangma early next month. She will travel to Tibet to make her attempt "over the coming days", her spokesman said. A third contender, Austria's Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, is to begin her climb of the world's highest summit, Mount Everest, next week. But she would still have to climb K2, the world's second highest peak, regarded as the most difficult and dangerous of the 14 summits, which all lie in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges in Asia. Italy's Reinhold Messner became the first man to climb all 14 mountains in 1986. Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionEvery once in a while someone will come into your life and they will change everything. Back in February 2014 we came across an ad on Trademe for a dog free to a good home. I had been looking for a dog to adopt for many years as I hadn’t had a dog in my life since my teen years. Had been wanting to get a Labrador but this one was a Staffy cross. Something struck me about this one in particular. I don’t exactly know what it was. So on the phone to the owner to see what the story was, he had separated from his wife and he needed to move closer to be with his children. He had been trying for some time to find a rental property that would take his dog but was rapidly running out of time, in fact was moving that weekend. We arranged to visit to meet the dog on Saturday morning. We turn up to find he had moved the day before and this poor girl had spent the night in the house on her own. We met the owner there as he was cleaning the house. Something had struck me about Jessie the moment I saw her. She was so calm. I knelt down across the room from her on her bed and she came straight up to me for a pat, she came so close it was almost a hug. That’s it, I’m sold. To seal the deal she had to be good with the kids. My son picks up her tennis ball and promptly throws it to her, well, not to her, at her. It hits her square on the nose, she doesn’t even flinch. Lucas later goes over to her and basically sits right on her. Not a problem. Arrangements were made and we adopted her on the spot. It took a bit of adjusting having a dog added to our family. Especially for our cat who hates dogs, and this dog who just wanted to eat cats. After a month or so the dog and cat were best of friends, and Jessie had fit into our family as though she had always been there. Through many dramas including selling our home and moving, losing loved ones and so on Jessie took it all in her stride. Twenty months later, we discover a lump on Jessie’s tummy. With my heart beating in my throat I take her along to the vet, tests were done and the results in a couple of days later. Sad news unfortunately and she has a very aggressive form of cancer. After a very difficult amount of thinking and talking the decision was made to let her go. Considering the speed this cancer came up and how unusually sad she had been recently (most probably due to being in pain, not that she let on that she was in pain, but she would have been) it was unlikely surgery and chemotherapy would have cured her, would have just put her through more unnecessary pain and discomfort only for the cancer to get her later on. Today, just 6 days later, the heartbreaking appointment came at the local vet. Many tears were shed. She was given a sedative to relax her and have her sleep. We are on the floor with her, I have her head on my lap. Holding her, rubbing her, talking to her. Then the final injection was administered. It doesn’t take long and she is now relaxed. No more pain. No more discomfort. It was extremely peaceful. The twenty short months Jessie was in our lives she brought us so much joy and happiness. She changed us like I thought no dog ever could. She was quiet, caring and happy. She wasn’t just a dog, she was a part of the family, just like one of the kids, only better behaved. Most of the time. Rest in peace Jess. You will be missed more than you know. April 2006 – October 2015. AdvertisementsSteve Bannon entered the White House with a minimum net worth of about $10.7 million, according to newly released disclosure forms. The president's chief strategist's assets include the value of his own consulting firms and film companies, in addition to rental property and anywhere from $1.1 million to $2.25 million in cash held in three different bank accounts. ADVERTISEMENT Separately, he earned more than $1.3 million in salary in 2016, including $191,000 from Breitbart News, where he worked until he began as Trump's campaign chief. That money, as well as other income, flowed through his consulting firm Bannon Strategic Advisors. As its own entity, Bannon Strategic Advisors netted him nearly $494,000. Bannon is known for holding a financial stake in television shows, such as "Seinfeld." Those royalties earned him between $50,000 and $100,000 last year. He will also dissolve several of his production companies, including Victory Film Group, Victory Film Project, and two similarly named LLCs. Further, he will be "going dormant" at Breitbart News and Bannon Strategic Advisors, only receiving "passive income." The ethics portion of his financial disclosure says that Bannon will be selling the equity he owns in Glittering Steel and Cambridge Analytica, the latter of which is worth anywhere from $1 million and $5 million. Almost all of Bannon's debt comes from mortgages on his four pieces of "investment property" — totaling at least $1.1 million.87 Bedford is indefinitely closed to regular submissions as our editorial staff embark on new journeys. We will do our best to maintain the website and the stories, poems, and artwork featured on our homepage by all the talented creators we have had the pleasure to work with. If you enjoy what you read and would like to help us stay online longer, feel free to check out our Patrons Page. Either way, we appreciate your support and welcome you to come back and visit again! We publish the following: Short Fiction Flash Fiction Micro Fiction Serial Fiction Poetry Spoken-Word Art Photography Other Forms of Creative Media Book Reviews Short Fiction We are seeking beautifully-written, original short stories by writers with distinct voices, and a clear, sweeping vision. We want to read stories not only for the pleasure they give us but also for the way they dare to dream, to risk, to question and to speak to our ever shifting world, possessing both the courage and craft needed to execute on their ambitious intent: the melding of art with entertainment. Our favorite kinds of stories are those that are still emotionally haunting long after their plots have slipped from our memories, the fingerprints of their ghosts left behind on our day-to-day lives. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, the ending of a short story should be at once surprising and inevitable, gifting us with some kind of intangible – a deepening awareness of the fragile conditions of being human. We are strong advocates for intoxicating language and pleasing sentences. That said, stories should also be clear and readable. Proper grammar and punctuation are vital to crafting a story which is fluid, artfully-written, and also easy to comprehend on a line-by-line level. We welcome both traditional and experimental forms of literary fiction, as well as genre fiction provided we feel that the work shows some “literary” aesthetic. We highly encourage submitting intrepid stories that slip across borders, elusive to strict marketing conventions while staying in full control of their geography at all times. Genre-blending should have purpose and direction. We’ll take any great story that can be classified under the umbrella of commercial or genre fiction (romance, mystery, crime, etc). What gets us excited is speculative fiction in all its guises (fantasy, science-fiction, magic realism, surrealism, slipstream, urban fantasy, horror, steampunk, silk punk, cyberpunk, etc). We are fans of humor, but our tendency is towards dry wit, satire, or absurdity treated with a flat acceptance, rather than anything slapstick or vulgar. We do not accept anything that contains gratuitous sex, violence or unnecessarily graphic language. Nor do we read fan fiction. Please only send us works between 500 to 10,000 words (preferably ~4000). We will not consider any story over 10,000 words unless we feel it’s absolutely outstanding and makes a valid case for the extra word count. Flash Fiction We define flash fiction as stories between 500 to 1000 words. Submitted stories that fall within these limits will automatically be classified as flash. Just like a great short story, a great piece of flash ought to impress us with finesse throughout its entirety, instead of hinging solely on an unexpected twist at the end. Micro Fiction For a bigger (or smaller) challenge, send us a work of micro fiction (less than 100 words). Be sure it still tells a “complete story” that has a beginning-middle-end with conflict and resolution. Micro fiction shares a lot of the same elements with prose poetry. We like to think the difference is an emphasis on character and character development rather than on an image. Serial Fiction We accept serial works, especially for fantasy, science fiction or other genre fiction. We will publish each installment weekly or in each new issue. * Please send us only (1) story per category per active submission. Please do not submit again until we have responded to your previous submission in a given category. For example, you may send us a short story submission and a flash fiction submission at the same time, but no multiple submissions, i.e. do not submit another short story or flash until we have responded to your previous short story or flash submission. We allow simultaneous submissions but ask that you notify us as soon as your story has been accepted by another market. Refer to the guidelines below on how to format and submit your manuscript. We try our very best to keep our response time to under one month. Feel free to inquire about the status of your submission if you have not heard back after a month. * Poetry We want vibrant poetry that steals into our mind, hijacks our neurotransmitters and takes us for a joyride outside our comfort zone, towards a higher political, social, and cultural elevation. We accept all types of original prose and spoken-word poems. Please submit a total of no more than (2) prose and/or spoken-word pieces to us at a given time. Please do not submit again until we have responded to your previous submission. Refer to the guidelines below on how to format and submit your poetry. * Art & Photography We want sublime art and creative photography to pair with our stories and poems. We’re much more inclined accept works that complements the prose we’ve published (any story or poem that is not featuring an art sample), but we’re happy to consider standalone pieces as well. You may submit up to a total of (3) pieces of art or photo in a single submission. Please do not submit again until we have responded to your previous submission. Refer to the guidelines below on how to format and submit your art or photography. If you would like to submit art that fits the subject of our current or upcoming contests, please take a look at our Contest Page. * Formatting & Submitting All fiction manuscripts should be in standard manuscript format. Most important: double-spaced, 12 pt standard font (e.g. Times, Arial, Courier), and page numbers. Poetry can be formatted any way you want. Include your work as a separate Word (.DOCX) attachment in an email. For spoken-word and other creative media pieces, include a link to your performance video in the body of your email (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) or attach a video file in a common video format (.AVI,.FLV,.MPEG,.WMV,.MOV) along with a transcript of the piece. For art and photos, please send each piece as a separate attachment only as.PNG or.JPEG. * Please email all submissions to [email protected] and include in the subject field the type of piece, the genre, if appropriate, the name, and approximate word count or number of lines of poetry. Examples: Flash Fiction – Fantasy – “The Girl Who Grew To Be 80 Ft. Tall” (6000) or Poetry – Spoken-Word – “Folding Origami With My Mother” (20). Please also mention how you heard about us in the body of the email. A cover letter isn’t necessary, but you’re welcome to include anything that you feel is important or interesting for us to know about the piece. If you use Duotrope or The Submission Grinder, we encourage you to favorite us and report on your submission. For contest submissions, please follow the instructions on our Contest Page. We look forward to receiving your work! * Editing, Rights & Payment If we accept your work, we may make line-edits for grammar, punctuation and clarity. You will have the opportunity to review and discuss all edits with us before the final version of your work is published. * For unpublished works (that have never appeared anywhere online or in print), we ask for First World Serial Rights, First World Electronic Rights and Exclusive Rights for 90 days. All rights revert back to the author after 90 days. We accept reprints of published works. For reprints, we ask for Second Serial World (Reprint) Electronic Rights, which are non-exclusive. For all stories and poems, whether original or reprint, we also ask for Non-exclusive Audio Rights, which gives us the right to publish an audio podcast of the work if we so choose. We kindly request permission to archive your work on our website. We publish works on a rolling basis, and all published works will automatically be archived unless you tell us not to. For questions on your rights, first take a look here. If you have additional concerns, please let us know through our Contact Page. We’ll happily explain. * We pay $10 for each short story, flash fiction, installments of serial fiction, or book review. We pay $5 for everything else, such as reprints, micro fiction, poetry, art and photography, or other creative works. Payment will be made through PayPal (preferred), or mailed by check, upon publication. All published works will be credited with a byline, and contributors will be featured on our Contributors Page. Our core vision from day one is to compensate creative authors for their time and hard work, and to provide quality content to readers for free. We are working on becoming a semi-professional paying market through crowdfunding, with the intention of being a self-sustained in the near future. If you would like to support us by donating, please visit our Indiegogo Campaign, or Patrons Page. You can also help by sharing about us with friends and family. All the money raised will go toward compensating authors, the upkeep of the magazine, and future projects such as contests and anthologies. We really appreciate your support!TEHRAN(Basirat) :Hossein Naqavi Hosseini, an Iranian MP and a member of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission says the US seeks to compensate for its defeats and frustration in the region by imposing sanctions on Iran. The United States has put on its agenda extensive sanctions against Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) in line with Washington’s bans on the Islamic Republic of Iran. To that end, the US House of Representatives and Senate have, once again, passed a sanctions act aimed at countering "Iran’s destabilizing moves.” The legislation passed in late July, 2017 imposes sanctions on Iran, Russia and North Korea. Now the development begs the question of whether the US can be trusted as a friendly country and a partner. To review what objectives Washington pursues by imposing sanctions and what counter-measures Tehran has put on its agenda, the Basirat news website has interviewed Hossein Naqavi Hosseini, an Iranian MP and a member of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission. The full text of the interview follows. What objectives Washington follows by passing the Countering America's Adversaries through Sanctions Act, which envisages restrictions on Iran’s missile activities and the isolation of the IRGC in the region? The victory of the [1979] Islamic Revolution of Iran has jeopardized the United States’ colonial interests in southwest Asia. So, the US government has always pursued Iran’s political isolation and Iranophobia as two of its major schemes in a bid to regain its foothold in the region by undermining Iran’s sources of power. Missile activities and the IRGC constitute sources of Iran’s power. By passing the sanctions, the US has not only violated the Iran nuclear deal, but seeks to undercut the sources of Iran’s power. The Iran nuclear deal (also called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA for short) is an international agreement between Iran and six world powers. It is not simply a bilateral agreement between Tehran and Washington. Among all signatories to the JCPOA, only one (the US) is not living up to its obligations under the deal. Iran had expected Washington to breach its promises and not to abide by an international agreement. Iran has reached agreement with six countries and has made good on its commitments under the deal. However, since the second day of the implementation of the JCPOA (January 17, 2016), the US imposed sanctions on 11 Iranian natural and legal persons. The move shows Washington wouldn’t like the JCPOA to be implemented and the Iranian nation to benefit from the deal. Ever since, the US has, for 16 times, adopted measures and passed legislation in contravention of the JCPOA, which we presented to the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission in a documented report. The last instance of these violations was legislation passed by the Senate a couple of days ago, blocking the sales of commercial aircraft to Iran. This comes as it is clearly stipulated in the JCPOA that Iran is entitled to purchase passenger planes. So, US statesmen do not want the JCPOA to be implemented. They are seeking pretexts and breaching their commitments. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is the only authority to verify that Iran has delivered on its commitments under the JCPOA, and the agency has so far reiterated in is official statements eight times that Tehran has remained committed to the JCPOA and has fulfilled all its obligations. The IAEA chief has also, time and again, reaffirmed Iran’s compliance with the deal in his speeches. However, the US seeks to create the impression that the agency regards Iran as a violator of the agreement. So, the US ambassador to the UN travelled to the IAEA headquarters and met [IAEA] chief Yukiya Amano in order to persuade him to introduce Iran as a violator of the agreement in the agency’s statements and in his own remarks. The call for inspecting Iran’s military sites and missile activities was in line with the same objective. Washington also resorts to different pretexts in order to neutralize benefits of the JCPOA. Sometimes they say the JCPOA needs addenda, and sometimes say the agreement should include missile activities as well. Sometimes they say the JCPOA needs to be revised. None of these scenarios is acceptable to Iran. We have signed an agreement and act accordingly. If the new sanctions act is implemented, what will Iran’s reaction be? The Supreme National Security Council and the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission have held several meetings in this regard and reviewed different scenarios. Precisely scheduled operational plans have been envisaged for each of these scenarios, and Iran is definitely prepared to take the necessary action based on the circumstances. The actions taken by the US run counter to international norms. But we should know that sanctions have never been able to impede Iran’s development and progress. Many economic and military experts happen to believe that if Iran’s economic or technological progress is studied, we will see that the peaks of the country’s progress coincided with the time when Iran was under sanctions. It means whenever the sanctions were intensified, Iran’s scientific, economic and military development gained momentum. So, sanctions will definitely not be able to hinder the progress and development of such a nation. Despite the fact that the IRGC has adopted effective measures in countering Takfiri terrorist groups in the region, why is it that the US calls the IRGC a terrorist entity? By pressuring the IRGC and calling it a terrorist entity, the US seeks to make up for the frustration and defeats it has suffered in the region. Today, Zionists and Saudis are furious at the situation in the region. They had made a 10-to-15-year investment. They gave financial and military support to a terrorist group called ISIS and trained its members. They spent a lot to help ISIS counter Iran. From the outset, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS and other terrorist groups in the region aimed to target Iran. This is the reality. Now, the evil triangle comprising the US, Zionism and Saudi Arabia has reached a stalemate, and its plots have been foiled. It is natural that they have got angry. The Americans have bitten the dust in Syria and Iraq. They themselves know that they will soon drown in the quagmire of Bahrain and Yemen. In order to compensate for this frustration and defeat, they are trying to portray the IRGC as a terrorist group. They have also put pressure on the IRGC’s Quds Force in order to soothe their pains a little bit and make up for their defeats in the region. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule. Interview by Akbar KarimiWE all know the excruciating feeling sitting in a room with someone who is repeatedly mispronouncing someone’s name. And when it’s a commentator on national television, it can get a little irritating. Channel Seven footy caller Brian Taylor is an AFL legend by right, but he came under serious fire for his horribly botched pronouciation of Essendon star Orazio Fantasia while calling the Bombers’ clash against Sydney on Friday. Taylor repeatedly pronounced the 21-year-old’s name wrong, ignoring the silent “z” and turning his Italian name into a long Aussie drawl. Taylor was brought up by fellow commentators asking how to pronounce “Orazio”, to which the 55-year-old replied: “Oraaaa-zee-oh” in jest. It’s not the first time the veteran commentator has been called out for his butchering of Fantasia’s name. A fan-made video surfaced on Youtube in May this year of the Seven commentator’s most hilarious Fantasia bungles. Fans looked to have had enough of Taylor’s mispronunciations and fired off at him on Twitter. Seriously, BT should be banned from calling Essendon games. This Orazio stuff is just ridiculous now. #AFLSwansDons — Alex Fair (@AJFair85) June 23, 2017 It's interesting watching a commentator become a human meme. #AFLSwansDons — Max Laughton (@maxlaughton) June 23, 2017 Wittily mused BT. A masterclass in ironic commentaric observation.#GoodCallBT — Richard Hinds (@rdhinds) June 23, 2017 BT commentating Orazio is Bruce's Cyril. — Andrew Bogut (@andrewbogut) June 23, 2017 "What a sound" - my mum's reaction to BT's overly enthusiastic call on that Orazio Fantasia mark & goal #aflswansdons — Melanie Dinjaski (@MelanieDinjaski) June 23, 2017 Another video of Taylor saying Eagles utility Elliot Yeo’s name repeatedly has also been uploaded, much to fans’ delight. Amid the Brian Taylor kerfuffle, there was an AFL game played. And what a game it was. Sydney completed astonishing one-point victory over Essendon at the SCG, sneaking home via a Gary Rohan conversion from the goal square after the final siren. The Bombers looked set to complete an epic come-from-behind win on Friday night, piling on seven consecutive goals to hit the front with 10 minutes remaining. The visitors pushed it out to a 19-point lead but the Swans rallied in remarkable fashion. Lance Franklin missed two shots in the ensuing chaos, but his side still managed to kick two goals in the final 80 seconds. The margin was cut to five points when Franklin marked outside the 50m arc, wheeled around and kicked his sixth behind of the night. Soon after, the Sherrin landed in the lap of Rohan, who had cost Sydney two goals during the Bombers’ preceding blitz, and the flame-haired speedster did not disappoint. The Swans won 11.20 (86) to 12.13 (85), surging into the AFL’s top eight for the first time this season. Both sides were guilty of crippling turnovers and inaccurate goalkicking, especially in the opening half. Swans skipper Josh Kennedy, as has been the case throughout his side’s revival, was inspirational in the engine room and likely to earn the three Brownlow votes. The Bombers landed in NSW with two worrying records hanging over their heads. The Swans had won the past six meetings between the clubs, while Franklin had averaged a bag of five goals in his 13 clashes with Essendon. They successfully shot down one of the hoodoos. Franklin was held goalless by the Bombers for the first time in his 260-game career. It wasn’t entirely the visitors’ doing. Franklin had the yips, as did fellow key forward Sam Reid, in what was far from Sydney’s most-polished performance of the year. The Swans, however, move to a position where finals are somehow on the cards. It is some achievement, given they opened 2017 with six straight losses. No club has rallied from a 0-5 start and reached finals, let alone 0-6. WATSON NAMES AFL ‘GOAT’ The AFL has been treated to dozens of freak midfielders over the years. Players like Chris Judd, Robert Harvey, Nathan Buckley and Gary Ablett Senior and Junior wowed fans for years with their incredible ability on the ball and ridiculous habits of racking up 30-plus disposal games. Starting a conversation over who is the best on-baller in history and you’ll likely get half-a-dozen different opinions, but footy great Tim Watson has zero doubts in his mind about who takes the top spot. “I’ve said that Gary Ablett is the best midfielder that I have seen in the time that I have been watching football full stop,” he said on SEN radio Friday. “I have watched a lot of football and I’m talking about someone who is the complete midfielder.” Watson picked the Gold Coast star over Judd and AFL legend Greg Williams, putting Ablett’s incredible marking skills ahead of the former Carlton star. “I rate him higher than the unbelievable Chris Judd, and Greg “Diesel” Williams. “Diesel was a great distributor of the ball, he was tough and inside and all that sort of stuff, but he couldn’t run like Ablett, he was a good mark for his size, but he couldn’t mark like Gary Ablett.” “If you look at all of Ablett’s components, and I’ve done this before, break him down into pieces, and say what he can do? “He’s creative, he can bring other players into the game with his creativity and his vision, he can kick the ball as well as any midfielder that has ever played the game, he can win the ball inside, he can win it on the outside, he can mark (and) he can kick goals. “There is not a thing he couldn’t do as a midfielder.” — with AAPAugust 27th marks five years since diaspora, the open, privacy-oriented social network, was placed into the hands of its community by its founders. One year ago the community released diaspora version 0.6, the result of a huge effort of refactoring the old code to make it perform better, as well as redesigning diaspora's interface and introducing new features. One year later, we are proud to announce the release of diaspora version 0.7. Since the last major release, 28 contributors have added 28675 lines of code and removed 20019 lines, which marks the release of diaspora* version 0.7 as one of the biggest versions diaspora’s community has ever released. Our latest release contains some important changes, particularly ‘under the hood’. It is now possible to mention people in comments as well as in posts – a long-awaited feature. The markdown editor, with previews, is available on comments and conversations, bringing them into line with the publisher and making it a lot easier to add formatting, links and images to comments and conversations. This markdown editor is now also available on the mobile version of diaspora, for posts, comments and conversations! It includes Federation v0.2.0, which is amazing enough that it got its own blog post. , which is amazing enough that it got its own blog post. And, last but certainly not least, this new release will include the first of the two steps towards a full account migration feature! Version 0.2.0 of our federation protocol, created by Benjamin Neff (SuperTux88) with help from Senya (cmrd-senya), has started the process of including new functionality. It also provides underlying support for secure and reliable account migration. Important reminder to podmins: This new federation protocol is incompatible with versions of diaspora* older than 0.6.3.0. If you are still running an earlier version, your server will no longer be able to fully communicate with servers running the latest software. Senya has also been hard at work creating the first stages of the much-needed account migration feature! With the release of this version, it will be possible to fully export your account data which will become importable in a future diaspora* release. We also started working on implementing federation methods to enable pods to correctly handle account migrations. The next step will be to create this secure account importing, which can be introduced once the majority of pods in our network have updated to version 0.7. These steps cannot be introduced in the same release as the network first needs to upgrade so when the first users start to import their archives, a maximum of pods will be able to understand the migration message. Since last year's launch of version 0.6.0.0, we achieved a pretty impressive list of changes! Additions and enhancements since version 0.6.0.0: Automatically pull new notifications every 5 minutes Add a user setting for default post visibility Use guid instead of id in permalinks and in single-post view instead of in permalinks and in single-post view Links to streams of posts I have liked or commented on Access to “My aspects” and “Followed tags” pages on mobile Improve color themes and add a “Dark” color theme Enable collapsing of notification threads in your mail client OpenGraph video support Improve error handling on mobile Admin pages for mobile users NodeInfo 2.0 Stop communication with pods that have been offline for an extended period of time Support for an optional Content-Security-Policy header header Support for Liberapay donations Community guidelines Links to our Discourse forum Here’s a quick round-up of the major changes coming your way in version 0.7: Interface Mentions in comments Improve Mentions: display @ before mentions; simplify mentions in the publisher Internationalization for color themes Refactoring single-post view interactions Update help pages Simplified publisher preview Add markdown editor for comments and conversations Support cmd+enter to submit posts, comments and conversations Account migration Update the user data export archive format Reset stuck exports and handle errors Add support for receiving account migrations Federation Switch to new federation protocol Fix order of comments across pods Mobile Always link comment count text on mobile Include count in mobile post action links Support direct links to comments on mobile Improve responsive header in desktop version Add markdown editor for posts, comments and conversations on mobile Mark as "Mobile Web App Capable" on Android Internals Upgrade to jQuery 3 and Rails 5.1 Send public profiles publicly Change sender for mails Add some missing indexes and clean up the data base if needed Improve stream when ignoring a person who posts a lot of tagged posts UpdatingWASHINGTON -- These quirky robotic flying machines may be the gift of the season. Manufacturers say they've sold 200,000 new unmanned aerial vehicles. While hobbyists are thrilled, the FAA is worried about a burgeoning fleet of personal drones
luckier residents, Tom Morris, once again finds himself in the news. His $204,000 per year pension is seen as a symbol of the public employee excesses that helped push the city into insolvency. $204,000 is a lot of money most places in America. The San Joaquin County municipality is no exception. The average median household income there is $45,700 per year. The vast majority of its residents can scarcely imagine retiring at age 52 and receiving more than $200,000 every year for the rest of their lives. That's why Bloomberg News led a recent story with an anecdote about Tom Morris, why the San Francisco Chronicle republished it, why Matt Welch of Reason noted it, and why it intrigues me too. The national media is only rehashing a debate they've been having in Stockton for awhile. A local newspaper story from 2008 helps explain the career trajectory of this controversial man. "Born and raised in Stockton, Morris joined the department as a junior cadet in 1972 and became an officer in 1979. During his career, he has served as a patrol officer, SWAT team member, homicide investigator and in the department's Internal Affairs Division," the piece states. Morris said his decision was not motivated by money but by principle. "Money wasn't the issue," he said. "Just don't take away what I've already earned." When Morris assumed leadership of the Police Department in March, he said he would stay for three to five years, barring any personal matter that might force his retirement. The furlough, and the resulting loss of income, is that personal matter, he said. He has to consider the effect on his family, he said. "In all my years in law enforcement, they've taken a back seat," he said. Morris said he tried to negotiate with the city to make staying palatable -- offering to surrender vacation days -- but was unsuccessful. "I'm not looking for a way out," he said. "I'm looking for a way in." In early 2008, he was named police chief. He retired eight months later when Stockton, already having serious financial problems, was forced to order staff furloughs. Chief Morris would have faced 12 days off, which "would have reduced his roughly $175,000 annual salary by about 5.8 percent, according to Human Resources Department Director Diana Garcia." The contemporaneous article went on to state the following:Retiring on "principle" apparently had the salutary benefit of a pension that would pay out more than his annual salary. Said the article:He has a wife and two kids. He never found one that satisfied him. After he retired, Morris began looking for another job. After all, he was only 52. Columnist Michael Fitzgerald picked up the trail in 2009. "Shortly after he resigned as Stockton's police chief in October 2008, Tom Morris went after a job as an investigator with the San Joaquin District Attorney's Office," he wrote that April. "Morris was chief only eight months. But this modest stint enabled him to retire on a chief's pension of approximately $16,200 a month. To this pension he has added an investigator's wage, which, at the high end of that position, is $5,332 a month. So Morris is making $18,000 to $21,000 a month, earning in one month the greater part of what the average Stocktonian earns in a year, if you believe the census." I do believe it. The columnist then does us the favor of letting us hear from the man himself: I called Morris. He said he never really wanted to quit the PD. But he disagreed with City Hall's chain-saw approach to the budget crisis. They weren't listening to him, he felt. "I was very blessed to be able to touch the top of the flagpole," Morris said of his career. "Now I can actually go back and enjoy the work of putting away the people who are making life miserable for others." Morris said he could have applied to become police chief elsewhere. But he prefers to go back to his roots as a cop, doing work he loves, in a city he loves. He's not ready to retire. I expected him to dismiss as sour grapes the criticism, and the perception that he's all about money. He didn't. "To be honest with you, I wish I could just blow it off. I don't, because it does bother me," Morris said. "Those people who say that about me either don't know me and don't know the circumstances. I care about this town, and I care about the police department more than a lot. So when you ask me, does it bother me -- sure it does." This would seem to miss the point. Though I don't know Morris, I never imagined he was "all about money." No one is. I don't doubt his affection for policing or for Stockton. (He's plenty rich enough to move.) Perhaps he acted unethically by reneging on his commitment to head the police department for a lengthier period. Perhaps the furlough and corresponding salary reduction absolved him of that obligation. What we can say is that compensation deals like his played a large part in driving his municipality into bankruptcy, a state of affairs that includes massive layoffs, significant service reductions, and a lot of pain for residents who do not earn close to six figures, even though they go to work everyday rather than enjoying an early retirement. Wrote the local columnist back in 2009: It's a funny situation. The public dozed right through the period when public employee compensation went off the hook. Now they're fuming because they didn't attend the meeting. I don't like overcompensation. It's hurting cities. But maybe a cop who is paid well because he rose through the ranks on his own merits and served honorably is the wrong guy to blame it all on. Again, this rather misses the point. The public "dozed" through the period when public-employee compensation went off the hook because Democratic legislators, Governor Gray Davis, and countless local officials from both parties colluded with public-employee union negotiators to raise retirement benefits, especially for public-safety employees, to reckless and unsustainable levels. They often did it as quietly as possible, using backroom deals and closed contract negotiations, all the while citing forecasts for stock market returns to pension funds that were wildly unrealistic. All this occurred at a time when Californians were so fed up with their leadership that they in fact recalled Gray Davis in an election where his giveaways to the public-safety employees were an Issue. I recall talk-radio hosts ranting about them daily in drive time. It is fantasy to think the average voter can comprehend and be regularly attentive to returns to pension funds, obscure labor contract negotiations, or loopholes that permit public employees to spike their last-year salary in a way that yields them a pension much larger than the casual observer might expect. While California voters can be faulted for their disastrous ballot box budgeting and unfailing loyalty to Democratic legislators despite their poor stewardship of the state, the people's blame is mitigated by the fact that the inept California GOP continues losing with lackluster, inexplicably socially conservative candidates while the state's fiscal outlook crumbles. A healthy society depends on a political system that reins in special interests more than California's public-safety unions are reined in; it depends on competitive elections between political parties more functional than the California GOP; it depends on public servants at the highest levels of leadership who are less mercenary and more critical of a system that pays them so much more than their worth or that can be sustained (it has come to literal bankruptcy); and it depends on politicians and voters who don't permit some public employees to extract so much -- no class of people wouldn't be tempted by $204,000 for life starting at 52, if they could get it. It's time to stop giving it to them. Tom Morris probably isn't a bad guy, and he isn't "the problem," just a manifestation of it. But can we all agree that he makes too much? The Democrats who rule the California legislature ought to agree to common sense reforms, but they're mostly in safe seats and beholden to public-safety unions, so they dawdle, unwilling even to go as far as Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, as municipality after municipality declares actual bankruptcy and the state itself faces a fiscal cliff. "Many cities are hobbled by retiree obligations that consume 10 percent or more of revenue," Bloomberg reports. "And unlike other expenses, which can be cut or deferred, pension costs are intractable." It's a bankrupt system.In his Kremlin defense of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond. Crimea, said Putin, “is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.” Russia is a Christian country, Putin was saying. This speech recalls last December’s address where the former KGB chief spoke of Russia as standing against a decadent West: Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation. Heard any Western leader, say, Barack Obama, talk like that lately? Indicting the “Bolsheviks” who gave away Crimea to Ukraine, Putin declared, “May God judge them.” What is going on here? With Marxism-Leninism a dead faith, Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead. In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God’s side. The West is Gomorrah. Western leaders who compare Putin’s annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria, who dismiss him as a “KGB thug,” who call him “the alleged thief, liar and murderer who rules Russia,” as Wall Street Journal‘s Holman Jenkins did, believe Putin’s claim to stand on higher moral ground is beyond blasphemous. But Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing, and his new claim has a venerable lineage. The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, was, at the time of his death in 1964, writing a book on “The Third Rome.” The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today’s Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was—Moscow. Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism. Putin is plugging into some of the modern world’s most powerful currents. Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as America’s arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated. He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West. In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a “culture of death.” What did Pope John Paul mean by moral crimes? The West’s capitulation to a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide—the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes that she was stunned when in Tbilisi to hear a Georgian lawyer declare of the former pro-Western regime of Mikhail Saakashvili, “They were LGBT.” “It was an eye-opening moment,” wrote Applebaum. Fear and loathing of the same-sex-marriage pandemic has gone global. In Paris, a million-man Moral Majority marched in angry protest. Author Masha Gessen, who has written a book on Putin, says of his last two years, “Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world.” But the war to be waged with the West is not with rockets. It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russia’s role, in Putin’s words, is to “prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.” Would that be the “chaotic darkness” and “primitive state” of mankind, before the Light came into the world? This writer was startled to read in the Jan-Feb. newsletter from the social conservative World Council of Families in Rockford, Ill., that, of the “ten best trends” in the world in 2013, number one was “Russia Emerges as Pro-Family Leader.” In 2013, the Kremlin imposed a ban on homosexual propaganda, a ban on abortion advertising, a ban on abortions after 12 weeks and a ban on sacrilegious insults to religious believers. “While the other super-powers march to a pagan world-view,” writes WCF’s Allan Carlson, “Russia is defending Judeo-Christian values. During the Soviet era, Western communists flocked to Moscow. This year, World Congress of Families VII will be held in Moscow, Sept. 10-12.” Will Vladimir Putin give the keynote? In the new ideological Cold War, whose side is God on now? Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? Copyright 2014 Creators.com.The United States has been using lies to go to war since 1846, when Americans who believed in manifest destiny sought to expand to the Pacific Ocean at the expense of Mexico, acquiring by force of arms California and what were to become the southwestern states. In 1898 the U.S. picked up the pieces of a dying Spanish Empire in a war that was driven by American imperialists and the yellow dog reporting of the Hearst Newspaper chain. And then came World War 1, World War 2, and Korea, all avoidable and all enabled by deliberate lying coming out of Washington. More recently, we have seen Vietnam with its Gulf of Tonkin fabrication, Granada and Panama with palpably ridiculous pretexts for war, Iraq with its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Afghanistan with its lies about bin Laden, Libya and its false claims about Gaddafi, and most recently Syria and Iran with allegations of an Iranian threat to the United States and lies about Syrian use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons. And if one adds in the warnings to Russia over Ukraine, a conflict generated by Washington when it brought about regime change in Kiev, you have a tissue of lies that span the globe and bring with them never-ending conflict to advance the American imperium. Buy Gold at Discounted Prices So lies go with the American Way of War, but the latest twist and turns in the Middle East are bizarre even by Washington’s admittedly low standards of rectitude. On the 5th of June, Saudi Arabia led a gaggle of Arab and Muslim nations that included the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain to cut off all diplomatic, commercial and transport links with Qatar, effectively blockading it. Qatar is currently isolated from its neighbors, subject to sanctions, and there have even been Saudi threats of going to war against its tiny neighbor. Salman al-Ansari, the president of the Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee, even tweeted: “To the emir of Qatar, regarding your alignment with the extremist government of Iran and your abuse of the Custodian of the two sacred mosques, I would like to remind you that Mohammed Morsi [of Egypt] did exactly the same and was then toppled and imprisoned.” It is the second time the Saudis have moved against Qatar. Two years ago, there was a break in diplomatic relations, but they were eventually restored. This time, the principal allegation being directed against Qatar by Riyadh is that it supports terrorism. The terrorist groups that it allegedly embraces are Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi’s affiliation. Hezbollah and Hamas are close to Iran which is perhaps the real reason for their being singled out as many would call them resistance movements or even legitimate political parties rather than terrorists. And the Iran connection is critical as Qatar has been under fire for allegedly saying nice things about trying to respect and get along with Tehran, undoubtedly somewhat motivated by its joint exploitation with Iran of a vast gas field in the Persian Gulf. Qatar’s ownership of al-Jazeera also has been a sore point with the Saudis and other Gulf states as its reporting has often been critical of developments in the region, criticisms that have often rankled the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptians. It has been accused of spreading propaganda for “militant groups.” One of the Saudi demands to permit Qatar to again become a “normal” Arab Gulf state would be to close down the network. The terrorism claims by the Saudis are, of course, hypocritical. Both Qatar and Saudi Arabia are well known as sponsors of Salafist terrorism, including the funding and arming of groups like ISIS and the various al-Qaeda franchises, to include al-Nusra. Much of the money admittedly comes from private individuals and is often channeled through Islamic charities, but both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been extremely lax in their enforcement of anti-terror and money laundering regulations. In a 2009 State Department memo signed off on by Hillary Clinton it was stated that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Qatar, meanwhile, has been described as a “permissive environment for terrorist financing.”. The Saudis also have considerable blood on their hands by way of their genocidal assault on neighboring Yemen. In addition, the Saudi Royal House has served as the principal propagator of Wahhabism, the virulently fundamentalist version of Islam that provides a form of religious legitimacy to terror while also motivating many young Muslims to join radical groups. The falling out of two Gulf Arab regimes might be a matter of relatively little importance but for the unnecessary intervention of President Donald Trump in the quarrel. He has taken credit for the burgeoning conflict, implying that his recent visit to the region set the stage for the ostracizing of Qatar. His twitter on the affair, posted on June 6th, read ““So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!” And he again came down on Qatar on June 9th during a press conference. Trump’s tweets might well be regarded as simply maladroit, driven by ignorance, but they could also provide a glimpse of a broader agenda. While in the Middle East, Trump was bombarded with anti-Iranian propaganda coming from both Israel and the Saudis. An escalation of hostilities with the intention of starting an actual war involving the United States to take down Iran is not unimaginable, particularly as the Israelis, who have already endorsed the Saudi moves, have been arguing that option and lying about the threat posed by Tehran for a number of years. A war against Iran would be very popular both with the U.S. Congress and the mainstream media, so it would be easy to sell to the American public. The terrorist attack in Tehran on June 6th that killed 17 is being blamed in some Iranian circles on the Saudis, a not unreasonable assumption. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack but it must also be observed that both the Saudis and Israelis have good connections with the terrorist group. But if the possibility of a possible Saudi hand is true or even plausibly so, it guarantees a rise in tension and an incident at sea could easily be contrived by either side to escalate into a shooting war. The United States would almost inevitably be drawn in, particularly in light of Trump’s ridiculous comment on the tragedy, tweeting that Iran is“falling victim to the evil they promote.” There is also another considerable collateral damage to be reckoned with as a consequence of the Trump intervention even if war can be avoided. Qatar hosts the al-Udeid airbase, the largest in the Middle East, which is home to 10,000 U.S. servicemen and serves as the Combined Air and Space Operations Center for Washington and its allies in the region and beyond. Now the United States finds itself squarely in the middle of a fight between two alleged friends that it doesn’t have to involve itself in, an intervention that will produce nothing but bad results. Backing Saudi Arabia in this quarrel serves no conceivable American interest, particularly if the ultimate objective is to strike at a non-threatening Iran. So the fallback position is to lie about what the support for the aggressive Saudi posturing really means – it is alleged to be about terrorism, which is always a popular excuse for government overreach. And the ultimate irony is that when it comes to terrorism the United States itself does not emerge without fault. As early as 2011, the U.S. was arming Syrian dissidents from the arsenals in Libya, flying in weapons to Turkey to hand over to the rebels. Many of the weapons, as well as those provided to Iraqi forces, have wound up in the hands of ISIS and al-Nusrah. U.S. advisers training rebels have conceded that it is impossible to determine the politics of many of those receiving instruction and weapons, an observation that has also been made by the Obama White House and by his State Department. So watch the lies if you want to know when the next war is coming. If the House of Saud, the Israelis and Donald Trump are talking trash and seem to agree about something then it is time to head for the bomb shelter. Will it be Iran or an escalating catastrophe in Syria? Anything is possible. Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review. The Best of Philip GiraldiA trip to Wembley is always a memorable experience but from the very outset this one felt a bit different. Two years ago when City lifted the FA Cup it felt as though the biggest hurdle had already been cleared with the 1-0 victory against Manchester United in the semi-final. This year it was Chelsea who were vanquished in the last four, with Wigan Athletic and Roberto Martinez awaiting Roberto Mancini and the Manchester City squad in the final at the home of English football. Again, it would seem that the hardest part had already been accomplished as tens-of-thousands of City supporters made their way south; City were huge favourites to lift the trophy. Wigan were in a relegation scrap – again – were decimated by injury and before the weekend’s events, Wigan had failed to even score a goal in the seven previous encounters. City, apparently, only had to turn up to win. The only problem was the fact that City didn’t turn up at all. That run, and the history books, belied the true situation – Wigan are a team that cause City problems as the league encounter just a month ago indicated. The result that day – a 1-0 victory to City at the Etihad with the only goal scored late on by Carlos Tévez – glossed over the problems the Blues seem to have against Martinez’ different team. No other coach in the Premier League plays the way he does with a back three and it seems Mancini is yet to find a suitable method of dealing with it. A more insipid turn-out would be difficult to find in a season oft-punctuated by below-par performances however the team have been set up. This was much more than a case of skill over will, however. It’s not without irony that Wigan were the team to deny Mancini his 2nd FA Cup during his tenure as the Blues’ boss – and his 19th cup win as player and coach – playing a fluid 3412 formation similar to which the City manager had tried to implement this season with little-to-no success. Martinez has nothing like the squad of Mancini but tactically, in these 90 minutes of football, showed himself to be infinitely superior to the man who delivered the FA Cup in 2011 ending City’s near-35-year barren spell. Wigan moved the ball so freely throughout the entire game, and devastated City in wide areas of the pitch. The tendency Mancini has of playing inverted wide players (not exactly wingers in the old or modern sense of the term, more like inside forwards) in the three ahead of Yaya Toure and Gareth Barry – David Silva and Samir Nasri on the right and left respectively – leaves City extremely narrow and full-backs exposed. In a game that City were expected to dominate, this shouldn’t prove to be a problem but when conceding possession so frequently it proved to be the ultimate downfall. A recurring criticism from fans this season is a lack of width, often coupled together with an incorrect assertion that is the reason Edin Džeko hasn’t fired as well as he can. He never played with wingers at Wolfsburg, but I digress. The unexpected reality of the game saw City squeezed by Wigan’s high line without ever trying to counter it with the obvious pace of Sergio Agüero in behind. Honduran international Roger Espinoza (who rarely played in a similar role during his four years at Sporting Kansas City) was made to look incredible by a combination of the space afforded to him by a lack of protection in front of Pablo Zabaleta and Arouna Koné dropping in front of him when City were in possession. Koné worked tirelessly and ran Vincent Kompany ragged, dragging him out of position creating gaps for Maloney to create and general uncertainty in City’s back line. On the opposing side of the pitch, Callum McManaman was outstanding against one of City’s more consistent performers this season, Gael Clichy. Again exposed by Nasri’s attacking tendencies, Clichy struggled all afternoon against McManaman who had the beating of his man on just about every occasion. With the exception of 10 minutes or so at the start of each half, Wigan were well on top. City looked flustered, unable to cope with highly-functioning Wigan and looked as though they believed the game was won before putting their boots on. All credit goes to Wigan Athletic and their exceptionally tactically astute manager, Roberto Martinez. Football is about romance and dreams, and what’s more romantic than a massive underdog lifting the cup at the end of the match? Congratulations to the supporters of Wigan, to Dave Whelan who took his local club from the depths to an FA Cup win, and to Roberto Martinez for bettering his opponent on the day. Here’s #ToTheDream.Posted 11 March 2017 - 05:42 AM Spoiler 1st Node = 978 cbills 2nd Node = 1,956 cbills 3rd Node = 2,934 cbills 4th Node = 3,912 cbills 5th Node = 4,890 cbills etc. 10th Node = 9,780 cbills 20th Node = 19,560 cbills 30th Node = 29,340 cbills 40th Node = 39,120 cbills 50th Node = 48,900 cbills 60th Node = 58,680 cbills 70th Node = 68,460 cbills 80th Node = 78,240 cbills 90th Node = 88,020 cbills 91st Node = 88,998 cbills Like many around here, I have a lot of mechs (150) and only a handful of modules (4 lances worth, plus assortment of weapon modes). I like the new skill tree, however the pain comes in when looking at where my stable will be after it drops.Now, I understand that post skill tree, a mech with 91 nodes unlocked is equivalent to a mech loaded with modules on the liver server. It would be ideal if I could skill up my 150 mechs to have an equivalent bonus to what they have on live without modules, as well as be able to fully skill up two lances of mechs.With how the pricing models stands, that is not possible, unless PGI injects more c-bills into my account than what I would be entitled to.What I propose is this:- Total cost to skill up 91 nodes remains the same: 4,095,000 cbills (45k * 91)- The first skill node unlock would cost 978 c-bills- Each node would increase in price by 978 c-billsWhat this does is drop the total cost of the initial nodes down while retaining the total cbill sink PGI is looking to retain. For a 1,012,230 million c-bill investment into a skill tree, under this system 45 nodes would be unlocked.For me, it would allow me to get my stable pretty close to what it is now on live with the c-bill refund from my limited number of modules. All 150 mechs would have 45 nodes unlocked, which is fairly equivalent to a mech mastered but with no modules on live. I would also be able to afford to fully skill out a couple lances.A couple of other benefits to this system:- Very easy to codeFor New Players:-Lower c-bill cost for the beginning nodes reduces gap between them and vets quicker-Greater satisfaction in beginning matches with a new mech due to being able to unlock nodes even with bad matchesFor Experimenters- Cost of experimenting with builds at the beginning of a mech's life cycle is drastically reducedAdditional Benifit- Best nodes can be purchased first at lower cost, more optional nodes can be left by the way side if c-bill retention is desiredPerception- This would, for some people, make the skill tree feel less of a grind and more of an investmentAll the while, the c-bill sink that a game with this type of f2p business model requires is maintained and the max cost currently chosen by PGI remains. Edited by Dracol, 11 March 2017 - 06:24 AM.One factor that is very important when buying a 3D printer is budgeting for the tools you need to use it effectively. Often I see people throwing out a budget for a printer of for example $1000, but they do not factor in shipping costs and more costly than that are the tools! If you are in the market for a 3D printer or simply want to know what tools are effective, I have written this guide to help you understand what you need and approximate costs. There are 3 tiers of tools and equipment I will list here. Are the essential tools, you absolutely will need these to get your printer functioning properly Are the useful tools that will be used however you do not need them from day 1, you could go for weeks or months without needing these, you will eventually though Are the optional tools. When you want to make your life a little easier or experiment, these can help but are not needed to use a printer effectively 1: ESSENTIAL TOOLS Essential Tools starting at around $66 AUD total 2. USEFUL TOOLS Useful tools starting at around $70 AUD total 3. OPTIONAL TOOLS Optional tools starting at around $160 AUD totalKnown for its dynamic tech startups, agricultural innovations, and security solutions, Israel could soon add cannabis powerhouse to the list, thanks to domestic efforts to decriminalize the drug… and a push to use it as a medical export. Israel is already a leading global player in clinical testing and Israeli growers have been leveraging those clinical trials to produce new strains for decades. These growers have developed unique grow-how to deliver a medical grade product. “Israeli growers have agreements with companies in USA, Canada, Czech Republic and Australia. Israel has the oldest and largest regulated medical cannabis programs in the world with over 22,000 registered patients. The Hebrew University holds a rich IP bank of cannabis patents. It is easier to conduct cannabis research and clinical studies in Israel than in any other country in the world,” said Saul Kaye, the founder of iCan and CannaTech, a yearly cannabis innovation and investor summit in Israel. Governments and multinationals are currently flocking to Israel where clinical testing faces fewer hurdles. “Israel is playing a large role in clinical trials and foreign governments and multinationals come to Israel for this purpose. In the US, the DEA does not allow for the transportation of raw materials. A company in New York cannot import enough raw cannabis to conduct the clinical trials,” said Dr. Tamir Gedo, the CEO of Breath of Life, a manufacturer of pharmacy grade API for companies looking to conduct clinical trials. The country’s warm climate coupled with its accumulated know-how in all things agriculture and farming are fertile ground to transform the desert state into a player on the global medical marijuana market. Even though the UN’s 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs prevents the trafficking of narcotics, Israel has the ability to circumvent the convention by having the Medical Cannabis Unit of the Health Ministry turn itself into a national narcotics agency. Regulatory conditions are also helping to sow the seeds for a cannabis culture, since the Ministry of Health is the only national FDA equivalent body that has publicly declared and accepted the benefits of cannabis. In fact, Israel has already approved a vast number of medical conditions for treatment with cannabis, including cancer, epilepsy, neurological conditions and MS. “The Israeli government has started to understand the economic benefits of cannabis. I believe medical cannabis will be be bigger and more profitable than all the arms exports combined.” Tamir Gedo, CEO, Breath of Life “The Israeli government has started to understand the economic benefits of cannabis. I believe medical cannabis will be be bigger and more profitable than all the arms exports combined,” Gedo said. The potential for cannabis crop to create significant export revenues has some entrepreneurs envisioning a future in which the herb functions as a peace pipe to bring other countries from the region to the trade table. “Israel’s neighbours in the Mediterranean are years away from recognizing and organizing their medical cannabis programs. In the future, neighboring countries will almost certainly look to Israel to model their own programs. Israel now has the potential to export our knowledge and skills to these countries,” Kaye said. Oren Leibovitz the editor of the Israeli cannabis news and information website, Cannabis and the chairman of the Green Leaf (Ale Yarok) party, is confident that Israel will soon become an international cannabis powerhouse. “In the next few months, the exporting of medical cannabis might be approved by the Knesset [Israeli parliament], which will make cannabis the country’s #1 export, superseding weaponry and, potentially, natural gas,” Leibovitch said. Leibovitch’s political movement is growing rapidly and garnered 50,000 (out of 4,255,000 votes) votes in the 2015 election. While Israel is still far from decriminalizing cannabis, Leibovitch believes that due to the political support from the political parties on the left and right, Israel will soon move towards a more liberal approach to cannabis. “What happens in America, always happens in Israel 10 years later. I envision Israel to join the state of Colorado and other pro-legalization states by the year 2024,” Leibovitch said. Israelis witnessed a concrete move to decriminalize cannabis in June this year when Yinon Magal, a member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) introduced a bill that would decriminalize cannabis for recreational use. The law would allow one plant and up to five grams of cannabis for personal use. Moreover, the chair of the Committee on Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Tamar Zandberg is a proponent of decriminalizing the personal use of cannabis. Indeed, there are many in Israel who believe that the time is ripe for new legislation. In spite of possible legal and political hurdles, a number of Israeli startups in the medical marijuana space have began developing products that directly or indirectly relate to the cannabis industry. Tel Aviv based Syqe Medical developed the world’s first precision metered dose inhaler and Cannabics Pharmaceuticals is developing cannabinoid-based treatments and therapies while companies such as BreedIt are providing advanced agro-breeding technologies. While Israeli companies are making headway in cannabis tech, many Israeli politicians are still hesitant to fully back the industry due to perception-induced fear. Israel should export medical solutions, not narcotics. We don’t want to be in the business of exporting cannabis for recreational use. Dr. Oded Sagee, CEO, Breedit “Israel does not want to have the reputation of being the world’s number one narcotics exporter. Instead, we should be known as the number one medical solutions exporter. Understandably, the political process is influenced by perception and politicians are still fearful of the connotations of being labeled as pro-drugs,” said Dr. Oded Sagee, the founder and CEO of BreedIt. Therefore, Israel should perhaps position itself as an exporter of medical solutions, by focusing on the end-product, rather than on exporting raw, unprocessed cannabis, according to Sagee. “We can provide products for specific purposes, for example tailored cannabis for cancer, MS and other illnesses. Israel should export medical solutions, not narcotics. We don’t want to be in the business of exporting cannabis for recreational use,” Sagee concluded. Israeli contributions to cannabis research actually spans decades. Over a half century ago, in 1963 an Israeli researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Dr. Raphael Mechoulam identified the structure of cannabidiol (CBD) and isolated THC for the first time. Because of Mechoulam and his team’s efforts, 20,000 Israelis are able to enjoy the benefits of medical cannabis. Today, Israel is at the precipice of becoming a major force in the field of cannabis and medical marijuana, but country’s successes are often hindered by external forces, but today – according to the leader of the cannabis movement – the enemy comes from within. “The only thing preventing Israel from becoming a cannabis superpower is the Israeli government,” Leibovitch said.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Sep. 12, 2016, 11:21 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 13, 2016, 12:53 AM GMT By Courtney Kube and Alex Johnson The Pentagon said Monday it has confirmed that a U.S. airstrike killed ISIS' second-in-command, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, despite Russia's insistence last month that it was one of its planes that killed him. ISIS itself has already said al-Adnani, who also served as the terrorist group's main spokesman, died in the Aug. 30 strike in al-Bab in Syria's devastated Aleppo province. But the Defense Department said at the time that it hadn't been able to nail that down. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said Monday
rioting sparked by Saturday’s fatal police shooting of an armed black man, 23-year-old Sylville Smith. The unrest, in which protesters torched multiple businesses and police cars and at least one person was shot, was the second wave of major protests since December 2014, when a county prosecutor declined to file charges against police in the fatal shooting of another black man, Dontre Hamilton. But while anger over such police shootings may have set off the mayhem, decades of unemployment, segregated housing, substandard schools, and racist policing set the stage for Milwaukee to blow. Indeed, the city has earned itself a reputation as the worst place to be black in America. Here’s why: Concentrated poverty: Milwaukee is one of the nation’s most segregated cities, with black residents—40 percent of the population—living almost exclusively on the city’s north side. Milwaukee is also America’s second-poorest major city, in a state that in 2014 had the nation’s highest black unemployment rate. A third of its black residents live in “extreme poverty,” defined as a household with an income less than half that deemed appropriate by the federal government for a family of its size—and 40 percent live below the poverty line. This is partly because the region’s jobs are concentrated in three white suburbs that are all but inaccessible by public transportation. The WOW counties, as these suburbs are known, are at least 94 percent white, and just 1 to 2 percent black. Failing schools: Milwaukee’s public schools are doing a poor job of educating their students. During the 2013-14 academic year, Milwaukee had the nation’s largest black-white gap in graduation rates, and K-12 test scores were abysmal. Most black kids in Milwaukee attend highly segregated public schools. According to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Mark Levine, roughly three out of four attend a high-poverty institution where 90 percent of the students are black. And when those kids misbehave, schools are quick to dole out suspensions. In 2011-12, Wisconsin led the nation in suspending black high schoolers, thanks largely to excessive suspension rates in Milwaukee. (If you want to understand why suspensions are bad, and how children can be disciplined more effectively, read this piece.) Mass incarceration: Black men in Milwaukee are incarcerated at the highest rate in the nation. In 2013, according to UW researchers, one in eight were locked up, and by the time the men hit their 30s and 40s, more than half had served time. Two-thirds of the incarcerated men came from six of the city’s poorest zip codes, including those for Sherman Park, the neighborhood where the most recent police killing took place. Another of the zip codes (53206) has the highest black male incarceration rate in America—62 percent, according to another UW study. (A documentary on that community is due out later this year.) So many Milwaukeeans have criminal records, one ex-offender told NPR, that police routinely ask the people they pull over whether they’re on probation. Wisconsin spends more on corrections than on higher education. And to top it off, just 10 percent of black men with a criminal record in Wisconsin have a valid driver’s license—which makes it tough to secure jobs and services. (The sheriff of Milwaukee County recently called the Black Lives Matter movement a terrorist organization.) How it got this bad: Black people moved to Milwaukee in large numbers beginning in the 1960s—later than many blacks who left the South inhabited other Rust Belt cities such as Chicago and Detroit during the Great Migration. White immigrant communities in Milwaukee fiercely resisted integration in housing and schools, and when the city’s manufacturing industry collapsed shortly after blacks arrived, massive racial disparities sprang up in employment, housing, and education. Milwaukee also was hit harder by globalization and by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs than other major urban centers, an analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found. Black men suffered a drop in employment during this period that was more than twice what the nation endured during the Great Depression. White residents fled to the suburbs, taking their resources with them, and little has improved since. Decades of tensions between police and the city’s black communities helped fuel this latest flare-up.TRY CULTURE WHISPER Receive free tickets & insider tips to unlock the best of London — direct to your inbox Try it King of nonsense, Monty Python member and mr Basil Fawlty himself is one of Britain's comedy greats, time after time delivering farcical sketches and perfect comedy timing. From Fawlty Towers to the French soldier, he's brought us dead parrots, goose-stepping and smacking children over a misshapen chip. As both a member of Monty Python and a writer in his own right, he always succeeds in making us laugh.Now, with the news that Cleese will be receiving the 'Rose D'Or' lifetime achievement award, we bring you five of his silliest, funniest, and most ridiculous scenes:A bit of cross-Channel mockery and franglais: "Your father mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries" is a classic line, and let's not forget the less well-remembered but hilarious, "fetchez la vache".A dead man, his breakfast tray, and some incriminating kippers are enough to cement this as a stand-out scene from the timeless family favourite, Fawlty Towers.Sometimes the best comedy moments require no words, and John Cleese's comic acting make this a memorable classic.Leading one of Monty Python's most well-known and frequently quoted scenes – and a video employed by History teachers across the country...."Oh, peace? SHUT UP.""There's always one, isn't there?" Cleese as a school master-esque executioner follows the brilliantly blasphemous themes of Life of Brian in perfect dead-pan fashion.As FARC rebels prepare to demobilize, Colombia's Senate and Lower House on Wednesday passed an amnesty bill protecting the group's guerrilla fighters from persecution for minor crimes committed during the country's 52-year civil war. The new law is a key part of the historic peace agreement signed last month between the government and rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The accord saw Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos receive the Nobel Peace Prizefor his role in the peace talks. The new amnesty law passed with a clear majority in both chambers, winning 69 votes in the 102-seat Senate and 121 votes in the 166-seat Lower House. However, members from the right-wing Democratic Center Party, which has stridently opposed the peace accord, abstained from voting. Santos took to Twitter to praise the "historic" vote, calling the amnesty law the "first step towards consolidating peace." Amnesty for minor crimes As part of the law, rebel fighters found guilty of committing minor crimes during the civil war will be granted amnesty. The same law also applies to members of the military. Rebels found guilty of committing serious crimes, such as massacres, sexual violence or kidnapping, will not fall under amnesty. A special court set up to hear their crimes will hand out alternative sentences such as land mine removal. In a joint statement Wednesday, FARC leaders and the government said they would establish how many rebels are not eligible for amnesty by the end of January. Complex peace process The amnesty law is the first in a series of measures designed to reassure FARC rebels of the peace deal and accelerate their demobilization. Other laws tied to the accord include rural reform, compensation to victims, the removal of land mines and a ceasefire deal to be monitored by the United Nations. Perhaps most controversially, the FARC will transform into a political party, receiving a guaranteed 10 unelected seats in Colombia's parliament until 2026. Ahead of Wednesday's vote, the President of Colombia's Senate, Mauricio Lizcano, said that some 5,700 guerrilla fighters had already laid down their arms and begun moving into special demobilization zones. Colombia's 52-year long conflict saw more than 260,000 people killed and left some 45,000 missing. Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month, Santos said his country's peace deal should serve as proof to all countries mired in civil war that peace is always possible. dm/cmk (Reuters, AFP)At the end of 2016, the European Parliament, Council and Commission signed for the first time a joint declaration setting out a list of legislative proposals that should be given priority in the year ahead. The EU institutions pledged to prioritise six key areas: Employment and growth Social Europe Security Migration The digital single market Energy and climate change Find out more about the specific legislative files identified in these areas. A substantial number of proposals have already been dealt with by Parliament. Regarding security, MEPs approved a proposal to widen the scope of what constitutes terrorism-related offences across the EU, criminalising preparatory acts such as training to commit terrorist attacks and travelling abroad to join a terrorist group. New rules imposing systematic checks against databases on everyone entering or leaving the EU were also approved. In addition, MEPs endorsed tighter controls on blank-firing and deactivated guns to make sure they do not fall into the wrong hands. Building a thriving digital marketplace requires being able to meet the increasing demand for mobile data. With this in mind, MEPs voted in favour of making the 700 MHz band available for the next generation of mobile internet. They also cleared the last hurdle to the end of roaming by fixing caps on the fees that telecoms can charge each other. Parliament adopted its position on the reform of the EU's emissions trading scheme, which should improve the functioning of the EU market for carbon credits and create incentives for companies to invest in greener technologies. A package of measures to reduce landfilling of waste and boost recycling also received MEPs’ backing. On these two issues, Parliament still needs to reach an agreement with the Council on the final text of the legislation. MEPs are also negotiating with the member states in the Council on steps to tighten money laundering legislation, safeguard the security of gas supply and establish an EU agency for asylum with more powers compared to the existing European Asylum Support Office.BOSTON/HOUSTON (Reuters) - The crisis at Japan’s Fukushima plant could hit the U.S. nuclear-power industry in its weakest spot — by raising costs. Plant developers have spent years seeking approvals to build the nation’s first new nuclear reactors in three decades, arguing that nuclear power offered the United States an opportunity to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions and become less dependent on imported oil. They have been less vocal about the cost of building a nuclear plant — two to four times as much as for a coal or natural gas-burning power station. And with regulators seen mandating new safety measures in the wake of Japan’s crisis, the gap will only widen. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already launched a review of the nation’s 104 nuclear plants. It could consider an array of new safety measures at U.S. plants, from requiring passive cooling systems that could keep reactors and spent-fuel pools safe in the event of a power loss such as the Fukushima plant faces, to seeking stronger containment around spent-fuel pools, to mandating additional backup generators, experts interviewed by Reuters said. “This is going to impose significant costs, perhaps material costs, before we are done,” said John Rowe, chairman of Chicago-based power company Exelon Corp, the nation’s largest operator of nuclear power plants. The Fukushima plant was hit by a March 11 disaster beyond what the engineers who designed it some four decades ago had planned for. It was first rocked by a magnitude 9 earthquake that cut its connection to the power grid, then hammered by a tsunami that knocked out its backup electric systems. Just as the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks prompted security agencies around the world to redefine their concept of “worst-case scenario,” the Fukushima accident could prompt regulators to demand more robust nuclear plants. “I would hope that an accident of this significance... would lay bare the reality of nuclear power,” said Jim Riccio, nuclear policy analyst at environmental group Greenpeace. “If it doesn’t lead to a much higher level of questioning of the nuclear industry, then there’s something seriously wrong.” ECONOMICS ‘NOT GOOD’ Tougher defenses could raise the cost of new plants and force operators of current facilities — including the 23 using the General Electric Co Mark I design used at Fukushima — to pay for pricey upgrades. “The economics were not good at all for the U.S. to build new nuclear plants given the low (natural) gas prices and the outlook for huge reserves of gas,” said Jone-Lin Wang, managing director for global power for IHS CERA, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based consultancy that focuses on energy issues. The cost of building a new nuclear plant in the United States could range from $5 billion to $12 billion depending on the facility’s size. The higher debt burdens that nuclear plant operators carry due to their higher construction costs effectively erase the economic benefit of using a cheaper fuel stock. Prices of natural gas — another major source of electricity in the United States — have fallen about 69 percent from their last peak in July 2008, and the discovery of new supplies of shale gas leave some forecasters to conclude they will remain low for some time. At the current low for natural gas prices in the United States, electricity from nuclear plants and gas-fired plants is comparably priced. While some of the proposed design modifications may be comparatively inexpensive — diesel generators could add $10 million to $15 million to the tab — observers say new plants are on the margins of economic feasibility already. NRG Energy Inc has all but stopped work on a $10 billion Texas project, which Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Co helped it to develop. NRG warned that even a slight change in its design could kill the project outright. “The economics related to the capital budget are right on the edge of viability,” said NRG Chief Executive David Crane. Other companies that have proposed new U.S. nuclear plants include Southern Co, SCANA Corp, NextEra Energy Inc, Progress Energy and Duke Energy. PASSIVE APPEAL One technology that may gain more fans in the wake of the Fukushima crisis is passive cooling. At its simplest, such a system amounts to a large reservoir of water stored over the reactor that can slowly release its contents over time, keeping the reactor cool even if a blackout disables other systems. The idea of passive protection evolved after the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania, the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. “Following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, there was interest in developing a reactor with passive safety features and less dependence on operator actions,” said GE spokesman Andy Katell. “Utilities requested a reactor that was simpler to operate, with fewer components and no dependence on diesel generators for safety.” France’s Areva SA, Toshiba Corp’s Westinghouse unit and GE-Hitachi have all designed reactors with such passive protections as an inherent part of their design. “Adding more safety features can be expected to make nuclear power more expensive compared with other low-carbon alternatives that do not carry the same risk,” said Ellen Vancko, manager of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ nuclear energy and climate change project. “We all will have to decide at the end of the day, once lessons are learned, how much safety we are willing to pay for.” But there are engineering limits to how much can be done to make an existing nuclear plant safer. “Retrofitting an existing fleet of nuclear plants with new passive design is not practical and would require extensive re-engineering of the plant and changing out major pieces of equipment,” said Dean Oskvig, chief executive of Black & Veatch Corp’s energy arm, which helps engineer and build nuclear plants. “Passive designs are an advanced technology and not an add-on feature.” Companies that operate older reactors will likely face costly upgrades over the longer term, said Fitch Ratings. It noted that plants located in coastal and earthquake-prone areas — such as California — are most likely to be affected and that higher costs could weigh plant operators’ credit ratings. COSTS TO HIT OPERATORS History suggests that any large-scale retrofits of existing nuclear plants would be borne by plant operators, not the companies that designed and built the reactors. “We have gone through this after (Three Mile Island), where there were major retrofits,” said Fitch Ratings Senior Director Phil Smyth. “Ultimately, it becomes a capital/operating cost of the owner.” He said it is too early to say what these upgrades will cost. Meanwhile, huge new supplies of natural gas in the U.S. and the absence of any cost on carbon emissions have pared nuclear’s price advantage to near parity with gas and coal, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study. “The design issues of the reactors are going to be less important to the future of the nuclear industry than the economic ones,” said nuclear critic Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “This is a reminder that a $5 billion investment can go to a multibillion liability in a few hours.”Complete protection twentyfour hours a day is currently not available. Lyra needs to sleep and eat too, you know. Shipping not included. Humans pestering around in your local area? Are they desperately trying to date every mare possible? Then we have the solution for you. Lyra Heartstrings - the number one deterrent against the invading Homo Sapiens. Keeping your village safe! Call now and get a free plushie at no extra charge**!So yeah. Descriptions. I guess I'm getting faster at doing this kind of thing. This comic took two days to do, and then one extra day for some polish. I will make another version of this as an "what if Lyra wasn't somehow obsessed with humans?".Once I figure out something good, that is.This is one of the possible sequels to the Bravo vs Ponyville series. You'll find the rest here:Bravo vs. Ponyville #1(Rarity): [link] Bravo vs. Ponyville #2(Fluttershy): [link] Bravo vs. Ponyville #3(Pinkie Pie): [link] Bravo vs. Ponyville #4(Rainbow Dash): [link] Bravo vs. Ponyville #5(Applejack): [link] Bravo vs. Ponyville #6(Twilight Sparkle): [link] Bravo vs CMC: [link] Bravo vs Canterlot 1: [link]As part of its Xbox Live service, Microsoft promised to introduce more Primetime-oriented features, to help its users socialize more in a game show-style format. For a while there, the company really had something going with its video game adaptation of the hit TV show 1 vs. 100, only to cancel it out of the blue and leave several users bummed in the process. Fortunately, a new social experience is just around the corner, being introduced for the first time this weekend at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Full House Poker is a game where you play along with others through Xbox Live in full-on Texas Hold ‘Em fashion. True, this isn’t the first Texas Hold ‘Em oriented game to arrive on the service (the free Texas Hold ‘Em Poker game that came out a couple of years ago is still popular), but Full House Poker seems to be the most elaborate game based on the activity to date. Ante up with your friends to play Full House Poker via Xbox The game features a variety of modes to choose from. If you’re limited on time, you can jump into a quick two-player lightning match, raising the ante and seeing who can take all in a matter of minutes. If you’ve got a few more minutes to invest, however, you’ll want to take advantage of the 30-player tournaments that Microsoft will be hosting. Like any given World Series of Poker event, you’ll be able to enter into the lower ranks and, depending on how well you play, bluff your way to the final table and see if you can win the jackpot. AI players will be available as well, but c’mon, isn’t it more fun to take out your aggression on real card sharks? Probably the most important part of the game, however, is Texas Heat. This is a live poker TV show that airs across Xbox Live, put into a 30-minute format similar to 1 vs. 100. Here, a select number of opponents will have half-an-hour to bet and get to the final table, while users take part and watch all the action unfold. No word yet if this tournament will feature actual prizes (like 1 vs. 100 did for some time there), but it wouldn’t be surprising to see Microsoft offer something along the lines of Xbox Live subscriptions or points. Maybe even something more. With Full House Poker, you’ll be able to exhibit your bluffing skills just as effectively as your playing skills. You’ll have a series of unique tells available, which can easily throw off opponents into thinking you’ve got a better – or worse – hand than you actually have. You can also dress up your Avatar in different costumes to throw off your appearance. If you never thought you’d find the opportunity to dress up your virtual character in a cowboy outfit, you’d better think again, pilgrim. We never met a poker face we didn’t like. Best of all, you can take your Full House Poker experience on the go with you. Krome Studios developed a version for the Windows Phone 7 that ties into your Xbox Live account, so anything you earn (or lose) can be carried over into your Xbox 360 status. This is pretty cool, especially if you’re in the middle of a big game tournament that you don’t want to interrupt. Microsoft’s social poker game will hit Xbox Live later in February, as part of the company’s new House Party program (which will also include a new version of Bejeweled Blitz, Uprising: Hard Corps and Beyond Good and Evil HD). We’ll have continued coverage of Full House Poker in the weeks ahead, so you might want to get in your bluffing skills now. Considering the way we play, you will need them.(Newser) – Women who are able to get pregnant naturally and give birth in their mid-30s and after tend to live longer than other women, a new study suggests. Specifically, Boston researchers found that women who gave birth after age 33 were twice as likely to live to 95 than women who were done having kids at 29, reports Medical Daily. So what kind of effect should this have on a young couple's family planning? Not much, the co-author of the study in the journal Menopause tells the Boston Globe. “Women shouldn’t delay child-bearing based on this study,” says Thomas Perls. But he hopes it will get people to stop second-guessing women who become pregnant in middle age. "Critics say they’ll be too old to care for their teens or help raise their grandchildren," says Perls, "but I would wager that these women are aging exceptionally well.” One caveat: The extra longevity doesn't apply to women who use IVF or other technologies to get pregnant. So what's going on? Researchers think that women who are able to get pregnant and conceive at older ages have "genetic variants" that slow down their own aging, reports Counsel & Heal. What's more, by reproducing longer, they have a better chance of passing along those genes. "This possibility may be a clue as to why" many more women than men live to hit the century mark, says Perls. (Click to read about a woman who gave birth via IVF using her own 46-year-old egg.)Another famous hacker is joining the ranks at Apple. Following in the footsteps of jailbreak community members Comex, and Peter Hajas, jailbreak developer Winocm announced this afternoon on Twitter that he would be joining Apple. It’s still unclear as to what capacity he’ll be joining Apple, but if the past is any indication, it’s probably for an internship—Just like Hajas, and Comex a.k.a. Nicholas Allegra. I’ve reached out to Winocm for a comment, but he declined to elaborate. It looks like he’s already getting used to the Apple culture… https://twitter.com/winocm/status/436942799930679296 As for what he will actually be doing at Apple, it’s anyone’s guess at the moment. He’s proven to be a multifaceted talent in the iOS community, whose most high profile projects involved a series of jailbreak releases. Serious congratulations to Winocm. He’s been nothing but classy during the times I’ve had the privilege to interact with him. I’m sure this was a big dream of his, and it’s well-deserved. What do you think about Apple’s new hire?CLOSE Democrats staged a sit-in on the House floor on Tuesday and demanded a vote on gun control legislation.Video provided by Newsy Newslook Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D, walk into a news conference June 21, 2016 to unveil a bipartisan measure to ban gun sales to people on the no-fly list. (Photo: Mark Wilson, Getty Images) WASHINGTON – The Senate voted Thursday to allow further consideration of bipartisan legislation banning gun sales to people on the terrorism "no-fly" list. Senate Republicans could have killed the measure, but several sided with Democrats in allowing it to go forward. But it is not clear it has enough support to pass. Fifty-two senators voted to keep considering the bill, but it will ultimately need 60 votes to be adopted. Majority Whip Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, had called it a "test vote to see what it looks like.” It doesn't look great. To reach the threshold, supporters could set their sights on picking up the backing of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, outspoken advocates for a no-fly/no-buy ban who didn't vote Thursday. But they would then have to flip six Republicans who voted to kill the legislation, a daunting task. Still, Democrats declared victory in simply keeping the compromise — crafted by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine., and a handful of colleagues from both parties — alive for another chance. "We won the vote, Collins won that vote," Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Nev., said, adding that the National Rifle Association "lost this one." He called on Republican leaders to allow another vote to actually try and pass the proposal. "It’s the right thing for the country," Reid said. The effort to forge the compromise began last week after Democrats led by Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy filibustered for nearly 15 hours on the Senate floor demanding a vote on gun control. The chamber took votes Monday defeating four partisan gun proposals largely along party lines. In order to succeed with the current party split in the Senate, legislation needs support from both sides of the aisle, so those advocating any changes to gun laws have shifted their hopes to Collins' compromise proposal, even though it’s a narrow sliver of what gun control advocates had called for after the massacre Jun 12 in Orlando. It would ban gun sales to roughly 109,000 people, including 2, 700 Americans, who are on two lists: The no-fly list, which prevents them from boarding commercial planes flying to, from or over the United States; and a so-called “selectee list,” which mandates they receive extra scrutiny at airports before flying. The measure, proposed as an amendment to a spending bill funding the Justice Department, would allow individuals denied firearms to appeal in court. It would also mandate notification of law enforcement if someone who was on broader terrorism watch lists within the past five years tries to buy a gun. Orlando shooter Omar Mateen had been on a watch list in 2013 and 2014 but was taken off when the FBI closed its investigation of him. He legally purchased a semi-automatic rifle and pistol before launching the killing spree at Pulse nightclub that left 49 dead and 53 others injured. Under Collins’ amendment, federal authorities would have had to have been notified of the purchases, giving them an opportunity to surveil him and possibly prevent his tragic scheme. While public attention shifted to the Democrats’ sit-in on the House floor demanding a vote there on gun control, Collins and supporters of her amendment had quietly been trying to drum up votes. Murphy, who led the filibuster last week, said Thursday's vote "represented the largest defection of Republicans from the gun lobby in the modern history of the anti-gun violence movement." “Between the Senate filibuster, the House sit-in, and this vote, we have helped create a massive uprising of support in favor of laws to make our nation safer from gun violence," he said. "And while I know we are far from the finish line, this has been a momentous last eight days for this crusade.” Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/28SUrSkMUMBAI: The central government’s decision to modernise 400 railway stations in India has brightened the growth prospects for food service companies such as Travel Food Service (TFS), Lite Bite Foods, Jubilant Foodworks among others, within the travel retail sector. Indian Railways handle over 800 crore passengers a year — a huge captive business for companies.“When it comes to Indian Railways, there are various local and unorganised players who run the railway canteens on long-term tenders and sometimes they are run by the government,” said Ankur Bisen, vice-president, retail at Technopak Consultants, adding that this potential can be well tapped by the organised players with efficient systems and technology.The government plans to modernise 400 railway stations under A1 and A categories which have an annual passenger earning of more than Rs 50 crore, including key stations in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Bhopal, Jaipur, etc.With the rapid growth of passenger traffic and growing disposable income, brands cannot choose to ignore this segment for too long. For instance, railway stations handle over one lakh passengers a day and these passengers on an average spend around Rs 100-125 on a meal.“While the passenger spends in a railway station are less than that of an airport, the former will give us almost double the volume of business than in an airport,” said Gaurav Dewan chief operating officer, TFS, which has recently won the contract to develop food courts at Pune and Vishakhapatnam railway stations. The company, a subsidiary of K Hospitality Corp, is partnering local F&B brands in these markets to bring the local flavour.“Customers in a railway station look for more regional and local cuisine which should be competitively priced and easy on the pockets,” said Dewan.There are four kinds of F&B formats in railway stations — food courts, kiosks, vending and onboard catering — which are tendered by Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC).Industry experts point that setting up a food court at a station entails an investment of around Rs 15-20 crore.According to Varun Kapur, director, TFS, the company has readied investments to the tune of Rs 200 crore in railways and airports over the next 2-3 years.Jubilant Foodworks, which runs Domino’s Pizza and Dunkin’ Donuts in the country, recently started a trial project with IRCTC to deliver pizzas onboard 201 trains and 41 stations. “This is qualitatively a big opportunity and we are very positive about it, but we cannot ascertain it’s quantum without a trial of consumer response to this new service and also logistical feasibility of delivering hot and tasty pizzas on train seats,” said Harneet Singh Rajpal, senior vice-president, marketing, Domino’s Pizza India.Lite Bite Foods too has initiated discussions with the railway authorities to develop its brands in stations. “Railways is a huge opportunity and untapped potential for us,” said Rohit Aggarwal, director, Lite Bite Foods, which owns quick service restaurant brands such as Punjab Grill, Street Food by Punjab Grill and Bistro Café Baker Street. The company’s recent joint venture with US-based food service firm HMSHost will bid for the railway projects, said Aggarwal.A Money Metals Exchange Exclusive - The Ultra Low Premium Silver HMS Bounty from the New Zealand Mint Money Metals is pleased to announce that we have been designated as the only dealer worldwide for a stunning new 1 oz.999 silver coin, the New Zealand Mint’s “HMS Bounty” – the lowest priced 1 oz legal tender silver coin in the world, period! The content and purity of the NZ Bounty are identical to those of silver American Eagles, yet premiums on this exciting new issue are much lower. The NZ Bounty is also priced lower than the Austrian Philharmonic,British Britannia, Canadian Maple Leaf coins, and the list goes on. You already know Money Metals as America’s most trusted source of low-premium precious metals. Tens of thousands of customers trust Money Metals to bring them the most metal for their money in a wide range of legal tender as well as privately minted formats. Now we’re proud to serve our customers as the exclusive dealer for this ultra-low premium legal tender coin. The NZ Bounty is not only an outstanding value in legal tender silver. It’s also a spectacular mint silver coin. The obverse features Queen Elizabeth II and bears the coin’s legal tender denomination which is a face value of two New Zealand dollars. The reverse depicts Her Majesty’s Ship Bounty under sail, circumscribed by an eight-point compass. Also, its weight and purity is guaranteed by the New Zealand Mint. The HMS Bounty: A three-masted merchant vessel built in England in 1784, the HMS Bounty was purchased by the Royal Navy in 1787. She was sent to the Pacific under command of William Bligh to acquire breadfruit plants from Tahiti and transport them to the British West Indies in hopes of producing edible harvests. In September 1788, the ship sailed past the southern tip of New Zealand on its long and arduous voyage. The mission was aborted in April 1789 following a mutiny led by Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian. This was the famous Mutiny on the Bounty, subject of three films including the 1935 classic starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable. The mutineers burned the ship on Pitcairn Island in 1790 in order to avoid detection by the Royal Navy, which sought to return them to England for trial. The remains of the Bounty were discovered in 1957, and various parts have been salvaged. Though its service was short and its end tragic, the Bounty remains a bold symbol of the global quest for wealth and prosperity. The New Zealand Mint: The New Zealand Mint has been producing legal tender coins, bullion, and collectible medallions for more than four decades. New Zealand’s only precious metals mint, it prides itself on high quality design and production. The Bounty was specifically produced for the south Pacific island of Niue(NEW-ay), a self-governing state in free association with New Zealand; its residents are New Zealand citizens, and New Zealand conducts most diplomatic relations on its behalf.Running season is in full swing, and the local races keep on coming. In June, runners can participate in everything from 5K fun runs to half marathons and overnight relay races. Whether you’re training for the Bank of America Chicago Marathon or simply enjoying the warm outdoors, there’s a race to satisfy everyone in June. June 1 North Shore Half Marathon: This 13.1-mile course takes runners through neighborhoods in the north suburbs, including the historic Fort Sheridan. The race begins and ends in downtown Highland Park. Runners will also contribute to charity when registering. For every person who registers for the half marathon, RAM Racing will donate $5 to Misericordia Heart of Mercy. United Run for the Zoo: Join the running herd in a 5K or 10K race through the Lincoln Park Zoo. The course takes runners through the zoo and along the lakefront path before ending at the Kovler Lion House. June 5 Totally Awesome 80’s 5k: Celebrate Throwback Thursday with an 80’s-themed 5K in Grant Park. The post-race party features a DJ mixing 80’s tunes, and runners are encouraged to wear their best 80’s attire -- leg warmers, tube socks and all. June 6 Ragnar Relay Chicago: This overnight relay race sounds more intense than it actually is. It’s meant to be more of a fun run for dedicated runners with at least 11 runner friends. The race begins in Madison, Wis., and ends in Chicago. Each team member runs three times with each leg somewhere between three and eight miles. By the time your team reaches downtown Chicago, you will have run approximately 200 miles together. June 7 Run Home Chicago: Join a fundraising team in a 5K run/walk to help end homelessness in Chicago. Run Home Chicago is organized by the Primo Center for Women and Children, an organization that addresses housing needs in the Chicago area. Bacon Chase: Run the 5K or the 0.05K in a race that’s all about bringing home the bacon. No matter which race you choose, the prizes are the same -- unlimited bacon at the finish line, bacon bits along the course, a free Bloody Mary and a bacon-scented race bib. Energizer Night Race: Give the gift of light in this unique global night race series. Chicago is the only U.S. city to take part in th race this year, but cities across the globe are taking turns hosting it. In honor of the race, Energizer Battery Company is donating 14 million hours of solar light to communities without electricity around the world. Runners receive LED headlights to wear while they run to support the mission and light the path. June 14 Trot Against Trafficking: Head to Park Ridge to run a 5K and support organizations working to end human trafficking. All proceeds of the race go to Room to Read, an organization that promotes literacy and gender equality in education in developing countries, and Girls Education and Mentoring Services (G.E.M.S.), an organization dedicated to empowering girls and young women who have experienced sexual exploitation in the human trafficking system. June 21 PAWS Chicago Run for Their Lives: Bring your pup and embark on an 8K run or a 4K walk to support PAWS Chicago, a no-kill animal shelter. Participants can fundraise at least $86 or pay an $86 registration fee to pay for one animal at PAWS to be spayed or neutered. Participants and their pets can enjoy food, snacks, a doggie buffet and adult beverages after the race. June 26 Disco Dash: Get your groove thing on at the Disco Dash in a 5K or 10K race followed by a groovy after party. Disco tribute band The Shagadelics will perform at the post-race party. Costumes are encouraged, and cash prizes will be awarded to the funkiest male and female runners. June 28 Proud To Run: Join the Pride Week festivities at the Proud To Run 10K or 5K races along Chicago’s lakefront. Money raised from the event supports local LGBT organizations, including the youth theater group About Face Theatre, The Night Ministry and LGBT running group Frontrunner/Frontwalkers Chicago.
a rather disturbing fetish for costumed heroes. Superstitious and Cowardly (#214) By Christos N. Gage and Phil Winslade Famed assassin Deadshot returns to Gotham, following the events of Infinity Crisis, to kill a witness who is set to testify against a corrupt businessman. Knowing of his recent heroic actions during the crossover as part of the Secret Six, Batman must find a way to convince Deadshot to abandon the contract to kill the witness. Viewpoint (#0) A preview of upcoming stories published during the Post-Zero Hour "Zero Month" event. Note: Vince Giarrano produced the framing sequences between the previews. Two of the preview stories featured were never published. Duel (Annual #1) By Dennis O'Neil, Jim Aparo, Keith Giffen, Malcolm Jones III, Joe Quesada, Josef Rubenstein, Tom Lyle, Ty Templeton Dan Spiegle, James Blackburn, and Michael Golden Mike Mignola (Cover Artist) Batman has illusions about the metaphorical "burden" he has to carry. Vows (Annual #2) By Dennis O'Neil, Michael Netzer, and Luke McDonnell Transformation (Annual #3) By Dennis O'Neil, Mike Manley, Luke McDonnell, Gray Morrow, and Ricardo Villagran Azreal, who is replacing the injured Bruce Wayne as Batman, must help a disillusioned priest who has recently gained superpowers fight an army of alien creatures feeding on humans in Gotham. Notes: Part of the 1993 "Bloodlines" DC Annual crossover. Citizen Wayne (Annual #4) By Brian Augustyn, Mark Waid, Joe Staton, and Horacio Ottolini Note: Part of the 1994 "Elseworlds" Annual event, featuring DC characters in various Elseworld scenarios. Wings (Annual #5) By Chuck Dixon and Quique Alcatena Batman and the Man-Bat's first encounter is retold through the point-of-view of the Man-Bat. Note: Part of the 1995 "Year One" banner event involving that year's DC Annuals. Features a retelling of the origin of the Man-Bat, originally from Detective Comics #400. Executioner (Annual #6) By Alan Grant, Barry Kitson, and Vince Giarrano I Am A Gun (Annual #7) By James Robinson, Steve Yeowell, and Russ Heath 2012–present series [ edit ] The Butler Did It (#1) By Damon Lindelof and Jeff Lemire All of the Above (#1) By Jonathan Larsen and J.G. Jones The Crime Never Committed (#1) By Tom Taylor and Nicola Scott Crisis in Identity (#2) By B. Clay Moore and Ben Templesmith Letters to Batman (#3) By Steve Niles and Trevor Hairsine A Game to Die for (#4) By T.J. Fixman and Christopher Mitten Batman The Movie (#4) By Andrew Dabb and Giorgio Pontrelli Together (#4) By Jonathan Larsen and Tan Eng Huat Slam! (#5) By Joshua Hale Fialkov and Phil Hester Gotham Spirit (#6) By Jeff Parker and Gabriel Hardman Dungeons and Dragons (#6) By Michael Avon Oeming Look Inside (#6) By Rob Williams and Juan Jose Ryp Haunted Arkham (#7) By Joe Harris and Jason Masters Continuity [ edit ] Technically, most of the stories in LOTDK are in the accepted Batman continuity, albeit with a number of exceptions. These include stories set in the year 3000, Batman being a cyborg, certain Joker or Clayface stories that just do not fit chronologically and many more. Many of the stories share a lot of elements with the regular Batman and Detective Comics and have often been referenced in modern continuity, notably Leslie Thompkins' discovery of Batman's identity, the origin of Bane's drug Venom, the characterization of Hugo Strange, the origin of the Batcave, and others. Whereas most comic book titles move forward chronologically, Legends tells stories in random order, mainly focusing on Years One through Five, but sometimes including canonical stories after that time as well.[1]Batman Confidential was a series with which the original Legends utilized a similar literary format. DC has stated that the 2012 stories of the series are not set in the Batman continuity.[6] Specials [ edit ] In the 1990s, writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale collaborated on three Halloween specials[7] collected as Batman: Haunted Knight that led them to create Batman: The Long Halloween as stated in the introduction to the book by Jeph Loeb. The three specials are titled Fears (1993), Madness (1994) and Ghosts (1995). In the last, based on A Christmas Carol, Bruce is visited by three spirits on Halloween, that of Poison Ivy (the spirit of Halloween Past), The Joker (the spirit of Halloween Present), and a cloaked, skeletal version of Batman (the spirit of Halloween Yet To Come). Having been immersed so much in stopping crime for nearly two years (the time being Year Two in which the story takes place), Bruce undergoes a change, much like Ebenezer Scrooge, in which he is reminded what it is to be human. Another special released was Batman Jazz (1995), written by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger. Crossovers [ edit ] The Destroyer - #27 - #27 KnightQuest - #59-61 - #59-61 Knight's End - #62-63 - #62-63 No Man's Land - #116-126 - #116-126 War Games - #182-184 Writers [ edit ] Dennis O'Neil #1-5, 16-20, 27, 50, 59-61, 63, 100, 127-131, Annual #1-3 #1-5, 16-20, 27, 50, 59-61, 63, 100, 127-131, #1-3 Grant Morrison #6-10 #6-10 Doug Moench #11-15, 46-49, 86-88, 137-141, 146-148 #11-15, 46-49, 86-88, 137-141, 146-148 Mike W. Barr #21-23 #21-23 Howard Chaykin #24-26 #24-26 Matt Wagner #28-30 #28-30 James Hudnall #31 #31 James Robinson #32-34, 71-73, 85, 102-104, 114, Annual #7 #32-34, 71-73, 85, 102-104, 114, #7 Bo Hampton & 'Mark Kneece #35-36 & 'Mark Kneece Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning #37, 95-97 & #37, 95-97 Alan Grant #38, 52-53, 89-90, Annual #6 #38, 52-53, 89-90, #6 Bryan Talbot #39-40 #39-40 Tom Joyner #41 #41 John Francis Moore #42-43 #42-43 Steven Grant #44-45, 69-70 #44-45, 69-70 Robert Loren Fleming #51 #51 Mike Mignola #54 #54 Chuck Dixon #55–57, 62, 124, 142–145, Annual #5 #55–57, 62, 124, 142–145, #5 Graham Brand #58 #58 Jamie Delano #64 #64 J.M. DeMatteis #65-68, 149-153 #65-68, 149-153 Ted McKeever #74-75 #74-75 Scott Hampton #76-78 #76-78 Mark Millar #79 #79 James Vance #80-82 #80-82 Warren Ellis #83-84 #83-84 Garth Ennis #91-93 #91-93 Michael T. Gilbert #94 #94 Paul Jenkins #98–99 #98–99 C.J. Henderson #105-106 #105-106 Archie Goodwin #0, 132-136 #0, 132-136 Dwayne McDuffie #156-158, 164-167 #156-158, 164-167 Bill Willingham #168 Lee Marrs #107–108 #107–108 Steve Englehart 109–111 109–111 Dan Vado #112–113 #112–113 Darren Vincenzo #115 Artists [ edit ] Marshall Rogers #132-136 Collected editions [ edit ] Several of the stories from the title have been collected into trade paperbacks including the following: Awards [ edit ] Issues #116-126 of the series were part of the No Man's Land storyline, which won the Comics Buyer's Guide Fan Award for Favorite Story for 2000. Specials and spin-offs [ edit ] There are three annual Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Specials written by Jeph Loeb with art by Tim Sale, which were reprinted in Batman: Haunted Knight; the popularity of these led to the limited series Batman: The Long Halloween. The short-lived series Legends of the DC Universe was based on the concept of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight. But instead of Batman, it featured a rotating roster of other DC superheroes. The Batman: Mitefall special used the modern version of Bat-Mite, who first appeared in Legends of the Dark Knight #38, to parody the Batman Knightfall storyline. Batman: Four of a Kind chronicles Batman's four first meetings with the Batman villains Poison Ivy, the Riddler, the Scarecrow and the Man-Bat. Those stories were printed in the Annuals of the four Batman comic book series of that time: Batman: Shadow of the Bat, Detective Comics, Batman and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight. See also [ edit ]In his recent confirmation hearing for the Defense Secretary post, current CIA chief Leon Panetta commented that the next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a cyberattack that cripples" America’s electrical grid and its security and financial systems. I don’t think we would be taking to much risk to simply drop the "very well" and definitively assert that will be the case. Just glance at a handful of headlines from today and you can begin to see the rising global temperature around vulnerable systems and the data they hold. As details emerge related to the compromises at the IMF, Sony, Bethesda Software, the US Senate and Citi Group I’m struck by a few things. First, these are just the attacks that are making the news. In the case of LulzSec these revelations seem to be for entertainment value. But, the others seem to only be hitting the headlines as the data being compromised becomes much more personal in its nature- bank transactions, account numbers and in the case of the IMF- Because the fund has been at the center of economic bailout programs for Portugal, Greece and Ireland — and possesses sensitive data on other countries that may be on the brink of crisis — its database contains potentially market-moving information. It also includes communications with national leaders as they negotiate, often behind the scenes, on the terms of international bailouts. Those agreements are, in the words of one fund official, “political dynamite in many countries.” Second, and perhaps building on the first, these attacks appear to be increasing in their sophistication. I can’t help but think that the real pros aren’t hitting the headlines, but there seems to be an increasing number of amateurs learning the craft. As they tinker in public they are able to spread the information they learn that much more quickly. What today may be done for vanity, can very easily turn into something darker and more lucrative at scale. As a consultant on the Citi breach notes “if you think financially motivated breaches are huge now, just wait another year.” Finally, unlike Pearl Harbor, most of the attack targets are still unaware of who is doing the attacking. Each of the instances listed above seem to be littered with the term “unclear” As in, it’s unclear who was actually behind the attack. Or, it’s unclear what data was stolen. As Nick pressed with Sony’s Jack Tretton: Q: Do you know who attacked Sony? A: No. We still have no insights into who attacked us. 80 million compromised accounts later- no insights. Its very likely that if we have a Pearl Harbor like threat to the United States it will not come from a single country but an “unclear” network banded together through purpose and technology yet distributed around the globe. As I said a few weeks back, anonymity will continue to play an increasing central role in the future of the web. I also believe that as these attacks become more and more visible individual consumers will be forced to think seriously about the nature of their personal data and online personas. Security and privacy are sorely lacking from the vocabulary of the average facebook or twitter user. But as we paint a more complete pictures of ourselves and our lives online I can’t help but think we’ll long for the days when it was just advertisers that were looking to target us better. There will be plenty of investment opportunity In the build up to the coming privacy panic. I’m still wrapping my head around what those might look like, but there’s an increasing amount of signal here worth exploring.Court rules that Islamist party's assets should be confiscated as crackdown on supporters of Mohamed Morsi escalates The Egyptian authorities have banned the Muslim Brotherhood, sealing the marginalisation of the Islamist movement that was the country's most powerful political group until as recently as the July overthrow of Mohamed Morsi. A court on Monday ordered the freezing of the Brotherhood's assets and also banned its spin-off groups, state media reported. In practice, the group had almost been forced underground already by the arrest this summer of thousands of its members – including most of its leaders – and the killing of about 1,000 more. It is a familiar predicament for the Brotherhood, which has been banned for most of its 85-year history and has successfully fought off every threat to its existence. Originally banned under Gamal Abdel Nasser, it was tacitly tolerated under his successor, Anwar Sadat. During the last years of Hosni Mubarak's regime, several of its members were allowed to be elected to parliament in an independent capacity. "I don't think it will have an effect," Ahmed Ragheb, a pro-Morsi activist close to several leading Brotherhood members, said of the new ban. "People think the Brotherhood can be dissolved through governmental decisions. But it has existed for 85 years and survived far worse." The group's London-based spokesman, Abdullah al-Haddad, tweeted: "The Muslim Brotherhood are part and parcel of Egyptian society. Corrupt illegitimate judicial decisions cannot change that … [The Muslim Brotherhood] will continue to be present on the ground: they cannot kill an idea, they tried before and failed – they are trying again and they will fail." Brotherhood members who remain at liberty say that the arbitrary arrests and state-led killings of their colleagues remain a far more serious threat to the organisation's operational capacity. Only a handful of senior Brothers dare live in the open, and two recently told the Guardian that they were unsure of who was now in charge of the group, following the arrest of its leader, Mohamed Badie, and his deputies. Young members say this breakdown in communication has made the group more fragmented, and also finally given them the chance to have more say in the activities of the group, which is usually highly hierarchical. "Now the youth are just by themselves," said Ragheb. "And they work together far better than when the leaders are involved. Now that the leadership is gone, no one needs to ask permission for anything any more." In an example of the Brotherhood's current organisational chaos, a group of younger members spent over two months drafting an apology for some of the mistakes the movement made during the post-Mubarak period. But when the statement was released on a Brotherhood-linked website, one of the remaining Brotherhood leaders instantly ordered its removal, claiming it did not represent the group. Ragheb said this had frustrated young members but claimed they still wanted to remain part of the group. "No one is going to leave. But it's going to get more revolutionary," he argued. Thought to number between 300,000 and 1 million members, the Brotherhood remains highly unpopular among much of the rest of Egypt's population of 85 million, who blame the group for trying to grab too much power following Morsi's election in 2012.THE four-year NRL exile is over. Finally, Sandor Earl’s NRL comeback can kick-off and it starts next month when he joins Melbourne for pre-season training. Foxsports.com.au understands the 28-year-old has inked a one-year-deal with the Storm as he attempts to complete one of the great rugby league redemption stories. The Storm are expected to confirm the signing this week with Earl posting on social media on Monday that; “It’s a special week. “By week’s end we will announce a new chapter and a new beginning. “I say WE because this journey has been a rollercoaster for so much more than myself. My partner Steph, my family, close friends, my manager and mentor and everyone who took even a second out of their day to offer me support. Sandor Earl playing for the Raiders. Source: Getty Images “A new club opens the door to a group that will become family and brothers. I walk in a new man armed with a fresh perspective full of new goals and an extremely positive outlook on the future.” Earl was exiled from the game in 2013 courtesy of a doping ban handed down by ASADA. Earl’s suspension for trafficking of peptides ended in late August. While several clubs registered interest in the winger, including the Dragons and Eels, he is now based in Melbourne. Returning in peak physical condition, the fitness guru has been training solo. Under the rules of his ASADA sanction, Earl was forbidden to associate with any sports team while suspended. Sandor Earl pictured training on his lonesome at Albert Park in Melbourne. Source: News Corp Australia Pushing himself in the gym, a lean Earl has added muscle to his frame to better deal with the physical demands of the NRL. While Earl and the Storm are yet to officially confirm the deal, Earl said he’s more determined than ever to make his return to the game a success. “My mindset is to strip myself back to a first time rookie,” Earl continued to write on social media. “I have overcome adversity and ultimately that will set me up for the greatest success. “I have worked hard no doubt to get to this point BUT the hard work is only just beginning. I will work tirelessly at my trade, value every moment and take on new teachings to offer the best version of myself and be the best I can be.” Over four seasons at the Roosters, Penrith and Canberra, Earl has scored 23 tries in 48 games.With 21 campaign events scheduled this week, persistent Republican hopeful Newt Gingrich does not appear willing to appease those who want him out of the presidential race. With wife Callista, Mr. Gingrich embarks on intensely local appearances in Delaware and North Carolina: he’ll frequent regional GOP luncheons, visit a library, an azalea festival and elementary schools. He’ll throw out the first pitch at a Gardner-Webb University baseball game and brave an appearance at the North Carolina Zoo — which has puffins but no penguins. The candidate was nipped by the latter last week during a zoo appearance; but that is history. Mr. Gingrich continues to bill himself as “the last conservative standing,” and he remains standing as Tuesday’s five primaries loom, continually reminding the press of his local endorsements from the likes of “former first lady of the National Rifle Association” Ingrid Sigler, and in Delaware, chairman Bill Sahm of the Northern New Castle County GOP; plus Hans Reigle, chairman of the Kent County Republican Party. “I previously endorsed Gov. [Mitt] Romney, but since then, Newt is the only candidate who has shown a willingness to meet and talk with Delaware voters for more than an hour,” Mr. Reigle observes. MAHER MAUL “Newt Gingrich is still receiving Secret Service protection. What are they protecting him from? Reality?” (HBO host Bill Maher, on Mr. Gingrich.) AND IN SUMMATION “Obama strategist David Axelrod spends another Sunday morning pretending Obama hasn’t been president for the past three years,” says the Republican National Committee, in review of Mr. Axelrod appearances on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. The Grand Old Party collectively deems the appearances as “Axelrod’s World of Make Believe,” adding that while “Obama added nearly $5 trillion to the national debt, Axelrod says we don’t want policies that bankrupt our country.” OLBERMANNIA For those keeping score, former ESPN, Fox News, CNN and Current TV analyst Keith Olbermann surfaced Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” in which he addressed dogs in politics, the Secret Service scandal and baseball. Mr. Stephanopoulos could not hide his delight in it all. Gleaned from a series of the host’s Tweets that began Thursday: “Can’t wait for Keith Olbermann’s debut,” “Keith Olbermann has arrived on set and is prepping,” and finally to Mr. Olbermann himself, “Fantastic having you on the roundtable. Hope to see you back soon.” “Thank you George. My privilege,” the guest Tweeted back. THE RESTLESS PLANET Millions seek a new permanent home, and the leading destination is America, according to Gallup, which surveyed 452,199 adults in 151 countries to find out. “About 13 percent of the world’s adults — or more than 640 million people — say they would like to leave their country permanently. Roughly 150 million of them say they would like to move to the U.S. — giving it the undisputed title as the world’s most desired destination for potential migrants since Gallup started tracking these patterns,” analyst Jon Clifton says. Almost a quarter cited the U.S. as their first choice. Britain was in second place with 7 percent, Canada followed with 6 percent and France with 5 percent. Saudi Arabia, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy and the United Arab Emirates rounded out the Top 10. “Potential migrants who say they would like to move to the U.S. are most likely to come from populous countries such as China (22 million potentials), Nigeria (15 million), India (10 million), Bangladesh (8 million), or Brazil (7 million),” Mr. Clifton notes. See more here: www.gallup.com BUMPER PATROL “I express my individuality by displaying mass-produced bumper stickers.” (Bumper sticker spotted in Severna Park, Md., by Inside the Beltway reader Ed Maddox). INTELLECTUAL LIGHTS They married in 1956 and have been stalwarts of neoconservative thinking and reason for decades. Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz have won the Heritage Foundation’s highest honor: the Clare Boothe Luce Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the conservative movement in America. The couple is in good company. Past recipients include Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and William F. Buckley. Heritage board Chairman Thomas Saunders praised the pair as “intellectual lights who burn all the brighter because they have never lost sight of human nature and human needs” while president Ed Feulner deemed them “institution builders” who uplifted the public debate with compelling arguments. Among many things, Mr. Podhoretz — prolific essayist and author — served as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine for 35 years and as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His spouse, herself a canny journalist and deft social critic, was a senior fellow at the Institute on Religion and Public Life, served on Heritage’s board of trustees and was pivotal in founding the Committee for the Free World and the Independent Women’s Forum. POLL DU JOUR • 38 percent of Americans say the economy will improve in the next 12 months; 19 percent expect it to get worse, 42 percent expect it to “stay the same.” • 36 percent say President Obama’s policies “helped” the economy; 33 percent say they “hurt” it, 30 percent say his policies have not made much difference on the economy. • 32 percent say that if Mitt Romney wins the presidential election, economic conditions will be “helped.” • 24 percent say economic conditions will be hurt, 39 percent say his election will not make much difference. • 31 percent say that if Mr. Obama wins re-election this year, economic conditions will be “helped.” • 30 percent say economic conditions will be “hurt,” 37 percent say his re-election will not make much difference. Source: An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted April 13 to 17. • Feats of derring-do, stifled yawns to [email protected] Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.MIAMI - A Miami-Dade County commissioner has designed a model for a proposed Major League Soccer stadium next to Marlins Park in Miami, the third such formal proposal for a site since David Beckham announced he was bringing soccer to South Florida earlier this year. Commissioner Xavier L. Suarez presented the model for the 40,000-seat stadium Wednesday afternoon. Several parcels of land would need to be acquired for the stadium dream to become a reality, but a news release from Suarez's office said it is "feasible and not costly since the infrastructure is already in place." "Someone somewhere along the lines said something about this location not being ideal," Suarez told Local 10 News. "I don't know why it wouldn't be. It's not next to a body of water. It's not next to the bay, but you can't have everything." Suarez was referring to two other sites that Beckham and his team of investors had set their sights on -- the PortMiami site and a boat slip at Museum Park next to the AmericanAirlines Arena. Both of those proposed sites were rejected. Suarez said this site has the support of Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado and other commissioners. The question remains whether Beckham would support the location. Compared to the $50 million Beckham's group would have to spend to build a waterfront venue, the commissioner believes his plan is more practical. Copyright 2014 by Local10.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Skywanderers is a sandbox game set in a procedural galaxy, with a heavy focus on exploration and creative freedom. I have been creating this game as a one-man passion project. Let me show you what it is about and why I need you! It will be distributed via Steam for Windows. To watch the trailer + video with HD quality, go here! You can build many things in Skywanderers. My vision is to create a building experience that feels intuitive and tangible, as if you were actually playing with real bricks. Green hull and canopy are made from blocks, all the rest is bricks! The game uses the one-meter voxel block that we all know and love. In addition to blocks, I created the brick system in order to build smaller details and mechanisms. The player can use a wide array of bricks of many forms and functions. They can be combined using stud connections: Mobile user: if the gif does not play you can access all the gifs here! There are no prefabs in Skywanderers, you have the complete freedom to design everything from scratch. Let's say you want a cockpit for your fighter: you get to create your own custom seat, build a canopy, an opening mechanism, and design the command layout. Now you can create custom doors, ramps, cozy interiors, weapon mounts, retractable landing gears, or anything else you can imagine! The game offers a comprehensive choice of logical gates and various rotators and sliders. You can also paint anything: blocks, bricks, weapons, engines, commands, even lights! This means you can create a lot of very cool stuff, from big warships, to little shuttles or small fighters, or anything else you can imagine! The Basalisk is a 400m long behemoth warship. I also added mechs! They are really easy to setup, you can choose your stance: eastern (Gundam like) or western (mechwarrior like) style, and soon multi-legged crawlers will be added. I have just added hovercrafts, and one day you will be able to create cars, tanks and monorails! Land speeders are a lot of fun to race with your friends! All my testers really enjoyed building in Skywanderers - and we are just starting to tap into the potential of the brick system. It is a really fresh and new way to build, I am sure you will enjoy it too! Exploration is a major focus of the game. From mining rare resources in order to craft a unique technology, to venturing in the lawless outer rim to hunt a wanted pirate. Or just simply for the sake of exploring! I am dedicated to creating a rich and immersive galaxy for you to explore. You start your journey using the holomap, where you can select your warp destination, or scan for nearby ships, stations or points of interest. Then punch it and warp to a new system! With Skywanderers, I want to go beyond the simple generic random skybox formula and have the player truly immersed in the galaxy. So everything from stars, clouds of dust occluding the galatic core, or nearby nebulae are accurately computed using their mathematical representations and your relative position in the galaxy. This means that when you look into the sky each feature of the skybox is really there. Left: Close to the galactic core \| Right: Further away Explore truly volumetric and procedural nebulae: each system gets an accurate view on them depending on their viewpoint. Warp inside a nebula, and you will get a truly stunning and colorful vista! Fly inside and mine planetary rings. Land on and explore ring space habitats. Some being over one thousand kilometer wide! This still is a very early Work in Progress, the terrain's look especially will be improved. I've spent a lot of time creating a robust and fast procedural technology that allows you to transition seamlessly between all the various locations of a system. Soon I will add more stellar objects and hazards including: black holes, pulsars, large asteroids and comets… Check the FAQ for the plan about planets. Until now my focus has been on crafting the hard tech behind the voxel building and the procedural generation engine. It was a lot of work! But it's getting there so now it's time for me to focus on three aspects: Polish, bugfix and optimization of existing components. There are some key refactorings I would like to do on top of the bugfix and polish phase expected in every game development cycle. There are some key refactorings I would like to do on top of the bugfix and polish phase expected in every game development cycle. Multiplayer functionalities. Although multiplayer is already a part of the game it needs more attention. Multiplayer is notoriously harder to test! . Although multiplayer is already a part of the game it needs more attention. Multiplayer is notoriously harder to test! Traditional gameplay other than building and exploration. I want to give the player a sense of purpose that will push him/her to build ships and explore the galaxy. This means systems design including weapon balancing, power systems, shield or armor balancing. But also mining, crafting, trading, or missions like bounty hunting. To do this I need time! I have been self funding the development of Skywanderers for a year now, so to continue I will need additional funding. Just as important, I also need testers: this is where you enter the picture! Indeed I need people motivated by the potential of the game to test, provide feedback on existing or planned mechanics, and build and play in multiplayer. My goal is to have hundreds of testers spending thousands of hours collectively in the game before I hit Steam, to get a successful launch without hiccups. Making the Archimedes pushed the game forward in many different ways. Creating this game solo does not mean I have been alone: I am actually very lucky to already have a small community around the game! They helped me tremendously by hunting bugs, making me improve the building logic, feeding me with crazy build ideas and more generally pushing the game to its limits (special thanks to the 1600m Imperial Star Destroyer, and all those hinges / rotators stack madness). If you are curious check out what they have been building! I hope you will join us in this adventure, together we can make a great game! How much we will raise will dictate how I plan the next months of development. Here is what will happen, think of it as a three stage Saturn 5 rocket: First Stage = Base Goal of 15000 EUR: The heavy lifting. This goal will allow me to work full time for 6 months before the early access release. I will focus on: Polish, refactor and stabilize the technology Add ship systems like energy, weapon, shield and more Improve the multiplayer experience Work on the navigation and flight model Second Stage = From 15000 EUR up to 50000 EUR: This takes us to orbit, where the fun begins! As we raise more I will add weeks of development to the game, up to an extra 6 months before Early Access release. I will work on the following: Mining and crafting gameplay components AI and Missions Dedicated servers Basic modding support for Texture and Skin Advanced character customization Improved procedural generation Third Stage = Over 50000 EUR: The stage that will fly us to the moon! The money over this point will be used to remunerate people to work with me to increase the quality of the game: Master builders to create high quality faction ships Texture artist Sound designer Composer I will also save on the budget to be able to work on the following point post early-access release: Deep faction interaction system: missions, ranking, dynamic galactic influence Survival mode (see long term roadmap) Planets (see FAQ below) So raising as much money as I can at this stage is very important. The advantage of working solo is that I can be very flexible and quickly re-adjust things on the way. Stretch Goals like gameplay are obviously key components to my vision. Even if only the base target is met, I plan to work on these after the early access release. I have ambitious plans for Skywanderers and a lot of crazy ideas. Hopefully with the support of the community I will be able to develop the game for many years following early access. On top of the short term roadmap that will lead the game to Early Access, it is important for me to share my long term vision. Here is what a typical play through will look like in the 1.0 version of the game: Early game: survive! You will first have to explore and find the resources needed for your livelihood. Little by little, you will mine rarer materials and craft more advanced technologies by exploring the world around you. You will build a small exploration buggy, then a plane, and one day you will be ready for your first space trip - and land on the moon that has been peering down at you every night. Then you will explore your solar system, and will soon unlock the key to interstellar travel! Late game: be who you want! From that point on it will be a different game. Soon you will discover that the galaxy is full of factions and species. You might encounter some threats or maybe distress beacons. You will dock into space stations looking to trade or take on missions. The game won't force you into a certain role so you might want to hunt down pirates or become one, you might want to build a massive battleship and go to war with your friends. Maybe you will prefer setting up a mining outpost, or you will build a network of stargates to link your bases. One day, you might even be able to build and manage your own space station! House Imperitus is feared for its heavily militaristic fleet. Lore: It's been 100 years since the Artura Insurrection was won, but the price paid was high. Now, Armistice station lies in disuse and virtual ruin, House Imperitus has secured its borders after leaving the Coalition shortly after the conflict ended. More recently, having lost hope for any meaningful peace negotiations, House Elgari along with several of the other powerful Houses left the once proud alliance. The Coalition itself is but a shadow of what it once was, reduced to a parliament of squabbling smaller factions, each attempting to gain the upper hand against the others. All the while each house strengthens its military and prepares for another conflict. The galaxy is in a state of cold war, and somewhere on the outer rim, a long forgotten eye opens, looking inward to the core. With my Master Builders we plan to add the following factions over time: House Imperitus, a militaristic empire set on expanding their borders , a militaristic empire set on expanding their borders House Elgari, a race of aliens that promote peace and equality , a race of aliens that promote peace and equality Senrai Mining Corporation, a massive corporation providing a huge amount of resources to the galaxy , a massive corporation providing a huge amount of resources to the galaxy The Coalition, the remnants of the Anti-Artura Coalition, made up of many smaller Houses , the remnants of the Anti-Artura Coalition, made up of many smaller Houses The Petcha, a loose association of space wanderers and refugees just trying to survive I like to view Skywanderers as a mix between Minecraft and Elite. The two legends who are Notch and David Braben also inspired me in my approach. Both showed us that it is possible to create very ambitious gameplay and worlds with very limited resources, by using clever maths and elegant design solutions. The game will also draw influence from games from very different genres: FTL, Mass Effect or Startopia for example! Tribute ship to my childhood built by yours truly. LEGO® and more specifically LEGO® space is also very deep in the DNA of the game. With the brick system I want to give player the same artistic freedom talented MOC builders are using in their designs. All the sets I had as a kid but also as importantly the one I desired left an impression so big on me that it is at the root of my will to create Skywanderers. For the background I want to mention Star Wars, Valerian (the French comic), the Fifth Element, Hyperion. Think funny Aliens species, rusted ships, space pirates and
logg Recalled 28 Million Boxes of Cereal Last year, Kellogg recalled 28 million boxes cereal, including Apple Jacks, Corn Pops and Froot Loops, due to a foul odor emanating from their liner bags that was sickening people. The odor came from a coal tar and oil based chemical called methylnaphthalene, which had leached into the cereal from the package liner. According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting public health and the environment, the San Antonio Budget Grocery Examiner reported that consumers affected by the Kellogg contaminated cereal typically experienced nausea and/or vomiting within 15 minutes of ingesting the cereal. EWG claims methylnaphthalene is known to be commonly detected in air pollutants from cigarette smoke, diesel and gasoline engine exhaust, wood smoke, tar and asphalt. Animal studies show that methylnaphthalene causes lung damage when exposure occurs via inhalation, ingestion and skin contact. EWG claims methylnapthalene contamination in cereal raises safety questions: “The chemical is structurally similar to naphthalene, which was the primary component in mothballs until those products were reformulated due to toxicity concerns. Naphthalene and methylnapthalene share the same toxicity to lung cells. “Naphthalene is also toxic to red blood cells, causing anemia, fatigue, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. The methylated form of the mothball chemical has not been fully assessed for toxicity to blood cells, a critical data gap when it comes to evaluating the potential effects of food contamination. The National Library of Medicine’s Hazardous Substances Data Bank lists these symptoms as a concern for workers exposed to methylnapthalene.” Known Carcinogens in Boxed Cereal The antioxidants Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA) and Butylated Hydroxytoluene (BHT) are the preservatives most often added to breakfast cereals — both are carcinogenic and linked to increased hyperactivity and ADHD in children. BHA and BHT are toxic to the liver and kidneys, and are identified by the U.S. National Library of Medicine as carcinogens. Other additives contained in boxed cereal are monosodium glutamate, linked to asthma, migraines, food allergies such a shortness of breath, swelling and hives, obesity, hyperactivity in children, and fluttering or irregular heartbeat; soy lecithin, filled with pesticides, herbicides and solvents; fructose which is linked to obesity, diabetes, and mercury contamination; and food dyes, which contain known carcinogens and contaminants that increase the risks of cancer, hyperactivity in children and allergic reactions. All the additives in processed foods are designed to do one thing — increase profit margins by preserving the shelf life of a product, or artificially enhancing a product’s color and taste. But these corporate profits are made at the expense of the consumer who pays dearly, and at great expense to their physical health, and associated health care costs from the diseases created by short-sighted, profit-driven multinationals, many of which manufacture both the chemicals that make us sick, and the pharmaceutical chemicals they sell us to regain our health. Like on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on LinkedIn Pin to Pinterest Share on StumbleUpon + Comments commentsCNN contributor Sally Kohn has a bone to pick with all of you racists. Apparently unsatisfied with the unbelievably favorable coverage which Ferguson’s “peaceful protesters” have been receiving in the media, Kohn seeks to draw a comparison – while assuring us it’s not a comparison – between the months of riots, shootings, arson and assault in Missouri and (wait for it…) a pumpkin festival in New Hampshire. Where’s the outrage about all of these out of control white people? When black people protest against police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, they’re thought of as a “mob.” But when white people got up in arms at the Pumpkin Festival in Keene, New Hampshire, a few weeks ago — for apparently no reason whatsoever — they were merely accused of “disruptive behavior.” The two situations — protests in Ferguson and drunken violence in Keene — are not equivalent. However, it’s revealing how the two groups are perceived differently by society and and the media. How is it that the bad behavior of some black people is used to condemn an entire community, while the bad behavior of some white kids is excused and explained away? Maybe this is why residents of Ferguson protested in the first place. I understand that there’s a temptation to read that first, jaw dropping introduction and just walk away shaking your head, but Kohn’s outrage really provides a good example of what passes for justifiable rationalization in the liberal media. Why, she appears to wonder, are the rioters in Ferguson described in such pejorative terms when a bunch of drunken white kids are treated differently when they were hurling broken glass and rocks at police (as well as, apparently, pumpkins). Since Ms. Kohn is apparently confused and seeking answers, allow me to volunteer my services in my usual, helpful way. The fact is that we have plenty of harsh words for people like those college students. Let’s start with… idiots. You want to call them rioters? Fine. Count me in. They were rioting. Nobody is saying that white people don’t go out and cause problems as these morons did, and sometimes they do far worse. The fans of the Detroit Pistons, particularly in the 90s, used to be legendary for trying to burn their city to the ground every time the team made it to the playoffs. Granted, that’s a pretty racially diverse crowd, but there were plenty of white people there, trust me. If you go across the pond you will find limitless examples of almost entirely white soccer hooligans causing all manner of mayhem during and after game time. Yes… they are rioters. Happy? With that point out of the way, let’s focus on the original question of why the descriptions and coverage of these events are completely different. Let us first note one substantial difference in media treatment and, more importantly, public perception here. Nobody – and I mean nobody – is out there defending the morons at the pumpkin festival or the Pistons’ fans. Nobody is excusing their behavior. Nobody is calling them “peaceful protesters” (or protesters of any sort, for that matter) and coming up with reasons why their behavior is justified. They are idiots and are quickly identified as such. Next we might ask why the coverage of such things fades so quickly. The reason is that the events themselves are over in rapid order. Unlike in Ferguson, where rampant violence or the threats of more of the same drag on for months on end, the rioters at the pumpkin festival were gone the same night. The next morning you saw the ones who were not in jail waking up with horrible hangovers, an embarrassed look on their faces, and probably calling in sick to work. That sort of story just doesn’t have a lot of staying power. And finally, let’s not try to pretend that there is any sort of equivalence between the root cause and goals of the rioters in these scenarios. The pumpkin festival was a festival. It was a celebration. The drunken morons in the streets were celebrants. The rioting fans in Detroit were celebrating the victory of their team. In neither case did the room temperature IQ participants get together to organize an attack on the cops or on anything else. They were partying, and the conflicts with the cops erupted spontaneously when they attempted to break up the brain dead festivities. And – yet again – it happened and then it ended, with general feelings of shame and embarrassment all around. That was never the case in Ferguson. These were planned protests and, yes, planned attacks. There was intentional violence. People showed up with guns and Molotov cocktails. And some of them were there specifically to attack the structure of law enforcement and the government. Nobody was celebrating a damn thing. It was a mob enforcing mob rules in a deliberate effort to disrupt the social order. No, this does not apply to every person out there. Some just wanted to carry signs, chant slogans and make their voices heard. But there were more than enough in the former category to constitute a mob. And, as such, I don’t plan on apologizing for calling it a mob. Words have meaning, Ms. Kohn. And there is a clear reason why the rioters in Ferguson are not being described in the same fashion as the clueless cohort in Keene, New Hampshire. It’s because they are entirely different, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference what color anyone’s skin was in either instance.The earthquakes that have shaken Dallas and Irving, Texas the last several months have people looking into whether oil and gas activity in the area plays a role. Some of those people work at the Environmental Protection Agency. But EPA researchers say they’re not getting the data they’ve requested from Texas state oil and gas regulators to investigate the link. Philip Dellinger is head of the EPA’s Underground Injection Control Section in Dallas. At a conference of the Groundwater Protection Council on Tuesday, he showed early results from a study his team conducted on earthquakes around Irving. The group looked at the use of waste water disposal wells closest to Irving earthquakes. Dellinger does not necessarily believe the recent quakes are related to disposal wells, where waste water from oil and gas drilling is pumped underground. But these types of wells have caused other earthquakes, so his team wanted to see what wells were close to the Irving events. His choice for where to look was simple. There are only two wells near the recent quakes, and one had been plugged up. Even the active well is “a good distance off,” says Dellinger, “it’s ten or eleven miles away from the (earthquake) activity.” Using an approach outlined in the EPA’s new report on man made earthquakes, the team used data on the volume of fluid being injected into the wells and the rate of injection. It looked at how that might impact the underground region where the waste water was flowing. It compared that data to earthquakes going years back. “It showed some correspondence with some of the early earthquakes, but some of those early earthquakes were many miles away from the recent Irving earthquakes,” Dellinger says. Those quakes were also thought to be associated with the disposal well that is now plugged up. “The recent earthquakes are clustered in a localized area and they were very frequent,” he says. So the EPA team requested daily injection data for the disposal well that is still in operation. The request was made to state oil and gas regulators at the Railroad Commission of Texas in January, after quakes above 3.0 began shaking the Dallas region. Dellinger says the Railroad Commission has not yet shared any data. When asked if he knew why the commission had not passed the data along he said: “No.” In a statement provided to StateImpact Texas, the Railroad Commission said that their staff seismologist, Dr. Craig Pearson, “has not found it necessary to request additional information beyond what is required by Railroad Commission rules from the closest disposal well.” The EPA’s Dellinger appears confident the commission could share the data if it desired. “After the last few years of seeing this (earthquake activity) here in south central part of the country, these regulators are looking at disposal wells,” says Dellinger. “You just don’t hear it on the news.”The Staff of the Army comprises: 3 brigadiers, 9 colonels, 12 lieutenant-colonels, 25 commandants, 60 captains, and 40 lieutenants. The Royal Corps of Halberdiers consists of 43 officers, and 240 rank and file. Total, 283 men. The Infantry comprises 5,972 officers, and 164,000 rank and file, making a total of 109,972 men. They are organized as follows: Forty regiments of the line of two battalions. One regiment of three battalions. permanently stationed at Ceuta. Twenty battalions of Chasseurs. Eighty battalions of reserve, (provinciales.) During the war in Africa, these eighty battalions of reserve furnished 60,000 men, with 1,613 officers. The Cavalry comprises 968 officers, and 14,600 rank and file. Total, 15,568 men, with 14,710 horses. There are also 376 men belonging to the General School of Cavalry. The organization is as follows: Four regiments of Carabineers. Four regiments of Cuirassiers. Six regiments of Lancers. Four regiments of Chasseurs. Two regiments of Hussars. Two squadrons of Chasseurs. Four squadrons of Remounts. The twenty regiments are each divided into three squadrons, with 520 men in each squadron. The Artillery comprises 689 officers and 11,680 rank and file. Total number of men 12,369, with 2,600 horses. They are divided as under: Five regiments of foot Artillery. Four brigades of mounted Artillery. Two brigades of mountain Artillery. Advertisement Continue reading the main story One brigade of horse Artillery. Five brigades of foot Artillery, (fixed in garrisons.) The Engineers comprise 256 officers and 3,760 rank and file. Total, 4,016 men. They are divided into two regiments, of two battalions each. The Gendarmerie, or civil guard, comprise 451 officers and 12,500 men. Total, 12,951, with 1,500 horses. The Militia of the Canaries is divided into six battalions of Provinciales, three sections of ditto, and seventeen companies of artillery. The entire force of this militia is 225 officers and 7,104 rank and file. Total, 7,329 men. The Corps of Carabineers comprises 499 officers and 11,285 rank and file. Total 11,784 men, with 1,200 horses. The Corps of Catalonia contains 16 officers and 500 rank and file. Total, 516 men. The total military force of Spain is as under: Men. Horses. Royal Corps of Halberdiers........ 285 -- The Infantry...................169,972 -- The Cavalry.................... 15,568 14,710 The Artillery.................. 12,369 2,600 The Engineers.................. 4,016 -- The Gendarmerie................ 12,951 1,500 Militia of the Canaries........ 7,329 -- Corps of Carabineers........... 11,784 1,200 Corps of Catalonia............. 516 -- Total.......................... 234,788 20,010 Advertisement Continue reading the main story Of the total number of soldiers 9,119 are officers and 225,669 rank and file. In Spain and its possessions contiguous to the Peninsula, there are 150 fortresses, posts, forts, citadels or open towns where troops are in garrison. The engineers have a splendid museum at Madrid, beside a theoretical and practical school, directed by a Brigadier-General or Colonel, in the principal town or place of each province. The establishments of this arm are a topographical depot-general, or collection of maps, plans and military memoirs; an academy for the instruction of young officers intending to enter this branch of the service, after they have passed through the primary school of Segovia; and the museum, which contains representations in relief of the fortresses and different models of fortifications. Will these establishments are situated in the capital. The figures which we have thus far given, only refer to the military force of the Peninsula and the neighboring dependencies of Spain. There are likewise separate armies for the Colonies of Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands. We have no data at which we can arrive at the number of men comprised in these colonial armies, but the organization is as follows: Veterans. Eight regiments of two battalions, (each battalion of four companies.) Three battalions light infantry. Artillery. One regiment of two brigades foot artillery, of five batteries each. One brigade of five batteries mountain artillery. One company of workmen. Cavalry -- Two regiments of lancers. Engineers -- One battalion. Civil Guards. One section of six companies of infantry and two squadrons of cavalry. Militia. One regiment of infantry of two battalions of Havana. One battalion of Cuba. One battalion of Puerto Principe. One battalion of Cuatro Villas. One regiment of cavalry of Havana. One regiment of cavalry of Matanzas. Eight squadrons (rural) of Fernando Po. Four companies of cavalry of Cuba, One company of Puerto Principe. Eight companies of Cuatro Villas. Two sections of militia of color -- one section of ten companies in the Department of the West, and one section of six companies in the Department of the East. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Veterans. One regiment of infantry of two battalions of chasseurs. One brigade of foot artillery, of four companies. One section of cavalry. Militia. Seven battalions of infantry in the seven departments. One regiment of cavalry, in nine companies. ARMY OF THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. Veterans. Ten regiments of infantry, of one battalion. One regiment of cavalry, (lancers,) of two quadrons. Artillery. One brigade of seven batteries, of which one is flying artillery. Three brigades of four batteries of foot and one of mountain artillery, each with a company of workmen (Each of the four brigades has, in addition, a company of sappers and miners attached to it. Militia of Manilla. Four companies. Mr. S.T. WALLIS, in his work on Spain, states that the weight of the army in political affairs has been a crying evil, since the very commencement of the liberal system. "Its pronunciamientos," he says, "have been always influential, and often omnipotent. Its leaders have found military service -- or the rank which they have reached without it -- a passport to the highest places of the State. The Legislature is full of them, -- the ministerial bench is rarely free from them. They are the boldest intriguers, the most open and avowed self-seekers. Where a civilian finds a pretext necessary, a Brigadier-General affects none. If the Government displeases him, he is indignant and confesses it. He represents an estate of the realm, and he has no hesitation in proclaiming that he will make himself feared, if the rulers will not love him." The officers of the scientific departments of the array, however (although they have always been remarkable for the liberality of their political sentiments, and have almost universally encountered the greatest sacrifices in the maintenance of such opinions,) have habitually refrained from inter meddling with the ordinary politics of the country. But that the engineers and artillery officers are not politicians generally, is probably owing to the particular organization of those corps, more than to any other cause. Promotion, with them, follows the rigid rule of seniority; whereas, in the other divisions, he who has friends, male or female, either in the palace or about it, rises soonest and most infallibly. The number of general officers (588) is out of all proportion to the actual strength of the army, and it is double the number found in other European armies of three or four times the extent. But it must be borne in mind that the military system of Spain provides for the enrollment and reduction into service, on occasion, of what is called the reserva, or reserved division of the levies -- from which, as we have already stated, 60,000 men were furnished for the late war in Africa; so that the enormous disproportion which the statistics show between the rank and file and the superior officers ought to be considered with a trifling qualification on that account. However if the reserva were called by circumstances into activity, there is not much in the history of the past to induce the belief that the opportunity would be taken to make the officers deserve their honors by the laborious discharge of duty. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the occasion would be greedily seized to enlarge the list of Generals yet more extensively, and to decorate with new ribbons and crosses, if such could be found, those who had already reached the summit of actual rank In fact, crosses and decorations, ribbons and buttons, are sought and given without stint -- so that unlucky is the man of moderate pretensions in Madrid, who has not a uniform, at least, to wear on gala days. Knights of the royal orders, too, are as plentiful as Colonels in the Confederate States. The list of grand crosses in the Order of CHARLES III., occupies eight pages of the Court Guide; and that of similar dignitaries in the Order of ISABELLA the Catholic goes somewhat over ten. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The Spanish army is recruited by voluntary enrollment, and, in case of insufficiency, by ballot or conscription. The term of service is eight years for the first enrollment or ballot, and two or four for the second, when the soldier becomes entitled to an increase of pay. Before the war of independence no one could attain the rank of officer without having been a cadet, and each cadet was bound to prove his nobility. But after the return of FERDINAND these proofs were dispensed with, and sergeants now obtain a third of the sub-lieutenantcies, the other two-thirds being reserved for the pupils of the Military School of Segovia, who have passed the customary examinations at the end of their courses of study. Mr. FONBLANQUE, in 1857, calculated the ratio to population of the standing army of Spain to be 1 in 119. In a previous article on the English army, we gave that gentleman's calculation of the ratio to population of the armies of the five great European Powers to be, at that period, England 1 in 128; France 1 in 95; Prussia 1 in 80; Russia 1 in 72; and Austria 1 in 68. During the war in the Peninsula, in 1809-'14, WELLINGTON experienced a great deal of trouble from the impossibility of relying upon the steadiness of the Spanish troops, and the good spirit of their leaders. At the battle of Talavera the British leader found it necessary to place his 34,000 Spanish allies where their firmness would be exposed to the slightest test; but even this precaution was unavailing. Five thousand Spaniards decamped immedately after the order of battle had been formed! Yet their Generals claimed for them the honor of the victory -- the chief of them being a servile dotard, who had stipulated for all the consequence of command without the responsibility. However, it is evident that in latter years a great revolution has been worked in the discipline of the Spanish army, and Mr. WALLIS states that with whatever truth the contrary may have been said twenty years before, there can be no question that at the period of his visit to Spain, in 1852, the army was in a high state of discipline, and thoroughly instructed in the best improvements of modern military science. The regiments which went to Rome attracted great admiration, although the duty assigned to them afforded but little opportunity for the display of their more substantial qualifications. Mr. Wallis saw some of them after their return, and heard ample testimony borne by competent judges, without national bias, to the excellence of their equipment and drill. "The garrison of Madrid," says that gentleman, "was composed of a very fine body of men, -- both infantry and cavalry, -- lithe, active, and strikingly martial in their bearing. I could not help frequently observing, however, among the company officers of the line, a manifest inferiority to the rank and file in soldier-like appearance." He thought that this was mainly attributable to the comparative youth and immaturity of the Captains and Lieutenants, some of whom seemed hardly fit to encounter the rude ness of war's alarms. The worst enemies of the army, as a political engine, appear to be constrained to acknowledge the personal bravery of its officers. It is said it would be hard to find a more gallant band of gentlemen; such being the case it is the more to be regretted that so many of them are tempted, by a corrupting political system, to hang upon the favor of a Court. The navy of Spain, though still but the shadow of its former greatness, has recovered from the state into which it had fallen when, in 1823, the only ship of the line, on being sent out to South America, surrendered to the Peruvians. It must be admitted that the necessity of defending her colonies from the aggressive expeditions of our buccaneers has produced a decided augmentation of the Spanish navy within the last dozen years; and liberal and wise appropriations have been successively granted in furtherance of such augmentation. Large purchases for the Spanish arsenals have been made in our own timber markets. The naval schools have been reorganized; the modern improvements in naval architecture have been studiously consulted; the quiet acquisitions in nautical science, which men like NAVERRETE had for years been hiving, have found scope for their display and application. The National pride has become enlisted, and the opposition but rivals the Government in encouraging and following its suggestions. Independently, too, of the principal cause, which we have here mentioned, the increase of the navy was absolutely required by the improving commercial activity and prospects of the kingdom. The military marine was found to be utterly unequal to the discharge of its proper duties, and required a complete reorganization in order to meet the most moderate advance in commerce. Although an increase of naval strength would naturally be suggested by this increase of commerce calling for projection, still it is evident that the attempts of a portion of our floating and licentious population to enrich themselves at the expense of Spain and her colonies, and of our National good name, was the leading cause which led to the rusted tridents of the Peninsula being once more burnished, arid thence to the restoration of the goodly trade which once flourished under its guardianship. PRESENT STRENGTH OF THE SPANISH NAVY. The Spanish Navy, at the present day, consists of the following vessels: 2 Ships-of-the-line, of................. 84 guns each. 3 Frigates, of..........................32 to 42 guns each. 4. Corvettes, of........................16 to 30 guns each. 8 Brigs, of.............................12 to 18 guns each. Advertisement Continue reading the main story 1 Brigantine, of........................ 6 guns. 10 Schooners, of........................ 1 to 7 guns each. 2 Luggers, of........................... 1 gun each. 6 Feluccas, of.......................... 1 to 4 guns each. 10 Transports, of....................... 5 guns each. 40 Sailing vessels. Guns. Home Power. 3 Vessels, each of...................... 16 500 7 Vessels, each of...................... 6 350 1 Vessel, of............................ 2 230 2 Vessels, of...........................2 to 6 200 14 Vessels, of..........................1 to 5 100 to 180 2 Transports, of........................ 2 480 to 500 20 Side-wheel steamers. Guns. Horse Power. 1 Ship-of-the-line, of.................. 100 1,000 10 Frigates, of.........................37 to 51 300 to 800 6 Corvettes, of......................... 3 to 4 130 to 200 18 Schooners, of........................ 2 to 4 80 to 200 12 Transports, of....................... 2 90 to 300 18 Gunboats, of......................... 1 20 to 30 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 65 Propellers. Guns. Horse Power. 2 Ships-of-the-line, of................. 100 1,000 2 Iron-clad frigates, of................ 40 1,000 8 Frigates, of.......................... 51 800 6 Schooners, of......................... -- 200 2 Schooners, of......................... -- 80 18 Gunboats, of......................... 2 80 to 100 38 Steam-vessels building. Coast-Guard Vessels. 24 Feluccas..... Armed in proportion to their size. 87 Estamparias. 24 Similar vessels in the Philippines. 135 It will thus be seen that, upon the completion of the vessels now in course of construction, the entire naval strength of Spain will be: Sailing vessels......... 46 Building,(all steamers) 38 Side-wheel steamers... 29 Coast-guard vessels....135 Propellers.............. 65 Total.......................................... 313 The personnel in active service includes: Officers of all grades 1,121 Marines............. 7,980 Storekeepers, &c... 189 Guards of the Arsenals.. 539 Mechanics.............. 93 Sailors................12,976 Making a total of.................................23,898 In the Spanish navy, promotion is dependent upon fired rules, and the result is identical with that which has already been adverted to, in connection with the scientific corps of the land service. Mr. WALLIS informs us that it is a very rare thing for naval officers to be heard of in association with political intrigues, or, indeed, anything political; although they are remarkable as a class for their ability, and for the extent of their general as well as professional attainments. Until lately, the Spanish navy had been for many years in a state of sad inactivity, and the opportunity for any practical exercise of the scientific acquirements which the routine of the service prescribes was extremely insignificant. Sailors and naval commanders cannot be made or occupied without ships, and the disasters of the preceding and the present century had not only destroyed the proud armaments of Spain, and exhausted the means of their restoration, but it had in a great degree broken the spirit which might have repaired her fortunes on the sea. All the temptations which leisure creates were therefore thrown in the way of the officers of the navy. Ambitious, and at the same time capable and well educated, they had every inducement to seek, in the palace or the halls of legislation, the command which they had no quarter-decks to supply. The influences which countervailed so natural a tendency must have been strong, especially when they beheld Field Marshals and Generals changing into Senators and Secretaries all around them, and when there was scarcely a scale of power into which some one did not fling, before their eyes, a sword no heavier than theirs. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The sums voted to ward defraying the expenses of both arms of the Spanish service were, according to the budget of last year, for the army, $19,-179,348; and for the nary, $5,948,844; which amounts were increased by a special budget of $3,328,000 for the army, and $5,200,000 for the navy. These figures make the total for the year $22,507,348 for the army, and 11,148,844 for the navy; and a grand total of expenditure for both arms of the service of $83,656,192. GIGNOUX's "INDIAN SUMMER." -- Our readers will remember that we have at various times spoken of a large picture upon which GIGNOUX had been working for many months. It is now completed, and on exhibition at the gallery of Mr. SCHAUS, on Broadway, Under the title of an "Indian Bummer in Virginia" the artist has successfully attempted to convey to those unacquainted with the golden colorings, and the variegated beauties of that most delightful season, a representation of its unequaled splendors. Of all romantic spots of that poetically beautiful region, the "Hawk's Nest" in the Alleghanies is the most wondrous. Here GIGNOUX selected his theme, and with it found unaccustomed inspiration. One familiar with the grandeur of the mountains, the deep calm of the valley, the dazzling glories of the atmosphere, the exquisite tintings of the foliage, and the pronounced and absolute color of the more susceptible plants, would feel surprise that any artist would be willing to venture his reputation upon a pictured representation of the spot. This, however, GIGNOUX has done, and while preserving to a remarkable extent the portraiture, he has, remembering his title, worked in also the many characteristics of our American coloring. Grand old trees, moss-covered and crowned with gorgeous foliage -- trailing vines, superbly tinted-vast mountains, tree-clad and abounding in shaggy rocks -- a placid water, shadow-filled and dark -- a misty atmosphere, hazy, yet bright with the golden sunlight, and white floating clouds, lake-reflected, are elements the management of which reflect great credit, not upon the imagination, but upon the delineating power of the artist. The picture has attained a great success. Here, where one is not surprised at Autumnal beauty, the picture is admired for its fidelity to nature, and its remarkable composition, while in Europe (where it is soon to be exhibited,) it will doubtless be criticised for exaggerations of color, and admired rather as an evidence of the ingenuity and handicraft of the artist than as a faithful picture of a well-known spot. SCHAUS has also upon exhibition an exquisite engraving by COUSINS, from a picture by MERLE, called the "Christian Maiden." It is of a similar school as the "Christian Martyr," though not so painful in its prominent features, and will undoubtedly meet with the success which it, in common with the latter, so well deserves. The soft-lined engraving is even more beautiful than the original picture, which has for a long time been regarded as one of the most tenderly suggestive paintings, among the many pictured exponents of sacred feeling to be found in the galleries, native or foreign.Colorado – swing state Colorado – has been a linchpin for every Presidential victory since 1996. George W. Bush won the state twice when he ran and so did Barack Obama. Every vote counts in Colorado. That’s why evidence of voter fraud in the Rocky Mountain State is especially troubling. Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Democrat, said that “It is impossible to vote from the grave legally.” But it’s happening. An investigation by CBS Denver uncovered rampant voter fraud throughout the state. “We do believe there were several instances of potential vote fraud that occurred. It shows there is the potential for fraud. It’s not a perfect system. There are some gaps,” Williams said. This kind of voter fraud may have been recently uncovered in Colorado, but it’s been going on across the country. Last year, we reported on 21 states where there were more voters than citizens. 141 counties across the United States have more registered voters than people alive. County election officials in 21 states are officially on notice. The next step will be a lawsuit to get states in compliance. According to Public Interest Legal Foundation, the numbers break down like this: States with counties which received a notice letter are (# of counties): Michigan (24), Kentucky (18), Illinois (17), Indiana (11), Alabama (10), Colorado (10), Texas (9), Nebraska (7), New Mexico (5), South Dakota (5), Kansas (4), Mississippi (4), Louisiana (3), West Virginia (3), Georgia (2), Iowa (2), Montana (2), North Carolina (2), Arizona, Missouri, New York (1 each). Federally produced data show the letter recipients have more registrants than living eligible citizens alive. And last summer, Project Veritas uncovered just how easy it is to vote s someone else. In the following video, the Project Veritas journalist claims she is Jocelyn Benson, the Dean of Wayne State University Law School, but that she lost her ID. The “Poll Supervisor” is quick to reassure Mrs. Benson that as long as she signs the affidavit on the back of the ballot she is free to vote. When the journalist pushes back and insists that she feels an obligation to prove her identity the Poll Supervisor reassures her that “nobody can vote twice” because if the real Jocelyn Benson subsequently comes in she won’t be able to vote “because you already voted.” Perfect logic if we understand it correctly. So just to clarify, each registered voter only gets one ballot…great, this seems reasonable…but it doesn’t necessarily matter so much who casts that ballot…wait, what? PV Journalist: “I feel like I should prove that I am who I am.” Poll Supervisor: “Your word is your proof is right here.” PV Journalist: “And that’s fine?” Poll Supervisor: “Yup. Because if somebody else comes in and says that they’re you, they can’t because you already voted. So, you can’t vote twice, nobody can vote twice. So once you vote, I don’t care who you are.” PV Journalist: “You guys are fine with me just voting.” Poll Supervisor: “Yup I’m fine. You’re not the first one that’s left you ID at home. H/T: ZeroHedge Facebook has greatly reduced the distribution of our stories in our readers' newsfeeds and is instead promoting mainstream media sources. When you share to your friends, however, you greatly help distribute our content. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you.The Houston Rockets announced they've signed star guard James Harden to a four-year contract extension. The extension is for $118 million and runs through the 2019-20 season. The announcement came after the introduction of free agents Eric Gordon and forward Ryan Anderson. "I'm truly excited more than ever," Harden said. "Ever since I stepped foot in Houston, it's nothing but love.... I'm happy to be here another four years. It's been a progress. It's been a build up. The addition of our new signings and a couple other pieces, good things are going to happen next year." Harden came to Houston before the 2012-2013 season via a trade from Oklahoma City. With Houston he's become one of the NBA's elite scorers. "There's no indecision," Harden said of what signing the contract does for the franchise. "There's no doubt."Share 0 SHARES RADIO signals emerging from the newly-discovered ‘TRAPPIST-1’ planetary system have been decoded by linguistic experts at NASA, confirming the existence of extraterrestrial lifeforms who want ‘no part of Earth’s bullshit’. There was great excitement from astronomy enthusiasts earlier this week following the discovery of seven planets in the ‘habitable’ zone of a nearby solar system; planets which seemingly had all the criteria for supporting life. However, this was eroded somewhat today when
ps were too small, they were unable to find anyone on the ship who had seen her wearing them and learned that no forensics had been done on them.[9] In 2016, private investigators working for the family said that they had conclusively established that the footwear did not belong to the couple's daughter. Not only were they not in a style she would wear, they noted, the flip-flops had another crewmember's name and cabin number written on them. The Coriams said this led them to strongly doubt Disney's claim that they had been found in the pool area, as well as its theory that Rebecca was swept or fell overboard from there.[12] It was also noted that in the video of the phone call, Rebecca's clothes appear very large; her friends and fellow crew have speculated that they may have been someone else's.[3] Labour MP Chris Matheson, who has represented the Chester constituency since the 2015 election, believes Rebecca Coriam was a crime victim, possibly murdered or sexually assaulted. "The more you look into this the more it smells rotten; the more it smells like a crime has taken place", he told the Echo the year of his election. He claims to have a copy of the original police report with "compelling" evidence to that effect.[13] John Anderson, a private investigator who has worked with both the Coriams and Matheson, says records show the seas around the Wonder were normal that night, casting doubt on Disney's "rogue wave" claim. He also says that any wave capable of taking her off the ship would have caused visible damage to it as well.[3] Baron John Prescott, former Deputy Prime Minister under Tony Blair and now a life peer in the House of Lords, has also taken an interest in the case. He believes Rebecca was thrown overboard rather than falling.[3] He has also called for laws that would allow British authorities to investigate their own citizens' deaths on cruise ships in international waters.[13] Criticism of investigation [ edit ] Ronson reported that at the time his article was published, the Coriams had received no further updates from Disney or the RBPF on the progress of the investigation. "[W]henever we call anyone, all they say is, 'The investigation is ongoing,'" Mike Coriam said. "We've tried emailing, telling them how we feel, how it's getting harder... But nothing. Just, 'It's ongoing.'" The Bahaman police officer assigned to the case never returned Ronson's calls.[1] The Coriams have been joined in their criticism of the investigation by British government officials, Rebecca's friends among the crew, and advocates for victims of other incidents on cruise ships and their families. The latter, especially, note that 170 passengers and crew have disappeared from cruise ships since 2000, many without being seriously investigated or widely reported. All critics contend that Disney, like other cruise operators, is more interested in avoiding adverse publicity related to these incidents than anything else.[1] In November, Stephen Mosley, the MP for the City of Chester, the Coriams' constituency, brought the case up in the House of Commons. "The investigation into Rebecca's disappearance was appalling," he told Mike Penning, the Minister for Shipping.[14] "[T]he Bahamian authorities made virtually no attempt at investigating Rebecca's disappearance," he continued, saying the RBPF was "internationally recognised as almost toothless[1]... Very few people know that when they board a cruise ship that they are so poorly protected."[14] Countries such as the Bahamas, often criticized for the lax standards of such "flag of convenience" ship registrations, did not have the investigative capabilities to deal with such incidents.[1] Penning responded by announcing that the Marine Accident Investigation Branch would investigate all deaths or disappearances of British citizens from vessels anywhere in the world, paralleling similar legislation signed by U.S. President Barack Obama that gives the Federal Bureau of Investigation that authority in the event of the death or disappearance of any American citizen. The Government would also work through the International Maritime Organization to increase international cooperation on such investigations.[14] Penning, too, was critical of Disney, saying the company was "more interested in getting the ship back to sea than in investigating the case of the missing member of their crew".[15] "In other corporations, police get involved," said Kendall Carver, an Arizona resident who founded the lobbying group International Cruise Victims after his own daughter's 2004 disappearance from the Celebrity Mercury. "On cruise ships they have, quote, security officers, but they work for the cruise lines. They aren't going to do anything when the lines get sued."[1] Miami lawyer Jim Walker, publisher of the blog Cruise Law News, which is highly critical of the industry, concurs. "The Coriam family does not deserve Mickey Mouse games," he commented in Ronson's article.[16] Walker later represented the Coriams in a suit against Disney in American courts; they settled with the company in 2015 for an undisclosed sum and an agreement not to discuss the case publicly.[3] Carver and Walker[16] both believe Disney has more evidence than it has shown, particularly security footage of the area by the pool, and is covering up knowledge of what happened out of fear of adverse publicity. "If there's a video that shows your daughter going overboard," Carver told Ronson, "that's the end of the story. There's no way someone can go off a ship and it not be recorded."[1] Melissa told Ronson it was implausible that there was no footage since the pool is close to a number of other important offices, such as human resources and the payroll department, where money and sensitive documents were kept. She believed any coverup by Disney may have been as much about protecting themselves from charges of negligence, since the pool is just below the ship's bridge and would thus be the portion of the ship where a fall would most likely be seen by someone in a position to start a rescue.[16] "If it was 6 am and they were doing their job and watching the front, someone must have seen her go over," she told Ronson. "Or if they didn't, they're covering up why they didn't."[1] Disney told Ronson that they are deferring to the RBPF. "[They have told] us the investigation is still ongoing. They have not shared a timeline with us, either." Their spokesperson refused to comment on specifics about whether a tape of the phone call or additional security-camera video exists. "[W]e wish we knew what happened as much as anyone... Rebecca's disappearance has been difficult and heartbreaking for everyone."[1] See also [ edit ]Tomas Rosicky has backed Olivier Giroud to surpass last season's goal tally this term. The French striker scored 17 times in all competitions in his debut campaign - second only to Theo Walcott in the Club's scoring charts. Giroud has notched up six goals in three games on the Asia Tour and Rosicky expects an improvement now he has fully adapted to life in the Premier League. "I expect him to have a better season than he did last year, and I believe he can score more than he did then. If he continues with how he has played in pre-season, then why not?" Tomas Rosicky "When you come to England it can be difficult in the first season because you have to settle and get used to it," the Czech midfielder said. "So I expect him to have a better season than he did last year, and I believe he can score more than he did then. If he continues with how he has played in pre-season, then why not?" Rosicky - who sent in the cross for the Giroud's headed goal against Nagoya Grampus on Monday - believes that the striker's good form in Asia bodes well for the coming campaign. "Well it is only pre-season, and even though we won the games, it doesn't mean much," he said. "But on the other side, goals always give strikers confidence, whenever they score them. Olly started very well and we know he has great qualities which he showed last season."Joel Whitney is a co-founder of the magazine Guernica, a magazine of global arts and politics, and has written for many publications, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Finks describes how the CIA contributed funds to numerous respected magazines during the Cold War, including the Paris Review, to subtly promote anti-communist views. In their conversation, Whitney tells Robert Scheer about the ties the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom had with literary magazines. He talks about the CIA's attempt during the Cold War to have at least one agent in every major news organization in order to get stories killed if they were too critical or get them to run if they were favorable to the agency. And they discuss the overstatement of the immediate risks and dangers of communist regimes during the Cold War, which, initially, led many people to support the Vietnam War. Photo by Beowolf SheehanA military strike on Syria could lead to a nuclear catastrophe if a missile were to hit a reactor containing radioactive uranium, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman warned. The remark comes as the US continues to push for a military strike on Syria. "If a warhead, by design or by chance, were to hit the Miniature Neutron Source Reactor (MNSR) near Damascus, the consequences could be catastrophic," Aleksandr Lukashevich said in a Wednesday statement. Russia’s Foreign Ministry urged the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to complete a risk evaluation as the US continues to seek support for military action. It asked the agency to “react swiftly” and carry out “an analysis of the risks linked to possible American strikes on the MNSR and other facilities in Syria.” Lukashevich stated that the region could be at risk of “contamination by highly enriched uranium and it would no longer be possible to account for nuclear material, its safety and control.” He added that such material could fall into the wrong hands. The IAEA said that it is aware of the statement, but it is waiting for a formal request asking the agency to complete a risk evaluation. “We will consider the questions raised if we receive such a request," Reuters quoted an IAEA spokesperson as saying. The agency said in a report to member states last week that Syria had declared there was a “small amount of nuclear material” at the MNSR, a type of research reactor usually fuelled by highly enriched uranium. Although this type of a reactor would not contain a lot of nuclear material, it would be enough to cause "a serious local radiation hazard" if the reactor was hit, nuclear expert Mark Hibbs from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told Reuters. The United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted on Wednesday to approve President Obama's plan to strike Syria in retaliation against the alleged use of chemical weapons by President Bashar Assad’s regime. Should Congress move to approve the president’s request, the US could soon initiate a limited strike on Syria. On the other hand, Moscow needs convincing proof – not rumors - from UN experts that chemical weapons were used in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with AP and Channel 1 on Tuesday. “We believe that at the very least we should wait for the results of the UN inspection commission in Syria,” Putin said. He added that so far there is no information regarding exactly which chemical agent was used in the attack in the Damascus suburb, or who was behind it.Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Getting VR Support On October 13, 2016 By Sato. August 29, 2016. 2:00am Koei Tecmo announced that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is getting its VR support on October 13, 2016 on the same day the PlayStation VR launches. Gamer.ne.jp provides us with a first look. The above video gives us a demonstration of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 on VR that was available during a recent event hosted by Koei Tecmo. During the event, they got to try out the “Gravure Paradise” mode featuring Marie Rose, Honoka, Kasumi, and Nyotengu with a set of 9 different swimsuits. The VR update adds a new “VR Paradise” option that basically features “Event Paradise,” “Gravure Paradise,” and “Photo Paradise” in VR modes. In VR Paradise, you’ll get to use the controller and PSVR headset to get a virtual reality look at the girls to look at them from various distances and angles, and you’ll even get to touch them. Here’s a look at some more screencaps: Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is available in Japan and Asia for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.Energy Observer (Fig. 1) is an experimental boat that is embarking on a worldwide voyage starting from Paris that will take six years to visit 50 countries and 101 ports of call. A floating laboratory, Energy Observer uses only renewable energy sources to power its propulsion engines. Victorien Erussard, captain of Energy Observer, said, “What we are doing with Energy Observer is allowing nature’s energies, as well as those of our society, to collaborate. We are bringing, around our project, the knowledge from companies, laboratories, startups, and institutions together.” Related: Autonomous Ships Are on Their Way 1. The Energy Observer Catamaran is actually a floating laboratory that employs several renewable energy technologies that powers the boat. Built in Canada, Energy Observer is a maxi-catamaran that was originally 24.38 meters long, has been extended four times, and now measures up to 30.5 meters long and 12.80 meters wide. By using electrolysis of sea water it will produce hydrogen for a fuel cell that supplies electrical power to charge batteries that drive two reversible electric motors. It is also supported by a mix of other energy sources that include: Three types of solar panels Two vertical-axis wind turbines One traction kite Li-ion batteries It will rely on sun or wind during the day and tap into its hydrogen reservoirs at night, or in bad weather. 2. Energy Observer systems include the necessary technologies to provide power for the boat from wind, sun and hydrogen obtained from sea water. Figure 2 shows the various numbered systems included in the Energy Observer. They are: Photovoltaic Panels There are 130 m2 of photovoltaic panels combining three different technologies: conformable, bifacial, with a non-slip coating 21KWc. Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine Two vertical wind turbines will produce about 3 kW, which is 10% of the power needed for the two electrical motors. Each turbine is 2 meters high and has been developed specifically for this boat. Desalination System Seawater desalination system produced by reverse osmosis with two-story 105 L/h. Maritime Routing Development of a routing software, to optimize the route plan by incorporating the parameters related to sailing conditions (waves, wind, currents, etc.) but also to optimize production of energy on board (sunshine, cloud cover, hydrogen levels, remaining distance). Monitoring On-board and remote real-time tracking of the performance, management, and optimization of energy flow. Two-Story H 2 O Compressors For the compression of hydrogen from 30 to 350 bars in tanks. Smart-Traction Kite Sail The kite sail serves a dual purpose of assisting in navigation and generating power. The sail will be used during long voyages, or when there’s wind at high altitude. In its navigation mode, the kite sail converts the mechanical energy of its propeller into electrical energy—between 2 to 4 kW. Electrolyzer To break down the H 2 O molecule into oxygen (O 2 ) and dihydrogen (H 2 ). While the oxygen will be released into the atmosphere, the hydrogen will be stored in gaseous form in order to conserve the excess energy 4 Nm3/h at 30 bars. Hydrogen Storage Hydrogen tanks for long-term energy storage 2 × 4,322 L tanks, or 62kg of H 2. Fuel Cell To generate electricity from the stored hydrogen which acts as a range extender for the vessel, coupled with an absorption machine for air conditioning. The fuel cell uses a proton exchange membrane that relies on hydrogen and oxygen as input products. The fuel cell can produce 26 kWh using 1.6 kg of hydrogen. 400V Batteries Li-ion batteries for short-term energy storage and power demands’ management of 106 Kwh for the motorization, electrolysis, compression, and 220V and 24V power. Propulsion Two 97% efficient electric motors reversible in hydrogenerators when kite sailing at 2 × 41 KW at 3,000 rpm in propulsion mode and 2 × 2.5 KW in hydrogeneration mode. Hydrogen advantages include: Up to three times more energy per unit mass than diesel, and 2.5 times more than natural gas. It is the lightest and most abundant chemical element in the universe. Its combustion does not produce CO 2 or fine particles. or fine particles. It is storable. The hydrogen production process begins with reverse osmosis that desalinates the sea water and feeds it into a solar-powered electrolyzer, which splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. Hydrogen is stored in tanks for use with the fuel cell. Aquarius Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) Eco Marine Power (EMP) of Japan announced that it is preparing for sea trials of its Aquarius Marine Renewable Energy (MRE). This preparatory work will lead to the world’s first installation of an integrated rigid sail and solar power system for ships using EMP’s patented technologies. This represents a sustainable future for shipping that is expected to result in its deployment on ships ranging from coastal cargo vessels to bulk ore carriers and cruise ships. Aquarius MRE is an advanced integrated system of rigid sails, marine-grade solar panels, energy storage modules, and marine computers that will enable ships to tap into renewable energy by harnessing the power provided by the wind and sun. Use of these alternative sources of energy and propulsion will reduce fuel consumption, lower air pollution, and cut CO2 emissions. The rigid sails used by Aquarius MRE are based on EMP's EnergySail technology. These renewable energy devices can even be used when a ship is at anchor or in harbor. Each EnergySail can be configured with a mix of sensors, photovoltaic panels, or other power generation devices. Figure 3 shows an artist’s conception of a ship with Aquarius MRE. 3. Aquarius MRE consists of an integrated system of rigid sails, marine-grade solar panels, energy storage modules, and marine computers that allow the ship to generate power from wind and sun. A feasibility study, currently underway, involves several large bulk carriers. For each ship, an estimate of the propulsive power that could be provided by an EnergySail array will be prepared according to the routes they operate on. In addition, the total amount of solar power that could be installed on each vessel will be determined. On-board testing and data collection will be undertaken as required. After the feasibility study is completed, one ship will be selected for the sea trials phase. During this phase a trial configuration that will incorporate all the elements of Aquarius MRE will be installed and evaluated during a period of approximately 12 to 18 months. Several strategic partners are involved in the Aquarius MRE Project, including KEI System Co. Ltd., The Furukawa Battery Company, and Teramoto Iron Works Co. Ltd. 4. EnergySail is a rigid sail device that allows ships to harness the power of the wind and sun. The patented EnergySail (Fig. 4) is a revolutionary rigid sail device designed by Eco Marine Power that allows ships to harness the power of the wind and sun in order to reduce fuel costs plus lower noxious gas and carbon emissions. EnergySail is unlike any other sail—it has been designed to withstand high winds or even sudden micro-bursts. EnergySail is positioned to act similar to a typical rigid sail, i.e., the force of the wind on the sail helps move the ship forward. It is propulsive force, not electrical power as such. However, the sail can also be fitted with wind power devices such as turbines. The EnergySail can be fitted with a range of renewable energy technologies such as solar panels or wind power devices. It is a truly unique renewable energy platform specifically designed for shipping that can be fitted to a wide variety of vessels from large Capesize bulk ore carriers and RoRo vessels to naval and coastguard patrol ships. You can configure the EnergySail to suit the operational profile of a vessel. For example, you can change the number and type of solar panels or install other compatible equipment. Therefore, you can configure the device for a particular type of ship, for the route the vessel operates on, and/or the operational profile or mission profile of the vessel. The EnergySail can also be used when a ship is in port or harbor, which is a major advantage over traditional and rigid sail designs. A typical Aquarius MRE System would include several EnergySails along with energy storage modules and solar panels either mounted on the sails or elsewhere on the ship. At times the sun could be hitting both PV surfaces of the EnergySail and at other times just one. The issue with PV now is the performance has improved and the cost has come down over the last five years so that it’s feasible now to use them on vertical surfaces. EMP is investigating a new type of PV that is very lightweight and thin. Aquarius Eco Ship The Aquarius Eco Ship is a sustainable ship design concept by EMP that incorporates the Aquarius MRE System (patent pending) along with other fuel and emission reduction technologies, including the Aquarius MAS computer system. This combination of technologies could lead to an annual fuel reduction of 40% or more plus significantly lower noxious gas and carbon and particulate matter emissions. Aquarius MAS (Management and Automation System) is a compact marine computer that monitors the performance of a solar power array and battery pack, logs data, switches equipment on/off, calculates vessel emissions, records fuel consumption, and displays system alarms. In addition, the Aquarius MAS can monitor system performance and alarms from a wide variety of other equipment and sensors installed on ships. An Aquarius Eco Ship could include up to 1 MWp of solar power and enough energy storage modules so the ship wouldn’t need to use auxiliary diesel generators while in port, enabling the ship to operate emissions-free. The energy storage modules could be charged via the solar panels, by the ship’s main generators or from shore power when available. Both the Aquarius Eco Ship and Aquarius MRE have been designed to take into account the reality of operating rigid sails on ocean-going ships and include a range of safety features. The rigid sails, for example, can be lowered and stored when not in use or during emergencies. The revolutionary Aquarius MRE technology will enable ships of all types and sizes to safely use renewable energy in order to reduce fuel consumption and lower harmful emissions in a cost-effective way. An Aquarius Eco Ship is an example of how this system could be integrated into a new ship design, although it is also suitable for existing ship designs and could be retrofitted to vessels already in service. Eco Marine Power is currently working on applying its Aquarius MRE System technology to an Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) concept. This USV (Fig. 5) will utilize renewable energy technologies that would allow the vessel to stay on at sea longer or operate in stealth mode if required. A variation of the design will also include EMP’s EnergySail technology. Typical missions or roles for this unmanned vessel may include marine surveys, port patrols, surveillance of marine parks, and cleanup of urban waterways. 5. An Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) using Aquarius MRE System technology.CHICAGO (AP) — The huge crowds expected to attend gay pride parades around the United States in the coming weeks will be greeted by more police officers and ramped-up security measures as a means to protect them in the wake of the mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Florida. While many federal and local authorities around the U.S. say they have not received information on any credible threats, Houston is investigating a threat that was made against the parade in a tweet. Meanwhile, authorities from Denver to Chicago to New Orleans are tightening security with bag searches, more police officers and private security workers and more crowd-control barriers. In Chicago, where nearly 1 million people have attended the pride parade in previous years, better security — including 200 additional uniformed and plainclothes officers — will be assigned to this weekend’s PrideFest and next weekend’s parade out of “an abundance of caution,” Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said Thursday. Parade organizers themselves also are providing additional security at the city’s request — hiring 160 off-duty police officers and other security professionals, 70 more than worked the parade last year. The FBI also said it would take an active role, gathering intelligence on any possible threat to the parade and sharing that information with Chicago police. The FBI also echoed Johnson’s plea to the public to quickly report any suspicious activity. Houston police also are increasing security for the city’s gay pride parade on June 25. Acting Police Chief Martha Montalvo said the department is investigating a threat that was made in a tweet earlier this week that indicated there would be a “massive shooting” at the parade. “We take all threats seriously and we are investigating it and we have notified and are working in conjunction with the FBI,” she said. “But at this point I don’t have anything solid in terms of specifics.” In Denver, organizers of this Sunday’s PrideFest, said the 300,000 people expected to attend will see more fences, more searches of bags and other security measures. “We’re making security a top priority,” said organizer Debra Pollock, chief executive officer of the GLBT Community Center of Colorado, which is holding that city’s event. And in New Orleans, city officials say that security will be beefed up this weekend in the popular French Quarter for the city’s annual gay pride celebrations, announcing that large numbers of police officers and state troopers will be on duty. It’s unknown how last weekend’s rampage at Orlando club Pulse that left 49 people dead will affect attendance at the popular parades and festivals. But in Chicago, the parade coordinator Richard Pfeiffer said the attack may increase attendance for the 47th parade. “Our history shows that we beat back hate like this by coming out and coming together and being in public,” he said. “The feedback we are getting is that more people want to come out (to demonstrate) they won’t be pushed back into the closet.” ___ Associated Press writers Steven K. Paulson in Denver, Cain Burdeau in New Orleans and Juan A. Lozano in Houston contributed to this report. © 2016, Associated Press, All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. This Story Filed UnderFormer Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) on Tuesday said he hasn't seen any evidence to support President Trump's claim of widespread voter fraud. "I have no evidence whatsoever, and I don't know that anyone does, that there were that many illegal people who voted, and frankly it doesn't matter," Huckabee, a longtime Trump backer, told Fox Business. "He's the president, and whether 20 million people voted, it doesn't matter anymore. He's the president, and I'm not sure why he brought it up." Trump told congressional leaders at a reception at the White House that he would have won the popular vote if not for millions of illegal votes, sources told The Hill on Monday. ADVERTISEMENT He said between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes resulted in him losing the popular vote. Democrat 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 won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, but Trump won the Electoral College. The president made similar claims in tweets he posted after his victory. "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," he tweeted after Election Day. During the presidential campaign, Trump frequently charged that the election was rigged and alleged widespread voter fraud.Carlos Ceballos, 33, of West Palm Beach, faces charges of grand theft, false verification of ownership and dealing in stolen property, the Palm Beach Post reported. He was released from the Palm Beach County Jail on Thursday after posting a $10,000 bail, jail records show. >> Read more trending news According to Riviera Beach police, the victims reported that 80 of their 193 gold coins were missing from the safe located in their pantry. They told officers the 193 coins were worth a total of $406,327. Click here for more news on crime The 80 coins were worth $2,000 each, totaling a value of around $160,000, according to the arrest report. The victims told investigators that the only people who had access to the safe other than family members was her caretaker and the caretaker’s husband, Carlos Ceballos. The female victim said she told Ceballos’ wife what was in the safe, and she also told officers Ceballos did repair work around their home, the Palm Beach Post reported. Investigators discovered that Ceballos sold 44 of the gold coins at a local pawn shop for almost $25,000, but the coins had an actual value of around $90,000.The people most at risk of becoming seriously ill are babies too young to be vaccinated and the immunologically frail; measles can transform into something much worse, like encephalitis, and can be deadly. Among the fully vaccinated, the chances of contracting measles are small but do exist; the C.D.C. says the vaccine is more than 95 percent effective. On Friday, all unvaccinated students who had been sent home from Huntington Beach High School after a possible measles exposure were allowed to return to school. But in Riverside County, officials reporting a probable case of a school employee with the measles ordered 40 students without vaccinations to stay home. Similar scares are playing out far from Disneyland. In Kearny, Ariz., a small rural community with an economy tied to a nearby copper mine, a single family’s Christmas vacation has upended the rhythms of daily life. The family visited Disneyland in December, and four of its unvaccinated members came back with measles; a fifth person in Kearny also contracted the disease. Now, many businesses in town — the grocery store, the post office, and more — have measles alerts in the windows featuring a blond boy with a rash all over his face. Several signs say that someone with the measles was in the store at a specific time last week and advise others who were there at the same time to be alert to symptoms. Some parents in Kearny are sympathetic to the family that did not vaccinate children. “I strongly believe in getting children the vaccines they need to protect them from any childhood disease out there, but that is my opinion,“ said Tiffany Magee, a mother of three. “I also strongly believe other parents have the right to choose not to get their children vaccinated due to religion or health reasons.” Kearny school officials sent a letter home to all parents, urging calm, noting that, other than the children in the affected family, all other students in the district had been vaccinated. But it also advised parents to keep an eye out for symptoms. The measles outbreak has dominated talk in town and in two Facebook groups that discuss Kearny goings-on, and it has altered the way some people in town think about vaccines.Freud has an unquestionably powerful impact on American culture. Turn on the TV and Joan from “Mad Men” is suffering from “hysteria,” and Brian from Family Guy is trying to uncover whether urinating on the floor is an act of subconscious aggression. Or, there’s Tony Soprano’s psychoanalysis sessions: Films and books are also cluttered with Freudian references. Jonathan Franzen’s latest book “Purity” portrays “mother and father figures with shades of the Oedipal and the Electral,” according to an Esquire review. Similar Oedipal themes have been noticed in Francis Ford Coppola’s films, and Lars Von Trier’s horror film Antichrist was “loaded” with Freudian constructions. Or take US politics: President Barack Obama’s jokes have been analyzed according to Freud’s belief that jokes give insight to the subconscious, and the commander-in-chief has also been accused of making “Freudian slips.” Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg argued that George W. Bush’s Oedipal relationship with his father shaped his presidential decisions. And in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd claimed that “American politics bristles with Oedipal drama,” and managed to link Freudian theory to John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Al Gore, among others. But though Freud’s “Oedipus complex” and ideas on “penis envy” are common cultural references, his theories have been largely dismissed by mainstream mental health professionals. Psychoanalysis, the field most closely associated with Freud, has largely migrated out of psychology classrooms and into literature other departments, according to a 2008 report by the American Psychoanalytic Association. “Psychoanalysis and analytic ideas, however admired in their history, are not likely to be seen as living contributors to the science of psychology; rather, they will be regarded by readers of these texts as ‘has-beens,’” the report authors wrote. Freud has steadily falling out of favor among psychologists since the 1960s, shortly after B. F. Skinner published his theories on behavioral therapy, with its focus on environmental stimuli rather than dreams or repressed memories. Psychology also developed into a more empirically-tested science, emphasizing evidence-based ideas over Freud’s often un-provable theories. This focus on evidence-based research has only increased with the growth of neuroscience, and ability to scan brain activity. Harvard cognitive scientist and psychologist Steven Pinker is a strong critic of Freud and exemplifies the attitude of many in psychology in his book How the Mind Works, when he writes, “The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard.” So as psychology abandons Freudian ideas in favour of empirically tested ideas, why does Freud’s work still have such a hold on American culture? To some extent, Freud is now simply part of the literary tradition. Peter Rudnytsky, a professor of English at the University of Florida who also practices psychoanalysis, and is an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, tells Quartz that Freud’s work has influenced generations of writers and can’t be so easily discarded. “Once psychoanalysis takes hold in the culture, it becomes something that influences later writers. There’s a self-consciousness, starting in the 20th century, about engaging with psychoanalysis,” he says. Freud himself drew on the literary canon, performing psychoanalysis on characters in works by Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. In turn, practitioners of literature—and by extension films and movies—cannot completely detach themselves from Freud’s ideas. Freud ideas are also interwoven with earlier works of mythology, which further heightens his cultural resonance, even as science has moved on. “When Freud gave his concept the name ‘Oedipus complex’, he capitalized on the cultural prestige of Sophocles,” says Rudnytsky. “He was arguing that this Oedipus complex is a developmental phase that structures the human psyche, but it had the resonance and depth of a mythological narrative. He caught lightning in a bottle.” Meanwhile, many of Freud’s theories naturally lend themselves to drama. John Fletcher, professor of English at University of Warwick, tells Quartz that Freud’s work in psychoanalysis involves complex and compelling narratives. “He describes and analyses the ways in which human subjects are caught up in emotional dramas that repeat and repeat, and which they carry with them as a kind of baggage.” This Freudian narrative alludes to both a past—where do these neuroses come from?—and a future, namely how the character is trying to progress. Such character progression is crucial in literature and, as Fletcher says, Freud’s has the added benefit of referencing both fantasy and reality. He explains: “When Freud is interpreting neurotic and borderline psychotic symptoms, he’s challenged to interpret some kind of scene that has been blocked out of memory but appears to be acting out. He doesn’t know if it’s a fantasy, a memory, or a combination of the two. The interaction between patient and analyst is part of the drama. Literary people find Freud illuminating because of this focus on scenes, micro-dramas, and the acting out of dramas.” And though Freud may be unpopular in psychology departments, his work isn’t considered totally meaningless from a scientific perspective. Freud’s emphasis on the importance of early experiences is evident in attachment theory, while scientific evidence supports Freud’s belief in an unconscious mind. And, as Fletcher points out, neuropsychologist Mark Solms has given credence to Freud’s theory that dreams are signs of wish fulfilment. So while Freud’s ideas are no longer considered an authority on the human condition, they remain inherently dramatic and compelling, and many of his theories contain more than a grain of truth. No wonder novelists and scriptwriters are reluctant to let go of such excellent source material.Cup #3 of the WoW® Arena World Championship goes live Saturday 10th June. To keep up with the action, tune in to the broadcast at 10.30am PDT, with matches kicking off at 11am PDT sharp. Don’t miss out! Here’s where to catch the action, Saturday 10th at 11am PDT What's New? The Teams To Watch Union Sneaky Snakes Mageiden Mage, Ele Shaman Amne Disc Priest Sethcurry Windwalker Monk Ssds Hunter, Enhance Shaman Brian Holy Paladin Aveng Paladin (Ret, Prot) Prevy Balance Druid Syfoxy Feral Druid Tempo Storm Jungle Book Jahmilli Mage, Shadow Priest, Ele Shaman Dilly Survival Hunter Pikaboo Rogue, Warrior Aardvark Disc Priest Gorecki Resto Druid Junash Feral Druid Panda Global Method: Reborn Rubcub Holy Paladin Cdew Shaman, Disc Priest, Druid Rositajones Mage Snutz Shadow Priest, Warlock Jellybeans Hunter Bean Feral Druid, Prot Paladin Wallabare Feral Druid, Warrior Samiyam Mage Noah and Friends Method: Synergy Noah Balance Druid Mes Death Knight, Demon Hunter Maylol Resto Druid Kolo Druid, Shaman Vellido Death Knight, Ele Shaman Maldiva Warlock Vices Warrior Your Hosts These are the faces (and voices) providing expert opinion, hype and point-by-point analysis. Elliott 'Venruki’ Venczel Jared ‘Vhell’ Coulston Sid ‘Supatease’ Compston Dates For Your Diary Arena Cup 4: July 29, registration closes on July
key elements of Immutable Infrastructure is the capability to efficiently create fully-provisioned images. These images must have all required software already on board. In fact, with everything fully configured and ready to run on boot, these images don't even need SSH. On AWS, the typical process to achieve that can be described as follows: You first create an AMI, based on which you can then launch any number of identical instances. Integrating with Existing Workflows Boxfuse lets accomplish all this a single command, boxfuse run, that will effectively fuse your application artifact into an image, convert Boxfuse image to an AWS AMI and launch the number of instances you desire based on the newly created AMI. Some of you however have already been practicing this for a long time with various combinations of open-source and in-house tools. You have asked us to provide you with a gradual migration process to adopt Boxfuse one piece at a time. And that's why today we are introducing boxfuse convert to allow you to benefit from Boxfuse's incredibly fast AMI creation, while still relying on your current instance provisioning technology: With boxfuse convert you can finally say goodbye to your old, slow and flaky AMI creation workflows. This is all you need to do to go from a JVM-based application (using Dropwizard in this example) to a fully-provisioned, secure, production-ready AMI: > boxfuse convert dwunikernel-1.0.jar Fusing Image for dwunikernel-1.0.jar... Image fused in 00:06.525s (55362 K) -> axelfontaine/dwunikernel:1.0 Pushing axelfontaine/dwunikernel:1.0... Verifying axelfontaine/dwunikernel:1.0... Waiting for AWS to create an AMI for axelfontaine/dwunikernel:1.0 in eu-central-1 (this may take up to 50 seconds)... AMI created in 00:19.777s -> ami-e66264fb And there you have it: Your brand new fully-provisioned AMI has been created from scratch in less than 30 seconds! It is tagged consistently with boxfuse:app and boxfuse:image tags so you can retrieve it quickly and reliably. You can immediately start launching instances based upon it from the AWS console or your orchestration tool of choice. Comparing to Packer Packer is a great tool for building images for many platforms. It is not without its problems though. Besides the fact that Packer effectively builds an image per platform (instead of using the same image on all platforms), it is also incredibly slow when it comes to building AMIs. For comparison, try building the same type of AMI (HVM+EBS in this case) using Packer and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. And don't forget to go and grab a coffee, as it will take a while. Compared to Packer's EBS backed AMI builder, Boxfuse is more than 10 times faster: And that's not all. Boxfuse's AMIs are also more than 10 times smaller: (In fact Boxfuse AMIs are even much smaller than that, but AWS's smallest EBS snapshot size is a full 1 GB) And finally consider the effort required to write and maintain your Packer.json descriptors (don't forget to pin the version of every single package to avoid the issues of deferred provisioning) to create fully-provisioned hardened images that are ready to boot without manual tuning and with no SSH. Now look at Boxfuse Convert's one-liner again and see for yourself just how easy things can be. How does Boxfuse do it? Boxfuse intelligently analyses your application and generates minimal images in seconds. There is no general purpose operating system and no tedious provisioning. Boxfuse images are lean, secure and efficient. You can run them on VirtualBox for development and deploy them unchanged and with zero downtime on AWS for test and production. So if you haven't already, sign up for your Boxfuse account now. All you need is a GitHub account and you'll be up and running in no time. The Boxfuse free plan gives you 100 AMI builds per month. And if you wish to take things further it also aligns perfectly with the AWS free tier, so you can deploy your application to EC2 completely free.President Trump met with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai on Monday afternoon, according to the White House schedule. It appears to be the first time the two have met since Trump elevated Pai to the chairmanship in January. “Chairman Pai had a warm meeting with President Trump this afternoon, in which they reconnected for the first time since Chairman Pai was elevated to head the FCC," an agency spokesman said in a statement on Monday afternoon. "No proceedings pending at the FCC were discussed.” ADVERTISEMENT Pai, who has served on the commission since 2012, has worked quickly to try to undo many of the regulations pushed through under his Democratic predecessor. He has revoked nine companies from a subsidy program for internet access, suspended an FCC probe into free-data programs offered by providers like Verizon and AT&T and retracted a report on a program that provides broadband access to schools and libraries. The FCC also voted last week to block a data security rule on the day before it would have gone into effect. The rule would have required internet service providers to beef up their security of consumers’ data. Pai is set to appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday for an oversight hearing. Updated 4:47 p.m.8:13 p.m.: Confirmed tornado on the ground 11 miles north of Canadian. Another possible tornado was located five miles west of Canadian. Both are moving northeast at 45 mph. NWS is reporting major damage in the Pampa area after a tornado touched down near the southeast loop. Damage includes downed power lines and numerous gas leaks. The storms in Pampa have moved northeast toward Lipscomb County. There is a tornado warning in effect for Lipscomb and Hemphill counties. Xcel Energy is reporting that crews have just arrived in the Pampa area. At least two transmission lines not operating and this has taken power down in Canadian and the Miami area. An estimated 6,500 customers are currently without power. Severe thunderstorm warnings are in effect for southeast Amarillo and Borger. NWS has also confirmed a wedge tornado has passed near Miami. 8:11 p.m.: The NWS has confirmed a tornado is moving over Highway 136 northeast of Amarillo. Take cover. 7:15 p.m. A second tornado has been confirmed in the Pampa area. Residents are urged to stay in their shelters. Xcel Energy spokesman Wes Reeves said three transmission lines are down in the Pampa area, and said he was working to get further information. 7:08 p.m.: The NWS has confirmed reports of a large tornado over Booker moving northeast at 50 mph. Residents are urged to take cover. 7:02 p.m.: The National Weather Service has received reports of storm supercells moving east towards Miami. 6:44 P.M.:The National Weather Service is receiving reports of widespread damage from a mile-wide tornado touching down south of Pampa. At 6:30 p.m., the NWS reported the tornado was headed toward Pampa at 40 mph. 5:55 p.m.: Snow, hail, damaging winds and isolated tornados could hit parts of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles beginning Monday afternoon. "There's a tornado watch under effect until 9 p.m. with a chance for hail up to 2 inches in diameter and wind gusts up to 70 mph," said NWS meteorologist Nicholas Fenner. "Especially later this evening closer to sunset, That's when the chance for the tornadoes will increase." According to Fenner, there's a large upper-level pressure system that has been spinning across the New Mexico/Arizona line, and that's the leading source of the severe weather. "That's been drawing up a lot of moisture," he said. "And the strong winds are helping to keep the thunderstorms lasting, so that's helped to develop some supercell thunderstorms." Although the entire area is at risk for severe weather, Fenner said the eastern part of the Texas Panhandle will see the greatest risk of tornado development. "The eastern half of the Panhandle is the most favorable for the development of tornadoes," he said. "We've already had some reports of quarter-sized hail." The storms have been building pretty quickly towards the northeast Monday, with the greatest chance of Amarillo seeing activity being any time after 3 p.m., said Fenner. The snow chances will be confined to the far northwest Texas Panhandle, but mainly across the Oklahoma Panhandle tonight. "Dalhart, north of Dumas, Stratford might see something," said Texas Department of Transportation Amarillo District spokesman Paul Braun. TxDOT's main priorities are making sure that the equipment is ready and that all crew members are well rested, Braun said. "Our supervisors are out patrolling," he said. "We make sure that the materials used for either de-icing or for traction control, that we have that on hand, that our eqipment is operating and our crews are rested for when they need to come in, if they need to come in." TxDOT advises drivers to keep abreast of road conditions by visiting www.drivetexas.org. or by calling the Road Conditions hotline at 1-800-452-9292. "The most important thing when adverse weather comes in, especially snow and ice, is to slow down," Braun said. "Give yourself plenty of distance between you and the next vehicle in front of you, so that you have time to react." Drivers should also allow plenty of travel time between destinations and make informed decisions on whether to travel or stay home. The Amarillo NWS is also recognizing Panhandle's Winter Weather Preparedness Week, according to the organization. "We'll be highlighting some winter weather preparedness tips and safety-type stuff since we're getting into that time of year," Fenner said. Monday's thunderstorms are expected to continually move east throughout the course of the evening, clearing up for Tuesday.Houston entrepreneurs and philanthropists Victor and Barbara Samuels have long been supportive of the need for social workers, who take on relatively low-paying jobs because they want to protect and address the needs of some of society's most vulnerable members. To help support the next generation of social workers, the couple has donated $1 million to the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, officials announced Monday. The gift builds on an endowed scholarship at UH that the Samuels established in 2014. The scholarships will be open to all students interested in pursuing a career in social work. They will be awarded based on academic merit and financial need. Victor Samuels, known to friends as Vic, is the former CEO of Victory Packaging, which he established in 1976. He has been a longtime supporter of UH, dating back to 2002, when he joined the Dean's Advisory Council. Barbara Samuels, known to friends as Bobbi, is a UH alumna and was a longtime instructor at UH-Clear Lake. The couple has also endowed the “Bobbi and Vic Samuels Center for Jewish Living and Learning” at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center of Houston. “Social workers strive to improve individuals and communities and help the neediest in society,” Victor Samuels said in a statement. “The GCSW has become a primary source of social workers in Houston and our surrounding area. We expect our gift to be an investment in our city, now and in the future.”The Toronto Police Service will not participate in this year's Pride parade, says Chief Mark Saunders, a move that comes a month after Pride Toronto voted to ban uniformed officers from the event. "We understand the LGBTQ communities are divided. To enable those differences to be addressed, I have decided the Toronto Police Service will not participate, this year, in the Pride parade," Saunders said in a statement on Friday. Toronto police officers will continue to provide security for the event, but will not participate in side kiosks or parade floats. Saunders said the force will continue to hold its annual Pride reception. Chief Mark Saunders says Toronto police won't participate in Pride parade 1:07 The decision to remove officers from the parade doesn't sit well with Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association. "All this is doing is creating a negative environment around something that should be positive and something that should be inclusive," he said. Saunders greets the crowd during Toronto's Pride parade in 2015. (Chris Young/Canadian Press) It's a sentiment shared by Mayor John Tory. "I am disappointed and frustrated with the current situation," he said. "No one should feel excluded from Pride and no group should have to decide it is better if they just don't take part. This current situation is not good for a city as inclusive as Toronto." Pride says officers'still welcome' "We want to be clear, members of the Toronto Police Service are still welcome to march in the Parade as members or allies of our diverse and beautiful community," Pride Toronto said in a statement to CBC Toronto. The group added that the festival must belong to everyone in the community. During its annual general meeting in January, Pride Toronto voted to remove uniformed officers and police floats from future parades. People from Black Lives Matter sit on the ground to halt the annual Pride parade in July 2016. (Mark Blinch/Canadian Press) The demands came from Black Lives Matter Toronto, which briefly halted the Pride parade in July 2016. The organization presented Pride Toronto's executive director with a list of demands, which also included a commitment to increase diversity in hiring at Pride Toronto. The matter was originally referred to a formal dispute resolution process that would have taken place in August. But the formal dispute process was rendered moot after Pride Toronto's vote in January. Leadership roles vacant Pride Toronto has been without an executive director for months. The former director, Mathieu Chantelois, stepped down in August, shortly after signing a document agreeing to a list of demands from Black Lives Matter. With less than four months until the event, the organization does not have a festival director in place. This year's Pride Toronto festivities run June 1-25.Turned out that my kitchen device was not satisfying. Not for the reasons suggested in comments, not because I wanted to use cheezy OS like the ones actually supported for most tablets (last time I checked, you cannot get a decent libre OS with full hardware support) for instance. But the Raspberry Pi B+ is just not powerful enough to browse Internet of these days with such a resolution. It is just too slow. On another hand, for years, I had issues with a declining portable music player I have plugged into the car audio system (that have RCA connectors or otherwise only specific mp3 files support). Either it got stuck on some files, or it had problems to recharge. And even working best as it could, the random mode seemed to have a few songs in favor. So, for less than 30 €, I ordered a tactile 3,5″ screen from Quimat. It work fines with Raspbian, provided you use their specific script that you can obtain via (otherwise the screen would remain white): git clone https://github.com/goodtft/LCD-show.git The box isn’t perfect, on one side the screen won’t be properly supported. But I do not intend to put my paws so much on it so let’s say it is acceptable for such price. Then, to get some acceptable music player system, I went for a mpc/mpd solution, not wanting to bother with Kodi or any complicated solution that might not work or require a dedicated system other than raspbian. So I ended up with mpd along with awesomewm and a few wrapper scripts for mpc just build playlist or send OSD notifications. (since the screen I improved the icon set, removed the visible cursor) I use cava to provide a visualizer. Access to the device is made through anonymous Samba. My -utils-mpc package carries such setup mostly based on mpc-monitor (check currently played, could be used to made stats or scrobbling later), mpc+notify (run mpc command with sendnotify call), mpc-playlist-build, mpc-playlist-next and few sample conffiles (awesome/rc.lua, smb.conf, redshift.conf + extra details in the README about input calibration, mpd.conf). This Raspbian was purged of systemd, because I do want unexpected troubles, and of pulseaudio, because it causes mpd sometimes to stall and works perfectly without. All files at stored in the main mpd music directory. Any file within a subdirectory will be treated as belonging to a specific playlist. Plugging the USB energy input on the car relevant plug generates some odd noise: it has to be plugged to an energy bank. It seems to draw very little power. Last step was to fill the 32GB USB key serving as storage for the music directory. Turns it was quite boring to hand pick such amount of files. So I used another quite crude script to fill it, taking randomly two thirds of available files for a given directory (a band name): #!/bin/bash DEST=/media/user/mpdmusic if [! -d "$PWD/$1" ]; then echo "$PWD/$1" not found && exit; fi LIST=`find "$1" \| grep -v.JPG$ \| grep -v.jpg$ \| grep -v.png$ \| shuf` COUNT=0 for file in $LIST; do [ -d "$file" ] && continue ; COUNT=$(($COUNT+1)) done echo $COUNT THIRD=$(($COUNT / 3)) COUNT=$(($COUNT - $THIRD)) echo a third is... $COUNT # div by 3 and and skip this count if [ "$2" ]; then COUNT=$2; fi echo but... $COUNT for file in $LIST; do if [ "$COUNT" -lt 0 ]; then exit ; fi [ -d "$file" ] && continue ; #echo $COUNT $file COUNT=$(($COUNT - 1)) cp -v "$file" $DEST/`basename "$file"` done Quite crude indeed. mpc-monitor could be used to make stats to, in the end, remove unwanted out. But for now it should properly replace dying mp3/ogg player that you have no control over beside the power-off and play button. Sure, maybe there are cool mp3/ogg/whatever players out there that could come for cheaper. Not really the point, I enjoy having full control over this one, even if I am not using more than 0,001% of this power. And, BTW, I intend, for another pre-electronics vehicule, to get a proper setup with music player and GPS so any experience in this regard is worth it. AdvertisementsThis is a reblog from This Week in Christian Nationalism In a recent blog post on his “Christian Fighter Pilot” blog, Air Force safety officer Maj. Jonathan C. Dowty (yeah, the Christian “fighter pilot” is actually a safety officer) displayed his crack (as in he must be smoking crack) investigative “skills” in yet another attempt to raise suspicions about the finances of Mikey Weinstein and theMilitary Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). I suppose that at this point in his Air Force career, with any prospect of future promotion into the highest ranks looking extremely unlikely, it would make sense for Maj. Dowty to be honing his “journalism” skills for a potential post-military career in the fact-challenged right wing media. Why do Maj. Dowty’s prospects for a brilliant future in the military look dim? Well, after about six years as a major, he was selected for promotion to lieutenant colonel, but he was not selected to attend Senior Developmental Education at the same time. What does that mean? According to a source who knows about these things: “When officers are selected for promotion to Lt Col, the top 10% to 15% of selectees are also identified to attend Senior Developmental Education (SDE), which consists of the possibility of going to one of several service war colleges or special fellowships. Virtually ALL of those chosen to attend SDE that attend these schools will be promoted to full colonel a few years down the road and the next generation of general officers are also chosen from this pool. If an officer is NOT chosen to attend SDE, then their chances of making full colonel drop to less than half (depending on the promotion/personnel environment) and their chances of eventually making general officer are virtually zero — they are not ‘players.’” So, rest assured, there is never going to be a General Jonathan “Christian Fighter Pilot” Dowty. Additionally, Major Dowty was made a safety officer a few years ago, which, from what I’ve been told by reliable source type people I know, is basically a slap in the face for a fighter pilot. He did not get a position at the Air Force Academy, which, according to emails obtained by MRFF through a FOIA request, was what he wanted. In a 2011 email to an instructor at the Air Force Academy, Maj. Dowty, who was then still in a fighter-pilot-related job, working at the USAF Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, wrote: “Do you have any insight into possible openings for either the test slot or just a line instructor? “All else being equal I suspect I’ll end up at Eglin barring other possibilities. “Hope your family is doing well; I’ve got three kids now (who only know Edwards, interestingly). We’ve been enjoying the life here, though moving on will be nice too.” And end up at Eglin Air Force Base he did (which is a good thing because we have a contact there who can keep an eye on him). So, Maj. Dowty now does his countless hours of obsessively blogging about Mikey Weinstein from a nice little house he bought at XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX in nearby XXXXXXXXX, XXXXXXX, where he currently resides with his wife Beth and those three kids of his. One of Maj. Dowty’s regular activities is to scrutinize MRFF’s tax returns (I guess everybody needs a hobby). He then attempts to make the information on these returns appear highly suspicious via one of his scare-quote-laden blog posts. The latest of these posts, titled “Mikey Weinstein, the MRFF, and MIBON Consulting,” differs little from his many similar previous posts. The good “Christian Safety Officer” makes his usual accusation that Mikey Weinstein is getting rich off the the donations to MRFF, and implies that there is something suspicious about my employment by MRFF. Maj. Dowty opens his post by saying: “Michael “Mikey” Weinstein sometimes tries to make the MRFF — the group he created and runs — seem bigger than just him, citing the number of people associated with his “charity.” However, he quietly admits to the IRS the MRFF has only a single employee — Mikey Weinstein. That admission seems to contradict claims by others, like Chris Rodda, who say they work for the MRFF.” Yes, he is actually implying that I don’t really work for MRFF. And what is the basis of this suspicion-casting assertion? I get paid as a contractor. When I started working for MRFF almost seven years ago, it was to do research for some specific projects and I was hired as a contractor. Those projects led to a permanent job with the foundation, but we just never changed the way I was paid. There is nothing at all wrong with this, of course, but Maj. Dowty somehow manages to make it sound terribly suspicious in his next paragraph: I once “admitted” that I was paid as a contractor? Seriously? And how did this big “admission” come about? Maj. Dowty asserted in one of his many previous MRFF-bashing posts that I didn’t really work for MRFF because I wasn’t listed as an employee on the foundation’s tax return, so I said in a comment on that post that the line item for research on the return was what I was paid. That’s it — my big “admission” — I do research for MRFF and MRFF pays me for it and reports it on its tax returns as research expenses! Stop the presses! We’ve got a scandal! And I’ve “faded from the MRFF scene in the past year or so?” Really? Someone needs to tell Mikey that so he’ll stop calling me all the time and bugging me to do stuff for MRFF! But enough about me. Let’s get to the gist of Maj. Dowty’s accusations about MRFF’s tax return. And let’s have some fun with this by comparing what Maj. Dowty claims to be suspicious about MRFF’s tax return to what appears on a recent tax return from the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, an organization to which Maj. Dowty himself belongs. Maj. Dowty big claim is that that MRFF’s personnel expenses are an excessive percentage of its total expenses compared to what are listed as direct program expenses. Maj. Dowty has determined that 73% of MRFF’s expenses would be classified as personnel expenses. He arrives at this 73% figure by adding up every expense that he doesn’t consider to be a direct program expense — Mikey’s salary, research (a.k.a. my pay), accounting, support, and consulting. So, how does Maj. Dowty’s own organization, the Officers’ Christian Fellowship (OCF), fare when you look at their tax return using the suspicion-casting methods of Maj. Dowty. Well, right off the bat, you’ll see that a whopping 54% of OCF’s total expenses are personnel expenses. According to OCF’s 2012 tax return, their total expenses were $3,992,890, of which $2,139,351 were personnel costs. And $1,600,069, or 75% of all of OCF’s personnel costs (including things like pension plans and other benefits) were listed as “program service expenses,” in the same way that MRFF lists certain personnel costs as “program service expenses.” Then there are all the other things that the OCF lists as “program service expenses” — the same types of expenses that MRFF and every other non-profit lists. These are a few of OCF’s other expenses listed as “program service expenses”: Office Expenses: $424,666 Occupancy: $354,450 Depreciation, depletion, amortization: $310,090 Other Service Fees: $67,570 Insurance: $37,453 Investment Management Service Fees: $5,791 Yes, that’s over $1,200,000 in operating and other expenses that the OCF lists as “program service expenses,” and that’s not even all of them! So, what’s our tally for OCF’s personnel and the “program services” expenses listed above? $3,339,371 — over 83% of its total expenses –10% more than MRFF’s similarly listed expenses! What does the OCF — an organization that Maj. Dowty has belonged to since way back when he was a cadet at the Air Force Academy — spend on its actual “ministry” expenses? A mere $133,417. Yep, according to its tax return, this “ministry” only spends about 3% of its total expenses on its stated charitable function of being a ministry! So, why isn’t Maj. Dowty questioning the OCF’s highly suspicious expenditures? Inquiring minds want to know! MRFF has many other questions about Maj. Jonathan “Christian Safety Officer” Dowty, but we’ll get to those in future posts.22.12.2016, 11:02 by Gal Once finished (deadline is end of January) this project will become open-source software and hardware. My quadruple BDC driver for supports up to 4 brushed motors with encoders. Each motor is controlled by its individual closed loop and individual PID gain settings. Additionally, motor speed can also be individually addressed. Analog part of the driver is based on DRV8701P predriver and is controlled by STM32F4 microcontroller. Specifications: 35 V max input voltage (recommended up to 30V) 13 A max continuous motor current (recommended up to 10A) 50 kHz max encoder pulse frequency (recommended 30kHz) Serial communication ROS compatible with available library XT-60 power connector XT-30 motor connectors XH2.54 connectors for encoders Adjustable current protection (0.1A – 13A) Adjustable current alert (LED or on serial) Temperature protection Hardware emergency stop RGB LED for status report Extra 24V power switch for external 24V load Schematics The circuit is divided in two parts. The analog power part and the digital part with peripherals. Let’s talk about the power side firstly. Power side Everything is based on DRV8701P integrated circuit that takes care of dead times, gate currents and ensures higher voltage for opening high side n-mosfets. The DRV has four control inputs. One is sleep (it is used for emergency stop) and two are PWM signals for forward or reverse drive. The DRV also features braking (though not regenerative) with both PWM signals on at the same time. The fourth control input is reference voltage for limiting the current. The DRV has shunt amplifier built-in with fixed gain of 20. This is ideal for current sensing with a 10 mOhm shunt resistor. Once the voltage on the output of the shunt amplifier exceeds the voltage reference set on the control pin the driver enters so called current chopping mode in which it effectively limits the motor current to set level. The driver measures voltage drop across transistors and immediately enters fault mode when the drop is too large. It also features internal temperature protection. The schematic (1) is only for 1 channel. The actual circuit board has 4 identical ones. Digital side and peripherals Digital side is based on STM32F4 microcontroller. I used one in QFN housing to make it more immune to possible mechanical vibrations. The microcontroller is generating 8 PWM signals at 21 kHz with 1000 sections (10bit). The encoders are read by interrupt active pins. All four motors work in PID closed loop. Some additional features are motor sensing motor current, input voltage, used energy and temperature sensing. An RGB LED indicator is present on board to provide basic information about the driver state. Blue LED indicates whether the driver (as a unit) is in sleep mode and motors drives are disabled. Red LED blinks with a fault code and indicates a possible problem. Green LED indicates whether one of the channels is braking. The board has got a connector for remote emergency stop switch. A relay or NPN/n-channel transistor can also be connected on this input to work as an emergeny stop with external watchdog module. Two small 1 A buck switching regulators take care of providing 3.3V and 5V from the input supply. Additionally another N-channel MOSFET switch is implemented. It can switch currents up to 20A. The communication with the driver is based on UART. User has multiple write registers (to set motor speed, PID gains, etc.) and multiple read register that will contain information about temperature, used energy, encoder ticks, etc. Scroll down to software section to view register-map. Power management There were some problems in first two revisions with step-down converter supplying 3.3V to the MCU. The switcher would randomly burn and take the microcontroller with it. Since I couldn’t figure out what was the problem in the first two revisions, I chose to implement a solution with different step-down regulators. I chose LM53601 because it supports up to 35V (all other components are also rated for 35V) and is for automotive use which is perfect for my application. There are two step-downs on board. One is supplying 3.3V to the MCU and other peripherals while the second one provides power for encoders (5V). Both are rated for 1 A. Circuit board First prototype The first prototype was thoroughly tested and initial mistakes were corrected. Some problems were as follows: Wrong interrupt pins (joined interrupt lines in the MCU) Wrong 3.3V switcher layout Huge button bounce (solved with a capacitor, the button was removed in rev. 0.3 due to lack of space) Some other minor mistakes that were solved with second revision Added 2.5 V reference for ADC Added forward and reverse PWM signals of a single driver to a single MCU timer Added a resistor in parallel with NTC to make it more linear Improved board layout The power side of the circuit worked perfectly in the first revision and no correction were made there. Prototype PCBs were manufactured by PCBWay. Their rapid prototype service is fast (5 days from gerbers to PCBs in my hands), reliable and the quality of the PCBs is completely comparable with a local manufacturer. Not to mention 20 boards with 6mil clearance were just 30$ including shipping. I’ll definitely order again. Revision 0.2a Rev 0.1 issues solved: Issue with interrupt pins was solved in this revision. All four of the encoders could be read simultaneously. Rev 0.1 issues still present: Improved step-down switcher layout did not help. It was still unstable and “powergood” signal would stay false. New issues: Because I wanted to improve the accuracy of the ADC readings a 2.5V reference was added on the STM32 AREF pin. It turned out that my reference which was a single 2.5V reference diode did not supply enough current and the voltage collapsed to 1.6V which caused the mcu to reset right after the initialization of the ADC. It was a shameful lesson. DRV8701 has a 5V output rated for 10 mA. It turned out that 10 mA is not enough current to power most of the encoders. Revision 0.3 – final Rev 0.2 issues solved: Step-down switcher replaced with a more suitable one, rising the maximum input voltage of the circuit to 35V. The AREF pin is connected directly to 3.3V rail. The new switcher is believed to have cleaner output compared to the first one (it had 100 mV ripple) and thus an ADC reference would not be needed anymore. New issues:??? Added features: 5V 1A supply to power encoders Added XH2.54 connectors for encoders (they can be bought on ebay for cheap) Added one big RGB led instead of three small ones for indicating status Removed button because it was proven to be useless and was taking up space Extra track on bottom solder layer that runs along with the wide power supply tracks. If overheating problems should occour due to too low trach amperage, a thich copper wire can be soldered on top of the trach for better current conductivity and reduced heat. Pictures of the PCB Connection diagram Click on the picture to open the connection diagram in PDF format. Software Most of the software has already been written. What can the driver do: Control the motors in open loop with duty cycle in both directions Read the motor speed from encoders Control the motors in closed loop in both directions Read temperature Read motor current Read input voltage Calculate used energy Transmit/receive data over serial port Register map Adjustable under-voltage and over-current protection Fault code Startup routine (beeping and such…) Active breaking (routines for active braking in PID regulation) Adjustable UART timeout (driver enters sleep mode if no UART packets are received in specified time interval – used as an fail-safe feature) To do: Regenerative braking Encoder timeout (fail-safe in encoder failuire event) RGB LED status report Register map Click on the picture to open register map in PDF form. Example command that sets motor 3 speed to “10”: 0x7e 0x83 0x00 0x00 0x27 0x10 0x1f 0x83 0x7e Explained: 0x7E Start of frame 0x80 Address byte - 10000011 in binary - MSB bit sets the write command, address is 6 lsb bits - in this case the address is 0x03 0x00 Data byte 0 0x00 Data byte 1 0x27 Data byte 2 0x10 Data byte 3 0x00002710 translates to 10000(dec) Note: the actual parameter is multiplied by 1000 / set speed is divided by 1000 0x1F CRC byte 1 0x83 CRC byte 2 More about CRC: https://www.lammertbies.nl/comm/info/crc-calculation.html 0x7E End of frame The driver then returns: 0xC3 or 11000011 in binary: Bit7 (msb) indicates that an write command was executed. Bit6 is acknowledge bit which is also set to 1 - the parameter was in range and set accordingly. Bit5:0 is addres - in this case it indicates which register was set. Click on the picture to open example frame in PDF form. More soon…11.12.2014 Walter Benjamin: involved his listeners To piece together what has been smashed Walter Benjamin Radio Benjamin Verso, 2014, pp389, £16.99 I first encountered the writings of Walter Benjamin as an undergraduate fine art student when instructed to read his seminal The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction as part of my studies. Over the years since, I have been continually drawn back to his work. Perhaps the allure lies in his humanity and the empathy he has with the downtrodden. Maybe it is the identification with the dead resonating in his work that differentiates him from his contemporaries in the Frankfurt School. For, while he envisaged a better future for humanity beyond capitalism, just as he wrote of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, in On the concept of history, his face too was “turned to the past”.1 In his writings he displayed optimism, passion, vision - and yet there often comes across a sense of deep sadness. In some of his writings it is as if there is an uncanny foretelling of both Benjamin’s own fate and that of the working class of Europe. Benjamin was known as a Marxist, an essayist, a critic of art, theatre and literature, but Radio Benjamin reveals another aspect of the man. This newly translated book of broadcasts for children, written and delivered by Benjamin on Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt between 1927 and 1933, has been well received - and rightly so. Curiously, little attention had been paid to Benjamin’s broadcasts, given the work he had done in analysing the production and consumption of art in the technological age. The translator draws our attention

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