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mopolitan hotel in Las Vegas.
"It's exciting," Gencarelli tells The Oregonian/OregonLive. "I'm curious to see what Lardo does outside of Portland. We've only known it in three locations. Two of them did well. And Vegas is just one of those exciting challenges. It's going to be fun."
Other food tenants at the Cosmopolitan include chef Jose Andres' China Poblano, David Chang's Momofuku and an outpost of Los Angeles breakfast sandwich hotspot Eggslut.
"We have total control over the menu, recipes, what people wear, what the look is, and then Rick or our kitchen manager will go down there once a quarter," Huffman says. "If they're not respecting the recipes, we have the right to pull the brand."
"They want our involvement as much as we're willing to give," Gencarelli says. "They want it to be a Lardo."
According to Huffman, Lardo has been approached about opening locations at the Portland International Airport, Los Angeles, Seattle and even Japan. But a lawsuit filed by former partner Ramzy Hattar limited which opportunities they could pursue. That suit was settled in March.
"We got past that lawsuit and that was really the hardest year and a half for me in terms of the Lardo years," Gencarelli says. "This Vegas deal seems like smart growth. Now I'm just excited for where it's going to go."
-- Michael RussellA Bitcoin transaction services company says that hackers broke into one of its brokerage accounts last week, nabbing more than $12,000 worth of the digital currency.
That attack knocked Bitinstant offline over the weekend. The company says that while it lost Bitcoins, no customers were affected by the hack.
The criminals were able to take control of Bitinstant's internet domains by convincing its domain registrar, Site5, to hand over control of the company's Domain Name Service, or DNS. "Armed with knowledge of my place of birth and mother's maiden name alone (both facts easy to locate on the public record) they convinced Site5 staff to add their email address to the account and make it the primary login," the company said Monday in a blog post detailing the incident.
With control of the DNS, the bad guys also had control over Bitinstant's email. They then did an online password reset at a Bitcoin exchange called VirWox and started emptying Bitinstant's account. The total haul: $12,480.
The attack worked on the VirWox exchange because Bitinstant's account didn't have two-factor authentication. In other words, the criminals were able to empty out money with just a user name and password. "No other exchanges were affected," Bitinstant wrote, saying that the other exchanges it uses were protected by such security precautions as multi-factor authentication, Yubikeys, and auto lockdowns.
Reached Thursday, a VirWox representative said that the exchange has had multi-factor authentication since September 2012. "Bitinstant was not using it (they learned and do now)," the representative said in an email message.
This isn't the biggest Bitcoin heist. Last year, the Bitcoinica exchange was hacked twice, to the tune of more than 60,000 bitcoins. (A Bitcoin is worth more than $40 today; the Bitcoinica thefts were worth several hundred thousand dollars at the time.) That exchange eventually went out of business.
Bitcoins have been getting a lot of attention lately. The Internet Archive is paying its staff members in Bitcoins. You can use them to shop at Amazon or even buy a pizza. But that has made them a more attractive target to hackers, who have taken to writing malicious software that steals Bitcoins out of digital wallets stored on people's desktop computers.
Gaven Andresen, chief scientist with the Bitcoin Foundation, says he had a digital wallet swiped last year. It had been stored on an internet service provider's computer. But the thieves got away with only about $15. That's because Andresen stores most of his Bitcoins on an encrypted laptop that's not connected to the internet.
"Right now, we're in the Wild West days of Bitcoins," he says. "And some of the smaller exchanges and smaller services just don't have their security up to snuff yet."
Site5 and Bitinstant couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
H/T: Help Net Security.
Update – This story has been updated to include comment from VirWox*We've just finished updating the software on the new Kindle Paperwhite with a 300ppi display to a beta version with Amazon's new font and new text rendering engine. The verdict? It's way better. True to Amazon's claims, hyphenation is more logical and spacing between lines and paragraphs is much more sensible.
Amazon also makes a big deal out of things like ligatures (allowing some letters to sit more closely or even overlap) and drop caps and while they're both impressive, I'm more impressed with the new Bookerly font on this screen. An e-reader like a Kindle is a real "one job" kind of gadget: it needs to lay out text in a super readable fashion. It's nice to finally see Amazon give some real attention to that.
But it's the pixel density on this screen that does the most to make text more readable. It's a huge step up, even if the other elements of the screen haven't changed: it's not that much different than the last generation's in terms of contrast. It can get just a little brighter, but at max brightness it's a little bluer than last year's model. It also doesn't have the ambient light sensor you'll find on the Voyage. Yes, even though it has the same pixel density as the Kindle Voyage, the Voyage still has a slightly better screen. But regardless, the 300ppi here makes a huge difference in terms of readability and just plain overall experience. It's really great, and I'm glad to see that Amazon hasn't increased the price at all: it's still $119.
The new Paperwhite seems ever-so-slightly faster than the old Paperwhite, but it's impossible to know whether that's due to improved software or just the (occasional) software quirks I've seen on pretty much every Kindle e-reader. The new software should roll out to Kindle e-readers in the coming weeks and the Paperwhite itself will begin shipping on June 30th.
We'll have more to say in a full review, but for now have a look at some hands-on photos of the new Paperwhite side-by-side with the last version. They're virtually indistinguishable, but you'll know you're looking at the new one because it's the one on the left, and you can also tell by its matted logos and sharper screen.Muslim Groups Call for Boycott of Starbucks Over its Pro-LGBT Stance
Muslim groups in Malaysia and Indonesia are taking a stance that fits well within their hate-filled religion by calling for a boycott of Starbucks because the company supports LGBT issues.
Perkasa, a Muslim Malaysian group, called on their members to boycott Starbucks this week in an asinine attempt to get the company to cater to their outdated and hate-filled beliefs, the AP reports.
Amini Amir Abdullah, the Islamic affairs bureau chief for Perkasa commented to Reuters:
“Our objection is because they are promoting something that is against human instinct, against human behavior and against religion – that’s why we are against it.”
The Washington Examiner reports:
“Perkasa called on the Malaysian government to revoke trading licenses for Starbucks, as well as other companies like Microsoft and Apple. This came days after an Indonesian Islamic group, Muhammadiyah, also denounced the chain in the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population. According to AP, shares in the company that operates Starbucks in Indonesia fell and a boycott Starbucks hashtag was popular for a short time. Amini said the call for boycott stemmed from a report that Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz supports gay marriage. In 2013 Schultz, who was Starbucks CEO at the time, told shareholders who were opposed to diversity to sell their stocks at a shareholders meeting. Sodomy is illegal and punishable by up to 20 years in prison in Malaysia and, while homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court is looking to make homosexual sex and sex out of wedlock a criminal activity, AP said.A few weeks ago, at the state Republican convention in Dallas, a conservative asked me in confidence whether I thought Donald Trump would really be a worse choice for president than Hillary Clinton.
The question is one that many Republicans are grappling with in the wake of Trump’s emergence as the presumptive Republican nominee and because Clinton is almost certain to be his Democratic opponent in the general election. And it’s a question that I had been somewhat ambivalent about taking seriously. Trump is so ignorant, vicious, and volatile that he would strike me as a worse choice for president than anyone the Democrats could have nominated this year. and I have no doubt that some of the Republican “leaders” who would dispute me on that point in public would privately agree.
In this case, however, the conservative asking the question happened to be one I respect, and I had no doubt that his question was serious, so I answered it seriously. And a couple of days later, when I interviewed Ted Cruz, I came to appreciate, a bit, why other serious conservatives might be struggling with the same question.
Last year, as we all know, Cruz was unusually enthusiastic about Trump adding his voice to the Republican primary; I woodshedded him for that back in August, and would still describe it as an error of judgment on his part. But my sense, during the interview in Dallas, was that Cruz himself had come to see Trump in a different light over the course of the primary—that in addition to having made a strategic miscalculation about Trump’s prospects in the primary, he had made some overly naive assumptions about Trump’s character and competence, only to have some very unpleasant realizations, on both fronts, by the time we met in Dallas, in May. That trajectory would actually make sense. I know, because while I was one of the exceptions, most Americans were glib about both Trump’s character and his chances last year. Cruz’s initial error of judgment was not unusual. What’s actually unusual about Cruz’s situation is that, because he was competing with Trump, and doing so effectively, he was confronted with the unpleasant reality earlier than most.
In retrospect, I suspect, Cruz will come to look like the canary in the coal mine. And I hope his fellow Republicans consider that possibility before it’s too late. In the meantime, here are six reasons why Clinton, from a conservative perspective, would be a better choice for president—or, at least, a less grim one—than Trump.
Clinton is more psychologically stable than Trump.
Any president can expect to confront crises and challenges; to be met with ferocious political opposition; and to face constant scrutiny and criticism. That being the case, psychological stability and resilience are pretty crucial qualities in a president. Though we can’t say how anyone would handle the pressures of a job they haven’t actually held, there is ample evidence that Clinton is unusually well equipped on this front. She’s been living her life in public for decades as part of a high profile and controversial political couple. In addition to having logged years of experience in serious jobs—as a United States senator, as Secretary of State—she has, as a result of her marriage, spent years as the First Lady of Arkansas, a state she isn’t from, and of the United States, a country where a woman in that role can expect to be judged not just on her professional accomplishments, but her hairstyle, and cookie recipes.
Clinton’s success in each of those roles is subject to debate, but even conservatives, I think, can agree with the following: we’ve all seen Clinton stumble. We’ve all seen her blanketed with hostile and, at times, deeply personal criticism. We’ve all seen her dust herself off and get back in the game. That bodes well for her ability to be put through the wringer as president.
I would agree that Clinton’s response to her critics has at times been overly defensive, even paranoid, as when, in 1998, she referred to the “vast right-wing conspiracy” working against her husband. But again, she’s faced an inordinate amount of criticism, from both the left and the right, for decades. And she’s shown herself to be far more capable of handling pressure than Trump, as she herself noted in a speech last week.
Clinton, unlike Trump, occasionally shows respect for other people, including the Americans she’s seeking to lead.
One thing I noticed, while covering the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, was that Clinton’s stump speeches, while not as inspirational as Barack Obama’s, often included a reference to the exact number of jobs that had been lost during George W. Bush’s presidency, specifically in the county she was in at the time. It was a small thing, but one that made an impression on me, because by referencing conditions on the ground she was showing that she had done her homework about the conditions the voters in the room might be dealing with. In other words, Clinton was treating the campaign like a job interview; by taking the trouble to inform herself about the details, she conveyed respect for the public’s intelligence, and their specific, localized concerns.
During the course of this year’s campaign, Clinton has come under fire from critics who see her as having began the Democratic primary with the attitude that she was entitled to it, and I can see where they’re coming from given that she had most of these superdelegates all sewn up before the voters even had a chance to weigh in. But over the course of her life, Clinton’s proven herself to be an hard-working candidate who respects the public’s intelligence rather than merely expecting its support.
Trump, meanwhile, lives in some toddler-type state of mind. Not only does he expect everyone to serve his ego, he lashes out at anyone who declines to do so. I realize “takes the trouble to Google a few facts” may not seem like a particularly high bar here. But it’s much more than Trump, who recently asked a coal executive what LNG is, has bothered to do.
Clinton isn’t a misogynist, racist, nativist, or any other kind of bigot.
The conservative who raised the question about Trump versus Clinton was one of a number of men at the convention who quietly mentioned that they had noticed, somewhere along the way, that Trump appears to have a problem with women. All of them, it turned out, had recently heard their wife, or a friend, or a colleague, say that she would under no circumstances vote for Trump. Several of them added that, further to their surprise, these Republican women of Texas had gone a step further, and said they were planning to vote for Clinton.
As a woman, the puzzlement among the menfolk was slightly comical, but mostly poignant. The men in question weren’t misogynists; misogynists don’t brood about their wives’ opinions. But they were, through no fault of their own, men. Their antennae hadn’t been calibrated by years of life as a woman. Similarly, they were white; they were Texans; none of them were Jewish, or Muslim, or members of any of the other groups Trump or his supporters have spent months maligning. Accordingly they hadn’t been primed to see, as easily as many of their fellow Americans, that Trump is a misogynist, a racist, a nativist, and a bigot; and even now they hadn’t quite grasped that the Republican nominee is, in fact, all of those things.
Holding the hand of grown adults as they come to learn unpleasant facts about our world isn’t actually my job. But I do hope that conservative readers who are still in denial about Trump’s character will believe me when I say that I really don’t cry wolf about such things, and I’m warning you right now that if you vote for Trump, you’ll be voting for a man who thinks women, including your mother, your wife, and any daughters you might have, are effectively objects for men to acquire, consume, and dispose. Actually, conservatives, let me put this to you even more bluntly: Is your daughter’s body attractive enough to elicit Donald Trump’s sexual arousal? If that question offends you, I’d recommend that you don’t vote for a candidate who would use that standard to determine her value as a human being.
And, conservatives, if you’re somehow okay with Trump’s slurs—or have even convinced yourself that they’re an auspicious measure of his willingness to stand up to “political correctness”—you should, of course, be aware that you’re associating yourself with everything that has emerged, and will, from this man’s psyche. Trump spent the past year baying like a wounded animal about all the people who threaten his fragile ego. The kind of divisiveness that Trump is engaging in has long been evident, and so has the racism, nativism and anti-Semitism his campaign has roused in the country. If you throw in with Trump, you now know—or should know—the ugliness you’re associating yourself with. It’s simply not credible, at this point, for Republicans who’ve declared their support for Trump to denounce anything he says as “unacceptable,” as Newt Gingrich did this weekend. Gingrich had already accepted Trump’s racism. Learn from his example.
Clinton is less risky than Trump.
A lot of Republican leaders have said that they are reluctantly compelled to support Trump, despite the various principled qualms they would like the public to give them credit for in the future, because he is the alternative to the Democratic nominee and the nation can’t afford four more years of Obama. I realize those leaders have incentives that make it tempting to cast a politically expedient decision as a principled one, but anyone who believes that Clinton represents an existential threat to the republic has succumbed to hysteria. In fact, we can be fairly confident that the nation can straggle through four more years of a Democratic presidency, because we’re currently in the eighth year of one. I continue to hate Obamacare, but I can see that the nation it’s been inflicted on still exists.
Meanwhile, Trump’s own supporters will be happy to tell you that they see his candidacy as an exciting chance to shake up the snow globe. There’s no reason for other conservatives to follow their lead.
The risks of a Clinton presidency are more or less known, and known to be tolerable. Yes, she’s a Democrat. Yes, she’d probably appoint Democrats to the Supreme Court. Republicans should have thought about that before settling on Trump as the man to oppose her in November. As it stands, conservatives can take comfort in the fact that Clinton, as a graduate of Yale Law, has at least heard of the Constitution, and that at the end of the day, her views are almost certainly more aligned with those of her life partner, Bill, than Obama’s. She’s a politician, so it’s hard to be sure, but it is demonstrably the case that in 2008 she made a very serious effort to thwart Obama’s efforts to become president in the first place, and almost succeeded.
It’s true that Clinton will likely pursue some policies as president that conservatives find suboptimal. But there’s also a chance that Trump would do the same—not to mention the possibility that he would undermine the rule of law and some fundamental institutions of American democracy, as some conservatives and libertarian legal scholars are now concerned about.
Clinton is more conservative than Trump on a number of key issues.
Clinton, as noted above, is to all accounts less leftist than many national Democrats. Many progressives who voted for Obama in 2008, or Sanders in 2016, would be happy to tell you that, at length. Beyond that, she’s arguably more conservative than Trump, whose political views are to all appearances derived from his personal interests and unruly feelings, and therefore don’t really map onto any kind of philosophical framework.
I’ll just give one example, because it’s a dispositively clear example. As a fiscally conservative Texan, I obviously care about a candidate’s views on trade. It is something I’m generally in favor of, and know to be a crucial pillar of the economy of the state in which I live. It used to be the case that most Republicans pretended to hold a similar view of the subject, and so it’s astounding to me that the Republican Party would nominate a candidate who is anti-trade. Trump has, in fact, specifically vowed to “beat Mexico at trade,” which would not only devastate Texas’s economy, it would create the kind of insecurity along our southern border that Dan Patrick has nightmares about.
Clinton, by contrast, is generally pro-trade. And conservatives are well within their rights to vote for the candidate whose beliefs are more closely aligned with their own. The Republican Party has abandoned conservative principles. That doesn’t mean conservative voters have to do the same.
Clinton is a Democrat.
If Clinton becomes president, Republicans will be members of the opposition, meaning they can oppose her agenda openly and even, despite this Trump disaster, with occasional credibility. If Trump becomes president, they’ll be the loyal members of a party led by a dangerously impulsive president. They’ll be chronically torn over whether they should summon the temerity to express their discomfort with whatever Trump decides to do in response to something mean he saw someone say about him on the internet, or to accept the reality that he is their leader, and they are tools he feels free to use to serve his ego. I know which lifestyle I’d prefer.
So there you go, conservatives. Six reasons. And though I could go on, I suspect any of you who’ve read this far could use a break. But that does bring up one more reason conservatives should hope Clinton beats Trump: if she does, that’ll likely be the end of Trump’s career in politics. And so I’d have no more reason to write about him, or the many Republicans humiliating themselves on his behalf, ever again.ACCENTUATE the positives, eliminate the negatives.
That’s exactly what Liverpool did during the second half of last season. Brendan Rodgers’ team was far from perfect during 2013-14 but – crucially – as the season went on he got them focused on what they could do rather than what they couldn’t.
They imposed their will on games with an attacking brand of maniacal, front-foot football regardless of the opposition. Whether it was top sides like Everton or Man City visiting Anfield or middling teams like United and Southampton away from home, Liverpool played their way and asked opponents ‘Can you deal with this?’.
The vast majority of teams couldn’t. And that’s precisely why we ended the season so close to being crowned champions.
It was curious and more than a little frustrating then, that on Sunday we abandoned that philosophy. Rodgers set his team out against Southampton in a way that didn’t get the best out of his players. Two deep defensive midfielders worked great under Rafa Benitez when those lads were the mobile and tenacious Javier Mascherano alongside the serene and canny Xabi Alonso. With an ageing Steven Gerrard and an ailing Lucas Leiva though? Not so much.
You can easily get bogged down in the numbers game: 4-2-3-1, 4-3-3, 4-1-2-3, 4-1-2-1-2, blah blah blah. People switch off in the face of that stuff and understandably so. The fluidity of modern-day football renders such reductive terms as almost meaningless anyway and I have no desire to start banging on about numerical systems here.
But if last season illustrated one thing it was that this particular incarnation of Liverpool does not require a babysitter for it’s captain regardless of the physical limitations being enforced upon him by Mother Nature and Father Time. Whatever the system, The Reds don’t require two defensive midfielders on the pitch at the same time these days.
Lucas Leiva should play as a holding midfielder when Gerrard isn’t available. Partnering them doesn’t work. It rarely has in the past and it shows no sign of doing so in the future. It doesn’t help either of them as individuals – one need only look at the amount of criticism they’ve taken this week (the Brazilian in particular). It certainly doesn’t help the players around them, as we saw with Jordan Henderson and Philippe Coutinho on Sunday.
So why go with it in the first place against the Saints?
Well, perhaps the manager decided to pair them up in front of the back four against Southampton in an attempt to add solidity to a team that conceded too many goals last term. Maybe he saw Lucas as a more physical alternative to Joe Allen and decided that was what was required against the imposing midfield duo of Morgan Schneiderlin and Victor Wanyama.
In theory, I get that. In practise though, Liverpool were no more secure with Lucas holding Gerrard’s hand than they were when the shape eventually changed and Joe Allen and Henderson played in advance of the skipper. The only team whose threat was diminished by the presence of Lucas and Gerrard appearing in tandem on Sunday was Liverpool. It meant one less body breaking forward. It meant one less attacking player offering for the ball when we had possession deep in our half. The high pressing that became the calling card of this team last season was conspicuous by it’s absence.
I realise the season is only 90 minutes old and I’m in serious danger of exaggerating the faults with what was ultimately a crucial opening day win, but we’ve seen this Lucas/Gerrard approach in the past numerous times from Rodgers and it concerns me a little that a manager who has generally demonstrated an acute ability to learn from his mistakes continues to revisit this particular aberration.
I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who groaned a little when the team was released prior to kick off and my dissatisfaction wasn’t just down to the absence of the immaculately coiffured Emre Can. It seems to me that almost everyone knows that pairing Gerrard and Lucas together in midfield isn’t the way to go these days. It’s a negative tactic in my mind that shows we are more concerned with our flaws than with our qualities. The contrasting fortunes against Arsenal and Everton last season are perhaps the best examples of why seeing Lucas line up next to Gerrard unsettled me on Sunday.
Last November we went to Goodison Park and played with two defensive midfielders to negate the threat Everton posed between the lines – particularly that of the in form Ross Barkley. Gerrard and Lucas never got near Everton’s young star that day. Barkley drove at and beyond them time and time again. The Blues created enough clear-cut chances to win five derbies but somehow we got out of dodge with a point.
In the return fixture at Anfield in January, we lined up against an Everton team who many saw as favourites on the day with only Gerrard as a deep midfielder. Plenty of people I’ve spoken to since have admitted that they shared my personal concern before kick off that Barkley’s athleticism would once again expose the (in theory) isolated Gerrard in our defensive third. We needn’t have worried. Everton’s young star barely got a kick because Coutinho and Henderson pressed Everton’s midfield high and cut off the supply line. We decimated Everton and Gerrard strolled through the game.
Now let’s go back to November again. The Reds travelled to north London to take on Arsenal who included Santi Cazorla, Aaron Ramsey and Mesut Ozil in their side on the night. In other words, three players who excel at playing in that gap between the opposition’s midfield and defence. To combat this, Rodgers again deployed the Gerrard/Lucas axis.
It was no use.
Arsenal tampered with us like a cat who has cornered an injured vole. Mikel Arteta ran the game from deep as no one was closing him down and Ramsey and Cazorla bagged the goals in a comfortable 2-0 win for the Gunners.
Fast forward to February when Arsenal came to Anfield. They were top of the league and had the best defensive record in the country. We all know what happened next. Philippe Coutinho was put in central midfield alongside Jordan Henderson and the pair of them bullied Arteta, Jack Wilshere, Ozil and co mercilessly. Arsenal could barely muster an attack because every time they tried to play through midfield Coutinho and Henderson were in their faces. Gerrard was left alone to patrol in front of his centre halves and he barely broke into a sweat as he ran proceedings.
It’s important to acknowledge that Gerrard is no specialist defensive midfielder. He didn’t grow up learning that craft and his best days were spent as an attacking force, yet Rodgers’ ploy of pairing two mobile lads (whether it was Allen, Henderson or Coutinho) ahead of him in midfield meant that it barely mattered as last season progressed. The two players in front of him masked his deficiencies.
You don’t need Gerrard to have legs when Jordan Henderson is running a marathon for your team every week and Coutinho or Joe Allen is snapping at the heels of the opposition like a hyperactive Jack Russell.
Gerrard’s influence as a match winner – that we relied on for so long – wasn’t required in the latter stages of the previous campaign. He was free to concentrate on building play from deep rather than having to put out fires all over the pitch and bang in crucial goals from open play. No donkey work for him, just the ball at his magical feet and options ahead of him. It worked spectacularly well. Again, it was accentuating the positives and hiding the negatives.
We go to the Etihad on Monday and there is no tougher fixture that we will face domestically all season. Last time out we played brilliantly there against City on Boxing Day and came away with nothing. That could easily happen again. They’re a bloody fantastic outfit who can beat anyone on their day.
My hope ahead of this match is that, regardless of the eventual outcome, Liverpool go to Manchester and do exactly what they did in that defeat last season. Lucas played the holding role alone in Gerrard’s absence that day while Henderson and Allen went toe to toe with City’s midfield in front of the Brazilian. They created chances, we created chances. It was a thrilling, open game that could have gone either way and demonstrated to the rest of the league that Liverpool could meet the best squad in the country head on and come out looking formidable, even in defeat.
The worry this time around for me is that we redeploy the same shape we utilised against Southampton. City are great between the lines, with Silva and Nasri wreaking havoc in particular, but I hope that fact doesn’t persuade Brendan to start Lucas again. I’d much rather see Jordan Henderson and Emre Can (providing he’s fit) or even Joe Allen going toe to toe with Yaya Toure and Fernando (or little Fernando who happens to be the older Fernando) as was the case in both of those wonderful games against City last season.
Sure, such an approach plays to their strengths as much as it does ours and would almost guarantee goals at both ends, but the alternative is to be cautious and full of worry about what they can do while simultaneously significantly reducing our own attacking abilities.
This Liverpool team hasn’t been constructed to eliminate the threat of others by being defensive. It’s been built to attack opponents and it challenges them to be good enough to deal with what we offer. Most can’t. City are a team that can overcome us even on our better days because of their quality, but to my mind we stand a much better chance of being successful if we approach Monday’s game, and the season as a whole, in the same proactive manner we did from December onwards last season.
It’s time for another throw down between the two best English teams of 2014. It’s time to abandon the caution of Sunday and go back to doing what we do best.
Monday is the time to once again start accentuating the positives and eliminating the negatives.
Pics: David Rawcliffe
[yop_poll id=”6″]You never know where a conversation in the hallway might lead you.
Between sessions at the 2014 OpenStack Summit Paris, Anne Gentle spied something she didn’t recognize on Justin Shepherd’s smartphone. “I’m a curious one,” says Gentle, a principle engineer at Rackspace, so she asked him about it.
From thousands of miles away, Shepherd, a distinguished architect for Rackspace Private Cloud, was keeping an eye his wife’s health while she slept in Texas. After a decade of monitoring her Type 1 diabetes, she was pregnant.
“You almost are both diabetic at that point. All of your conversations revolve around her blood sugar. Are you too high, are you too low? When did you last eat? Do I need to get you some sugar? Are you starting to pass out in the middle of the night? Do I need to get you some orange juice? Let’s take care of all of your blood glucose,” Shepherd says. “That becomes a big part of your life.”
The trip to Paris complicated that vital monitoring process. Before leaving, Shepherd investigated how he could check on her remotely and realized that the Dexcom Continuous Glucose Monitoring device, or Dexcom CGMS, she was using had a service called Dexcom Share, which allows you to take data from the Dexcom CGMS, send it to an iPod-like device and connect that to your smartphone via Bluetooth. The proprietary set-up costs about $400, plus a monthly fee, he says.
His strategy resonated with Gentle, whose son Evan had been diagnosed at age 11 with Type 1 diabetes after the sugary funnel of a Pixy Stick sent him to the emergency room.
“I was trying to figure out how to give my son more control and at the same time, train him. He’s going to middle school this year, he should have more independence. How can we give that to him? I know we can manage this with technology…I have access to a lot of cloud,” Gentle says. “Would you rather have your kid, your wife, your friend, pricking fingers five times a day, or go ahead and get data every five minutes? That’s what continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) gives you…We have to emphasize how valuable this is in controlling this disease. ”
Shepherd and Gentle got to talking and realized they could do better. Essentially, the Dexcom CGMS was just connecting a couple of devices and providing those data points. The person monitoring has just a trend line and can set some alarms, but a lot of things affect diabetes control. “If you exercise, that actually drops your blood sugar. When you give yourself insulin, it drops your blood sugar, when you eat, it takes your blood sugar up,” Shepherd says. “There’s all this data that would be really interesting to put together and wouldn’t it be amazing if there were an open-source solution to this?”
Gentle’s research led her to John Costik, software developer and father of a son also named Evan, an original member of the CGM in the cloud team of a nonprofit called the Nightscout Foundation. Nightscout is an open source, DIY project that allows real-time access to a CGM data via personal website, smartwatches and smartphone apps and widgets. The project’s original approach to collect the data required an Android phone attached to the CGM receiver, but the project now has a REST API for collecting and displaying data.
She found inspiration in Nightscout’s rallying cry, the slogan “We Are Not Waiting.” As in “not waiting for a proprietary solution, not waiting for a company to market a product but reverse-engineering the system to figure out how to make it work for their needs today,” Gentle says. A Stanford diabetes data hackathon gave birth to the slogan in 2013 which quickly gained momentum as a Twitter hashtag, #WeAreNotWaiting.
Her son’s current set-up is a combination of proprietary and open-source solutions. Evan wears a sensor on his arm or backside and carries the small Dexcom device — not too heavy for a sixth grader to stick in his pocket all the time. The device pairs with his iPhone and the Nightscout web application (Node.js connected to a MongoDB database) running on an OpenStack cloud server hosted at Rackspace. Gentle says that there were some initial head scratchers with the data — you have to rely on common sense sometimes if the numbers don’t quite look right — but overall it’s given her peace of mind. She and her husband can watch their son’s blood sugar on a Pebble, a smartwatch or smartphones.
“This has been amazing because I can have a babysitter come in and just tell her, ‘Go to this webpage on your phone and you can watch his blood sugar too and just make sure he’s in safe ranges,’” Gentle says.
In the process of putting together her son’s set-up, she learned a lot about what it means to run an app on OpenStack, how to get everything working together and reliable enough to stay running. The result is a tiered application stack with multiple open source projects working together and multiple proprietary solutions working together.
“Our hope is to inspire you to look into open source, to think of ways to solve the data problems that you might have already,” Gentle says. “Let’s not wait for someone else to solve it. The OpenStack community is especially good at thinking this way.”
Shepherd and Gentle teamed up to show how they’re monitoring their nearest and dearest (and how to avoid being worst helicopter relative, ever) at the Summit Tokyo. Catch the complete 37-minute talk on the OpenStack Foundation’s YouTube channel.
Cover Photo // CC BY NCInvestors take fright as company reveals $457m loss for 2016 and concedes its financial growth is lagging its popularity
Shares in Twitter have slumped after the tech company suffered a decline in advertising income, despite a rise in user numbers as Donald Trump’s high-profile tweeting helped to advertise the platform’s influence.
Jack Dorsey, chief executive and co-founder, hailed the growing “impact and influence” of Twitter, saying the US president had “boosted the power” of the service.
But investors took fright as the loss-making company conceded that its financial growth was lagging behind its increasing popularity among users and would continue to do so in the near future.
The San Francisco-based company reported annual revenues up 14% on last year to $2.5bn (£2bn). Monthly active users climbed from 317 million to 319 million in the final quarter of last year.
While Twitter trumpeted an increase in users and time spent on the site, revenues increased by less than analysts had forecast.
The tech company is still making sizeable losses, falling $457m into the red during 2016 despite cutting 9% of its workforce, or about 350 people. Its shares fell by more than 11% to $16.54 in early trading on Wall Street after the disappointing set of figures were revealed.
Would you believe it? Print remains a favourite with readers Read more
Twitter has now racked up losses of almost $2.8bn since it floated on the stock market three years ago – at $26 a share – and the latest figures deal a blow to the company’s plan to turn a profit by the end of 2017.
One figure that will give cause for concern among investors is a fall in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter, down to $638m from $641m in the same period of last year. This was largely because of a slump in revenues in the US, which wiped out gains in Twitter’s international markets.
The company had reported an
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I’m a city girl turned country by my awesome husband and we have three busy boys and two darling daughters. I love spending time with my family, reading Karen Kingsbury novels, and catching up with friends while our kiddos have play dates. I’m blessed beyond measure and can’t wait to see what God has in store.
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Related posts we've written:When the indigenous peoples of the Americas encountered European settlers in the 15th century, they faced people with wildly different religions, customs, and—tragically—diseases; the encounters wiped out large swaths of indigenous populations within decades. Now, researchers have found that these diseases have also left their mark on modern-day populations: A new study suggests that infectious diseases brought by Europeans, from smallpox to measles, have molded the immune systems of today’s indigenous Americans, down to the genetic level.
The immune system is a complex structure, built over a person’s life in response to environmental conditions. Antibodies, proteins that tag and attack viruses and bacteria, “remember” past invaders, allowing white blood cells to quickly respond during subsequent infections. Because different groups of people encounter different diseases—the European settlers had high exposure to smallpox, measles, and influenza thanks to close contact with livestock—they develop different antibodies. But what about the genes behind the immune system? Could those also change vulnerability to certain diseases?
To find out, a team led by Ripan Malhi, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, sought permission from the Tsimshian, a First Nations community in the Prince Rupert Harbor region of British Columbia in Canada, to examine DNA from the skeletal remains of 25 individuals who lived in the region between 500 and 6000 years ago. These ancient indigenous inhabitants, many of them ancestors to the modern Tsimshian, were a seafaring people who first encountered Europeans in the early 1700s.
Using a technique known as whole exome sequencing, researchers—including Tsimshian scientists Barbara Petzelt and Joycelynn Mitchell—sifted through the DNA for genes related to immune response. They then sequenced DNA samples from 25 Tsimshian living near Prince Rupert today. Comparing the two sets of genes, the team discovered several immune-related gene variants that were rare among the living. For example, a variant of a gene known as a HLA-DQA1, which codes for proteins that sort healthy cells from invading viruses and bacteria, was found in nearly 100% of ancient individuals, but in only 36% of modern ones.
That finding suggests that the immune-related genes of the ancient Tsimshian were well-adapted to local diseases but not to novel infections like smallpox and measles, the team reports today in Nature Communications. Because European-borne epidemics altered the disease landscape, survivors were less likely to carry variants like HLA-DQA1, which were less able to cope with the new diseases (precisely how is still a mystery). “Those ancient genetic variants that were once adaptive were no longer adaptive after European contact,” Malhi says.
Measuring differences between the ancient and modern DNA, Malhi and colleagues calculated a rough date for the genetic shift, about 175 years ago. At that time, smallpox epidemics raged throughout the Americas, including in Prince Rupert Harbor. Those with the most susceptible immune system genes were killed. Based on the new findings and historical accounts, the team says that close to 80% of the community died in the decades following initial European contact.
Kim TallBear, a native studies researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the study is well designed and provides “deeper genetic resolution on what we already know.” Still, she’s concerned the paper suggests that indigenous people are defined by their differences with Europeans, rather than by their adaption to their own environment. “Within the dominant scientific narrative, the European body is the standard and indigenous bodies are thought of as biologically deviant,” TallBear says.
Going forward, Malhi plans to investigate the immune-related genes of other indigenous communities. Jennifer Raff, an anthropologist and geneticist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, agrees that it’s an important question going forward. “Different tribes had different experiences of contact,” she says. “It’s critically important to study the specific genetic consequences in populations across the Americas.”Still doing the business: Anthony Minichiello. Credit:Getty Images Through the pain and adversity, they only grew stronger. The odds were stacked against them – a series of debilitating injuries throughout their respective careers threatened to jeopardise their playing future. They shouldn't be here – but after 19 Tests for Australia, 19 Origin appearances for NSW and four premierships between them – they are here. And at Brookvale Oval on Friday night, two of the best fullbacks of the modern era may cross paths for the last time as the curtain closes on the career of the Roosters captain 15 years after making his first-grade debut at the same club.
"When I started coming through into first grade, Mini was the in-form fullback and a lot of the up-and-coming fullbacks were basing their game around the way he played," Stewart said. "He'll be remembered as relentless. He's the ultimate competitor and has got that never-say-die attitude. To watch him play when I was coming into first grade was a pleasure. He's probably had one of the most longest stints at fullback. "The generations have changed a bit but he's adapted his game to the fullback role as the generations changed and will be remembered as one of the best. Speed was a big part of my game when I first came into grade. Then two serious knee injuries slowed me up a little bit. I just had to change my focus to the ball in the hand and my catch and pass, which didn't come natural to me when I first came into first grade. I think you become smarter and you try and think ahead a bit more because you have to and that's what Mini has done."
The magnitude of their injury woes is highlighted in the fact that in a four-year period between 2007 and 2011, Stewart and Minichiello never squared off. Stewart, 29, who has been dogged by knee injuries throughout his career, leads the head-to-head battles with six wins from the nine matches they've taken the field on opposite teams.
The Manly fullback also leads in the try scoring stakes with five tries to two against Minichiello, who endured a horrible run with a chronic back injury in the middle of his career. But it's the 34-year-old Minichiello who holds bragging rights after he led his Roosters to premiership glory at the expense of Stewart's Sea Eagles last year in what was the first time the pair has locked horns in finals football. "I've got a tremendous amount of respect for Mini, especially with the serious injuries he's had with his back," Stewart said. "He sat out basically 2½ years of football but came back bigger and better. It's something that I can relate to, having my own issues with injury. He's an important part of that side and leads from the front. "I don't know too much about it but from what I heard the surgeons told him he wouldn't play again. For anyone to come back from that is a testament to themselves."Thank you Santa for the great gifts! Angus absolutely loves the Bobs a lot treat dispenser. Every time we walk through the kitchen now he has to check it to see if he left any treats in there. I'm super sneaky and like to surprise him with treats in it. He also enjoys playing tuggies with his braided monkey. My 2 year old son is even learning how to play too. The cats can't seem to get enough of the cat nip toy. Within an hour of giving it to them, they had soaked it with saliva. I couldn't get Otto or Ezio to sit still long enough for a picture. But Stella let me when it was her turn to have a lick. Thanks again for all the wonderful gifts! We really appreciate them and will get tons of use out of them.Jordan Baker was 26 when he was shot to death by an off-duty Houston Police officer.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Or something like this one.
A Harris County, Texas, grand jury declined Tuesday to indict police officer Juventino Castro in the shooting death of 26-year-old African-American Jordan Baker.
Baker, a community college student and father of a then-7-year-old boy, was reportedly riding his bike through the parking lot of a shopping mall in January when he was stopped by Castro, an off-duty Houston policeman moonlighting as extra security at the mall because shops in the area had experienced a string of hold-ups.
According to police accounts, Jordan, who was wearing a black, hooded sweatshirt, was spotted looking into store windows. Castro, who was the only witness, said that his attempt to ask Jordan for identification led to a brief struggle and then a foot chase. (Initial accounts even had Jordan on the ground, with Castro attempting to cuff him, when Jordan got up and ran.) The chase ended in an alley where Castro says Jordan stopped, then charged the officer.
Castro fired one shot, killing Jordan.
At the time, the Houston Police Department said Jordan was stopped because he matched the description of the robbery suspect: a black man wearing a hoodie. Police initially even told reporters the man shot was the one responsible for the armed robberies.
Apparently not.
Jordan’s mother, Janet Baker, said her son was a devoted student and father who was doing “everything right.” She accused the off-duty HPD officer of profiling Jordan.
Even though Castro shot Jordan while off duty, he was still placed on the standard 3-day administrative leave after the incident. He was also apparently afforded the same benefit of the doubt accorded on-duty officers, both in Houston and across most of the U.S.
Castro, who was not injured in the reported scuffle with Jordan, was found by Houston Police to have followed agency policy... even though, again, he was off duty when the shooting occurred.
Harris County has not indicted any Houston Police officers on any criminal charges in any shooting since 2004, according to the Houston Chronicle. "Harris County grand juries have cleared HPD officers in shootings 288 consecutive times."
This is hardly unique to Houston, however. As has become clear since the shooting of unarmed African-American teen Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., this summer, the vast majority U.S. police shootings do not result in any legal action against the offending officers.
Chicago, for instance, hasn’t indicted an officer in a shooting since 2007. Dallas reviewed 81 shootings involving 175 police officers between 2008 and 2012, and indicted only one.
More than a quarter of the 121 civilians shot by HPD officials between 2008 and 2012 were unarmed, according to analysis by the Chronicle.
The paper does not say how many, if any, of those shootings were by off-duty officers.Fifty-four percent of students who started college for the first time in 2006 graduated within six years.
Photo by Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images
Just over half—or 54.1 percent, to be exact—of first-time college students starting school in 2006 graduated within six years. That’s according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The full report, which breaks down completion rates by state, age, type of school, and enrollment status (part-time or full-time), shows some notable gaps in completion rates for those categories.
For four-year public colleges, 81 percent of students enrolled full-time for the duration of their college experience graduated within six years—70 percent from the same institution they started with. But just 19 percent of those who attended school part-time graduated within six years. You’d think that’s because it may be taking students longer than six years to complete a four-year degree part-time, right? Not really. Almost 70 percent of exclusively part-time students hadn’t graduated and were no longer enrolled at any institution after six years. Meanwhile, mixed-enrollment students had an overall graduation rate of just under 47 percent. Four-year private nonprofit schools had a similar breakdown in graduation rates by enrollment status.
In 13 states, the number of part-time students with no degree and no current enrollment after starting at a four-year public college was more than 75 percent, even worse than the nationwide average. “Traditional age” students (i.e., under 24 years old) had higher graduation rates than older students in pretty much every state. The completion rate gap was the smallest in Arizona at just 1 percent, but largest in Vermont, at 42 percent.
The Chronicle of Higher Education created an interactive map based on the data, which gives a good picture of the state-by-state numbers. Or, you can read the report in full here.Samsung Electronics announced today that it will recycle parts from Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, which gained notoriety last year after a battery defect caused several to burst into flames. The company said in a statement on its Korean site (via Google Translate) that it also expects to recover 157 tonnes of rare metals, including gold, from the devices.
Sales of the Galaxy Note 7 were suspended last September, but Samsung confirmed in March that it plans to sell refurbished Galaxy Note 7s instead of throwing them away.
In its new announcement, Samsung said it will recover components like OLED display modules, memory chips, and camera modules from Galaxy Note 7s and reuse them for repairs or recycle them. Rare metals, including cobalt, copper, and gold, will be recovered during the recycling process.
Though Samsung faces a unique PR challenge because of the exploding phone fiasco, other smartphone companies have also announced initiatives to reduce their impact on the planet. For example, Apple announced in April that it is figuring out how to use only renewable materials in its products. Not to be outdone, Samsung said today that it is working on new ways to recycle materials from its products and “actively lead the industry in terms of environmental protection and resource recycling.”A 22-year-old cat whose family created a bucket list for him after he was found suffering from kidney failure and a tumor shortly after being adopted has sadly passed away.
Tigger was adopted two years ago by Adriene Buisch, a former Baltimore Ravens cheerleader, and her boyfriend after his former owner abandoned him. However, a few months after joining his new family, tests discovered Tigger’s kidneys were failing and a golf-ball sized tumor was later found.
But instead of being down about the somber diagnosis, Buisch decided to create a bucket list for Tigger for the final chapter of his life. For over a year, Tigger and his family set out on numerous journeys, which included trips to the beach, a family trip to Florida and other adventures in their hometown of Baltimore.
PREVIOUS STORY: Owner discovers adopted cat has tumor, creates bucket list
His bucket list story went viral and Tigger would end up receiving gifts and care packages from around the world supporting him in his journey.
Last November, Tigger celebrated his 22nd birthday!
However, Tigger's bucket list adventures finally came to an end as he died peacefully by his family's side. His family wrote on Facebook:
"I hope his journey helps cat and pet lovers know how wonderful it is to not only adopt but to adopt older pets. Witnessing the love and happiness of Tigger changed our lives."DURHAM, N.H. – More than 50 million years ago, when the Earth experienced a series of extreme global warming events, early mammals responded by shrinking in size. While this mammalian dwarfism has previously been linked to the largest of these events, research led by the University of New Hampshire has found that this evolutionary process can happen in smaller, so-called hyperthermals, indicating an important pattern that could help shape an understanding of underlying effects of current human-caused climate change.
“We know that during the largest of these hyperthermals, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, temperatures rose an estimated nine to 14 degrees Fahrenheit and some mammals shrank by 30 percent over time, so we wanted to see if this pattern repeated during other warming events,” says Abigail D’Ambrosia, a doctoral student at UNH and lead author of the study. “The hope is that it would help us learn more about the possible effects of today’s global warming.”
In the study, published in Science Advances, researchers collected teeth and jaw fragments in the fossil-rich Bighorn Basin region of Wyoming. Their focus was on several early mammals including Arenahippus, an early horse the size of a small dog, and Diacodexis, a rabbit-sized predecessor to hoofed mammals.
Using the size of the molar teeth as a proxy for body size, the researchers found a statistically significant decrease in the body size of these mammals’ during a second, smaller, hyperthermal, called the ETM2. Arenahippus decreased by about 14 percent in size, and the Diacodexis by about 15 percent.
“We found evidence of mammalian dwarfism during this second hyperthermal, however it was less extreme than during the PETM," said D’Ambrosia. “During ETM2 temperatures only rose an estimated five degrees Fahrenheit and it was shorter only lasting 80,000 to 100,000 years, about half as long as the larger PETM. Since the temperature change was smaller, this suggests there may be a relationship between the magnitude of a global warming event and the degree of associated mammal dwarfism.”
Researchers propose that the body change could have been an evolutionary response to create a more efficient way to reduce body heat. A smaller body size would allow the animals to cool down faster. Nutrient availability and quality in plants may have also played a role. Previous research shows that both the PETM and the ETM2 hyperthermals coincided with increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that could have limited nutrient quality in plants, which may have contributed to the smaller mammal body size. Hydrological records during the PETM also suggest less precipitation and drought which could have led to drier soils and even fire which may have affected vegetation growth and eventually possibly offspring size. After both hyperthermal events, body sizes on all mammals rebounded.
The carbon dioxide released during both hyperthermals has a similar footprint to today’s fossil fuels. Researchers hope that developing a better understanding of the relationship between the change in mammalian body size during those events and today’s greenhouse gas-induced global warming may help to better predict possible future ecological changes in response to today’s climate changes.
Co-authors include William Clyde, UNH; Henry C. Fricke, Colorado College; Philip D. Gingerich, University of Michigan; Hemmo A. Abels, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.
The preliminary findings were presented earlier at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s 2013 annual meeting.Last month, POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine published another ill-tempered tirade by retired L.A. cop Dean Scoville in the magazine’s Patrol Tactics section. (You may recall Sergeant Scoville from his previous ill-tempered tirade in which he openly praised police brutality against captive prisoners.) This most recent tirade, Four More Cops Killed: Where Is The Outrage? launches into this subject with the following claims of imminent and growing danger that people (non-police) pose to government police:
Shortly before I retired, I openly speculated that we were on the cusp of a new era where people would increasingly bring the fight to us. Moreover, I said they would prove to be greater threats, less predisposed to gangsta -style shooting and actually recognize the significance of sight alignment and trigger control. I also noted that technology has helped the people who want to kill us develop better eye-hand coordination and tactics via video games and other poor man’s combat simulators, …. They have also become more sophisticated in their choice of weaponry, and are fast becoming better armed than us, accessorizing with everything from laser sights to cop-killer bullets. … More recently, economic stress, racial strife, a resurrection of militia types, and spillover from Mexican cartel activity have made this toxic cocktail even deadlier. — Sergeant Dean Scoville (2009-12-01), POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine : Four More Cops Killed: Where Is The Outrage?
He closes the article with the following credo:
Yes, I believe that the job is increasingly dangerous. And it is made more so by what is put out there about it.
(This is used as a springboard for a couple pages’ worth of rambling complaints against society at large for our willingness to embrace anti-cop sentiments and stereotypes, with a special focus on the alleged anti-cop drum beating of Hollywood, rap music, and those segments of society who have fundamentally failed to hold their own [sic] accountable — and, just so we’re clear, by those segments of society, Scoville means black people. [ ] Also, I guess he’s pissed off that Dick Wolf decided to cast Ice-T as a cop in Law and Order: SVU.)
Scoville’s claim that being a government cop is increasingly dangerous is not an isolated claim. For example, down in the comments section on the article, another retired government cop, mtarte, writes:
I’m retired now and still wish I could do the job, but today’s cops are in much more dangerous situations than ever before. — mtarte, in re: Sergeant Dean Scoville (2009-12-01), POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine : Four More Cops Killed: Where Is The Outrage?
In Milwaukee, by way of explanation for why Milwaukee Police Department had begun arming regular patrol cops with semiautomatic rifles:
It’s obvious that our officers are facing an increasingly dangerous threat to their safety as well as the safety of the community as represented by these weapons …. — Police Chief Ed Flynn, quoted in Officer.com (2009-04-24): Milwaukee Police Increase Firepower
CRIPT Academy, a tactical training outfit for government cops, says that it:
… provides cutting edge training, information, and service that is continually updated to adapt to today’s fluid environment which is becoming increasingly dangerous for those professionals that must operate in harm’s way. — Officer.com Directory: CRIPT Academy Mobile Training Teams
If you spend much time at all reading articles and public statements by government police, you’re likely to see this received factoid over and over again. Time never alters it; things only get more and more dangerous. No matter what year it is, it’s always this year that’s poised to become the most dangerous year for police ever; in 2007, in an article on how government cops can better confuse detained Suspect Individuals about their rights to refuse searches, former government cop and government prosecutor Devallis Rutledge offered the following:
So far, 2007 is the deadliest year for law enforcement officers in nearly three decades. — Devallis Rutledge, POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine (October 2007): How to Justify Officer Safety Searches
The thing is that all these claims are false. Both in factual detail and in overarching narrative. They could easily have been discovered to be false by taking even a cursory glance at statistics about police deaths in the line of duty. In fact, 2009, when Dean Scoville declared the job to be increasingly dangerous, was the safest year for government police in the U.S. since 1959, in terms of absolute numbers of police officers killed while on duty. With only a few exceptions, the number of government police killed on the job had been decreasing steadily for the past 35 years. Here’s the annual data for the past 35 years, as reported by the Officer Down Memorial Page yearly reports.[ ]
Year Total line-of-duty deaths Deaths from violent attacks
(Excluding terrorist attacks.) Total violent deaths adjusted to 2009 population 1974 279 149 215.48 1975 240 148 211.93 1976 202 117 165.92 1977 189 108 151.63 1978 215 109 151.42 1979 214 120 164.87 1980 210 113 153.44 1981 201 105 141.18 1982 194 100 133.18 1983 193 92 121.41 1984 184 83 108.59 1985 179 85 110.23 1986 178 80 102.79 1987 182 84 106.97 1988 194 85 107.26 1989 196 79 98.75 1990 162 71 87.76 1991 148 75 91.47 1992 170 72 86.60 1993 163 83 98.53 1994 180 86 100.84 1995 185 77 89.22 1996 143 64 73.30 1997 177 76 86.00 1998 176 66 73.82 1999 151 49 54.18 2000 163 55 60.13 2001 242 67 72.45 2002 159 63 67.41 2003 147 51 54.22 2004 164 56 58.99 2005 164 54 56.37 2006 156 54 55.84 2007 193 65 66.56 2008 138 42 42.62 2009 120 49 49.00
Or, if you prefer, here’s the chart. The blue line represents the absolute number of cops killed that year in the line of duty; the yellow line best represents the overall danger to cops from violent attacks (specifically, the number killed in violent attacks against police, adjusted to the U.S. population at the end of 2009).
Coming back to Devallis Rutledge’s deadliest year in nearly three decades, it’s true that 2007 saw a sudden jump in the number of police killed, compared to 2006. (The next two years saw a sudden drop back to the trend of decreasing police deaths.) But the main reason for that was a jump in deaths due to automobile accidents and other accidental deaths; the number of cops killed in violent attacks — 65 total — was less than the total number killed in 2001, let alone the much higher rates of violent deaths in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. And in fact, if you adjust for the increases in the total population, and the absolute number of police on the streets, it turns out that the increasing safety of government police over the past 35 years is only the tail end of a general trend that has been going on since 1921. (The temporary uptick in violent police deaths from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s never ended up producing more per-capita violent deaths than there had been in 1935.) Following the yellow line, you can see that 2008 and 2009, at the tail end of this trend were the safest years to be a police officer in over 110 years.
In other words, it’s never been safer to be a cop in America than it has been over the past 2 years. Yet boss cops, spokespeople for the government police, and articles written by cops and for cops, constantly repeat the demonstrably false claims that criminals are more violent than ever before, and that government cops somehow face more danger on their patrols now than they ever have before. That this is a complete lie would be obvious to anyone who had spent 15 minutes perusing the police’s own institutions and resources for honoring their fallen comrades. The interesting question, then, is what kind of purpose the constant refrain of this unfact from government police serves — what it means when ever-more-heavily-armed government cops keep insisting on a completely mythical ever-present, ever-increasing danger to their politically-sacred persons, in spite of the evidence of the senses and the consistent trends over the last century of historical reality. When you see heavily-armed, well-protected men trying so very hard to psych themselves up to believe in a growing danger that does not actually exist — and when this constantly repeated Big Lie is used to slam pop-culture for any attempt to portray any abuse of police power; to swat down real-life complaints about police belligerence or invasions against civil liberties; to explain the alleged need for assault rifles, tanks, cordoning off strategic hamlets in inner cities, and a niche industry in warrior mindset trainings — I couldn’t much blame you if you did see some real danger in this concerted effort to inculcate and reinforce a consciously-constructed, fact-resistant permanent siege mentality among patrol cops. But not danger for the cops.
Do you feel safer now?
See also:For other people named Richard Jenkins, see Richard Jenkins (disambiguation)
Richard Dale Jenkins (born May 4, 1947) is an American actor. Jenkins began his acting career in theater at the Trinity Repertory Company and later made his film debut in 1974. He has worked steadily in film and television since the 1980s, mostly in supporting roles. His first major role did not come until the early 2000s, when he portrayed the deceased patriarch Nathaniel Fisher on the HBO funeral drama series Six Feet Under (2001–2005). He is also known for his roles in the films Burn After Reading (2008), Step Brothers (2008), Let Me In (2010), and Jack Reacher (2012).
Jenkins was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the drama film The Visitor (2007).[1] He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for the limited drama series Olive Kitteridge (2014). For his performance in the fantasy drama film The Shape of Water (2017), Jenkins received Academy Award, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor.
Early life [ edit ]
Jenkins was born and raised in DeKalb, Illinois. His mother, Mary Elizabeth (née Wheeler), was a housewife, and his father, Dale Stevens Jenkins, was a dentist.[2][3] He attended DeKalb High School. Before he was an actor, Jenkins drove a linen truck (his boss was actor John C. Reilly's father).[4][5] Jenkins earned a degree in Drama from Illinois Wesleyan University before relocating to Rhode Island.
Career [ edit ]
Theatre [ edit ]
Jenkins worked with the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, while breaking into film with a bit part in Feasting with Panthers (1974), a television film about Oscar Wilde. Jenkins was given the option of joining the Screen Actors Guild. Knowing that it was not that easy to join, Jenkins immediately accepted the offer.[6] He continued as a member of Trinity's resident acting company and served as its artistic director from 1990 to 1994.[7]
Film [ edit ]
Since his debut in the television movie Feasting with Panthers (1974), Jenkins has been working steadily in film. His earlier film credits include Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Sea of Love (1989), How to Make an American Quilt (1995), Flirting with Disaster (1996), and Snow Falling On Cedars (1999).
He has worked with the director siblings the Farrelly brothers in There's Something About Mary (1998), Outside Providence (1999), Me, Myself & Irene (2000), Say It Isn't So (2001), Hall Pass (2011) and the 2012 Three Stooges remake. He has also appeared in three Coen Brothers movies: The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), Intolerable Cruelty (2003), and Burn After Reading (2008). He is in North Country (2005), has three memorable scenes as FBI Director James (Robert) Grace in The Kingdom (2007), and Step Brothers (2008).
Jenkins in April 2011
Although primarily known for supporting parts, Jenkins had a lead role in The Visitor (2007) for which he was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award and an Academy Award for Best Actor.[8] Jenkins won the International Press Academy's Satellite Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture.
In 2010, Jenkins costarred in Dear John, as the father of John Tyree (Channing Tatum), and also co-starred with Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem in Eat Pray Love. In 2012, he appeared in the Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard horror film The Cabin in the Woods and the action film Jack Reacher. He then appeared in the action films White House Down (2013) and Kong: Skull Island (2017).
Jenkins co-starred in Guillermo del Toro's fantasy romance drama film The Shape of Water (2017), for which he received critical acclaim. For his performance, he garnered Academy Award, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor.
Television [ edit ]
Jenkins is perhaps best known for playing Nathaniel Fisher in the HBO drama series Six Feet Under. His character is the deceased patriarch of the Fisher family and regularly appears to his family as a ghost or in dreams. He played the role for the show's entire run. He and his castmates received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series in 2002.
Jenkins portrayed a DEA agent in one episode of Miami Vice and a mob boss in a later episode.
In 2015, Jenkins won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie for his performance as Henry Kitteridge in the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge.[9]
Personal life [ edit ]
Jenkins and his wife, Sharon R. Friedrick, were married on August 23, 1969. They have two children, son Andrew Dale and daughter Sarah Pamela, and reside in Cumberland, Rhode Island.[3]
Awards and honors [ edit ]
In 2014, Jenkins and his wife Sharon received the Pell Award for Lifetime Achievement from Trinity Repertory Company in Providence.[10][11]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]Why Steven Universe “Mindful Education” Broke Me
Hey friends! For those who don’t know me, I am Darth Mexican and I am the owner of The Geek Lyfe. While owning an indie geek website is fun, it’s still pretty taxing especially when you add in the fact that I work 40 hours a week, have to maintain my friendships, ensure my family knows I love them, and some how convince a woman I am worth dating.
Most days I can handle the weight of the world and walk with pride with a genuine grin but there are some times where the weight does get to me. I try to move forward but it seems when one thing cracks, the rest does as well and it can be overwhelming when everyone comes to you wanting something from you but you can only give so much of yourself. The idea of even trying to spread yourself so thin and work so hard then to be rejected or unappreciated hurts, it really does. I was recently in one of these funks and I was so stressed out that I became numb to it all and just started wandering through life like a zombie because I felt as though I was unable to do anything correct.
One of my guilty pleasures is Steven Universe. If you are unfamiliar with the show, it’s about a boy who is destined for greatness and turn the tide against a coming war from extra terrestrials but he is such a carefree and fun loving guy that the lessons of war are hard to grasp for him. Their episodes are almost always light hearted and fun, often filled with songs to add to the charm of it all and it just makes all of the bad stuff going on in my life melt away, even if just for 11 minutes.
Recently an episode aired called ‘Mindful Education’ that focused on both Steven and, his friend, Connie dealing with their inner demons. When they tried to ignore them, they showed that it can be much more damaging than actually acknowledging and dealing with what happened. This episode spoke volumes to me because it was exactly what was happening to me, I realized that instead of dealing with my problems I just tried to grin and bare them without ever admitting how much it hurt.
Their main message can be found in this song, ‘Here Comes A Thought’:
As the song began they explained how bad thoughts come and can confuse you but you need to take a moment and find yourself. Once you deal with what happened you can then move forward with healing. It hit me so hard that I didn’t even notice that a few tears rolled down my cheek. My heart raced, my throat went dry, my hands shook, and I just could not function. I should also add that I was watching this episode at the office where co workers frequently walk down the hall and peek into my office. I just did not care at that moment, I was a 26 year old bearded man who lifts weights and loves boxing and I just cried at an episode of Steven Universe. After the episode ended I just sat there at my desk contemplating my life and the problems I had.
It was exactly what I needed because after that day, the world and it’s problem didn’t seem nearly as daunting to me. I think everyone can benefit from checking out this song, we all have our issues, none are more important than others since we still feel the damage from them. It’s okay to acknowledge that we’re not perfect human beings. We are flawed in so many ways that tripping and breaking is naturally, it’s why we have emotions in the first place so we can cry at the bad times and then laugh at the good times. When we try and hold back on letting ourselves feel what we need to feel, it’s when we crack and are unable to move forward because we’re still shackled by our past.
I apologize if this seems like rambling but I felt like I needed to write this in hopes it helps someone else going through a rough time! Be sure to check out Steven Universe, it’s a wonderful show!The Problem
We wrote some new code in the form of celery tasks that we expected to run for up to five minutes, and use a few hundred megabytes of memory. Rinse and
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cut flesh. He held hands with himself, trying to contain the residual movement from ten hours of labour. But it never worked. He chopped his way down North La Salle, pared the night air as he strolled along West Eugenie, peeled and julienned until at last he’d reached the dogleg at Sedgwick and Menomonee. He could see the lights from Salvedo’s, see the Syrian shadows dancing upstairs to their pretty music.
He climbed the steps and Rosa received her kiss. She wheezed a question; he answered with a laugh. In the kitchen Paul unwrapped his parcel and browned the chops with onions. He’d salted the meat and worked a spoon through a pot of cold polenta before little Melba ran in to kiss her father’s knees. His kitchen pants smelled of thousand island and Borax.
Six years earlier, when Rosa was forty-one, she’d been rushed to the hospital complaining of a stomach tumour. The diagnosis was not what she’d expected, and she told the doctors to go to hell; she was dying; don’t joke. Rosa and Paul carried baby Melba home with a look of surprise that would never entirely vanish. Melba would grow up to be a ballet dancer and a nurse and would marry a Sicilian. And all the Folis back in Johnston City would declare her a beautiful girl.
That night after supper Paul put on a few records and they danced to Bob Wills and Alberto Rabagliati. Rosa stood (she had to sometimes) and Paul was forced to gaze up into her eyes. The window was open and the bucket on the sill and the Syrian across North Sedgwick yelled into the night. He wanted to know what kind of music would make them dance so good. When ‘Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina’ was over Paul lowered Rosa’s bucket to the sidewalk. They heard the clink of two bottles and Rosa shouted, to no one in particular: ‘Garibaldi! Garibaldi!’ It didn’t matter who she meant. Back in Johnston City everyone had been losing some battle. But in Chicago everyone was a general.Been playing some Fire Emblem or XCOM lately and thought "I really dig this but wish it was more Dragon Agey?" You might not be alone in that yearning.
Mark Darrah, the executive producer on Dragon Age, recently took to Twitter to start a poll asking users if they'd be interested in a tactics game within the Dragon Age universe and what platforms they'd play this hypothetical game on:
Would you play a Dragon Age Tactics game? — Mark Darrah (@BioMarkDarrah) February 19, 2016
He then provided some clarification on what he meant when he said "tactics":
tactics as in a game like Fire Emblem or XCom — Mark Darrah (@BioMarkDarrah) February 19, 2016
The last game in the Dragon Age universe was Dragon Age Inquisition and its various DLC. Inquisition was our Game Of The Year for 2014.
[Source: Twitter]
Our Take
I've never been the biggest fan of Dragon Age, mostly because the combat systems just aren't that great, but I'd play a tactics game in that universe in a heartbeat. I'm curious to see what, if anything, comes from this.For the past decade or so, the Rams were among the worst teams in the NFL when it came to scoring points. Every year since 2007, they ranked 21st or worse in points scored, proving to be incapable of fielding a consistent offense.
That certainly hasn’t been the case this season with the Rams entering Week 13 second in the league in scoring. Strangely enough, their offense is the first thing that comes up when discussing Los Angeles in 2017.
On Sunday against the Cardinals, the Rams proved they’re far more than just an offensive powerhouse. They don’t need to score 35 points to win a game, and they don’t need Todd Gurley to carry the ball 20 times to come away with a victory.
Sure, the Rams did score 32 points in Arizona this week, but it wasn’t completely thanks to the offense. Alec Ogletree returned an interception 41 yards for a touchdown, contributing six points on his own. Defense and special teams played a huge role in the Rams’ scoring outburst Sunday, as they have all season.
On L.A.’s two touchdown drives, they both began inside the Cardinals’ 30-yard line. On the Rams’ final two drives that ended in field goals, they started at their own 42-yard line and 46-yard line thanks to a blocked field goal and long punt return, respectively.
If you just look at the scoreboard, you’d think the offense was absolutely dominant against Arizona. It wasn’t.
The Rams were actually outgained by Arizona 312 to 303, running six fewer plays than the Cardinals did. They were 3-for-11 on third down and only had the ball for 28 minutes 58 seconds.
Outside of Todd Gurley, the Rams’ offense was actually very underwhelming. If you take away his 158 yards of offense, the rest of the team totaled just 155 yards. Gurley is obviously a huge part of the offense and his role can’t be diminished, but the lack of productivity from other players on Sunday was a bit surprising.
There’s no question L.A.’s offense is a strong suit and ranks among the best in the NFL. It’s honestly been quite dominant at times. But it’s hardly the only reason Los Angeles is 9-3.
The Rams’ special teams unit is one of the best in the NFL, which was evident against the Cardinals. They had a blocked extra point and field goal, a 56-yard field goal, a 70-yard punt and averaged 15 yards per punt return with a long of 30 yards.
On defense, the Rams are in the top 10 in takeaways and have three touchdowns on interception returns. Plays like that often get overlooked when discussing the fact that the Rams are second in points scored, but they’ve played a big part in the team’s 9-3 record.
Sunday proved that the Rams are one of the most complete squads in all of football. Their offense is dominant when it has to be, the defense creates turnovers and gives Jared Goff short fields to work with, and the special teams unit is nearly perfect on a weekly basis.Rebecca Mader is going back to the island.
The Lost vet is the latest alum from the beloved ABC drama to land a gig on CBS’ Hawaii Five-0.
RELATED Leftovers Star Visits Hawaii
TVLine has confirmed that Lost’s erstwhile Charlotte will guest-star in an upcoming episode of the CBS procedural as Nicole, the dynamic, smart and edgy recovery specialist for a big insurance company. As she works closely with McGarrett on a case, Steve constantly second-guesses her motives, yet is genuinely impressed and amused by her various ploys.
(Rest assured, though, Mader will also share screen time with Lost pals Jorge Garcia and Daniel Dae Kim, whom she tweeted a photo with while on set.)
Mader’s more recent TV credits include Once Upon a Time and an upcoming turn on CBS’ Blue Bloods.
Ready for more of today’s newsy nuggets? Well…
* The Young and the Restless‘ Judith Chapman will bring her matriarch Gloria Fisher to sister soap The Bold and the Beautiful during the Nov. 20 episode, TV Guide Magazine reports.
* Max Brown (Beauty and the Beast) will guest-star on Sleepy Hollow as “a powerful and mysterious new ally known, at first, only as Orion—a charismatic soldier who possesses a game-changing weapon,” per EW.com.
* ABC is reviving Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People with a two-hour special airing Dec. 14. The first honorees to be revealed are Oprah Winfrey, Neil Patrick Harris, Chelsea Handler and Scarlett Johansson.
* Season 2 of DirecTV’s Full Circle will feature Terry O’Quinn (Lost), Calista Flockhart (Brothers and Sisters), Eric McCormack (Perception), Kate Burton (Scandal), Chris Bauer (True Blood), Stacy Keach (Prison Break), Rita Wilson (Girls, The Good Wife), Brittany Snow (American Dreams), Patrick Fugit (Gone Girl) and David Koechner (The Office).
* Roma Downey and Mark Burnett will produce a six-part series for TLC about people who claim they’ve experienced divine intervention. The actress will also host.Pinterest (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
It’s the battle of the century: Tiny Hands vs. Big Bird.
Donald Trump's proposed budget is a house of horrors. If the budget were to go into effect, countless vital programs would see their funds cut drastically. The EPA? I hope you weren't worried about climate change. NEA? Who needs art when you have tanks? The State Department? Who needs diplomacy—we're building more tanks! Meals on Wheels? Sorry, we traded the wheels for tank treads.
EDITOR’S PICK
It goes on from there, with the military being the biggest beneficiary of this garbage accounting. One of the main groups that would see its funding destroyed is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Now, in some ways this isn't shocking. Donald Trump doesn't exactly strike me as someone who would enjoy Masterpiece Theatre. And the kids’ programming that has defined the childhoods of the last three or four generations? Well, I somehow have a feeling that Donald Trump's kids had enough nannies that Donald never had to be burdened with learning about Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Hell, if he had, he'd probably try a real estate play there and evict the old man while refusing to rent to Daniel Tiger. But one show Donald is definitely familiar with, and may in fact be one of the reasons he'd be happy to see PBS defunded? Sesame Street.
Now, sure, Sesame Street has been THE kids' TV show forever. But as loving and positive as Sesame Street has always been, there's one person it's always loved mocking... I think you know where this is going. From The Washington Post:
Granted, Sesame Street is now underwritten by HBO (which airs new episodes months before they go on PBS for free), so this decision wouldn't kill off Big Bird, but it could cause public-broadcasting stations to shut down, forcing kids from lower-income families who can't afford HBO to stop spending time with their tall, feathered friend. Which is too bad—between that yellow-headed sweetheart and Donald Trump, only one of them has the right temperament to be president.
Watch Now:Grilled Lemonade. My first experience with grilled lemons came at a restaurant who served them with the veggie skewers I had ordered. Oh. My. Gosh. The FLAVOR was amazing! So much bolder than raw lemons. A little smokey, soooo much juicier. I was sold.
With summer upon us, I thought about making this grilled lemonade. You can see the depth of color you get simply from grilling them for a few minutes.
It all begins with halving the lemons. We used a grill pan to show you that this could be done indoors. You could also use an outdoor grill (and if you are grilling anything else, including veggies….I urge you to throw a few lemons on and serve alongside. You won’t regret it!) If you grill indoors or on a pan, you get the added benefit of catching all of those caramelized lemon drippings. Add them right to your lemonade. We’ll strain things later on…
Anyway, you can ever so lightly wipe the pan with vegetable oil to assure they won’t stick. Nothing worse. Before you place the lemons down, sprinkle the cut sides with a very small amount of sugar. This helps them get that caramelized color and sweetens things up a bit.
Here’s what they look like straight off the grill pan. A really vibrant yellow. Allow to cool slightly and juice while still warm. You know how you hear professional chefs on t.v. tell you to microwave the lemons prior to juicing? This is the same idea. It releases the juice much easier from the fruit.
We also took one lemon and sliced it pretty thick and grilled it on both sides to add to the pitcher as a garnish. They also can be used on the serving glasses themselves.
While the lemons are cooling, we made a simple syrup of sugar and water and added that to the strained lemon juice along with 4 Cups of Water and some Ice.
Print Pin 5 from 1 vote Grilled Lemonade Author aimee Tried this recipe? Mention or Tag me @aimee_stock Ingredients FOR THE SIMPLE SYRUP:
1 C Sugar
1 C Water
FOR THE LEMONADE:
3 very large or 6 medium Lemons halved, grilled then juiced
1 Tbl Sugar for sprinkling the lemons
4 C Cold Water plus Ice Cubes Instructions For the simple syrup, combine 1 Cup Sugar and 1 Cup Water in a small saucepan over medium heat. Boil for 5 minutes until sugar is dissolved. Cool completely.
Preheat a grill pan or grill until very hot. Oil lightly to prevent any sticking.
Halve the lemons and sprinkle the cut sides with a small amount of sugar. Place cut side down on the grill pan and cook for 2-3 minutes and remove to a plate until cool enough to handle. Squeeze the juice from them while still warm into a strainer over a measuring cup. You'll need 1 full of Cup of lemon juice.
Also, make thick slices from another lemon (or two) and sprinkle both sides with sugar. Grill until marks appear, repeat on the other side. Set aside for garnish.
Add the lemon juice to a pitcher. Follow with the simple syrup, 4 Cups of Water and Ice Cubes.
Makes six 8 oz. servings.Stargate Atlantis‘s David Hewlett has a role in this summer’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes feature film, starring James Franco, Frieda Pinto, Andy Serkis and John Lithgow. With the film under a shroud of non-disclosure agreements, his role has been something of a mystery — until now.
Watch David go all angry and get his ass kicked by CG ape Caeser (Serkis) in this extended preview clip from the film!
“The reason I was drawn to it and attracted to it — outside of the nerd factor — was the story,” Hewlett told GateWorld earlier this year (story). “At its core, it’s a story about family, and I love that. I’m so sick of going to the movies and being like, ‘That was so gorgeous, but the plot … meh.’ This has a real story and a real plot and real characters you can care about.”
Hewlett previously played Dr. Rodney McKay on Stargate Atlantis.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is directed by Rupert Wyatt, and opens August 5 in the U.S. and August 11 in the U.K. Check out the movie’s official Web site.
(Thanks to Dan for the tip!)The top three names that come to mind from the Rangers' perspective would be Joey Gallo, Jorge Alfaro, and Nomar Mazara. Gallo and Alfaro, to me, would seem to be the least likely to be traded, with Mazara also presenting an intriguing set of tools as he has vaulted himself into being among the more prized prospects in the Texas organization.
Of interest, I think, would be that Philadelphia needs to rebuild the middle of their infield after sending away Jimmy Rollins. Texas, of course, has a potential logjam at the position. However, because of the uncertain status of Jurickson Profar's recovery, I think Texas will wait and see before doing anything rash.
Hamels would represent a significant addition to the Texas pitching staff that current comprises of Darvish, Holland, Lewis, and some combination of Nick Martinez, Nick Tepesch, and possibly (hopefully) Matt Harrison at some point. Hamels has been good for about 3.5-4 WAR a season, and has started 30 or more games in seven straight seasons, so he's been pretty durable.
In the end, this is a deal I don't see happening before the season begins. Perhaps if Texas is in contention near the trade deadline and appear to be one pitcher away from getting over the top, Jon Daniels could make a move like he did in 2010 to snag Cliff Lee. Speaking of Lee, he could be another intriguing possibility if he's able to show anything prior to the trade deadline.
Whatever the case, this would seem to be a case where we'll be left speculating more than seeing a trade actualize, but hey, this is what happens during the winter. Last season, the Rangers were supposedly done spending, and days later signed Shin-Soo Choo. Crazier things have been known to happen.Sigmund Esco "Jackie" Jackson (born May 4, 1951) is an American singer and songwriter best known as a founding member of the Jackson 5. Jackie is the second child of the Jackson family and the oldest Jackson brother.
Early life [ edit ]
Sigmund Esco Jackson was born on his mother Katherine's 21st birthday in 1951. Nicknamed Jackie by his grandfather, taken from Jackson Boy, he came from a black working-class family. He and his brothers and sisters grew up in a two-room house in Gary, Indiana, an industrial city outside of Chicago. In 1964, Jackie's father, Joseph, formed the Jackson Brothers singing group, which included Jackie and his brothers Tito and Jermaine. The group included younger brothers Marlon and Michael playing assorted percussive instruments. By 1966, Joseph made Michael the lead singer and within two years, they emerged professionally under the name the Jackson Five, which was later altered to a numeral 5 after signing with Motown in 1969. Prior to the group signing with Motown, Jackson wanted to pursue a career in professional baseball.
Career [ edit ]
Jackson performed with a high tenor singing voice. He added brief lead parts in some of the Jackson 5's hit singles, including "I Want You Back" and "ABC". In 1973, he released a solo album that failed to chart. After the Jackson 5 became the Jacksons after leaving Motown for CBS Records in 1976, Jackson's role as a vocalist and songwriter increased. He added a lead vocal alongside brother Michael on their Top 10 Epic single, "Enjoy Yourself", and also added composition on six of the group's albums with Epic. Jackson's voice changed to a lower tenor vocal style during the Epic years. One of Jackson's most successful compositions was co-writing with Michael, "Can You Feel It", which became an international hit in 1981. Jackson began performing more lead vocals as Michael pursued a successful solo career. On their 1984 album, Victory, Jackie performed lead on the song "Wait", while writing the single "Torture". Notably before the start of the Victory Tour in 1984, he suffered what was officially described as a knee injury incurred during rehearsals.[2] However, a former companion of Jermaine Jackson's, Margaret Maldonado, wrote in her 1995 book Jackson Family Values that Jackson was injured in an automobile accident, a cause of his then wife Enid Jackson running over him with her car, after catching him with choreographer and then-Laker Girl Paula Abdul.[3] Jackson recovered well enough to perform on the last leg of shows in December 1984 in Los Angeles, where Michael announced he was leaving the group. In early 1985, Marlon Jackson joined Michael in leaving the group as well.
Jackie, Tito and Randy became session musicians, vocalists and producers during this time. In 1987, Jackie, Randy, Tito and Jermaine reformed as the Jacksons and recorded "Time Out for the Burglar", the theme song for the film Burglar. The single was a minor R&B hit in the US, but had more success in Belgium where it peaked in the Top 40 at #17 for two consecutive weeks. The Jacksons also contributed backing vocals to the Tito-produced title track of Tramaine Hawkins' 1987 album Freedom. In late 1988, the Jacksons set out to record their final Epic album, 2300 Jackson Street, which included Jackie and Jermaine splitting leads on most of the songs. 2300 Jackson Street failed to chart successfully despite the Randy and Jermaine-led "Nothin' (That Compares 2 U)". Randy did not participate in much of the album's promotion as he was working on his solo project leaving Jackie, Tito and Jermaine to promote the album mostly overseas. Afterwards, the group was dropped from the label and each brother went into solo projects. Jackson signed with Polydor and released his first solo album in 16 years, Be the One, in late 1989. The album was a minor hit, charting at #89 on the R&B charts. The first single, "Stay", was a Top 40 R&B hit while, second single "Cruzin'" was a moderate success. In 2001, after years out of the limelight, Jackie, along with his other brothers, returned to the mainstream in a reunion performance with Michael during his 35th-anniversary special at Madison Square Garden.
Recent years [ edit ]
Currently residing in Las Vegas, Jackson at one time ran two record companies, Jesco Records and Futurist Entertainment. His son, Sigmund, Jr., known by the name of DEALZ, released a mixtape off Jesco in 2007. In 2009, he, Tito, Jermaine and Marlon starred in their brief reality series, The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty. In 2012, the quartet began their first tour since the end of the Victory Tour in 1984. The four brothers continue to tour, currently planning to perform a series of shows at the Las Vegas casino circuit.
Personal life [ edit ]
Jackson has been married three times and has four children. He married his first wife, Enid Adren Spann (June 27, 1954 - December 20, 1997), in November 1974. A rocky marriage, they initially separated in 1984 after Enid filed for divorce, but later reconciled in 1985. In 1986 Enid filed for divorce for the final time and accused Jackson of being physically abusive.[4] They had two children:[5]
Sigmund Esco "Siggy" Jackson Jr. (June 29, 1977), Siggy married Toyia Parker on September 23, 2017 and have three children together: son Jared (born 2011) and daughters Kai-Ari (born 2014) and Skyy (born 2018).
Brandi Jackson (February 6, 1982).
In 1980s, Jackson was the subject of media coverage when he had an affair with pop star Paula Abdul.[6]
In 2001, Jackson married his second wife, Victoria Triggs. They later divorced.[7]
Jackson married his third wife, Emily Besselink, in 2012, who gave birth to twin boys:[8]
Jaylen Jackson (December 31, 2013).
River Jackson (December 31, 2013).
Discography [ edit ]
Studio albums [ edit ]
Singles [ edit ]
As main artist [ edit ]
Title Year Peak chart positions Album US R&B
[9] "Cruzin'" 1989 58 Be the One "Stay" 39 "We Know What's Going On" 2010 — Non-album single "—" denotes items which were not released in that country or failed to chart.
As a featured artist [ edit ]
Title Year "That's How I Feel"
(DealZ featuring Jackie Jackson & Jermaine Jackson 2011In 2009, ecstasy, the drug that had sparked a cultural revolution in Britain two decades beforehand, was on its knees. That year, forensic scientists found that over half of ecstasy pills seized by police contained no MDMA at all. They were duds packed with a mixture of caffeine and underwhelming stimulants such as BZP and cheap speed. As a product it had become defunct. By 2012 ecstasy use, as with many other drugs, was falling. There was talk of a nation falling out of love with getting high.
Ecstasy and LSD use reaches new high among young Read more
Yet all of a sudden, ecstasy is back and in demand by a new generation. Latest figures from the Home Office’s annual drug survey published yesterday reveal a surge of ecstasy use among young people. Use among 16- to 24-year-olds has nearly doubled over the last two years to levels not seen since 2003, when newspapers were warning that Britain was facing an “ecstasy epidemic”.
In an era when teenage drug use is supposedly dominated by an alphabet soup of new psychoactive substances, or “legal highs”, why is this happening? The biggest factor is purity. More people are taking it because it’s got more MDMA in it. Ecstasy was so poor between 2008 and 2012 because the global MDMA market was shattered by a series of huge seizures of the chemical used to make the drug, safrole oil. One haul resulted in the destruction of 33 tonnes of chemicals that would have made enough ecstasy pills to supply the entire UK market for five years.
But wily Dutch criminal chemists who manufacture the bulk of Europe’s ecstasy found a new way of synthesising MDMA, using a chemical called PMK-glycidate, a legal substance easily available and relatively cheap to order in bulk from underground Chinese chemical labs. As a result, ecstasy in most of western Europe now has MDMA purity levels reminiscent of the early days of the rave era in the late 1980s. Analysis of drugs at festivals and clubs this summer, carried out by Fiona Measham, a professor of criminology at Durham University, found crystalline ecstasy that was over 90% pure.
Like few other drugs, ecstasy use is, in a charming kind of way, highly infectious, because it is a group experience
A new breed of super-strong ecstasy pills, far more potent than the pills that were being popped at the height of the rave era in the 1990s, are widely available. Tests on UPS branded pills manufactured in Holland, which hospitalised six young people in a Middlesbrough nightclub in February, found they contained 278mg of MDMA, 10 times stronger than the average ecstasy tablet on sale five years ago. Yet this pure MDMA would not have sparked such a spike in popularity without the appropriate setting in which to take it.
The Warehouse Project in Manchester, for instance, is in essence a colossal student rave. It is no coincidence that its club nights start in September, when the student loans arrive. Over one weekend, at £25 a ticket for Friday and Saturday nights, the 2,500-capacity venue pulls in £125,000. It’s big business.
And a significant proportion of these customers are young people who take ecstasy, a reality that the owner of the Warehouse Project has tried to tackle, by inviting Measham to run an on-site ecstasy testing facility at his club in order to alert customers about the potency of the drugs.
Like few other drugs, ecstasy use is, in a charming kind of way, highly infectious, because it is a group experience. “If a club is on ecstasy people want to be part of that vibe, they don’t want to be sat in the corner scowling on cocaine. So they will join in,” says Measham.
For this new generation of young clubbers, the mainstreaming of rave culture with huge electronic dance music (EDM) events in America, itself borrowed from the UK, is likely to have boomeranged back here. It’s a scene intrinsically linked to MDMA, or as the Americans call it “Molly”, a fact constantly broadcast in songs and interviews by pop stars such as Miley Cyrus to their teenage fans.
Many people are unaware that the average finger-dab of crystal MDMA is the equivalent of one pill, says Measham. This summer she saw drug users at festivals swallow huge crystals of MDMA rather than grind it up. Dab doses go up, she says, when people share bags because of what she calls “competitive dabbing”.
And the longer the fingernails, the more powder can be scooped up. Because of this, she started a campaign called Crush, Dab, Wait, designed to teach young people how to use ecstasy more safely.
The return of ecstasy – alongside a second consecutive year of rising drug use among young people, including LSD, cocaine and magic mushrooms – should send a shiver up David Cameron’s spine. It was he who in 2012 rejected calls to set up a royal commission to re-evaluate our creaking drug policy on the basis that drug use was simply going out of fashion. The mantra was, drug use is falling, so our policy must be the best. As I warned him in 2012, it was a stance based on a shaky premise, open to the whims of notoriously unpredictable drug trends.
With more young drug users taking higher purity ecstasy, the risk of overdose rises. Now drug use is going up, and the risks are multiplied, it will be interesting to see what, if anything, the government will do about it.International monitors arrive in Torez to inspect wagons accompanied by convoy of heavily armed and nervous rebels
The bodies of the victims of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 are being loaded on to three railway carriages, apparently with refrigerator capability, which are standing at the train station in the town of Torez, several miles from the crash site in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
The Guardian witnessed the arrival of a delegation from the international monitoring body the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) at around midday local time to inspect the wagons, accompanied by a convoy of heavily armed and nervous rebels.
As they opened the metal door to one of the carriages to inspect the interior, a stench of death wafted out, and black body bags were visible inside.
"The special monitoring mission in its third day dealing with the incident has now monitored the location where bodies are being refrigerated in three wagons," said Alexander Hug, the deputy chief of the mission.
"We have not been able to count them as that would be too difficult in this situation."
Alexander Hug, deputy chief monitor of the OSCE special monitoring mission to Ukraine, talks to a Russia-backed separatist commander during a visit to MH17 flight crash site in the village of Grabovo, east Ukraine. Photograph: Petr Shelomovskiy/Demotix/Corbis
Michael Bociurkiw, the spokesman for the mission, added: "Going inside the wagons is impossible without special equipment. The stench is very, very bad."
The OSCE, which has had its access to the crash site itself limited in recent days, left in a convoy to return to the crash site.
There have been no international investigators at the scene. Ukrainian authorities say they are setting up facilities for relatives to stay and autopsies in the city of Kharkiv, about 200 miles away.
Armed separatists at the scene refused to say how many bodies were in the train carriages or when they would leave. The train driver told the Guardian he had no idea of the train's destination.
The local department of Ukraine's emergencies ministry in the eastern Donetsk region said on Sunday that 196 bodies had been found at the site where the Malaysian airliner crashed.
"As of 7am on 20 July, in the Shakhtarsky region of the crash site of the Boeing 777, 196 bodies were found," it said in a statement, adding that divers were involved in the search because the area included a reservoir.
An OSCE investigator during a visit to the MH17 flight crash site in the village of Grabovo, eastern Ukraine. Photograph: Petr Shelomovskiy/ Petr Shelomovskiy/Demotix/Corbis
It also emerged on Sunday that the UN security council was considering a draft resolution to condemn the "shooting down" of a Malaysian passenger plane in Ukraine, demand armed groups grant access to the crash site, and call on states in the region to cooperate with an international investigation.
Australia – which lost 28 citizens – circulated a draft text, seen by Reuters, to the 15-member security council late on Saturday, and diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it could be put to a vote as early as Monday.
The draft resolution "demands that those responsible for this incident be held to account and that all states cooperate fully with efforts to establish accountability".
It "condemns in the strongest terms the shooting down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 … resulting in the tragic loss of 298 lives" and "demands that all states and other actors in the region refrain from acts of violence directed against civilian aircraft."
The US and other powers have said the plane was probably brought down on Thursday by a surface-to-air missile fired from rebel territory.
The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said on Friday that Washington could not rule out Russian help in firing the missile.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, urged the pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine to cooperate and insisted that an international investigation must not leap to conclusions. Moscow denies involvement and has pointed the finger at Kiev's military.
Ukraine and its western allies accuse Moscow of fuelling a pro-Russia uprising that threatens to break up the former Soviet republic of 46 million people. Russia denies orchestrating the unrest and says Ukraine's attempts to end it by military force are making the situation worse.
The draft UN resolution "calls on all states and actors in the region to cooperate fully in relation to the international investigation of the incident, including with respect to immediate access to the crash site".
It "demands that the armed groups in control of the crash site and the surrounding area refrain from any actions that may compromise the integrity of the crash site and immediately provide safe, secure, full and unfettered access to the site and surrounding area".
The OSCE said on Saturday it had been allowed to see more of the crash site, though gunmen stopped them approaching some of the wreckage.
Russia's UN mission declined to comment on the draft security council resolution.The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, by Jürgen Osterhammel, translated by Patrick Camiller, Princeton, RRP£27.95/$39.95, 1,192 pages
From one perspective, attempts to write panoramic, all-encompassing accounts of humanity are nothing new. On the contrary, they have been around for a very long time. One early example was Sir Walter Raleigh’s The History of the World, published exactly 400 years ago while its author was languishing as a prisoner in the Tower of London. Yet despite its million words, Raleigh took his story only from the creation down to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and since he died in 1618, he never even got to the birth of Jesus Christ.
More recent practitioners of the genre include HG Wells, whose The Outline of History (1920) provided a single narrative extending from the origins of the earth to the first world war. Professional historians did not like it, but Wells’s book was a popular success, and it was remarkably free of the Eurocentric and racist attitudes much in evidence at the time. On a very different scale was Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, which appeared in 12 vast volumes between 1934 and 1961, and which chronicled the rise and fall of the many separate civilisations that Toynbee believed divided the past. Once again, the scholarly fraternity disapproved, and it is only recently that such broad-based approaches to the long, varied, dispersed and yet also joined-up story of humanity have acquired serious academic credibility.
Indeed, since the beginning of the new millennium, global history has become as fashionable in universities as economic and social history were during the 1960s and 1970s, and as cultural and feminist history were in the 1980s and 1990s. On both sides of the Atlantic, and increasingly in Asia and the southern hemisphere, lecture courses, textbooks, journals and conferences devoted to it multiply and proliferate, and a new generation of scholars proclaim that in today’s unprecedentedly interconnected world, global history is the only true and timely way to engage with the past.
There is certainly something to be said for this view. In the aftermath of the fall of communism, the shock of 9/11 and the economic meltdown of 2008, we are all more than ever aware that we live in a globalised world, and these events have focused the attention of historians on finding out how and when humanity became thus joined-up and wired-up. This awareness has been accompanied by an increased recognition that many of today’s pressing problems – among them poverty, Aids and global warming – are worldwide in their causes and consequences, which means they can be neither addressed nor resolved within the parochial structures and weakening authorities that now constitute the nation state. In the present but also therefore in the past, so this argument goes, we need to raise our sights and expand our horizons.
In history’s many-mansioned Valhalla, the shades of Raleigh, Wells and Toynbee are surely cheering at what must seem like long-overdue vindication. Yet the titular deities of this new brand of global history are not these early pioneers but rather a trio of innovative and ambitious scholars whose wide-ranging work is admiringly (but not uncritically) cited by today’s panoramic practitioners.
The first was Fernand Braudel, whose 1949 book on the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, while confined to only one region, told many different histories, including climate and environment, commerce and culture, pioneered the notion that they operate on different timescales, and dismissed political history as being largely ephemeral, no more than “l’histoire événementielle”. The second was Eric Hobsbawm, whose classic trilogy covering the “long” 19th century, extending from 1789 to 1914, explored the themes of revolution (political in France and industrial in Britain), capital formation (the key to the triumph of the bourgeoisie) and imperialism (which, following Lenin, he saw as the prime cause of the first world war). And the third is Sir Christopher Bayly, whose The Birth of the Modern World 1780 to 1914 (2004), was deliberately written as a work of global history, and was structured around uncovering long-distance comparisons and making transnational connections.
All three authors are appreciatively yet sceptically referred to by Jürgen Osterhammel in his vast, weighty, original, enthralling, exhausting and intimidating book The Transformation of the World. Osterhammel, a professor of history at the University of Konstanz in Germany, gives greater weight than Braudel to political events, is unpersuaded by Hobsb
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It shall not mean a locked glove compartment or behind the last upright seat, or any area not normally occupied by the driver or a passenger in a motor vehicle that is not equipped with a trunk.
(5) "Public highway or right-of-way" means the entire width between and immediately adjacent to the boundary lines of publicly maintained highways or roads when any part thereof is open to the use of the public.
C. Notwithstanding R.S. 32:391 and 411, whoever violates the provisions of this Section shall not be taken into custody by the arresting officer, but instead shall be required either to deposit his driver's license with the arresting officer or give his written promise to appear. Furthermore, a violation of the provisions of this Section shall not be included in the records kept by the commissioner required in R.S. 32:393.1.
D. (1) Whoever violates the provisions of this Section shall be fined not more than one hundred dollars. Court costs shall be assessed in addition to the fine authorized by this Subsection.
(2) For purposes of enforcement, the observance of a glass, cup, or other container that, on its face, does not indicate that the container contains an alcoholic beverage, shall not, absent other circumstances, constitute probable cause for a law enforcement officer to stop and question a person.
E. This Section shall preempt the authority of a municipal or parish governing authority to enact any code or ordinance regulating the possession of alcoholic beverages in motor vehicles. However, the local governing authority of a local governmental subdivision with a population of over fifty thousand as of the most recent federal decennial census may enact a code or ordinance that does not conflict with the substantive provisions of this Section, and such local code or ordinance may provide for the imposition and collection of fines and court costs for violations thereof for amounts in excess of the amounts provided in this Section. The preemption contained in this Subsection is solely for the purpose of providing for a uniform open container prohibition in motor vehicles throughout the state, and nothing in this Section shall be construed to further preempt the authority of a local government to provide for any other type of alcohol beverage regulation within its jurisdiction.
F. The provisions of this Section shall not apply to the following persons or in the following areas:
(1) Any person operating or occupying a motor vehicle who, as a condition of his employment and while acting in the course and scope of such employment, is required to carry open alcoholic beverage containers, provided that the operator or passenger does not consume the alcoholic beverages.
(2) Any paid fare passenger on a common or contract carrier vehicle, as defined in R.S. 45:162.
(3) Any paid fare passenger on a public carrier vehicle, as defined in R.S. 45:200.2.
(4) Any passenger in a courtesy vehicle which is operated as a courtesy vehicle.
(5) Any passenger of a self-contained motor home which is in excess of twenty-one feet in length.
(6) Possession of an open container of alcoholic beverage in the trunk of a motor vehicle.
(7) If the motor vehicle is not equipped with a trunk, possession of an open container or alcoholic beverages in any of the following areas:
(a) In a locked glove or utility compartment.
(b) In an area of the vehicle not normally occupied by, and not readily accessible, to the driver or passengers.
(8) Passengers and krewe members riding on a parade float.
(9) Any passenger in a privately owned limousine the driver of which possesses a Class D commercial driver's license.
Added by Acts 2000, 1st Ex. Sess., No. 97, §1. Amended by Acts 2004, No. 15, §1.Students are turning to technology to come up with creative versions to cheat in exams, a study has found.
More than one in ten GCSE, A-levels and university students have admitted to cheating on their finals this year, according to a study.
And as they are not using their brainpower to study, time is spent exploring new ways of deceit, including using UV light pens, wireless headphones linked to phones and gadgets and storing formulae or facts on calculators.
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More than 11 per cent of GCSE, A-levels and university students cheated on this year's finals, a study claims
A study found 11 per cent of students on all levels cheated in the most recent set of public exams, The Times reported.
The youngest students are the worst offenders, with one in seven admitting to cheating, compared to one in 20 A-level students.
A majority of students admitted that they stick to old-school methods of cheating, such as hand-written, hidden notes scribbled on items or body parts, but the high-tech tricks are becoming more popular.
A UV light pen can be used to reveal invisible ink, and by using wireless or bluetooth headphones, students can listen to pre-recorded information on their phones.
New cheats: Wireless or bluetooth headphones can be used during exams to listen to information which has been pre-recorded onto phones and other gadgets
One secondary-school teacher told The Times that it has become popular to store information on statistical calculators.
The study was conducted by The Student Room, an three million-strong online community for students aged between 14 and 24.
Jack Wallington, the community director, said the effects of cheating were wider than just upping grades as they distracted and bothered those who saw them.St. John's-native Tina Maddigan Mayer is scheduled to sing the Canadian anthem in Kansas City Friday night with the Royals hosting the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series.
Maddigan Mayer, who just recently relocated to Missouri with her husband and young family, made the announcement Thursday on Facebook.
"My Canadian roots are proud to be singing the Canadian national anthem for the ALCS game," she wrote.
Maddigan spoke with CBC News by Skype on Friday afternoon and despite her many years of performing on some of the biggest stages, admitted to being nervous.
"It's just thrilling to be able to get to sing," she said.
The Toronto Blue Jays and the Kansas City Royals will face off Friday night in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series. (Charlie Riedel/Associated Press/Denny Medley/USA TODAY Sports/Reuters)
So how did Mayer get this gig?
A friend of hers in Kansas City asked her recently if she knew the words to Canada's anthem.
Maddigan gave him a sarcastic reply, and was then asked if she would be interested in singing at the baseball game.
"Yes. I can," she replied without any hesitation.
The Royals offered her the opportunity, and tickets to the game for her, her husband and their two young children.
She has performed the anthem at sporting events before, but never on such a large stage, and before her "beloved Blue Jays."
Canadian baseball fans have been whipped into a frenzy in recent days, and Maddigan said she is honoured to be involved.
Maddigan Mayer is a graduate of Brother Rice High School and became a Broadway star after landing the lead role of Sophie in Mamma Mia, a mega-hit musical in New York.
She also played a leading role in the original Broadway production of The Wedding SingerImage copyright AP Image caption G7 leaders meeting in Germany agreed on the need to move away from fossil fuels
The G7 has called for a transformation of electricity generation towards clean sources by 2050.
They said fossil fuel emissions should not be allowed in any sector of the economy by the end of the century.
Their targets are not binding - but they send a clear message to investors that in the long term economies will have to be powered by non-polluting energy.
The world's leaders have effectively signalled the end of the fossil fuel era that has driven economies since the Industrial Revolution.
This is a seismic shift - and an acknowledgement from the leaders, prompted by Angela Merkel, of the scale of the threat from climate change.
The G7's mid-century target is for emissions to be cut 40-70% globally compared with 2010.
Image copyright AP Image caption Hot air? Balloons portraying the G7 leaders are released near the summit
The G7 also accepted that rich nations would need to help poorer countries - especially in Africa - develop using clean technology, and adapt to inevitable changes to climate in the future.
They have promised to address risks from weather disasters that may become more serious as the climate heats and they say they will help with insurance and protection for the poorest.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption G7 leaders accepted that rich countries would need to help poorer ones adapt to changes
But they will be pushed by developing nations to show they are making good their previous promise of £100bn in climate finance by 2020.
The leaders also promised to strengthen cooperation over energy efficiency and work together with other interested countries to co-ordinate clean energy research, development and demonstration - as urged by the UK's climate ambassador David King.
The resolutions will feed into the meeting of world leaders to seal a global deal on climate later this year in Paris. A positive outcome there is now more likely.
But huge questions remain. Some scientists and environmentalists accused the G7 of reckless complacency by suggesting that we can afford to burn fossil fuels at all past 2050.
On the other hand there are worries from some developing countries about the suggestion that coal should be phased out. It is not clear how poor nations are to be persuaded to ignore the cheapest fuel available in their attempts to develop.
The cost of solar energy is plummeting, and is now competitive with coal in some parts of the world, but it has not yet shown that it can power industries on a large scale.
Gas fuel firms say carbon capture and storage technology, which would take most of the emissions from a fossil fuel power station and bury them underground, will allow economies to continue to benefit from a consistent power source. But the technology is still in its infancy.
Follow Roger Harrabin on Twitter @rharrabinAn Afghan member of the security forces stands guard as a man helps schoolchildren run from the site of clashes near Pakistan's consulate in Jalalabad, capital of Nangahar province, on Wednesday. (Mohammad Anwar Danishyar/AP)
The Islamic State claimed it carried out an attack on a Pakistani consulate in Afghanistan on Wednesday that killed seven Afghan security personnel.
No casualties were reported among those inside the consulate in the eastern city of Jalalabad, near the border with Pakistan, officials said.
“Our security forces say that the target of the attack was the Pakistani Consulate,” said Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, an aide to the governor of Nangahar province. “The consulate has suffered some damages, but no one has been wounded or killed inside it."
The Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attack in a statement released online. Nangahar is the stronghold of the Islamic State’s so-called Khorasan branch, which has battled both the Afghan government and the Taliban.
Wednesday’s assault came three days after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani visited Jalalabad, the provincial capital, and declared that the Islamic State “has no room in the Afghan society.”
The attack showed a level of orchestration previously not seen from the Islamic State in Afghanistan, raising concerns that the group's ability to carry out complex operations is increasing. Afghan officials have acknowledged that the group, which recently launched its own radio station in Nangahar, is growing stronger.
[A new Islamic State radio station spreads panic in eastern Afghanistan]
Ghani telephoned Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to express his “concern and grief” about the attack, according to a statement from Sharif's office. Ghani also promised more security for Pakistani diplomats in Afghanistan.
The attack, the first in years to target Pakistani officials in Afghanistan, took place nine days after a similar assault on an Indian consulate in northern Afghanistan. It also coincided with diplomatic discussions aimed at bringing peace to Afghanistan in which Afghan and Pakistani representatives are taking part.
On Monday, officials from those countries, China and the United States met in Islamabad to begin crafting a road map for peace talks with the Taliban and other insurgent groups in Afghanistan.
[Four-way talks on Afghanistan start, with much to overcome]
“Whichever group carried out the attack, they want to disrupt the peace talks,” said Najib Mahmood, a political science professor at Kabul University. Officials vowed not to let that happen.
“The terrorists behind Jalalabad attack today are exactly the type of enemies & spoilers we all need [to] identify & oppose [with] all means available," the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan, Janan Mosazai, said on Twitter.
The attack began about 8 a.m. when a suicide bomber targeted a police vehicle outside the Jalalabad consulate, clearing the way for two assailants to enter a building next to the compound, according to Atta Ullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the Nangahar governor.
Security forces exchanged gunfire with the attackers for nearly three hours before overcoming them, officials said. Seven members of Afghan security forces, including two police officers, were killed, according to an Interior Ministry spokesman, Sediq Sediqqi. More than 10 people, including civilians, were wounded.
Until the Islamic State claimed responsibility Wednesday afternoon, it was unclear which group had mounted the attack. The Taliban regularly conducts such strikes against the Afghan government, international aid workers or foreign troops. But the Taliban’s main faction, led by Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, denied involvement.
The Taliban has also distanced itself from the attack on the Indian Consulate in Mazar-e Sharif on Jan. 4 in which Afghan security forces repelled a group of gunmen attempting to lay siege to the facility. Three attackers and a police officer died in the day-long standoff, which came a week after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Afghanistan.
Wednesday’s attack was seen by some as an attempt to punish Pakistan for its prominent role in planning peace talks.
“Many terrorist groups might not see peace as being in their best interests,” Mahmood said.
Two other attacks also roiled the region Wednesday. In the Pakistani city of Quetta, an explosion outside a polio immunization center killed at least 14 people, most of them policemen. The Pakistani Taliban asserted responsibility. In the southern Afghan city of Lashkar Gah, a botched suicide bombing injured a civilian, according to local media.
Mohammad Sharif in Kabul and Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
Read more:
The Islamic State is making these Afghans long for the Taliban
The chaotic war in Afghanistan
Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the worldPresident Barack Obama has claimed progress in the US-led fight against ISIL militants despite a background of political turmoil in Iraq and renewed violence in Syria.
We have momentum, and we intend to keep that momentum
In a rare presidential visit to CIA headquarters, Obama said it had been “a bad few months” for ISIL.
“Today, on the ground in Syria and in Iraq, ISIL is on the defensive. Our 66-member coalition, including Arab partners, is on the offensive. We have momentum, and we intend to keep that momentum (…)We continue to take out their leaders, their commanders and those plotting terrorist attacks. For ISIL’s leadership, it has been a bad few months.”
“For ISIL's leadership, it has been a bad few months.” — POTUS on our military campaign to degrade and destroy ISIL: https://t.co/sUylnvxUW6 — The White House (WhiteHouse) April 14, 2016
However Obama offered no new steps or specifics about how or if the US will beef up the fight against ISIL. The Pentagon is said to be seeking ways to increase military support including a likely increase in US forces along with the use of more equipment for in Iraqi-led combat missions.
Obama also said the ultimate solution has to be a diplomatic one. “The only way to truly destroy ISIL is to end the Syrian civil war that ISIL has exploited,” he said.
Some critics say the positives on the ground are less clear than the president makes out. In Syria, escalating fighting between the government and militants is threatening a fragile cease-fire. And in Iraq ongoing sectarianism remains a destabilising factor. In both countries any hard fought gains on the ground could be short lived.This massive crab caught in the English Channel has claws so powerful they could crush a man's wrist.
The giant edible brown crab was brought up from the deep off Portsmouth by a local fisherman.
It weighs over 9lbs, has a body measuring 30cm wide and boasts huge claws that have a crushing strength of over 90lb per square inch - nearly four times that of a human hand.
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Aquarist Martyn Chandler carefully handles the mammoth crab brought in to the Blue Reef Aquarium in Southsea by a local fisherman
'Popeye' was found off the coast of Portsmouth. With claws the size of fists, he's capable of crushing strength four times that of a human being
The crab has been nicknamed Popeye because of its bulging arms, which it uses to tear prey apart and could easily disfigure any human.
Its discovery comes just eight months after a photo taken in the Whitstable harbour in Kent appeared to show a crab measuring as much as 50ft in width.
It is now set to be a popular display feature at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Southsea after it was donated by the unnamed fisherman who caught it.
Aquarist Martyn Chandler said: 'These crabs use their giant claws to crush and tear their prey.
The crustacean weighs over 9lbs, has a body measuring 30cm wide and boasts huge claws that have a crushing strength of over 90lb per square inch
Its gigantic claws are the size of fists and are four times as powerful as the average human hand
'Weighing over 9lbs, you wouldn't want to dip your toe in any rock pool this crab was in.
'He's a fantastic-looking specimen with an awesome set of fist-sized claws.
'It is clear that he has been around for a long time and it would be a shame for such an impressive-looking crab to end up as someone's lunch.
'We are currently keeping him in our quarantine area but the plan is for him to move in to his new home here at the aquarium in the coming days.
'He'll be looked after and provided with everything he needs and there is the added bonus that he won't have the temptation of any crab pots!
'No one is entirely sure how long crustaceans can live for but it is certainly decades so hopefully he has got a good few years left to enjoy his retirement.'
This photograph, which was shared online, appears to show a crustacean that is at least 50ft wide lurking in the shallow water. It dwarfs the fishing boasts resting on the nearby pier
The edible crab - Cancer pagurus in Latin - is the most common crab found in UK waters.
Mature adults usually grow to a weight of 3kg and a carapace size of 25cm, meaning Popeye is one of the largest of its type to be found.
The creatures live up to 30 years although some have been known to live up to 100 years.
The largest known species of crab is the Japanese spider crab, which can measure more than 12ft.
Last year's disputed sighting of a 50ft crab photographed in the Whitstable harbour in Kent had many convinced an even larger crustacean was lurking in British waters.School officials prompted a public outcry this month when they said the book would no longer be required reading, spurring a debate about censorship and race, and drawing national attention to the district in the city of about 45,000 people on the Gulf of Mexico.
Kenny Holloway, the vice president of the Biloxi School Board, later told The Sun Herald that the book was still available in the library, but that the eighth-grade curriculum would use another book because some of the language “makes people uncomfortable.”
Mr. Holloway, Mr. Powell and other officials at the district, Biloxi Public Schools, did not reply to phone calls and emails for comment on Friday.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee has been taught in countless classrooms and influenced generations of readers.
Set during the Depression in a small Alabama town where a black man is accused of raping a white woman, its exploration of racism, injustice and discrimination has placed it among the most banned or challenged works of literature in the United States, according to the American Library Association.Fredericksburg students crown a friend with Down syndrome
Libby Klein, left, stands with her escort Lane Williams after being crowned Homecoming Queen of Fredericksburg High School Saturday night. Libby Klein, left, stands with her escort Lane Williams after being crowned Homecoming Queen of Fredericksburg High School Saturday night. Photo: Robert Owen, Courtesy Photo Photo: Robert Owen, Courtesy Photo Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Fredericksburg students crown a friend with Down syndrome 1 / 7 Back to Gallery
FREDERICKSBURG — After spending the weekend as royalty, Libby Klein resumed her friendly, upbeat and down-to-earth existence Monday at Fredericksburg High School.
But the euphoria persists from the affectionate gesture of classmates who elected her homecoming queen Friday during halftime of the Billies' 16-13 defeat of the Llano Yellow Jackets.
“The crown makes me feel perfect,” said Klein, a senior with Down syndrome. “I wanted the crown so badly because I didn't have one.”
Klein, 19, was the clear winner over four other would-be queens for the honorary title that this year carries special significance.
“I'm really proud of the student body. They realized how much it would mean to her,” said Natalie Smith, faculty sponsor for the student council. “They really showed good character in wanting that for her. They love her.”
The crowd cheered wildly and tears flowed freely as the royal tiara took its place atop Klein, decked out in a strapless burgundy gown and pearls.
“A lot of people were very moved to see it,” said Camry Weinheimer, 17, a queen candidate who is Klein's cousin. “I've never seen anybody so happy as she was.”
Police Officer Chris Ayala misted up, though he'd already caught wind of the “Elect Libby” campaign on the campus where he's stationed.
“The second she heard her name, she jumped and screamed,” he recalled. “That made my eyes water.”
Far from casting it as a sympathy vote, Klein's backers say she merited the recognition on her own terms, for her can-do attitude and positive outlook.
“She's nice to everybody and she really deserved to win,” said Kendyl Spies, 16.
Many of the campus's 940 students are familiar with Klein from pep rally appearances as an honorary cheerleader.
“It's just amazing how much the community has rallied around my daughter,” said Greg Klein, 50, calling his family blessed to live in such a place.
Libby Klein was home-schooled by her mom before enrolling in Fredericksburg High School three years ago.
“She's a very sweet, loving girl and I think she's very bright for having Down syndrome,” Karen Klein said.
She plans to enroll in a Schreiner University program for special-needs students and wants to teach children as a profession.
Terri Mauldin, executive director of the Down Syndrome Association of South Texas, called it “awesome” that students elected a classmate with the genetic defect, known medically as Trisomy 21, which affects on average one of every 691 live births.
“Something like this is significant in that they're finally being accepted as a peer by their classmates,” she said, noting Drew Boynton, who also has Down syndrome, was named Alamo Heights High School's homecoming king in 2011.
Klein said the best part of being queen is “spending time with the principal, because I like Mr. Halderman so much.”
Principal Ralf Halderman responded, “We've known each other for three years and we've become very good friends.”
Of Klein's election, he said, “It just kind of goes to show you we have really good kids with big hearts.”
[email protected] has announced that it sold 12 million total hardware units in the US during 2011, marking the fifth year in a row it has accomplished such a feat. This includes more than 4.5 million units of Wii, more than 4 million 3DS systems, and over 3.4 million units of NDS systems.
This brings the installed base for Wii and Nintendo DS to 39 million and over 51 million, respectively.
Nintendo also said Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 for 3DS were also the fastest-selling titles in the history of their respective franchises at launch, and are the first 3DS titles to sell 1 million units each in the US.
On Wii, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword became the 45th Wii title to sell more than 1 million units in the US.
“One of the strongest software lineups in our history helped Nintendo have a great holiday season and to close 2011 with a full head of steam,” said NOA VP of sales and marketing Scott Moffit. “Not only have the new Mario and Zelda titles already broken records, but with strong reviews and satisfied customers sharing their positive experiences, all three are also shaping up to be the latest long-tail titles from Nintendo.
“Couple that with a massive first and third-party lineup in the first part of the year and the prospects for 2012 are extremely promising.”
In addition to the milestones reached by new software, two other Nintendo titles celebrated milestones as 2011 closed: Mario Kart Wii passed 11 million units sold, and New Super Mario Bros. for NDS systems crossed 10 million total units sold.
The firm also said it has a strong line-up planned for 2012 with new installments in the Mario Party, Pokemon, and Kid Icarus franchises, and highlighted third-party titles such as Resident Evil Revelations and Metal Gear Solid 3D Snake Eater.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A red-faced police officer was forced to retrieve his cap from a canal in front of a laughing hen party - after lending it to the bride-to-be for a photo.
The ‘hen’ perched the hat on her head for a snap but moments later it fell into the drink.
To the amusement of her watching pals, the poor officer was able retrieve his headgear, although it was very wet, from the canal at Deansgate Locks in Manchester city centre.
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The sheepish officer later told his superiors he now regrets being so accommodating with his iconic custodian helmet.
A colleague said: “We do encourage officers to engage with the public, if it’s not distracting them from tackling crime or anti-social behaviour.”
For years, GMP officers have not worn their force-issue helmets apart from certain occasions, for instance when they are required to appear in court.
City centre police tweeted about the incident afterwards, posting a picture of a helmet and said: “Cop regrets lending helmet to hen party for a photo Deansgate Locks, after it fell off bride-to-be's head into canal.”A most interesting piece of news this morning comes from Double Fine. Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert got together and decided to throw up a Kickstarter campaign to fund a point-and-click adventure. It launched 8 hours ago with a target of $400,000 and as of writing 9,249 backers have already contributed $424,393.
What’s also interesting is the spread of backers. Around half have donated the basic $15 pledge, which gets you a copy of the game plus video documentaries. A further 35% have gone for the $30 pledge, which gets you to the video in HD plus a soundtrack. 10% have pledged $100. 3% have pledged $250. 31 people have put up $1000 each, 5 people have put in $5000 a-piece and one intrepid soul has put $10,000 into the project.
In a way, this activity is a more organised version of the pledges that propelled Minecraft to success. It also shows how the dynamics of tribal marketing are becoming ever-more important in game making. Whether for small projects like Puzzle Clubhouse or more significant undertakings like Double Fine’s, fans will spend to support, and spend big. Perhaps in the future all new franchises will launch in this way first.Editor’s note: A police state is a “state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the population.” The micromanagement and control over entire industries — such as health care — is categorically part of the development of a police state. The ongoing market manipulations and monopolistic regulations have had a variety of consequences on economic and social freedoms. Some of the economic consequences will be examined here.
The Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) was passed in 2010 with the promise of lowering health care costs. Capitalizing on the public’s dismay over the increasingly expensive health care, Democrats and insurance lobbyists came together to produce a startling example of corporate cronyism. As we illustrated in the first article in this series, Health Care: 100 Years of Creeping Government Control, decreasing the supply and increasing the demand for a product — such as health care — will never lower its costs. And it won’t in the case of the “Affordable” Care Act.
There is still a lot of misinformation about what the ACA includes; understandably so considering that the legislation is thousands of pages long. To cut through the misinformation, we’ve pieced together a much-needed breakdown of the effects of the ACA on private insurance plans and the upcoming penalties for non-compliance.
* * * * *
A GREAT DECEPTION
Politicians made a lot of promises about their new insurance scheme. One such promise included:
“If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” Barack Obama
This claim was widely promoted, not just by the president, but by the Speaker of the House among many others.
“Keep your doctor, and your current plan, if you like them.” Nancy Pelosi
These claims were made to garner the public’s acceptance of the hasty passage of the Affordable Care Act. But they were lies all along. It is simply not true that everyone is allowed to keep their current plan (or lack thereof). Thousands across the nation are already losing their current plans thanks to the ACA. Some are offered comparable (but more expensive) plans. Some are written off entirely and told to find coverage elsewhere.
ACA registration began October 1st, and already the reports pour in about cancellation notices and rate hikes.
THE TRUTH
The truth is far from what the American people were sold. This is the cold, hard reality about your chances of keeping your current plan:
All new plans must provide numerous expensive benefits, now officially known as “essential health benefits“.
Essential health benefits must include items and services within at least the following 10 categories: ambulatory patient services; emergency services; hospitalization; maternity and newborn care; mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.
If your plan does not provide these benefits, it will probably be banned due to extremely restrictive qualifying criteria.
So what happens to the plans that don’t meet the new minimum standards? They will likely disappear. A handful of existing plans will be grandfathered in, but the qualifying criteria for that is hard to meet: Members have to have been enrolled in the plan before the ACA passed in 2010, and the plan has to have maintained fairly steady co-pay, deductible and coverage rates until now.
If your current plan does provide these benefits, the premiums will almost certainly increase substantially.
Of the 51 states studied, all experienced health insurance rate increases, with 44 of those states experiencing triple digit percentage increases in premiums for the lowest-priced coverage. Pre-ACA premiums average $62.00 monthly, while post-ACA premiums average $187.08 per month, a $125.08, or 202 percent, increase. The average percent change between 2013 and 2014 minimum level plan monthly premiums is 260 percent, reflecting a nearly 3 to 1 ratio between the two sets of premiums.
If, by chance, your plan is not cancelled but does not offer the “essential health benefits”, you will still be required to pay a stiff tax penalty in addition to the premiums that you pay for the plan that you are graciously allowed to ‘keep’.
As enforcement of the ACA expands, we can expect more and more existing plans to be changed or eliminated.
The data shows that there will be a near complete transformation of the individual and family health insurance market starting in 2014. Less than 2% of the existing health plans in the individual market today provide all the Essential Health Benefits required under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
If your health care is sought through means other than insurance — such as self-treatment or paying cash for medical consultation — the federal government will now impose annual fines on you. Uninsured individuals and families will face stiff penalties for trying to opt out and be left alone.
THE COST OF NON-COMPLIANCE
If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan. Period. Maybe. Probably not. But if you keep it, you will be required to pay a stiff fine. Sorry, did I forget to mention that part in my speech?
Another widely distributed misconception is the idea that it ‘only’ costs $95 annually to refuse to comply. It pops up far too often in discussions pertaining to the ACA.
And again:
These sort of comments reflect a grave misunderstanding of the penalties. The ACA designed these penalties to increase year-to-year, forcing more and more people into unwanted and unaffordable insurance plans. This oft-touted $95.00 penalty is the bare minimum, only applying to single individuals earning a small annual income… and only valid in the first year.
Here is a much-needed breakdown of the upcoming incremental fine schedule. Keep in mind: this is what it costs to have no coverage!
2014 PENALTIES:
Uninsured individuals will be penalized 1% of their annual income above the minimum tax threshold — no less than $95/year.
Uninsured families will be penalized at one of the following rates (whichever is greater):
$95 per adult and $47.50 per child, capped at $285 per family, or
1% of their annual income above the minimum tax threshold.
2015 PENALTIES:
Uninsured individuals will be penalized 2% of their annual income above the minimum tax threshold — no less than $325/year.
Uninsured families will be penalized at one of the following rates (whichever is greater):
$325 per adult and $162.50 per child, capped at $975 per family, or
2% of their annual income above the minimum tax threshold.
2016 PENALTIES:
Uninsured individuals will be penalized 2.5% of their annual income above the minimum tax threshold — no less than $695/year.
Uninsured families will be penalized at one of the following rates (whichever is greater):
$695 per adult and $347.50 per child, capped at $2085 per family, or
2.5% of their annual income above the minimum tax threshold.
PENALTY CAVEATS
After 2016, rates will be increased proportionally with consumer inflation rates.
Individuals are exempt if the cost of the cheapest bronze plan on their state exchange exceeds 8% of their income.
The total fine will be capped at the national average premium price of a bronze plan on the state exchanges.
Sources: (1) Countdown to Obamacare: The Penalties for Uninsured Americans, (2) What to know if you opt out of buying health insurance
A REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
A friend of mine recently said,
We received a letter yesterday from our insurance company stating that our current insurance plan was not Obama approved and would be canceled the first of the year. So I go online to look at the government rates and plans only to find the cheapest plan is double what we are currently paying and has a higher deductible. How many families like ours are now going to be forced to go without insurance and pay a penalty to the government for it?
This is not a wealthy family. This is a hard-working small business owner, employing 15 people while raising 4 kids. They purchased the best health coverage that they could afford (a plan with high deductibles and limited coverage) and budgeted cash payments for the expenses that wouldn’t be covered by it. They liked their plan. They will not be able to keep it, nor can they responsibly afford a plan that costs twice as much as their previous plan.
By 2016, they will face a minimum tax penalty of $2,085 in addition to the financial burden of losing what coverage they were offered by their previous plan. This penalty will increase each year in accordance with consumer inflation.
This family is a prime example of the victimization that is taking place at the hands of the federal government. Small business owners and the working class, the very demographic that this legislation was supposed to help, are hit the hardest by it.
Don’t believe for a moment that ACA proponents in Washington are surprised by this. Anyone with an average intelligence quotient and freshman knowledge of economics could recognize that this plan would be harmful to American families. This dubious realization should tell you a lot about those who thrust the ACA on us. Their agenda is not about making our lives better.
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about construction work, parking spaces and traffic back-ups. Info from sources including Bosch’s radar units will be crucial to making this work properly.
The “radar road signature” being developed by Bosch will work with any “conventional mapping format,” the company notes, so it could potentially make its way to a lot more places, especially as mapping becomes key to rolling out autonomous vehicles safely and effectively. Since Bosch is one of the world’s leading supplier for automakers when it comes to this kind of radar hardware, those maps should have great coverage, too.If Republican National Committee researchers need any help digging up dirt on Hillary Clinton, they might turn to their Democratic counterparts for help.
On Tuesday, a hacker, or possibly a group, going by the name “Guccifer2” released what he said were hundreds of Democratic National Committee documents that exhaustively catalogue Clinton’s political and policy vulnerabilities on just about every issue that’s touched her career. From Benghazi to her private email server to Monica Lewinsky, it’s all there.
A 113-page Word document, appropriately titled “Hillary Clinton Master Doc,” draws on news articles and attacks levied by her opponents in order to create a kind of point/counterpoint guidebook, showing where the DNC thinks Clinton is likely to get hit by her critics and how she or her surrogates might fight back.
The document begins with foreign policy and specifically Benghazi, arguably the favorite talking point of conservatives who continue to question Clinton’s role in an attack that took the lives of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens. The document cites criticism of her own account of the embassy attack, as well as the Obama administration’s mixed “messaging” in the aftermath.
The document moves on to criticism of Clinton’s policies on Syria, Russia, and other countries. None of the harsh words are likely to come as news to most Republicans, but their inclusion in what purports to be a comprehensive portfolio gives a window into how the DNC thinks Clinton needs to prepare for the general election.
A spokesperson for the DNC didn’t respond to a request for comment about the leaks or the authenticity of the documents, but committee officials had previously acknowledged that their computers were hacked and that research was stolen. The documents were released hours before Bloomberg News reported that the computers of the Clinton Foundation, the charitable organization run by the Clinton family, also were hacked, apparently by Russians.
Guccifer2, who draws his name from an earlier data thief, Guccifer, who broke into the email account of Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal, claims to be responsible for the intrusion into the DNC. U.S. security researchers have pinned the DNC breach on the Russian government. The Washington Post reported last week that Russian hackers also stole the DNC’s research on Clinton’s opponent, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
The master document, along with hundreds of others that the hacker released, reveal a Democratic establishment that’s especially anxious about the amount of money Clinton and her husband have made in private life, earning hundreds of millions of dollars between them in book advances and speaking fees. Many of the files and spreadsheets are focused on the Clinton’s finances and her personal travel expenses aboard private jets.
Several documents leaked by Guccifer2 show that DNC researchers, whose annotated notes can still be seen in the electronic files, looked for the tiniest potential infraction or questionable item in Clinton’s travel expenses, for instance, asking why one trip from New York to Washington, D.C., aboard a Bank of America jet cost just $45.75, an amount that a researcher called “weirdly low.”
A whole section in the “Master Doc” is devoted to questions and criticism about the money Clinton made from her book advance, book tour, and her public speeches, which generally ran around $250,000 per appearance and required the host to provide first-class travel and accommodations. In Clinton’s defense, the DNC cites articles stressing that fees went to the Clinton Foundation, and characterizing the work that the former secretary did in her private life not as an attempt to enrich herself, but to benefit her and her husband’s charitable work.
The document also delves into subtler territory where the DNC seems to think Clinton is vulnerable.
A section titled “Beatability” discusses Clinton’s perceived “lack of authenticity” and whether her nomination seeming “inevitable” might turn off prospective voters.
On hot-button policy issues, that DNC researcher also attempted to poke holes in Clinton’s potential defense, a process known as “red teaming.” For instance, one bullet point stresses that “Secretary Clinton successfully negotiated the 2012 Israel-Gaza ceasefire with the help of Egypt.” The DNC researcher notes, “This is an accomplishment that unraveled a bit in 2014, but was noted frequently during her book tour.”
On Cuba policy, the document argues that clinton “worked to free Alan Gross from Cuba and advocated for his release” after the U.S. government contractor was arrested in 2009 and accused of being a spy. “She clearly didn’t succeed at the time,” the researcher pointed out. “She also opposed swapping Gross in exchange for five [Cuban] spies” the U.S. was holding. (In December 2014, the U.S. and Cuba released their respective prisoners, though each government claimed their actions weren’t coordinated.)
The document also seeks to draw contrasts between Clinton and other Obama administration officials. In a section titled “Defense of China Policy as Secretary of State,” the DNC links to an opinion item in the Wall Street Journal by Brookings Institution scholar Michael O’Hanlon, who wrote that Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, “has not conveyed the sense of focus on the region” that she had while in office. O’Hanlon praised Clinton’s tenure as “arguably the most consequential” with respect to China and wrote that her “firmness,” “clarity,” and “respect for China…bode well for how she would handle Beijing as president.”
The DNC catalogue covers even more obscure terrain and controversies. It recalls Clinton’s position, from 2000, that Elian Gonzalez, the young Cuban boy living in Florida, should be sent back to his native country and reunited with his father. And it links to press coverage of an Ecuadorian woman, Estefania Isaias, who was accused of fraud but allowed to travel to the U.S., where she worked for an Obama fundraiser, after a ban a travel ban was lifted while Clinton was Secretary of State.
The DNC dissects Clinton’s positions on healthcare, the environment, immigration, gun rights, eminent domain, LGBT issues, the financial sector, voting rights, and even her stance on whether to name Washington, D.C.’s, professional football team the Redskins. (She was against it.)
And while the litany of Clinton’s career high and low points list steers clear of some of the wilder conspiracy theories that have continued to animate her most strident critics—such as the accusation that she was involved in the death of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster—several pages of the “Master Doc” are devoted to one of her darkest chapters, the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Drawing entirely from passages in the book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, by journalist Kate Andersen Brower, the DNC points to Clinton’s desire for privacy in the midst of the sex and impeachment sagas, as well as reports that she physically assaulted President Bill Clinton with a book. The document doesn’t attempt to debunk any accusations, but nevertheless recalls them in their gory detail, including one passage of the book where White House personal staff found “blood all over the president and first lady’s bed,” apparently after Hillary Clinton threw a book at her husband’s head.
As for books, the hacker Guccifer2 also released a separate DNC document listing the “negative press” that Clinton received for her memoir, Hard Choices.
“Hillary Clinton’s memoir had disappointing sales…” the DNC summary begins. It continues, “…as did the People magazine issue that put Secretary Clinton on the cover.” Reviews slammed the book for its “lack of substance,” the DNC concluded, citing one that argued “Hard Choices is a good example of why publishers don’t disclose advances.” (Various claims have pegged the advance at $14 million.)
Other documents leaked by the hacker include copies of Clinton’s tax returns and her personal financial statements, as well as a breakdown of how much money she paid to travel by private jet. None of that’s news, but it’s another indication of where the DNC thinks Clinton could be assailed.
The document dump isn’t solely focused on Clinton, however. There are at least three papers that list the relative strengths and weaknesses of Vice President Joe Biden, using the same format as those drawn up on Clinton. It’s not clear whether the DNC thought Biden might mount his own presidential run, but he had flirted with the idea and eventually declared publicly that he would not seek the nomination.
And while it’s not clear that the documents Guccifer2 released represent everything the DNC has, if not being included is a sign of how seriously the committee takes a candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders should note: There are no position papers on the candidate who gave Clinton the strongest run for her money.
The DNC devoted more attention to Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, drawing up at least four documents on various policy positions for a candidate who flamed out after less than five months in the race.
—with additional reporting by Alexa CorseWe haven’t heard this name, in some time.
Felix Sater, the shady character who occasionally found his way into conversations about Donald Trump throughout the primary and election season is back.
Sater is a former business partner of Trump’s, with a history of legal troubles. His former real estate company, the Bayrock Group, had a big hand in selling Trump’s condos to Russia.
He’s also the guy who did a stint in prison for stabbing a guy in the face with the stem of a martini glass.
Classy.
Reportedly, Sater has been in contact with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, and from what he’s telling people, he feels there is the distinct possibility of trouble ahead.
Honestly, I had forgotten about the guy, but then this piece from Raw Story pops up:
Sater hinted in an interview earlier this month that he may be cooperating with both Mueller’s investigation and congressional probes of Trump. “In about the next 30 to 35 days, I will be the most colourful character you have ever talked about,” Sater told New York Magazine. “Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. And believe me, it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.”
Sater has gone as far as to suggest that he may be looking at prison time, with Trump not far behind.
This could, of course, all be bluster from a sketchy character, looking to raise his profile.
The talk of former Trump associates turning on the president has become a topic of consideration, however, and it may have a bit of weight to it.
Last week, reports were that the FBI had conducted a raid on the home of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
To be clear, the FBI aren’t in the habit of just randomly raiding peoples’ homes. In order for that raid to happen, a judge would have had to approve it, based on evidence presented that was strong enough to make him say, “Yeah. Maybe you guys need to go in there.”
Immediately following the news of the raid (which was conducted in late July), the National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid that has been very loyal to Donald Trump, splashed a headline accusing Manafort of a torrid affair with a much younger woman.
My first thought: Does Manafort have the kind of profile, outside of diehard politicos, that would make a story about his indiscretions front page-worthy?
He’s no Johnny Depp, after all.
The story is that Manafort may be rolling on Trump, and he needs to be discredited.
And great, big, fat caveat, here. This is all speculation of the highest order.
As it is, we don’t know if Felix Sater actually has spoken with Mueller’s team. We don’t know if Paul Manafort has anything to actually damage Trump. Maybe the National Enquirer was having a really slow news day.
Time will tell.A few small molecules that control gene expression can repair the scar tissue in a mouse’s damaged heart. The technique could translate into human therapy for heart attack patients and others.
Researchers from Duke University Medical Center used molecular control switches known as microRNAs (miRNAs) to induce cells in scar tissue to change roles and turn into myocytes, the heart muscle cells that beat. The first miRNA was found in 1993, but it took nearly another decade for scientists to recognize these short RNA molecules (comprising roughly 22 bases) as a unique class of genome regulators. Now biologists have shown that they regulate many cellular processes and can play a role in many diseases, including cancer and heart disease.
By injecting a virus carrying four different miRNAs into a mouse’s damaged heart, the Duke researchers were able to show that scarred heart tissue can regenerate into healthier muscle tissue. Each miRNA turned a different set of genes on or off to orchestrate the cells’ role change. In theory, similar miRNAs could be given to patients after a heart attack so that their cardiac muscle regenerates, thereby reducing the risk of future heart failure.
Other techniques, like induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology, can also reprogram heart and other adult cells. With iPS cells, for instance, an adult cell such as a skin cell is “deprogrammed” into a pluripotent state before being reprogrammed to become, say, a cardiac muscle cell. However, the miRNA method may be simpler and more direct.
“If everything comes to fruition, I think we will see this as a therapy in the next decade,” said author Victor Dzau of Duke University Medical Center in a release.On his show Cashin’ In this past weekend, Fox News host Eric Bolling told Muslim extremists that if they want a “holy war” than the United States will give them one. Last night, The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur decided to tell Bolling why that would be playing directly in the terrorists’ hands.
“Really, Eric? Are you that much of a coward?” Uygur asked the Fox host. “You’re worried that guy in the middle of Syria is going to capture the White House?”
He explained to Bolling that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, or 23% of the population, and stressed that the U.S. should be focused on fighting terrorist groups like ISIS, not all Muslims.
“If you did a holy war, not just against Islamic radicals but against — that’s what a holy war is — against all Muslims, and if you notice in that clip he kept interchanging Islamic radicals with Islam, then you have given the terrorists the best gift they could possibly hope for,” Uygur said “You’re going to take their ragtag army and turn it into an army of 1.6 billion people.”
Watch video below, via The Young Turks:
And watch Bolling’s full segment below, via Fox News:
[Photo via screengrab]
— —
>> Follow Matt Wilstein (@TheMattWilstein) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]“I don’t mind talking about God with atheists. In fact, the stronger their arguments are, the more God strengthens my faith.”
I’ve heard this or variations of it countless times. It can be bewildering, because Christians often seem most confident after what seem to be the most fact-based, strongest attacks against their faith. Sometimes, this characteristic of debates has led me to walk away from the debate and give up, especially when Christians do it with pride. They feel more confident after debate, no matter what the atheist says — so that must mean, to them, that the atheist is wrong.
But I’ve found that there is actually a really straightforward way to explain it.
First, there’s this thing that psychologists call “belief perseverance,” and it’s a phenomenon that was first discovered in a 1975 study. What the researchers did is give the subjects suicide notes to read, and the subjects were instructed to decide who killed themselves and who did not based on the notes. The researchers then split the subjects up, and told one group they did very well on the test, and another that they did very poorly. Then, they called them back and said that they had lied the first time — neither group had done exceptionally well or exceptionally bad. After this, they had the groups rate themselves.
They found that even though both groups had been told, the second time, that they had not done very well OR very poorly, the group that had been told the first time that they had done well continued to think they had done well, and the group that had been told they had done poorly continued to think they had done poorly.
Their beliefs were persistent, in spite of clear evidence that they were wrong.
Then, there was another experiment in 1977. Here, the researchers gave a psychological profile of one man to one group, and a psychological profile of another man to a second group. They told the first group that their man ended up committing suicide, and told the second group that their man ran for public office. Then the researchers asked the members of the groups to use the psychological profiles in order to determine how each man’s psychology led him to the decision that he made. They came up with very well thought out theories.
After that, the researchers said that actually neither of the endings were true — the first man did not commit suicide, and the second man didn’t run for public office. After they explicitly told both groups that these events did not happen, they asked the groups to go back and rethink what each man’s probable outcome was.
And…each group kept their reasoning intact. The first group STILL said that the first man probably committed suicide, and the second group STILL said that the second man probably ran for public office, even though they had been clearly told that neither of these events actually happened.
In each case, the work researchers had done indicated that the more work a person goes through to establish a conclusion, the more likely the conclusion will remain in spite of contradictory evidence — even very strong contradictory evidence.
This tendency also plays into confirmation bias to produce the backfire effect, which not only makes incorrect beliefs persist in the face of strong contradictory evidence, but actually makes them stronger. There are several disturbing examples of this. For example:
In a 2010 study, Nyhan and Reifler asked people to read a fake newspaper article containing a real quotation of George W. Bush, in which the former president asserted that his tax cuts “helped increase revenues to the Treasury.” In some versions of the article, this false claim was then debunked by economic evidence: A correction appended to the end of the article stated that in fact, the Bush tax cuts “were followed by an unprecedented three-year decline in nominal tax revenues, from $2 trillion in 2000 to $1.8 trillion in 2003.” The study found that conservatives who read the correction were twice as likely to believe Bush’s claim was true as were conservatives who did not read the correction.
In addition, the more someone has invested in a belief being true, the more they continue to believe that it is true. We call this phenomenon “motivated reasoning.” In short, we are likely to highlight evidence that we already believe. And I’ve been victim of this, as an atheist. For example, in arguments online someone has given me a series of articles from very reputable sources contradicting something I thought was true based on a something I read before from a much less reputable source, like Wikipedia or a highly biased blogger. My strong temptation, oftentimes, is to respond by increasing my confidence in the original source, which decreases my confidence in the series of more reputable articles. Whereas before I thought I was right based on what I knew was shaky evidence, now I think I am right because I have responded to contradictory evidence by making the original evidence stronger in my mind than it originally was. It’s like pulling teeth, sometimes, to force myself to admit I’m wrong and avoid this tendency.
You follow? It’s not just Christians who make this error. It’s a human glitch. We all have it.
And that’s why, when presented with contradictory evidence, belief perseverance, confirmation bias, the backfire effect, and motivated reading can actually make Christians more, not less, confident they are right. It might be part of why the most stubborn Christian demographic in the United States — the category that is bleeding the fewest adherents in today’s increasingly nonreligious world — is Christian evangelicals. The more they are given evidence against Christianity, the more (just like that biased article I clung to in the above example) they may cling to the actual words of the Bible, so that arguments against them increase, as opposed to decrease, their faith.
Yes, atheists are susceptible to this bias, too — we all are. But for us, “faith” isn’t a virtue. For many Christians, “faith” is so effective and strong because it’s essentially glorified confirmation bias, and the Bible often actively encourages Christians to disregard sources (no matter how reputable) that contradict it. In Christendom, belief perseverance is actively encouraged. When children are young, they are taught these beliefs and their belief perseverance/confirmation bias is actively encouraged by references to faith, exaltation of the Bible and, often, respect for church leaders. Once these traits are embedded and encouraged as a way of life, attacks can encourage, as opposed to discourage, faith.
Which is why, after volleying a powerful attack against a Christian, the response may often be, “Y’know, you have some thoughtful arguments — but God just uses them to increase my faith.”
That’s not your God; that’s a tendency we both have, whether the belief is right or wrong. If we want to be right, we often need to fight this tendency, not encourage it.
How can we do this? Partly by realizing that feeling more confident after a powerful attack against your pre-held beliefs is normal –not an act of God — and is a feature of many beliefs you may have, not just the ones pertaining to God’s existence. Realizing this can help people see powerful attacks against their beliefs for whether or not they are valid, not just how they make the person feel. In doing this we can increasingly work towards (whatever our beliefs) being “less wrong.”
So, because you are likely to emphasize evidence that confirms what you already believe and de-emphasize evidence that contradicts what you believe, evidence that contradicts what you believe will tend to look less important and, thus, less convincing to you. As a result, evidence confirming what you believe will seem MORE convincing, making you more confident in your position.
And the only thing needed to jump start this process, you remember, is evidence that contradicts your beliefs. Contrary to popular wisdom, it is completely normal for evidence contradicting your beliefs to make those beliefs even stronger.
This is not something to be proud of because it’s faith or God’s work. This is a tendency to watch out for, to guard against, if it is important to us to actually be right.
Thanks for reading.
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Thanks!LOS ANGELES – Thousands of California prison inmates who have been in solitary confinement – some for more than 30 years – will be released into the general prison population under a legal settlement announced Tuesday.
The agreement follows several hunger strikes over the past decade to protest the use of indefinite solitary confinement to control prison gangs.
“Today is a historic day,” said Jules Lobel, lead counsel in the case and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “When we started this lawsuit, California was housing thousands of prisoners in solitary confinement often for no more than possessing art work or literature believed to be gang related.”
Now, all prisoners held in indefinite solitary confinement will be transferred to the general population, unless there is misconduct. Those still confined to solitary will no longer face an indefinite sentence but will serve a set term, depending on the offense.
“This will affect 1,500 to 2,000 people immediately,” Lobel said. “Only a small percentage will remain in the SHU (Solitary Housing Unit). They will no longer be in solitary simply because of gang affiliation.”
Marie Levin, sister of one of the plaintiffs in the federal class action lawsuit Ashker v. Brown, called the settlement “a monumental victory for prisoners and an important step in our goal of ending indefinite solitary confinement in California and the rest of the country”
Her brother, Satawa Nantambu Jamaa, has been in solitary for 31 years.
“He’s still in there,” Levin said. She said it will be “a blessing to be able to hold him and give him a hug.”
Dolores Canales, founder of California Families Against Solitary Confinement, said she can’t help but feel a sense of sadness for relatives of inmates who have died before they could see their loved ones.
“They went to their death without ever being able to hold their loved ones’ hands,” Canales said. “I can’t help but wonder how they would be feeling at this moment. They would probably be thinking this is just the beginning.”
Jeff Beard, secretary of the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitations, conceded that the lawsuit, protests and hunger strikes did work to speed up the process of ending the 30-year-old policy.
But he said that the state had already been moving in that direction, starting a Step Down pilot program two years ago to release inmates in solitary to the general population.
Now, “an actual gang-related behavior has to occur, not just membership,” Beard said.
Small, high-security units will be formed within three or four months to keep dangerous inmates away from the general population but not in solitary. They would have many of the same privileges as other inmates, including contact with family, religious services, phone calls and various educational programs.
The majority of the prisoners who have been isolated for at least 10 years and haven’t had a major violation in at least two years, will be moved back into the general prison population.
Correctional officers groups warn that the settlement may result in more homicides behind prison walls.
“The Department of Correction has been reviewing and releasing hundreds of them to the general population under its new policies and they agree there has been very little negative results,” said Carol Strickman, co-counsel and staff attorney at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. “We recognize we need to keep the peace. Prisoners recognize that.”
The lawsuit was initially filed in December 2009 by plaintiffs Todd Ashker and Danny Troxwell, who were both in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison. There were a series of hunger strikes – the largest in 2013, when more than 30,000 inmates participated in the 60-day protest.
Beard said that California was the only state that kept inmates in solitary strictly because of gang affiliation.
“We’re moving to a behavior-based system,” he said. “A few years ago, it was upwards of 4,500. Now, we’re down to 3,000. … We’re looking for that number to fall.”
A statement read by Levin said, “The prisoners’ human rights movement is awakening the conscience of this nation to recognize that we are fellow human beings.”
Lobel said this settlement will “hopefully serve as a model in other states to end solitary for gang affiliation.”AnandTech, the brilliantly super techie blog founded by recent Apple hire Anand Shimpi, has left the independent media club* after announcing its sale to Purch, the publishing company behind fellow tech sites Tom’s Hardware and Laptop Mag.
AnandTech made its name as an authority for in-depth hardware reviews, but branched out into mobile, software and general tech news over the years. Started over 17 years ago by a then teenaged Shimpi, it has been profitable from birth. The companies have not revealed the price of its acquisition, but a note from editor-in-chief Ryan Smith explains the strategy behind the move.
Smith said Shimpi met with a range of publishers over the past year before his retirement in August because they realized the site was in need of a larger organization’s resources in order to fulfill its potential.
While we had no issues competing with larger corporate owned sites on the content front, when it came to advertising we were at a disadvantage. Our advantage in quality allowed us to make progress, but ultimately it became a numbers game. The larger corporate owned sites could show up with a network of traffic, substantially larger than what AnandTech could deliver, and land more lucrative advertising deals than we were able to. They could then in turn fund a larger editorial operation and the cycle continues.
It sounds like AnandTech had no shortage of suitors, and Smith stressed that the deal will see it retain its editorial independence while enjoying the benefits of a “family whose combined traffic is eight times larger” than its own audience.
“AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware remain editorially independent, and though no longer competitors, the goal is to learn from one another,” Smith added.
It’s certainly been a transitional year for the site, what with Shimpi departing and passing the baton on to Smith and his team, but then 2014 itself has been a particularly notable one for online media.
AllThingsD became Re/Code with financial backing from NBCUniversal, VICE blew up and is considering an IPO next year, BuzzFeed raised $50 million from A16Z, The Verge made changes at the top, Gawker also shuffled its pack, The Information showed the potential of a subscription-based business model… and that’s just some of the year’s most significant developments.
Unlike most of those media mentioned above, however, AnandTech’s rise is a bit of a fairytale… a blog started by a tech-crazed kid has (long) grown into a legitimate media company. That’s quite something these days.
*Big fat disclosure while we’re on the subject of media acquisitions — and for those who have been living under a rock — TechCrunch is owned by AOL.More anti-gun hysteria: Belle Plaine High School in Iowa will no longer honor veterans with a 21-gun salute in its annual Veteran's Day assembly thanks to state gun laws, reports local station KWWL.
Veterans firing rifles at the school assembly has been a fun, safe tradition for as long as some students can remember. But even though the vets are firing blanks, and since all guns under any circumstances are viewed as being possessed by Satan now, the tradition has been nixed.
Post 39 Legioneers were already disappointed when the school announced the assembly would go on at a different location. One Legioneer offered school officials the use of his own yard across from the school for the assembly so the salute can continue.
Post 39 Legioneers believe that high schools across the state, and possibly even the country, may soon follow suit. Post 39 commander Pam Munson thinks it's only a matter of time. She says the Post 39 Legion will continue to fight for the tradition to continue next year.
Welcome to the America of hope and change, where 21-gun salutes to our veterans supposedly promote gun violence, and a Muslim schoolboy who brings something to school that looks like an IED is invited to the White House.A quick tour of present-day borders reveals a few key similarities with the local Ottoman boundaries in place before the French and British arrived. The three separate provinces -- Mosul, Baghdad and Basra -- that were joined to make Iraq, for example, were often treated as a coherent economic and military area by the Ottoman government. And of course, the region’s geographic unity going back to the origins of human civilization, had long been recognized in the term “Mesopotamia.” Meanwhile, the fact that Iraq’s eastern border with Iran followed a line set by the 16th-century conquests of Suleiman the Magnificent didn’t prevent the countries from fighting a decade-long conflict over it that killed ten times more people than all the Arab-Israeli wars combined. To the West, Mount Lebanon had been carved out as a special administrative unit following religious violence there in 1860 as a compromise between Istanbul and the Great Powers. (That this region should nonetheless belong to Syria was perhaps one of the Assad regime’s least controversial positions over the years.) The only country in the area for which no ancient borders existed was Jordan -- it was formed in 1922 from some not-too-desirable bits of arid land as something for Britain’s ally, Abdullah, to be king of. Like most kings, he would have liked something bigger, and yet under his family’s rule Jordan has been spared much of the turmoil endured by its less “artificial” neighbors.
Even if Britain and France had set out to divide the Middle East with the best of intentions, which admittedly they did not, it’s far from clear how they could have done better. At best, creating more countries would have just meant more borders to fight over, while fewer large countries would have turned regular wars into civil ones.
In Iraq, for example, creating smaller independent states would only have prefigured the conflicts dividing Iraq today. A predominantly Kurdish state built around the old Ottoman province of Mosul would almost inevitability have become ensnared in the ongoing conflict between the Republic of Turkey and its own Kurdish minority. Similarly, Shiite Iran would have had religious grounds to try to incorporate a small Shiite state based around Basra, whereas a state based around the central province of Baghdad would have hated to sit back and watch its neighbors grow rich off oil deposits that it lacked.
So what if the British and French had instead endorsed the logic of pan-Arabism and created one big Arab state out of the whole region? Well, any such state would still have faced difficulty with its Christian, Kurdish, and Shiite minorities. And with Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia all asserting their own claims to preeminence in the Arab world, the question of leadership would have been contentious. Had such a state failed, like the short-lived United Arab Republic (1958-1961), its division would have brought regional politics back to square one.A new union-funded advertising blitz is attacking Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals and Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives for supporting tax cuts for corporations. The $100,000 campaign by a group cheekily calling itself People for Corporate Tax Cuts claims on its slick website peopleforcorporatetaxcuts.ca that its “biggest supporters” are McGuinty and Hudak.
The website peopleforcorporatetaxcuts.ca goes after Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals and Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives for supporting tax cuts for corporations.
An actress portraying “Nuella Warkworth,” who is billed as “the president, chair, CEO, COO” of the organization, says in the YouTube spots that every Ontario household must fork over $500 to cover the business tax cuts. “And if you can’t come up with the $500, the government will just take it out of your public services like hospitals, schools, and other luxuries,” intones the bespectacled spokeswoman in her best chipper Sarah Palin imitation. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, who would be the greatest political beneficiary of the ads funded by the Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union, praised the initiative.
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But Horwath insisted the New Democrats have nothing to do with OPSEU’s crusade, which she only learned about on Facebook on Monday night. “I was amused by it. It is very funny but at the same time it has an important message,” she told reporters at Queen’s Park Wednesday. “We want to see a tax plan in this province that is fair, one that does actual positive things for the economy.” Horwath has pledged to raise corporate taxes to bankroll the elimination of the 8 per cent provincial portion of the 13 per cent harmonized sales tax from electricity and natural gas bills if she wins the Oct. 6 provincial election. OPSEU president Warren Thomas said the union spent $100,000 on the ads because members “want corporate tax cuts to be part of the election campaign.
“If it gets people’s attention and gets people thinking and talking about it, that is a good thing,” said Thomas “Humour always paves the way.” The website features a running tally of hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on corporate tax cuts and boasts a shop for gear such as emblazoned boxer shorts, pet bowls, baby jumpers, mugs and T-shirts.
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McGuinty, for his part, said the organization is oversimplifying his administration’s taxation reforms. “It is a standard criticism offered by the left. But I would ask all Ontarians to take a good hard look at what we are doing in terms of tax reductions,” the premier said. “We have a comprehensive package of tax reforms that includes personal income tax cuts,” he said, noting tens of thousands of low-income Ontarians have been “taken off the tax rolls completely.” “There is a new children’s activity tax credit. There is an Ontario property and energy tax credit. We are cutting the price of electricity. If you put it all together people would have to come to the conclusion we are trying to bring a holistic approach to tax reforms that take into account the needs of all Ontarians.” Hudak, meanwhile, was unapologetic for being “a strong supporter of reducing the tax burden for families and seniors as well as job creators. “The problem is we were actually on course to having among the lowest taxes on businesses and job creators in Canada and then Dalton McGuinty came into office (in 2003), he jacked them up to among the highest,” said Hudak. “It was a catastrophic decision. It had a major impact on our manufacturing, our business sector and (was) one of the key reasons why Ontario lost some 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the first few years of this government,” he said. While the Liberals have since reduced corporate tax rates to levels that have met with approval from the federal Conservative government, Hudak stressed he remains concerned they will increase again. “I actually don’t believe that Dalton McGuinty may carry through on any commitments to reduce taxes. It’s not in his DNA. This premier is hard-wired to tax and spend.”
Read more about:Marco Rubio, as you may have heard, has issued yet another blunt rejection of the whole notion of man-made climate change. “Well, yeah, I don't agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what's happening in our climate,” he said yesterday on ABC’s “This Week.” He continued:
“Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that's directly and almost solely attributable to man-made activities…I don't know of any era in world history where the climate has been stable. Climate is always evolving, and natural disasters have always existed… I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate
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S{idProduct}=="8289", RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/remove_ignore_usb-device.sh 05ac 8289" SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0a5c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="4500", RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/remove_ignore_usb-device.sh 0a5c 4500"
As udev's OPTIONS=="ignore_device" may not work reliably, the above rules use a script to manually remove the usb device from /sys/bus/usb/devices/.
If battery life is not satisfactory, it may help to use power saving utilities, such as, and/or from the official repositories. To better optimize battery life, TLP also has a configuration file located at /etc/default/tlp that you can edit to suit your machine. For more information, visit the wiki pages for these tools, TLP and Powertop, respectively.
SD Card Reader
Disappears sporadically after suspend as of Linux 3.18. Workaround is to create /etc/modprobe.d/xhci-reset-on-suspend.conf with:
# Reset XHCI USB devices on suspend/resume, fixes SD Card reader vanishing after suspend options xhci_hcd quirks=0x80
Note: As of Linux 3.18.6-1 (and possibly earlier versions post-3.18), this fix may not be needed and might cause issues ranging from failed suspend to the SD card not being recognized at all. Test with and without the fix to determine which works best for you.
Repurpose the power key
By default systemd handles the rMBPs power key as defined in /etc/systemd/logind.conf. By setting
HandlePowerKey=ignore
systemd ignores power key events.
Now the power key can be repurposed as keycode 124. For example in i3 conf:
bindcode 124...
Web cam
A reverse engineered driver is being developed here: https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/. It is marked experimental, but basic functionality seems to be working. Install AUR [broken link: package not found] or AUR.
What does not work
Updated 2016-07-21
General
Wi-Fi
or from the AUR works Stability is an issue for some, look at Broadcom wireless for possible fixes (e.g. downgrading kernel works if your card is BCM4360) If stability is still an issue after the above, a possible alternative is to connect on a 802.11g network. More recent standards can cause the BCM4360 to disconnect randomly.
Backlight keys / Suspend support
AUR is an AUR package created specifically for MacBook laptops that includes patches for these issues, as well fixing powering off correctly and CPU frequency scaling with the intel_pstate driver.
DiscussionsEmma Watson, best remembered for the hugely successful Harry Potter franchise, will be starring in the movie adaptation of Queen of the Tearling. Since the conclusion of her role as Hermione Granger, Watson has opted for appearing in smaller movies such as My Week with Marilyn and The Bling Ring, both of which featured great performances from her. She was also radiant in yet another book-to-screen adaptation, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and will be seen in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah in March of 2014. The actress has definitely been keeping busy.
Queen of the Tearling is the first novel in a trilogy written by new author Erika Johansen. Watson will take the lead role of Kelsea Glynn. The character was created with inspiration from a speech given by Barack Obama in 2007. According to Variety the plot “is set three centuries after an environmental catastrophe when a malevolent Red Queen holds considerable power.” There have already been numerous comparisons to the popular television series Game of Thrones, which is definitely a plus.
A screenwriter and director have yet to be found but there is no rush on this one, seeing as the books will not be published until 2014. Producing will be David Heyman (who was also behind the Harry Potter films).
There is a considerable risk when creating a movie adaptation for a novel that is still not widely available yet. Typically an audience would be largely composed of fans of the book. Since those fans are non-existent at the moment, their numbers are uncertain.
Watson may be relied on to bring in her massive number of world-wide fans, who would be delighted to see her in almost anything. Although if the books become an instant hit, casting Watson as the lead would just be an added bonus. It’s still too soon to tell but if all goes well, the actress may have just added another iconic character to her already impressive filmography.
What do you think of Watson joining Queen of the Tearling? Let us know in the comments below.Intel buys computer vision startup Movidius as it looks to build up its RealSense platform
Intel’s RealSense platform was the star of its Intel Developer’s Forum conference in San Francisco last month and it seems the company is only looking to grow the scale and capabilities of its computer vision tech. Today, the company announced that it is acquiring the computer vision startup behind Google’s Project Tango 3D-sensor tech, Movidius.
In a blog post, Movidius CEO Remi El-Ouazzane announced that his startup will continue in its goal of giving “the power of sight to machines” as it works with Intel’s RealSense technology. Movidius has seen a great deal of interest in its radically low-powered computer vision chipset, signing deals with major device makers, including Google, Lenovo and DJI.
The eight-year old company has about 180 employees with offices in Silicon Valley, Ireland and Romania. The company had raised $86.5 million in funding across several rounds from investors including Summit Bridge Capital, Capital-E, DFJ and Emertec Gestion amongst others.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We’re on the cusp of big breakthroughs in artificial intelligence,” wrote El-Ouazzane. “In the years ahead, we’ll see new types of autonomous machines with more advanced capabilities as we make progress on one of the most difficult challenges of AI: getting our devices not just to see, but also to think.”
The company’s Myriad 2 family of Vision Processor Units are being used at Lenovo to build the company’s next generation of virtual reality products while Google struck a deal with the company to deploy its neural computation engine on the platform to push the machine learning power of mobile devices.
At its recent IDF developers conference, Intel made major announcements related to its depth-sensing RealSense platform, including a new virtual reality platform called Project Alloy, feature upgrades to its autonomous drone piloting and other initiatives aimed at enhancing computer vision in consumer and enterprise devices.
Intel wants to get its RealSense sensor tech in as many devices as possible and a major key is keeping the power usage low enough to appeal to a broad array of devices. Movidius gives Intel an in to get its sensor tech on low-powered mobile devices. Movidius’s SoC claims a sub-1 Watt power budget, a rate much lower than competitors.
“We see massive potential for Movidius to accelerate our initiatives in new and emerging technologies,” said Josh Walden, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s New Technology Group. “The ability to track, navigate, map and recognize both scenes and objects using Movidius’ low power and high performance SoCs opens up opportunities in areas where heat, battery life and form factors are key.”What was already expected to be a contentious second meeting for President Trump's Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, on Tuesday in Manchester, N.H., is likely to get a whole lot more contentious thanks to a column written by the panel's co-chair.
Although the chairman, Vice President Pence, said in that first meeting that the commission has "no preconceived notions or pre-ordained results," the panel's co-chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, seemed to contradict him in Breitbart News last week.
Kobach claimed that "now there's proof" of voter fraud in last year's election, enough to have likely changed the outcome of a key Senate race. He cited a report that more than 5,000 New Hampshire voters used out-of-state drivers' licences as identification and have yet to update those licenses, even though new residents are required to do so within 60 days of moving to the state.
"It is highly likely that voting by nonresidents changed the result," wrote Kobach, one of the few election officials in the country who hasn't dismissed Trump's unfounded claim that up to 5 million ballots were cast illegally last year.
What Kobach didn't say in the Breitbart column is that there are other possible explanations for all the out-of-state voter IDs. The most likely is that many were used by out-of-state college students, who are still eligible to vote.
"It's wrong," says Matthew Dunlap, Maine's secretary of state and one of five Democrats on the 12-member presidential commission. "It oversimplifies the model to say that there's a direct path to fraud through the driver's license. There never has been."
New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner told New Hampshire Public Radio last week that he has no reason to doubt last year's election results, although he supports further investigation.
"I don't have proof there's widespread voter fraud, but that doesn't mean that there might not be. It's just that I don't have proof. Well, how do you get to the proof? It's by way of the facts," said Gardner, also a Democrat.
Gardner has come under pressure from New Hampshire Democrats to resign from the commission, which has been criticized as biased towards those who think voter fraud is rampant.
"It's a commission that is about promoting this false and dangerous narrative that vote fraud is something that's widespread across the country and we know that that's just not the case," says Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
The commission's stated mission is to find ways to boost public confidence in elections. But Clarke and other voting rights advocates fear the commission's real goal is to push laws, such as strict ID requirements, that will make it harder for minorities and others to vote.
The panel has also been widely criticized by state election officials for requesting that they share detailed voter information with the panel. Several states have refused to comply, citing privacy and other concerns.
The Lawyers Committee is one of several groups suing the commission for violation of federal privacy and transparency laws. There are also complaints that the panel is bipartisan in name only. Its two leaders — Pence and Kobach — are both Republicans.
One of the panel's other Republican commissioners, Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, dismisses the suits as unfounded and says charges that the panel is trying to build a case to suppress legitimate voters are "ridiculous."
"Why do so many people not want the commission asking questions? It seems to be that there are folks out there who don't want an answer to this," he says.
Still, a federal judge has admonished the panel for not being more open in its proceedings. Members of the public were not allowed to attend the commission's first meeting at the White House in July, although it was streamed online. Room at Tuesday's meeting is also limited, and there's no time on the agenda for public comment.
That's disturbing to people like Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona election official who served on another election commission — one appointed by President Barack Obama to try to improve the voting process after some people waited eight hours or more to cast ballots in the 2012 election. The panel was co-chaired by two widely respected election attorneys — Democrat Bob Bauer and Republican Ben Ginsberg — and held several public hearings, at which members of the public could testify.
"We really felt that the voter's perspective and the voter's experience was the main tenet of our effort and so we needed to hear from the voters in addition to election administration and other experts," says Patrick.
Many of that commissions recommendations — including things like more early voting and online voter registration — have since been widely adopted by state and local election officials.
Casey McDermott of New Hampshire Public Radio contributed reporting to this story.
Copyright NPR 2019.(Credit: Andy Nietupski/Texas Stars)
The Texas Stars, American Hockey League affiliate of the NHL’s Dallas Stars, announced Friday the team has re-signed forward Travis Morin to an AHL contract for the upcoming 2017-18 season.
The Texas captain returns for his ninth season with the team and is the only player to skate each season for the Stars since their inception in 2009.
Morin, 33, led the team in scoring last year with 55 points (21-34=55) in 72 games. The 6-foot-1, 200-pound veteran is the franchise career leader in games played (543), goals (157), assists (310), points (467), power-play goals (42) and power-play assists (140). During his time with the Stars, the Brooklyn Park, Minn. native has been selected to four AHL All-Star Classics (2011, 2014, 2015, 2016), appeared in two Calder Cup Finals (2010, 2014) and won the Jack A. Butterfield award as the Most Valuable Player of the playoffs in the Stars’ 2014 run to winning the Calder Cup.
Morin was named the fourth captain in team history on Sept. 18, 2015. He and his wife also sit on the board of the Texas Stars Foundation, which issues financial grants to charitable causes throughout Central Texas.
Morin is also a former winner of the Les Cunningham Award and John B. Sollenberger Award as the AHL’s regular season Most Valuable Player and scoring champion back in 2014. He has also appeared in 13 games for the NHL’s Dallas Stars during his playing career.
One of the big question marks for Texas is back in the fold for the coming season as Texas has signed Travis Morin to an AHL deal.It's a change from the past seven seasons, which have seen him on an NHL contract with Dallas. However, it's the right call. Morin is no longer a lineup option for the Dallas Stars but has the veteran experience and scoring touch at the AHL level to be an extremely valuable piece of the development puzzle. Putting him on an AHL deal frees up some contract space for other players. In the end, it's all coming out of the same account since Dallas owns the Texas Stars.Morin is the only player to skate in every season for Texas and leads the team in almost every offensive statistical category. He won both the regular season and playoff MVP awards when Texas won the Cup in 2014.Here's the release:Veteran presenter says nature classes should be on a par with maths and English for children 'estranged' from the natural world
Classes on the environment are just as important as lessons in maths and English for today's children, veteran natural history presenter Sir David Attenborough has told the Guardian.
Attenborough, the voice of television natural history programmes for more than 50 years, said most children now grew up with "very little" direct contact with the natural world and were "estranged" from non-human forms of life.
The 84-year-old naturalist said learning about nature should be "on a par" with lessons in maths and English in schools. "As our children's world is changing, our planet is also in increasing peril," Attenborough said.
"Climate change and habitat destruction are problems facing our generation and those of our children. In order to equip the next generation to face these problems, it is crucial that children grow up with an understanding and respect for our planet. Human beings depend on the natural world for everything. We are going to have to make increasing demands on people to care for the natural world."
He said teachers had "enormous power" to influence the thoughts and actions of their pupils. "Bringing nature into the classroom can kindle a fascination and passion for the diversity of life on earth and can motivate a sense of responsibility to safeguard it."
Many children used to get to know the natural world in the countryside, but now many learn about nature at school, he said. "School grounds are absolutely invaluable if they can be used to give children things like ponds, places where children can grow their own plants and see animals." But, he said, unfortunately some urban schools had playgrounds that were just tarmac.
Attenborough yesterday told teachers how the national curriculum could be used to inspire children to learn with nature. He was speaking at the Association for Science Education Conference, held at Reading University, where he launched an encyclopaedia about life on land to be used in schools and universities.Craft Beer Sales Still Increasing
By Chuck Sudo in Food on Aug 3, 2010 5:20PM
Sales of craft beer are proving to be recession-proof. According to the Brewers Association, both volume and dollar sales of craft beer increased in the first half of 2010 versus the same time frame last year. Volume sales increased by 9 percent while dollar sales increased by 12 percent.
These numbers are encouraging, as the craft beer growth is happening even as overall beer sales decreased by nearly 3 percent the the first half of 2010. “There is a movement by beer lovers to the innovative and flavorful beers created by America’s small and independent craft brewers," said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. "More people are starting to think of craft-brewed beer first when they buy in restaurants, bars and stores.”
The numbers also reinforce the trend of craft beer growth versus overall beer sales in recent years. In other craft beer news, the total number of breweries in the US has increased to 1,624, and increase of 100 in the twelve-month period from July 2009 to now.The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed the earlier decision of a U.S. District Court in the long-running file-sharing case between Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Boston student Joel Tenenbaum. The appeal court ruled that District Court should not have considered constitutional matters. Instead, it could have reduced the amount of damages awarded and given Sony a chance to request a new trial.
Joel Tenenbaum’s fight with the RIAA has been dragging on now for six years. In 2009, a jury found Tenenbaum guilty of “willful infringement” and awarded damages of $675,000.
But in July 2010, the severe punishment handed out to the Boston student was in the spotlight.
Judge Nancy Gertner ruled in Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum that the awarded damages were both excessive and unconstitutional. She slashed the jury-awarded damages by 90% to $67,500 – $2,250 for each of 30 infringed works.
Unhappy, Tenenbaum lodged an appeal, as did the RIAA, and in April this year both parties were back in court before Chief Judge Sandra L. Lynch, Judge Juan R. Torruella, and Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson at the 1st Circuit Court of Appeal in Boston.
In its decision released yesterday, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals reversed U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner’s decision. Although the appeal court did not necessarily disagree with the response to the constitutional question, it found that Judge Nancy Gertner should not have considered it.
“Citing the doctrine of ‘constitutional avoidance,’ which dictates that courts should avoid tackling constitutional issues unnecessarily, the court found that Judge Gertner should first have considered using a procedure called ‘remittitur‘,” explains EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry.
“Under this procedure, she could have lowered the damages amount, but, if the record companies chose not to accept the new amount, they could have asked for a new trial.”
“A decision on a constitutional due process question was not necessary, was not inevitable, had considerable impermissible consequences, and contravened the rule of constitutional avoidance,” wrote Chief Judge Sandra L. Lynch in her decision.
“That rule had more than its usual import in this case because there were a number of difficult constitutional issues which should have been avoided but were engaged.”
Noting that this has been a difficult case, the Court found against Tenenbaum and in favor of the plaintiffs, Sony BMG.
“We have, inter alia, rejected Tenenbaum’s arguments that the Copyright Act is unconstitutional under Feltner, 523 U.S. 340, that the Act exempts so-called ‘consumer copying’ infringement from liability and damages, that statutory damages under the Act are unavailable without a showing of actual harm, that the jury’s instructions were in error, and his various trial error claims,” wrote Judge Lynch.
“We vacate the district court’s due process damages ruling and reverse the reduction of the jury’s statutory damages award. We reinstate the jury’s award of damages and remand for consideration of plaintiff’s motion for common law remittitur based on excessiveness.”
So yet again, in common with the case against Jamie Thomas, Joel Tenenbaum’s case grinds on while serving no obvious purpose.ZAPATA, TEX. -- Falcon Lake is famous for its monster bass and for the maniacal obsession of the fishermen who come from all over Texas -- and the world -- to stalk them. Now this remote reservoir that straddles the international boundary is known for something else: pirates.
In the past month, crews of outlaws in a small armada of banged-up skiffs and high-powered bass boats launched from the Mexican shore have ambushed bass anglers from the Texas side innocently casting their plastic worms over favorite spots. The buccaneers have struck in Mexican waters but within sight of the Texas shore.
Dressed in black, the pirates brandish automatic weapons, carry radio cellphones and board the anglers' boats. They demand weapons or drugs from their captives, but finding neither, seem satisfied with taking $400 or $500 as booty, according to law enforcement officials and victims' accounts.
There is a saying about not messing with Texas, and the idea that criminals are preying on American anglers is raising already-high temperatures along the southwest border. Answering calls for help, President Obama last week ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to the region.
The pirates claim to be "federales," or police, but instead are brigands -- with the letter "Z" tattooed on their necks and arms -- from the notorious drug cartel Los Zetas. The Zetas are on a rampage of killing and extortion along the Mexican border as they fight gun and grenade battles against the military and the rival Gulf Cartel.
"Within the last month, with all the feuding going on over there, the dope smuggling has dropped off and it is starving them. This water is Zeta central. They controlled the whole lake. They distributed everything. Now they're desperate and diversifying," said Jose E. Gonzalez, the second in command of the Border Patrol's Zapata station, which operates an around-the-clock maritime patrol.
At least three armed robberies have been reported in Mexican waters. The Texas Department of Public Safety put out a warning for people to stay on the U.S. side. On Memorial Day weekend, when 200 bass boats would usually be in town, only two dozen were seen at county ramps Friday afternoon.
One group of pirates was savvy enough to demand the memory chip from an angler's camera, lest they be identified. Another fisherman told authorities that armed men came roaring toward him. "I saw 'em, and I saw they were machine guns. They were that close, they were 15 yards away from me," San Antonio bass chaser Richard Drake told a local television station. "I was scared."
'Some bad boys out there'
Last week, Border Patrol agents tried to follow a Mexican boat filled with men wearing ski masks, but it was too fast for the agents and entered Mexican waters, where U.S. law enforcement is forbidden.
Olga Juliana Elizondo, the mayor of Nueva Guerrero, Mexico, said ranchers are harassed on their land, motorboats have disappeared, vehicles have been stolen and tourists have fled. "We hope this ends soon," she said.
"We've all heard about the pirates, and we're all sticking to the American side of the lake, because those are some bad boys out there," said Dwayne Deets, a fisherman from Houston who was sliding $50,000 worth of cream-colored bass boat, bristling with sonar and GPS electronics, down a ramp in Zapata.
Deets said Texans loved fishing the Mexican side. It is legal to carry a loaded firearm in a boat in Texas, but it is illegal to bring ammunition or weapons into Mexico. "I just pray no one gets killed out there," he said.
The International Falcon Reservoir was born in the early 1950s, when engineers erected a dam on the Rio Grande, flooding the banks and inundating towns on both sides. The 98,960-surface-acre impoundment stretches 60 miles and provides for irrigation, power, flood control and recreation in the area.
"Until this started, we fished everywhere, and we never cared about the border, Texas to Mexico. But now? No. Hardly anybody is fishing the Mexico side of the lake," said Tom Bendele, who with his brother owns the Falcon Lake Tackle shop in Zapata, now serving as the de facto intel center on all things piratical.
Out on the water, with a reporter in tow, Tom Bendele pointed out the picket line of 14 large concrete beacons that mark the international boundary. Some are swimming distance from the Texas shore; others are miles out in the middle of the lake.
Bendele ventured up the Rio Salado cove on the Mexican side, where two of the acts of piracy occurred. Around the bend, the steeple of the church in Old Guerrero is now mostly underwater. The shoreline is lonely mesquite brush, dotted by rough fish camps used by Mexicans who string gill nets along their side of the lake, hauling up tilapia, carp and bass.
Though illegal in the United States, the Mexican netters often cross into the Texas side to fish, playing an endless hide-and-seek with Texas game wardens.
Bendele cut off his engine, and the boat rocked in the cove. "You could see how it would be easy to get jumped in here," he said. "Notice you don't see any Americans."
'They watch us'
Out on the water with the U.S. Border Patrol, roaring right down the international boundary line but careful never to cross into Mexico, Gonzalez and a crew pointed out spot after spot where they have intercepted tons of marijuana crossing the lake.
The Border Patrol seized 18,000 pounds of marijuana in the lake region last year, worth about $14 million at $800 a pound; it will likely confiscate even more this year.
"But, man, they are so good at counter-surveillance," Gonzalez said, describing the lake as kind of a Wild West on the water. "They watch us, they watch our boats, our cars, our homes. The smugglers, they know every move we make."
The traffickers cross day and night, driving boats with bales of marijuana right into the backyards of homes along the lake. They rent cabins at the lakeside state park and stash dope there. The border agents point to a three-story house built like a watchtower on the Mexican shore. The officers frequently see observers with binoculars on the roof. Up and down the lake, netting boats are idled. Nobody waves.
"We're telling folks that right now, Mexico is not safe. Don't cross, because we can't go over and help you. It's just an imaginary line, but it's a line I can't cross," said Jake Cawthon, a Texas game warden. He said that anyone fishing the Mexican side these days has "got to have one hand on their fishing pole and the other on their boat keys, ready to haul back home."Your predictions were accurate. Assuming there are no further adjustments, the premiere earned a huge 2.8 adults 18-49 rating.
via press release:
AMC IS HOME TO CABLE’S TOP TWO DRAMAS
RETURN OF AMC’S BREAKING BAD DELIVERS 5.9 MILLION VIEWERS, MOST-WATCHED EPISODE IN SERIES HISTORY
102% INCREASE OVER LAST SUMMER’S SEASON FIVE PREMIERE
4.2 HH RATING 3.6 MILLION ADULTS 18-49
FIRST OF EIGHT FINAL EPISODES ALSO BECAME A TWITTER EVENT, WITH NEARLY 760,000 TWEETS AND 11,799 TWEETS-PER-MINUTE AT PEAK
AMC’S NEWEST DRAMA SERIES, LOW WINTER SUN, STARTS STRONG WITH 2.5 MILLION TOTAL VIEWERS
New York, NY – August 12, 2013 –AMC’s Breaking Bad returned last night with the first of its eight final episodes, delivering 5.9 million viewers, the most in series history and up 102% over the show’s season five premiere last summer. From 9pm – 10pm, the network earned a 4.2 HH rating delivering 3.3 million adults 25-54 and 3.6 million adults 18-49. Immediately following Breaking Bad, AMC premiered its newest dramatic series, Low Winter Sun, which got off to a strong start, attracting 2.5 million viewers. To close AMC’s first ever three-premiere night, the Breaking Bad after-show, Talking Bad – hosted by Chris Hardwick and featuring discussion and analysis of this iconic television series – debuted with 1.2 million viewers.
With 3.6 million viewers among adults 18-49, Breaking Bad is second only to AMC’s The Walking Dead in delivery to this key demographic, across all cable networks. With the success of these two shows, AMC is now home to cable’s top two dramas among adults 18-49.
On Saturday night, AMC’s Hell on Wheels returned with a two-hour season three premiere, delivering 2.5 million viewers, up 2% from the season two premiere and double AMC’s Saturday prime time average.
“We are so pleased and gratified by viewer response to a historic four-premiere weekend on AMC,” said AMC’s president and general manager, Charlie Collier. “For Breaking Bad to continue to deliver record-setting ratings in its fifth and final season is remarkable. Our new series, Low Winter Sun, is off to a strong start, and we have successfully launched another after-show in Talking Bad, which will super-serve Breaking Bad fans all the way through these final episodes. On Saturday, we also launched another night of original programming on AMC with Hell on Wheels, doubling our prime time average on Saturday nights, even before time shifting, and delivering the network’s highest Saturday night rating all year.”
The first of the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad also became an event on Twitter, with 759,689 total show-related Tweets from nearly 400,000 unique users – approximately two Tweets per unique user. Aaron Paul’s (@aaronpaul_8) “It’s so close I can almost taste the meth #BreakingBad” Tweet at 7:23pm EST generated 25,175 retweets. Peak activity for the show on Twitter was at 9pm EST – 11,799 Tweets-per-minute and at the end of the show at 10pm – 7,859 Tweets-per-minute. Twitter data from SocialGuide.
Key Nielsen Highlights for last night’s return of Breaking Bad:
9pm airing – 4.2 HH rating with 5.9 million viewers: +91%/+102% vs. season 5 premiere
airing – 4.2 HH rating with 5.9 million viewers: +91%/+102% vs. season 5 premiere 9pm airing – 3.6 million Adults 18-49: +87% vs. season 5 premiere
airing – 3.6 million Adults 18-49: +87% vs. season 5 premiere 9pm airing – 3.3 million Adults 25-54: +81% vs. season 5 premiere
Key Nielsen Highlights for the series premiere of Low Winter Sun:
10pm airing – 1.8 HH rating with 2.5 million viewers
airing – 1.8 HH rating with 2.5 million viewers 10pm airing – 1.4 million Adults 18-49
airing – 1.4 million Adults 18-49 10pm airing – 1.3 million Adults 25-54
Key Nielsen Highlights for the series premiere of Talking Bad:
11pm airing –.94 HH rating with 1.2 million viewers
airing –.94 HH rating with 1.2 million viewers 11pm airing – 679,000 Adults 18-49
airing – 679,000 Adults 18-49 11pm airing – 672,000 million Adults 25-54
Source: Nielsen Fast Nationals, 8/11/13, L+SD
From acclaimed writer, producer, director Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad is produced by Sony Pictures Television with Mark Johnson (Gran Via) and Michelle MacLaren serving as executive producers. Breaking Bad first premiered on AMC in January 2008 and follows protagonist Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a milquetoast high school chemistry teacher who lives in New Mexico with his wife, teenage son who has cerebral palsy and a new baby girl. White is diagnosed with Stage III cancer and given a prognosis of two years left to live. With a new sense of fearlessness based on his medical prognosis, and a desire to gain financial security for his family, White chooses to enter a dangerous world of drugs and crime and ascends to power in this world. The series explores how a fatal diagnosis such as White’s releases a typical man from the daily concerns and constraints of normal society and follows his transformation from mild-mannered family man to a kingpin of the drug trade.
Breaking Bad has garnered seven Primetime Emmy® Award wins and a Peabody, and been named to the American Film Institute’s (AFI) list of the “Top 10 Programs of the Year” (2008, 2010, 2011, 2012). The explosive series that The Hollywood Reporter called “one of the greatest dramas in TV history,” recently received 13 2013 Primetime Emmy® Award nominations. Breaking Bad stars three-time Emmy® Award-winner Bryan Cranston; two-time Emmy® winner Aaron Paul; Anna Gunn; Dean Norris; Betsy Brandt; RJ Mitte and Bob Odenkirk.
Low Winter Sun is a contemporary story of murder, deception, revenge and corruption in a world where the line between cops and criminals is blurred. Low Winter Sun begins with the murder of a cop by a fellow Detroit detective. Seemingly the perfect crime, in reality the murder activates forces that will forever alter the detective’s life, and pull him into the heart of the Detroit underworld. The series is a co-production between Endemol Studios and AMC Studios. Chris Mundy (Criminal Minds, Cold Case) serves as writer, executive producer and showrunner, which stars Mark Strong (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Zero Dark Thirty) and co-stars Lennie James (The Walking Dead, Jericho, Snatch). In addition to Mundy, Jeremy Gold, head of creative affairs for Endemol Studios, oversees the project with Greg Brenman, head of drama for Tiger Aspect.
Talking Bad is a weekly, half-hour live after-show and companion piece for its Emmy® Award-winning series, Breaking Bad. Hosted by Chris Hardwick, the series analyzes and examines every detail of Breaking Bad’s final eight episodes. Talking Bad features Hardwick spending time with fans, actors, producers and tv enthusiasts, recapping that most recent Breaking Bad episode, and taking questions and comments from viewers. Fans may continue to engage with the after-show following the on-air conclusion, online, at amc.com for more videos, weekly polls and photo galleries of the guests featured on the series. The series is produced by Michael Davies’ Embassy Row with Sony Pictures Television serving as the studio partner.
In Hell on Wheels, Cullen Bohannon leaves his vengeance-seeking behind and invests in the new American landscape … the beginnings of big business, big religion, and the new role of Wall Street in the White House. Bohannon must contend with racism, greed and murder as he single-mindedly leads the Union Pacific in its race across the country against the Central Pacific Railroad. The high stakes corporate race, the environmental costs and degradation of the native peoples’ way of life are themes that resonate deeply in today’s America.
Hell on Wheels was developed by Endemol USA. The series is produced by leading independent studio, Entertainment One (eOne) and Nomadic Pictures. eOne’s Television CEO John Morayniss and EVP US scripted television Michael Rosenberg oversee production in partnership with co-producers Mike Frislev and Chad Oakes from Nomadic Pictures.
About AMC
Whether commemorating favorite films from every genre and decade or creating acclaimed original programming, AMC brings to its audience something deeper, something richer, Something More. The network reigns as the only cable network in history ever to win the Emmy® Award for Outstanding Drama Series four years in a row, and boasts the most-watched drama series in basic cable history with The Walking Dead. AMC’s original drama series include Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Killing and Hell on Wheels. Its newest series, Low Winter Sun, premiered this summer. AMC also explores authentic worlds with bold characters through its slate of unscripted original series like Comic Book Men, Small Town Security, Talking Dead, Talking Bad and Freakshow. AMC is owned and operated by AMC Networks Inc. and its sister networks include IFC, Sundance Channel, and WE tv. AMC is available across all platforms, including on-air, online, on demand and mobile. AMC: Something More.First published Tue Nov 20, 2012; substantive revision Wed Sep 28, 2016
Although most people value humor, philosophers have said little about it, and what they have said is largely critical. Three traditional theories of laughter and humor are examined, along with the theory that humor evolved from mock-aggressive play in apes. Understanding humor as play helps counter the traditional objections to it and reveals some of its benefits, including those it shares with philosophy itself.
When people are asked what’s important in their lives, they often mention humor. Couples listing the traits they prize in their spouses usually put “sense of humor” at or near the top. Philosophers are concerned with what is important in life, so two things are surprising about what they have said about humor.
The first is how little they have said. From ancient times to the 20th century, the most that any notable philosopher wrote about laughter or humor was an essay, and only a few lesser-known thinkers such as Frances Hutcheson and James Beattie wrote that much. The word humor was not used in its current sense of funniness until the 18th century, we should note, and so traditional discussions were about laughter or comedy. The most that major philosophers like Plato, Hobbes, and Kant wrote about laughter or humor was
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As Russian and Syrian forces eradicate the terrorist remnants one can anticipate that a trove of highly indicting information will be uncovered that grievously imputes Washington, London, Paris and others in Syria’s dirty war. Among the finds too will be hundreds of Nusra and other terrorist operatives who may be willing to testify as to who their handlers were. A huge can of worms awaits to be prized open.
To pre-empt such devastating evidence of Western culpability in waging a covert criminal war in Syria, the Pentagon and its British partner appear to be dispatching their elite troops to perform a little bit of «house cleaning». That cleaning may involve whacking jihadis who know too much.
No wonder the British official said it could the most important mission for the SAS in its 75-year history. Washington and London’s neck is on the line.
SourceBut as the New York Times' Tamar Lewin points out, the latest arguments also harp on the purported profits the federal government makes off of student loan programs. Because the government earns money on its lending, advocates argue, policymakers should not let interest rates go higher, but should keep them low.
In the policy brief at the center of Lewin's story, the Public Interest Research Group, Young Invincibles, and the U.S. Student Association lay out the argument:
Recent projections from the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper for federal programs, indicate that federal educational lending now carries a "negative cost subsidy" of 36.48 percent for 2013. On average, every dollar lent will yield more than 36 cents of profit to the federal government....
The federal student loan program as it currently operates is the opposite of a low cost program to student loan borrowers; it makes billions in revenue yearly.
Terry Hartle from the American Council on Education (a leading higher education trade association) broke it down more practically in the Times:
If the numbers are accurate, the government will make more money on student loans than Ford makes on automobiles," he said. "Using student loans to create a profit center is not what anybody intended.
There's just one problem with these numbers: they're entirely dependent on what method the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) chooses to use in accounting for the cost of loan programs. Traditionally, the CBO has used a procedure laid out in the Federal Credit Reform Act (FCRA) of 1990 to assess the cost of federal loan programs. This method produces the gaudy student loan surpluses cited by student advocates (and displayed here, in CBO's 2013 forecast for student loans).
But by the CBO's own admission, the FCRA procedures don't account for the cost of "market risk," or the potential for economic forces out of the government's control to affect the ability of borrowers to pay back their loans. When the economy goes south, for instance, borrowers are more likely to be delinquent or to default, leading to lower recovery rates and higher collection costs for the government.
Luckily, the CBO has recently experimented with another method--"fair value accounting"--that better acknowledges the cost of market risk. What difference does it make? A lot, it turns out. The six education loan programs go from a surplus of $36.3 billion under the government's traditional accounting methods to a surplus of just $5.5 billion under fair-value in FY 2013 (see Table 1 here), or from about 32.1 cents for every dollar lent to 4.9 cents. That's just for one year, and doesn't count administrative costs. Map the difference over the standard 10-year budget window and we're talking big money.
Which method is right? As Jason Delisle of New America (a proponent of the fair value approach) argued last November, if you take leading, non-partisan finance experts as a litmus test, the answer is pretty clear:
Even if it is Republican lawmakers who have taken up the mantle of reform for fair-value estimates, the non-partisan views of organizations like the CBO, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and the Financial Economists Roundtable should make it clear that this is hardly a one-sided partisan issue.
The first step toward making our student aid system more sustainable and effective is to acknowledge, as fully as possible, what each program costs us each year, and whether those dollars are well-spent. Until then, we'll continue to make policy based on politics and deadlines, not sound accounting and common sense.
In that spirit, policymakers and journalists must recognize that the Ford-esque "profits" attached to student loans may be more fiction than fact, an artifact of the way Congress has chosen to measure the cost of federal loan programs.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected] Zhang Xu Editor: Jane Wang
Flowers are seen in a shop in Caojiadu flower market in Shanghai, east China, February 14, 2017. Flowers set featuring the Valentine's Day attracted many citizens on Tuesday.[Photo: Xinhua]
In Asia, men on the Chinese mainland are most willing to splurge in order to please their girlfriends or wives, according to a survey by MasterCard.
The survey says the average budget on the Chinese mainland for celebrating Valentine's Day was 310 US dollars, the highest among surveyed Asian countries. 75% of Chinese mainland respondents would like to buy gifts for their lovers on Valentine's Day, far more than the average of 44% in Asia.
MasterCard released the report on Monday, after surveying 9,123 respondents aged between 18 and 64 from 18 Asian countries and regions including Japan, South Korea, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
(Source: CRIENGLISH.com)Sixty-four dollars is as much as some people make in an entire day. For them, handing that over to play a video game is not a minor event. All they want in return is to use the product they just fucking paid for. If any other company in the world sold you a product that didn’t work, and then refused to hand over some sort of compensation in return, you wouldn’t even need a lawyer. The judge would tell them straight up, “Give them a working product, or give them their money back, or go to fucking jail.” But for whatever reason, the video game industry gets away with this now? Every time they have a problem with their servers, I can’t play the game I already bought? In an era when people carry their entire music library around with them on their phones, I have less ownership and control of my video games than I had in 1979? John Cheese, Cracked, “5 Reasons ‘Diablo III’ Represents Gaming’s Annoying Future” (Part 2); published May 17, 2012.*
There remains a cabal of misinformed gamers who defend “always-connected” video games with tired talking points such as “You never played Diablo offline to begin with!”, “They’re doing it to stop hackers!”, and “People are entitled to protect the integrity of their work!” As with most things on the internet, people are completely missing the point.
Let’s go ahead and explain the video game industry’s “control freak” thing. It explains why the servers for Diablo III (a single-player game with MMO infrastructure) remained mostly unplayable for two days following its May 15, 2012 launch.* It explains why the iOS version of Rock Band would “no longer be playable on your device” at the end of May 2012, until Electronic Arts insisted the messages broadcasted by the game were accidental.* It explains why the “App Stores” for mobile devices (legitimized in-part through video games) allow the developers or publishers of a product to modify licensed purchases as they see fit, where one can revoke the free version of a program and replace it with a paid version. It explains why fans of the online components for games such as Metal Gear Solid 4 (Metal Gear Online) and Demon’s Souls have to beg companies continue maintaining the game servers.** It explains why OnLive continues to persist, despite the current lack of interest in streaming game platforms, and it explains why Sony just bought digital streaming company Gaikai for 380 million dollars.* It explains why Nvidia is touting hardware that would allow low-end consumer devices to stream high-quality game graphics, despite the failure of tablet and smartphone technology to provide tactile input necessary for the game mechanics associated with those graphics.* This move towards streaming media will be affirmed by high-profile console game designers like David Jaffe, who believes streaming television applications will take over the role of the game consoles.* And most importantly, these events will explain why people who enjoy video games look at these developments with incredible concern, even as they’re derided as conspiracy theorists and scaremongers and haters or whatever.
Though not everybody seeks the same goals in the video game industry, we’ll refer to the industry as a whole here. It’s easier and far more inflammatory. And as I’ve been told, the gigantic video game publishers have a “fiduciary responsibility” and their goal is to “provide a profit to their shareholders”. As a result, “IF U THINK ORIGIN IS MALWARE THEN DNO’T BUY THE GAME!1!” In the pursuit of that profit, the video game industry has developed a number of enemies: Software piracy, used video games, modmaking, unruly customers. Among those problems, there is a percentage of gamers who value the history of the medium and seek to learn from it, sharing their knowledge and educating consumers so they know when Game X or Genre Y has been done better in the past.
At-worst, those “problems” are necessary evils. Well, the industry kinda disagrees. Those who control major game development are no longer satisfied with the mere creation of culture and the profit that comes with it. They seek the right to modify culture at any time, limit access to culture, and eventually revoke all access to this culture when it becomes a burden on the bottom line of the company. In the pursuit of profit, the video game industry seeks the right to synchronize creation of the games with their distribution model. And should they get their way, they will destroy video games as an artform. That doesn’t mean the distribution model will inherently destroy the artistic value of the games they create. Games are art, whether you accept it or not. But what good is video game art if it’s programmed to disappear? That’s what these companies intend to do: They will destroy the ability for consumers and fans of games to preserve or maintain the history of video games. How fitting. All this talk about whether video games can be art, and the greatest threat to preservation of the medium…has become the people who create them.
Why is this the least bit surprising? Have you been paying attention to the ongoing narratives in video game development? This is an industry that wants the consumer to trust them on digital rights management because, as they’ve put it, the consumer cannot be trusted to do the right thing! This is an industry whose traditional distribution model (physical retail) is in the process of falling apart and will be supplanted by the digital distribution models that these companies (and others) author. But why focus on this debate now, eight years removed from the launch of Steam, five years removed from the launch of Spore? Well, as it stands right now, Steam is still a platform that can be beaten. (And we sure as hell saw what happened to Spore.) Steam’s value lies primarily in its convenience, or at least that it’s as convenient as the illegitimate download route. At the end of the day, people know that if Valve fucks up or pisses off their fans, people have recourse against the company. That arrangement creates a healthy bond between the consumer and the developer, who work together to respect the wishes of each other. As it turns out, a lot of companies don’t like that, and they wish to change it.
With help from improving internet, companies have finally figured out how to front-load systemic failure into their software. Based on the social chatter and controversy surrounding these systems, it’s clear that these ideas are not universally accepted. Unfortunately, the ongoing discussion fails to grasp the scope of the situation. Most journalists and writers are failing to see the long-term ramifications, and online discussions usually devolve into a pissing match where “You just want to pirate the game!” But since enough people are buying games that use this variant of the digital model, the blueprint to the future is partially unfolding. Now, sure, developers are still making great single-player games that can be purchased on a disc and played without any interaction on the internet. Companies are still making games that seek to be lasting pieces of art rather than a mere game engine for “episodic” content updates. So let’s call this unfolding scenario the “ideal” business model in the current video game sector.
The first goal has been accomplished, which was to take back control of multiplayer game servers from their player base, because “software piracy”. During the early-to-mid-nineties, companies allowed third-parties to provide hosting for multiplayer computer games, because the alternative (company hosts the servers themselves) was expensive. Players subsidized the costs. After some improvements in internet technology, the commercial rise of the MMORPG, and the whole “Xbox Live” thing, companies realized how absurdly valuable it was to funnel all players into one ecosystem controlled by the developer. In this ecosystem, you can charge people for things that previously had no value, things that could be enabled and/or created by the community. And in cases where dedicated servers are still necessary to maintain good latency for online games, companies like Electronic Arts now use “authorized third-party resellers” to sell server space to their communities. With help from a string of pointless boycotts and dubious methods for conducting those boycotts (i.e. “pirate the game”), consumers laughed at those who correctly recognized the pratfalls of a service like IWNet. In-turn, companies made their move and have won that fight.
The second stage is well underway. The goal is to create “always-connected” video games, regardless of whether the genre or game model require this infrastructure. These games have little in common with the previous generation of “always-connected” video games (PC versions of Assassin’s Creed II and Driver: San Francisco, the single-player component in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, and games as used with the Origin digital distribution service). Originally, this technology required one to defeat the “handshake” that created the connection. For the most part, this only works if one has control of the platform. For example, the way Apple controls their mobile phones through proprietary hardware and constant updates. (Yes, the phones can be jailbroken, but it’s a more difficult process than downloading software for your desktop computer and executing a crack.) Those games helped create a silly presumption that Diablo III would be immediately and effortlessly cracked. (Two months after that game’s release, the “crack” is a half-functional version of the game. Developer mission accomplished.) As people will soon learn, as they should have already learned with the League of Legends that has few options for private servers, this is not going to be the case. This new class of games provides the player with little more than a client that manipulates the content as it is relayed from a server to your computer. Think of your computer like a gun in a shooting gallery. All you’re paying for is the right to shoot the weapon.
Functionally speaking, it’s the model used for MMORPGs. And in that community, this issue has been ignored because the games associated with the birth of the genre and its financial success (Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Asheron’s Call, Lineage, Everquest, World of Warcraft, Rift) are still chugging along. That’s because very few people have played the text-based MUDs which provided inspiration for those games or the succesors that provided the closest blueprint, games such as 1986’s Habitat or 1991’s Neverwinter Nights, games which no longer exist in their original form. Hell, nobody even seems to care that Asheron’s Call 2, The Matrix Online, Earth and Beyond, and Tabula Rasa cease to exist in any shape or form, with the emulation projects for these recent games going unnoticed.
That is the model which League of Legends and Tribes: Ascend now use, the model that Hawken will likely use, where developers continuously inject new content into their games as designed for server-side use. This allows the company to maintain a lucrative business model, where die-hards constantly gobble up new content for prices totaling far beyond the cost of a sixty-dollar game disc. It also assures that any emulated version of the game will not be “authentic”, a game that is not “up-to-date”. Even games with private servers, games such as World of Warcraft, vary wildly in quality and design depending on the server you are playing on. Which is not to dismiss the smattering of successful projects (AlterIWNet as used with Modern Warfare 2, SWGEmu for use with Star Wars Galaxies), but they’re hardly the norm, and the reasons for their success vary wildly. Even fewer of these amateur projects use original and uncopyrighted game code. As a result, people usually have to reverse-engineer the game code. As each team of amateurs gets closer to emulating a game, it will be difficult to propagate the jailbreak method into the wild without receiving a cease-and-desist order from its copyright holder. There will likely be some success in emulating the more popular games, but the risk of less prominent games disappearing from the timeline becomes very real.
For the time being, this “always-connected” approach will be the course of action preferred by game makers. This is because bandwidth doesn’t come easy in this North America, the most lucrative video game market on the planet. (It seems fitting that the largest impediment to a gigantic entertainment cabal gaining absolute authority over distribution is a telecommunications cabal that seeks to turn bandwidth into a commodity before people decide it is a right.) For now, the Battle.net 2.0 model will be used to redefine the perception of what a video game is: You have no right to the game, you’re simply licensing it, you’re simply getting in line to use Company X’s theme park. The idea that people were lined up on queues to play Diablo III in a “single-player” capacity should make that concept clear. (This is also the reason that Blizzard Entertainment has categorically denied any server-side issues concerning Diablo III, whether players claim they are getting banned for using Linux* or having their accounts hacked by the thousands.* The second that any Blizzard employee admits the Battle.net 2.0 gaming service is flawed, it will de-legitimize the company’s billion-dollar business model.) For the most part, companies have succeeded in the always-connected approach. More high-profile releases will become content engines (Saints Row The Third and its “forty weeks of downloadable content”, “Day One DLC”, “premium content”, etc.), regardless of whether these content engines are sold as sixty-dollar console video games or “free-to-play” computer games.
As the technology gets better, companies will make their move. Then the real fun begins. They will push for the OnLive model, where the developer or publisher (in conjunction with a distributor) streams the game through a game client, or the television, or your computer, or whatever. This is the future that OnLive, Gaikai, and Nvidia envision. It is the dream development model for every large publisher except those who are interested in continuing to develop video game hardware. (Certainly, Sony’s decision to purchase Gaikai should cast some doubt in the future of the PlayStation as we know it.) The player will have zero access to the game code because it’s located on a server somewhere else in the country. There will be no disc and the only downloads will be those necessary to use the distribution client. With this model, you eliminate unauthorized modmaking, software piracy, and further affirm the elimination of video game resale. I suppose that the game code could always be leaked, but that won’t instantly make it playable. In this model, the publisher effectively becomes the lord and master of the work. If the game sucks, if the game is controversial, if the game must cede way to a sequel, or if the game simply doesn’t sell, then the distributor can simply make the game disappear.
This is not theory, and this is not a “look fifty years down the road” scenario. All one has to do is look at a list of games which have already been pulled from the Xbox Arcade game service,* the popularity of FIFA Online in South Korea (a persistent online sports video game normally associated with traditional retail models), the shutdown of Star Wars Galaxies in favor of Star Wars: The Old Republic,* and the inevitable shutdown of retail Xbox and Xbox 360 games as designed for use with Xbox Live. Even Halo 2, the best-selling video game for the original Xbox, an eight-year-old video game, no longer works with Microsoft’s online console-gaming service. With every subsequent year of digital distribution as an inevitable future, with more imposing rules for using software, with more games directly programmed for this digital future, with more games connected to “the cloud”, with more companies going out of business, the more content that will become vulnerable.
It’s probably difficult for people to envision such a conundrum because, without even putting a conscious thought towards “preservation” of the medium, the medium as we know it in 2012 is largely preserved. Yes, a couple of significant works are lost for good, such as pioneering amateur projects of the mid-seventies (m199h), a growing body of MUDs that will soon include a growing body of MMORPGs, and numerous finished and unfinished games that never got their commercial releases. Yes, there will be difficulty finding storage space for large arcade games, a fate that parallels the pinball games which predeced this medium. Yes, it will be difficult to recreate game experiences that rely heavily on peripherals, particularly the specialized rhythm games. (It’s been a little over a year since Activision canceled development on the Guitar Hero franchise and the peripherals are already going for premium prices, regardless of the game it was released with.) And a decade from now, it’s possible that the majority of current-generation hardware (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii) will cease to function. And while that sucks, there aren’t many surviving copies of first-print classic literature, either. The important question is: Can the game code be placed into a digital format, emulated, and then have its controller input replicated with some degree of proficiency? For the vast majority of games, the answer is “yes”. And as a community and a whole, nearly every current-generation video game exists on a hard drive somewhere. Once people find a way to network their holdings and make the content from those game discs function on a computer, then that generation of games will be emulated.
Libraries have burned down, the vast majority of silent films no longer exist, decades of famous television episodes have been lost, and the history of video games is “preserved” because the medium has been commercial for most of its existence, and because people wanted to get these games playing on newer machines. (“Preserved” obviously assumes that society remains stable. The search for a long-lasting digital format which can endure decades of calamity remains elusive.) Nobody compensated the people who emulated these games, they did it for the challenge and the goal of getting to play those games on a home computer. (Which is funny, because it seems when a company pays somebody to get older games working on newer consoles, the result is usually lousy.) 1962’s Spacewar!, a game programmed for a PDP-1 that took up the size of a kitchen, can now be played in your internet browser.* There’s a good chance you never even gave any of this a thought. You just thought it was cool that you could play Mega Man on your computer, so long as you deleted the ROM after twenty-four hours. (Lol.)
What people have to understand is that this widespread emulation, this preservation of video games, exists in spite of copyright law. It is illegal. There are some exceptions in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act made for library archival, but they don’t apply to the wide-spread game downloading that we associate with emulation. In spite of this, most game developers understand they have no recourse. They can lash out against sites like Snesorama and events can even lead to their closure,* only for that site to be replaced by two or three others. As a result, companies are choosing a different direction. In conjunction with End User License Agreements, these companies are creating a system where they determine what copyright is. Not merely what the law says about copyright, but how copyright is programmed and how it functions. So, they will create games that will never enter the public domain, because a functional copy of the game will not appear out of thin air when its copyright expires. They will create games which skirt existing laws, they will create games whose systems mandate the collection of personal information. There will be no more “buy the console and play the damn game”. And to get an idea of what happens if the video game industry gets its way, simply pretend that emulators and the gigantic libraries of games cease to exist. Pretend that a limited number of coveted games exist in the form of buggy, unappealing doppelgangers. And only if the copyright holder decides that it is profitable to continue distributing that game for newer devices (where they potentially pervert the vision of the original developers in porting that game to new hardware) will they continue letting you play it.
And for what? “Because it’s more convenient than driving to the store”? You know what was the last time I heard “convenience” invoked in the video game industry? Angry Birds, because “it’s convenient to play on-the-go”. Well, fuck Angry Birds and fuck “convenience”. Every time I hear that word tossed around, I think of a three-hundred-pound woman commanding the U.S.S. Hoveround in the pursuit of low, low prices. Sometimes, to earn satisfaction, it has to be inconvenient. You have to struggle for it, you have to learn it, you have to strive to understand it. (Note that a lot of great games work the same way.) And yes, this server-side future may save you a ten-minute trip to the store or a two-hour game download, but quite frankly, I don’t see anything convenient about a future where I have to indefinitely bend to the whim of the copyright holder to use his product. I don’t see anything convenient about a future which relies on an expectation of permanent internet, a future where my purchase can’t be played on the first day due to intense demand. I don’t see anything convenient about a future where the games I played when I was younger simply disappear when businesses suck each other up and then “restructure operations”.
All the while, I’ve seen derisive suggestions that this issue (in the context of server outages for console and computer video games) is a “first-world problem”, the idea that you have a house over your head and some kid in Africa is starving, so you’re not entitled to complain about anything. Well, no shit, buddy. Science and ethics is a first-world problem. The mechanisms for dealing with global warming are a first-world problem. Oh, but I suppose since video games are an entertainment medium, that makes it okay? Well, that will be a great lesson to pass on to future generations: That it was okay to destroy our culture and ideas, i.e. “our legacy”, when a businessman with no connection to the artwork could save a couple of bucks by eliminating it from the timeline. First-world problems, indeed. Third-world dictators would kill for this kind of system.
Let’s make this clear: This is not merely the endgame of the video game industry. This is a societal issue. It’s the goal desired by all entities that wish to commercialize and control the internet. Smartphone creators are popularizing an interface that transforms the internet into a strip mall, with neat clickable buttons that ensure you’ll never have to harm your worldview by going to a web site like this one. As mentioned earlier, television companies will soon position their hardware to perform many of the same tasks seen on those smartphones, programs also downloaded from “App Stores”. Naturally, the functions for these devices will be stored server-side. People don’t seem to understand that when you say “They’re a business and they’re trying to make money!”, well…this is how the video game industry and other entities intend to do it. If they can’t create a better product or provide more value, they’ll take over the distribution model for their product. Then, they will invoke the power of the free market in order to create and personalize their own command economies, artificially inflating the value of goods and services designed for use in their own ecosystem.
Fortunately, the governments in a number of other major markets (most notably those in Asia and Europe) are pushing back, particularly against the failure of these companies to assure that the games are “always-connected”. In particular, South Korea and Japan (for various reasons) are going after the item trading which will drive the always-connected game economies of the future.** I don’t have much faith that America will take those same steps. We don’t really have laws against anything here anymore. So, at least in my country, the most lucrative video game market on the planet, these businesses are going to do what the Robber Barons did in the late-nineteenth century: Vertical monopoly ahoy. They create the product, they control the railroads that ship the product. What makes this predicament interesting is that books, movies, and television could no doubt persevere in such an environment. They can be copied with relative ease. Video games are interactive mediums featuring exceptionally complex mechanisms. You can’t take photos of games and capture what makes them great pieces of art. So if somebody decides that these pieces of technology are going to disappear, and they can spend vast resources on such complex fail-safe mechanisms, then they can probably do it.
So hopefully, I’m making the stakes very, very obvious. Just make sure that when the “cloud revolution” comes to video games, the narrative of convenience and the narrative of intellectual property rights, you may want to try and make it a little inconvenient for them.
Just a little.
Correction: I originally wrote that pedit5 has been lost to history, not recognizing that the game’s status as a “lost work” referred to the very original game code. The game is in the wild, and the article now reflects that.
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Facebook'Stuck in a rut' eurozone a threat to British businesses: Osborne urges British companies to explore new markets beyond Europe
George Osborne yesterday said the crisis-torn eurozone is the ‘greatest immediate economic risk’ to the UK.
The Chancellor told business leaders that British firms need to explore new markets in fast-growing regions beyond Europe.
‘The greatest immediate economic risk to us is the very very weak growth of the eurozone,’ he said.
Warning: George Osborne said the crisis-hiteurozone is the 'greatest immediate economic risk' to Britain
Half of British exports go to the European Union, including 45 per cent to the single currency bloc.
Last year the UK exported £12.4billion worth of goods to China, up 18 per cent on 2012 and 34 per cent on 2011. More than £150billion of goods were sold to Europe, including £30billion to Germany and £21billion to France where the economy has ground to a halt. Exports to the EU rose by just 1.6 per cent in 2013 but were down 3.3 per cent on 2011.
‘The thing that’s the most obvious weakness in the British economy is our export performance,’ Osborne told the Institute of Directors’ annual convention in London. ‘We have not connected ourselves enough with the big fast-growing economies in Asia, South America and the like.
‘Too many of our small and middle-sized businesses have felt daunted about entering into export markets.’
The Chancellor’s comments came after the International Monetary Fund warned that the global recovery is ‘brittle and uneven’ – with the UK and the US leading the way among the major developed nations and the eurozone lagging behind.
Figures yesterday suggested the UK economy grew by 0.8 per cent in the third quarter of the year following expansion of 0.9 per cent in the previous three months.
Markit said its index of activity in the UK, where 50 is the cut-off between growth and decline, fell from a nine-month high of 59.7 in August to a six-month low of 58.1 in September.
Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, said: ‘The surveys are signalling GDP growth of 0.8 per cent in the third quarter, down from 0.9 per cent in the three months to June but still robust by historical standards and signalling a continuation of the UK’s strong economic growth spell.
‘There are signs, however, that economic growth could slow further in the fourth quarter.’
The eurozone clocked up a score of just 52, its worst so far this year, as downturns in France and Italy dragged the region down.
The Republic of Ireland scored an impressive 60 in September while Spain hit 55.3 and Germany achieved 54.1.
But output in Italy and France fell again, with Italy scoring 49.5 and France a dismal 48.4.No publication on Keats could be more acceptable just now than a complete edition of his letters. It was high time for someone to include in a definitive edition the correspondence discovered in recent years, and there is no one who could have done this more appropriately than the present editor, a son of Harry Buxton Forman. For over forty years the elder Mr. Forman worked at the task of making all evidence on Keats available by collecting new materials, revising the old in the light of fresh discoveries and publishing and republishing the letters and poems in notable standard editions. It was Mr. Forman who first made public the poet’s delightfully human letters to his sister Fanny, and who had the courage to print, in the face of considerable Victorian criticism, the love letters to Fanny Brawne. This editor never considered his work finished, and when he died in 1917 he left a quantity of revised and new materials designed for still further editions. Maurice Buxton Forman has gone on from where his father left off, and, making use of all possible new data, has been able to give us the most complete and valuable printing of the letters up to this time.
Keats wrote remarkable letters. Shelley once reminded young Henry Reveley of a bargain they had made. “You are to write me uncorrected letters, just as the words come,” he said; “I like coin from the mint, though it may be a little rough at the edges.” Keats’s letters were like this, struck fresh from a glowing mind, with no blemish of affectation or reserve. Their great value is that they give us so much authentic knowledge of the life and sensations of a man who, born to be a poet, with a tendency to dwell apart in imaginative realms of his own, was yet a very wise and alert citizen of the everyday world. To read these letters for the first time is to discover a new Keats: a witty, chatty, sensitive human being, a solicitous and loyal friend and brother, a sympathetic observer of men and the world about him, a sagely philosophic commentator on his own poetry, on questions of his art, and on some of the vexing, unsolved problems of existence. They show him, too, a lover, who, tormented with doubts and, in the end, with the certainties of unfulfilled passion, wrote a language of anguish at times almost too painful to be borne. In addition, the letters, themselves often rising to pure poetry, give continual new meaning to the poems. What Keats puts into verse, he was forever writing about to his friends, and many a hard passage in the poetry is made understandable through some lucid unpremeditated utterance in prose.
When the Fanny Brawne correspondence was first published, Matthew Arnold declared that these letters read like the love letters of a surgeon’s apprentice, and Coventry Patmore charged that there was nothing in them which deserved “a much better name than lust,” that there was no trace of “the singing robes of love” which should characterize the expression of such feelings by a “man of splendid imagination like Keats.” There is, however, something quite above vulgarity and lust in these letters. One thing they show is that with Keats love and beauty are closely related. “Why may I not speak of your Beauty,” he wrote, “since without that I could never have loved you?—I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty.” And again, “All my thoughts, my unhappiest days and nights, have, I find, not at all cured me of my love of Beauty, but made it so intense that I am miserable that you are not with me.” At other times Keats writes to Miss Brawne things less loverlike, but full of suggestion as to the kind of man he was:
I was alone for a couple of months while Brown went gadding over the country with his ancient knapsack. Now I like his society as well as any Man’s, yet regretted his return—it broke in upon me like a Thunderbolt. I have got in a dream among my Books—really luxuriating in a solitude and silence you alone should have disturb’d.
Self-revealing passages like this are found throughout the letters. It would be pleasant to quote form them at length, but two or three extracts must suffice. An excellent bit of self-criticism, indicative of the trend of Keats’s creative mind in early 1818, occurs in a newly published letter to Haydon:
In Endymion I think you may have many bits of the deep and sentimental cast—the nature of Hyperion will lead me to treat it in a more naked and grecian Manner—and the march of passion and endeavor will be undeviating—and one great contrast between them will be—that the Hero of the written tale being mortal is led on, like Buonaparte, by circumstances; whereas the Apollo in Hyperion—being a fore-seeing God will shape his actions like one.
Another passage, from a new fragment (there are in this edition 230 letters and parts of letters as against the former total of 217), the inside sheet of a letter to Bailey, now recovered “through help from America” after being lost for over a hundred years, is of particular interest as corroborating other evidence in Keats of anti-aristocratic leanings and intense hatred of injustice. Keats is writing to his friend Bailey in response to news of some wrong at the hands of no less a person than the Bishop of Lincoln. The tone is one of vigorous invective:
It must be shocking to find in a sacred Profession such barefaced oppression and impertinence
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. Operators of both a brewery and a distillery, Rogue’s recent project began with the maturing of their sweetish, highly aromatized Spruce Gin in local pinot noir barrels, itself an unusual endeavor that resulted in Rogue Pink Spruce Gin. Brewer John Maier and distiller John Couchot then got together and filled the pinot and gin saturated wood with Rogue Juniper Pale Ale, thus creating John John Juniper Pale Ale.
The barrel-accented brew is quite different from the original Juniper Pale Ale, with a more profound fruitiness and fragrant spruce perfume on the nose and distinctly gin-esque notes in the body, along with some plummy fruit, a whack of juniper and a muting of the original beer’s fresh hoppiness. Like the Pink Spruce Gin itself, it became a drink more for reflection than refreshment, not necessarily better, but most certainly different.Jeep Wrangler Unlimited was named the worst value overall by Consumer Reports. (Photo: Jeep)
When it comes to overall value, one of America's most iconic vehicles – the very symbol of rugged individualism – should be avoided by any wise car buyer, says Consumer Reports magazine.
It's the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, which Consumer Reports says is the worst car value among any model. It leads a worst-value list that includes a wide range of models by category – from the hapless Fiat 500C among subcompacts to the hulking Mercedes-Benz GL350 BlueTec for luxury large SUVs.
The Jeep, however, is among the nation's most beloved vehicles, especially by its owners. Nevertheless, Consumer Reports calls it "hard-riding, ponderous, uncomfortable, and unreliable." It costs 77 cents a mile to operate, compared with 52 cents for the top-rated Toyota Camry Hybrid.
The value index rates cars based on road tests, predicted reliability and five-year ownership costs.
"The worst values were a mix of underperformers, expensive, unreliable German luxury sedans and big SUVs with voracious fuel appetites," says Mark Rechtin, Consumer Reports' automotive editor in a statement.
The four-door version of the Wrangler wasn't the only Jeep singled out by the magazine. The Jeep Cherokee Latitude also came up with a low score due to its "higher operating cost, poor reliability, unimpressive test score and higher price."
Here are the worst vehicles by category:
•Subcompact: Fiat 500C Pop (MT)
•Compact: Fiat 500L Easy
•Luxury Compact Car: Mercedes-Benz CLA250
•Luxury Midsized/Large Car: Mercedes-Benz S550 (AWD)
•Large Car: Ford Taurus Limited (3.5, V-6)
•Sports Cars/Convertible: Infiniti Q60 convertible
(base)
•Midsized Car: Nissan Altima 3.5 SL (V-6)
•Wagons (AWD): Honda Crosstour EX-L (V-6)
•Small SUV: Jeep Cherokee Latitude (4-cyl.)
•Midsized SUV: Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara
•Large SUVs: GMC Yukon SLT
•Luxury Compact SUV: Cadillac SRX Luxury
•Luxury Midsized/Large SUV: Mercedes-Benz GL350 BlueTec
•Pickup Truck: Toyota Tacoma (V-6)
•Minivan: Chrysler Town & Country Touring L
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/16QfwpYSan Luis, Cuba - One must follow three rules when smoking a fine Cuban cigar, the man with striking blue eyes says at the 170-year-old tobacco farm.
"Never inhale, it makes you sick. Never smoke a cigar on an empty stomach. And last, never ever smash it out - let it die with the dignity it deserves," says Ivan Rodriguez, 42, a tour guide at the Vegas Robaino cigar company's Chuchillas de Barbacoa plantation in western Cuba.
Three generations of the Robaino family have grown tobacco here since 1845.
Cuba's renowned cigar producers are poised to gain greatly after the end of 55 years of discord between Cuba and the United States - and Rodriguez is excited at that prospect.
"It's going to be great for the American people, they know high quality. They'll come here and bring our cigars back home. It's part of our culture - cigars make people friends," he says.
Strong dose of capitalism
It remains unclear how long the barriers between the Cold War rivals that hold back billions of dollars in trade will last, but change now appears inevitable. After December's historic declaration of rapprochement, it was announced embassies could be opening for business as of July 20.
For small and medium-sized Cuban businesses, a strong dose of capitalism shot into the communist economy can't come soon enough.
The owner of Chuchillas de Barbacoa, Hirochi Robaina, pulls no punches when discussing the lackadaisical government handling of his prized tobacco leaves.
It's the end of the growing season and he's upset because enough tobacco for 14 million cigars is drying out in storage and prone to pests while it awaits slothful government buyers to buy it for state-run cigar manufacturers.
"This tobacco is of the highest quality, but now it is declining the longer it sits," says Robaina from a wooden rocking chair as he watches the Cuban baseball championship on an old television set.
RELATED: 'El Bloqueo': 55 years of obstructing the Cuban people
Once trade sanctions are lifted, the US' mammoth cigar appetite - representing 65 percent of the global market - will be hungry for Cuba's best-known product. But Robaina says years of communist control over the industry threatens any boom.
"Our cigar production is in decline, mostly because of neglect and incompetence," he says. "Tobacco is a very important part of the economy. I criticise because these problems need to be solved. I love my country - that's why I point this out."
Learning capitalism
Back in the capital Havana 200km northeast, a husband-and-wife team have jumped all over the relaxation of communist rules that for decades banned entrepreneurial endeavour, after President Raúl Castro's economic reforms were launched in 2008.
Julio Alvarez and his wife, Nidialys Acosta Cabrera, personify the burgeoning capitalist spirit on the Caribbean island of 11.3 million people.
Alvarez is a car mechanic and the couple opened a repair shop in 2012. But after travelling to the US under bilateral initiatives for Cubans to learn how to run a small business - their entrepreneurial spirit took off.
The auto-shop now refurbishes American cars from the 1950s for tours or to rent to the surging number of tourists arriving here. Not only that, the couple organised a cooperative with other classic-car owners to pool their vehicles for the effort. Business is booming, they say.
"Every single year over the past three years we've grown," Alvarez says proudly. "We're very hopeful our success will continue."
'All of this is new'
At the auto-shop, workers pass by to use a nearby lathe from 1949 to hone a car part. Two graphic designers show up with a large banner advertising the company - NostalgiCar - that's set to hang on the concrete wall.
The couple is proud to mention they met Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson while in the US studying American capitalism, and their excitement is palpable when discussing the future.
Previously, Alvarez and Acosta had to rely on their savings to prop up the business, but now Cuban banks are offering lines of credit - something virtually unheard of here.
"All of this is new - loans, tax credits. I saw this in the US and was very impressed. I'm learning to be a proper businessman from all of this experience," Alvarez says.
Small-scale businesses known as trabajadores cuentapropistas have multiplied over the past 20 years with about 435,000 now on the island, up from 138,000 in 1995. About one million people, 20 percent of the workforce, are now considered part of the private sector.
RELATED: Can Cuba's internet come out of the cold?
Yet, challenges remain after five decades of Soviet-style economic planning.
Pedro Vázquez is an architect and urban design consultant who also gives American tourists government-sponsored history lessons on Cuba.
While détente takes hold and economic prosperity presents itself, Vázquez says his greatest concern is that the Cuban people - long accustomed to proletariat relegation - will miss out on new opportunities.
"There's no discipline among the people here," he says. "It's a cultural constraint and it happens in every aspect of life. Cubans are very good at doing nothing."
Not just anybody
As Cuba transforms its centrally planned Soviet-styled economy, many observers are wondering just how far the government will go. Several economists here told Al Jazeera the ideals of the 1950s socialist revolution will hold firm while accommodating the most desirable aspects of capitalism.
From his sunny Havana office, Hugo Pons Duarte, director of Cuba's National Economist and Accountant Association, says the "management model" will have three pillars: state enterprises, cooperatives, and the self-employed.
"The policy is not to open up the country to just anybody who wants to come," says Pons. "The government has a strategy for guiding investment."
Vázquez notes the communist rulers are well aware of the dangers of giving multinational corporations carte blanche. "Money is power and the government has a very narrow path for business," he says.MEXICO CITY — Mayor Bill de Blasio may not think the Nets are working out in Brooklyn, but NBA commissioner Adam Silver begs to differ.
When The Post asked Silver, on hand Thursday night for the first of the Nets’ two games at Arena Ciudad de Mexico, about the shade being thrown at the team by the New York City mayor, he defended both the impact they have had on the area around Barclays Center and the direction they are headed in climbing out of their recent malaise.
“I believe the Brooklyn Nets have exceeded all expectations in terms of the move from Secaucus to Brooklyn,” Silver said. “The development surrounding the area around the Barclays Center in Brooklyn is fantastic in terms of restaurants and commercial business and the residential (development).”
Granted, the Nets are just 10-14 after Thursday’s 100-95 win over the Thunder and they were a combined 41-123 over the prior two seasons. But Silver, while acknowledging Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov’s overzealous gaffes and former general manager Billy King’s ill-fated deal with Boston for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, sounded bullish on the franchise’s future.
see also Nets call out 'Brooklynite' de Blasio for unnecessary diss Looks like Hizzoner can add another New York City sports...
“In terms of the team, they’re on their way,” Silver said. “The current owners will be the first to admit they made some rookie mistakes in their early days of owning the team. They in essence went for it, trying to take a short cut in terms of trying to build a championship team. It didn’t work out.
“But I have enormous confidence in Sean Marks as general manager, coach Kenny Atkinson. I think the fans here will see a young, hungry team that is well-coached and wants to achieve. As a New Yorker and as the commissioner of the NBA, I couldn’t be happier with what’s happening with the Nets.”
Atkinson, asked about de Blasio’s comments, didn’t dare wade into those waters.
“I definitely want to stay away from that one,” Atkinson said. “I have no comment. I just don’t want to comment.”Early this morning, Fan Expo Canada banned Honey Badger Brigade (HBB) from the Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo (CalEx). Security staff approached the HBB booth, ordered us to leave, and refused to state the reason why unless Alison Tieman agreed to speak to them away from the other members of the group, without recording. They informed Alison that they had received complaints on social media, including 25 allegations of harassment. No evidence was presented, no request was made for information from HBB, and no specific incident was cited until further questions were asked of security.
Upon further questioning, security mentioned the Women in Comics panel discussion from the previous day, where Alison was given permission to speak. Alison spoke briefly in relation to a topic brought up by the panelists. Accusers, however, claimed that Alison derailed the conversation. Alison and myself were in attendance, and you can listen to Alison’s statement in the panel here on YouTube. You can hear Alison, myself and indeed the entire panel in the full discussion record.
As you will hear, there was no harrassment. Expo staff and mob rule, in their crusade for ending harassment against women, harassed the Honey Badgers despite having no evidence of any policy violation.
The SJWs came for the Honey Badger Brigade yesterday:This is what we are up against. This is why I will never back down, why I will never ever apologize for thinking, speaking, and writing freely. This is why I am the Leader of #GamerGate and why you should be too.The real crime of the Honey Badger Brigade, for which they were successfully attacked, was not "reportedly disrupting panels", but rather "associating with GamerGate".Think about it. A group of women were just harassed and driven out of a convention for being guilty by association. And the SJWs claim that we are the intolerant ones, we are the uncivil ones, we are the ones harassing women, we are the ones trying to drive others from the public discourse. Meanwhile, the moderates claim that the problem is our tone, that we're simply not being nice enough, that if only we didn't express our "problematic" views but kept them quietly to ourselves, everything would be all right.Horseshit. Absolute and unadulteratedNotice that they wanted to isolate Alison, and speak to her away from the others and without recording. Sound familiar? Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that I am an arrogant, cruel, and ruthless badthinker who eminently deserves every "shitbag" "asshat" "jackass" "dipshit" insult and every denigrating and disqualifying "mentally unbalanced" "racist" "misogynist" "sexist" "anti-Semitic" "homophobic" "Nazi" "white supremacist" description that has been hurled my way by SJWs from New York City to New Zealand for the last 10 years. Even if all of those accusations were perfectly true, how would that explain the coordinated assault on the Honey Badger Brigade?Did that take place in response to me? If I was just a little nicer, if my rhetoric dripped with pure honey rather than pure contempt, if I lovingly laved Teresa Nielsen-Hayden's warty folds with my tongue and dutifully nominated John Scalzi and Charles Stross and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden for awards so those three giants of modern science fiction could add to their collective total of 39 Hugo nominations (only 8 more than Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke combined), would that have somehow prevented the Honey Badgers from being attacked by SJWs and expelled from Calgary Expo?This is a cultural war, everyone. And if you're not fighting it, you're losing it. The reason the SJWs went after the Honey Badger Brigade instead of #GamerGate is the same reason they went after Sad Puppies instead of Rabid Puppies. The more publicly acceptable the face of their opposition, the more they are determined to silence and separate it from their most implacable opponents.It didn't work with Larry and Brad. It won't work with the Honey Badgers either. #GamerGate will not abandon them. What do you say, Rabid Puppies? What do you say, Dread Ilk?Support the Honey Badgers and join the #GamerGate email campaign against the sponsors of Calgary Expo. Send one email, just one polite little email, to start. I have. That's all it takes... because we are legion.
Labels: #GamerGate, SJWThe baby daddy drama continues for Jenelle Evans! After the Teen Mom 2 star’s boyfriend David Eason was sentenced to 60 days in prison for violating a domestic violence protective order, RadarOnline.com can exclusively reveal the family’s legal troubles are far from over!
Court papers obtained from the New Hanover County Clerk of Court reveal Eason’s sister, Jessica Lenn Miller, was arrested for attempted larceny on August 29th, 2016.
READ THE COURT DOCUMENTS!
Miller, who was not booked by police and instead was issued a citation, stole from a Belk department store.
“[Miller] did take a pair of woman’s shoes, grey and black in color, with a retail value of $50.00,” the citation read.
David’s sister is due in court on Thursday, October 27. If she misses her court hearing, a warrant will be issued for her arrest.
PHOTOS: Jenelle’s Revenge! Her Ex Nathan Splits With Girlfriend Jessica Henry
Eason was in court himself on September 13th to be sentenced for violating a domestic violence protective order filed against him by an ex-girlfriend.
Evans’ soon-to-be baby daddy hugged his son, who is also protected by the order, after running into him at a grocery store.
Although Eason pled not guilty to the crime, a judge found him guilty and sentenced him to six months in prison.
PHOTOS: Jenelle Evans Shows Off Baby Bump In First Public Outing Since Pregnancy Bombshell
Eason is currently appealing the verdict to the Superior Court. A court date has not been set yet.
The protective order was granted when Eason became violent with his baby mama on April 19, 2014.
“The Defendant did assault [redacted], a female person, by grabbing the victim around the throat and saying to the victim, ‘I will kill you b****,‘” documents obtained from the New Hanover Clerk of Court’s Office read.
PHOTOS: Tears & Tantrums! 9 Shocking Moments From Jenelle’s Jury Trial
He was arrested in May 2014 and was found not guilty.
We pay for juicy info! Do you have a story for RadarOnline.com? Email us at [email protected], or call us at (866) ON-RADAR (667-2327) any time, day or night.Share:
Feminism: A global advocacy of social and political equality for all human beings regardless of their gender, age, religion, race and nationality.
By now, we’ve all heard of the name ‘Bahar Mustafa’ – the “Diversity Officer” of a British university who infamously banned white people and men from attending a so-called “anti-racism” event. Mustafa defended her racist and sexist attitude by claiming she can be neither racist nor sexist because of her “ethnic minority” status.
To be clear, Mustafa used Feminism as a front to push her racist and sexist bile and later justified her abuse by erroneously defining racism and sexism to suit her convenience. For those post-modern Western feminists who have a hard time deciphering what “Racism” actually is – it’s not defined by personal financial, social and political authority – Racism is solely measured by contemptuous attitudes toward the skin colour and geography of persons and is perpetuated through racial hostility from the poorest to the wealthiest of citizens from across the globe.
When Mustafa’s belligerence was met with the backlash it very well deserved – she garnered support from other pseudo feminists who defended her blatant racism and sexism by regurgitating not only her “as an ethnic minority….” nonsense, but also cited “free speech”. Apparently, she’s a knight in shining armour who merely tried to create a “safe space” for blacks and ethnic minorities by using the hashtag “#KillAllWhiteMen” and racist slurs like “white trash”. This new breed of unicorns are flaunting their new-age racism and sexism as Feminism and feeding the anti-feminist and misogynistic trolls that fuel the invalidation of authentic Feminism.
Those who proudly support Mustafa reek with narcissism just like their dear leader – the stench of their abuse has proceeded across oceans and infected the eagerly awaiting unicorns hungry for the opportunism necessary to utilize their phantom victimhood to justify their own racist/sexist behaviours. Bahar Mustafa is an illustration of what fanning the flames of racism/sexism looks like – her attitude is not one which Feminism endorses – she is, however, a representation of opportunism – and I’m an ethnic minority woman, so you can’t hold it against me for being critical of her!
I don't “#supportbaharmustafa” because as an ethnic minority who survived genocide – I find her racism and sexism immeasurably nauseating. To associate my identity as an ethnic minority to justify the very societal abuse [which she promotes against whites/men] that rained bombs and bullets over my people will never be forgiven. Being an ethnic minority does not magically blockade the contempt that influences racism and sexism in people – we people of colour are not immune from attitudes resonating from cultural, religious and racial bigotry just because some white people happen to be racists in the West – to even entertain such logic is obtuse. In fact – people of colour in the East are profoundly more abusive against racial minorities than the Western world.
Opportunism arrives in many forms when selfish people feel like crying over their irrational hurt feelings – kind of like the outrage over the Game of Thrones episode. Western feminists rallied in honour of Sansa Stark unlike any victim of real life sexual violence! I was rather amused by the weeping and wailing and the oaths of never tuning into the show ever again – because while pseudo feminism outraged over a fictional character’s trauma, real-life women and girls were being raped in Nigeria by Boko Haram for many months now, and by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, among other real life events of gender-based violence like the shooting of Mutlu Kaya. And yet, not a single word of outrage trended for these victims. The freedom of expression is being systematically denied to women and girls worldwide but Western [pseudo] feminists couldn’t for one moment get a sense of priority and use their “free speech” to address these daily abuses.
Women like Malina Suliman from Afghanistan literally risk their lives to express their right to free speech and equality under the tyrannical rule of the religious extremists, the Taliban. Afghanistan is a place where women and girls are sentenced to jail or murdered for “moral crimes” such as refusing the hijab/burqa or being assertive with their fundamental human rights by rejecting obedience to their husband or relatives.
Can you fathom the 21st century, where freedom of expression is yet to be secured for females anywhere on earth? A woman/girl cannot express her real-life distress and abuse without being accused of “talking too much” or “dishonouring the family” or “being a bitch”. A girl cannot even attend school to express her intelligence because that too “offends” the mainstream Patriarchy that continues to dehumanize them. When the Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai who advocated for universal education for all children, including girls – not only was she accused of being a Zionist agent and American spy, among other delusional accusations – I had witnessed many Western feminists join the shaming by calling her “white washed” and “Islamophobic”.
Many of the domestic violence cases where men batter their girlfriend, wife or daughters, are rooted in the misogyny that denies Free Speech for females as well. If women/girls object or address their opinions in matters – suddenly Patriarchy gets spasms of triggers that outrage its ego and so the hand is raised to turn its victim black and blue. Mutlu Kaya was allegedly shot by none other than her own [ex] boyfriend because Kaya pursued singing against his wishes, as a contestant in a Turkish television show known as Sesi Cok Guzel. Entertainment is a forbidden industry, especially for women/girls as it is culturally and religiously frowned upon in the Muslim and a great majority of the Eastern world – a sentiment that is closely echoed by many male intimate partners. And for those thinking how this could be an isolated incident – there are plenty of women and girls who were murdered by an intimate partner and men who just couldn’t tolerate female independence. I had previously detailed my points on violence against women and girls.
The censorship of Free Speech for women and girls goes hand in hand with misogyny and sexism. One of the well noted and earliest examples from history that persecuted women for their freedom of expression is Hypatia, a well famed name in mathematics and astronomy. Alas, a woman who is evident of intellectual complexity was a threat to the patriarchal society and so she paid the ultimate price for expressing herself – her life. There are many theories regarding her murder – some say she was stoned to death, others say she endured enormous torture like mutilation and being flayed alive – but we’ll never know the absolute truth except that Hypatia was silenced for merely applying Free Speech to her daily life.
A woman in the Muslim world must fear even a visit to her own relatives’ house without the permission of her husband, like Shabana Bibi, who was murdered by her husband for precisely that reason. Imagine living a life where you cannot express that that life is your own…? Such scale of gender-apartheid denies fundamental human rights for all women/girls at one point or another.
Even in crisis, women/girls can’t express their right to life – like the case of the Rohingya. While both men and women are fleeing on boats, the men rape the women/girls who are also fleeing the same genocide. How does one process such horror without erupting in rage? People want justice for the Rohingya which is long overdue but who will give justice for the Rohingya women/girls raped by their own brethren…?
Women/girls are told they can only express their identity through the approval of Patriarchy. While genuine feminists vocally express the gender-based issues plaguing the world – anti-feminists threaten their lives and even promote violence to silence them. There is very little difference between the Islamists like the Kouachi brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo and the men who batter their wives/girlfriends/daughters – as both groups of men assault people who practice their right to Free Speech.
So between Bahar Mustafa and team-Sansa Stark vs. the multiple examples of real life issues that women and girls require emancipation from – I give my support to the latter cause. As for those in solidarity to people like Mustafa and fictional characters – you have your right to express yourselves – I will fight to secure you that right. And if your expressions are ostentatious and vile – I will practice my right to Free Speech and call you out on your bulls**t because I have my priorities straight; Humanism will always trump tribalism.
One day, maybe centuries after I am long dead and turned to dust, women and girls will wear a hijab because it represents something other than the fetishization of female modesty and we'll have the right to free speech and expression without facing consequences from the glares of Patriarchy – maybe one day, religion will actually mean peace and will not endorse anti-LGBTQ sentiments, racism, sexism, violence and misogyny. But until that day – as a woman, as a daughter – as a human being – I have a fundamental duty to lambast Patriarchy – and those who adopt its values to enforce their own bigotry.Kratom is one of my favorite plants and poisons. It ranks right up there with scopolamine and the Solanaceae plants it comes from. I talk about kratom in nearly every death investigation or drug talk I give – about two a year. But unlike scopolamine, it’s not the evilness of kratom that is alluring to me, rather I am drawn to it from the toxicology side of things. The history and pharmacology interests me, but the detection of it excites me. It keeps me on my toes, gives me something unusual to work on in the lab, and presents its own unique challenges. If you’ve heard of kratom before, it’s probably been framed around the words “herbal” or “natural.” If you’re a regular reader, you know that I do postmortem forensic toxicology – read: dead people. So if I’ve worked on it, it’s a pretty safe bet that it’s lethal. Sorry for the spoiler folks, I just wanted to throw that out there in the first paragraph. So if you stop reading now, and all you take away from this is “natural or legal or herbal ≠ safe,” then I’ve done my job for today. But do stick around and read the rest, it’s fun... and no more spoilers.
Kratom, Mitragyna speciosa, is an evergreen tree that grows in the tropical regions of southeast Asia, namely Thailand and Malaysia. In Thailand the tree is known as kratom, and in Malaysia is known as biak-biak (1). I’ll refer to it simply as kratom; it’s not nearly as fun to say as biak-biak, but it’s easier for me to type. Kratom belongs to the Rubiaceae family, a huge family of plants with over 13,000 species. Notable genera include Coffea and Cinchona, which gives us the drugs caffeine and quinine, so you know the Mitragyna genus holds something special, too.
Malaysians were first observed to use kratom as early as 1836, though they undoubtedly used it long, long before then. The locals were observed making it into a tea or by simply chewing on the leaves, delivering an opium-like effect (2). It wasn’t until 1921, however, that Ellen Field, from the Department of Medical Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), isolated the principle alkaloid, and named it mitragynine (3).
Early 1929 reports from the Government Laboratory of Siam (Thailand) state (4):
“According to the reports of the officials of the Revenue Department the chewing of kratom leaves is habit-forming. Addicts appear to be able to endure great fatigue and exposure to heat. The habit has not a bad reputation, like opium smoking, nor does there seem to be any progressive change in the condition of the addict or in his character. On the other hand, educated people avoid the habit.”
Endure fatigue and exposure to heat? Sign me up! I find it humorous – why I don’t know – that even in 1929 it was reported as relatively harmless, but that educated people avoided it. This is in stark contrast to cocaine, in which at first only the wealthy partook in the vice, but when the “lower” classes joined in, that’s when the prohibition started. But I digress.
Like most natural products, kratom contains many, many different chemicals – natural chemicals, there I go again. The two principle alkaloids are mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, which make up approximately 66% and 2% of kratom’s alkaloid content, respectively (5). These two alkaloids have been shown to work by way of the opioid receptors, much akin to morphine and oxycodone. It is most likely that, like morphine, they work specifically through the mu- and delta- opioid receptors. As such, they have sedating effects, as well as tolerance, addiction, opioid induced constipation, and respiratory depression. Pharmacologically, mitragynine is 4-times less potent than morphine, whereas 7-hydroxymitragynine is 10-times more potent than morphine (1). So while only making up a small percentage of kratom’s alkaloid content, 7-hydroxymitragynine packs a punch.
It is also worth mentioning that kratom appears to have stimulant properties in low doses, and was originally said to be cocaine-like (2). This reminds me of people in the Andes chewing on coca leaves to extract out cocaine, or people from Yemen or Somalia chewing on khat. In the talks I give I mention that taken like this – chewing on leaves – kratom is relatively safe, and less harmful than popping the Oxycontin prescribed by your doctor. But when “Westernized” – my catch-phrase for wretched excess – and concentrated and not taken as intended, it can lead to trouble. Fatal trouble.
An increasingly common “cocktail” made by youths in Thailand is dubbed the “4 x 100”, and sadly it’s not the track & field relay. This cocktail is made by boiling kratom leaves with Coca-Cola, cough syrup, and codeine – and sometimes other additives like alprazolam (Xanax) or anti-depressants – then served over ice in a highball glass (6). The results are often fatal as a toxicologist would suspect, as you are mixing several central nervous system depressants of unknown doses.
Here in the US, the “4 x 100” may not be popular, but kratom extracts are, in which the kratom leaves are ground, boiled, then evaporated, leaving behind the alkaloids that can than be made into a powder or dissolved further. The extracts are then sold as some factor of “X” – 8X or 20X – 8 or 20 times the alkaloid concentration of the same weight of kratom leaves. Definitely not what Nature intended. They are sold in “headshops” or online, and are legal in most states. I even have a large online distributor operating just down the highway – right next to a large Army base, imagine that – that sells kratom as “herbal blends” and “herbal remedies.” And like most of the so-called “legal highs,” kratom is not immune to catchy names.
Is kratom all bad, though? Well, if chewed like a Thai local, maybe not – though I certainly don’t recommend it. But there is also a growing number of people that believe kratom can help them deal with their opiate addiction (7). As an opiate itself, kratom is essentially acting as a “replacement therapy”, and you are just trading one opiate addiction, mitragynine, for another, usually heroin or oxycodone. This is how methadone treatment works, or buprenorphine. Does it work? It seems to for some, but again, I wouldn’t recommend it – but that’s just me.
Strangely enough, in Thailand and Malaysia, where kratom use is traditional, it has been illegal since 1943 and 1952. In the US though, where kratom is not traditional, and mostly sold as more dangerous concentrated extracts, it is completely legal. Neither kratom, nor its alkaloids are DEA controlled substances, and of this writing no state has banned kratom directly. Some states have tried to ban “synthetic drugs”, but since kratom and mitragynine are natural, these laws do not cover them. Kratom is on the DEA “watchlist,” so who knows what the future holds for it.
Despite the legality though, kratom can be lethal. So be careful, and remember, natural does not equal safe.
** UPDATE **
*** Featured image of Mitragyna speciosa by Ahmad Fuad Morad (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) ***
References:
1. Adkins, Jessica E., Edward W. Boyer, and Christopher R. Mccurdy. “Mitragyna Speciosa, A Psychoactive Tree from Southeast Asia with Opioid Activity.” Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry 11.9 (2011): 1165-175.
2. Jansen, Karl L.r., and Colin J. Prast. “Psychoactive Properties of Mitragynine (Kratom).” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 20.4 (1988): 455-57.
3. Field, Ellen. “XCVIII. Mitragynine and Mitraversine, Two New Alkaloids from Species of Mitragyne.” Journal of the Chemical Society, Transactions119 (1921): 887-91.
4. “Siam. Report of the Government Laboratory.” The Analyst 54.641 (1929): 475-76.
5. Takayama, Hiromitsu. “Chemistry and Pharmacology of Analgesic Indole Alkaloids from the Rubiaceous Plant, Mitragyna Speciosa.” Chemical & Pharmaceutical Bulletin 52.8 (2004): 916-28.
6. Chittrakarn, Somsmorn, Pimpimol Penjamras, and Niwat Keawpradub. “Quantitative Analysis of Mitragynine, Codeine, Caffeine, Chlorpheniramine and Phenylephrine in a Kratom (Mitragyna Speciosa Korth.) Cocktail Using High-performance Liquid Chromatography.” Forensic Science International 217.1-3 (2012): 81-86.
7. Boyer, Edward W., Kavita M. Babu, Grace E. Macalino, and Wilson Compton. “Self-Treatment of Opioid Withdrawal with a Dietary Supplement, Kratom.”American Journal on Addictions 16.5 (2007): 352-56.Posted 28 May 2015 - 12:48 AM
Highlights:
- Two maps will be played, one in NA and one in EU.
- Maps as it stands right now are koth_ramjam NA (UGC) and cp_glassworks EU (ETF2L)
- Highlander
- teams have been pre-picked, and will be announced shortly
- match will be streamed on eXtv with a pro caster and a special guest
- time is 20:00 CEST, 2pm EST, 11am PST Sunday 5/31
- if you are on the EU match and you are NA, or vice versa, deal with it. Mods will end up playing
one match where they are high ping.
some rules:
- You are not allowed to spam binds during the game, wear your name that you signed up for.
- No team tags pls.
- A mod will check that every player is on the right class before game starts.
- Be nice in-game and on mumble. Remember all of the mods are watching u.
- Pregame is fun place remember that if you spam memes before game starts be nice.
- Team leader can ask for a pause ingame- (5 sek rule before pause.)
- If a player is afk, crashes or rgq during game its up to team leaders to pause and a sub will be brought in. If said player leaves mumble as well.You've really shaped up as a Keyblade Wielder, haven't you.
Uh-huh, you're looking really fine, too!
I think it's time to tell you, then.
Before my master, He who created me, disappeared,
He bestowed His six followers with new names, and gave five of them
|
, biological and radiological (CBR) weapons," the department announced today.
“The NYPD works for the best but plans for the worst when it comes to potentially catastrophic attacks such as ones employing radiological contaminants or weaponized anthrax,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement. The airflow tests will be performed in partnership with the energy department's Brookhaven National Laboratory using perfluorocarbon tracer gases (PFTs), which, though alarmingly named, are apparently benign. (Wikipedia tells us the gases are regularly used to map oil reserves and, awesomely, to track ransom money following kidnappings.)
The $3.4 million study, called the Subway-Surface Air Flow Exchange, will be the largest of its kind. The exact dates of the test, to be held over the course of three non-consecutive days in July, will be determined by weather conditions and announced to the public one day in advance. Research will be conducted during the daytime in parts of all five boroughs, but is not expected to hamper operations.
“The NYPD, in partnership with the MTA, is responsible for keeping more than 5 million daily subway customers safe and secure, Acting Chairman Fernando Ferrer said in a statement. "This study will bolster the NYPD's understanding of contaminant dispersion within the subway system as well as between the subway system and the street, thereby improving its ability to better protect both our customers and the city population at large."
Sounds good, Ferrer. Now when will someone look into the MTA's little electric eel problem?By By R. C. Camphausen Sep 9, 2010 in Crime Interesting information emerges from Germany, where the pastor Dr. Terry Jones was previously fired from a church he led in Cologne. He also was fined for pretending to be an academic. Soon however, one calamity followed another. First, in 2002, he was fined $3,800 by a Cologne court, writes the A few years later, by the end of 2007, the members of the church had enough of Jones' dictatorial regime, his fundamentalist views and his increasing personal war against Islam. Asked to change his manners and stance, he refused, and soon he and his wife and some fellow preachers were expelled from the church, He then moved back to the US where he had started the tiny church that has now become big news sometime in the 1990s. Andrew Schäfer, a Protestant Church official responsible for monitoring sects in and around Cologne, confirmed the accounts members of the German church had given about the now disgraced pastor. "Terry Jones is a fundamentalist," he told In the same article, it says: A "climate of fear and control" had previously prevailed in the congregation, says one former member of the church who does not want to be named. Instead of free expression, "blind obedience" was demanded, he says. Various witnesses gave SPIEGEL ONLINE consistent accounts of the Jones' behavior. The pastor and his wife apparently regarded themselves as having been appointed by God, meaning opposition was a crime against the Lord. Terry and Sylvia Jones allegedly used these methods to ask for money in an increasingly insistent manner, as well as making members of the congregation carry out work. The Local adds this in an article published yesterday: "We want to distance ourselves fully from this plan and from Jones," said Stephan Baar from the 'Christian Community of Cologne' in the western German city. "We are as shocked as the rest of the world," Baar added in an interview with news agency AFP. "This has nothing to do with us and nothing to do with our beliefs," he said. Related articles on DJ and elsewhere: Lynn Hermann, Andrew Moran, myself, Think Progress, The Last Crusade Before pastor Terry Jones took over the tiny church known as Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, he ran a somewhat larger one in Cologne, Germany. Jones had founded the 'Christian Community of Cologne' in the 1980s, and was rather successful during the first few years -- his church grow to about 800 to 1,000 members.Soon however, one calamity followed another. First, in 2002, he was fined $3,800 by a Cologne court, writes the Seattle Times, apparently basing their report on The Local, a website in English with German news.A few years later, by the end of 2007, the members of the church had enough of Jones' dictatorial regime, his fundamentalist views and his increasing personal war against Islam. Asked to change his manners and stance, he refused, and soon he and his wife and some fellow preachers were expelled from the church, He then moved back to the US where he had started the tiny church that has now become big news sometime in the 1990s.Andrew Schäfer, a Protestant Church official responsible for monitoring sects in and around Cologne, confirmed the accounts members of the German church had given about the now disgraced pastor. "Terry Jones is a fundamentalist," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE, and "Terry Jones appears to have a delusional personality."In the same article, it says:The Local adds this in an article published yesterday: More about Terry Jones, Dove outreach, Koran, Book burning, Gainesville More news from terry jones dove outreach koran book burning gainesville floridaThis secret syntax is known as the ornate double-bladed sword, and is typically denoted as:
<<m=~m>> Comments here m ;
It is a hack for multi-line comments, making use of the heredoc syntax and match operator ( =~ ) with > as delimiter.
Note, as slashes, /, aren't being used as the delimiter for matching, the'm' operator is required. For example $my_var =~ /test/ is equivalent to $my_var =~ m>test>, whereas $my_var =~ >test> would be invalid.
Pay attention to the fact that the first m character in your snippet is enclosed by single quotes, meaning the $a and $b variables won't be interpolated. Had these quotes been omitted (as per my provided code example) perl would automatically add double quotes to the end marker and any subsequent variables would be interpolated. This would cause problems if $a and $b are no longer defined and you're using use warnings;.
To make the ornate double-blade example above easier to understand (but still not recommended), we could write:
<<"END" =~ // Comments here END ;
Note that the =~ // is redundant, so this is equivalent to:
<<"END"; Comments here END
Which is just standard heredoc syntax in void context.
I would not recommend using this in production code as having a string in void context can cause problems. Plus this code is a head scratcher for even the most experienced perl programmers and is pointlessly difficult to read and maintain! If you want to create proper multi-line comments then I would suggest sticking to pod as explained here How do I enter a multi-line comment in Perl?
Hope this clears it up.Johann Reuchlin ( German: [ˈjoːhan ˈʀɔʏ̯çlin]; sometimes called Johannes; 29 January 1455 – 30 June 1522) was a German-born Catholic humanist and a scholar of Greek and Hebrew, whose work also took him to modern-day Austria, Switzerland, and Italy and France. Most of Reuchlin's career centered on advancing German knowledge of Greek and Hebrew.
Early life [ edit ]
Johann Reuchlin was born at Pforzheim in the Black Forest in 1455, where his father was an official of the Dominican monastery.[2] According to the fashion of the time, his name was graecized by his Italian friends into Capnion (Καπνίον), a nickname which Reuchlin used as a sort of transparent mask when he introduced himself as an interlocutor in the De Verbo Mirifico. He remained fond of his home town; he constantly calls himself Phorcensis, and in the De Verbo he ascribes to Pforzheim his inclination towards literature.[2]
Here he began his Latin studies in the monastery school, and, though in 1470 he was for a short time at Freiburg, that university seems to have taught him little.[2] Reuchlin's career as a scholar appears to have turned almost on an accident; his fine voice gained him a place in the household of Charles I, Margrave of Baden, and soon, having some reputation as a Latinist, he was chosen to accompany Frederick, the third son of the prince, to the University of Paris.[citation needed] Frederick was some years his junior, and was destined for an ecclesiastical career. This new connection did not last long, but it determined the course of Reuchlin's life. He now began to learn Greek, which had been taught in the French capital since 1470, and he also attached himself to the leader of the Paris realists, Jean à Lapide (d. 1496), a worthy and learned man, whom he followed to the vigorous young University of Basel in 1474.[2]
Teaching and writing career [ edit ]
At Basel Reuchlin took his master's degree (1477), and began to lecture with success, teaching a more classical Latin than was then common in German schools, and explaining Aristotle in Greek.[2] His studies in this language had been continued at Basel under Andronicus Contoblacas, and here he formed the acquaintance of the bookseller, Johann Amerbach, for whom he prepared a Latin lexicon (Vocabularius Breviloquus, 1st ed, 1475–76), which ran through many editions. This first publication, and Reuchlin's account of his teaching at Basel in a letter to Cardinal Adrian (Adriano Castellesi) in February 1518, show that he had already found his life's work. He was a born teacher, and this work was not to be done mainly from the professor's chair.
Reuchlin soon left Basel to seek further Greek training with George Hermonymus at Paris, and to learn to write a fair Greek hand that he might support himself by copying manuscripts. And now he felt that he must choose a profession. His choice fell on law, and he was thus led to the great school of Orléans (1478), and finally to Poitiers, where he became licentiate in July 1481. From Poitiers Reuchlin went in December 1481 to Tübingen with the intention of becoming a teacher in the local university, but his friends recommended him to Count Eberhard of Württemberg, who was about to journey to Italy and required an interpreter. Reuchlin was selected for this post, and in February 1482 left Stuttgart for Florence and Rome. The journey lasted but a few months, but it brought the German scholar into contact with several learned Italians, especially at the Medicean Academy in Florence; his connection with the count became permanent, and after his return to Stuttgart he received important posts at Eberhard's court.[2]
About this time he appears to have married, but little is known of his married life. He left no children; but in later years his sister's grandson Philipp Melanchthon was like a son to him till the Reformation estranged them. In 1490 he was again in Italy. Here he saw Pico della Mirandola, to whose Kabbalistic doctrines he afterwards became heir, and made a friend of the pope's secretary, Jakob Questenberg, which was of service to him in his later troubles. Again in 1492 he was employed on an embassy to the emperor Frederick at Linz, and here he began to read Hebrew with the emperor's Jewish physician Jakob ben Jehiel Loans. Loans's instruction laid the basis of that thorough knowledge which Reuchlin afterwards improved on his third visit to Rome in 1498 by the instruction of Obadja Sforno of Cesena. In 1494 his rising reputation had been greatly enhanced by the publication of De Verbo Mirifico.[2]
In 1496 Duke Eberhard I of Württemberg died, and enemies of Reuchlin had the ear of his successor, Duke Heinrich of Württemberg (formerly Heinrich Count of Württemberg-Mömpelgard). He was glad, therefore, hastily to follow the invitation of Johann von Dalberg (1445–1503), the scholarly bishop of Worms, and flee to Heidelberg, which was then the seat of the Rhenish Society In this court of letters Reuchlin's appointed function was to make translations from the Greek authors, in which his reading was already extremely wide. Though Reuchlin had no public office as teacher, he was for much of his life the real centre of all Greek and Hebrew teaching in Germany. To carry out this work he provided a series of aids for beginners and others. He never published a Greek grammar, but he had one in manuscript for use with his pupils, and also published several little elementary Greek books. Reuchlin, it may be noted, pronounced Greek as his native teachers had taught him to do, i.e., in the modern Greek fashion. This pronunciation, which he defends in De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (1528), came to be known, in contrast to that used by Desiderius Erasmus, as the Reuchlinian.[2]
At Heidelberg Reuchlin had many private pupils, among whom Franz von Sickingen is the best known name. With the monks he had never been liked; at Stuttgart also his great enemy was the Augustinian Conrad Holzinger. On this man he took a scholar's revenge in his first Latin comedy Sergius, a satire on worthless monks and false relics. Through Dalberg, Reuchlin came into contact with Philip, Count Palatine of the Rhine, who employed him to direct the studies of his sons, and in 1498 gave him the mission to Rome which has been already noticed as fruitful for Reuchlin's progress in Hebrew. He came back laden with Hebrew books, and found when he reached Heidelberg that a change of government had opened the way for his return to Stuttgart, where his wife had remained all along. His friends had now again the upper hand, and knew Reuchlin's value. In 1500, or perhaps in 1502, he was given a very high judicial office in the Swabian League, which he held till 1512, when he retired to a small estate near Stuttgart.
Hebrew studies and advocacy [ edit ]
For many years Reuchlin had been increasingly absorbed in Hebrew studies, which had for him more than a mere philological interest. He was interested in the reform of preaching as shown in his De Arte Predicandi (1503)—a book which became a sort of preacher's manual; but above all as a scholar he was eager that the Bible should be better known, and could not tie himself to the authority of the Vulgate.[2]
The key to the Hebraea veritas was the grammatical and exegetical tradition of the medieval rabbis, especially of David Kimhi, and when he had mastered this himself he was resolved to open it to others. In 1506 appeared his epoch-making De Rudimentis Hebraicis—grammar and lexicon—mainly after Kimhi, yet not a mere copy of one man's teaching. The edition was costly and sold slowly. One great difficulty was that the wars of Maximilian I in Italy prevented Hebrew Bibles coming into Germany. But for this also Reuchlin found help by printing the Penitential Psalms with grammatical explanations (1512), and other helps followed from time to time. But his Greek studies had interested him in those fantastical and mystical systems of later times with which the Kabbala has no small affinity. Following Pico, he seemed to find in the Kabbala a profound theosophy which might be of the greatest service for the defence of Christianity and the reconciliation of science with the mysteries of faith, a common notion at that time. Reuchlin's mystico-cabbalistic ideas and objects were expounded in the De Verbo Mirifico, and finally in the De Arte Cabbalistica (1517).[2]
Many of his contemporaries thought that the first step to the conversion of the Jews was to take away their books.[2] This view was advocated by Johannes Pfefferkorn, a German Catholic theologian.[3][4] Pfefferkorn, himself a converted from Judaism, actively preached against the Jews and attempted to destroy copies of the Talmud, and engaged in what became a long running pamphleteering battle with Reuchlin. He wrote that "The causes which hinder the Jews from becoming Christians are three: first, usury; second, because they are not compelled to attend Christian churches to hear the sermons; and third, because they honor the Talmud.".[5] Pfefferkorn's plans were backed by the Dominicans of Cologne; and in 1509 he obtained the emperor's authority to confiscate all Jewish books directed against the Christian faith. Armed with this mandate, he visited Stuttgart and asked Reuchlin's help as a jurist and expert in putting it into execution. Reuchlin evaded the demand, mainly because the mandate lacked certain formalities, but he could no long remain neutral. The execution of Pfefferkorn's schemes led to difficulties and to a new appeal to Maximilian.
In 1510 Reuchlin was appointed by Emperor Maximilian to a commission which was convened to review the matter. His answer is dated from Stuttgart, 6 October 1510; in it he divides the books into six classes — apart from the Bible which no one proposed to destroy — and, going through each class, he shows that the books openly insulting to Christianity are very few and viewed as worthless by most Jews themselves, while the others are either works necessary to the Jewish worship, which was licensed by papal as well as imperial law, or contain matter of value and scholarly interest which ought not to be sacrificed because they are connected with another faith than that of the Christians. He proposed that the emperor should decree that for ten years there should be two Hebrew chairs at every German university, for which the Jews should furnish books.
Maximilian's other experts proposed that all books should be taken from the Jews; and, as the emperor still hesitated, his opponents threw on Reuchlin the whole blame of their ill success. Pfefferkorn circulated at the Frankfurt Fair of 1511 a gross libel (Handspiegel wider und gegen die Juden) declaring that Reuchlin had been bribed. Reuchlin defended himself in a pamphlet titled Augenspiegel (1511), which the theologians at the University of Cologne attempted to suppress. On 7 October 1512 they, along with the inquisitor Jacob van Hoogstraaten, obtained an imperial order confiscating the Augenspiegel.
In 1513 Reuchlin was summoned before a court of the inquisition. He was willing to receive corrections in theology, which was not his subject, but he could not unsay what he had said; and as his enemies tried to press him into a corner he met them with open defiance in a Defensio contra Calumniatores (1513). The universities were now appealed to for opinions, and were all against Reuchlin. Even Paris (August 1514) condemned the Augenspiegel, and called on Reuchlin to recant. Meantime a formal process had begun at Mainz before the grand inquisitor. But Reuchlin managed to have the jurisdiction changed to the episcopal court of Speyer. The Reuchlin affair caused a wide rift in the church and eventually the case came before the papal court in Rome. Judgment was not finally given till July 1516; and then, though the decision was really for Reuchlin, the trial was simply quashed. The result had cost Reuchlin years of trouble and no small part of his modest fortune, but it was worth the sacrifice. For far above the direct importance of the issue was the great stirring of public opinion which had gone forward.
And while the obscurantists escaped easily at Rome, with only a half condemnation, they received a crushing blow in Germany. In Reuchlin's defense, Virorum Epistolæ Clarorum ad Reuchlinum Phorcensem (Letters of famous men to Reuchlin of Pforzheim),[6] had been published. It was closely followed by Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum (Letters of obscure men), a satirical collection purporting to defend his accusers, but actually directed against them. No party could survive the ridicule that was poured on Reuchlin's opponents by this document.
Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen did all they could to force Reuchlin's enemies to a restitution of his material damages; they even threatened a feud against the Dominicans of Cologne and Spires. In 1520, a commission met in Frankfurt to investigate the case. It condemned Hoogstraaten. But the final decision of Rome did not indemnify Reuchlin. The contest ended, however; public interest had grown cold, absorbed entirely by the Lutheran question, and Reuchlin had no reason to fear new attacks. When, in 1517, he received the theses propounded by Luther, he exclaimed, “Thanks be to God, at last they have found a man who will give them so much to do that they will be compelled to let my old age end in peace.”[7]
Heinrich Graetz and Francis Yates contended[8] that this affair helped spark the Protestant Reformation.[9] Although suspected of a leaning toward Protestantism, Reuchlin never left the Catholic Church. In 1518 he was appointed professor of Hebrew and Greek at Wittenberg, but instead sent his nephew Melanchthon.[7]
Influence on Luther [ edit ]
Luther's comment that justification by faith was the "true Cabala" in his Commentary on Galatians[10] has been explained as relating to Reuchlin's influence.[11] While Luther had consulted Reuchlin as a Hebrew expert and used De arte Cabalistica as support for an argument, Luther took objection to Reuchlin's comment in De rudimentis hebraicis that the Hebrew letters for Jesus name meant "the hidden God," which Luther found contrary to Matthew, Chapter 1:21, which describes the meaning as being about "he would save His people from their sins."[12]
End of life [ edit ]
Reuchlin did not long enjoy his victory over his accusers in peace. In 1519, Stuttgart was visited by famine, civil war and pestilence. From November of this year to the spring of 1521, the veteran statesman sought refuge in the University of Ingolstadt where he received an appointment as professor from William of Bavaria.[7] He taught Greek and Hebrew there for a year. It was 41 years since at Poitiers he had last spoken from a public chair; but at 65 he retained his gift of teaching, and hundreds of scholars crowded round him. This gleam of autumn sunshine was again broken by the plague; but now he was called to Tübingen and again spent the winter of 1521–22 teaching in his own systematic way. But in the spring he found it necessary to visit the baths of Liebenzell, and there contracted jaundice, of which he died, leaving in the history of the new learning a name only second to that of his younger contemporary Erasmus.
Reuchlin died in Stuttgart, and is buried at St. Leonhard church.[13]
Publications [ edit ]
De Verbo Mirifico ( The Wonder-Working Word, 1494)
(, 1494) De Arte Cabbalistica (On the Art of Kabbalah, 1517)
Notes [ edit ]Apple keeps springing surprises on us, some very pleasant, some a little harder to swallow.
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There was the surprise of Apple not attending Macworld this year, although when you looked at the history it was clear Apple had been successively pulling out of major Mac-related events.
Really, us Apple watchers should not have been surprised, but hey, Macworld was the ultimate Mac conference and it still came as a blow.
It was a surprise that the iPod touch had improved sales figures over the December period right up to Christmas Day. App Store sales have indicated a big spike in downloads from the touch model, despite it being a premiere model of iPod.
Some pundits were predicting, somewhat gleefully, Apple's decline - but here it was still selling premium priced products at a healthy rate.
Apple's latest earnings figures will probably surprise as well - the last three months have not been good for most computer and consumer electronics companies. With the exception of IBM, most stocks went down, but Apple has fared OK; in fact, it has continued to grow, reporting nine per cent unit growth over the year-ago quarter for Macs, three per cent unit growth in iPod sales and 88 per cent unit growth for the iPhone.
It was a bit of a surprise that the new guitar and piano lessons feature of GarageBand '09 only works on Intel Macs, but once again, maybe we shouldn't have been surprised. Apple deleted the G-series of PowerPC processors in Macs years ago already and is in the latter stages of its full transition to Intel. Who knows if Snow Leopard will support the G4-G5 CPU family at all? It may be time to upgrade your hardware.
The future could hold any number of surprises. Intel has made quad-core chips and even dropped prices significantly, lately - these could end up in new iMacs or even Mac Pros, with octa-core towers a possibility. Snow Leopard's ‘Grand Central' is designed to help developers better exploit multithreading in these multi-core CPUs.
Other developments could include developments from touch-screen patents filed last year, not to mention LCD screen technology developed by Apple that allows monitors to capture images.
But I like today's surprise a lot. When Apple released new MacBooks - the aluminium so-called unibodies, slimmer, with better graphics chips that could at last handle modern games - Apple left one model of the older Polycarbonate MacBook in the line-up.
This meant you could still get a white entry level MacBook, but hey, it had that limiting Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100.
Well, that changed today. Apple sneaked in a proper NVIDIA GeForce video card, which means even the cheapest MacBook can now drive a bigger screen (although not the 30-incher; external resolution is limited to 1920x1200) and will run ‘proper' games (maybe even Call of Duty 4, for example).
Apple also bumped installed RAM from one to two GB. The frontside bus has been accelerated to 1066MHz. While the processor did get slowed down a little, from a 2.1GHz to a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, and it still only uses 667MHz DDR2 RAM instead of the faster DDR3 RAM of its aluminum brethren, Bluetooth has also been improved, going from v2 to v2.1 + EDR.
Not bad for a machine that retails for the same price, even if it is made from that glossy white and not-quite-so-green Polycarbonate stuff.
Otherwise the Poly MacBook is exactly the same - it has the 13.3-inch glossy 1280x800 pixel LCD, 802.11n Airport Extreme, a 120GB 5400RPM hard drive and the 8x SuperDrive optical drive.
Notably, the Poly MacBook retains the FireWire 400 port, so if you need FireWire 400 support in a little MacBook, it's a more attractive option now with its better video and a faster architecture. And please note that Apple has often created a ‘best of brand' model shortly before final deletion.
This also means Apple could get the NVIDIA card into the mini, so that might be the next little ‘surprise'.
This article originally appeared in the New Zealand Herald - http://blogs.nzherald.co.nz/The Syrian army has captured a key southern town from rebel forces after weeks of fierce fighting, state media and activists say.
The fall of Sheikh Maskin on Monday means that government forces will strengthen their hold on Deraa province, while cutting off rebel factions from key supply lines.
Deraa, the scene of the earliest protests against the Syrian government in 2011, contains routes crucial to both the Syrian army and rebel fighters.
"The town is very important for both sides. They have both fought fiercely. Now, by taking it, the regime has cut off the rebels links between eastern and western Deraa," said Rami Abdulrahman, head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks violence in the country through a wide network of local sources.
"The destruction in the town is huge."
READ MORE: Syria talks to seek ceasefire, exclude al-Nusra and ISIL
The Observatory said fighting involved government troops backed by fighters from the Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah, as well as air support from Russian fighter jets.
Rebel groups involved in the battle include al-Nusra Front and some aligned with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.
The Syrian state news agency, SANA, said the army had taken full control of the town and dismantled explosive devices planted by the rebels.
Rami Khouri, from the American University of Beirut, told Al Jazeera that military help from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah over the past year had turned the tide for government forces.
"Without these three support groups, the Syrian government would probably have vanished because they were really in bad shape about a year ago," said Khouri.
"There's a shifting pattern of control on the ground and it's important because when the [peace] talks go ahead in Geneva, and if they achieve ceasefires, who controls more land will gain more political, economic, and humanitarian power."
Juan Cole, a Middle East analyst at the University of Michigan, told Al Jazeera that recent gains by government forces in Syria's south were significant, considering rebels once controlled about 70 percent of Deraa province.
Cole also underscored Russia's role in the advance.
"Largely because of Russian air intervention, the rebels are being scattered. Things have just turned around 180 degrees for the regime since the Russians came in … Now there is a significant reversal that will affect the rebels' logistics," said Cole.
Before Sheikh Maskin, the army, backed by Russian strikes, recaptured another key rebel base - the town of Rabia in the northern province of Latakia. It was the last rebel-held town in the province and provided an important supply route to Turkey.
Peace talks
A Syrian government advance on Deraa began late in December and Sheikh Maskin's fall comes amid international efforts to bring opposing factions to the negotiating table.
On Monday, Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, said that peace talks originally scheduled to start on Monday would be pushed back to Friday.
The proposed Geneva 2 peace effort has been blighted by disagreements over which rebel groups should be allowed to attend.
The talks will also exclude al-Nusra Front, which is al-Qaeda's affiliate in the country, as well as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, which controls most of Syria's eastern half.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday argued strongly against Turkey's demand to keep a leading Kurdish group out of Syria's peace talks, and said he expected the UN envoy to resist "blackmail" by Turkey and others, reflecting the sharp differences that remain.Any new devices released with Windows 10 on board will need to have a display at least eight inches in size to gain access to the desktop and desktop applications, Joe Belfiore confirmed through Twitter.
Even with Windows 10 unifying the experience across phones, tablets, laptops and desktops, there still has to be a cut-off point for desktop access. It makes no sense to have access to the desktop on a phone, for example, where the display is far too small for it to be usable. Now that the cut-off has been defined, it appears 7-inch tablets have also been deemed too small.
In some cases even eight inch displays are too small to properly use desktop apps, as we've noted previously in our reviews of 8-inch Windows 8 tablets. However, with Windows 10 you'll still be able to purchase devices of this size and run desktop Office, Photoshop and even AutoCAD if you really want to.
It should be noted that the desktop will only be unavailable on devices smaller than eight inches that come with Windows 10 pre-loaded. Existing seven inch tablets with the full, desktop Windows 8.1 experience - such as the $99 HP Stream 7 - will be upgraded to the full, desktop-capable version of Windows 10.
Folks asking about updating 7" *existing* devices to Win10 -- you keep your desktop, you get continuum. Go try it yourself now! :) — joebelfiore (@joebelfiore) January 27, 2015
Windows 10 will be officially released later this year, though if you're curious, you can already check out some of its features through the Windows 10 Preview program.Mallory Ortberg. Sam Breach
Mallory Ortberg, aka Dear Prudence, is online weekly to chat live with readers. An edited transcript of the chat is below. (Sign up below to get Dear Prudence delivered to your inbox each week. Read Prudie’s Slate columns here. Send questions to Prudence at [email protected].)
Q. Boyfriend on display: I have been dating a terrific guy, “Jason,” for about five months now (we’re both dudes, if it matters). He’s everything I’ve been looking for but there’s a problem: He has an Xtube page up. I introduced him to my friend “Bob,” who is an avid watcher of online porn. Bob later told me about the page and sent me the link to it. (I made Bob promise not to tell anyone; he’s a great friend and I’m not worried about him spreading the word.) Basically it’s nine videos of Jason masturbating with his face showing in a few of them. I was mortified seeing the videos and cried privately. I don’t know what to do. This is the best relationship I’ve been in in years. Jason is attentive and caring and is interested in taking our union further, but I don’t know if I can ever trust him. I’m not interested in having a boyfriend whose naughty bits are on display for the whole world to see! If it matters he apparently hasn’t logged on or uploaded any new videos to his porn page in over a year. What should I do?
A: I’m not sure why you feel like you can’t trust him. What about his having masturbated in front of a camera a few years ago has rendered him untrustworthy? I can understand feeling uncomfortable, certainly, and wondering whether you two are compatible in terms of how you view privacy, but trustworthiness doesn’t seem to be an issue here. There’s nothing untrustworthy about jerking off for an audience. If you think you can have a conversation with Jason about this (without accusing him of hiding something from you or of being an untrustworthy person), then tell him what you found, ask him if he’d be comfortable removing the videos, and have a serious conversation about what you both think about privacy. On the other hand, if you honestly don’t believe you can date someone who has ever had an Xtube page, no matter what the circumstances, then do Jason a favor and end your relationship before it gets serious.
Q. New wife: My parents, who had been married 31 years, divorced last September. The decision to officially divorce was made roughly a year ago, by my mother, who was the one who left. My father has moved on. While I may think it’s far too soon, I know he’s an adult. He moved in with his now wife and three kids the same month the divorce was final and just recently married her. They have been married roughly a month and already she’s being named as a beneficiary for his IRA account (I know because I work at the firm that holds his account), and I’ve been removed. Not only that—he told me that he is redoing his will but assures me I will not be cut out. I’m hurt and confused. How do I even broach this without looking like the child wanting their share of the pie, when really I just don’t want her taking advantage of my father?
A: I don’t know that you can. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that he would want his wife and (presumably minor) stepchildren to be the new beneficiaries of his IRA and that he would want to update his will to reflect his new family. You don’t say anything that suggests your father’s new wife is pressuring him to go into debt to keep her in jewels or minks or hydroelectric dams—being named in your husband’s will is hardly “taking advantage.” This issue is not financial but emotional. I feel for you; it must be strange and disconcerting to see your father remarry and acquire stepchildren so quickly after his marriage to your mother ends, but he is not being taken advantage of here. You’re simply sad.
Q. Bumble trouble: I recently was swiping on a dating app called Bumble. I came across a friend’s fiancé’s profile on the dating app. He posted several recent photos and a short profile description. Do I tell the friend about this? I like her a lot, but am not especially close with her. I see her once or twice a month. I could disclose it to a mutual friend who is closer to her, but I don’t want to spread gossip. They’re getting married this summer.
A: I’m not against telling in cases like this, but if you’re not especially close with your friend, and you don’t want to involve a third party, consider keeping it to yourself. There are the usual caveats (maybe they’re in an open relationship, there’s no smoking gun, maybe he really is the one guy in the world who’s ‘just looking for friends,’ etc.); besides, if it was this easy for you to find him, my guess is he won’t be able to keep it a secret for long, if it is one.
Q. Baby brain: My friend had trouble conceiving several years ago but after some difficulties conceived twins using IVF. I was a devoted friend throughout her complicated pregnancy and after the babies arrived. Eventually I returned
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no clock in the room. I didn’t know how much to tell or what to leave out.
Pacing, they told me at graduate school, is one of the beginning writers’ biggest challenges, because a beginning writer wants to tell all the wrong things, or everything.
A nurse told us at the hospital in Covington, Louisiana, where I’d been committed during a Christmas vacation at my in-laws’, that we were there because we did not believe in Jesus, a conviction that he had extrapolated from one young woman’s confession of unbelief during group therapy.
At the same hospital, another nurse told me that I ought not to be upset at my roommate, who was pilfering things such as my shoes, and my favorite tweed coat, because she might not know what she was doing, or that what she was doing was wrong. One morning, I woke up and discovered that she had taken my pillow during the night.
In October 2013 I was told that I did faint on a plane and went in and out of consciousness for four hours, that I may have had a seizure, that I did not have a seizure, that there was nothing to be done. I was told to go home and return to the emergency room if I fainted again, which I did not. I was given a neurotransmitter test and told to mail it in, which I ultimately did not do, in part because of the remarkable number of misspellings and grammatical errors in the instructions, and in part because Dr. M told me that such things were hogwash. I was told that I had lost twenty pounds in two weeks, but that the only physical problem with me was peripheral neuropathy, or a numbness and prickling in my hands and feet, which was determined in October to be the result of a vitamin B6 toxicity, a determination to be rejected later. I was told that my first novel was “still under consideration” at every house it had been sent to, which meant essentially nothing. In October I began to fracture, but I did not recognize it as fracturing, and I was told so many things that month, but I was not told that I was losing my mind again.
*
A side effect of my condition is a lack of interest in food or forgetting to eat it, leading to weight loss. In late November I was fitting into XS tops and size zero dresses again. I surprised myself by the swiftness of it. This is what diet pill advertisements mean when they exhort that the pounds will just melt away. For me, another day was another pound lost.
When I did look in the mirror, a practice that I generally avoided — the neurological disruption that creates a disconnect between emotional recognition and faces extends to my own as well — my body had changed dramatically. During one bathroom visit I lifted my bra, which had become baggy and sad. Bones. Someday: ash. I ordered a new bra, which was black and edged in peach lace.
It arrived. I slipped it on. It was, somehow, ridiculous in its sexiness. The cups barely covered. The straps were designed to look like a harness. It was me, but it also wasn’t me. I took a self-portrait with my 1970s Polaroid camera. The resulting picture, in which I am doing my best to make a charming, alluring face, I gave to Chris.
Somatic details figure heavily in these recollections: what I wore, what I looked like. I told myself, through mirrors and dressing-up and Polaroids and weighing myself, You have a body. The body is alive.
But the more that I tried to remind myself of the various ways in which I did, in fact, seem to have a body that was moving, with a heart that pumped blood, the more agitated I became. Being dead butted up against the so-called evidence of being alive, and so I grew to avoid that evidence because proof was not a comfort; instead, it pointed to my insanity.
Why do any of these things? Why did I behave in the manner of someone who was alive, when I believed, to differing levels of absolutism, that I was dead? The notion of Perdition never left me when I was suffering from Cotard’s delusion, but the degree to which I despaired about it did. Most of the time, I was able to stuff down the despair enough such that I continued to — pointlessly, in my mind — brush my teeth, sometimes wash my hair in the sink, and report my symptoms to the phantom who claimed to be my doctor.
Suicide was not on my mind, though it had been before during my depressions. Perhaps if I’d considered suicide as an option, I wouldn’t have continued to do what I saw as meaningless tasks, and tried to kill myself instead. But as a dead woman, my condition meant that a successful suicide would simply doom me to the same thing, or to a deeper, unfathomably worse circle of Hell.
Instead of killing myself, I watched the Adam Sandler film “Funny People.” I was unaware of the fact that singer-songwriter James Taylor has a cameo in Funny People. When he came onscreen, I thought, without self-consciousness: “Oh, God. I can’t believe that James Taylor is still alive, and I’m dead.”
*
November 24th.
Like a child asking for a bedtime story, I crawled into bed with Chris at six in the morning. I said, “Tell me about what is real.”
I asked him about everything. I asked him to tell me who I am, what I like, where I am from, what I do. I asked him about my parents. I asked him if they are real, even though I don’t see them. I asked him about the President, and about the Vice President. He told me about our house. He told me about our neighborhood and the city in which we live. He explained where the furniture is from. That I picked all of it myself. He told me about the farm table in the dining room.
I listened as he employed logic to tell me that I am alive.
“When people die,” he said, “they are buried, and then you don’t see them again. That’s what happened to Grandpa this year. I don’t see him anymore, but I see you.”
None of this solved the problem, but it did help. It was as comforting as a bedtime story would be. I thanked him. He went back to sleep, and I went back to my studio.
*
According to myth, Demeter calls forth Persephone from the Land of the Dead once a year. I imagine myself as that pale daughter, who, in my imagination, has become so accustomed to being among the dead that she doesn’t comprehend her transition into the living. For me, the Cotard’s delusion lifted without fanfare. There was no moment when I looked around myself and realized that I’d be resurrected, no shock of joy for having emerged from Perdition. I had become sick with other, more definably physical, ailments. I was undergoing neurological exams and MRIs and CT scans for cancer, and I was afraid, but I was conscious enough to know that there is no hope of even death in Perdition; only more of the same awful suffering. It stands apart from loss, injury, or perhaps even grief, all of which are terrible, and yet are still beautiful to the dead woman, who sees them as remarkably human, and alive.
*
Photographs courtesy of the author, who was happy to be asked, having “once had a piece about mental health diagnoses run with a really awful stock photo of a Young Pretty White Girl Looking Vaguely Glum.”
$ Donation Amount: Updating Amount... Like this article? Tip The Toast! Select Payment Method PayPal Loading... Personal Info First Name * Last Name Email Address * Donation Total: $1.00(CNN) Less than three days after his former player was shot to death, New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton publicly blasted gun laws in Louisiana and the United States.
"I hate guns," he told USA Today in a phone interview. "I find myself leaning to the right on some issues. But on this issue, I can't wrap my brain around it."
Payton, who helped lead the state's beloved Saints to their first Super Bowl in 2010, knows that his comments may make him unpopular in Louisiana.
His response?
"So be it."
"I've heard people argue that everybody needs a gun," he said. "That's madness. I know there are many kids who grow up in a" hunting environment. I get that. But there are places, like England, where even the cops don't have guns."
Smith, 34, was shot in a traffic altercation late Saturday evening in New Orleans' Lower Garden District. He died at the scene.
Cardell Hayes has been charged with second-degree murder in connection with Smith's killing.
Police say after an accident, Smith and Hayes "exchanged words" before Hayes shot the former Saints defensive end.
However Hayes' attorney says that he was not the aggressor in the conflict.
Hayes called 911 before the shooting, secured a witness who was leaving the scene, and remained at the scene after the shooting until authorities arrived, attorney John Fuller said.
"Tell me if that's the behavior that's consistent with someone who's an animal out here looking for blood," he said. "His actions are totally consistent with someone that is complying with a police investigation."
Will Smith became one of these red dots on Saturday. @SI_DougFarrar with some perspective: https://t.co/EgmwKvWaya pic.twitter.com/Gqa8zWl5Lk — Rachel Nichols (@Rachel__Nichols) April 11, 2016
He won a national championship while at Ohio State and was on the Saints' only Super Bowl-winning team. He led the team in sacks during the regular season that year.
His wife, Racquel, was shot in the leg and is expected to survive. The pair had three children: William, Lisa Mya and Wynter Chase.THERE'S one way to stop the haters.
media_camera "A knife has never touched this body"... Teenager Courtney Stodden, who married 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchinson in June, wants to prove she's all natural. Picture: Dr Drew's Lifechangers
Ever since she rose to prominence by marrying 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison, Courtney Stodden has had to fend off speculation that her rather striking looks have been surgically enhanced.
Courtney Stodden banned from Facebook for being sexually inappropriate
Pictures: Courtney Stodden
In a new effort to put the rumours to rest and to promote a career on TV, 17-year-old Courtney appears in Dr Drew's new show Lifechangers for a special ultrasound.
Pictures: Celebrity Plastic Surgery
media_camera Shock at wedding... Actor Doug Hutchinson, then 50, married then 16-year-old Courtney Stodden in June.
"I've had nothing. A knife has never touched this body," Courtney tells Dr Drew Pinsky and plastic surgeon Dr John Diaz in a clip from the show, which airs in the US on Monday.
"Let's do a full exam so we can lay this to rest,' Dr Drew tells the audience, as Courtney, wearing a hospital gown, is placed under a large blue sheet, with her towering black high heels dangling over the chair.
"If she's had plastic surgery, we're going to find out today," proclaims Dr Diaz.
An assistant then prepares her for the special ultrasound, while viewers will have to wait until Monday's program for the results.
Courtney wears her usual full make-up in the appearance with her 51-year-old actor husband.
She tells Dr Drew that people have wrongly claimed she has had work done to her "breasts of course and a lot of work on my face. Botox, nose job, cheek implants, chin implants."
Another clip from the show, features Dr Diaz asking Courtney to smile in an effort to examine her face for any tell tale signs of cosmetic enhancement.
'What I'm looking for is any unnatural contours,' Dr Diaz explains
In an interview with E!Online earlier this year, Doug Hutchinson said: "A lot of the critics are saying that Courtney is a fake. That's she's a Barbie doll, fake boobs, fake lips, fake nose, fake hair - but God was her only plastic surgeon."
Courtney added: "I was born this way out of the womb. Like, hello world!"
Stodden and Hutchinson met with MTV producers last week to discuss a reality TV show.
Originally published as Courtney's body examinedby
So I climb the mountains in snow, the ice is hurling on the wind, forming from the breath on my beard, and in the balsam fir like diamonds and pearls. And in the genius of the sun in the west after a day full of cloud, all the world is in rapture. Do I care about the madmen below in the cities? Not at all. Here we find habitat for creatures other than men, and that’s a delight. The coyote tracks are in their places. In the frozen marshes of the cols especially, but also at the peaks they have been wandering and I wish I’d heard them sing. There is no future for mankind without these others.
I am lost for a few hours in the cold and the ice in the Catskills. That’s good enough. Feet are fleet, arms are ready. I’ve brought no food except chocolate, which is gone. Water is gone, so I eat the snow. It is a sweet light luscious water on the tongue when it melts. The sun is falling, blanketing the earth with a sense of doom and purpose and glory. There will be a night hike out.
I’m looking for the canister placed on the peak by the Catskill 3500 Club, whose membership I’m trying to attain. It’s a ridiculous membership of course. “We all want to be part of the cult,” says a hiker on my way up. He’s with two others, a male and a female. I’ve been hiking in the mountains for the past week and have seen no one, talked to no one, have been very alone, and have been glorying in this idea of the Catskills where few people want to climb the peaks.
These aren’t even mountains. The Catskills are an eroded plateau. I read in a history of the region that if not for the softening effect of the last glaciation, the Wisconsin of 11,000 years ago, the Catskills would have worn away much as the canyonlands of the West did, becoming sharp and precipitous.
And thereby the Catskills, as in the canyonlands, would have degenerated into a tourist draw. So thanks, big thanks, you glaciers – you killed off tourism ten millennia ago. Instead, what has been given us? Mere habitat for the wild things, and watersheds weeping for joy from the melt of the snow. It’s a place without any of the marketeers’ required qualities. No high peaks, epic vistas, big slopes. In the Catskills, one finds in the woods the small, the secret things, the tracks of the Other.
I find his sign more common in the Catskills than, say, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In the Whites there are a lot of trails and roads and huts and maps and ideas for how great these places are, and there are the investors and second-home owners and ski-enthusiasts and high-peak maniacs, and there are towns with restaurants and bars and there are big views from the peaks, and Backpacker and Outside Magazine assure us these are the peaks to climb – and my ecologist friends say you will be climbing in a dead place. Ice and rock. What lives here but a little man with his viewshed from the mountaintop?
So I am confined to the pitiful broken plateau of the Catskills where no one wants to go. One day I got lost, I said to hell with the map and the compass. I came upon a forest of the ancient sweet-smelling balsam fir high on a mountaintop. The world was rimed in frost, silver and gold. Everything was still, the coyotes didn’t sing. Then boiling up from the valley there was a squall of snow, and the eye of the sun was swallowed in tumult. I lay in the snow, rolled in it, buried my face, I heard the wash of the wind in the fir, and I was wet with sweat, and delight, and desire, and all that mattered was in the forest when the snow and wind shot through it.A crowd of more than 200 people of many faiths listens prior to walking through Philadelphia's gun damaged Germantown neighborhood.
Participants of many faiths pick up shirts of the Memorial to the Lost in preparation for carrying them in the walk on Good Friday, March 25 in Philadelphia organized by Heeding God’s Call to End Gun Violence.
Movita Johnson-Harrell, who lost her son and nephew to gun murder, speaks during the Good Friday Memorial to the Lost walk in Philadelphia, sponsored by Heeding God's Call to End Gun Violence, an ecumenical faith-group which includes United Methodists. Photo by the Rev. Linda Noonan.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
The National Rifle Association has that as its slogan and taken literally, it is true. But according to statistics from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, every day in America, 297 people are shot — 89 die and 55 of those were suicides.
“Whether it happens in the towns of northeastern Nigeria, a suburb in the United States, the streets of Australia, or an office in France, gun violence has become an all-too-often frightening phenomenon,” states a revised resolution going to the 2016 United Methodist General Conference.
“Our Call to End Gun Violence” cites Micah’s “prophetic dream” of turning weapons into plows. (Micah 4:1-4)
“We need the reality of Micah’s vision more than ever,” states the proposal coming from the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, the denomination’s social action agency.
United Methodist pastors the Revs. Lydia Munoz and James McIntire lead the assembled in songs of grief for the lost, faith in God and inspiration. Photo by the Rev. Linda Noonan
Heeding God’s Call to End Gun Violence
On this past Good Friday, March 25, grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters carried T-shirts bearing the names of their loved ones who were killed by guns in the past year. The 1.5 mile walk sponsored by Heeding God’s Call to End Gun Violence took marchers to three places where someone was killed with a handgun.
Those three places of violence became three stations of the cross.
“Gun violence takes away young lives before they had a chance to know who they really were and the good they could offer the community,” said the Rev. Bob Coombe, pastor of First United Methodist Church, Germantown, Pennsylvania, where the Good Friday walk began.
“Gun violence takes the life of the one who was shot and the one who did the shooting. One of the three stops was at an alley where a mother spoke of the loss and grief she still feels from her son’s death by a gunshot.”
Heeding God’s Call to End Gun Violence is a faith-based movement. United Methodists have been involved since its beginning in 2009 with protests against Colosimo’s Gun Center, a notorious gun seller who had been selling firearms to straw purchasers, people paid to buy handguns by people who cannot legally purchase the guns themselves.
The Revs. David Tatgenhorst and James McIntire, United Methodist pastors, were among 10 religious leaders arrested for trespassing and disorderly conduct when they blocked the entrance to Colosimo’s in 2009. Both pastors are still involved in the movement that was born in Philadelphia during that fight.
“For at least eight years we have also participated in a Good Friday vigil in which we remember the crucifixion of Jesus and also 300-plus people killed in handgun violence each year in our region,” Tatgenhorst said. “I have been so moved by this witness as we call out the names of people who have been killed by handguns, holding up a cross or a T-shirt with their name printed on it. I have cried with mothers of young people who have been killed; mothers and fathers brave enough to speak up about their pain. Having experienced in a small way that Good Friday pain makes the resurrection joy of Easter Sunday all the more poignant and powerful.”
McIntire is convinced the gun violence prevention movement is making a difference.
“United Methodists who consider themselves followers of Jesus — which, I pray, means all of us — really have no other option but to work to reduce and end gun violence if they are being faithful to the Jesus message,” McIntire said. “Methodism has always been on the leading edge of justice issues and this issue should be no different. We must be out front making positive change happen.”
No ban on guns
The proposed resolution does not call for a ban on guns. Instead, it lists several suggestions for preventing gun violence including asking United Methodists who own guns as hunters or collectors to safely and securely store their guns and teach the importance of gun safety.
The Desert Southwest Conference has a gun violence task force.
Billie K. Fidlin, director of outreach for the conference, said Bishop Robert Hoshibata issued a call for all churches in the conference to participate in the gun violence study from the United Methodist Board of Church and Society. Findlin said more than half of the churches have already participated.
“This study was a good first step in opening honest dialogue between people on both sides of this issue — those who own guns, and those who don't — except we all learned that the issues travel far deeper than ownership,” she said.
The task force offers education, trainings and a speaker’s bureau. Upcoming programs will look at how churches can offer education about buying and using gun-locks, as well as facilitate gun turn-in events in conjunction with law enforcement agencies.
“The mission of the task force ‘is to promote dialogue, information and education about gun violence among the people of God.’ The team will also watch legislation, again emphasizing that we take no stand on whether someone should own a weapon or not.
“The concern is safety for all of God's people, so that we may live out the Great Commission,” Fidlin said.
Background checks
The Rev. Ann Thomas, pastor of Journey United Methodist Church in Las Vegas, held a forum to discuss a proposed gun background check initiative in Nevada on March 14. She teamed with Nevadans for Background Checks. The initiative would extend firearm background checks to private party sales and some transfers.
“There’s so much emotion around guns and gun violence,” Thomas told the Las Vegas Review-Journal before the event. “I have no interest in taking peoples’ legitimate, legal guns away. I’m hoping to have a civil conversation.”
The Rev. Lydia Muñoz, an elder in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, was a worship leader for the 2016 Good Friday walk.
“I would encourage other United Methodist churches to not only find community faith based groups like Heeding God's Call to be involved with but to make their church buildings, their spaces and their resources available so that the community can organize around issues like these and others.
“We need to become community resource centers, helping the community organize, become educated, and to heal and reconcile. If not then we are only a Sunday morning gathering space with no real relevance. The world doesn't need another one of those organizations.”
The 2016 United Methodist General Conference will vote on the resolution during the May 10-20 gathering in Portland, Oregon. General Conference is the only entity that decides church law.
Gilbert is a multimedia news reporter for United Methodist News Service. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected] summer: as part of our summer series on Postmodernism, Dezeen invited architect and former FAT director Charles Holland to look at some of the movement's most iconic projects that didn't stand the test of time.
Postmodernism began with an act of demolition. In 1972, the Pruitt-Igoe housing blocks in St Louis, Missouri were demolished following years of problems and neglect. Architecture critic Charles Jencks hailed this event as the death of Modernism and the birth of Postmodernism, an architectural style that would embrace popular taste and historic symbolism.
Since then, Postmodernism itself has grown old and if anything even more unpopular. It has suffered more than its fair share of lost or demolished buildings. But these losses are often more to do with the cycles of fashion than any innate deficiencies in the fabric of the buildings themselves.
Postmodernism is still at the bottom of the architectural depreciation curve, despite recent attempts at revivification. As a style that hit its peak in the 1980s, many of its landmarks were commercial and somewhat disposable building types including office blocks, shops and hotels.
What follows is a tribute to some of Postmodernism's more important lost icons, the buildings that future generations will come to mourn even if we don't quite realise it yet. Their demolition is all the more acute for the combination of monumentality and lightness of the buildings themselves and the way that they combined an interest in architectural history with popular taste.
There are 11 entries because Postmodernism is not meant to be compositionally tidy – or symmetrical. And there should always be room for loose ends...
1. Strada Novissima, Venice Biennale, 1980
Let's start with Postmodernism's cultural high-water mark, the moment at which its disparate strands coalesced into a definitive architectural movement.
In 1980, Paolo Portoghesi, the director of the First International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, invited a number of architects to contribute to the Strada Novissima, an installation within the Venice Arsenale. This took the form of a "street" made up of individually designed facades by, amongst others, Hans Hollein, Michael Graves, Venturi Scott Brown and Robert Stern.
The roll call also included some more unlikely names including Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas. Gehry's contribution was actually one of the best – a bare stud wall with the timbers arranged to focus on one of the Arsenale's windows. His installation was barely there, an almost spectral presence that articulated a sense of fragility entirely appropriate to its site and an architectural movement obsessed with ephemeral signifiers
The whole exhibition was dismantled, but despite its temporary nature it was one of the most significant achievements of Postmodernism.
2. Clifton Nurseries, London, Terry Farrell and Partners, 1980 – 1988
The first of two buildings in this list designed by Sir Terry Farrell, although the only one to have an intentionally short lifespan. Clifton Nurseries was a temporary flower shop in London's Covent Garden.
In a moment of admirable chutzpah, Farrell placed it directly on axis with Inigo Jones' St Paul's. Not only that, but the new building's facade directly echoed the temple front of Jones' church, albeit sliced down the middle so that only half of its implied width was inhabited. Behind this billboard front lurked a mono-pitch structure covered by a high-tech tensile roof. A mix of solid and void Doric columns supported the portico with an Art Deco-style rising sun fenestration pattern.
The Covent Garden building was the second that Farrell designed for Clifton Nurseries. The first, an equally delightful but less obviously historicist structure with a wave-form roof (and, it has to be admitted, a broken pediment) experimented with polycarbonate and gasket construction, a particularly fruitful and now largely forgotten marriage of high-tech and historical strains of Postmodernism.
3. TV AM, London. Terry Farrell and Partners, 1983 – 2011
An out-and-out classic and a tragic loss for London, Farrell's Camden Town TV studio was probably the most 1980s building ever designed. It provided a home for the shoulder pads and big hair of breakfast television and epitomised the emergence of loft conversions, canal-side regeneration and what Charles Jencks dubbed "wharfism".
Farrell turned a bunch of warehouses on the Grand Union Canal into a pop masterpiece. The street entrance featured giant 3D super-graphic letters and a keystone motif made from neon-coloured metal tubes. The interior was a blocky, neo-Egyptian landscape of pastel-coloured ziggurats and fake palm trees.
But the pièce de résistance were the giant eggcups that adorned the sawtooth roof profile (main image). Not only were these an amusing reference to the role of eggs in classical decoration – egg and dart motifs – and, of course, to breakfast, but legend has it that they were glued into place by members of the Farrell team after the contractors refused to counter such silliness.
The building suffered a number of indignities including the filling in of the giant letters and a monochrome paint job before being irrevocably buried under characterless cladding. Amazingly, at the last count the eggcups are all still standing.
4. Kensington Homebase, Ian Pollard/Flaxyard, 1988 – 2014
A recent loss and a controversial one. Ian Pollard's west London Homebase store was, depending on your point of view, a heartfelt homage to James Stirling's Staatsgalerie or a cynical and shameless rip off of the great man's work. As Stirling himself was an arch-pilferer, Pollard's creation could be seen as an entirely appropriate tribute.
Once again the building recycled some already third-hand Egyptian references in the form of hieroglyphics, deities depicted holding power tools and columns lifted straight from Karnak. It also featured one of the most Postmodern of all Postmodern "jokes" in the form of a draughtsman's section line painted on the facade where the material shifted from stone to render. Chuck in some of "Big Jim's" trademark green-framed windows and the fact that the whole edifice was in the name of cheap home makeovers and it was enough to give the entire architecture profession the heebie-jeebies.
Pollard himself was a very curious character, a hippy developer and professional eccentric who subsequently retired to become a naked gardener. Perhaps this was atonement for dressing up buildings in fake glitz for all those years.
5. Best Superstores, SITE, 1970-84 –?
During the 1970s, the US-based Best superstore chain was an unlikely patron of art and architecture. They commissioned a number of contemporary architects to design their big-box retail outlets, including Robert Stern, Venturi Scott Brown and Stanley Tigerman. By far their most impressive and consistent relationship though was with James Wines' groundbreaking SITE practice. Wines was a sculptor not an architect and he brought a rigorous conceptual clarity to the process of designing buildings.
The series of stores SITE designed were audacious and witty. Each one was based on a single concept executed with complete conviction. There was the deconstructed Inside Outside facade, the Forest Facade which appeared as a ruin out of which trees were growing and the crumbling brick wall of the Indeterminate Facade.
Wines' genius – and the reason that Best liked him so much – was that he accepted the logic of the dumb retail box and used it much like Duchamp used the urinal – as a ready-made whose meaning could be played with precisely because of its conventional familiarity.
Sadly, as the blog site Failed Architecture has recently catalogued, pretty much all SITE's brilliantly unashamed one-liners have disappeared, the stores reverting back to the banal typologies that Wines was wittily riffing on all those years ago.
6. Moore House, Charles Moore, 1969 –?
Moore's design is one of the absolute masterpieces of Postmodernism. Built while he was dean of the Yale School of Architecture, he hollowed out the interior of a timber-framed turn-of-the-century New Haven house and turned it into a Pop Art, bachelor playpen par excellence.
Three two-storey timber structures – named Howard, Berengaria, and Ethel – were inserted into the remains of the house. These objects were animated by vast super-graphic cutouts and layered with acid-coloured plywood shapes. Found objects including advertising billboards, Tuscan columns, neon signs and cow-skin rugs were artfully added to make a vibrant and deliberately discordant composition.
There is a convincing case to be made for Moore practicing a form of architectural psychedelia, designing sample-heavy, playful and often highly disorientating kinds of interior dreamscape – influenced equally by Mannerist architecture, Pop Art and the late 1960s counterculture. The house itself is lost in the mists of time, subject no doubt to countless DIY makeovers if it still exists at all.
7. Lieb House, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, 1967 – 2008
Not actually gone, merely moved. The Lieb House was designed in the late 1960s in Long Beach, New Jersey and its meaning was intimately tied to that context. The design echoed the forms and materials of the beach houses in the area but with sophisticated and mannered refinements.
Clad in asbestos shingles and constructed out of a simple balloon frame, the Lieb House was cheap and cheerful and represented Venturi Scott Brown at their taught and tense best. It was full of erudite allusions including Palladian windows, proportional games and scale refinements, none of which detracted from their obvious love of the rough-and-ready source material.
American artist Dan Graham has eloquently described the way that the Lieb House holds a mirror up to its surroundings. Threatened with demolition, it was eventually bought and moved to Long Island by another client of VSBA's, resulting in the surreal spectacle of this diminutive house being floated down the East River on the back of a barge. It now resides in the garden of a much later house designed by the pair, thankfully preserved but also thoroughly out of place.
8. Southgate Estate, Runcorn New Town, Stirling Wilford and Partners, 1977 – 1992
It is debatable as to exactly how Postmodern this work by Stirling Wilford really is. Architect and writer Douglas Murphy has coined the term Brutalamo to describe the moment when the big sculptural forms of Brutalism started to inflect more historicist elements. I've always inclined to the view that Stirling was a Postmodernist all along, collaging historical fragments from at least Leicester onwards.
What isn't in doubt that is that it has well and truly gone. It had an unhappy life up to that point anyway, never really loved even by Stirling's staunchest apologists. There were two distinct phases to the work, both problematic in different ways. One was in pre-cast concrete, uncompromisingly abstract blocks that Stirling compared to Georgian squares. A second phase experimented with GRP, one of the architect's favoured materials at the time. This was employed in violent shades of orange and blue and had a ribbed texture and circular windows, giving the whole thing the look of a vast outdoor launderette.
There were technical problems. It was unpopular with residents and the whole estate was eventually demolished in 1992. Stirling's buildings are always uncompromising and challenging. These ones proved a provocation too far.
9. RCA Bookshop, James Gowan, 1985 – about three weeks later
Stirling's sadly recently deceased ex-partner James Gowan was usually regarded as the more sensible, restrained one. His solo work was generally less spectacular but always interesting and technically flawless. The exquisite little facade he designed for the Royal College of Art bookshop was atypically strident for him. Allegedly Gowan hammed up its sophisticated toy-town classicism to wind up the then head of the RCA's School of Architecture. If the flamboyance wasn't typically Gowan, the acerbity certainly was.
The only known appearance in print of Gowan's bookshop is in one of AD magazine's late 1980s Pomo special issues and tragically it has been removed, replaced by the anodyne white plasterboard beloved of art institutions everywhere.
10. Snyderman House, Michael Graves, 1972 – 2002
Back in the late 1960s, Michael Graves was part of the New York 5, a group of architects also including Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk that attempted to revive the revolutionary forms of early Modernism.
The Snyderman House represented Graves at a turning point from this early work to his later Pomo phase. Here, the pastel-painted figurative forms that he would go on to develop fully were just beginning to emerge from the constraining Modernist grid. The house was thus one of his most interesting works, exploiting a genuine artistic tension between figuration and abstraction, modernity and tradition.
It was the largest project Graves had undertaken – he'd been known up to that point as the Cubist Kitchen King – and represented a release of pent-up energy. It was easy to overlook the fact that somewhere in all that formal frenzy was an actual house. The composition teetered on the edge of legibility, the rational grid deployed to the point of irrational incoherence. There are relatively few interior photographs, partly because there wasn't much of an interior. There's even less now, as sadly the house burnt down in 2002.
11. Lassú Chair, Alessandro Mendini, 1974
In 1974, while editor of Italian design magazine Casabella, Alessandro Mendini set fire to a chair. The photograph of the resulting conflagration graced the front cover of the magazine. Mendini's ritual destruction of his own design can be read in various ways: as a comment on the ephemeral nature of architecture, as an example of design as media performance and as a personal comment on destruction and mortality.
What's clear is that Mendini's act was one of the very few examples in design where the demise of the object was intrinsic to its meaning. It is a fitting way to end this lament because Postmodernism was a movement that always acknowledged its own temporality and was obsessed by ruins, fragments and remains. Despite its claims to popularity and a shiny commercialism, Postmodernism was actually morbidly obsessed with the dead and (nearly) buried remains of architecture and culture. This is actually one of the most interesting things about it.
Contrary to popular misconception, materiality was very important to it. It's just that it also acknowledged the alchemical process by which that materiality gains cultural meaning, as well as how that meaning changes over time. Sometimes it disappears altogether. And in disappearing, it gains another, perhaps more permanent kind of meaning.
Charles Holland is a director and co-founder of Ordinary Architecture. Prior to setting up Ordinary Architecture he was a director of FAT, where he was responsible for a number of the firm's key projects including a House for Essex, Islington Square and Thornton Heath Library. Charles is also a respected teacher, writer and contributor to contemporary architectural culture. He is a visiting professor at Yale University, a design tutor at the Royal College of Art and practitioner in residence at
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orak and multicoloured head scarf, her parents had no objections. Though given this young women's attitude to those who cross her, that is perhaps just as well.
Image caption Trainer Nasar puts the boxers through their paces
"I don't like fighting but when it's necessary I want to be able to defend myself," she says.
"There are a lot of street boys who harass girls and women. They think girls are weak. Now we have the chance to prove them wrong. I can defend myself and punch boys who are disrespectful to me."
Have you ever punched a boy, I ask.
"Yes, recently I was in a book shop and there was a guy who came in after me and he put his hand in my backpack.
"At first I didn't do anything but when he did it a second time, I punched him. His nose and mouth was covered in blood.
"When I left I could hear his friends making fun of him. They were saying 'Shame on you, you were hit by a girl.' I don't think he'll ever bother another woman. Now he knows how to treat them. "
The combative Terin has ambitions to go to medical school and become a doctor. But, it seems, she has no intention of using her medical skills to patch up boys she has punched.
Image caption Sonaya hopes one day to box in the Olympics
"When I punch someone I will never go back to treat him, because he has to learn from his mistake," she says.
One could be forgiven for wondering whether, after several decades of war, perhaps the last thing Afghanistan needs is for its women to start fighting each other.
But Sonaya, who is hoping that she and her fellow female boxers will qualify for next year's Olympics in London, believes their success in the ring might spark harmony rather than hatred.
"The difference between the long-term fighting in Afghanistan and boxing is that the war is destroying things and ruining the reputation of the country. But the fighting that we are doing in a ring in front of each other is friendly fighting and a sort of message for peace."Six baby ducks were at a local rehab center for weeks after they were rescued from a storm drain in Arlington. (Courtesy of Felicia Schwenk)
Six baby ducks rescued from a storm drain in Arlington last month are said to be in good shape after spending some time undergoing rehabilitation, according to a caregiver.
Felicia Schwenk of Falls Church said she was helping the six ducklings at a local rescue facility and last week took them to a farm in Calverton, Va., where another rehab specialist will help them prepare to go back into the wild in the coming months.
“They’re doing well,” Schwenk said of the six ducklings. They were only a few days old when they were rescued by Officer Kim Corcoran, who works for the Animal Welfare League of Arlington.
Corcoran responded after an administrator at Wakefield High School called authorities on May 10 to report that the ducklings had fallen down a storm drain near the school’s entrance.
[Six baby ducks rescued after falling down a storm drain in Arlington]
One of the six baby ducks rescued after they fell down a storm drain in Arlington. (Courtesy of Felicia Schwenk)
Using a net and some duct tape, Corcoran scooped each of the ducklings through the grates out of the eight-foot-deep area. None of the ducks was injured.
Authorities had said they couldn’t locate the ducklings’ mother, even after they watched quietly for her to return for several hours following their rescue.
Mother ducks typically lay their eggs in a nest near water. After the eggs hatch, the mother may try to lead the ducklings to the water, experts said.
That may mean having to walk a couple of blocks, toddling behind mama duck.
Chelsea Lindsey, a spokeswoman for the Animal Welfare League, had said the mama duck likely walked over the drain without thinking about it, and the little ones followed.
“And, oops, they fell down,” she said.
Once the mother duck didn’t return to the area near the drain for her little ones, animal experts decided that since the ducklings were so young they couldn’t be left alone. So they took them to a Falls Church rehab facility.
There, they’ve grown a few inches and eaten well. One of the most crucial things in caring for them, Schwenk said, was to make sure they kept a healthy fear of people because when they are eventually released into the wild that would help protect them from predators.
“They can’t be tamed or a predator may get them or they might get run over by a car,” Schwenk said. The ducks will be released once they are able to fly, experts said.
The few times Schwenk said she got to hold them was in cleaning out the bin they lived in. She did little things to try to create the feeling of a mama duck, like placing them under a heat light to stay warm, Schwenk said. And putting a feather duster in the bin so they could sit under it.
“It’s like being under their mother,” Schwenk said.Scientists have developed a new method for producing hydrogen in a clean, carbon-free way, boosting its chances of becoming the sustainable fuel of the future.
The technique produces hydrogen using untreated biomass, sunlight, and special nanoparticles called quantum dots as the catalyst, removing the need for the high levels of heat (and energy) that usually power the process of getting fuel from biomass.
Less heat and less energy in the conversion process means fewer demands on the planet's resources, and no need for polluting chemicals, says the team from the University of Cambridge, potentially increasing the number of ways hydrogen can be used.
"Our sunlight-powered technology is exciting as it enables the production of clean hydrogen from unprocessed biomass under ambient conditions," says one of the researchers, Erwin Reisner.
"We see it as a new and viable alternative to high temperature gasification and other renewable means of hydrogen production."
The potential of hydrogen as a clean, renewable fuel is huge - its only waste product is water when used in cars - but scientists are still trying to figure out how to produce it using as little resources as possible.
The key could be biomass (organic matter) such lignocellulose, which contains the tiny fibres that protect trees and plants from wear and tear.
Lignocellulose has already been identified as a good biofuel source, but here the researchers were able to improve the conversion process using quantum dots - more specifically, cadmium sulphide quantum dots suspended in alkaline water.
These very tiny particles react with sunlight to kick off a complex series of chemical reactions, ultimately rearranging the atoms in the water and biomass solution to form hydrogen fuel and other organic chemicals, including formic acid and carbonate.
The hydrogen gas rises out of the solution and can be collected ready for any purpose - such as powering the cars of the future.
Even better, the team got positive results from different types of biomass, including wood, paper, and leaves, and say the process can be used in small-scale and large-scale projects alike - it's versatile, as well as environmentally friendly.
While biomass has been used as fuel for centuries, the modern techniques explored here and in other studies could finally make it suitable for the technology of the 21st century, the researchers suggest.
"There's a lot of chemical energy stored in raw biomass, but it's unrefined, so you can't expect it to work in complicated machinery, such as a car engine," explains one of the team, David Wakerley.
"Our system is able to convert the long, messy structures that make up biomass into hydrogen gas, which is much more useful.... With this in place, we can simply add organic matter to the system and then, provided it's a sunny day, produce hydrogen fuel."
The findings have been published in Nature Energy.As many schoolboys and students know, unintended innuendo can be found in the most unexpected of places and can lend a certain mischievous serendipity to otherwise dull lessons and lectures. One major source of linguistic amusement is transatlantic confusion. This was recently driven home to me by the following passage from an Irwin Shaw story: "Across the street, on the public athletics field, four boys were shagging flies."
My confused yet amused eyes tripped and staggered over the sentence, but made no sense of it, retraced their steps several times, then sat on the kerb of the full-stop, under the shade of the quotation mark, and scratched their chin in bemusement. Boys shagging flies? Not only is that physically impossible, but why on earth would a celebrated American writer, working in a more decorous pre-Monty Python and Little Britain age, stoop to such crudity? It had to be something else.
Some sleuthing around and further research – the OED, Google and a couple of American friends – cracked the mystery. Rather than implying that a group of young lads were attempting intercourse with insects, the sentence was actually about baseball and catching fly balls.
As George Bernard Shaw once, rather hyperbolically, claimed, Brits and Americans are "divided by a common language". And examples abound of confusing word usages, especially when it comes to slang and popular colloquialisms, not to mention regionally within each country.
Given the growing transatlantic familiarity in the age of the internet and saturating mass media, especially the British familiarity with Americanisms, confusion is receding, but it can still occur. English slang that might confuse Americans includes: the exclamation "bugger", "cowboy" (as in unscrupulous trader), "con" (as in con artist, not convict), "fag" (as in cigarette), to "fancy" (ie find someone attractive), to be "pissed" (as in drunk), etc. Given that we've grown up with American pop culture, most mainstream Americanisms are very familiar and even many obscure local expressions have made it across the Atlantic. But hearing references to "fanny bags" and someone showing a lot of "spunk" can't but elicit a knowing smile from a Brit.
Given the length and breadth of that language ostensibly known as English, the geographical differences don't end there. Although Australian English is, in many ways, quite similar to British English, with perhaps more borrowing from American, there are still significant differences. The first time an Australian friend told me that he felt "crook", I wondered what crime he believed he had committed. What he meant was that he had been feeling ill or unwell.
Of course, meanings do not only change across space, but also across time, in a phenomenon known as semantic shift. Among the most popular and best-known recent examples are "gay", ie happy and carefree, and "queer", ie odd or unusual. In fact, such is the way of things, that a "gay man" once referred to a womanising bachelor and a "gay woman" was a prostitute. Moreover, though gay lib may have really taken off only in the 1960s but before that we had the "Gay 1890s", without a gay pride parade in sight.
As for "queer", which has been appropriated as a term of pride by gay people, long before Britain came out of the closet, it had "Queer Street", where people in financial dire straits figuratively lived, and someone "feeling a little queer" was not touching up anyone, but was, instead, under the weather.
Going even further back, things get really weird! Weirdly enough, if you though the word "weird" was relatively new, think again. It was used half a dozen times by Shakespeare, at a time when it meant possessing supernatural powers. Its modern meaning was coined by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the early 19th century. In fact, umpteen apparently familiar words in Shakespeare have quite different meanings today. For example, when one of the witches in Hamlet says, "You all know security/ Is mortals' chiefest enemy", security here means complacency and not safety, which would be nonsensical.
Over time, many words go through elevations in their meaning, or they fall from grace, or they end up meaning the complete opposite of what they originally signified. For example, "knight" simply meant "boy or servant", while "gentle" meant of high birth, hence "gentleman". Girl meant any young person – "gay girl" meant girl, not lesbian, and "knave girl" meant boy – while "man" meant any person, regardless of gender.
Once upon a time, people who were "awful" (ie deserving of awe) and "silly" (blessed and happy) were admired, and people who were "brave" (ie cowardly) were looked down upon. And if you were "fond" of someone, you found them stupid and silly, and if you found someone "cute" that meant they were bow-legged. If all this is a bit confusing, don't "worry", especially since, in medieval England, the word meant to strangle or choke someone to death.
Semantic shift is occurring around us even as we speak and, in the future, words may take on radically different meanings to the ones they have now. Today, in jest, we may say someone is "bad", meaning good, "wicked", meaning cool, or "fit", meaning attractive. But future generations may have no other meaning for these words and may conclude that "survival of the fittest" means that only the beautiful live on.Christina Mattina
A newly published analysis, supported by an editorial, finds that the growing prevalence of cosmetic-related adverse events may warrant stronger regulation of these products used to alter appearance.
Besides ensuring the safety of food and drugs, the FDA also monitors adverse reactions to cosmetic products. A newly published analysis, supported by an editorial, found that the growing prevalence of such adverse events may warrant stronger regulation of these products used to alter appearance.The research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine analyzes data from the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition’s Adverse Event Reporting System, which tracks reports of adverse events linked to food, dietary supplements, and cosmetics. This repository of side effects, which can be submitted by consumers or clinicians, was made public in 2016.Researchers identified 5144 adverse events that were reported between 2004 and 2016. Hair care products were the most common source of complaints, followed by skin care and tattoos. The mean percentage of adverse reactions considered serious, meaning they caused serious injury, disability, or death, was 35% across all product types. Baby products were the most likely to have serious outcomes (51.8% were serious), while personal cleanliness, hair care, and hair coloring products also had higher than average reports of serious adverse events.The number of adverse events reported more than doubled from 706 in 2015 to 1591 in 2016, which was driven by a sharp increase in the number of hair care-related reports. The letter’s authors noted that the FDA had launched an investigation of a brand of conditioners in 2014 after receiving 127 adverse event reports. In the course of its investigation, the FDA found that more than 21,000 consumers had already complained to the manufacturer about hair loss and scalp irritation, but the company was not required to report these events.This disparity between adverse events reported to the manufacturer and to the FDA highlights an important consumer safety issue, according to the authors. Manufacturers are not required to submit their products for approval prior to marketing nor to disclose complaints from customers, so the FDA will only begin to investigate a cosmetic’s safety after a sufficient number of consumers file a direct complaint in its database, which contains a small fraction of all events.Highlighting the efforts of Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) to propose the Personal Care Products Safety Act, the letter’s authors praised the bill for requiring manufacturers to report unsafe events, allowing the FDA to recall dangerous cosmetics from the market, and instituting an annual review of the safety of 5 ingredients. While it does not allocate more funding to the National Toxicology Program to increase scientific testing, they called the act “a first step in the right direction to protect consumers.”An accompanying editorial in the same issue highlighted the challenges the FDA faces in trying to regulate cosmetics. According to former FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf, MD, and co-authors, these constraints include inadequate funding, a voluntary cosmetic registration system, and limited authority to surveil and regulate the safety of cosmetics. They explain that the FDA, like police, need “probable cause” to begin an investigation, which comes from voluntary consumer complaints.In contrast, the postmarket regulatory system for drugs mandates safety reporting and strengthens oversight using a technological “ecosystem” of claims and records that allows for active surveillance. If the cosmetic regulatory system replicated these policies, the FDA would be better able to identify and intervene in cases of adverse events, the authors wrote.“By borrowing innovations being developed for efficient, cost-effective active surveillance of drugs and devices, the oversight of cosmetics can be modernized without creating an inappropriately burdensome regulatory process,” they concluded. “Using these new tools to collect and analyze the right kinds of empirical data, we can achieve the high levels of safety people in the United States have a right to expect.”The main findings of this study were that decomposition as reflected by mass loss of leaf litter decreased with increasing level of background radiation in forest sites around Chernobyl resulting in a reduction by 40 % across a radiation gradient differing in radiation level by more than a factor 2,600. Potentially confounding variables such as site effects, effects of invertebrates, pH or soil moisture did not change the conclusions concerning effects of radiation on litter mass loss. We reached similar conclusions when analyzing individual litter bags within sites, mean values of litter mass loss for sites, or differences in litter mass loss between pairs of neighboring sites differing in level of radiation. This shows that our findings were robust and independent of the spatial scale of analysis. Finally, mass loss from litter bags had consequences for litter mass loss and accumulation of organic matter in the field because the forest floor was thicker in sites with higher levels of background radiation, lower proportional mass loss from litterbags and sites with stands of pine trees.
We estimated the impact of radiation on litter mass loss by comparing the rate at the highest radiation level relative to the rate at the lowest background radiation level. The decrease in rate of litter mass loss was by 40 % in the most contaminated sites compared to the cleanest sites. While each of our bags with leaf litter only had leaves from one tree species, patterns of leaf litter mass loss, changes in nutrient concentration, and decomposer abundance and activity depend on whether leaves are decaying in mixtures or on their own (Gartner and Cardon 2004). Therefore, future studies based on mixed leaf litter may provide results that are more similar to the situation in natural forests.
A quarter of our litter bags were enclosed in fine nylon mesh to prevent access by large soil invertebrates. While there is clear evidence of the soil fauna being perturbed by radioactive contamination from Chernobyl (Krivolutski et al. 1999; Victorov 1993; Krivolutski and Pokarzhevsky 1992; Maksimova 2005), the information on soil microbes is rudimentary at best. Ragon et al. (2011) showed similar abundance and diversity of bacteria in biofilms on building surfaces in Chernobyl and elsewhere in Europe, although the rate of mutation accumulation was increased in the most contaminated areas in Chernobyl. Zymenko et al. (1995) and Romanovskaya et al. (1998) reported reduced abundance of saprophytic bacteria in more contaminated soils. We assumed that both microorganisms and soil invertebrates have access to litter bags with coarse mesh, while only microorganisms have access to litter bags with fine mesh. We found a significant difference of <1 % in litter mass loss between bags with and without fine mesh. Since we did not find a significant interaction between presence or absence of fine mesh and background radiation, we conclude that a given level of radiation had an equally negative impact on litter bags with and without mesh.
We found differences in the rate of litter mass loss among tree species with greater loss in birch than in the three other species. Such differences between conifers and deciduous trees are well described in the literature (e.g., Berg and Ekbohm 1991; Gillon et al. 1994; Taylor and Parkinson 1988). These differences in litter mass loss among tree species are as expected. Surprisingly, we did not find a significant interaction between tree species and background radiation on level of mass loss from litter. This finding suggests that all species were equally impacted by background radiation, and it further suggests that it is the decomposers rather than the litter that are affected by the effects of background radiation. An experiment that consisted of litter bags with both clean and contaminated litter would allow us to determine whether contamination effects on litter quality affect rates of decomposition.
While mass loss from litter bags is only one of several components of decomposition, the ultimate test of an effect of background radiation on decomposition is through the effects on the thickness of the forest floor. We made such a test in 2013. The experiment on mass loss from litter bags was made in 2007–2008, so there is a temporal delay between the two parts of this study. We see no obvious reason why this should be a cause of consistent bias, and it is our clear impression based on extensive field work in 1991, 1995 and 2000–2013 that the thickness of the forest floor is consistently positively related to background radiation every year. Here we have shown that the thickness of the forest floor increased with the level of background radiation.
We have conducted research in Chernobyl since 1991 and have noticed a significant accumulation of litter over time. This accumulation of litter is demonstrated here to be significantly positively related to background radiation, negatively related to the proportional loss of litter mass from the litter bags, and to be greater in the presence of pine stands. Accumulation of litter may have consequences for the risk of fire because accumulation of dead plant matter for 27 years implies an accumulation of fuel and hence an elevated risk of fire followed by an increased risk of subsequent redistribution of radionuclides. Obviously, factors other than litter accumulation will impact the risk of fire. These include the probability of fire ignition, which will have been affected by increased summer temperatures in recent decades, reduced levels of precipitation, the large spatial scale of the areas with accumulation of litter, the reduced levels of defense against insect pests and the resultant rate of tree mortality (A. P. Møller et al., unpublished data). Several studies have suggested non-negligible risks of a major Chernobyl fire (e.g., Kashparov et al. 2000; Yoschenko et al. 2006a, b), and our study provides important information on factors that relate to this risk. The accumulation of litter over time may also have consequences for the mineralization of organic matter in the forest floor and hence primary productivity, suggesting that growth rates of trees and other plants may be suppressed in the presence of poor levels of decomposition caused by elevated levels of background radiation and could in part explain reduced growth rates of pine trees in radioactive regions of Chernobyl (Mousseau et al. 2013).
In conclusion, we have shown severely depressed levels of litter mass loss in the most contaminated forest areas around Chernobyl, with reductions of 40 % relative to background levels recorded in uncontaminated, control areas. These findings suggesting a linear dose–response of decomposition in relation to background radiation were independent of potentially confounding variables such as pH, soil moisture, study site and method of analysis. These results have a number of implications for management of contaminated areas, risk of fire and re-distribution of radionuclides in forest ecosystems around Chernobyl.During his briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer laid out the chain of events that led to the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
Glenn Thrush didn’t seem to buy it.
Appearing on MSNBC after the briefing, Thrush — a White House correspondent for The New York Times — called Spicer’s chronology of the events “sloppy,” and said there were clear gaps.
“I think that was a very sloppy, clearly hastily organized timeline that Sean Spicer came up with — that has an awful lot of holes in it,” Thrush said.
Specifically, Thrush questioned how it could take the White House 17 days after learning of the existence of a transcript of a phone conversation between Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak to determine that it was a breach of trust, given that the White House’s Counsel office was immediately able to determine there was no legal issue with the Flynn-Kislyak conversation.
“It is a very, very sloppy and implausible timeline,” Thrush said. “And I think it just begs a lot of questions and requires a lot of reporting.”
Thrush was also mystified at a particular turn of phrase used by Spicer during his briefing.
“Sean explicitly — and maybe it was an inartful use of language — actually said… this will help us ‘cover it up.’ I mean, he actually said that from the podium!”
Watch above, via MSNBC.
[featured image via screengrab]
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Follow Joe DePaolo (@joe_depaolo) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] matter. Not so much because they change the results of elections (they don’t). They matter both because they do determine much of what parties do when they actually win, and because they tell you a lot about where a party stands at a given point in time – what they see the big challenges facing a country are and what they’d do about it.
This election is, we are told, all about Brexit. Except it shouldn’t be. Yes there are huge questions to be answered over the next five years about the terms of our exit from the EU and nature of our future relationship, from cash to trade and migration. But of more immediate impact to many families is a simply disastrous outlook for living standards – their family budgets matters more to them than talk of Article 50, and those budgets look set for a truly terrible few years. Real earnings are now falling, as wages rise more slowly than prices, incomes looks set to stagnate as our employment boom peters out, and big benefits cuts risk turning a period of flat living standards for all into the first significant rise in inequality since Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street. Some of these challenges are related to Brexit, such as the rising cost of imports, but far from all of them are.
Politicians raising their sights to the challenges of our time should have this problem in their sights. And after all, we know Theresa May cares about families who are just about managing and Jeremy Corbyn cares deeply about inequality. But it looks increasingly like no party is putting this threat to low and middle income families living standards centre stage.
Labour’s leaked draft manifesto includes a host of major policy proposals – from abolishing tuition fees, to renationalising our railways and scrapping increases in state pension age. Reasonable people will disagree on the desirability of these proposals, but they are big changes with big price tags attached. In stark contrast, when it comes to the huge benefit cuts for the low and middle income families the Labour Party exists to represent, the draft manifesto merely commits to “review” some of these cuts. For families in the bottom third of the income distribution we are talking about changes that would cost them an average of almost £1,000 a year.
A Labour Party that has money to spend on anything in its manifesto shouldn’t be reviewing these policies, it should be trumpeting plans to reverse them as its first act. For a party founded to represent the interests of working people this isn’t an optional extra. Hopefully by the time the draft document is turned into a final manifesto this puzzling omission will have been corrected.
Some have argued that Labour’s plans for a £10 an hour minimum wage by 2020 would compensate losers from these benefit cuts. It is certainly far higher than the £8.75 for workers aged 25 and over currently on the cards (which in reality could be more like £8.70 given current slow wage growth).
Leaving aside for a second the (very serious) debate about whether such a high minimum wage would risk negative employment and potential inflation effects, would it cancel out the living standards squeeze that millions of families are set to face? In short, no. This is principally because, as we have explained before, different people are affected by the benefit cuts than would gain from the higher minimum wage. As the chart below shows, middle income families are the main winners from a higher minimum wage, while the bottom third of households would still expect to see major income falls in the years ahead.
A worker on the minimum wage with two kids would get a welcome £570 pay boost by 2020 but they’d still be over £1,000 a year worse off after the cuts in support through Universal Credit.
Labour’s omission of what should be a key plank of their manifesto is all the more worrying because it risks letting the Conservative leadership off the hook on the key issue where their very welcome rhetoric on standing up for ordinary working people is undermined by policy decisions that do the opposite. These policies were inherited by Theresa May and Philip Hammond from their predecessors, and changing tack would be desirable, feasible and politically sensible. Unfortunately they have already missed the chance to change course twice – in the Autumn Statement and Spring Budget. Third time lucky is all we can hope for in their imminent manifesto.
Half way through this election campaign we risk having both main political parties failing to put front and centre the huge threat to the living standards of low and middle income families that the coming years represent. In the few days left as manifesto launches approach, let’s hope they think again.THE profitability of slavery is an enduring question of economic history. Thomas Gowan, writing way back in 1942, noted wearily that “the debate […] has been going on, in one form or another, for almost one hundred and fifty years.”
Intuitively, a business that uses slaves should be profitable. You pay your workers nothing, and reap the benefits of their labour. And some economic historians try to show just how lucrative it was.
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Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman made the most famous contribution to the debate. Their book, Time on the Cross, suggested that slavery in the American South was a lucrative enterprise for plantation owners. The authors reckoned that slaves were treated pretty well. And this meant that they were productive. So for the owners, slavery was:
generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favourably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in manufacturing
Another study, by Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, calculated the rate of return on investing in slaves. They reckoned that “slave capital” earned at least equal returns to those from other forms of capital investment—such as railroad bonds. The rate of return on slaves could be as high as 13%—compared to a yield of 6-8% on the railroads.
There was also a big industry in slave finance, procurement and transport. And by the end of the 17th century, there were about 70,000 slaves transported each year. And some financiers became fabulously wealthy. Christopher Codrington made a lot of money from the sugar trade, and made large bequests to All Souls College, Oxford.
Individual businesses might have done well out of the slave trade. But the effect of slavery on wider economic development is also important.
John Elliott Cairnes, an economist, reckoned that slavery stifled economic growth in the South. Cairnes argued that reluctant workers depleted soils more quickly. In addition, scientific agriculture was impossible. Reluctant slaves, with little interest in learning, had no interest in using new farming techniques. And this meant that Southern farms lost competitiveness to their Northern counterparts.
Others reckon that slavery made it difficult for the South to establish trading networks. According to Ralph Anderson and Robert Gallman, slavery forced planters to diversify their economic activities. The costs of owning a slave—such as food and shelter—were pretty constant. And so if plantations specialised in a certain crop, they left themselves open to sudden drops in income and consequently big losses. But by pursuing a range of economic activities, they had a steadier revenue flow to match their fixed costs.
Diversification posed problems. Messrs Anderson and Gallman argue that it inhibited trade within the South—and, consequently, the development of towns and villages. Slaveowners found it easier to produce something themselves, rather than buy it. And the South found it difficult to develop a manufacturing industry—instead, it depended on imports from the North. As a result, economic growth was stifled.
Slavery hindered the development of Southern capitalism in other ways. Eugene Genovese, writing in 1961, reckoned that the antebellum South was not profit-seeking. In fact, slavery was not even meant to be profitable. Slaveowners were keener on flaunting their vast plantations and huge reserves of slaves than they were about profits and investment. Rational economic decisions were sacrificed for pomp and circumstance.
Economies which used slavery may, in the long run, have been at a disadvantage. Some analyses suggest that the economic contradictions of slavery led to its inevitable demise. But slavery had indirect effects on other economies. Douglass North, a Nobel-Prize-winning economist, argued that the expansion of Southern plantation slavery was at the centre of midwestern economic development in the nineteenth century (though the South's demand for certain foodstuffs).
And other research looks at slavery's effects on economies outside America. James Walvin reckoned that provincial banking emerged in the eighteenth century because of the need for credit in the long-distance Atlantic slave trade. And according to Eric Williams, although slavery stifled Caribbean economic growth, it encouraged global commodity circulation—a major precondition for the British industrialisation in the late eighteenth century. He also thought that slave profits were important to financing the infrastructure projects, like railways, that powered the industrial revolution.
Of course any account of the economic effect of slavery should note the effect of treating human beings as capital equipment. The direct impact on the utility of the slaves themselves of this condition represented a terrible economic cost. And there was also an opportunity cost to the broader economy, which lost out on the potential human capital and entrepreneurial contributions slaves might have made as free workers. Abolition of involuntary servitude to say nothing of chattel slavery, was clearly a moral imperative. We can also feel pretty safe concluding that, whatever the benefit of the system to slave-owners, its abolition made as much economic sense as anything can.
Suggested reading list:
Anderson, R. V., & Gallman, R. E. (1977). Slaves as Fixed Capital: Slave Labor and Southern Economic Development. The Journal of American History,64(1), 24-46.
Conrad, A. H., & Meyer, J. R. (1958). The economics of slavery in the ante bellum South. The Journal of Political Economy, 66(2), 95-130.
Fogel, R. W. (1995). Fogel, R.W. & Engerman, S.L. (1974) Time on the cross: The economics of American Negro slavery. WW Norton & Company.
Genovese, E. D. (1976). Roll, Jordan, Roll: The world the slaves made. Random House.
Govan, T. P. (1942). Was Plantation Slavery Profitable? The Journal of Southern History, 8(4), 513-535.
North, D.C. (1961). The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860. Harper & Row.
Williams, E. (1944) Capitalism and slavery. University of North Carolina Press.These creme egg tray bake brownies are actually worth going home on your lunch for if you haven’t packed them in to your lunch box…seriously. I was trying my best to start being healthier after a bridesmaid fitting I had this weekend… the fitting made me realise I have two months left to feel and look amazing (ahhhh!!). So I came back from my girlie weekend away thinking that is it! Healthy eating and exercise now, until June.
This was all very well until I looked in the cupboard and saw Cadbury Creme Eggs and just had to make these brownies…oops! All in moderation I thought. I made a very healthy light lunch, packed my fruit for snacks and then Monday morning hit like a bomb. So off I popped home and there were the brownies looking AMAZING! Needless to say, my afternoon was so much better after this scrumptious Cadbury Creme Egg brownie fix. Not only that but were going to the Chester Food Festival this weekend as well where I’m sure I’ll HAVE to sample all that’s on offer. They are just so good. Can you resist?!
4.5 from 2 reviews Save Print Cadbury Creme Egg Brownies Author: CookBakeEat Prep time: 10 mins Cook time: 40 mins Total time: 50 mins Serves: 12 Ingredients 185g Dark Chocolate
185g Butter
85g Plain Flour
40g Cocoa Powder
3 Eggs
275g Caster Sugar
6 Cadbury Creme Eggs Instructions To begin, pre-heat the oven to 180 and gas mark 4. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a bowl over a pan of hot water. Once melted, leave to cool. Mix your eggs and sugar using an electric whisk. This takes time and your mixture needs to double in size and thicken up. Your mix should also be pale in colour. Add you egg and sugar mix to your cooled chocolate mixture. TIP: Make sure your chocolate mixture is at least luke warm, or cooler. If the chocolate mixture is too hot it will cook the eggs! Sift in the flour and cocoa powder and fold everything together. TIP: Take your time and be gentle :)Pour everything into your brownie tray and cook for about 20 mins. Whilst that's cooking, start to cut your creme eggs in half. This is tricky and doesn't always turn out very neat, but don't worry, it will still taste great. If you heat our nice in hot water before every slice it may also help. After 20mins cooking, take out your brownies. They should be looking quite cooked around the egde but still quite soft in the middle. Place your eggs on top of the half cooked brownies and gently press down. I found I could fit 3 across each row. Bake for a further 10 - 15 mins or until cooked through out. Once cooked, leave to cool before cutting. I found these brownies taste amazing warmed up and served with vanilla ice cream! 3.3.3077
YUMMY RECIPES To Your InboxThis article is about medicine. For the personal characteristic of heroism, see hero
In medicine, heroic treatment or course of therapy is one which possesses a high risk of causing further damage to a patient's health, but is undertaken
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Food Lion brand. Publix is currently renovating the rest of the Martin’s grocery store portfolio. The first of those locations is expected to open over the summer as well.
On July 10th, the following three Martin’s stores will close:
6401 Centralia Road, Chesterfield
5201 Chippenham Crossing Center, Richmond
11361 Midlothian Turnpike, Richmond
On August 2nd, the following five stores will follow:
253 North Washington Highway, Ashland
12601 Jefferson Davis Highway, Chester
200 Charter Colony Parkway, Midlothian
7045 Forest Hill Avenue, Richmond
5700 Brook Road, Richmond
“We want to thank our associates for their hard work and dedication over the years, and we are grateful for the loyalty of our many customers,” Martin’s president Tom Lenkevich said in the news release.
“Throughout this difficult process, our top concern has been to take care of our associates and treat them fairly and with respect. We know our associates’ continued dedication to our customers will provide excellent service in the coming weeks. We are also making a best in class commitment to take care of our people with a strong severance package.” No details on the severance packages were immediately available.Cliff Bleszinski may be the face of Epic Games but Mark Rein is the voice. No tight jeans, diamond earrings or chainsaw-waving japes for him - just a wardrobe full of polo shirts and a great big bundle of opinions.
Eurogamer sat down with Mark Rein and his opinions at the Develop Conference in Brighton last week. Naturally he banged on about how great Epic's Unreal Engine 3 is, and naturally we asked him stupid questions about Gears of War 3 which he was never going to answer. Still, read on to find out what Rein reckons to the recent id Software buyout, why he's excited about Project Natal and what's going on with Gears of War 3.
Eurogamer: Hello Mark Rein. The last time you and I met was at E3, when the press got to see Project Natal for the first time. Had you seen it before?
Mark Rein: Yes. The two games they showed on stage used our engine, so we're really excited about that. I'm very pro-Natal. There are a lot of interesting things you could do with it and I'm really excited to be involved with it.
We're working closely with Microsoft to spread the enhancements they made with Unreal Engine 3 to other developers. If people out there are interested in doing really cool games for Natal, they should contact me and I can put them in touch with Microsoft.
Eurogamer: Is this interview just going to be you hawking your wares for the next 20 minutes?
Mark Rein: No! I'm answering your question about Project Natal! The whole concept of playing a game without a controller is very intriguing. That's going to open up a lot of stuff. Take EA Sports Active on the Wii. It's a great game but it's not very compelling to have to have all that extra hardware attached to your body.
If you made a game like that for Natal - and I'm sure EA is doing it - Natal could just look at you and tell if you're doing the exercises properly. Plus anything could become your controller - a tennis club, a golf club, a gun...
"I'd just like to thank my wife, November, my sister, Purple, and of course my brother, Singininthe."
Eurogamer: A chainsaw...
Mark Rein: Or a gun with a chainsaw...
Eurogamer: That is where I was going with that, yes. When you look at Project Natal, what opportunities do you see for the Gears of War and Unreal series?
Mark Rein: That's a hard one. Our games are really designed for the controller experience. They're very twitchy. I'm not a hundred per cent sure there's a good fit there, or that there even needs to be.
I could see doing gestures to other player in multiplayer games, where Natal notices if you've raised your hand. I could see maybe using it to throw a grenade. But I doubt the Gears of War-type experience is what they're aiming for with Natal.
Eurogamer: Wouldn't it be nice if you could have a chat with Marcus Fenix though? 'Hello, how was work?' 'Yeah not bad, just been doing a bit more war on the Locust horde,' that sort of thing.
Mark Rein: Milo Fenix? I don't think that's our thing. I'd rather have that conversation with Lara Croft.It seems like only yesterday I was sitting at home in my house relaxing, and now the semester is underway, homework starting to pile up, and we’re nearly out of January. This is also a good thing, though! We’ve got some fun things coming up this next weekend. Sunday, February 1st marks the date of the Budget Cup II, and the day after that is the start of Rock League Season 3! These are two important events for a lot of the more budget players in the community who don’t have access to a playset of every single card. The Budget Cup is a chance for you to brew crazy decks based around low cost strategies, and Rock League gives you a similar challenge, limiting you to 4 uncommons and the rest commons. In today’s article I want to talk about both of these things. Let’s start with Rock League.
I joined Rock League midway through Season 2 and had a blast. You can always find people who want to play, and it’s extremely affordable for the average player since you mostly need commons. From the decks I played against in Season 2, there were a few clearly powerful strategies that floated to the top.
These cards were very central to a lot of strong decks last season. Gearsmith gives you a piece of free card draw stapled to a body for the low, low cost of 1 resource. This is easily your best turn 1 play in these decks. With this drawing you the best artifact in your top 3 cards, it is very easy to set up for a turn 3 or 4 Pterobot. Pterobot is a very hard card for most decks to beat, because it is a flier with high toughness that is also an artifact. Those three qualities negate Murder, Crackling Bolt/Burn, and blocking with most of Wild’s troops. The most common forms of removal for those shards are effectively useless against a very fast and evasive threat. You have to hope that in the format without reserves that you took into account these cards stomping you and brought along some form of artifact removal.
That’s one of the first lessons I learned quickly in Rock League. You need to have the cards maindeck that prepare you for any possibility. This means that you may have some dead cards in every matchup, but you have silver bullets in a lot of them. Do try to make these answers as versatile as possible. Turbulence may be great at this in a Wild deck, but for the cost of an uncommon it might just be better to play Nature Reigns instead. This shows us the second lesson. Rarity is a limited resource.
Now clearly that is a part of the rules of deckbuilding, so it seems obvious, but it is important to probe the impact that this rule has. We only have 4 uncommon slots. Is it worth it to use one of them as a generally better conditional answer than to conserve it for a generally worse conditional answer? That’s something to evaluate in context of the deck you’re building.
Moving on to the next deck that I saw a lot, it wasn’t so much a deck as a card.
When you socket him to give him Spellshield, he becomes an extremely hard to remove threat. He has a big body, rarely outclassed in Rock League by any 1 or more troops and he can’t be hit by a single removal spell in the format that I can recall.
This is another card that every deck needs to have a solution to. It can be as simple as “Kill them before they cast it,” or as time sensitive as “Countermagic save me.” Either way, your deck needs an answer. So this makes 2 commonly played cards that are hard to deal with that require answers in every other deck. That influences deckbuilding in a pretty major way, giving you an idea of the meta before you play a single match.
So how have I approached this meta? I decided that I wanted to be casting unremovable fatties. Last season, the main deck I played was a Boulder Brute deck that pumped him with various spells like Wild Aura and Blood Aura and then turned him sideways and won. I loved the deck, and I plan to play it this season as well as one of my decks. Here is the list for that. It came together so well in the last set that I haven’t really wanted to change it at all this time around! The only things I did were to add reserves and to add Sterling Starwatcher to those reserves. Everything else has been played in the maindeck at some point.
Rock League B/W Brute Force
Troops 4 Boulder Brute (MinW Conservation) 4 Moon’ariu Sensei 4 Cottontail Ronin 3 Dandelion Sprite 3 Feral Ogre 2 Glimmerglen Witch 1 Crazed Squirrel Titan Actions, Artifacts, Constants 4 Blood Aura 4 Murder 4 Wild Growth 3 Wild Aura 2 Sorrow Shards # Name 14 Wild Shard 4 Blood Shard 4 Shards Of Fate Reserves 4 Nature Reigns 4 Sapper’s Charge 3 Sterling Starwatcher 2 Sorrow 2 Glimmerglen Witch
Champion: Zared Venomscorn
I wanted to shine a spotlight on another fun deck I plan to try out this season. It is in the same shards, but it plays completely differently. It’s Blood-Wild Bunny Legion.
Rock League B/W Bunny Legion
Troops 4 Shin’hare Militia 4 Moon’ariu Sensei 4 Blood Cauldron Ritualist 4 Briar Legion 4 Concubunny 4 Cottontail Ronin 2 Bucktooth Bannerbunny Actions, Artifacts, Constants 4 Briarpatch 4 Murder 4 Evolve 1 Nature Reigns Shards # Name 9 Blood Shard 9 Wild Shard 3 Shards Of Fate Reserves 4 Boulder Brute (MinW Conservation) 4 Blood Aura 3 Nature Reigns 4 Sorrow
Champion: Warmaster Fuzzuko
So what’s going on here? Evolve is a really strong card. I wanted to take advantage of that card and the activation of Warmaster Fuzzuko. So what cards go well with swarming the board? Why Bunnies of course! So I threw a bunch of the better bunnies in, along with another pair of cards that love the “Legion” strategy I’m already building, the Briarpatch and its Legions. I don’t know if this is just my wishful thinking, but I really want these cards to be good in Rock League. If a game ends up going on forever, the Briarpatches give me a huge advantage because the majority of my draws will be gas that only get better and better.
The basic gameplan is just to play Bunnies and then pump them. Attack. Rinse. Repeat. Nice and simple. You’ve got a little removal in Murder, and something to do with the weaker Battle Hoppers you can’t pump with the Blood Cauldron Ritualists. The Bucktooth Bannerbunnys make swinging in for lethal out of nowhere a possibility. And a singleton Nature Reigns as a mise against Pterobot. Generally you just want to swing through it and win that way.
This deck also shows the cost of rarity. Because I wanted to focus all of my efforts on assembling my winning board state I didn’t reserve any of my uncommon cards for removal like Turbulence that would clean up the issues I have with cards like Pterobot or Duskwing Rider. Instead, I have to rely on the explosive power of Evolve and Bunnies, or grind out wins by using cards like Blood Aura out of the reserves paired with my larger Briar Legions.
Now I normally write about control, and I haven’t done that so far this article. That’s because I’m not as big a fan of control in Rock League. I tried to build a sapphire base control deck at first in Rock League, but it wasn’t great. It’s possible that the deck could have gotten better with the addition of Phoenix Guard Messenger and Verdict of the Ancient Kings, but I don’t really think so. It can’t beat a resolved Boulder Brute or Pterobot with any sort of consistency, and it sure can’t win before they drop, so it’s not a well-positioned deck. Sad, but likely true.
Transitioning into the Budget Cup, one of the fun aspects of the format is that if you’ve only played Rock League, you can likely have a reasonably competitive deck by just adding in some rares you have lying around that are stronger than some of the commons and call it a day.
You can also work with existing decks, like those that Top 8ed the last Budget Cup. There have been a lot of sweet new cards added into the mix with Shattered Destiny. One of the decks that caught my eye that I wanted to play with was the deck piloted by Caerbannog. Servant of Shathak was the card that the deck was built to take advantage of. Certainly a hard card to build a deck for, as that restriction cuts down on consistency. From the general purpose of each card, it seems to me that the deck was built to stick a Servant of Shathak hopefully on turn 1, and then tempo out the opponent with removal, Countermagic, and various tricks. I like the idea, and it seems like a card like this only gets better with the addition of more cards to upgrade the singleton aspect of the deck. So here is my take on Servant of Shathak for the Budget Cup.
Budget Cup II S/D Shathak
Troops 4 Servant of Shathak
4 Buccaneer
4 Thunderbird
2 Menacing Gralk
2 Mentor of the Song
1 Storm Colossus
1 Living Totem
1 Cerulean Mentalist
Actions, Artifacts, Constants 4 Countermagic
1 Verdict of the Ancient Kings
1 Crackling Wit
1 Immortal Decree
1 Inner Conflict
1 Oracle Song
1 Repel
1 Solitary Exile
1 Stoneskin
1 Stormcall
1 Time Ripple
1 Yesterday
1 Arcane Shield
Shards 9 Sapphire Shard
9 Diamond Shard
4 Shard of Purpose
3 Shards of Fate
Reserves 2 Augmented Awakening
1 Flock of Seagulls
1 Judgement
1 Arcane Shield
1 Cerulean Mentalist
1 Blinding Light
1 Clear Sky Stormcaller
1 Forgotten Lord
1 Infusion of Diamond
1 Queensguard
1 Royal Enforcer
1 Snare Trapper
1 Vanguard of Cerulea
1 Mentor of the Song
Champion: Wyatt the Sapper
Puzzle out what I’m doing. It’s mostly the same, just with some additions of various kinds of removal and some other threats. The reserves are equally messy to preserve the ability to keep Servant of Shathak in the deck. There are some cards for aggro matchups like Flock of Seagulls and Infusion of Diamond. There are other cards for control matchups like Mentor of the Song and Forgotten Lord. Basically it’s just a set of cards that lets you tune your mainboard by paring out the bad stuff and adding in some things that work better.
There are many other strategies that are wide open for this tournament though. Playing Blood-Wild Spellshield is completely reasonable. You have access to Dandelion Sprite, Boulder Brute, and the various auras to pump them up. This was part of strategy that Herford used in his Top 8 deck. He used the Wild Spellshield troops and the Countermagic and disruption of Sapphire to play the tempo game by sticking a threat his opponent can’t remove and then stopping them from messing with it.
I’m really excited to be able to host the Budget Cup II this weekend. I can’t wait to see all of the sweet decks that you guys are brewing. Let me know if you plan on streaming and are willing to/want me to use your match as one of our feature matches. If you want to use a cardblocker we have those available as well. It’s going to be a fun tournament. If you want to bounce ideas off me or get a second set of eyes on your decklist, feel free to PM me in game and I can take a look at it.(07-03-2013, 04:39 AM) Koji Wrote: You do love your spongebob don't you?
(07-03-2013, 04:39 AM) Koji Wrote: Well, let's run down some possibilities... Is it a hard freeze? (that is, PCSX2 completely freezes and you have to force close it) or a'soft' freeze (you can still go back into the menus and close PCSX2 properly)? Can you still hear music or see any animation while it's frozen (IE, no input effects it, but it doesn't completely "freeze")?
(07-03-2013, 04:39 AM) Koji Wrote: And of course, as always, what's the log say when it freezes?
Eh, I don't like every SpongeBob game I find, but a few of them are actually pretty good. Though there are a fair share of garbage ones too.It's a hard freeze. It'll start loading and you'll see this screen:The buoy moves up, and down then the water also moves with it (that is the loading animation apparently). After a few moments it'll freeze the animation will freeze and the sound will stop. I can shutdown PCSX2 without doing anything special (life killing a process).I cannot go back to the menus in-game I have to reset the game, and it always go's like that.Now this I find very strange, when it freezes the log doesn't say anything. Also I think it is important for me to note that the game does keep the saves even after having to shut down (or reset) the emulation (due to the freeze).CLOSE Sutherland Springs, Texas is reeling from the loss of so many of their friends and family. Hear in their own words how they're leaning on each other and honoring the precious lives lost. USA TODAY
Artist Greg Zanis of Aurora, Illinois, constructed 58 crosses and drove across the country, arriving in Las Vegas Thursday afternoon, October 5, 2017, to install them on Las Vegas Blvd to honor the people killed in the mass shooting. Zanis said he has created crosses for many of the recent national tragedies, Newtown, San Bernardino and now Las Vegas. Mandatory Credit: Tom Tingle/The Arizona Republic via USA T (Photo11: Tom Tingle, The Arizona Republic via USA TODAY Network)
None pioneered a lifestyle like Hugh Hefner, rocked like Chuck Berry or made ‘em laugh like Jerry Lewis.
Those who died this year in Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs and a dozen other places are familiar to us only because of why they died: One of their fellow citizens wanted to kill — publicly, suddenly, often randomly — in massacres that shocked a nation seemingly inured to gun violence.
But, like the more famous departed whom the news media are memorializing this month, the hundreds of victims of 2017’s mass shootings also deserve to be remembered at year's end.
We know them, if at all, mostly through posthumous tributes dominated by clichés. To judge from these platitudes, the victims all would give you the shirt off their back. All were the life of the party. All had a smile that lit up the room. All loved kids and dogs.
These generalities, well intended and understandable, make the deceased all seem the same. Which is how a tragedy becomes a statistic.
Yet these individuals had their own talents, accomplishments, hopes, plans, flaws and quirks. They left behind classrooms, delivery routes, farms, teams and homes; the victims of the Las Vegas shooting alone had 87 children.
And if their biographical details are less exalted than those of the year’s celebrated dead, they’re no less precious.
Precious as the laugh of Tony Cross, 33, killed along with seven others at a cookout in Plano, Texas, by a man whose victims included his estranged wife.
Rachel Vinyard, 32, knew Cross for more than half her life. “He had a laugh that you knew came from the core of his being, and made you want to laugh that hard with him," she told the Austin American-Statesman. "The world needed a Tony Cross.’’
And the world needed a “Big Mike” Lefiti, a UPS driver gunned down at a depot in San Francisco by a coworker who also shot four others, killing two of them.
Lefiti was a delivery man out of Frank Capra’s fonder dreams: honking if he saw you walking down the street, trading gossip, offering to pick up lunch. A Bank of America security guard called the burly Samoan “everybody’s big brother.’’
Nelson Barry, a lawyer on Lefiti’s route, recalled how he’d greet people by name and ask about their families -- including pets. “No one can fill the hole he left,’’ Barry said.
Sandy Casey. (Photo11: Handout, AP)
And the world needed a Sandy Casey, a Manhattan Beach, Calif., special ed teacher who was killed with 58 others in Las Vegas when a gunman fired from a high-rise hotel into a concert crowd across the street.
She had the knack, hard to define and harder not to admire, of getting through to students. That included a girl who’d previously spoken barely a word. Casey’s reward: a seashell her student decorated with glitter.
“Now I have a gap to fill,’’ Casey’s fiance, Chris Willemse, observed at her funeral. “That gap will never be filled.’’
That lament spans the generations. “Who’s going to play UNO with us now?’’ asked the granddaughter of Terry Andres, 62, of Virginia Beach. He was killed at Fort Lauderdale airport by a man with a history of mental illness who flew in from Alaska and shot 11 people, killing five.
Who will lead the way like James Dunlop, “the glue that held all the friends together … the successful one you wanted to be like,’’ his friend Jonathan Harvey told the University of Texas-Dallas Mercury. “He made you feel you need to work harder, because he would go out and buy a house, and all of the rest of us would be like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re supposed to do that as adults now.’’’
Dunlop was another of those killed at the Plano party. He was 29.
Who will fill Benson Louie’s position in nine-man volleyball? Louie, 50, one of the slain San Francisco UPS men, excelled in a version of the game invented in Holyoke, Mass., in 1895. Missionaries took volleyball to China, where it evolved (lower net, larger court, more players) into a version that was brought here by Chinese immigrants.
Since players don’t rotate in nine-man, their skills become more specialized. As a defender on the left side of the back line, Louie was expert at digging -- keeping the ball in the air -- even if it meant diving on the asphalt. “He was known for his bleeding knees,’’ recalled his friend, Henry Lam.
A decade ago interest in the sport was waning in the Chinese-American community. So Louie and Lam started a program with a few high school kids; now the city has seven teams, some of which play around the nation and world.
Who will ring the cowbell at Anchorage hockey games like Dorene Anderson, former treasurer of the group that calls itself the Cowbell Crew? She died in the Las Vegas shooting. She was 49.
Her many friends remembered her at a vigil outside the local hockey arena in a way she would have appreciated: They rang their cowbells.
Missing people, missing places
The Rothschild, Wis., branch of Marathon Savings Bank lost its beloved manager when Diane “Dee-Dee” Look was gunned down by a man who also killed one of her tellers. She was 67.
She had a nice word for everyone. One customer recalls that if Look saw her car in the drive-thru lane, she’d ask her to roll her window down so she could say hi to the woman’s handicapped daughter. And she always had treats for dogs, such as Antoinette Krzensinski’s pooch, Patches.
When she learned of the shooting, Jami Miller thought of how Look had helped her children set up their savings accounts, and had patiently counted the change from their piggy banks. Without her, she wrote on a funeral website, “something as ordinary as banking will no longer be the same.’’
Nor will a visit to the public library in Clovis, New Mexico, where an angry high school student killed two librarians and wounded four other people.
Children’s librarian Krissie Carter, 48, was “the smiling face my daughter always looked forward to seeing,’’ according to a parent, John Mead.
She’d start her toddlers group with a song called “Goood Moooorning, Have a Happy Day!’’ Susana Mendoza, a mother whose kid was in the group, still finds herself humming it, and thinking of Miss Krissie.
Some memories offer consolation: Caleb Edwards, 25, a Plano casualty, laughing at a bad joke because he didn’t want to hurt your feelings; Michelle MacFayden, 55, killed in a shooting spree in Rancho Tehoma, Calif., riding a tricycle around the office.
Sometimes the irony is too bitter. Kevin Lawson survived service with the 82nd Airborne in the First Gulf War, only to be shot to death, along with four others, by a former co-worker at an RV awning manufacturer where he worked outside Orlando. He was 46.
This is Peggy Warden, she was a Sunday school teacher and threw herself in front of her grandson Zach Poston and was fatally shot as she protected the 18-year-old, who then shielded a child who had been hiding under a pew. (Photo11: Jimmy Stevens, via AP)
In Texas, a ‘wicked scheme’
It’s said over and over after each shooting. The victim “would do anything for you.’’
Usually, it’s figuratively true. Leisa Kugler recalls the time some branches fell on her roof, and she was too scared of heights to clear them herself. So she called her older sister, Peggy Lynn Warden, who climbed up instead.
Sometimes, it’s literally true. Warden’s 18-year-old grandson said she shielded his body with hers from gunfire in the invasion of First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The grandson lived; the grandmother died, along with 24 others, one of whom was pregnant. Warden was 56.
Bryan Holcombe, a 60-year-old lay minister, was scheduled to preach that day. He was born to preach; according to family lore, his first word was “God,” and his first sentence “see the light.’’
He met his wife Karla in high school. One day, when a student group was raising money by selling roses, he had one sent to her in each class.
He grew into a burly man with a white beard. His usual Sunday church outfit consisted of jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Bryan and Karla sat in the fifth pew from the front, on the left.
He earned his living making tarps for livestock trailers, but his passion was scripture. He favored the Holman Christian Standard Bible, and would debate its merits with another congregant, Stormy Choate, who preferred the King James translation.
On Oct. 8, before reading the day’s scriptural passage, he told the congregation how “spirit-filled’’ the church had felt the previous Sunday night during a performance by a women’s gospel singing group. Then, he said, he woke the next day to learn what had happened in Las Vegas.
He said the problem was not God’s design but the human heart: “Man gets involved, and our wicked nature takes over.’’ Citing the Book of Proverbs, he said the Lord hates seven things, including “a heart that plots wicked schemes.’’
He was going to preach Nov. 5 because the pastor was away. But someone entered the church behind him. Someone with a heart that plotted wicked schemes. Someone with a gun.
Seconds later he was dead, as were seven other members of his extended family, including the one to whom he once sent roses.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2AiWms0The Spanish State under Francisco Franco did not officially join the Axis Powers during World War II, although Franco wrote to Hitler offering to join the war on 19 June 1940. Franco's regime supplied Germany with the Blue Division to fight specifically on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, in recognition of the heavy assistance Spain had received from Germany and Italy in the Spanish Civil War. Despite ideological sympathy and allowing volunteers to serve on the Eastern Front, Franco later stationed field armies in the Pyrenees to deter a German occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish policy frustrated Axis proposals that would have encouraged Franco to take British-controlled Gibraltar.[1] Franco considered joining the war and invading Gibraltar in 1940 after the Fall of France, but knew his armed forces would not be able to defend the Canary Islands and Spanish Morocco from a British attack.[2]
Domestic politics [ edit ]
During World War II, Spain was governed by an autocratic government,[3] but despite Franco's own pro-Axis leanings and debt of gratitude to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, the government was divided between Germanophiles and Anglophiles. When the war started, Juan Beigbeder Atienza, an Anglophile, was the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The rapid German advance in Europe convinced Franco to replace him with Ramón Serrano Súñer, Franco's brother-in-law and a strong Germanophile (18 October 1940). After the Allied victories in North Africa, Franco changed tack again, appointing Francisco Gómez-Jordana Sousa, sympathetic to the British, as minister in September 1942. Another influential anglophile was the Duke of Alba, Spain's ambassador in London.
Volunteers [ edit ]
The main part of Spain's involvement in the war was through volunteers. They fought for both sides, largely reflecting the allegiances of the civil war.
Spanish volunteers at an official act
Spanish volunteers in Axis service [ edit ]
Although Spanish caudillo Francisco Franco did not officially bring Spain into World War II on the side of the Axis, he permitted volunteers to join the German Army on the clear and guaranteed condition they would fight against Bolshevism (Soviet Communism) on the Eastern Front, and not against the western Allies. In this manner, he could keep Spain at peace with the western Allies, while repaying German support during the Spanish Civil War and providing an outlet for the strong anti-Communist sentiments of many Spanish nationalists. Spanish foreign minister Ramón Serrano Súñer suggested raising a volunteer corps, and at the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, Franco sent an official offer of help to Berlin.
Hitler approved the use of Spanish volunteers on 24 June 1941. Volunteers flocked to recruiting offices in all the metropolitan areas of Spain. Cadets from the officer training school in Zaragoza volunteered in particularly large numbers. Initially, the Spanish government was prepared to send about 4,000 men, but soon realized that there were more than enough volunteers to fill an entire division: – the Blue Division or División Azul under Agustín Muñoz Grandes – including an air force squadron – the Blue Squadron, 18,104 men in all, with 2,612 officers and 15,492 soldiers.
The Blue Division was trained in Germany before serving in the Siege of Leningrad, and notably at the Battle of Krasny Bor, where General Infantes' 6,000 Spanish soldiers threw back some 30,000 Soviet troops. The American ambassador called it a dubious distinction, since no other free country was attacking the Allies. In October 1943, under severe diplomatic pressure, the Blue Division was ordered home leaving a token force until March 1944. In all, about 45,000 Spanish served on the Eastern Front, mostly committed volunteers, and around 4,500 died. Joseph Stalin's desire to retaliate against Franco by making an Allied invasion of Spain the first order of business at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, was not supported by Harry S. Truman and Winston Churchill. War weary and unwilling to continue the conflict, Truman and Churchill persuaded Stalin to instead settle for a full trade embargo against Spain.
Memorial of the Blue Division at La Almudena Cemetery, Madrid
372 members of the Blue Division, the Blue Legion, or volunteers of the Spanische-Freiwilligen Kompanie der SS 101 were taken prisoner by the victorious Red Army; 286 of these men were kept in captivity until 2 April 1954, when they returned to Spain aboard the ship Semiramis, supplied by the International Red Cross.[4]
Spanish volunteers in Allied service [ edit ]
After their defeat in the Spanish Civil War, numbers of Republican veterans and civilians went into exile in France; the French Republic interned them in refugee camps, such as Camp Gurs in southern France. To improve their conditions, many joined the French Foreign Legion at the start of World War II, making up a sizeable proportion of it. Around sixty thousand joined the French Resistance, mostly as guerrillas, with some also continuing the fight against Francisco Franco.[5] Several thousand more joined the Free French Forces and fought against the Axis Powers. Some sources have claimed that as many as 2,000 served in General Leclerc's Second French Division, many of them from the former Durruti Column.[note 1]
The 9th Armoured Company comprised almost entirely battle-hardened Spanish veterans; it became the first Allied military unit to enter Paris upon its liberation in August, 1944, where it met up with a large number of Spanish Maquis fighting alongside French resistance fighters. Furthermore, 1,000 Spanish Republicans served in the 13th Half-brigade of the French Foreign Legion.[6]
In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union received former Communist Spanish leaders and child evacuees from Republican families. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, many, such as communist General Enrique Líster, joined the Red Army. According to Beevor, 700 Spanish Republicans served in the Red Army and another 700 operated as partisans behind the German lines.[6] Individual Spaniards, such as the double-agent Juan Pujol García (code name GARBO), also worked for the Allied cause.
Diplomacy [ edit ]
From the very beginning of World War II, Spain favoured the Axis Powers. Apart from ideology, Spain had a debt to Germany of $212 million for supplies of matériel during the Civil War. Indeed, in June 1940, after the Fall of France, the Spanish Ambassador to Berlin had presented a memorandum in which Franco declared he was "ready under certain conditions to enter the war on the side of Germany and Italy". Franco had cautiously decided to enter the war on the Axis side in June 1940, and to prepare his people for war, an anti-British and anti-French campaign was launched in the Spanish media that demanded French Morocco, Cameroon and the return of Gibraltar.[7] On 19 June 1940, Franco pressed along a message to Hitler saying he wanted to enter the war, but Hitler was annoyed at Franco's demand for the French colony of Cameroon, which had been German before World War I, and which Hitler was planning on taking back.[8]
At first Adolf Hitler did not encourage Franco's offer, as he was convinced of eventual victory. In August 1940, when Hitler became serious about having Spain enter the war, a major problem that emerged was the German demand for air and naval bases in Spanish Morocco and the Canaries, which Franco was completely opposed to.[9] After the victory over France, Hitler had revived Plan Z (shelved in September 1939) for having a huge fleet with the aim of fighting the United States, and he wanted bases in Morocco and the Canary islands for the planned showdown with America.[10] The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote: "The fact that Germans were willing to forgo Spain's participation in the war rather than abandon their plans for naval bases on and off the coast of Northwest Africa surely demonstrates the centrality of this latter issue to Hitler as he looked forward to naval war with the United States".[10] In September, when the Royal Air Force had demonstrated its resilience in defeating the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, Hitler promised Franco help in return for its active intervention. This had become part of a strategy to forestall Allied intervention in north-west Africa. Hitler promised that "Germany would do everything in its power to help Spain" and would recognise Spanish claims to French territory in Morocco, in exchange for a share of Moroccan raw materials. Franco responded warmly, but without any firm commitment. Falangist media agitated for irredentism, claiming for Spain the portions of Catalonia and the Basque Country that were still under French administration.[11][12]
Hitler and Franco met only once at Hendaye, France on 23 October 1940 to fix the details of an alliance. By this time, the advantages had become less clear for either side. Franco asked for too much from Hitler. In exchange for entering the war alongside the alliance of Germany and Italy, Franco, among many things, demanded heavy fortification of the Canary Islands as well as large quantities of grain, fuel, armed vehicles, military aircraft and other armaments. In response to Franco's nearly impossible demands, Hitler threatened Franco with a possible annexation of Spanish territory by Vichy France. At the end of the day, no agreement was reached. A few days later in Germany, Hitler would famously tell Mussolini, "I prefer to have three or four of my own teeth pulled out than to speak to that man again!" It is subject to historical debate whether Franco overplayed his hand by demanding too much from Hitler for Spanish entry into the war, or if he deliberately stymied the German dictator by setting the price for his alliance unrealistically high, knowing that Hitler would refuse his demands and thus save Spain from entering another devastating war.
Spain relied upon oil supplies from the United States, and the US had agreed to listen to British recommendations on this. As a result, the Spanish were told
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–30: St. Cloud–Grand Forks
Nos. 31–32: Sandstone-Willmar
Nos. 35–36: Duluth-Grand Forks
Nos. 43–42: Billings-Sweetgrass
Nos. 43–42: Billings-Great Falls local (GN's only RDC operation)
Nos. 47–48–49–50: Morris-Browns Valley
Nos. 53–54: Watertown-Sioux Falls
Nos. 61–60: Minneapolis-Hutchinson
Nos. 99–100: Fargo-Minot via Grand Forks
Nos. 105–106: Sauk Center-Bemidji
Nos. 131–132: Crookston-Noyes
Nos. 135–136: Crookston-Warroad
Nos. 161–162: Garretson-Sioux City
Nos. 185–186: Willmar-Huron via Benson
Nos. 197–198: Breckenridge-Larimore
Nos. 201–202: Grand Forks-Larimore
Nos. 215–215: Neilhart-Great Falls
Nos. 219–220: Berthold-Crosby
Nos. 221–222: Havre-Great Falls Nos. 223–224: Williston-Havre
Nos. 235–236: Havre-Great Falls Western Star connection (later used GN's only RDC)
connection (later used GN's only RDC) Nos. 237–238: Havre-Great Falls Empire Builder connection
connection Nos. 243–244–245–246–247–248–249–250: Columbia Falls-Kalispell
Nos. 253–254: Oroville-Wenatchee
Nos. 255–256: Nelson, BC-Spokane
Nos. 285–286: Snowden-Richey via Fairview
Nos. 287–288: Watford City-Fairview
Nos. 289-290: Williston, Bainville-Scobey
Nos. 291–292: Fairview-Sidney
Nos. 301–302: Fergus Falls-Pelican Rapids
Nos. 317–318: Sioux Falls-Yankton
Nos. 359–358: Vancouver, BC-Seattle
Nos. 365–366: Great Falls-Augusta
Nos. 367–368: Lewiston-Moccasin
Nos. 371-372: Williston, Bainville-Opheim (mixed)
Nos. 373–374: Great Falls-Pendroy
Nos. 401–402: Seattle-Portland (four months per year) – joint Coast Pool train with Northern Pacific (NP) and Union Pacific Railroad (UP)
Nos. 459–460: Seattle-Portland – joint Coast Pool train with NP and UP
Rails to trails [ edit ]
In addition to the Stone Arch Bridge, parts of the railway has been turned into pedestrian and bicycle trails. In Minnesota, the Cedar Lake Trail is built in areas that were formerly railroad yards for the Great Northern Railway and the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway. Also in Minnesota, the Dakota Rail Trail is built on 26.5 miles of the railroad right-of-way. Further west, the Iron Goat Trail in Washington follows the late 19th-century route of the Great Northern Railway through the cascades and gets its name from the railway's logo.[21][22]
See also [ edit ]This article is about the 1995 James Bond film. For other uses, see Goldeneye (disambiguation)
GoldenEye is a 1995 spy film, the seventeenth in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions, and the first to star Pierce Brosnan as the fictional MI6 officer James Bond. It was directed by Martin Campbell and is the first in the series not to utilise any story elements from the works of novelist Ian Fleming.[2] The story was conceived and written by Michael France, with later collaboration by other writers. In the film, Bond fights to prevent an ex-MI6 agent, gone rogue, from using a satellite against London to cause a global financial meltdown.
The film was released after a six-year hiatus in the series caused by legal disputes, during which Timothy Dalton resigned from the role of James Bond and was replaced by Pierce Brosnan. M was also recast, with actress Judi Dench becoming the first woman to portray the character, replacing Robert Brown. The role of Miss Moneypenny was also recast, with Caroline Bliss being replaced by Samantha Bond; Desmond Llewelyn was the only actor to reprise his role, as Q. It was the first Bond film made after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which provided a background for the plot.
The film accumulated a worldwide gross of US$350.7 million, considerably better than Dalton's films, without taking inflation into account.[3] It received positive reviews, with critics viewing Brosnan as a definite improvement over his predecessor.[4][5][6] It also received award nominations for "Best Achievement in Special Effects" and "Best Sound" from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.[7]
The name "GoldenEye" pays homage to James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming. While working for British Naval Intelligence as a lieutenant commander, Fleming liaised with the Naval Intelligence Division to monitor developments in Spain after the Spanish Civil War in an operation codenamed Operation Goldeneye. Fleming used the name of this operation for his estate in Oracabessa, Jamaica.
Plot [ edit ]
In 1986 in Arkhangelsk, USSR, MI6 agents James Bond and Alec Trevelyan infiltrate a chemical weapons facility and plant explosives. Trevelyan is captured and executed by Colonel Arkady Grigorovich Ourumov, but Bond flees as the facility explodes.
Nine years later in 1995, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Bond arrives in Monte Carlo. He is following Xenia Onatopp, a member of the Janus crime syndicate, who has formed a suspicious relationship with Charles Farrel, a Canadian Navy admiral. Onatopp crushes Admiral Farrel to death with her thighs during sex. Ourumov, who is also working with Janus, steals Admiral Farrel's credentials and uses them to board a French Navy destroyer with Onatopp where they steal a Eurocopter Tiger helicopter. Ourumov and Onatopp fly the helicopter to a bunker in Severnaya, Siberia, where they massacre the staff and steal the control disk for the GoldenEye satellites, two Soviet electromagnetic pulse weapons from the Cold War. They program the first GoldenEye (Petya) to destroy the complex and disable incoming Russian Air Force fighters, and escape with kidnapped computer programmer Boris Grishenko. Natalya Simonova, the lone survivor, contacts Grishenko and arranges to meet him in St. Petersburg, where he betrays her to Janus.
In London, M assigns Bond to investigate the attack. He flies to St. Petersburg to meet CIA operative Jack Wade, who suggests that Bond meet with Valentin Zukovsky, a former KGB agent-turned-gangster and business rival of Janus. Zukovsky arranges a meeting between Bond and Janus. Onatopp surprises Bond at the Grand Hotel Europe and attempts to seduce and kill him, but he overpowers her. She takes him to Janus, who reveals himself as Trevelyan; he and Ourumov faked the death at Arkhangelsk. though he was badly scarred by the explosion. A descendant of the Cossack clans who collaborated with the Axis Powers, Trevelyan had vowed revenge after the British betrayed his people, which led to his parent's suicide. Just as Bond is about to shoot Trevelyan, Bond is shot with a tranquilizer dart.
Bond awakens, tied up with Natalya in the helicopter, which has been programmed to self-destruct. They escape but are captured and transported to the Russian military archives, where Minister of Defence Dimitri Mishkin interrogates them. Just as Natalya reveals the existence of a second satellite and Ourumov's involvement in the Siberian massacre, Ourumov arrives and kills Mishkin. Intending to frame Bond for the murder, he calls the guards, but Bond and Natalya escape. In the ensuing firefight, Natalya is captured. Bond steals a tank and pursues Ourumov through the streets of St. Petersburg to Trevelyan's missile train, where he kills Ourumov. Trevelyan escapes and locks Bond in the train with Natalya, setting it to self-destruct. As Bond cuts through the floor with his laser watch, Natalya triangulates Grishenko's satellite dish to Cuba. They escape just before the train explodes.
Bond and Natalya meet Wade in the Florida Keys and borrow his plane for the trip to Cuba, where they make love. They search for GoldenEye's satellite dish the next day, and are shot down in the jungle. Onatopp rappels from a helicopter and attacks Bond. After a fight ensues, he shoots the helicopter pilot, sending the vehicle into a spin which snares Onatopp between tree trunks and crushes her to death. Bond and Natalya watch water draining out of a lake, uncovering the satellite dish. They infiltrate the control station, and Bond is captured. Trevelyan reveals his plan to rob the Bank of England before erasing all of its financial records with the second GoldenEye (Misha), concealing the theft and destroying Britain's economy.
Natalya programs the satellite to initiate atmospheric re-entry and destroy itself. As Trevelyan captures Natalya and orders Grishenko to save the satellite, Grishenko unwittingly triggers an explosion with Bond's pen grenade (a gadget received earlier from Q), which allows Bond to escape to the antenna cradle. He sabotages the antenna To create a System Overload, preventing Grishenko from regaining control of the satellite and then settle the score with 006. Bond and Trevelyan fight on the antenna's suspended platform, which finishes with Bond holding a dangling Trevelyan by his foot. Bond releases Trevelyan, who plummets into the dish. Seconds later the cradle explodes, killing Trevelyan and Grishenko. Natalya commandeers a helicopter and rescues Bond. It drops them in a field, where they are rescued by Wade and a team of U.S. Marines.
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
Prelude [ edit ]
Following the release of Licence to Kill in July 1989, pre-production work for the seventeenth film in the James Bond series, the third to star Timothy Dalton (fulfilling his three-film contract), began in May 1990. A poster for the then-upcoming movie was even featured on the Carlton Hotel during the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. In August, The Sunday Times reported that producer Albert R. Broccoli had parted company with writer Richard Maibaum, who had worked on the scripts of all but three Bond films so far, and director John Glen, responsible for the previous five instalments of the series. Broccoli listed among the possible directors John Landis, Ted Kotcheff, and John Byrum.[8] Broccoli's stepson Michael G. Wilson contributed a script, and Wiseguy co-producer Alfonse Ruggiero Jr. was hired to rewrite.[9] Production was set to start in 1990 in Hong Kong for a release in late 1991.[10]
Dalton would declare in a 2010 interview that the script was ready and "we were talking directors" before the project entered development hell caused by legal problems between Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, parent company of the series' distributor United Artists, and Broccoli's Danjaq, owners of the Bond film rights.[11] In 1990, MGM/UA was to be sold for $1.5 billion to Qintex, an Australian-American financial services company that had begun making television broadcast and entertainment purchases. When Qintex couldn't provide a $50 million letter of credit, the deal fell apart. A French company called Pathé Entertainment (unrelated to the French studio Pathé) quickly moved in to buy MGM/UA for $1.2 billion and merged the companies to create MGM-Pathé Communications. Pathé CEO Giancarlo Parretti intended to sell off the distribution rights of the studio's catalogue so he could collect advance payments to finance the buyout. This included international broadcasting rights to the 007 library at cut-rate prices, leading Danjaq to sue,[12] alleging the licensing violated the Bond distribution agreements the company made with United Artists in 1962, while negating Danjaq a share of the profits.[13] Countersuits were filed. When asked what he would do following resolution of the lawsuits, Dalton told Broccoli that he would likely not continue in the role.[14]
Paretti's behavior led to bankrupting of MGM-Pathé and additional lawsuits eventually resulted in a foreclosure by financial backer Crédit Lyonnais in 1992. The Bond rights lawsuits were settled in December 1992, and the renamed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, now run by a Crédit Lyonnais subsidiary, began to explore further development of Bond 17 with Danjaq in 1993. Dalton was still Broccoli's choice to play Bond, but the star's original seven-year contract with Danjaq expired in 1993. Dalton has stated that the delay of his third film effectively ended the contract in 1990.[14][15]
Pre-production and writing [ edit ]
In May 1993, MGM announced a seventeenth James Bond film was back in the works, to be based on a screenplay by Michael France.[16] With Broccoli's health deteriorating (he died seven months after the release of GoldenEye), his daughter Barbara Broccoli described him as taking "a bit of a back seat" in film's production.[17] Barbara and Michael G. Wilson took the lead roles in production while Albert Broccoli oversaw the production of GoldenEye as a consulting producer, credited as "presenter".[18][19] Broccoli reached out to Dalton to ask again if he would come back and now found Dalton open to the idea.[14]
In August 1993, France had turned in his first draft, and continued to work on the script. In an interview around the same time, Dalton stated that production was set to begin in January or February 1994.[20] In further discussion with Broccoli, Dalton expressed excitement over taking the best elements of his previous two films and combining them as a basis for one final film. Broccoli stressed that, after the long gap without a film, Dalton couldn't come back and just do a single film but needed to return for multiple films.[14] Despite France's screenplay being completed by January, production was pushed back with no concrete start. In April 1994, Dalton officially resigned from the role.[21][22] In a 2014 interview, Dalton revealed that he agreed with Broccoli's expectation but couldn't commit to appearing in four or five more films.[14]
This was Pierce Brosnan's first appearance as Bond
Further work was done on the screenplay throughout 1994. Jeffrey Caine was brought in to rewrite France's script.[23] Caine kept many of France's ideas but added the prologue prior to the credits. Kevin Wade polished the script and Bruce Feirstein added the finishing touches.[24] In the film, the writing credit was shared by Caine and Feirstein, while France was credited with only the story, an arrangement he felt was unfair, particularly as he believed the additions made were not an improvement on his original version.[25] Wade did not receive an official credit, but was acknowledged in the naming of Jack Wade, the CIA character he created.
To replace Dalton, the producers chose Pierce Brosnan, who had been prevented from succeeding Roger Moore in 1986 because of his contract to star in Remington Steele. He was introduced to the public at a press conference in June 1994. Before negotiating with Brosnan, Mel Gibson, Hugh Grant, and Liam Neeson passed on the role. Paul McGann was the studio's original choice for it. He would have been cast as Bond only if Brosnan had turned down the role. Brosnan was paid $1.2 million for the film, out of a total budget of $60 million.[26] Judi Dench, an English actress, was cast as M replacing Robert Brown, making this the first film of the series featuring a female M. The decision is widely believed to be inspired by Stella Rimington becoming head of MI5 in 1992.[27][28] John Woo was approached as the director, and turned down the opportunity, but said he was honored by the offer.[29] The producers then chose New Zealander Martin Campbell as the director. Brosnan later described Campbell as "warrior-like in his take on the piece" and that "there was a huge passion there on both our parts".[30]
While the story was not based on a work by Ian Fleming, the title GoldenEye traces its origins to the name of Fleming's Jamaican estate where he wrote the Bond novels.[31] Fleming gave a number of origins for the name of his estate, including Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye[32] and Operation Goldeneye, a contingency plan Fleming himself developed during World War II in case of a Nazi invasion through Spain.[33][34]
Although released only six years later than Licence to Kill, world politics had changed dramatically in the interim. GoldenEye was the first James Bond film to be produced since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, and there was doubt over the character's relevance in the modern world.[35] Some in the film industry felt it would be "futile" for the Bond series to make a comeback, and that it was best left as "an icon of the past".[36] The producers even thought of new concepts for the series, such as a period piece set in the 1960s, a female 007, or a black James Bond. Ultimately, they chose to return to the basics of the series, not following the sensitive and caring Bond of the Dalton films or the political correctness that started to permeate the decade.[26] The film came to be seen as a successful revitalisation, and it effectively adapted the series for the 1990s.[5] One of GoldenEye's innovations includes the casting of a female M. In the film, the new M quickly establishes her authority, remarking that Bond is a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" and a "relic of the Cold War". This is an early indication that Bond is portrayed as far less tempestuous than Timothy Dalton's Bond from 1989.[37]
Filming [ edit ]
The film's climactic scenes were filmed at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico
Principal photography for the film began on 16 January 1995 and continued until 2 June.[38] The producers were unable to film at Pinewood Studios, the usual location for Bond films, because it had been reserved for First Knight.[39] Instead, an old Rolls-Royce factory at Leavesden Aerodrome in Hertfordshire was converted into a new studio, dubbed Leavesden Studios.[40] This process is shown on the 2006 DVD's special features.
The bungee jump was filmed at the Contra Dam (also known as the Verzasca or Locarno Dam)[41] in Ticino, Switzerland. The casino scenes and the Tiger helicopter's demonstration were shot in Monte Carlo. Reference footage for the tank chase was shot on location in St. Petersburg and matched to the studio at Leavesden. The climactic scenes on the satellite dish were shot at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.[42] The actual MI6 headquarters were used for external views of M's office.[43] Some of the scenes in St. Petersburg were actually shot in London – the Epsom Downs Racecourse doubled as the airport – to reduce expenses and security concerns, as the second unit sent to Russia required bodyguards.[44]
The French Navy provided full use of the frigate FS La Fayette and their newest helicopter, the Eurocopter Tiger to the film's production team. The French government also allowed the use of Navy logos as part of the promotional campaign for it. However, the producers had a dispute with the French Ministry of Defence over Brosnan's opposition to French nuclear weapons testing and his involvement with Greenpeace; as a result, the French premiere of the film was cancelled.[45]
The sequences involving the armoured train were filmed on the Nene Valley Railway, near Peterborough in the UK. The train was composed of a British Rail Class 20 diesel-electric locomotive and a pair of BR Mk 1 coaches, all three heavily disguised to resemble a Soviet armoured train.[46][47]
Effects [ edit ]
GoldenEye's opening title sequence featured a woman destroying the opening title sequence featured a woman destroying the hammer and sickle
The film was the last one of special effects supervisor Derek Meddings, to whom it was dedicated. Meddings' major contribution was miniatures.[48] It was also the first Bond film to use computer generated imagery. Among the model effects are most external shots of Severnaya, the scene where Janus' train crashes into the tank, and the lake which hides the satellite dish, since the producers could not find a round lake in Puerto Rico. The climax in the satellite dish used scenes in Arecibo, a model built by Meddings' team and scenes shot with stuntmen in Britain.[44]
Stunt car coordinator Rémy Julienne described the car chase between the Aston Martin DB5 and the Ferrari F355 as between "a perfectly shaped, old and vulnerable vehicle and a racecar." The stunt had to be meticulously planned as the cars are vastly different. Nails had to be attached to the F355 tyres to make it skid, and during one take of the sliding vehicles, the two cars collided.[49] The largest stunt sequence in the film was the tank chase, which took around six weeks to film, partly on location in St. Petersburg and partly on the old de Havilland runway at Leavesden.[50] A Russian T-54/55 tank, on loan from the East England Military Museum, was modified with the addition of fake explosive reactive armour panels.[38] To avoid destroying the pavement on the city streets of St. Petersburg, the steel off-road tracks of the T-54/55 were replaced with the rubber-shoed tracks from a British Chieftain tank.[44] The T-55 Tank used in the film is now on permanent display at Old Buckenham Airport where the East England Military Museum is based.[51]
For the confrontation between Bond and Trevelyan inside the antenna cradle, director Campbell decided to take inspiration from Bond's fight with Red Grant in From Russia with Love. Brosnan and Bean did all the stunts themselves, except for one take where one is thrown against the wall. Brosnan injured his hand while filming the extending ladder sequence, making producers delay his scenes and film the ones in Severnaya earlier.[44]
The opening 220 m (720 ft) bungee jump at Arkhangelsk, shot at the Contra Dam in Switzerland and performed by Wayne Michaels, was voted the best movie stunt of all time in a 2002 Sky Movies poll, and set a record for the highest bungee jump off a fixed structure.[52][53] The ending of the pre-credits sequence with Bond jumping after the aeroplane features Jacques Malnuit riding the motorcycle to the edge and jumping, and B.J. Worth diving after the plane – which was a working aircraft, with Worth adding that part of the difficulty of the stunt was the kerosene striking his face.[54]
The fall of Communism in Russia is the main focus of the opening titles, designed by Daniel Kleinman (who took over from Maurice Binder after his death in 1991). They show the collapse and destruction of several structures associated with the Soviet Union, such as the red star, statues of Communist leaders—notably Joseph Stalin—and the hammer and sickle. In an interview, Kleinman said they were meant to be "a kind of story telling sequence" showing that "what was happening in Communist countries was Communism was falling down".[55] According to producer Michael G. Wilson, some Communist parties protested against "Socialist symbols being destroyed not by governments, but by bikini-clad women", especially certain Indian Communist parties,[56][57][58] which threatened to boycott the film.[44]
Product placement [ edit ]
The film was the first one bound by BMW's three-picture deal,[59] so the producers were offered BMW's latest roadster, the BMW Z3. It was featured in the film months before its release, and a limited edition "007 model" sold out within a day of being available to order. As part of the car's marketing strategy, several Z3's were used to drive journalists from a complimentary meal at the Rainbow Room restaurant to its premiere at Radio City Music Hall.[60]
For the film, a convertible Z3 is equipped with the usual Q refinements, including a self-destruct feature and Stinger missiles behind the headlights. The Z3 does not have much screen time and none of the gadgets are used, which Martin Campbell attributed to the deal with BMW coming in the last stages of production.[44] The Z3's appearance in the film is thought to be the most successful promotion through product placement in 1995.[61] Ten years later, The Hollywood Reporter listed it as one of the most successful product placements in recent years. The article quoted Mary Lou Galician, head of media analysis and criticism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, as saying that the news coverage of Bond's switch from Aston Martin to BMW "generated hundreds of millions of dollars of media exposure for the movie and all of its marketing partners."[62]
In addition, all computers in the film were provided by IBM, and in some scenes (such as the pen grenade scene towards the end), the OS/2 Warp splash screen can be seen on computer monitors.
A modified Omega Seamaster Quartz Professional watch features as a major plot device several times in the film. It is shown to contain a remote detonator and a laser. This was the first time Bond was shown to be wearing a watch by Omega, and he has since worn Omega watches in every subsequent production.[63][64]
Music [ edit ]
The theme song, "GoldenEye", was written by Bono and the Edge, and was performed by Tina Turner.[65] As the producers did not collaborate with Bono or the Edge, the film score did not incorporate any of the theme song's melodies, as was the case in previous James Bond films.[66] Swedish group Ace of Base had also written a proposed theme song, but label Arista Records pulled the band out of the project fearing the negative impact in case the film flopped. The song was then rewritten as their single "The Juvenile".[67]
The soundtrack was composed and performed by Éric Serra. Prolific Bond composer John Barry said that despite an offer by Barbara Broccoli, he turned it down.[68] Serra's score has been criticised: Richard von Busack, in Metro, wrote that it was "more appropriate for a ride on an elevator than a ride on a roller coaster",[69] and Filmtracks said Serra "failed completely in his attempt to tie GoldenEye to the franchise's past."[70] The end credits song, Serra's "The Experience of Love", was based on a short cue Serra had originally written for Luc Besson's Léon one year earlier.
Later John Altman provided the music for the tank chase in St. Petersburg. Serra's original track for that sequence can still be found on the soundtrack as "A Pleasant Drive in St. Petersburg".[71] Serra composed and performed a number of synthesiser tracks, including the version of the "James Bond Theme" that plays during the gun barrel sequence,[72] while Altman and David Arch provided the more traditional symphonic music.[73]
Release and reception [ edit ]
The film premiered on 13 November 1995, at Radio City Music Hall, and went on general release in the United States on 17 November 1995.[74] The UK premiere, attended by Prince Charles, followed on 22 November at the Odeon Leicester Square, with general release two days later.[75] Brosnan boycotted the French premiere to support Greenpeace's protest against the French nuclear testing program.[76]
The film earned over $26 million during its opening across 2,667 cinemas in the United States. Its worldwide sales were around the equivalent of $350 million.[77] It had the fourth-highest worldwide gross of all films in 1995[78] and was the most successful Bond film since Moonraker, taking inflation into account.[3]
The film was edited to be guaranteed a PG-13 rating from the MPAA and a 12 rating from the BBFC. The cuts included the visible bullet impact to Trevelyan's head when he is shot in the prologue, several additional deaths during the sequence in which Onatopp guns down the workers at the Severnaya station, more explicit footage and violent behaviour in the Admiral's death, extra footage of Onatopp's death, and Bond giving her a rabbit punch in the car.[40] In 2006, the film was remastered and re-edited for the James Bond Ultimate Edition DVD in which the BBFC cuts were restored, causing the rating to be changed to 15. However, the original MPAA edits still remain.[79]
Reviews [ edit ]
The critical reception of the film was mostly positive. Film review collection website Rotten Tomatoes holds it at a 78% approval rating,[80] while a similar site, Metacritic, holds it at 65%.[81] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale.[82]
In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave the film 3 stars out of 4, and said Brosnan's Bond was "somehow more sensitive, more vulnerable, more psychologically complete" than the previous ones, also commenting on Bond's "loss of innocence" since previous films.[83] James Berardinelli described Brosnan as "a decided improvement over his immediate predecessor" with a "flair for wit to go along with his natural charm", but added that "fully one-quarter of Goldeneye is momentum-killing padding."[84]
Several reviewers lauded M's appraisal of Bond as a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur",[5][85][86] with Todd McCarthy in Variety saying the film "breathes fresh creative and commercial life" into the series.[5] John Puccio of DVD Town said that it was "an eye- and ear-pleasing, action-packed entry in the Bond series" and that the film gave Bond "a bit of humanity, too".[87] Ian Nathan of Empire said that it "revamps that indomitable British spirit" and that the Die Hard movies "don't even come close to 007". Tom Sonne of the Sunday Times considered it the best Bond film since The Spy Who Loved Me. Jose Arroyo of Sight & Sound considered the greatest success of it was in modernising the series.[88]
The film was also ranked high in Bond-related lists. IGN chose it as the fifth-best movie,[89] while Entertainment Weekly ranked it eighth,[90] and Norman Wilner of MSN as ninth.[91] ET also voted Xenia Onatopp as the sixth-most memorable Bond Girl,[92] while IGN ranked Natalya as seventh in a similar list.[93]
However, the film received several negative reviews. Richard Schickel of Time wrote that after "a third of a century's hard use", Bond's conventions survived on "wobbly knees",[94] while in Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman thought the series had "entered a near-terminal state of exhaustion."[95] Dragan Antulov said that the film had a predictable series of scenes,[96] and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said that it was "a middle-aged entity anxious to appear trendy at all costs".[97] David Eimer of Premiere wrote that "the trademark humour is in short supply" and that "Goldeneye isn't classic Bond by any stretch of the imagination."[88] Madeleine Williams said that "there are plenty of stunts and explosions to take your mind off the plot."[98]
Awards [ edit ]
The film was nominated for two BAFTAs, Best Sound and Special Effects, but lost to Braveheart and Apollo 13, respectively.[7] Éric Serra won a BMI Film Award for the soundtrack and it also earned nominations for Best Action Film and Actor at the Saturn Awards and Best Fight Scene at the MTV Movie Awards.[99][100][101]
Appearances in other media [ edit ]
The film was the second and final Bond film to be adapted to a novel by novelist John Gardner. The book closely follows its storyline, but Gardner added a violent sequence prior to the opening bungee jump in which Bond kills a group of Russian guards, a change that would be retained and expanded upon in the video game GoldenEye 007.[102]
In late 1995, Topps Comics began publishing a three-issue comic book adaptation of the film. The script was adapted by Don McGregor with art by Rick Magyar. The first issue carried a January 1996 cover date.[103] For unknown reasons, Topps cancelled the entire adaptation after the first issue had been published, and to date the adaptation has not been released in its entirety.[104]
The film was the basis for GoldenEye 007, a video game for the Nintendo 64 developed by Rare (known at the time as Rareware) and published by Nintendo.[105][106] It was praised by critics and in January 2000, readers of the British video game magazine Computer and Video Games listed it in first place in a list of "the hundred greatest video games".[107] In Edge's 10th anniversary issue in 2003, the game was included as one of their top ten shooters of all time.[108] It is based upon the film, but many of the missions were extended or modified.[109]
The game was modified into a racing game intended to be released for the Virtual Boy console. However, it was cancelled before release.[110] In 2004, Electronic Arts released GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, the first game of the James Bond series in which the player does not take on the role of Bond. Instead, the protagonist is an aspiring Double-0 agent Jonathan Hunter, known by his codename "GoldenEye" recruited by a villain of the Bond universe, Auric Goldfinger.[111] Except for the appearance of Xenia Onatopp, it was unrelated to the film, and was released to mediocre reviews.[112][113][114] It was excoriated by several critics including Eric Qualls for using the name "GoldenEye" as an attempt to ride on the success of Rare's game.[115][116] In 2010, an independent development team released GoldenEye: Source, a multiplayer only total conversion mod developed using Valve's Source engine.[117]
Nintendo announced a remake of the original GoldenEye 007 at their E3 press conference on 15 June 2010. It is a modernised retelling of the original movie's story, with Daniel Craig playing the role of Bond. Bruce Feirstein returned to write a modernised version of the script, while Nicole Scherzinger covered the theme song. It was developed by Eurocom and published by Activision for the Wii and Nintendo DS and was released in November 2010. Both Wii and DS versions bear little to no resemblance to the locations and weapons of the original N64 release. In 2011 the game was ported to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 under the name GoldenEye 007: Reloaded.[118]
Legacy [ edit ]
The malware Petya (also known as "Goldeneye") is a reference to the film. A Twitter account, suspected by the German newspaper Heise Online to belong to the malware author, used an image of Boris Grishenko as his/her avatar.[119]
See also [ edit ]The belief that the Earth is at the center of the universe and that the sun circles our planet went out the window in the mid-1500s, after Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. It became completely discredited when Johannes Kepler added in his two cents a century later. Copernicus, by the way, came 1,800 years after Aristarchus of Samos, who posited a similar theory: that the Earth circles the sun, not the other way around. In that regard, there’s nothing new under the, em, sun.
That is, unless you’re Katheryne Thomas, the director of The Principle, a soon-to-be-released Christian documentary that promises to turn the current knowledge of our galaxy on its head by allegedly returning to the old saw that our sun circles the Earth.
According to Raw Story,
A new documentary film, narrated by a former Star Trek actress, promotes the long-ago disproven idea that the sun revolves around the Earth. … The film, which is set to be released sometime this spring, was bankrolled in part by the ultra-conservative and anti-Semitic Robert Sungenis, who maintains the blog Galileo Was Wrong.
Here’s the trailer. You’ll hear Sungenis himself claiming that “You can go on some websites of NASA to see that they’ve started to take down stuff that might hint to a geocentric universe.”
The website for the film says that The Principle is “destined to become one of the most controversial films of our time,” because it will present
unexpected evidence of a preferred direction in the cosmos, aligned with our supposedly insignificant Earth.
Whatever that means.
“The Principle” features narration by Kate Mulgrew (“Star Trek Voyager”, “Orange Is The New Black”, and “Ryan’s Hope”), stunning animations by BUF Compagnie Paris (“Life of Pi”, “Thor”), and commentary from prominent scientists including George Ellis, Michio Kaku, Julian Barbour, Lawrence Krauss, and Max Tegmark. Tracing the development of cosmology from its inception (Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid at Giza), through the great revolution of Copernicus, to the astonishing new discoveries of Earth-oriented alignments in the largest structures of our visible universe, “The Principle” leads us face-to-face with the question, and the challenge — what does this mean for the future of mankind?
Forget Captain Kathryn Janeway. The presence of known skeptics like Krauss (pictured above) and Kaku should really raise some eyebrows. Were they tricked into doing interviews with Sungenis’ crew and made to look silly with selective editing? That’s hardly an unknown tactic for some Creationists.
Krauss has called the movie “nonsense” and said on Facebook yesterday that he didn’t give permission for footage of himself to be used,
|
The world has changed, and we need to realize we comic book fans, who wish to live a spoiler-free life, aren’t as important in the great and geeky machine.
“Both DC and Marvel are so corporate-minded about literally making profit each quarter that they will do everything they can to drive new readers into the stores,” Siuntres said. “I think comics is enough of a Johnny Appleseed business that each reader really does count. It’s that stupid chain from publisher to store that’s their real customer.”
Sales-wise, the die-hard comic book reader isn’t enough. Catering to this small demographic doesn’t warrant keeping stories under wraps. If you look at a movie like Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Disney could afford to keep its main plot twists a secret, because it knew enough people would flock to theaters in droves. Marvel doesn’t have that same luxury with X-Men Red. They need to boost those advance orders, and shops need to make sure readers will be ready to pick up all the books they’ve ordered.
“There’s a much bigger pond out there of people and they want them to cross over and jump into the small pond with us,” Siuntres said. “So I don’t see that ending.”
And at the same time, that small and devoted pool of readers remain the publishers’ personal punching bags. A fan’s loyalty is bait, said Welch, who has many customers who talk about dropping titles from their pull list but never do because they’ve been collecting them for so long and just can’t throw in the towel.
“That gives the companies the power to market aggressively and invasively, ruining what the customer hasn’t bought yet because they know they will buy the title no matter what,” Welch added. “Spoiler-heavy marketing also pushes the speculator market, which is still thriving as far as what I see each week, and accounts for a much larger amount of sales than actual comic fans because the speculators buy multiple copies.”
Like I said, it’s depressing.
Resisting the new normal
On the other hand, why be depressed about it? We could always resist. There’s so much about the culture of strategic spoilers Siuntres dislikes and Welch abhors and, me–don’t forget about my disgust! That’s three people in what’s apparently a small pond of comic book readers in this “Johnny Appleseed business.” We can’t be alone. In fact, Welch did tell me he believes this marketing strategy is beginning to receive the cold shoulder from readers.
So rather than be depressed about the endless onslaught of unexpected spoilers, I’m going to do my best to dodge them and hold out hope that the “new normal” doesn’t stay normal for long. Trends come and go. Before we know it, this obsession with spoiling could become the “old normal.”
And right now, there are readers out there who want to know when exactly we’ll get past this spoiler-heavy era. Well, that would be a spoiler, wouldn’t it?Along with campaigns against fracking and climate change, perhaps the largest and most dynamic grassroots movement in North America today is the anti-genetic engineering, Millions Against Monsanto food movement.
Last May and October, as part of a global "March Against Monsanto", over a million protestors, many for the first time, marched and picketed in hundreds of cities and towns across North America, calling for mandatory labels or bans on GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms).
And not just in the US...
In Mexico, a massive coalition of over 300 urban, rural and indigenous organizations have successfully mobilized public opinion and the Federal courts to ban, at least temporarily, the commercial planting of Monsanto's genetically engineered corn and other GMOs.
In Canada, the Canadian Biotechnology Action Movement (CBAN), the organic food community and environmental groups are protesting against the spread of GM corn, canola, soy and sugar beets, and suing the government over the legalization of a new, highly controversial, genetically engineered salmon that threatens the livelihoods of traditional fishing and indigenous communities.
Meanwhile in the US, the heartland of genetic engineering and industrial / chemical agriculture, a growing corps of organic and natural health activists, utilizing state and county ballot initiatives, grassroots legislative lobbying, consumer boycotts and street protests, have forced Monsanto, the biotech industry, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) to go the defensive.
USA food fight over GMOs intensifies
Confronted in the US with the inevitability of mandatory state GMO food labeling laws - laws that will likely, as in Europe, drive GMOs off supermarket shelves - industrial food and biotech corporations are in a panic.
After being forced to spend $70 million, and then barely defeating (51-49%) two citizen ballot initiatives in California and Washington State, Big Food and biotech's front group, the GMA is facing criminal charges in Washington State for illegally laundering over $11 million in campaign donations.
The GMA engaged in this blatant money laundering to shield its members, Big Food Inc. and their brands from consumer wrath and marketplace boycotts over the GMO labeling issue.
And these brands include some of the biggest: Coca-Cola (Honest Tea and Odwalla), Pepsi (Frito-Lay and Naked Juice), General Mills (Cheerios, Muir Glen, Cascadian Farm), Kellogg's (Kashi), Kraft, Dean Foods (Horizon, White Wave),
The King amendment - defeated!
Sensing defeat in upcoming ballot initiatives and legislative labeling battles in Vermont, Oregon and other states, the GMA and the factory farm lobby recently tried to insert a controversial clause into the 2013-18 Farm Bill.
The "King Amendment", named for its author, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), would have taken away the long-established right of states to regulate agricultural production practices in their jurisdictions, likely undermining future mandatory labeling of GMOs, and meat and other products produced on factory farms.
A massive coalition of animal welfare, organic and anti-GMO networks, supported by numerous state legislators and state Attorney Generals, led by the Humane Society of the US, (HSUS) helped convince the US Senate to kill the King Amendment in January.
A similar anti-consumer, anti-right-to-know Farm Bill amendment to nullify mandatory 'Country of Origin' labeling for meat, fish, produce and nuts failed at the same time.
Frontline battles in Oregon
In Oregon, where a decisive GMO labeling ballot initiative will go before voters in November 2014, and several counties have proposed GMO bans, the battle lines have been clearly drawn.
Threatened by 2014 ballot initiatives in four counties calling for the banning of genetically engineered crops, the Governor and pro-biotech legislators, in October 2013, rammed through a last-minute provision designed to strip counties and local communities of the right to ban or restrict the growing of GMO crops.
SB 633, dubbed the "Oregon Monsanto Protection Act" by critics, is part of the final 2013 state appropriations bill. Specifically, SB 633 prohibits local governments from enacting or enforcing any measures that "regulate agricultural, flower, nursery and vegetable seeds or their products
May 2014, Jackson County will decide
Jackson County, Ore., which had already qualified a GMO ban initiative for the May 2014 ballot prior to the passage of SB 633, was exempted from the Monsanto Protection Act. As a result, Jackson County will be at the center of a crucial community rights vs. corporate rights battle in May.
But Jackson County may not be going it alone. Angered by Monsanto and agribusiness stomping on their traditional community rights, residents in three other Oregon counties - Benton, Lane, and Josephine - are attempting to place initiatives on the ballot that would nullify the Oregon Monsanto Protection Act - and affirm that community rights, not corporate rights, should be sovereign under the law.
A similar battle over community rights and home rule is unfolding in Hawaii, where a grassroots-powered Kauai county ordinance has placed heavy restrictions on GMOs and pesticide corporations, and where Hawaii County (Kona) has passed an outright ban on new GMO crops.
Six counties in the US have now banned the planting of GMOs - four in California (Mendocino, Marin, Trinity, and Santa Cruz); one in Washington State (San Juan County); and one in Hawaii (Kona). In addition, a number of cities and towns in Maine, Colorado and California have banned genetically engineered crops.
Industry fights back against Community Rights movements
Approximately 1,000 counties in the US have explicit authority in their state constitution to allow and uphold citizen ballot initiatives.
Fearing that more and more counties will launch these initiatives, factory farm and biotech interests in at least a dozen states have passed so-called "Right-to-Farm" legislation designed to protect the interests of corporate agribusiness, over those of local citizens.
And in Hawaii and Jackson County, Ore., where there are active initiatives in play, the biotech industry and the Farm Bureau are now pouring money into campaigns to defeat those initiatives.
In late 2013, the powerful GMA began lobbying the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA), and now Congress to eliminate states' rights to pass GMO labeling laws on GMOs.
GMA - special pleading and bullying
The GMA, according to leaked documents, is pleading with the FDA to derail the growing anti-GMO movement with 'voluntary' federal labeling, make-believe safety monitoring, and legalization of the widespread industry practice of fraudulently advertising and labeling GMO-tainted foods as "natural" or "all natural" - steps so outrageous that even FDA bureaucrats appear stymied, given the present level of public anger and concern.
Compounding their reputation as ruthless bullies, the biotech industry and GMA lobbyists continue to threaten states like Vermont, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Oregon with expensive lawsuits if they dare pass GMO labeling laws.
Are corporations rethinking their GMO strategy?
While heavily-armed St. Louis police were arresting 'Occupy Monsanto' protestors outside corporate headquarters, and a shareholder resolution was introduced for the company to support GMO labeling, the embattled CEO of Monsanto, Hugh Grant, sheepishly admitted to investors on January 28:
"We simply haven't engaged enough at the level we should have with all of our audiences, and for that, we apologize … we need to do more."
In the same week, Wired magazine and Mother Jones both reported that Monsanto is apparently giving up on marketing new gene-spliced vegetable and grain crops (except for dicamba-resistant soybeans and RNAi corn), opting instead for high-tech, and less controversial'marker assisted' crossbreeding.
Other major biotech corporations such as Syngenta, Bayer, Dow, BASF, and Dupont are following this same path, investing the bulk of their research and development in marker-assisted breeding, rather than genetic engineering.
As Mother Jones and Wired explain, Monsanto spokespersons admit that they have no new gene-spliced vegetables under development, reverting "instead to good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same technology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia."
Crushing local democracy with Corporate Trade Agreements
Fearing the spread of citizen activism, ballot initiative and community rights ordinances, major food corporations and biotech firms, joined by Big Pharma, multinational banks, and the fossil fuel industry, have been single-mindedly lobbying for approval of several new sweeping, secretly-negotiated international trade agreements, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA).
These agreements, full of anti-consumer and anti-worker provisions, also grant multinational corporations the sovereign right to nullify local, state and national food labeling, food safety, Fair Trade, Buy Local, labor rights, indigenous, and environmental protection laws.
In an unprecedented demonstration of North American and international solidarity and online / grassroots action, a broad coalition of anti-GMO, environmental, Fair Trade, and labor activists seem to have derailed the TPP and TAFTA, at least for the moment, preventing President Obama from ramming the TPP through Congress, utilizing so-called 'Fast Track' authority.
We the People can vanquish
From the activist standpoint, the recent victories on the GMO and TPP 'fast track' fronts are welcome news.
A critical mass of millions of people, informed, determined and united - online and on the ground, locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally - are proving, through collective action, that "we the people" can indeed battle, and at times, defeat the Corporatocracy and its indentured politicians, PR flacks and media minions.
The growing strength of this 'Movement of Movements' provides hope in desperate times - that by aggressively framing issues, capitalizing on divisions among the elite, utilizing the power of social media, building broad coalitions, carrying out boycotts, mobilizing street protests, and engaging in direct democracy tactics that bypass corrupt federal government officials and politicians (by using county and state ballot initiatives), the global grassroots can begin to overcome the dictatorship of Monsanto and the Corporatocracy.
This is only the beginning
The broader hope is that this embryonic Movement of Movements can rise to the occasion and continue to win over the hearts and minds of the majority, addressing, not only crucial issues of food and farming and public health, but also related life or death issues such as climate change, economic justice, and militarism.
But to do this we must connect the dots between the different struggles, not only struggling for the right to know whether the food we are eating is genetically engineered or factory-farmed, but for democracy, health and sustainability on all fronts.
Without campaign finance reform, without breaking the stranglehold of large corporations and the wealthy over the media, the federal government and the judiciary, there can be no democracy.
Dismantling Corporatocracy
Without dismantling the bloated infrastructure of the military-industrial complex and bringing to heel the Shadow Government of the CIA and NSA, there can be no liberty, nor the financial resources to address our life or death issues.
Without challenging the outrageous legal doctrine of "corporate personhood", whereby corporations have more rights than the people, Americans and people everywhere will remain disenfranchised.
And without restoring and maintaining a balance of powers between nation states and transnational corporations; nation states and indigenous communities; federal governments, states and local home rule counties and municipalities; there can be no republic.
Only a Corporatocracy, an unholy alliance and dictatorship of indentured politicians, media minions, and profit-at-any-cost corporations - driving us headlong toward climate catastrophe and economic collapse.
The battle to build a 21st Century democracy and overthrow the Corporatocracy is a battle we cannot afford to lose.
Ronnie Cummins is national and international director of the Organic Consumers Association.
This article was first published by the Organic Consumers' Association under the the title 'Food Fights, Corporate Trade Agreements, and States' Rights: Democracy or Corporatocracy?'Phyllis Kahn, the long-time serving Minnesota legislator, is at it again: This time taking aim at Major League Soccer.
The Minneapolis DFLer said Thursday she is introducing legislation to have community ownership of Minnesota’s new MLS franchise, a move that would allow fans to buy stock in the team. Under the legislation, a corporation would own the team and a private managing owner would own no more than 35 percent of the common stock.
Common stock and preferred stock would then be sold, she said, and give stock owners voting rights on any relocation or contraction of the team. “I call this the Green Bay Packer model”, said Kahn, referring to the National Football League team that is similarly community owned.
Other than the private managing owner, no other individual or entity could own more than five percent of the common stock, she said of her proposal.
A House member since 1972, Kahn has not met with success in her other tries at community ownership. She struck out in her attempt to have baseball’s Minnesota Twins community owned, and once proposed — again, without success — having the state own Northwest Airlines.
Kahn said she has not spoken to Bill McGuire, the former UnitedHealth Group chief executive who is leading a group to bring a MLS team to Minnesota. “I love baseball, and I really like soccer. But I really don’t like football very much,” she said.MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Boko Haram extremists killed at least 27 people by shooting them and slitting their throats as they attacked several villages in northern Nigeria’s Borno state in the past week, residents said.
Such deadly attacks in recent months have pressured Nigeria’s government to increase its efforts against a homegrown Islamic extremist group it last year declared to be “crushed.”
Boko Haram fighters entered villages in the Nganzai area on Wednesday, slitting throats and using guns to kill at least 15 people while injuring two others, said Modu Jialta, a member of a local self-defense group. The attackers also burned homes.
Residents weren’t able to get to the bodies for burial until Friday, Jialta said.
Suspected Boko Haram fighters also attacked in the Guzamala local council area on Wednesday, killing 12 people and injuring at least four, said Mai Abatcha Monguno, the commander of the council’s citizen defense forces.
Northern Borno state is the birthplace and stronghold of Boko Haram. Bunu Bukar, secretary of the hunters’ association there, said more government support and better equipment is needed to combat the extremists.
Boko Haram’s eight-year insurgency has displaced millions in Nigeria and neighboring countries and killed more than 20,000 people.
In a speech to the nation on Monday, President Muhammadu Buhari vowed to “reinforce and reinvigorate the fight” against Boko Haram, which he accused of “attempting a new series of attacks on soft targets.”SA can use power normally again after generator goes offline
Updated
South Australians have been advised they can return to using power normally, after a fire which knocked out two of the state's major gas generators.
With the Torrens Island and Pelican Point power stations now slowly increasing their output, the Australian Energy Market Operator is no longer forecasting a lack of power reserve in the state.
Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis says households can now resume normal use of appliances.
Earlier residents were asked to conserve electricity to avoid potential load-shedding after three units at Torrens went offline following spot fires.
Four spot fires and a possible explosion at the power plant resulted in three units generating a combined 400 megawatts of power going offline at 3:33pm.
The AEMO also reported a loss of 200 megawatts of power from the nearby Pelican Point station, which tripped as a result of the Torrens Island incident.
Load-shedding — ordered by AEMO when power demand outstrips supply — most recently led to 90,000 Adelaide customers being switched off during a heatwave in February.
A Metropolitan Fire Service spokesperson said that on arrival, they found "on-site AGL personnel had extinguished a series of small spot fires using dry power fire extinguishers".
Torrens Island is the state's largest power generator, with a total of eight gas-fired units that generate up to 1,280 megawatts.
It was not clear how many units were in use at the time of the outage and the extent of the damage and time it will take to be repaired remains unknown.
South Australians on tenterhooks over power supply
The reliability of SA's power supply has been a controversial topic since September last year when wild weather resulted in a state-wide blackout.
Another blackout occurred in December, when an electrical fault on the Victorian side of the border prompted the failure of the Heywood Interconnector, which was contributing about 220 megawatts into SA's mix.
SA Power Networks said the cause of the Torrens Island fires was being investigated and did not appear to be caused by its distribution network.
Mr Koutsantonis said the outage was not caused by "some inherent fragility of the system" but was due to fires and the close proximity of large generators to each other.
"The restart is occurring during a very high demand [period]," he said.
"Is it frustrating? Yes absolutely.
"The important thing here now is rather than a blame game is to try and help people, help the market operator manage the system … by keeping the demand low."
Wholesale power prices in SA spiked and hit the maximum allowable limit of $14,000 per megawatt hour.
Topics: community-and-society, electricity-energy-and-utilities, adelaide-5000, sa
First postedHere's a sign of the times in Chicago sports:
Last night's Cubs-Dodgers game drew an average local TV rating of 24.1, or more than 1 million homes tuning in.
That's the highest-rated Cubs game during the National League Championship Series. But that's not the jaw-dropper.
The Bears, playing the rival Green Bay Packers on Thursday Night Football at the same time as the Cubs game, posted just a 12.8 average TV rating in Chicago between NFL Network and CBS combined, according to a source familiar with the ratings.
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That means roughly 400,000 more Chicago TV households were watching the Cubs last night instead of the Bears, who lost to the Packers 26-10.
The Cubs' high number is not shocking, given the fervor around the team as it marches toward a National League pennant.
But the Bears' TV rating is exceptionally low. Its games so far this year have posted ratings in the 19 to 21 range. That's a more drastic dip than NFL TV ratings overall, which were down 11 percent over the first six weeks of the season compared to the same point last year.
The Cubs will try to clinch a trip to the World Series tomorrow night in Game 6 of the NLCS, a game that will likely be one of the most-watched Cubs games ever.Microsoft has just announced the signing of a new partnership with Twitter that allows users to search for accounts, tweets and hashtags straight from the official page of the search engine.
“Through an exclusive partnership with Twitter, Bing is rolling out a fast and intuitive way to discover tweets directly in its search results. Now when you search for a trending hashtag, Bing will show the most relevant tweets directly in the search results – in near real-time,” Redmond revealed in an announcement today.
Basically, people can now use Bing to search for everything on Twitter, which clearly comes in handy especially since this particular social network is continuously growing bigger.
Microsoft has been trying to make Bing more of a social search engine for years and this new partnership with Twitter clearly comes in handy, especially for those who are using this social network on a regular basis.
The new feature is already available on the US version of Bing's homepage, but in case you don't see it right now, wait for a few more hours and try again. The company is currently rolling out the improvements across the world, so it might take a little bit longer until they become available to everyone.LONDON, UK -- A dramatic increase in Kurds refused visas for the UK has been revealed in a parliamentary answer. Between April and September last year 1,165 of 1,790, or two-thirds of all applications made in Erbil were turned down.
The APPG Chairman, Jason McCartney MP had discovered that the rejection rate for applications from April 2014 to March 2015 was 55%. The latest figures obtained by the Northern Ireland MP Danny Kinahan represent a one-fifth increase in rejections.
The issue of visas has been raised with visiting British parliamentarians on every delegation to Kurdistan since 2008. The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) has teamed up with three major British trade organisations to urge changes to reduce the rejection rate for legitimate visitors.
The joint memo from British Expertise International, the Middle East Association and Pathfinder Trade and Invest is also supported by the KRG High Representation in London. It notes the KRG has designated the UK as its "partner of choice" and quality British goods and services are sought by a government with a deep historic affection for the UK and where English is the unofficial second language. It says visas are vital to building business links, to purchase health treatment or tourism.
The groups acknowledge positive changes such as the Visa Application Centre in Erbil, which means applicants no longer need to travel and stay in Amman or Baghdad while their application is processed.
Applications are processed by independent entry clearance officers (ECOs) who only use the information on the form because there is no interview process. Common reasons for rejection include failing to correctly complete the complex form, and omitting sufficient proof of assets or jobs.
ECOs can choose to disbelieve evidence and some with substantial sums to their name have been refused, as have senior government officials and those who have been invited to the UK on official matters. One Kurd who applied for a visa for a three day conference was even questioned why they wanted to stay a few extra days. People understandably take advantage of a work conference to take a break and do some sight-seeing, which increases tourism revenues too.
The signatories fear Kurds may vote with their feet and go elsewhere. American and other European applications are much easier to complete. The memo cites "very many instances where people who could by any reasonable standard be deemed useful to the British political and commercial interest have been rejected" and argues "it materially jeopardises the export of UK goods and services to the region and undermines bilateral good will."
The groups accept the UK has the right to control and patrol its borders and make sure visitors are genuine and will return but conclude British diplomats and politicians should be able to influence visa decisions in the British national interest.
They also recommend the Government investigates the validity of the reasons for refusing so many applications, which was ruled out in a further answer to Danny Kinahan. They say a checking system prior to acceptance of applications could sift out errors and omissions, and this service could be provided privately, but in close co-operation with the UK authorities. They urge the Government to quantify the cost of staff cover in Erbil for a new post to facilitate interviews, given the importance of building commercial and political links. The forms should also be simplified. The memo to the British government will soon be released alongside the report of the APPG's most recent delegation to Kurdistan in November.
British parliamentarians have also been exercised by changes to the American visa system which stipulate that those who have visited Iraq, Syria and Iran in the last five years are no longer automatically considered for the American visa waiver scheme.
MPs and others who have visited Kurdistan would, unless exempted, have to take time to apply in person for an American visa rather than the online visa waiver system. Members of the Newcastle-Gateshead Medical Volunteers, for instance, have also voluntarily provided vital medical operations. They may now all have to spend time and money in securing a visa for American holidays. This may discourage business people from seeking contracts in Kurdistan if they intend to visit America afterwards.
There may be case by case exemptions for those who have visited for governments, humanitarian NGOs, and the media as well as business purposes. MPs recently raised the matter with the US Ambassador to the London in the Commons. They accept America has good reason to protect its borders but argue this measure has the unintended consequence of making it harder for those seeking to build relationships with crucial and joint allies such as the KRG, an ideological and military bulwark against Daesh. The MPs hope the rule can be scrapped after the American election in November.The Samsung Galaxy SIII was the most recommended smartphone in a mystery shopper survey of eight leading retailers carried out by Informa Telecoms and Media.
While some retailers recommended Apple's iPhone 5, rival manufacturers such as ZTE, Motorola, LG, Huawei and BlackBerry-maker RIM had little or no presence.
"The mystery shop showed that the most recommended Samsung handsets were the Galaxy SIII and the Galaxy Note II, despite having been on the market longer than the latest handsets from Apple, Nokia and HTC," said Julian Jest of Informa.
"However, most surprising was the way that, despite an in-store advertising campaign and recent product launch, Apple was recommended in only two stores, 3 and Phones 4 U, with both recommending the iPhone 5."
The researchers visited John Lewis, Everything Everywhere, O2, 3, Maplins, PC World, Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U. The mystery shoppers scored manufacturers based on whether they were advertised in the store window or in-store. They then asked a sales assistant to recommend three smartphones or tablets.
Apple and Samsung were just as likely to be promoted by advertising in the store or the shop window but sales assistants were far more likely to recommend Samsung.
In a press release, Informa said it was "likely that sales assistants see the Samsung devices as a safe bet to earn greater commissions".
Both Samsung and Apple reported quarterly earnings last week. Samsung saw an increase in profits of 76 per cent, largely thanks to strong sales of its Galaxy smartphones. However, the Korean firm warned that it expects smartphone growth to decelerate in the West this year.
The company is expected to launch its new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S IV, at an event in Monaco next month.
Apple, meanwhile, saw $50bn wiped off its value following weaker than expected iPhone sales. The company sold a record 47.8 million iPhones in the last quarter but Wall Street had expected sales to be higher.Purchase 10 oz silver bars for as low as $0.89 over spot!
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The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary says the pair were part of four men who were arrested following a violent break and enter and robbery on Angel's Road, just before midnight.
Tyler Donahue, 23, and Abdifatah Mohamed, 27, have been charged with forcible confinement, unlawful possession of a firearm, alongside robbery and break and entry.
Mitchell Nippard, 25, and Gary Thomas Hennessey, 32, have been charged with break and entry.
Three of the four men have criminal records in Newfoundland and Labrador, one with convictions as serious as assault with a weapon.
Tyler Donahue, Gary Hennessey, Mitchell Nippard and Abdifatah Mohamed appear in provincial court in St. John's on Friday. (Ted Dillon/CBC)
Police got a report of a violent break-in around 11:30 p.m. Thursday.
Two people were in the home at the time of the break-in, and said armed, masked men forced their way into the home and fled with electronics and jewelry.
Police said no one was injured in the break-in, and they believe the incident was targeted.
A home on Angels Road in Paradise is blocked off Friday, as ground crews search the area. (Garrett Barry/CBC)
Officers found an abandoned vehicle in a wooded area near Dawes Road. A police dog unit was brought in, and two men were found a short time later. A firearm was seized.
A second suspect vehicle was stopped on Topsail Pond Road a short time later, and two other men were arrested.
'On edge'
Matthew Noseworthy, who lives just a few houses down from the building where the incident is alleged to have occurred, said he saw a commotion when drove home at about midnight.
Matthew Noseworthy said the alleged attack has left the neighbourhood shaken. (John Pike/CBC)
He said he saw police cars scattered about, and what appeared to be men being placed under arrest. It's unusual for a neighbourhood like this, he says.
"This neighbourhood is very quiet and peaceful. Most people know eachother, very neighbourly," he said.
He said it's harder to feel safe after an incident with violence.
"It's terrifying, it really puts everybody on edge. It's not something I would have expected here, but you know, I guess times are changing and nobody is immune to that kind of thing now."
Bob O'Keefe lives down the road from where a woman was allegedly robbed. He says the police response would have been bigger if there was a concern for public safety. (John Pike/CBC)
Just down the road, Bob O'Keefe says he's not worried at all.
"This is the biggest thing up here, now, in recent memory," he said. He added that a targeted incident means "it's got nothing to do with anybody else here."
Targeted incident, police say
All four men appeared in provincial court in St. John's Friday afternoon. Their case was set over until Monday for a bail hearing.
Here's a look at the search underway in Paradise. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/cbcnl?src=hash">#cbcnl</a> <a href="https://t.co/1q4XFeLSkL">pic.twitter.com/1q4XFeLSkL</a> —@GarrettBarry
Rovers Search and Rescue were still on the scene in Paradise Friday, combing through the Dawes Road area.
Police tape was blocking the entrance to the home on Angels Road, as about 10 people searched the wooded area near Three Island Pond.Same-sex marriage: Tim Minchin releases postal vote song to tune of I Still Call Australia Home
Updated
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Tim Minchin sings a version of Still Call Australia Home (ABC News)
Australian comedian and musician Tim Minchin has entered the same-sex marriage postal vote debate with his typical comedic flair.
In a video posted to his Facebook page, Minchin reworks the lyrics to the Peter Allen classic I Still Call Australia Home.
Minchin sings:
I'm always travelling, but wherever I stay People love Aussies, and they generally say They think we're kind, fun and funny Tall, tanned and toned And a little bit racist, and a little bit home-ophobic
In a take on another famous verse, Minchin says:
One day we'll all be together once more Once they do their bloody jobs, and change the f***ing law
In a written statement at the end of the video, Minchin said he thought the postal vote was "noxious and obnoxious".
"Polls show that Aussies are overwhelmingly in favour of marriage equality," he wrote.
"Not that it should matter … it's not f***ing X-Factor."
Minchin implored his fans to participate and vote yes, saying those behind the postal vote, "think by making it postal, young people won't vote".
"Prove them wrong," he wrote.
The song was viewed more than 300,000 times and shared almost 20,000 times within three hours of being posted.
Topics: community-and-society, marriage, lgbt, music, arts-and-entertainment, comedy-humour, government-and-politics, australia
First postedA few months ago, I was lying on the bed with a lover, cuddling and caressing. It was a sweet and beautiful moment that did not become “sexual” in the common sense of the word.
I remember this episode because, at a certain point, she looked at me with a serious look on her face, and said, “hey, thank you for not having expectations regarding what might or might not happen between us.”
That simple phrase struck me.
I was reminded, once more, of one of the big dramas in sexuality: a goal-oriented attitude.
Goal-oriented sex.
Goal-oriented sex happens when, in intimacy, we focus on some “goal” instead of allowing the situation to unfold. Some typical goals in erotic intimacy: getting to intercourse, achieving orgasm, proving one’s ability as a lover, and other similar accomplishments. Over time, we can develop a goal-oriented attitude toward sex.
A goal-oriented attitude in sex prevents us from enjoying the present moment, and closes us down to the richness and variety of intimacy. When our intimate life becomes goal-oriented, we may find that we keep repeating the same sexual and intimate patterns over and over again—sometimes for years. As useful as being goal-oriented can be in other areas of our existence, it kills intimacy just as it would kill a good conversation.
I’m mentioning the example of a good conversation because, aside from the obvious differences, there is a lot of similarity between sexual intimacy and an intimate conversation. Conversations, just as sex, can be deep or shallow, emotionally invested or carefree, but one thing is for sure: approaching an intimate conversation with a fixed idea of the results we want to achieve isn’t a great start.
When we converse intimately with our friends, we don’t follow an agenda, but instead we carve the path of the conversation together, as we talk. We don’t really know where the conversation is going to lead, because the other can surprise us, and we can surprise ourselves.
But isn’t the situation quite similar in sexuality?
A kiss or a hug could lead to passionate, hot sex, or to gentle cuddling, or to an argument, for that matter. No one knows for sure. And yet, we often live sexuality as if, from the moment of the first kiss, we had entered a path on rails that leads to some destination whether we want it or not.
When we develop a goal-oriented attitude in sexuality, we tend to expect the same attitude in our partners. As a consequence, we may take for granted that our partner has some expectations, some goal that he or she wants to reach. When we assume that our partner has strong expectations, we often feel compelled to match them. This whole dynamic of real and perceived expectations leads to many awkward situations where people end up having erotic interactions that they really don’t feel like having.
Changing our mind is okay.
There is another reason why a goal-oriented approach to sex sucks: if there is any field of life where changing one’s mind is common and welcome, that is sexual play.
Our desires and needs constantly evolve in response to our physical conditions, our mutable emotions, and the signals we receive from our partner. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that our desires may change wildly during the time we share intimacy with someone. Owning these changes and expressing them is as fundamental as honouring the fact that our partner may change his or her mind. So much for achieving goals!
Whenever we enter an intimate, potentially sexual situation with someone, we are much better off being open to
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Tripoli and Bayda—Khalifa al-Ghwel sits behind an imposingly large desk in his government office in central Tripoli. The officialdom of heavy furniture and carpeted floors is tempered by the printed sheet of paper taped to the door proclaiming his title of defense minister in bold font. Ad Policy
Ghwel is one of two defense ministers in Libya who sit on rival sides of a power struggle now engulfing the country. An engineer from Misurata, Ghwel was appointed to the post in September, one month after a coalition of militias calling itself Libya Dawn took control of the capital following weeks of fighting with militias allied to Khalifa Hifter, a renegade general and self-appointed leader of the Libyan National Army who launched an offensive dubbed Operation Dignity last May against Islamist groups in Benghazi.
After the power shift in Tripoli, the General National Congress, the predecessor to the parliament elected last June, decided to reconvene and appoint what it called a National Salvation Government. The newly elected House of Representatives and its appointed government, which enjoys international recognition, were forced to seek refuge in the east of the country.
The move effectively cleaved Libya in half, with two rival coalitions, each with its own array of militias, each with its own parliament and prime minister, and each claiming sole legitimacy. Representing a complex web of shifting regional, tribal and political alliances, each side is defined more by its enemies than by any coherent ideology.
For Ghwel, Hifter is enemy No. 1. “Hifter is like Qaddafi or worse,” he told The Nation, referring to the Libyan dictator overthrown in the 2011 uprising. “There can be no dialogue with this man.”
Libya Dawn, the coalition backing the Tripoli government, includes several moderate and hardline Islamist militias and is led in part by powerful brigades from Misurata. Ghwel estimates they number between 10,000 and 15,000 fighters and says the aim is to push the battle eastward until they reach the Egyptian border and control the entire country. With Hifter’s forces and allied tribal militias in firm control of much of the east, Ghwel’s goal is fanciful at best.
Hifter, who commands much of the former military and air force that defected from Qaddafi in 2011, has been locked in a battle for Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, for the past nine months against a coalition of Islamist militias named the Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries. The backbone of the Shura Council is Ansar al-Sharia, the armed Islamist group implicated in the 2012 killing of US ambassador Chris Stevens.
“Ansar al-Sharia are not extremists,” Ghwel said. “None of the groups fighting Hifter are terrorists or extremists; they are revolutionaries.”
Such is the plight of Libya today. Nuance has been drowned out by a deepening polarization. One side says it is fighting forces of the former regime, the other says it is fighting terrorists. And dialogue between the factions battling each other is paltry.
Civilians have borne the brunt of the conflict. Over 1 million refugees have fled the country, and there are as many as 400,000 internally displaced, according to the United Nations. For those who remain, a breakdown in basic services and an economy on the brink of collapse has made life an ordeal.
Ghwel went so far as to blame Hifter for the disappearance of the twenty-one mostly Egyptian Coptic Christians earlier in January. “Hifter took the Copts to make the other side look bad,” he claimed. But responsibility for the kidnappings had already been claimed by the Tripoli Province, a Libyan affiliate of the Islamic State, the extremist group that has taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria; Tripoli Province posted a statement online along with photos of the men. Three weeks after Ghwel’s comments, a video released online under the logo of the Islamic State’s media arm showed militants beheading the twenty-one men on a Mediterranean beach with the group’s trademark theatrical brutality.
The killings prompted Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—who has backed the internationally recognized government in the east with both public support and covert military aid—to retaliate by launching airstrikes on Tripoli Province strongholds. Omar al-Hassi, prime minister of the self-declared government in Tripoli, condemned the airstrikes as an attack on Libya’s sovereignty and echoed the claim that the video was “fabricated” to justify foreign intervention.
Days later, Islamic State militants unleashed suicide bombings in the eastern town of Qubba, killing at least forty civilians in one of the single bloodiest attacks since the fall of Qaddafi, in what the group said was retaliation for the Egyptian airstrikes.
Extremist groups have taken advantage of the deepening chaos and instability to consolidate their influence across the country, opening up a third front in a conflict that is spiraling out of control. The Islamic State group has taken over the eastern city of Derna—establishing its own police, courts and tax system—has seized control in Sirte and other cities, and has made its presence felt in Tripoli itself, despite assurances by the authorities there that the capital is secure.
“Libya Dawn came to Tripoli because there was no safety. Now, Tripoli is the safest place.” Ghwel told The Nation. “Life is normal here.” The next day, gunmen stormed into the Corinthia Hotel, one of the largest and most prestigious in Libya, and killed nine people, including five foreigners. The Libyan affiliate of the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
* * *
Among the militias battling Hifter’s forces in Benghazi as part of the Shura Council is the Rafallah Sahati Company, a Salafi brigade named after one of the first Libyans to die fighting Qaddafi’s forces in March 2011.
Sitting in his apartment in a block of high rises in Tripoli, a former commander of the group who asked to not be identified said that supporters of Hifter’s Operation Dignity have empowered the most radical elements by branding all of their enemies as terrorists.
“I am part of accusations like this; they say that we are a part of Daesh,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. He concedes however, that revolutionaries (the loose term used for militias that took up arms against Qaddafi) have formed a tactical military alliance with the most extreme Islamist militias to fight Hifter—militias over which they have no control.
The former commander said his house in Benghazi was burned down three weeks earlier by Hifter’s forces, even though he moved to Tripoli months before that with his family. His wife and children live separately from him in another apartment in the capital for safety reasons.
Hifter launched his offensive last year against Islamist militias that were widely blamed for a string of assassinations that had seen scores of former military and security personnel, prosecutors, judges, local leaders and activists killed over the course of the previous two years. Hifter was backed by disaffected military units, prominent eastern tribes and federalists demanding greater autonomy for the eastern part of Libya.
The assault kicked off the most intense fighting in Libya since the 2011 revolt that deposed Qaddafi. The Shura Council forces battling Operation Dignity initially gained control of most of Benghazi over the summer. In mid-October, Hifter called for an armed uprising there, urging youth to fight for their own neighborhoods and thus facilitate the army’s operations in residential areas. Hifter’s Libyan National Army moved in shortly afterward and has since gained control of sizable areas of Benghazi.
Yet the former Rafallah Sahati commander is convinced Hifter will lose in the long run. “Half of the forces in the east are fighting with Hifter, plus he is backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates—and still, after nine months, he can’t take Benghazi? It’s a small city,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time before Ansar al-Sharia takes all of Benghazi.” Despite the bluster on both sides, neither coalition has been able to strike a decisive blow.
While the epicenter of the fighting remains in Benghazi, separate fronts have opened up between militias allied with Libya Dawn and Operation Dignity across the country, including at the country’s largest oil port al-Sidra and in nearby Ras Lanuf in the oil crescent region, the Nafusa mountains and al-Watiya airbase in the west, and the Warshefana area near Tripoli, among other regions. Hifter’s forces have launched airstrikes on Misurata, while suicide bombers have attacked the hotel in Tobruk when the elected parliament in the east was in session there.
“I knew when it started it would be like an atomic bomb,” the former commander said.
* * *
A cold wind whips across Tripoli’s landmark Martyrs’ Square as a few hundred protesters gather after sunset prayers. Posters of those killed in the fighting are plastered across the front of a stage outfitted with large loudspeakers. A man carrying a plastic box half-filled with cash is collecting donations for Libya Dawn amid makeshift stands selling popcorn and hot tea.
The United Nations is not popular here. A large banner strung between two palm trees bears the face of UN special envoy Bernardino León crossed out in red atop the words, “Sorry, we don’t need you.” Onstage, a woman is leading the crowd in chants of “Death to Hifter!” and “No dialogue, freedom to the revolutionaries!”
The demonstrations, which have been taking place on a weekly basis since last summer, when Libya Dawn took control of the capital, offer a glimpse into the enormous hurdles standing in the way of a negotiated solution to the conflict.
The UN is seeking to broker a ceasefire and strike a deal for a unified government, distant goals that still fall well short of ending the overall crisis. This month, UN negotiators for the first time held separate meetings with delegates from both sides in the southern town of Ghadames. Yet the eastern parliament this week voted to suspend its participation in the talks. Meanwhile, hardliners among the armed groups still have not joined the talks, believing they can gain more from fighting.
One cause of the growing conflict can be traced to some fateful early decisions: after the fall of the Qaddafi regime, post-revolution governments placed all civilians who had taken up arms on the state payroll, after which the number ballooned from 60,000 in 2011 to more than 200,000 a year later. The government wage bill is now almost three times what it was in 2010.
The militias operated nominally under the authority of the state but were actually loyal to their own commanders. As they began to battle one another over turf and resources, state salaries continued to be paid to fighters on all sides—a Kafkaesque cycle, in which the wealth of the country has been being drained to fund the internal conflict.
Ninety-five percent of state spending in Libya comes from oil revenues—and the money is running dangerously low. “We have two problems: low production and low price,” Mustafa Sanalla, the chairman of the National Oil Corporation, told The Nation. His spacious office at the institution’s gleaming white headquarters is replete with marble floors, plush leather chairs and framed maps of Libyan oil terminals, pipelines and wells.
Sanalla said the country’s oil production in January stood at 330,000–360,000 barrels per day—just 20 percent of normal levels. The drop has come as oil facilities have been damaged or destroyed by the fighting, with foreign oil companies pulling out of Libya amid the deteriorating security situation. After a fire at a pipeline in mid-February, production fell below 200,000 barrels per day. With oil prices hovering around $50 per barrel, the government budget this year is expected to be just 10 percent of the 2012 figure, Sanalla estimates. “The country will collapse” if the conflict continues, he said.
Meanwhile, both the National Oil Corporation and the Central Bank, which oversees the country’s oil earnings, have been caught in the middle of the power struggle. In September, the prime minister of the internationally recognized government in Bayda fired the governor of the Central Bank, Saddel Omar al-Kaber, and replaced him with his deputy. Yet al-Kaber remained at the helm in Tripoli, and the international community has rejected the eastern government’s attempts to set up parallel institutions to take over the oil industry.
* * *
Bayda, a city of 250,000 nestled in the Green Mountains near the coast east of Benghazi, is home to Libya’s internationally recognized government. The city is under the protection of Hifter’s Operation Dignity, which is headquartered in an airbase in nearby al-Marj. The elected parliament, which appointed the cabinet, convenes 150 miles farther east, in the city of Tobruk, close to the Egyptian border.
Massoud Muftah, the man tapped as defense minister for the eastern government, defected from Qaddafi’s army in the early days of the 2011 revolution and went on to serve as an artillery brigade commander in the civil war. Sitting in his office in Bayda’s center for agricultural research, a nondescript three-story building that has been converted into the government’s headquarters, he is dismissive of the self-declared government in Tripoli. “They are dreaming that they have a government, a parliament and a defense ministry,” Muftah told The Nation. “Let them dream.”
The armed groups in the east rely on the local black market to purchase munitions, Muftah said, pointing to a UN arms embargo imposed on Libya in 2011. “If we had enough money and ammunition, the battle would have been finished long ago,” he argued. After the gruesome killing of the twenty Egyptians by the Islamic State this month, Egypt and other Arab nations submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council to have the embargo lifted. The proposal was rejected by the United States and other Western powers.
Muftah sees no inconsistency in calling for more weapons while simultaneously taking part in negotiations to end the fighting. “When you sit at the dialogue table, you have to have a strong position on the ground,” he said. “Dialogue and war go in parallel; there are no contradictions.”
While the eastern government enjoys international recognition, its forces have come under criticism for bombing a Greek-operated oil tanker near the port of Derna chartered by the National Oil Company, killing two crew members. Their warplanes also forced another tanker sailing to Misurata to divert to Tobruk.
“What is strange about that, where fuel is going to the enemy?” Muftah says. “They are bombing us and we are bombing them back.” The eastern government’s fighter jets have also bombed Misurata’s port, a steel plant and the airport.
Meanwhile, divisions are emerging in the eastern power bloc. The loose constellation of forces fighting under the banner of Operation Dignity don’t fall into a coherent hierarchy. Aside from the array of militias, Muftah says, there are essentially two armies, the Libyan National Army, commanded by Hifter, and the Libyan army that comes under the purview of the chief of staff. And the two don’t always agree.
“Any army in the world has one head, and there has to be a chain of command,” Muftah said. “There is a problem and we should admit it.” This week, the eastern parliament appointed Hifter to the newly created post of general commander of the armed forces.
Yet the greater splits exist between Hifter and the government headed by Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni. In mid-January, Muftah was kidnapped by masked men, who stormed his hotel room and held him for hours before releasing him. According to an official in the prime minister’s office, it was forces close to Hifter who did it, as part of a dispute with Thinni over ammunition and supplies. “I negotiated with the head of the group,” Muftah said, without going into specifics. “But of course I was afraid.” Several other cabinet officials have also been temporarily kidnapped in recent weeks as well.
The animosity between Hifter and Thinni dates back to February 2014, when Hifter took to the airwaves and announced a military takeover, the suspension of the General National Congress and a new road map for the future. Following the announcement, Thinni, who was serving as defense minister at the time, said there was a warrant out for Hifter’s arrest on the grounds of plotting a coup.
Sager al-Jaroushi, Hifter’s number-two man and the commander of the air force, is open about his contempt for Thinni and accuses him of not supporting the military and security forces. “He failed to build the army or police, and he has the money and the power,” Jaroushi said in a phone call from Tobruk. “Hifter said that this guy is not clean and not honorable.”
These disputes are emblematic of the problems plaguing Libya, where elites, old and new, are consumed with tawdry feuds that have little to do with governing and everything to do with power.
* * *
Aisha Yousef, the prosecutor general of Benghazi, was elected to the House of Representatives in June and has lived in Tobruk, where the assembly is based, since August. Although Benghazi is less than 300 miles away, she has not been able to return home for six months.
“We are wanted,” she told The Nation, referring to parliamentarians from the city who are targeted by Islamist militias. “I consider myself displaced.”
The battle for Benghazi has devastated the city; the birthplace of the revolution has become the epicenter of the disaster that has befallen Libya. Thousands of families have poured out of Benghazi and into neighboring towns to flee the fighting. A number of neighborhoods are now deserted, with one-third of the city either completely destroyed or severely damaged. The historical downtown area has been razed. Hospitals are facing severe shortages in medical supplies. None of the city’s three power plants are operating, and all of its schools and universities are closed. “It is in the worst condition possible,” Yousef said.
Hifter’s forces claim to control about 80 percent of Benghazi, though the figures are difficult to confirm, and the Islamist militias have vowed to continue the fight.
“I have hope for dialogue, because the language of weapons will not solve anything,” Yousef said, but she adds that she rejects inclusion of Benghazi’s Islamist militias in the talks.
The breakdown of the country is not limited to Benghazi. Across the east, cities are plagued by frequent power cuts and are struggling to cope with the thousands of displaced. In Tripoli, militias roam the night, kidnappings are common and most journalists and civil society activists have fled. In still other cities, the black flag of the Islamic State is dominant.
Libya is shedding the last semblances of a coherent state. The polarization is deepening, and those with guns have little inclination to talk to their enemies. Instead, they are out for revenge.
This reporting made possible with support from the Puffin West Foundation. Special thanks to Nizar Sarieldin.Microsoft announced the availability of Sonar, an open source linting and website scanning tool that was developed by the Microsoft Edge team.
The open source tool was designed to allow developers to identify and solve performance and security issues, it is available on GitHub.
The Microsoft Edge team donated Sonar to the JS Foundation, the tech giant will continue to follow the project improving it along with contributions from external experts.
“Today, we are excited to announce the next evolution of the static scan tool: sonar, a new linting tool and site scanner for the modern web.” states a blog post published by Microsoft.
“sonar brings many improvements compared to previous scanners: execution of website code instead of static analysis, a more flexible and modernized set of rules, parallel test execution, integration with other services, a completely open source code base from day one, and more.”
Sonar is a linting tool that analyzes the code for a wide range of issues, including related to coding errors, performance, accessibility, security, Progressive Web Apps (PWA), and interoperability. Sonar can be used as a command line tool or via an online version.
From the cybersecurity perspective, the tool scans for the following weaknesses:
disallowed-headers
disown-opener
no-protocol-relative-urls
ssllabs
strict-transport-security
x-content-type-options
validate-set-cookie-header
no-vulnerable-javascript-libraries
One of the tests checks for the exposure to MitM attacks due to the use of HTTPS connections that don’t use the Strict-Transport-Security header.
Sonar also checks if the set-cookie header defines the Secure and HttpOnly attributes to prevent session hijacking via cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Setting the attributes the cookies cannot be transmitted over HTTP and their value cannot be accessed via JavaScript.
Another test is related to the exposure to attacks that rely on MIME sniffing, Sonar is able to check this kind of vulnerability, the linting tool is also able to determine if a website is running a vulnerable client-side JavaScript library or framework. The latter checks rely on the Snyk’s Vulnerability DB and js-library-detector.
The linting tool can also be used to avoid leakage of potentially sensitive data through the headers, and prevent unauthorized redirects that could lead users to malicious websites.
Sonar can be integrated with several other products, including aXe Core, AMP validator, snyk.io, SSL Labs, and Cloudinary.
Pierluigi Paganini
(Security Affairs – linting tool, hacking)
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Share OnA change in the law that will allow terminally ill people to be helped to end their lives is inevitable and will happen within as little as a couple of years, according to the deputy chair of the British Medical Association (BMA).
Speaking in a personal capacity, Dr Kailash Chand has thrown his weight behind Lord Falconer’s private member’s bill, which would offer assisted dying to terminally ill patients who are deemed mentally capable and are likely to have less than six months to live.
On Friday, the House of Lords voted unanimously to accept an amendment to the assisted dying bill, tabled by Lord Pannick and supported by Falconer, that would see all applications for assisted death subject to judicial oversight.
The move was welcomed by campaigners as a major step in changing the law. Chand said it was clear that momentum was now swinging behind those pushing for reform.
“No change is not an option,” he told the Observer. “The present law definitely needs changing. It discriminates and is very bad law. We currently have a two-tier system – one for the people who have the resources and money to go to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland and another for the majority of people who don’t have the resources or money.”
Some peers worry that disabled and vulnerable people will be pressured into ending their lives if the law is changed Several religious groups are opposed to the measure. The BMA, which represents Britain’s doctors, also fiercely rejects moves to legalise assisted dying.
However, Chand implied that the organisation was out of step with the public. “Look at the surveys. Between 60% and 70% of the public are in favour of a change in the law. Three-quarters of nurses are in favour. Only the doctors’ community is not substantially in favour. But if you ask a doctor a personal question whether, if they were in that sort of situation, would they want it, their answer would be yes.”
In a move that is likely to anger opponents, Chand called for a change in the language used in relation to the issue. “I don’t call it euthanasia or assisted dying; I call it dying with dignity. If we are allowed to live with dignity, why should we not be allowed to die with it?”
He also dismissed arguments that advances in palliative care meant many terminally ill people could now enjoy their final days. Examples of people who came round after asking not to be revived and went on to live for many more weeks or months were also misleading, Chand said. “Of course, you can find examples of these people who are still around, but those are very few exceptions.”
Right-to-die campaigners hailed Friday’s vote in the Lords as a breakthrough. The agreed amendment would require a judge in the family division of the high court to confirm that a terminally ill patient with less than six months to live had reached “a voluntary, clear, settled and informed” decision to control the time and manner of their death.
“We have moved a significant step closer to a change in the law,” said Sarah Wootton, chief executive of Dignity in Dying. “Reacting to pressure from the public and the courts, the House of Lords have accepted the principle of change and identified a uniquely British model of providing both greater choice and greater protection at the end of life.”
Safeguards such as the involvement of a judge would help ensure that vulnerable people were not pressured into ending their lives, Chand said.
“Things are moving very fast: within two to three years we will definitely see a change in the law. Why are we trying to prolong unnecessary life? Today in the House of Lords we are seeing a battle between those who are seeking a constructive way forward and those who, rather than identifying appropriate safeguards, are seeking to place barriers in the way of dying people having control over their death. Whether the law should change seems to have been settled. It is about how the law changes.”Microsoft stunned the world on Tuesday by launching its first ever laptop, the Microsoft Surface Book.
Over the past few years, Microsoft (MSFT) has said that its Surface tablets would replace traditional laptops, but now the company has a backup product -- just in case.
"Some people prefer this form factor," Ed Giaimo, a senior lead on the Surface Book team, told CNNMoney at an event in New York.
The Microsoft Surface Book looks like a MacBook at first glance, but how it works is much more interesting -- and intuitive.
Just like the Surface, the new Surface Book can be used as a full-powered laptop or as a tablet. You can also snap the display screen to the back of the keyboard so it acts like a clipboard, thanks to a unique mechanical hinge.
But the Surface Book isn't just another Surface tablet with a better keyboard.
The monitor contains the latest Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, and the keyboard base has a graphics processing unit (GPU) that boosts the laptop's performance. In addition, about three-fourths of the device's battery life is stored in the keyboard. (A fully charged battery can last 12 hours, Microsoft says.)
The Surface Book is noticeably sturdy. The tablet portion of the laptop weighs 1.6 pounds, and the whole unit weighs about 3.5 pounds.
The 13.5-inch Surface Book will go on sale on October 26, with pre-orders starting Tuesday. A base model will cost $1,499.
The Surface Book was just one of several Windows 10 products announced on Tuesday. Microsoft also launched a new Surface Pro and two Lumia smartphones.
The new Microsoft Surface Pro 4 has a bigger display -- 12.3 inches -- but is the same size as the Surface Pro 3. Microsoft also updated the accompanying keyboard to include a fingerprint reader, larger touchpad and a better keyboard.
The stylus also got an upgrade: It has a one-year battery life, magnetically attaches to the Pro 4 (and Surface Book), works with different pen tips and has a digital eraser on the other end.
The Lumia 950 and 950XL are basically like pocket-sized Windows 10 computers now: You can connect your phone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Microsoft's goal is to "reinvent" products and "move people from needing Windows, to choosing Windows, to loving Windows," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.ROCKFORD — Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the Mayflower or turkey for one group of real-life pilgrims.
More than 100 Burmese faithful celebrated the holiday Thursday at Myanmar Christian Fellowship Church, a branch of Rockford's Temple Baptist Church. Many of the congregants are refugees from Myanmar, which means Thanksgiving isn't about food and football, but about praising God for freedom and a better life in the United States.
Myanmar, a southeast Asian country near Thailand, has suffered from military rule and ethnic warfare since around 1948, when the Burmese won independence from Great Britain. The country recently instituted a series of democratic reforms, and, in November, held a new round of elections, but life is still a struggle for many Burmese. Ethnic minorities are discriminated against and denied citizenship, and human rights violations are still a problem throughout the country.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated in December 2014 there were about 479,000 refugees who originated from Myanmar. The United States admitted more than 18,000 Burmese refugees during fiscal year 2015, according to the State Department's Refugee Processing Center.
Pastor Kee Thang helped start Temple Baptist's Burmese branch about four years ago, soon after he came to the United States. Senior Pastor Bill Patterson said the church created Myanmar Christian Fellowship as part of a larger goal to make Temple Baptist "more multiethnic, more urban."
"These people are coming under similar conditions the pilgrims came under," Patterson said.
The church provides a community for the Burmese and helps them assimilate into the United States. Lay elder Bob Carlson said Temple Baptist, which celebrated its 135th anniversary this year, sent some of the first missionaries to Myanmar.
"One hundred thirty-five years later, they're kind of coming back to us," Carlson said.
Through his nephew, 19-year-old Tom Mana, Thang said the Thanksgiving celebration is about praising God and returning the blessings the congregants have been given. After worship, he said, congregants would cook Burmese food, including rice, pork and curry, for a group meal.
"Because we worship God, we want to worship in our own language," Thang said.
The service included music from a full-praise band, with Burmese lyrics projected on a screen behind the performers. Congregants closed their eyes and waved their hands to rock music while children crawled under pews and teenagers took selfies in the back of the sanctuary.
Some worshipers left baskets of fruits and vegetables on a table near the front of the church as a Thanksgiving offering to God. When Thang took the podium to give a blessing, his Burmese included a periodic 'hallelujah,' which the congregants repeated.
Church elder Ro Bin San, who came to the United States as a refugee about seven years ago, said celebrating Thanksgiving is important to him because it's the tradition of the country that adopted him. San came to the United States through Malaysia with his wife and children after spending time in a refugee camp in Myanmar. He said "everything is not freedom" in his home country, which is what brought him to the United States.
"Everything is freedom," San said. "That is why we came to America."
Lindsey Holden: 815-987-1339; [email protected]; @lindseyholden27Note: As the new episodes of Season 7 are released, the Lord will review them. So, keep checking our blog.
A common understanding of the Doom of Valyria is that The Faceless Men killed the mages and thus, the Doom occurred. And, then, there are no theories on dragons. But looking deeply, as the Lord found, it can be seen that it all is associated with the Great Cthulhu.
First, look here:
Even the Asshai’i do not claim to know who built their city; they will say only that a city has stood here since the world began and will stand here until it ends. Few places in the known world are as remote as Asshai, and fewer are as forbidding. – A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE
Still in doubt, eh?
Maesters and other scholars alike have puzzled over the greatest of the enigmas of Sothoryos, the ancient city of Yeen. A ruin older than time, built of oily black stone, in massive blocks so heavy that it would require a dozen elephants to move them, Yeen has remained a desolation for many thousands of years, yet the jungle that surrounds it on every side has scarce touched it. – A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE
When the daughter of the Opal Emperor succeeded him as the Amethyst Empress, her envious younger brother cast her down and slew her, proclaiming himself the Bloodstone Emperor and beginning a reign of terror. He practiced dark arts, torture, and necromancy, enslaved his people, took a tiger-woman for his bride, feasted on human flesh, and cast down the true gods to worship a black stone that had fallen from the sky. – A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE
So, first we have to give proof that Earth and Planetos are in the same universe.
1). Look at the first quote. Isn’t Asshai’i like a Planetosi equivalent to R’lyeh, the city where the Great Cthulhu now dwells.
2). Now, we are talking about Yeen. Look at the image below carefully; doesn’t it look like the remains of a Old One; the huge stones and all.
3). A black stone fallen from the sky… this one is very clear. It refers to the Great Old Ones.
Now, that it has been established that Earth and Planetos are in the same universe, now look at this:
When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the
sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. – THE CALL OF CTHULHU
So what happened actually was that as The Great Old Ones were moving from world to world, or more accurately from Planetos to Earth, the stars turned wrong and two of The Old Ones, one at Asshai’i and the other at Yeen, were left behind on Planetos.
So, long before the arrival of other species on Planetos, the Great Olds fell. But, then, see this:
When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals. – THE CALL OF CTHULHU
And, yes, you are right; the same thing happened on Planetos. The two Great Old Ones did the same thing, they formed a cult so that when the stars are right, they will help them become free. The greater part of this cult exists on Sothoryos and the rest of the unknown world. But one of them lies on Westeros, the Iron People.
Now, from what do we know of the cultists:
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any
men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now,
inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. – THE CALL OF CTHULHU
And from what we know of The Drowned God (more will be explained below), a.k.a. He Who Dwells Beneath The Waves, lives under the sea.
Look at this:
That is dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
What is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stranger.
Coincidence? No, it is not. And in fact, both of these sayings allude to the same thing, if looked closely upon. Now, since the central faith of these cults revolved around Cthulhu, the Iron People named him Nagga, the sea dragon (more will be explained below).
As time passed, Cthulhu called upon his servants and was nearly successful, before failing. And thus, on Planetos started The Long Night.
And it was during the Long Night that the Iron People forgot their true faith. The great Cthulhu, i.e., Nagga turned into an enemy which their mythical Grey King had defeated and for evidence to that, they took the bones of a kraken at Old Wyk, and then the broken fragments of Nagga took the form of their Drowned God.
But, they remembered one part, a part that became that centre of their renewed faith. They remembered that the Drowned God (i.e., the Old Ones)…
…would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. – THE CALL OF CTHULHU
And in Asshai’i by the Shadow during the time Cthulhu tried to free himself, the sensitive people turned mad there. One mad person, whom the world would later know as Azor Ahai, went to the remains of The Great One trying to free himself. Twice, he returned back, nearly dead. But he went again, and by this third time, Great Cthulhu had failed. And the illiterate men thought that this ‘Azor Ahai’ had done this, and began to worship a God, R’hllor who had sent him. And, this R’hllor they worshipped was no other than Great Cthulhu and the red priests, they performed ‘magic’ by tapping into the tempered energy into the unknown powers of Great Cthulhu lying dormant in the great city of R’lyeh. And since then, Asshai’i got a name for magic, all of them tempering with the power of Cthulhu.
The dark city by the Shadow is a city steeped in sorcery. Warlocks, wizards, alchemists, moonsingers, red priests, black alchemists, necromancers, aeromancers, pyromancers, bloodmages, torturers, inquisitors, poisoners, godwives, night-walkers, shapechangers, worshippers of the Black Goat and the Pale Child and the Lion of Night, all find welcome in Asshai-by-the-Shadow, where nothing is forbidden. – A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE
But Great Cthulhu totally did not fail and he sent his Black Winged Ones there to help the cults. And the Winged Ones were more powerful on Planetos than Earth due to the tempered power of Cthulhu. These Black Winged Ones went to the Shadow, the place known as Stygai where they bonded with one of the cults. Great Cthulhu told the cultists that when his second call will come, the people will help him with blood and fire, as they had more power on Planetos after the tempering.
These cultists became the Valyrians and their Valyrian Religion was the worship of the Great Old Ones, the chief among them, Cthulhu by the name of Balerion.
Slowly, the ‘magic’ on Planetos started dying as the tempering started to turn normal.
And then from February 28, 1925 to April 2, 1925 according to Earth, or 126 BC to 114 BC according
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he used to sleep in his mother’s pallu. In the morning, Salma (Salim Khan’s wife) had to loosen his grip over the pallu to go to the kitchen. Unlike Salman, I didn’t get to spend much time with my mother. I wasn’t allowed to go near her because she was suffering from tuberculosis. My father died when I was 14, the year I was appearing for my matriculation. I am one of those unfortunate persons who was brought up by servants. After my mother’s death, my father did become closer to me. Since I was the youngest in the family, he used to take me along wherever he went. Honestly, I think there’s definitely that influence of the mother [on your] character, because you retain those memories, and somewhere, it reflects in your work.
Q Is Salman closer to his mother than you?
A Yes, she [acts as] a buffer zone for him. Even today, when Salman is tired and emotionally low, he comes up here (Salman lives on the ground floor) and sleeps while she caresses him. A mother’s character is universal; she is the same anywhere in the world. With me, it’s different. When I was working, I was always busy and didn’t spend as much time with my kids. Pehle main kum bolta thha (earlier, I would speak to them much less), now I have become friendlier with them.
Q It’s incredible how similar Salman and you are in terms of your habits, temperament and, particularly, your views on women.
A Ek jaisa sense of humour hai hamara, if that’s what you mean (you mean we have a similar sense of humour). Salman and I are not alike. I am disciplined, punctual and committed. He has a laidback attitude, ki chal raha hai. Usko push karna padta hai (you have to push him). But he is changing now. He has become more professional. He is choosing the right projects and is very serious about his films. Emotionally, we react the same way. Usko bhi wohi baaton se taqleef hoti hai jisse mujhe hoti hai (the same things bother us). We connect that way. There’s unspoken love between us, and also respect. He stands up when I come and that’s not because he’s scared of me, but because he loves and respects me.
Q Does he seek your advice on which films to do, and whether a script is good or not?
A He doesn’t depend on me professionally. He takes all his decisions. I don’t interfere in my children’s life. Whenever he does ask me, I articulate my point. When I saw Bodyguard, I insisted they add the scene of the mother’s death and that there should be a family reunion in the end. Similarly, when I saw the first cut of Trishul, I suggested that the ambulance Amitabh Bachchan drives around in be added because I found the film too dry.
Q You have been a critic of Salman’s work, often voicing your opinion in public. Would it be fair to say that it is you who has guided and pushed him in the apt direction, that you are the real reason behind his success?
A The only credit I can take is that if one man hadn’t dared to come to Bombay from Indore, probably Salman would have been doing some other work; he would have been someplace else. I am not a critic of Salman, but I always felt his talent wasn’t utilised [well] right from his Maine Pyar Kiya days. He has disappointed me because I expected much more of him. He meets all the requirements of a Hindi film hero—he has terrific comic timing, he can romance well, when he fights he looks credible aur woh theek-thaak bhi dikhta hai (he is good-looking too). I had faith in his talent. Once, we were at a wedding in Aziz Mirza’s family, and there was this alleged rivalry played up by the media between Shah Rukh and Hrithik (Roshan). I told Shah Rukh that the only actor you must fear is Salman because jis din Salman serious ho gaya uss din woh sab ko peechhe chhod dega (the day Salman gets serious about his career, he will leave all of you behind).
Q Does all this talk of who is number one and the Shah Rukh versus Salman contest bother you?
A We don’t believe in the number game. Today if one actor is on top, someday there will be someone else. What you must not lose are your values. Salman has been brought up with the idea that failures and successes are part of life.
Q Do you think Salman’s fee of Rs 35 crore for Yash Raj’s Ek Tha Tiger is justified?
A When a star signs a picture, his first responsibility is to attract an audience. You give him his fee depending on his star value. Javed saab and I used to get our share; we used to retain the South Indian territory rights. It’s not a question of how much Salman is charging, it’s about how much a project can generate on his name. It’s like in cricket— everyone contributes, but there’s one player who gets the ‘Man of the Match’ [award] because he makes the maximum contribution.
Q This is Salman’s first film with Yash Raj in his two-decade-long career. What prevented him from signing one earlier?
A They approached him and he liked the script. It’s as simple as that. I have excellent relations with Yashji (Chopra). Woh nihayati (amended) shareef aadmi hai (he is a very cultured man). He respects me. Whenever he has any doubt on a script, he calls and asks for suggestions.
Q How is your equation with Javed Akhtar?
A Respect karta hun unki. Par aisa nahin hai ki hamara roz ghar aana jaana hai (I respect him, but it’s not like we are buddies). Once, I went out for a walk with a friend and suddenly it started raining. We ran and took shelter in Javed saab’s car-shed. He probably saw me and must have told Honey (Irani, his then wife), and she called me in, offering me something to drink. We chatted and I left. A friend later said, “Yeh Javed saab nahin kar sakte thhe?” If Javed saab were in my situation, he would have thought hard and pondered [the act of entering the car shed]; I just do it.
Q Of all your scripts, which are the most personal?
A Zanjeer, Shakti and Trishul gave me tremendous creative satisfaction. Sholay gave me an audience satisfaction; it reached out to the widest possible audience, and that has its own effect on a writer. Deewaar is the finest in terms of screenplay. Craft-wise, it was Salim-Javed’s greatest achievement.
Q Is there a script you’d like to write especially for Salman?
A Why only Salman? I want to just write a good screenplay.
Q You came to Bombay to act and become a star. Do you sometimes live that dream through Salman?
A I am not the kind of person to regret anything. Who says only actors are or can be stars? Nasir Hussain was the real star in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and not Aamir (Khan). There are times when producers are stars. Salim-Javed, despite being writers, were stars and quite popular. (Laughs) Maine kuchh ulti seedhee films kee thheen (I did act in some lousy films), but I soon realised that I cannot become Marlon Brando or Dilip Kumar. I discovered that I enjoyed creating and writing scenes more than I enjoyed acting them out. I was quick to identify my shortcomings and became a writer and reached the highest [possible professional] peak in writing.
I told Arbaaz (his second son) the same thing; when his acting career wasn’t going anywhere, I suggested he try out production, but he didn’t want to. Instead, he would go to (third son) Sohail’s office at 9 am, wondering what to do with his time. I bought him a makkhi maarne ki bat (flybat) and told his secretary, “Perhaps you and he can take turns at it.” The moral of the story is: realise your true potential and get right to the top of your field.
Look at David (Pointing towards director David Dhawan who has just dropped in to meet him), he knows he cannot make Mughal-E-Azam and sticks to comedies because that’s what he knows best. With all due respect to K Asif saab, he wouldn’t have been able to make a film like Partner. And Satyajit Ray couldn’t have made Sholay.
(The original version of this article incorrectly stated the word nihayati. The error is regretted.)Outrage grows after senior officer claimed troops in Afghanistan were on the lookout for 'children with potential hostile intent'
The US military is facing fresh questions over its targeting policy in Afghanistan after a senior army officer suggested that troops were on the lookout for "children with potential hostile intent".
In comments which legal experts and campaigners described as "deeply troubling", army Lt Col Marion Carrington told the Marine Corp Times that children, as well as "military-age males", had been identified as a potential threat because some were being used by the Taliban to assist in attacks against Afghan and coalition forces.
"It kind of opens our aperture," said Carrington, whose unit, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was assisting the Afghan police. "In addition to looking for military-age males, it's looking for children with potential hostile intent."
In the article, headlined "Some Afghan kids aren't bystanders", Carrington referred to a case this year in which the Afghan national police in Kandahar province said they found children helping insurgents by carrying soda bottles full of potassium chlorate.
The piece also quoted an unnamed marine corps official who questioned the "innocence" of Afghan children, particularly three who were killed in a US rocket strike in October. Last month, the New York Times quoted local officials who said Borjan, 12, Sardar Wali, 10, and Khan Bibi, eight, from Helmand's Nawa district had been killed while gathering dung for fuel.
However, the US official claimed that, before they called for the strike on suspected insurgents planting improvised explosive devices, marines had seen the children digging a hole in a dirt road and that "the Taliban may have recruited the children to carry out the mission".
Last year, Human Rights Watch reported a sharp increase in the Taliban's deployment of children in suicide bombings, some as young as seven.
But the apparent widening of the US military's already controversial targeting policy has alarmed human rights lawyers and campaigners.
Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah specialising in counter-terrorism, said Carrington's remarks reflected the shifting definitions of legitimate military targets within the Obama administration.
Guiora, who spent years in the Israel Defence Forces, including time as a legal adviser in the Gaza Strip, said: "I have great respect for people who put themselves in harm's way. Carrington is probably a great guy, but he is articulating a deeply troubling policy adopted by the Obama administration.
"The decision about who you consider a legitimate target is less defined by your conduct than the conduct of the people or category of people which you are assigned to belong to … That is beyond troubling. It is also illegal and immoral."
Guiora added: "If you are looking to create a paradigm where you increase the 'aperture' – that scares me. It doesn't work, operationally, morally or practically."
Guiora cited comments made by John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism chief, in April, in which he "talked about flexible definitions of imminent threat."
Pardiss Kebriaei, senior attorney of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a specialist in targeted killings, said she was concerned over what seemed to be an attempt to justify the killing of children.
Kebriaei said: "This is one official quoted. I don't know if that standard is what they are using but the standard itself is troubling."
The US is already facing criticism for using the term term "military-aged male" to justify targeted killings where the identities of individuals are not known. Under the US definition, all fighting-age males killed in drone strikes are regarded as combatants and not civilians, unless there is explicit evidence to the contrary. This has the effect of significantly reducing the official tally of civilian deaths.
Kebriael said the definition was reportedly being used in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. "Under the rules of law you can only target civilians if they are directly participating in hostilities. So, here, this standard of presuming any military aged males in the vicinity of a war zone are militants, already goes beyond what the law allows.
"When you get to the suggestion that children with potentially hostile intent may be perceived to be legitimate targets is deeply troubling and unlawful."
Children in conflict zones have additional protections under the law.
Kebriael, who is counsel for CCR in a lawsuit which seeks accountability for the killing of three American citizens – including a 16 year old boy – in US drone strikes in Yemen last year, said that the piece also raised questions over how those killed in that incident were counted. "Were they counted as military-aged males or were they counted as children with potentially hostile intent or were they counted as the innocent bystanders they were?"
In a speech in April setting out the context for the US programme of targeted killings, White House counter-terrorism chief John Brennan spoke about a threshold of "significant threat', which was widely seen as introducing a lower criteria than "imminent threat".
Brennan said: "Even if it is lawful to pursue a specific member of al-Qaida, we ask ourselves whether that individual's activities rise to a certain threshold for action, and whether taking action will, in fact, enhance our security. For example, when considering lethal force we ask ourselves whether the individual poses a significant threat to US interests. This is absolutely critical, and it goes to the very essence of why we take this kind of exceptional action."
An Isaf spokesman, Lt Col Jimmie Cummings, told the Marine Corp Times that insurgents continue to use children as suicide bombers and IED emplacers, even though Taliban leader Mullah Omar has ordered them to stop harming civilians.
There have been more than 200 children killed in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen by the CIA and Joint Special Operating Command, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.Syrian Electronic Army hacked BlueHost, Hostgator, Justhost, FastDomain and HostMonstor companies because they hosted websites managed by terrorists.
Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is an unstoppable cyber brigade that once again gained the attention of the principal media for a clamorous hack. SEA is a popular group of hacked aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is the past it hacked high-profile targets including Microsoft, eBay and PayPal,.
This time the popular hacking crew compromised a number of popular web hosting brands of the web-hosting company Endurance International Group INC, which manages over 60 different hosting brands.
The brands compromised by the Syrian Electronic Army are the hosting Companies BlueHost, Hostgator, Justhost, FastDomain and HostMonstor.
The Group announced its last attacks on Twitter by posting the screenshots of the administration panels of the hacked web hosting companies. The screenshots show that SEA had complete access to the control panel of these hosting companies (HostMonstor and BlueHost). The hackers of the Syrian Electronic Army panel access which indicates that the group had complete access to the control panel of these hosting companies.
SEA also sent a Tweet to warn the web hosting companies that next time it will change the DNS settings with serious repercussion for their clients and their visitors.
According to Syrian Electronic Army, Endurance Group’s BlueHost, JustHost, HostGator and HostMonster were hosting websites operated by groups of terrorists, for this reason the hackers hit it.
Like Anonymous, also the Syrian Electronic Army started a crusade against the media accounts of ISIS members and its websites managed by terrorists, the group of hackers recently hacked a website of Islam Army. The hackers of the Syrian Electronic Army have also hacked official Twitter account of Bluebox and used spread the news of the hack. Pierluigi Paganini (Security Affairs – Syrian Electronic Army, terrorists)
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Share OnIt was chaos in the parking lot of MetLife Stadium Sunday night.
As CBS2’s Hazel Sanchez reported, hundreds of concertgoers ran from the gates of MetLife Stadium as police armed with riot gear blasted off tear gas trying to disperse the crowd.
Many people were overcome by the fumes.
“People been standing out here for over 3 1/2 hours just trying to get into a concert that they paid for,” said one concertgoer.
Thousands of hip-hop and music fans had converged on the stadium for the Hot97 Summer Jam concert, but hundreds were not allowed inside due to an apparent crowd control problem, Sanchez reported.
“We we arrived here about 4:30-5 o’clock, when we got here they had everybody standing outside in a mob,” said Aaron Martin. “…They wouldn’t let us in. When I asked him what was going on they said there was some sort of riot but they wouldn’t elaborate.”
The stadium was put on temporary lock down while an armored tank was brought in using a piercing whistle, forcing spectators to leave the property and parking lot.
The situation became so volatile, a CBS2 camera man was forced into his vehicle while police apprehended a man on the ground.
“Barbaric — the way they treat our people is like animals. If there was another concert this would’ve never happened,” said one concertgoer.
State police released a statement Sunday night saying “security personnel at one of the entrance gates to MetLife Stadium were confronted by crowds attempting to illegally enter the sold out Summer Jam concert by climbing over fences and forcing their way through security personnel.”
Sgt. Gregory Williams said arrests have been made, but could not provide further details.
The concert was headlined by Kendrick Lamar and Chris Brown.
(TM and © Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)BAGHDAD — A restaurant owner in Dahuk province in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq named his restaurant, which opened one week after Donald Trump won the US presidential elections, after the president-elect.
Many Iraqis reveled in Trump’s victory, which went viral on social media in Iraq. Some Iraqis have gone so far as naming their newborns after the incoming US president.
The father of a baby boy, who was born into a Kurdish family in Dahuk, named his child Trump. He said he supports Trump for his supportive positions vis-a-vis the Kurdistan Region.
This unprecedented jubilation in Iraq with Trump’s Nov. 8 victory is in response to Trump's support for the Kurdish people, as seen in June statements by Trump Middle East policy adviser Walid Phares. Phares said Trump is a close friend of the Kurdish people and has always endeavored to strengthen relations between Washington and the Kurds. He added that Trump, as president, will not object to any US decision that is in the interest of the Kurds, including secession and independence.
The seemingly spontaneous pro-Trump celebrations in Dahuk and other provinces in Iraqi Kurdistan are a means also to draw media attention and to attract foreigners to restaurants and other places of leisure bearing the name of Trump.
Nidiar Zawiyati, the owner of the restaurant in Dahuk, told Al-Monitor, “I named my restaurant [Trump] out of enthusiasm, without any political objectives.”
He believes the restaurant's name has helped attract customers because of the extensive controversy stirred by Trump’s victory. He said foreigners who reside in the area have been frequenting his restaurant as well as locals.
It appears that the Kurdish people are not aspiring only for military and economic support from the Trump administration, but are pinning their hopes on the new US president to help them in their quest of secession and independence.
Kurdish political analyst Mahamad Zangana told Al-Monitor, “Some Republicans are hoping the situation in [Iraqi] Kurdistan will change based on Trump's statements, reflecting his support of Kurdish independence as well as the Kurdish [peshmerga] forces fighting against the Islamic State.”
He said that the Kurdish people are confident that the United States under Trump will treat them more favorably than during Barack Obama's presidency. “Some citizens are naming their shops or newborns after Trump in order to tease the haters of the Kurdish people and the naysayers to independence,” he added.
Zangana stressed that the US administration has priorities and that it may provide Kurdistan with indirect support. “Washington has maintained contact with Kurdish leaders and parties under all circumstances, and has always been present on the ground. I think the perspective will change this time and the Kurdish dream will come true under the new [US] administration, which will deal more favorably with the issue of Kurdish sovereignty, without directly supporting Kurdish independence. The new US administration will force the region to recognize Kurdistan’s independence.”
In turn, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) seems optimistic about Trump's presidency, and is betting on more US support for Kurdistan and more pressure on Baghdad regarding the pending issues between the KRG and the federal government.
Masrour Barzani, the chancellor of the Kurdistan Region Security Council, said during a visit to Washington on Dec. 8 that the new US administration under Trump is likely to increase aid to the KRG and take another position if Baghdad continues to marginalize the peshmerga forces.
Rudaw media network quoted Barzani saying, “We came here to thank the current administration for its support and assistance to the Kurdish people, and to get to know the new administration, from which we expect more support for the peshmerga forces.”
Barzani added, “We talked to a large number of advisers in the new US administration. All of them confirmed their support for the Kurds and promised to provide more aid.”
These US and Kurdish statements reflect the understanding and harmony between Washington and the KRG, as well as obvious US support for the independence of the KRG. Kurdish citizens seem to take these statements very seriously, as they see Trump as the man who will make their independence dream come true.
Hozan Nagda, a student at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimaniyah, told Al-Monitor, “We welcome any external support for the Kurdish independence cause. The [jubilant] reaction was an expression of gratitude to President Trump, because he put the Kurdish issue among his priorities. The Kurdish community has acted upon Trump's comments, and we hope that he will fulfill the promises he made during his election campaign.”
He said that Trump's statements fueled the Kurdish support for his policies and created a sense of joy about his victory, since Kurdistan has been dreaming of independence for decades, and especially at this time, as the financial crisis has destroyed the KRG infrastructure and weakened its regional and international position.
The fact that the Kurds are naming their children and shops after Trump is an expression of gratitude for the positions of the US president-elect, who has rekindled their hopes for secession and independence.
But despite the desire of the new US administration to provide more support to Iraqi Kurdistan to realize its dream, this will remain far-fetched if it is not coupled with reforms allowing the Kurdish parliament, suspended for more than a year, to resume its activities, and if the KRG does not abide by the constitution and and the rules of democracy.Belgium Boss Says Jason Denayer is the Man to Replace Vincent Kompany at Euro 2016
Jason Denayer looks as though he’s been handed a chance to permanently break in Belgium’s starting line-up after manager Marc Wilmots revealed he should start at Euro 2016.
With captain and regular centre-back Vincent Kompany sidelined after sustaining a groin injury, it had been expected that Wilmots would pair Tottenham defenders Toby Alderweireld and Jan Vertonghen together, given they enjoyed such a successful season in the Premier League.
But apparently Wilmots favours a straight swap for Kompany, and given Barcelona’s Thomas Vermalen also struggles with injuries, the coach said via the Manchester Evening News:
“Vincent and Thomas are prone to injury. We therefore looked at young players with an interesting profile.
“That’s why I brought Jason Denayer with us – he has the best profile to replace Vincent Kompany. He is fast and allows the team to play and press.”
Wilmots: "Denayer has best profile to replace Kompany. I have a defence (Toby-Denayer-Lombaerts-Vertonghen) that works well" (RTBF – 1/4) — John Chapman (@BelgoFoot) May 23, 2016
Denayer, 20, who made his name after a successful loan spell at Celtic last season, is still on the books at Manchester City, and is expected to stake a claim to start under Pep Guardiola next season following another successful loan spell with Galatasaray.
He’s still just 20, and throwing him in at centre-back could be seen as something of a gamble, but anyone who watching him at Celtic last season knows he’s an extremely talented player.
Will Denayer be a hit at the Euros?
Let us know in the comments section below…Nowruz, as the Iranian New Year is called in Persian, means “new day” and falls on the first day of the spring equinox every year. It is an ancient ritual dating back 2500 years and is rooted in Zoroastrianism. The Chinese Lunar New Year is also known as Spring Festival, as the season signifies a new start from the depths of winter, carrying the same meaning as in Iranian culture.
This is the Year of the Monkey in Chinese zodiac. Hence, the city of Hamedan included it in its urban decoration for Nowruz, placing monkeys along the different haft-seen elements.
Haft-Seen is the traditional table setting of Nowruz in Iran. It includes seven items starting with the letter S (called seen in Persian alphabet): sabzeh (greenery: wheat, barley or lentil sprouts grown in a dish), samanu (a sweet pudding made from germinated wheat), senjed (the dried fruit of the oleaster tree), sir (garlic), sib (apples), somagh (sumac berries) and serkeh (vinegar).
Other symbolic items which are usually set along the Haft Seen are candles, a mirror, decorated coins (sekkeh in Persian), spring flowers like hyacinth (sonbol in Persian) or tulips, decorated eggs, a bowl of water with goldfish, a holy book and/or a poetry book, rose water and pomegranates.
Related articles: The other Iran | Customs & Traditions
Sources: IRNA, Nafee.ir, Wikipedia | NowruzExtreme carelessness isn’t criminal, at least when it comes to handling classified information.
That’s the consensus of experts in national security law, who weren’t surprised that the FBI isn’t recommending an indictment for Hillary Clinton and her staff related to her use of a private email server, saying such a move would have set a bold new standard for such cases.
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“It would have been a real long-shot to shoehorn Secretary Clinton’s conduct into the existing federal criminal laws,” said Stephen Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law. “I don’t think this was the case in which to pursue unprecedented interpretations of those statutes.”
That might sound strange to anyone who never took the LSAT listening to FBI Director James Comey’s statement on Tuesday morning. He called her handling of highly sensitive information “extremely careless,” and said any “reasonable person” should have known what was classified, and that the emails she sent from hostile territory were even less secure than plain old Gmail.
It caught some seasoned prosecutors by surprise too. “When I listened to him, I thought for sure he was going to either make no recommendation or recommend prosecution,” said Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York who made his name prosecuting the Mafia in the 1980s. “No reasonable prosecutor would not present this case to a grand jury.”
But ultimately, other experts say, she and her aides weren’t trying to be traitors, and there’s no evidence that anything really bad happened as a result of her homebrew server.
“It’s not as if he overlooked or whitewashed the facts of the matter,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, about Comey’s statement. “But he also explained the difference between this case and previous criminal cases: Namely the question of intent, the volume of material, disloyalty to the United States and other factors which are not relevant here.”
Part of the issue is that the rules governing how classified information is handled date back to 1917, and it’s unclear exactly how the morass of laws apply – even to behavior that just seems wrong from a common-sense perspective.
“The basic problem here is that the relevant federal criminal laws are a patchwork, and there’s no general prohibition against basically unsecured communications,” Vladeck said. “Indeed, there isn’t even a clear prohibition of unsecure communication of classified information. So I think there’s a really wide gap between what the average person on the street assumes is illegal and what’s actually illegal in this area.”
That Comey got into all those unflattering details about the FBI’s findings is unusual, and may have been driven at least in part by concerns that the investigation would be influenced by Clinton’s political ties to the Obama administration. President Barack Obama endorsed her – they appeared together on the campaign trail for the first time just hours after Comey’s remarks – and former President Bill Clinton caused a furor last week with an impromptu social call on Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Lynch still has the final say on whether Clinton faces prosecution, and though she has said she’ll accept the recommendation of the career prosecutors – the ones Comey just advised not to proceed – Republicans are still crying foul.
Trump called the system “rigged” in a tweet Tuesday, and a few Republican lawmakers have called for a special prosecutor to take a look at the FBI’s findings before the Justice Department makes a final decision on prosecution.
On top of that, much of the national security establishment is hostile to Donald Trump, who has mused about abandoning decades of nuclear security policy and bringing back torture to interrogate terror suspects.
“Is the mistake of using the email server akin to calling for violations of international law?” said Susan Hennessey, a former National Security Agency lawyer now at the Brookings Institution.
But there are some national security law experts who think the case against Clinton is clear. There is one relevant law that criminalizes gross negligence, regardless of intent, and Clinton broke it, according to Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing in the 1990s.
“In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require,” McCarthy wrote in National Review on Tuesday. “The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing.”
Hennessey acknowledged the negligence provision, but noted the government doesn’t use it to prosecute people.
“There are not infrequently federal laws constructed such that a lot of different activity could technically be considered a criminal violation,” Hennessey added. But that’s not the same thing as “properly chargeable under the law.”
If the negligence law has never had its day in court, Giuliani said, there’s a simple explanation: “There’s never been a secretary of State who has been as reckless.”
Giulini also questioned the idea that Clinton had shown no criminal intent. “Everything [Comey] said is the kind of thing as prosecutor you use to prove intent,” Giuliani said in a phone interview, adding that Clinton showed the “conduct of a person who had consciousness of guilt: she hid records, she destroyed records, she put her server at home.”
He continued, “I’ve never heard of anyone in a criminal investigation who destroyed 34,000 records who didn’t get indicted.”
But even as Trump claimed on Tuesday that “General Petraeus got in trouble for far less,” one of the former prosecutors for David Petraeus said the two cases were quite different.
James Melendres said on MSNBC that for one, there appeared to be a lack of willfulness in the Clinton case, whereas Petraeus acknowledged that he knew the information he shared with his lover Paula Broadwell was highly classified. He also said that were aggravating circumstances in the Petraeus case, notably that Petraeus lied to investigators.
Government employees can still get in plenty of trouble for mishandling classified material, and as Comey noted, people involved in the Clinton case could still be subject to administrative sanctions. That could mean getting fired or having security clearance revoked. It wouldn’t affect Clinton if she’s elected, but she’ll likely want other top aides swept up in the inquiry, like her top foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan and longtime aide Human Abedin, to have access to security clearances.
“Because Clinton is running for president, if she is elected, she will have been cleared by the American people,” Aftergood said. “Other people who are employees of the State Department or other agencies might have new hurdles to face in future employment.”
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, didn’t second-guess Comey’s recommendation on prosecution, but he did call for more accountability down the road. “I hope the irresponsible handling of classified information documented by the FBI will be considered if any of these individuals currently possesses a security clearance or applies for one in the future,” he said in a statement.
But the point of those sanctions is usually to get sensitive material out of the hands of untrustworthy people, Hennessey said, and with Clinton’s aides publicly and politically chastened, it’s safe to assume they won’t make the same mistake again.
While some low-level State employees could get a slap on the wrist, she added, revoking clearances would be “really very aggressive considering the facts that have emerged.”
Another big reason Clinton is likely off the legal hook: while Comey talked about vulnerability to hackers, he didn’t mention any bad consequences.
“That might have changed the outcome, if there were evidence that, oh, a CIA source got killed as a result of sloppiness or an operation had to be aborted,” Aftergood said. “That would change the whole texture of the story, and no one has suggested that anything like that happened.”
Even as he accused the Justice Department of giving Clinton special treatment, Giuliani wouldn’t directly speculate about Comey’s motives for, in his view, dropping a slam-dunk case.
“Obviously he’s not comfortable with it,” Giuliani said. “He wouldn’t take any questions on it.”
Comey did go out of his way to criticize the State Department more broadly on Tuesday, even though it wasn’t the focus of the investigation.
“We also developed evidence that the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified e-mail systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government,” Comey said.
It’s unclear whether lawmakers will ever take steps to more clearly codify the law related to classified information. Right now, the laws seem to be so vague that they could apply to everyone, or no one.
“There’s a worthwhile debate that we ought to have about whether simply miscommunicating or communicating over unsecured networks should itself be illegal,” said Vladeck. “If it was, then hundreds if not thousands of federal employees would be liable.”NEW: Buy the eBook bundle and get two books! This book now has a sequel in which we take the next step in Monkey's evolution. You can buy both books together to get: Writing An Interpreter In Go and Writing A Compiler In Go in one package for a reduced bundle price!
and Writing A Compiler In Go in one package for a! Both books in ePub (iBook), Mobi (Kindle), PDF and HTML.
. The complete code presented in both books, including the Monkey interpreter from Writing An Interpreter In Go and the Monkey bytecode compiler and virtual machine from Writing A Compiler In Go. Buy now for $50
Buy this book to learn:
How to build an interpreter for a C-like programming language from scratch
What a lexer, a parser and an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) are and how to build your own
, a and an are and What closures are and how and why they work
are and how and why they work What the Pratt parsing technique and a recursive descent parser is
and a is What others talk about when they talk about built-in data structures
What REPL stands for and how to build one
Why this book?
This is the book I wanted to have a year ago. This is the book I couldn't find. I wrote this book for you and me.
So why should you buy it? What's different about it, compared to other interpreter or compiler literature?
Working code is the focus. Code is not just found in the appendix. Code is the main focus of this book.
. Code is not just found in the appendix. Code is the main focus of this book. It's small! It has around 200 pages of which a great deal is readable, syntax-highlighted, working code.
It has around of which a great deal is readable, syntax-highlighted, working code. The code presented in the book is easy to understand, easy to extend, easy to maintain.
No 3rd party libraries! You're not left wondering: "But how does tool X do that?" We won't use a tool X. We only use the Go standard library and write everything ourselves.
You're not left wondering: "But how does tool X do that?" We won't use a tool X. We only use the Go standard library and write everything ourselves. Tests! The interpreter we build in the book is fully tested! Sometimes in TDD style, sometimes with the tests written after. You can easily run the tests to experiment with the interpreter and make changes.
"If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don’t know how computers work. If you’re not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don’t know how they work." Steve Yegge, super famous programmer and blogger "Start by writing an interpreter with me!" Thorsten Ball, author of the book you're looking at
This book is for you if you…
learn by building and love to look under the hood
and love programming and to program for the sake of learning and joy!
! are interested in how
|
provide an avenue for direct feedback from consumers to suggest improvements and feature requests for Microsoft products.
The company listens. Cases in point: A surprising number of users clamored for Persian calendars in Windows 10—and Microsoft delivered. Microsoft’s monthly updates to the Xbox One often include and highlight community suggestions. Heck, when has Microsoft allowed consumers to beta-test a new operating system as it develops it?
Thousands of users wanted Persian calendar support in Windows 10. It's in there.
A group of dedicated developers could undoubtedly add their own improvements to the Windows products. (Stardock and others have built a business on that idea, with their own versions of the Windows Start menu.) And it’s also true that Microsoft doesn’t or can’t respond to all requests; the most popular Xbox One request, for example, is for Microsoft to build in backward compatibility to the Xbox 360 and its stable of games.
Right now, Microsoft has built its business on Windows, Office, and its enterprise products. But as Microsoft moves more toward a “devices and services” world, it’s possible that Windows will become less important, even as those services become more prominent.
“Microsoft’s revenue increasingly comes from the compute services rather than licensing software, and by selling a wide collection of related services such as Office 365, OneDrive, Bing, etc.,” said Al Gillen, a vice president with IDC. “So would it make sense to open-source Windows in, maybe, 10 years? Quite possibly.”
Additional reporting by Katherine Noyes of the IDG News Service.Just want to start off by saying that just because a movie is not labeled in the horror genre, or does not contain graphic or disturbing imagery, does not mean a movie cannot be absolutely horrifying. Conspiracy is proof of that.
This 2001 HBO production focuses on the Wannsee Conference of 1942, in which top Nazi officials discussed and planned the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question”. In just over an hour, the details would be laid on how to round up and eventually exterminate all of the Jews in Europe. Their discussions, and the manner in which they so nonchalantly discuss how they are going to murder people will just leave you in awe.
Kenneth Branagh stars as Reinhard Heydrich, the man left in charge by Adolf Hitler to come up with this final solution. He is aided by the more well know Adolf Eichmann, played by Stanley Tucci who organized the meeting to gather the other officials.
Both actors did a great job in their portrayals, because they made the characters seem human, and not evil, only adding to how disturbing the situation was.
This movie is based on the actual case file minutes recorded by Martin Luther, played by Kevin McNally.
Conspiracy stands at just over an hour and a half, and although that may seem rather short for a television film production, the meeting in real life lasted only about that time. It is truly amazing that the plan that would result in more than six million deaths was decided in only an hour.
This film does a good job in showing the meeting, and takes place almost all in one room. The discussions are intense, and save for a few profanities here and there, this would be a great film to show in a classroom when teaching about the Holocaust or Nazi Germany in general.
My final rating for this will be a 9 out of 10. The final few minutes detailed what the fate would be of some of the officials after the conference. I thought that was a very nice touch.
AdvertisementsThe Official Poster to Episode one!
Thanks to our generous backers, on 5/12/13 we achieved our initial goal to make our 1st episode for an $18,500 budget. Now, our producers are reviewing the initial budget we planned which is far more enticing to us as filmmakers and will allow us the creative atmosphere we have been craving to make our unique visions of these timeless characters possible. Thanks to the immense funding support thus far, we can now make this series to the best of our ability. With any additional funds raised over the course of the campaign, we plan to allocate roughly $20,000 to each episode (and MMPR has just over 20,000 fans on facebook) which means that if each fan gave only $1 we could fund an entire new episode, and $5 each would make 5 new episodes... well, you get the idea! This has turned into a movement to help us fund this unofficial fan-film series. Help us get there!
_____________________________________________________
This is a fan film and is completely not-for-profit. We do not own any copyrights to the 'Mighty Morphin Power Rangers' name or livelihood. No copyright infringement intended. All material copyright Saban Capital Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
WATCH OUR TEASER TRAILER:
WHAT'S THE STORY?
The Power Rangers have vanished. Lord Zedd, their greatest enemy, has been defeated. The world is saved. Tommy Oliver, no longer the White Ranger, is in exile; running…hiding…waiting…for evil to find him again.
The world has moved on. Now, 20 years later, Lord Zedd has returned – stronger and nastier than before! Slowly regaining his powers and at the helm of a new army, he is looking for revenge against Tommy and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
Haunted by his past and having given up on fighting for the world, Tommy is tracked down by Zedd and his minions. But with the help of a mysterious woman, they discover that Zedd is looking for more than revenge...much more.
Now, to stop the forces of evil, Tommy and this mysterious woman seek help in stopping Zedd: an underground street fighter looking to do battle with anyone and everyone, twin sisters as different as night and day, seeking to protect the earth, and a police officer who is no stranger to villains.
A new group of heroes have been chosen, but will they be able to team together to defeat Lord Zedd, all while dealing with an interfering militants and his soldiers?
Will they triumph, or will Zedd finally destroy his greatest threat once and for all?
Reformed, repowered, the POWER RANGERS are back.
SO, WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO DO?
We all grew up watching the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But as time goes by, we get older and our tastes change. However, the Power Rangers didn't get older with us. Today, it is still the same light-hearted, colorful television series made for children that it was back then.
But now the time has come for the Power Rangers... to grow up.
We are a group of filmmakers who have set out to give you an updated version of the Power Rangers. This is a dark and gritty world where villains are truly evil and the heroes may not be completely altruistic either. This is not the story of five teenagers with spunk chosen to fight the forces of evil. This is the store of five adults who are thrown into the middle of a war that they do not choose to be in and a villian who will stop at nothing until he achieves complete destruction.
The latest rendering of our Blue and Red Rangers from costume designer Robert Casanova -- this is an example of what the helmet will look like that you can receive for the $2500 level!
WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE FUNDS WE RAISE?
As you can see, we got off to a pretty good start with the teaser trailer, but in order to make the filming of the entire season happen we will need your help. This is an ambitious and unique series that will take significant resources to produce. We would love for you to become a part of this journey with us by supporting our immensely talented group of actors and a fiercely dedicated creative and producing team.
We seek your generous support to help with the following production costs:
Publicity and expanding outreach to the fan community
Covering the rental of technical equipment and insurance costs
Location and transportation expenses
Materials to realize extremely ambitious set dressing, wardrobe, lighting, and special effect techniques
Creating live-able stipends for our creative artists
Administrative costs (permitting fees, SAG fees)
Our original Lord Zedd staff, hand-made by our production designer & associate producer Jason Short (only 30 available at the $250 reward level!)
HOW CAN I MAKE AN IMPACT?
We need one FINAL PUSH to make this project happen. Our current goal is to raise $18,500 by the time we start our next round of principal photography in July 2013 on location in New York City. Please contribute whatever you can! Any amount at all will help us bring our unique vision of the beloved Power Ranger characters to life.
**BIG NEWS: Our trailer is nominated for the Geekie Awards!
Latest draft of our MORPHER, which as a donation reward will go around your wrist, designed by Jason Short
WHO'S ON THE TEAM?
Original Show Team Members Involved:
Production Companies:
Creative Team:
Director & Cinematographer: Dominick Sivilli
Producers: Louis Malderelli and Lauren Rayner
Associate Producers: Anthony Argento and Jason Short
Writers: Alex Gavin and Louis Maldarelli
Prop Design & Construction: Jason Short
Production Designer: Rocio Gimenez
Graphic Designer: Bob Cassella
VFX: Mario Pece
3-D Modeler: John Rivera
Costume Design: Robert Casanova
Actors: Ricky Barksdale, Ashley Carvalho, Kimberly Carvalho, Dina Cataldi, John Damroth, Matt Meinsen, Don Money with Jerry Murdock
Click here to see full cast bios and photos!
Director/Cinematographer Dominick Sivilli on set for the trailer shootBy TTT Subscriber and freelance football writer Paul Little.
“You have to make sure you don’t lose sight of who you are. Many young coaches change, for whatever reason – because of circumstances beyond their control, because things don’t come out right at first or because success can change you. All of a sudden, they want to amend tactics, themselves. They don’t realise football is a monster that you can only beat and face if you are always yourself: under any circumstance.” Sir Alex Ferguson’s advice to Pep Guardiola, Pep Guardiola, Another Way of Winning by Guillem Balague
“We’ve nothing to fear but fear itself” – Franklin D’s great rallying call to the American people in the depths of the Great Depression. It’s a line that’s been on my mind since the horrible West Ham defeat. Naturally, it was amplified on Saturday evening as Liverpool played fear football again, lost again, and Twitter burned.
Brendan Rodgers has the fear and it’s eating him and his Liverpool legacy game by game. And it’s sad. Remember “death by football”? Poor old Brendan is suffering death by football – but not his football. Instead, a football that goes against his blood. A football that he’s not very good at. A football he’s been cowed into playing in fear of his job, submitting to all those shrill voices shrieking “You cannot win Brendan’s way.” Submitting to all those who have called him naïve. Submitting to all those who see Crystal Palace two years ago as proof, whilst ignoring the fact that it was “his” football that got Liverpool where they were in the first place. That almost got them there. We could almost touch it. Genuinely almost touch it for the first time in over 20 years.
But you can’t play that way. Won’t win that way.
When Brendan Rodgers strode into Liverpool, I like probably everyone else had rather serious doubts. But I was tired of Liverpool in many ways. Tired of what we’d become. And Rodgers’ enthusiasm, his certainty in his young self and his idea for the club, fired my interest. It was a bold appointment, but having watched his Swansea and enjoyed his Swansea and become interested in his ability to play that kind of football with British players, I began to think – well, why not? Let’s do something different with somebody different. Maybe with better players, but the same approaches – maybe we’d have something that would be at the very least engaging.
And it was. The first season struggling to bring tiki taka to Anfield and the clear sense post-Christmas that something was stirring. And then that brilliant second season. The slow but winning start, and then the explosion at Spurs that lit the red touch paper.
That whole period, right up to Gerrard’s slip and the ensuing desperation at Palace, that despite the dismay, still left us with a shot at the title in the very last game of the season. All that was built on Rodgers’ self belief, his ability to instil confidence in his players, to get them to be brave and play his way. Rodgers talked early on about how he would give those players the belief by telling them that he would shoulder the blame for any failure.
It worked. It worked brilliantly at times – and saw Liverpool jump incredibly from a seventh place team to a team a game from glory.
Liverpool were searing. They were energetic. They were fast. They were bold. They were fun. This was Rodgers’ doing. I know some will insist that actually it was all down to Luis Suarez. But it simply wasn’t. If it were true that Suarez simply covered up Brendan’s failings, then why on earth did he not do likewise for Kenny Dalglish? Why didn’t he score all those goals for the King?
The answer of course is because Rodgers built a platform for Suarez, opened the game up for Suarez and Suarez delivered. As did Sturridge and Sterling, and many others. This was good management. This was great coaching. This was inspirational stuff.
Since then, of course, things have been less good and less than inspirational. There have been extenuating circumstances. I’m not going to outline them again – but there have been. There was even a period where it looked like Rodgers had rediscovered himself, solved the problems of not having a forward line and solved the problems in defence with his 3-4-3 that almost changed Liverpool’s season last time round.
But it was perhaps here, at the sharp end of last season, just when he had somehow put Liverpool back in top four contention, that Rodgers let in the fear and lost his way. Suddenly after a defeat at home to United, he lost confidence in his new system. He started listening to those who said it couldn’t work, that it’d be found out, that he’d be found out. And he lost his way.
Fear and doubt. A loss of belief. Joe Gomez this season epitomises all of this for me. Gomez is a talented defender plucked from obscurity. He’s got a future, no question. But his selection – although bold in some ways – is also a lot about fear. Alberto Moreno was bought for a brave Liverpool, an attacking Liverpool. But now he doesn’t play, because Liverpool are no longer brave, because Rodgers has lost his nerve. Instead, the talented defensive Gomez plays to stop Liverpool being exposed. He plays on the wrong side, unable to pose a threat going forward – but that has stopped being the club’s philosophy.
Moreno was bought as part of Brendan’s brave new world. But Brendan finds it hard to believe in it anymore. He can’t see it clearly any more. And if he can’t see it, then his players won’t see it.
And it’s a shame. It’s a shame that Rodgers may go out playing someone else’s football. I still hope he can find it within himself to go again. I’d love for him to at least try. And if it’s to be his death by football – at least let it be by his football.The number of rapes and other sex crimes reported to police is at its highest level since current records began, new figures show.
Sex offences reported to forces in England and Wales rose by 26,606 in the year to September 2015, an increase of 36% on the previous 12 months, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found.
The 43 forces recorded just under 100,000 sex offences in total, the highest figure since the current method of reporting began in 2003.
A graph showing the changes in the amounts of different crimes reported shows sexual offences, violence against the person and fraud has risen while robbery and theft has seen a small drop
The ONS report said forces recorded 33,431 rapes and 66,178 other sexual offences, a total of 99,609 that was the highest since the National Crime Recording Standard was introduced 13 years ago.
Recorded separately, rape reports rose 39% year-on-year and other sex crimes 35%.
The report noted: 'It is thought rises in police recorded sexual offences are likely to be due to an improvement in recording by the police and an increase in the willingness of victims to come forward and report to the police.
'Previous increases in the number of sexual offences reported to the police were shown to have been related in part to a rise in the reporting of historical offences following 'Operation Yewtree', which began in 2012.
'Analysis of records from the Home Office Data Hub indicates that both current and historical offences continued to rise in the year ending September 2015 compared with the previous year. However, the major volume contribution to this increase comes from current offences.'
As well as sexual offences, police forces recorded a 4% increase in gun crimes, the first time firearms offences have risen since 2008. Knife crimes also rose by 9%.
Sexual offences and violence against the person are both up by more than a quarter. Photo posed by actors
Overall, crime reported to police last year increased by 6% over 2014 to 4.3 million offences, with the ONS attributing it to 'a greater proportion of reports of crime being recorded in the last year, following improved compliance with national recording standards by police forces'.
The rise in total recorded crime is the biggest year-on-year jump since 2001-2002, statistics show.
The rate of sexual offences has doubled in the past year, from one in every 1,000 people to two in every 1,000.
Banking and card fraud are also up by eight per cent in figures that have seen the government come under fire. Picture posed by actors
London's Metropolitan Police accounted for almost a quarter of the increase in knife crime offences. There was also rise of more than a quarter (26%) in recorded rapes involving a knife or sharp instrument, while possession of a knife or sharp instrument rose by 15%.
Banking and card fraud was up 8% year on year, while total fraud incidents were up 5%.
The fraud rate per 1,000 people has crept up slightly, from 10 to 11.
Better recording of crimes was also thought to have affected reporting of violent crimes. The ONS said offences of violence against the person rose by 185,666 to 885,440, up 27% over the year previously. At the same time the Crime Survey for England and Wales'showed no significant change compared with the previous year's survey'.
Jack Dromey, Labour's shadow police minister, said: 'The Tories have slashed police officers by 17,000 and broke their promise to the public to protect frontline officer numbers. Now we see the biggest increase in recorded crime in a decade.
'The first duty of any Government is the safety and security of our citizens. By overseeing the sharpest decline in police numbers anywhere in the EU, the Tories are letting the British people down.'
Police Minister Mike Penning said: 'We continue to see a rise in police recording of violent and sexual crimes.
'The Office for National Statistics is clear that this rise reflects improvements in recording practice and a willingness of victims to come forward - this is something we welcome.
'We are also providing much greater transparency on what happens to crimes once they have been reported to the police."12 Years a Slave" or "Gravity"? "American Hustle" or "Wolf of Wall Street"? "This is the End" or "The World's End"?
These were just a few of the debates brewing as the Yahoo Movies team set out to come to agreement and narrow down 2013's impressive slate of films released to the 25 we considered the best of the best. It's a tough job but … we actually really like doing it.
See what made the cut (spoiler alert: one of the film's mentioned above did not), as well as some personal staff favorites that didn't and are among our honorable mentions (you can find the aforementioned snub there), then tell us your favorites in the comments section.
25. "Fast and Furious 6"
Its brilliance is in its self-awareness. The physics-defying action gets so outlandish we figure Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, the late Paul Walker, and the rest of the gang are in on the joke. (There's no possible way the cargo plane could have sped down the runway that long!) Add an epic girl-on-girl fistfight, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson flying through the air, and big 'ol explosions, and you get the most entertaining action romp of the year. – Meriah Doty
24. "The Kings of Summer"
It's a coming-of-age indie that hits all the right notes. Three teen boys, sick of their families at home, become bent on building a hidden house in the woods. They grow facial hair -- or at least try to -- get in touch with their inner bear-men, and beat the heck out of some drainpipes. A hilarious and heartfelt performance by newcomer Moises Arias is the cherry on top of this surprisingly delicious cake. – M.D.
23. "Captain Phillips"
If ever there was a story primed to receive the big-screen treatment it is the harrowing ordeal of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking of US cargo ship Alabama by Somali pirates. When you throw in Oscar winner Tom Hanks as your cinematic hero, Oscar nominee Paul Greengrass as director ("The Bourne Supremacy") and combine them with edge-of-your seat/based-on-a-true-story action, you have one of the most satisfying moviegoing experiences of the year. – Kara Warner
22. "Before Midnight"
There's something to be said for a franchise that takes its time between movies. In this third installment of the love story that began on a train to Vienna in 1995 and was rekindled in Paris in 2004, we learn that Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) may not have tied the knot -- that's not their style -- but they do have an adorable set of twins and a seemingly endless amount of arguments and affection for each other. Through the non-stop dialogue we've come to expect from these Richard Linklater films and set in the backdrop of Greece, we're reminded that long-term relationships are messy and take work, but they can be no less magical than, say, falling in love with a stranger on a train. – Breanne L. Heldman
20 Feet from Stardom More
21. "20 Feet from Stardom"
The unsung heroes behind some of pop music's biggest hits finally get their time to shine in this heartbreaking-yet-life-affirming documentary from award-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville. Part love letter, part confessional, "20 Feet From Stardom" honors these supremely talented back-up singers while showcasing why they never should have been relegated to the shadows in the first place. – Matt Whitfield
Nebraska More
20. "Nebraska"
In Alexander Payne's landmark black-and-white comedy, a lonely son (Will Forte) takes his alcoholic father (Bruce Dern) on a doomed car-trip from Montana to Nebraska to collect a Publisher's Clearinghouse windfall. Simple? Simply perfect thanks to Dern's gristly performance, Payne's shot-for-shot precision and writer Bob Nelson's humorous insight into the Midwestern heart of darkness. Nothing is left to chance but everything feels spontaneous in Payne’s American masterpiece. – Thelma Adams
Fruitvale Station More
19. "Fruitvale Station"
"Fruitvale Station" is one of those ultimate "movies you need to see, but will never want to watch again." Ryan Coogler's slow-burn directorial debut tracks the final 24 hours in the life of Oscar Grant ("Friday Night Lights" alum Michael B. Jordan, who it turns out could one day be "the Michael Jordan of acting"), the Oakland father killed by a metro cop who mistook his gun for a taser. It's a damning indictment of excessive force, and contains the most devastating climax of any film this year. -- Kevin Polowy
Rush More
18. "Rush"
Ron Howard's '70s era Formula 1 racing flick has it all: compelling and colorful characters, fast-paced pedal-to-the-metal action, and beautiful people taking off their swanky clothes. Though he's still bigger than life as playboy James Hunt, it's nice to see Chris Hemsworth convincingly lose the cape. While Golden Globe nominee Daniel Brühl manages to steal some of Thor's thunder with his cold and calculated portrayal of rival racer Niki Lauda, what really drives the movie is the real-life competitive nature of the two men, and of the head and the heart. – Adam Pockross
Blue Jasmine More
17. "Blue Jasmine"
You'll hear plenty about Cate Blanchett's riveting performance this awards season, and rightfully so — scene by scene, she honestly breaks down right before our very eyes. But there's more to the picture than just fantastic acting; Woody Allen's nuanced pacing and deft dialogue seamlessly walks the thin line between comedy and drama with a verisimilitude only a master can convey. The final redemptive scene between Bobby Canavale and Sally Hawkins might just be the best minute of filmmaking this year. – A.P.
STories We Tell More
16. "Stories We Tell"
In this fascinating documentary, actress-turned-director Sarah Polley ("Away From Her") turns the camera on her own family as she unravels the shocking secrets of her paternity. Polley also suggests that the stories we tell, even among children with the same mother, will never entirely mesh. While many directors are amazing storytellers, whether their medium is fiction or nonfiction, we recognize Polley because she is also a fearless truth-teller. – T.A.
Saving Mr. Banks More
15. "Saving Mr. Banks"
This one -- about Walt Disney's (Tom Hanks) wooing of author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) in his attempt to adapt "Mary Poppins" for the big screen -- pushed every button on our emotional dashboard: We laughed, we cried, we pondered, we sang. It's about so many things, yet it covers them all with resonance. It's about the hopeful power of storytelling; it's about finding common ground when ground is not easily given; it's about forgiving past sins to move onto future greatness; it's about the price of art, and how very valuable it can be. Somehow, though its messages are heavy indeed, in the end, there’s a therapeutic catharsis, eerily akin to flying a kite. – A.P.
The World's End More
14. "The World's End"
The third collaboration between director Edgar Wright and his co-writer/star Simon Pegg is a thoughtful and emotional exploration into the themes of aging, conformity, and addiction. And it features a bunch of sloppily drunk guys kung-fu fighting robots. Following "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," the film caps off the team's loose thematic trilogy that hides its themes under snappy verbal comedy and the trappings of genre, and "The World's End" is their most resonant work yet. Wright's camera work is both calculated and frenetic, and the performances are top notch, particularly Nick Frost going against type as a button-down lawyer who falls off the wagon and hulks out. Wright will next enter the Marvel Universe for "Ant-Man," but here's hoping he and Pegg are up for another round after that. – Matt McDaniel
The Conjuring More
13. "The Conjuring"
There have been far, far too many exorcism movies of the past decade -- they've become so disposable that even "The Last Exorcism" got a sequel (come on it was called "The LAST Exorcism"!) -- and spoiler alert, most of them have been horror-ible (sorry). It's all the more reason "The Conjuring" was such a welcome breath of fresh air/pure terror, a highly original, often understated shocker that like many of the all-time best films in its genre, never revealed too much and sustained a bone-chilling mystery that kept us on the edge of our seats. Oh, and that doll. This wasn't only the scariest movie of the year, it was among the very best. – K.P.
Blackfish More
12. "Blackfish"
One Southern California mother's piercing documentary about Sea World and Shamu turns into an explosive expose about corporate malfeasance and the fate of the six-ton serial killer whale Tilikum. Gabriela Cowperthwaite created the movie that Sea World doesn’t want us to see -- and launched the #FreeTilly movement. "Blackfish" joins the American documentary renaissance with an edge-of-your-seat feature as compelling, shocking and revealing as any summer blockbuster but completely CGI-free. – T.A.
11. "The Place Beyond the Pines"
The marketing campaign missed when it tried to sell us a stunt-driving bank-robber vs golden-boy police detective story starring two of the silver screen's sexiest men: Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper. Sure, the movie was that, for a riveting hot minute, but the rest of Derek Cianfrance's daring film is what truly sets it apart: a structure-defying, multi-generational, grey-as-a-storm-cloud drama about fathers and sons, and what it means to be a man. While Gosling and Cooper may never have been better, it's Dane Dehaan who's the biggest surprise, perhaps because he's barely in the trailer. – A.P.
Frozen More
10. "Frozen"
Between the catchy songs performed by seriously killer voices -- a special tip of the hat for Idina Menzel and the surprisingly fantastic Kristen Bell -- and the ridiculously adorable faces of the current Disney era, you'd be hard-pressed to dislike this animated fairy tale. "Frozen" has the makings of a "Little Mermaid"-style classic, but with an even more modern, feminist twist. After all, the main moral of the story has nothing to do with sweet Anna falling for the woodsy Kristoff, but rather the love of family and sisterhood. –B.L.H.
9. "Short Term 12"
Here's a film that most folks probably haven’t yet heard of (it made just a smidge over a million at the box office), but we couldn't recommend highly enough. Destin Cretton's comedic drama has drawn comparisons to 2006's excellent "Half Nelson," and rightfully so: Like "Nelson," it's based on a short of the same name, and it centers on twentysomething idealists (Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr.) hoping to affect change through the young people they mentor (here at a foster care facility in place of a middle school, and award-worthy Larson in lieu of an Oscar-nominated Ryan Gosling) despite their own flaws and troubles. "12" is the type of film that will have you in stitches one moment, tears the next; it's sweet, funny, tender, moving and beautifully true to life. – K.P.
8. "Inside Llewyn Davis"
The story of perpetually down-on-his-luck folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is not a happy one, but because it's told through the artistic and insightful lens of Joel and Ethan Coen, there is cinematic magic made in the misery. Their exploration of the early beginnings of American folk music has a timeless, familiar quality and, as we've come to expect from the Coens, a killer soundtrack. Not to mention a few key performances by Isaac, Carey Mulligan and John Goodman. – K.W.
7. "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire"
Don't act so surprised to see this film so high on our list. After all, when was the last time a book adaptation with a huge following that was also a sequel succeeded on so many levels? We'll bet never. Jennifer Lawrence and co. brought more action, higher stakes, and even more heartfelt emotion to the franchise's second installment. Packed to the brim with great performances and both heartbreaking and heart-pounding moments – with just the right dash of fun – we have to give a District 11 salute to director Francis Lawrence, who just nailed it. Needless to say, our countdown to Nov. 21, 2014, when "Mockingjay – Part 1" hits theaters, has already begun. – B.L.H.
6. "Her"
Who would've thought that watching Joaquin Phoenix fall in love with his computer, in this case a highly-advanced operating system (OS) voiced by Scarlett Johansson, would make for one of the more oddly realistic and emotionally moving films of the year? That is the beauty of Spike Jonze's "Her," a thoughtful, unique and slightly frightening look at where our addictions to technology may soon lead us. – K.W.
5. "Dallas Buyers Club"
Every bit as great as the Tom Hanks Oscar winner "Philadelphia," "Dallas Buyers Club" — also about a man with HIV-AIDS — is vastly different, showcasing a visceral, rousing cowboy spirit. "I prefer to die with my boots on," Matthew McConaughey's Ron protests as he goes against doctor's orders. Jared Leto is searing and heart-wrenching as Ron's unlikeliest of sidekicks. Intuitive in all the right ways, "Dallas" flaunts its star's most important performance to date. – M.D.
4. "The Wolf of Wall Street"
Martin Scorsese's previous movie was "Hugo," a sweet, kid-friendly romp that made some wonder if the old master had lost his edge. But he shut critics down with this, his fifth and best collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio. This adaptation of Jordan Belfort's memoir of unlimited greed and debauchery in the financial world of the early '90s has the manic energy of Scorsese classics like "Goodfellas." But it's also flat-out hilarious, with Jonah Hill heading up a deep bench of comedic talents. The film does run long, and it could be seen as unintentionally glamorizing the reckless behavior it actually decries. But it's still the most potent jolt of pure cinema you'll see this year. -- MM
3. "American Hustle"
"American Hustle" not only moves, it purrs and dances its a-- off. Fat-and-bald Christian Bale, sexy-to-the-max Amy Adams, and the rest of the outrageously brilliant cast get supersized by David O. Russell's inventive, dare we say, lyrically guided mind behind the camera. He even manages to sneak in a pseudo-musical into his '70s crime opus: Bale and Jeremy Renner lead a restaurant sing-a-long and Jennifer Lawrence angrily croons to Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die." – M.D.
2. "Gravity"
How did they do it? It's a question we're still asking about director Alfonso Cuaron's astonishing science-fiction movie. And we don't mean how did they film that 12-minute-long opening shot that puts you right in deep orbit with the astronauts on screen. Or how did they get Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, two of the biggest stars in the world, to agree to be dangled like puppets in an enclosed box to simulate the motion of spinning off into space. Or how did "Gravity" get to be the highest-grossing original film of the year (not a sequel, comic-book adaptation, or both). The real question is how did they make such a visual spectacle and pulse-pounding thriller also one of the most heart-felt and genuinely moving stories of the year? – M.M.
1. "12 Years a Slave"
In the hands of any other director, the true story of Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man kidnapped and forced into slavery from 1841 to 1853, could very well have been formulaic, run-of-the-mill and overly sentimental. Thankfully it landed in the hands of Steve McQueen ("Shame"), who portrays the brutality of slavery by framing Northrup's tale as a taut thriller, creating a visceral experience for viewers akin to someone grabbing you by the throat and not letting go for two hours (in a good, somewhat cathartic way). What results is an instant classic, and the definitive slavery film of our time. Believe the hype: "12 Years a Slave" will knock you out … again, in a good way. – K.P.
Honorable Mentions:
"About Time" and "Lone Survivor"
Both movies deserve mentions because they make us appreciate how good we have it, in completely different ways. One reminds us to be grateful for the good in our everyday existence, the other reminds us of the courageous men
and women who give up their lives in order for us to have it to begin with. – K.W.
"Ender's Game"
OK, OK. I know this is a debatable choice, but, as a fan of the original story, I was pretty darn pleased with this adaption. Some of the scenes – particularly those in zero-gravity – were exactly what I pictured as I read it and equally as thrilling. I cheered. Sure, the ending, where Ender starts communicating with the aliens, is a little off-putting (it was in the book, too) but it's necessary to understand the meaningful anti-war message of the story. And, speaking of the story, the author, Orson Scott Card, who's known for his negative views of homosexuality, didn't exactly help this film succeed. Apparently, not enough people realized that paying to see this movie would not be lining his pockets – he earned absolutely $0 of its box office receipts. In other words, you may want to give this one a shot, after all. –B.L.H.
"The Hunt"
The Oscars may finally recognize "The Hunt" in the Best Foreign Language Film category? The intense drama stars Mads Mikkelsen ( "Hannibal") as a teacher whose life changes when a kindergartner kisses him on the lips. Suddenly, the close-knit community the teacher enjoys turns against this alleged pedophile. The friendships he took for granted disintegrate. The Danish star, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, beautifully underplays this common man in uncommon crisis.
"Spring Breakers"
It's surely note everyone's cup of tea. In fact, two of our staffers counted it among the worst movies of the year (different strokes, right?). But give it a chance: Harmony Korine's ridiculously entertaining pop exploitation film is like an avant garde frat party. It's also the best thing James Franco has ever done; he is a certified quote machine as
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As the country marched to war, civil society crumbled and state institutions became engulfed in the flagrant corruption of the Milošević years, organised crime flourished. In an economy crippled by international sanctions, the black market was the only worthwhile employer and criminals became the benchmark of affluence. Garish tracksuits were enjoying a moment of global popularity at the time due to the popularity of jogging, but their prohibitive price tags combined with Serbia’s dire economic circumstances turned them into a gaudy status symbol.
“When tracksuits first appeared over here, they cost something like 250 deutschmarks (around $150). Take into account that the average pay back then was five marks ($3),” recalls Bojan Savić, a local collector of dizelaš fashion. “A German would buy a tracksuit to go jogging, while a Serb would wear it for its prestige.” Unsurprisingly, some of the only people who could afford to spend that sort of money were career criminals.
Gosha Rubchinskiy’s meteoric success has firmly embedded the gopnik into the pop cultural hive mind, but dizelaš fashion is almost unheard of
Kappa’s tracksuits were most popular, particularly a model known colloquially as the “Danone”, which was worn by Italian football giants Juventus and owed its name to the yoghurt manufacturer whose branding appeared on the team’s training wear. Reebok, Adidas and Asics were widespread, but anything by Gucci was the holy grail, simply because pricier meant better. Diesel were the gold standard in jeans, while Nike’s Air Max BW, the Air Max 2 and Reebok’s Graphite Pump and Instapump were the trainers of choice.
But it wasn’t enough to simply own the right brands: they had to be worn the right way. Track tops would be tucked into jeans or track bottoms which would then be tucked into socks. This detail was pioneered by Aleksandar “Knele” Knežević, one of Belgrade’s most notorious gangsters, who is said to have done this to prevent his gun slipping from his waistband, down his leg and dropping onto the floor should he ever be forced to run and take cover from opposing gunfire. Tucking your track top into your trousers also causes it to puff up, making its wearer look bigger and tougher. The kids on the street started mimic the look, even though few of them were likely to find themselves dodging bullets like Knele. Not that it helped him much: he would be slain in a gangland killing in 1992 at the age of 21.We’re still a few months away from the arrival of Weezer’s new album Everything Will Be Alright in the End, but you can get a good sense of what to expect by reading about EW‘s exclusive visit to the studio. I spent two days with the men of Weezer, and we had a ton of conversations both about the new album and about the stuff bands talk about between takes.
But of course there was not enough room to get all of the gems into the piece. If you’re hungry for more, here are a handful of awesome bits that were left on the cutting room floor.
Title of Record
When I showed up at the Village Studio in Los Angeles, the band had just announced the title of the album. Everything Will Be Alright in the End is by far the band’s longest title, besting previous record-holder Make Believe by five whole words (everything else in the catalog has been one word long). When I talked to Rivers Cuomo, he hoped people will pick up on the double-edged nature of the sentiment. “I told a friend of mine the title yesterday, and he hasn’t heard any music or seen any art work, and he said, ‘Well that’s really optimistic!'” Cuomo said. “I think once the title is digested along with the art work and the music, I think it won’t seem as purely optimistic as someone who is just seeing the title alone. You’ll see some melancholy in there too.” According to guitarist Brian Bell, there were many other title options, and Everything was initially even longer. And yes, they did consider returning to the well. “The colors, that’s always a consideration in any record we do,” Bell said, referencing the Blue, Green, and Red albums already in the band’s catalog. “But we still have Yellow to make, and Purple is still available.”
Words, Words, Words
As of about a month ago when I was with the band, Cuomo was still working out a lot of the lyrics. “In a lot of cases, the bulk of the lyrics come early on,” he explained. “There’s something I want to say, and that in a lot of ways writes the song for me or steers the course of the song for me, so it’s not any kind of problem finishing the lyrics.” But even though he’s been doing this for over two decades, there are still roadblocks, and it’s entirely possible that there will be songs the band loves that will get left behind. “Sometimes there’s just songs that are really difficult for me to finish a lyric. The one we may start today, ‘The Rules of Life,’ that’s another one. The chorus is great, but I can’t tell you how many verses I’ve written trying to figure out what my perspective is on that chorus. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but there’s just a massive amount of uncertainty sometimes. And sometimes I just don’t get it! Sometimes I have to set a song aside. I know it’s out there somewhere, but it hasn’t come yet, and we can’t do the song now. Sometimes it comes ten years later when I finally figure it out. I have a lot of pride about the records, and I don’t want to put it out if I know it could be better. Somebody else may be more practical and say, ‘This is fine, it’s good enough, it achieves our goal.’ I’m not like that. If I know it can be better, I’d rather put it on hold.”
One of the songs in limbo was a track called “The British Are Coming” (which their engineer, Sam Bell, kept referring to as “Here Come the British”). “That’s one of the ones where it’s going to go down to the wire when it comes to the verses, trying to figure out what my take is on it,” Cuomo said. “I have one extreme where the verses have apparently nothing to do with the chorus ‘The British are coming.’ I’m just talking about my own life and my own problems, and you’d really have to think hard to make a connection between the two. Or, is it possible to just do a historical narrative and just tell the story of Paul Revere? That would be kind of unprecedented for Weezer and maybe for all of alt-rock. Though They Might Be Giants have a song called ‘James K. Polk’ that is pure historical narrative, so I was going to check that out.”
Still, sometimes the songs that arrive at the eleventh hour end up bearing incredible fruit. “On the first record, the Blue Album, ‘Buddy Holly’ was one of the last songs tracked,” Bell noted.
Ric’s Flair
Producer Ric Ocasek, frontman for the Cars and architect of Weezer’s first and third albums, was relatively quiet during the two days I was with the band. As I noted in the piece, Cuomo really ran the show, but the band frequently turned to Ocasek for approval. He’s been pretty active on Everything Will Be Alright in the End, though. “I’m a little more relaxed around him, though I’m still a little starstruck,” Bell told me. “I was a huge Cars fan growing up. Not only that, the most exciting time of my life was joining Weezer and coming in to record the Blue Album, and Ric Ocasek was the guy who was like, ‘Let’s see if this guy can play.’ I hate to use the term rock star, but he’s a rock star. He’s a proper rock star. And he’s a great musical mind too. Stylistically, when we’re doing a track, sometimes we just try things, and that’s what we should do. We tried this little whistling idea, and he was like, ‘That’s the corniest of the corn. That is so lame.’ When Ric Ocasek says something is lame, you trust it. Then he’ll throw out a story about Andy Warhol, and I’m just like, ‘This is so cool.’ The one time I was at his house in New York City, he was standing there next to a portrait of himself done by Andy Warhol, and I was like, ‘Is this f—ing happening to me right now?’ It was blowing my mind. It was pretty cool. The whole thing, all of it, I still pinch myself that this is happening.”
This was the first time working with Ocasek for bassist Scott Shriner (he joined the band after the recording of the Green Album). “I had thought that he was going to be very stern, like a serious taskmaster. That’s what I was prepared for,” Shriner said. “Ric is a legend. The Cars is one of those bands who changed my whole scope of music. The I meet him, and he’s funny and goofing around and clever and supportive. He’ll pat me on the back. He’s not afraid to say something is terrible. Just by him being in the room, stuff is different. I don’t know what it is. Whenever you observed something you change it a little bit. It’s the same with Ric. Even just the idea of him being on his way to the studio changes it. We’ve done stuff on our own with a couple of different producers, and he’s just got his own thing. He’ll say, ‘That is the single worst idea I’ve ever heard,’ so then when he says ‘That’s fantastic!’ we really believe him. I believe him because he also told me that I suck.”
History Lesson
Cuomo is extremely sensitive to Weezer’s place not only in the current music scene but also in the pantheon of rock. In fact, one of the songs in contention for Everything Will Be Alright in the End addresses that idea directly. “The song ‘Eulogy for a Rock Band’ is a song about our place relative to the great rock bands that came before us, as they are retiring, moving on into oblivion,” Cuomo said. “We’re kind of in that spot now as one of the big rock bands.” By extension, he wants Weezer to operate the way those classic bands did as well. “I’ve always been a very traditional artist and in love with the golden age of rock music and the music business and the way the music business worked back then,” he said. “I just have a very strong instinct to want to be that kind of artist and that kind of band and make those kind of records and have those kind of singles and connect to that audience through those kinds of channels. That means first and foremost [getting on] radio. That’s kind of how I’m designed to work. Hopefully people still listen.”
Bell is also on that wavelength. “I still want it to be like Led Zeppelin,” he said. “I still think of Led Zeppelin as extremely popular with teenagers. Every generation latched onto Led Zeppelin, and I’m hoping that will happen with us. It seems to be starting to happen. I see the same age group mixed in with older age groups that we kept throughout the years, which is fantastic.”
Dre Day
One of the stories Bell told involved Weezer’s encounter with a music icon under somewhat unfortunate circumstances. “We were learning Poison’s ‘Talk Dirty To Me’ for this Sunset Strip music thing, and we wanted to pay homage to the Sunset Strip scen,” Bell said. “We were learning it at this studio owned by Jimmy Iovine, and we were just having a hard time with the intricacies of ‘Talk Dirty to Me,’ and in walks Dr. Dre while we were rehearsing it. We’re just butchering it, and he walks in and takes a look and kind of shakes his head and walks out. That was our one moment with Dr. Dre: We’re butchering ‘Talk Dirty to Me,’ and he was not impressed. There was no reason he should be impressed, because it was not impressive.”
The Six String Revolution
Though the band’s two previous albums, Hurley and Raditude, dabbled in modern pop production and songwriting techniques, all the guys in Weezer are glad to get back to rocking out. “Raditude was a different time,” Shriner said. “I love that record, some songs more than others. At that time, it seemed like we needed to get all of it right with a computer. I thought people would get tired of hearing music like that. There’s a charm to that too, from a dance perspective or something. But I like stuff that feels like it could almost fall apart, but it doesn’t. I need that human element to it.”
Bell also likes the idea of the band’s newly rediscovered warts-and-all approach. “Technology can be bad,” he said. “It can make for a lifeless recording when you start stacking things. You lose the human element. Hitting not right on time is not necessarily bad. Sometimes things shouldn’t be fixed.”Two-thirds of Americans think President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE has failed, so far, in his promise to "drain the swamp" in Washington, according to a Monmouth University poll out Wednesday.
Less than a quarter of respondents in the survey — 24 percent — said that the president has made progress toward the goal in his first four months in office, while 35 percent believe nothing has changed. Thirty-two percent said Trump has actually "made the swamp worse," according to the poll.
Trump vowed on the campaign trail to "drain the swamp" in D.C., but since taking office has brought into his administration several individuals with backgrounds in politics, lobbying and finance.
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The Trump administration has clashed with the Office of Government Ethics in recent days over the ethics watchdog's effort to gather names of former lobbyists granted waivers in order to work in Trump's White House.
The Monmouth University poll painted a largely dissatisfied view of Trump's presidency and Congress, with 61 percent of respondents saying that the country is heading in the wrong direction.
The poll also found that most Americans don't think the American Health Care Act, the GOP's plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare, will lower the cost of health insurance. Forty-four percent said they are anticipating an increase in cost under the law, while 36 percent said they believe it will stay about the same.
The poll of 1,002 adults in the U.S. was conducted between May 13 and 17. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.This is Part Two of a three-part blogpost on political remuneration in Ireland. Part One was published last weekend, and is available here, it focuses on the detail of salary and benefits and has been updated with some new information since last weekend. It’s worth saying that the value of the Oireachtas pension which costs TDs and senators 6% of their salary each year, has yet to be calculated but with life expectancy for men at 77 years and women at 82 years, average returns on private pensions of 1.1% per annum between 2001-2011, a guaranteed 50% final salary scheme based on 20 years service, and a generous lump sum arrangement, I can’t see how it would cost less than 20% of annual salary in the private sector.
There is now going to be a Part Three following the acquisition on here of details of political expenses paid for by the grants provided by the State to political parties – politicians, it seems, aren’t limited to direct payments for their political income; the information is presently being analysed. Part Three will also examine the failure of the mainstream media in Ireland to report on the cost of the political system and the lack of transparency over how our money is spent, and with whom it is spent.
Part One allows us to, for example, challenge ministers when they claim their salary increments are justified because, upon being promoted to the office of minister, they lose the Travel and Accommodation allowance that applies to TDs, because in response, you can say “but then you get a new dual abode allowance which allows you to buy a Dublin home, an annual unvouched tax free allowance of up €6,500, plus two drivers plus a mileage allowance of up to €1.14 per mile plus hotel, service charge, overnight subsistence and even a gift allowance”; and judging by the Ruari Quinn mileage expense claim reported last Sunday in the Mail, the mileage allowance is not subjected to the tightest scrutiny. You can also ask someone like the affable Mick Wallace, what we get in return for a €92,692 salary, a gold-plated pension, a personal representative allowance of €15,000 (unvouched) to €27,000 (vouched), a travel allowance of €32,966 (Mick being 130 km from Leinster House), an independent’s allowance of €41,152, a secretarial allowance of €41,092 an €8,000 grant for a constituency office, termination payments, free facilities at Leinster House etc. And let’s not forget Mick’s well-publicised distractions in dealing with his own extracurricular businesses. And you might ask if the €250,000-plus potential annual cost of Mick, as unconventional and decent a man as he no doubt is, is good value for money.
Comparison UK
There has already been a blogpost on here comparing the cost of our politicians with those in our nearest neighbour, the UK, which of course is not in an IMF programme, is a sub-Superpower with nuclear energy, which has control of/responsibility for its fiscal and monetary policy, whose economy is 10 times bigger than ours and whose political constituencies are three times bigger than ours (average Irish TD looks after 27,500 citizens, average UK MP looks after 95,000). That the emperor has no clothes is not just apposite for Treasury Holdings.
Personal Reward (Sinn Fein and United Left Alliance)
Whilst messages from this blog to the two parties that comprise the United Left Alliance (ULA), namely the Socialist Party and People before Profit parties, weren’t responded to, it is claimed in the media that the four TDs from these two parties adopt a remuneration policy similar to Sinn Fein’s. I don’t wish to offend anyone’s political loyalties, but a general statement on the matter, perhaps on the two parties’ websites might clarify the matter. With respect to Sinn Fein, each deputy and senator is paid the average industrial wage of €34,000 and then, personal tax and PRSI is paid on this €34,000 – typically the TD will end up with about €25,000 net. The rest is used at a local constituency level for party activities and that typically involves the employment of political activists. Sinn Fein has no special policy on pensions, but that party has the dubious privilege of not having to deal with it – in this Dail there are 14 Sinn Fein TDs, in the last Dail there were only four (five when Pearse Doherty was elected in November 2010), and in the previous Dail there were five, and before that just one. As far as I can see, Arthur Morgan (now aged 57) is the only past Sinn Fein TD and we don’t know what his pension arrangements are, but with only nine years service between 2002-2011, a salary of 9/40ths of €92,672 will not be significant even at age 65. Sinn Fein claims actual expenses only, as opposed to vouched expenses.
So given the straitened times we live in, it seems that Sinn Fein and the ULA are heroes in their personal sacrifice. Having said that however, the gross cost to the State of Sinn Fein and the ULA is exactly the same as any other party. And the second aim of this blogpost was to highlight the cost of our political system.
Part Two
Part Two is aimed at placing these political costs in context and examining the damage done to society and the economy by our gobsmackingly overpaid politicians. Again, the country needs presently borrow €300m a week to fund the difference between tax collected and state expenditure. Even in 2015, if all goes to plan, and we have a 3% deficit, that will still mean we need borrow 3% of €170bn, or €5bn a year or €100m per week. We are facing into a further four years of austerity/reform and by comparison with 2011, we will need adjust our budget annually by €12.4bn in 2015. With respect, if anyone thinks we will avoid a substantial household charge, university fees, cuts to public sector salaries, cuts to basic social welfare rates, cuts to frontline services, increases in mortality rates/class sizes/crime and reductions in education standards/crime detection rates/ available hospital beds, not to mention tax-rate increases and a wealth tax, and perhaps even an increase in corporate tax rates, then I think you’re deluded. €12.4bn is the annual adjustment needed, and that assumes economic growth which is far from certain, and assumes we will be able to borrow money to fill the €100m-a-week deficit in 2015. And it should be said that this is required regardless of bank bailout costs.
With a €12.4bn annual adjustment needed, the three main criteria for individual adjustments will be that they are undertaken quickly, efficiently and fairly. “Quickly” is easy to understand and measure, “efficiently” is less clear because there will be argument about cause and effect – do you raise VAT which drives down demand? do you cut public sector numbers or can you employ the same number with lower salary? how much can you tax wealth without it emigrating? – but it is the term “fairly” about which there will be most argument, and each of us has our tribes and vested interests and corner to fight. But “fairness” might objectively balance “ability to contribute” with “damage to the economy”. So a wealth tax akin to France’s or Italy’s may be needed, but any tax needs to take account of consequent behaviour and if you tax too much, the income or wealth may absent itself from the economy and since we don’t have capital controls or a Warsaw Pact approach to the free movement of people, any changes need to be sensitively considered.
Leadership
But in this war – and the fact that this country can’t pay its way is the greatest threat to our notion of sovereignty, so “war” is apt – to reduce the deficit, we need leaders. And our political leadership cannot continue to draw such plutocratic sums from the public purse whilst seeking to impose austerity on the rest of society. Or if it does, we end up with an unfair society, “the sow that eats her own farrow”, social unrest which at one end of the spectrum results in economic loss through days lost and low-level disorder and at the other extreme sees the collapse of law and order and loss of life and, mass emigration again and a place where the majority don’t want to live.
Turning to our leader, I should start off by saying I have no small amount of respect for An Taoiseach of the country, Enda Kenny. He leads a strong government not compromised by the whims of independents or dissidents at every turn. He has a rotten economic situation to deal with, and he hasn’t buckled under his responsibilities. He is the “father of the house” in the sense he is the longest-serving politician in the Dail, and that is no mean feat in this country. He seems to have a good sense of what is needed to keep his subordinates and his coalition partners in acquiescent equilibrium. And with respect to the theme of this blogpost, it should be remembered that one of the first actions undertaken by An Taoiseach in March 2011 was to reduce his own top-line salary and the salaries of An Tanaiste, ministers and junior ministers by 6.6%, which in An Taoiseach’s case meant a reduction from €214,187 to €200,000. And remember that only back in 2007, the top-line salary for then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was €310,000. And you might also have sympathy for the fact that An Taoiseach is meeting with people every day in this society and economy who earn a multiple of the taoiseach’s salary but with a fraction of the burden of responsibility.
But how can An Taoiseach ask for more from the nation, when his own rewards and those of his administration and his political system remain untouched? How will he answer critics in the US during his St Patrick’s Day visit when this year, he is likely to face questions on his salary from politicians in a country that is a big donor to the IMF, and doesn’t understand how a bankrupt country with limited options can afford to pay its political leadership sums which would appear excessive even in the world’s biggest economy and sole Superpower. In theUK, will opponents to the encroachment of Europe demand answers from their leaders as to why theUKis loaningIreland€4bn so as to pay such enormous sums. Perhaps this is the international agitation that is needed to focus politician’s minds here…
Part Three will be published next week.
(Graphic above produced by Japlandic.com, contact here)
AdvertisementsA couple months ago, I asked Seattle’s Chief Traffic Engineer, Dongho Chang, if Seattle could get some fun, joyful bike lane people like those in Portland. He said I should send ideas, and so now I need you to help me.
When do I get to make my own bike symbol, @dongho_chang?https://t.co/BtXx6wiWjS — Brock Howell (@BrockRides) October 6, 2017
Send some samples — Dongho Chang (@dongho_chang) October 6, 2017
Portland’s bike lane people are awesome. It all started a couple of decades ago with a curmudgeon maintenance worker (who didn’t bike) thought bike lanes were too boring, so he started modifying the symbols. His supervisor didn’t oppose it, and then later fully embraced it. Recently Portland even held a design competition for the markings.
Here are a few Portland examples (not my photos, they’re PBOT‘s):
So, I’m challenging you to help SDOT create the most awesome bike lane people ever. I have some ideas, such as creating a row of “Women’s March” people with pink hats from Judkins Park to the Seattle Center on Jackson Street and Fourth Avenue to commemorate last year’s march. And we obviously need bike lane people for Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Chief Seattle, and Bertha Knight Landes. But I really would love to see your ideas.
HOW TO ENTER & DEADLINE
Using this PDF, either digitally or in-real-life draw your person.
Write a short narrative telling a story about your person. Who are they? What makes them special? Where does your person live (i.e., where should they be installed by SDOT?)
Email your drawing to me at [email protected] by December 12, 2017.
After you’ve emailed me your drawing, tweet an image of your person with the hashtag #HappyBikeLanePeople and CC @BikeHappyPNW.
PRIZES
I will pick the best bike lane people and the winners will win gift certificates to Peddler Brewing, where you can either enjoy delicious beer or sweet shirts & swag. Winners will be based on originality, creativity, whimsy, and storytelling. Bonus points if you have a specific location in-mind for your person.
Will SDOT install them?
There’s no promise by SDOT that any of our bike lane people will get homes across the city. But fingers crossed, it’ll happen. I’ll submit all (PG-rated) ideas to Dongho for his consideration.
Submissions are due to [email protected] by Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 7 p.m.
*All photos on this page are from the Portland Bureau of Transportation under its Creative Commons licensing.Hide Transcript Show Transcript
WEBVTT CLOSER TO NEW rtENGLAND.YOU CAN ALSO KEEP TRACK OF THESTORM BY DOWNLOADING THE FREEWCVB APP.NICHOLE: FOUR BOSTON COLLEGESTUDENTS, RECOVERING AFTER ANACID ATTACK IN FRANCE.TONIGHT WE KNOW THIS WAS NOTTERRORISM.rtIT HAPPENED AT A TRAIN STATIONIN THE SOUTHERN CITY OFMARSEILLE.NEWSCENTER 5'S TODD KAZAKIEWICHIS LIVE NOW AT BOSTON COLLEGE.rtTODD?TODD: AS YOU SAY, THIS IS NOTOFFICIALLY CLASSIFIED AS ArtTERROR ATTACK, RATHER ANISOLATED INCIDENT.STILL, THE NEWS CERTAINLY ISTERRIFYING AND SHOCKING FOREVERYONE HERE ON CAMPUS.THE FOUR STUDENTS ARE JUNIORS,rtHERE AT BC, STUDYING ABROAD THISSEMESTER.THEY WERE ATTACKED THIS MORNINGAT ST. CHARLES TRAIN STATION INrtMARSEILLE, A 41-YEAR-OLD WOMANTHROWING ACID IN THEIR FACES.FRENCH POLICE DESCRIBE THE WOMANAS DISTURBED.BOSTON COLLEGE HAS IDENTIFIEDTHE STUDENTS AS COURTNEYSIVERLING, CHARLOTTE KAUFMAN,rtMICHELLE KRUG, WHO ARE ALLSTUDYING IN PARIS, AND KELSEYKOSTEN, WHO IS STUDYING INCOPENHAGEN.AGAIN, ALL FOUR HAVE BEENrtTREATED AND RELEASED FROM THEHOSPITAL, BUT AT LEAST ONE NEEDSTO SEE AN EYE DOCTOR TOMORROW,AFTER THAT DISTURBING ATTACKTHIS MORNING.rt>> THEY HAD GONE TO THE TRAINSTATION TO TAKE THE TRAIN BACKTO PARIS, AND THEN THEY HAD THEACID ATTACK BY THE WOMAN, WHO,WE'RE TOLD BY FRENCH POLICE,rtTHREW THE ACID ON THEM, AND THENSAT DOWN IMMEDIATELY ON THESTREET CORNER UNTIL FRENCHPOLICE ARRIVED TO ARREST HER.rtTODD: BC SAYS IT IS NOT ONLYSUPPORTING THE VICTIMS, BUT ALSOOFFERING SUPPORT TO ANY STUDENTSrtHERE AT HOME, HERE ON THE MAINCAMPUS, WHO MIGHT NEED SOMESUPPORT COPING WITH THEKNOWLEDGE OF WHAT HAPPENED THISMORNING.AT THIS POINT, THE FOUR STUDENTSrtARE PLANNING ON FINISHING THErt
Advertisement Acid attack in Marseille won't be investigated as act of terror Victims were Boston College students Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Four young American women were attacked with acid Sunday in the French city of Marseille by a woman who has been arrested, the Marseille prosecutor’s office said.French prosecutors are not investigating the attack as an act of terror.Two of the tourists were injured in the face in the attack in the city’s main Saint Charles train station and one of them has a possible eye injury, a spokeswoman for the Marseille prosecutor’s office told The Associated Press in a phone call.She said all four of the women, who are in their 20s, have been hospitalized, two of them for shock.The spokeswoman said the 41-year-old female suspect did not make any extremist threats or declarations during the attack and that there were no obvious indications that the woman’s actions were terror-related.The spokeswoman spoke on condition of anonymity, per the custom of the French judicial system.Victims identified as Boston College studentsThe four Americans who were injured by acid in an incident in Marseille, France are all Boston College students, the school confirmed.The university said the four students were sprayed in the face with acid outside the Marseille-St. Charles train station Sunday morning.A 41-year-old French woman was arrested by police in connection with the incident. Police said they do not believe the attack is related to terrorism and described the woman as “disturbed.”The students, identified as BC juniors Courtney Siverling, Charlotte Kaufman, Michelle Krug and Kelsey Kortsen were treated for the burns in a hospital in Marseille and were released.“It appears that the students are fine, considering the circumstances, though they may require additional treatment for burns,” said Nick Gozik, who directs BC’s Office of International Programs. “We have been in contact with the students and their parents and remain in touch with French officials and the U.S. Embassy regarding the incident.”Three of the students are enrolled in BC’s Paris program. Korsten is a enrolled as a student at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark.Police responded Sunday morningThe Marseille fire department was alerted just after 11 a.m. and dispatched four vehicles and 14 firefighters to the train station, a department spokeswoman said.Two of the Americans were “slightly injured” with acid but did not require emergency medical treatment from medics at the scene, the spokeswoman said. She requested anonymity in keeping with fire department protocol.A spokesman for the United States embassy in Paris said the U.S. consulate in Marseille was in contact with French authorities about the attack investigation and the condition of the American women.U.S. authorities in France are not immediately commenting further on what happened to protect the privacy of the American tourists, embassy spokesman Alex Daniels said.Marseille is a port city in southern France that is closer to Barcelona than Paris.In previous incidents in Marseille, a driver deliberately rammed into two bus stops last month, killing a woman, but officials said it wasn’t terror-related.In April, French police say they thwarted an imminent “terror attack” and arrested two suspected radicals in Marseille just days before the first round of France’s presidential election. Paris prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters the two suspects “were getting ready to carry out an imminent, violent action” on French territory.In January 2016, a 15-year-old Turkish Kurd was arrested after attacking a Jewish teacher on a Marseille street. He told police he acted in the name of the Islamic State group.By Matt Becker
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I recently spent a weekend with 108 people who shared a mindset I knew I had to share with you.
Conversation after conversation, person after person, the same things kept coming up.
They were excited about the work they were doing and the mission behind it.
They knew that their work could be improved and they were excited about the opportunities that presented.
They were actively learning from others and trying new ideas in an effort to make those improvements.
In other words, they were entrepreneurs.
Maybe not in the traditional sense. Some of them were running their own companies or on their way to doing so, but most of these people were employees.
But that didn’t stop them from wanting to make the world a better place.
No matter their situation, these people were applying an entrepreneurial mindset to improve themselves and the world around them.
It was an inspiring environment. It made me want to be a better person. And it provided some insights that I think are worth sharing.
So in this post we’re going to explore what an entrepreneurial mindset is and how you can apply it across all areas of your life to improve yourself and the world around you.
What is an entrepreneurial mindset?
An entrepreneur does three things:
Recognize – They see something that could be improved. Care – They care about finding a good solution. Act – They work at making it better.
Recognize. Care. Act.
That is the entrepreneurial mindset.
This isn’t just for entrepreneurs
You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to benefit from this mindset. There’s nothing in that definition that mentions starting a business or building the next hot tech company.
You can do amazing entrepreneurial work no matter what situation you’re in.
Just this past weekend, I talked to multiple people who were exploring new ways to help their employers reach new types of clients.
I talked to people looking for tools and processes that would reduce the stress of their regular tasks, cut down on mistakes, and leave more time for the work they enjoyed.
I talked to people who wanted to improve their communication and connection with their spouses and children.
I talked to one guy who, over the past few years, has intentionally structured his life so that he can alternate between 6 weeks at work and 6 weeks off. That’s right. He only works half of the year.
Some of these people were business owners. Most weren’t.
And they all shared the same excitement about not only improving their own lives, but making the world around them a better place.
How you can be an entrepreneur
There are an infinite number of ways you could apply this entrepreneurial mindset to your own life. The only limit is your imagination.
But here are a few ideas that might help you get started.
Family
How could you…
help your spouse, children, parents, siblings, etc. achieve their personal goals?
raise the level of conversation at the dinner table?
turn learning into a fun exploration?
Work
How could you…
make one co-worker’s job a little easier?
implement something that makes your company more profitable?
learn a skill that increases your value to the world?
Personal
How could you…
create time for a new hobby you’ve always wanted to try?
say no to something you feel like you’re “supposed” to do but that drains your energy?
surround yourself with people who understand and support your biggest dreams?
Money
How could you…
bring in a little side income?
align your spending and saving with your personal values?
create a personal financial system that runs itself?
Empower yourself
An entrepreneurial mindset is all about empowering yourself to improve your situation and the world around you. It’s the recognition that hoping for things to change isn’t a strategy. Purposeful action is the way to make things better and it’s in your hands to take it.
“Purposeful action is the way to make things better
and it’s in your hands to take it.“ Click to tweet.
Now, this certainly doesn’t mean that you’re on your own. Entrepreneurs know that they don’t have all the answers and they are constantly seeking out new ideas and new people who can help them in their journey.
But in the end, they know that it’s on them to make a difference. And they’re excited by the opportunity.
Recognize. Care. Act.
What will you do next to make the world a better place?West Valley communities are making a big mark on the environment — and not always a good one. Some communities have larger carbon footprints than downtown Phoenix.
Longer commutes might be one reason some West Valley cities have higher emissions than the state and
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's Wins Produced per 48 minutes (or WP48) was 0.390, the highest mark for his career.
In sum, peak Jordan was worth nearly four average players.
As Jordan's career progressed, however, his performance began to slip. By the time he was 29, his two-point shooting efficiency had declined. He was grabbing fewer rebounds and dishing fewer assists. Consequently, his WP48 in 1992-93 was 0.257—still more than twice that of an average player, but not quite Jordan's peak.
After Jordan returned from baseball and passed the 30-year benchmark, the declines started to become more obvious. In 1997-98, Jordan's WP48 was only 0.152. In two seasons with the Washington Wizards, at the age of 38 and 39—let us never speak of Jordan in a throwback Bullets jersey again—Jordan was actually a below-average NBA player.
TFW you're trying to watch Roger Federer, and instead see your reflection in the snow-covered hills. Photo by Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports
Kobe Bryant's career arc is similar. Despite what his fans might think, Bryant's productivity has never come close to what we saw from Jordan. Jordan could routinely shoot better than 50 percent from the field. Bryant has never been able to do this. In fact, Bryant's shooting efficiency for his career is not much different from an average shooting guard; consequently, Bryant's wins production is nowhere near Jordan's.
Nevertheless, Bryant has been a "good" NBA player. In 2003-04, when he was 25, Kobe's WP48 was 0.195 for the Los Angeles Lakers. This remains his career high (and yes, that's about half of Jordan's career high). After that peak, Bryant remained above average, but the last season Bryant reached double figures in wins production was 2008-09, when he was—you guessed it—30. Since then, he's had trouble staying on the court, and when he's there, he isn't what he used to be. Last year, he was one of the least productive Lakers. And this year, as Kobe puts it, he "freaking sucks."
So what about James? His wins production is similar to what we saw from Jordan. James has consistently hit more than 50 percent of his two-point shots. He rebounds and gets assists. In 2008-09, James was 24 years old, and his WP48 was 0.345 for the Cleveland Cavaliers. This remains his career high. Last season, however, James' production slipped: his WP48 was only 0.208. After three games this season his WP48 was 0.205. Yes, it's a small sample, but a sample consistent with last season.
Does that mean James is already in a steep decline? Not necessarily. Aging is only one factor that impacts performance. It's also the only factor that is inevitable. Even if James can rebound from a relatively poor 2014-15 this year, his production will erode with time—no matter what he does, getting older will cause him to do it less and less.
Time to give Kobe the "rimgrazer" dunk package in NBA 2K16. —Photo by Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
Still, there's good news for James, and for all those GMs who think he'll be named MVP: a less productive James remains a very productive James, and besides, the award doesn't always go to the most productive NBA player. Published research indicates that the sports media tend to give the MVP award to a leading scorer on one of the best teams. At 31, James definitely could lead the Cavaliers in scoring, and Cleveland definitely could be one of the NBA's best teams.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that James will be the league's most productive player. Stephen Curry, last year's MVP, had a WP48 of 0.345 in 2014-15—which is roughly what LeBron managed when he was 24. That was then. Time marches on, and like all NBA players have learned, it's the one opponent that remains undefeated. Even if you're a four-time MVP.(CNN) Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke pleaded not guilty Tuesday to murder and misconduct charges in the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
A few protesters yelled at Van Dyke and called him names as he approached the courthouse for his morning arraignment.
"You just couldn't wait to shoot a black man!" one person shouted.
McDonald was black. Van Dyke is white.
The suspended officer faces six counts of first-degree murder and one count of official misconduct in the killing that was captured on police dashboard camera video. A freelance journalist sued to have the footage released, arguing it was a public record. Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he thought releasing it would jeopardize a federal probe of the case, but a judge found in the reporter's favor and the video became public last month, more than a year after the shooting.
The video shows McDonald walking down the middle of the street. Police later said he held a 4-inch knife in his hand. At least two squad cars are visible, and McDonald can be seen walking away from officers. His back appears to be toward the cars when he is shot 16 times. According to a criminal complaint filed in Cook County Circuit Court, Van Dyke was the only officer to fire his gun among the at least eight other officers who responded. The complaint said that McDonald was on PCP.
Demonstrators were outraged not just about the content of the video, but that it took 13 months to release it
Van Dyke, who remained on desk duty after the shooting, had a history of complaints in his law enforcement career. He was cleared in almost every case. The allegations mostly involve excessive force, and at least one complaint alleges he used a racial slur.
There appear to have been no criminal proceedings against Van Dyke before he was charged in McDonald's death, but a jury did award a Chicago man $350,000 after determining Van Dyke used excessive force during a traffic stop.
Van Dyke's attorney, Daniel Herbert, has said Van Dyke feared for his life and insists that the video doesn't tell the full story. "Video by nature is two-dimensional, and it distorts images," he said. "So what appears to be clear on a video sometimes is not always that clear."
On Tuesday, after Van Dyke's arraignment, Herbert said he is seeking evidence that will clear his client, but he declined to give any details about what that evidence might be.
Criticized mayor takes steps
The uproar over McDonald's killing and last weekend's police shooting and killing of a Chicago grandmother and teenager have inflamed calls for Emanuel to resign, though there is no official process to remove him.
Emanuel's office said this week he planned to cut short a vacation in Cuba and return Tuesday afternoon.
On December 1, in the days after the McDonald video was released, Emanuel announced that he had asked police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to resign, and McCarthy complied.
The mayor then described a new task force on law enforcement accountability that will review how the city trains and oversees its police officers. It will include five Chicagoans who have been leaders in the justice system. Chicago native and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick will be a senior adviser to the group, Emanuel said.
About a week later, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that the Justice Department is investigating whether Chicago police have made a habit of violating the law or the U.S. Constitution in their policing.
"Trust in the Chicago Police Department is broken," Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said in a statement. "Chicago cannot move ahead and rebuild trust between the police and the community without an outside, independent investigation into its police department to improve policing practices."
Van Dyke is the first on-duty officer to be prosecuted for shooting someone since 1968, according to Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor and the founder of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic.
Other officers have been prosecuted on charges that they committed crimes while off duty, he noted.
Futterman played a significant role in the release of the McDonald dashboard camera footage.
He was among the first people outside the police department to learn of the video. The professor told CNN that it was a law enforcement official who contacted him.
This person was "shocked, and was afraid that this would be buried," he said. "This person put their career on the line [to speak to me], but I believe their sentiments are represented by a silent majority of officers. The vast majority of officers hate this, what is done by a small percent of officers. These good officers feel disempowered to speak up or do anything about it."
The source described the video frame by frame to Futterman, who then issued a broad statement calling for the video's release. Futterman and journalist Jamie Kalven obtained McDonald's autopsy, which revealed the teen was shot 16 times. That contradicted the official story that McDonald died of one gunshot wound, and seemed to conflict with an account that Van Dyke gave. His partner backed up Van Dyke's account.
In the spring of 2015, major news media begin filing public records requests demanding the video. Around that time, the city paid McDonald's family $5 million. The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and FBI are, meanwhile, investigating Van Dyke, a probe that Emanuel says is the reason the city fought against releasing the dashboard camera video.
In June 2015, represented by Futterman, freelance journalist Brandon Smith filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the video and then sued the police department to compel the video's release. A judge sided with Smith and during Thanksgiving week, the video was published across the country.
Despite the tension in Chicago, Futterman said he feels optimistic about city leadership's opportunity to turn around a police department and restore public trust in law enforcement.
"It feels like a moment that is different than anything I've experienced in my lifetime," he said. "It's the first time that our leaders have acknowledged that there are systemic issues," he said. "The acknowledgment which is the first step toward fixing this."Soon after the US invasion of Iraq began, military leaders set up a detention center known as Camp Bucca to house thousands of men believed – rightly or wrongly – to be militant threats. As Mitchell Gray, a former prison guard at Bucca, tells Radio Sputnik, that camp became a breeding ground for what would become the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
A young man, suspected of being a possible militant, is brought into an interrogation room in the early days of the Iraq War. Left alone with a copy of Maxim magazine, he is observed by prison personnel. If he picks up the men’s magazine, flips through its pages, he is deemed a "moderate," and shuffled off to one compound. If he resists, he is considered a "radical," and placed with like-minded jihadists.
© AP Photo / Dusan Vranic A US soldier stands guard as detainees pray at U.S. military detention facility Camp Bucca, Iraq.
This, according to an in-depth look by the New York Post, was how officials at Camp Bucca maintained peace during the Iraq War. Detaining thousands, prison personnel needed to keep Sunnis separate from Shiites, and moderates separate from extremists, in order to maintain peace inside the detention center.
“What Task Force 134 learned was that if you didn’t start segregating the detainees, then you would have problems with the more radical ones radicalizing the less radical prisoners,” former guard Mitchell Gray tells Radio Sputnik.
© AP Photo / ANDRES LEIGHTON OSCE Human Rights Office Urges US to Deliver on Pledge to Close Gitmo
That policy meant that radical jihadists were left isolated in one compound, where they were free to develop radical ideas.
"…There was violence at Bucca among prisoners. They would set up their own Sharia courts and even execute or torture others and intimidate people into becoming more radical."
The problems can be traced back to the camp’s origins, which was never prepared to properly address the political situation of the region.
"As the Iraq War unfolded, this unseated Saddam Hussein and the Sunni majority," Gray said, "and Iraq being a Shia majority country, this caused a lot of geopolitical problems. Bucca was not really set up to deal with these sophisticated political problems."
Serving between 2007 and 2008, Gray said that approximately 30,000 detainees were held at Camp Bucca.
"It was a mix. You had everything from al Qaeda to local militia members to just outright criminals," Gray says.
© REUTERS / Murad Sezer/Files Notorious ISIL Executioner Killed in Syrian Army Operation
In addition to housing a number of top lieutenants of the self-proclaimed Islamic State terrorist group, one of those detainees, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, would go on to found the militant organization after he was deemed to not be a threat.
"That’s what happened to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is he was deemed not a threat and released back into the community," Gray said. "In fact, he had been viewed, really, as somebody that was a mediator and a moderating influence."
"When I first got to Bucca they gave us a big pep talk and said 'treat these guys great because the next Nelson Mandela might be in the facility,'" he added. "And I thought later, well not only was the next Nelson Mandela not at Bucca, but the first Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was and they simply didn’t pick up on it."Kubica has been driving for Renault at in-season testing
Renault say there are "still question marks" over whether Robert Kubica can make a full-time return to Formula 1 after life-changing injuries.
The 32-year-old Pole has had three tests with Renault in the last three months, six years after he suffered a partially severed right arm in a rally accident.
Renault F1 boss Cyril Abiteboul told BBC Sport: "Have we definitively answered the question whether he can race again? No."
Kubica's manager said he believed he had "shown he can be a serious candidate".
Alessandro Alunni Bravi said Kubica's goal was to race for Renault in 2018, adding: "Our goal was to become a potential candidate for Renault for 2018. The goal remains to come back as a race driver but it is not our decision. It's not in our power."
Kubica completed 142 laps - two grand prix distances - in temperatures in the mid-30Cs in his test in a Renault 2017 car at the Hungaroring on 2 August.
He set the fourth fastest lap on the day and was 0.157secs slower than Renault's second driver Jolyon Palmer managed in qualifying at the Hungarian Grand Prix four days beforehand. The Englishman was 0.8secs off the pace of team-mate Nico Hulkenberg in qualifying.
Media playback is not supported on this device Archive: Kubica's remarkable return to Formula 1
It was his first run in a contemporary F1 car since early 2011. A matter of days after setting the fastest time for Renault in the first pre-season F1 test, Kubica crashed during a rally in northern Italy and suffered multiple injuries, from which he has faced a long rehabilitation.
Abiteboul said: "We have some indication, some confirmation he is a fantastic professional, that he is extremely talented, that he has a huge hunger for racing and to make a return to professional racing whether in F1 or somewhere else.
"But whether he can race in F1, there is more work to be done."
Will Kubica test for Renault again?
Abiteboul said he was not able to say whether Renault would be able to give Kubica further tests to fully answer their concerns over his ability to return as a fully fledged F1 race driver.
"We would like to," he said, adding: "We will try but there is limitation. It is going to be difficult in the timing and framework we have."
This is a reference to the fact that testing is severely restricted in F1 - the only chance to run Kubica before a post-season test in Abu Dhabi would be in a practice session at a grand prix weekend.
Cyril Abiteboul made a return to Renault Sport F1 as a managing director after two years with Caterham F1 Team
Abiteboul added that this may not fit in with Renault's desire to finalise their 2018 driver line-up before the end of the season.
He said: "Having said that, we have not done all of this in order to stop at the first difficulty. We knew there would be difficulty. Whether we can go further or not is still a little bit up in the air but we will see in the next two to three weeks what the future can offer to the team and Robert."
Where does Kubica stand?
Media playback is not supported on this device Kubica chasing 'impossible' F1 dream
Bravi said: "We are really thankful to Renault for the opportunity and just waiting to understand if there can be any further opportunities.
"For sure Robert's priority is to work with Renault because he feels part of this family.
"After the test, he said he was not 100% happy - that was because he missed an opportunity with ultra-soft tyres to do his optimum lap time because of a red flag and his feeling was that he made progress each time he went out on track.
"So he feels there is a lot of room for improvement. His potential to improve is bigger than the others' because he has been out for seven years.
"This is a starting point. We are not putting any pressure on Renault. He did his job. The decision is up to Renault."
Sainz a hot tip for Renault?
Nico Hulkenberg is sixth in the drivers' standings and Jolyon Palmer 19th
Nico Hulkenberg is contracted for next season but team-mate Jolyon Palmer is expected to be dropped after a disappointing season, even though Abiteboul has said the Englishman still has a chance to convince the team to keep him.
Renault are said by sources to have Toro Rosso driver Carlos Sainz at the top of their list for 2018.
The Spaniard is under contract to Red Bull but the team have made it clear he would be available to Renault at a price. Initial negotiations have taken place but no deal has yet been struck.
Abiteboul said: "We had an interest in Sainz starting actually last year. We continue to have an interest because I think he is doing a good season.
"But he has a contractual situation which Red Bull may or may not be willing to discuss. We will see. Things have been fairly quiet over the summer shutdown and I expect the next couple of weeks are going to be very intense on that topic."
Other drivers linked to Renault next year include Force India's Sergio Perez and McLaren's Fernando Alonso.
Bravi said that if Renault decided not to pursues their interest in Kubica, he had "other opportunities", both in F1 and other categories of motorsport.Mark your calendars on April 18th for Focus on the Family’s “Day of Dialogue.”
After the anti-gay ministry Exodus International dropped the “Day of Truth,” an event that tries to counteract GLSEN’s “Day of Silence,” which takes place on April 15th and opposes anti-gay bigotry in schools, Focus on the Family took over and renamed it the “Day of Dialogue.” The website features stories of people “leaving homosexuality” and criticizes GLSEN and the Day of Silence.
Candi Cushman, who leads Focus on the Family’s “True Tolerance” campaign against anti-bullying programs, wants to introduce the Day of Dialogue with a positive spin:
Focus on the Family rolled out its Day of Dialogue™ campaign today with one goal in mind: To encourage honest and respectful conversation among students about the fact that God cares about our relationships, our sexuality and our souls. The nationwide event, which began in 2005 as the Day of Truth, will take place April 18.
Through the Day of Dialogue, Focus hopes to encourage peaceful, student-initiated conversations and ensure there is a safe space for different perspectives and viewpoints, including faith-based ones.
Candi Cushman, education analyst for Focus on the Family and director of the new Day of Dialogue website, said the name change reflects the key goal of equipping students with an opportunity to articulate a Christian perspective.
“We’re excited about shepherding this student-led event,” she said. “Focus has a long tradition of supporting those who want to express their faith-based viewpoints about homosexuality in a loving and respectful way, and the Day of Dialogue gives students a great way to do just that.”
The event will come on the heels of the Day of Silence, on which gay activists and their allies encourage students to take a vow of silence to bring “attention to the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies.”
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Cushman said: “Our focus for this year’s event is going to be on dialogue and giving students of faith an opportunity to express the model presented by Jesus Christ in the Bible — who didn’t back away from speaking truth, but neither held back in pouring out His compassionate love for hurting and vulnerable people and defending those people from harm.
“The most important way family advocates can help is to make high school and college students aware of the Day of Dialogue. Students can register, and check out activities, conversation cards and posters on the new website.”Getty Images
Ted Thompson is entering his 10th season as the Packers’ General Manager.
And according to Packers president Mark Murphy, the club would like Thompson’s service to extend well into a second decade in Green Bay.
According to Fox Sports Wisconsin and other media outlets, Murphy said Thursday that a new contract for the 61-year-old Thompson was “a top priority” for the franchise.
Thompson’s current deal is believed to run through 2016, according to Paul Imig of Fox Sports Wisconsin.
The Packers have made the playoffs five seasons in a row, winning the Super Bowl in 2010.
“Ted’s been instrumental in the run we’ve had,” Murphy said Thursday, per Packers.com.
Murphy has previously indicated a new deal for Thompson would come before a new contract for head coach Mike McCarthy, whose deal runs out after the 2015 campaign.Rapidly sinking in the polls and careening from blunder to blunder, Donald Trump has ordered the second major shake-up of his staff in three months. Paul Manafort, who was named campaign chairman in the previous shake-up, has failed in his attempts to domesticate Trump and help him pivot to a centrist message, and the Republican nominee has now brought in Steve Bannon, chairman of the conservative website Breitbart. By all reports, Bannon wants to “let Trump be Trump”—to rile up the right-wing base with incendiary rhetoric and launch vicious attacks on Hillary Clinton.
The consensus view among political observers—including, and perhaps especially, on the right—is that Trump’s dumpster-fire campaign has become a wildfire. “Trump Has Decided To Live in Breitbart’s Alternative Reality,” announced the conservative Weekly Standard. On CNN, former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro called Trump a “turd tornado.” And Noah Rothman notes in Commentary, the flagship journal of neo-conservatism, “By bringing on Breitbart’s head, any illusion of distance between the Trump campaign and its most unwaveringly supportive blog is now gone. The Trump campaign will be said, rightly, to have embraced the voice of the racially transgressive ‘alt-right’ and self-identified ‘white nationalists.’”
But if the Trump campaign is an epic disaster, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s doing. In fact, by cementing ties with Breitbart and seeking advice from disgraced former Fox News head Roger Ailes, Trump has sent his strongest signal yet that long-held suspicions about his media-mogul aspirations are true. He’s using the election to develop an intensely loyal audience that occupies a special niche: those who think Fox News is too mainstream. Who better to help him cash in on such an effort than Bannon and Ailes?
Former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer tweeted:The Liberal government is not always appointing judges from a pool of "highly recommended" candidates, raising questions about whether partisan political considerations or diversity concerns are trumping merit.
Under a ranking system brought back last October by the Liberals – who said it would "highlight truly outstanding candidates" – advisory committees identify the best as "highly recommended." Second best are "recommended." A third group is "unable to recommend." The Conservatives had dropped the "highly recommended" category in 2007, drawing criticism from the legal community.
But the Liberals have appointed a number of judges from the "recommended" list, according to a federal agency that supports the appointment process. Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould would not reveal how many when contacted by The Globe and Mail. Neither would the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs, which collects data on the process.
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New statistics released as part of Ms. Wilson-Raybould's stated effort toward transparency and diversity show a large surplus of the truly outstanding: 129 highly recommended candidates, for just 74 appointments made since last October. The rankings come from 17 non-partisan advisory committees across the country, who review the candidates' applications and check each individual out with lawyers they know in the community.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould, who had instructed the judicial affairs commissioner to collect and publish the statistics, says it is her prerogative to appoint from the recommended list.
"I take care to consider a number of factors, such as each candidate's expertise, the needs of the court, and the strength of their application," she said in an e-mail to The Globe. "Whether someone is recommended or highly recommended is one factor that I take into account, among many important considerations, in exercising my prerogative to appoint the best candidates to the judiciary."
The highly recommended category is the key to a merit system of appointments, says Peter Russell, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. "If you just appoint people who are merely qualified, that is not looking for the best-qualified people for the positions."
In an interview, he questioned whether some appointed from the recommended group were chosen for their affiliation with the Liberals. "I think we should know – is it politics?"
The return of the "highly recommended" category was part of the Liberals' new appointments process in which candidates are now asked to self-declare their sexual orientation, ethnicity and other background factors. That information is kept private.
On Friday, for the first time in Canadian history, the judicial affairs commissioner published data on the diversity of candidates and appointments.
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Commissioner Marc Giroux's office said revealing the number of appointees from the "recommended" list could be damaging to the legal process.
"We have considered whether providing a further breakdown regarding appointees and the 'rating' of recommended or highly recommended should be provided," spokeswoman Caroline Masse said. "However, if such were disclosed, litigants or others could determine whether or not a particular judge was recommended or highly recommended by simply referring to their biography and comparing it to these statistics.
"This prevents our office from distinguishing between the number of appointees that were highly recommended vs. recommended," Ms. Masse said in her e-mail.
Just short of 1,000 applications have been received since last October, of which the committees got around to assessing 441. Of those 441, 129 candidates were highly recommended, 82 were recommended and 230 were not recommended.
The data also show that, of the 74 appointments under the new process, 37 were men and 37 were women. (An additional 12 were of judges who moved from trial courts to appeal courts; of these, five were men and seven women.) Men, however, made up a much larger proportion of assessed and highly recommended candidates; there were 75 highly recommended men compared with 54 highly recommended women.
For years, the federal government had been urged by lawyers' groups to collect data on applications and appointments by race. The new data show that, in the "visible minority" category, 97 applied (or roughly 10 per cent of all applicants) and 42 were assessed. Thirteen were highly recommended, six recommended and 23 not recommended. The government appointed nine visible minority judges.
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Toronto lawyer Ranjan Agarwal, past president of the South Asian Bar Association, said the numbers show that there is more work to be done in mentoring and encouraging visible minority lawyers to apply. "Maybe there's just not enough candidates applying from minority communities, which I think was the point of having the data – we could then focus in on the problem areas."
There were 36 Indigenous candidates who applied and 11 who were assessed. Five of the 11 were ranked highly recommended, two were recommended and four not recommended. Three Indigenous judges were appointed.
Of those lawyers who described themselves as belonging to an "ethnic/cultural group or other," there were 190 applications, and 80 assessed; of those, 18 were highly recommended, 16 recommended and 46 not recommended. Fifteen were appointed.
There was one person with a disability appointed out of 10 assessed candidates (two highly recommended and eight not recommended). There were four judges appointed from the LGBTQ2 community, out of 23 candidates assessed. Six were highly recommended.
There were more "highly recommended" candidates in every category of diversity (women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ, Indigenous and disabled) than judges appointed from each group.This is rich. In a Weekly Standard op-ed written by Elliot Abrams and trumpeted by Karl Rove and Bill Kristol, President Obama has been accused of promoting anti-Semitism for calling out the Israel Lobby’s influence and warmongering.
The logic behind this ugly, slanderous charge goes as follows:
1) President Obama called out AIPAC and the Israel lobby as being a powerful force, backed by millions of dollars, hoping to topple the Iran deal.
2) President Obama then identified this force, which was also behind the Iraq war, as advocating for a war which is against the United States’ best interest, arguing that he, as President, must do what’s right for the U.S., not Israel.
3) Thus, President Obama has accused American Jews of placing Israel’s interests over America’s, which is to accuse American Jews of “dual loyalty,” the most nefarious and dangerous of anti-Semitic tropes.
Here is Abrams concluding this anti-Semitism charge in his own words:
Why would these people opposing the deal be [advocating for war]? It’s their “affinity for our friend and ally Israel.” But we have to resist their arguments: “as president of the United States it would be an abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.” It is implicit, and very close to explicit, here that the other side wants the U.S. president to act not on our own country’s behalf but on Israel’s. This is an echo of the old “dual loyalty” charge that has been lodged against American Jews since the day the State of Israel was established. The president is not ignorant (the accusation he lays against his opponents) and must know he is here feeding a deep line of anti-Semitism that accuses of American Jews of getting America into wars.
What chutzpah! No, I’m not talking about Abrams’ history with the Iran-Contra affair, which is a different matter all together. What’s incredible and maddening is that Abrams has, in accusing Obama of anti-Semitism, actually employed a REAL anti-Semitic trope in his accusation. For Abrams has conflated AIPAC and all Jews together, as if they are one and the same, something only the ugliest anti-Semite would dream of doing.
Allow me to explain: Abrams has smeared Obama as anti-Semitic for accusing AIPAC of warmongering. According to Abrams, by targeting AIPAC, Obama is accusing American Jews of warmongering, casting them as having “dual loyalty.”
However, unlike Abrams, President Obama distinguishes between American Jews, who overwhelmingly support the Iran deal, and the Israel Lobby, which does not represent the Jewish community. Rather than being anti-Semitic, Obama is explicitly distinguishing between American Jews and the Israel lobby as a way to combat anti-Semitic notions.
And why must he do this? Because Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly claimed to represent “the entire Jewish people” in his opposition to the Iran deal. This conflation between Israel and all Jews which Netanyahu and many Jewish leaders employ is used to shield Israel and its policies from critique, including (now) opposition to the Iran deal. In reality, this conflation is an anti-Semitic trope which the most vile bigots use to justify attacking innocent Jews for the actions of Israel.
Abrams has gone one step further than Netanyahu, though: he has conflated the Israel LOBBY and all Jews together, casting Obama’s critique of AIPAC’s warmongering as an anti-Semitic volley being lobbed against all Jews.
Note to Abrams: here is President Obama, Mr. Anti-Semitism, during his watershed speech in Cairo:
Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction — or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews — is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.
No, Obama is not the anti-Semite here, nor the one pushing any anti-Semitic ideas about American Jews.
That would be Abrams himself, and those ‘pro-Israel’ hawks who similarly conflate the Israel Lobby and the Jewish community.
Shame on them.
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David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, published recently by Oneworld Publications.
Follow him on Twitter @David_EHG.Looking for news you can trust?
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ONE LATE-WINTER evening in 2008, I opened up Google Earth, drew a 100-mile circle around my house in western Colorado, and vowed to stay within that minihabitat for a full year. This unusual experiment began with a plane ticket. My grandmother was turning 90, and her birthday shindig was in Kansas, 750 miles away. I could jet in for two quality days and be home within 48 hours. Or I could spend two grueling days on the road. It was a no-brainer—and probably more so for me than for the average American. As the daughter of an Air Force fighter pilot, my childhood revolved around planes; Dad’s second career as an American Airlines captain made jumbo jets the equivalent of the family car. With free family passes in hand, I grew accustomed to flying wherever and whenever I liked. But then I stumbled across some figures that led me to question my ways. Grandma’s party left me on the hook for 1,058 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of driving my fuel-efficient car 2,600 miles—almost twice the round-trip distance to Kansas. In fact, all of my green bragging rights—the recycling, the composting, the buying local, drying laundry on a clothesline—were obliterated by flying. In 2008, I took four round-trip flights, including cross-country jaunts to New York and Washington, DC. My flight-related carbon footprint dwarfed the average Indian citizen’s total annual footprint by a factor of four. Naive as this may sound, I’d always considered flying relatively benign—there were a couple hundred people on each plane, right? In reality, airplanes not only spew far more greenhouse gases per passenger than any other mode of transport, but they do so high in the atmosphere, magnifying the ill effects. I wasn’t alone in my denial. A recent study by Stewart Barr, a geographer at the UK’s University of Exeter, found that people who identified as committed environmentalists actually flew more than those who didn’t. Some of these “bleeding-heart jet setters” insisted they’d earned their flights through green behavior at home. “People tell themselves they can justify a flight of 5,000 miles because they’ve recycled all year,” Barr told me.
Yes, that was me in a nutshell: happy to pedal to the grocery store or buy an energy-efficient gadget, but if I had to sacrifice something important to me (like visiting Grandma, my final trip), I balked. America’s social and geographical sprawl following three decades of discount travel—thanks, People Express!—further complicates the equation. I thought my vow might provoke some guilt, or maybe even inspire a few friends to join in. What I got was a collective shrug. Love miles were nonnegotiable. Ditto pleasure trips.
My mother all but disowned me. “You can’t do that!” she screamed when I unveiled my plan. I might as well have told my parents I’d converted to Scientology. They fly nearly once a month; jetting off to international destinations makes my mom feel worldly and adventurous, traits she has prized ever since she and Dad left their tiny hometown on the Kansas plains.
But this wasn’t all about status or wanderlust. Mom and I were co-contributors to a new essay anthology, and she felt betrayed that I wouldn’t be traveling to Albuquerque for a joint signing at her local bookstore. A signing, however, wasn’t even close to making my short list of potential pledge breakers: Family death or serious illness? Of course. Best friend’s wedding? Oh, dear.
At the end of my year at home, friends congratulated me and asked where I planned to fly off to first. The answer surprised even me: nowhere. Somehow, in my absence from elsewhere, I’d laid down roots. I finally climbed that funny-shaped peak I’d long eyed from the front porch, and even bothered to check out my sleepy town museum. (Old West saloon replica!) Limited choices, it turned out, were a potent form of stress relief: I no longer agonized about whether to take this trip or that—or had to hassle with the logistics.
From 398 consecutive days in my home habitat, I concluded that a lot of my essential travel simply wasn’t. I’ve kept in touch well enough by phone and Skype, and my relationship with Mom survived the signing spat. Okay, granted, I’ll be at her next bookstore event. The point is, even love miles are sometimes negotiable: Dad recently invited me to join his cycling buddies for a tour of Germany—a most brutal temptation. Instead, I arranged to meet him for a ride in Albuquerque, where it’s mostly sunny, and the beer is always served cold.Jack Hunter of The American Conservative makes a
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, depending on the circumstances. He's not really a bad guy. He's just misunderstood.
More than three decades after Donkey Kong arrived in arcades, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts returned the favor. In addition to tributes to Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, classic kaiju flicks, and various anime series, he stuffed Kong: Skull Island full of video game Easter eggs. Fans found some; Vogt-Roberts revealed others. Many are still out there waiting to be discovered, so what are you waiting for? Boot up your Blu-ray player and start hunting!EXCLUSIVE: Empire star Terrence Howard, Wesley Snipes (Blade), Eiza González (Baby Driver), rapper and actor Tip “T.I.” Harris (Ant-Man), Demetrius Shipp Jr. (All Eyez on Me) and Shameik Moore (Netflix’s The Get Down) have all been tapped to star in post-Katrina heist drama, Cut Throat City, with Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA at the helm. The pic, currently filming in New Orleans, is produced by Elliott Michael Smith of Rumble Riot Pictures, Michael Mendelsohn of Patriot Pictures, William Clevinger, Kyle Tekiela, Sean Lydiard, Film Wealth, and RZA.
P.G. Cuscheri wrote the script which centers on four boyhood friends who return to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina, to find their home decimated and prospects for work swept away. Turning to a local gangster for employment, the crew is hired to pull off a daring casino heist, right in the heart of the city.
Rounding out the cast are Joel David Moore (Avatar), Kat Graham (The Vampire Diaries), Rob Morgan (Mudbound), Keean Johnson (Alita: Battle Angel), Denzel Whitaker (The Great Debaters) and Isaiah Washington (The 100).
The film was fully financed by Mendelsohn’s Union Patriot Capital Management. Jim Steele, Natalie Perrotta, and XYZ Films are executive producers, Jarod Einsohn is co-producing. XYZ is also repping international sales. RZA will also oversee the soundtrack and score for the film.
Howard is repped by CAA; T.I. by CAA and Category 5; González by CAA and Management 360; Snipes by APA; Moore and Shipp Jr. by CAA; RZA by WME.From prison to 'Breaking Bad's' set
Luis Moncada did time, then got a job as a security guard on a movie shoot. And before he knew it, he was on ‘Breaking Bad.’
For Luis, now 32, it's one of a long string of acting gigs that began in 2002, when a director spotted his tattoos and asked if he wanted to be in a film. For Daniel, 30, it's his first acting role.
Fourteen years later, Moncada is telling a different kind of story with his eyes. He and his brother Daniel have recurring roles on AMC's "Breaking Bad," where they've spent much of this third season playing silent-assassin types — cartel members from Mexico who've come to kill Walter White ( Bryan Cranston).
A gang member at the time, he was convinced he wouldn't make it to 21 and wanted to deliver this angry message to the world when he was gone.
Every time Luis Moncada blinks, he curses, thanks to the unprintable expletive tattooed onto his eyelids at age 18.
"I tell my wife all the time, ‘Wow, look at how far we've come,' " Luis Moncada says, with Daniel sitting nearby. "
The journey included a few key stops, such as Luis' prison sentence for driving a stolen vehicle. "I'm not thankful I went to prison," he says, "but after going to prison, that's when you really, really, really think, ‘Wow, what a waste of time.' I had to change."
Also crucial was a beautiful girl who happened to be a parole officer ("No, not my parole officer," Luis notes with a smile), along with a move away from the Hollywood and Echo Park neighborhoods where Luis and Daniel sometimes associated with the wrong crowd. Leaving his gang on good terms, he moved with his brother to Studio City. Luis married the parole officer and they have a 2-year-old son; Daniel lives in their spare bedroom.
The acting career was an accident. Luis was a security guard on the set of a small film, "El Padrino," when director Damian Chapa spotted the gang tattoo around his neck and asked if he wanted to play Jennifer Tilly's bodyguard. "I was getting off in 10 minutes so I said, ‘You know what, sir? No thank you. I don't know if I can do eight or 12 more hours."
But Manuel Jimenez stood nearby. Jimenez is an ex-con who created Suspect Entertainment, a talent agency that turns reformed gang members into actors; Hollywood often utilizes Suspect when it needs to fill the role of a bad guy.
Jimenez convinced Luis to take the role and then signed him to the agency. A slew of other parts followed — "Gangbanger," "Carjacker," "Thug," his IMDB credits read. "Would you be cool with me if you saw me in an alley?" he asks. "No, you'd probably be scared of me. So I'm the bad guy. For now."
And then came "Breaking Bad." "We knew we were going to have these very scary, very silent Mexican cartel assassins in our third season, so we put the word out and needed to find these guys," says Vince Gilligan, the show's creator. "We needed a couple of guys who were very charismatic, whose expressions and eyes told us a lot."
The Moncadas stood out; Luis had initially caught the eyes of the show's casting directors, but since the script called for brothers, they asked that his brother audition too. "They exuded a certain authenticity," Gilligan says. "They don't have to glare at you to scare you."
Cranston directed them in last month's season premiere, which included a sequence in which the brothers coolly walked away from an exploding truck. Daniel even remembered Cranston's note that, "If you feel like it, it would be cool if you casually lifted your cigarette to your lips and take a puff like you're walking in the park."Starting this Sunday, the NFL will be broadening its cancer awareness campaign, no longer using October to focus solely on Breast Cancer and the color pink.
Instead, the league will use the month to raise awareness and money to fight multiple types of cancer.
Teams were originally told last October about the switch that would begin this season. The Bengals' Devon Still, who publicly documented his daughter's battle with Stage 4 neuroblastoma, was a big proponent for the shift.
The cancer campaign, called Crucial Catch, will use other colors to help shift its focus to other types of cancer.
"While all teams will support the overall league message of early detection and risk reduction, each team has elected to support either a specific cancer or multiple cancers for its 2017 Crucial Catch game," the NFL said on its Crucial Catch website. "Throughout October, NFL Crucial Catch games will feature players, coaches, fans, and referees in apparel supporting multiple types of cancer, as well as additional on-field and in-stadium branding to help raise awareness for the campaign."
The NFL partners with the American Cancer Society to raise money and awareness, raising more than $18 million since the program's inception in 2009.Two brothers fighting for power is the oldest story in Indian politics. All it needs for the Mahabharata to play out is a doting father, blind to an ambitious son's machinations, a brother or a cousin with parallel claims to power and a wily uncle, a Shakuni if you will, to plot a clash of ambition and egos.
Since it had the right cast of characters, Mulayam Singh Yadav's extended parivar was always a perfect setting for a political drama. The dynamics between the ageing patriarch, his brothers Shivpal and Ramgopal, and ambitious son Akhilesh were destined to lead to a war. Enter Shakuni aka Amar Singh.
Shivpal is known to be close to brother Mulayam. Within party circles, Shivpal is the grassroots man, someone who built the party from the scratch with his elder brother. He obviously thinks the Samajwadi Party is as much his own as that of others.
Ramgopal is perceived to be the face of the party outside Uttar Pradesh. Four years ago, when the Samajwadi Party won a landslide victory in the Assembly polls, he convinced his elder brother to pass on the leadership to the next generation by anointing Akhilesh as chief minister.
Gradually, from a monarchy, the party turned into a loose oligarchy, with Mulayam, Akhilesh, Shivpal and Ramgopal turning into powerful centres of influence. In spite of the various pulls and pushes from different directions, the parivar could have remained united had Mulayam remained the final court of appeal. But, Mulayam's position diminished once Akhilesh started taking independent decisions, sometimes overruling his own father and uncle Shivpal, like the reversal of the party's alliance with the Bihar Mahagathbandhan and then with Mukhtar Ansari's Quami Ekta Dal.
While Shivpal was the moving force behind the two alliances, the volte-face was credited to brother Ramgopal, who is believed to have advised Akhilesh to annul the decisions, even when they had Netaji's blessings. Thus began a struggle for control over Netaji, the SP and government whose final act is now being played out in the open with the marginalisation and ouster of Shivpal.
It is often said about Amar Singh that a rift is guaranteed when he is around, especially as an outsider meddling in the affairs of a family. Rumours abound of his role in the friction between the Ambani brothers and then the chasm between the triumvirate famously referred to as Amar, Anil (Ambani) and Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan). The troika that was once like a close-knit family, drifted apart, with Amar Singh taking potshots at Bachchan in public and blaming him for the rift among the "three brothers."
In this backdrop, Ramgopal's insinuation that the Mahabharata in the Yadav family is because of the dubious role of an outsider should be seen as an indictment of Amar Singh's role, who returned to the SP in March 2016 after spending several years out in the cold. Many blame him for triggering the family feud by advising Mulayam to replace his son with brother Shivpal as party chief. In retaliation, Akhilesh removed Shivpal from key ministries, starting a sequence of events that has now spiralled out of control.
The drama in the Yadav family is almost identical to the recent split in the Karunanidhi clan. With his wives, sons Alagiri, Stalin and daughter Kanimozhi fighting bitter turf battles, Karunanidhi was forced to defer the announcement of his successor and step up as the face of the DMK in the 2016 elections at the ripe of 92. It is widely believed that the DMK lost an election it could have won because of the divisions within the family and its inability to offer an alternative to both Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha.
A similar script may play out in Uttar Pradesh. The Samajwadi Party is already facing rising anti-incumbency, a spirited BJP and resurgent Mayawati. The more it appears destined to falter at the hustings, the more is the possibility that its core vote base of Muslims and Yadavs would look for winnable alternatives.
If the feud within the family continues, both the BSP and the BJP would start dreaming of poaching its voters, and also some slighted members of the Yadav family.
This may be Mahabharata. But, nobody minds having a Vibhishan in their camp before a crucial poll battle.
Remember Bihar, uncle Ram Kirpal and the 2014 Mahabharata in another Yadav family?
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.Hey Japan, thanks so much for having an event on Thanksgiving. You must know how much I love to write about figures on holidays! In between basting the turkey, I get to go “oh shit, look at all this cool stuff!” And as much as it pains me to work on a holiday, some of the things on display at Tamashii Nations was just too awesome to not post. Like Bandai’s D-Arts Persona line: Thanatos, who was teased previously, was shown off, and a new one was announced: Yukikio’s first Persona, Konohana Sakuya! This is actually my favorite of all of the Personas, and Thanatos is my second, so this is a pretty awesome day! Mostly because of the food, but the figures are nice too.
[via AmiAmi]Aug 7, 2015 This week’s theme
Unusual verbs for everyday actions
This week’s words
micturate
osculate
regurgitate
masticate
exungulate
Photo: Ermolaev Alexander (Shutterstock)
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Next week's theme
Words related to space Unusual verbs for everyday actions A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg
exungulate PRONUNCIATION: (ek-SUNG-uh-layt)
MEANING: verb tr.: To pare nails, claws, etc.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin exungulare (to lose the hoof), from ex- (out) + ungula (claw, nail, hoof, talon, etc.). Earliest documented use: 1623.
USAGE: “Pets mimic their owners; Fred [the dog] is very protective. A few days after me and Jordana had done the dirty for the first time, he swiped me across the ear. I would like to exungulate Fred.”
Joe Dunthorne; Submarine: A Novel; Random House; 2008.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars. -Garrison Keillor, radio host and author (b. 7 Aug 1942)
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DonateAcross India, especially in the North and Eastern India, including Nepal, Vasant Panchami is the day when one of the cardinal goddesses of Hinduism, Devi Saraswati, is worshipped. This falls on the 5th day on the month of Magha during the time of the spring. Some scholars believe that the linking of Goddess Saraswati with Vasanta Panchami comes from the later day Brahma Vaivarta Purana, where Sri Krshna orders the worship of Devi Saraswati on this particular panchami tithi. Artists, writers, students and just about anyone involved in any kind of creative endeavour seek benedictions of this form of the Divine Mother to enable them to excel in their chosen field of self-expression.
Saraswati is one of the earliest names of the goddess, and a redoubtable member of the Vedic pantheon, that come to us from the time of the Rg Veda itself. The eponymous river Saraswati ( सरस्वती नदी sárasvatī nadī) is considered a central icon of the Vedic era, and even in the post-Vedic texts, is referred to with tremendous reverence. We are told that the early Vedic people lived along the banks of this river, just as most ancient civilizations flourished on the banks of major rivers, and over time, elevated the physical river to the status of a life-giving goddess. While this naturalistic explanation certainly has some scriptural backing, including from the Mahabharata which mentions the drying up of the Saraswati river, there is also another way of looking at the whole Saraswati phenomenon. For She is in Her true scope and manifestation, when seen in a purely Vedantic light, nothing less than a phenomenon par excellence especially in contrast with the frailty and ignorance of the limited human consciousness.
Saraswati can mean, “she of the stream, the flowing movement”, and is therefore, a natural name for a river, but it also means eloquence and the power of speech, as also a movement of inspiration. In spiritual terms any force or capacity, like speech, is a Shakti and a manifestation of the Divine Mother. Saraswati is also referred to as Mahi, meaning vast or great, and found, at times, mentioned in connection with two other names, Ila and Bharati.
IlA saraswatI mahI tisro devIr mayobhuvah; barhih sIdantvasridah
Sri Aurobindo's commentary of this verse is as follows:
“May Ila, Saraswati and Mahi, three goddesses who give birth to the bliss, take their place on the sacrificial seat, they who stumble not,” or “who come not to hurt” or “do no hurt.” The epithet means, I think, they in whom there is no false movement with its evil consequences, duritam, no stumbling into pitfalls of sin and error. The formula is expanded in Hymn 110 of the tenth Mandala:
A no yajnam bharati tuyam etu, ilA manusvad iha cetayantI; Tisro devIr barhir edaM syonaM, sarasvatI svapasah sadantu.
“May Bharati come speeding to our sacrifice and Ila hither awakening our consciousness (or, knowledge or perceptions) in human wise, and Saraswati,—three goddesses sit on this blissful seat, doing well the Work.”
Thus ila and Bharati are similar powers of the Divine Mother, similar to Saraswati yet with slight and nuanced differences. While Saraswati is the inspiration that comes down to us from Rtam, the tremendous Truth-consciousness, Bharati and Ila are also different forms of the same energy. In a rik by Madhuchchhandas, in which Bharati is identified with Mahi, this deity, translating literally, is “full of cows for the sacrificer.” To a naturalistic interpreter this may seem like a straight link between an agrarian society's high regard for bovine wealth, but by this kind of logic, many verses of the Veda appear as meaningless ramblings of prehistoric barbarians. That does not do justice to the belief passed down since the ancient times that the Vedic verses were “seen” by Rishis in a state of Divine inspiration containing lofty spiritual truths, which can be properly understood only by tapashya and sadhana, not mere scholastic or intellectual readings.
In one of Vamadeva's hymns in the fourth Mandala (IV.3.16) the Rishi describes himself as one illumined expressing through his thought and speech words of guidance, "secret words" – ninya vacamsi --"seer-wisdoms that utter their inner meaning to the seer" -- kavyani kavaye nivacana. The Rishi Dirghatamas speaks of the Riks, the Mantras of the Veda, as existing "in a supreme ether, imperishable and immutable in which all the gods are seated", and he adds "one who knows not That what shall he do with the Rik?" (I.164.39). It becomes clear therefore that even when the Vedic Age was in full force, the verses of the Veda-s acted as symbols of higher spiritual truths. “Go”, therefore, is both cow and light - a spiritual illumination – so prized by our Rishis. Thus Bharati is the Shakti that is filled with a greater illumination which, when invoked, shares a portion of Her exalted status with the performer of the sacrifice.
While delving more into this we might as well recall a bit from Sri Aurobindo's own writings, about how he came across the Vedic corpus for the 1st time. Of course, some may or may not like his writings, regardless, it is vital that the following passage is quoted lest some are led to ignorantly believe that the man was commenting without sufficient Tapashya or sadhana.
“My first contact with Vedic thought came indirectly while pursuing certain lines of self-development in the way of Indian Yoga, which, without my knowing it, were spontaneously converging towards the ancient and now unfrequented paths followed by our forefathers. At this time there began to arise in my mind an arrangement of symbolic names attached to certain psychological experiences which had begun to regularise themselves; and among them there came the figures of three female energies, Ila, Saraswati, Sarama, representing severally three out of the four faculties of the intuitive reason,—revelation, inspiration and intuition.”
Much later when he was in Pondicherry and on an Adesha from Krshna started studying and meditating on the Rig Veda, did he recognize that the three Goddesses he had seen earlier were Vedic deities.
Coming back to Saraswati and Her sister goddesses, we find Mahi is associated with, apart from illumination, a sense of vastness, brhat, which contains within Herself the Truth, Satyam. Ila, on the other hand, means She who attains, and contains a similar association of ideas as Rishi or Rtam. Thus Ila is the Goddess who sees, or grants the ability of direct perception of spiritual planes and realities. While Saraswati represents the ability to hear the inspired word, and during normal functioning, is the goddess who provides inspiration for creativity. In other words, when the mind becomes more supple in deeper states of meditation and goes beyond the churning of the rationalizing machine, certain kinds of powers of intuition manifest themselves to the sadhaka. Of these, the access to revelation – like a vision seen within which is true – is represented by the goddess Ila; while Saraswati is one who brings about shruti or occult, inspired hearing, analogous to a voice that speaks within and provides inspired inputs.
These fine distinctions, however, came to be neglected later on as Saraswati became associated with “learning” - a crude derivative of Her Vedic nature – while Bharati got merged into her and Ila just vanished and a later story of another Ila came about in relation to the life of the graha Budha! Moreover, as the age of Tantra and Puranas gained prominence, these triple goddesses became represented in the three rivers: Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati, or the three channels inside the subtle body, namely, ida, pingla and kundalini, where Saraswati became representative of the subtler susumna, equivalent to the vanished river of vedic era.
Although we now associate Saraswati with learning or education, she is certainly not the goddess of fact accumulation which passes as knowledge these days. She is rather the inspiration of the artist and the creator, of the architect and poet, of the scientist, of all who stand at the forefront of the masterful application of human knowledge and potential. Sri Aurobindo writes,
“Mahasaraswati is the Mother's Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and order. The science and craft and technique of things are Mahasaraswati's province. Always she holds in her nature and can give to those whom she has chosen the intimate and precise knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the accuracy of intuitive mind and conscious hand and discerning eye of the perfect worker.”
In the famous Devi Mahatyam, which comes from the Markandeya Purana, we find MahaSaraswati as the presiding deity of the 3rd section of the text. In Shakti sadhana there are 3 fundamental aspects: an awakening of Shakti, a holding of Shakti, and the application of the same. Each of these is progressively more difficult, thus while many may awaken Shakti by dint of sadhana, only a few are then able to hold it in their mind and body, and even lesser learn how to apply the same. And this, the third part, is where the real guidance of Mahasaraswati becomes vital to the sadhaka.
Where reason cannot reach even by labored meandering advances, intuition prompts us in the right direction. Of all forms of the Divine Mother, it is Mahasaraswati that demands of us infinite patience and a vast capacity for work. Because intuition of creativity does not come when sitting idle, it comes unannounced, when we are completely absorbed in our work, the deeper the engagement the greater is the possibility of opening up the consciousness to the play of Mahasaraswati, who nudges us slightly but persistently towards a greater and more accurate perfection of the work.
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You can follow uson Facebook tooMark Pittman, the Loeb Award-winning Bloomberg journalist, a personal friend, a legendary financial reporter and the first person to sue the Fed (in conjunction with Bloomberg News) and win, passed away on Wednesday. He was 52. Our thoughts are with his family.
Bloomberg's brief on Mark's legacy.
Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Mark Pittman, the award-winning investigative reporter whose fight to open the Federal Reserve to more scrutiny led Bloomberg News to sue the central bank and win, died Nov. 25 in Yonkers, New York. He was 52.
Pittman suffered from heart-related illnesses. The precise cause of his death wasn’t known, said his friend William Karesh, vice president of the Global Health Program at the Bronx, New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
Pittman, a former police-beat reporter who joined Bloomberg News in 1997, wrote stories in 2007 predicting the collapse of the banking system. That year, he won the Gerald Loeb Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the highest accolade in financial journalism, for “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain,” a series of articles on the breakdown of the U.S. mortgage industry.
Pittman’s fight to make the Fed more accountable resulted in an Aug. 24 victory in Manhattan Federal Court affirming the public’s right to know about the central bank’s more than $2 trillion in loans to financial firms. Pittman drew the attention of filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, who gave him a prominent role in their documentary about subprime mortgages, “American Casino,” which was shown at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival in May.
“Who sues the Fed? One reporter on the planet,” said Emma Moody, a Wall Street Journal editor who worked with Pittman at Bloomberg. “The more complex the issue, the more he wanted to dig into it. Years ago, he forced us to learn what a credit- default swap was. He dragged us kicking and screaming.”
Police Reporter, Ranch Hand
James Mark Pittman was born Oct. 25, 1957, in Kansas City, Kansas, where he played linebacker on the high school football team. He took engineering classes at the University of Kansas in Lawrence before graduating with a degree in journalism in 1981. He was married soon after and had a daughter, Maggie, in 1983. The marriage ended in divorce.
Pittman’s first reporting job, covering the police department for the Coffeyville Journal in southern Kansas, paid so little he took a part-time job as a ranch hand across the Oklahoma border in Lenapah, according to an interview he gave to Ryan Chittum for the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Audit, a watchdog for the business press.
“What a funny guy -- huge personality,” Chittum said in an e-mail message. “Mark was my favorite reporter working. In a time when too much journalism is timid or co-opted, Mark personified the whole ‘afflict the comfortable’ tenet of the business. Mark’s passing is a huge loss for journalism at a time when we can least afford it.”
No Small Moves
Pittman spent a year in Rochester, New York, with the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper and 12 years at the Times Herald- Record in Middletown, New York, where he met his second wife, Laura Fahrenthold-Pittman in 1995.
“All I know is we fell in love the moment we met,” Fahrenthold-Pittman said in an interview Friday. “We moved in together a week later. He was as serious about his family life as he was about work. Mark did nothing in a small way.”
Pittman joined Bloomberg News in 1997. In 2007, he was writing about the securitization of home loans when subprime borrowers, who have bad or limited credit histories, began missing payments on their mortgages at a faster pace.
Pittman’s June 29, 2007, article, headlined “S&P, Moody’s Hide Rising Risk on $200 Billion of Mortgage Bonds,” was excoriated at the time by Portfolio.com for “trying to play ‘gotcha’ with the ratings agencies.”
“And that really isn’t helpful,” said the unsigned posting. [TD: the posting is not unsigned, it was authored by "Yves Smith" and Felix Salmon]
Beating the Pack
Pittman’s story proved prescient. So did his reports on U.S. banks exporting toxic mortgages overseas, on Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson’s role in creating those troubled assets while he was chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and on the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc.
“He’s been on this crisis since before the crisis,” said Gretchen Morgenson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning financial columnist for the New York Times. “He was the best at burrowing into the most complex securities Wall Street could come up with and explaining the implications of them to readers of all levels of sophistication. His investigative work during the crisis set the standard for other reporters everywhere. He was a giant.”
In the “Faustian Bargain” series, Pittman explained how 5 percent of U.S. mortgage borrowers missing monthly payments could lead to a freeze in lending throughout the world.
‘Fearless, Most Trusted’
“Mark Pittman proved to be the most fearless, most trusted reporter on the most important beat during the 12 years he wrote about credit markets, corporate finance and the Federal Reserve at Bloomberg News,” said Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler. “His colleagues will miss his laughter and generous sense of mission. Bloomberg readers were rewarded by his many achievements culminating with a federal court ruling validating his search for records of taxpayer-financed policies withheld from the public and the Gerald Loeb Award.”
Public policy would be more effective if reporters, lawmakers and citizens understood how the financial system worked and why the crisis happened, Pittman said in the Feb. 27, 2009, interview with Chittum.
“Hopefully, we will be able to inform the people enough to know how badly we’re getting screwed,” he said with a laugh. “We need to know how to prevent it from happening again, and we need to know who did it.”
Standing 6 feet 4 inches with a booming laugh, a loud telephone voice, and a taste for bourbon, Pittman made lifelong friends on Wall Street, in Congress, in journalism circles and in the artistic community after he and his wife opened an art gallery in Yonkers in 2005.
‘A Great Loss’
“I always learned something new when I spoke with Mark,” said Representative Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. “He was dogged in pursuit of the truth. This is a great loss for journalism and for those who relied on Mark for his insight.”
In “American Casino,” the title of which comes from an expression Pittman uses in the documentary, the filmmakers profile subprime borrowers who are losing their homes, mortgage brokers who made loans they knew their customers could never repay and bankers and ratings analysts whose companies profited from the housing boom.
Pittman provides an anchor for the narrative, at one point searching the Bloomberg terminal and finding the mortgage of a Baltimore teacher going through foreclosure inside a security underwritten by Goldman Sachs.
Celebrating Life
“He was a wonderful friend, a seeker of truth, a fighter for right, a proud family man, a big and jovial hand, a lover of food, drink and celebration of life,” said Joshua Rosner, managing director of Graham Fisher & Co., a consulting and analysis firm in New York. “This is a personal loss, a professional loss and a societal loss. He is truly irreplaceable.”
Along with his wife and daughter Maggie, Pittman is survived by daughters Nell, 10, and Susannah, 8, from his second marriage; his father Warren Pittman; mother Donna Pittman- Nealey; and brothers Barry Pittman and Craig Pittman.
“He was so large -- in spirit and in person -- and his passion for his craft was so great, it is impossible to think that it could just end,” said Jeffrey Taylor, Pittman’s editor on the “Faustian Bargain” series.
Bloomberg’s lawsuit against the Fed, which was filed after Pittman’s requests under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act were denied, continues without him. The central bank won a delay pending an appeal, which is scheduled for the week of Jan. 4.
“He was one of the great financial journalists of our time,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor. “His death is shocking.”
At the time of his death, Pittman’s outgoing messages offered a link to a black-and-white photo of Woody Guthrie. Written on Guthrie’s guitar: “This machine kills fascists.”Sometimes, distance is good for perspective. For Angela Merkel, that perspective came in New York.
The week before last, the German chancellor flew to the Big Apple to address the United Nations summit on sustainability, women's rights and climate change. But what she took home with her was the surprising realization that Horst Seehofer actually has a lot in common with Ahmet Davutoglu and Nawaz Sharif.
Seehofer is the governor of Bavaria and the head of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the sister party to Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU); Davutoglu is the prime minister of Turkey; Sharif the prime minister of Pakistan. All three have recently conveyed the same message: Merkel must get tougher in the refugee crisis.
Davutoglu asked Merkel in New York for her support for a buffer zone along the Syrian-Turkish border, where anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 refugees from the civil-war torn country are to be accommodated. Sharif, for his part, engaged the chancellor about the escalating situation in his country and in neighboring Afghanistan. He demanded that the chancellor send Pakistani refugees back home.
'Close To the Limits of Our Possibilities'
It was only four weeks ago that the Germans cheerfully welcomed the first refugee trains as they arrived and fêted the chancellor as "Mama Merkel" for her generosity. Early on, Merkel's message to her country was: "We can do it!" Lately, though, many dispirited communities are responding with, "We're beat." Many helpers are "at wits end," says Ralf Jäger, the interior minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. And with no end in sight to the influx of refugees, the mood is worsening by the day. If the inflow remains as high as it has been in the past few weeks, according to expert forecasts, some 1 million people will have arrived in Germany by the end of the year -- a greater number than ever before in the country's history.
"We in Germany are rapidly approaching the limits of our possibilities," Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), told SPIEGEL ONLINE in an interview last Friday. "Although the (country's) asylum law doesn't have an upper ceiling, there are real limits to how much pressure we can put on our cities and towns."
Concerns are growing that Germany is already there. Tensions among residents of often overcrowded refugee hostels, for example, have boiled over into violence in some facilities. Furthermore, officials from police officers to border control agents and government functionaries are desperately searching for ways to bring the number of refugees under control.
The debate is having a negative impact on Merkel's public image. A poll by Infratest Dimap for German public broadcaster ARD last Friday showed that the percentage of Germans who are "scared" about the number of refugees entering the country has increased from 38 percent in September to 51 percent today. The same poll also showed Merkel's approval rating had dropped by nine points to 54 percent, her lowest in nearly four years.
For a time, the chancellor was able to dismiss the increasingly sharp tone taken by CSU boss Seehofer against her refugee policies. CSU nagging has long been part of the two parties' partnership. But it's no longer just Seehofer. German President Joachim Gauck, who hails from the other end of the political spectrum, likewise called Merkel's refugee policy into question, warning as he did at the end of September against harboring "fantasies" on the issue.
That Gauck, who is no stranger to emotion, is now presenting himself as the voice of reason, is not without a certain amount of irony. But the president was merely expressing what many in Merkel's party are feeling. By stating that there is no "limit in the number" of refugees allowed in under Germany's asylum laws, Merkel opened the door wide without having a plan for how to close it again.
A Fateful Decision
Merkel herself has remained outwardly confident about welcoming refugees to Germany. In a long interview aired on Sunday night by public broadcaster Deutschlandradio, Merkel said: "To turn my back on this now or to complain is not my style." She also said that Germany now stands "before new challenges the scale and scope of which we have never seen before."
The impression that Merkel lacks a plan has been fueled by the circumstances surrounding the decision to reintroduce border controls in Germany in mid-September. At the time, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière's (CDU) staff had drawn up altogether different plans. Initially, the plan under discussion had been to largely shut Germany's borders.
On Sept. 12, a Saturday, German Federal Police President Dieter Roman was told to begin preparing for
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the Obamacare fight Wednesday, voting to begin debating fast-track budget procedures that, if successful, would allow the GOP to kill the 2010 health care law without having to face a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
The 51-48 vote, on the second day of the 115th Congress, underscores how serious Republicans are in making good on their repeal pledge. But it also signaled that Democrats are just as committed to defending the Affordable Care Act and convinced that they have the upper hand politically.
After years of fruitless repeal votes, Republicans, now in control of Congress and about to take the White House, is firing with live rounds. Democrats said that means Republicans will take the blame for any mistakes.
“They want to repeal it and blame it on us. Not going to happen,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said after a Capitol Hill summit with President Obama.
The president urged congressional Democrats to defend his signature law even after he is out of the White House.
Republicans counterpunched by huddling with Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Capitol Hill to plot their strategy for repealing the law, which has been their top target ever since it was enacted.
“We are going to be in the promise-keeping business, and the first order of business is to keep our promise to repeal Obamacare and replace it with the kind of health care reform that will lower the cost of health insurance without growing the size of government,” Mr. Pence said.
CLICK HERE to read multiple comments and insights from both sides of the aisle in the complete story on WashingtonTimes.com
Click here to contribute your news or announcements FreeOil extended its advance to near $50 a barrel as weekly U.S. industry data showed crude stockpiles declined, easing a glut.
Futures rose as much as 1.7 percent in New York Wednesday, marking a second day of gains. U.S. oil inventories, which are near the highest in 80 years, dropped by 5.14 million barrels last week, the American Petroleum Institute was said to report. That would be the biggest decline since December. The Energy Information Administration is scheduled to release data later Wednesday.
Oil has surged more than 85 percent from a 12-year low in New York earlier this year on signs the global glut will ease amid declining supply in Nigeria and non-OPEC countries including the U.S. While some of the world’s biggest producers continue to pump crude at near-record levels, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is unlikely to set an output target when it meets June 2 as it sticks with Saudi Arabia’s strategy of squeezing out rivals, according to all but one of 27 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
“We see some signs of recovery, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty out there,” Hans Jakob Hegge, chief financial officer of Statoil ASA, said in a Bloomberg TV interview. While demand is likely to grow, oil inventories remain at historically high levels, meaning producers face a tough year ahead, he said.
West Texas Intermediate for July delivery rose as much as 83 cents to $49.45 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange and was at $49.30 at 8:45 a.m. Central time. The contract gained 54 cents to $48.62 on Tuesday. Total volume traded was about 32 percent below the 100-day average.
Brent for July settlement increased as much as 78 cents, or 1.6 percent, to $49.39 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The contract rose 26 cents to $48.61 on Tuesday. The global benchmark crude was traded at a premium of 8 cents to WTI.
Crude stockpiles at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for WTI and the biggest U.S. oil-storage hub, declined by 189,000 barrels last week, the API said Tuesday, according to people familiar with the numbers. Nationwide inventories probably dropped by 2 million barrels through May 20, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey before the EIA report.CLOSE 12-year-old Stormy the Arabian horse is remarkably unharmed after falling in a backyard pool Saturday in Mesa.
Mesa firefighters came to the rescue of a horse that fell into a Mesa swimming pool Saturday.
The Mesa Fire Department received a call Saturday calling for help for a horse that had fallen into its owner's swimming pool.Firefighters called a veterinarian, who tranquilized the horse, which was distressed by its predicament. Fire fighters were able to keep the horse's head out of the water and then used a lift system to get it out of the pool. (Photo: Photo by: Mesa Fire Deparment)
Mesa firefighters responded to an unusual rescue call Saturday.
A homeowner near Val Vista and University drives called at about 2:30 p.m. to report that his horse fell into his swimming pool. When firefighters arrived at the home, they found the horse in the shallow end of the pool.
CLOSE Mesa firefighters rescued a horse that fell into its owner's swimming pool. The horse had to first be tranquilized.
Firefighters called a veterinarian, who tranquilized the horse, which was distressed by its predicament. Firefighters were able to keep the horse's head out of the water and then used a lift system to get it out of the pool.
The horse is doing fine, Mesa Fire Department Capt. Forrest Smith said.
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1wsmzx0At this workshop, you will receive helpful pointers from professional financial aid counselors. They will be available to give individual help answering your questions with the on-line completion of the FAFSA Application.
What should I bring?
1) Social Security Number. Be sure that it is correct!
2) Records of income, such as income earned from work and business, child support paid or recieved, and any other untaxed income.
3) Information about assets, such as savings, certificated of deposit, stock options, bonds, 529 plans and other college savings programs, and investment real estate, business, and farm.
4) Driver's license number, if the student has one.
5) Alien Registration Number, if not a U.S. citizen.
¿Qué datos serán necesarios?
1) Número de Seguro Social. Asegúrese de anotarlo correctamente.
2) Datos sobre los ingresos, tales como sueldo ganado por su trabajo, por negocio, y otras fuentes de dinero; también la manutención pagada o recibida por hijos menores.
3) Información sobre los ahorros y las inversiones actuales en negocios, bienes raíces, propiedades, empresas, fincas, acciones, bonos, planes 529, etc...
4) Número de licencia de conducir (si el estudiante tiene alguna)
5) Número de registro de extranjero o tarjeta de residencia permanente del ESTUDIANTE (en caso de no ser ciudadano de EE.UU.)
Where can I contact the organizer with any questions?
For further information please call us at (708)222-5240Overclockers UK has started to offer its top-of-the-range 8Pack OrionX computer that weds two completely different systems in one box: a multi-core overclocked Intel Core i7-6950X-based high-end desktop and a quad-core factory overclocked Intel Core i7-7700K-based gaming rig. The 8Pack OrionX was designed by former world #1 overclocker Ian Parry (aka 8Pack, we interviewed him 2013) for those who want to have the absolutely best performance in all applications and who can pay for such system. The limited edition rig is now available from OcUK for £24,000 ($30,116).
Dual Systems
Different types of workloads can benefit from different microprocessor architectures and even different CPU configurations. There are a number of workloads that scale well with an increase cores and there are applications that take advantage of high frequencies, IPC included. In a perfect world, one could dedicate hardware to multi-core or high-frequency as required. In fact, back at CeBIT 2005, ECS demonstrated taking this concept to pure crazy: its PF88 motherboard supported both AMD’s Athlon 64 and Intel’s Pentium 4 processors and allowing users to take advantage of both microarchitectures. The processors used the same graphics card and the same operating system, which optimized the cost of the setup and offered somewhat consistent user experience. But while the concept was interesting, there were multiple factors (apart from the cost of two processors) that prevented it from taking off even in the enthusiast space: switching between CPUs required opening up the system and changing jumper settings manually; it was impossible to install proper coolers on CPUs because they were located nearby each other; ECS had to use SiS chipsets that were not popular among the target audience at the time.
Today, Intel offers two completely different desktop platforms targeting different performance and power targets as well as different applications and pricing. The mainstream/gaming platform is based on CPUs with two or four cores running at rather high frequencies and the majority of games are tailored for 4C/8T processors because that is what most gamers use. This platform typically also uses the latest microarchitecture and supports the latest technologies. Meanwhile, Intel’s high-end desktop platform is powered by CPUs with up to ten cores featuring a previous-generation microarchitecture with certain enhancements but lags a bit behind the latest technologies that Intel has to offer in terms of chipset. The HEDT platform can offer plenty of horsepower for professional applications tailored for multi-core CPUs, but due to relatively low frequencies of such chips, they not always deliver the highest performance in all games. All-in-all, ideally you are going to need different Intel CPUs for different tasks and this is exactly why Overclockers UK are offering the 8Pack OrionX. At a premium.
Conceptually, the 8Pack OrionX resembles the aforementioned platform from ECS, but rather than putting two CPUs on one board with a jumper, it simply squeezes two premium factory overclocked systems featuring high-end components available in one large case.
Chassis and Cooling
When we talk about PCs, we usually start with CPUs and GPUs because they define general capabilities of almost any platform. However, when we discuss a system with two CPUs, four or five GPUs and five SSDs, it makes more sense to start with the chassis and cooling.
The 8Pack OrionX PC comes in the Phanteks Enthoo Elite chassis that was developed to build 2-in-1 desktop PCs featuring an ATX motherboard and a Mini-ITX motherboard. Phanteks calls its chassis “the extreme full tower” because this 123-liter giant is 75 cm tall (29.5”) and can fit in 13 3.5” drives, six 2.5” drives, a standard PSU of virtually any length (the 8Pack OrionX uses the Super Flower Leadex 2 kW PSU) and virtually any cooling system.
For cooling, the 8Pack OrionX uses a custom-built triple-loop cooling system with EK Supremacy Evo CPU water blocks, insane tubing and pass-through plates made of polished acryl. This involves custom reservoirs, as seen above, installed along the rear, front, and mid-plate panels of the case. The LCS has four pumps that are dynamically controlled. OcUK does not reveal too many details about the cooling system, but we suspect that one loop is dedicated to the Intel Core i7-6950X CPU, another is used to cool down three primary graphics adapters and the primary SSD of the X99 platform, whereas the third one is dedicated to the secondary system running the Intel Core i7-7700K and the NVIDIA TITAN X video card. In the past OcUK likes to offer Mayhem coolants, known for their striking color, although this isn't specifically mentioned.
Since the LCS is extremely large and uses two massive radiators located on top and bottom of the chassis, the expansion capabilities of the Phanteks Enthoo Elite will be limited to the owners of the 8Pack OrionX (for example, it will be impossible to install a 5.25” ODD instead of front USB and audio ports), but this is a necessary tradeoff.
“Golden” CPUs and High-End Motherboards
Both CPUs are factory overclocked and Overclockers UK guarantees that the Intel Core i7-6950X will work at an AVX stable 4.40 GHz or higher frequency, whereas the Intel Core i7-7700K will work fine at 5.10 GHz or higher. Since overclocking potential of microprocessors vary, the manufacturer only advertises 4.4 and 5.1 GHz frequencies, but actual systems may run faster.
Overclockers UK chose ASUS’ Rampage V Edition 10 and ROG Strix Z270I Gaming motherboards for its 8Pack OrionX systems. Both mainboards feature high-quality VRMs to guarantee stable operation of overclocked CPUs, offer plenty of USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports, GbE, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, 7.1-channel audio sub-systems and so on. Meanwhile, since the system lacks ODD space, it will be impossible to install Rampage V’s additional front-panel SupremeFX Hi-Fi headphone audio sub-system (ESS ES9018K2M Sabre DAC, Cirrus Logic CS5361 AD converter, multiple amps) into the case, but maybe OcUK has an external solution for this add-on for those who want to have a high-end audio.
As for memory sub-systems, the manufacturer chose 8 GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 modules: eight of such DIMMs are installed into the X99 motherboard (making up for 64 GB) and two are used for the Z270 platform (making up for 16 GB).
Four NVIDIA TITAN X Cards in One Box
Since the 8Pack OrionX is designed a no-compromise system, it also uses the highest-performing graphics cards today: the NVIDIA TITAN X with 12 GB of GDDR5X memory. Moreover, an interesting thing is that NVIDIA does not advertise more than two TITAN X cards per system for gaming, however other non-gaming uses can take advantage. Three of the NVIDIA TITAN X cards are installed into the primary X99 motherboard and come with factory overclocked GPUs operating at 2 GHz. Meanwhile, the fourth one runs with the Z270 platform.
Keeping in mind that far not all games are compatible with the AFR rendering technique, even a dual-GPU sub-system is an overkill nowadays and NVIDIA officially does not support 3-way and 4-way GPU configurations for its GeForce GTX 10 (Pascal) family. Nonetheless, some may try to run older games at 4K resolution with FSAA and since some of those games support AFR, three GPUs might make sense. In any case, the overclocked TITAN X GPU can offer a very high level of performance in modern games even when working alone.
Meanwhile, many prosumers use GPU-accelerated applications and this is exactly where 10752 stream processors of three TITAN X GPUs will show their potential. In fact, specifically for people looking forward extreme FP32 performance, OcUK offers an option to install the fourth TITAN X into the X99 system.
The manufacturer mentions overclocking for the NVIDIA TITAN X card plugged into the Z270 motherboard, but does not specify exact GPU frequency here. In any case, this card inside the 8Pack OrionX will offer something more than the “regular” TITAN X.
Five SSDs and 20 TB of HDD Space
The storage sub-system of the 8Pack OrionX is reported as being tailored for the workloads of each platform. In total, the rig comes with 4.2 TB of solid-state storage and 20 TB of HDD storage space.
The X99 system is equipped with three layers of storage. The primary SSD of the X99 is the Intel 750 1.2 TB NVMe SSD that is based 20 nm MLC NAND flash memory and offers sequential read speed up to 2.5 GB/s as well as sequential write speed up to 1.2 GB/s. To ensure that the SSD does not throttle under high loads, it is liquid-cooled. The secondary SSD-based layer of the X99 system is comprised of two Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB SSDs working in RAID 0 and thus delivering up to 1.1 GB/s read performance. The final layer uses Seagate’s top-of-the-range helium-filled BarraCuda Pro 10 TB drive.
Being primarily aimed at gaming, the Z270 part of the 8Pack OrionX is equipped with a simpler (if this word is applicable to this rig at all) storage sub-system. The primary storage is based on two Samsung 960 Pro 512 GB SSDs running in RAID 0. Meanwhile, there is another Seagate BarraCuda Pro 10 TB attached to the Z270 motherboard to keep all the data that is not stored on the SSDs (or backup copies).
8Pack OrionX Specifications X99 Primary System Z270 Secondary System CPU Intel Core i7-6950X
10C/20T
OC to 4.4+ GHz
25 MB L3 Cache
140 W Intel Core i7-7700K
4C/8T
OC to 5.1+ GHz
8 MB L3 Cache
91 W PCH Intel X99 Intel Z270 Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Edition 10 ASUS ROG Strix Z270I Gaming Graphics 3 × NVIDIA TITAN X
or
4 × NVIDIA TITAN X
GPU overclocked to 2 GHz NVIDIA TITAN X
Unknown OC Memory 8 × 8 GB DDR4-2666
Corsair Dominator Platinum 2 × 8 GB DDR4-3200
Corsair Dominator Platinum Storage Primary SSD Intel 750 1.2 TB
PCIe NVMe 2 × Samsung 960 Pro 512 GB
RAID 0 Secondary SSD 2 × Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB
RAID 0 - HDD Seagate BarraCuda Pro 10 TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro 10 TB Bays 13 × 3.5" drives, 6 × 2.5" drives Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi + BT 4.0 IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi + BT 4.1 Ethernet Intel I218V GbE
Intel I211-AT GbE Intel I219V GbE Display Outputs Front HDMI 2.0 MB - 1 × HDMI
1 × DP Graphics Card Every card:
1 × HDMI 2.0b
3 × DisplayPort 1.4
1 × DVI-I 1 × HDMI 2.0b
3 × DisplayPort 1.4
1 × DVI-I Audio 7.1-channel
Realtek ALC1150
SupremeFX Shielding
Sonic software enhancements 7.1-channel
Realtek ALC1220A
SupremeFX Shielding
Sonic software enhancements USB Front 2 × USB 3.0 Type-A
1 × USB 3.1 Type-C (shared) 2 × USB 3.0 Type-A
1 × USB 3.0 Type-C (shared) Rear 2 × USB 3.1 Type-C
2 × USB 3.1 Type-A
4 × USB 3.0 Type-A
2 × USB 2.0 Type-A 1 × USB 3.0 Type-C
3 × USB 3.0 Type-A
4 × USB 2.0 Type-A Other I/O Earphone, microphone 3.5-mm jacks on the front panel
SPDIF, PS/2 on the back panels Dimensions W×H×D 270 × 750 × 615 mm
10.6 × 29.5 × 24.2 inch Volume 123 L Chassis Phanteks Enthoo Elite (PHES916E) PSU Super Flower Leadex ‘8Pack Edition’ 2000 W PSU OS Windows 10 Pro Windows 10 Pro
When it comes to bespoke PCs from boutique PC makers, the look is as important as performance because such systems have to be distinct from others. Without any doubts, the look of the 8Pack OrionX is different, mostly because of the complex LCS and lighting.
First, the Phanteks Enthoo Elite has its own RGB lighting on its right side and on the bottom. The lights can be customized from the front panel of the rig. Secondly, Overclockers UK offers a choice of different watercooling fittings and fluid colors. As it is shown in the pictures, different liquid colors may be used for different LCS loops. The SI also offers different PSU cable braiding to match the color scheme of a particular system. Finally, there are multiple RGB stripes installed inside the 8Pack OrionX and their color can be set by OcUK or by the owner using appropriate ASUS software.
The manufacturer does not keep the 8Pack OrionX in stock and each PC is built-to-order by OCUK and Ian Parry who then tunes each one to its own stable maximum. What the manufacturer advertises right now is the base model and actual specs can be modified upon request. For example, some people may prefer to have only two graphics cards installed into the X99 system, or 32 or 64 GB of memory installed into the Z270 platform.
Pricing
The base price of the 8Pack OrionX is £24,000 ($30,116), but it may increase or decrease depending on exact configuration. The base model does not look like a PC for everyone even despite the price because there are not a lot of applications that can take advantage of three NVIDIA TITAN X graphics cards. Moreover, two systems in one box make sense for those who would like to physically separate their work projects from their gaming or entertainment, but for some reason prefer not to buy two separate PCs (or do not want to work with VMs).
But even if money is not a problem, the minimum lead-time for these systems is 42 working days, which means over two months and OcUK warns that delays may occur. When speaking with 8Pack at the last OCUK event, We were told that these sorts of high-end systems do sell sufficiently to warrant their development costs. Buyers apparently come from all over the world, even if not for the aesthetics but the raw performance. Undoubtedly a self-build is cheaper, but some customers want the support package as well, or financially sufficient to have a system integrator build what they want. Just fire up Minecraft and away you go...
Related Reading:Disney/"Frozen" LinkedIn Influencer, Jacki Zehner, published this post originally on LinkedIn.
This past weekend, Disney's animated hit Frozen passed a historic landmark.
Not only has Frozen become Walt Disney Animation Studio's first billion dollar movie, but Frozen surpassed Pixar's Toy Story 3 to become the highest grossing animated film of all time.
Frozen currently sits in the top 10 highest grossing films worldwide, and with co-director Jennifer Lee at the helm, Frozen is also the highest grossing film with a woman director, and the highest grossing film to feature not one, but two female leads.
However, that's not all Frozen has achieved, because this film is not just a hit, it's become a pop culture phenomenon. The internet is filled with covers of its ubiquitous smash hit song, "Let it Go", fan art abounds on social media, as does fan fiction, YouTube videos, and blogs dissecting every moment of every scene. The film has won Oscars, Annies, a BAFTA and Golden Globe award, and both the DVD and soundtrack have sold millions of copies. Frozen has struck a very powerful and vocal chord with audiences, and everyone; girls, boys, men, and women, are voicing their love for this film in ever increasingly creative ways.
Even more impressive is the fact that Frozen is not just an anomaly regarding women in film, but in fact was released in one of the best years for women onscreen in decades. 2013 will be remembered as the year that Catching Fire was the top grossing film domestically, the first time since records were kept that a film with a sole female lead took this honor. This was also the year that Gravity shattered box office records with its release in October, and over the Thanksgiving weekend, both Frozen and Catching Fire burned up the box office, bringing in record revenues. 2013 was the year that three films with female leads were in the top ten highest grossing films domestically, with another two (Despicable Me 2 and Oz the Great and Powerful) featuring a male lead surrounded by women and girls. However, as impressive as these numbers are, my hope for 2013's legacy is that people finally realize how important the intent behind their tickets can be.
The fact is, despite the success of 2013, the situation in Hollywood regarding women both onscreen and off is still far from perfect. Even when the top grossing film of the year features a female lead, Hollywood still considers these films to be risky and a niche market. Behind the camera, women make up 50% of all film school graduates, but only 18% of the directors whose films screened at festivals between August 2011 and August 2012, 13.5% of the members of the Directors Guild of America, and 7% of the directors of the Top 250 grossing films between 2009-2012. I could throw plenty more statistics at you, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and this info graphic from the New York Film Academy sums up the situation pretty succinctly. It's also pretty depressing.
However, if people were to realize the power they wield in simply going to the movies, then change can happen. By supporting women directed or women centered films, you are sending the message that women's voices and stories are a viable business and worth putting on the big screen. By rejecting misogynistic and sexist films, you are sending the message that the discrimination and objectification of women on screen will no longer be tolerated. The truth is money talks, especially in Hollywood, and it is my hope that going forward, 2014 will be remembered as the year a critical mass of moviegoers realized that the price on their ticket stub is so much more than a simple number.
More From Jacki Zehner:
State of Philanthropy: Women on the Cusp of Transformative Power
A Journey To Witness How Change Happens
Productivity Hacks: Make To-Do Lists Work for YouLeft: Original photo of UVA’s Dean Eramo; Right, demonic Rolling Stoneized version accompanying Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s smear job
One of the tangential victims of the broken glass gang rape hoax worked up by UVA coed Jackie Coakley and reporter Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely was a minor campus official named Nicole Eramo, who became nationally demonized by feminists last November for not taking seriously enough Jackie’s story to, say, have the White House call in a drone strike on the frat house.
Now, Eramo is suing Rolling Stone for $7.5 million.
As I explained in Taki’s Magazine on December 3, 2014:
Late in her first year at UVA, depressed and in danger of flunking out, Jackie talks to Dean Nicole Eramo, Chair of the Sexual Misconduct Board. This dean patiently explains to Jackie the three ways she can file charges, but Jackie can’t make up her mind. Eventually, Dean Eramo suggests she join a campus rape survivors’ support group. There, Jackie makes new friends who appreciate her story (even though it’s more violent than their own). In Erdely’s telling, Dean Eramo, a middle-aged lady, is a sinister figure, a sonderkommando who shields the rape culture by getting students to confide in her instead of exposing the vileness all about. But there’s a problem with the author’s interpretation: Jackie and numerous other young women love Dean Eramo. She listens. Jackie and others responded to the Rolling Stone hit piece against Eramo by writing a long letter to the college newspaper praising the dean. During her sophomore year, Jackie became prominent in the struggle on campus against rape culture. But the patriarchy struck back brutally last spring, using its favorite tool of violence, the glass bottle. Outside a bar at the Corner: One man flung a bottle at Jackie that broke on the side of her face, leaving a blood-red bruise around her eye.
That’s horrifying … assuming it happened. Or are we deep into Gone Girl territory now? (There’s nothing in the article about anybody calling the police over this presumably open-and-shut case.) Erdely continues: She e-mailed Eramo so they could discuss the attack—and discuss another matter, too, which was troubling Jackie a great deal. Through her ever expanding network, Jackie had come across something deeply disturbing: two other young women who, she says, confided that they, too, had recently been Phi Kappa Psi gang-rape victims.A bruise still mottling her face, Jackie sat in Eramo’s office in May 2014 and told her about the two others. … (Neither woman was willing to talk to RS.) Eramo had been listening to Jackie’s stories for a year at this point: As Jackie wrapped up her story, she was disappointed by Eramo’s nonreaction. She’d expected shock, disgust, horror. Erdely attributes this widespread ho-hum reaction among Jackie’s old friends and confidantes to a second massive conspiracy, this one to cover up the first conspiracy in order to protect that bastion of the right, UVA.
Could a runaway jury pile on punitive damages? For whatever it’s worth, some website estimates publisher Jann Wenner’s net worth at $700 million. I just wanted to throw that out there.Hi all,
I have received a ton of questions regarding a recently published ZDI advisory, which provides some details about a bug I discovered and reported to Microsoft (via ZDI), affecting Internet Explorer 8.� I wanted to take a few moments to clarify some of the confusion and answer some of the questions in this post.
1. Advisory vs Exploit
First of all, what was published is an advisory, not an exploit.� The advisory contains *some* details about the bug, but rest assured, it won’t be easy reproduce the vulnerability based on the advisory alone.�� In other words, what has been disclosed is the fact that there’s a bug in IE and that it has not been patched (yet) after 180 days.� Some websites reported that "Microsoft won’t fix" the bug. As far as I can tell, this is speculation and may be (partially) right or just wrong. Only Microsoft knows, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens.� Long story short, the actual exploit has not been released and there are no plans to do so at this point in time/before a patch gets released.
2. So this is the only bug in?
The "Upcoming advisories" list on the ZDI website shows that this is not the only vulnerability that has not been patched (not just in Microsoft software).� The website obviously only lists vulnerabilities that have been reported through ZDI. It’s hard to estimate how many bugs have not been reported (and may be used in the wild as we speak), how many have been reported through other means, or how many bugs have not been identified yet.� In any case, all of the bugs listed on the ZDI page have 2 things in common: they have been reported and a small number of people have details about the bug, due to the fact that it was reported to the vendor via ZDI.� Nothing special here.
Technically, all of those cases put us in the same position – it proves that affected systems are vulnerable. At the same time it doesn’t matter how long it takes for a bug to be patched because there’s always a chance that somebody else has discovered the same bug or another bug and may use it against us whenever he or she wants.� It is also clear that the faster bugs gets fixed, the better; and the more bugs get fixed, the better.� But it doesn’t guarantee 100% security because there’s always a chance a new/different bug was found or will be found.�
Also, until a bug gets fixed, no patch is available.� Surprise surprise, all unpatched bugs are… hmmm… unpatched.
3. If this bug gets patched, we’re safe, right?� If not, we’re doomed?
Achieving a zero-bug state in complex software (such as a web browser) is very unlikely.� That’s exactly why Operating Systems (Windows, Unix, Linux, OSX, Android, etc) have adopted additional security measures such as ASLR, DEP, Canaries, etc.�� It doesn’t matter what OS or application you’re running. Focusing on just one bug and its time/delay to patch doesn’t really say much about your absolute level of security. We often don’t need to be worried about the known, but about the unknown. We need generic and layered defense, period.�� Harden your OS, harden your apps, harden your browser.
4. Is it really a dangerous bug?
The ZDI advisory looks pretty accurate.� IE8 is affected and arbitrary code execution is definitely possible. As Microsoft indicates, EMET (Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit) will prevent the POC/exploit from achieving arbitrary code execution. In fact, it should be clear by now that installing EMET has become an important layer of defense on your Windows endpoints.� This case simply re-enforces this.� EMET won’t stop every single exploit, but it does increase the cost (for an attacker) to pwn a box. If you’re serious about security, install it. If you don’t care, install it too. It doesn’t matter if you’re using IE or not.
5. 180 days
The fact that the vulnerability was reported back in October 2013 and still has not been patched may sound disconcerting, but I’m sure there must be a very good reason. 180 days is a number, a deadline, a commonly accepted period in which most bugs should get patched.� Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.�� Again, only Microsoft knows exactly why. Everybody agrees that 180 days is a very long time, but I don’t believe this is an indication that Microsoft is ignoring bug reports or doesn’t care about security at all, so let’s not exaggerate things.� In fact, Microsoft is doing an excellent job in handling vulnerability reports, issuing patches and crediting researchers.� I’m sure we can all come up with examples of (small and large) software companies that approach bug reports in a different way.� Additionally, the BlueHat initiative is a good example of being pro-active and providing monetary rewards for cutting-edge security research.
Anyways, I am worried too about a 180-day delay to get a bug fixed.� But I would be really worried if the bug was actively being exploited and left unpatched for another 180 days.
I hope this short post clarifies some of your doubts and answers some of your questions. If not, please feel free to reach out.
cheers
Peter
External links:
� 2014, Corelan Team (corelanc0d3r). All rights reserved.
Related Posts:TOKYO (Reuters) - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Wednesday he believes strongly in the need to maintain a strong dollar and said the United States was determined to get its budget deficit down.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testifies before the House Financial Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, October 29, 2009. REUTERS/Larry Downing
The dollar’s decline has been a source of concern in the export-heavy region, especially since top exporter China keeps its currency’s value closely managed against the U.S. dollar and so felt less impact on prices for its exports than other Asian nations that let their currencies float freely.
“I believe deeply that it’s very important to the United States, to the economic health of the United States, that we maintain a strong dollar,” Geithner said in a meeting with Japanese reporters at the U.S. embassy.
The Treasury chief was visiting Japan before heading on Wednesday night to Singapore to join a meeting of finance ministers from the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) on Thursday. It was his first trip to Japan since assuming the post in January.
The dollar index, which measures the dollar’s value against a basket of six major currencies, has fallen 7.6 percent this year and hit a 15-month low of 74.889 on Wednesday.
Geithner said the United States was well aware it must work to keep investors’ confidence in U.S. economic policymaking.
“We bear a special responsibility for trying to make sure that we are implementing policies in the United States that will sustain confidence... in investors around the world that as growth recovers and growth strengthens that we’re going to bring our fiscal position back to a sustainable balance,” he said.
The U.S. budget deficit soared to a record $1.4 trillion in the fiscal year that ended on September 30 and is expected to be about the same this fiscal year.
Geithner talked with reporters after meeting Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and before a lunch meeting with Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa. He met Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii on Tuesday night.
In a separate interview with public broadcaster NHK on Wednesday, Geithner said that while the U.S. economy was growing again, the recovery was still in the very early stages.
“It’s a very early stage of recovery, again this is a very tough economy,” Geithner said.
“Unemployment is really very, very high, exceptionally higher in the United States. It’s still rising. It’s probably going to rise for a bit longer, until you see a longer period of growth take hold.”
The U.S. jobless rate jumped to a 26- year high of 10.2 percent in October and economists polled by Reuters expect it to hit 10.5 percent by the middle of next year.
LESS DRIVEN BY U.S. CONSUMER
Geithner said he was encouraged by Tokyo’s commitment to shift its policy toward growth that comes from more spending at home rather than from selling abroad — a policy that the Obama administration is encouraging throughout Asia.
“Both the (finance) minister and the prime minister made it clear at the very beginning of our conversations that the basic objective of economic policy here is to make sure that future growth comes more from domestic demand,” he said.
Geithner said the reality was that if a still-struggling recovery was to be turned into sustainable future growth “it will have to be less driven by the U.S. consumer” because heavy levels of debt were forcing American consumers to save more.
Geithner cited signs of stabilization in the global economy but said it still needed the stimulus that governments around the world have poured in to foster stronger growth.
“We’re at a point now where I think we all recognize that although the
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it instead. I thought about it, but The River City News didn’t cover weed in my per diem.
And at precisely 4:20, Perry awarded the blue ribbon for the Best Bud in the nation’s capital.
Following the competition, the buds were distributed to state fair volunteers. I checked. It was too late to sign up.
There were also lots and lots of hemp products to be purchased at the DC State Fair. I discovered Hemp Butter was not a tasty breakfast condiment, but a moisturizing cream. Another booth selling hemp products (and bongs) displayed a six foot marijuana tree.
I wandered around the rest of the booths supporting causes as wide-ranging as DC Statehood and the American Cancer Society.
I was hot and I was tired, but I couldn’t leave quite yet. It was time for dance instruction by the DC Rawhides – a LGBT Cowboy Line Dance Group. I won’t go into detail on this one. But next time you see me, ask to see my blue ribbon.
Follow Rick Robinson on Facebook and at www.authorRickRobinson.com.Tel Aviv Pride 2017 will be held under the theme of bisexual visibility.
In honor of this, the organizers of Tel Aviv Pride have released an official music video for the event to kick off Pride month.
The song, ‘Blonde & Brunette’ by DJ Only featuring Ishtar, is explicitly about bisexuality. It was written by Gil Weingerten (aka DJ Only) with input from the bisexual community in Tel Aviv. Performed by internationally-known Israeli recording artist Ishtar, both the song and the video place bisexuality in the forefront.
The video features many important figures of Israel’s bisexual and queer communities, donning pink and blue swimwear reminiscent of the bisexual pride flag. The producers of the video seek to convey the message of ‘intellectual openness in both music and sexuality.’
Check out the video below as well as the English translation of the lyrics.
Sunday at the Brasserie
Monday at Abu Dabi’s
I’m sick of picking out between Hapoel and Maccabi
Berlin or Amsterdam
I’m wanting both as one
Tuesday means clubs
and Wednesday is for bars
I feel like middle eastern music
Or maybe reggaeton and bass
the world has gone insane
go figure it out, man
Why choose between everyone
when they all seem like fun?
I want blond and brunette
I don’t know which one
I want hot I want cold
Versace and Dior
I want jeans and a skirt
why should I convert
She tells me
it’s okay, just bi!
Let’s get it high high high
Sunshine from Hawaii
That burns within me
Over you and I
I want to go to Hilton
I want Eilat’s hot sun
I want to go so fast
and also go real slow
to fly around the world
in the sea and in the sky
Why choose between everyone
when they all seem like fun?
I want blond and brunette
I don’t know which one
I want hot I want cold
Versace and Dior
I want jeans and a skirt
why should I convert
She tells me
it’s okay, just bi!
Let’s get it high high high
Sunshine from Hawaii
That burns within me
Over you and I
Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv
We’ve got to let it bi!IRVING, Texas – The NFL will hold a special meeting on the Los Angeles relocation situation in January with members of the league’s influential Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities pushing for a vote at that time on which team or teams could move into the nation’s second largest market.
On the eve of league meetings in suburban Dallas on Wednesday, allies of Rams owner Stan Kroenke have begun lobbying for a deal in which the Chargers would join the Rams in playing at a $1.86 billion stadium in Inglewood.
League owners expect Kroenke and his allies to begin pitching at the Four Seasons resort a proposal in which a second team relocating to Inglewood would be an equal partner with the Rams.
The latest moves come on the same day Kroenke met with Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon at Rams Park. Kroenke, who has avoided meeting with supporters of a $1 billion downtown St. Louis stadium, has been encouraged in recent weeks by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to begin communicating with Nixon and Dave Peacock, the former Anheuser-Busch executive who is co-chairman of a stadium task force set up by Nixon.
While Los Angeles committee members are determined to hold a January vote on which team or teams relocate, other owners are pushing for a vote to be pushed back to late February or March.
Chargers owner Dean Spanos and Mark Davis of the Raiders are committed to building a $1.75 billion stadium in Carson. Both Kroenke and the Spanos-Davis partnership are believed to have the nine votes needed to block a team from relocating. Under NFL rules, teams seeking to relocate need the approval of three-quarters of the league’s 32 owners.
Houston and Dallas have been mentioned as possible sites for the January meeting.
While there have been hints in recent weeks that the NFL’s more-than-20-year journey back to the Los Angeles-Orange County market could extend into the spring – if not beyond – Tuesday’s developments created a renewed optimism a relocation decision is within reach.
“Dallas is the start of the fourth quarter,” said Marc Ganis, a sports business consultant who was involved in the Raiders and Rams relocation after the 1994 season. “Dallas is the start of the beginning of the end of the game.”
NFL officials said a vote on relocation will not be scheduled during meetings Wednesday. Neither will a relocation fee be set for franchises moving into the Los Angeles-Orange County market.
There will, however, be plenty of lobbying and arm-twisting. Efforts on behalf of a stadium in Carson backed by the Chargers and Raiders have been joined behind the scenes in recent weeks by Disney chief Robert Iger. Iger agreed last month to be the chairman of Carson Holdings, the group behind the Carson project, if the league approves the Chargers’ and/or Raiders’ relocation.
But the key to the relocation remains whether the St. Louis task force can convince Kroenke or at least enough NFL owners that the downtown stadium is a viable option.
Several league owners have said it would be extremely difficult for Kroenke to win relocation approval with a viable option in his current market.
“There’s going to be a series of inflection points from here on,” Ganis said. “Those will indicate which way this is headed. And we’re getting to the more important inflection points. Does St. Louis show up or not? That’s a major inflection point. If it does, the final resolution becomes self-evident. It becomes self-evident that the answer (to who is relocating to Los Angeles) is not the Rams.”
The St. Louis project, however, is far from a slam dunk. The task force has presented a term sheet to the league for a proposed outdoor stadium on the city’s waterfront just north of downtown. The St. Louis term sheet, however, continues to evolve with questions emerging about whether some funding sources are still available and about potential increases in the project’s budget.
Tuesday’s developments are a further indication of the amount of votes Spanos and Davis and their allies have secured for the Carson project, league employees said. While the Carson project does not have the 24 votes needed for relocation, Spanos and Davis are believed to be significantly closer to the figure than Kroenke.
The latest pitch from Kroenke’s allies is a significant departure from how he earlier viewed a second team in Inglewood.
During an August NFL meeting on the Los Angeles situation in suburban Chicago, Kroenke was asked during his presentation on the Inglewood project by Chicago Bears chairman George McCaskey if the stadium could host two franchises. Yes, Kroenke replied, a lease agreement with a second team could be drawn up very quickly.
Contact the writer: [email protected] the uninitiated, nerdcore is a sub-genre of hip-hop obsessed (unsurprisingly) with all things nerdy. Its songs typically focus on pop culture topics like video games, Star Wars, Stranger Things and Harry Potter. Anything an artist feels passionately about is fair game. "Anytime that I can use my platform to make people aware of things they might not be familiar with, and I can do it in an artistic manner, that's what I'm going to do," Mega Ran told us in an interview last year. "It's great to have the kind of freedom we have to talk about whatever we want without having to fall into a format of genre or subject matter limitations."
"If I can play a part in people being comfortable enough with themselves to talk about the things they love, using the vehicle of rap music, it's a good thing," he added. Well, we're definitely comfortable enough to talk about anything Gameboy and Nerdcore related, so job done Mega Ran?A couple of 400-yard passing performances lead the NFL's Week 4 Players of the Week awards.
Quarterback Philip Rivers continued his career renaissance with a 401-yard, three-touchdown torching of the Dallas Cowboys' secondary to take the AFC Offensive Player of the Week award. Over in the NFC, Drew Brees' 413-yard dismantling of the Miami Dolphins' defense led the New Orleans Saints to a 4-0 start and won him this week's award.
On the defensive side of the ball, Tennessee Titans cornerback Alterraun Verner finally is getting recognized for his stellar play. In Week 4, Verner had two interceptions, one fumble recovery and two passes defensed against the New York Jets. We told Geno Smith not to throw his way.
Patrick Peterson took home the NFC Defensive Player of the Week award with his two interceptions that were key in the Arizona Cardinals' 13-10 comeback win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Dexter McCluster returned four punts for 113 yards Sunday. But it clearly was his video game-like, 89-yard return in the Kansas City Chiefs' 31-7 win over the New York Giants that won him the AFC Special Teams Player of the Week award. We could watch this play over and over and over and over and over...
Yes, kickers are allowed to win awards, too. This week's NFC Special Teams Player of the Week is kicker Steven Hauschka. His 45-yard overtime field goal kept the Seattle Seahawks a perfect 4-0.
NFL Media will announce the players of the week every Wednesday on NFL Network's "NFL AM." The list of Week 3 winners is right here.
The "Around The League Podcast" reviewed every Week 4 game. Click here to listen and subscribe.Image caption Me love cookies: Cookie monster might not be so enthusiastic about internet cookies, which can be used to track your movements online
By any yardstick the implementation of the EU's Privacy and Communications Directive by its member states has been poor.
This is the "cookie law" that governs what information a web site can collect on its visitors without explicitly asking them if it's OK.
When the deadline to implement it passed in May only Estonia, Denmark and the UK had taken steps to bring it into law.
Denmark has now decided to puts it draft rules on ice indefinitely and the UK has given firms a year to comply.
To give the UK's Information Commissioner's Office its due, its guidance on the law is probably the most comprehensive of any member state so far.
Internet stalking
This Directive was born of consumer concerns upon finding adverts for a particular product they had previously looked at mysteriously appearing on subsequent sites they visited.
This led to an outcry as people realised they were basically being stalked around the internet.
And who was this sneaky perpetrator? Cookies.
Most cookies perform basic functional tasks like storing your login details or personal preferences.
The perceived villain of the piece was "third party cookies" - the ones that enable companies to work out what you like and what you might want to buy, thus allowing them to tailor their marketing to you.
So the Directive was drawn up which divided cookies into those which are "strictly necessary" for a service being provided and others, which will require consent from users.
Confusion
This has caused uproar, particularly among Europe's marketing community, who are thoroughly confused.
Image caption Matt Isaacs, CEO of Essence, says there's confusion in the marketing community about the new laws
Matt Isaacs is CEO of Essence, which develops and places online advertising for brands such as Google, eBay, eHarmony and YouTube.
"Some are suggesting that it means nothing more than making users aware of the standard security options within their browsers, while others believe it means users need to be proactively alerted of each and every cookie ever placed on their machine," he says.
The problem is the definition of "strictly necessary" is very narrow, says Ben Allgrove, partner at the international law firm, Baker & McKenzie.
He believes the term would cover a cookie that enables an online shopping basket to function, but it would not cover a cookie that remembers you prefer your website in English rather than French.
"This law can't be complied with in any sensible way," Mr Allgrove says.
"If you had full compliance you'd have pop ups coming up all the time asking for consent; consumers hate that and most web browsers automatically block the pop ups anyway."
Lifeblood
Marketing professionals argue cookies are misunderstood and most actually enhance the consumer experience, allowing people, for example, to be directed to a Hilton hotel rather than Paris Hilton. (Or indeed, vice versa.)
Paul Carysforth is a partner at Amaze, which runs online marketing campaigns for companies like Unilever, Lexus, Toyota, Coca-Cola and Dyson.
He says cookies are the lifeblood of an online business and restricting them will do more than just interrupt consumers' while they are online.
Cookies are the primary means by which all online businesses determine the return on their investment Paul Carysforth, Amaze
"Cookies are the primary means by which all online businesses determine the return on their investment," he says.
"Without cookies it would be almost impossible for companies to understand their ROI and in particular isolate which strategies are delivering a positive return, and which would hamper investment and innovation."
Slightly more optimistic is Ben Cooper from Tullo Marshall Warren, which has created online campaigns for the likes of Lynx, Guinness, Nissan and Sony Ericsson.
He says there is a new challenge for marketers.
"There is little value in communicating with individuals who are patently not engaged or interested," he says.
"With the changes in the cookie legislation we are now faced with trying to convince individuals that there is indeed value in sharing their information with a particular brand," he adds.
Mr Cooper says there could be something of a return to "the good old days" of marketing.
"In some sectors, notably financial services, there has already been a resurgence in the use of direct mail where, for some products and services, the returns can be measured more accurately and the targeting has improved," he says.
Prior consent
What will test companies operating across Europe perhaps the most is just how much "prior consent" will be required by regulators before a consumer is judged to have accepted cookies.
Have your cookie and eat it Identify what cookies you use currently
Assess the necessity and intrusiveness of those cookies
Make clear and prominent disclosures on your websites about cookie use
Consider potential strategies for giving users effective control over cookies
Focus on cookies that are more privacy intrusive, they attract greater compliance problems
Here things get more confusing than ever as the 27 nations of the EU have differing ideas.
"In the Netherlands there is discussion about whether consent must be 'unambiguous', which might make browser settings - a convenient way of getting consent - less likely to be acceptable," says Matthew Norris, global head of technology and media at the insurer Hiscox.
"German and French legal commentators use the term 'opt in' and that is more draconian than the UK, where the Information Commissioner's Office has specifically said that UK law does not amount to a requirement to opt in," he says.
There is talk in some places of a "double opt in", where consumers would have to click on two separate links to give their consent.
European divide
Eduardo Ustaran, a partner in Field Fisher Waterhouse's privacy and information group, says early signs are that member states will fall into one of these two camps - those that impose a strict "opt in" consent requirement and those that recognise the ability of visitors to express consent through, for example, appropriate browser or other application settings.
Mr Ustaran believes a double click policy "would be fatal to online commerce".
Many are waiting for the browser companies to ride to the rescue with enhanced security settings that will allow consumers to weed out the cookies they do and don't want.
The strain of enforcement could be very big on the regulators.
"There are millions, if not billions of websites in Europe and the world accessed by UK citizens," says Richard Dennys, chief marketing officer at Qype, Europe's largest consumer reviews site.
Image caption Baker and McKenzie's Ben Allgrove says taking a wait and see approach is not enough
"Will the UK be issuing legal proceedings against non-UK websites which are accessed by UK citizens? How many prosecutions can they handle per year? Will there be test cases, then appeals, then what?"
But Ben Allgrove from Baker and McKenzie says a "wait and see" approach will not suffice as regulators are empowered to hand out big fines and cause big dents in brand images.
"Enhanced browser controls may not happen and you can't palm off your obligations to a browser manufacturer," he says.
Eduardo Ustaran is advising clients to identify all their cookies, assess their necessity (for the functionality of the site) and intrusiveness, make clear and prominent disclosures on their websites about cookie use, and consider potential strategies for giving users effective control over them.
Back to school
The cookie law was pushed through to satisfy a public that was suddenly aware their privacy was at risk, even if they weren't sure how.
Essence's Matt Isaacs thinks it is time consumers were educated as to what cookies are and how organisations use them to enhance a user's online experience.
"This obviously requires an industry wide acknowledgment and commitment to consumer privacy, but also a focused approach to educating consumers about online privacy and when it's safe to release personal information online," he says.
But as yet there is no co-ordinated approach from industry on either of these and unless it comes soon it might be too late; the horse will already have bolted and be causing traffic chaos on the internet super highway.Image copyright Thinkstock
Gonorrhoea could become an untreatable disease, England's chief medical officer has warned.
Dame Sally Davies has written to all GPs and pharmacies to ensure they are prescribing the correct drugs after the rise of "super-gonorrhoea" in Leeds.
Her warning comes after concerns were raised that some patients were not getting both of the antibiotics needed to clear the infection.
Sexual health doctors said gonorrhoea was "rapidly" developing resistance.
A highly drug-resistant strain of gonorrhoea was detected in the north of England in March.
That strain is able to shrug off the antibiotic azithromycin, which is normally used alongside another drug, ceftriaxone.
In her letter, the chief medical officer said: "Gonorrhoea is at risk of becoming an untreatable disease due to the continuing emergence of antimicrobial resistance."
Soaring cases
But while an injection of ceftriaxone and an azithromycin pill are supposed to be used in combination, this may not always be the case for all patients.
Earlier this year, the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH) warned that some online pharmacies were offering only oral medication.
Using just one of the two drugs makes it easier for the bacterium to develop resistance.
The letter, which is also signed by chief pharmaceutical officer Dr Keith Ridge, stated: "Gonorrhoea has rapidly acquired resistance to new antibiotics, leaving few alternatives to the current recommendations.
"It is therefore extremely important that suboptimal treatment does not occur."
What is gonorrhoea?
Image copyright CAVALLINI JAMES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The disease is caused by the bacterium called Neisseria gonorrhoeae.
The infection is spread by unprotected vaginal, oral and anal sex.
Symptoms can include a thick green or yellow discharge from sexual organs, pain when urinating and bleeding between periods. Often the person has no symptoms, however, but can still easily spread the disease to others.
Untreated infection can lead to infertility, pelvic inflammatory disease and can be passed on to a child during pregnancy.
Gonorrhoea is the second most common sexually transmitted infection in England and cases are soaring.
The number of infections increased by 19% from 29,419 in 2013 to 34,958 the following year.
Dr Jan Clarke, the president of BASHH, told the BBC News website: "We're really pleased that the chief medical officer has stressed that gonorrhoea needs this approach to treatment due to the rapid development of resistance.
"We need to protect what we've got and we need to encourage pharmacists and general practitioners to follow first-line treatment."
Dr Andrew Lee, from Public Health England, added: "Investigations are ongoing into a number of cases of anti-microbial resistant gonorrhoea.
"Public Health England will continue to monitor, and act on, the spread of antimicrobial resistance and potential gonorrhoea treatment failures, to make sure they are identified and managed promptly."QUEENSLAND has woken up – or at least arched its eyebrow and propped one lid open.
We can only hope that it will continue to emerge into consciousness.
Signing up to be part of NSW’s medical cannabis trial for suffering children and dying adults is a sign it is at least willing to listen to the people.
We should be grateful for small mercies.
REAL VALUE: Queensland to trial medical marijuana
OPINION: High time medical marijuana was legalised in Queensland
SICK: Father arrested for giving medical cannabis to his toddler
But nagging concerns about this whole positive medical movement linger.
It is concerning that NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner said the trials would not include crude cannabis, but a derivative – presumably in a pill.
This is presumably to head off any chance that the public might envisage children puffing on a plant and getting high.
Cynics might say this also ensures medical companies are not entirely cut out of the “revolution”, a concern raised any time consideration is given to allowing people access to their own herbal medicine and get off lucrative drug cocktails.
But making some sort of medical marijuana pill is like testing the nutritional value of tomatoes by getting someone to make it into tomato sauce first.
The power is already in the whole plant. The last thing they should do is to play with it too much.
media_camera NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner said the trials would not include crude cannabis, but a derivative – presumably in a pill.
And while there is a flurry of excitement, I fear it may all yet disappear into the ether. There has been talk of having to import the cannabis – as if it does not exist here already. The talk of recruitment of trial candidates is nebulous.
It seems strange that the trials are occurring at all, and not because they are at odds with society’s needs or expectations, or that the medical evidence needs to be gathered.
It seems strange that yet again, we are not prepared to learn from the findings of other nations. Australia may be an island, but must we always take this so literally?
More than 20 nations have already legalised medical cannabis and gone through the motions of checking the science and laying out the safety zones.
By insisting on tilling ground that has already been prepared by others, we are delaying the process of approvals – something we have become champions at in Australia.
media_camera It seems strange that yet again, we are not prepared to learn from the findings of other nations.
Medical cannabis is used in places more mature than here for relieving pain, muscular contortion, anxiety and as a salve for a tortured brain in the midst of an electrical storm. In many cases, it is found to do this far more effectively than pharmaceutical products.
Medical cannabis already exists in Australia. Sick people all around the country are already taking it to help with their pain and suffering.
The problem is they do so quietly because those who make and supply it, as well as those who use it, risk arrest.
It is ludicrous.
For the debate on this issue to be properly advanced, the recreational and medical uses of cannabis need to be separated, at least for now.
We need to stop talking about marijuana that is smoked for fun and cannabis oil that is taken for comfort and survival in the same conversation. And while it might be catchy, people need to stop calling medical cannabis “pot”.
Politicians need to stop making references to cannabis in this context as a gateway drug.
We need to grow up a bit and stop the oscillating Jekyll/Hyde approach of giggling teen and judgmental parent. The health-giving properties need to be discussed scientifically and maturely.
People who take medical cannabis are not going to get high, or bliss out.
Those seeking a party buzz would be sorely disappointed with the effects.
media_camera Mark Elliott has been campaigning for the legalisation of medical cannabis for his daughter Charlotte, who has a severe form of epilepsy. Picture: Dylan Coker
This week, a senate inquiry into the availability of new, innovative specialist cancer drugs has heard that the long approvals process and subsidy failures are killing Australians.
Because the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme was established to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, key drugs in circulation and used to great effect overseas do not make it on the list. This makes the drugs needed by a handful simply too expensive for patients to acquire here.
The senate inquiry heard that half of all cancer deaths here are from rare or less common cancers and those patients need these medications most.
We are too slow to change in our approach to helping desperately ill people. Fresh thinking is required where both medical cannabis and the PBS are concerned.
And overwhelmingly, US President Barrack Obama was right this week when he said that where medical cannabis is concerned, we need to follow the science, not the ideology.
The science was in – 1000 years ago.
Email Jane Fynes-ClintonNEW DELHI: Aam Aadmi Party MLA, Commando Surender Singh, got into an argument with municipality employees who were clearing the Race Course Road pavement of unauthorized vendors on Tuesday evening and allegedly beat up one of them. Sanitary inspector Ram Jeevan Meena, who was leading the NDMC team, claimed that the former Army commando also made castiest remarks. An FIR has been registered under the SC/ST act on the basis of a complaint by one of the employees.Singh was interrogated for three hours over the incident on Wednesday before being let off. Speaking to TOI, Singh said he lost his cool when a vendor told him that the NDMC men were demanding a bribe of Rs 3,000 for letting him off. “I did not beat up anybody nor did I abuse,” he said.Meena, leading the 10-member NDMC team, said the incident took place around 6pm. The men were from the health enforcement unit and had found unauthorized vendors outside the Race Course Road Metro station. They were caught and their wares taken away. However, a vegetable vendor later identified as Rinku tried to flee, Meena said.The officials chased Rinku and caught him at a traffic signal. Meena said Rinku was found to have no licence and his motor-rickshaw was being hauled into an NDMC truck when the MLA, who was passing by in his Mahindra Scorpio, stopped and asked them what was going on. After being told about the drive, Meena said Singh grew angry and asked the NDMC men to stop hauling the vehicle.A NDMC worker, Mukesh Kumar, protested but Singh’s driver stepped out and intervened. An argument broke out during which Mukesh was beaten up by Surender and his driver, Meena said in his complaint. Surender left after this threatening them with dire consequences if they harassed illegal vendors unnecessarily.Meena accused Singh of hurling castiest abuses. “He said, ‘tum log bhangi ho, safai to karte nahi ho, rickshaw-rehdi ke peeche bhagte ho aur unhe tang karte ho… mein tumhara naukri kharab kar dunga’ (you people are from the scavenger caste, instead of cleaning up the place, you run after vendors and harass them. I will get you sacked),” claimed Meena.Following the incident, NDMC workers registered a complaint at the Tughlaq Road police station. Mukesh was admitted to RML hospital with injuries on his head and face. He was treated and let off by the doctors on Wednesday morning.Police said that a FIR under section 332 IPC (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty), 186 IPC (obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions), 353 IPC (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty) and under sections of the SC/ST Act.The MLA, however, denied the charges. He said he was returning from the assembly session and had stopped after seeing a vendor pleading with the NDMC men for his cart to be released.“At the Race Course Road traffic light, 10-12 men were dragging the vendor towards a truck. Initially, I thought it was road rage. But the men told me they were from NDMC. I asked them to deal with the situation legally instead of creating a ruckus on the road. I got upset when the vendor told me they were demanding Rs 3,000 to release the cart. I called up the NDMC chairman and informed him about this,” Singh said.“After this, the men accused me of abusing them. There was no fight. It’s all a political vendetta,” he added.NDMC vice-chairperson Karan Singh Tanwar, a BJP member who was defeated by Singh in the last assembly polls, said, “It is a shocking incident. He (Surender) is a council member and still he abused the NDMC employee. I’m told that he has suffered serious injuries. This just exposes AAP and its members.”Meanwhile, the vegetable vendor also reached the police station to register a complaint against the NDMC workers. “I am here to register a complaint against the NDMC men for the loss they have caused to my wares and for beating me up,” he said.Rinku is a resident of Chirag Dilli and said he has been selling vegetables in the area for the past six months.The Padres have agreed to sign catcher Tony Cruz to a minor league deal, per SB Nation’s Chris Cotillo (on Twitter).
Cruz, 30, spent the 2007-15 seasons in the Cardinals organization before playing the 2016 campaign in the Royals’ system. Though he totaled just five big league plate appearances with Kansas City, Cruz logged a solid.264/.347/.387 batting line in 92 Triple-A contests last season. Prior to that, he appeared in 259 games for the Cardinals from 2011-15 while serving as a backup to Yadier Molina, though he’s never provided much in the way of offense in the Majors. Across 638 big league plate appearances, Cruz is a.218/.260/.308 hitter, but it bears mention that he has a.732 OPS in the minors and a.724 OPS in parts of three Triple-A campaigns.
From a defensive standpoint, Cruz has halted 27 percent of stolen base attempts against him in the Majors, and his career 43 percent minor league mark in that regard is quite impressive. Though he once graded poorly in Baseball Prospectus’ pitch-framing metrics, he’s progressed to be a roughly average receiver, by that measure, in recent years.
Austin Hedges and Christian Bethancourt figure to be the primary backstops in San Diego this coming season, but with Bethancourt perhaps shifting into a hybrid catcher/outfielder/relief pitcher role, there could be some room to carry a third catcher on the roster, if Cruz proves worthy of a spot. Others that will be in the mix are Rule 5 pick Luis Torrens and non-roster invitees Hector Sanchez and Rocky Gale.Age and Occupation
At first glance, the flyer might have struck the jaded flâneur as parody. Instead of the crusty punks and hippies that usually festoon images of protest in Berlin, a bunch of white-hairs hold a large banner with the classic squatter’s slogan “This house is occupied.” And even though the header is strictly informative — “Senior citizen community center” — the fact that it comprises a single word makes it perfectly suited for the sort of double-meaning that rock bands favor when choosing a name.
But this is no irony-saturated album cover. The photograph documents a public show of solidarity by a group of senior citizens. Residents of the eastern portion of Berlin who passed much of their adult lives under the German Democratic Republic’s iron rule, they joined together to fight the insidious advance of gentrification threatening to exile them from their longtime home. The fine print explains:
“On June 29th, senior citizens occupied their community center at 10 Stille Straße in Berlin’s Pankow neighborhood. This meeting place for seniors, like many other socio-cultural establishments in the district, is threatened with elimination by the red pen politics of the Berlin Senate. We demand of the responsible parties in regional and local politics a political solution for Stille Straße. We come forward for a life of dignity, even in old age, and for a city, in which people aren’t measured by the content of their wallets! We’ll all stay!”
That last line, echoed in the catchy house graphic on the bottom left of the flyer, communicates the fundamental tenet of the squatting movement: refuse to be displaced. In a way, this declaration of tenaciousness makes even more sense coming from this demographic, since they have typically lived in their communities the longest.
For those of us who live outside of the hotbed of radicalism that Berlin has been for a century, it is important to discern the relationship between this unlikely action and the sort of thing the Occupy movement started doing once it had passed the point where simply showing up at a public gathering sufficed as a political gesture.
In fighting the home evictions that have swept the United States (and other countries, to a less obvious extent) since 2008, the movement understandably focused on the plight of senior citizens. Trying to get by on fixed incomes and often the victim of predatory lenders that had convinced them to refinance their homes under unfavorable terms, elderly people worked very nicely in their role as rhetorical standard-bearers for the 99%.
The situation of these Berlin seniors was rather different, given the context. They had expected to collect the standard retirees’ pension dispensed by East Germany’s communist government. Forced to adapt to more uncertain conditions in the post-unification West, they eventually found themselves challenged by the same trends, broadly speaking, that inspired Occupy Wall Street: a widening gap between the well-off and everyone else and the intuition that the so-called 1% would stop at nothing in the ruthless pursuit of more private Lebensraum.
It is worth noting that, unlike the majority of squat-related protests, this one actually led to a political victory, with Berlin officials recently agreeing to let the community center continue at its current location. Also noteworthy is the fact that, as this article in The Guardian details, the building in which this community center is housed once belonged to the head of East Germany’s feared Stasi secret police.
Preface and translation from the German by Charlie Bertsch. Photographed in Berlin by Joel Schalit.We know there’s a real estate bubble, and we know it’s going to pop any day now. The real question is, what do we do about it? Former Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan has been warning us about this very thing for over 25 years now, so we thought we’d get his take on what’s behind the housing increase, the government’s role in all of it, and what we need to do to fix it.
Sam, currently the Vancouver-False Creek MLA, is a popular and outspoken politician that encourages engagement and discussion of ideas to help build better cities. In fact, he’s so committed to the exploration of new ideas and engaging the public, he has hosted public forums where over 190 experts have contributed to the discussion of policy. Naturally, we thought he would be the perfect person to discuss housing and the role of government in all of this.
What’s Behind The Rising Home Prices
“Prices have been rising ever since Vancouver down zoned the City in the 1970s. Prices are a function of supply and demand”, explains Sam. “Government policy that restricts supply of housing is behind most of the high prices.” During his tenure as mayor he introduced EcoDensity, one of the world’s most ambitious plans to create affordable, sustainable, and eco-friendly housing in Vancouver.Its primary focus was to create more towers, and laneway homes, adapting existing land use so that it accommodates the increasing demand for Vancouver real estate. The plan mostly stagnated after his party denied him the nomination for reelection (yes, in Vancouver they have municipal parties), and the new municipal council, while verbally committed to building on the policy changes, has mostly been disengaged with the public.
According to city data, he might have a point. Last year Vancouver, while at a multi-year high, approved only 56 residential buildings more than 3 stories. While that sounds like a lot, it’s only 1,829 units – not quite enough for the 30,000 people that move to the Vancouver region every year.
Vancouver Needs To Utilize Foreign Investment
When asked about foreign investments, Sam thinks it’s a problem, but one that can be fixed. “Foreign investment has local effects but is not the main problem.” He further explained that the city needs to create greater investment opportunities for foreign capital.
“In the 1990s city government saw large pools of capital looking for a place to land. We freed up large areas in the downtown for new housing. If capital does not have opportunities to invest in new housing it will settle on existing housing. We need new opportunities for investment capital to land on.”
One of those projects in the early 90’s was Concord Pacific Place, Canada’s largest planned community that just happens to also be in False Creek. The 1986 Expo lands were sold to Chinese-Canadian billionaire Li Ka-shing, who led a consortium of investors from around the world to build 10,000 homes at a cost of $4billion dollars. Since then, the largest densification approved by council was the Oakridge centre, a $1.5 billion dollar development slated to create 3,000 homes – which has since hit a snag with city council earlier this year.
If capital does not have opportunities to invest in new housing it will settle on existing housing.
Government Is Broken
“EcoDensity has moved the City in the right direction but not fast enough. We need
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of course, that this has anything to do with the squalid £1bn deal the Conservatives made with the DUP in May this year, in order to keep May’s government in power.
Asked in July why there weren’t granting transparency from 2014, the Northern Ireland office said to Channel 4 that James Brokenshire “does not believe that it is right or fair to impose retrospective regulations on people who donated in accordance with the rules set out in law at the time”.
But the reality is that the 2014 Act made clear that all donations from then on would one day be public. Talk to people in Northern Ireland, and they are clear: the assumption was always that one day, all details held by the Electoral Commission about donations from 2014 onward would one day be published. This is what the donors expected, it’s what the parties expected, and it’s what the public had demanded.
Brokenshire’s move also has involved ignoring all the people the government would normally consult on such an important decision.
There is one thing that the 2014 Act specifies. It says that the Secretary of State must “consult the Electoral Commission” before making donors details public.
The head of the Northern Irish Electoral Commission, Ann Watt, has made it unequivocally clear that she thinks information about donors from 2014 onwards should be published, saying: "While all reportable donations and loans received from 1 July 2017 will now be published by the commission, we would also like to see the necessary legislation put in place, as soon as possible, to allow us to publish details of donations and loans received since January 2014.”
Her predecessor Séamus Magee retired in 2014, and so is freer to say what he really thinks. At the time, he Tweeted: “The deal on party donations and loans must be part of the DUP/Conservative deal. No other explanation.”
“Every party in Northern Ireland understood that the publication of political donations over £7,500 was to be retrospective to Jan 2014.”
Similarly, the UK government claims it properly consulted all of Northern Ireland’s political parties on transparency, and that only the Alliance party specified that all information from 2014 onwards should be released.
This is a patently dishonest claim. For a start, the consultation took place in a context in which the parties all thought that the 2014 date was a given. You can read the Alliance Party response to the ‘consultation’ from the Northern Ireland office here. It comes from their party leader, Naomi Long, who happens to have been the MP who successfully passed the piece of legislation allowing transparency from 2014. As she said: “the successful amendment ensured that all donations dating back to the commencement date of the legislation (January 2014) can be published once the exemption is lifted.” She doesn’t argue for transparency from 2014. She points out that it’s what the legislation she wrote already provides for.
Second, Brokenshire's so-called 'consultation' with Northern Irish parties happened in January 2017, before the DUP’s controversial £435,000 donation was public, and before £1bn Tory-DUP deal to keep Theresa May in power. And in any case, all Northern Irish parties (apart from the DUP) have now clarified that they are happy with the 2014 date.
As our colleague James Cusick wrote in October:
“openDemocracy has learned that Sinn Fein, the SDLP, the Alliance Party, and the Greens have all told Brokenshire in writing or during talks that they want transparency on political donations backdated to 2014, thereby revealing the source of the DUP’s Brexit funding.”
“The Ulster Unionists have also told Brokenshire in private talks that they too do not oppose retrospective legislation and backed a consensus for the 2014 date.”
Finally, Northern Irish civil society has long been demanding transparency. After a string of political scandals drenched in allegations of corruption, charities, NGOs, journalists and local campaign groups are desperate to know who’s been paying for their politicians’ campaigns. And yet there was no consultation with any of them before Brokenshire made his announcement.
As Niall Bakewell at Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland, who have long demanded donor transparency, said to openDemocracy: “James Brokenshire’s failure to consult anyone from civil society reveals a contempt for democracy. As a strident voice in favour of donor transparency for half a decade, Friends of the Earth had a right to be heard on this important issue, and yet we were completely ignored. The Secretary of State has distinguished himself as aloof and timid. It seems to us that he was either entirely ignorant of the history of the issue, or deliberately excluded voices that would challenge him to make a courageous and just decision on this issue.
“That his decision comes so soon after the confidence and supply deal was announced raises fair suspicion that it is impossible to maintain a Chinese wall protecting the Northern Ireland office from having to give consideration to awkward parliamentary arithmetic when delivering peace and normalisation for our society”.
There is a final, crushing irony in all of this – even beyond the fact that Theresa May’s government is being propped up, as it negotiates Brexit, by a party funded by secret Brexit donors.
It is this. Just last week, the DUP’s leadership made headlines across for Europe for blocking the Brexit negotiations from progressing. Why? Because they did not want Northern Ireland to be treated any differently from the rest of the UK.
In the same breath, they want to keep abusing a uniquely Northern Irish legal loophole to ensure the secrecy of the biggest donation they have ever received – cash which sought to influence the biggest democratic decision the British people have made for a generation.
In a bid to prevent our elected representatives from stopping this stitch up, the government has proposed this change to the rules in a way which means MPs can’t simply make an amendment, as they can with most other laws. But the special committee of 17 MPs looking at this proposal, which meets tomorrow, can kick up a fuss and attempt to force the government to reconsider. If Brexit was ever about Taking Back Control, they must.
The 17 MPs are: Nigel Adams (Conservative); Tonia Antoniazzi (Labour); Margaret Beckett (Labour); Ben Bradshaw (Labour); Alex Burghart (Conservative); Deidre Brock (SNP); Simon Clarke (Conservative); Nic Dakin (Labour); Steve Double (Conservative); Simon Hoare (Conservative); Margaret Hodge (Labour); David Morris (Conservative); Jess Phillips (Labour); Chloe Smith (Conservative); Owen Smith (Labour); Steve Pound (Labour); Julian Sturdy (Conservative)
Update: This article was updated to reflect the correct composition of the committee of MPsEveryone knows how in-demand “tech” skills are. But what’s interesting is how dynamic that demand is, shifting every few years. These shifts are why GA exists—agile curriculum, short programs; these are all key in helping people remain relevant in an ever-changing workforce. Today, in partnership with Burning Glass Technologies, we released a report on these shifts, focusing on what’s growing and where, with an emphasis on how much growth there is in hybrid roles. Hybrid roles demand multiple skill sets-—business, marketing, and technical—rolled into one person. And these jobs pay well, $100,000 or more in some cases.
The new report, Blurring Lines: How Business and Technology Skills Are Merging to Create High Opportunity Hybrid Jobs, outlines the critical role hybrid jobs are having on today’s job economy, and what this means for higher education and job seekers.
Our report covers hybrid job counts across six disciplines over the last five years, their average salary, the technical skills and knowledge required of each discipline, and which cities these jobs are mostly found in.
A few key insights:
More than 250,000 positions were open in the last year for hybrid jobs. Demand for web developers, previously the powerhouse of growth in tech jobs, grew only 11% in the last 3 years. Somewhat predictably, that growth has been replaced by demand for mobile developers. Data and marketing analytics roles are growing fast —2-4x over the last 3 years.
Read the entire report at the link below.
Download the Report
Read the executive summary.New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo once gave a speech in which he brought up the immigration issue, and dramatically offered to be deported.
And last night, in light of President Trump's new executive orders on refugees, criminal aliens in sanctuary cities, and his now-famous big and beautiful wall, Cuomo decided it was a good moment to promote himself by tweeting that speech out:
As I’ve said before, I say again today, if there is a move to deport immigrants, I say then start with me. pic.twitter.com/elejUuKS9J — Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) January 25, 2017
As much as many of his fellow New Yorkers (including many of those who voted for him in 2014) would like to see Cuomo leave, he is not an immigrant any more than I am. He cannot be deported anywhere.
As he noted in his speech by omission, his father was also not an immigrant. Both were born in Queens. But there is a difference: Whereas Mario Cuomo's last name probably caused him trouble in finding his first job, Andrew Cuomo's last name is probably the only reason he's governor of New York today.
But of course, that's a minor point. The bigger point is that in January 2014, Cuomo told a local public radio show in New York City that people with certain views — including "right-to-life" and gun-rights conservatives — don't even belong in his state. Here's a version of it from YouTube that gives more than enough context to understand what he's talking about:
So let's get this straight. In 2014, Cuomo wanted people with certain views (and even in New York, I'm guessing that's at least 30 percent of the population) to take their right to political participation and self-deport. Now, he puts on these noble and politically self-serving airs, like he wants to be deported himself, in an effort to style himself as the anti-Trump.
He should make up his mind. Or alternatively — as most of the responses to his tweet suggest — maybe Trump should take him up on it.The Rosetta spacecraft hasn’t been in the news much lately, but wow, is it the gift that keeps on giving. Check out this magnificent view of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, looking past the Seth region on the big lobe to the towering Hathor cliffs on the small one:
Cometary cliffs may be hinting at eons-old forces at work. Photo by ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM (CC BY-SA IGO 3.0)
Oh, my.
67P is a double-lobed beast, a 4-kilometer-long cosmic rubber ducky. It’s not clear why it (and so many other comets and asteroids) have this bowling pin or dumbbell shape; maybe it’s from two objects colliding slowly and sticking together, or one bigger object slowly eroding away as ice inside the comet gets heated to a gas by sunlight and vents into space.
Those cliffs are a clue, but what they’re telling us isn’t clear. They reach 900 meters high and are striated with linear features, looking very much like the comet has been cleaved right there.
That view is strengthened, perhaps unfairly, when you look at the comet in context. This mosaic shows 67P taken at a different time, but viewed from almost the exact same angle, and the lower left quadrant shows the same part of the comet as seen above:
When you see the whole thing, it looks like it was a snack for Galactus. Photo by ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM (CC BY-SA IGO 3.0)
It really looks like it has a bite taken out of it! It’s not hard to imagine this started off as a more elongated, somewhat cylindrical object, and that over the eons a vent in the side kept getting bigger and bigger, eating away into the body of the comet.
The same as the top image, but enhanced to show the gas venting away. Photo by ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM (CC BY-SA IGO 3.0)
Interestingly, you can see ice doing just that from Seth; if you brighten the top image a bit and drop the contrast, the streams of gas flowing away can be clearly seen.
But all this could be coincidence; the comet is a bizarre, alien landscape, and interpretation is difficult. Our sense of what can happen there may be biased by our more terrestrial experience, and we have to be careful to remember: This is in space, has little gravity, is composed of loosely conglomerated gravel and ice, and is sculpted by escaping gas and the rare impact rather than wind and sea. It’s easy to follow the garden path of reason to a completely wrong conclusion here.
But it’s fun to think about, isn’t it?Brown/Black Male Heavy Absolute (middle and up) LEE VILLENEUVE
Brown Black Male Light Absolute (light and down) DARSON HEMMINGS
Purple Male Heavy Absolute (middle and up) MATTHEW PASQUALE
Purple Male Light Absolute (light and down) REUBEN SAGMAN
Blue Male Heavy Absolute (middle and up) NATHAN DOS SANTOS
Blue Male Light Absolute (light and down) ERIC CONG PHAN
Purple and up Female Heavy Absolute (middle and up) ALISON TREMBLAY
Purple and up Female Light Absolute (might and down) MELISSA BISCARDI
Blue Heavy Female absolute (middle and up) YACINTA NGUYEN-HUU
Blue Light Female absolute (light and down) AJ REITSMA
Move over IBJJF, there is a new king of the tournament scene, and it's name is the Ontario Open.As you probably know, since you read my blog, or at least, you pretend too read my blog, and like the post when I put a new link on facebook, I have always said that the IBJJF run the smoothest, most professional tournament I have attended. Not Anymore. The Ontario Open just stole that crown, with very little pomp and flair. They've been uping their game every year, and this year tipped them over. This comes after reports from Dallas and Vegas that the IBJJF has been sliding. I was not at either of those events, so cannot say for sure, but stories of running behind schedule, and confusion at weigh ins, and other bad things have been coming up on the communities I frequent. But, this is not about them, It's about the Ontario Open.Lets start at the very beginning, the registration process. In the past at OJA events, you would have to register for the OJA on site, or, if you were already a member for the year, you would just have to check in. Now, you register online before you register for the event! I actually saw someone complain about this on facebook, I need to know what kind of drugs they are on, or if they have ever had to deal with the line up at any tournament that doesn't do everything on line. The online process isn't perfect, and you still need to duplicate some information, so I give them 8/10 for that. Check-in at the venue was fast and easy. They had printed lists of names, and slapped a wrist band on. There was never a long line at the door and they were very friendly and lovely. It was a 30 second process verse 20 minutes to 45 minutes that I have experienced at other events(IBJJF New York anyone?).They posted a competitor list early (not quite IBJJF early, but who needs a list with 5 people on it), and it was updated regularly leading up to the deadline. They were prompt with updating peoples changes when the competitors made mistakes, and were quick to answer questions sent via email or facebook.The venue was the Brampton Soccer Centre. This is a favourite venue in the BJJ community, and it's easy to understand why. It's very simple to get to and it has ample, free parking. The gymnasium is gigantic, and easily supports the 10 rings the Ontario Open ran, and could likely support up to 12, maybe even 14. There is food available, and plenty of room for sponsors. The one down side is the lighting situation, the wall opposite the spectator area (which is on the 2nd floor, so they have a great view) is all windows. So, when you are taking pictures or video, they get screwed up and dark, because all the light from the windows makes the camera go "Hey it's bright, I'm going to be dark". The other, minor problem is, while having the spectator area above the gym, offers a great view, it is not overly large, and I think if the tournament grows anymore, It may become over crowded. I know our space started out comfortable, but as people went downstairs to compete, and came back up, it shrank drastically. I even had a strangers gi on top of my gi bag at one point. No big deal, we are all friends and whatnot in the community, but that is a pretty good indicator that space was limited and people were feeling cramped.So, we got to the tournament about 30 minutes before it was scheduled to begin, and low and behold, competitors were already weighing in, all the mats had staff at them, and the referees were dispersed to the mats. Half an Hour before the scheduled start. Are you serious? This was our first indication that we were indeed in for a treat. Speaking of referees, the head referee was none other than Andre Terencio, the head referee of the IBJJF. Arguably the best BJJ referee on the planet. The 18 member team, consisted of 90% Brown and Black belts. There were, I believe, 2 purple belt referees, both of which had extensive experience. They had 18 referees for 10 rings. It was great to see the referees able to have breaks, watch each other work, and have rest and food. This keeps them fresh, and alert and makes them better referees all day long. That being said, the refereeing wasn't perfect, there will always be mistakes, but they were minimal from what I saw As usual, Jon had points score against him when he went for a baseball bat choke (got his guard passed), and there were some points from 50/50 that were missed, but overall, excluding crazy situations, the refereeing was solid!The first matches started right on time, and that schedule was maintained throughout the day. Divisions were even started early! Of course, if not everyone was there yet, they waited until the scheduled time, but It was amazing to see the efficiency improvements. They had 2 large TV's set up with a feed showing what divisions were on what mat, and which divisions were currently being weighed in. This was really helpful with the kids on Sunday Morning, and was a cool extra as a spectator. It could use some improvement, as the font was small and difficult to read, and the corner screen should have faced the spectator area better. But, that's just being picky and looking for things to complain about.They had paramedics for the medical staff, which is always good. They know how to handle the serious injuries and head trauma that can sometimes happen. They do have a tendency to recommend going to the hospital pretty quickly, but I think, they have to do that to cover their asses. I think, ideally, a combination of paramedics, and athletic therapists, or a sports injury doctor would be perfect. The paramedics are great for assessing concussions, and major injuries, but for determining a torn ACL, or other weird sport specific injuries, they are a little bit out of their element. Also, having an athletic therapist would be super helpful when it comes to having injuries taped to keep competing. That being said, they were very friendly, very attentive to the mats all day, and well equipped to deal with everything that came up throughout the day.Saturday's absolute saw 10 trips to the IBJJF worlds given out. 10!!! 4 of which went to the ladies. Unfortunately, none went to me. Whatever, one day I will beat my nemesis. The prizes went to the following divisions:Congratulations to all of these winners. It takes an insane amount of skill, dedication, and hard work to be able to win these absolutes and my hats off to all of you!The format for Sunday's No Gi Event was a bit different than the normal OJA style. It was not split by belt, but by experience. Novice being less than 2 years, and expert being over 2 years. This was a cool idea and it lead to some very interesting match ups. Unfortunately, I think it scared a lot of competitors away, the nogi divisions were significantly smaller than the gi divisions, which is not that unusual, but when you think that the expert, should, in theory, encompass all the blue, purple, brown, and black belts, they should have been much larger. I think the fact that the prizes for the absolutes were much less significant also affected the numbers. That being said, there were some ridiculously good matches in the nogi on Sunday and I hope that they can tweak the format a bit and get more guys and gals out next year. I was really looking forward to the nogi, since, with the combined levels, I actually had a division of 4. Unfortunately, an injury kept me from being able to compete. :(Speaking of Sunday's experience... How did I forget, THE KIDS RAN ON TIME. You heard me right. The kids! Ran on Time! How is that even possible? I don't know, but they did it!! Like normal, they moved kids up that were to heavy for their division, and they combined and rearranged on the fly as they had to and STILL ran on time. Everyone was certain, that nogi would be starting late, but low and behold, they were weighing people in almost an HOUR before the scheduled start and some nogi divisions started before the scheduled start. One thing, with the kids, that wasn't quite ideal, was, one of our kids, only got 2 fights, in a division of 9. They did 3 pools of 3, and the winner of each pool went against each other. The OJA normally does round robins for the kids, so the pools were to be expected, but I would think a pool of 4 and a pool of 5 would be better. Divisions of 5 they leave as one pool, so It seems like the best case. Then some kids get 3 fights, and some 4, but that's better than most of them getting 2, except for the 3 winners, who get 5. It would work out to be more even that way, in the long run.We had a decent size team out to the event this time around. Not nearly enough to threaten for one of the team trophies, but considering the size of our club, I think 22 competitors is pretty good. I believe, all together, the team earned 5 golds, 7 silver, and 5 bronze. I try to keep track, but it's hard sometimes. Some teams had several pages of competitors. I hope, next year, that they implement the IBJJF rule where only 2 competitors from one team can register per division. After that, they have to register as a different team. I think that will make for some more interesting and diverse divisions and team trophy winners. I still don't think our small team would vi for the title, but when one team has like 15 affiliates then are they really actually teammates?Enough about that... Let's talk about my awesome team mate Matt. Matt used to be... a big boy, but, he's worked his way down to making super heavy! It's been insane watching him shrink over the last few months. He's put my journey to middleweight to shame! He trounced the Super heavyweight guys like they were children and he did it with a smile. It was a pleasure to watch, he fights and moves like a light or feather weight. Here is one of his fights from Saturday. Feel free to turn the sound down/off It's full of inane conversation and stupidity. Here is another one, from nogi on Sunday, again, turn off the sound, it's full of me heckling the referees and being a bad person haha. Anyway, Matt is crazy, and lots of fun to train and roll with.I suppose I should talk about how my matches went, I don't really want to though, because I wasn't to thrilled about my performance. In my division, I only had one fight, since it was just the two of us. Tiffany implemented her game plan pretty much perfectly, and I did very little to stop her. I'm not sure where I was for that fight, but hey, She did everything right and kicked my ass.The absolute went a little better. First match was against Alison, it was a good match, as much as a match against Alison can be. I have yet to beat her, and this weekend did not change that. It went down to points in the end, with Alison winning 29-0 or so. I did get a semi-decent armbar attempt in, but it was sloppy and easily defended. She had me in a triangle at one point, but we ended up out of bounds, and my head was almost popped out anyway.At this point, I had to explain to the guy with the drawsheet how they worked. I know a 3 person division is a little odd, but they probably should have explained them. I also had to tell them how long my rests were supposed to be. It's all good though, they believed me and everything carried on wonderfully.Next, I had to fight Tiffany again, because it was just the three of us, so as the loser of the top half of the bracket, I filled in the empty spot on the bottom half. This fight went a lot better than the first, I passed her guard, and set up an armbar, she escaped, we had some scrambles, and I passed and set it up again. I managed to get the tap after a couple minutes of fighting. It was a great match I think.This put me inline for a rematch with Alison for the final. I started out good, but then put my arm in a stupid place and bam! Kimurad!! She didn't crank it any harder than she really needed to. But, since I didn't have a grip on anything, it ended up wrenching pretty bad. But, if she hadn't have done that, chances are, I would have gotten a grip, and defended, and blah blah blah. I don't blame her one bit for my shoulder getting tweaked. It's still pretty sore, but I'm not taking any advil or anything for it anymore so that is progress. It's just kind of weak, and hurts if I do something stupid like try to change the water bottle cooler at work using mostly my left arm. I'm just going to take it easy this week, train light next week, and do what I can to protect it till worlds.Speaking of Worlds!!! Steve leaves on Saturday, Stephen and Alasdair leave on Sunday and Jon and I leave on Friday!! Joel is actually in California right now on a kind of vacation. He's scoping out the sites and hopefully arranging for some team t-shirts for us. I am so freaking excited! Training at Art of Jiu Jitsu for a couple days and then competing at worlds. It's going to be great. Last time we trained there I felt like my game improved like crazy from all the small details and the intense pace that they push there. I'm really looking forward to rolling with my extended team mates again, and with all the new ones that have joined since last summer! We are fighting under the Atos banner at worlds (well, some of us, that registered before 2 other in the same division did). This will be a very different experience, because we will be part of such a large team who could vi for the team title. This is so weird compared to having a little team of 3 or 4 or, when a big crew comes out 20, who come out to play and support each other.We aren't going to have much time for site seeing this time around, not like we did last time either. I'd love to beable to hit up Atos San Diego while we are there. Maybe it will end up part of the training schedule for the camp. I'd also like to get some shopping in, of course, hahah.Also coming up fairly soon is the Five Grappling Event. I met the organizer/owner of Five at the Ontario Open this past weekend. He seemed like a very cool cat, and they have a lot of great ideas to grow the sport of Jiu Jitsu and build a league and whatnot. I think the event in July is going to be great and would strongly encourage anyone looking for something a little different to check it out. Grappling Industries is also coming back to Toronto in July. The 20th to be exact. It's going to be a killer event, with lots of trips and prizes. I will be refereeing, as well as competing in the gi AND nogi!I made this cheesecake last night, it's keto friendly, but not diet friendly, if you know what I mean. It's super addicting and I can't stop eating it. I need Jon to come home and stop me from putting another slice in my fat face before I end up struggling to make Medium Heavy, not just Middle hahah. Here is my pin of the recipe on Pinterest. I love pinterest. I have found so many amazing recipes on there. I have pinned a billion of them, and tried about 20 or so. I wish I had way more time to cook and bake, I would love to try every single recipe I've pinned. Though, if I did, I'd probably be right back in Heavy in no time. and ain't no one got time for that.I think that is enough rambling for me for one day. My shoulder is getting kind of sore from typing anyway.Wake Up America - Share Pat's Columns!
“I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you.”
So said Nadine Collier, who lost her mother in the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, offering forgiveness to Dylann Roof, who confessed to the atrocity that took the lives of nine churchgoers at that Wednesday night prayer service and Bible study.
If there is a better recent example of what it means to be a Christian, I am unaware of it. Collier and the families of those slain showed a faithfulness to Christ’s gospel of love and forgiveness that many are taught but few are strong enough to follow, especially at times like this.
Their Christian witness testifies to a forgotten truth: If slavery was the worst thing that happened to black folks brought from Africa to America, Christianity was the best.
Charleston, too, gave us an example of how a city should behave when faced with horror.
Contrast the conduct of those good Southern people who stood outside that church in solidarity with the aggrieved, with the Ferguson mobs that looted and burned and the New York mobs that chanted for the killing of cops when the Eric Garner grand jury declined to indict.
Yet, predictably, the cultural Marxists, following Rahm Emanuel’s dictum that you never let a crisis go to waste, descended like locusts.
As Roof had filmed himself flaunting a Confederate battle flag, the cry went out to tear that flag down from the war memorial in Columbia, South Carolina, and remove its vile presence everywhere in America.
Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post appeared front and center on its op-ed page with this call to healing: “The Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime, not a republic. The Confederacy was treason in defense of a still deeper crime against humanity: slavery.”
But if Jenkins’ hate-filled screed is right, if the Confederacy was Nazi Germany on American soil, then not only the battle flag must go.
The Confederate War Memorial on the capitol grounds honors the scores of thousands of South Carolinians who died in the lost cause. And if that was a cause of traitors and totalitarians and about nothing but slavery, ought not that memorial be dynamited?
Even as ISIS is desecrating tombs in Palmyra, Syria, the cultural purge of the South has begun.
Rep. Steve Cohen wants the name of legendary cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest removed from Forrest Park in Memphis and his bust gone from the capitol; Sen. Mitch McConnell wants the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis removed from the Kentucky capitol.
Governors are rushing to remove replicas of the battle flag from license plates, with Virginia’s Terry McAuliffe the most vocal. Will McAuliffe also demand that the statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson be removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond?
“Take Down a Symbol of Hatred,” rails The New York Times.
But the battle flag is not so much a symbol of hatred as it is an object of hatred, a target of hatred. It evokes a hatred of the visceral sort that we see manifest in Jenkins’ equating of the South of Washington, Jefferson, John Calhoun, Andrew Jackson and Lee with Hitler’s Third Reich.
What the flag symbolizes for the millions who revere, cherish or love it, however, is the heroism of those who fought and died under it. That flag flew over battlefields, not over slave quarters.
Hence, who are the real haters here?
Can the Times really believe that all those coffee cups and baseball caps and T-shirts and sweaters and flag decals on car and truck bumpers are declarations that the owners hate black people? Does the Times believe Southern folks fly the battle flag in their yards because they want slavery back?
The Times’ editorialists cannot be such fools.
Vilification of that battle flag and the Confederacy is part of the cultural revolution in America that flowered half a century ago. Among its goals was the demoralization of the American people by demonizing their past and poisoning their belief in their own history.
The world is turned upside down. The new dogma of the cultural Marxists: Columbus was a genocidal racist. Three of our Founding Fathers — Washington, Jefferson, Madison — were slaveowners. Andrew Jackson was an ethnic cleanser of Indians. The great Confederate generals —- Lee, Jackson, Forrest — fought to preserve an evil institution. You have nothing to be proud of and much to be ashamed of if your ancestors fought for the South. And, oh yes, your battle flag is the moral equivalent of a Nazi swastika.
And how is the Republican Party standing up to this cultural lynch mob? Retreating and running as fast as possible.
If we are to preserve our republic, future generations are going to need what that battle flag truly stands for: pride in our history and defiance in the face of the arrogance of power.In preparation for this weekend's General Women's Meeting, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shared a video featuring words from LDS leaders and women of the church.
The video, which the Mormon Channel uploaded March 20, discusses the upcoming meeting, a historic event that invites all women ages 8 and up to attend.
"It's groundbreaking that we get to do this and do it together," one woman featured in the video said.
Leaders in the church also shared their thoughts on the upcoming conference in the video. Sister Linda K. Burton, Relief Society general president; Sister Bonnie L. Oscarson, Young Women general president; and Sister Rosemary M. Wixom, Primary general president, all spoke about the meeting.
"There's power in gathering. Just in the fact that women are gathering together," Sister Burton said.
Women outside of the video have also shared their anticipation through social media.
"I am very excited for this meeting this coming Saturday!" Melanie Shockley said in the YouTube video comments. "What a great thing to participate in a meeting where so many women are. Come and join us!"
And the meeting's Facebook event now has 11,700 planning to attend the meeting either live, online or via broadcast.
"I am excited about hearing the word of God especially for us from our leaders," Libby Watts Baker said on Facebook. "We need this in our day. Join us and be a part of this large gathering."
LDS.org also provided tips for inviting others to the meeting. The ideas highlight social media and include sending invitations to the meeting via Facebook or Google+, using the hashtag #WomensMeeting and even using provided images with Women's Meeting information as Facebook cover photos.
The meeting will be held Saturday, March 29, at 6 p.m. MDT. Women can participate through various methods, including BYUtv, the Mormon Channel website and Facebook. They can also find extensive coverage on DeseretNews.com's LDS General Conference page and follow live updates on the @ldsconf Twitter account.AutoGuide.com
The Pininfarina Sergio concept that first went on display during the 2013 Geneva Motor Show will be produced and sold in very limited quantity.
Ferrari North American communications director Krista Florin confirmed to AutoGuide.com that following strong interest in the concept car, Ferrari will build six production versions. However, Ferrari hasn’t confirmed that the images to the right are of the final version of the car.
Based on the Ferrari 458 Spider, the car is meant as a tribute to automotive designer Sergio Pininfarina. First shown nearly a year and a half ago, rumors of its potential production began surfacing soon after the debut in Switzerland. At the time, it didn’t have a roof, windshield or really anything between its occupants and anything hanging in the air. Side glass was also absent.
In production form, the car will add those items according to a report by The Supercar Kids where the original report came from. If the rendering shown here proves to be legitimate, the production version will be much more conservative than it was in concept form.
GALLERY: Pininfarina Sergio Concept
Discuss this story at our luxury lifestyle forumLegendary Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, Eisner Award-winning colorist Dave Stewart and Dark Horse Comics are releasing a limited edition Hellboy print at Rose City Comic Con, with all proceeds going to the Houston Food Bank in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The 11” x 17” print features an illustration of Hellboy by Mignola colored by Stewart. 500 numbered prints, retailing for $20.00, will available at Rose City Comic Con, September 8-10 in Portland, OR.
About Mike Mignola:
Mike Mignola’s fascination with ghosts and monsters began at an early age; reading Dracula at age twelve introduced him to Victorian literature and folklore, from which he has never recovered. Starting in 1982
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Cubs about Javier Baez.Cleveland is reportedly looking for power hitting, right-handed bats, view Baez as an option. — Sean Sears (@sean_sears6) December 10, 2017
For what it’s worth, the talks between the Indians and Cubs never got serious about Baez, but what’s important to take away from this is that both clubs are engaged. The Cubs have reportedly been talking to everyone, according to Jon Heyman of FanRag Sports, holding talks with most of the free agent starters on the market along with clubs on the trade market.
How Does Salazar Fit On The Cubs
Salazar has had trouble staying healthy the last few seasons, but the 27-year-old is a strikeout machine when healthy with a career 10.51 K/9. The hard-throwing righty has stuff that consistently hits in the upper 90’s and has even touched triple-digits a few times.
However, what troubles me about this move is that the Indians are likely trying to make a deal involving Kyle Schwarber, and if that’s the case I’m not sure I’m in love with a deal like this. Salazar’s potential is front-end rotation stuff, but with the injury history plus his somewhat down 2017 campaign, a straight swap of Schwarber for Salazar doesn’t intrigue me.
If the Cubs were able to make a deal like this work with Ian Happ as the key piece, I’d be all for it. But the moment we bring Schwarber into the conversation is when I start to hate this deal. But, adding a talented, controllable arm like Salazar to the Cubs rotation is enticing.
With three more years of control via arbitration, a healthy Salazar instantly becomes an excellent top of the rotation arm, and a guy that helps the Cubs stay constant contenders in the next three years. That being said, the Cubs have been rumored to make a deal with the Indians since before either club turned their franchises around.
At this point, I wouldn’t expect anything quiet yet, as the Cubs seem to be content with just weighing options for starters. As long as Alex Cobb remains on option, it feels like the Cubs will avoid moving parts for a starter, but if Cobb does end up signing with the Yankees or Rangers, expect the Cubs to start making some calls. With the Indians being one of the first calls made.
UPDATE – 12:32 pm
A source informed Sports Mockery earlier today that the talks between the Cubs and Indians are involving Danny Salazar and Ian Happ, with Jason Kipnis coming into the conversation as a salary dump. The 23-year-old switch-hitting Happ would give the Indians a bat with some pop that can play all three outfield spots and fill in at 2nd base if Kipnis is sent with Salazar to Chicago.Babies must crawl before they walk, parents and pediatricians agree. Crawling has also been held up as a prerequisite to the normal progression of other aspects of neuromuscular and neurological development, such as hand-eye coordination and social maturation. But new research may knock the legs out from under this conventional wisdom.
According to anthropologist David Tracer of the University of Colorado at Boulder, babies of the Au hunter-gatherers of Papua New Guinea do not go through a crawling stage. Instead their parents and other caregivers carry them until they can walk. Yet Au children do not appear to suffer any ill effects from skipping this phase. In a presentation given to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago this past April, Tracer argued that, in fact, not crawling may be entirely normal and possibly even adaptive.
In his observations of 113 Au mother-child pairs, Tracer found that babies up to 12 months old were carried upright in a sling 86 percent of the time. On the rare occasions when the mothers put their infants on the ground, they propped them up in a sitting position, rather than placing them down on their stomachs. As a result of spending all of that time upright, Au kids never learn to crawl. (They do, however, go through a scoot phase in which they sit upright and propel themselves along on their bottoms. Tracer says the Au believe that this scooting, rather than crawling, is the universal human prewalking phase.)
The Au are not alone in discouraging their children from crawling. Tracer notes that babies in a number of other traditional societies—including ones in Paraguay, Mali and Indonesia—are raised this way. Furthermore, he observes, neither do our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, put their youngsters on the ground very often. Thus, it may well be that our early hominid ancestors toted their babies around, too, rather than letting them crawl.
Citing a study of Bangladeshi children showing that crawling significantly increases the risk of contracting diarrhea, Tracer proposes that carrying infants limits their exposure to ground pathogens. It also protects them from predators. He therefore contends that the crawling stage is a recent invention—one that emerged only within the past century or two, after humans began living in elevated houses with flooring, which would have been much more hygienic than dirt.
Wenda Trevathan, an anthropologist at New Mexico State University, agrees that babies were probably rarely placed on the ground in the past, adding glowing embers as another potential hazard. Tracer’s work “highlights how narrowly we view normal infant development,” she remarks, “and calls into question the tendency to judge all human infants on the basis of Western infants.”
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Hitching a Ride."In a series of recent interviews with John Amodea of PaintballX3, a few high powered people in paintball mentioned “50 cal”, or 50 caliber paintballs – opposed to the traditional.68caliber rounds currently used. Normally, we would find the comments nothing more than a fly on the rotting corpse of 50 caliber paintball, but this one caught our eye because of who said it: Dennis Tippmann, and Richmond Italia.
If you’re new to the game or don’t recognize those games, you probably know the companies these two men operate: Tippmann, and G.I Sportz.
Do we have your attention now?
The quotes read as:
“We see three major trends that will occur in the industry in 2014: An extended interest in magfed, the resurgence of 50 caliber, and the expanded globalization of the sport.” -Dennis Tippmann
“I think the single biggest shift we will see in 2014 is a continued growth of 50 caliber.” -Richmond Italia
A quick history lesson may be in order for some of our newer readers…
A few years ago, during the Great Recession, a few paint manufactures came up with the idea of replacing 68 caliber paintballs with 50 caliber. The main advantages of 50 cal over 68 – they postured – included a reduced use of resources, making the paintballs cheaper to manufacture, package, and ship; and that a 50 caliber paintball had less impact force, making the game safer, less hurtful, and thus, more appealing to a younger demographic. The downfalls, as many noted, included a less accurate paintball, a smaller splatter mark, not to mention – the sudden move would effectively render every hopper and marker manufactured in the last 20 years useless. Needless to say, the movement never gained much traction.
Like a phoenix raising from the ashes, suddenly, the motivation behind the recent acquisition of Tippmann by G.I Sportz becomes crystal clear as Tippmann has one of, if not the, single largest footprints in the world, especially at the rental and beginning customer level. G.I now has the capability of putting 50 caliber paintballs at any field in the world, and the ability to phase out the current generation of rental marker fleets, replacing them with 50 caliber ready markers. Also, on another strategic front this gives G.I the resources to directly compete with the JT Splatmaster 50 caliber paintball kits, which can be found in many big-box stores around the nation.
Tippmann Jr even alluded directly to this in the interview stating:
The 50 caliber question has been out there for a long time but with the GI acquisition of Tippmann, we see synergies that can support the growth of this category that will help fields expand their player base.”
It’s really quite important to realize though – there is no New-World-Order conspiracy happening to force you to replace your beloved makers. 68 caliber paintballs have been around for quite some time, and it would take a monumental effort to switch the standard paintball from 68 to 50 caliber. However, it is likely that more and more, players and field owners will be given an increased opportunity to incorporate 50 caliber into their market line.
You can read the entire article on PBX3’s website.
Photo: PaintballPhotography.com
What are your thoughts on 50 cal?NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Blockchain and tech enthusiasts gathered in New York City on Monday, November 27th as Onchain revealed their groundbreaking public platform Ontology. The event attracted world-class blockchain industry experts and investors as Ontology is the first project that will allow all business types, including those with little or no technical background, to easily use the blockchain technology in their systems.
"We are honored to have a strong introduction to Ontology Network in New York City," said Hongfei Da, CEO of Onchain & Founder of NEO. "Not only did we bring the best industry minds together, but the Ontology launch brought our project to the world stage. Ontology and NEO will build a broad ecosystem using blockchain and other new technologies to serve the real economy. "
The overall goal of the Ontology Network is to form an original and open innovation cooperation mechanism, combining the cutting-edge distributed ledger and blockchain technologies and technological advancements in other businesses so as to provide a comprehensive, robust and flexible Enterprise-level distributed ledger platform for institutions and corporations.
"Ontology Network was received well at its launch in New York City," said Jun Li, Chief Architect of NEO. "We have built rock solid infrastructure for trust cooperation in the different scenarios that make up the Ontology trust ecosystem, and we look forward to seeing the global impact starting in the US."
The Ontology Network Launch had a robust agenda including other presentations such as Jun Li, Chief Architect of Onchain - A New Generation of Distributed Trust Networks, Alphacat, The Key, Q Link, Deep Brain and more.
About Onchain
Onchain is a high-profile Chinese blockchain startup that has received international media attention for its leadership in the blockchain industry. Now with their new product launch, Ontology Network uses distributed identity verification, data exchange, communities, and other industry-specific features along with a robust smart contract protocol to build an unparalleled trust ecosystem. Ontology will continue to provide support for additional protocols and modules, welcoming further distributed business scenarios.Submitted by RLS Staff on Sep 9 2015 - 2:43pm.
A report of shots fired quickly turned into a carjacking at the Target on Route 22.
According to initial reports, officers were dispatched to the Clinton Manor Motor Lodge on Route 22 West for dispute between a man and a woman.
Upon arrival police discovered that a man - later identified as Quadree Frazier, 35, with addresses in Newark and East Orange - attempted to rob two women at that location. Before fleeing, the Frazier shot one of the women in the face/neck area and struck an employee in the head with the gun.
Frazier then ran across Route 22 and entered the Target parking lot where he carjacked a woman at gunpoint and took her 2010 Lincoln.
Before an officer on patrol attempted to stop the vehicle, the Frazier crashed into a pickup truck which caused another vehicle to lose control and crash into a parked Jeep - occupied by Union County Prosecutor Grace Park - who was unharmed.
The ordeal came to an end when the suspect crashed into the Halloween City wall engulfing in flames while partially inside the facility. No one inside the store was injured.
The suspect got out of the car and tried to escape but was apprehended by police.
Frazier was transported to University Hospital for injuries including a broken vertebrae in his neck and back, damaged ribs, and a collapsed lung.
According to officials, pending charges are expected to include, carjacking, weapons offenses and attempted murder.
Police recovered the weapon under one of the crashed vehicles.Netflix teamed up with The New York Times to produce this interactive map of the most popular movies in 12 major U.S. cities.
The map ranks the most rented movie and TV rentals for each zip code, so you can see whether the folks in your neighborhood have the same tastes as you do.
You can also see a color-coded overlay of every city for each of Netflix's top 100 most-rented films in 2009. Do you want to know which New York borough appreciated Slumdog Millionaire the most? Looks like it's bigger in Brooklyn than in lower Manhattan. The sharp divisions for some items — like the austere and thoughtful TV series Mad Men — are very telling, but Brad Pitt's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is red hot just about everywhere.
You can make some interesting anecdotal deductions using the map. For example, noted film critic Roger Ebert tweeted that you could make educated guesses about a community's opinion on homosexuality based on where Milk ranks. Hardly scientific, but it's interesting to think about. You can probably find a correlation between number of teen girls in a neighborhood and how popular Twilight is, though you'll unfortunately need a different map tell you who's Team Edward and who's Team Jacob.Christmas Island staff prepare for arrival of asylum seekers, according to Labor MP Alannah MacTiernan
Updated
Staff on Christmas Island have been told to prepare for the possible arrival of asylum seekers, according to Labor MP Alannah MacTiernan.
An asylum seeker vessel made contact with marine rescue authorities on Thursday night claiming to be leaking oil 300 kilometres west of Christmas Island.
The ABC understands that vessel is from southern India and has more than 150 people on board, including 37 children.
Ms MacTiernan said people onboard two asylum seeker boats were picked up by border protection authorities on Saturday evening.
She said staff on Christmas Island were "on standby waiting for instructions", but do not know whether the asylum seekers will arrive on Christmas Island or "be taken elsewhere".
"They're saying that two boats have been intercepted and the ship on which they're being loaded is in Christmas Island waters," she told the ABC.
"And everyone is on standby waiting for instructions as to whether or not the boat is going to be unloaded here or whether or not it's going to be taken elsewhere.
"They're hearing the people are from south India but they're not clear whether or not they're originally Sri Lankan."
However, Christmas Island Shire Councillor Philip Woo says he has not seen any indication of boats arriving at the island.
"I have been to the wharf and back and there's no boats approaching Christmas Island, there's only a Navy boat out there," he told ABC News Online.
Mr Woo says there are Australian Federal Police officers patrolling the island and the detention centre.
"There are, I think, close to about 60 of them [AFP officers]. They are looking after the detainees on the island. I don't know the actual amount whether they are increasing or not," he said.
Mr Woo says staff are standing by but there are no demonstrations happening inside the camp.
Earlier on Saturday a man named Duke told the ABC he was onboard an asylum seeker boat in trouble about 250 kilometres north of Christmas Island.
However, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison would not confirm whether the Government was aware of the boat.
"It is our standard practice, as you know under Operation Sovereign Borders, to report on any significant event regarding maritime operations at sea, particularly where there is safety-of-life-at-sea issues associated," he said.
"I'm advised that I have no such reports to provide... if there was a significant event happening then I'd be reporting on it."
Opposition immigration spokesman Richard Marles says the Government's lack of public information is a farce and the public have a right to know what is going on.
Boat has 37 children onboard, according to asylum seeker
Duke said the group on the boat are mostly Tamils from Sri Lanka, who left from India two weeks ago.
He said the group is determined to make it to Australia to seek asylum.
"[There are] 32 [women] and we have 37 children, 253 kilometres... from Christmas Island," he told Saturday AM.
"We are refugees. We come from Sri Lanka – we stayed in India and we are unable to live there. That's why we are coming to Australia."
The man said the vessel was being buffeted by wild weather and needed assistance.
"It's heavily raining also. We didn't get help anywhere. The wind is blowing in high speed, and [there are] huge waves," he said.
"The children and infants are also in the boat... We can see some boats lights, maybe fishing boats."
Topics: refugees, immigration, community-and-society, christmas-island, australia
First postedThe molluscs, which have bred rapidly in the damp conditions, are partial to the glue on envelopes and stamps.
Hundreds of workers at Royal Mail sorting offices as well as homeowners are reporting deliveries arriving half-eaten.
A spokesman for the Royal Mail said staff regularly clean postboxes to keep the snails out.
He said: ''We do all we can to protect the mail and insure it is delivered to its intended recipient in a good state.
''Unfortunately there is the odd occasion when snails still manage to make a meal out of envelopes and we apologise for that
''Occasionally wall-mounted postboxes do provide good homes for snails. When we identify the problem, we install brushes in the aperture which deter them.
''They are particularly keen on stamps and air mail letters. Something in the dye attracts their taste buds.''
One resident in Torbay, Devon, made an official complaint when her prize crossword entry was attacked by the molluscs.
The letter was eaten as it lay in a postbox overnight and a worker was forced to send it on a plastic bag with a note.
It read: ''I am very sorry that the letter enclosed has been damaged and subsequently delayed. This item was found during a scheduled collection from a posting box and has been eaten by snails.
''Unfortunately, despite regular cleaning and placing pellets in the boxes, we find that snails and slugs still occasionally manage to creep into the apertures.
''They fall down into the box and start eating the glue or adhesive on the stamps and envelopes.
''I am very sorry for any problems caused by this unusual tampering - and while I am pleased to be able to return your letter, albeit in a damaged condition, I regret the understandable annoyance caused.''Article by Vincent Friedewald; Photos by Caleb Kerr
The next stop on our Cozy Up, Texas photo tour series is the Perry Mansion in Terlingua Ghost Town, in far West Texas. There are few places anywhere in the U.S. like Terlingua, and there are fewer places still like the Perry Mansion. How often can you say you’ve spent the night among the ruins of a ghost town? Here’s your chance.
A special note: Absent from our tour are photos of the Perry Mansion’s interior, comprised of two small guest rooms and a shared bathroom. The interior was undergoing renovations at the time of our visit, so we’ve decided to focus our photo efforts on the exterior. This happens to be the most interesting part of the Mansion anyway, and our omission leaves you with a little extra something to discover on your own when you visit.
Name: The Perry Mansion
Location: Terlingua, Texas
Overview: A ghost town mansion in ruins, with the exception of two renovated guest rooms, available for overnight stays. Owned by amiable local Bill Ivey and his wife Lisa, the Perry Mansion sits on a hilltop in the Terlingua Ghost Town, which is situated just north of the Rio Grande between Big Bend National Park and Big Bend State Park. To experience the Perry Mansion is to experience a microcosm of Terlingua itself: abandoned with a mysterious past, yet still very much alive—and just as mysterious in the present.
Appreciate: The opportunity for a one-of-a-kind adventure. If you’re inspired by travel where getting there is itself a challenge; where the locals are like characters from a movie; where the landscape looks like a lunar surface; where ghost town artifacts are strewn about the town as if they were dropped just yesterday; and where you’re at risk from isolation, heat, rattlesnakes, and any number of other wild west perils, you’ll love your visit to Terlingua. There are several lodging places, including other rooms owned by Bill Ivey under the moniker of Big Bend Holiday Hotel. But the Perry Mansion is certainly the most adventurous place to stay.
Know: The history here. The Perry Mansion was the private residence of Howard Perry, a Chicagoan and owner of the Chisos Mining Company. Between 1903 and 1943, the Chisos Mining Company was a flourishing mining operation that extracted the local cinnabar (the basis for mercury, also known as quicksilver) from the reddish surrounding landscape. Perry rarely stayed in the Mansion before the mining operations ceased altogether and Terlingua was mostly abandoned. The mansion fell into ruin, and remains in that condition today. Only the two guest rooms at the back corner of the property have been restored.
Notably Cozy: The Veranda. You won’t spend much time in your rooms, although they’re certainly very comfortable: the upstairs room features two queen beds, the downstairs one king. Both rooms have a private sink, but share the downstairs bathroom. There’s no TV or WiFi, so beyond your nap you’ll most likely move out to the Veranda. Enjoy a Terlingua Wild Golden Ale as the desert sun sets, and settle in to watch the brilliant show of stars emerge overhead.
Nearby: Just up the road from Terlingua Ghost Town is La Kiva, a quirky bar once named the most bizarre bar to visit before you die by GQ Magazine, and one of the top 50 bars in the U.S. by Mens Journal. In August 2014, La Kiva was purchased by a British couple, John and Josie Holroyd, following an uncertain future that accompanied the tragic death of its former owner. As of this writing, La Kiva is poised for reopening, and should be in full swing by the time you arrive. In town, stock up on beer and other provisions at Terlingua Trading Company, also owned by Bill and Lisa Ivey. Next door, have dinner at the Starlight Theatre, and in the morning, take a reverent sunrise walk through the cemetery.
Special Comments: Some of the locals in Terlingua are very private people, and others still can be a little unwelcoming of tourists. Proprietor Bill Ivey and his wife Lisa are friendly people; deal with them directly, and you shouldn’t have any problems with your booking. Otherwise, always expect the unexpected in Terlingua.
Rates: $245 per night
Website: www.bigbendholidayhotel.com
The Perry Mansion sits on a private drive secluded behind the rest of the Ghost Town.
The westward facing side illuminated as the sun sets, and in the background to the east, the Chisos Mountains. On the right side of the photo, you can see part of the Ghost Town.
No, seriously. There are venomous snakes—be careful.
"¿What's goin' on up here?"
While the main portion of the mansion is still in ruins, the long covered Veranda is available for your use. Enjoy the view, or put together a game of Texas Hold 'Em.
Sun-scorched earth and sun-scorched buildings are plentiful here.
To the left, the renovated rooms in which you can stay. To the right, the mansion ruins. In the center, the veranda.
East-facing porches are made for watching sunrises and drinking coffee. This one will not disappoint.
The entrance to the rooms in a sheltered walkway between the two parts of the mansion.
A good old fashioned Texas welcome.
Texas is known for beautiful sunsets, but you haven't seen the best of them until you visit West Texas.
Spending time at the Mansion is wonderful, but don't forget to explore the rest of Terlingua Ghost Town. A very short walk will take you to the Starlight Theatre.
Before dinner, leave plenty of time to enjoy a West Texas beer—like Terlingua Gold from Big Bend Brewing Co.—on the front porch of the Starlight Theatre with the locals.
A burger with a fried egg and avocado. Not pulled from the standard menu, but the waitstaff were happy to oblige the request.
Meet The Honorable Clay Henry, the famous beer-drinking dead goat and Honorary Mayor of Lajitas, TX. He used to be a living beer-drinking goat, but that's a story for another day.
Near the Perry Mansion is a chapel where birds make themselves at home, coming in and out through the open door and windows.
The beautiful graveyard is best explored at sunrise or sunset. The calmness (and coolness) with the sun low on the horizon only adds to the somber feel of the ancient wooden crosses and piles of stones, all slowly blending back into the earth from the relentless West Texas sun.
- N4SJAs noted, FOX recently renewed American Grit, which is hosted and executive produced by John Cena, for a second season.
There was speculation that John Cena would be taking a hiatus from WWE soon to start filming the second season given the finish of his match to AJ Styles at WWE SummerSlam last week. Cena lost his match to AJ Styles clean, and left one of his "Never Give Up" bands on the mat before leaving the ring. He has yet to appear on WWE television since the loss, although he wrestled dark matches at RAW and SmackDown last week.
Despite that finish, we have learned that Cena will not be taking a hiatus from WWE until mid-October, which is when the first season began filming last year. Cena is expected to be out of action for most - if not all - of the remainder of the year to film the show.Editors note: After this fact-check published, we looked deeper into the stat Fiorina cited. You can read that work here.
It is a powerful statistic that speaks to a fundamental injustice in this world. It emerged nearly two decades ago and has been used as a call to action ever since.
Over the weekend, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina repeated it on ABC’s This Week.
"Seventy percent of the people living in abject poverty are women," Fiorina said.
But so far as anyone can tell, that statement has no basis in fact.
We reached out to Fiorina’s office and asked for the supporting data. We did not hear back.
We went to the World Bank data pages and contacted the bank’s research staff. We exchanged emails with the United Nations Development Programme, and UN Women, an entity focused on gender equality. None of them could point to statistics that would confirm this claim.
"I checked with our research colleagues, and we can indeed not verify this figure either," said Nanette Braun, chief of communications and advocacy at UN Women headquarters.
It’s a telling admission, given that UN Women references the statistic on its own Web page.
Duncan Green, who spent eight years as director of research for Oxfam-Great Britain, the international poverty relief organization, flagged a problem with the statistic three years ago in a blog post on Oxfam’s website. Green is now Oxfam’s special strategic adviser.
"Every expert (feminist economists, poverty researchers etc.) I’ve consulted on this agrees the number is dodgy," Green wrote. "Yet people just keep on using it, presumably because its message is one they want to promote."
The original statistic dates to at least 1995, when it was mentioned in the United Nations Human Development Report. The report warned about rising disparities.
"The most persistent of these has been gender disparity, despite a relentless struggle to equalize opportunities between women and men. The unfinished agenda for change is still considerable. Women still constitute 70 percent of the world's poor and two thirds of the world's illiterates."
The 70 percent figure shows up a couple of times in the 205-page report but not in any of the report’s statistical tables. In fact, staff at the United Nations Development Programme said they no longer use it.
Experts told us they’re not sure what the real figure is, but that it’s likely lower than 70 percent.
"Its not easy to say how many women are poor because data on poverty are typically constructed on a household basis," said Diane Elson, professor of sociology at the University of Essex.
In other words, surveys don’t count how many women and men live in each household. Statisticians, some within the United Nations itself, began debunking the 70 percent figure as early as 1998 -- just three years after it gained prominence.
Sylvia Chant, professor of development geography at the London School of Economics, pointed us to 2002 data from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. In Latin American countries, by a slight margin, women were more likely to live in poverty in rural areas. But the reverse was sometimes true in cities.
"In 10 out of 17 countries, the proportion of men in poverty is actually on a par with or slightly higher than women," Chant wrote in 2008. "Women are nowhere near the level of 70 percent of people in income poverty as popularly expounded."
A 2001 analysis of 10 developing countries largely found no statistically significant differences. Where there was a gap, in every country but one, it was very narrow, and sometimes, as in the Latin America survey, men outnumbered women in poverty.
Chant said Fiorina’s claim is no more right today than when it first emerged.
Green, the Oxfam adviser, agreed.
"It was wrong then, and remains wrong," Green said.
One note: While we don’t have a worldwide figure, we can use Census Bureau data to come up one for the United States. According to the most recent data, females account for 55 percent of Americans living in poverty.
Our ruling
Fiorina said that women account for 70 percent of the people in the world who live in poverty. She provided no support for the claim, nor does any seem to exist. We contacted the international bodies that rely on such statistics, and they told us they do not have the data to back up the claim. Independent experts echoed that point.
At least in Latin America and the United States, the data suggest a much lower figure. We rate this claim False.President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE expressed “exasperation and disgust” over charges brought against three former campaign aides by special counsel Robert Mueller Robert Swan MuellerSasse: US should applaud choice of Mueller to lead Russia probe MORE, The Washington Post reported Monday evening.
Both the Post and CNN reported that Trump watched his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort Paul John ManafortManafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump looks for boost from Korea summit The Hill's Morning Report - A pivotal week for Trump MORE, turning himself over to the authorities live on cable news.
The president kept phoning his lawyers and paid close attention to commentary on cable shows, the Post added.
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Manafort and a former business associate, Richard Gates, both pleaded not guilty to the charges unveiled in a 12-count indictment on Monday.
News also broke on Monday that George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in its investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. presidential election.
Trump’s fury over the day’s news was apparent to those who communicated with him, the Post reported.
CNN said Trump became “increasingly frustrated” as he saw the Manafort footage on television.By Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr
The United States has become increasingly concerned Israel could be preparing to strike Iran's nuclear program, a senior U.S. military official told CNN on Friday.
The U.S. military and intelligence community in recent weeks have stepped up "watchfulness" of both Iran and Israel, according to the senior U.S. military official and a second military official familiar with the U.S. actions. Asked if the Pentagon was concerned about an attack, the senior military official replied "absolutely." Both officials declined to be identified because of the extreme sensitivity of the matter.
Both the U.S. Central Command, which watches developments in Iran, and the U.S. European Command, which watches developments in Israel, are "increasingly vigilant" in watching potential military movement in both countries. U.S. satellites are a crucial method of gathering intelligence in both arenas, though the official did not specify that was the method being used.
Separately, another senior U.S. military official is now calling Iran the largest threat to the United States in the Middle East. Concerns about the threat to American interests from Iran has grown for several reasons, according to military officials. In addition to the country's nuclear ambitions, recent allegations have come to light about an Iranian assassination plot in Washington, Iranian shipment of weapons into Iraq, and continued Iranian support for the militant group Hezbollah.
The concerns over a possible Israeli strike come as the International Atomic Energy Agency is set to release a report next week detailing Iran's progress on its nuclear weapons development program. A number of Israeli newspapers in recent days have speculated that the Israeli government could respond with attacks.
The military official told CNN that the United States is watching any Israeli military movements closely as well as those inside Iran. In the past, the U.S. officials felt they had assurances from Israel that it would give warning to the United States of any attack.
"Now that doesn't seem so ironclad," the official said.
The American assessment is that an Israeli strike could likely include both manned aircraft and use of Israeli Jericho ballistic missiles. Manned aircraft are particularly risky because Israeli pilots would have to cross into third-country airspace, and likely engage in mid-air refueling that could be detected by radars in the region. In addition, Iranian air defenses are "top notch," according to the official, and pose a threat to both manned aircraft and missiles. Drones do not have the range to attack Iranian targets and do not carry enough firepower to destroy Iran's underground weapons facilities.
The official underscored long-standing U.S. military concerns about the risk of hostilities to American troops in the region, both those still in Iraq and U.S. naval forces and ground forces throughout the Persian Gulf. The official also strongly emphasized the United States has no current intention of striking Iran.Bryce Harper won the NL MVP Award on Thursday. A player called baseball’s “Chosen One” when he was only 16 years old, Harper fully happened in 2015, staying healthy enough to play in 153 games and setting new career highs in practically every offensive category.
Here are 7 incredible facts about Harper’s 2015 season:
1. It was the best offensive season since Barry Bonds retired
Harper put up the type of numbers we haven’t seen much of in recent years, with pitchers dominating the Majors. Harper’s 1.109 OPS is the highest mark since Albert Pujols’ MVP 2008 campaign. But in context, Harper’s 195 mark in park- and league-adjusted OPS+ stands as the best season since Barry Bonds retired. And Barry Bonds, lest you forget, was an otherworldly hitter.
2. No player his age has hit so well since Ted Williams
Harper became one of only three players ever with an OPS+ of 190 or higher at age 22 or younger. The others? Ted Williams and Ty Cobb. Ted Williams! Ty Cobb! Bryce Harper!
3. He raised his career OPS+ over 20 points
Harper entered the season with a very good 121 career OPS+. He finished it with a 143 career OPS+. To put that in context: In the course of one year, he went from Harold Baines to Harmon Killebrew. And smart money says it’ll keep climbing from here.
4. He showed way better plate discipline
Harper has credited his breakout campaign to his health, and it could be that staying on the field and getting more reps allowed him to work counts better and get better pitches to drive. But by whatever means he got there, Harper made an astonishing improvement. He entered the season with a 10.4% career walk rate, then walked in 19% of his plate appearances in 2015. Unsurprisingly, he also hit more line drives, more home runs and more extra base hits than ever before.
5. Only two other players his age have gotten on base so much.
Harper led the Majors with a.460 on-base percentage. It was the third best OBP ever for a player at age 22 or younger. The only players Harper’s age to ever post higher OBPs? Ted Williams and Jimmie Foxx. This is a theme: Harper had the type of season typically only seen by inner-circle Hall of Famers when they’re his age.
6. He became one of only seven players his age to hit 40 homers
This time a couple non-Hall of Famers sneak onto the list, but one of them is A-Rod and the other, Juan Gonzalez, likely would have got there if his career weren’t derailed by injuries by his early 30s. The others: Eddie Mathews, Mel Ott, Joe DiMaggio, and Johnny Bench.
7. He finally faced a pitcher younger than him
Until June, Harper had gone his entire professional career without facing a pitcher younger than him — including in his minor league rehab stats. Harper didn’t turn 23 until mid-October, and he’s already arguably the best hitter in the world. Buckle up, folks.Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, a challenge by a church to a town ordinance regulating signs.
Like most other towns in America, Gilbert, Ariz., regulates when, where and how many signs may be displayed. Temporary noncommercial signs are classified by their content, and each category has its own set of regulations.
Real estate signs, for example, may be up to 80 square feet, and political signs may be up to 32 square feet; political signs may be displayed for 4 1/2 months before an election, including in the public right of way; and homeowners’ association event signs may be displayed for 30 days.
The Good News Community Church, which holds services at different facilities such as local schools because it doesn’t have a permanent church, uses signs to invite people to services. Because the signs include directional information (i.e., an arrow pointing to the location of the service), they may not be bigger than
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Mark barely knew me. I’m forever indebted to him for that.
I got hired by the Daily News in December 2000, and initially did general-assignment reporting for the sports staff—filling in for Frank Isola at a Knicks practice one day, Rich Cimini with the Jets another day and doing sidebars at MLB games, etc. When T.J. Quinn moved from the Mets beat to investigative reporting at the Daily News, Leon put me on that baseball beat—saying just do it for a couple of years and then you can rotate to something else. Although fans think it’s a dream job, the number of people on a sports staff eager to cover baseball as a beat are few and far between because of the travel and time demands, the latter of which has only worsened with the technological changes.
Well, I ended up covering the Mets full time for 15 years, following Leon to ESPN New York in 2010, as that company created a handful of local websites.
In the last few weeks I departed that position to serve as the assistant athletic director for strategic communications at The New York Institute of Technology. I’m essentially the SID, promoting the Old Westbury school’s Division I baseball program and the dozen other sports competing in Division II. We’ve been very successful so far, including getting the startup lacrosse team on the front page of The New York Times’ sports section.
I’ll actually still keeping a toe in the water with journalism. Although it’s not yet cemented, I’m expecting to do limited TV and website work for SNY, the Mets-owned TV network. And I’m still planning to do a Sunday morning baseball-themed radio show on ESPN 98.7 in New York this season, provided they can sell the advertising to make the show viable. I may even do some stringing for one of the tabloids during the summer at Citi Field.
2. At what point did you start contemplating a career change? Why did you start having those thoughts? Why did you eventually settle on college SID as the right landing spot?
The mechanics of baseball beat reporting have seismically shifted since I started on the Mets beat. It used to be that either you had the story in the newspaper or you didn’t have it in the newspaper. And if you got beat by the Post, you had 24 hours to come back and do better the next day.
Now, thanks to social media and other technology, every second of every day can be consumed by providing tidbits of information or advancing a story. I don’t know how Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman have the stamina to do it nonstop throughout the year with a national scope.
There are several reasons I wanted to change. The impact of the technological revolution probably ranked No. 1, even though I adapted very well and believe I had built the largest social-media audience of any team-specific MLB beat reporter.
I’m a workaholic, and I was determined to be a one-stop shop for Mets news. So that meant providing content nonstop. I would watch the games on TV when I was off and live tweet. I created a morning aggregation I called “Morning Briefing,” which I tried to pattern off MSNBC’s “First Read,” in order to be the first place people went in the morning for Mets news. And I wanted comprehensive coverage of the minors, too. So I would post daily recaps of all the Mets affiliates’ minor-league games, which was particularly grueling once the Mets got booted from Buffalo and ended up in Las Vegas as a Triple-A affiliate. The games would end at 1:30 a.m. ET or beyond.
There were other reasons I wanted to depart:
*I don’t think I’m alone in saying the relationship between reporters and players has changed over the years. Probably rightfully so because of the scrutiny they receive in the social-media age, but the players are much more guarded now. It’s not viewed as frequently as a mutually beneficial business relationship. And I didn’t like being treated as a nuisance.
* It’s become much harder these days for team-specific reporters to break news—at least the transactions. The structure tilts toward favoring the national reporters. And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that there are now a ton of reporters getting paychecks from entities affiliated with MLB. It’s not a level playing field.
*When the Mets reached the World Series in 2015, my traffic was off the charts. I was told the Mets had generated the second-most traffic for ESPN of any team in MLB for the entire 2015 season (behind the Cubs), partly because of the team’s success and partly because of the way I covered the team. But when the Mets reached the World Series, I was chronicling someone else’s moment. Contrast that with the high school basketball team my brother coaches (which people who follow me on Twitter are more acquainted with than they’d like). When that team notched the school’s first boys basketball playoff win in 10 seasons that same year, it was much more fun for me than covering the World Series, because I had played some small part in it—preparing programs for their tournament, sending articles to The Levittown Tribune weekly community paper to promote the team, and scouting—or at least videotaping—upcoming opponents. My new position allows me to be a part of NYIT’s success.
*Any beat reporter who doesn’t get a call returned from an executive or has to stand around waiting to speak with a particular player—only to be blown off on occasion—questions why his sports-reporting job is appealing. As you get older, standing around to get a banal soundbite gets less and less appealing. At least it did for me.
I fortunately had a ton of opportunities to go to work for colleges in recent years and came close to pulling the trigger a few times.
I’ll break a little news here and reveal that ESPN declined to renew my contract, so I would have been out later this year anyway. ESPN seems to be bleeding money because of cord-cutting, so my salary was unattractive to them. And the new MLB editor at ESPN wants to get away from “thorough” beat coverage—that’s the precise word she used—and I suppose I was the sacrificial lamb to hammer home that point. Anyway, ESPN agreed to give me a buyout to leave now. And I get to do what I planned to do anyway. So it worked out tremendously.
3. You were known as a dogged reporter. We saw it on the beat firsthand. We can say, with no embellishment, that no one worked longer or harder. Now that you’re out of the game, can you take us into your process? What was Adam Rubin’s day on the beat? What were your days like around the trade deadline or one of the Mets’ many crises?
It’s really nonstop, at least in-season. I mentioned I produced a morning aggregation. Over the years, as more content got posted by newspapers in real time rather than at 4 a.m., the aggregation could be done the night before and be set to post at 6:30 a.m. Then the link would auto-tweet. So I think I fooled some people into thinking I was working 24/7. A lot of times I was sleeping when the “Morning Briefing” went live and the link tweeted.
That said, I wanted people to visit the site multiple times a day. So that required daytime content. My mornings would consist of writing series previews, a weekly minor league “Farm Report” that included a feature on a prospect, etc.
And it meant interacting with fans throughout the day, which can be quite time consuming. One of the reasons I believe I built a sizable Twitter following is that I would try to answer every (reasonable) question directed at me.
Anyway, as you know, beat reporters get to the stadium quite early for a 7 p.m. game. I would be at Citi Field generally by 2 p.m., with the clubhouse opening to media at 3:10 p.m. Like other reporters, I’d interact with players for 50 minutes, then attend Terry Collins’ press conference.
In the olden days, you would hang out by the batting cage during BP. Not anymore. After Terry spoke, I generally would race up to the press box to produce content based upon what was said in the clubhouse and at the manager’s interview session.
Then, of course, I would live tweet during games, mixing a little play-by-play with relevant stats. (Mark Simon at ESPN is such a great statistical resource, and I’d generate plenty of my own stuff using Baseball-Reference.) You used to be able to watch the games. Now, it’s mostly staring at your computer screen.
ESPN killed it during my final year there (a sore subject), but one of the popular things I did was “Rapid Reaction.” In essence, I wrote a game story that was posted the second the game ended. Because there’s a delay on TV, people marveled that I often had tweeted the link to a game story before they saw the final pitch on their TV sets.
Then we’d go down to the clubhouse, get postgame reaction, and produce more content. Then there would be the game recaps of the minor league affiliates and producing the next day’s Morning Briefing. I probably wouldn’t get to sleep until after 2 a.m. most nights. It’s like Groundhog Day.
I found myself over the years liking the trade deadline and winter meetings less and less. I really, really dislike bugging people at all hours. Having a conscious is not always good when you’re competing for information.
4. When you get to ESPN, it seems like it becomes a national gig no matter what you cover. There are radio shows and TV hits and Twitter. How much of the job for you was brand management and upkeep? I’d say there are some reporters who focus as much on that as reporting. Is that wrong as a career strategy?
There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, but one of the seismic shifts that relates to the technological changes is the need for self-promotion. When I started in the business, you were taught to be a fly on the wall—an invisible observer. Now, you have to be a personality in order to build up the social-media following that drives traffic.
During the height of the baseball season, I’d be sending more than 30,000 link clicks a day from my Twitter account to ESPN.com. That’s probably a drop in the bucket for ESPN, but it was still nearly 1 million link clicks a month that I sent via my Twitter account to my employer’s site.
I wish I could have remained invisible, but that’s not practical anymore. I devised shticks like tweeting “OH NO” in-game when something bad had happened to the Mets, such as an opponent homer. Because of that little delay on TV, it became quite the talk. People knew something bad was about to happen on their screens.
5. After more than a decade on the beat, to what extent do you think you can ever go back to simply enjoying baseball as a fan? How much baseball do you think you’ll watch? You had a reputation for having a very active and thorough Twitter account. How often do you find yourself reaching for your phone to check Twitter, only to remember you don’t need to anymore?
I’m going to keep a toe in the water contributing to SNY and do the ESPN radio show if everything goes as planned. So I’m keeping close track of the content being produced down in Port St. Lucie by the beat reporters. I’m actually still having scouts ask me questions about the team, even though I’m not around it full time. If I had no upcoming reporting involvement, I probably would not watch another MLB game, at least for a year or two.
I enjoy watching the Islanders, but my sports interests have considerably waned. I enjoy being on the SID side and being a part of things—taking the six-hour bus ride back with the team after a women’s basketball win in the conference tournament, hearing which juggernauts the NYIT men’s basketball coach has scheduled for next season well before it becomes public and promoting the student-athletes. But I rarely go to sporting events just for the sake of being at a sporting event.
I did constantly reach for my phone the first couple of weeks after departing ESPN. I still reach for it too frequently. The best thing about being out of the baseball-beat-writer pressure-cooker is that I don’t have to be tethered to my phone (although it’s still important in my new job).
6. To what extent do you think your journalism experience has prepared you to immediately be successful in your new role? What aspects do you think will require a learning curve?
With three weeks under my belt as an SID, I can say the skill sets are very similar. We’re an incredibly small staff at NYIT, so it’s challenging. But I’m trying to replicate an MLB.com model at NYITBears.com. That means not just game recaps, but regular features and notebooks. Similar to MLB.com, it’s a news site, but it has a positive tone. For example, though, I asked my athletic director whether I should put a photo of dejected women’s basketball players on the site after they lost a heartbreaker in the finals of the conference tournament. He was all for it. So we’re pushing the envelope a little.
One sad thing is people don’t distinguish between whether they’re getting their news from an independent organization or someone with a vested interest. I suppose we’re trying to take advantage of that and produce content that is news, but with a positive slant.
My social-media skills are being put to good use. I’ve grown the Twitter and Instagram followings at NYIT roughly 5 percent in three weeks.
And I’m doing the same type of video content that I would do at ESPN. Mostly I have a student do a stand-up style report, then have a player and/or coach interview follow it, with some B-roll from the event mixed in.
I believe I was ahead of the curve at ESPN in producing photography and video content. I bought my own sophisticated camera, taught myself Adobe Premiere Pro, and cut up my own video, etc. I’m now in the process of learning After Effects to take it to a completely different level, and I find that very enjoyable.
The one area I’m not at all fluent in is the NCAA statistical software, which is called Stat Crew. Fortunately, the AD at NYIT was impressed enough with my content-creation ability that he’s contracted for people well-versed in it to enter the statistical data during games. I need to learn that. But I ultimately don’t want to be tied to a computer entering balls and strikes during a game, because that will prevent me from content creation, which I believe is what successful universities are doing.
7. You were involved in a high-profile incident with Omar Minaya. It was one of the first big media lurker moments as Deadspin and the like took off. Did that have an effect on your career? How difficult did it become to cover the Mets? Was there consideration to leave the beat? Do you have a relationship with Omar now?
People wrongly presume that Omar and I have a bad relationship. That’s the opposite of the truth. He actually called me—multiple times—when I announced I was leaving ESPN, until we finally connected. He was very complimentary. A couple of years ago, when he was working for the Padres, he actually gave me and a few other reporters his breakfast reservation at a fashionable San Diego spot so we didn’t get shut out. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Jared can vouch for this—he was there.)
That said, I’m still upset about that press conference to this day for multiple reasons. Journalism can be a cesspool sometimes, and I always felt I carried myself very ethically. So to be accused of something that was not even true really hurt. Even if the public generally was very supportive, if anyone thought lesser of me because of it, it stung because I really believe I’ve done things the right way throughout my career.
Even though I would gladly expunge the event if it were possible, it was probably good for my career. As we discussed, so much of being a successful journalist is branding. And I cannot dispute that the incident considerably increased my name recognition.
With respect to the incident itself, I’ve always felt wronged, even though Omar was apologetic from the moment it happened.
Tony Bernazard, who was fired by the Mets after my reporting brought some incidents to light, desperately wanted to become a GM. And when Tony struck out elsewhere, Omar was warned by folks that Tony was angling with ownership for his job with the Mets. Omar chose not to accept it at the time.
Anyway, Tony and I had an interesting relationship. He liked me, or at least respected my work ethic. And he very much envied how much I knew about the minor leaguers. I think I knew a lot more than him about some things because the players trusted me, especially some bad stuff I never wrote (like a guy around the Binghamton team whom I heard was peddling drugs). Tony admired the information I could get, and often told me, and this is a direct quote, “You’re on my list.” What he meant by that is that when he became a GM, I was on his list to hire because I could get info about minor leaguers.
He said it so many times, I started to think maybe it’s a viable path for me down the road. In spring training annually, the Mets front office invited the beat writers to dinner for an off-the-record session. During it, I asked Tony and Jeff Wilpon what it would take to pursue a career like that. That was the extent of it. I was invited to have a meeting back in New York after spring training to speak in general about a position like that—nothing specific to the Mets—but I never pursued it. Months later, at the fateful press conference, Omar accused me of lobbying for a job. I’m sure Tony unloaded on me when he was told he was fired and concocted some fancy story about the whole thing. The Daily News, the day after the incident, ran a first-person thing from me about it. I never typed a word of that. I did dictate some things, but I believe what was printed was almost like a compromise with the Mets to get through it rather than a fully accurate portrayal of what occurred.
I have pretty good sources, and I was told Omar didn’t even know what “lobby” meant when he said it at the press conference. He had to ask someone afterward. As I mentioned, though, I have no ill will toward Omar. He’s a very nice man. It was a regrettable moment all of us wished never happened.
I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to cover the team, regardless of the truth. And Tony seemed particularly close with the Latin American players in the clubhouse. But when I finally returned after about a week, there seemed to be mostly euphoria in the clubhouse, with players and staff privately patting me on the back for helping get Tony ousted with my reporting. I was concerned the Puerto Rican players would particularly be upset with me. But Pedro Feliciano probably said the nicest thing of anyone to me. And Alex Cora, whose family was raised alongside Tony’s family, if my memory is correct, also was very kind.
I will say this: I’ll always be fond of David Wright. The night of that incident, he called me to make sure I was OK.
8. What do you see as the role of the modern beat writer? I imagine it’s changed dramatically since you started — probably multiple times. The internet has undoubtedly devalued some kinds of reporting that was once crucial in the newspaper age. So what makes a good beat writer in 2017?
What I’m finding now confirms my suspicions and is pretty depressing for journalism. After losing about 2,500 followers the first couple of days after I announced I was leaving the beat, not only did the number stabilize, but it’s started to climb again as I simply retweet other reporters who actually are in Port St. Lucie. That I can maintain a following simply by sharing information reported by others does not speak positively about the economic model for the business.
A modern beat writer needs to excel at print, video and still photography, interact nonstop with folks on social media, be an expert on the subject and basically work nonstop.
There will always be a place for thoughtful features. But to me what builds a following these days is always being first—or at least always having credible information quickly—on a nonstop basis. Short bursts of information. That’s why it boggles my mind that ESPN is going the opposite direction, eschewing thoroughness for features that might have national appeal. Coming from a business-school background, I believe it’s more lucrative ultimately to sell the same customer a $1 bagel each day of the year, rather than try to make a big sale with a feature on a less regular basis. I believe the new MLB editor at ESPN will see eroding traffic over time because of the model she is selecting.
9. In general, what would you change about how baseball is reported on and covered?
After a ton of long-winded answers, I’m really not sure I have a good answer on this. I do believe things are being covered thoroughly. I would advise reporters to spend more time writing about the minor leaguers on a regular basis. There’s a larger audience for that than many people realize. And the coverage pays dividends when those players reach the major-league clubhouse and already are acquainted with you.
10. What’s the best part of Golden Corral, your favorite Port St. Lucie hangout during spring training?
I got a lot of ribbing for eating at Golden Corral. But it was quick and inexpensive, and allowed me to get back to work. You just have to get over people licking their fingers and then touching the serving utensils. I liked the roasted chicken and sweet potato. I tried to stay away from the bread, but the rolls are excellent too. Wish they would open one on Long Island.
AdvertisementsThe Blondie comic strip was created by my father, Chic Young, in the year 1930. Blondie began her cartoon life in the same flighty, pretty-girl flapper image of my dad’s earlier strips (some of which, in his own words, were better not remembered!).
For historical purposes, they were: “The Affairs of Jane,” “Beautiful Bab” and “Dumb Dora” (appropriately subtitled, “She’s Not So Dumb As She Looks”). Anyway, Blondie Boopadoop was this gorgeous flapper who had a ton of boyfriends…one of whom was Dagwood Bumstead. Dagwood, in those days, was the bumbling, playboy son of billionaire railroad tycoon, J. Bolling Bumstead. In his town, J. Bolling not only owned all of the property on his side of the track, but also all the property on the other side of the track….plus 3,000 miles of the track!
Dagwood wasn’t exactly a successful playboy. For instance, his polo pony would stop and eat grass in the middle of the field during a chukker. And once, when he became lost in his own mansion, he experienced the humiliation of having to join a sightseeing tour to get back to the living room.
All of a sudden, the Great Depression was upon us. With families facing disaster, farms being foreclosed, tenants being dispossessed, and nothing on the horizon but despair…this comic strip, about a flighty blonde and her boyfriend’s millions, was not so funny any more. The Blondie magic began to evaporate as more and more newspapers dropped the comic strip. Blondie was headed for ignominious doom and extinction.
Then, the miracle! Blondie and Dagwood fell in love. Really in love. More than any comic characters before them. They made plans to get married, at the time a bold departure in comics.
So, in true storybook fashion, love conquered all obstacles. After a tumultuous engagement that included a 28-day, 7-hour, 8-minute, 22- second hunger strike, these two unlikely misfits tied the matrimonial knot in the memorable comic strip wedding scene of February 17, 1933.
Dagwood, of course, was immediately disinherited by his parents for marrying “that gold digger blonde.” When J. Bolling wrote him out of his will, Dagwood and his Blondie had to go out into the world and hack it like the rest of us.
Settling down to a modest lifestyle with children and a dog, they became concerned with real life…making ends meet, raising a family, eating, and sleeping. And these four same topics are the primary ingredients of the strip to this very day.. Today, Blondie and Dagwood appear together in blissful love and happiness in over 2,300 newspapers all around the world…translated into 35 different languages in 55 countries and read by an estimated 280 million people every day.NDEBELE ART LIVES ON
by Morrel Shilenge / 29.06.2015
Esther ‘Gogo’ Mahlangu is believed to be the most important Ndebele artist working today. From painting walls with feathers and twigs in Mabhoko Village to doing a paint job on a BMW for a New York gallery, I was lucky enough to have the 80 year old legend take me on a journey through her expansive artistic career. Spending a few days in her presence was a similar experience that I often have with my own gogo – a time filled with wisdom, stories and laughter…
The moment I arrived at her home; Esther invited me to one of her huts and just spoke for hours – allowing me to ask any question in my broken Ndebele, Xhosa and Sepedi. So, where did it all begin?
Esther was taught to paint by her mother and grandmother at the age of 10 and underwent the traditional Ndebele practice in which young women are cloistered from society for a few months and taught the traditional craft of beadwork. She has since become an expert and an authority figure in executing the traditional Ndebele art of wall painting in South Africa; an art form traditionally only done by women on special occasions. These early lessons would later serve as a training ground for her artistic career and to this day she remains true to the Ndebele traditions because she doesn’t want them to vanish.
Esther has become internationally recognized for her work and over the years has received commissions from all around the world. She always travels in her neck-hands and leg steel bangles and told me that at airports they will always search her. She told me about all the many places she has visited and that ‘Gogo’ is now on her fifth passport…
What’s unique about Gogo’s work is that although it is heavily rooted in tradition, she is not apposed to evolving and expanding the art form. In the past, Ndebele painting was reserved for the outer walls of houses but Esther is one of the first artists to transfer these traditional designs to canvas and other mediums – making her an Ndebele art pioneer.
In 1991, Esther coated the entire bodywork of a BMW 525i, for the first time, with bright colours and clearly distinguishable geometric shapes typical of Ndebele tribal art. She was also the first South African to have her work exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2010.
Since then she has taken her work to the stratosphere having been commissioned to paint the tail of a British Airways Boeing. In 2014 she also was commissioned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the US to create two large works of art. Esther has began to transpose her art on canvas, shoes, sculptures, ceramics and other modern materials. What’s astounding about her work is that despite the varied canvases she paints on; she still paints freehand without prior measurement or sketches and continues to use feathers and bundles of twigs as brushes – the old-school way.
Despite being an internationally recognized artist, Gogo still lives in Mabhoko Village in KwaMlanga, Mpumalanga and does her chores like any ordinary Gogo in the village – sweeping her yard early in the morning, cooking and teaching young people Ndebele art. Before I left, I asked her how she still does it all on her own at her tender age of 80 to which she simply replied: by keeping busy and surrounding herself with her grandchildren.
A warm, good hearted and down to earth woman – Esther understands that things change and culture evolves. Her story is one of legends and her contribution to the preservation and expansion of Ndebele artistic and cultural heritage is worth telling a thousand times.
We can’t wait for Gogo to start bombing billboards next…
* Images © Morrel ShilengeA Russian government agency has threatened “protective restrictive measures” against Swiss produce imports if the country does not provide appropriate documentation to clarify an uptick in shipments.
In a notice published yesterday, the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance (Rosselkhoznadzor) highlighted a meeting took place with Swiss counterparts to discuss why their country’s plant product exports had risen by 50% on average since a ban was imposed on EU-grown produce.
For apples the figure has risen 400 times.
“In this regard, Rosselkhoznadzor suspects that not all of the products are actually Swiss,” the notice said.
The watchdog said all necessary steps needed to be taken to determine the real source of exports, giving Switzerland 10 days to confirm the authenticity of phytosanitary certificates.
The notice said a Swiss representative had expressed readiness to assist in the “speedy receipt” of the appropriate information, stressing pride in the country’s neutrality.
A similar notice was given to Bosnian authorities on Nov. 19, calling for an explanation as to why the country’s apple exports to Russia were 100 times higher year-on-year in the first nine months of 2014.
Belarus and Kazakhstan have set the scene for some of Russia’s biggest crackdowns on “gray market” produce exports. Rosselkhoznadzor head Sergey Dankvert told ITAR-TASS that tighter controls were needed to prevent this kind of circumvented trade.
“Nobody expected there would be such an expression as ‘fake transit,” Dankvert was quoted as saying.
“But since it has appeared, we should enshrine in law how to prevent it.”
A source close to www.freshfruitportal.com who was in Russia four weeks ago and visited various supermarkets, said she was surprised at the amount of fruit on sale that was clearly marked as being of EU origin.
“I saw a range of fruit there from different European countries with different names on cartons. I think where there’s a will there’s a way, and you will get it into Russia, in all honesty,” the source said.
Photo: www.shutterstock.com
www.freshfruitportal.comAfter three years of renovations, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is reopening on May 14. The new SFMOMA is gleaming white and twice as large as its boxy brown predecessor. It’s in no danger of being dwarfed, even among the South of Market neighborhood’s collection of rising towers.
The latest chapter in the history of SFMOMA is defined by power and wealth. It’s a strange contrast with the first chapter of that history, which began just a few years after the 1906 earthquake reduced the city to rubble.
A group of civic elites known as the San Francisco Art Association decided to create a museum dedicated to contemporary artwork. Their first museum, which opened in 1916, folded after a decade. But in 1935 they succeeded in founding the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Grace McCann Morley, its first director, found herself leading a museum that from its inception was plagued by troubles. Unlike the de Young Museum or the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, it was privately funded, and those funds were scarce.
The museum was also housed on the cramped fourth floor of the War Memorial Veterans Building, not an ideal location, according to SFMOMA Deputy Director Ruth Berson.
“It had no street presence whatsoever — you couldn’t just walk into the lobby of the building, you had to take an elevator to get there,” Berson said. “The other thing was that the spaces were never intended to be galleries, so they didn’t have the proportions (for exhibits) that one would have preferred.”
Morley was one of the museum’s first assets. Described by Berson as a “dynamo,” Morley quickly set about transforming the museum into a hot spot for contemporary art. In one of her first feats, Morley helped arrange for the mammoth 1934 Carnegie International, European Section, U.S. Selections exhibitions to be shipped across the United States — a logistical nightmare in the age of trains.
Over the next two decades, Morley and the Trustees organized exhibitions for well-known artists and emerging talents, including Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz and Henri Matisse. Berson also noted that the museum gave Jackson Pollock his first solo exhibition in 1945.
The outbreak of World War II influenced much of Morley’s administration. In 1939, the museum arranged for an exhibition titled “Twentieth Century German Art (Banned)” that featured “degenerate” artwork banned in Nazi Germany. Throughout the war, Morley sought out local artists with useful skills to contribute to the war effort, and in 1945, the museum temporarily relocated to a downtown store so the building could host the United Nations’ charter meeting.
At the end of the war, Morley began working for UNESCO, where she founded the International Council of Museums. Her work with these organizations eventually forced Morley to leave the museum in 1958. But Berson said she left behind an impressive legacy.
“She accepted photography into the collection at a very early stage,” Berson said. “Her first architecture exhibition was in 1940, way before anybody was thinking about that.”
Morley’s replacement, George Culler, inherited a museum with greater resources, which he focused largely on education and outreach. Among the programs that were funded during his administration was “Insights,” which inspired bizarre experimental art like “Snowjob,” a performance piece by Bonnie Sherk that involved dumping 2 tons of snow in downtown San Francisco.
When Gerald Nordland took the reins in 1966, the nation and the Bay Area were in the midst of radical cultural and political transformations. Nordland was determined to incorporate new trends by organizing shows that pushed the boundaries of art.
Some of these exhibitions proved to be quite memorable, like a 1969 showing of Jay DeFeo’s “The Rose,” a 2,300-pound painting so difficult to transport that it inspired a documentary. Later that year, the museum became the only West Coast museum to host the controversial exhibit “Contemporary Black Artists.”
In 1970, the museum resurrected its film program. Although it was shuttered eight years later because of financial strains, the program made a splash with its first exhibition, a floating TV-sculpture called “The Videola” by Don Hallock and several other artists.
Nordland also oversaw a period of growing prestige for the museum. In 1972, the museum expanded into the third floor of the Veterans Building. It also established the Museum Intercommunity Exchange to foster greater collaboration with its peers in New York; Washington, D.C.; and Europe.
Henry Hopkins became the museum’s director in 1974. Today, Hopkins is probably best remembered for adding the word “modern” in 1975 to the name of the museum. But during his 12 years as director, he also led SFMOMA through a period of explosive growth, creating new departments and enlarging its collections.
Hopkins organized a record number of shows that relied solely on SFMOMA’s collection, which had swollen with acquisitions over the previous decade. Hopkins, who particularly liked Abstract Expressionists, was instrumental in securing artwork by Clyfford Still and Philip Guston.
Also during Hopkins’ administration, SFMOMA established its first department of photography in 1980, and in 1983 it created the department of architecture and design — the first of its kind on the West Coast.
These enhancements increased the prestige of SFMOMA, but Hopkins was never satisfied with the museum’s location. In a 1980 interview for the Archives of American Art, he recalled visiting the museum before he was director and wishing the staff had the funds to buy 500 gallons of white paint to freshen up the “tawdry” building.
In 1987, the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Los Angeles, ending SFMOMA’s unofficial status as California’s premier contemporary art museum. The Board of Trustees and its new director, John Lane, began searching for a new home for the museum. They soon set their sights on Third Street in the South of Market area.
“South of Market was a little bit of a dicey neighborhood back in the day,” Berson said, recalling that the museum’s neighbor was an empty parking lot surrounded by chain-link fence.
But the move paid off. When SFMOMA reopened in 1995 in a new building designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, membership jumped from 12,900 to more than 31,000. Lane launched SFMOMA’s website that same year, increasing public awareness of upcoming exhibits.
Lane took advantage of the new wealth brought in by the dot-com bubble to acquire significant works for the museum, including pieces by Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Brice Marden. David Ross, who took over as director in 1998, continued this trend, acquiring pieces by Ellsworth Kelly, Charles Sheeler and René Magritte.
Under Ross’ directorship, SFMOMA began to focus heavily on digital arts. The museum launched “e.space,” an online curatorial space that featured SFMOMA’s Web-based art. In 2001, the museum exhibited “010101: Art in Technological Times” to showcase the rosy future promised by technological advances. But the prediction turned out to be premature.
“At that time we had the dot-com bubble in San Francisco,” Berson said, noting that when it burst, “we certainly felt it.”
Ross resigned in 2001 to pursue a career in the technology field. The board of trustees selected Neal Benezra as SFMOMA’s new director in 2002.
Benezra was an easy choice: Born in Oakland, he fell in love with SFMOMA when he visited it as a child. As a young adult, he had even applied for an internship at the museum but had been turned down.
Returning as director 20 years later, Benezra inherited a museum that was suffering from layoffs and a $2 million deficit. To re-energize it, Benezra organized blockbuster shows. In 2002, the Marc Chagall exhibition broke the attendance record for the museum. In 2008, the Frida Kahlo exhibit broke that record again. The museum also featured the work of other popular artists, such as Diane Arbus, Sol LeWitt and Jeff Wall.
SFM
|
more than — I’ll tell you what, there’s nobody out there. I just came in, and I’m looking around with Orrin and with Mike and with the governor and with everybody, and I’m just saying, what a beautiful picture it is. But no one values the splendor of Utah more than you do, and no one knows better how to use it.
With your help in treating our natural bounty with respect, gratitude, and love, we will put our nation’s treasures to great and wonderful use. Families will hike and hunt on land they have known for generations, and they will preserve it for generations to come. Cattle will graze along the open range. Sweeping landscapes will inspire young Americans to dream beyond the horizon. And the world will stand in awe of the artistry God has worked right here in your great state.
Together, we will usher in a bright new future of wonder and wealth, liberty and law, and patriotism and pride all across this great land.
Thank you to the wonderful people of Utah. May God bless you and may God bless America. Thank you very much. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause.)
And in your honor, I will now, with your representatives, sign this very, very important proclamation. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you. (Applause.)
(The proclamation is signed.)
END
12:37 P.M. MSTSaturday, December 17th, 2016
OAKLAND, Calif. -- Bay Area Bike Share is expanding into the East Bay in the next two years and on Thursday program planners released a map showing the proposed locations for 1,500 bikes in Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville.The Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Motivate have asked for public feedback on the map showing the locations of 66 proposed new bike stations.The new stations, which will bring the total number of East Bay docking stations to 130, include locations in the Oakland neighborhoods ofFruitvale, San Antonio and West Oakland and Berkeley's Southside, North Berkeley and West Berkeley, Bay Area Bike Share officials said."The planned system reflects countless hours of community input from neighbors and businesses throughout Oakland, Emeryville and Berkeley, aswell as our collective commitment to equity," Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, an MTC commissioner, said in a statement.MTC and Motivate are a public-private partnership leading the program, which they say will eventually grow from 700 to 7,000 bikes by the end of 2018.Last year, Motivate and MTC committed to placing at least 20 percent of the docks and bikes in low-income neighborhoods with large numbersof minority or immigrant households."We're proud to have far surpassed our goals in terms of providing service to diverse communities across the East Bay and that membership willbe accessible to low-income residents at just $5 for the first year," Bay Area Bike Share general manager Emily Stapleton said in a statement.Users can buy a membership for the day or the year, which includes unlimited trips of 30 minutes or less. The system will be renamed Ford GoBikeafter its new sponsor, Ford Motor Company."Currently, with just 700 bikes in the system, we've seen over 1 million trips taken in San Jose and San Francisco over the last three years,"Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors President Dave Cortese, also an MTC commissioner, said in a statement."We're expecting those numbers to explode once the system expands into the East Bay, and we have 7,000 bikes across the region," Cortese said.The popular program's expansion to the East Bay is expected to begin next year. The map of all the proposed stations in the East Bay isavailable here. nullMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption President Barack Obama delighted pupils at Mount Pleasant Primary School when he visited with David Cameron
President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron were met by hundreds of well-wishers as they arrived at a primary school in Newport.
A 22-car convoy carrying the two leaders swept into Mount Pleasant Primary School in Rogerstone, Newport, at 09:40 BST on Thursday.
President Obama and Mr Cameron joined a lesson both greeting children with "Bore Da" - good morning in Welsh.
They made the 30-minute visit before joining delegates for the Nato summit.
Image copyright Chris Tinsley/Athena Image caption President Obama and David Cameron joined in the children's class for half an hour
President Obama and Mr Cameron were driven to the school from nearby Celtic Manor - where the summit is being held.
There were cheers as the motorcade pulled into the school, with the US President's black stretch limousine bearing a Welsh flag for the first time in history. A car of armed guards then blocked the entrance to the school.
The world leaders then watched a lesson for year five and six pupils on Nato led by Army reservist Lieutenant Rachel Broughton, 28, of Tenby. They listened in as the children answered questions on Nato and its members on their second day back at school.
Ben, 10, read out a welcome message to President Obama when he arrived, thanking him for being the first serving US president to visit Wales.
He said: "I was pretty nervous but my mum and dad said he's just an ordinary guy - and when I did it I really enjoyed it. I was trying to tell him Wales was a great place to stay and we'd show off the country a little bit and the school as well.
"I was in shock when I was chosen - I'm overwhelmed with what I did."
Members of the public started to gather outside from 05:50 BST hoping to catch a glimpse of the president.
Some had folding chairs and picnics to make the wait more comfortable.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Ella and Ben, both 10: 'We met the president'
Parents were asked to get children to the school, which has about 230 pupils, by 08:30 BST.
As pupils arrived they were directed through a metal detector.
Around 500 people had gathered outside the school gates, waiting for President Obama and Mr Cameron to arrive, many carrying Welsh and US flags.
Some brought ladders while others stood on walls, or even on the back of bikes to try to get the best vantage point.
Image copyright Athena Image caption President Obama listening to children at the Newport school
Image copyright Richard Williams/Athena Image caption The special lesson on Nato was led by Army reservist Rachael Broughton
Image copyright David Cameron Image caption David Cameron tweeted pictures of himself and Barack Obama inside the school
Image copyright David Cameron Image caption The two world leaders joined a class in the school for a lesson about Nato
Teachers explained that the visit was the result of a message they sent on Twitter in June.
The tweet to Nato said Year 6 pupils had been finding out all about the summit and "would love a VIP visit!"
Sally Pyrah-Barnes, 47, said it was "a once in a lifetime" experience and it was good he was "acknowledging the local city and the local kids".
Parents said pupils had been taught about Nato in preparation for Obama's visit.
One told BBC Radio Wales the visit was "new for Wales" he added: "It's nice to have him come to my little boy's school."
Another called the visit "an amazing opportunity for our children".
Local councillor Chris Evans, also in the crowd outside the school gates, added it had given the area a big boost.
"It has brought the whole community together," he said. "It's especially good after the recent bad news we've had with 600 job cuts at a bakery firm."
Deputy head teacher Andrew Rothwell said: "It's been a real pleasure to host Barack Obama and David Cameron.
"As you can see, the children have not stopped smiling. It's given them a tremendous sense of pride."
Children at the school were among students from across Wales who have written postcards to world leaders attending the summit telling them what they would like to see changed in the world by the time they are adults.
Their messages of hope for the future will be presented to Nato leaders at the summit.
Image caption Members of the public gather outside the school waiting for President Obama and the Prime Minister
Image caption BBC News political editor Nick Robinson tries to get a view a good view from a rooftop
Image caption Welsh and US flags were on display in anticipation of the president's arrival
Image copyright US Embassy Image caption US ambassador Matthew Barzun meets well-wishers outside schoolStorage, Handling and Spoilage
How Liqueurs Spoil
Most life-forms can only function at low levels of alcohol. One reason is osmosis, which we discussed in a previous section. But the big reason is that alcohol is really just poisonous. Even yeasts, which make alcohol as a product of digesting sugars, can only stand so much. That's why wine has only so much alcohol in it. When the yeasts stop fermenting the sugars into alcohol, you're done. To get higher concentrations of alcohol, you need to distill it, which is beyond the scope of this site. Rest assured that any alcoholic beverage with more than 15% alcohol is quite safe from biological contamination.
Anyway, you must wonder what, then, does cause liqueurs to spoil. And the answer to that is air. Or, more specifically, oxygen. Oxidation is the bugaboo of most everything organic, and it's the main bugaboo of alcohols. Oxidation is the process that turns fruit brown - it breaks large molecules into smaller ones, complex flavors into simpler ones, good liqueurs into stale, insipid or even sour ones. And it's something you want to avoid if you can.
When a liqueur spoils due to oxidation, it does what you would expect a fruit to do. It turns brown, the sugars break down, and many suspended solids stick together and form a clump at the bottom. Often, the colors and flavors will separate considerably, leaving you with a dark, cloudy bottom half and a sickly yellow top half. It will never hurt you to open up the bottle and taste it, but don't expect much. Some fruits rich in pectin may also gel. Sugars may fuse with other chemicals to produce glycerin, making the liqueur thicker anyway. And the pectin inside may form isolated clumps of odd, alcoholic jelly floating in your bottle. It happens to my nectarine after two or three years, though I've never had the guts to taste the jelly. But a general rule of thumb is that when your liqueurs start to fall apart or change state, its time to toss them and start fresh.
Corking
Wine corks are standard-sized, and though they can vary in quality, you should be able to buy good, supple ones for something around $0.35 apiece. They are well worth the investment. Most unusual bottles come with brittle, porous, tapered corks. They are pretty much useless for actually sealing bottles. Beyond the obvious hazards of stiff, brittle and porous material, the tapering angle is probably the most serious concern. What makes wine corks good is that they're cylindrical - straight from top to bottom. Compress a cork into the neck of a bottle, and it's an inch and a half of solid seal, in complete contact with the glass. If there's a bubble, a warp, or a crease 1/4" down the neck, it's still sealed for the remaining inch. Even if there are many slight imperfections, as long as they don't form a continuous chain, you're still sealed. But tapered corks really only grab the neck at a line, or at best a narrow ring. If there's an imperfection in that narrow band, you're sunk.
As an aside, I occasionally see, and use, "Grolsch"-style bottles - bottles with a rubber ring and latch much like the jars I use for steeping. Although you might think these would be just as good as their jars, they seldom seal as tightly as jars. I find they leak - faster than good corks, slower than bad. They'll last fine for months at a time, but they're no good for serious, long-term storage.
Bottles
It's worth saying, of course, that any container is fine for short-term storage. If you're bringing it to a party to be consumed that night, you can pour it in an open-air bucket. But if you want to store it for two or three years, get the best storage containers you can. I could say it's worth the investment, but good wine bottles are actually considerably cheaper than fancy bottles. So think about how the liqueur is going to be treated when you're selecting bottles. I usually go for a mix of fancy but unreliable bottles and boring but solid ones, with the expectation that the fancy bottles are going to parties that year, and the boring ones are to be kept in personal liquor cabinets.
Handling
The proper way of handling corks, I've been told, is to stand the bottle upright for a few days to let the pressure equalize a little, and then set the bottle on its side. Leave it there until you're ready to open it. If you get slight leakage, wipe it off and leave it - it's just the higher-pressure environment inside the neck trying to equalize a little more. It'll finish. Actually, my SO and I joke that we prefer to bottle in a rainstorm - the air pressure is lower then, so we'll get less leakage in the long run.
Other than cork husbandry, keep your liqueurs in a cool, dark and relatively dry place. Heat and light can both cause oxidation-like effects even without the air, so if you shelter your liqueurs you will have them longer. Dryness keeps things like mold and mildew from forming on the outside of your corks. This may be just unsightly, but that can put a lot of people off their palates thinking about it. And it's always possible that the mold can degrade the cork and cause it to fail.
Some people suggest using what are called capsules on the necks of your bottles. These are wax (or foil) caps that sit on the neck of the bottle. At first, you might think these are great to keep off the occasional mold spore, and even a way to supplement the effectiveness of corks. But wax is awfully porous. Porous enough that it won't help at all against oxidation, and over a few years it won't even keep the molds out. If you want to use wax capsules, put them on last, right before you present the bottle to its recipients.
Life Expectancy
I freely admit I may be wrong, and maybe it's all a matter of how good your bottles are, but my experience hasn't been great for long-term handling. Then again, I am lazy...
My general rule of thumb is: if the bottle is never opened, expect three years out of it. If it's opened once, or seldomly, expect a year or so. If it's opened lots, expect that you'll finish it soon anyway. There is so much fresh oxygen hitting it that it will be bad in a couple of months, so you may as well drink it while you can.
But commercial liqueurs can last considerably longer. They have commercial preservatives and antioxidants to use. They've got a vested interest in increasing the life expectancy of their brews, and the financial wherewithal to make it work. So if you're here wondering whether your 40-year-old Benedictine is still good, I would bet it is. And since you're not going to poison yourself by trying, I would recommend just opening it up and seeing.
There is a second class of liqueurs that bears some consideration - cream liqueurs and egg liqueurs. Despite alcohol's great disinfectant properties, every liqueur book I've ever read cautions people against trying to keep cream or egg liqueurs for more than a few weeks to a month, and then only in the refrigerator. I'm forced to make the same recommendation. Even with the alcohol, treat it like fresh milk or fresh eggs. If you would throw out milk that had been in your fridge for that long, you should throw out your liqueurs. So these should be made immediately before they are to be consumed. It is perhaps possible to keep cream liqueurs longer, but in order to experimentally determine how long they can last, I would be required to, on at least one occasion, consume spoiled cream or egg liqueur. And that I have no strong urge to do.
Again, commercial liqueurs last considerably longer. Eierlikör and Bailey's Irish Cream both have much longer shelf life than four weeks. But it is because they know what they're doing that they can get long shelf lives. As long as we're just puttering in our kitchens, we should be a good bit more careful.So hi there guys! I hope you are fine. So what is in this post? Today we will be writing a cleanup script. The idea for this post came from Mike Driscol who recently wrote a very useful post about writing a cleanup script in python. So how is my post different from his post? In my post I will be using path.py. When I used path.py for the first time I just fell in love with it.
Installing path.py:
So there are several ways for installing path.py. Path.py may be installed using setuptools or distribute or pip:
easy_install path.py
The latest release is always updated to the Python Package Index. The source code is hosted on Github.
Finding the number of files in a directory:
So our first task is to find the number of files present in a directory. In this example we will not iterate over subdirectories instead we will just count the number of files present in the top level directory. This one is simple. Here is my solution:
from path import path d = path(DIRECTORY) #Replace DIRECTORY with your required directory num_files = len(d.files()) print num_files
In this script we first of all imported the path module. Then we set the num_file variable to 0. This variable is going to keep count for the number of files in our directory. Then we call the path function with a directory name. Firthermore we iterate over the files present in the root of our directory and increment the num_files variable. Finally we print the value of num_files variable. Here is a litle bit modified version of this script which outputs the number of subdirectories present in the root of our directory.
from path import path d = path(DIRECTORY) #Replace DIRECTORY with your required directory num_dirs = len(d.dirs()) print num_dirs
Finding the number of files recursively in a directory:
That was easy! Wasn’t it? So now our work is to find the number of files recursively in a directory. In order to acomplish this task we are given the walk() method by path.py. This is the same as os.walk(). So lets write a simple script for recursively listing all files in a directory and its subdirectories in Python.
from path import path file_count = 0 dir_count = 0 total = 0 d = path(DIRECTORY) #Replace DIRECTORY with your required directory for i in d.walk(): if i.isfile(): file_count += 1 elif i.isdir(): dir_count += 1 else: pass total += 1 print "Total number of files == {0}".format(file_count) print "Total number of directories == {0}".format(dir_count)
That was again very easy. Now what if we want to pretty print the directory names? I know there are some terminal one-liners but here we are talking about Python only. Lets see how we can achieve that.
files_loc = {} file_count = 0 dir_count = 0 total = 0 for i in d.walk(): if i.isfile(): if i.dirname().basename() in files_loc: files_loc[i.dirname().basename()].append(i.basename()) else: files_loc[i.dirname().basename()] = [] files_loc[i.dirname().basename()].append(i.basename()) file_count += 1 elif i.isdir(): dir_count += 1 else: pass total += 1 for i in files_loc: print "|---"+i for i in files_loc[i]: print "| |" print "| `---"+i print "|"
There is nothing fancy here. In this script we are just pretty printing a directory and the files it contains. Now lets continue.
Deleting a specific file from a directory:
So lets suppose we have a file called this_file_sucks.py. Now how do we delete it. Let’s make this scenario more real by saying that we do not know in which directory it is placed. Its simple to solve this problem as well. Just go to the top level directory and execute this script:
from path import path d = path(DIRECTORY) #replace directory with your desired directory for i in d.walk(): if i.isfile(): if i.name == 'php.py': i.remove()
In the above script I did not implement any logging and error handling. That is left as an exercise for the reader.
Deleting files based on their extension
Just suppose you want to remove all the ‘.pyc’ files from the directory. How would you go about dealing with this problem. Here is a solution which I came up with in path.py.
from path import path d = path(DIRECTORY) files = d.walkfiles("*.pyc") for file in files: file.remove() print "Removed {} file".format(file)
This will also print the name of the file which is deleted.
Deleting files based on their size:
So another interesting scenario. What if we want to delete those files which exceed 5Mb size?
NOTE: There is a difference between Mb and MB. I will be covering Mb here.
Is it possible with path.py? Yes it is! So here is a script which does this work:
d = path('./') del_size = 4522420 for i in d.walk(): if i.isfile(): if i.size > del_size: #4522420 is approximately equal to 4.1Mb #Change it to your desired size i.remove()
So we saw how we can remove files based on their size.
Deleting files based on their last access time
In this part we will take a look on how to delete files based on their last access time. I have written the code below to achieve this target. Just change the number of days to anything you like. This script will remove the files which were last modified before the DAYS variable.
from path import path import time #Change the DAYS to your liking DAYS = 6 removed = 0 d = path(DIRECTORY) #Replace DIRECTORY with your required directory time_in_secs = time.time() - (DAYS * 24 * 60 * 60) for i in d.walk(): if i.isfile(): if i.mtime <= time_in_secs: i.remove() removed += 1 print removed
So we have also learned how to remove files based on their last modified time. If you want to delete files based on last access time just change i.mtime to i.atime and you will be good to go.
Goodbye
So that was it. I hope you liked the post. In the end I would like to make a public apology that my English is not good so you may find some grammar mistakes. You are requested to email them to me so that I can improve my English. If you liked this post then don’t forget to follow me on twitter and facebook. A retweet won’t hurt either! If you want to send me a pm then use this email.Press release
Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Calif. (Oct. 29) — After more than a week of searching for hiker Robert “Bob” Woodie, the mission has been put on hold due to a series of incoming winter storms forecasted for over the next week.
All search teams were taken out of the field Wednesday afternoon in anticipation of the significant weather event, which was forecasted to bring two to three feet of snow at elevations above 8,000 feet and high winds, with gusts up to 75 mph.
“We’ve completed very thorough ground and aerial searches in very difficult terrain over the last nine days, but the storms would put our search teams at risk and decrease our ability to find clues,” explained Rich Browne, incident commander for the search. “When it clears, we’ll reassess, but it does look like weather and snow coverage will end our ability to continue active ground and aerial search operations.”
The suspension of an active field search moves the operation into what is called “limited continuous,” which may include air searches, backcountry patrols, and outreach to hikers heading into the area. The operation will be upgraded to an active search if any leads about or whereabouts of Mr. Woodie are discovered. Additionally, the Incident Management Team continues to evaluate data collected by field teams while investigators continue to follow up on leads.
The itinerary for Mr. Woodie, a 74-year-old resident of Manhattan Beach, CA, was a four-day backpacking and fishing trip between Thursday, October 13 and Sunday, October 16. An experienced hiker who knew the area, he parked his vehicle at the South Lake trailhead in Inyo National Forest and hiked over Bishop Pass into Kings Canyon National Park. An “OK” check-in message was sent from his satellite GPS device on Saturday evening from the Barrett Lakes area. A winter storm that night and next day brought very high winds, overnight temperatures to below freezing, and snow to some areas above 10,500 feet. When Mr. Woodie did not return from his trip, his family notified authorities.
The National Park Service continues to ask the public to contact officials at 559-565-3195 if they were in the search area between Thursday, October 13 and Thursday, October 20. The 26-square-mile search area within Kings Canyon National Park consists of Bishop Pass, Dusy Basin, Barrett Lakes, and the John Muir Trail/Pacific Crest Trail between Muir Pass and Mather Pass. The area is a high sierra alpine environment, between approximately 8,000 and 12,000 feet elevation. The rugged terrain includes areas of forest, alpine lakes, and areas above tree line with talus slopes and rocky mountain passes.
Over 130 personnel have worked on this multi-agency operation within Kings Canyon National Park. They include Yosemite National Park (YOSAR, including YODOGS, and Helicopter 551), L.A. County Sheriff’s Department (with Sierra Madre Search and Rescue), and Fresno County Sheriff’s Department, San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department, California Office of Emergency Services, China Lake Search and Rescue, National Weather Service’s Hanford field office, USGS, and U.S. Forest Service.Thomas Francis "Tom" Neale (6 November 1902 – 27 November 1977) was a New Zealand bushcraft and survival enthusiast. He spent much of his life in the Cook Islands, and a total of 16 years – in three sessions – living alone on the island of Anchorage in the Suwarrow atoll, which was the basis of his popular autobiography An Island To Oneself.
Early life [ edit ]
Thomas Francis Neale was born in Wellington, New Zealand, but his family moved to Greymouth while he was still a baby, and then to Timaru when he was seven years old. His parents were Frank Frederick Neale and Emma Sarah Neale (née Chapman). He joined the Royal New Zealand Navy as a young man, but at 18 was too old to become an apprentice seaman, and signed on as an apprentice engineer instead. For the next four years, Neale travelled through the Pacific Islands on Navy ships, before buying his way out of the Navy to have greater freedom to see the islands independently. He spent the next six years wandering from island to island, taking short term jobs on inter-island trade ships, clearing bush or planting bananas.
After a few months back in Timaru in 1928, Neale returned to the Pacific and settled in Moorea, Tahiti, where he lived until 1943, supporting himself with odd jobs and enjoying a private life. He was then offered a job as a relieving storekeeper in the Cook Islands, running small shops in various islands while their normal keepers were on leave. As storekeeper he was also an advisor to the local communities. He met with author Robert Dean Frisbie in Rarotonga, and was entranced by his tales of the atoll of Suwarrow, where Frisbie had lived briefly. In 1945, Neale had the opportunity to visit Suwarrow briefly when a ship dropped in stores for the World War II coast-watchers living there. He decided that this was the place he wanted to live.
First stay on Suwarrow [ edit ]
In October 1952 he had an opportunity to book a passage on a ship passing close to Suwarrow, uninhabited since the end of the war.[1] The boat dropped him off with two cats and all the supplies he could scrape together, on the islet of Anchorage, about a mile long and a few hundred feet wide. A hut with water tanks, some books, and a badly damaged boat remained from the habitation by the coast-watchers. They had also left wild pigs and chickens on the atoll. The pigs were a liability as they destroyed vegetation and made planting a garden impossible; Neale built a hunting stand in a tree and speared the pigs over the course of several months. He planted a garden, domesticated the chickens, and repaired the boat. For the most part he lived on fish, crayfish, chicken, eggs, paw-paw, coconut, and breadfruit.
Ten months after arriving at Suwarrow, Neale had his first visitors: two couples on a yacht, who had been advised of Neale's existence by the British Consul in Tahiti and asked to call in to check up on him. They stayed a couple of nights. The visitors gave Neale a new plan: to rebuild the pier which had been built on Anchorage during the Second World War, but which had been wrecked during a hurricane in 1942. It took six months of intermittent hard labour. A day after he completed the project, a major storm hit the islet destroying the pier.
According to his autobiography, in May 1954, Neale injured his back throwing the anchor from his boat. He returned to his hut on the opposite side of the atoll with difficulty, and lay semi-paralysed for four days. A couple on a yacht arrived at the atoll not knowing of his existence, discovered him in pain, and were able to nurse him back to health. They notified the Cook Islands government, who sent a ship which took him back two weeks later. However, according to biographers A. H. Helm and W. H. Percival Neale returned to Rarotonga in July 1954. The problem with his back occurred a couple of months after he went back to Suwarrow in 1956. Although Neale thought at the time his back problem was a slipped disc, it was actually arthritis.[2]
Second stay [ edit ]
Neale wished to return to Suwarrow once his back was fully healed, but the government did not want the responsibility for him. He married Sarah Haua (born c. 1924) on 15 June 1956. They had two children, Arthur and Stella.[3]
In March–April 1960 he was able to return to the atoll, this time with more carefully chosen and more extensive provisions.[4] During this stay, one of his visitors was by helicopter from a passing American warship; the helicopter could only stay half an hour before the ship was out of range. British author Noel Barber heard of Neale's life on the island from a report by the United States Navy and paid him a visit. Fourteen months later, his next visit was from an old friend from Rarotonga, investigating rumours that Neale had died. Many months later another yacht visited, with a couple and their daughter. A squall hit the lagoon that night, the yacht's anchoring cable parted, and it foundered on a reef. The three lived with Neale for a couple of months, but successfully signalled a passing ship with a mirror, and were rescued.
On December 27, 1963, after three and a half years on the island, Neale voluntarily returned to Rarotonga. This decision was due in part to a group of pearl divers who paid periodic visits to Suwarrow; he had found their presence increasingly hard to tolerate. But the "predominant reason was a very simple one. I realized I was getting on, and the prospect of the lonely death did not particularly appeal to me."[5]
His autobiography An Island to Oneself recounts his life through his second stay on the atoll. It was written with assistance from Barber, who wrote an introduction to it. It sold well and allowed Neale to fund a much greater store of provisions for his next stay.[6]
Third stay and death [ edit ]
In Neale's absence, a number of others visited or took up temporary residence on the island. 1964, June von Donop, a former accountant from Honolulu, lived alone in his house on Suwarrow for a week, while her crewmates on the schooner Europe stayed on board their vessel. In 1965–66 Michael Swift lived alone on Suwarrow, but he was not familiar with survival techniques and had a hard time finding sufficient food. Many other visitors to the island during Neale's absence (one of them Chögyam Trungpa's former student P. Howard Useche) left messages for him.[7]
Neale returned to the atoll in June 1967.[8] He stayed there until 1977, when he was found ill with stomach cancer by a yacht and taken to Rarotonga. After treatment by Milan Brych, he died eight months later. His grave is in the RSA cemetery on Rarotonga, opposite the airport.
References [ edit ]
General
Specific
^ Helm and Percival, p 92 ^ Helm and Percival, pp 94–5 ^ Helm and Percival, pp 95–96 ^ Helm and Percival, p 96 ^ ″An Island to Oneself″ Tom Neale, p255 ^ Helm and Percival, p 99 ^ Helm and Percival, pp 63, 100, 105 ^ Helm and Percival, p 99Taking a page from their United States counterparts, European Union trade negotiators apparently interpret the word “consultation” as a synonym for “ignore.” Fresh evidence for this attitude toward the public was provided thanks to a leak of the final text of the proposed “free trade” agreement between Canada and the EU.
Although the E.U. trade office, the European Commission Directorate General for Trade, promotes a process of public consultation on its web site, it isn’t the public who gets listened to. The final text of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) includes language mirroring corporate wish lists unchanged from previous drafts despite the fact that the E.U. trade office has not had time to analyze comments submitted by the public.
This farce of a “consultation” process mirrors the secretive negotiations in the better known Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic trade agreements. Corporate lobbyists are well represented in these talks, but the public, watchdog groups and even parliamentarians and legislators are barred from seeing the text. The CETA text is also secret, but was leaked by the German television news program Tagesschau, which published the entire 521-page document on its web site. Yep, 521 pages.
Critical to understanding the CETA text is Section 33, the portion simply labeled “dispute settlement.” Under that bland heading a reader finds the muscle — what is known as an “investor-state dispute mechanism.” These “mechanisms,” found in many bilateral and multilateral trade deals, are corporate-dominated secret tribunals that hand down one-sided decisions with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. Governments that agree to these mechanisms legally bind themselves to mandatory arbitration with “investors” in these secret tribunals on which most of the judges are corporate lawyers who represent the “investors” in other legal proceedings.
Kenneth Haar, a spokesman for the watchdog group Corporate Europe Observatory, in an interview with the EurActiv news site, called the dispute mechanism “an outright danger to democracy,” and said:
“The Commission is not really serious about its own consultation. It’s more about image than substance. … I think those who chose to respond to the Commission’s consultation are being ridiculed.”
Decisions will be final and unaccountable
Employing the standard sweeping language, CETA’s Article 14.2 (the articles here are numbered “14” even though they are found in Section 33) states: “[T]his Chapter applies to any dispute concerning the interpretation or application of the provisions of this Agreement” [page 472]. Article 14.10 goes on to declare, “The ruling of the arbitration panel shall be binding on the Parties. … The panel shall interpret the provisions referred to in Article 14.2 in accordance with customary rules of interpretation of public international law” [page 476].
“Customary” international law is whatever one of these secret tribunals says it is. Environmental regulations, “buy local” laws or any other government action that a corporation claims will hurt its profits can be, and frequently are, ruled illegal by these tribunals when adjudicating disputes under existing trade agreements. Such rulings set precedents that become “customary” international law.
In case these “customary” laws are not clear, on page 480 of the CETA text is Article 14.16, which would supersede national law:
“No Party may provide for a right of action under its domestic law against the other Party on the ground that a measure of the other Party is inconsistent with this Agreement.”
Your law was passed in a democratic process? Too bad — it will be overruled if an “investor” doesn’t like it.
CETA’s proposed rules are consistent with what is being secretly negotiated in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the U.S. and E.U., and in the Trans-Pacific Partnership being negotiated among 12 Pacific Rim countries. A majority of the world’s economy would be removed from any possibility of democratic control should these three trade deals come into effect.
The watchdog group Council of Canadians warns:
“The Harper government has thrown Canadian municipalities under the bus, forever banning ‘buy local’ and other sustainable purchasing policies that help create jobs, protect the environment and support local farmers and businesses. The Harper government has also agreed to lengthen patents and give new monopoly protections to already profitable brand name drug companies, which will needlessly add hundreds of millions to the cost of prescription drugs in Canada.”
Not even water would be exempt. If a water system is privatized and a local government chooses to re-municipalize it because rates have risen while service declines (as has routinely occurred on both sides of the Atlantic), the investor would be able to hold out for an extra windfall under the terms of the trade deal.
Only corporate lobbyists need apply
Although the public, and public-interest groups, are not
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Paris will keep Tokyo abreast of developments in the investigation.
Kurosaki, a junior at the University of Tsukuba, was studying at the University of Franche-Comte in Besancon. Before her disappearance, she dined with the Chilean man and the two returned to her dorm afterward.
While no body has been found, French prosecutors have put the man on an international wanted list for murder and other charges. A French official said prosecutors have enough evidence to believe Kurosaki was murdered.Steve Bannon unloads to The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, again—this time on his grand design to blow up the Republican Party and more. Kuttner joins us.
Former White House strategist Steve Bannon speaks at a rally for Roy Moore, Monday, Sept. 25, 2017, in Fairhope, Ala. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
Steve Bannon didn’t talk much to the press when he was inside the White House as Donald Trump’s chief strategist. Now outside, he’s talking. About blowing up the Republican Party. Going after the party establishment. Going to war for his vision of economic nationalism. And one of the people he’s talking to – maybe appealing to - is Robert Kuttner, ardent progressive. Editor. They’ve just talked, again. Kuttner’s with us. This hour, On Point: Steve Bannon, unchained. -- Tom Ashbrook.
Guest
Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. Professor at Brandeis University's Heller School. His latest book is Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. (@rkuttner)
From Tom's Reading List
The American Prospect: Steve Bannon, Unleashed — "Bannon’s current obsession is to blow up Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Senate incumbents whom he regards as hostile to his brand of nationalism. Bannon believes that if Republicans will just embrace populist economic nationalism, they can become a workers’ party and the majority party for decades to come. He’s been on the road, recruiting primary challengers to knock off Republican incumbents—and carry that populist message."
CNN: Steve Bannon Is Looking For Retribution After Alabama Win. And He's Recruiting. — "Fresh off his insurgent candidate's big win in Alabama, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is making clear he is seeking retribution against fellow Republican campaign operatives who work against him. 'The populist movement is going to do a house cleaning of all those individuals that made a living off the conservative grassroots while stabbing them in the back,' a source familiar with Bannon's thinking tells CNN."
HuffPost: Missing In Action: Barack Obama — "But after Obama’s presidency, and the Republican effort to block him at every turn, we were most dis-united than ever. And Trump has made divisiveness the essence of his strategy. So where is that prophetic voice? What is staggeringly disappointing is that Obama has declined to weigh in on the greatest threat to this Republic since the Civil War, not to mention the greatest threat to racial justice. In fairness to Obama, it’s clear that he is reluctant to be a lightning rod for even more racism. But on that front, as on other fronts, Obama’s signal weakness both as president and as post-president has been an excess of caution."AMMAN: For more than four years, Umm Malak has held on to the hope that her husband Hussein is still alive, sitting in a darkened cell somewhere in Syria.
Hussein, then 32, was arrested by Syrian government forces on summer day in 2013 at a checkpoint in southern Damascus. A supermarket employee, he had been providing material support—food and supplies—to opponents of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, his wife says.
The summer day he was arrested, Hussein left his house in the town of Aqraba, southeast of the Syrian capital. He, his wife and their three daughters began living there several weeks prior after fleeing bombardment of the rebel-held al-Hajar al-Aswad district just south of Damascus.
Hussein was heading to the family home in al-Hajar al-Aswad. He kept birds on the roof there, and periodically returned to give them food and water. That day, he planned to set them free. As bombings increased and the security situation in and around the capital deteriorated, he was not sure he would always be able to reach and care for them.
What Umm Malak knows about what happened next—as related to her later by a 15-year-old neighbor who witnessed the arrest—is that a masked man pointed out her husband to state security forces at a checkpoint leading into al-Hajar al-Aswad. The men put Hussein in a car and took him away to an unknown location.
Umm Malak, 36, has received no news of her husband since she learned he was taken.
“My feelings tell me that he is still alive,” she tells Syria Direct from the apartment in Amman that a charity pays for her and her daughters to live in. The family shares the apartment with another Syrian refugee—a widow.
“I’ve searched and searched for him, but come up with nothing,” says Umm Malak. Some people in her situation pay lawyers and government officials for confirmation of whether detained loved ones are alive or dead, but she hasn’t done so.
“It costs a huge amount of money, and there is no guarantee that the answer I received would be true,” she says.
Umm Malak’s friends and acquaintances talk, whispering that after more than four years with no news, it is unlikely that her husband is still alive. But without proof one way or the other, she holds on to hope.
A sign held by demonstrators in south Damascus in October 2016 reads: “Freedom for the Detainees.” Photo courtesy of Revolution Spring and Creative Memory.
For friends and families, disappeared detainees exist in a space between life and death. Prolonged absence forces a difficult choice—assume loved ones to be dead and move on with life, or wait, perhaps for years, in the hope that they are still alive.
For many women—the wives of the disappeared and detained—that choice is particularly fraught. To divorce an absent spouse—even one presumed dead—and remarry can bring accusations of betrayal and abandonment from extended family, in-laws and society. To remain alone and wait may demonstrate loyalty, but also brings increased scrutiny and judgment from society as a single woman or female head of household.
An estimated 92,000 detainees are currently held by Syrian government forces as of this year, according to the UK-based violations monitor Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR). Among them are more than 76,000 victims of enforced disappearance since March 2011, according to an August 2017 SNHR report.
Enforced disappearance, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, is the “arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or give information on the whereabouts of those persons.”
Since Syria is not a member state of the Rome Statute, the country is not within the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction.
What enforced disappearance means in Syria is that more than 76,000 people with lives and hopes and loved ones who were detained—at protests, at checkpoints, in their homes and on the street—have vanished.
The first news following a disappearance may take the form of a phone call from a prison official telling relatives that their loved one is dead, and asking them to come collect their identification documents.
Others eventually find them online, among the thousands of grim photos of the starved, beaten bodies of government detainees smuggled out of Syria in 2014 by a military defector codenamed “Caesar.” Some look through the 28,000 grim images and still come up empty-handed, a bitter relief.
Many times, detainees who knew the person are released and give loved ones the news that their sister, brother, mother, son has died.
But thousands of others still do not know what has happened.
The “ongoing and daily agony” of these family members, according to an August 2016 SNHR report on detainee disappearances, is particularly deep for “wives, mothers and children who bear the greatest burden from an economic and social standpoint.”
Financially, this is because those who disappear may be the sole breadwinner for a family. Socially, the decision made by the wives of the missing to either wait—like Umm Malak—or divorce and remarry, is not just personal, but public, with social consequences.
“I have gone through a lot of suffering and condemnation from society,” says Umm Malak.
The Syrian Organization for the Victims of War displays the ‘Caesar’ pictures documenting torture inside state detention centers. Photo courtesy of Philippe Desmazes/AFP.
The experiences of two women who chose differently—Umm Malak, a single mother of three, and 24-year-old Naela Fayez, who obtained a divorce after hearing news of her husband’s death in prison and remarried—illustrate a few of those consequences.
Together, their stories show some of the challenges faced by the wives of disappeared detainees, whichever path they take: to wait and hope, or divorce and remarry.
‘My right to keep living’
Naela Fayez knows her ex-husband Ali is dead, she says. Neither she nor any member of his family has seen his body—or any trace of him—since he was arrested in 2012 at a government checkpoint in the south Damascus suburb of Babila.
Ali worked in construction and was on his way to work when he was detained and disappeared one morning, says Naela. He had attended local demonstrations against the government of Bashar al-Assad.
After her husband, the family’s sole breadwinner, went missing, Naela and her two young sons moved in with his relatives in Syria’s southern Daraa province. In 2014, with violence increasing and living conditions deteriorating in Syria, she fled with her sons to Jordan.
In 2015, Ali’s family in Daraa received a phone call from the al-Khateeb Branch of the Syrian government's State Security in Damascus. A voice told them to go to the branch and collect Ali’s documents. The family understood from this directive that he was dead, likely killed under torture. No one from the family risked going to collect the papers, fearing a trap.
Naela believes that Ali is dead, but with no body, no proof and no closure, his family refuses to accept that. Stories and rumors of detainees believed to be dead who return years later give them hope.
Even so, one year after that fateful phone call, and four years after her husband went missing, the now 30-year-old mother of two boys went to a sheikh in Jordan who gave her a ruling allowing her to remarry another Syrian—her cousin. She then did.
“In the end, I am a human being,” says Naela. “It is my right to keep living. I will not stay trapped and waiting.”
According to Islamic religious law, which governs the marriages of Sunni Muslims including Naela and Umm Malak, a wife may be granted a divorce if her husband is missing and presumed dead for between two and four years, depending on the school of thought.
The question of how and when a wife may divorce an absent, presumed-dead husband and perhaps remarry is becoming increasingly important as the war continues and the fates of tens of thousands of missing Syrians remain unknown.
Image courtesy of SNHR.
In September 2017, the opposition Syrian Islamic Council, based in Turkey, issued a religious ruling defining procedures for separations and divorces for the wives of husbands who have been missing for a prolonged period.
The fatwa clarified that a woman may ask the court to issue a ruling as to the missing spouse’s death or absence and that she may remarry afterwards. However, should the missing husband return, any marriage in his absence would be annulled.
“If the husband is missing and nothing is known of his whereabouts, as in the case of a detainee, and he is thought most likely to be dead, then the wife must wait four years, then another four-month waiting period,” Abu Bakr, a religious judge in opposition-held Syria told Syria Direct earlier this year. “She may then remarry, without needing the permission of the court.”
The pro-government newspaper Al-Watan reported this past January that some 4,000 requests for separation or divorce had been registered in the state Sharia Court by wives of missing husbands in 2016.
But although Naela’s second marriage was religiously and legally permissible, her ex-husband’s family accused her of disloyalty.
“They attacked me, accused me of betraying him,” she says. “They completely reject my new marriage.”
Prolonged conflict with her former in-laws about her remarriage and what would happen to the children—under Islamic law they were to stay with her, but the family wanted them—sparked problems with Naela’s new husband. Ultimately, he refused to raise her children.
In the end, Naela sent her children to live with their father’s family in Daraa and shortly afterward moved to Egypt with her new husband.
“My heart burns without my children,” she says.
‘No matter how long his absence’
Umm Malak says she will wait as long as it takes for her husband to return. If Hussein is still alive, he is now 36 years old.
“I will wait for my husband no matter how long his absence,” says Umm Malak. “I won’t accept raising my daughters with any man but him. I will not divorce him and become another executioner, while he is suffering terribly under torture.”
But although Umm Malak has not chosen to remarry, she still says she faces intense social pressures and scrutiny.
As a single mother, Umm Malak says she is under a microscope, with community members scrutinizing every choice she makes. As the wife of a disappeared detainee, she is held to a high standard, any change in her life bringing “looks of suspicion and mistrust.”
“I am seen as a broken person, easily taken advantage of,” says Umm Malak, “especially by men.”
Fadel Abdul Ghany, the chairman of SNHR, emphasized the social impact of enforced disappearances on those left behind in the monitor’s August 2017 report.
“The mental, physical and emotional toll [that disappearance cases] have on the victims and their families make this crime a form of collective punishment against the community,” wrote Fadel Abdul Ghany.
As the years drag on, life continues. In Egypt, Naela lives with her new husband. In Jordan, Umm Malak raises her daughters as best she can under the gaze of prying, judging eyes.
Hanging over it all, Hussein’s absence is a deafening silence, an unfinished story about a country on fire and a man who left home to free his birds and disappeared into a void.
“My life is a prison of waiting,” she says.It was a historic election for the Libertarian Party -- at least, by Libertarian Party standards.
So at what point does this become a problem for the GOP?
Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson took about 1 percent of the vote, winning more raw votes than any Libertarian candidate ever has (about 1.2 million).
A Ron Paul supporter at the Republican National Convention. (AP photo)
Johnson fell shy of the previous Libertarian record of 1.06 percent of the vote (the record belongs to 1980 nominee Ed Clark). But he did take at least twice as much of the vote as any Libertarian candidate since Clark -- including Ron Paul 1988 -- and he got more than 1 percent in most of the swing states.
On the Senate front, Libertarian candidates pulled around 6 percent of the vote in two key contests in Montana and Indiana -- the party's best showings in three-way Senate races in at least the last decade, according to a Fix review.
And as Daily Kos Elections' David Nir notes, in those two races and seven others, the Libertarian candidate's share of the vote was actually bigger than the victorious Democrat's margin of victory.
The suggestion some make, of course, is that these Libertarian candidates can -- and in some cases might have already -- cost Republicans winnable seats by siphoning off GOP votes.
This theory is feasible but impossible to prove. And it's too easy to say that all or most Libertarians would back Republicans without that third option. (Some may lean more toward Democrats because of social issues, while others might simply stay home.)
But what we do know is that more and more people are voting Libertarian, and it's quite possible that many or most of them would otherwise vote Republican. While we can't prove it empirically, it makes logical sense.
For one thing, the libertarian philosophy is more closely associated with conservatism -- there's a reason the biggest libertarian figures in recent years (Paul and Johnson) have come from the GOP -- so it's logical to assume that there's quite a bit of crossover between the two.
In addition, Paul's surprising impact on the presidential campaign should serve notice that there are plenty of people in America (and plenty of Republicans, more specifically) who are ready to embrace libertarian politics under the right circumstances. Can you imagine how much of the vote Paul would have taken if he had run as a Libertarian rather than Johnson?
That's a big reason why the GOP worked so hard to bring Paul into the fold. If you're losing voters -- no matter how many -- it's concerning. And in close races, a third party candidate can change the outcome of an election by taking just a few percentage points.
The question from here is whether the Libertarian Party continues to be an occasional nuisance, or whether it continues to build on its nascent progress and becomes a real headache for the Republican Party.
Given the GOP's ongoing problems with its brand, it's not hard to see voters continuing to desert that brand and pick an increasingly valid third-party option.
Romney donors annoyed with Christie: Two weeks after Election Day, the decision by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to tour damage caused by Hurricane Sandy alongside President Obama is still receiving attention. The New York Times reports there is lingering bitterness among some top Romney donors about Christie's decision to appear with Obama in the aftermath of the storm. One top Romney aide described the contributors as “furious."
If the negativity is a temporary byproduct of frustration at Romney's loss, then the story line will likely fade over time. But if the bad blood lingers and some top GOP donors continue to find themselves at odds with one of the party's brightest stars, it would represent an ill-timed headache for a Republican Party that is trying to recover from its 2012 losses.
Fixbits:
Vice President Biden celebrated an early Thanksgiving with wounded soldiers and their families.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) clarified his previous remarks about Pitbull, saying the rapper "makes party music not message music. Always been place for that in #HipHop.As he gets older he will have more 2 say about life."
House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sees a possible split between President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on a "fiscal cliff" framework.
The DNC and RNC communications directors will shave their heads for charity on Sunday.
A former Romney economic adviser calls for raising more tax revenue.
Nate Silver, meet Sophia McCrimmon.
A new twist in an election decided by one vote.
Must-reads:
"Conservative Republicans fight back after Romney loss" -- Paul Kane and Rosalind S. Helderman, Washington Post
"For Obama and Clinton, Their Final Tour as Partners" -- Peter Baker, New York Times
"Gaza conflict threatens Obama's plans for Mideast diplomacy" -- Paul Richter, Los Angeles TimesMy main job is smuggling weapons from Iraq to fighters in Syria. I’m with the Deraa al-Ahrar - one of 15 brigades affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood's Command in Syria.
We cross the border to Iraq every 15 days or so, to get weapons for our fighters all over Syria, especially in Aleppo, Hama and Deir Ezzour.
Me and about 25 other fighters will drive hundreds of kilometres across the desert to Iraq. We have to cross the border only when it is completely dark.
Typically we have wait in the desert for 10 days for the weapons to come. For every trip to Iraq we spend at least $120,000 on weapons.
We can buy a Kalashnikovs for $9,000 in Iraq - inside Syria they costs more than $14,000 each. You can get rifles in Iraq for $600 - they cost $900 in Syria.
If you are caught with 100 weapons by fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq (or the al-Qaida in Iraq - AQI) they will confiscate 10 guns for themselves before they let you cross the border to Syria.
We have tried to buy weapons from AQI but they only sell to Jabhat al-Nusra - because they share the same ideology. The other day they sold them 200 pickups. They consider the Muslims Brotherhood a secular organisation.
To smuggle Kalashinkovs, you have to dismantle them into two parts, otherwise they will be seized.
When we get the weapons we want, we travel back in convoy of about 10 cars at the middle of the night. Two cars loaded with weapons will be in the middle of the convoy - escorted by other four cars to the front and rear.
Before it was so complicated to smuggle the weapons. But now that so many areas of Syria have been liberated, it has become much easier.
We want to smuggle anti aircraft weapons like Stingers and Strelas, but Iraqi smugglers charge us too much. They are also buried underground, so the smugglers can't guarantee they will work. We can’t risk wasting our money.
When we buy the Kalashnikovs, we have the chance to check them, but you can’t do that anti-aircraft guns.
Most of the weapons we buy have already been used. The smugglers say they get them from Ramadi and Diyla and from the north of Iraq.
Sometimes we travel to the north of Iraq to buy brand new weapons.
We get money from Muslim Brotherhood branches in Syria and donations from its supporters. I can’t say which countries they get the money from.This certainly puts a damper on the opening preseason Chicago Bears victory in front of the home crowd at Soldier Field.
Just when many Bears' fans were reflecting on the win against the Miami Dolphins, Brad Biggs tweets out some bad news.
No sign of #Bears WR Alshon Jeffery and I'm told he was in a walking boot before the game. We will see if John Fox gives details. — Brad Biggs (@BradBiggs) August 14, 2015
When head coach John Fox met the media after the game he revealed that Jeffery strained his calf at practice and is "day to day." The walking boot and crutches could just be precautionary, but with the secretive way the Bears now talk about injuries, it's anybody's guess.
Jeffery will get treatment in Bourbonnais when the Bears head back to training camp, but his status for the joint practices against the Indianapolis Colts next week is in doubt.ESPN's Rick Reilly - a Colorado native - is the last person who should be opining on Tiger Woods' personal and professional life. And yet he's doing it endlessly anyway. It's time for Rick Reilly to shut up.
I should probably be skewering the Nuggets for dropping a fourth road game against a sub-.500 opponent rather than take on a columnist who rarely covers the NBA. But after reading Rick Reilly’s pompous, unrealistic, holier-than-thou, how-to-fix-your-marriage column directed at Tiger Woods on ESPN.com yesterday, I’ve finally had enough of this Reilly high-horse nonsense that's been going on since Woods crashed his SUV into a fire hydrant two weeks ago. For whatever reason, Reilly has become the self-appointed arbiter on all things in regards to Woods’ – shall we say complicated – married life, and I've been getting progressively more enraged with each Reilly appearance on the subject. You see, not only is Rick Reilly one of the last people who should be publicly advising Tiger on his marital problems (more on that shortly), but all of Reilly’s advice, notably what was written in his latest column, is dead wrong.
Before diving into my rebuttal of Reilly’s farce of a column (titled "An image-rehab plan for Tiger Woods"), let me first state that I have no connection to Tiger Woods whatsoever, nor do I claim to know Rick Reilly personally. However, since the Denver sports and social scene is relatively small, I’ve met Reilly a few times over the years. Being a longtime admirer of his work, a fellow Coloradoan and a syndicated cartoonist, sports animation producer and Nuggets blogger, I figured Reilly might be interested in talking to me the few times we’ve met. But instead, each time I’ve introduced myself it’s been painfully obvious that Reilly – who’s nice for the first 30 seconds you talk to him and then basically ignores you while you stand there – can’t wait for the conversation to end. When we last ran into each other, during a Nuggets playoff game, I attempted to congratulate Reilly on joining forces with Bill Simmons at ESPN.com (I’m a huge Simmons fan) just to see what kind of reaction I’d get. Reilly couldn’t help himself and cracked on Simmons by saying something like: "I don’t know how that guy has the time to write so much. I guess it helps when you just sit around the house watching TV all day." This was typical old media smugness and condescension from Reilly that we bloggers have heard from him before.
So do I like Reilly personally? No, not really. But I respect what he’s done with his career and commend his charitable work (I even donated to Nothing But Nets after seeing Reilly advocate for it on "The Colbert Report").
Maybe my personal thoughts on Reilly color my professional view of him in an unfairly negative way, but from my vantage point he’s completely out of line and hypocritical when it comes to legislating how Tiger Woods should move forward from his infidelity debacle. After all, Reilly, himself a father of three, is on to marriage number two and those of us who live in Denver or spend a lot of time there certainly know he took full advantage of his D-List (or is it E-List?) celebrity status after his own divorce in 2003. Like any of us would do after divorcing our wife of 20 years, Reilly was routinely seen with girls substantially younger than himself before remarrying in 2008. Like most guys who stupidly marry too young – as Reilly did at 25 years old – I’m assuming Reilly had to "sew the royal oats" before settling down again. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that and I bet he had a hell of a lot of fun doing it.
Given all this, why of all people is Rick Reilly publicly telling Tiger Woods how to live his life? Making Reilly's arguments even less credible, not once in his column does he refer to his own past shortcomings as a husband and father. And yet Reilly has the audacity to claim that Tiger has "lost his mind." Lost his mind? Really, Rick?
Moreover, in the column – as if stolen right out of a chick lit fantasy tale – Reilly preposterously proposes, among other things, that Tiger beg for forgiveness on Oprah, skip the Masters (!) and possibly the U.S. Open (!!), spend 24 hours a day on his marriage (that sounds fun), fire his caddy, fire his agent and get some "new friends."
Are you @#$% kidding me, Rick?
Not that Tiger needs my advice either, but never one to complain without offering solutions, here’s what the world's most recognizable athlete should do: get divorced, surround himself with his closest friends, keep caddy Steve Williams as close by as possible, avoid the press (especially hypocrites like Reilly), play hours upon hours of golf and start winning tournaments again.
That’s it.
And while Tiger goes back to work, the Rick Reilly's of the world should join the rest of us in reality and acknowledge that marriage is no longer a viable lifestyle choice for the modern day professional athlete – especially for someone with Tiger’s remarkably high level of visibility. Unless they’re in the Kurt Warner camp whose fear of retribution from Jesus for stepping outside their marriage is bigger than their fear of TMZ, marriage doesn't work for even the average pro star.
Beyond the embarrassment of getting caught fooling around and the lives around you being temporarily humiliated in the process (note I didn’t use the words "permanently" or "ruin"), marriage isn’t even practical for pro athletes on a business level anymore. In the old days, an athlete had to get married to improve his image with sponsors and then fooled around on the side while the press protected him. These days, not only don’t they need marriage for the sake of their sponsors (how many endorsements has Derek Jeter lost out on by being single all these years?), but by getting married they’re setting themselves up to fail as everyone is the media now and outing celebrities is the cheap path to boosting web traffic. I guarantee when the news of Woods’ various affairs came out every athlete north of 40 years old from Michael Jordan to Arnold Palmer thought: "Phew! Thank god the internet wasn’t around when I was at the top of my game! (wink, wink)." And yet Reilly adamantly insists that Tiger go back to the marriage well? What is this; the 1950s, Rick?
This isn’t to suggest that I condone what happened with Tiger (lying is lying, regardless of whom you’re lying to) or that I don’t feel bad for Elin Woods and their two kids, because I feel awful for them. I come from a divorced home and know it’s not easy (and my parents marital problems certainly weren’t on the cover of every trashy women's magazine at the grocery store checkout line...sorry, girls, but it's your magazines that are turning this non-story into a national outrage). So whatever Elin is owed based on their prenuptial agreement, Tiger should triple it – maybe even quadruple it – for the painful public embarrassment he caused her and her family and for lying to her. But if Tiger really does care for her and love her, money’s not enough: he should let her go free rather than commence the Reilly-endorsed charade of saving the marriage through counseling, groveling and skipping golf tournaments. At this point, all that stuff just takes valuable time away from the driving range. Time Tiger will need to win all four majors next year as part of his "Fuck You" tour.
Like many celebrities – Rick Reilly included – Tiger did something really fundamentally stupid long before he cheated on his wife: he got married too young. Clearly Tiger, still a young man, wasn’t ready to stay within the boundaries of the marriage he and Elin agreed upon (some celebrities have open marriages; I suspect this wasn’t one of them). But rather than double-down on stupid by attempting to salvage his marriage only to get caught again (and he will get caught again), Tiger should do the right thing, ignore everything Rick Reilly and other would-be marriage counselors in the media are suggesting and BE SINGLE.
Besides, women dig single dads. Just ask Rick Reilly.Manitoba Moose sign Jansen Harkins to an amateur tryout agreement
The Moose made another move today adding Jansen Harkins, a 2nd round pick of Winnipeg in 2015 (47th overall) to the roster.
And clearly the prospect is excited tweeting:
Off to Peg! Excited for the experience! It will be fun!! #legoo #tooexcited — Jansen Harkins (@JansenHarks26) April 2, 2016
Moose Release:
The Manitoba Moose hockey club announced today that they have signed forward Jansen Harkins to an amateur tryout agreement.
Harkins, 18, registered 24 goals and 33 assists for 57 points in 69 games for the Prince George Cougars of the WHL this season. He also had two goals and two assists for four points in four playoff games.
The native of North Vancouver, BC has recorded 54 goals and 116 assists for 170 points in 211 career games in the WHL.
He was selected by the Winnipeg Jets in the second round, 47th overall in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft.
The Moose open up a two-game series against the Milwaukee Admirals on Tuesday, Apr. 5 at the MTS Centre at 7 p.m.Yesterday, I wrote about a new peer-reviewed paper from inventor Nathan Myhrvold and climate scientist Ken Caldeira. It found that, if there is to be any hope of staying in the zone of climate safety (or at least semi-safety), the transition to carbon-free energy must begin immediately and cannot include any merely “low carbon” sources like natural gas.
I sent Myhrvold a few follow-up questions. Here are his responses, lightly edited.
Q. Back when you were quoted in SuperFreakonomics, you seemed skeptical, if not contemptuous, toward the “immediate and precipitous anti-carbon initiatives” pushed by climate activists. But your paper seems to suggest that only such initiatives have any hope at all of keeping us in the zone of climate safety. Have you changed your mind about the need for immediate action? And/or the wisdom of activists?
A. Yes and no.
First, while I love the SuperFreakonomics book, it wasn’t my book and was never intended to fully represent my views on a complicated topic like this.
One thing we wanted to point out is how hard the problem is. There are many advocates who say that it will be easy to switch to a low-greenhouse-gas energy solution. They have a great “can do” attitude, but their schemes are hopelessly flawed. To beat one dead horse, that little book 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth — well, it’s at best wishful thinking and at worse deeply disingenuous. Those “simple things” are not going to save us. At most they can let you foolishly think you are actually accomplishing something when you are not.
There are many more serious proposals to move to wind or solar energy — the so called “Pickens Plan,” for example, or a bunch of other people’s supposed “plans” to convert to solar or wind power — that simply don’t add up. I am contemptuous of “plans” that are not real and which at best fool people into thinking the problem is easy.
There is another set of people who have proposals that might work, but they are so draconian that no politician is going to implement them, and if they did, the population would revolt. Banning all new fossil fuel plants would surely help — try doing that. It is not realistic to think that you can get the world to change overnight. That is one reason why our paper models transitions lasting from one year (clearly an impossible lower bound) to 100 years (which is very slow).
The most galling examples are people who argue against researching geoengineering on the basis that we already know how to solve the climate problem. To them, the climate problem is a done deal, we just haven’t implemented yet. I think that is just absurd, but you see smart people make this argument.
There is a great quote attributed to Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Unfortunately, the clean-energy debate rarely avoids dipping into the “simpler” territory.
Q. More broadly, what do you see as the policy implications of your work? Is it, “We need to mobilize on the scale of WWII and build out clean power?” Or is it, “There’s no way to do this, so we need to spend money on adaptation and researching geoengineering?” Or some mix?
A. Some mix.
We need to invent new energy technologies. As one example, we can’t store energy worth a damn at the moment. Well, with pumped hydro we can store it in a dam, but only if we are lucky with geography. Without storage, wind and solar are very difficult to fully utilize.
We need higher efficiency in solar. We need new kinds of nuclear technology (I am working on this myself). We need lower cost for all of these things. It would be nice if carbon capture and sequestration would work — unclear how well it does, since it has never been tried at scale.
So there is a lot of energy invention to do.
I think we also need to investigate geoengineering. Right now, 2012 will have higher CO2 than 2011. Does anybody believe we are doing the things now so that 2013 or 2014 will be less than 2012? We are not over the hump yet, and until we are, I think that we need to understand that set of options — they may be real, they may not be, but it would be inexcusably irresponsible not to understand them.
We probably also need to investigate adaptation to a warmer world.
Q. Your finding with regard to natural gas flies directly in the face of enthusiasm (even among some greens) about fracking and the “100 year supply” of natural gas found in the U.S. Is the conclusion that natural gas can’t be a part of a clean energy solution at all? And have you heard from any of natural gas’s many fans, pushing back on your conclusion?
A. Natural gas is definitely cheap. It is definitely in big supply (100+ years). Those are true, and we don’t dispute them.
Prior to our study, nobody had looked in detail at the climate impact of converting to natural gas. People relied instead on the intuitive idea that emissions were “half of coal.” But climate change is nonlinear. It turns out that cutting by half is nowhere near enough to have an impact this century. In fact, it may take 200 years to get a measurable impact.
People are surprised by this and some people have pushed back, saying, “how can this be so?” Well, the detailed answer is all of our equations, but the simple answer is that due to the time lags in the system, you can’t get a near-term benefit until the emissions cut back is dramatic — like 10X.
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The value of work like we have done is precisely that it highlights counterintuitive results. Those results may not fit with somebody’s first guess, or to the gas industry’s entrenched position. It is unfortunate that gas does not help, but that is where the science leads us.
One can try CCS with gas (our CCS cases include both coal and natural gas-based CCS), but even there you need to be careful, because the LCA estimates for CCS don’t show as much benefit as people think.
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head's too far up there. Get your head out of his butt. He's gone. George is gone. He's history, Stephen.
"In fact, turn it over to other people who care about more important things."
A spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office was not immediately available to comment.
Richard "Cheech" Marin and Tommy Chong, who have grown from a stoner counterculture act when they started in 1970s, are cultural icons when it comes to doper humour.
Besides performing live, the duo have released several comedy albums and films and appeared in numerous TV shows. Marin was a regular in the cop drama "Nash Bridges" while Chong had a recurring role on the comedy "That '70s Show."
They went their separate ways in the 1980s, with reports of friction between them, but returned to working together on a variety of projects, including their current tour, in the late 1990s.
Needless to say, they are unabashed advocates of legal marijuana.
Cheech and Chong were in Montreal where they hosted a show last week at the Just For Laughs Festival, doing some of their fabled bits. It's their only Canadian date for now.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, they were more than happy to hold forth on their favoured herb.
"The trouble with the law is that pot is quasi-legal," ventured Cheech, whose father was a Los Angeles police officer for 30 years.
"It's a grey area. You don't know if it's legal or isn't legal. It's like being quasi-pregnant. Either you're pregnant or you're not."
Marijuana for medicinal use has been allowed in Canada for nearly a decade and was nearly decriminalized by Parliament seven years ago. After taking office in 2006, the Conservatives announced they would not revive a Liberal bill to reform marijuana laws.
Last month, police arrested 35 people in raids on clubs in Quebec which supply visitors with marijuana, ostensibly as therapeutic treatment for certain medical conditions. A club in Toronto was also raided two months ago.
Chong sported a T-shirt emblazoned with the face of British Columbia pot activist Marc Emery, who now faces five years in a U.S. prison after being deported from Canada earlier this year. Chong said he wasn't surprised Emery was deported.
"I'm insulted. As a Canadian I'm insulted that Harper would go to that length."
He said marijuana has been used for medicinal purposes for centuries. Cheech's grandmother used it for arthritis and his wife used a hemp-based cream.
"It's a political football that the Conservatives jump all over," Chong said of the marijuana debate.
Health Canada says there are definite distinctions between regulated medicinal marijuana and street use.
"Health Canada does not advocate the legalization of marijuana. Marijuana remains an illegal and controlled substance, similar to other controlled products," spokesman Gary Holub said in an email. "Unlawful possession is a criminal offence."
Cheech, who is now 64, and Chong, 72, both got turned on to pot when they were young.
"It was like a really hush-hush thing," Cheech said of the era. "My roommate turned me on and it was like, 'Wow, how soon can I quit my job?' "
Chong said he got high when he was 18. A jazz bass player handed him a marijuana cigarette and a Lenny Bruce record -- and the rest is history.
"Lenny Bruce got me into comedy so really the pot and Lenny together is why we're here now."
He said smoking pot wasn't a big deal then because many people didn't recognize the smell.
"I remember someone asked us what kind of tobacco that was," he said of one time when he imbided during a visit to Kelowna, B.C. "After we stopped laughing for a half-hour we told them it was Italian."
But pot has landed Chong behind bars. He served nine months in 2003 for selling pot pipes.
Cheech and Chong enjoy the comedians that have imitated their act over the years but they take pride in their originality.
Cheech says they always reflected the mainstream "middle-of-the-road dopers."
Chong agreed.
"I think what made us was the fact that back in the day people would talk about stoners. We were the stoners -- so much so I ended up going to jail because I was such a good actor they believed that's who I really was."GETTY Brendan Rodgers is reportedly keen on Juventus midfielder Hernanes
Juventus are said to be keen to offload the Brazil international as he no longer fits into manager Massimiliano Allegri's plans. The arrival of Miralem Pjanic from Roma this summer has pushed the attacking midfielder further down the pecking order.
Stars who have played in both Scottish and English Premier Leagues Sun, November 26, 2017 Express Sport takes a look at some of the greatest players who have appeared in both the English and Scottish top flights in recent times Play slideshow Getty Images 1 of 36 Express Sport takes a look at some of the greatest players who have played in both the Premier League and the Scottish Premier League (now Scottish Premiership)
And Italian website Calcio Mercato Web claim Celtic could offer Hernanes an escape route with the transfer deadline fast approaching. The report says the SPL champions were the first to reach out to Juve and are keen to see a deal done for the 31-year-old.
It is said Hernanes could be lured to Celtic Park with the promise of Champions League football after Brendan Rodgers' side secured safe passage to the group stages last week. Celtic avoided an upset to beat Israeli side Beer Sheva 5-4 on aggregate and have been draw in Group C along with Barcelona, Manchester City and Borussia Monchengladbach.Editor’s Note: in the many long months that I have been writing about the McCarthyist, neoliberal fever dream that has become known as the “Russiagate” scandal, I have frequently been accused of all manner of absurd partisan positions by uninformed troglodytes who are indeed, themselves often outrageously myopic partisans. To say that this situation is frustrating would be a mild understatement but until now, I have done my best to ignore it; after all, how seriously can you take someone who is telling a post-op transwoman anarcho-syndicalist that she sekretly loves swine emperor Trump and Vladimir fucking Putin?
Unfortunately however, as time has gone on I’ve found myself subconsciously responding to these ridiculous criticisms by writing longer and longer paragraphs explaining my political positions in reference to the issues surrounding the “Russiagate scandal.” As the proposed conspiracy has grown to include Wikileaks, these paragraphs have now become even longer – and that’s without even discussing the paragraphs I have to write assuring outraged leftists that just because I’m certain Donald Trump has committed crimes that could result in a demand that he be impeached, that does not mean I believe the Cold War era spy novel Democrats are selling in the media to manufacture consent for a proxy war with Russia.
This shit is in a word, exhausting and at this point all of the explaining is starting to clutter up my writing. As a result I’ve decided to write this article explaining my political positions surrounding various aspects of this now preposterous scandal and include it in the editor’s note of every single article touching on Russiagate I write from here on out. Where possible, I will include links to my work that objectively prove I’ve been writing from these perspectives the entire time and while I sincerely doubt it will stop random Twitter trolls from shitting up my mentions online, at least I won’t have to keep wasting paragraphs explaining that I am neither a nazi nor a Clinton hagiographer. Consider this the “Russiagate” version of my Bull Durham speech.
——-
I’d like to start by pointing out that I really shouldn’t have to write an article like this. As an independent analyst my work primarily consists of heavily sourced, academic essays, editorials and long form writing about US politics with a focus on corruption, austerity, imperialism and propaganda in the corporate media. A simple search of the archives at ninaillingworth.com will quickly reveal that I frequently criticize both the Republican and the Democratic “sides” of the American corporate duopoly.
In short, I am writing this piece under protest because I feel my work and the extensive sourcing I provide with each piece, more than stands up on it’s own merits; my political positions shouldn’t and in fact don’t really matter as long as I’m writing about the truth and providing hyperlinked citations to confirm that truth if readers so desire. There used to be a time in what passed for a free and democratic society where telling the truth without the filter of party loyalties was a valued commodity and I genuinely resent having my integrity portrayed as evidence that I support either morally bankrupt political party in the United States.
Swine Emperor Trump, the Trump Administration & the Republican Party: I am not, nor have I ever been a supporter of Donald Trump. I have written articles that prove Trump is an actual goddamn fascist, articles that repeatedly examine the bountiful harvest of evidence that he’s a white supremacist and articles that discuss the methods by which his family is profiting off his presidency. I have also written extensively about the dangers created through Trump’s disastrous foreign policy decisions and open warmongering. I am furthermore not a supporter of those who continue to support President Trump despite all of the available evidence that he’s a hateful, bigot fascist serving elite capital at the expense of the common American. I am additionally not, nor have I ever been a supporter of Trump’s nightmare neo-feudalist administration; who in some ways I regard as more dangerous than Trump himself. Over the past year, I have written a tremendous number of highly unflattering articles about the Trumpet’s openly bigoted government with a particular focus on the activities of gibbering hate goblin and current US Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Finally I do not and quite simply will not ever support the monstrous bigoted shit-weasels in the Republican Party; although I write about fascism and imperialism more often than the GOP, the various articles that I have written are once again highly unflattering.
Russia, Russian Hacker Bots & Vladimir Putin: frankly, I don’t give a good god damn about Russia or Vladimir Putin one way or another but I do recognize that Russia is an imperialist power that (like the United States) has been known to persecute and even murder, those who get in their way politically. I highly doubt that Vladimir Putin’s origins as a KGB officer made him a kinder, more transparent leader; just as I highly doubted that George HW Bush’s former role as the head of the CIA would produce a kinder, more transparent America. I don’t write about Russia very often for two obvious reasons; I’m only one person with a limited amount of energy to write each day and because I simply don’t have the time, or interest necessary to become versed enough in Russian politics to discuss the matter credibly. Despite the behavior of mainstream news outlets, it takes more than compiling and repeating Russophobic propaganda from elements of the US government to call yourself an expert on a foreign country and personally, I feel that it’s somewhat hypocritical of barely informed American observers to rail against human rights violations in Russia without ever discussing human rights violations that regularly occur at home.
Although I have written repeatedly about the absurdity of claims that Russia “hacked” the DNC and that Russian social media operatives “rigged” the 2016 Presidential election against Hillary Clinton with low quality Facebook posts that nobody read and schemes to trick people into naming their Pokemon after Mike Brown; there are still two major points I feel it’s necessary to reiterate here:
Julian Assange & Wikileaks: frankly my opinion of Julian Assange and Wikileaks as a whole is completely irrelevant to this discussion for the same reason it simply doesn’t matter if Russia hacked the DNC; an informed public has literally no reason to care if the Podesta emails were delivered by Ivan the Terrible himself, as long as they’re real. For the record however, I’ll note that while I have some concerns about Assange personally, Wikileaks itself has never given me any reason to doubt the veracity of it’s work; in its entire existence, the transparency organization has never released a fake “leak” or a document altered in any meaningful way. There are certainly times I question Assange’s motives, the exact nature of his potentially terrifying social views and what precisely a fair trial would reveal about the sexual assault allegations against Assange in Sweden. What no reasonable person can question however, is the veracity of the incriminating videos, diplomatic cables and internal emails from US officials the Wikileaks organization has released regularly since 2006; in that regard, Julian Assange’s personal politics are largely beside the point – there is simply no universal law saying that disliking a woman who allegedly once threatened to launch a drone strike on you or being less interested in Russian corruption than American corruption, automatically makes the completely authentic documents you release less relevant or explicitly fraudulent in some largely-undefined way.
Hillary Clinton, “Liberal” Corporate Media & the Democratic Party: to put it politely, I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan of Hillary Clinton, her husband Bill or their monstrous allies inside the powerful American intelligence community. I have written extensively on the subject of why Hillary Clinton would be a terrible president (even if Trump is also a terrible choice as president) as well the farcical travesty of justice that was the Clinton unauthorized, private email server investigation and the corrosive effect it had on the rule of law thanks to the clearly-compromised Loretta Lynch-led Department of Justice. Although I have long-past given up on “conservative” media entirely, over the past couple of years I’ve grown increasingly critical of a faux-left, corporate “liberal” media class that willingly engages in irresponsibly wild speculation, coordinated smears and even bald-faced lies on behalf of powerful neoliberal elites; seeming out of an (at times) entirely unearned sense of smug moral superiority. The mainstream “liberal” media’s coverage of the Russiagate scandal however has actually somehow exceeded my expectations for dishonesty, sensationalism and open ratfuckery; I’d laugh, but frankly the brazen lunacy of accusing a foreign nuclear power of an act of war against America for clicks and viewers has all too terrifying potential consequences. Although I have supported Democratic Party candidates in the past (namely in 2004 & 2008) these last eighteen months in particular have diminished whatever fleeting hope I still had for the establishment “center-left” and have left me completely disillusioned with Democrats as a whole. At this point in my life, I have little use for a McCarthyist, psychologically abusive political party that has just spent the past year lying to, gaslighting and smearing me and my friends for telling the truth about crooks, rapists and lying cheats.
Separating Fact from Fiction in the “Russiagate” scandal: As I’ve written in the past, the key to understanding the massive number of problems with the elite “liberal” spin on the Russigate scandal is all about tracking the significant ways in which the narrative has diminished and changed over time. Initially, the two core (shocking) accusations that formed what we now know as “Russiagate” or “Kremlingate” were that Russia had hacked or rigged the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton and that Donald Trump was Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate or a compromised Russian intelligence asset; possibly because of a videotape involving two Russian hookers and human urine. A year after the election however, both of these absurd accusations remain impossible to prove and as a result the “Russiagate” narrative pushed by establishment liberals has changed considerably over that time. As I wrote in a recent letter published on this website, I don’t think it’s an accident that we’ve gone from using words like “treason” “rigged” and “controlled” to far less clearly defined terms like “interference” and “colluded.” Examining the balance of evidence, I believe the two core, scandalous accusations that started off the Russiagate controversy were opportunistically hijacked from the ridiculous Steele Dossier and were part of a cooked-up post election strategy by the Democratic Party to deflect blame away from the Clinton campaign, offer protection to party elites who had just punted a winnable election to a reality TV, rodeo-clown fascist and ultimately help manufacture consent for a more aggressive posture (and likely a proxy war) against Russian allied nations the US establishment already had its eye on in the Middle East.
Despite the propaganda involved and the reality that nobody can prove Vladimir Putin “rigged” the 2016 election or that Donald Trump is a Russian intelligence asset however, a rigorous study of the public evidence that is available does make it clear that the swine emperor and members of his inner circle are in fact guilty of breaking numerous laws; specifically obstruction of justice or tampering with a federal investigation, lying to the FBI, influence trading, accepting bribes and possibly (probably) money laundering. Although I was originally reluctant to accept any Russian involvement whatsoever based on the notably thin initial evidence offered in the public sphere and we’re still waiting for actual proof that anyone actually did accept anything, I believe a fair and reasoned examination of the story now strongly suggests quid pro quo between the highest levels of Trump’s campaign and people (possibly) attached to the Russia government occurred – namely Trump got “dirt” on Clinton and possibly money, various Russian entities (and US corporations like Exxon) were promised Russian sanction relief in return.
I think it’s important to note here that these are in fact very serious charges and I’m not even remotely concerned with the fact that the vast majority of the swine emperor’s wounds were self inflicted blunders in a system literally designed to protect powerful elites from prosecution for these type of transgressions; as was the case in Watergate, the cover-up is almost certainly worse than the crime. What they are not however, are proof that Russia “hacked” the 2016 US Presidential election, or that Vladimir Putin is controlling a Trump administration that quite frankly seems to have enough goddamn trouble controlling itself on a moment to moment basis. It isn’t treason and most importantly, it isn’t an act of war; especially in light of the fact that foreign governments and entities bribe our politicians all the time to affect US policy – do you recall the last time respected media observers called for war against Saudi Arabia? Me neither.
——-
In conclusion, I would just like to state that my coverage of the entire “Russiagate” scandal has been both more impartial and more consistent with the proper ethical standards of professional journalism than literally every Trump-Russia grifter and the vast majority of talking heads on your TV screen; regardless of political affiliation. At every step of the way, I have habitually provided extensive sourcing to back up my observations, incorporated new information into my analysis and even acknowledged the limited number of times I’ve been wrong about some small aspect of the overall story. I have never lied to anyone, sculpted the facts towards any particular preconceived conclusion or ignored aspects of reality that don’t fit my narrative; how many other people writing about this scandal can truthfully claim the same?
If refusing to trust the CIA and recognizing that we’re all being taken for a ride by both the neoliberal #Resistance and proto-fascist propagandists in various forms of “conservative media” somehow makes me a Trumpist neo-nazi or a Hillbot cultist in your eyes; please allow me to heartily encourage you to eat my whole ass like groceries.
Nina IllingworthBosnia's national soccer team goalkeeper Asmir Begovic signs autographs after a humanitarian match against the Bosnia U21 team in Gradacac, May 22, 2014. Bosnia will face Argentina, Iran and Nigeria in Group F of the World Cup finals in Brazil. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic (BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA - Tags: SPORT SOCCER WORLD CUP)
Asmir Begovic doesn’t have many memories of Bosnia, the country of his birth. He was four when he and his family fled the southern town of Trebinje. The war had started. The machine-guns, the explosions, the bullet-holes. But fittingly, he does remember the impact it all had on his soccer.
“We got out at a good time but unfortunately were there for the beginning of everything,” Begovic said. “I used to play goalkeeper in my bedroom. It was for safety reasons because I wasn’t allowed outside.”
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A child refugee, he used the upheaval as motivation. Before the war began, his father, Amir, had been a professional goalkeeper and his mother, Ajnija, was in law school. In an instant, everything changed. But Begovic absorbed it all and was heavily influenced by his parents’ attitude to the turmoil. The family moved to Germany where Amir worked in construction and Ajnija in a factory. Begovic, at a remarkably early age, figured out some principles that have since followed him throughout his personal and professional life.
“All the problems we had as a family taught me that if I stayed true to my beliefs and worked really hard, I’d overcome any difficulties I’d have in the future. That determination was instilled in me from very young and I went through things that many people never get to experience. Having to uproot my life two or three times, moving to different countries and continents made me grow up quicker than I should have and mature sooner, which helped me in the long run. It helped shape the person I am today and I take great pride in my past.”
The past is the reason why he’ll be competing at this summer’s World Cup.
Bosnia goalkeeper Asmir Begovic, center, deflects a head ball away from Ivory Coast's Lacina Traore (18) as Bosnia's Toni Sunjic (15) watches during the first half in an international friendly soccer match Friday, May 30, 2014, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
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In 1999, Begovic and his family relocated to Edmonton and three years later became Canadian citizens. He remembers the city vividly. “It was a little bit overwhelming. I didn’t know what to think. It was a new country, a new beginning. But it was filled with fun, easy-going people and once we settled in we really enjoyed life there.”
Quickly, he made friends and rapidly developed as a goalkeeper, his father proving an inspirational coach. He received a call-up to the Canadian Under-17 team. In early 2004, he went from writing his biology finals to a two-year contract with Portsmouth’s youth academy in a matter of days. Upon being granted a UK visa, Begovic was farmed out on loan to a number of lower-league English clubs like Macclesfield, Yeovil and Bournemouth. With his reputation on the rise, he represented Canada at the Under-20 World Cup in 2007. And then came a messy divorce.
“I went through every age group with Canada and it was a huge part of my development - getting to play at those different levels, traveling the world, playing against some good teams. But once I started getting into a professional setup, especially in England, I got to see how things were done the proper way. Every time I’d go back to Canada, something used to happen that I didn’t quite agree with or didn’t quite work for me. Going forward I just didn’t see the future being that great for Canadian soccer. I wasn’t sure if the people running it were the right people.”
In the summer of 2008, Begovic’s grandfather died. He traveled to Bosnia for the funeral, It was his first time back there since he had been forced to leave as a child. He met relatives and heard their stories, their struggles, their war. It was emotional. It was family. It was catharsis. Begovic knew what he had to do. He wanted to play for Bosnia. His decision was helped by what he saw as a slow-moving Canadian Soccer Association – the stewards for a national team program that has failed to qualify since making its lone World Cup appearance in 1986.
“There were plenty of opportunities for me to get capped by Canada at (the) senior level. I was called into a few squads and at the time I was committed to playing for Canada and the option of Bosnia never arose. I had been through the youth system with Canada, got called up to the senior team but I never played, After a while you start thinking to yourself, ‘What’s going on here? What’s the idea?’ People kept saying the right things but it never ended up happening. When the day came when I had to make a choice, I had to do right by myself. I don’t think people could’ve said anything differently – maybe they could’ve done differently. The words were there, the actions weren’t.”
Bosnia moved fast and Begovic made his international debut for them in late 2009. Unsurprisingly, many Canadian soccer fans were furious but Begovic was prepared for the criticism. It was the same criticism faced by players such as Owen Hargreaves and Jonathan DeGuzman, who bolted the CSA to play for other countries.
“You’re going to get a backlash and you can’t please everyone. I had to make a decision for myself and my family and I’ve gone the way I felt was best. I had to disappoint some people, anger some people and that’s the way it was. That’s their opinion, that’s their feeling and I can’t change that. I probably regret a few of my actions because sometimes you get pulled over by emotion and different things. I had loyalties in Canada and lived there for a good part of my life – a very important part of my life. It was difficult to leave that and move onto a different thing. People will think otherwise but sometimes it’s easier when you don’t have the choice.”
Begovic was an integral part of Bosnia’s World Cup qualification campaign as the team finished top of their group, losing once and conceding just six goals in 10 games. But in Brazil, making the knockout stages will be tough. They’ve been drawn in Group F alongside Argentina (one of the tournament favorites), Nigeria (the best team in Africa) and Iran (Asian outsiders).
Given its turbulent history, however, the fact Bosnia is at this World Cup at all is cause for celebration.
“It means everything to the country,’’ Begovic said. “All the years of pain and hurt that they’ve had, to now have such a positive thing and be on such a grand stage is fantastic for the country. It’s a very young country, it’s a small country with great people passionate about their country and us being able to deliver this for them was a huge motivation.”
For Bosnia, this World Cup is about more than football. It’s about struggle and toil and hard work and where you can get in life with grit, desire and talent. In Asmir Begovic, the country has the ideal poster boy.BOSTON (WHDH) - The bomb squad was called to a fire station in Boston Tuesday morning after someone brought a possibly explosive device to the station.
Around 11 a.m. Tuesday, a person drove to the Engine 14 firehouse in Boston with what appeared to be an old military mortar in the back seat of a car.
According to Boston Fire, the captain decided to evacuate the firehouse and set up a safety zone while Boston Police were called.
The Bomb Squad investigated the device and determined it was inert, not posing a danger to anyone.
After examination by Boston Police EOD pic.twitter.com/p018qTQoSR — Boston Fire Dept. (@BostonFire) July 5, 2016
Mortar shell in backseat of a vehicle pic.twitter.com/j7Zq8mHpfk — Boston Fire Dept. (@BostonFire) July 5, 2016
(Copyright (c) 2019 Sunbeam Television. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)With Spurs down by two goals just 28 minutes into Sunday's match with Southampton, it seemed the headlines for this match would write themselves:
Shambolic Spurs outplayed by sparkling Southampton (Guardian)
Pochettino shows Spurs what they're missing (Telegraph)
Spurs lack character and more importantly ENGLISH Spirit! (Daily Mail)
Such headlines (minus the last one, of course) would have been justified. Though Southampton's goals were the result of individual errors, the Saints were clearly the superior side in that opening half hour. Before reviewing how Spurs turned the match around, it's worth taking a look at why they were getting outplayed in the first place.
Same old mistakes
In recent games, Spurs have played a high line without pressing the ball, an incredibly dangerous combination. The opening half of Sunday's match was no different. Southampton players were consistently able to get in dangerous positions, survey their options, and play passes in behind Tottenham's defense.
Here, Adam Lallana, under no pressure from Danny Rose, find Rickie Lambert. Spurs are let of the hook when Lambert's poor first touch takes him away from goal. Note that Spurs back line is only 15 yards inside their own half and how easy it is for Lallana to time his pass with Lambert's run.
In the next GIF, Lambert drops into a hole in front of the Spurs back line and has time to find Jay Rodriguez. Spurs do a poor job of holding a steady line - Vertonghen is a yard or two deeper than Kaboul when the pass is played - but Rodriguez doesn't bend his run enough and is flagged for offsides.
Finally, Lambert plays a curved ball behind Spurs defense to Jay Rodriguez, who is incorrectly flagged for offsides.
That Southampton played all these passes from Spurs' left side is not coincidence; Christian Eriksen's tendency to drift infield and unfamiliarity with that position means that flank will always be less protected when he is playing there. Compounding the problem was an obviously unfit Mousa Dembélé. Dembélé finished with no tackles, attempted take-ons, and just a single interception.
Halftime adjustments change game
After the game, Jan Vertonghen revealed Sherwood's instructions at halftime:
The manager told us at half-time that we had to improve, put more pressure on them because they were able to play their game, just passing the ball. They were passing into midfield and the runners gave us a lot of problems at the back, so we tried to put more pressure on the midfield.
Quite why Spurs were not doing this in the first half is unclear, but to the extent Sherwood deserves blame for the poor first half performance, he deserves credit for the terrific second half performance. Sherwood has been deservedly criticized in the past for failing to make use of his bench, but his bold decision to replace the ineffective Dembélé with Gylfi Sigurdsson should also be lauded.
Both decisions paid immediate dividends. Though the Spurs second goal will be remembered for the pressure Roberto Soldado put on Dejan Lovren near the endline, the move started when Spurs pressed Southampton in midfield, prompting a turnover. The contrast to how Spurs gave Southampton time on the ball in the first half is stark.
Spurs pressing created several counterattack opportunities in addition to the one immediately above. Here, Nabil Bentaleb chases Jack Cork into a corner before gently easing him off the ball. His cross doesn't connect with Soldado but the idea is good. It's worth noting that were it not for Sherwood's halftime substitution, it would have been Dembélé, not Bentaleb, in this position.
The few passes Southampton managed to play behind Spurs' backline in the second half were easily dealt with by Jan Vertonghen and Younes Kaboul. Again, the key is Spurs' pressure on the ball. Southampton players had no time to look up and time their passes with the runs of their teammates, as can be seen below.
In the end, the tactical story of this game was fairly simple. Spurs gave Southampton time on the ball in the first half and nearly paid for it. In the second half, Spurs pressing prevented Southampton from playing and created several good opportunities. It would be really nice to see more of the latter during the final seven games of the season.
Bonus GIFs
Sigurdsson
Despite playing in an unfamiliar central midfield role, Sigurdsson was particularly key to Spurs pressing game, as can be seen in two of the three GIFs above. In addition to scoring the winning goal, he also added a bit of guile in attack.
Here, he fills the space vacated when Aaron Lennon comes infield from the right wing. When three players converge on Lennon, Sigurdsson is left completely open.
His positioning forces Dejan Lovren out of position to cover, leaving a gap for Christian Eriksen to run into. Though the pass is a little late and under-hit, this was one of Spurs' best attacking sequences in the game.
Kaboul
Kaboul played three long balls behind the defense and hit his target every time. The first two were to Soldado and Chadli respectively, and the one below is to Eriksen. None resulted in goals, but these passes are much more dangerous than the typical diagonals to the wings typically played by Spurs' center backs.Science educator Bill Nye is best known for hosting 'Bill Nye the Science Guy,' a PBS Kids show about science.
Who Is Bill Nye? Born on November 27, 1955, Bill Nye grew up in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Cornell University, he moved to Seattle to work as a mechanical engineer for Boeing and eventually became a comedy show writer and performer. Nye went on to become the face of Bill Nye the Science Guy, an award-winning educational program that taught science to preteens. Also a successful author, he remains a popular public figure and vocal member of the science community. Bill Nye (Photo: F. Scott Schafer Courtesy Planetary Society) ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website Net Worth Nye's net worth is estimated at $6.5 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
Early Life & Education American science educator William Sanford Nye, better known as Bill Nye "The Science Guy," was born in Washington, D.C., on November 27, 1955, to Jacqueline and Edwin Darby Nye. Brilliant in math and science, Nye's mother was recruited to become a codebreaker during World War II. His father was held in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, where he had no electricity, for four years: The experience made Edwin Nye a sundial enthusiast, and later, his son would become one himself. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website After attending the private Sidwell Friends School, Nye enrolled at Cornell University, where he studied mechanical engineering. Upon earning his Bachelor of Science degree, Nye went on to begin his career at The Boeing Company in Seattle, where he would live for many years. Nye developed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor that is still used in the Boeing 747.
Entertainment Career Nye got his start in comedy after winning a Steve Martin look-alike contest, and went on to work as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. He eventually quit his day job and became a comedy writer and performer on the show Almost Live. It was there that he earned the nickname "The Science Guy." 'Bill Nye the Science Guy' Soon after, Seattle's PBS KCTS-TV produced the show Bill Nye the Science Guy, an educational television program that aired from September 10, 1993, to June 20, 1998. Nye hosted the show, which aimed to teach science to a preteen audience: Each of the show's 100 episodes focused on a specific topic. The show is often used in schools as an educational tool. Over its five-year run, the show won 19 Emmy Awards; Nye personally received seven Emmys, for writing, performing and producing. After the show ended, Nye went on to work on other television shows, including The Eyes of Nye, a science show aimed at an older audience, and the Planet Green Network's Stuff Happens program. He also hosted the 100 Greatest Discoveries show, and appears in videos for several attractions at Walt Disney World and Epcot, including one with Ellen DeGeneres. Additionally, Nye has played a science teacher in a Disney movie and on the television crime drama Numb3rs. He has been a guest in segments of several other shows, including The Weather Channel and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Nye also appeared on Larry King Live several times to talk about global warming — a favorite subject of his — and space exploration. In 2013 Nye took on a different type of television role. He joined the cast of celebrity contestants on the popular competition Dancing with the Stars. In addition to his acting and guest appearances, Nye has written several children's books about science. In 2015 he published Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World. 'Bill Nye Saves the World' In 2017 Nye teamed up with Netflix and launched his own show, Bill Nye Saves the World, which explores science topics that affect people's everyday lives, inviting celebrity guest speakers as well as experts to join in on the discussions.WASHINGTON — Government officials requested to know the identities of more than 1,900 Americans whose information was swept up in National Security Agency surveillance programs last year, according to an intelligence report issued Tuesday.
The identities of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents were found in 3,914 intelligence reports the NSA distributed last year, the report said. The annual report comes just weeks after President Donald Trump accused former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser of possibly committing a crime when she asked government analysts to disclose the names of Trump associates documented in intelligence reports.
Most names in such intelligence reports are masked to protect privacy, but last year government officials requested that 1,934 identities — not initially revealed in the NSA reports — be unmasked in order to understand the intelligence being conveyed. In 2015, government officials requested the unmasking of 2,232 identities.
Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, has said neither she nor other Obama officials used secret intelligence reports to spy on Trump associates for political purposes. Rice’s official role would have given her the ability to request that names be revealed for national security purposes.
In interviews, Rice acknowledged that she sometimes asked for the names of Americans referenced in reports. She would not say whether she saw intelligence related to Trump associates or whether she asked for their identities, though she did say that reports related to Russia increased in the final months of the presidential election campaign.
Lawmakers have repeatedly asked U.S. intelligence agencies to tell them how many Americans’ emails and calls are vacuumed up by warrantless government surveillance programs created to collect information on foreign intelligence targets.
“This report provides a small window into the government’s surveillance activities, but it leaves vital questions unanswered,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement. “At the top of the list is how many Americans’ communications are being swept up.”
After former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing extensive government surveillance, Congress passed a law that ended
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flutes and rattles. Photo courtesy of Antonio Garcia.New television deals have helped finance the record spend for English clubs in transfers
The summer transfer activity which resulted in English clubs spending a record £835m is down to improved television deals, according to Dan Jones from the sports business group Deloitte.
Jones has observed how clubs throughout the Premier League increased their spending this summer, with Manchester United and Hull City two examples of the money being spread across the division.
And Jones acknowledges clubs are splashing the cash for different reasons.
He said: “The extra TV money in the clubs' pockets and also clubs at the top trying to push on and sustain their success - the four teams in the Champions League accounted for about 40 per cent of the spend. Then of course Manchester United, the biggest spenders, trying to get themselves back up to the top - a record amount of spending ever by one English club in the transfer window.
The extra TV money in the clubs' pockets and also clubs at the top trying to push on and sustain their success - the four teams in the Champions League accounted for about 40 per cent of the spend. Dan Jones
“But then of course even further down the Premier League you’re seeing clubs spending a lot of money, and that’s one of the great strengths of the Premier League is because of the way the money is shared out our clubs quite a lot further down the line can spend.
“So you see Hull making eight-figure signings which a few years ago would have been impossible to conceive of. So, very, very busy, not perhaps quite as busy a deadline day as we’ve been used to, but a very busy window overall.”
But with such huge sums of cash being parted with this summer, some critics are questioning the impact of UEFA’s financial fair play rules, which were implemented to restrict reckless spending from clubs.
When Michel Platini was elected UEFA president he promised to take a stance on clubs living beyond their means, and big-spending Manchester City and Paris Saint Germain have both been hit by sanctions recently.
While Jones concedes many football fans are feeling alienated by the vast spending in the modern game, he insists financial fair play is working.
Jones said: “It’s well known Manchester United is the most profitable football club in the world and so, they’ve got the profits there to justify the spending. And of course if they want to keep those revenues up they need to improve the on-the-pitch performance.
“Then you’ve got the Premier League clubs overall getting £25m more a year in TV money, so £25m across 20 clubs, that’s £500m. You look at the net amount they’ve spent, £835m gross. But of course they’ve been selling players, bringing money in, and the net spending is only down around £400m, so they’re only spending the extra money they’re getting in from TV.
A look at the biggest stories and best moments from another memorable Transfer Deadline Day on Sky Sports Sports HQ. A look at the biggest stories and best moments from another memorable Transfer Deadline Day on Sky Sports Sports HQ.
“So, yes, at first glance it looks like financial fair play is having no effect, but actually Manchester City had a very quiet transfer window, PSG pretty invisible in the transfer window. Those have been the two most high-profile clubs sanctioned by UEFA. So we’ve always felt that if more money comes in to the game, more money will be spent on players. That’s inevitable because teams are there really to win matches, win trophies, not to make a profit.
“But I do think we are seeing some signs, and Michel Platini was talking just last week about it being the first season UEFA has ever seen where revenue went up faster than wages, so let’s see, it will take another couple of years to really see the numbers filtering through.
“Certainly it’s not the case the taps have been turned off and the chequebooks have been closed - clearly that’s not what is going on, but there is more revenue coming into the game and that does allow for more spending.”Splot is a Frozenbyte game for iOS.
Splot combines the easy to learn gameplay mechanics of a modern mobile title with the depth and detail of an old-school platformer, with sharp controls and crispy visuals.
You play as Splot, a one-eyed blue alien who has crash landed onto a strange planet along with his adversaries, the Hungry Blobs. Native Baby Birds are in danger of being eaten by the Blobs, and Splot sets out to rescue them.
The gameplay of Splot is fast-paced platforming where your goal is to reach all the captured baby birds in time before the Blobs eat them, while racing to the end of the levels as fast as possible.
Key Features
Race against the Hungry Blob Kings and rescue the endangered Baby Birds
Easy to learn touch controls with stunning precision – maneuver your way through perilous obstacles: spikes, lava, lasers, portals and more
Level up and boost your abilities with splottastic power-ups such as the Magnet, Freeze and Vacuum
Collect vault pieces and unlock over 150 different Splots
Explore seven unique worlds: a peaceful fairy forest, a hazardous space ship, a haunted castle, and many more to discover
Play through a total of 56 challenging levels and three difficulty settings that put your skills to the test
Splot was released on iOS on October 23rd 2014. The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle buyers also received the Windows version on the same date.
Purchase Splot
Splot on iTunes
More press materials here.President Trump says a federal appeals court made a “political decision” when it refused to reinstate his ban on travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority nations.
If so, it was bipartisan politics.
The panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that issued Thursday’s 3-0 ruling consisted of two Democratic-appointed judges — William Canby, nominated by Jimmy Carter, and Michelle Friedland, named by Barack Obama — and one Republican, Richard Clifton, chosen by George W. Bush.
On Friday, the Trump administration was setting out a plan for what to do next. White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said that “every single court option is on the table,” including a high court appeal or “fighting out this case on the merits” in a lower court. Trump, meanwhile, told reporters he may sign a “brand new order” in response to Thursday’s ruling. But he said it probably would differ “very little” from the executive order he issued Jan. 27.
That order placed a 90-day ban on admission of anyone from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The order also halted all U.S. admission of refugees for 120 days, and barred refugees from war-torn Syria indefinitely.
A federal judge in Seattle blocked enforcement of Trump’s order a week later in a lawsuit by the states of Washington and Minnesota. The administration then filed an emergency motion asking the appeals court to suspend the judge’s ruling and reinstate the president’s order, arguing that courts lack both the wisdom and the authority to “second-guess” executive decisions on national security.
The panel unanimously rejected that argument. Such claims, the court said, are “contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy. Within our system, it is the role of the judiciary to interpret the law.”
The court’s decision to emphasize judicial independence was the road to a unanimous ruling that crossed ideological lines and sent a message to the White House, said Jayashri Srikantiah, a Stanford law professor and director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.
“This message is one that’s not political,” she said Friday. “The judiciary’s role is to make sure the executive branch complies with the Constitution.”
Another immigration law professor, Bill Ong Hing of the University of San Francisco, said the appeals court judges obviously “want somebody to educate Donald Trump about Marbury vs. Madison,” the Supreme Court’s 1803 ruling that established the Constitution as the supreme law of the land and declared the courts’ duty “to say what the law is.”
The 3-0 vote came two days after a hearing in which the same court panel seemed divided, with Clifton pointedly questioning the states’ claim that the executive order was aimed at excluding Muslims, referring to their argument that Trump’s order discriminated on the basis of religion.
Since fewer than 15 percent of the world’s Muslims live in the seven nations, Clifton said, “the vast majority of Muslims would not be affected” by Trump’s order. He also asked the lawyer representing the states whether “we have to take your word for it” that the order was anti-Muslim. He observed that President Ronald Reagan had barred Cubans from entering the United States, a possible precedent for exclusions based on nationality.
But both Srikantiah and Hing said Clifton and his colleagues evidently decided to emphasize the issues on which they agreed — that the president must follow the law, that the states had legal grounds to challenge his order based on its potential impact on their universities, and that the exclusion of legal residents, visa-holders and refugees without advance notice or a hearing may violate their constitutional rights.
By contrast, the court sidetracked the states’ claim of discrimination against Muslims, the argument that did not appear to persuade Clifton at the hearing. The panel said the states had raised some “serious allegations,” but that they could be reviewed at a later stage of the case.
The court has ordered written arguments through March 29 on the disputed legal issues, and then will schedule a hearing on whether to block enforcement of the executive order indefinitely.
Those plans could change, however, if Trump makes substantial changes in the order, which was drafted hurriedly, was issued without warning, and has been criticized by a number of judges for unclear language and shifting government interpretations.
USF’s Hing said major revisions would be needed to survive judicial review.
While Trump’s lawyers have invoked a 1952 federal law authorizing the president to bar entry of “any class of aliens” that would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” Hing said the Bush and Obama administrations interpreted that law to apply only to terrorist organizations and other specific groups and not to entire nationalities. Another law, passed in 1965, prohibits discrimination in immigration decisions based on national origin.
“If you try to keep everyone out from Iran, Iraq or Syria, you cannot win that factual argument” in court, Hing said. “There are people who have come here (from those countries) who have not done us harm.”
Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter:@egelkoThe Drug Enforcement Administration's controversial cannabis eradication program continued apace in 2015, new numbers released by the administration show. In 2015, local, state and federal authorities uprooted roughly 4.1 million cultivated marijuana plants in all 50 states, down slightly from the haul of 4.3 million plants in 2014.
Federal spending on the program remained at $18 million dollars, consistent with levels seen in previous years. That works out to a cost-per-plant of $4.42, up slightly from a cost of $4.20 per plant in 2014 (yes, really).
The DEA's program provides funding to 128 state and local law enforcement agencies to aggressively search for, seize and destroy illegal marijuana grows across the country. Much of the money for the program comes from the Justice Department's asset forfeiture fund, a controversial program in its own right. In many states, the eradication program money is used to fund aerial operations involving helicopters scouring the countryside for marijuana. Sometimes, overzealous or untrained officers seize perfectly legal plants, like okra, mistaking them for marijuana.
Last year, a group of lawmakers led by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) tried to pass legislation to redirect marijuana eradication funds to perhaps more productive uses, such as domestic violence prevention programs. The effort was ultimately unsuccessful, and Lieu is dismayed to see the program continue. "Marijuana needs to be removed from Schedule I classification, and DEA should stop this wasteful program," he said via email.
Indeed, eradication programs continued last year in states such as Washington and Oregon that have legalized marijuana for adult recreational use. While full state breakdowns aren't yet available, a DEA spokesman said that just under 36,000 marijuana plants were destroyed in Washington last year at a cost to federal taxpayers of about $950,000, or roughly $26 per plant.
The DEA did note, however, that at least two states declined to accept federal eradication funds last year: Alaska and Colorado, where marijuana is now legal. Those states conducted their own enforcement efforts against illegal marijuana grows.
In many ways, the federal marijuana eradication program is a holdover from the earlier days of the drug war. Four states plus the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for adult use, several other states are hoping to do so this year, and a growing chorus of researchers, lawmakers, doctors and the general public is calling on the federal government to change course on marijuana policy.
"It makes zero sense for the federal government to continue to spend taxpayer dollars on cannabis eradication at a time when states across the country are looking to legalize marijuana," Lieu said. "I will continue to fight against DEA’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program in Congress and work to redirect these funds to worthwhile programs."Nov 14, 2015; Tucson, AZ, USA; Arizona Wildcats quarterback Anu Solomon (12) goes down during the fourth quarter and does not return against the Utah Utes at Arizona Stadium. Arizona won 37-30 in double overtime. Mandatory Credit: Casey Sapio-USA TODAY Sports
When are Pac-12 referee’s going to wake up and start calling more helmet-to-helmet calls?
The Wildcats earned a huge win for the team and took Utah out of the National Championship discuss in the process. When unranked, Arizona has beaten a top 10 team four seasons in a row. There is not a team now in the Pac-12 who has less than two losses.
Congratulations to the Wildcats for taking out a top-10 team and becoming bowl eligible at the same time with a 6-5 record!
The Arizona football team suffered a significant loss in the fourth quarter of their enormous game with Utah this past Saturday.
What is most concerning about the Utah game is that no call was made by Pac-12 referees on a damaging hit late with nine minutes left in the fourth quarter to Arizona’s starting quarterback, Anu Solomon. Solomon was hit in the helmet while attempting to slide by Utah’s 270-pound defensive lineman Jason Fanaika and had to go to the trainers bench to get checked out. Not one referee threw a yellow flag on the play, leaving no room for a review.
Anu Solomon taken out of Utah game https://t.co/DKuL3N2mbc — Jason Bartel (@jasonbartel) November 15, 2015
One could argue that the hit to Solomon could also have been judged a targeted hit either to the head or more probably to the legs, either way, a flag should have been thrown for the helmet-to-helmet infraction. No flag for either, no review, no nothing.
Brad Allis, Editor-In-Chief of Wildcat Sports Report, agreed that the hit should have been flagged, but not for targeting, “IMO [the hit] should’ve been a flag for helmet-to-helmet, not targeting only because when I watched [the] video, Anu is still standing when the Ute dives.”
Ummm…looks like helmets collided to us! What do you think? pic.twitter.com/6ON7rTJCTN — ZonaZealots Go Cats! (@ZonaZealots) November 16, 2015
Sports broadcaster Petros Papadakis during the Fox Sports 1 broadcast continued to suggest during the live TV broadcast that the hit was a shoulder hit and not a helmet hit. On further review, helmets did indeed hit, so Petros was wrong. This is why it makes sense to turn down the TV and turn up the radio to listen to the Arizona IMG Sports Network broadcast; they had a much different reaction.
Head coach Rich Rodriguez said when Solomon came out he was shaking his head, “I didn’t know if he was okay or not, then when he started to come off and he didn’t answer, it’s time for the trainers.” According to Micheal deCourcy (TheScore.com), ‘Arizona staff took the quarterback’s helmet away from him while evaluating him on the sideline.’
After the game, we spoke with some folks close to Solomon, and they said he was okay and celebrating. It’s good news that he was able to celebrate a win that he earned along with fellow quarterback Jerrard Randall. Randall completed one out of five passes, but that one pass was his last pass to Nate Phillips which sealed the deal for the Cats.
Solomon was the leading rusher in the game with 57 yards. Also scored two touchdowns and completed 17-of-27 passes for a total of 277 yards.
The latest on Solomon, coming from a Jason Scheer tweet is that Solomon is listed as day-to-day.
Anu Solomon is day to day. My gut says he plays. — Jason Scheer (@JasonScheer) November 16, 2015
Coach Rich Rodriguez said that he will be letting his AD Greg Byrne take care of the discussion with the Pac-12 to avoid penalties. According to Tucson.com, “The UA has filed a formal complaint with the Pac-12 office over the hit that knocked Solomon out.” The article also stated that Jake Matthews injured his foot and is out for the season but will return prior to next season.
On a happy note, Arizona kicker Casey Skowron was selected as Pac-12 player of the week, the first Arizona player this season to be acknowledged. Dad is proud!
Congrats to my "lil boy". Proud of all you do and who you are. https://t.co/M6WLqnZuq6 — Ted Skowron (@tskowron) November 16, 2015
There you have it Wildcats fans! Time to complain to the Pac-12 about the non-call!
Hopefully, Anu plays against our ASU rivals to win and keep the Territorial Cup in Tucson.
Beardown!From the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (Todd Hartman):
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has required operators of a wastewater injection site in Weld County to make changes to their well and adjust their disposal activities after determining actions at the location are potentially related to low-level seismic activity nearby.
On June 23, the COGCC directed NGL Water Solutions DJ LLC* to stop disposing wastewater into the well for a 20-day period while the agency worked with the operator and a team of University of Colorado researchers to determine whether deep injection at the site may be tied to recent seismic activity detected within the general vicinity. Following a 3.2 magnitude event on May 31, seismometers placed by CU recorded other small earthquakes, including one of magnitude 2.6 on June 23.
Since the shutdown, the COGCC has further analyzed data associated with the injection well, as well as seismic data recorded by a local network of instruments placed and maintained by CU geophysicists. While seismic activity in the area around the well continued during the shutdown period, it occurred at a lower energy level, according to the CU researchers.
Flow rate tests conducted by NGL indicated a high permeability zone near the bottom of the well that created a preferred pathway for injected wastewater. As a result of the findings, NGL, with approval and oversight from the COGCC, has plugged the basement of the well from a depth of 10,770 feet to 10,360 feet in order to seal off the preferential pathway and to increase the distance between the zone of injection and “basement” rock. These measures are expected to mitigate the potential for future seismic events.
Beginning Friday, July 18 the COGCC will allow NGL to resume limited injections, at lower pressures and lower volumes, under continued seismic monitoring, to ensure the facility is operating safely. Specifically, the operator will be permitted to inject at an initial maximum rate of 5,000 barrels per day with a maximum pressure of 1,512 psi. After 20 days, the maximum injection rate may be increased to 7,500 barrels a day at the same pressure.
Continued use of the injection well will be reviewed and may be halted if seismic events within a 2.5-mile radius of the well occur at or above a magnitude of 2.5 – the U.S. Geological Survey’s default threshold for displaying seismic events. CU geophysicists will continue to monitor the location, and the COGCC has required NGL to install a permanent seismometer near the well to allow for real-time monitoring. The company is also required to provide access to the monitor and all its data to the COGCC and any third parties authorized by the agency.
“We are proceeding with great care, and will be tracking activities at this site closely,” said Matt Lepore, director of the COGCC. “We’re moving slowly and deliberately as we determine the right course for this location.”
The COGCC is also reviewing a potential violation of the operator’s permitted injection volumes. The matter remains under investigation and any further information on possible enforcement would be contained in a Notice of Alleged Violation from the agency. Such a determination could result in financial penalties against the company.
The well, SWD C4A, is located east of the Greeley-Weld County Airport. It was permitted by COGCC in March 2013 and injection began in April of 2013.Needless to say, most folks have been… a bit excited regarding Valve’s E3 showing. They’ve booked a private press room, just as they did for their previous game announcements and reveals, and they’re talking about a possible big unified PC platform press conference, something completely new for E3. So it makes sense that they might be planning something big. However, there’s been some… developments, so to speak. Let’s take a look.
In a forum post on ValveTime, Casper Hansen shared this screencap of an e-mail exchange with Gabe:
In it, Gabe simply says: “We are not announcing anything at E3. Really. We are not announcing Half-Life 3 or Portal 3 or Left 4 Dead 3. We are going to be showing stuff everyone already knows about (CS:Go, Dota 2, 10′ UI, …)”.
It does sound a bit hinky: the odd and almost sarcastic tone, chiefly the strange inclusion of “Really.”; as well as the odd mention of Dota 2, which, as they said last year, is not the kind of game they’d show off at E3; and, simply the way he’s just being so candid and open about this, especially through mentioning HL3 by name, something Gabe has never done before. Casper himself had made a YouTube video demonstrating the legitimacy of the e-mail, but many were still understandably skeptical.
To solve the mystery, community member Surf, who is a close friend of mine, and the leader of the Call for Communication, decided to take matters into his own hands, and ask Gabe if the aforementioned e-mail reply was real. Turns out that, yes, as proven by this screencap of his e-mail reply to Surf, the original e-mail is legitimate – and so, according to Gabe, we will not be seeing any new announcements from Valve at E3 2012.
If you ask me, it still looks and sounds a bit too hinky, but I don’t think Gabe would really lie to us. To be honest, I don’t know what to think at this point, but one thing’s for sure – I’m not getting excited over whatever Valve may have in store for this E3, and I think neither should you.
Source is ValveTime.AMHERST - The University of Massachusetts at Amherst announced that it is notifying clients of the university's Center for Language, Speech, and Hearing that their protected health information was possibly revealed after a workstation was inadvertently infected with a malware program.
The malware infection was detected on April 5. An investigation by the university's Office of Information Technologies found no evidence suggesting or indicating that any data was copied from the workstation.
The data includes Social Security numbers, addresses, names, dates of birth, health insurance company names or names of other payee, insurance numbers, primary health care or referring physicians, and diagnoses and procedure codes.
A total of 1,670 patient records were affected. University officials, while stressing that the risk of theft of this information is low, are notifying individuals in accordance with the federal Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act.
The Center for Language, Speech, and Hearing offers clinical services for individuals with communication disorders, differences or delays.
In a letter to the affected patients, Dan Gerber, associate Dean of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, advises them to pay particular attention to "any unusual activity with respect to your health insurance information to limit the likelihood of misuse of PHI [protected health information]."
The letter states that UMass Amherst has taken steps to improve the support and security for all workstations located in the center, installed automated software to detect malicious activity, and identified files in departmental computers containing personal information.
In addition, current and new staff will receive additional training in security practices.Oakland parents, activists call on schools to get the lead out of water
Oakland Unified School Board member Roseann Torres (right) and CALPIRG’s Jean Shanley advocate for reducing allowable lead levels in drinking water. Oakland Unified School Board member Roseann Torres (right) and CALPIRG’s Jean Shanley advocate for reducing allowable lead levels in drinking water. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Oakland parents, activists call on schools to get the lead out of water 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Oakland parents and community activists called on school officials Wednesday to adopt a policy that ensures students have access to safe drinking water, an outcry spurred by test results showing faucets at seven school sites had high levels of lead.
“We’re talking about the water in schools being dangerous to our kids,” said Vien Truong, an Oakland mother whose child is in kindergarten. “Our families already have too much to worry about — they shouldn’t have to fear drinking water at schools.”
School board member Roseann Torres said she expects the panel to vote before the end of the year on setting testing requirements and possibly reducing allowable lead levels in school drinking water.
“Schools were built in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s,” Torres said. “We know we have pipes that are very old.”
Test results released to The Chronicle last week showed that taps at seven Oakland schools dispensed water with lead levels higher than the 15 parts per billion allowed under federal guidelines. A kitchen tap at the temporary site of Glenview Elementary School near the Emeryville border dispensed water containing 60 parts per billion.
“This is an emergency,” Sylvester Hodges, a former school board member, said at a news conference in City Hall. “It’s time for some action.”
The district is testing water taps at its other schools as quickly as possible, said spokesman John Sasaki. He said the taps where lead levels exceeded the federal limits have either been fixed or are off limits.
“We know we have a sense of urgency to get this right,” Torres said.
Representatives of the consumer rights group CalPIRG and other activists called on the district to replace all pipes and fixtures that contain lead, which could include any plumbing installed before 2010. They also asked for filters on drinking water taps and regular testing for lead.
Torres said she’d like to follow the example set by the San Diego school district, where officials limit lead levels to a maximum of 5 parts per billion rather than the 15 set by federal guidelines.
Some activists maintain that no amount of lead exposure is safe for children. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that school water contain less than 1 part per billion of lead, said Jason Pfeifle, a CalPIRG health advocate.
Lead is a toxic metal that can cause irreversible neurological and brain damage, including lowering a child’s IQ, said Dr. Noemi Spinazzi, a pediatric physician at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland.
“It gets stored in the bones, it gets stored in the liver, it gets stored in the brain,” she said at the news conference. “Even at low levels, it leads to lower IQ.”
Many other districts have been grappling with the lead issue since the state launched a voluntary program in January allowing for free testing of five taps at each school by the local water utility.
San Francisco found three school sites with elevated levels of lead, including one water fountain in the San Francisco International High School gym that had 860 parts per billion. Schools in San Mateo, Napa, Sacramento and San Bernardino counties also have found elevated levels.
Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law last month that will require all schools to test for lead before 2019.
Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @jilltuckerHOW FAST CAN OIL SANDS REALLY GROW? A slide presentation by geologist David Hughes includes charts showing the wide discrepancy between commonly accepted growth scenarios for the Alberta oil sands, and significantly higher projections put forth by Enbridge and other proponents of fast build-out of oil sands infrastructure. The slides also include satellite views of the oil sands showing growth over nearly three decades. View the slides here.
Scandal Rocks Key Player in Canada's Oil Sands PR Push read more
Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners ‘Punch to the Gut’ Musical on Residential Schools Returns to Vancouver Children of God has been shaped by intense audience reactions, says director Corey Payette.
The Northern Gateway Pipeline will explosively increase the scale of oil sands production at a level not in the national interest, says David Hughes, one of Canada's foremost energy analysts.
By tripling oil sands production rates above 2010 levels, the project will "compromise the long term energy security interests of Canadians, as well as their environmental interests," charges Hughes.
The proposed pipeline, designed to ferry bitumen to Asian markets, will also liquidate a non-renewable resource at prices that will likely seem like a bargain down the road says Hughes in a 30-page report titled "The Northern Gateway Pipeline."
The top-notch analyst also points out that Enbridge, Gateway's proponent, has made up its own oil sands growth forecasts, which it has provided to the National Energy Board to justify the project.
"Enbridge has generated its own projection of a further increased oil supply, with no methodological backup, to justify the need for its Northern Gateway project to the National Energy Board."
Hughes' damning report also posits a simple question that Canada's media routinely neglects: why does the Canadian government support a proposal to export oil to China when nearly half the country (Quebec and Atlantic Canada) is nearly 100 per cent dependent on declining or volatile reserves from the North Sea and the Middle East? (The study was funded by the author and by Forest Ethics with intervenor money for the Gateway hearing provided by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.)*
He also singles out a glaring public policy omission: Canada does not have a credible energy plan. "The absence of a National Energy Strategy, given the non-renewable nature of the majority of the energy inputs to Canadian society, represents an extreme vulnerability to the long-term security interests of Canadians."
Author's 32 years with Natural Resources Canada
Hughes is neither a radical nor a foreigner. Nor he is an environmentalist. In fact the no-nonsense geologist regards the oil sands as a strategic resource that should be developed measurably and carefully in the national interest.
His energy expertise is genuine and hard won. The rock hound worked for the Natural Resources Canada for 32 years where the senior researcher focused on analyzing coal reserves, shale gas and unconventional natural gas supplies.
The retired 61-year-old energy specialist now gives detailed and sobering talks about declining global energy supplies across the continent.
The report, which has been submitted as evidence to the National Energy Board (the author will testify at the public hearings), squarely questions the "Canadian energy superpower" rhetoric of the Harper government. Hughes says it's based entirely on the oil sands -- a low quality and environmentally high-cost source of oil.
But Canada does, however, burn super volumes of fossil fuels. Canadians now consume five times more oil than the global per capita average, says Hughes. In addition half the country depends on oil imports (780,000 barrels a day) from foreign countries. In fact, the majority of oil consumed in Quebec and Atlantic Canada comes from volatile regimes in the Middle East.
How can Canada be an energy superpower, asks Hughes, when it will become "increasingly dependent on OPEC and the vagaries of the world oil markets for what is likely to be much higher cost imported oil?"
Furthermore, Canada's highest quality energy resources are declining. "Our natural gas production peaked in 2001 and conventional oil peaked in 1973. The superpower claim is totally a statement about the tar sands," Hughes told The Tyee.
But bitumen is not light oil, cheap oil or even easy oil. It's taken 40 years of dedicated brute force and landscape destruction as well as nearly $200 billion worth of mostly foreign capital to reach marginal production levels of 1.5 million barrels a day. (See satellite images)
In the global scheme of things, that's a drop in the bucket. It's also a modest figure given that Canada now consumes 1.8 million barrels a day. (Domestic demand could grow to 2.25 million barrels by 2030).
Moreover Canada has or will soon pick the best fruit first in the oil sands, says Hughes. The mineable portions are the richest and cheapest to extract. These are the focus of nearly 90 per cent of the 26 billion barrels currently under "active development" according to the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board.
Of the remaining 143 billion barrels, 90 per cent can only be exploited by in situ methods, which are so energy wasteful and water intensive that many experts think this technology should be banned or severely limited.
According to the "growth" forecasts by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Canada could extract 3.7 million barrels a day by 2025 (the maximum recovery rate) but such haste would exhaust the 26 billion barrels "under active development" within 19 years. The Gateway Enbridge pipeline, which proposes to suck out half a million barrels a day to Asian supertankers, would accomplish that job quickly.
Three strikes against
Hughes thinks that the rapid liquidation of Canada's highest quality bitumen reserves, as proposed by Enbridge, is bad national policy for three reasons.
For starters, peak oil means the end of cheap oil. What stays in the ground will only get more valuable over time, says Hughes. Speedy liquidation means not only a revenue giveaway but exponential growth of pollution and water contamination. (Current mining waste liabilities already total more than $20-billion.)
Second, energy returns on bitumen are dropping fast, which means that industry will increasingly spend more energy to get less energy back. Right now industry secures but 5.7 barrels for every barrel of oil or its energy equivalent invested in tar sands mining operations. In contrast, the Middle East still garners superior returns of 20 to one. (According to energy expert Charles Hall, our currently oil-driven civilization requires returns of 10 to one or must face economic stagnation.)
But the steam plants, models of inefficiency and waste, win returns of 3.8 to one for in situ recovery (80 per cent of the resource). Given that the best bitumen resources with the highest energy returns are now being used up, a rapid extraction policy leaves Canadians with the dregs of the barrel as well as less energy and even bigger environmental messes, says Hughes.
Third, the Enbridge pipeline is based on a projection that accelerates liquidation of a non-renewable resource in the absence of any national policy. Hughes points out that Northern Gateway is not needed unless oil sands production is ramped up by more than three-fold over 2010 levels. Enbridge bases its Northern Gateway proposal on the assumption that oil sands production can be tripled in less than 25 years. (Remember it took 40 years to reach 1.5 million barrels.)
The Enbridge forecast, which was an extension of CAPP's most optimistic forecast of tar sands development filed in its application to NEB, has no documented methodological basis. This was confirmed in an email to Hughes from CAPP.
It stated: "The extension is not from CAPP. Looks like someone has done the extension without our cooperation. In other words, we can't comment on the methodology."
CAPP, the nation's powerful oil lobby, has two growth scenarios for the tar sands. Given existing approvals and projects under construction, CAPP's more conservative forecast says oil sand production will grow from 1.8 million barrels a day to 2.8 million barrels by 2019 (tar sands production including diluents). That's a 50 per cent increase over 2010 production levels.
But a super "growth" CAPP scenario based on speculative numbers suggests production could reach nearly 4.6 million barrels per day by 2025, a growth rate of 154 per cent.
Enbridge, however, took these figures and jacked them up to 5.8 million barrels a day by 2035 or a growth rate of 217 per cent over 2010 levels. "Enbridge's rationale for the Northern Gateway Pipeline is based on its own unsubstantiated and highly optimistic projections for growth in oil sands production beyond 2025," reports Hughes. "This may serve Enbridge's corporate needs and those of its shareholders but does not consider the longer term environmental and energy security needs of Canadians."
In summary Hughes concludes that 50 per cent growth in oil sands production can be handled by existing pipelines and U.S. demand. In other words Gateway is not needed. (A Natural Resources Canada briefing note reached the same conclusion last year saying "Even without Northern Gateway, Canada will have enough crude oil export capacity for some considerable time.")
Slow and steady
Like many oil patch veterans, Hughes favors a slow and prudent course and doesn't recommend much further growth in bitumen production. "I agree with [former Alberta premier] Peter Lougheed. I think we should have a planned growth strategy that puts Canada first."
But Enbridge's radical growth projections would expand the scale of the mammoth tar sands project and triple current levels of production by 2035. Hughes calls such irrational growth a threat to the nation "in the light of the long term energy security and environmental interests of Canadians."
Furthermore, "the absence of National energy strategy which safeguards the long term energy security and environmental interests of Canadians means there are no constraints on the uncontrolled liquidation of Canada's intrinsic energy resources."
Asked why Natural Resources Canada hasn't raised these critical energy issues, Hughes paused for a moment on the phone at
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of my new non-Copernican “white hole” cosmology.’53
12. Spiritual implications of a centre
To Christians, the thought of being located at the centre of the cosmos seems intuitively satisfying. But to secularists, it is deeply disturbing. For centuries they have tried to push the Copernican revolution54 yet further to get away from centrality. Carl Sagan devoted an entire book in this style to belittle our location and us:
‘The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light [an image of Earth taken by Voyager I]. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.’55
Let’s consider more closely why the central position of mankind in the cosmos is so important an idea that the enemies of God try to escape it.
First, the Bible declares the uniqueness and centrality of our home planet. It mentions the Earth first in Genesis 1:1, on Day 1—long before it mentions the Sun, Moon and stars over a dozen verses later, on the fourth day. Genesis 1:6-10 locates the Earth ‘in the midst’ of all the matter of the cosmos, as I explained in Starlight and Time.56 In Genesis 1:14–15, God says the host of the heavens exists for the benefit of those on the Earth. So it is not man who imagines himself ‘at a commanding position at the centre of the universe’,57 but God who says we are there. It is heartening to see the evidence once again supporting what Scripture says.
‘Okay,’ you might say, ‘but then why didn’t God put us right at the centre of our galaxy, where the centrality would have been more evident?’ Well, it looks like He had something better in mind. First, there are good design features about our Sun’s position in the Milky way, making it an ideal environment.58,59 The inner galaxy is very active, with many supernovæ, and probably a massive black hole, that produce intense radiation.60 Instead, the Sun has a fairly circular orbit keeping the Earth at a fair distance from the dangerous central portion. In fact, the Sun is at an optimal distance from the galactic centre, called the co-rotation radius. Only here does a star’s orbital speed match that of the spiral arms—otherwise, the Sun would cross the arms too often and be exposed to other supernovæ. Another design feature is that the Sun orbits almost parallel to the galactic plane—otherwise, crossing this plane could be disruptive.
Second, there are aesthetic and spiritual reasons. If God had placed the Sun closer to the Milky Way centre, the thick clouds of stars, dust, and gas (quite aside from the supernovæ!) near our galaxy’s centre would have prevented us from seeing more than a few light years into the cosmos. Instead, God put us in an optimal position, not at the outmost rim where the Milky Way would be dim, but far enough out to see clearly into the heights of the heavens. That helps us to appreciate the greatness of God’s ways and thoughts, as Isaiah 55:9 points out.
Most important, it is very encouraging to see evidence for the centrality of humans to the plan of God. It was a sin on this planet that subjected the entire universe to groaning and travailing (Romans 8:22). Ours is the planet where the Second Person of the Trinity took on the (human) nature of one of His creatures to redeem not only us, but also the entire cosmos (Romans 8:21). This knowledge that God gave minuscule mankind prime real estate in a vast cosmos astounds and awes us, as Psalm 8:3-4 says:
‘When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained; What is man, that you are mindful of him? and the son of man, that you visit him?’
Acknowledgements
Here I want to acknowledge the valuable comments of many creationists, including those of many creationist friends in New Mexico with whom I meet regularly.Real estate magnate and reality television star Donald Trump, who currently leads the Republican primary polls, is constantly telling everyone that he’s very rich.
And he is. Trump’s fortune is estimated to be worth $2.9 billion (according to Bloomberg), or $4 billion (according to Forbes), or $8.7 billion (according to a document Trump circulated at his July campaign announcement), or “well over $10 billion” (according to Trump himself, later the same day).
Even the low end of that range of estimates dwarfs John F. Kennedy’s $1 billion (in 2015 dollars) reserve, and makes George Washington’s $525 million (again, 2015 dollars) look pedestrian.
In fact, a President Trump would not only be the richest president in U.S. history; he’d be richer than all previous U.S. president combined. (Their collective net worth adds up to only around $2.6 billon.)
At the other end of the spectrum, Bernie Sanders’s estimated “fortune” of around $330,507 would put him very near the bottom of the richest presidents list, alongside Vermont’s Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman. Carly Fiorina, currently running second or third in Republican primary polls, would slot in at number 10, just ahead of Bill Clinton at $59 million.
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who dropped out of the Republican race this week, would have taken last place on the list if he’d remained in the race and prevailed in both the primary and general elections. He’s currently in debt, putting his net worth in negative territory.
Read next: These Are the 10 Richest Women of All TimeFormer FCC Commissioner: “We Should Be Ashamed Of Ourselves” For State of Broadband In The U.S.
In Washington, DC today, a group of internet industry executives and politicians came together to look back on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and to do a little crystal-ball gazing about the future of broadband regulation in the United States. Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps was among the presenters, and he had sharp words for the audience about the “insanity” of the current wave of merger mania in the telecom field and the looming threats of losing net neutrality regulation.
Copps has been a longtime pro-consumer advocate. He was the lone member of the five-person FCC to vote against the merger of Comcast and NBC, and since the 2010 net neutrality rule was vacated in February he has been urging the FCC to reclassify broadband ISPs as a common carrier service. He has also advocated against continued media consolidation and big telecom mergers.
Several current and former members of Congress spoke first about the 1996 Telecom Act, sharing their memories of bringing the bill to law. Sen. Ed Markey (MA) and former Reps. Thomas Bliley (VA) and John Shadegg (AZ) all praised the bipartisan process that created the regulation, and lauded the capacity for competition that the Act created. In all, both business representatives and lawmakers alike were largely retrospective and celebratory, ignoring the problems that face internet industries and consumers today.
Copps, however, was anything but retrospective when he stood to speak. “I’m not here to celebrate,” he began, “I’m here to advocate.” And the landscape he laid out is indeed not one to cheer for.
He led off by agreeing with the several executive speakers that true competition is the way of the future, and the best way to serve consumers. “But we haven’t given competition the chance it needs,” he continued, before referring to how poorly U.S. broadband compares on the global stage. “We have fallen so far short that we should be ashamed of ourselves. We should be leading, and we’re not. We need to get serious about broadband, we need to get serious about competition, we need to get serious about our country.”
Broadband competition is indeed scarce in the United States, and the looming wave of “merger mania” is unlikely at best to improve the situation for anyone.
For all that the current bout of mergers — Comcast with TWC, AT&T with DirecTV, and maybe even Sprint with T-Mobile — seems inevitable, it’s not. The mania for consolidation, Copps said, did not fall ordained from the hand of God, derive from natural law, or arise organically from an unfettered free market. It is, instead, the result of “conscious public policy choices” that shape the business environment we live in.
And that environment is dire. Even taking into account the previous monopolies of 19th and 20th century industry, Copps said, “there has never been a more urgent need for legislators and regulators” to make moves to protect consumers.
He called back to an earlier speaker, who had pointed out that the internet, to most users, had become about the very core of freedom of expression: the freedom to say, read, and watch what we want. And with “the likelihood of gatekeeper control” impending, in the form of the FCC’s new proposed net neutrality rule, those freedoms are in danger.
In the end, Copps directly challenged both the FCC and current members of Congress to do more, and do better. “Our democracy depends on what happens between now and the end of this year,” he said. “Are we going to have regulators and legislators with enough gumption to make this happen?”
“I know it can,” he added, calling on the audience in the room to speak up and make their voices heard with lawmakers. But ultimately, he concluded, it all boils down to two questions:
“Whose internet is it anyway? And whose democracy is it anyway?”Tue 29th September, by Annem Hobson
Over the last few years, Tottenham (London) has continued to surprise me more and more. Now, coming towards the end of 2015, I’m hooked. I’ve been living here for 4 years and in our area we now have:
Tottenham Green market every summer Saturday.
Fairs, markets & community run events at both Downhills Park & Lordship Recreation Ground.
Green Lanes ‘Turkish Mile’, full of amazing restaurants & cafes.
Also on Green lanes: Bun & Bar, a great new burger joint – and Hashtag, for fish & chips.
the amazing Beavertown Brewery & Redemption Brewery just down the road.
Craving Coffee, a new independent speciality coffee company with licensed cafe.
And I’ve just discovered we have our very own cheese.
Our Mozzarella magic occurred one fine Wednesday evening, when my husband Michael surprised me with vouchers to go and ‘get our cheese on‘. The two of us jumped in the car and popped 5 minutes down the road to an industrial estate in Whitehart Lane. Not the kind of place you’d expect to find cheese heaven, but then BAM, there it was – Wildes Cheese in all it’s glory.
As we walked in we were greeted by the lovely Phil & Keith who settled us in with generous helpings of their finest cheese and crackers. My jaw was dropping just looking into the rest of the room, I couldn’t wait to get in!
First, they explained a few important house rules; wear hairnets and overalls, disinfect shoes/wear shoe protectors, and if you use your phone whilst inside, wash your hands again to prevent germs from spreading because lets be honest – we all know you use it when you’re on the toilet!
Any germs on the cheese can have dire consequences, and these guys run a tight ship.
The lovely Phil, Keith and Rodolfo then schooled us on milk 101. We got to try fresh milk, pasteurised only to the legal limit and boy was it good. The cream on top was heavenly and made me realise that the semi skimmed crap we often buy from the supermarkets is barely even milk at all. It’s udderly terrible, we are all paying for watered down white stuff!
Who are those good looking guys sitting at the front? http://t.co/w8UORxy2ay #UrbanFoodAwards @standardnews — wildes cheese (@wildescheese) September 28, 2015
They continued to then explain in great detail the process of using whey, and producing cheese curd. We then got a little tour and were allowed to handle some cheese, tasting and exploring the entire way through. Everyone was encouraged to ask questions, and we chuckled the whole way through since they had a great sense of humour and lots of cheesy jokes!
The highlight was walking into the cold rooms where the cheese was left to produce mould. Each individual cheese looked like it was lovingly made, and the room smelled pungent in a good way.
Cheese is basically milk with different living bacterias added. Does that mean cheese is alive? Do they have feelings?
After the tour and stuffing a few more cheese crackers in my mouth, we got going with the mozzarella making.
We were given generous helpings of the premade curd, and slowly poured in warm/hot water – rolling the curds into each other as they began to stretch and melt.
Then, we start forming a ball and stretching outwards and under like a jelly fish! The process was very gentle, just enough so we were lightly stretching, rather than mushing together like a bread dough.
From here, we produced balls – and lots of them.
You dump the balls into bowls of ice cold water, where they lie waiting – for they are done! The second batch we decided to do plaits and our stretching power was at the max setting! The cheese got so long it began to resemble an edible skipping rope.
Afterwards, we salted our batch and packaged them up – ready to take home, with official Wildes Cheese labels!
But we couldn’t leave without shoving more cheese & crackers into our mouths.
There was enough to not need dinner after! In fact, the whole class consisted of eating cheese, eating some more cheese, trying some delicious fruit membrillo from Fruit Magpie (posh chutney stuff), drinking fresh milk, eating more cheese, making cheese, making more cheese and then eating some more cheese before leaving to go home, extremely full of cheese.
A video posted by So Wrong It’s Nom (@sowrongitsnom) on Sep 23, 2015 at 1:37pm PDT
It was the best £35 I’ve ever spent. Keep an eye out for some recipes I’ve made using the mozzarella!
If you want to experience this for yourself, check out the Wildes Cheese website!
If anyone has other great tips for what’s happening in Tottenham (food related and not), let me know in the comments!How many among us own multiple credit cards and forget its last date to pay the bill of the month? Shopping is the most enjoyable moment for all those who love to be in trend, and at the same time when it comes to payment of bills it becomes a heart-breaking moment and when you forget to pay and see the next installment it may give you a heart failure. To avoid heart-failures and for you to enjoy blissful credit card shopping, here in the list we've reviewed some best bill reminder apps that reminds your bill payment date in advance so that you can make arrangements and be ready to pay on time. These bill reminder apps lets you add multiple bill entries along with the reminder date and time so that it reminds you to make the payment in advance, which is great. Let's checkout the list below: Bills Reminder: Bills Reminder is a bill reminder app that lets you schedule bill reminders to specific dates so that it reminds you to pay the bills on time. The app reminds you advance when to pay bill and lets you customize each bill according to the needs. This app also has the ability to flash the due date to checkout bill payment due dates to avoid penalties and fine charges. The app lets you set recurring which you can set for everyday, week, month, year, etc. Not oly that, the app has the ability to capture instant photos or to attach photos of bills, invoices, receipts, and more to keep you updated and away from the hassle of bundle of papers. The app comes with 30-day trial facility, which can be used further after purchasing the upgraded version of the app. Grab this app from here. Developed By: Handy Apps MoBill Budget and Reminder: MoBill Budget and Reminder is another bill reminder apps that reminds you to pay bills on time. This app lets you create multiple accounts along with numerous currency support. The app lets you add reminders according to categories and schedule them date-wise to stay updated and pay bills on time. The app comes with in-built calculator and at the same time lets you create recurring to simplify your efforts with ease. You can track your payment progress in form of pie-graph for better tracking. This bill reminder lets you backup, restore and at the same time set password for securing your data form unauthorized access. The app is capable of working in the absence of internet connection, which is quite good! Grab this app from here. Developed By: hakane Bills Reminder: Bills Reminder is another bill reminder app that lets you manage your bills on time without any failure. The app marks your payment actions ans has the ability to organize your payments date-wise in an orderly manner. The app reminds you on that exact date and time so that you can manage your bill payments and stay due free. You can customize every aspect of the… Best Bills Reminder Apps to Avoid Sneaking of Due Dates Best Bills Reminder Apps to Avoid Sneaking of Due Dates Editor's Rating User Ex Reminder Ex 91 User Rating: No ratings yet 91
How many among us own multiple credit cards and forget its last date to pay the bill of the month? Shopping is the most enjoyable moment for all those who love to be in trend, and at the same time when it comes to payment of bills it becomes a heart-breaking moment and when you forget to pay and see the next installment it may give you a heart failure.
To avoid heart-failures and for you to enjoy blissful credit card shopping, here in the list we’ve reviewed some best bill reminder apps that reminds your bill payment date in advance so that you can make arrangements and be ready to pay on time.
These bill reminder apps lets you add multiple bill entries along with the reminder date and time so that it reminds you to make the payment in advance, which is great. Let’s checkout the list below:
Bills Reminder:
Bills Reminder is a bill reminder app that lets you schedule bill reminders to specific dates so that it reminds you to pay the bills on time. The app reminds you advance when to pay bill and lets you customize each bill according to the needs.
This app also has the ability to flash the due date to checkout bill payment due dates to avoid penalties and fine charges. The app lets you set recurring which you can set for everyday, week, month, year, etc. Not oly that, the app has the ability to capture instant photos or to attach photos of bills, invoices, receipts, and more to keep you updated and away from the hassle of bundle of papers. The app comes with 30-day trial facility, which can be used further after purchasing the upgraded version of the app.
Grab this app from here.
Developed By: Handy Apps
MoBill Budget and Reminder:
MoBill Budget and Reminder is another bill reminder apps that reminds you to pay bills on time. This app lets you create multiple accounts along with numerous currency support. The app lets you add reminders according to categories and schedule them date-wise to stay updated and pay bills on time.
The app comes with in-built calculator and at the same time lets you create recurring to simplify your efforts with ease. You can track your payment progress in form of pie-graph for better tracking. This bill reminder lets you backup, restore and at the same time set password for securing your data form unauthorized access. The app is capable of working in the absence of internet connection, which is quite good!
Grab this app from here.
Developed By: hakane
Bills Reminder:
Bills Reminder is another bill reminder app that lets you manage your bills on time without any failure. The app marks your payment actions ans has the ability to organize your payments date-wise in an orderly manner.
The app reminds you on that exact date and time so that you can manage your bill payments and stay due free. You can customize every aspect of the app that deals with adding bill reminders. The app supports multiple currency and recurring to manage your monthly money, effortlessly.
Grab this app from here.
Developed By: Amazier
Easy Bills Reminder:
Easy Bills Reminder is again a bill reminder app that lets you keep an eye on bills and their payment to be paid on time, without any delay. The app lets you stay notified with the current status and at the same time allow you to schedule advanced reminders along with recurring to stay updated and aware of the last date.
The app supports multiple languages and currencies allowing you to keep a track of your entire payments record, which are overdue to be paid as upcoming ones. The app lets you backup your entire data to Dropbox to store the date effortlessly.
Grab this app from here.
Developed By: AA3 Apps
Smart Bills Reminder:
Smart Bills Reminder is an app that lets you manage your bills and their respective payments on time. The app displays the bills as calendar overview and lets you track the progress in graphical representation. The app supports variety of currencies and recurring feature which make it easy to schedule reminders on daily basis, monthly, etc. The app comes with simple and handy interface so that you can seamlessly manage your bills and payments without any occurrence of dues.
Grab this app from here.
Developed By: YourELink Inc.
Although there are many reminders app, that reminds you about various tasks on time for your stay updated. Despite of that, these bill reminder apps lets you manage your monetary areas with ease in a detailed manner.
Comments
commentsRob Wainwright, director of Europol | Jerry Lampen/AFP via Getty Images Encryption a problem in terrorism investigations: Europol
Encryption hampers terrorism investigations and the EU needs laws to deal with it, Europol Director Rob Wainwright told POLITICO.
"Encrypted communication via the Internet and smartphones are a part of the problems investigators face in these instances," Wainwright said. "We have to find a more constructive legislative solution for this problem of encryption."
Police powers to intercept private phone calls are well established and regulated in the EU, but that right does not exist when it comes to encrypted communication.
"We have the same difficulties getting access to that material as any other law enforcement agencies," he added.
The EU is struggling to create laws that can deal with the challenges of Internet-based communications systems, Wainwright said, and countries are filling that void. Examples are the U.K.'s Investigatory Powers Bill and a slew of rules introduced in France in the wake of terror attacks in that country.
"We have to find a better balance than we have now between privacy and security, notwithstanding very important interests of maintaining privacy rights of individuals," Wainwright said.On Friday, the city’s Committee on Information and Technology (CoIT) voted to approve a drone-use policy that directs how five departments—the Controller’s Office, Fire Department, Port Commission, Public Utilities Commission and Recreation and Park Department—may use the devices.
The document set guidelines for how city employees may employ drones for work like disaster response, property inspections, marketing, wildlife monitoring and “building fire reconnaissance.”
Although it took CoIT roughly two years to create the new rules, their policy-writing isn't done quite yet. The document approved on Friday included an amendment that requires each of the five departments to come up with its own policies which will need to be approved by CoIT staff, said Matthias Jaime, the committee’s director.
“Timelines may vary,” Jaime wrote in an email. “But I would imagine it will take a couple of months since we will want to continue a public dialogue before providing approval … we will use CoIT meetings and other public forums to provide updates on the progress of the drone policy.”
A drone flies above Bernal Heights. | Photo: arbitragery/Flickr
The only department that currently has drones is Rec and Park, however, its seven-device fleet has been grounded pending CoIT's policy work.
In addition to city regulations, departments must comply with state and federal law. Operators must obtain a remote pilot certification from the Federal Aviation Administration, and each device must be fitted with GPS.
Departments launching drones must also submit a flight plan to the city 24 hours before takeoff or within 48 hours of being deployed in an emergency.
Over the past couple of years, major changes have been made to the draft drone policy, the Examiner reported last week.
For instance, a provision that would have allowed Rec and Park to monitor large events from the air was deleted, as was language that would have given the Port Commission, Public Utilities Commission and Rec and Park permission to use drones to secure city properties and assets.
A drone hovers over the intersection at Market, Sanchez and 15th streets. | Photo: Shane Downing/Hoodline
Privacy concerns have always been an issue with drones, especially in dense urban environments like San Francisco, but the policy doesn’t permit the devices to be used for law enforcement or security.
Each department will be required to appoint an employee tasked with managing drone footage who'll delete any “personal identifiable information" captured during the course of a flight. But the policy also states that departments may retain unprocessed raw footage for up to a year, which concerns some civil liberty groups.
“We continue to be concerned about the impact of drones used by government on the privacy of people of the city,” Adam Schwartz, a Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney, was quoted as saying.
To ensure that the city agencies now permitted to use drones are strictly adhering to the approved regulations, CoIT will review the policy in another 12 months.Pro-Life Students Fighting Back
Parkland High School in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Students Defend Their Rights
Some students in Parkland High School wanted to start a student pro-life group. They followed all of the guidelines required to start a group and submitted their completed proposal in March, but they were denied on the grounds that they would be too political and controversial. When Grace Schairer, a junior, sent an e-mail to the principal asking what steps they could take to over come the objections, there was no response, in spite of the fact that the school already has other groups that could be considered political and controversial, like the Political Science Club and the Gay Straight Alliance.
Elizabeth Castro, a senior, stated that they were simply denied because they are pro-life. They simply want to educate their peers on the life issues and run a diaper drive to support parenting students.
Fortunately, the Thomas More Society has come to their defense and challenged the Parkland School District on the legal standings of the students under their First Amendment rights. In the past most school districts have changed their tunes when challenged legally. We will have to see if Parkland does the same.
Assistant Principal at Downingtown STEM Academy in Pennsylvania Resigned After His Treatment of Pro-Life Students Caught on Video
Two teenagers, Conner and Lauren Haines, were hosting a pro-life display on the public sidewalk outside STEM Academy as members of a Christian group called Project Frontlines.
When Dr. Zach Ruff, the assistant principal, saw their display, he yelled at the teens, swore at them, said he was calling the police, and told them to go to hell. During his rant he said he did not give a (expletive) what Jesus says and told them to shut up. Fortunately, the students took a video of the entire encounter, which became a big problem for Dr. Ruff.
The school administrators conducted an investigation and placed Dr. Ruff on leave without pay. Knowing that he was entirely in the wrong for screaming at these students and trying to intimidate them for exercising the First Amendment rights, he later resigned. Meanwhile, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel, Kevin Theriot, defended the students in a statement saying that no one should ever be berated for exercising their freedom of speech in a public place.
Professor at Fresno State University Recruited Class Members to Erase Pro-Life Group Sidewalk Messages
In April the Fresno State Students for Life had received permission to place life- affirming messages with chalk on the sidewalks leading to the university library. When the students were busy doing this on May 2, Professor Gregory Thatcher told them they were only allowed to do this in the free speech area of the college. Although Professor Thatcher was told by the club President, Bernadette Tasy, that the university had given them permission to do this, Professor Thatcher said he planned to return and erase their work.
Thatcher returned with several of his students, and they began erasing the messages, claiming that he was exercising his own free speech rights. Fortunately the entire encounter was caught on video.
Once again, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys have come to the defense of these students and filed a lawsuit against Professor Thatcher for censoring the free speech of the Fresno Students for Life who were acting with permission from the University. It appears that Professor Thatcher has little to stand on in this regard.
Christian School Student Who Refused Abortion Is Punished by Administration
Maddi Runkles has attended Christian schools her entire life and is about to graduate from Heritage Academy in Hagerstown, Maryland; but she will not be allowed to participate in her graduation ceremony because of her pregnancy! Maddi is an exemplary student with a 4.0 average and was President of the Student Council, but she has been stripped of that position. The administration even wanted her to finish her senior year classes at home when they found out about the pregnancy.
Maddi said she at one point considered abortion because she was so afraid of what everyone would think of her; but with the support she received from her parents and her church, she bravely chose life for her baby boy, which she said was not an easy decision but the right one.
Maddi went public and confessed to the entire student body, asking forgiveness for breaking her pledge to remain celibate until marriage. But did the school administrators forgive her? No, they did not. They allowed her to continue her remaining classes at school, but she is still denied her graduation. Her father, Scott Runkles, resigned his position as President of the School Board because of this harsh treatment of his daughter.
Meanwhile, her story has made national headlines, and Students for Life are giving her their full support - raising funds for a college scholarship and baby gifts for her unborn child. One has to wonder why this school could not forgive this brave girl and celebrate her example for choosing life for her unborn child rather than death through abortion.Hello DeLaney Community! _______________________________________________
I can't believe it's July already! It feels like I just started the season here, but we are nearly halfway through already. I've learned quite a lot; how to till fields, plant with a seeder, harvest cutting greens, set up irrigation in beds, turn compost...the list is huge! Still, I feel like the biggest things this internship have impressed upon me so far are how fast things change in a season and how much work goes into growing food. Sometimes it feels like we could have twice as many interns and staff here at DeLaney and still feel like we could use an extra hand (and believe me, it makes one quite thankful for all the help we do get). Just last week I recall a day where I wished there was just one more of us there to juggle our needs of tilling, setting up irrigation, watering the fields and leading a volunteer group to plant (somehow we got it done with just the two of us working that day, I have no idea how).
No day feels quite like the last. I turn around and the pumpkins we planted a few days ago are already coming up and the beds we just barely got through weeding already have knee high thistle in them. Even this morning in the office, writting the newsletter and getting caught up with the programs side of things, the nature of what needs to be done is so different from last month it almost feels like an entirely different job.
So far being a farm intern has been fun, amazingly rewarding, and profoundly educational, but it above everything else it's been humbling.
- Jake One of our amazing volunteer groups Baby pumpkins
Recipes: Kale Chips from: Bon Appetit
12 kale leaves
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and black pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 250°F. Toss the kale leaves with the olive oil in a large bowl. Arrange leaves in a single layer on two large baking sheets. Bake leaves for about 30 minutes, or until crisp. Use tongs to transfer leaves to a cooling rack. Serve when cool to the touch.
Southern-style turnip green recipe with salt pork By Diana Rattray, About.com Guide If you’re not fancy to pork, omit it from the recipe and add a few pinches of salt instead. This recipe also works with mustard greens or collards. Serve with vinegar or pepper sauce and cornbread. 1 pound turnip greens 1/4 pound salt pork, rinsed and diced 1/4 cup water 1/4 cup finely chopped onion 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1/4 teaspoon sugar, optional dash of crushed red pepper, optional Cut off and discard tough stems and discolored leaves from greens. Wash greens thoroughly and drain well. Cook salt pork in a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat until crisp and brown. Add the turnip greens, water, onion, sugar, pepper, and crushed red pepper; bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer 40 to 45 minutes or until greens are tender. Taste and adjust seasonings. Whole Wheat Spaghetti wit h Swiss Chard
(And onions! And tomatoes!) from Giada at foodnetwork.com 1 T olive oil 2 onions, thinly sliced 10-14 C chopped swiss chard (about one DeLaney bunch- use the stems too!) 3 garlic cloves, minced 1 14 oz can diced tomatoes with juices (or 2-3 fresh chopped tomatoes) 1/4 C dry white wine 1/4 t crushed red pepper flakes Salt and pepper 8 oz whole wheat spaghetti (or any long pasta) 1/4 C pitted kalamata olives, chopped 2 T grated pecorino cheese (or whatever your favorite) 2 T toasted pine nuts or walnuts Cook pasta according to package directions and set aside. Heat the oil over medium heat in a large frying pan. Add the onions and saute until tender, about 8 minutes (if you're using the chard stems, throw them in after about 4 minutes). Add the chard and saute until it wilts, about two minutes. Add the garlic and saute until fragrant, about 1 minute. Stir in the tomatoes with their juices, the white wine, and red pepper flakes. Bring to a simmer, cover, and then simmer until the tomatoes break down and chard is very tender, about 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Toss the cooked pasta with the chard mixture and transfer to serving bowls. Sprinkle with olives, cheese, and nuts, and then serve.
Arugula Salad with Lemon-Parmesan Dressing Reproduced from
It makes a great side dish, but this salad is even better as a pizza topping. Brush the with olive oil, sprinkle it with sea salt and shredded mozzarella, then bake. When the pizza comes out of the oven, top it with the salad.
1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon peel
4 cups (packed) baby arugula
1 cup halved cherry tomatoes
Blend first 4 ingredients in processor. Season dressing with salt and pepper. Transfer to bowl. Cover; chill up to 3 days. Combine arugula and tomatoes in large bowl. Toss with enough dressing to coat.
Chris Harvesdting ArugulaReproduced from Epicurious It makes a great side dish, but this salad is even better as a pizza topping. Brush the with olive oil, sprinkle it with sea salt and shredded mozzarella, then bake. When the pizza comes out of the oven, top it with the salad.1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice1 teaspoon finely grated lemon peel4 cups (packed) baby arugula1 cup halved cherry tomatoesBlend first 4 ingredients in processor. Season dressing with salt and pepper. Transfer to bowl. Cover; chill up to 3 days. Combine arugula and tomatoes in large bowl. Toss with enough dressing to coat. From our Field to You! Shareholder Giveback Opportunities Hands on at DeLaney:
Call or text Fattma to arrange a good time. Right now available hours are from 7am - 3pm Monday through Friday, and Saturdays starting in July. We definitely need people to come out and help with a variety of activities, not least of which is weeding to (barely) stay ahead of the curve!
Please contact Faatma at
(720) 212-3026
[email protected]
Fundraising:
We're hoping to create partnerships with corporations, faith-based organizations and other organizations to sponsor our Community Partner Share (CPS) and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) programs. If you are interested in helping out, or have ideas, this is a wonderful way to provide giveback hours!
Please contact Heather at
[email protected]
Call or text Fattma to arrange a good time. Right now available hours are from 7am - 3pm Monday through Friday, and Saturdays starting in July. We definitely need people to come out and help with a variety of activities, not least of which is weeding to (barely) stay ahead of the curve!Please contact Faatma at(720) 212-3026We're hoping to create partnerships with corporations, faith-based organizations and other organizations to sponsor our Community Partner Share (CPS) and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) programs. If you are interested in helping out, or have ideas, this is a wonderful way to provide giveback hours!Please contact Heather at Join Our Carpool Map! Please sign up for the Carpool Map! Meet other shareholders in your farm community and save energy!
Here's how to do it: Click on This Link Type in the nearest street corner to your home in the search field at the top of the screen. (e.g., "Clarkson & Ellsworth, Denver, CO".) For safety reasons, I recommend NOT typing in your actual address. Hit enter/return to search. When you see the map "plot"/flag pop up, click on it. In the dialogue box that pops up, click "Add to map." You'll then see the address you typed in appear in the "Where Everyone Lives" list to the right. Scroll over the address in that box and click the paint bucket
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to allege that Hicks had "picked on" his daughter and her husband "a couple times before."
"They were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know he would go this far," he said.
Police chief Chris Blue called the killing “senseless and tragic” and said the force's “thoughts are with the families and friends of these young people who lost their lives so needlessly”.
He said: “We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case.”
The shooting has been met with an outpouring of anger on social media, where people posting new pictures of the victims studying and playing basketball claimed they had been “murdered execution style”.
Some compared the incident to the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, and others called on Barack Obama and senior religious figures to condemn the attacks.
An American football and basketball fan, Mr Barakat was believed to be a dental student at the University of North Carolina and volunteered with a charity providing emergency dental care to children in Palestine.
He regularly posted on Twitter, and wrote in January: “It's so freaking sad to hear people saying we should ‘kill Jews’ or ‘kill Palestinians’. As if that's going to solve anything.”
UNC officials said Mr Barakat and Yusor Abu-Salha got married less than two months ago, in late December. She had been planning to begin her own dental studies in Chapel Hill this autumn.
The three victims were recently pictured together at the graduation of Yuzor's sister, Razan, who ran a blog showing her interest in photography and art.
She had started a degree at North Carolina State University last summer, studying Architecture and Environmental Design, and her Twitter biography read: “I like buildings and other stuff.”
A community Facebook page set up in the memory of the three victims, called “Our Three Winners”, thanked people for their support and said it would carry “official announcements”.
Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: the Chapel Hill shooting Show all 8 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: the Chapel Hill shooting 1/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat (centre) 2/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat posted this image to Facebook writing: 'Tonight we provided free dental supplies and food to over 75 homeless people in downtown Durham' 3/8 Chapel Hill shooting A 46-year-old man, named by police as Craig Stephen Hicks, has been arrested on suspicion of three counts of first-degree murder Chapel Hill Police 4/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat, pictured here with his wife Yusor, was a keen basketball player 5/8 Chapel Hill shooting The victims of the shooting, from left to right: Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 6/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat was a dental student at UNC who worked for a charity giving dental care to Palestinian children and refugees 7/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat and his wife Yusor at an American football match 8/8 Chapel Hill shooting One of the victims, Razan Abu-Salha, pictured in a post by Deah Barakat describing her as 'the best third wheel ever' 1/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat (centre) 2/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat posted this image to Facebook writing: 'Tonight we provided free dental supplies and food to over 75 homeless people in downtown Durham' 3/8 Chapel Hill shooting A 46-year-old man, named by police as Craig Stephen Hicks, has been arrested on suspicion of three counts of first-degree murder Chapel Hill Police 4/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat, pictured here with his wife Yusor, was a keen basketball player 5/8 Chapel Hill shooting The victims of the shooting, from left to right: Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 6/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat was a dental student at UNC who worked for a charity giving dental care to Palestinian children and refugees 7/8 Chapel Hill shooting Deah Barakat and his wife Yusor at an American football match 8/8 Chapel Hill shooting One of the victims, Razan Abu-Salha, pictured in a post by Deah Barakat describing her as 'the best third wheel ever'
While it was not immediately clear if it was set up by the family, it carried news that funeral arrangements would follow pending an update from the medical examiner.
“It sorrows us all to see what has happened here today,” another statement read. “Please rely on each other and remember these beautiful souls in your happy thoughts. Their faith meant a lot to them, and it is in fact what helps us all feel at peace with the tragedy of their murder.”
Last night, police were forced to turn away people claiming to be family members at the scene of the crime, saying that they would not be able to confirm any more details until Wednesday.
Kristen Boling, a UNC student who lives in the building where the shooting took place, told the Daily Tarheel she had been home since 3.45pm but didn’t see or hear anything until police arrived.
“It was a regular day when I got off the bus,” she said. “Now it’s chaos and confusion and they’re not telling us what’s going on..”
Another resident, Bethany Boring, said: “It’s a really quiet community, a lot of graduate students, professionals and families. I thought it was pretty safe.”
The university reportedly put out an alert message to students last night saying that counselling services had been made available. “We know many of you may be feeling unsettled by this news,” it said.
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 nowConsuming the powerful psychotropic hallucinagen DMT is doing more for belief in the afterlife than organised religion has in decades, a report released today claimed.
“DMT is responsible for providing users with powerful trips in which they often experience the presence of calming beings believed to be from an underlying layer of reality which then expose people to the idea that the information we receive through our physical senses is limited,” claimed psychonaut Professer Rick Strassman. “When people make this deep connection and understanding that there is more to reality than what we can experience through the senses they begin to suspect that there may be more to life than the physical.”
“I prayed for years and went to church but have never had anything near a proper religious experience before,” claimed one respondent, an 80 year old formerly lapsed Catholic, Niall O’ Hara from London. “But when I smoked DMT it was like someone came along and went ‘here look behind this curtain’ pulled back our received reality and went ‘that’s reality.'”
“You could pray for years and give as much money to the church as you could afford but you wouldn’t even scratch the surface on the deep underlying belief in the divine that DMT provides after even one experience,” continued Niall. “I’ll never go to Mass again unless I’m weirdly too happy and want to depress myself and feel guilty about some natural urge I might have.”
“The self transforming machine elves may not be divine in the way that the Abrahamic religions have us believe but they do seem to be separate from our conscious reality and suggest the existence of something after death,” continued Dr. Strassman. “I don’t think it’ll be heaven in the typical sense, you know like a blowjob kingdom where you have all these virgins wanting to shag you constantly but never grow bored of it, sort of like being Tom Jones in the 70s or visiting Ibiza.”
“It seems that it’ll be more like the contentment of a warm hug from a loved one stretched out to infinity while you bask in the wonder and beauty of creation itself,” he added.
Reports claim that formerly militant atheists and rationalists who dispelled belief in any form of pseudoscience felt that they experienced things while smoking DMT that they couldn’t quite explain as belonging to reality and therefore now suspect there may be more to death than just nothingness.
“I’ve upgraded from atheist to agnostic, I don’t know what’s there,” concluded Niall. “I’ll never be fully blown religious but I trust my own mind and the experiences I had with DMT more than a priest. Mainly because DMT doesn’t rape children or hoard donations by the poor to live in powerful opulence.”(Adds data, Maduro quotes, context)
By Andrew Cawthorne and Diego Ore
CARACAS, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Venezuela confirmed on Tuesday it had entered a recession while inflation remained the highest in the Americas, and President Nicolas Maduro's socialist government blamed political foes for the dismal data.
The Central Bank said GDP contracted in each of the first three quarters: 4.8 percent, 4.9 percent and 2.3 percent. Twelve-month inflation reached 63.6 percent in November.
Economists, banks and regional bodies have long forecast that the OPEC member would be the worst-performing major economy in the region this year. The central bank statement confirmed those views just before Maduro began a news conference in which he was expected to announce economic changes.
Maduro, 52, won election last year to replace his mentor Hugo Chavez. He has blamed political opponents, who protested in the streets for four months this year, for damaging the oil-dependent economy.
Those protests resulted in violence that killed 43 people, including protesters, security officials and Maduro backers.
"These actions against public order blocked the correct distribution of basic goods to the population, as well as the normal development of production of goods and services," the central bank statement said.
"This resulted in an inflationary spike and a fall in economic activity."
Venezuela, whose last recession was from 2009-2010, may struggle to turn around its economy given the plunge in oil prices. Venezuelan crude has dropped to $48 per barrel, compared with $96 mid-year.
Opponents say Venezuela's economic crisis is a consequence of 15 years of socialist policies, begun by Chavez, who ruled from 1999 to 2013 before dying of cancer.
"With one day of the year left, they publish the September, October and November figures. The highest in the world. Economic efficiency Nicolas! Wonderful," scoffed opposition leader Henrique Capriles via Twitter.
CHANGES COMING?
Venezuela had not published inflation data since August.
Inflation in September was up 4.8 percent, October 5.0 percent and November 4.7 percent, compared with the same months of 2013, the bank said in its statement, which can be viewed at ( http://www.bcv.org.ve/Upload/Comunicados/aviso301214.pdf )
The bank said Venezuela's balance of payments posted a surplus of $6.8 billion by the end of the third quarter, with a current account surplus of $899 million, and the capital account showing a deficit of $568 million.
Venezuelan exports, of which oil accounts for more than 90 percent, fell 14.2 percent to $19 billion in the third quarter, while imports were down slightly, by 1.4 percent, to $12.2 billion in the same period, the bank said.
Chavez-era welfare policies have long been popular among Venezuela's poor, and the bank said social indicators were all improving despite the poor GDP data.
It said extreme poverty was down to 5.4 percent of households in 2014, half the level before Chavez came to power, while unemployment fell to 5.9 percent.
"Despite the protests and economic war during 2014, Venezuela's economic indicators have improved," Maduro said at the start of his news conference.
"This economic war, this fall in the oil prices, is a great opportunity for economic change. 2015 is the year of opportunity, for great change in the economic model."
Many analysts are recommending reforms such as a unification of Venezuela's three-tier currency controls and a rise in gasoline prices that are the cheapest in the world. But Maduro has balked at such measures so far, perhaps wary of a social backlash prior to a crucial vote for a new parliament next year.
(Additional reporting by Eyanir Chinea and Corina Pons; Editing by Peter Murphy and David Gregorio)One Texas school district has taken book banning to an entirely new level. Young adult author Richelle Mead holds the distinction to perhaps be the only author ever to have a book banned... before it was even written.
The ALA reports:
[All six books in her Vampire Academy series were] banned at Henderson Junior High School in the Stephenville, Tex. Independent School District in 2009, [prior to the release of the 5th and 6th books in the series]. The entire teen vampire series was banned for "sexual content or nudity." Stephenville ISD actually banned books that have not yet been published and perhaps even books that have yet to be written. There is no way the district could know the content of, and yet they have been banned.*
The ALA was indeed correct: at the time that the series was banned, Mead had yet to even complete writing and editing Last Sacrifice, the 6th and final book in the young adult vampire series. Stephenville ISD is "so committed to censorship that they are shattering the space-time continuum to literally ban books from the future," Chris Sims of Comics Alliance wrote this week.
"I can understand how whatever board came up with this list in Texas thought they were doing something good," Mead told Comics Alliance. "But, the fact that they've banned the series in its entirety -- before the content can even be reviewed -- makes it hard to take seriously."
The insanity doesn't end there. This week, fellow Penguin author Andrea Cremer blogged at Mundie Moms about a parent protesting her visit to a grade school due to her forthcoming debut novel's "inappropriate content":
The objection had come from a parent who hadn't read Nightshade (which won't even be available to the public until October 19th). She'd just seen my blog post supporting Laurie Halse Anderson (the author of Speak). Turns out my first encounter with censorship stemmed from my speaking out against it.
Cremer's Nightshade, a young adult novel featuring such objectionable material as gay werewolves, arranged marriages, and a conspiracy involving philosopher Thomas Hobbes, will be released later this month; Mead's Last Sacrifice will be published in December. Expect to see both books on the ALA's annual list of challenged books next year.
In 2009, the American Library Association recorded 460 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom. "I teach for a living," Cremer wrote. "I know how to talk to students. I have a Ph.D. in history and I understand the ways in which violence, religion, and sexuality have shaped societies... These subjects shouldn't be avoided or hidden. They need to be discussed."A new suburb in Sydney’s north-west that 10 years ago was little more than rough bushland, trees and an old creek has shocked onlookers with a median house price today that has hit almost $1 million.
The Ponds, 40 kilometres from Sydney’s CBD with no train station, few services and in a local government area – Blacktown – that suffers high levels of homelessness, where up to 25 per cent of young people are neither employed nor in education, and an estimated 40,422 people live in poverty, has just recorded a median house price of a mighty $985,000. In the latest September quarter alone, it enjoyed a rise of 6.3 per cent.
“It’s quite remarkable, given that it’s on the fringes of the city,” says Domain Group chief economist Dr Andrew Wilson. “It’s an area of new properties and – while I don’t like the term – McMansions, but there’s certainly strong demand out there. It won’t be long before it hits $1 million.”
The masterplanned community designed by UrbanGrowth NSW and developers Frasers Property on 80 hectares of bush and waterways launched in only 2007, but sold its 4200 home sites in a record seven years. Now it has more than 12,400 residents and is one of the fastest-growing suburbs in Australia.
Its median house price rose 3.1 per cent during the past year, and one house in the suburb even sold for a record $2,706,000. Urban Taskforce Australia CEO Chris Johnson says The Ponds’ success is an indication of Sydney’s maturity, showing that people are happy to live far from the features of the reigning “Brand Sydney” – the harbour, bridge and Opera House.
“It shows that water and a country landscape and nature is just as important to many people as inner-city living,” Johnson says. “We can translate how many of us see Sydney into a much more suburban setting.
“Of course, that near-million dollars does have an impact on affordability, but that’s a double-edged sword as people like their investment in property always to go up.”
For The Ponds’ developers, the property price hike is being greeted as a recognition of the quality of the area. Frasers Property general manager residential NSW Nigel Edgar says it’s an indication that the suburb has great connectivity, with buses and a proposed train station coming nearby at Rouse Hill, as well as a variety of housing, recreation spaces, education and the town centre.
“There’s always been a lot of demand there,” Edgar says. “People generally are attracted to things that reflect their needs so we hit the right mixture of housing types, sizes and amenity. Everything was carefully planned so The Ponds has a heart and a soul.”
It hasn’t been a painless transition, however. Just a few months ago, it was named one of the city’s bottom three least liveable suburbs, coming in at number 553 out of 555 suburbs in the 2016 Domain Liveable Sydney Study.
It beat only nearby Parklea and Stanhope Gardens, with its poor public transport links and scarcity of cultural amenities such as theatres, libraries and art galleries. The study was commissioned from Tract Consultants and Deloitte Access Economics in August, while the latest 2016 Blacktown City Social Plan cites the local government area’s high rates of homelessness, joblessness and poverty.
But supporters have instead criticised the liveability study, saying it was heavily skewed towards high-density, inner-city living and values. “But The Ponds is a place where people want to raise families with traditional Australian values, with people who tend not to work in the city, or visit the city; they often work within half an hour of where they live,” Edgar says.
Dr Wilson believes the latest price rises certainly show there’s still strong demand for an outer suburban lifestyle. “There are a lot of changeover buyers moving from inner-city areas for a larger piece of land and bigger houses. It shows not everyone wants to live in the inner west.”A new initiative timed with the UN climate summit hopes to inspire journalists – just as their government’s reliance on fossil fuels is on the rise
Russia’s environment has it rough. For close to a century, successive leaders have attempted to bend nature to their will in the drive for economic growth.
Under Stalin, planners tried to make Siberian rivers run south rather than north, Khrushchev dreamed of growing corn in the Arctic circle and attempts were made under Brezhnev to unlock tight oil using nuclear explosives.
Exiled environmental activist speaks of 'impossibility' of protest in Russia Read more
Yet Russians hear relatively little about the treatment and exploitation of their own land, because of a lack of media coverage.
In a bid to improve environmental reporting in Russia, a group of journalists is attending a training project held to coincide with the UN climate change conference in Paris.
But the participants won’t just report on the summit itself, says Nina Zakharkina-Berezner, who runs D’Est, the organisation behind the initiative. She hopes to open Russians’ eyes to the way environmental problems are reported elsewhere through a series of seminars and exchanges with leading journalists from Le Monde, Radio France Internationale and La Croix.
‘Foreign agents’
Today, Russia’s economy has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels, and the Kremlin has reacted to economic slowdown by cutting green subsidies.
At the same time, the chance draw attention to abuses has been severely compromised, with Putin attacking NGOs which campaign to protect the natural world by branding many of them “foreign agents”.
As Le Monde journalist Simon Roger notes, only “big stories make the national and international headlines” – such as the plan to build an oil pipeline near Lake Baikal, or to cut through Khimki forest for a new Moscow to St Petersburg road.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russian servicemen remove felled trees outside the town of Lukhovitsy in 2010. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/Reuters
Human rights activist forced to flee Russia following TV 'witch-hunt' Read more
One of the project’s participants, Nikita Kuzmin, has exposed the illegal felling of trees for the construction of mansions on the Curonian Spit, a narrow strip of land running from Kaliningrad to Klaipeda and a Unesco world heritage site.
Another, Maria Chernova, documented how illegal felling in Irkutsk province has been carried out with the connivance, if not wholesale approval, of the local police. “Any exposure is always a threat to corruption,” she says.
But the ability of civic activists to cry foul in the face of environmental degradation has come under threat. Of the roughly 100 NGOs designated as “foreign agents” by the Russian Ministry of Justice, around 20 focus on the environment. Their aims are many and far reaching: they protect wild pacific salmon in Russia’s far east (Sakhalin Environment Watch), have brought successful legal challenges against illegal logging in the Altai mountains (Gebler Ecological Society) and protect the rights of people suffering the ill-effects of radiation (For Nature – Chelyabinsk).
A report submitted to the Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights in October noted that the number of NGOs operating in Russia since the foreign agent law took effect in 2012 has decreased by a third.
Official harassment does not end there. For over 15 years, Nadezhda Kutepova of Planet of Hopes had stood up for the rights of radiation victims in her closed city of Ozersk, Chelyabinsk province. But, this summer, she was forced to flee the country with her three children after the Rossiya-1 channel ran a documentary accusing her of “industrial espionage”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, addresses the opening plenary session of the UN climate talks in Paris. Photograph: Planet Pix v/REX Shutterstock
Such persecution makes it all the more important that independent journalists can continue to work unimpeded and engage the public on environmental issues.
Gaining traction
Harassed and shunned, the Russians labelled foreign agents by Kremlin Read more
Despite the recent clampdown, reporters say environmental messages are slowly gaining traction in Russia. Angelina Davydova, a St Petersburg-based journalist who has been covering the beat since 2008, believes that they “have become far more important, both for the general public, and for the authorities and companies”, while she has witnessed “a growing number of civil society movements and initiatives”.
One key to encouraging local interest in the environment, she said, is to focus on local disputes over recycling, green spaces or new factories.
“Often, environmental stories are [ones] of access to natural resources, of local groups fighting against a big investor exploiting local resources and not taking account of the externalities of a production process,” says Davydova, who is also head of the German-Russian Bureau of Environmental Information and a co-organiser of the project.
The journalists remain hopeful that their reporting can make a difference, and say the slow instigation of much needed initiatives to mitigate against the effects of climate change show Russian authorities are not blind to the issue.
This year, St Petersburg approved an adaptation plan, which calls for better flood defences, and Davydova expects Moscow to follow suit, along with Kazan and Murmansk province. These measures come none too soon – particularly as Russia contains so much territory at extreme northern latitudes, where warming is faster than average.The world's biggest election began yesterday: one in which more than half a billion Indians are set to turn out to vote over the next six weeks. Polls suggest that the Congress party will take an unprecedented pummelling – which makes Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, frontrunner to be India's next prime minister.
Modi bears a responsibility for some of the worst religious violence ever seen in independent India – but there's nothing like looking like a winner to attract apologists. And the standard apology for Modi comes in two parts. First, there is normally an acknowledgement that the chief minister of Gujarat bears some vague responsibility for the orgy of killing and rape that engulfed his state in 2002 – but, um, wasn't that all a long time ago? And hasn't he behaved himself since – or, as the FT put it yesterday, done his best to "downplay tensions" between Hindus and Muslims? This is followed by pointing to Gujarat's rapid economic development and an appeal: shouldn't the rest of India enjoy some Modinomics? Or, as Gurcharan Das, the former head of Procter & Gamble India, put it in a piece for the Times of India last weekend: "There will always be a trade-off in values at the ballot box and those who place secularism above demographic dividend are wrong and elitist."
Given the enormity of the allegations against Modi, this is frankly pathetic. First, the Gujarat massacres have not safely been consigned to the past; whatever the claims of his supporters either in India or over here (such as the Labour MP Barry Gardiner who invited him to Britain last year), there has been no "clean chit" for Modi. Courts in India are still hearing allegations against him. And second, the much-talked about Gujarati model may have brought lots of money to the state, but it has ended up in relatively few hands, without yielding improvements in health, infant mortality, or even workers' wages.
Let's look at the carnage of 2002 first. On 27 February that year, a train coach carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire in Godhra station in Gujarat. Fifty-eight people died. Within hours and without a shred of evidence, Modi declared that the Pakistani secret services had been to blame; he then had the charred bodies paraded in the main city of Ahmedabad; and let his own party support a state-wide strike for three days. What followed was mass bloodshed: 1,000 dead on official estimates, more than 2,000 by independent tallies. The vast majority of those who died were Muslim. Mobs of men dragged women and young girls out of their homes and raped them. In 2007, the investigative magazine Tehelka recorded boasts from some of the ringleaders. One, Babu Bajrangi, boasted of how he slit open the womb of a pregnant woman.
When BJP supporters try to dismiss the pogrom of 2002 as ancient and contested history, what they are trying to erase is that epic, shameful violence. Other allegations have been made about Modi's direct involvement in the carnage, but the ones I have listed above aren't contested by any serious observer.
Now try this thought experiment. Imagine if, in the wake of 7/7, which killed 52 civilians, Ken Livingstone had not behaved with his commendable dignity, but had immediately blamed the tube attacks on jihadis; paraded the bodies up and down Pall Mall; and then declared a capital-wide strike. As Suresh Grover, the human-rights campaigner working for the families of three British citizens who were killed in Gujarat in 2002, puts it, he would have probably been arrested for wilful neglect of duty, hate speech and for inciting violence. Modi, by contrast, said a couple of years ago that he felt the same pain over the bloodshed as a passenger in a car that has just run over a puppy. He referred to the refugee camps set up to shelter some of the 200,000 Muslims who lost their homes as "baby-making factories". And his minister for women is now serving 28 years in prison for murder and conspiracy to murder.
All of this is routinely summed up in journalistic shorthand that refers to the chief minister as being a "polarising" or "controversial" figure.
As for the so-called Gujarati development model, there isn't one. The state has enjoyed growth but very little development. Under Modi, it has lagged behind the other major states in India in tackling infant mortality, in reducing poverty, and in increasing literacy. In 2006, there were even more undernourished children in Gujarat than in 1993, which Modi has claimed is because middle-class girls are "beauty-conscious".
Big businesses back Modi, but that is because he gives them so much. As a string of reports from the independent Comptroller and Auditor General, among other bodies, points out, his administration has sold off public land dirt cheap to industrialists, provided companies with energy at below-market prices and given them loans at an interest rate of 0.1%. They in return have provided him with sponsorship and rides in their private jets. As Atul Sood, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has written: "The governance model of Gujarat is all about aggressive implementation of development on behalf of the big private investor. It is a model that works for the rich and against the poor."
And this somehow represents an improvement for India.Labour has pledged to reverse the cuts to student grants and maintenance allowances in order to increase the number of poorer students staying in education.
The bold plan would see a Labour government reinstate the maintenance grants for students from low and middle income families. This would help over half a million students, freeing them from more debt taken on during the course of their education.
The party said the costs of Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) were greatly outweighed by the benefits, noting IFS research that showed that the scheme increased participation in for 17 year olds education by 7 per cent.
The move will be paid for by an increase in corporation tax, which was cut in George Osborne’s final Budget.
Angela Rayner, shadow Education Secretary, said the policy would have a “real and meaningful impact” on younger students.
“Today’s commitment to restoring both EMA and student maintenance grants shows that while the Tories continue to burden our young people with debt, the Labour Party is committed to investing in our young people.
“It is only by investing in education that we can ensure that all of our young people, whatever their background, are able to succeed in whatever they aspire to.
“This policy will have a real and meaningful impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of students.
“When we can help improve the education of over a million young people with a small increase in corporation tax, it is an investment we would be foolish not to make.”
Maintenance grants support university students from poorer families, but were turned into repayable loans by the Conservatives.
EMA was introduced by Labour in 2004 and is given to 16-18 year olds staying on in full time education to support them with their basic needs. It was scrapped by the coalition government in 2010Bacon is a popular form of cured pork; a virtual god in pig form. Bacon is often served with breakfast meals. It is also used as flavoring in bean dishes, and can be found in hamburgers.
Lean bacon is a designation used in regard to the fat content of a meat product containing 10% or less of fat.
Contents show]
The History of Bacon Edit
Bacon was first created by God. He decided that perfection was to be allowed on Earth; first referred to as "The land of non-pork products." However, this plight was soon ended, as God created Thor, who in turn, created, Baco. Baco was the most merciful and most epic of gods. He not only gave us the pig, but he also had a son named Bacon. Humans didn't create bacon (food) though. It was Bacon himself who sacrificed his body in order to sustain peace and happiness on Earth! Magic alien gods brought down pigs from the heavens, and sacrificed them for our amusement. However, as we started to go hungry, we ate the sacrifices instead. It made more sense to eat the sacrificial pigs. The god Baco soon got angry that we were eating from his sacrifice, so he removed all bacon from the world. The bacon lovers on Earth forgot how to control flooding in rivers, which created a flood. The only survivor was a man named Noah, who revived the bacon spirit.
Bacon was popularized by the godesses Mimi and Nyami (From Pop'n Music!!!) who disguised as bacon enthusiasts to give homes in the USA some bacon to cook.
Types of bacon Edit
Bacon Related Stuff Edit
You can't argue with logic.
Bringing home the bacon
The Bacon Profit
Bacon Commandments
History of Bacon
Oddessy Games
Lord of the BaconI dont follow NA as much as i follow the EU scene, for obvious reasons, first because i feel the EU scene is better to watch (NA CS EleGiggle), and second because im from Portugal, so most games are very late and i cannot watch, but if theres one thing i know is that SPLYCE arent onliners at all, instead they play WAYYYYYYYYY better on LAN. Since that winout lan or something like that, where Renegades play like shit, that people should know that. So why dafuq do u guys still think that splyce is good online, and that they will win these matches easily, im not sure who it is, but i think theres a guy on the SPLYCE team that plays with some wood pc or something, and online they dont get as hyped as they get on LAN for obvious reasons. Im not saying that they will get to finals in the major, they might not even get out of groups, but one thing i know is they will play SO MUCH BETTER that they play online. TL;DR: Splyce are LANers and will play way better at the major.
2016-03-27 20:56On Friday I got this in a longtime valued commenter on this blog, a gay citizen of Singapore who online goes by the name Anakin:
Hi John,
Not sure if you’ve heard about this, but it’s been raging all over my country for the past few weeks. Basically a group of concerned Christian parents wrote to the National Library Board to get three children’s books banned (including And Tango Makes Three, based on the true story of gay penguins at the New York Zoo that raised a young penguin together), saying that they were not “pro-family” (which of course is code for anti-gay).
The library responded promptly, thanked them for bringing the matter to their attention, took the books out, and later proudly announced at a press conference that the books would be destroyed for not being in line with the library’s pro-family values. Lots of people cheered them on, with scary comments in social media suggesting things like how we should burn the gays along with the books, people applauding the library for protecting our (presumably-straight) children from the perverted gay agenda, and more of the usual homophobia. Plus all the fear-mongering about how reading books with gay people will apparently turn kids gay (when the opposite has never turned gay kids straight), presumably because heterosexuality is that fragile.
Background coverage: Singapore Provokes Outrage by Pulping Kids’ Books About Gay Families.
It’s come to light that a few other books have previously been banned or are in the process of review for potential banning because they portray LGBT people/relationships in a positive light (those that do so in a negative light are generally allowed, but restricted to the adult lending section). The latest is a volume of Archie comics that features a gay marriage and has been banned by a large bookstore chain here for contravening media content guidelines on sexuality.
The government has been censoring LGBT material from TV and films for ages (kids here can be surprised to learn that Glee featured any gay characters, which shows just how far they go with the censorship). But somehow the actual destruction of children’s books feels worse, particularly with the implication, often explicitly stated, that LGBT people should be kept away from children because we have no business being around anything that innocent, lest we taint that innocence.
So everything is heating up like never before. Newspaper forum pages are filled with letters about this every day, at least one library has newly created a bin for people to put books with ‘unsuitable content’ for review, social media is filled with graphically violent hate speech against LGBT people, and Christian churches are picking up the anti-gay frenzy—a lot of which is imported wholesale from the American Christian Right—in a way that’s getting disturbing. The ex-gay movement is growing in fervor. A lot of LGBT kids, closeted or otherwise, are getting hurt by the stuff their parents are saying. For a movement that claims to be pro-family, it’s sad and ironic how many families the Christian right is pulling apart.
But on the bright side, all this has gotten a lot of publicity for the books in question. It also led a group of 77 Christian parents who were part of the large anti-LGBT group headed by prominent and vehemently anti-gay Christian pastor Lawrence Khong (who has been enthusiastically spearheading all of this) to leave Khong’s group, saying that they were still against the ‘gay lifestyle,’ but even more against the destruction of books, and were deeply disturbed by the way things were going overall.
Others have expressed similar views, which gives me hope that this might be what finally changes things. A few local writers–some LGBT–have pulled out of writing events hosted by the library, or resigned from library-related positions in protest. And given the literary nature of all this, there’s been such an amazingly beautiful outpouring of creativity in response–poetry, comics, passionate pleas for the freedom of knowledge and imagination and reading, and one local gay writer penning haikus in response to individual homophobic comments.
So yeah… there’s always light in the darkness. And the hope that God will take all this pain and malice and turn it around into something good. But right now it kind of sucks.
Thanks, again, for the work that you do, with NALT and your other reminders that people can still come around. Because if that change can happen in the US, it can happen here too.Gurbaksh Ch
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history of this staircase, surely the most famous and important in Philadelphia, save for the Rocky Steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In a future story, I will relate what I found about some of the other Penn stairs—all of which no longer exist.
To begin with, the embankment steps at Wood Street show how steep the western bank of the Delaware River in Philadelphia was before the march of time and progress obliterated all traces of the riverside’s original landscape. The muddy/gravelly edge of the Delaware originally lapped up to the future location of Water Street—a rutted lane now mostly gone in the city’s old waterfront district. Immediately above this tidal flat was a sheer embankment bluff, between ten and fifty feet high, all along the local shoreline, as the river had scoured a deep channel over the eons. The top of this bluff later became Front Street, the first roadway to parallel the river when Philadelphia was planned.
Some of the city’s first settlers actually lived in caves they dug into the embankment, pretty much within the space between where Front and Water Streets came to be. These shallow dugouts, long part of Philadelphia lore, provided the newcomers with their initial shelter upon reaching Penn’s settlement in the 1680s.
William Penn had wanted his “Greene Countrie Towne” of Philadelphia to unfold evenly between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. As part of this plan, he reserved the high frontage along the Delaware for the Proprietary (or Propriety) of Pennsylvania, with land set aside for Penn and his family to use as they saw fit. He further hoped that a promenade with a parapet would stretch atop the length of the Delaware’s west bank to provide a pleasing, uninterrupted view of the river from Front Street.
It’s doubtful that Penn long pursued his plan to preserve the high ground paralleling the Delaware River for the purpose of beautifying his city. A practical man, and a shrewd real estate developer at that, he must have realized that shipping facilities had to line the edge of the river if Philadelphia was to become a prosperous commercial metropolis. This would be the only way to accommodate ships transporting merchandise and travelers to the Atlantic Coast and foreign seaports.
Soon, everyone wanted to own prime real estate in the nucleus of Philadelphia, so they clustered by the river. Even more disturbing to Penn was that waterfront land buyers were under the impression that they owned the waterfront abutting their holdings. The riverbank lot purchasers also claimed the privilege to hollow out space in the high bank next to their lots so as to create “vaults” for use as storerooms. This was the first private versus public conflict concerning the development of Philadelphia’s waterfront.
Leading merchant Samuel Carpenter was the first buyer to make such a demand. Early in 1684, he asked Penn for permission to “dig cellars or vaults between the Edge of the bank and [his] land provided it be done and kept without prejudice to the Road [Front Street] above.” Penn rejected this request, but Carpenter returned with an even more alarming proposal. He wanted to construct a set of wharves and warehouses on his sizable bank lot between Walnut and Chestnut Streets. Such harbor structures would impede everyone’s access to the river for almost a city block.
In response to this and other claims for the east side of Front Street, Penn firmly declared that the riverbank was a common area owned by the Propriety—not by any banker or other first purchaser. He then softened his stance by offering a compromise. This language appears in a letter dated August 3, 1684, a few days before Penn returned to England:
The Bank is a top common, from end to end. The rest, next [to] the water, belongs to front-lot men no more than [to] back-lot men: the way [Front Street] bounds them. They may build stairs—and, [at] the top of the bank, a common exchange, or walk; and against [Front] street, common wharfs may be built freely;—but into the water, and the shore, is no purchaser’s.
Penn’s declaration is an example of his Solomonic wisdom, since he devised a way to balance both public and private interests. He allowed Carpenter and other riverfront developers to build on their bank lots as they desired, but only if they allowed the public to have convenient access to the Delaware.
Another reason for the mid-block stairways was that Penn wanted to let cool, fresh air from the Delaware River into the hot, congested city. This is echoed by Abraham Ritter in Philadelphia and Her Merchants (1860):
I may advert to a row of small two and three-story brick houses, of sombre weather-beaten hue even sixty years ago, and tell of a gap here and there between, as airholes from the river to fan the more condensed atmosphere above; or show the forethought of Father Penn in facilitating ingress and egress to and from Front to Water street by an occasional flight of stone steps.
The Penn stairs thus enabled the town and the river to stay linked both physically and ecologically.
In the end, William Penn instructed the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania to mandate that bank lot owners install stepped passageways along the Delaware River between Philadelphia’s principal east–west streets. These mid-block stairs helped form strong ties between docks at the Delaware’s edge (the city’s “lower” level) and the core (“upper”) level beginning at Front Street. Some blocks had more than one set of steps. Precisely how many of these stairways were installed is undocumented. The number varies from eight to twelve in the literature and gradually diminished until only the Wood Street Steps remained. Having served their original civic purpose, some stairs were closed as far back as the late eighteenth century. Others gave way to the construction of I-95 in the 1960s, but not as many as often supposed.
In any case, the terrain at Vine Street had a more gradual descent to the river than that to the south—say, between Race and Market Streets—where the change in elevation was greater. Therefore, the number of actual steps (treads) composing the Wood Street stairwell is less than that of the other Penn stairways. That is to say, the other long-gone public stairs were generally longer and more impressive than the stairwell at Wood Street.
The stairway was once an extension of a slender alley between Vine and Callowhill called Wood Street. The steps were built between 1702 and 1737, but while the treads originally could have been wooden, there’s some evidence that the granite steps there today may date from the late seventeenth century. The stone treads were there for sure in 1737, when Wood Street was first registered as a public street. The passageway is still labeled as “Wood” in city records and is administered by the Philadelphia Department of Streets. A narrow Wood Street still exists on the other side of I-95 in Old City and is interrupted by the I-676/I-95 interchange in its march west toward the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where it terminates.
A land warrant (patent) by William Penn to one Henry Johnson in March 1689 actually established the Wood Street Steps. Johnson was the buyer of forty feet of ground on the east side of Front Street north of Vine. A provision reads:
[T]he said Henry Johnson his Heirs and Assigns shall further leave a Proportionable Part of the said Lot for Building one publick Pair of Stone Stairs of ten Foot in Bredth leading from the said Front Street down to the said Lower Street or Cartway and so forward to the Wharfs and one Pair of Stone Stairs from off the Wharfs down to Low Water Mark of the said River in the Middle or most convenient place between Vine Street and the North Bridge.
This passage substantiates the authorization of stone steps back to William Penn himself, although it doesn’t prove if and when any steps were built. It also indicates that the Wood Street Steps were initially meant to be made of stone. Local historians have generally thought that this and other bank stairs were made of wood until the 1720s or 1730s, at which time granite steps were installed. The warrant shows that Penn wanted stone rather than wooden steps and makes it more likely that the existing Wood Street Steps were built prior to earlier estimated dates.
The warrant also directs that the riverbank stairs between Vine and Callowhill were to extend down into the Delaware River at low tide on the east side of Water Street (the “Lower Street” or “Cartway”). It’s unclear if these particular steps ever, in fact, reached into the Delaware, but other bank stairways did continue on the east side of Water Street as walkways with additional stairs that descended straight into the river for use at low tide. (The Delaware is of course a tidal waterway, rising and falling about six feet twice a day. Penn Treaty Park is a perfect place to survey this natural phenomenon.)
That this last set of William Penn’s public stairs to the Delaware River survives is a miracle of sorts. As late as the 1980s, the Wood Street Steps were in jeopardy. An adjoining owner wanted the city to strike the passageway from the street plan so that he could acquire the ground to enlarge his property. The River’s Edge Civic Association put a stop to that plan.
This staircase consists of fourteen granite blocks, including twelve treads and two landings. Four treads of the Wood Street Steps have cracked in half and are sagging as a result of subsidence. River’s Edge is planning to repair the steps and conduct an archaeological investigation beneath them. What treasures (and trash) might be found under the steps, untouched after three centuries?
In the meantime, all are invited to celebrate the Wood Street Steps, their longevity, and their purpose, as well as to remember the other Penn stairs that no longer exist. Join members of the River’s Edge Civic Association and others on October 12th at the dedication ceremony for the long-awaited and hard-fought Pennsylvania State Historical Marker.Low-power processors aren't just for netbooks: These computers-on-a-chip are going to be powering our smartphones and other diminutive gadgets in the forseeable future. So what's the difference between the Atoms, Snapdragons and Tegras of the world?
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Intel Atom
The current reigning king of low-cost, low-power processors, Intel's Atom flat-out dominates the netbook market. Its single- and dual-core processors are also some of the most powerful on our list, despite having abilities roughly equal to, in Intel's own terms, a 2003-2004 vintage Celeron. Based on the x86 architecture, the Atom is capable of running full versions of Windows XP, Vista (though not all that well), and 7, as well as modern Linux distros and even Hackintosh. While it requires far less power than a full-power chip, it's still more power-hungry than the ARM-based processors on our list, requiring about 2 watts on average. That's why netbook battery life isn't all that much longer than that of a normal laptop.
You can find the Atom in just about every netbook, including those from HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, Sony, Toshiba, MSI, and, well, everyone else. The 1.6GHz chip is the most popular at the moment, but Intel is definitely going to keep improving and upgrading the Atom line. However, you're unlikely to catch an Atom in a handset; it's low-power, yes, but low-power for a notebook. Battery life on an Atom handset would be pretty atrocious, which is why Intel's sticking to netbooks for now.
Qualcomm Snapdragon
Based on ARM, which is a 32-bit processor architecture that powers just about every mobile phone (and various other peripherals, though never desktop computers) out there, Snapdragon isn't competing directly with the Intel Atom—it's not capable of running full versions of Windows (only Windows Mobile and Windows CE), it's incredibly energy-efficient (requiring less than half a watt), and is designed for always-on use. In other words, this is the evolution of the mobile computing processor. It's got great potential: Qualcomm is trumpeting battery life stretching past 10 hours, smooth 1080p video, support for GPS, 3G, and Bluetooth, and such efficiency that a Linux-based netbook can use Snapdragon without a fan or even a heat sink. Available in single core (1GHz) or dual-core (1.5GHz), it can be used in conjunction with Android, Linux, and various mobile OSes.
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Unfortunately, Qualcomm is still holding onto the notion that people want MIDs, and is championing "smartbooks," which are essentially smartphones with netbook bodies, like Asus's announced-then-retracted Eee with Android. Snapdragon's got promise, but we think that promise lies in super-powered handheld devices, not even more underpowered versions of already-underpowered netbooks.
We're frankly not sure when we'll see Snapdragon-based devices sold in the US. We're sure Snapdragon will end up in smartphones at some point, as at least one Toshiba handset has been tentatively announced, but the only concrete demonstrations we've seen have been in MIDs, and Snapdragon themselves spend all their energy touting these "smartbooks." Snapdragon's Windows Mobile compatibility suggests we may see it roll out with Windows Mobile 7, if Tegra hasn't snapped up all the good handsets.
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Nvidia Tegra
Nvidia's Tegra processor is very similar to Snapdragon—both are based on ARM architecture, so both are designed for even less intense applications than the Atom. Like Snapdragon, Tegra isn't capable of running desktop versions of Windows, so it's primarily targeted at Android and handheld OSes, especially forthcoming versions of Windows Mobile. What sets Tegra apart from Snapdragon is the Nvidia graphics pedigree: The company claims smooth 1080p video, like Snapdragon, but also hardware-accelerated Flash video and even respectable gaming (though no, you won't be able to run Crysis). They also go even further than Qualcomm in their battery life claim, suggesting an absolutely insane 30 hours of HD video.
While Snapdragon tends to be loosely associated with Android, Tegra is an integral part of Microsoft's plan for next-generation Windows Mobile devices. Instead of focusing on "smartbooks" and MIDs, which we think are part of a dead-end category, Tegra's commitment to pocketable handhelds could spell success. We've seen proof-of-concept demonstrations of Tegra already, but its real commercial debut will come with Windows Mobile 7—and if WM7 doesn't suck, Tegra could take off.
Others
We haven't included certain other processors, especially VIA's Nano, due to intent: The Nano requires lower power than full-scale processors, but at 25 watts, it's not even really in the same league as Atom, let alone Snapdragon or Tegra. The VIA Nano is really targeted at non-portable green technology, and looks like it'll do a good job—it outperformed Atom in Ars Technica's excellent test, and stands up to moderate use with ease. AMD's Puma (Turion X2) is in a similar boat: It's certainly markedly more energy-efficient than AMD's other offerings, but as it's targeted at laptops (not netbooks) with a screen size greater than 12-inches, it's not quite right for our list here.
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These low-power processors aren't just, as we so often think, crappier versions of "real" processors. They've got uses far beyond netbooks, especially in the near future as the gap between netbooks and smartphones narrows.
Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about why your iPhone can't play Crysis, how to tie a bow tie, or anything else to [email protected], with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.Looking for news you can trust?
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We’ve entered the age of the coconut. While the lactose intolerant quaff Starbucks’ new coconut milk lattes, the gluten averse are busy baking with coconut flour. The number of coconut oil products—for both cooking and skin moisturizing—grew by 800 percent between 2008 and 2012.
Of course, the craze started with a different part of the hairy tropical fruit: its liquid center. Ethnic markets in the United States have sold coconut water for decades, but it didn’t go mainstream until 2004, when, as the New York Times‘ David Segal reported earlier this year, two separate brands, Vita Coco and Zico, happened to launch simultaneously. Inspired by the drink’s popularity in Brazil and Central America, the entrepreneurs emphasized the beverage’s hydrating minerals—an all-natural Gatorade. Food trends analyst Harry Balzer of the market research firm NPD Group notes that the launches coincided with our growing fixation on natural eating; Whole Foods was an early vendor. Between 2008 and 2012, the number of coconut water brands quintupled. Today, a 12-ounce serving goes for $1.50 to $2.00—adding up to a $500 million industry, with PepsiCo and Coca-Cola owning big sellers.
After a lawsuit accused Vita Coco of exaggerating health claims, the brand rewrote its labels and paid a $10 million settlement.
Americans were the perfect market for this salty-sweet liquid because we already bought into the benefits of post-exercise beverages, says Jonny Forsyth of another market research group, Mintel. But ads touting coconut water’s superior hydration turned out to be overblown. After a 2011 lawsuit accused Vita Coco of exaggerating when it claimed that the beverage had “15 times the electrolytes found in sports drinks,” the company agreed to rewrite its labels and shell out a $10 million settlement (though it did not admit any wrongdoing). Lilian Cheung, director of health promotion at Harvard’s School of Public Health, says coconut water does contain some electrolytes, especially potassium. And it usually packs less sugar than sports drinks—around 1.3 grams an ounce compared to Gatorade’s 1.7 grams. But for those getting seriously sweaty during workouts, sports drinks contain more sodium than coconut water. And for the rest of us, water is still the best choice for hydration, says Cheung, especially because it’s easy to replace lost electrolytes with food (oranges, spinach, and kidney beans, for example).
Iffy science notwithstanding, the coconut water trend spurred industry confidence in the fruit’s oil ($10 to $15 for a jar), which came with a whole new set of questionable health promises. In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration scolded health guru Joseph Mercola for saying that Tropical Traditions Virgin Coconut Oil could “reduce the risk of heart disease” and “lower your cholesterol.” Some nutritionists have praised the oil’s higher proportion of medium-chain fatty acids, which are less likely than long-chain fatty acids to deposit fat into your tissue. But unlike olive oil or vegetable oil, coconut oil is still mostly saturated fat, and eating too much of it could raise levels of the bad kind of cholesterol, “a major cause of heart attacks,” says Frank Sacks, a Harvard professor of cardiovascular disease prevention. Even more so if the product has gone through harsh processing, says Cornell nutrition science professor Tom Brenna.
Here’s what coconut products are good for: companies’ bottom lines. American brands are “making really high margins and buy the coconuts for virtually nothing,” Mintel’s Forsyth told BeverageDaily.com. In the Philippines, the world’s second-largest coconut producer after Indonesia, nearly two-thirds of small-scale coconut farmers live in poverty. Though harvesting the fruit requires a perilous climb, often up trees treated with harsh pesticides, they make just $3 a day at the height of the harvest. Each coconut yields around 500 mL of liquid; a 12-ounce bottle uses about two-thirds of a nut. Of the $2 that you pay for a bottle of the stuff, the farmer makes between 7 and 14 cents. And don’t forget that all that coconut water must be shipped across the planet, adding considerably to the product’s greenhouse gas footprint.
So what’s a coconut lover to do? One option: Buy an ethically made product. Earlier this year, Fair Trade launched a coconut certification program that guarantees farmers a 10 percent premium on top of their sale price to be used toward causes like typhoon relief. Participants in the program include Naked, Coco Libre, and Nutiva Virgin Coconut Oil. The brand Harmless Harvest only works with organic farms, and its Fair for Life certification prioritizes fair pay. Another company, Big Tree Farms, reduces shipping emissions by selling dehydrated coconut powder so you can make your own coconut water. Guilt remedies? Maybe. Magic health elixirs? Probably not.SEATTLE, WA - The periodic "slow-slip" seismic event began deep underneath Washington this week, and with it comes a slightly higher risk of a Cascadia subduction zone megathrust earthquake.
But University of Washington earth sciences professor Ken Creager, who studies slow-slip events, advises Puget Sound residents not to lose sleep worrying about it.
"You should always be prepared because [a Cascadia subduction earthquake] is going to happen," he told Patch.com. "There is some reason to think the probability is higher during [slow-slip], but it's still highly unlikely. I don't think it's cause for alarm."
What is a slow-slip event? Learn more here >>>
Slow-slip events have preceded some recent large earthquakes, which is why scientists believe the chance for a Cascadia quake is slightly higher right now. The March 2011 subduction quake in Japan was preceded by a slow-slip event, as was a 2014 magnitude 8.1 quake near Chile.
Slow-slip events are characterized by a series of small tremors deep underground. During past events, the tremors have traveled north toward Vancouver, and then turned around and moved south, sometimes as far as the Columbia River near the Oregon border.
However, if the tremors move continue moving west toward areas where the North America and Juan de Fuca plates are locked together, that might be cause for alarm.
"That might be cause for further discussion," Creager said.
The Cascadia subduction zone runs from northern California up to Vancouver Island. Deep underground, the Juan de Fuca plate is sliding underneath - subducting - the North America plate. The plates are locked together in some spots. At some point, the pressure will cause the two plates to unlock and spring apart. When that happens, the Pacific Northwest will be rocked by up to a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami.
The slow-slip event can last anywhere between two and six weeks - and, as Creager says, it's never a bad time to be prepared for a large earthquake. Scientists estimate there's a 37 percent chance of a Cascadia quake occurring within 50 years.
Image via ShutterstockYemen dialysis patients at risk as war restricts treatment, Medecins Sans Frontieres say
Posted
Medecins Sans Frontieres say the ongoing war in Yemen and related import restrictions are taking a heavy toll on the country's medical system.
Key points: Ongoing war, import restrictions result in cutbacks in lifesaving treatment for over 4,400 patients with kidney failure
Most of the 28 functioning dialysis centres in Yemen lack supplies, causing interruptions in treatment
A man died waiting for emergency treatment
MSF said they have provided medications and supplies to treat 660 dialysis patients over a six-month period.
The support had reached four dialysis centres in most urgent need, but they said most of the 28 functioning dialysis centres in Yemen lacked supplies, which was causing interruptions in treatment.
Malak Shaher, a spokesperson for MSF, has called on international organisations to support Yemen's dialysis centres, where more than 4,400 people are treated with kidney failure.
"And this number is the last number the Ministry of Health has provided for us. So the number could be even greater now," she said, describing the situation as "critical".
"MSF decided last year to intervene and start supporting those centres with medical supplies," Ms Shaher said.
"But unfortunately the needs are great... The dialysis centres, they lack medical supplies.
"So the main problem here is that now they lack the financial ability to buy those supplies and then conduct the services and provide dialysis services for the people."
Ministry of Health unable to afford dialysis sessions
Ms Shaher said the war had displaced more than 2.5 million people and among those were people living with kidney failure.
"They need at least three dialysis sessions a week to stay alive and if they don't get those dialysis sessions they will have side effects that might lead to death," she said.
"And so the situation now in Yemen is because those people, most of them are poor, and they cannot afford having dialysis sessions at private centres, the only available centres are the Ministry of Health dialysis centres.
"And so for this reason the Ministry of Health, because they don't have the financial capacity, they have reduced the dialysis sessions from three sessions a week to only two."
Ms Shaher said recently a patient waiting for treatment had died. The man, she said, was in critical condition and in need of an emergency dialysis session.
"But unfortunately because the centre was full of patients at the time he passed away," she said.
Ms Shaher said the health system had been collapsing since last year when the war first started in March last year.
"With everyday the hospitals are facing more and more difficultly, it's not only the medical supplies, it's also the fuel that's keeping the hospital running, because the public electricity is not on all the time," she said.
"And so the health system has lost the financial capacity to pay for the staff, to pay for the medical supplies, to pay for the fuel, to pay for other services and so day by day the health system in Yemen is deteriorating to the worst."
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, liver-and-kidneys, diseases-and-disorders, health, doctors-and-medical-professionals, relief-and-aid-organisations, international-aid-and-trade, yemenI have a confession: I have become an Overwatch meta slave. I rarely pick heroes other players think are “bad.” I won’t take risks with our tank-healer balance. And, most important, I will seethe when my team doesn’t reflect the holy comp du jour.
Did you pick Hanzo on an attack map? I probably scoffed at you. Did you, Genji, really think we could defend Eichenwalde without Reinhardt? Apparently, I type in team chat, you couldn’t care less about winning. I see you switched from our only healer to Widowmaker on a control point. Are you serious, I grunt into my headset.
In the grand scheme of toxic Overwatch players, I rank low. For heaven’s sake, I’m not telling any Genji players to “kill yourself.” I’m not reporting all Widowmakers for “griefing.” But I do admit that, over the last few months, I crossed into “taking Overwatch comp too seriously” territory. It’s a sad place over here, verging on mean-spirited, but at least it’s not lonely. In Competitive Mode, inevitably, there are others who loudly police hero picks before I even have the chance. I tend to let them do the talking, unless someone’s way out of line. (I am looking at you, last-pick Genji. We do not have a healer).
I feel at home in Competitive Mode among my fellow meta peons. So, I cue up for Quick Play infinitely less than I used to. There’s just something about stumbling into a room comprised of a Hanzo, Widowmaker, Genji, Sombra and Torbjorn that makes my blood boil. Have you no empathy? I think, before inevitably picking Reinhardt or Mercy. Who raised you? Quick Play’s disregard for team balance, lack of communication and “fuck it” attitude has become grating.
Overwatch’s Quick Play and Competitive Mode breakdown has become the equivalent of mixing oil and water. The strength of Competitive players’ culturally-sanctioned snobbery bonds propels others away. Or, perhaps, we’re less dense.
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And yet, there are two problems with being angry at other players for not adhering to the “meta.” First, meta is designed to reflect players who max out each heroes’ skill. I am not a great Overwatch player. I’m simply an obsessive one who is remarkable with Roadhog most of the time. In no world am I, and five mid-rank randos I met online, playing each hero to their fullest potential throughout the entirety of a match.
The second problem is the reverse of the first: If a player is truly glorious with a non-optimal hero, there’s a chance they’re not actually a selfish, terrible person (unless they are a Hanzo main.) Maybe, in fact, they are okay. I am loathe to admit it, but I’ve witnessed an attack-Bastion pull my team through the last moments of a payload map. It hurt. But it worked.
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I justify my newfound Overwatch elitism like so: I like structure. I like rules. I like doing right by others in online games. I like feeling like I’m a part of the great Overwatch zeitgeist. But you know what else? I, and I suspect, my peers, secretly like having someone, like an ill-advised Genji, to blame to when we lose. If only you had switched, I say, with a sleight of hand that brushes away my own and others’ failings. If only you had switched.Toothaches can be distressing, particularly if you can't get to the dentist's office immediately. While some people will reach for an over-the-counter topical anesthetic like Orajel or Anbesol, others will head to the health food store for a bottle of clove oil—a natural remedy used for centuries to treat tooth pain. While it is safe when used correctly and may provide you with relief, there are limitations to its use and things you should know before using it or any therapeutic oil.
Background
Popular in Ayurvedic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, cloves were once inserted whole into an infected cavity or applied as a topical extract to relieve pain and inflammation.
By the early 19th century, the active ingredient, Eugenium aromaticum, was combined with magnesium oxide to create a temporary filling material. The magnesium oxide has since been replaced by zinc oxide to produce zinc oxide eugenol (ZOE), a temporary filling cement still popularly used in orthodontics.
Cloves are dried flower buds taken from a tree of the Myrtaceae family. The oil is usually extracted through steam distillation; other producers rely on chemical solvents and boiling to obtain the prized oil. Depending on the method used, a refined oil can contain anywhere from 80 percent to 90 percent eugenol.
How It Works
Eugenol is the chemical that gives clove its spicy scent and pungent flavor. When applied to tissues, it creates a warming sensation that Chinese herbalists believe treat yang deficiencies.
Clove oil works similarly to capsicum in peppers by stimulating the production of a protein known as trans receptor potential vanilloid-1 (TRPV-1) which, in turn, desensitizes nerve endings near the surface of the skin. It also exerts potent antibacterial properties that can aid in healing and prevent infection.
Clove oil, which can be colorless or have a slightly yellowish tinge, is often used in dentistry to treat pain from a dry socket following the extraction of a tooth. It can provide short-term relief of tooth pain but doesn't necessarily treat the underlying cause (such as an abscess, tooth decay, or a tooth fracture).
While there had been some suggestions that clove oil is just as effective as benzocaine in treating toothache, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently downgraded eugenol, citing that the evidence supporting its use was lacking.
Applications
Clove oil should never be applied to the gums undiluted as it can cause irritation and may lead to toxicity. Instead, it is best diluted by adding a two to three drops to a neutral carrier oil, such as olive oil or canola oil. The oil preparation can then be dabbed onto the affected tissue with a cotton ball or swab. You can even keep the cotton ball in place for several minutes to increase absorption.
Upon application, you should feel a slight warming sensation and a pungent, gunpowdery flavor. The numbing effect should be fully felt within five to 10 minutes. You can reapply every two to three hours as needed.
If you have multiple areas of mouth pain following a dental procedure, you can add a few drops of clove oil to a teaspoon of coconut oil and swirl it in your mouth to coat. (Do not swallow.) People have also been known to apply ground cloves directly to the gums, the taste of which most find off-putting.
Side Effects
While clove oil is considered safe if used appropriately, it can become increasingly toxic if overused.
The most common side effect is tissue irritation, which is characterized by pain, swelling, redness, and a burning (rather than warming) sensation. This would either suggest that the concentration is too high or you are especially sensitive to eugenol. Do not persist with treatment as this may lead to the formation of oral lesions (contact stomatitis).
Clove oil should never be ingested. Animal studies have shown that this can lead to liver damage as well as the thickening and hardening of esophageal and stomach tissues. Gastric ulcers and kidney impairment were also noted.
Allergic reactions can be expected in around 2 percent of users. Most cases are mild and transient with localized rash, itching, swelling, and scratchy throat. Clove oil is generally not associated with anaphylaxis.
If swallowed in large quantities, clove oil can cause severe symptoms, including:
Abdominal pain
Coughing up blood
Diarrhea
Difficulty urinating
Dizziness
Nausea and vomiting
Seizures
Coma
Seek urgent medical care if you have accidentally swallowed a large amount of clove oil. Keep the oil well out of reach of children to avoid accidental ingestion.
You should also avoid the excessive inhalation of clove oil, which can trigger respiratory symptoms, including a sore throat, coughing, and shortness of breath. Long-term exposure may even increase the risk of lung infection (as evidenced in part by the high rate of infection and pulmonary edema in clove cigarette smokers).
Contraindications
Clove oil should not be used if you are actively bleeding as eugenol interferes with normal blood clotting. As such, it may not be appropriate for people with bleeding disorders or those who regularly take blood thinners such as warfarin. It should also be avoided prior to a dental procedure as it may promote excessive bleeding.
While clove oil is not regulated in the same way as a pharmaceutical drug, the FDA strongly advises against its use in children.
A Word From Verywell
While clove oil has long been a tried-and-true remedy for many families, it is not for everyone. If you are unable to tolerate the taste or experience adverse symptoms, there are other options you can try, including:
Rinsing your mouth with salt water or ice water
Dabbing diluted peppermint oil on your gums
Pressing a moistened peppermint tea bag against your gums
Placing a cold compress against your cheek
Taking an over-the-counter analgesic like Tylenol (acetaminophen)Looking for news you can trust?
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Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have a timid—but lengthy!—piece in National Review today that takes to task the purists in the Republican Party who think that the road to victory is always and everywhere to demand more confrontation, more obduracy, and more loyalty to the one true cause:
It is a politics of perpetual intra-Republican denunciation. It focuses its fire on other conservatives as much as on liberals. It takes more satisfaction in a complete loss on supposed principle than in a partial victory, let alone in the mere avoidance of worse outcomes. It has only one tactic — raise the stakes, hope to lower the boom — and treats any prudential disagreement with that tactic as a betrayal. Adherents of this brand of conservative politics are investing considerable time, energy, and money in it, locking themselves in unending intra-party battle. ….The need for greater purity, the ever-present danger of betrayal: These have been long-standing themes on the right. When our people get power, they immediately stop being our people, the great conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans quipped decades ago. Yet this assessment of what ails conservatism has grown less and less true with time.
This is a good point. The tea party faction seems unable to recognize that, in fact, they have very clearly taken over the Republican Party. Moderate Republicans are no longer a real force. For better or worse, right wingers finally have the party they’ve always wanted—or at least as much of it as any faction is ever likely to get in real life.
But now that they have it, they’ve discovered that it isn’t doing them any good, and Lowry and Ponnuru identify the obvious reason for this: We live in a democracy. The tea partiers may control the Republican Party, but they don’t command majority support among the American public. Without that, they’ll never be able to advance their agenda, and the more apocalyptic they get, the less likely they are to ever win the kind of broad-based victories that Ronald Reagan did.
So why do I call this piece timid? Not because it’s full of caveats about how understandable the frustrations of the tea partiers are or how much their hearts are in the right place. That’s standard boilerplate in a piece like this.
No, it’s timid because, in the end, Lowry and Ponnuru pull back, seemingly unwilling to make any truly robust recommendations for changing things:
For the country to be governed conservatively, however, conservatives have to win more elections….There is no alternative to seeking to expand the conservative base beyond its present inadequate numbers and to win the votes of people who aren’t yet conservatives or are not yet conservatives on all issues. The defunders often said that those who predicted their failure were “defeatists.” Yet it is they who have given in to despair. They are the ones who entertain the ideas that everything has gotten worse; that the last few decades of conservative thought and action have been for nothing; that engagement in politics as traditionally conceived is hopeless; that government programs, once begun, must corrupt the citizenry so that they can never be ended or reformed; that the country will soon be past the point of regeneration, if it is not there already.
OK, but how will conservatives win more elections? L&P explicitly disavow the notion of the party turning left, suggesting only that they’re skeptical of “the idea that moving in the opposite direction will in itself pay political dividends.” But if they have no concrete suggestions—either in
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to the spine. The patient-victim was told that this was part of his “treatment.” The torture continued until Marley foundered on the threshold of death.
Cedella Booker-Marley, his mother, visited him three times in the course of the “treatments.” She found Dr. Issels to be an “arrogant wretch” with the “gruff manners of a bully,” who subjected her dying son to a bloodless brand of “hocus-pocus” medicine. Booker-Marley: “I myself witnessed Issels’ rough treatment of Nesta [Marley]. One time I went with Nesta to the clinic, and we settled down in a treatment room. Issels came in and announced to Nesta, ‘I’m going to give you a needle.’” Dr. Issels “plunged the needle straight into Nesta’s navel right down to the syringe. [Marley] grunted and winced. He could only lie there helplessly, writhing on the table, trying his best to hide his pain. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I heard myself mumbling.” Issels yanked out the needle and strolled casually out of the room. Marley was left groaning with pain. “I went and stood at his side and held is hand.
“With every visit,” she recalls, “I found him smaller, frailer, thinner. As the months of dying dragged on, the suffering was etched all over his face. He would fall into fits of shaking when he would lose all control and shiver from head to toe like a coconut leaf in the breeze. His eyes would turn in his head, rolling in their sockets until even the white jelly was quivering.”
Marley’s torment was aggravated by starvation. “For a whole week sometimes,” Booker laments, her son “would be allowed no nourishment other than what he got intravenously. Constantly hungry, even starving, he wasted away to a skeleton” – starved to death like an Auschwitz inmate. “To watch my first-born shrivel up to skin and bone ripped at my mother’s heart.” Marley weighed 82 pounds on the day of his death. The starvation diet must have devastated his immune system and rushed his demise, not prolonged his life as Dr. Issels and some biographers have contended. It also caused him intense pain. “It would drag on so, for one long painful month after the other, and every day would be a knife that death stabbed and twisted anew in an already open, bleeding wound.” The agony “wrapped him up like a crushing snake.”
Death finally claimed Marley on May 11, 1981. In Jamaica, May 20 was declared a national day of mourning. Marley’s wake at the National Arena was attended by some 30,000 mourners.
He was survived by his old partner Peter Tosh, who was shot to death in 1987. Marley and Tosh were not the only musicians murdered for political reasons in Jamaica. By the end of the decade, all Jamaican musicians were censored and subject to shell-casing politics.
The island’s Daily Gleaner reported in 1987 that Winston “Yellowman” Foster, stopped at a police roadblock and frisked for drugs, resisted detainment. One of the officers hissed, “You want to go like Tosh?” When Tosh went, there was nothing random about it. Witnesses and friends insist that he was a political hit. Two of the gunmen fled to New York to remain at large. The third was Dennis “Leppo” Lobban, an ex-con sentenced for the murder after an 11-minute trial.
Like Marley, Peter Tosh found the bloodshed and hypocrisy of death squad justice and CIA covert ops in the Third World unbearable. He was so obsessed with hidden evil and the upswell of violence in Jamaica that they visited him in his sleep. He had “visions” of “destruction [and] millions of people inside of [a] pit going down. And I… say, ‘bloodbath, where so much people come from?’ and looking in the pit, mon, it the biggest pit… but the way the people was crying, it was awful.”“All the books are about animals,” the Toronto author says of the bedtime stories she shares with her 2-year-old son, Toma.
And like a conclusive majority of climate scientists, she sees man-made, carbon-based global warming as settled fact and an immediate threat to human civilization.
“And at a certain point it just struck me that so many of the books... were about animals that are facing (climate related) extinction crises and that he may never see some of the animals he’s reading about.”
And since humans have no control over the natural laws that govern a carbon-stoked climate, she argues, capitalism will have to change.
In her own book, This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs The Climate, Klein advances this existential conundrum:
What changed for me was hearing the argument for the existence of a climate debt, which is the idea that in order to address the crisis... which was created by the wealthiest countries in the world and is being felt most acutely by some of the poorest countries in the world, there needs to be a process of redress.
You were once in denial about climate change. You didn’t deny the science, but like so many others you turned cringingly away from the worsening news. What made you change your mind to take a hard look and write a book about it?
Core inequalities need to be tackled through redistribution of wealth and technology. And this was explained to me as a chance to heal the world; to heal some of the deepest and most lasting wounds left by colonialism. And I suddenly saw that though this crisis continues to be existentially terrifying, it could also be a catalyst for really inspiring change and social justice.
I want to talk about those changes, but again, many people continue to ignore or outright deny climate change. And this denial is based largely on the (oil-interest inspired) belief that the science is still unsettled. How would you suggest that manufactured scientific controversy be surmounted?
In the book I make a distinction between hard denial and soft denial. The hard denial is it’s not happening — the science is wrong, it’s a conspiracy. That’s actually quite a small percentage of the population, particularly in Canada. Overwhelmingly, Canadians believe that climate change is real.
Where the impact of the oil lobby and misinformation campaigns have been very effective (is in feeding) that soft denial of “I can’t bear to look.”
I think that state of not looking, in Canada, is very much about this really successful talking point about if we take this crisis seriously, our economy will collapse. Everything good that is happening in the country is because of the oil boom.
In Canada, (that) has been a much more effective way of preventing us from focusing on the climate crisis than outright scientific denial of the facts.
And that’s why I hope the book will play a constructive role in this debate because I am outlining an economic future that is not collapse, that is not grim, that is in fact, I hope, more exciting and inspiring than the economic choices we are being presented as Canadians.
I think just highlighting other economic alternatives... success stories where that false dichotomy has been rejected, opens up the possibilities to look.
There is certainly big money behind the most important player in this debate, the United States, and that money reaches deep into the halls of Congress where people appear to be paid to deny the existence of the problem. But you argue in the book that big money isn’t the root of the problem, it’s the means of generating that big money that’s at fault. You argue that, in fact, capitalism as it’s currently practiced is incompatible with saving the planet. Can you explain that?
Well, I think that in terms of responding decisively to climate change I do think that big money is at the heart of the suppression of that response.
Both by... bribing politicians and serving as (an election-campaign) disciplinary force for politicians — you get the money if you do the right thing. But if you don’t do the right thing from the perspective of the oil companies then that same money is used to attack you in television ads and so on.
But in terms of what you’re saying about what the book argues about capitalism, I think the resistance by some of the most powerful players in the world... to a decisive response to climate change (comes about) because there is an understanding that we’ve allowed the crisis to deepen to such an extent that if we were to cut our emissions in line with what science is telling us, then the cuts would be so deep that they would present a fundamental challenge to the logic of growth for growth’s sake, which is the logic of the core of our economic system.
That doesn’t mean there can’t be parts of our economy that grow, there can and must be... in order to respond to climate change. But as that happens, we also need to contract those parts of our economy that are destabilizing the climate and are just fuelling mindless consumption.
Some of the aspects of that perpetual growth economy are rampant consumerism, globalization and deregulation... those seem ingrained and backed by irresistible (business) forces. How do you convince enough of those people who are more concerned with a bigger TV and the newest logo-bearing product that they can rise up and face those powerful interests?
I think that is the key question and it is to me the greatest crime of neo-liberal ideological messaging; that so many of us have been convinced that all we are is self-interested, gratification-seeking units.
We (believe) we’re so unidimensional in our values and desires that we are incapable of responding collectively to an existential crisis and incapable of acting collectively for a greater good.
Well, we know that historically, this has not been the case. We know that in the midst of the Great Depression we came together and built some of the social programs we’re proudest of. We know the same is true of wartime rationing. There’s an incredible statistic I have in the book about how use of public transit in Canada increased by 95 per cent during the Second World War.
So really, what we’re saying when we say we can’t do this — and this is what we’re told again and again, we can’t do this, there is something wrong with us, we’re too selfish, we’re too greedy — is that this idea of the “we” of who we are has changed.
Maybe our grandparents could do things like act collectively and come together at times of crisis... (but) it’s almost like we think we’re a different species from our grandparents.
MORE ON THESTAR.COM:
Carbon dioxide pollution hits record level: ‘Time is not on our side’
Scientists say ozone layer is recovering
New study finds global warming, melting sea ice, connected to polar vortexThe 3M Company, formerly known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation operating in the fields of industry, worker safety, health care, and consumer goods.[2] The company produces a variety of products, including adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint protection films, dental and orthodontic products, electronic materials, medical products, car-care products,[3] electronic circuits, healthcare software and optical films.[4] It is based in Maplewood, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul.[5]
In 2017, 3M made $31.7 billion in total sales,[2] and the company ranked No. 97 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.[6] The company has 91,000 employees[7] and has operations in more than 70 countries.[2]
History [ edit ]
Five businessmen founded 3M in Two Harbors, Minnesota, in 1902.[8] Originally a mining venture, the goal was to mine corundum, but this failed because the mine's mineral holdings were anorthosite, which had no commercial value.[8] Co-founder John Dwan solicited funds in exchange for stock and Edgar Ober and Lucius Ordway took over the company in 1905.[8] The company moved to Duluth and began researching and producing sandpaper products.[8] William L. McKnight, later a key executive, joined the company in 1907, and A. G. Bush joined in 1909.[8] 3M finally became financially stable in 1916 and was able to pay dividends.[8]
The company moved to St. Paul in 1910, where it remained for 52 years before outgrowing the campus and moving to its current headquarters at 3M Center in Maplewood, Minnesota in 1962.[9]
The company began by mining stone from quarries for use in grinding wheels. Struggling with quality and marketing of its products, management supported its workers to innovate and develop new products, which became its core business.[10] Twelve years after its inception, 3M developed its first exclusive product: Three-M-ite cloth. Other innovations in this era included masking tape, waterproof sandpaper, and Scotch-brand tapes. By 1929, 3M had made its first moves toward international expansion by forming Durex to conduct business in Europe. The same year, the company's stock was first traded over the counter and in 1946 listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The company is currently a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and of the S&P 500.
Founding [ edit ]
The founders original plan was to sell the mineral corundum to manufacturers in the East for making grinding wheels. After selling one load, on June 13, 1902, the five went to the Two Harbors office of company secretary John Dwan, which was on the shore of Lake Superior and is now part of the 3M National Museum, and signed papers making Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing a corporation. In reality, however, Dwan and his associates were not selling what they thought; they were really selling the worthless mineral anorthosite.[11]
Failing to make sandpaper with the anorthosite, the founders decided to import minerals like Spanish garnet, after which sale of sandpapers grew. In 1914, customers complained that the garnet was falling off the paper. The founders discovered that the stones had traveled across the Atlantic Ocean packed near olive oil, and the oil had penetrated the stones. Unable to take the loss of selling expensive inventory, they roasted the stones over fire to remove the olive oil; this was the first instance of research and development at 3M.
Expansion and modern history [ edit ]
The company's late innovations include waterproof sandpaper (1921) and masking tape (1925), as well as cellophane "Scotch Tape" and sound-deadening materials for cars.
In 1947, 3M began producing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) by electrochemical fluorination.[12] During the 1950s, the company expanded worldwide with operations in Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom in large part by Clarence Sampair.
In 1951, DuPont started purchasing PFOA from then-Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company for use in the manufacturing of teflon, a product that brought DuPont a billion-dollar-a-year profit by the 1990s.[13] DuPont referred to PFOA as C8.[14] In 1951, international sales were approximately $20 million. 3M's achievements were recognized by the American Institute of Management naming the company "one of the five best-managed companies in the United States" and included it among the top 12 growth stocks (3M).[15]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, 3M published a line of board games, largely under the "3M bookshelf game series" brand. These games were marketed to adults and sold through department stores, with easily learned simple rules but complex game play and depth and with uniformly high-quality components. As such, they are the ancestors of the German "Eurogames". The games covered a variety of topics, from business and sports simulations to word and abstract strategy games. They were a major publisher at the time for influential U.S. designers Sid Sackson and Alex Randolph. In the mid-1970s, the game line was taken over by Avalon Hill.
3M traffic signals installed in Shelton, Washington. Standing off-axis from the intended viewing area, these signals are invisible to adjacent lanes of traffic in daylight. (A faint glow is visible at night.)
The same two signals above, taken in the signal's intended viewing area (a single lane of northbound traffic). Special light-diffusing optics and a colored fresnel lens create the indication.
3M's Mincom division introduced several models of magnetic tape recorders for instrumentation use and for studio sound recording. An example of the latter is the model M79 recorder, which still has a following today. 3M Mincom was also involved in designing and manufacturing video production equipment for the television and video post-production industries in the 1970s and 1980s, with such items as character generators and several different models of video switchers, from models of audio and video routers to video mixers for studio production work.
3M Mincom was involved in some of the first digital audio recordings of the late 1970s to see commercial release when a prototype machine was brought to the Sound 80 studios in Minneapolis. After drawing on the experience of that prototype recorder, 3M later introduced in 1979 a commercially available digital audio recording system called the "3M Digital Audio Mastering System",[16] which consisted of a 32-track digital audio recorder and a companion 4-track digital recorder for mixdown & final mastering. 3M later designed and manufactured several other commercially available models of digital audio recorders used throughout the early to mid-1980s.
3M launched "Press 'n Peel" in stores in four cities in 1977, but results were disappointing.[17][18] A year later 3M instead issued free samples directly to consumers in Boise, Idaho, with 94 percent of those who tried them indicating they would buy the product.[17] The product was sold as "Post-its" in 1979 when the rollout introduction began,[19] and was sold across the United States[19] from April 6, 1980.[20] The following year they were launched in Canada and Europe.[21]
In 1996, the company's data storage and imaging divisions were spun off as Imation Corporation. In doing so 3M shed 20% of its sales, employees and product lines at a cost of only 5% of its profits and immediately looked much improved in the estimation of Wall Street analysts. These businesses, with annual sales of over $2 billion had generated handsome profits for 3M which funded R&D and development of many new business lines but were largely in "sunset" industries: printing products, photographic film, and removable storage media. Imation shortly sold its imaging and photographic film businesses largely to Kodak in order to concentrate on storage. Imation was purchased by a hedge fund in 2016 and ceased to exist as an independent business. What is left is now called Glassbridge Enterprises, an American holding company.
As of 2012, 3M was one of the 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, added on August 9, 1976, and was 97 on the 2011 Fortune 500 list.[22] The company has 132 plants and over 67,000 employees worldwide, with sales offices in over 200 countries[citation needed]. The vast majority of the company's employees are local nationals, with few employees residing outside their home country. Its worldwide sales are over $20 billion, with international sales 58% of that total.
In 2002, 3M changed its legal name to 3M Company; it had been popularly known as "3M" for much of its history. Also in 2002, the company agreed to acquire AiT Advanced Information Technologies Corp. for about $37.4 million in cash, after AiT had strongly hinted it had put itself on the auction block.
On December 20, 2005, 3M announced a major partnership with Roush Fenway Racing, one of NASCAR's premier organizations. In 2008, the company sponsored Greg Biffle in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series as he drove the No. 16 Ford Fusion. In addition, on February 19, 2006, 3M announced that it would become the title sponsor of the 3M Performance 400 at Michigan International Speedway until 2011.
On April 4, 2006, 3M announced its intention to sell its pharmaceutical non-core business. The pharmaceuticals businesses were sold off in three deals, in Europe, the Americas, and the remainder of the world. Another division of the Health Care business, Drug Delivery Systems, remains with 3M. The Drug Delivery System division continues to contract manufacture inhalants and transdermal drug-delivery systems, and has now taken on manufacture of the products whose licenses were sold during the divestiture of the pharmaceuticals business.[23] On September 8, 2008, 3M announced an agreement to acquire Meguiar's, a car-care products company that was family-owned for over a century.[24]
On August 30, 2010, 3M announced that they had acquired Cogent Systems for $943 million.[25]
On October 13, 2010, 3M completed acquisition of Arizant Inc.[26] In December 2011, 3M completed the acquisition of the Winterthur Technology Group, a bonded abrasives company.
3M follows a business model based on "the ability to not only develop unique products, but also to manufacture them efficiently and consistently around the world".[27]
On January 3, 2012, it was announced that the Office and Consumer Products Division of Avery Dennison was being bought by 3M for $550 million.[28] The transaction was canceled by 3M in September 2012 amid antitrust concerns.[29]
In May 2013, 3M announced that it was selling Scientific Anglers and Ross Reels to Orvis. Orvis said it planned to continue running the company as an independent entity at its Midland, Michigan headquarters and that the Ross Reels would also continue independent operations at its headquarters in Montrose County, Colorado. While under its ownership, 3M had chemists and other scientists develop improved fly lines that were easier to cast, floated at a higher level in the water, and dried faster for its fishing brands. Ross Reels had been acquired by 3M in 2010.[30]
In March 2017, it was announced that 3M was purchasing Johnson Control International Plc's safety gear business, Scott Safety, for $2 billion.[31]
In 2017, 3M had net sales for the year of $31.657 billion, up from $30.109 billion the year before.[32] In 2018, it was reported that the company would pay $850 million to end the Minnesota water pollution case concerning perfluorochemicals.[33]
On May 25, 2018, Michael F. Roman was appointed CEO by the board of directors.[34] As of August 2018, 3M India Ltd. was the only listed 3M Company subsidiary.[35]
Finances [ edit ]
For the fiscal year 2018, 3M reported earnings of US$4.858 billion, with an annual revenue of US$31.657 billion, an increase of 5.1% over the previous fiscal cycle. 3M's shares traded at over $200 per share, and its market capitalization was valued at over US$107.7 billion in October 2018.
Year Revenue
in mil. USD$ Net income
in mil. USD$ Total Assets
in mil. USD$ Price per Share
in USD$ Employees 2005[36] 21,167 3,111 20,541 55.84 2006[37] 22,923 3,851 21,294 56.50 2007[38] 24,462 4,096 24,694 63.18 2008[39] 25,269 3,460 25,793 55.07 2009[40] 23,123 3,193 27,250 51.04 2010[40] 26,662 4,085 30,156 68.53 2011[40] 29,611 4,283 31,616 72.73 2012[40] 29,904 4,444 33,876 76.88 2013[41] 30,871 4,659 33,550 100.63 88,667 2014[42] 31,821 4,956 31,209 129.25 89,800 2015[43] 30,274 4,833 32,883 144.98 89,446 2016[44] 30,109 5,050 32,906 160.59 91,584 2017[45] 31,657 4,858 37,987 200.59 91,536
Environmental record [ edit ]
[46] The Target Light System, built by 3M at Target headquarters in Minneapolis
In 1999 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began investigating perfluorinated chemicals after receiving data on the global distribution and toxicity of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS).[47] 3M, the former primary producer of PFOS from the U.S., announced the phase-out of PFOS, perfluorooctanoic acid, and PFOS-related product production in May 2000.[48][49] Perfluorinated compounds produced by 3M were used in non-stick cookware and stain-resistant fabrics.[50] The Cottage Grove facility manufactured PFCs from the 1940s to 2002.[51] In response to PFC contamination of the Mississippi River and surrounding area, 3M stated the area will be "cleaned through a combination of groundwater pump-out wells and soil sediment excavation". The restoration plan was based on an analysis of the company property and surrounding lands.[52] The on-site water treatment facility that handled the plant's post-production water was not capable of removing the PFCs, which were released into the nearby Mississippi River.[51] The clean-up cost estimate was $50 to $56 million, funded from a $147 million environmental reserve set aside in 2006.[53]
In 1983, the Oakdale Dump in Oakdale, Minnesota, was listed as an EPA Superfund site after significant groundwater and soil contamination by VOCs and heavy metals was uncovered.[54] The Oakdale Dump was a 3M dumping site utilized through the 1940s and 1950s.
In 2008, 3M created the Renewable Energy Division within 3M's Industrial and Transportation Business to focus on Energy Generation and Energy Management.[55][56]
In late 2010, the state of Minnesota sued 3M for $5 billion in punitive damages, claiming they released PFCs, a very toxic chemical according to the EPA but unknown at the time of release,[citation needed] into local waterways.[57] After many long delays, a settlement for $850 million was reached in February 2018.[58][49][59]
Operating facilities [ edit ]
3M facility in St. Paul, Minnesota
3M's general offices, corporate research laboratories, and some division laboratories in the US are in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the United States, 3M operates 80 manufacturing facilities in 29 states, and 125 manufacturing and converting facilities in 37 countries outside the US (in 2017).[60]
In March 2016, 3M completed a 400,000-square-foot (37,000 m2) research-and-development building that cost $150 million on its Maplewood campus. Seven hundred scientists from various divisions occupy the building. They were previously scattered across the campus. 3M hopes concentrating its research and development in this manner will improve collaboration. 3M received $9.6 million in local tax increment financing and relief from state sales taxes in order to assist with development of the building.[61]
3M owns almost all of the real estate it occupies. Because 3M is a global enterprise characterized by substantial intersegment cooperation, properties are often used by multiple business segments.[60]
Selected factory detail information:
Leadership [ edit ]
Current officers [ edit ]
Mike Roman – chief executive officer
Inge G. Thulin – executive chairman of the board, president
John P. Banovetz – senior vice president, research and development and chief technology officer
James L. Bauman – executive vice president, Industrial Business Group
Julie L. Bushman – executive vice president, international operations
Joaquin Delgado – executive vice president, Consumer Business Group
Ivan K. Fong – senior vice president, legal affairs and general counsel
Nicholas C. Gangestad – senior vice president and chief financial officer
Eric D. Hammes – senior vice president, business transformation and information technology
Paul A. Keel – senior vice president, business development and marketing-sales
Ashish K. Khandpur – executive vice president, Electronics and Energy Business Group
Jon T. Lindekugel – senior vice president, business development and marketing-sales
Mojdeh Poul – executive vice president, Safety and Graphics Business Group
Kristen Ludgate – senior vice president, human resources
Kimberly Foster Price – senior vice president, corporate communications and enterprise services
H. C. (Hak Cheol) Shin – vice chair and executive vice president
Michael G. Vale – executive vice president, Health Care Business Group
Sarah Grauze – Treasurer and Vice President, Finance
Sources: [65]
Presidents [ edit ]
Chief executive officers [ edit ]
Chairmen of the board [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Editor's Choice
Some of Hillary Clinton’s defenders have taken to saying that voters shouldn’t pay attention to the latest Clinton scandals — the gushing of often undisclosed millions to the Clintons and their organizations by characters seeking official favors — because the charges are just one more in a long series: Whitewater, the Rose law firm billing records, the Buddhist temple fundraising, the Lippo Group.
So, the theory goes, because the Clintons have been accused of so many scandalous doings before, people shouldn’t be concerned now about Secretary Clinton’s actions that helped certain donors turn over 20 percent of U.S. uranium reserves to a state-run Russian company.
Common sense might tend to make you more suspicious of those who attract many accusations. But the Clintons’ defenders expect and hope in their case that you will instead be suspicious of those who make so many accusations. After all, they’re always saying nasty things! In this view, even charges advanced and amplified by the New York Times may be summarily dismissed as the products of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Of course, for some voters, the just-one-more-scandal argument may cut the other way. They may decide that they’ve endured enough Clinton scandals.
Still, Clinton defenders have some basis for thinking that the just-one-more-scandal argument has worked for the Clintons before. Bill Clinton may have been interrogated and impeached, but he wasn’t removed from office. Instead, Newt Gingrich was knocked off the speaker’s chair days after Republicans lost seats in the midterm election.
But there’s a big difference between then and now. Bill Clinton was the incumbent president when he was impeached. Hillary Clinton is a private citizen who is running for president.
Most voters wanted Clinton to remain in office. He was re-elected in 1996 by an eight-point margin over Bob Dole. Before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, his job approval was in the high 50s. Once he was threatened with removal, that bounced up to 70 percent.
In effect, a crucial number of Americans were saying not to boot him from office. He’s been elected to two terms; he’s been performing tolerably well — so what if he lies under oath about conduct that is personal and outside his official duties?
(That doesn’t mean that Clinton’s conduct didn’t have political consequences. The Lewinsky revelations put an end to negotiations between Clinton and Gingrich on serious entitlement reforms. They’ve been delayed now going on 20 years.)
But that doesn’t mean voters were necessarily buying the Clintons’ defenses. Even as his job approval rose, Clinton’s favorable/unfavorable ratings declined. People thought less of him personally, but they also couldn’t accept the idea of pushing him aside.
Hillary Clinton is in a different position. She is a candidate, not an incumbent. Candidates are easily dispensed with, as former Sen. Gary Hart learned when the photos of him sailing on the “Monkey Business” appeared in May 1987 when he was seeking the Democratic nomination for president. His staffers vowed he would hold onto his support, but it wasn’t his to hold on to. He quickly withdrew and faded from view.
Hart’s position in 1987 was weaker than Clinton’s position today. His lead in Democratic primary polls was not overwhelming, and there were other serious active or potential candidates in the field or just over the horizon. That’s because even in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, Democrats of varying ideological stripes were winning major offices around the country. Democrats had reason to think they had a good chance of nominating a strong ticket without Hart.
Today’s Democrats fear they are not in this comfortable position. They’ve been losing most elections lately in constituencies beyond those where their core constituencies — blacks, some Hispanics, gentry liberals — are clustered. They don’t have many prominent plausible alternative candidates.
Absent Hillary Clinton, they would be faced with a choice of tax-raiser Martin O’Malley, socialist Bernie Sanders, Reagan appointee Jim Webb, former Republican scion Lincoln Chafee or the gaffe-prone Joe Biden. None run as well as Clinton in general election polls.
But how strong is Clinton? Her numbers have been declining, and she runs under 50 percent against lesser-known Republicans in most national and target-state polls. All voters know her, and most don’t favor her. She runs stronger in polls of all adults, not just registered voters. That gap suggests she could have a hard time inspiring maximizing turnout.
The argument that the Clintons have always faced scandal charges is intended to shore up her support. But it may have the opposite effect.Schizophrenia, the psychotic disorder marked by hallucinations, delusions and cognitive disorganization, affects roughly 1 percent of the U.S. population.* Many of those afflicted, however, also have reduced reproductive fitness, which means they are less likely to pass a genetic profile associated with the condition onto their offspring.
"It's sort of a genetic paradox," explains Steve Dorus, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Bath in England. "Why is this disease found at such a high prevalence?"
Dorus co-authored a report, appearing in this week's Proceedings of the Royal Society B, about the evolution of genes linked to schizophrenia. After analyzing human DNA from several populations around the world and examining primate genomes dating back to the shared ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees, researchers reached a striking conclusion that several gene variants linked to schizophrenia were actually positively selected and remained largely unchanged over time, suggesting that there was some advantage to having them.
"Schizophrenia can be explained by a lot of individual alleles (variations of genes)," Dorus notes. "There are many different loci that impact the actual manifestation of the disease." Over the past decade, several dozen genes have been identified as potential culprits, and scientists believe that several genes cause disruptions in protein formations predisposing a person to schizophrenia.
For this study, the team, which also included Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biology professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and East Carolina University evolution professor Kyle Summers, focused on 76 gene variations most strongly related to schizophrenia. By comparing these combinations with the evolution of other genes known to affect neuronal processes, the researchers determined that 28 of the schizophrenia-associated genes have been evolutionarily preferred in recent years by either Caucasian, Asian or African populations.
"Because it's a such a complex genetic trait you actually expect there to be some variability from population to population, in terms of what genes are playing a role in the disorder," Dorus says. He notes that he was surprised that the study turned up a positive selection for some of the genes most closely associated to the disease, including DISC1 (disrupted in schizophrenia 1), which is involved in the transport of proteins along the relatively lengthy cell bodies of neurons, among them. "The most important thing is we don't really know what the basis of the selection has been," he says. "It could be due to an entire range of neurodevelopmental processes."
Co-author Crespi says that a number of theories have been floating around regarding the persistence of schizophrenia's genetic underpinnings. One holds that schizophrenia is a "disorder of language" and that the illness is an unfortunate consequence of the development of human speech, expression and creativity. "Whenever you get strong selection, it's like a big plus, and you can drag along a lot of minuses," he says. "You can think of schizophrenics as paying the price of all the cognitive and language skills that humans have—they have too many of the alleles that taken individually might have positive effect, but together they are bad."
Dorus says the team will now home in on the 28 genes fingered in positive selection in the hope of finding new treatments for the mysterious disorder.
*CORRECTION: Initially, this phrase read "Schizophrenia, the psychotic disorder marked by hallucinations, multiple personalities and cognitive disorganization, affects roughly 1 percent of the U.S. population." The condition of having multiple personalities was incorrectly identified as a signature of schizophrenia.shadow
C’è il vecchio boss Salvatore Muscatello, 80 anni, già arrestato nell’operazione «Infinito» e che dai domiciliari era tornato a gestire il locale di ‘ndrangheta di Mariano Comense (Como). Ci sono il 62enne Antonio Galati, suo figlio di 35 Giuseppe e altri parenti, tutti affiliati alla cosca Mancuso di Limbadi in provincia di Vibo Valentia. Erano loro, i Galati, a gestire gli affari del clan in Lombardia. Un business vasto e variegato: estorsioni, intestazione fittizia di beni, riciclaggio, detenzione di armi. E, al centro, un mega affare immobiliare a Lucernate di Rho. Quello
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-life money: "Where prizes are successfully restricted for use solely within the game, such in-game features would not be licensable gambling."
But as we've reported, when it comes to games such as FIFA 18, you can most definitely cash out.
The full government response can be found here.Rolling Stone has unveiled its next cover, featuring a dreamy photo of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and many people have erupted in outrage. Some critics say the image depicts Tsarnaev as a kind of celebrity; others believe it turns him into a martyr. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick called the cover “out of taste,” while CVS has banned the issue “out of respect for the victims of the attack and their loved ones.” A smaller chain of New England stores is also boycotting the magazine for “glorify[ing] evil actions.” Never mind that the picture itself once appeared on the front page of the New York Times; when Rolling Stone uses it, they’re “tasteless,” “trashy,” and “exploitative.”
As the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple points out, the image is exploitative—but it isn’t just exploitative: It’s also smart, unnerving journalism. By depicting a terrorist as sweet and handsome rather than ugly and terrifying, Rolling Stone has subverted our expectations and hinted at a larger truth. The cover presents a stark contrast with our usual image of terrorists. It asks, “What did we expect to see in Tsarnaev? What did we hope to see?” The answer, most likely, is a monster, a brutish dolt with outward manifestations of evil. What we get instead, however, is the most alarming sight of all: a boy who looks like someone we might know.
Judging from the article itself, the image is disconcertingly apt. The story, a two-month investigative report by Janet Reitman, tracks Tsarnaev’s tragic, dangerous path from a well-liked student to a monster, focusing on the increasing influence of radical Islam. (The headline on the cover suggests as much; those immediately outraged by the picture might do well to read the accompanying text.) That slide from likable teenager to troubled murderer is a potent narrative—and not a new one. Time magazine profiled the Columbine shooters through a similar lens, calling them “the monsters next door” on their cover and asking, “What made them do it?”
Few people complained, however, when the Columbine shooters graced the cover of Time, perhaps in part because that magazine is devoted primarily to news, whereas Rolling Stone devotes more space to music and culture. And it’s certainly true that Rolling Stone’s cover is prime celebrity real estate; many forget that the late Michael Hastings’ explosive piece on General Stanley McChrystal was tucked in an issue featuring Lady Gaga on the cover.
But Rolling Stone has published several other terrific works of journalism, and its editors have stood by their cover. And they are right to do so. They are not “glorifying” anyone. Whatever “glory” this cover brings is more in line with infamy than celebrity; after all, the text of the cover describes him as “the bomber” and “a monster.” Yes, the editors were surely aware that Tsarnaev has attracted a bizarre fan base of young women professing their crushes and asserting his innocence. But it’s ridiculous to assume that the magazine was playing off his strange cult following—an assumption we would never make for Time or the New York Times.
We may want the media to reconfirm for us that psychopaths are crazed, nutty, creepy recluses whom we can easily identify and thus avoid. But, as this cover reminds us, that simply isn’t the case. Some psychopaths point guns at cameras; others snap selfies in T-shirts. As Tsarnaev’s many friends could attest, we aren’t as good as we’d like to believe at spotting the evil beneath the surface.UK: Going about Our "Normal" Lives? One of the most striking images from the night of the London Borough Market terror attack was of drinkers being marched out of the Market under police escort with their hands on their heads. The British public at that point looked not like stoical, pugnacious heroes, but like a defeated army being marched into captivity.
Contrary to all our public statements, we have become terrorised, just as the terrorists want.
It is a glimpse into the soul of a city; and like all such ugly glimpses, we will turn away from looking at it, rather than considering it and wondering what it truly suggests. Whenever Britain suffers a terrorist attack -- and it has suffered four Islamist attacks this year alone -- the British public responds the same way. Twelve years ago, when four suicide bombers detonated homemade bombs on the London underground and on a red-top bus in central London, there was much talk of "Blitz spirit". After 7/7, the media erupted with boasts of wartime echoes. Some people who lived in London noticed a rather different atmosphere. Of course people "got on with their lives" (what else could they do?) but in the days and weeks after the attacks it was not really "business as usual". Especially not after another four suicide bombers went onto the tube a fortnight later, on July 21, and attempted to repeat the exercise. Fortunately, on that occasion the bombs failed to detonate. But during the period that ensued, it was certainly easier than usual to get a seat on the London Underground. Of course, political leaders relish the opportunity to accentuate and exaggerate these echoes. If the British public are the citizens of London in the Blitz, then the politicians are Winston Churchill. After attacks like the 2013 daytime slaughter of Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of London, then-Prime Minister David Cameron stressed from the steps of Downing Street that "One of the best ways of defeating terrorism is to go about our normal lives. And that is what we shall all do." These themes are thought to play deep to the spirit of the British people. But the more this conspicuous, self-conscious egging-on of such attitudes is stressed, the thinner it seems to get. In March, after Khalid Masood ploughed a car across Westminster Bridge, mowing down locals and tourists, and crashed the car and stabbed policeman Keith Palmer to death inside the gates of the Palace of Westminster, one prominent British journalist took to the pages of the New York Times to pour out the clichés. "By Thursday morning, London was, if not quite back to normal, then certainly back in business. As I traveled through the south of the city, up to Chelsea and later over to King's Cross, Londoners really were going about their lives as on any other day. "This behavior reflects something deeper than conscious defiance, I think. It would simply not occur to the 8.6 million citizens of this megalopolis to allow one man to send them into hiding. As they say in the East End, you're having a laugh, aren't you?" One wonders when the author last went into an East End pub to have a pint, and whether he honestly believes such honest cockneys still reside there? Nevertheless, he went to boast of the "stoicism" and "ancestral pride" that still exists there and to insist that, "The only way to proceed is -- in the much-loved British slogan -- to keep calm and carry on." Quite why this spirit is meant to reside in the bones of a city in which most of its current residents (according to the last census) have arrived in the decades since the Second World War is never clear. Similar clichés spilled out after the suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena in May. They came out yet again after the London Bridge attack in June. Yet one of the most striking images from that night was of drinkers in Borough Market, where the terrorists finished their assault, being marched out of the Market under police escort with their hands on their heads. The British public at that point, at any rate, looked not like stoical, pugnacious heroes, but like a defeated army being marched into captivity. Still the clichés continued. The day after the attack, in her address to the nation, Prime Minister Theresa May assured the public that "Our response must be as it has always been when we have been confronted by violence. We must come together, we must pull together." One of the most striking images from the June 3, 2017 Borough Market terror attack was of drinkers being marched out of the Market under police escort with their hands on their heads. The British public at that point looked not like stoical, pugnacious heroes, but like a defeated army being marched into captivity. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) So it is interesting to consider, beneath all the talk of business as usual, and Blitz spirit, and keeping calm and carrying on, what, in fact, are the British public actually feeling? Last month provided a sobering demonstration. Early in the evening on Friday, November 24 there were reports of shots having been fired at Oxford Circus station. A crowd stampede occurred, with people fleeing in terror down Oxford Street and other parts of one of London's busiest shopping areas. Terrified crowds barricaded themselves into local shops. A celebrity singer and television presenter called Olly Murs tweeted to his millions of followers that he was in Selfridges department store. "F**k everyone get out of Selfridges now gun shots!! I'm inside." That was his first unwise tweet, followed up shortly after with, "Really not sure what's happened! I'm in the back office... but people screaming and running towards exits!" The police announced that they were responding to events as though they were a terrorist incident. Social media and some early national media reports said that not only gunshots had been heard but that a vehicle had ploughed into pedestrians on Oxford Street and that there were bodies and blood everywhere. Within an hour, however, all this turned out to be nonsense. Not only had there been no vehicular attack -- there had been no gunmen. Reports that the incident may have been sparked by a gang fight rather than a terrorist attack were themselves later quashed. The next day two men who thought they might have been responsible for the panic voluntarily came into a police station and were released without charge. The only casualties from the incident were 16 people injured, one seriously, as a cause of the mass stampede out of Oxford Circus station and through the neighbouring area. Incidents like this one in London last month easily flow by in the news cycle, and are easily forgotten. They will not be referred to in the speeches of any politician and they immediately fell away from even the "News in Brief" sections of the nation's media. But they are in fact extremely telling. They suggest that rather than being this persistently stoical, unbending and resilient people, the citizens of London have absorbed the lessons of the terror attacks of the last year and the terror attacks across Europe that have occurred in the years preceding them, in Paris and elsewhere. Contrary to all our public statements, we have become terrorised, just as the terrorists want. So much so that a minor altercation on an average evening can lead to a mass panic, a crowd stampede, and terrified public figures bleating to their followers about wholly imagined horrors. It is a glimpse into the soul of a city. And like all such ugly glimpses, we will turn away from looking at it, rather than consider it and wonder what it truly suggests. Douglas Murray, British author, commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England. His latest book, an international best-seller, is "The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam." Follow Douglas Murray on Twitter © 2019 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute. Related Topics: United Kingdom Recent Articles by Douglas Murray UK: A Defeat Dressed Up as a Victory, 2019-02-11
Lessons We Seem Unwilling to Learn, 2019-01-13
UK Welcomes Extremists, Bans Critics of Extremists, 2018-12-29
The EU's Dangerous New Confidence Game, 2018-11-20
Britain Welcomes Radicals - Again and Again, 2018-08-04 receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free gatestone institute mailing list en 33 Reader Comments Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply-> Reply->Chicago is making headlines in the new year, but for all the wrong reasons. The city is embroiled in an epidemic of gun violence.
The 2016 crime data speaks for itself: Last year, the Chicago Police Department recorded 762 homicides. That’s a nearly 60-percent increase over last year’s homicide rate.
To put it in a national perspective, more homicides took place last year in Chicago than in New York City and Los Angeles combined.
But the violence isn’t necessarily citywide. Nearly two-thirds, or 65 percent, of the increase in homicides last year took place in five police districts on the South and West Sides of the city, according to a Jan. 1 press release from the Chicago Police Department.
Following public backlash from the release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson have announced policy reforms as the Police Department is investigated by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations.
Some of the initiatives include adding nearly 1,000 more police officers to the force and equipping all patrol officers with body cameras by the end of 2017. Roughly one-third of the city’s officers currently wear the cameras, according to the Police Department.
A recent "60 Minutes" special highlighted last year’s uptick in shootings with a reported drop in arrests and investigative stops by police officers. In the report, former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy called the decline in police activity “horrific.”
What went wrong last year and what can be done to reverse this disturbing pattern of violence in Chicago?
Johnson joins us to discuss the city’s violent crime problem and how the police department plans to combat it in 2017 and beyond.
Follow Evan Garcia on Twitter: @EvanRGarcia
Related stories:
Study: Crime Victims in Illinois Prefer Shorter Sentences for Offenders
Dec. 16: Seven in 10 crime victims surveyed in Illinois prefer a “more balanced approach to public safety,” including shorter sentences and a greater focus on prevention, rehabilitation and trauma recovery.
Chicago Police Department Mulling Changes to Use of Force Policy
Dec. 6: When is a police officer allowed to fire a weapon? The Chicago Police Department is set to release new rules on that, but they are already drawing criticism.
New Program to Stem Chicago’s Violence Epidemic Starts in Jail
Oct. 20: For many young men inside the Cook County Jail, violence on the streets is a daily reality. But a new program based at the jail aims to change that reality.Snow covers the Dome of the Rock in the compound known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Old City, on Feb. 20, 2015. (Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)
British authorities have banned an Israeli government tourism ad because it appears to suggest that Jerusalem's Old City, which is technically occupied Palestinian territory, is a part of Israel.
The ad, a brochure titled "Israel Land of Creation," was inserted in British newspapers earlier this week. According to Agence France-Presse, it showed "a panorama of the walled Old City with the text 'Israel has it all.'" The ban came after a complaint from a reader who noted that the ad implied "the Old City of Jerusalem was internationally recognized as part of Israel."
Britain's advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), said that "the presentation of the ad would mislead consumers into believing that the Old City of Jerusalem was part of Israel and into making a transactional decision they would otherwise not have taken."
According to the ASA's ruling, the Israeli government had said that it did not intend to make a political statement and "believed the leaflet provided practical information that made clear that visitors to the places referred to in the ad, such as the Old City of Jerusalem, could only be visited via traveling to Israel."
Jerusalem's Old City, a protected UNESCO World Heritage site, is home to shrines and temples that are sacred to all three biblical religions. Its status is the source of endless friction, not least last year, when escalating tensions between Palestinians and Israelis led to deadly violence and terrorist attacks.
A separate Palestinian state, as imagined in a long-stalled two-state solution, would make East Jerusalem its capital. But the expansion of Israeli settlements and housing blocks in the West Bank and areas of East Jerusalem has made that a distant reality.
In a speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Jerusalem as Israel's "eternal, undivided capital" — a wording that's consistent with his long-standing rhetoric.
European frustration has been mounting with Netanyahu's government, which many critics accuse of undermining the prospect of a two-state solution. That anger led last year to a spate of votes in various Western countries recognizing an independent Palestinian state, even though no such thing exists on the ground.
The British Parliament held a symbolic vote in October, and it passed.
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Top referee Mike Dean has not been given a game this weekend after being involved in two highly controversial "grappling" penalty decisions.
The Premier League ordered a crackdown this season on pushing, shirt pulling and fouls at set pieces which has put refs on red alert.
Dean gave two big calls which seemed to fall into the new directive for a decision against Raheem Sterling for blocking off at a corner at Stoke.
He also gave a penalty against Bournemouth when Charlie Daniels was accused of pulling Christian Benteke's shirt. It is understood Dean believes both were penalties.
(Image: 2016 Rex Features)
(Image: REUTERS)
Both decisions caused discussion at the PGMOL - which is in charge of the Premier League's referees and officials - and Dean has not been given a game this weekend.
Dean is one of the Premier League's most high profile refs and his absence amid decisions about a new directive has caused surprise.More information can be found here.
The Flypast includes the following aircraft:
Battlefield Support:
Merlin, Puma, Puma, Chinook
D-Day 70th
Dakota
Historic
Spitfire, Lancaster, Huricane
Combat ISTAR & Global Air Mobility
Sentinel
HS125, E3D Sentry, HS125
C-17 Globemaster III
3 x Tornado GR4, Voyager, 3 x Typhoon
Red Arrows
120.625 STANSTED APPROACH
123.300 NATO Common Radar
125.800 WATTISHAM ZONE
126.950 STANSTED RADAR
132.700 THAMES RADAR
132.900 NEATISHEAD (Displays/Fly-Past) Primary
134.550 NEATISHEAD (Displays/Fly-Past) Secondary
135.275 LONDON MIL(East) Fly-Past Monitor Primary
135.925 LONDON MIL(East) Pre-Join Transit
232.875 31 Sqn Air-to-Air GOLD STAR OPS
243.450 RED ARROWS Air-to-Air
244.550 56(R) Sqn Air-to-Air
260.150 NEATISHEAD(TAD 100 Series) Tanker Co-ord Primary
275.350 LONDON MIL(West) Pre-Join Transit for Brize based aircraft
277.775 LONDON MIL(East) Pre-Join Transit & Co-ord
299.975 LONDON MIL(East) Fly-Past Monitor Secondary/Pre-Join Co-ord
300.100 Air-to-Air Refuelling LION/MADRAS
369.125 NEATISHEAD(TAD 100 Series) Tanker Co-ord Secondary
Added 7 photos of the Queen's Birthday Flypast (15th June 2013).
(Thanks to David Hackney)One of the themes from News Foo that continues to resonate with me is the importance of data journalism. That skillset has received renewed attention this winter after Tim Berners-Lee called analyzing data the future of journalism.
When you look at data journalism and the big picture, as USA Today’s Anthony DeBarros did at his blog in November, it’s clear the recent suite of technologies is part of a continuum of technologically enhanced storytelling that traces back to computer-assisted reporting (CAR).
As DeBarros pointed out, the message of CAR “was about finding stories and using simple tools to do it: spreadsheets, databases, maps, stats,” like Microsoft Access, Excel, SPSS, and SQL Server. That’s just as true today, even if data journalists now have powerful new tools for scraping data from the web with tools like ScraperWiki and Needlebase, scripting with Perl, or Ruby, Python, MySQL and Django.
Understanding the history of computer-assisted reporting is key to putting new tools in the proper context. “We use these tools to find and tell stories,” DeBarros wrote. “We use them like we use a telephone. The story is still the thing.”
The data journalism session at News Foo took place on the same day civic developers were participating in a global open data hackathon and the New York Times hosted its Times Open Hack Day. Many developers at contests like these are interested in working with open data, but the conversation at News Foo showed how much further government entities need to go to deliver on the promise open data holds for the future of journalism.
The issues that came up are significant. Government data is often “dirty,” with missing metadata or incorrect fields. Journalists have to validate and clean up datasets with tools like Google Refine. ProPublica’s Recovery Tracker for stimulus data and projects is one of the best examples of the practice in action.
A recent gold standard for data journalism is the Pulitzer-Prize winning Toxic Waters project from the New York Times. The scale of that project makes it a difficult act to follow, though Times developers are working hard with nifty projects like Inside Congress.
You can see a visualization of the Toxic Waters project and other examples of data journalism in this Ignite presentation from News Foo.
At ProPublica, the data journalism team is conscious of deep linking into news applications, with the perspective that the visualizations produced from such apps are themselves a form of narrative journalism. With great data visualizations, readers can find their own way and interrogate the data themselves. Moreover, distinctions between a news “story” and a news “app” are dissolving as readers increasingly consume media on mobile devices and tablets.
One approach to providing useful context is the “Ion” format at ProPublica.org, where a project like “Eye on the Stimulus” is a hybrid between a blog and an application. On one side of the web page, there’s a news river. On the other, there’s entry points into the data itself. The challenge to this approach is that a media outlet needs alignment between staff and story. A reporter has to be filing every day on a running story that’s data sensitive.
Upgrading Data.gov
The data journalism News Foo session featured a virtual component, bringing City Camp founder Kevin Curry, Data.gov evangelist Jeanne Holm, and Reynolds fellow David Herzog together with News Foo participants to talk about the value propositions for open government data and data journalism.
As the recent open data report showed, developers are not finding the government data they need or want. If other entrepreneurs are to follow the lead of BrightScope, open government datasets will need to be more relevant to business. The feedback for Data.gov and other government data repositories was clear: more data, better data, and cleaner data, please.
Improving media access to data at the county- or state-level of government has structural barriers because of growing budget crises in statehouses around the United States. As Jeanne Holm observed during the News Foo session, open government initiatives will likely be done in a zero-sum budget environment in 2011. Officials have to make them sustainable and affordable.
There are some areas where the federal government can help. Holm said Data.gov has created cloud hosting that can be shared with state, local or tribal governments.Data.gov is also rolling out a set of tools that will help with data conversion, optical character recognition, and, down the road, better tools for structured data.
Those resources could make government data more readily available and accessible to the media. Kevin Curry said that data catalogs are popping up everywhere. He pointed to CivicApps in Portland, Ore., where Max Ogden’s work on coding the middleware for open government led to translating government data into more useful forms for developers.
Data journalists also run into government’s cultural challenges. It can be hard to find public information officers willing or able to address substantive questions about data. Holm said Data.gov may post more contact information online and create discussions around each dataset. That kind of information is a good start for addressing data concerns at the federal level, but fostering useful connections between journalists and data will still require improvement and effort.
Related:Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safe, concurrent, and fast. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Send me an email! Want to get involved? We love contributions.
0.9 is on the brink. Perhaps this week, the next at the latest. Some hefty changes come this week.
What’s cooking on master?
63 pull requests were merged this week.
Breaking changes
@mut has been removed. The replacements are Gc<RefCell<T>> or, preferably, Rc<RefCell<T>>. See also Cell<T> for Pod types.
has been removed. The replacements are or, preferably,. See also for types. Dereferencing of unary tuple structs and enums (tuple structs with one field and enums with one variant) has been removed. An example:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 struct Foo(int); fn bar() { let x = Foo(42); // previously `*x` would return 42 let Foo(y) = x; // but now you do this pattern matching }
Other changes
Additionally, it hasn’t landed yet, but external syntax extensions, aka loadable syntax extensions, aka procedural macros, seem to be really close to landing. This is quite exciting!
New Contributors
Alan Andrade
Carl-Anton Ingmarsson
John Louis Walker
Peter Zotov
lyuts
Matthew Auld
Meeting
Once again, no meeting due to the holidays. There will be one on January 7, however.
This Week in Servo
Servo is a web browser engine written in Rust and is one of the primary test cases for the Rust language.
Mozilla Corp. came back from vacation this Thursday, January 2nd. We landed 14 PRs this week.
Notable additions
Aydin Kim fixed Android support – hooray! – in #1445.
Mike Blumenkrantz cleaned up our configure script to avoid the “configure smashed my submodule edits” problem in #1449.
deokjinkim fixed several font-related issues in #1454 and #1452.
Simon Sapin refactored font styles in #1455.
Shamir Khodzha implemented child_elements for filtered iteration in #1443.
for filtered iteration in #1443. ms2ger landed several changes to attributes in #1439, #1456, and #1460.
New contributors
Shamir Khodzha
Mike Blumenkrantz
Announcements, etcSo what does a soon-to-be-rich 26-year-old do on a Sunday night in Miami?
Takes some free shots.
Not in a nightclub, but on a practice court. Hassan Whiteside's free throw percentage has been climbing lately -- up to 54.5 -- but he still made a stop in the Heat's gym late Sunday night, an event he captured on his Snapchat account.
He took 250 free throws, by his count, including roughly 100 in the dark.
"I'm just trying to build on it," Whiteside said. "Trying to get better as a basketball player."
He said he used to do this overseas and in the D-League.
"I got a skill that you can't work on, which is shot-blocking," Whiteside said. "But you can always work on offense. So I'm thankful for that."
He's not necessarily thankful for the potential quiet of working late hours.
"I blast music as loud as I can," Whiteside said. "Try to distract me so much. If I can get a tape recorder of people just saying, 'Hassan, you suck,' I'll put it on the microphone. So I want all the distractions I can, like in the game."
Whiteside has said the toughest things to replicate in practice are getting hit in the face before going to the line, and feeling his lungs burning from running.
He has a fix for the latter, though.
"You can run sprints," Whiteside said. "I do that sometimes."Abstract
Background: Consumption of small, frequent meals is suggested as an effective approach to control appetite and food intake and might be a strategy for weight loss or healthy weight maintenance. Despite much speculation on the topic, scientific evidence is limited to support such a relation in the absence of changes to diet composition. Objective: We examined the effects of high compared with low eating frequency (EF) on self-reported appetite as a secondary outcome in a controlled trial. Methods: We conducted a randomized, crossover intervention trial in 12 participants (4 men, 8 women) who completed 2 isocaloric 3-wk intervention phases of low EF (3 eating occasions/d) compared with high EF (8 eating occasions/d). On the last morning of each study phase, participants completed a 4-h appetite testing session. During the appetite testing session, participants completing the low EF phase consumed a meal at 0800. Participants completing the high EF intervention consumed the same meal spread evenly over 2 eating occasions at 0800 and 1030. Standardized ratings of hunger, desire to eat, fullness, thirst, and nausea were completed every 30 min with the use of paper-and-pencil semianchored 100-mm visual analog scales. A composite appetite score was calculated as the mean of hunger, desire to eat, and the inverse of fullness (calculated as 100-fullness rating). Linear regression analysis compared ratings between low EF and high EF conditions. Results: The mean composite appetite score was higher in the high EF condition for the total testing period (baseline through 1200) (P < 0.05) and for the time period from baseline through 1030 (P < 0.001). Conclusion: The results from this study in 12 healthy adults do not support the popularized notion that small, frequent meals help to decrease overall appetite. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT02548026.
Introduction
Cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer are among the leading causes of death in the United States and worldwide (1). The burden of these diseases can be partly attributed to overweight and obesity due to excess energy intake and poor diet quality (2). One strategy to improve control of food intake and body weight could involve better regulation of appetite.
The consumption of several small, frequent meals may contribute to feelings of greater fullness and satiety than less frequent, larger meals. Eating frequency (EF)6 is proposed to influence appetite via effects on several physiologic (3) and cognitive pathways (4), and the effects of EF may be largely determined by diet composition. However, few studies have investigated this topic with the use of repeated-measures assessment of self-reported appetite especially in the context of a diet that is not manipulated in terms of energy or macronutrient content (3). In 1 study with obese males, researchers found that increased frequency of eating was associated with reduction in self-reported appetite ratings directly before a consumed lunch and with lower energy consumption at lunch (5). Conversely, another trial showed that increased frequency of eating was associated with lower satiety in healthy males over the morning but with a delay in gastric emptying with more frequent feeding (6). Other studies have collected satiety data at only 1 time point per day, either directly before 1 large meal or in the form of 1 question that asked about hunger throughout an entire day (7, 8). On the basis of the current research available on EF and appetite, it is unclear what the impact of alterations in EF is on appetite or subsequent food and caloric intake. The role of EF in human appetite regulation thus remains unclear.
The goal of the present study was to investigate the relation between EF and self-reported appetite in the absence of alterations to the caloric or macronutrient content of the diet. Specifically, in a randomized crossover trial, we tested whether the consumption of food consumed as 1 eating occasion would result in higher or lower self-reported appetite ratings compared with the same amount of food consumed as 2 equal servings over the same time period in 2 separate appetite testing sessions. We hypothesized that increased EF would be associated with decreased appetite in a sample of men and women. The variables analyzed comprise secondary outcomes of a larger parent study, called the Meals and Grazing Study (MAGS) whose primary outcome was changes in biomarkers related to disease risk and appetite.
Methods
Participants.
All study participants were enrolled in the MAGS, a randomized, crossover controlled clinical trial that investigated the impact of EF on health-related outcomes. Recruitment was completed with the use of posters and online advertisements at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) and the University of Washington campus in Seattle, Washington. Briefly, participants were told that researchers were interested in learning more about whether it was more beneficial to eat more often throughout the day or fewer times throughout the day. Participants were healthy 18- to 50-y-old men and women with a BMI (in kg/m2) ≥18 (normal to obese). Exclusion criteria included diabetes, smoking, following a diet to gain or lose weight, athletes in training, nonnormal blood cholesterol or blood pressure, taking prescribed medication other than oral contraceptives, and pregnancy or nursing (women) because these conditions would not be compatible with the protocol or could have confounded results. All experimental protocols were approved by the Institutional Review Office at the FHCRC, and all participants provided written informed consent. Participants were paid $100 for completion of the parent study plus the optional appetite testing sessions to compensate for their time and travel expenses.
Study design.
Participants were recruited with the use of flyers on the FHCRC campus in Seattle, Washington, and online advertisements. Interested individuals were invited via e-mail or telephone for an initial orientation session at FHCRC in which eligibility criteria were verified and study procedures were explained in detail. Participants were free-living and consumed their own food throughout the study with the use of an individually tailored meal plan, which was designed with the use of the following procedures. Eligible participants who enrolled in the study were provided detailed written and verbal instructions on keeping a 7-d food record. Participants then recorded details (type and quantity) for all food and drink except water consumed for 7 consecutive days and returned food records to study staff via hand delivery or US Postal Service. On receipt, the study dietitian analyzed the 7-d food record for energy and macronutrient content with the use of The Food Processor software (ESHA Research). Keeping food items, energy, and macronutrient content of the diet constant, a low EF meals meal plan (providing all energy as 3 evenly spaced eating occasions per day) and a high EF grazing meal plan (providing all energy as 8 evenly spaced eating occasions per day) were individually designed for each participant. Initial and final eating occasions for each participant were set to match approximately their usual schedule, and equal time was allotted between each daily eating occasion. Weight-maintaining meal plans were designed to rotate every 7 d, and participants were instructed to eat only the foods on their individual eating plan at the specified hours. All meal and snack consumption (including time of intake) was reported daily with the use of an electronic meal plan checklist to monitor compliance during the 21-d intervention phases.
This study was a crossover trial, with each participant serving as his or her own control. Participants in the MAGS completed two 21-d study phases in random order with a 14-d washout period during which time they were instructed to consume their habitual diet. Participants attended 4 clinic visits at the FHCRC Prevention Center at 0800 on day 1 and day 21 of both phases. All other study activities were completed at home. Appointments were scheduled on the same day of the week whenever possible. Participants were asked to consume nothing other than noncarbonated water for 12 h before their clinic appointments and to refrain from drinking alcohol or eating or exercising outside of their normal routine. During all 4 clinic visits, body weight, height, waist, hip, pulse, and systolic and diastolic blood pressures were measured by trained staff with the use of a highly standardized protocol, and blood samples were taken. During the first appointment, DXA GE Lunar DPX Pro (GE Healthcare Lunar) was used to measure body fat percentage.
Appetite testing sessions.
All participants were invited to participate in the appetite testing on the last day of each study phase. The appetite testing sessions were conducted from ~0800 through 1200 on the last day of each study period. On arrival at the clinic, participants were seated in private clinic rooms where they would remain for the duration of the test. At baseline and every 30 min through 1200, participants rated feelings of appetite with the use of 100-mm visual analog scales (VASs). Immediately after the baseline assessment, participants in both conditions were provided a serving of food, which they were required to consume in entirety within 30 min. In the low EF condition there was 1 eating occasion (directly after baseline measurements), and in the high EF condition there were 2 eating occasions (directly after baseline and at 1030). Throughout the testing session, participants remained in clinic rooms and were allowed to engage in quiet activities, such as reading, listening to music with headphones, or using a personal computer, and to leave briefly to use the restroom.
We measured the impact of EF on self-reported appetite at the end of each 3-wk phase. Order of conditions followed the crossover design used for the parent MAGS, so that each participant in the present analysis completed a low EF appetite testing session and a high EF appetite testing session. During appetite testing sessions, participants consumed either 1 large portion of food at 1 occasion (low EF) or
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Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has for the first time addressed the scandal-ridden film Mathilde, calling on people to avoid introducing “speculations, which can hurt a great many people” into works dealing with historical facts, reports patriarchia.ru.
Pat. Kirill offered his remarks, without explicitly mentioning the name of the film, at a meeting of the Supreme Church Council of the Russian Orthodox Church at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral on Thursday.
For his part, Mathilde director Alexei Uchitel has expressed his disappointment at the patriarch’s words, calling them “unexpected.”
“Can there be an objective assessment of history?” the primate asked. “It’s a controversial question and the subject of battles. History is a very convenient soil for ideological speculations, and the creation of advantageous myths—both nationalistic and anti-nationalistic. When you’re working with history, it’s very easy to go into a deceitful interpretation, even in the small things. But for an honest person, lies and deceit are unthinkable,” His Holiness asserted.
Explaining how to properly handle history, the patriarch continued, “Strive to be conscientiousness when dealing with facts. Avoid fabrications, and especially fabrications which are not just false, but are also able to hurt a great many people, as has occurred with a not-yet-released but already infamous film.”
Responding to the patriarch’s “unexpected” evaluation, director Uchitel suggested that the patriarch should watch the film, as he has with all of his critics who have taken offense at the film’s deceitful depiction of the Royal Martyr Tsar Nicholas II, RIA-Novosti reports.
“The patriarch has come out with a statement that was personally unexpected for me. It was especially unpleasant,” Uchitel stated in a recent interview, “when a person of such a rank, whom I greatly respect, not having seen the film makes some claims about its historical inaccuracies… I still invite the patriarch to watch our film and find out for himself what it shows.”
Uchitel's reported surprise comes a few days after he admitted that the film contains historical inaccuracies and artistic fabrications.
As the patriarch further explained in his address, for many people, the events of the 20th century are “still a bleeding wound,” but still “the bitter pages of our past often become today a subject of speculation, including on the artistic level.” He noted that artists have the right to artistic creativity, but “artistic creativity and lying are different things.”
“Artistic creativity is a dramatic technique, and as such enhances the interest of the audience in the historical facts. Lying is not a dramatic technique. Lying grossly distorts the historical reality and deliberately leads people astray. It is precisely lies that sits at the base of propaganda, which plunged our people into revolutionary chaos, and then into the abyss of suffering,” His Holiness emphasized.
This is not the first time that Uchitel has been taken by surprise by a bishop’s negative evaluation of his film. Having watched the film at the director’s request, His Eminence Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Volokolamsk told him, “There is nothing good I can say about your film,” adding that, “He was upset, perhaps even offended.”
His Grace Bp. Tikhon (Shevkunov) of Egorievsk has also stated that he turned down Uchitel’s request for him to be a consultant on the film, given that the script had already been completed. Bp. Tikhon relates: “The director Uchitel said, ‘The script is already ready.’ I said, ‘The script?... First you make a request to consultants, and then you develop the script.’ He said, ‘The film is already almost ready.’ I said, ‘That’s great! You want a consultant on a film that’s nearly ready. Why?’”
Bp. Tikhon has also called the film a “vulgar fraud” and a “slander.Alan Miller of Patriots Question 9/11 has a new roundup entitled:
“41 U.S. Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence Agency Veterans Challenge the Official Account of 9/11 – Official Account of 9/11: “Terribly Flawed,” “Laced with Contradictions,” “a Joke,” “a Cover-up””
Click here to see the roundup.
The counterterrorism officials speaking out include, by way of example only:
* Terrell (Terry) E. Arnold, MA – Former Deputy Director, Office of Counter-Terrorism and Emergency Planning, U.S. State Department. Former Chairman, Department of International Studies, National War College. Graduate of the National War College. Retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the U.S. Department of State.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#TArnold
* William Christison – Former National Intelligence Officer. Former Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit responsible for political analysis of every country and region in the world. 29-year CIA veteran.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Christison
* Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret) – Former member of the staff of the Director of the National Security Agency. Former Political-Military Affairs Officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. 20-year Air Force career.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Kwiatkowski
* Robert David Steele – U.S. Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer for twenty years. Second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988 – 1992 and a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University. Also former clandestine services case officer with the CIA. 25-year U.S. military and intelligence career. Currently Founder and CEO of OSS.net and a proponent of Open Source Intelligence.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Steele
* Wayne Madsen – Former U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer, specialist in electronic surveillance and security. Formerly assigned to the National Security Agency and the State Department. Currently, investigative journalist, nationally distributed columnist, and author. http://patriotsquestion911.com/#MadsenChelsea star Ramires is only Brazilian in L'Équipe Team of the Year
Action Images
Chelsea midfielder Ramires is the only Brazilian player to be named in French newspaper L'Équipe's Ideal Team of 2012, published on Thursday.
Ramires, 25, was influential in his Chelsea side's double triumph at the end of the 2011-12 season, playing an important role in both Champions League and FA Cup success.
His performances, particularly his all-action display from the right-flank in a semi-final win over Barcelona have received much praise since and, indeed, he is nominated for the Samba Gold Trophy 2012—to be awarded next week.
The absence of any other Brazilian players in the newspaper's side, though, is an indication of the real absence of top Brazilian players in the European game at present.
World Cup winning centre-forward Ronaldo referred to the problem upon the announcement of the shortlist for FIFA's Ballon d'Or award last month, stating that Brazilian football was perhaps in “the worst period in its history”.
L'Équipe XI: Casillas; Lahm, Kompany, Sergio Ramos, Jordi Alba; Xabi Alonso, Xavi, Ramires, Iniesta; Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi.
Source: LancenetReds first baseman Joey Votto smiles as Billy Hamilton and Brandon Phillips joke with him in the third inning. (Photo: Kareem Elgazzar)
Cincinnati Reds first baseman entered Sunday's loss to the Cubs ready to put a finishing touch on another typical Joey Votto season, beginning the day with a batting line of.326/.435/.553. He would have had to go 0 for 8 or worse in the season finale to hit below.400 in the second half.
It was certainly a season up to his lofty standards, but Votto is realistic about where that puts him among the best in the game.
“Personally, until (Mike) Trout came into the league, I thought every year that I would be in the conversation for best player in the game and he f-----d that up for everybody,” Votto said. “Babe Ruth and Ted Williams included. He's ruining it for everyone.”
Contending with the consensus best player in baseball aside, the 33-year-old first baseman is pleased with how he performed in 2016. He was incredibly frustrated at times, especially when he was hitting just.215 on June 1, but another torrid second half brought his numbers back to his career norms.
Votto entered Sunday hitting.411/.494/.674 in the second half. He considers that stretch better than the one he put together after the All-Star break in 2015, when he hit.362/.535/.617. He entered the final game of the season leading the National League in both OPS (.988) and on-base percentage (.435).
The stat he cares about most is games played, though. He’ll finish having appeared in 158 of 162 for the second year in a row. Beyond feeling an obligation to take the field for the fans come to watch him play, he needed the runway to pull out of his early season spiral.
“I didn’t doubt that I would come back from the start,” Votto said. “I was frustrated and I was in disbelief, but I knew that physically I felt good. My mind didn’t waver. I stayed put and I really wanted to come back from it. The only way I could have done that is if I played every day. I knew that was a really important part of the process. Had I gotten hurt or taken time off or played 130 or 140 games, I never would have finished off how I finished.”
Votto’s season wasn’t perfect, however. Despite his stellar offensive numbers, there’s little talk of any MVP candidacy because of poor performance in the field. Votto rated as the worst first baseman in baseball by the metric Defensive Runs Saved, and was second worst according Fangraphs metrics Ultimate Zone Rating and Defensive Efficiency.
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It was by far the worst defensive season of his career. He had positive ratings in all those categories last season, when he finished third in NL MVP voting.
“You can't be in that conversation unless you do every aspect of the game and I love competing against the best and it's something I take a lot of pride in and it's something I think I fell a little bit short on this year,” Votto said. “Offensively, I felt like I was as competitive as I could compete with anybody in baseball but defensively, I feel like I've got a ways to go. And, it's exciting to have another challenge to overcome, so I'm grateful for that.”
The 2017 season will be the second in the Reds’ rebuilding effort, and another one where the Reds aren’t expected to be competing for a postseason berth. It’ll also be the fourth in Votto’s 10-year deal, with his salary increasing from $20 million to $22 million.
The Reds traded other pricey veterans both last offseason and at this year’s trade deadline, and received inquiries about Votto’s availability last year. But general manager Dick Williams told ESPN’s Buster Olney that it was very likely that Votto would remain a Red in 2017, and Votto has a full no-trade clause in his contract anyway.
Votto said the Reds are “heading in the right direction” and that he’s “excited about the future.” He also understands the logic of rebuilding, having seen the fruits of that labor pay off with the division foe Chicago Cubs.
“The Cubs, they waited it out and all of a sudden, they're the best ticket in baseball,” Votto said. “They're the best team to tune into. They're so much fun. But they did it in a lot of different ways and a combination of quality trades, some luck and benefiting from some good draft picks has them as the best team and a legitimate shot at winning the World Series and that's what we're playing for.”DAP has distanced itself from the 'adios' tweet of its Jelutong parliamentarian Jeff Ooi regarding the passing of PAS spiritual advisor, the late Haron Din, yesterday.
"DAP regrets the insensitive statement from Jelutong parliamentarian Jeff Ooi with regards to Haron's passing yesterday. I would like to announce that the re-tweet has been deleted.
"I would also like to express regret if any of Haron's family members felt slighted over Ooi's re-tweet which does not represent the party's stand," said DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng in a statement.
Lim also expressed DAP's condolences and sympathy for the loss suffered by the late PAS cleric's friends and family.
"While we may have our political differences, DAP is confident that the late Haron has contributed (much) to Islam.
"Once again I express my condolences to Haron's family on behalf of the DAP's extended family and hope that his soul will find a place amongst the pious," concluded Lim.
Lim was responding to words Ooi wrote in a re-tweet last night in relation to Haron's passing. The MP wrote "Adios Harun Din. May there be peace" when re-tweeting another tweet about the PAS spiritual advisor's passing.
He was hit by brickbats from both sides of the political aisle by those who condemned what he said as untimely and insensitive.
However, Ooi defended himself, saying that what he wrote was not meant as an insult, and asking all to refer to dictionaries if they do not know what 'adios' meant.
'Ooi doesn't represent the Chinese'
In a related development, BN component MCA advised social media users not to blame the Chinese community en masse, just because of Ooi's actions.
"This is not the work of the Chinese community. Ooi and his party DAP do not represent the Chinese community.
"By judging the community in such a wanton manner (it) will not do any good, especially if the criticism is based on Ooi's tweet," said the party's Religious Harmony Bureau chairperson Ti Lian Ker.
Ti, who was comes fresh from his no-holds-barred trading of barbs with Tourism and Culture Minister Nazri Aziz, advised the Chinese community to not be provoked into making silly retorts.
"It is time for cool heads to prevail and is best for everyone to take a back step first, without rushing out to post insensitive and damaging remarks.
"This will only cause racial and religious tension to aggravate," he said.
In the case of Ooi, Ti said that the former's untimely and insensitive tweet on the passing of Haron must be condemned.
"Even if Ooi considers Haron a political rival, that does not give him the license to insult the dead, especially when the late ustaz Haron had been DAP's comrade in arms before.
"It is still not too late for Ooi to put aside his ego and apologise to ustaz Haron's family," Ti said.
He called upon the police and the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Communication to immediately investigate such damaging comments in the social media, starting with the re-tweet by Ooi.The International Criminal Court has been asked to investigate the actions of former members of the British cabinet and troops over allegations of "systematic torture" in Iraq.
The European Centre for Constitutional Human Rights, based in Germany, and the Public Interest Lawyers firm, based in England, said in a statement that they had jointly filed a complaint to the ICC.
The complaint called for the "opening of an investigation" into the actions of senior British officials "in particular the former minister of defence Geoff Hoon and secretary of state, Adam Ingram, for systematic torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq between 2003 and 2008."
More than 400 Iraqi prisoners have contacted PIL in the past few years, alleging "serious abuse and humiliation" on the part of British soldiers, the two organisations said.
"Our legal team has exhausted all legal avenues" to obtain justice in Britain, said Phil Shiner, a public interest lawyer.
A 250-page document was handed over to the ICC, comprising 85 particularly representative cases and more than 2,000 accusations of abuse documented over five years, said the two organisations.
A similar complaint to the ICC failed in 2006. However, "eight years later, it is evident that a thorough investigation was and is remains necessary," read the joint statement.
Serious violations of the Geneva Convention which protects prisoners of war from abuse may constitute a war crime.
According to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the British ministry of defence admitted "isolated cases" of abuse by British soldiers in Iraq, but denied anything systemic.I won’t make any comment on this finding from the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll because the thing speaks for itself — and it should be speaking to superdelegates:
Lost in the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign’s aggressive attacks on Barack Obama in recent days is a deep and enduring problem that threatens to undercut any inroads Clinton has made in her struggle to overtake him in the Democratic presidential race: She has lost trust among voters, a majority of whom now view her as dishonest.
Her advisers’ efforts to deal with the problem — by having her acknowledge her mistakes and crack self-deprecating jokes — do not seem to have succeeded. Privately, the aides admit that the recent controversy over her claim to have ducked sniper fire on a trip to Bosnia probably made things worse.
Clinton is viewed as “honest and trustworthy” by just 39 percent of Americans, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, compared with 52 percent in May 2006. Nearly six in 10 said in the new poll that she is not honest and trustworthy. And now, compared with Obama, Clinton has a deep trust deficit among Democrats, trailing him by 23 points as the more honest, an area on which she once led both Obama and John Edwards.In another night that’ll go down in Foo Fighters lore, the band performed a secret show in Brighton, England on Wednesday under the moniker, The Holy Shits. Playing to a capacity crowd of just 600 diehard fans, Dave Grohl announced, “How about tonight we do a bunches of stuff we might not do at the old places,” before the band segued into “Enough Space”, a song which hadn’t been performed live since 2012.
From there, they rattled off performances of “I’ll Stick Around”, “See You”, “New Way Home”, “Up in Arms”, and “Big Me”, none of which had been played live in the last two years. Of “Up in Arms”, Grohl told the audience it’s “a love song – we don’t play it enough because when we play it at festivals the line for the toilets get really long. I don’t think anyone’s going anywhere tonight though, if you have to go do it on the person in front of you,” according to NME.
The band’s performance of “Big Me” was dedicated to a UK Foo Fighters tribute band in attendance. “We don’t wanna shit the bed in front of the UK Foo Fighters. They’ll be like ‘that’s not how it goes,” Grohl quipped. Later, Grohl invited the tribute band’s lead singer to the stage to join the band in their performance of “White Limo”.
As the setlist began to gear more toward greatest hits, Grohl said, “We’ll try to play every song a little bit different then we usually would, just to make it interesting for you.” Foos turned “Learn To Fly” into a thrash metal song, and Pat Smear performed an extended guitar solo during “The Pretender”. Also during “The Pretender”, the band offered a brief snippet of music from their forthcoming new album, Sonic Highways.
Watch a number of fan-shot video below, along with the full setlist. The band will play two more “secret” UK shows this week before they headline the closing ceremony of the UK’s Invictus Games. During last night’s show, they also teased forthcoming performances at London’s Wembley Stadium.
“White Limo” w/ Foo Fighters’ tribute band
“Enough Space” -> “I’ll Stick Around” -> “See You” -> “New Way Home”
“Big Me” -> “Generator” -> “Rope”
“Learn To Fly” (trash metal version)
“Hey, Johnny Park!”
Setlist:
Enough Space
I’ll Stick Around
See You
New Way Home
Up in Arms
Big Me
Generator
Rope
The Pretender -> Snippet of new song
Learn to Fly
White Limo w/ Foo Fighters tribute band singer
Arlandria
Cold Day in the Sun
Dear Rosemary
Breakdown (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers cover)
My Hero
Hey, Johnny Park!
Everlong
Encore:
All My LifeTop seed and tournamnet favourite - Roger Federer needed just 39 minutes to dismantle Mischa Zverev 6-0,6-0 to storm into the semifinals of the Gerry Weber Open, an ATP 250 event, in Halle, Germany. This was the second instance where Federer secured a double-bagel over any of his counterparts.
The Swiss ace made a clinical start by breaking Zverev's serve in no time. He then held his serve twice and broke Zverev two times thereafter to grab the first set 6-0. After the beatdown in the opening set, Federer didn't allow his 156th ranked counterpart to gain control.
He convereted 3/5 break points opportunites to bag the second set 6-0, and booked himself a semifinal spot. The maestro won 54/76 (71%) of the total match points and bagged 83% of his second serve points against 31% of Zverev, which helped him record a crushing victory.
The 17-time grand slam winner will meet the winner between Tommy Haas and Gael Monfils for a place in the summit clash.Signs are emerging of a possible alliance this fall between Ron Paul, the libertarian-minded rebel Republican, and Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee.
Paul was the Libertarian nominee in 1988, and many of his supporters are libertarian-minded on economic and social issues. Just before formally ending his presidential bid Thursday night, the Texas congressman praised Barr, and in a statement yesterday, Barr reciprocated.
"Congressman Ron Paul has fought tirelessly in both the Libertarian Party and the Republican Party to minimize government power and maximize individual liberty," said Barr, a former six-term GOP congressman from Georgia. "I want to thank him for all that he has done for liberty in this nation, and encourage him to continue his fight through whatever avenues he sees fit."
The Libertarian Party plans to get Barr on the ballot in 48 states in November, and Barr could get a significant boost if a sizable number of the 1.1 million people who voted for Paul during the Republican primaries go his way. Some analysts say Barr could be a spoiler, taking votes away from presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in key swing states, including Colorado, Nevada, and his home state of Georgia.
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader also began courting Paul voters yesterday.
"Ron Paul was a lightning rod for millions of Americans against the war in Iraq and for the protection of personal liberties that the two major parties have turned their back on - by continuing to support the illegal criminal war and the PATRIOT Act," the Nader campaign said in a statement. "There is a clear choice for those who want to support a candidate who will stand up against the war and stand up for personal liberties and privacy."
On Thursday night, Paul told supporters attending the Texas Republican Party convention in Houston that he was ending his campaign and starting the group Campaign for Liberty to help elect libertarian-leaning Republicans.
Paul hopes that at least 11,000 of his supporters fill a Minneapolis arena for a counter-convention on Sept. 2, timed to coincide with the Republican National Convention in neighboring St. Paul.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.CBS has brought its TV streaming app to Android and Windows 8, offering US viewers full episodes of network shows such as The Big Bang Theory, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and How I Met Your Mother.
Daytime and late night programming should be available within 24 hours of its initial airing, but primetime shows will take up eight days to reach the app.
The popular American TV network also promises to update the app in the coming months with new episodes for fresh series and seasons airing in CBS primetime slots this fall. CBS Classics, including Macgyver, Star Trek and Perry Mason, will also be added around the same time.
The popular TV network launched its iOS app in March and has accumulated 4 million downloads across the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It was recently integrated with the CBS Connect iPad app, offering synchronized second-screen experiences and Connect Live – a series of live video chats with CBS actors and actresses. Both of these features will also be added to the Android incarnation throughout the fall.
If you’re a BlackBerry Z10, Q10 or Q5 owner, fear not: CBS is also promising a BlackBerry 10 app before the year’s end too.
➤ CBS | iOS | Android | Windows 8
Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question.
Image Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Read next: Facebook for Windows Phone gets support for multi-photo messages, unfriending, unliking, inline tagging, and moreOdds are that you fell in love with the E3 2014 trailer of No Man's Sky, and the track from the band 65daysofstatic had a lot to do with that. Not only did Hello Games license their song "Debutante" for that trailer, but the partnership between the studio and the band has blossomed into 65daysofstatic composing the entire game's soundtrack and creating a No Man's Sky album. While visiting the Hello Games studio for our January cover story on No Man's Sky, we were able to sit down and discuss the past and future of the collaboration with members of the development team and half of the band. Not only is the galaxy within the game procedurally-generated, but 65daysofstatic and Hello Games are working to create a procedurally-generated soundscape so that every planet will be coupled with a unique musical experience. It's an ambitious plan (but you should be used to that by now if you're following No Man's Sky) so watch the video to learn how they are tackling the project. We should note that the video contains footage from the band's No Man's Sky concert at PSX 2014 (which you can learn more about here) and a majority of the music is not content from the upcoming soundtrack album.
Watch the video below to learn how Hello Games founder Sean Murray, No Man's Sky audio director Paul Weir, and Paul Wolinski and Joe Shrewbury of 65daysofstatic are rewriting the rules of game soundtracks.
Click on the banner below to enter our hub of exclusive content for No Man's Sky that is being updated throughout the month.Pennsylvania Republicans hand-delivered an ethics complaint against Democrat Katie McGinty, who is challenging GOP Sen. Patrick Toomey, the same day WikiLeaks revealed her coordination with John Podesta while she was working in the governor’s office.
McGiinty was Gov. Tom Wolf’s chief of staff until a week before her Aug. 4, 2015 Senate campaign launch.
The letter from Paul Engelkeimer, the state party’s deputy communications director, to Sharon Minnich, the state’s secretary of administration and copied to Gov. Tom Wolf, cites Section 1 (8) (a) of the Governor’s Code of Conduct, which prohibits political activity during work hours. Engelkeimer also cited in the letter is the Office of Administration’s own guideline that states that running for office as a political activity.
The email was sent from her personal Outlook email account Friday July 17, 2015 at 4:08 p.m., during her normal work hours. Podesta is chairman of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
Here is Podesta’s reply with her original email at the bottom:
Re: US Senate From:[email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: 2015-07-17 18:30
Subject: Re: US Senate I’ll call
On Jul 17, 2015 4:08 PM, “Kathleen McGinty” <[email protected]> wrote:>
> Hey John–Emilys List and DSCC have been working me hard re a US Senate
> run. Would love your perspective. Will need to decide one way or other by
> mid next week.
> Thanks,
> Katie
> 717 480 0960
Engelkeimer says that in addition to violating state ethics laws, McGinty was working on her Senate campaign on Day 17 of the state’s budget impasse between the governor and the legislature and that she gave Podesta the number to her state provided cell phone.
In Wolf’s 2014 campaign against Gov. Tom Corbett, Democrats hammered Corbett when it appeared his staffers may have blurred the line between political and official business.Quote: Originally Posted by franciscofranco Originally Posted by On Shamu I can't get anything to work besides the usual RGB and inverted.
Quote: Originally Posted by flar2 Originally Posted by Sweet. I'll try it on HTC m8 and Nexus 6 this week.
Quote: Originally Posted by neobuddy89 Originally Posted by Great work @savoca
How to check MDSS_MDP_HW_REV? Any idea which is for Hammerhead and Shamu?
Sat/Hue/Val/Cont use the picture adjustment feature, and on APQ8084 and beyond it's been moved to a 2nd version of Qcom's picture adjustment. I don't have any of those devices so I didn't attempt to add support - but here's a blind patch you can try to add support or use for reference:(This patch is assuming the scaling for PA v2 is the same as v1, it's very possible that has changed - but again, no device in hand, not much I can find out)First code block in the OP has a reference list.Nearly 2 Years After Beating – Kenneth Gladney Case Goes to Trial Tomorrow
After a health care town hall meeting in August 2009 St. Louis native Kenneth Gladney was beaten, kicked and called racist names by Rep. Russ Carnahan’s SEIU supporters. Gladney was beaten so badly that he was hospitalized for the night.
Gladney, a cancer survivor, was selected by the Carnahan supporters for the beatdown because he was handing out “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and because he was black.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported at the time:
Kenneth Gladney, a 38-year-old conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with “Don’t tread on me” printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room of the St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was waiting to be treated for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face that he suffered in the attack. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack started.
The national media and NAACP ignored the hate crime.
Gladney didn’t fit the mold.
Kenneth Gladney was beaten by several SEIU thugs in the parking lot. He was working outside the town hall event selling flags and buttons when he was attacked.
Although he was too weak to speak after his public beating, Kenneth Gladney attended the protest against SEIU violence following his beatdown in St. Louis.
In April 2010 the SEIU thugs seen pummeling Kenneth Gladney in the video pleaded not guilty.
The trial is set for tomorrow.
CBS Local reported:
Twenty-months after he claims he was beaten by two union activists, while he tried to sell conservative buttons outside a Congressman Russ Carnahan town hall forum on health care reform, Kenneth Gladney now has a court date. The case against two Service Employees International Union members accused of attacking Gladney is scheduled for July 11th, according to St. Louis County Counselor Patricia Reddington. SEIU members Elston McCowan and Perry Molens are charged with misdemeanor assault. Both men pleaded not guilty and requested a jury trial. Earlier, Gladney had complained that the delay in scheduling a trial was “political” and he pointed the blame at Reddington and fellow Democrat, County Executive Charlie Dooley. Reddington countered that the delay was caused soley by the defendant’s request for a jury trial. Her municipal court system has no jurors, so she had to work with he state courts to set up a court room and a jury, Reddington said.Welcome to Cook, One of America’s Safest Counties City life has its risks. But the likelihood you’ll sustain a mortal injury here is lower than in a deathtrap like central Wisconsin.
PHOTO: ABEL URIBE/CHICAGO TRIBUNE
So this happened:
Yes, there are risks in Chicago, more so than in the collar counties. But it’s no southwestern Illinois. Or central Wisconsin.
And by the standards of major urban counties, Cook’s not bad. Certainly safer than postapocalyptic nightmares like Phoenix, Tampa, and Las Vegas. Although it’s not as safe here as it is in Oakland.
That’s from a new study out of the University of Pennsylvania in Annals of Emergency Medicine: “Safety in Numbers: Are Major Cities the Safest Places in the United States?” If by “safety” you mean “not dying from an injury,” the answer is yes (the authors didn’t evaluate nonfatal injury).
And the nominal reasons are pretty straightforward:
The overall injury death rate was 56.2 per 100,000 persons in the population. The overall death rate for unintentional injury was 37.5 per 100,000, and the overall death rate for intentional injury (homicide and suicide) was 17.0 per 100,000. The most common mechanisms for injury death across all subjects were motor vehicle related, which occurred at a rate of 14.9 per 100,000, and firearm related, which occurred at a rate of 10.4 per 100,000.
So driving is still the most likely thing to kill you. And you’re much more likely to in or from a motor vehicle in rural areas than in urban areas:
Motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of injury death across the population, and the number of motor vehicle crash injury deaths increased sharply with increasing rurality (27.61/100,000 in most rural, 10.58/100,000 in most urban…).
Here’s another way of looking at the primary causes of injury death in the United States. The numbers represent the death rate per 100k, and the lines run from more urban on the left to more rural on the right.
Death from homicide is more common in urban counties (oddly enough, so is death from unintentional poisoning, though the difference is minor), but it’s not enough to outweigh the dramatic difference in deaths from motor-vehicle-related causes. The difference is especially dramatic for youth.
The authors write:
Despite public perception to the contrary, when all types of injuries are considered together, rural areas, not urban, bear a disproportionate amount of injury-related mortality risk in the United States. Although variability among urban areas clearly exists (see Figure 1 city comparisons), when urban areas were considered as a group, risk of serious injury resulting in death was approximately 20% lower than in the most rural areas of the country.
Although our findings support the belief that homicide rates and risk of homicide are significantly higher in urban areas compared with rural, we demonstrate that the magnitude of homicide-related deaths, even in urban areas, is outweighed by the magnitude of unintentional injury deaths, particularly those resulting from motor vehicles.
In fact, the rate of unintentional injury death is more than 15 times that of homicide among the entire population, with the risk resting heavily in rural areas such that the risk of unintentional injury death is 40% higher in the most rural counties compared with the most urban.
For all the disadvantages that city life creates, crime being foremost in the public mind, it also benefits from the effects of concentrated humanity: Transportation alternatives, reduced driving from greater density, more immediate access to generally superior trauma care, better infrastructure, and greater density of professional public safety departments.
In short, the benefits of civilization.
Update: The authors, as noted, didn’t get into nonfatal injuries versus fatal injuries. But here’s an interesting sample with regard to that when it comes to motor vechicles, from Chicago, suburban Cook, and the surrounding counties. First, fatalities per 100,000:
So Chicago has a comparably high number of fatalities by million vehicle miles traveled, but a comparably average number of fatalities per 100,000, suggesting that it’s not safer to drive in Chicago, but in Chicago you don’t have to drive as much, or at all, so it evens out.
Now, non-fatal injuries:
So Chicago and suburban Cook typically have higher rates of non-fatal injuries. Finally, crashes in general:
So crash rates are substantially higher in Chicago than in the collar counties, and higher than in suburban Cook. In short: if you drive in Chicago you’re more likely to get into a crash, somewhat more likely to be injured in a crash, but no more likely to be killed in a crash, than in the region as a whole.
And you can definitely see the effects of public transportation: there are two or three times as many crashes per 100 million VMT in Chicago (or more, depending on the county and timeframe), but only about 20 percent more crashes per 100,000 people.
ShareLinux Mint 9 offers an interesting and fresh spin on Ubuntu 10.04
On May 18th, the Linux Mint project released version 9, codenamed "Isadora" of their popular re-spin of the Ubuntu Linux operating system.
What's the big deal about Linux Mint and why is it so popular among Linux users? It's because that it includes a number of improvements and tweaks that aren't set up out-of-the-box in the base Ubuntu distribution.
Also See: Linux Mint 9 (Gallery)
Linux Mint 9 follows Ubuntu's 10.04 LTS release, and shares many of the same components
|
, M.D., Ph.D., the University of Southern California professor who led the research. “We showed that 3K3A-APC helps the cells convert into neurons and make structural and functional connections with the host’s nervous system.”
To confirm that the stem cells were responsible for the animals’ improved function, the researchers used a targeted toxin to kill the neurons that had developed from them in another group of mice given the combination therapy. These mice showed the same improved performance on the tests of sensory and motor functions prior to being given the toxin but lost these gains afterwards, suggesting that the neurons that grew from the implanted cells were necessary for the improvements.
In a separate experiment, the team examined the connections between the neurons that developed from the stem cells in the damaged brain region and nerve cells in a nearby region called the primary motor cortex. The mice given the stem cells and 3K3A-APC had many more neuronal connections, called synapses, linking these areas than mice given the placebo. In addition, when the team stimulated the mice’s paws with a mechanical vibration, the neurons that grew from the stem cells responded much more strongly in the treated animals.
“That means the transplanted cells are being functionally integrated into the host’s brain after treatment with 3K3A-APC,” Dr. Zlokovic explained. “No one in the stroke field has ever shown this, so I believe this is going to be the gold standard for future studies.”
3K3A-APC is currently being studied in a NINDS-funded Phase II clinical trial to determine if it can reduce the death of neurons deprived of blood flow immediately following a stroke. As a result of the new mouse study, Dr. Zlokovic and his team, including co-first authors Yaoming Wang and Zhen Zhao, now hope to pursue another Phase II clinical trial to test whether the combination of neural stem cell grafts and 3K3A-APC can stimulate the growth of new neurons in human stroke patients to improve function. If that trial succeeds, it may be possible to test the treatment’s effects on other neurological conditions, such as spinal cord injuries, for which stem cell therapies are being investigated.
The study was supported by the NIH (NS090904, NS075345, HL052246, HL031950) with additional funding provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Adelson Medical Research Foundation, the New York State Stem Cell Research Board, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Lundbeck Foundation, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and the ALS Association.
The NINDS is the nation’s leading funder of research on the brain and nervous system. The mission of NINDS is to seek fundamental knowledge about the brain and nervous system and to use that knowledge to reduce the burden of neurological disease.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute provides global leadership for a research, training, and education program to promote the prevention and treatment of heart, lung, and blood diseases and enhance the health of all individuals so that they can live longer and more fulfilling lives.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
NIH…Turning Discovery Into Health®The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) will host in April the annual global consultation for their joint program on female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage in Uganda. They present research on FGM in Uganda and discuss ideas to raise awareness of the costs of FGM.
Issues like FGM continue to persist. Globally, approximately 200 million women and girls have suffered this abuse. And while FGM is on the steady decline, it nonetheless continues to be outnumbered by multiple other factors.
“Despite positive achievements, and the fact that the prevalence of FGM is declining in many countries, these declines are being outpaced by demographic growth,” explained the Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin. “If current trends continue, the number of girls and women undergoing FGM will continue to increase.”
Since 1969, the UNFPA has worked to reduce, spread awareness, educate and prevent genital mutilation, gender-based violence, child marriage, and child abuse as well as improve access to modern contraceptives and reproductive health care for hundreds of millions of women and girls in over 150 countries. Last year, the nonprofit organization received $979 m in donations in 2015.
Recently, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uganda, Sam Kutesa, published a press release welcoming the new national representatives of the UNFPA to Uganda, as well as thanking the government of Uganda for their support of the organization’s efforts.
Preceding the global consultation are various reports outlining UNFPA-supportive countries’ involvement and donations for 2017. With disappointing news that the US is eliminating funding for the UNFPA, citing abortion and maternal care as reasons for ending monetary contributions, other nations have opted to step up in order to make up for the loss of the US’s contributions (apart from Britain and Sweden, the US stood as UNFPA’s third-largest contributor).
The European Union plans to continue their stellar contributions to the organization, citing their amazing 2014-2015 record, during which the EU was a top donor towards nonprofit’s maternal health and family planning causes.
Sweden has announced its plans to increase its core contribution to UNFPA by SEK 200 m (22 m USD) from SEK 515 m to SEK 545 m. As one of the organization’s largest contributor’s, Sweden’s donation increase makes a huge difference, allowing the UNFPA to continue to magnify their global sexual and reproductive programs.
Iceland is also stepping up its contributions to the organization. Early March 2017, Iceland’s Prime Minister, Bjarni Benediktsson, announced to the press that the country would be tripling its monetary contributions to the UNFPA, gifting all money to the nonprofit’s core budget.
These generous contributions and the incredible work of the UNFPA is one big step in gender equality in Uganda and eventually other areas around the world.
Featured Image by MONUSCO Photos on Flickr
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Sign Up For Our NewsletterCounty legislators meet on Feb. 5. They have a chance to override the veto. I gather that local merchants have complained about lost revenue since government workers relocated to temporary quarters after the center closed. They may be pushing for whatever is in the pipeline.
But many people who spoke at a public hearing last month in Goshen endorsed Mr. Kaufman’s proposal. It would save the center, potentially save the county a fortune, bring in tourist dollars and even put the Rudolph building on the tax rolls. Demolishing Penn Station seemed expedient to politicians and other people a half-century ago, when only a noisy bunch of architecture buffs and preservationists pleaded for its reprieve. Back then, Rudolph was a leading light in American architecture, his work the epitome of American invention and daring. He lived long enough (he died in 1997, at 78) to see his reputation decline with the rise of Post Modernism, whose own eclipse has coincided with renewed interest in Rudolph’s legacy.
Orange County legislators should take a look at his Art and Architecture Building at Yale, which Post Modernists had squarely in their cross hairs. Opened in 1963, it was restored several years ago by the firm of Gwathmey Siegel. Ugly partitions and drop ceilings from an unfortunate renovation were stripped away, years of contempt and neglect erased. Cramped, dark, byzantine spaces returned to how Rudolph intended them: light-filled, exalting, with serendipitous vistas and a communal, townlike connectedness. There’s a syncopated flow to the building. The concrete facade, its corduroy pattern bush-hammered by hand, looks quarried from some immense rock. Almost miraculous, the restoration vindicates Rudolph.Calls for more transparency and regulation governing the content and advertising on Facebook are suddenly coming from both the right and the left in Washington, and are likely to increase as more information emerges about how the company earns nearly all of its almost $30 billion in annual revenue.
The attention has intensified since Facebook recently admitted that Russian buyers were able to purchase thousands of ads on its platform on hot-button issues like immigration and gay rights in the run-up to the US election. It’s also been revealed that its policing of ads is so lax that it was possible to buy ads targeting users interested in topics like “Jew hater” and “how to burn Jews,” ProPublica reported. (The topics have been removed since). Facebook isn’t alone—until recently, on Google, it was possible to target messages to people who search for phrases like “blacks destroy everything,” BuzzFeed reported.
Long before Russia meddled in the 2016 US presidential election, and before lawmakers in Washington DC were scrambling to figure out how to rein in Facebook, a small federal agency was wrangling with how to regulate the growing power of the internet in political elections.
From the mid 2000s until last year, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was locked in internal debates about the money being poured into political advertising and campaigning on the web, and how or even whether it should be disclosed. After all, the US had for decades held television broadcasters up to strict standards, dictating how sponsors of political advertisements should be identified, requiring television stations to ferret out which candidates third parties were working for, and forcing them to make public lists of such backers. Shouldn’t the internet be held to the same standards?
In October 2014, vice commissioner Ann M. Ravel wrote a statement (pdf) accusing the FEC of turning a “blind eye” to the growing force of the internet in politics, and explaining the reason she and two of her co-commissioners, all Democrats, had voted for more disclosure of funding of political material on the web:
Some of my colleagues seem to believe that the same political message that would require disclosure if run on television should be categorically exempt from the same requirements when placed on the internet alone. As a matter of policy, this simply does not make sense. … This effort to protect individual bloggers and online commentators has been stretched to cover slickly produced ads aired solely on the internet but paid for by the same organizations and the same large contributors as the actual ads aired on TV.
The FEC had just undertaken a vote on the topic that ended in a deadlock, with three Republicans voting against their Democratic colleagues, a common impasse in the increasingly dysfunctional agency tasked with keeping US elections fair and transparent. Nonetheless, Ravel’s statement sparked outcry and anger, especially from conservatives who equated money spent on political advertising on the internet to “free speech”—the same argument that won the landmark 2010 “Citizens United” Supreme Court case, sending a torrent of cash into political elections.
The end result was, for the coming years, the commission would do nothing to address who was spending money on political advertising on the web, even as Facebook’s audience and influence grew in the US.
Bring on the trolls
A day after Ravel published her statement, co-commissioner Lee Goodman, a Republican, appeared on Fox & Friends (video) to warn that the three Democrats wanted to censor free speech online, and set up a “regulatory regime” that would reach deep into the internet. “Boy, I thought Democrats were for free speech,” commentated the Fox anchor interviewing him, Tucker Carlson. “That was obviously an earlier species.”
Ravel says Goodman’s Fox appearance unleashed a torrent of abuse. The issue was picked up by Drudge Report, Breitbart, and other right-wing news sites, which singled her out. Responses poured in from Twitter and e-mail, ranging from death threats to misogyny, everything from “stick it up your c-nt,” she recalled this week, to “You’re the kind of person the Second Amendment was made for.” They also included “Hope you have a heart attack,” and “You will more than likely find the ‘Nazi’ scenario showing its ugly head,” the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan group that investigates democracy, reported (Ravel is Jewish).
Such threats, while appalling, hardly seem novel in America right now. But this was in 2014, eight months before Donald Trump even announced he was running for president in a campaign that was accompanied by a big spike in anti-Semitic, white nationalist threats online. Michael Toner, a Republican former FEC commissioner called the harassment of Ravel “incredibly inflammatory stuff.”
The FEC took the threats so seriously that an event Ravel had planned—to bring together “technologists, social entrepreneurs, policy wonks, politicos, and activists” from across the political spectrum to discuss how political advertising on the internet should be regulated—was cancelled.
The bumper sticker argument
Advertisers are drawn to Facebook and Google because of their massive reach, but also because of their ability to pinpoint the people most likely to buy their products. Both companies rely on algorithms to target ads to certain users, but don’t disclose much about how these algorithms, so how the process works is particularly opaque.
In Facebook’s case, the lack of disclosure in the US about who is buying political ads, and which of the company’s 2 billion users see them, has its roots in a creative legal strategy.
Facebook successfully argued that the company should not have to disclose who was behind political advertisements because the commission did not require political committees to include disclaimers on buttons, bumper stickers, or other small items where it “could not easily be printed,” in this 2011 letter (pdf, pg. 8) seeking clarification from the FEC. Its advertisements were tiny, Facebook argued, and purposely limited to 25 characters in the headline and 135 in the body. “Changing the size or format of these ads would cause a significant disruption to Facebook’s basic advertising,” the company argued. Additionally, the FEC has allowed Google to run Google search ads from political committees without disclaimers, Facebook argued.
Facebook’s revenue from advertising has skyrocketed since then, and the company is engaged in a public and constant battle to keep promoters of everything from pornography to bogus diet polls from using its site to make a profit. While it has been openly policing those things for years, it said little about political advertisements until after an internal investigation in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. “We have had to expand our security focus from traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people,” the company said (pdf) this April. It has announced a series of tweaks since to fight misinformation.
The 2011 letter, which asked the FEC for more guidance, resulted in “a lengthy and detailed discussion among FEC commissioners in the hopes of handing down an official opinion,” wrote ClickZ, a trade publication covering the digital marketing industry after the letter became public. Like so much else at the commission, the FEC discussion “resulted in a non-decision,” ClickZ noted.
Anticipating Putin
Despite the backlash to her 2014 push to get Facebook and other internet companies to be more transparent about where their ad revenue was coming from, Ravel kept pursuing the issue. In 2015, the FEC grappled with the topic of how to make sure foreign money wasn’t being used to pay for political advertisements on the internet, a clear violation of a federal law.
In doing so, Ravel even anticipated Putin’s influence. “I mean, think of it, do we want Vladimir Putin or drug cartels to be influencing American elections?” Ravel asked in an October of 2015 meeting, while pushing for the commission to require state and local campaigns to declare foreign contributions. The commission tried once again to hash out what was “local” or “national” given the internet’s global reach.
Once again, though, the FEC settled on doing nothing. In February of this year, Ravel left the commission before her term was up, saying at the time (paywall) that the commission was so dysfunctional that she thought she could do more to improve transparency and fairness in US elections outside the government.
The demonization of Ravel and the FEC’s overall failure to write rules helped create the disturbing situation the United States finds itself in now.
Multiple US government bodies are likely to spend tens of millions in taxpayer dollars investigating how the Kremlin may have influenced the 2016 presidential election, particularly via big social media platforms like Facebook. The FBI’s special prosecutor is currently looking at how Russia may have used Facebook to spread misinformation and propaganda on the web, while Facebook and Twitter executives may be hauled in front of Congress to explain the same.
More broadly, social media is helping to polarize the country—allowing right-wing extremists and hate groups to spread their messages in new ways, and organize anti-immigrant and neo-Nazi demonstrations (sometimes the organizers are even Russian-backed). This is happening while some 45% of Americans use Facebook to get their news.
In a surprise vote that could mark a first step towards fixing the situation, the usually divided FEC voted unanimously on Sept. 14 to reexamine the rules surrounding disclosures on online ads. “For our democracy to work, the American people need to know that the ads they see on their computer screens and in their social media feeds aren’t paid for by Russia or other foreign countries,” commissioner Ellen Weintraub wrote after the vote.Like surveyors charting out a parcel of land by measuring angles, distances and elevations, astronomers have long mapped the positions of celestial objects in the sky.
Those celestial maps are about to see some major revisions. New and upcoming campaigns using ground-based telescopes or spacecraft promise to fill in many new details in astronomers’ maps of the sky. Together these projects will catalogue detailed positional information on several billion stars and galaxies near and far.
One of the most dramatic upgrades to celestial cartography should come from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch next year. After taking up a position in deep space, well beyond the orbit of the moon, Gaia will map the positions and distances of roughly one billion stars. The mission is the successor to the Hipparcos satellite, which launched in 1989 and whose catalogue still finds wide use. But that satellite charted just 120,000 stars or so, and only a slight minority were pinpointed with top-level precision.
Hipparcos measured precise stellar distances, to within 1 percent, for fewer than 1,000 stars. Most of the satellite’s distance measurements have much greater uncertainties of 20 percent or more. Gaia should measure the distances to about 10 million stars with a precision of 1 percent or better. “That’s about the quantum leap that we will make,” says Timo Prusti, project scientist for Gaia at the European Space Agency (ESA).
By mapping out so many stars, astronomers hope to improve their understanding of our home galaxy’s layout. “The main science goal is to address the issues of our Milky Way—the structure and the dynamics,” Prusti says. Buried as we are within the Milky Way, humankind has never had a glimpse of the galaxy in its entirety. The astronomer’s predicament is a bit like that of an artist who must sketch the Manhattan skyline from midtown, instead of from a clear vantage point across the Hudson River. Just as the artist can inspect Manhattan’s skyscrapers one by one to reconstruct the skyline in her sketch, the astronomer can fill in a map of the galaxy one star at a time.
A next-generation space telescope called Euclid ought to extend that map from the local to the global, by mapping up to two billion galaxies in three dimensions. The mission, which ESA approved in June for a 2020 launch, will scan roughly one third of the sky to measure the positions and distances of galaxies across the universe. The hope is that the distribution of cosmic structure will reveal some hidden clue to the nature of dark energy, the unknown entity driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.
“We have no idea what dark energy is, but it’s a very subtle effect,” says Richard Griffiths, the Euclid program scientist at NASA, which is a participant in the European-led mission. “The only way we can get at it is to study the whole universe, basically.”
Euclid’s design specs should allow astronomers to see galaxies so distant that their light has taken more than half the age of the universe to reach Earth. “We will literally obtain a three-dimensional image of our universe, with us in the very center, and we will be able to detect the accelerated expansion in it,” says ESA’s project scientist René Laureijs. “It will give us the opportunity to watch the universe evolving over the last 10 billion years.”
Euclid is not the only project charting galaxies to try to unravel the mystery of dark energy. A campaign called the Dark Energy Survey will soon take advantage of a new 570-megapixel camera on a four-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The survey will measure the shapes and positions of some 200 million galaxies across a quarter of the southern sky. Whereas the scope of the ground-based project pales in comparison to the billions of galaxies targeted by Euclid, the Dark Energy Survey should have a significant head start on its space-based counterpart. The project’s camera has just been installed on the telescope and could see first light as soon as this month, according to the project’s Facebook page.
Many of the leading surveys now coming online are based in the southern hemisphere, where celestial cartographers can expect to make the greatest impact. In the north, the granddaddy of all astronomical surveys—the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico—has reigned for more than a decade and has already carefully mapped more than one million galaxies in three dimensions, in addition to many other accomplishments.
Among the new crop of southern surveys is a project at the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope in Chile, which is already carrying out a broad infrared survey to complement the more targeted Dark Energy Survey. And the SkyMapper project in Australia plans to chart the entire southern sky in optical light. The SkyMapper telescope should detect roughly one billion stars and one billion galaxies, according to Stefan Keller of the Australian National University, one of the project’s lead scientists.
But the telescope most likely to rewrite the books on the southern sky is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, in Chile. When it comes online around 2022, the LSST—as currently envisioned—will feature an 8.4-meter mirror (compared to the Sloan survey’s 2.5-meter telescope) and a three-gigapixel digital camera. The mammoth telescope will image the heavens every week to capture transient phenomena such as supernovae and close passages of potentially dangerous asteroids. In the process, it will also mark the three-dimensional location of some four billion galaxies.Compared to the popular third-party alternatives, Android's stock recovery has always been pretty...weak. Makes sense, because it's not really meant to do all the stuff that ROM flashers tend to use recovery for, but rather a failsafe of sorts in case something goes awry.
With L's Android release, the recovery is getting a little bit more useful with two new options: reboot to bootloader and power down. Nothing groundbreaking here, but still incredibly useful (especially "reboot to bootloader") for those times when stock recovery is the only option.
Basically everything else is the same here: reboot device, update from ADB, factory reset, and wipe cache are all along for the ride. But what do you care – you're just going to flash TWRP anyway, right?
Thanks, Alexei Watson!As Election 2016 heats up (could it get hotter—yes!), I expect you will see more ‘marches’ and rallies organized by the community organizers at the Council on American Islamic Relations which are involved in getting Muslim voters registered to push back on those of you who have security concerns about more Muslim migration to America.
CAIR has been learning its lessons well from the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center*** which throws out their hate label to anyone who has a differing policy view from theirs. CAIR and the SPLC want more Muslim migration to America and I, for one, don’t. It is simply a policy discussion America needs to have.
And, of all places, Minnesota Somalis have given us reason to have security concerns as dozens of young Somali refugees, who benefited from the generosity of the American taxpayer have joined the jihadists in Africa and the Middle East (since 2008 the FBI has been aware of their activities).
Some have been arrested, either before leaving to join ISIS or upon their return. Some are dead. Some have been sentenced to prison. Some are unaccounted for.
Any sane person should be concerned about these Minnesota Somalis who did not assimilate, became more devout and have joined the Islamic terrorists.
Here is the news (Feb. 20th) from WCCO CBS Minnestota. Watch the clip! LOL! Is there even one Somali in the march?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Dozens of protesters marched down Cedar Avenue Saturday, taking a stand against something many are all too familiar with–discrimination.
[….]
The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations organized the march as part of many happenings throughout the country to raise awareness of Islamophobia.
“We created Minnesotans Against Islamophobia. 26 local organizationsendorse our action today,” said organizer Karen Schraufnagel.
Minnesota has the highest population of Somalis in the country, making Islamophobia a reality for many of them.
***Readers, I consider it a great honor to be called-out by the SPLC! See here. I had been hoping for years to be noticed by them! I was green with envy when Daniel Greenfield was noticed a few years back and wrote this hilarious piece about his “hate group” (Greenfield and his cat). I have a cat too!
My first response on finding out that I was now a hate group was to look around to see where everyone else was. A hate group needs the group part and one man and a cat don’t seem to be enough.
Back to the notice the SPLC has taken of RRW…..
(Not sure what they mean by my increasing radicalization.) The only thing I can figure is that they see a change of tone over the years which can be attributed to my anger over a growing realization about how much power and money drives the secretive UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program on the political left and the political right (cheap labor for big global corporations!) and how unwilling elected officials are to even discuss it! Or, more accurately, they are willing to discuss it, but do nothing seriously about it!And you thought the NBA season was short. The competitive curling-circuit season typically runs from September to April, but officially, the 2017-18 season began over the weekend with what stands to be the largest purse, men’s or women’s, in any curling event. In Siberia.
That’s because they had to accommodate the Arctic Curling Cup, a Curling Champions Tour-sanctioned event with a $100,000 U.S. purse, projected to be the most lucrative bonspiel of the season, eclipsing any given Grand Slam of Curling event when we factor in Canadian exchange rates. Advertised as the first curling tournament within the Arctic Circle, this took place in Dudinka, about 50 miles east of Norilsk, the heart of operations for Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest producer of nickel. Its operations have led it to be named one of Time Magazine’s 10 most polluted places.
The winning team was Team Anna Sidorova, the 2014 Olympians and perennial Team Russia representative in world championships. In the final they defeated Team Jennifer Jones, winners of the 2014 Olympic gold medals and literally the world’s finest team of the last decade. The tournament’s big names also included Team Margaretha Sigfridsson from Sweden (2014’s silver medalists) and 2015 world champion Team Alina Pätz from Switzerland. The USA national team skipped by Nina Roth showed up as well. All to promote curling in a small mining freight town of about 20,000.
But in fairness, they brought the fireworks.
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Russia’s love for—and unorthodox attempts to excel at—curling are well-documented. In 2010, the Russian Curling Federation signed three up-and-coming Canadian players (Jason Gunnlaugson, Tyler Forrest, and Justin Richter) to a four-year deal, at a reported $100,000 per player per year. They won the Russian national championship, but a month before they were supposed to go to the European championship, the Russians voided the deal after about six months, perhaps because they wouldn’t renounce their Canadian citizenship, or perhaps because they underperformed that season. Ultimately the Russians finished 7th out of 10 teams in the Sochi Olympics.
Their other notable tournament, which began a few years ago, is the Red Square Classic, a men’s event and the circuit’s only outdoor event, played with a backdrop of St. Basil’s Cathedral. In all fairness, the scenery for this one is immaculate, even though the quality of outdoor curling is usually akin to playing pool on an uneven table. Still, it always brings in some of the world’s top men’s teams.
They have since produced two world-class women’s teams, skipped by Sidorova and Victoria Moiseeva, and have simultaneously developed a world-class mixed doubles curling team, which won a world title in 2016 and will contend at the 2018 Olympic debut of this curling variant. Still, the sport was not immune from their far-reaching doping scandal, as noted in the McLaren report and further detailed by The Curling News. Affected athletes included one female curler and another unidentified athlete whose sample was labeled “curling world championship mixed doubles” in 2015. Two wheelchair curlers were apparently involved as well.
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As for this event, its website says the expenses were funded by “local enterprises,” which almost certainly has to be the mining industry, with intent to promote curling as well as local tourism.
I’m never going to dissuade more curling clubs and tournaments, especially when the largesse goes directly to the athletes. But it remains strange: with the money to wave at big sporting events, Russia is using it on curling.As most of you know, my favorite is SimpleInjector. I use it in all my projects. Since Sitecore 8.2 was released yesterday (August 30th 2016), I decided to do a performance benchmark against Microsoft Extensions DependencyInjection which is used as part of Sitecore to provide DependencyInjection.
Kam has written a blog post: Dependency Injection in Sitecore 8.2 which talks about the Sitecore integration.
I ran these tests on a virtual with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4870HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz with 8GB memory.
My source is available on GitHub: IoC Performance
In order to do this I have taken two approaches. First, I used the repo from Daniel Palme and his blog post: IoC Container Benchmark – Performance comparison and I updated the NuGet packages. Here is a blurb from Daniels post about the setup:
The test setup
Several benchmarks are executed to test the performance of the containers in different scenarios. Every container is initialized with a couple of interfaces and their corresponding implementations. The types are registered with different lifetimes to support the various benchmarks.
Every interface is resolved 500.000 times during the benchmark and the time is measured in milliseconds. Each test is executed single threaded and multi threaded.
The benchmarks:
Singleton: Objects with is singleton lifetime are resolved
Transient: Objects with is transient lifetime are resolved
Combined: Objects with two dependencies (singleton and transient lifetime) are resolved
Complex: Objects with several nested dependencies are resolved
Property: Objects which require property injection are resolved
Generics: Objects with a generic dependency are resolved
IEnumerable: Several objects that implement the same interface are resolved
Conditional: Objects with a conditional dependency are resolved
Child Container: Objects are resolved trough a child container
Interception With Proxy: Objects with a dynamically generated wrapper are resolved
Prepare And Register: Initializes container and registers some basic elements (executed 3.000 times)
Prepare And Register And Simple Resolve: Initializes container and registers some basic elements. The resolves two objects (executed 3.000 times)
First value: Time of single-threaded execution in [ms]
Second value: Time of multi-threaded execution in [ms]
That produced the following results:
Version Singleton Transient Combined Complex Property Generics IEnumerable Conditional Child Container Interception With Proxy Prepare And Register Prepare And Register And Simple Resolve No 56 89 72 104 105 124 134 134 148 146 96 110 305 231 98 118 606 391 72 105 2 3 AutoFac 4.1.0.0 602 508 1240 785 3760 2108 10242 6385 18682 10466 2632 1592 10363 5634 37968 20398 Microsoft
Extensions
DependencyInjection 1.0.0.20622 156 220 140 144 320 318 729 830 198 186 738 448 18 25 Ninject 3.2.2.0 3932 2588 13965 11564 37197 25070 103800 64927 93449 69829 37011 26061 91829 68581 34162 23586 62954750* 75133444* 102117 99437 129042 115231 SimpleInjector 3.2.2.0 66 101 87 120 151 159 188 176 270 218 100 131 854
520 121 144 28926 30097 419 3359
Second, I took the repos from:
IOCBattle by Martin From
IOCBattle by Nathanael Mann
To get the following results:
Version Singleton Reg. (ms) Singleton Resolve (1,000,000) (ms) Transient Reg. (ms) Transient Resolve (1,000,000) (ms) new () 0.0726 57.6387 0.0683 200.6526 AutoFac Lambda 4.1.0.0 54.8336 453.2864 2.1957 6569.4292 AutoFac 4.1.0.0 4.8632 464.7712 0.7575 16183.6045 Microsoft
Extensions
DependencyInjection 1.0.0.20622 0.5311 66.0343 0.4936 198.7997 Ninject 3.2.2.0 34.5873 3343.113 1.6425 186098.403 SimpleInjector 3.2.2.0 31.0477 104.6839 2.5184 225.4272
If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).
Links:
IoC Container Benchmark – Performance comparison
IoC Battle in 2015 results: Using Ninject – think again!
*Due to the updated AutoFac version I was getting some issues with Daniels code. I will resolve it at a later date and retest it.31DtaBBC Day 2: 10 Theories About WotC’s Boneheaded Decision
1. The suits at Hasbro actually believe this move will stop piracy.
2. WotC doesn’t want to share D&D profits with anybody.
3. Hasbro is trying to get away from all things electronic because computers are a fad.
4. An Evil Wizard has taken over at WotC.
5. WotC secretly wants to control all places where D&D is available.
6. WotC/Hasbro had a critical failure on their Intelligence role.
7. This isn’t Wizard’s fault this is all a HUGE plot instituted by a disgruntled former employee.
8. Hasbro can’t sell the new 4e D&D-My Little Pony tie-in if.pdfs of older material is still available.
9. The same marketing firm that came up with the SyFy channel told Hasbro/WotC this is sound business strategy.
10. WotC doesn’t want you to play anything but 4e. (Thanks to Berin for this one)
John over @ the Core Mechanic has his own list add those to Greywulf’s 10 below and now we have 30 reasons.
AdvertisementsTrack list, for reference:
Horchata White Sky Holiday California English Taxi Cab Run Cousins Giving Up the Gun Diplomat’s Son I Think Ur a Contra
Until the emergence of one Car Seat Headrest, I considered Vampire Weekend to be the best working guitar-based band since I started following music closely (circa 2010). Ezra is an insanely talented lyricist, Rostam’s arrangements and harmonies are endlessly interesting and beautiful, and the band as a whole seems to approach their image and aesthetic, as well as the crafting of their songs and albums, with both grounded cool-headedness and an expectation of excellence.
Of the band’s three studio LPs (2008’s Vampire Weekend, 2010’s Contra and 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City), Contra is probably the one that gets the least attention. Vampire Weekend started it all, identified their erudite, preppy aesthetic, established their signature culturally aware yacht rock sound and contained longtime fan favorites like “Oxford Comma“, “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” and the ubiquitous “A-Punk“. Modern Vampires was seen as their ‘mature, adult’ album, won them a Grammy, killed the year-end list bonanza, etc. Contra served as the confirmation that the band were indeed ‘for real’, but I’d also argue that it’s the most conceptual and aesthetically cohesive record in the band’s discography, and also their best arranged and produced. An album about cultural opposites and juxtapositions, and how they fit into navigating reflections on a failed relationship, Contra has grown on me steadily over the years, and at this point I’d say its a dead-heat between it and their self-titled as my second favorite album of all time.
10. “Holiday”
Easily one of the most well-known Vampire Weekend songs (owing in no small part its appearance in car commercials and perennial existence on winter holiday corporate playlists), its also the least interesting song on Contra, melding solid dueling guitar work with
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Netherlands. That is why the Dutch have taken the lead in identifying the bodies, trying to establish what caused the crash and running the criminal investigation.
Image copyright Hans de Borst Image caption Hans declined to see Elsemiek's body - he says "I want to remember the way she was before"
Image caption A shrine for a family of six from Neerkant who died in the MH17 crash
Western governments suspect that the jet, with 298 people on board, was hit by a Russian surface-to-air missile fired by pro-Russian separatists. The rebels and Russia blamed the Ukrainian military for the crash.
Like most of the families, Hans de Borst gave DNA samples a week after the crash. He was also offered the chance to see his daughter's body in the makeshift morgue. He declined:
"They told me she is in one piece. So in that way maybe I am lucky. But she is damaged of course. I don't want to see that. I want to remember the way she was before... They took photographs, in case I change my mind in 10 years time."
Sometimes I wish I was on that plane too because what's my purpose in life now? Hans de Borst, Father of MH17 victim
Who did it?
This is the biggest criminal investigation ever conducted in the Netherlands.
"Never before have we had a murder case with so many victims," said Wim de Bruin from the Dutch prosecution service, fielding press inquiries from all over the world. Passengers from 10 different countries were on board Flight MH17.
Ten Dutch prosecutors and 200 police officers are involved in gathering and preparing the evidence for a criminal trial.
There are three main questions about the eventual MH17 trial: Where will it be conducted? What crimes will the accused be charged with? How long before we see the suspects in court?
The Dutch prosecutors are still in the initial stages of the criminal investigation, but they have already dismissed speculation that the trial could be held at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The ICC only takes cases if countries are unable or unwilling to prosecute. The Dutch are willing and able.
Under the current plan, the suspects would be extradited to face trial at the District Court in The Hague. But extradition would require the host country's co-operation, once the suspects are identified.
Wim de Bruin says they are considering "several grounds and possibilities" concerning the charges.
"Of course murder, but we also have the crime of 'wrecking an airplane' and we could use international criminal law - that would mean possible charges of war crimes, torture and genocide."
Image copyright AFP Image caption The number of missing bodies is still unknown
Image copyright AFP Image caption Investigators examine the wreckage near Grabovo, Ukraine
Lockerbie lessons
It is impossible, they say, to give a time frame. The only reference they have is Lockerbie. Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Scotland in 1988, killing 259 people on board and 11 others on the ground. In 2001, a Libyan intelligence officer was jailed for the bombing.
Yet questions remain about the bomb plot - not only the perpetrators but also the motives. In 2003 Col Muammar Gaddafi - later killed in the Arab Spring - accepted responsibility and paid compensation to the victims' families.
"With Lockerbie it took three years for the investigation and then another seven for the trial," Mr De Bruin recalls. "And that was with a plane that crashed in a peaceful place. With MH17 the case is more complicated."
The passengers were catapulted into a conflict zone. The evidence is scattered over a 35 sq km (13 sq mile) area, across sunflower fields and farmland.
Image caption Tributes in a Hilversum church: Three local families and a teenage boy died
And there are concerns about what happened to the debris in the initial days after the crash. Was vital evidence lost or tampered with? Two Dutch prosecutors flew to Kiev but have been unable to access the site in eastern Ukraine.
Some say gaining control of the crash site around Grabove has become a point of honour for the Ukrainian government forces and the pro-Russian separatists fighting them, making visits to the area risky.
On 6 August the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, announced that the Dutch forensic investigators and their sniffer dogs were pulling out until the situation calmed down.
More than 220 coffins have been returned to the Netherlands with an unknown number of passengers inside. They don't know how many bodies are still missing, and not all of the remains have been recovered.
What caused the crash?
A team of 25 air crash investigators is trying to establish what destroyed the plane.
Experts from Ukraine, Russia, Germany, the UK, Australia, Malaysia and the United States are working at the rather nondescript Dutch Safety Board headquarters in The Hague.
Normally with any aviation investigation they would start at the crash site, but counter-terrorism experts feared the presence of aviation investigators might jeopardise the forensic team's efforts to recover the bodies, so they have been forced to rely on alternative sources of evidence.
Wim van der Wegen from the Dutch Safety Board says they already have enough to prepare a preliminary report. "We are using the voice recorder, the black box flight data recorder, satellite images, information from air traffic control and photos taken by people who were able to visit crash site."
They expect to publish the preliminary report within two weeks. It will not attribute blame or liability.
From the moment the first remains were repatriated, the Dutch authorities have strived to restore the honour and dignity that was stolen from the families.
Bringing the perpetrators to justice would help to heal a wound that has cut deep into Dutch society.WASHINGTON — A botched rebound during a pickup basketball game changed the trajectory of Dr. Dana Kuhn’s life forever, sparking a nearly three-decade-long campaign to help people pay for health care that would otherwise leave them financially destitute. His mission to provide at-need individuals and families relief has landed him at odds with the highest government health care regulators in the U.S., and he is taking the fight to Congress.
The federal government is effectively working to upend Kuhn’s life’s mission of charitable giving, he says. He argues that his services balance carefully crafted government markets. His story is compelling and highlights the intricately connected battle between the government, lawmakers, corporations, and individuals in the world of health care.
WATCH OBAMA SLAM GOP FOR ATTACKING OBAMACARE LEGACY:
It was 1983 and by all appearances, Kuhn was leading a normal life. He was married with two young children, living in Memphis and working towards becoming an ordained Presbyterian minister. He wasn’t overtly interested in health care, had never been treated in a hospital and was planning to dedicate his life to God.
As part of his theological training, Kuhn served a country church in Jackson, Tenn., which was having a fundraising pickup basketball game for the various charitable missions the local community churches supported together. Kuhn decided to play.
“I went up for a rebound and came down and broke my foot. I knew something was not good. I had never been treated before, but I knew I should go to the hospital. They found out I had hemophilia and treated me with a blood product,” Kuhn told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The blood that doctors gave Kuhn contained both the HIV and Hepatitis C viruses.
“I happen to win the lottery–the medical catastrophe lottery. I got a sample with both the hepatitis C virus and HIV in it,” Kuhn said.
The blood test for HIV did not come out until late 1984 and was not administered until 1985. Kuhn was tested in 1986, and the results came back positive for HIV. His doctor told him to use protection when having sex with his wife, but there was one problem: there was a three-year window where his wife could have contracted the virus. Once again, Kuhn (and this time his wife) won the Murphy’s Law contest.
“I ended up being infected in 1983, and the test didn’t come out till late-1985, early 1986 for HIV. I got tested and it came back positive. I was told that my wife and I were to use protection if we were getting intimate. If you do math from 1983-1986 there were 3 years of potential exposure. My wife ended up becoming HIV positive during that time. It claimed her life 9 months later,” Kuhn said.
After finding out he had a lifelong disease and losing his wife, a situation that could emotionally cripple anyone, Kuhn was now a single parent of 2 preschool age children and in need of some help. He moved in with his parents in Virginia and took a job at a local hospital. The job opened his eyes, much like his own experiences had, to the financial burden health care saddles on families.
I was helping people with expensive chronic illnesses deal with what was happening in their lives … I was watching families lose everything they had, because they had a child that had leukemia lymphoma or one of these other exotic rare chronic diseases. I would watch them spend everything they had and even get to the point where one of the parents had to give up their jobs to become the primary caretaker. Then they had their homes go into foreclosure. As the disease progressed and they dwindled their finances down, they had to get a divorce so that the mother and child could get on Medicaid. Mortality and morbidity would claim the child’s life and it would break up the families further, Kuhn said.
Something Has To Be Done
Kuhn grew tired of watching this movie play out time and again. He felt compelled to act and conjured up a way to help families pay for health care.
“What I did do was come up with a solution-oriented idea. If I could create a non-profit that would provide help with these premiums and co-payments, more than likely these patients, or these families, would stay financially stable,” Kuhn said.
That is exactly what Kuhn did with Patient Services, Inc. (PSI), a $100 million 501(c)3 non-profit that provides people with insurance premium and copayment assistance. PSI helps patients cover the cost of their premiums, co-payments and deductibles.
PSI provided payment assistance to 36,000 people in 2016. The average income of a PSI recipient is around $34,000.
The non-profit has found that their average recipient only needs one to two years of assistance, ranging from $5-15,000 in total. That is all it takes to keep these families from financial ruin.
“Some of the families would then be able to support their own costs after the disease was managed. Others were able to move and find employment that provided them with better health insurance,” Kuhn said.
Kuhn says PSI never had an insurance company reject their cost-sharing payments until 2014, when the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services under former President Obama issued a ruling allowing insurance companies to prohibit their insureds from accepting charitable support (from non-profits, including churches).
Kuhn then took the fight to Washington, D.C., and was able to convince Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota to put forth legislation in 2015 with the backing of 146 cosponsors. He then was able to get Cramer to send a letter in 2017 signed by 183 members of Congress — Republicans and Democrats — to Health and Human Services asking the agency to overturn the ruling. The effort was unsuccessful, as was another in 2017, but Kuhn is trying once again to rally lawmakers behind his cause.
Cramer is trying once again to introduce legislation asking for a repeal of the rule. Cramer put forth a measure in October 2017, a bill that currently has roughly 47 cosponsors.
Why Did CMS Make The Ruling?
The CMS rule requires that Obamacare Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) accept premium and cost-sharing payments from third-party entities, like PSI, for three categories of Obamacare plan enrollees: Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program under title XXVI of the Public Health Service Act; Indian tribes, tribal organizations or urban Indian organizations; and State and Federal Government programs. Other than those categories, CMS encourages insurers to reject third-party payments.
CMS said in its ruling that these payments “could skew the insurance risk pool and create an unlevel competitive field in the insurance market.”
CMS did not respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.
The agency believed at the time that allowing third-party payers into the market would incentivize individuals to enter the Obamacare marketplace, instead of going with a Medicare or Medicaid plan. The people who the third-party payers would be helping largely mimic the demographics of someone who would be eligible for a Medicare or Medicaid plan.
“People should be enrolled in a plan designed for them, and many people enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid receive additional protections and non-medical services that are not typically available in individual commercial coverage,” Cathryn Donaldson, director of communications at America’s Health Insurance Plans, told TheDCNF.
“Inappropriately steering people into a commercial market that does not meet their needs through third-party payments of premiums is inappropriate and unfair to the patient, and creates further imbalance in the risk pool that leads to increased costs for everyone,” Donaldson said.
The president of AHIP, Marilyn Tavenner, was the former administrator of CMS under Obama and was acting administrator when the ruling was established.
Where Is The Hang Up?
PSI gets a lot of negative attention because it lists a number of big pharmaceutical companies as donors.
The non-profit lists a host of corporate donors, including: Bayer, CVS Caremark, Norvo Nordisk and more. The thinking on the part of those who are against third-party payers is that such donations are made to get a bigger payout or better reimbursement terms.
Donaldson noted this in her conversations with TheDCNF.
“Many of the organizations that are making the premium payments stand to benefit financially (either directly or as a direct benefit to the funding organization through higher reimbursement). They mirror practices that are prohibited in Federal health care programs under the anti-kickback and civil monetary penalty (CMP) laws. Any expansion of eligible third-party entities beyond current regulations will result in higher premiums for all consumers, increased market instability, and decreased affordability,” Donaldson said.
Kuhn does not shy away from discussing his relationships with big pharma. He says they have the money and, to his credit, he isn’t wrong in that assertion. Generic and specialty pharmaceuticals have a market cap well in the hundreds of billions.
“When I created this model, it was created in a way that I would get the money from pharmaceutical companies and specialty pharmacies. They have the money. I knew how to get the money from them,” Kuhn told TheDCNF. “I can get the money, and I use it for disease specific programs.”
PSI’s flagship disease specific program is for hemophilia, a disease one could argue started PSI in the first place.
The question Donaldson and others pose has nothing to do with questioning the altruism of PSI or other organizations like it. Opponents of allowing these third-party payers into the market believe their presence works to unbalance the market, driving consumers away from plans they feel would better meet their needs, like a Medicaid or Medicare plan.
“Insurance companies and those that are against say we are the catalyst for pharmaceutical companies to raise their prices astronomically. I usually say that is a big myth and I’ll tell you why,” Kuhn said.
The ‘Big Myth’ Kuhn Says Is Behind His Opponents’ Message
Kuhn whipped out a chart from his bag and placed it on the table. It’s a simple bullet-pointed argument as to why those that think he is colluding with pharmaceuticals are wrong.
“I love showing this to members of Congress,” he quipped.
He says the myth is that PSI sets the price point. Their presence in the market, insurers argue, allows prices to soar.
“We don’t set the price point when the drug comes out of clinical trials. We don’t write the prescription. We don’t set the reimbursement rate for a drug, the insurers do,” Kuhn said. “Oh, and we aren’t the pharmacy either.”
“All of those are basically the people who make the money. All I do is provide access and affordability,” Kuhn said.
To his opponents, Kuhn has one message: “there is no way I can be the catalyst for soaring prices.”
What Is Kuhn Doing About All Of This?
“We have been in D.C. working very hard to try and get this rule overturned. We had to come up with a way to do it,” Kuhn said.
He’s back in D.C. trying for a third time to get members of Congress to overturn the ruling.
His pitch this time? Show them that what he is doing is not only helping save lives and families, but also saving the government money.
“Here is what I’ll say to it. If we don’t help people that are in this vulnerable area, what is going to happen is they will not be able to afford health care and go to the emergency rooms for their primary care. Then they are going to run up costs in uncompensated care. Who do you think pays for it? We do. It’s our taxes,” Kuhn said.
Overuse of emergency departments is estimated to cost as much as $38 billion in wasteful spending annually. The main drivers of said overuse are lack of access to other primary care services and financial and legal obligations by hospitals to treat all patients who arrive in their emergency departments.
“We’ve been helping the government save money. Now, we can do it. It is mind boggling to me,” Kuhn said.
Kuhn says he hasn’t met with the Trump administration because he thinks it’s better to solve the issue legislatively. He did meet on one occasion with the Obama White House, a meeting he says taught him a great deal about how the Obamacare deal with insurance companies was struck.
Kuhn went to the White House in July 2016 to meet with former deputy Health Director of White House Office of Health Care Reform Jeanne Lambrew. He knew her from years back and was hoping to lobby her towards removing the rule. Lambrew left him with a familiar message: the work PSI does is great, but it works to undermine the government-backed Medicare and Medicaid plans.
“We talked about the ruling. I said, ‘Here is an easy fix. Everybody is talking about filling in the cracks in the ACA. Here is an opportunity for us to fill this crack in. She said, ‘This wasn’t meant to harm, or to deter, non-profits. This is very important work that you do.’ She also said ‘we are concerned about certain populations and how that may be looking to steer people on to the marketplace plans.’”
Kuhn believes her statements reveal that some sort of deal was struck between the administration and insurance companies to get the Affordable Care Act settled into law.
“My interpretation was that now I understood that more than likely there has been a deal cut with insurance companies. They (Obama admin) had to make this work—the ACA had to work. If the insurance companies are complaining about having all these sick people on their plans, why not let us help out?,” he asked.
He said he offered Lambrew a solution, and she said she would follow up but never did.
Kuhn and his partners believe they can rally enough lawmakers to support their cause this time around, but insurance companies, their lobby arms and supporters of the Affordable Care Act will likely not give up without a fight.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected] of four known photographs of the Trunko carcass, taken by A. C. Jones
Trunko is the nickname for a globster reportedly sighted in Margate, South Africa, on 25 October 1924, according to an article entitled "Fish Like A Polar Bear" published in the 27 December 1924, edition of London's Daily Mail. The animal was reputedly first seen off the coast battling two killer whales, which fought the unusual creature for three hours. It used its tail to attack the whales and reportedly lifted itself out of the water by about 20 feet. One of the witnesses, South African farmer Hugh Ballance, described the animal as looking like a "giant polar bear" due to what was thought to be dense-white fur.[citation needed]
The creature reputedly washed up on Margate Beach but despite being there for 10 days, no scientist ever investigated the carcass while it was beached, so no reliable description has been published, and until September 2010 it was assumed that no photographs of it had ever been published. Some people who have never been identified were reported to have described the animal as possessing snowy-white fur, and an elephantine trunk.[1]
Commenting on the photos, paleontologist Darren Naish wrote:
They show that it was the rotting carcass of a large vertebrate, most likely a whale. The idea that this was really the body of a white-furred, trunked sea monster stems from naivety about the appearance of rotting animal carcasses. [the photos] are somewhat ambiguous, but the enormous bulk of the carcass, the large amount of what looks like frayed, badly decayed collagen and the presence of what seems to be a mostly obscured internal skeletal framework suggest that this is another globster – a rotting mass of whale tissue."[2]The day Zaheer Abbas took his players off and Sunil Gavaskar stayed put to get his hundred
September 19, 1983. As the Bangalore Test match was drawing to its lifeless end, all of a sudden there was ridiculous stand-off in the middle. Zaheer Abbas wanted to end the match. Sunil Gavaskar wanted to score a century. Arunabha Sengupta recalls the day when Pakistan came close to forfeiting a Test match.
The end was so farcical that it beggared belief. Especially when one considers the sombre seriousness associated with a Test match.
Life had been mercilessly squeezed out of the game by the afternoon of the third day, part of it by the elements and the rest by insipid cricket. And just as the yawn of a game was dwindling to its thankful closure, it was caught up in incredible drama. Captain Zaheer Abbas wanted to end the game, some would say rather churlishly. And Sunil Gavaskar refused to allow the umpires to end the match because he was within touching distance of another hundred.
Rain and Snail’s Pace
Whatever excitement was in store had been there in the match was squeezed out by the afternoon of the second day and the morning of the third. The rest of the Test was a tale of nothingness, as many of the India–Pakistan matches of the past often were. Neither side wanted to take much of a chance, and as a result, the run rate never quite went beyond 2.5 per over. And then there was rain.
The innocuous bowling line up of Pakistan was sans stalwarts like Imran Khan and Sarfraz Nawaz. Yet, surprisingly, after a rain-curtailed first day, it made inroads into the Indian batting on the second morning.
Mudassar Nazar had castled Anshuman Gaekwad and Mohinder Amarnath the previous afternoon. Now he got Yashpal Sharma snicking one to Wasim Bari. Sandeep Patil was removed by Tahir Naqqash and skipper Kapil Dev by Azeem Hafeez. Finally Tahir brought one back to trap Gavaskar leg before, ending a painstaking 169-minute knock of 42.
India were struggling at 85 for 6. Zaheer, the Pakistani captain whose dour, defensive frame of mind had shielded the thinnish bowling department, suddenly discovered a chance to deal a surprise blow.
In truth, the Indians were done in by poor batting and quixotic selection. In the last Test they had played, in St John’s some five months earlier, Ravi Shastri had amassed an enterprising century and Dilip Vengsarkar had counterattacked fiercely against the hostile West Indian bowlers to score a 103-ball 94. For reasons best known to the selectors, now both of them were out of the team, leaving a rather ordinary middle order to face the Pakistani medium pacers.
But then, with the batsmen back in the hutch, Roger Binny and Madan Lal, two gutsy fighters down the order, put together a stand of 155 in four-and-a-half hours. The Indians were saved from nasty embarrassment, and by the time their innings got over by late afternoon of the third day, there was but little chance of any result.
Not that too many men of either side were looking to force the issue. Pakistan scored a tad faster than the Indians, but only a tad. Javed Miandad ploughed his way to 99 before being superbly held by substitute Krishnamachari Srikkanth.
The interesting bit of Miandad’s batting was generated less by his strokeplay and more by the way he kept taunting Dilip Doshi. Whenever the ball went into the outfield to the rather slow-moving Indian spinner, Miandad called out, “Two, it’s only Doshi.” Finally, umpire MV Gothoskar had a talk with the vice-captain Wasim Bari at the other end. When that did not help matters, he issued a warning to the batsman.
The Pakistan innings ended with a 13-run lead just after lunch on the final day, Iqbal Qasim’s 85-ball 9 effectively smothering the final breath out of the game. With absolutely no chance of any result, Gavaskar and Gaekwad walked out to open the second innings.
The quest for a ton
Gavaskar, down with bronchitis the previous days, had not fielded during the Pakistan innings. According to his account in Runs ‘n Ruins he had been given some medicine by Dr Kartar Lalvani and it had worked. He was wobbly during the first few overs, but then gradually his strength had returned.
The Pakistanis were going through the motions by now, with Zaheer repeatedly asking umpires Gothoskar and Swaroop Kishen what the rules said about ending the match. They informed him that it was 77 overs for the day, but on the final day it was four-and-a-half hours followed by 20 mandatory overs.
Gothoskar’s biography The Burning Finger mentions: “I told him [Zaheer] in India all the mandatory overs had to be bowled. In England if there is no hope of a result, the mandatory overs need not be completed. In India, one has to consider the feelings of the crowd which is very volatile and can be easily aroused.”
This explanation does not reflect very well on the rules of an international game. It is not ideal to have two set of rules for Tests in two different countries, especially when the difference was caused by crowd reactions. Besides, in India itself, throughout the 1980s Tests were called off by the 10th mandatory over or even earlier.
However, this was what was told to Zaheer and he was not very happy about it. He continued asking the umpires about the rules. According to Gavaskar, “If it was his intention to disturb the concentration of the batsmen, then he failed.”
By tea, India had not lost a wicket and by the time the 20 mandatory overs were scheduled to start, they were 97 for no loss. Gavaskar had just got to his 50 in 156 minutes.
The Pakistan bowling was struggling under a burden of obligation by now. Most of the work was done by Tahir and Mudassar. And sensing the chance to force his way to an easy hundred, Gavaskar opened up and started playing a few shots.
Ten overs down the line, Gavaskar had progressed to 64. Gaekwad dutifully rotated the strike, and the legend made most of a disgruntled attack.
Gavaskar needed the hundred rather desperately, mainly, as he confessed, to boost his confidence. His previous series, in the West Indies, had seen him score 240 runs at 30.00 in spite of another inconsequential 147 not out scored on the final day of a rain-washed Georgetown Test. That had been followed by India’s victorious Prudential World Cup campaign in England where his contribution had been 59 runs at 9.83.
After the 10th mandatory over the master opened up further, a flurry of boundaries taking him to 84 by the end of the 14th.
Zaheer walks off
And now, the clock ticked past the scheduled close of play. Zaheer reasoned that 77 overs had been already completed for the day, and no result was possible by any stretch of imagination. He simply walked off with his players without a word to the umpires.
This placed Gothoskar and Kishen in severe dilemma. They asked the batsmen whether they wanted to end the game, and obviously Gavaskar said he did not. The two Indian openers remained standing in the middle. The confused spectators were getting agitated, unsure about the reason for the stoppage.
The umpires left the ground to confer with Zaheer, manager Intikhab Alam, and the Karnataka Cricket Association members. Only the two batsmen were seen sitting on the field as the discussions went on. The Indian captain tried to bring his batsmen in, but they refused. According to Gothoskar, “After the Pakistanis left the field, Gavaskar refused to leave the ground and dissuaded his partner Gaekwad from leaving the field, despite repeated entreaties of his skipper Kapil Dev.”
Ultimately, the umpires decided to issue a warning. If the Pakistanis did not come out and bowl the six remaining overs, the Indians would be declared winners. It would be the first forfeited Test match, way before the headstrong Darrell Hair would end the England-Pakistan match at The Oval in 2007.
Hence, the Pakistanis trooped in, without any sign of willingness. And they proceeded to bowl the remaining overs. Zaheer himself rolled his arm for an over. The bowlers trundled in from both ends without any perceptible change in the field.
Finally as Mudassar started the final mandatory over, Gavaskar took strike on 99. The first ball was struck to the boundary, giving the great man his 28th century, taking him within one ton of Don Bradman’s record. By the time the ball had crossed the boundary line, Zaheer was already walking off the ground with his players. There was no intention of bowling the five remaining balls, and neither, it seemed, were the Indians too eager to face them now that the hundred had been reached.
Gothoskar writes, “[during the 23 minute break after the 14th over] One of the Board officials asked us to tell Gavaskar to retire from Test cricket if he had to ‘scrounge’ for his Test centuries in this manner … It left a poor taste in the mouth, but the unsophisticated Indian crowd was overjoyed, because Gavaskar was now only one short of Bradman’s record.”
In Runs n Ruins Gavaskar is not too apologetic about the circumstances of the hundred. He ends his account of the innings with the words, “Some of the Pakistani players were critical of (Zaheer’s) action, which they felt was unnecessary and unsporting. As far as I was concerned, the break gave me time to relax and get my strength back. The century did not give me much joy but it did bring back a great deal of confidence, a commodity without which any cricketer is lost.”
Brief Scores:
India 275 (Sunil Gavaskar 42, Roger Binny 83*, Madan Lal 74; Tahir Naqqash 5 for 76) and 176 for no loss (Sunil Gavaskar 103*, Anshuman Gaekwad 66*) drew with Pakistan 288 (Javed Miandad 99, Wasim Bari 64; Kapil Dev 5 for 68).
Man of the Match: Madan Lal.
(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/senantix)The news release begins with a statement as terse and vague as you would expect from a high-profile couple confirming their divorce, after reporters got wind of it.
Lynn and Dave Aronberg — a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader and the top prosecutor in Palm Beach County, Fla., respectively — have “decided to respectfully and amicably part ways and end our marriage,” they announced in a joint statement last week.
“We kindly ask for your support in preserving our privacy as we start to navigate this new chapter of our lives.”
So far, so standard.
And then, mystifyingly, the next seven paragraphs of the news release are spent obliterating privacy and expectations alike.
The release, which was issued by Lynn Aronberg’s PR representative, quotes almost verbatim from a gossip website about the “brand new BMW” and tens of thousands of dollars that she apparently extracted from her husband in a settlement.
It claims the state attorney’s reluctance to have children contributed to the breakup.
And it concludes with the line that would propel the couple’s divorce case from Palm Beach County gossip pages to international news:
“A staunch Republican and supporter of President Donald Trump, Lynn also said she felt increasingly isolated in the marriage.”
Or as the PR firm headlined it: “the Trump Divorce.”
[The Mooch’s wife reportedly files for divorce; she’s no fan of Washington politics, says New York Post]
The romance
Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg. (Bill Ingram/Palm Beach Post via AP)
With the same anonymous individuals and exclamation points it would use to chronicle the demise of their marriage, the website Gossip Extra broke news of the couple’s engagement minutes after it took place in late 2014:
“EXCLUSIVE,” reads the headline, “State Attorney Dave Aronberg Asks ex-Miami Dolphins Cheerleader to Marry Him … Atop Eiffel Tower … She Says Yes!”
They had met years earlier, Lynn Aronberg told The Washington Post, when he was a state senator in the 2000s. She described herself as a lifelong Republican and him as “a short Democrat” who nevertheless appealed to her.
They married on a beach in 2015. The gossip site covered that, too.
Though she put aside cheerleading years ago to build a career in publicity, Aronberg, 37, said her husband’s liberal supporters came to regard her as “the hayseed wife” — nearly 10 years his junior, with intolerable politics.
“It wasn’t an issue at first, but that was before the Hillary-Trump saga,” she said. “And as that built, the tension in our relationship built.”
The races
Despite his affiliation in the Florida statehouse, Aronberg is not exactly a party-line Democrat.
He was elected to the state attorney’s office in 2012 with the help of Republican donors, according to the Palm Beach Post.
And the prosecutor has been spotted multiple times at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, according to the newspaper — despite backing Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race; investigating assault accusations against Trump’s campaign manager that year; and recent reports that he may be considering a bid for U.S. Congress under the Democratic banner.
The Washington Post's Jenna Johnson and Aaron Blake explain why President Trump spends so much time at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and how he uses it as a second White House. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
[At Mar-a-Lago, the star power of the presidency helps charities — and Trump — make more money]
While Lynn Aronberg has been a Trump fan since his days on “The Apprentice” — she owns a three-legged dog named Ivanka — she said her husband had known the mogul for years.
He raised political funds at Mar-a-Lago, she said, and took her to the resort nearly every weekend — even as Trump’s brand became increasingly toxic to her husband’s liberal base.
“I’m walking through the red carpet, and he’s sneaking through the bushes,” she said, recalling selfies she snapped with the future president and his wife, Melania Trump, while her husband would “run and hide from the photographers.”
“He’d ask me to not to take pictures. He wouldn’t want me to post them,” she said.
“I did not listen to him.”
Lynn Aronberg and Melania Trump. (courtesy of Lynn Aronberg)
The selfies
Her Facebook wall and photo galleries attest to that. Grinning with Melania Trump in multiple photos. Posing with the future president in a gold-trimmed ballroom on New Year’s Eve, three weeks before he moved into the White House.
“He’s really nice,” Lynn Aronberg said of Donald Trump. “He’s like: ‘Dave: How did you get her to marry you?’”
But staying married to him became a strain as the presidential race wore on, she told The Post. At the couple’s home in West Palm Beach, she said, her selfie habit drew irritated phone calls from her husband’s supporters.
[Boy Scouts leader apologizes for Trump speech’s ‘political rhetoric’]
“You know, the unions,” she said. “Or sometimes he wouldn’t even tell me who was calling him, to say not to post pictures of Trump or Melania.”
She would refuse the requests, she said.
Eventually she’d do so in public.
The leaks, and the end
“So what if I like Ivanka Trump or a conservative issue on social media?” Lynn Aronberg told Gossip Extra in February, the same month she filed for divorce. “So what if I invite Melania to be in my book group?”
“Dave Aronberg’s Divorce Getting Downright Ugly!” the website reported in June, quoting an unnamed friend of the family.
And then last week, “a source familiar with the negotiations” gave Gossip Extra details of a settlement that Aronberg reportedly signed with her husband: “$100,000 worth of goodies in exchange for her signature on the dotted line.”
And the website expanded on their private woes:
“They have no children, which was a problem for Lynn,” it reported. And then all the stuff about Trump.
These article were no more popular with her husband’s supporters than her selfies, Lynn Aronberg told The Post: “They’d get mad and try to say I’m leaking it.”
She denied doing so. She also declined to discuss her divorce settlement with The Post — and said she didn’t know how the same
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also known as “strong A.I.”—intelligence as broad, creative and flexible as a human’s. That’s the kind of A.I. that Istvan and others are referring to when they talk about robot presidents. Strong A.I. isn’t here yet, but some experts think it’s coming soon.
“I am one of those people who believe that you’re going to get human-level intelligence much, much, much sooner than most people think,” Waser says. “Around 2008, I said that it would occur close to 2025. Ten years later, I don’t see any reason why I would modify that estimate.” Vita-More agrees, predicting we could have an early version of strong A.I. within 10 or 15 years.
But that optimism requires a key assumption: that we will soon reach a time when computers can solve their own problems—what scientists call the “technological singularity.” At that point, computers would become smarter than humans and could design new computers that are even smarter, which would then design computers that are smarter still. Nourbakhsh says, however, that he doesn’t think all the technical problems involved in building better and better computers can be solved by machines. Some require new discoveries in chemistry or the invention of new types of material to use in building these supersmart computers.
Another big technical problem to solve before computers could run the country: Robots don’t know how to explain themselves. Information goes in, a decision comes out, but no one knows why the machine made the choice it did—a huge hurdle for a job that constantly demands decisions with unpredictable inputs and grave consequences. Say what you will about Donald Trump or Bill Clinton, but at least they’re able to think about their thought processes and, in turn, explain their actions to the public, lobby for them in Congress, and spin them on TV or Twitter. A computer, at least for now, can’t do that.
“Machines have to be able to cooperate with other machines to be effective,” Waser says. “They have to cooperate with humans to be safe.” And cooperation is hard if you can’t explain your thought process to others.
This shortcoming is partly because of the way A.I. systems work. In an approach called machine learning, the computer analyzes mountains of data and searches for patterns—patterns that might make sense to the computer but not to humans. In a variant approach called deep learning, a computer uses multiple layers of processors: One layer produces a rough output, which is then refined by the next layer, and that output, in turn, is refined by the next layer. The outputs of those middle layers are opaque to any outside human observers—the computer spits out only the final result.
“You can take your kid to the movie Inside Out, and then you can have this really interesting and deep conversation with your kid about [their] emotions,” Nourbakhsh says. “A.I. can’t do that because A.I. doesn’t understand the idea of going from a topic to a metatopic, to talking about a topic.”
***
Even if we can fix all those problems, robots still might not be the great decision-makers we imagine them to be. One of the main selling points of a robot president is its ability to crunch data and come to decisions without all the biases that plague humans. But even that advantage might not be as clear as it seems—researchers have found it terribly difficult to teach A.I. systems to avoid prejudices.
A Google photo app released in 2015, for instance, used A.I. to identify the contents of photos and then categorize the pictures. The app did well, except for one glaring mistake: It labeled several photos of black people as photos of “gorillas.” Not only was the system wrong, but it didn’t know how to recognize the appalling historical and social context of its labeling. The company apologized and said it would investigate the problem.
Other examples carry life-altering consequences. An A.I. system used by courts across the country to determine defendants’ risk of reoffending—which then guided judges’ bail and sentencing decisions—seemed like the perfect use for autonomous technology. It could crunch large amounts of data, find patterns that people might miss and avoid biases that plague human judges and prosecutors. But a ProPublica investigation found otherwise. Black defendants were 77 percent more likely than otherwise-identical white defendants to be pegged as at risk of committing a future violent crime, the report found. (The for-profit company that created the system disputed ProPublica’s findings.) The A.I. system did not explicitly consider a defendant’s race, but a number of the factors it weighed—like poverty and joblessness—are correlated with race. So the system reached its biased result based on data that, while neutral on its face, carried the baked-in results of centuries of inequality.
This is a problem for all computers: Their output is only as good as their input. An A.I. system that is fed information inflected by race is at risk of putting out racist results.
“Technological systems are not free from bias. They’re not automatically fair just because they’re numbers,” says Madeleine Clare Elish, a cultural anthropologist studying at Columbia University. “My biggest fear is people won’t come to terms with how A.I. technologies will encode the biases and flaws and prejudices of their creators.”
A report on A.I. published by the Obama administration in October raised the same concern: “Unbiased developers with the best intentions can inadvertently produce systems with biased results, because even the developers of an A.I. system may not understand it well enough to prevent unintended outcomes,” it said.
Once we develop supersmart A.I., some experts think concerns about bias will evaporate. Such a system “would detect bias,” says Vita-More, the Humanity+ chairwoman. “It would have a psychological meter that would detect ‘where is that information coming from?’ ‘what do those people need?’” and account for the flaws in the data.
Hacking is another A.I. risk that could possibly be solved with stronger A.I. What if the Russians or North Koreans or Chinese broke into our robot president, gaining access to the whole of American government? And how would we even know if the decisions a robot president made were being manipulated? The solution, supporters say, is a machine that’s smart enough to not only solve our country’s biggest problems, but also to block anyone who would try to sabotage that effort.
Nourbakhsh, for one, says that relying on strong A.I. to solve existing problems with A.I. is mostly a rhetorical flourish. “If you name a problem, somebody can say, ‘These computers are superhuman in their intelligence abilities, and therefore they will find a solution to that problem,’” he says. Ultimately, he thinks, there are problems humans will have to solve on their own.
***
If these obstacles sound discouraging for the pro-robot caucus, there might be a middle ground that suffices for now: A computer that can chug through all the decisions a president has to make—not to make the final choices itself, but to help guide the human commander in chief. Think of it as a human-computer partnership that produces better results than either could alone.
Jonathan Zittrain, an internet law professor at Harvard Law School, thinks that even with A.I.’s flaws, computers could serve as checks against human biases. “A.I., properly trained, offers the prospect of more systematically identifying bias in particular and unfairness in general,” he wrote in a recent blog post.
Maybe a computer, working alongside a human president, could still rein in some of the president’s flaws.
“The place that A.I. can come into play is in understanding ramifications,” Nourbakhsh says. He points to Trump’s travel ban as an example of a presidential decision that turned out badly because its legal and constitutional implications weren’t fully grasped or thought through. A computer could have analyzed the likely legal responses by opponents and courts.
Already, several studies have shown that “a human-machine team can be more effective than either one alone,” as the Obama administration’s A.I. report put it. “In one recent study, given images of lymph node cells and asked to determine whether or not the cells contained cancer, an A.I.-based approach had a 7.5 percent error rate, where a human pathologist had a 3.5 percent error rate; a combined approach, using both A.I. and human input, lowered the error rate to 0.5 percent.” A venture capital firm in Hong Kong is putting that kind of partnership into practice. It announced in 2014 that it was adding an A.I. system to its board of directors to crunch numbers and advise humans on the board about what investment decisions to make.
Keeping a person as president, but with a computer sidekick, would also let us keep the many nebulous benefits that a human president provides. The leader of the country, after all, isn’t just a “decider.” The president can also be a hero or a villain, a figure to emulate or lampoon—not to mention a unifier, or divider, relying on human rhetoric and emotion.
“The president is a national symbol,” notes Lori Cox Han, a political science professor at Chapman University. “When something goes well or something goes really badly, we look to the president.” And in a crisis, in all those times we expect the president to do more than just make a decision, we might still want a human in charge.There’s no place on Earth like the Great Barrier Reef. And Australians know it.
When the federal government approved the dumping of 3 million cubic metres of dredge spoil within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, an overwhelming 80% of Australians objected. Even scientists working for the Marine Park Authority disagreed with the decision.
The announcement also contributed to the historic swing against the Newman state government in Queensland, leading to the fall of a first-term premier. The new Labor government was quick to realise this and capitalise on the reef’s popularity by appointing the state’s first ever Minister for the Great Barrier Reef. (You can watch our interview with him here.)
The public outcry was so strong that even the federal government backtracked on its commitment, opting to ban all dredging within Marine Park areas in its recently released Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan.
But as laudable as that decision is (and Environment Minister Greg Hunt says it’s historic) the government seems to be more eager to please political pundits than actively address the wider problem; coal mining.
As leading coral reef scientists have said, you can have new coal mines or you can have a healthy reef. The two are incompatible.
It was a question I put to the Environment Minister in a recent interview.
Monique Wright: “On the topic of coal Minister, the massive expansion of Queensland’s mining operations is obviously having an impact on the reef. Can we conceivably save the Great Barrier Reef while also shipping millions of tonnes of coal across it?” Greg Hunt: “Could you just explain to me how it’s having an impact?” Monique Wright: “To be able to use it as a shipping lane essentially. And therefore to be constantly going over the top of it with this coal. Do you believe that will continue to be an issue?” Greg Hunt: “Well I haven’t seen any serious analysis that ships travelling over an area the size of Germany, when there are only on average a very small number of ships by world standards, has any significant impact.”
But Professor Terry Hughes from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies disagrees, saying ships impact on the reef through anchor damage, stirring up sediment, chemical pollution and noise.
A spokesperson for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority says the reef is among the best protected marine environments in the world, with most ships travelling safely along designated shipping routes.
“There are approximately 40–50 shipping movements a day across the Great Barrier and Torres Strait, compared to 140 ship movements per day within 20 kilometres of the 11,434 square kilometre Wadden Sea World Heritage Area in Europe.”
Small by world standards indeed. But consider this. A 2012 Greenpeace report found that since 1985, an average of two major shipping incidents (such as collisions or groundings) have occurred in the Great Barrier Reef every year. The likelihood of accident can only be exacerbated by increased shipping.
Marine scientist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg says the possibility of an accident means we have to tread carefully.
“We need to be extremely cautious given what has happened elsewhere with accidents such as the Exon-Valdez and other shipping related disasters.”
In any case, it’s clear the Environment Minister’s statement that ships have no significant impact only holds true as far as everything goes according to plan.
Because when things go haywire, the impacts are significant indeed. For instance the 2010 grounding of coal carrier Shen Neng 1 spilled oil across an area more than 3km wide, destroying around 290,000 square metres of reef.
Unlike the Environment Minister, the newly appointed Minister for the Great Barrier Reef seems to take the issue seriously.
Andrew O’Keefe: “Both the former Labor and Liberal governments approved large-scale coal-mining projects, which will see a doubling in shipping, major coastal reclamation works… As Minister for the reef, will you be opposing new industrial operations along that coast?” Steven Miles: “Look it’s my job to make sure that the development along the coast… that we minimise the environmental impact of those developments. So we’re doing a bunch of stuff. We’ll be looking at new shipping classes to increase the certainty that we won’t have shipping accidents on the reef.”
Shipping aside, the government’s long-term (and bi-partisan) plan to save the reef includes many salient points. The ban on dumping dredge material has never before been implemented and the efforts to reduce nitrogen content are a sure sign that marine scientists are being listened to.
All of these efforts are critical in saving the reef, which has already lost more than 50% of its coral cover in the past thirty years. But by failing to address the impact of expanded coal operations, Australia could be toying with the future of the reef.
In June the United Nations will decide whether to list the Great Barrier Reef as a World Heritage site in danger. The government’s quick-fix solution to ban dredging but allow the ongoing expansion of coal mining operations hints of a last minute ploy to avoid international embarrassment.
In the end we only have the Environment Minister’s words to rely on.
Larry Emdur: “What will the Great Barrier Reef look like for my grandchildren?” Greg Hunt: “It should be better than it is today. It’s one of the world’s great and majestic environmental jewels. It would be the first place you would put on a new World Heritage list if such a thing existed. It will be there, it will be better and your children and your grandchildren will be proud.”
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A MAN has admitted murdering Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah.
Mr Shah, 40, who ran a convenience store in the city's Shawlands area, died following an attack by 32-year-old Tanveer Ahmed on March 24.
Ahmed, from Bradford in West Yorkshire, pleaded guilty at the High Court in Glasgow.
Respected businessman Mr Shah was described by his family as a "brilliant" man.
Mr Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim who moved from Pakistan to Glasgow in 1998, was discovered outside his shop on Minard Road with stab wounds and taken to the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Hours before the attack, he had wished Christians a "very happy Easter" on Facebook.
Police said from the outset that they believed the attack was religiously prejudiced.
Mr Shah's customers and friends flocked to the store the day after the attack to lay flowers and tributes to the shopkeeper they described as a "pillar of the community" and a "wonderful and gentle man".
Hundreds turned out for a candlelit vigil that evening, including First Minister and local MSP Nicola Sturgeon, and donations to an online fundraiser for his family quickly topped £100,000.
Taxi driver Ahmed, a Muslim from Bradford's Toller area, was arrested and following a court hearing in April he released a statement through his lawyer saying Mr Shah had "disrespected the message of the Prophet Muhammad".
He said the shopkeeper "claimed to be a prophet" and that "if I had not done this others would".
Mr Shah's relatives said a person's religion, ethnicity or race never mattered to the shopkeeper, who treated everyone with kindness and respect.
The family said after his killing: "He was a brilliant man, recognising that the differences between people are vastly outweighed by our similarities.
"Asad left us a tremendous gift and we must continue to honour that gift by loving and taking care of one another."
The court heard that Ahmed, a Sunni Muslim, drove from Bradford to Glasgow on March 24 and engaged in a discussion with Mr Shah at his store before pulling out a knife and attacking the shopkeeper.
En route to Glasgow he had watched online footage of Mr Shah and made the comment "something needs to be done, it needs nipped in the bud".
Mr Shah fled violence in Pakistan to join his family in Scotland in 1998 and was granted asylum.
Ahmadis differ from the majority of Muslims in that they do not hold that Muhammad is the final Prophet, the court heard.
Evidence gathered showed that Mr Shah had posted videos on Facebook and YouTube which could be seen as him claiming that he was a Prophet.
"It so offended his feelings and faith that he had to kill him," advocate deputy Iain McSporran said.Rich Pedroncelli / AP Technology applied to wine tasting means an important advance for quality control
Admittedly, it can't wax poetic about the mouthfeel of a pinot or the flavors of mown grass and flint in a 2007 sauvignon. But an electronic "tongue" recently unveiled by scientists at Barcelona's Institute for Microelectronics is capable of identifying different wines and may be used as a new weapon in the battle against wine fraud. In a study published last week in the Royal Society of Chemistry's journal the Analyst, Cecilia Jonquera-Jiménez and her colleagues announced that by using microsensors cued to chemical ions, their device, or "e-tongue," can distinguish among grapes and vintages.
The technology has been in the works for some time. Scientists at the Institute had already developed membranes that could distinguish mineral content in different waters. "It was Cecilia's idea to apply the technology to wine," says César Fernández, speaking for his colleague Jonquera-Jiménez. "When she spoke with people in the industry, they would tell her they needed a quick way to determine the components of a wine without having to send it off to a lab."
Using first grape juice and then wine as their test samples, Jonquera-Jiménez and her team attached a series of synthetic membranes to a silicon chip called a microsensor. Each membrane detects a different chemical component of the liquid components that, when combined, mark the distinct characteristics of each grape varietal. So far, the device can distinguish among four: chardonnay, Aisén, malvasia and macabeu. It can also measure the difference between a 2005 vintage and a 2007. "It should even be able to identify, say, a chardonnay regardless of whether it was grown in France or California," says Fernández.
What's the value of an electronic tongue? Wine buyers, stung by recent reports of widespread fraud, will appreciate having an objective tongue on hand to weed out bogus bottles. "You could use it to verify that a wine was made from the proper grapes," says Mary O'Connor, wine director of Planeta Vino, a Madrid wine school. "For example, there are only five authorized grapes for a Rioja, but lots of winemakers sneak in cabernet anyway. This could help enforce the standards." The device, which is small, portable and relatively inexpensive, could also come in handy during the big business that is wine auctions. "Fraud is a big problem for auction houses," says O'Connor. "This is a way for them to verify a vintage."
For Antonio Palacios, professor of oenology at the University of Rioja, the significance is clear. "It represents an important advance for quality control," he says. "Wine is one of the most complex chemical substances out there, and no human palate can quantify its makeup objectively. This kind of electronic device can."
Jonquera-Jiménez plans to train the e-tongue to identify more varietals, and that, says, O'Connor, will only increase its value for wine educators like herself. "The human palate is unable to detect that a wine is, say, 20% merlot. A device [with a full range] would be an awesome tool for explaining the mystery of what goes into a wine." Still, she says, don't look for the e-tongue to completely replace the human palate. "This kind of device is purely technical. It's the human palate that determines whether a wine is worth drinking."
Indeed, the world's most famous wine expert doesn't expect the e-tongue to put him out of business anytime soon. Although he admits that his knowledge of the device is limited, critic Robert Parker of Wine Advocate says, "It's hard to believe any computer can interpret the nuances of smell and taste as well as a human's olfactory gland."With a number of familiar themes, the RBA's latest set of minutes from its July board meeting and steady rate verdict were balanced, slightly more positive tone on the labour market, and modest strengthening of its rhetoric around the currency. Market focus turns to Q2 CPI and Governor Stevens's speech in Sydney.
"Higher fuel prices and lagged effects of the weaker AUD should conspire to push headline CPI up from 1.3% to 1.7% in Q2", says RBC Capital Markets.
Domestically generated inflationary pressures, however, remain weak given the sluggish pace of wage growth and stagnant unit labour costs.
"This is expected to be reflected in the core measures, including a 0.2ppt deceleration in the trimmed mean metric to 2.1%y/y. The suite of inflation indicators should continue to provide more than enough leeway for further easing, which we expect will next occur in Q4", added RBC.WaterWerks on the Green
June 10th, 2017
LeMay Car Meusem
2702 E D St
Tacoma, WA 98421
Click here to register for the show
Click here for all the show prices
Itinerary
Staff Setup 7:00 Vendor & Swap Setup 7:30am Car show roll in 9:00am GA Gates Open 11:00am Car show cut off 11:00am (no show cars admitted after this time) Trophies 4:00pm Event Ends 5:00pm
**Activities include: Red Light/Green Light, Tug of War, The Teeter-Totter, and Car Limbo**
Host Hotel
Hotel Murano
1320 Broadway
Tacoma, WA 98402
Gates Open
The general public will be allowed on the event grounds at 11:00 am. Only cars that are entering the Show or Show n Shine can enter between 9:00am – 11:00am
Judging
Judging will not be concourse style or a point based system this year. There are no classes. Every car that enters the show parking will be given a number and a registration form. If you do not want to be judged, do not put the sticker on your car. There will be awards given for Best of Show, Best Wheels, Best Engine, etc. There will also be Bronze, Silver and Gold trophies as well.
There is no Show & Shine parking. There is only show parking this year. First 50 preregistered people will get a goodie bag.
Event Ends
The even ends at 5pm. Please make sure you drive safe and pick up any garbage. There will be receptacles available.
Show Rules
Show rules are located here. All attendees will follow the rules mentioned in the link. These rules are set forth by WaterWerks NW, LLC and the venue management.In 1952, George Jorgensen, a Bronxborn GI, underwent surgical and hormonal treatment in Denmark to become Christine Jorgensen, a nightclub entertainer and advocate for gender identity rights. Ever since, health professionals and lay people alike have debated the origins of gender identity, the wisdom of altering one’s biologically determined sex, and whether society should accept the transgender community as a fact of nature. There is even disagreement over whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination because of sex, also protects gender identity, a person’s inner sense of being male or female. Many more transgender people, whose identity does not match their biological sex, have come forward in recent years. Some seek sex change treatment. Olympic goldmedalist Bruce Jenner made a high-profile announcement last year of his transition to Caitlyn Jenner, including a cover story in Vanity Fair.
Yet the controversy over the rights of transgender students to use bathroom and locker room facilities that match their gender identity rather than their birth sex reflects the persistence of prejudice and misinformation about the nature and behavior of people who identify as transgender.
Those who insist that people should use only the facilities that match the sex on their birth certificates may not realize that most states allow those who change their sexual assignment to change the sex on their birth certificates. Furthermore, a transgender individual using a facility matched to his or her gender identity is no more of a sexual threat to others than anyone else using that bathroom might be. Psychosocial distress or embarrassment can be avoided simply by providing closed-door toilet and changing areas in public bathrooms and locker rooms.
I recently read a most illuminating article, “Care of Transsexual Persons,” that answered many questions and concerns about what is now more commonly referred to as being transgender. Written by Dr. Louis J. Gooren, an endocrinologist at VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam and a leading expert in the field, it was published in 2011 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Perhaps the most important point Gooren and others make is that a mismatch between gender identity and biological sex is not something people choose. The most common description given by transgender individuals is a persistent, painfully distressing belief that they are females trapped in a male body, or vice versa.
Although being transgender is classified in the psychiatric literature as “gender identity disorder,” Gooren pointed out that “a substantial proportion of the transgender population does not have a clinically significant coexisting psychiatric condition” other than chronic suffering from feeling they are not what their bodies tell them they are.
No chromosomal or hormonal causes of being transgender have been identified. Also lacking is convincing evidence that it is caused by some aberration of family dynamics — how a child is treated or dressed by mom, dad or anyone else.
Being transgender simply happens, possibly in the womb. All brains start out female; if the fetus is male, testosterone normally programs both the genitalia and the brain to develop as male. But autopsies of a small number of male-to-female transgender people found that two important areas of the brain had a typical female pattern, suggesting an alteration in the brain’s sexual differentiation.
In individuals who transition from female to male, it is possible that excessive production of androgens during pregnancy could have programmed the brain to be male.
Among adults, male-to-female transitions are nearly three times more common than female-to-male ones. It has not been unusual for people born male to first acknowledge and express their female gender identity in midlife, often after having married and fathered children.
In young children, girls who are tomboys and boys who act more like girls are quite common and should not be assumed to be transgender. Such behavior often changes by adolescence.
However, when bodily changes at puberty differ from a child’s gender identity, they are typically a source of extreme distress. Still, experts warn that at any age, and especially in adolescence, great caution must be taken before irreversible treatments are provided.
“Persons with gender identity disorder may have unrealistic expectations about what being a member of the opposite sex entails,” Gooren wrote. Therefore, he and others say that before starting hormone treatments, the person should live for at least a year as the desired sex.
A Swedish team from the Karolinska Institute and the University of Gothenberg followed 324 people who underwent sex reassignment surgery and compared them with matched controls in the general population. After an average follow-up of 11.4 years, men and women who had sex reassignments had death rates three times higher from all causes. Suicide rates were especially high, suggesting “the need for continued psychiatric follow-up” among those undergoing sex change, the authors wrote. Cancer deaths were doubled in the surgical group, though they appeared to be unrelated to hormone treatments.
The recent Danish study, by researchers in Copenhagen, investigated postoperative diseases and deaths among 104 men and women representing 98 percent of those who underwent sex reassignment surgery in Denmark from 1978 through 2010. One person in three had developed an ailment, most often cardiovascular disease, and one in 10 had died, with deaths occurring at an average age of 53.5.
The authors suggested that a host of societal factors, including social exclusion, harassment and negative experiences in school and at work, could largely contribute to the patients’ health problems. The findings underscore the importance of better postoperative support and closer attention to factors like smoking and alcohol abuse.WASHINGTON — Senator Rand Paul suffered five broken ribs and bruises to his lungs in an altercation with a neighbor on Friday at his home in Bowling Green, Ky., one of the senator’s advisers said on Sunday. The injuries, which the adviser said left Mr. Paul in considerable pain, appear to be much worse than the “minor” injuries that the police had reported on Saturday.
Doug Stafford, a senior strategist to Mr. Paul, said in a statement that it was unclear when the senator would be able to return to work.
According to a criminal complaint, Mr. Paul told the police that he was tackled from behind after the neighbor entered his property, NBC News has reported. The senator also had cuts to his nose and mouth and had trouble breathing because of the rib injuries, the complaint said. Mr. Stafford attributed the injuries to “high-velocity severe force.”This file picture dated July 5, 2005, shows Blackwater private security contractors securing the site of a roadside bomb explosion near the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad. Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images
In the latest plot twist in America’s longest war, Blackwater founder and informal Trump adviser Erik Prince is hawking a plan to privatize our military expedition in Afghanistan. The proposal comes, ironically, just days after a federal appeals court threw out much of the government’s case against five former Blackwater security guards who killed 17 Iraqis during a 2007 gun battle in Baghdad.
Together, these two vignettes illustrate the extent to which the U.S. has become reliant on contractors to fight its wars. More broadly, each of these cases highlights how much trouble the U.S. continues to have in deciding when, where, and why to use contractors—and how best to hold them accountable when things go wrong in war.
It’s easy to understand Prince’s faith in contractors—after all, Blackwater made him into a global player, and a very rich one at that. However, our national reliance on contractors during the past 16 years of war has not been repaid with results. At best, sending contractors to fight in Afghanistan would save a little bit of money while deploying fighters without the public scrutiny that normally attends military excursions. Privatization in Afghanistan offers neither a panacea for the war nor a way to reconcile the political battle between National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and White House strategist Steve Bannon. The only certain victor under the Prince proposal will be Prince himself, and any investors he brings along for this new private war.
At the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Pentagon relied so heavily on private firms that contractor personnel outnumbered troops in each country. The contractor headcount included hundreds of thousands of U.S., Iraqi, Afghan, and “third-country national” employees brought in to drive trucks, run dining facilities, provide translation, and build buildings, among other tasks.
That trend continues today, as the austere military missions in each country have outsourced many of their support missions to the private sector. At the high end of the expertise and cost spectrum, elite contractors like Academi (the company formerly known as Blackwater) and DynCorp provide security and consulting services via former U.S. and allied military personnel, functioning very much like private special operations units. At the lower end, contractors compete to perform every dull, dirty, and dangerous task necessary to support the U.S. military juggernaut, costing billions but saving the U.S. from having to deploy hundreds of thousands more troops. And somewhere in the middle of that continuum, contractors hire hundreds (once thousands) of Iraqis and Afghans to lend their language and cultural skills to our forces and to run reconstruction projects that have been vital parts of the counterinsurgency campaigns in each theater of war.
Four broad questions emerged during the wars about this heavy reliance on contractors—questions that still linger because all the stakeholders have powerful incentives to keep the contractor caissons rolling along, driven by the inertia of the wars themselves.
The first question is a normative one: Should the U.S. use contractors on the battlefield at all? Prior to the first Gulf War, the Pentagon answered this question largely in the negative, reserving contractors for specialized functions and limiting their numbers. After the first Gulf War, the Clinton administration pushed the Pentagon to increase its outsourcing in tandem with its “reinventing government” initiatives that privatized the work of many domestic agencies. Over time, the government has relied on technical definitions of what is (or is not) “inherently governmental” to answer the fundamental question of whether contractors are appropriate for a given role, with those decisions also predicated on cost-driven analyses of what would be most efficient for the taxpayer. These analyses miss the mark in wartime, however, when there is great value in having uniformed personnel, or civilian government employees, carry the country’s colors into battle. As my colleague Mackenzie Eaglen put it on Twitter: “Violence and killing in the name of the state should be left to those sworn to defend it and the Constitution.” Perhaps this is also why international law remains so skeptical about the propriety of using contractors to fight wars, and why nations have historically treated them as mercenaries or pirates.
Assuming it’s right to use private firms for these roles in certain circumstances, no national security agency has seriously evaluated the efficacy of contractors on the battlefield. Put simply: Sixteen years of evidence suggest contractors struggle as much as troops under austere conditions, and there’s no evidence to suggest they do better when it comes to building a road or advising foreign troops or delivering supplies. Indeed, the extensive archives of audits by special inspectors for Iraq and Afghanistan suggest the opposite: Contractors often struggle to perform, in large part because of their disconnection from the military and their dependence on commercial contracting systems for things like funding, schedules, and permission.
Cost is the third important question surrounding the use of contractors. Contractors may sometimes cost less than troops, in large part because of their deferred retirement, health care, and disability costs borne by the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs. But the data suggest that contractors cost more than military reservists, and significantly more than government civilian employees, who earn less than contractors and have fewer long-term benefits than troops. (As an aside, the government ends up paying long-term disability for contractors too, but it’s an inadequate scheme that serves neither the government nor contractors well.) Further, contractors may feed on the Pentagon itself, hiring away military talent that cost the Pentagon millions to train or creating situations wherein the Pentagon must pay more over time for the same things because of how contractors negotiate their contracts or manage their intellectual property.
Finally, there’s the issue of accountability, and how best to hold contractors accountable for their performance during messy wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under existing U.S. law, contractors operate under a chain of command that is very different from the military chain of command. Badly behaving contractors can be prosecuted in federal court, or even sometimes in military court, but only with enormous effort. Although contractors employ many military veterans and others who believe in the cause, they are ultimately accountable to their bottom line, not the mission. And therein lies the problem: how best to align their efforts, and hold them accountable, when they ultimately work for a different purpose than the troops they serve alongside.
Contractors have been held to account to some degree for their efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly with regard to business issues like accounting disagreements, battlefield construction problems, alleged fraud, and export control violations. However, as the Blackwater shooting case shows, prosecuting individual contractors for bad actions has been fiendishly difficult because of legal gaps or evidentiary problems. Holding them accountable under civil law has been equally difficult, whether for alleged torture at Abu Ghraib or culpability in making veterans sick through the use of burn pits. It has been even harder to hold contractors to account for program failures or mixed battlefield outcomes. In Iraq and Afghanistan, blame may simply be too diffuse to fix on any person or entity. At a certain point, bringing charges against individual contractors seems akin to writing speeding tickets at the Indy 500. Nonetheless, because we can summarily fire military commanders, or hold senior civilian leaders accountable, we deem them slightly more accountable than contractors, who charge their fees for services rendered and simply go home if the task gets left undone.
For better or worse, the Pentagon appears unlikely to kick its addiction to contractors anytime soon. Private sector personnel outnumber troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan; hundreds of thousands of contractors augment the Pentagon’s roster stateside, too. The majority of contractors supporting the Pentagon now provide services, not goods or weapons systems. After slogging for so long in Afghanistan, it’s easy to see why some new idea—almost any idea—for manning or running the war would hold appeal, especially for a White House that has struggled to reach consensus on this war. However, privatization offers neither quick nor certain victory, regardless of what Prince may say in his sales pitch.America’s Next War
Washington is now ‘involved’. Following a string of high-profile victories by Syrian government forces, the Obama Administration has announced that it will begin distributing ‘non-lethal aid’ to rebel factions. Although its justifications include four uses of chemical weapons by Syria, it is clear that Assad’s renewed momentum, with Russian and Iranian support, has changed Obama’s outlook. This was bound to happen, as bipartisan support for military action on Capitol Hill has gained momentum. The question is what the immediate consequences will be for both Syria, and the region more broadly.
The first is a proxy-war between the U.S. and its immediate allies. There will be a great deal of internal fighting over which resistance organizations ought to receive the most assistance. The Obama Administration carefully stated that it would give aid to “moderate
|
the January transfer window as Alexandre Pato finalised the details of a six-month loan move to Stamford Bridge, and Chelsea's interim manager insists he was given a significant say in the decision to pursue the Brazilian.
"I said, 'We are short of strikers and let's look at available strikers,'" Hiddink revealed. "Not having [Radamel] Falcao and with [Loic] Remy's injury frequency, I said let's go for it [the Pato deal]. The green light is mine and getting him on loan means there's no big risk for the club."
Chelsea's decision to sell Ramires to Jiangsu Suning in a deal reported to be worth around £25 million this week took many supporters by surprise, but Hiddink reveals that it was taken with a view to increasing the number of first-team opportunities afforded to Ruben Loftus-Cheek and other talented youngsters on the fringes at Stamford Bridge.
"We can [now] give the youngsters a chance as well to show themselves," Hiddink added when asked about the Ramires deal. "[Loftus-Cheek] did very well in training the other day and the youngsters will have opportunities. That made it easier towards the future to let Ramires go."
Liam is ESPN FC's Chelsea correspondent. Follow him on Twitter: @Liam_Twomey.The advertisement above was made entirely on a computer. It might look photorealistic and the details might seem too exact and the shattering objects too precise, but that’s the case. It was made by Alex Roman for Silestone, a company that makes countertops. The video was made by two people in two and a half months.
While the shatter effect is cool, the realism of the fruit really blows me away. Those lemons are look so real. After all, I understand how a mineral crashing into thousands of tiny pieces can fool my eyes, but seeing something commonplace, like the lemons or grapes, look that real in HD video is mind-blowing.
More of Roman’s work is available at thirdseventh.com where you can see other impressive videos highlighting architecture, flowing movement, and the use of photographic techniques in computer-generated video. For “The Third & The Seventh” he lists his software used as being 3ds Max, V-Ray (for 3ds Max), Adobe AfterEffects and finally Adobe Premiere Pro.
If you want some insights into Roman’s process, you can check out this excellent behind-the-scenes video he has made available.
Vimeo via Laughing SquidThe success of the film, which has also sold across Europe and the Middle East, follows that of Russian franchises 'Snow Queen' and 'Sheep and Wolves.'
Ukrainian animated feature The Stolen Princess has sold to China, Germany, the Middle East, North Africa and a raft of other territories after its debut at the American Film Market last month.
The sales, by Kiev-based Film.UA Group at AFM, reflect the growing strength of animation from the region. Russia's Wizart also had strong sales for the latest episode of its leading franchise Snow Queen and fellow animated film, Sheep and Wolves.
The Stolen Princess tells the story of Ruslan, a young warrior determined to marry the king's daughter Mila. When they meet love soon blossoms, only to be threatened by an evil sorcerer, Chernomor, who kidnaps the princess, planning to sacrifice her to give him immortality.
UA confirmed The Stolen Princess closed sales to China, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, as well as countries of the Middle East and North Africa, after an AFM screening of a "work-in-progress" version of the feature. Several more territories are currently under negotiation.
"We understand that even such work-in-progress screenings are a necessary part for the project's international promotion campaign, and we plan to keep using this instrument at future markets," said Film.UA Group international sales manager Yevgeny Drachov.
The film will next screen at the European Film Market in Berlin in February.
The Stolen Princess has previously sold to South Korea, France and French-speaking territories in Europe, Poland, Bulgaria, Iran and Israel.According to MLS Commissioner Don Garber, MLS will expand to 24 teams by 2020. The first team, New York City FC will be joining MLS in 2015, leaving five years for the four other teams. During the All-Star break, MLS publicly announced their contemplation to condense the schedule to 28-games. Might this be a better idea than first believed by the majority public?
First - lets think of the major advantage and disadvantage of a 28 game league schedule.
Advantage: You allow yourself to stop having games on international weekends. Pretty much every major league doesn't play on these game days. Let's not have Los Angeles Galaxy having to play without their stars and being hampered simply because they have lots of good players getting called up to international squads.
Disadvantage: You are going to remove three home games from every team's schedule. Teams need the revenue. MLS have been building slowly, but need to ensure they remain a viable league. Removing revenue sounds like it would be the same kind of mistakes people made before, ultimately leading to league bankruptcy.
There may be a solution, though. If the league is adamant about reducing the amount of league games, there are some things they can do to add some games to each team's home schedule.
1) Make more out of the US Open Cup. England's FA Cup and other European domestic cup competitions are popular and sell out, so should the US Open Cup.
2) Make an MLS type cup, regionalizing within the MLS teams to have groups of three (maybe add some non-MLS teams for now to make 24). Games can be played midweek that way. If you have groups of three, add in some local rivalries that will be more likely to sell out, and it will give you extra games.
Now let's say the 28-game season happens. In 2015, there are 20 teams, Houston Dynamo move back West and NYCFC make up the 10th team in the East. Scheduling is easy, 18 intradivision games (9 home, 9 away) and 10 interdivision games (5 home, 5 away). Simple.
However, let's think of 24 teams, two divisions, 12 teams per division. You play each team in your division two times for 22 games. That leaves six games left in a 28-game season, meaning NYCFC host LA Galaxy once every 4 years. That's not going to work.
Now let's say, for argument's sake that the other four teams at Miami (Beckham), Orlando (>20,000 fans at the recent final), Atlanta (according to this article there may be a "Blank" check-book to sweeten that pot). and San Antonio (a quick and informal poll between tBG contributors picked them as the fourth team).
While there is a bit of a stretch at times, one could easily see MLS going to four divisions of six. MLS East will have Montreal Impact, New England Revolution, New York Red Bulls, NYCFC, Philadelphia Union, and D.C. United. MLS North will have Toronto FC, Chicago Fire, Columbus Crew, Sporting Kansas City, Real Salt Lake and Colorado Rapids. Within MLS West there will be Vancouver Whitecaps, Seattle Sounders, Portland Timbers, LA Galaxy, Chivas USA and San Jose Earthquakes. That leaves Houston Dynamo, FC Dallas, and new teams San Antonio, Atlanta, Miami and Orlando in MLS South.
This will give you six teams per division. You play each team home and away (10 games). You then play all other teams home or away (18 games). That gives you the 28-game season MLS wants with the top two teams in each division qualifying for an 8-team playoff.
Add in the MLS League Cup - (San Jose, LA Galaxy, Chivas), (Portland, Seattle, Vancouver), (San Antonio, Houston, Dallas), (Atlanta, Miami, Orlando), (New England, NYRB, D.C.), (Philadelphia, NYCFC, Montreal), (Toronto, Chicago, Columbus), (Sporting KC, RSL, Colorado). Give each team two home games and two away games; that's 32 guaranteed games. Add in US Open Cup and that gives you 33 guaranteed games. Do well in both cups and you can get to 40 games in a season, plenty to cover the loss of revenue in league games. The more localized travel most of the time is going to cut down on costs and allow more midweek games.
So if MLS really wants to drop the number of league games that are played, the only way to really do that seems to be to have four divisions of six instead of sticking with just East and West, giving MLS a system sort of comparable to the NHL's new system.
Personally? I'd rather stick with two divisions, 34 games, more local midweek games (as much as that would stop me going to some). But I don't have any say in this. What do you think? Should MLS keep their current system in place, or should they adopt a shorter schedule more friendly towards international competitions and aimed at promoting the U.S. Open Cup? Let me know in the comments section!Conor Casey showed flashes of his brilliance this past campaign, and was a key reason behind the Union's midseason run to respectability. He registered eight goals, good for second best behind Sebastian Le Toux. But as the season wore on, Casey's minutes dwindled. Late in the season as a starter he was consistently subbed after 60 minutes. And as the tendinitis in his knee worsened, he stopped playing altogether. At age 33, Conor Casey can't be depended on for more than depth at forward next season, leaving a huge vacancy that needs to be filled in the offseason.
Here are some facts and stats about Casey:
Casey had a base salary of $192K in 2014
Casey played 1,459 minutes, 58 minutes per appearance, and 48% of the possible minutes. That minute total was good for twelfth most on the team
Casey led all offensive players with 0.7 clearances per game, indicating he contributed at the defensive end
Casey's whoscored.com rating of 6.73 was ranked 171st our of 268 players who played more than 17 games
Casey's pass completion percentage of 65.7% was the worst of all offensive players on the Union
Conor Casey Whoscored.com Stats Games Minutes Goals Assists Key Passes/Gm Pass % Tackles/Gm Int/Gm Clear/Gm Rating 2014 25 1459 8 1 0.8 65.7 0.2 0.2 0.7 6.73
Conor Casey does not have a contract with Philadelphia Union going into next season. Bringing Casey back next year would require a relatively big investment for a backup forward. Do his intangibles and experience bring enough to the Union to warrant a return to the Union? Would the Union want both Casey and Brian Brown as backups? Conor Casey has given two solid seasons to the Union, but does he have enough left in the tank?
Should the Union re-sign Conor Casey?
Previous You Be The GM votes:
Brian Brown
Maurice Edu
Amobi OkugoMashed, baked, or roasted potatoes can't be beat as a comfort food. Enter crispy potato pancakes, a warming dish for fall weather and just right for breakfast or dinner. Served with a dollop of vegan sour cream or applesauce, these savory spuds from VN columnist Robin Robertson are simple to make and delightful to devour.
Serves 4
What You Need:
1-1/2 pounds russet potatoes
1 small yellow onion
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, minced
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Safflower oil, for frying
What You Do:
1. Peel and grate potatoes, then place in a colander and set over a large bowl. Using your hands, squeeze out excess liquid from potatoes. Pour off liquid and place potatoes in bowl. Grate onion and add to potatoes along with parsley, flour, baking powder, salt, and pepper, and mix well.
2. Preheat oven to 275 degrees. In a large skillet over medium heat, heat a thin layer of oil. Take a heaping tablespoon of batter and flatten it before gently placing it in hot oil. Make three or four more potato pancakes this way, and add to skillet without crowding pan. Fry until golden brown on both sides, turning once, about 8 minutes total.
3. Repeat with remaining potato mixture, adding more oil as necessary. Remove cooked potato pancakes to paper towels to drain, then transfer to an ovenproof platter and keep warm in oven until all pancakes are cooked.
Photo by Hannah Kaminsky
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Jonathan Baha'i and Michael Maloney give Peerplays updates announces that next week they will be dropping by to give a BitShares Sharedrop announcement!
Learn more about the project at Peerplays Website
Upvote their content to show support at the PeerPlays Steemit Tag
KenCode (CTO) and Rodrigo (CMO) of BlockPay BlockPay Targets Venezualan citizens to help them remain resilient while safely storing and transferring their value during their difficult economic times. Robrigo digs into BlockPay's Ambassador program!
Learn more at the BlockPay Website
Upvote their content to show support at Blockpay's Steemit tag
@CM-Steem on Steemit gives an update regarding the Gridcoin hangouts, the status of the 'GRIDCOIN' MPA (appealing to #bitshares witnesses), Gridcoin's integration status with Openledger and informing users of the recent Gridcoin/BOINC Steem posts he has created.
Also speaks about tipping to BOINC users using a new tipping tool they are working on!
Upvote their content to show support at Gridcoin's Steemit tag
#4 Sollywood NewMoney Project
Surprise appearance from Solomon Sollars & Sense. He compares and contrasts Steem and the New Money Project while explaining the reasons for using BitShares for his UIA as he moves forward to funding New Money's Own Graphene based chain into the future. Answers community questions and calls out for developers interested in being paid to work on the project!
To find out more about his project check out the New Money Homepage
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Have your own Project? RSVP Here for Next Week's Hangout!Microsoft Corp has allowed government customers in China to use their own encryption algorithms in the especially-tailored Windows 10 Government Edition, with the aim of keeping all data in the nation, senior company executives said.
A staff member of Microsoft Taiwan demonstrates the interface of the new Windows 10 operating system at a press conference in Taipei, southeast China's Taiwan, July 29, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]
The US technology company unveiled the first version of its operating system customized for China's government agencies and State-owned enterprises in Shanghai on Tuesday, which it said has passed security reviews and received feedback for improvement through trial runs.
"One of the discussions we had is that they (Chinese government customers) want to keep all data within the country. They had this desire to be able to add encryption capabilities," said Terry Myerson, executive vice-president of Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft.
China Daily reported in March that Microsoft was developing the special build through C&M Information Technologies, its 49-51 joint venture with State-backed China Electronics Technology Group Corp.
Three government customers are the first to pilot the government version operating system－at the national level with China Customs, at the regional level with Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization, and State-owned enterprise Westone Information Technology, said Beth Xu, chief executive officer of CMIT.
According to Myerson, the China Government Edition is based on the Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, but has removed elements not necessarily needed by Chinese government employees, such as the cloud storage function OneDrive, and a number of entertainment features.
Myerson said CMIT is configuring the deployment so that all updates and data remain strictly within China. But whatever is added in encryption is beyond the reach of Microsoft.
"The security review is a thorough and transparent process. There has been a lot of education on the Windows operating system among government customers, and we will share the source code through the Government Security Program," he said.
This is "a far cry" from the initial design and normal practices of the Windows operating system, which relies on data feedback for improvement, said Harry Shum, executive vice-president of Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group.
"Yet we fully respect the government's concerns not to collect data. This is also in line within our thinking that within their own computer systems, they are entitled to add encryption capabilities," he said.CASUAL INTERACTIONS dere reeder, i’m proud to present a new monthly podcast i made with my friends, John “Hambone” McGuire and Shaun Simon.
Hambone, Shaun, and i have known each other for a really long time. we wrote records together, toured the world together, and eventually sat in front of a few microphones in my basement together.
episode one is all about origin stories…how our friendships came to be and why we decided to record our voices.
enjoy, lurk, like and subscribe for a monthly dose of casual interactions… available now on:
iTunes Stitcher SoundCloud Spotify GooglePlay & B.Calm’s Youtube Channel • 2 October 2018 • 325 notes
LeATHERMOUTH XO Vinyl Preorders Available! dear frens,
i am pleased to announced that after all these years XO by LeATHERMOUTH will finally see a vinyl release on November 9, 2018 via the wonderful Epitaph Records. preorders for this limited edition colored vinyl release (red, white and blue), as well as the ratking t-shirt vinyl bundle, are up for presale now in our KingsRoad merch store. this release will be limited to 1000 and will be sold exclusively in our KingsRoad online store.
to those of you who have been hoping and asking for this release, thank you for keeping the LM torch lit all these years. much love. this is for the kids who ain’t got no soul… xofrnk • 13 September 2018 • 320 notesSpecial Rapporteur to the occupied Palestinian territory Makarim Wibisono. (Photo Credit: PLO Negotiation Affairs Department Twitter)
BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- In a landmark victory for the Palestinian leadership, the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday passed four resolutions relating to the occupied Palestinian territory, one of which will draw up a "blacklist" of companies who do business in illegal Israeli settlements.
The PLO Negotiations Affairs Department said that in addition to the resolution regarding settlements -- which passed 32 to 0 -- a resolution was adopted recognizing the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
A resolution focused on Palestinian human rights that was passed by the council addressed Israeli army closures in areas under occupation, as well as home demolitions, violations of religious sites, and "extrajudicial" killings carried out by Israeli forces.
Another resolution to enact proper investigative systems to ensure accountability for violations carried out by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory was also passed by the council.
The resolution proposed by the Palestinian leadership obliging the UN Human Rights Council to form a database of all actors conducting business in areas under Israeli military occupation reportedly received major opposition from the US and EU prior to Thursday’s vote.
The Western leaders reportedly warned that the resolution would come at the detriment to aid given to the Palestinian Authority.
However, the resolution echoes a recent EU decision to label products made in illegal Israeli settlements, a victory for the BDS movement which attempts to use boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel to end its decades-long military occupation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on social media following Thursday's vote referred to the UN Human Rights Council an "anti-Israel circus."
The PM called on “"responsible governments not to honor the decisions of the Council that discriminate against Israel."
However, Palestinian Envoy to the UN Human Rights Council Ibrahim Khreisheh called Thursday's vote a "message of hope" for the Palestinian people.
Khreisheh called on all countries to respect the resolutions, pointing to past failures of the international community to act on UN measures regarding Israel.
"As the belligerent occupying power, Israel continues to systematically violate the inalienable rights of the Palestinians while enjoying impunity from the international community, despite numerous UN resolutions demanding an equitable and just end to the occupation," Khreisheh said.
"We ask countries opposed to the implementation of international law in the occupied State of Palestine to consider the impact their disregard for international law has within the international legal sphere and the Israeli violations they are perpetuating against the Palestinian people."
On Monday, Special Rapporteur to the occupied Palestinian territory Makarim Wibisono gave a particularly scathing report of Israeli violations in an address to the UN Human Rights Council.
Wibisono said that since he took up his post in June 2014, Israel had not allowed him direct access to victims in parts of the occupied Palestinian territory, despite repeated requests.
The human rights expert emphasized the "desperate need" for effective protection of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, and castigated Israel for its many failures as an occupying power and the international community for offering no protection.
"I have been struck by the abundance of information documenting violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, and the seeming inability of the international community to match what is known of the situation with more effective protection of Palestinians,” Wibisono said.
In recent years, the Palestinian leadership has made a concerted effort to place international pressure on Israel to end its military occupation after decades of failed peace negotiations.British Prime Minister Theresa May calls for greater control over the Internet in the wake of Saturday’s terrorist attack. (Will Oliver/European Pressphoto Agency)
— Following the third deadly terrorist attack Britain has suffered in less than three months, Prime Minister Theresa May vowed to review her country’s counterterrorism strategy.
While May condemned what she called the “evil ideology of Islamist extremism,” the thrust of her new counterterrorism demands focused on a far more technical matter: the Internet.
“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed,” May said Sunday, speaking outside 10 Downing Street. “Yet that is precisely what the Internet — and the big companies that provide Internet-based services — provide.”
It has become a common practice among those behind Europe’s terrorist attacks to communicate with one another via encrypted messaging platforms such as Viber and WhatsApp.
In a March vehicle attack outside Parliament that killed four pedestrians and a police officer, the perpetrator, Khalid Masood, 52, was revealed by British media to have been communicating on WhatsApp just minutes beforehand. This prompted Britain’s Home Secretary Amber Rudd to implore that messaging services “don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.”
It remains unclear, however, whether Masood’s use of WhatsApp was relevant to his crime.
The suicide bombing last month outside a Manchester concert, where 22 were killed, fueled speculation from May and others in the government about the problem of such messaging, but there has been no confirmation the technology played a role.
It is also unclear whether any of the three known assailants in Saturday’s attack relied on encrypted messaging in hatching their plot.
But May argued Sunday for increased government surveillance of cyberspace, already a component of the Conservative Party’s platform in Britain’s upcoming snap election later this week.
“We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning,” she said. “And we need to do everything we can at home to reduce the risk of extremism online.”
Similarly, her party’s manifesto already has called for a “regulatory framework in law” to “ensure that digital companies, social media platforms and content providers” abide by standards that prevent “abusive behavior.”
In the beleaguered Europe of 2017, having struggled to prevent an unprecedented spike in terrorist violence, May’s proposal is nothing new.
In recent years, variations of cyber-surveillance measures already have been imposed in nations such as France and Germany, more accustomed to the type of violence that now seems to have set its sights on Britain.
The problem, security analysts say, is that these surveillance measures aren’t always effective.
“The technical stuff is important and essential — disrupting these networks, etc. — but all you’re doing there is managing the problem,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a counterterrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “And how do you make the problem go away?”
In France, for instance, the country that has endured most of Europe’s recent terrorism, the government passed sweeping surveillance legislation following the January 2015 attack on the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo.
To the chagrin of information activists, the new laws permit the French government to monitor the private communications of individuals without having secured judicial authorization. Among other things, the laws also require Internet service providers to share metadata with French intelligence services.
Despite the adoption of these laws, even deadlier attacks in France were soon to follow.
In November 2015, 130 people were killed in an Islamic State-orchestrated assault on a concert hall and cafes across Paris. In July 2016, a “lone wolf” attacker, allegedly inspired by the Islamic State, plowed through celebrating crowds on an ocean promenade in Nice, killing 86. A host of smaller-scale incidents have happened periodically since.
The German Parliament adopted a controversial anti-terror surveillance law in October, a measure that, in part, allows the government to intercept communications of foreign nationals and organizations in Germany.
That law took effect earlier this year. But despite earlier surveillance techniques already in place, a Tunisian man who unsuccessfully sought asylum — who had pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State — plowed a truck through a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12.
“You’re dealing with ingrained ideologies and fundamental global shifts and patterns. It’s difficult to imagine how a single Western government can eradicate it,” Pantucci said.
In the wake of Saturday’s attack, it is not clear what prompted the police roundups of 12 people just hours later. Nor is it clear, despite the prime minister’s speech, whether the perpetrators made use of encrypted messaging platforms.
Mark Rowley, London’s assistant police commissioner, said that three assailants had been shot dead at the scene, but that they were not believed to have had accomplices.
Read more
Brits gather to see Ariana Grande again, this time in defiance
London attack toll rises to 7 dead as Theresa May insists ‘things need to change’
‘I saw blinding white headlights.... It hit directly to the right of me.’
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign newsAP San Diego Padres legend Tony Gwynn died at age 54 on Monday.
He had been undergoing treatment for cancer and had been on medical leave from his job coaching San Diego State since April.
Gwynn retired in 2001. He played for 20 seasons, compiling more than 3,000 hits and entering the Hall of Fame in 2007. His incredible stats show he was one of the best hitters in the history of the sport.
According to CSN Philly, Gwynn was first diagnosed with cancer in 2010. He has had two surgeries, one to remove a tumor on his cheek.
His son, Philadelphia Phillies player Tony Jr., told CSN on Sunday, "This has been the hardest of the four years he's fought it, by far."
Major League Baseball announced the news.
Gwynn was the rare superstar athletes who played his entire career for a single team. In his Hall of Fame speech, he had some great things to say about the organization:
"I played for one organization, the San Diego Padres, and when this day started out today, I thought I was going to go third. I thought I was going to get to hear what other people said about their towns and their cities. I only know one way, that's the Padre way. I wore brown, I wore the brown and gold, I wore the blue and orange. I didn't get a chance to wear the sand and whatever color blue you want to call that, but I'm proud as heck to be a San Diego Padre. I played for one team, I played in one town. I told the people of San Diego when I left to come to Cooperstown, they were going to be standing up here with me, so I hope they are just as nervous as I am, because this is a tremendous honor to be here today."
He was one of the best ever.Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Machines have replaced human work for as long as there have been machines, but in recent years, jobs that long seemed immune to the rise of the robots — restaurant servers, truck drivers, retail staff — have started looking shaky. Already, at the experimental edges of the economy, you can have dinner in a server-free dining room, watch a driverless truck haul cargo from A to B, and buy your groceries without a human being having anything to do with it. So BuzzFeed News went out and spent a day experiencing the new, job-free economy.
As those technologies go mainstream — and drive the older, human-dependent operations out of business — entire categories of jobs will go extinct. New jobs will always grow in popularity as old ones decline, most economists insist. But there’s no guarantee they’ll pop up fast enough to replace massive employment categories like restaurant workers or truck drivers, at least not without some serious economic pain in the meantime. And there’s no guarantee the jobs of the future will pay well or offer decent benefits. So what happens when well-paying middle-class work becomes a historical oddity, like horse-drawn carriages or professional typists? A growing list of technologists, economists, and labor organizers have banded together in recent months to fund studies of universal basic income (UBI), an increasingly popular policy idea in tech circles and on the left that would provide every citizen with a guaranteed monthly income. Earlier this month, eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar announced that his organization would be donating half a million dollars to a yearlong pilot program of basic income in Kenya, via the organization GiveDirectly. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes recently helped launch the "Economic Security Project," a brain trust with a $10 million war chest dedicated to studying and bringing about a viable UBI in the United States.
Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters Protesters dressed as robots demand a universal basic income at a demonstration in Switzerland.Since the beginning of war in Donbas, some 4,000 soldiers and mercenaries from Russia have died in Donbas. That is the estimate of Elena Vasilieva, a well-known human rights activist.
In early August she
created the group called “Cargo 200 from Ukraine to Russia” in
social networks. Its name is a reference to dead bodies carried
across the border.
The name caught
attention of tens of thousands of people, and the group started
receiving information about regular army soldiers, officers and
former military who volunteered to fight and were killed in eastern
Ukraine.
Having collected
enough material, Vasilieva decided to come to Ukraine and see with
her own eyes what is happening here. She became the source of
information for hundreds of Russians women whose sons and husbands
secretly went (or were sent) to war. Vasilieva is the one who tells
them what military units of the Russian Federation took part in which
fights, and what to do if a soldier has not been in communication for
some weeks.
Ukrainska
Pravda: You have been in Ukraine for about two months, which has
coincided with cease-fire. What discoveries have you had here?
Elena
Vasilieva: Initially when I realized how many dead people there were
on both the Russian and the Ukrainian side, I set myself a task to
stop this carnage. This breaks down into many smaller tasks.
The
first one of them is to try to find and record what troops were taken
into Ukraine, where the dead people came from. They’re not given out
back to their relatives in Russia.
After
my trip to the anti-terrorist operation zone I tried to disperse a
number of myths. For example, that there are NATO troops here. They
aren’t here, you see. That the “Ukres” (Editor’s note: this is
a derogatory reference to Ukrainians used by the separatists and the
Russian troops) are evil fascists. To find the Banderites who eat
babies for breakfast, I went to the western Ukraine. I only found two
Banderites, in the form of monuments.
Along
the way I met many volunteers and saw that the whole of Ukraine is
burned by this war. And also, in different regions the wounded and
those who had been in captivity, regardless of each other told me the
same story about the war – about the Ilovaisk trap, about the
Buryats who fought on behalf of Russia.
This
diverged completely from what the Russian propaganda was saying. This
is why I included this in a movie: “Ukraine,
in search of truth,” which Odesa-based Channel 7 helped me to
make.
Now,
when the Russian mothers siege me with questions about their lost
children soldiers, first of all I ask them what unit it was and
realize that this unit fought in Izvaryno. It means that either this
man stayed on the battlefield and was buried there somewhere, or was
taken to Rostov region.
I
can never say for sure, but I follow up on directions and point to
where the search should go.
UP:
How do mothers stay in touch with you? How do they find out what you
do? The Russian propaganda is still strong, and many simply refuse to
believe that this is happening.
EV:
When your own child dies or disappears, mothers get out of their way
to look in different directions.
The
very group Cargo 200 was so explosive because in August, when it
appeared, quite a few people died and were searched for already.
Initially, I created the group to dump all the information there and
then analyze it.
But
in the very first week it was jammed: people started sending links
and started counting. After the first count we came out with the
figure of 1,000 dead Russians. Then the grapevine kicked in, and
soldiers, officers and their mothers realized what happened, and
information started spreading in military communities.
It’s
more complicated with remote corners of the country. In Russia still
not so many people use the Internet, not to mention the deep
provinces. But surprisingly, I started to get correspondence from
very small villages.
I
predicted that November will become a decisive month because all the
draftees who were sent into Ukraine disguised as contractors, have to
come back home, but they’re not coming back. And they’re recruiting
new guys now, basically to become cannon fodder.
Those
mothers who are sending their kids to the army, have to know this is
what can happen to them. And in Russia we have lawyers who are trying
to help the draftees to wiggle out of trips to Ukraine.
UP:
But it’s very difficult to regular draftees to wiggle out.
EV:
Very difficult, almost impossible. For the first two months the
draftee will be safe because he has to learn at least to handle the
gun. And then it gets difficult.
I
just received a silly, but pretty typical story. A mother is writing
that her son had three months left till demobilization. A man arrived
to his unit, saying “Sign this contract, it’s not real.” He
talked a few kids into signing this “not real contract”. The guy
is gone, the contract remains. Now they expect mobilization, but are
told that they’re contractors now. How do you break it? They are now
told they’re being sent to Ukraine, and they don’t know what to do.
UP:
Are they actually told they go “to Ukraine” now?
EV:
They are now. Until September we did not know for sure if people were
thrown in as cannon fodder. In the field they were shot either by the
Ukrainian side, or by the DNR (Editor’s note: Donetsk People
Republic, a self-proclaimed secessionist entity).
There
are a lot of complaints about the DNR from the military. They are
referred to as stoned and drugged. They have rocket-propelled
grenades in their hands and mortars, and they fire anywhere they
want, they don’t care who they’re shooting at, as long as they shoot-
this is how much bravado they have.
UP:
There are KamAZ trucks with equipment and soldiers coming to Donbas
from Russia every day. Do you get information about that?
EV:
I do, before they enter (Ukraine). Because when they come in, the
soldiers switch off their phones, which are then taken away from
them.
UP:
The information you collect, is it going to be possible to use in
courts, for example?
EV:
Of course. I do it intentionally to draw people’s attention to the
problem. You media is one thing, everyone knows there is war going
on. The Russian media are a different case. Many people still think
this is a civil war and there are no Russian troops. So now our job
is to stop this war by normal means.
UP:
As I understand,
|
pins (greater than 5mm diameter) are printed with a perimeter and infill, affording a strong connection to the rest of the print. Smaller diameter pins (less than 5mm diameter) can be made up of only perimeter prints with no infill. This creates a discontinuity between the rest of the print and the pin, resulting in a weak connection that is susceptible to breaking. In a worst-case scenario, small pins may not print at all as there is not enough print material for the newly printed layers to adhere to.
Print of vertical pins with decreasing diameter (from 25 to 5mm) illustrating the upper diameter of the print becoming too small to print accurately
Often correct printer calibration (optimal layer height, print speed, nozzle temperature etc.) can reduce the likelihood of small pins failing. The addition of a radius at the base of the pin will eliminate that point as a stress concentration and add strength. For critical pins smaller than 5mm diameter, an off the shelf pin inserted into a printed hole may be the optimal solution.
Key design consideration: If your design contains pins smaller than 5 mm diameter, add a small fillet at the base of the pin. If function is critical, consider including a hole in your design in the location of the pin, drill the hole to the correct size and insert an off the shelf pin.
Advanced design
Several key aspects to consider when printing with FDM are how to reduce the amount of support required, part orientation and the direction the part is built on the build platform.
Splitting up your model
Often, splitting up a model can reduce its complexity, saving on cost and time. Overhangs that require a large amount of support may be removed by simply splitting a complex shape into sections that are printed individually. If desired, the sections can be glued together once the print has been completed.
Splitting a model in order to eliminate the need for support
Hole orientation
Support for holes is best avoided by changing the print orientation. Removal of support in horizontal axis holes can often be difficult, but by rotating the build direction 90 degrees, the need for support is eliminated. For components with multiple holes in different directions, prioritize blind holes, then holes with the smallest to largest diameter, then criticality of hole size.
Re-orientation of horizontal axis holes can eliminate the need for support
Build direction
Due to the anisotropic nature of FDM printing, understanding the application of a component and how it is built are critical to the success of a design. FDM components are inherently weaker in one direction due to layer orientation.
The lack of continuous material paths and the stress concentration created by each layer joint contribute to this weakness. Since the layers are printed as a round-ended rectangle, the joints between each layer are actually small valleys. This creates a stress concentration where a crack will want to form.
Rules of thumbPoliZette Trump Unveils 100-Day ‘Contract with the American Voter’ GOP nominee stakes out bold agenda, says 'change has to come from outside our very broken system'
Donald Trump delivered his “contract with the American voter” on Saturday, outlining a “100-day action plan to make America great again.”
Speaking in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil and the location where President Abraham Lincoln delivered the eternal Gettysburg Address, Trump pledged to bring change to Washington and unity to a broken nation.
“Hillary Clinton is not running against me — she’s running against change.”
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“Change has to come from outside our very broken system,” Trump said in his address. “I’m not a politician, and have never wanted to be one. But when I saw the trouble our country was in, I knew I couldn’t stand by and watch any longer. Our country has been so good to me. I love our country. I felt I had to act,” said Trump.
Trump promised he would pursue six measures designed to curb government corruption on his first day in office. These include a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all of Congress and a hiring freeze on all federal employees other than military, public safety and public health employees.
In addition, Trump said he would pursue a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations be removed. He also promised a five-year ban on congressional and White House officials becoming lobbyists, a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government, and a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American campaigns. “We will drain the swamp in Washington, D.C., and replace it with a new government of, by and for the people,” Trump said.
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Trump also said he will pursue a series of measures designed to protect the American worker. He announced his “intention to totally renegotiate NAFTA” or withdraw from the deal under article 2205. Trump said he will also “direct my secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator [and] direct the secretary of commerce and U.S. trade representatives to identify all foreign trade abuses” and use every legal tool at their disposal to end them.
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Trump also pledged to lift all “restrictions on the production of 50 trillion dollars worth of job-producing energy reserves” including oil, shale and coal. “We will put our miners back to work,” Trump said. He also said he will lift the “Obama Clinton roadblocks” that prevent America’s ability to make the most of its own energy resources.
Trump also promised five steps he would take to reinforce the safety and security of the American people and their Constitution. Trump said his first step will be to cancel “every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum, and order issued by President Obama.”
He will then initiate the process of replacing Justice Scalia, cut off all federal funding to sanctuary cities, and “begin removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back.” He also promised to “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur.”
In addition to first-day acts, Trump said he will spend the first 100 days of his term working with Congress on a series of acts to restore America’s economy and security. Trump claimed his Middle Class Tax Relief Simplification Act would grow the economy by 4 percent a year and create 25 million new jobs through simplifying the tax code, regulation relief and lifting restrictions on energy production.
The middle class would receive large tax reductions, with a middle class family of two seeing an approximate tax cut of 35 percent. “Current number of brackets will be reduced from 7 to 3 and tax forms will likewise be greatly simplified,” said Trump, and the “business rate lowered from 35 to 15 percent.”
Trump also announced an End Offshoring Act, which would establish tariffs to discourage companies from laying off American workers and moving operations overseas. “When they do that there will be consequences,” Trump promised.
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To great applause, Trump revealed the Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act, which he said will “fully repeal Obamacare and replace it with health savings accounts.” Trump also said the act would lift restrictions that prevent health insurance being purchased across state lines, and would put states in charge of Medicaid funds.
The American Infrastructure Act will create public private partnerships through tax incentives to “spur 100 million dollars of infrastructure investment,” Trump said, while the School Choice and Education Opportunity Act will give parents the ability to send their kid to any school — public, private, charter or otherwise — of their choice, and repeal Common Core, putting education in the hands of local communities.
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Trump also announced the End Illegal Immigration Act, which includes the construction of the border wall with Mexico, establishes two-year mandatory minimum sentences for an illegal alien who reenters after having been deported previously, and a five-year minimum mandatory sentence for those with criminal convictions or who have been deported multiple times before.
In regard to protecting Americans’ safety, Trump introduced the Restoring Community Safety Act and the Restoring National Security Act. Trump said the national security act will eliminate the defense sequester, expand military investment, initiate major VA reform, and reinforce the nation’s cyber security infrastructure.
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The community safety act will create a special task force on violent crime, increase funding for law enforcement training and support programs, and increase the resources of of federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to pursue gang members and other violent offenders.
“Hillary Clinton is not running against me — she’s running against change,” Trump said. “I have no special interest but you, the American voter.”Hello everyone,
It’s been a few days after the Developers Q&A, and I’ve had time to watch the stream a few times just to create a digest with the most important information. If you missed the stream, Wargaming NA & EU had a live stream on Facebook with Thaine Lyman, World of Tanks Product Director, and Milos Jerabek World of Tanks Developer Director where they talked about the new German Heavy tanks, new graphics, new Tier X Light Tanks and the new Matchmaker.
*Please note there will be some grammar mistakes, as I did this while I was listening to the stream. Please do let me know if you find any and I will correct them.
The new German Line was needed to bring the German Heavy tanks up to speed with other nations;
For developers, it was also a way of creating a common play-style, where players have consistency through out the line that ended in the Maus;
The Pz.VII was introduced to do the same with the VK 42.01 B branch.
Wargaming has plans to keep re-balancing other tanks that haven’t been touched for a long time, so they are “updated” to fight new vehicles introduced in the game;
Light Tanks and the Matchmaker are deeply connected, meaning Wargaming had to introduce Tier X Light Tanks in order to fix the Matchmaker;
Next big patch will bring the new Tier X Light Tanks and Matchmaker;
Tier X Light Tanks will be able to function like in mid tiers, they will have their purpose/role;
Wargaming wanted to eliminate the weirdness of Scout Matchmaking and make it easier for all players to play as a Scout;
Tier X Light Tanks guns have decent stabilization, so they can go around tanks and harass other tanks, but they are not snipers;
Tier X Light Tanks are play style will be up close to the enemies, but because of their maneuverability they will be able to scout for their team;
The reason Wargaming is limiting the number of games and what we test each time on Sandbox, is in order for them to be able to collect the correct data on how the game will change with these new vehicles and other changes;
There will be a lot of testing from Wargaming, so these changes are introduced without breaking the game;
The Sandbox Server was a way Wargaming created in order to be able to test drastic changes and see how it would change the game, without the commitment of bringing it to the game. This way, developers can be more creative and collect more data safely;
Tier X Light Tanks gun soft stats are overall worse than Medium Tier X, they are smaller so they can scout, but Tier X Light Tanks won’t be able to stand a 1vs1 fight versus a Medium Tank.
The Medium Tanks are a Jack of All Trades and very versatile, Light Tanks will have a specific role: scout.
Wargaming is still looking on what to do exactly with the AMX ELC bis, but they will make sure the changes done to it are the correct ones, because the vehicle is one of the players favorites;
Wargaming has a specialized Historical Team that works on what it will be the next big thing coming to the game, this is the team who found information and more details about the newly introduced German vehicles;
Wargaming has buffed the worse Premium Tanks first, but they now are planning to buff a few others so they can perform slightly better;
Wargaming never wanted to make Premium Tanks worse than regular tanks, the idea was to not make them better, so they weren’t pay to win, but this wasn’t implemented correctly;
, so they weren’t pay to win, but this wasn’t implemented correctly; Wargaming plans by the end of 2017 to have fixed the issues with Maps, Matchmaker and SPG’s;
New Matchmaker tracks the maps each player plays, to minimize the change of getting the same maps over and over again;
The new Matchmaker has a basic ideal template of 3+5+7, but if there isn’t enough tanks to fit this template, it can adapt to a different template but retain balance;
Platoon will be limited to one tier ;
; Matchmaker will match equal tier platoons, for example, if the player team has a Tier VIII platoon, the enemy team will also have one;
Wargaming will keep working on the new matchmaker even after it’s released to the Live Server;
Different iterations of the same map where seen as different maps by the old matchmaker, this is fixed in the new matchmaker ( H: Ruinberg and Winter Ruinberg are seen as the same map, for example)
Ruinberg and Winter Ruinberg are seen as the same map, for example) Wargaming doesn’t have any plans to introduce a +1/-1 Matchmaker for higher tiers, but they are talking and might test it for lower tiers. There is already a +1/-1 Matchmaker for Tier I and II.
There is a minimal number of battles a player has to reach, before it can be matched against any player. Wargaming already has a “protection system” for new players so they can gain experience and skill before they are matched against a more “veteran player”;
Wargaming believes Object 252U is a very strong tank at Tier VIII, but it’s not that special if playing against Tier IX and X;
The Sandbox Server tries to give the players an more active role into how the game evolves and changes;
There is still a bit more work around the Stun effect, otherwise Wargaming believes SPG is going in the right direction based on player feedback;
Sandbox is the new thing where Wargaming can test new things and even upcoming changes so they can get more data and feedback. Wargaming is already thinking on re balancing some of the new Tier X LT because of player feedback ( H: Russian LT is way to OP and Chinese LT is under performing, these are two of the LT that will be changed based on data from the Sandbox);
Russian LT is way to OP and Chinese LT is under performing, these are two of the LT that will be changed based on data from the Sandbox); Supertest and Common Test is good to get huge amount of data about new features, but its way to late change or even cancel some of them. Sandbox Server is used to complement these two other tests, so Wargaming can get critical information sooner;
The Developers read players feedback on the Sandbox Server, and they got a team that feeds all this information back to them;
Wargaming believes three SPG’s per team is the right balance;
SPG’s will not be able to nuke anymore;
There is a general dislike for SPG from players who play with it because they are not fun to play, and from players who play against them because they could get nuked by it;
SPG will have a more specialized support role;
Wargaming has to factor LT and SPG changes and make sure they are good to the game;
Wargaming is very careful on what happens to other classes/tanks when these changes are introduced;
Wargaming is aware the Stun effect can be a bit annoying, reason why they decided to introduce the multi use consumables;
The multi use consumable will drastically change the game, but there is still some strategy behind how players will use them;
Wargaming decided to introduce Tier X Ranked Battles because there isn’t any real endgame mode if you are not in a clan;
Wargaming is going to work on old/classic maps so they can come back to the game, for example Port and Dragon Ridge;
Wargaming will balance between updating existing maps to new graphics, improve these maps and work on new maps;
Wargaming is using heat maps from the live server so they understand what is wrong with each map in order to improve them;
When creating new maps, Wargaming uses data from other maps to understand what they did wrong and what players like;
Night, Weather and Visibility effects is not a priority at the moment. ATM Wargaming is focused on new graphics and after this is implemented, they will start looking into weather effects, etc.
RNG has it’s space in the game and it varies a lot but the average RNG seen is about 10%. Wargaming might look into RNG values in the future but it’s not on their “soon” list.
RNG is part of the game and essential so it’s not a “sim”;
Wargaming acknowledges SPG needs fixing, but removing it from the game it’s not an option;
SPG it’s essential to prevent people to “camp” in a position, but at the moment it’s so good at doing this, that punishes players who dare to push;
Wargaming thinks XVM is good for somethings and bad for others, for example it’s good for knowing how well players are doing with some tanks, but not so good with Lights for example.
Wargaming admits XVM gives information that they are missing from their side and they might address this;
XVM Win Rate predictor is wildly off, Wargaming looked into the data and concluded that is wrong most of the times.
Ranked Battles is part of and end game experience;
Skill based matchmaking is not good for Random Battles, but it will be introduced for Ranked Battles;
Ranked Battles will be made of ladders and each time the player goes up the rank, they will be matched against higher skilled players;
Ranked Battles it’s not just for players on Clans, it’s actually designed for lone players who want to play with Tier X tanks;
Players who are in the losing team, if they finish on Top 3 of their team, they will still be rewarded;
Players on the last 3 positions of the losing team will lose progression;
Ranked Battles is not in the near future, there isn’t any dates for when it will be released, but it will be after Light Tanks and New Matchmaker;
Ranked Battles will most likely not be tested on Sandbox;
First Season of Ranked Battles will be an Alpha Version, so Wargaming can test what is right or what it needs fixing;
Wargaming has currently a lot of resources currently working on the new map graphics;
Wargaming plans to release all maps in a very short period of time;
Maps are not bigger, but the outland has changed creating an effect that maps are bigger;
In terms of performance, if players are able to play the game on current minimal graphics, they will still be able to play with the new maps and shouldn’t notice any changes in the performance;
Ranked Battles will not be available 24 hours a day, but there will be a time frame within the day where players will be able to play them;
Wargaming is not ready to disclosure a date for the new graphics, but it should be soonish;
Wargaming is currently discussing bigger maps and there might be news in the upcoming weeks about it;
There will be new lines in 2017, but Wargaming will not share any information just yet;
Wargaming doesn’t want to introduce new tanks that are just a copy of existing tanks;
Wargaming uses an internal graphics engine called Core 5.0;
Multi-core CPU/GPU support is not coming right now to the game;
Female Crew voices are being worked on at the moment;Randall Steven Shepherd, the man accused of plotting a Valentine's Day attack at a Halifax mall last year, was sentenced Tuesday after pleading guilty in Nova Scotia Supreme Court to the charge of conspiracy to commit murder.
Justice Patrick Duncan accepted the joint recommendation from the Crown and defence and sentenced Shepherd to 10 years in prison, less 974 days for time served — leaving seven years and 121 days on his sentence.
An agreed statement of facts read in court painted the picture of a disaffected youth who bonded with his best friend, James Gamble, over a shared fascination with death and morbidity, particularly school shootings and mass murders.
However, facts of the case showed that while Shepherd helped plan the attack, he intended to kill himself before the act, rather than to hurt people.
"My last f--k you to the world isn't going to be, like me taking part in any of this, my last f--k you to the world is not stopping it, standing back and let, someone else put Halifax on the map," he said in a goodbye video he recorded two days before he was arrested.
Shepherd accomplice to main plotters
Shepherd was arrested on Feb. 13, 2015 at the Halifax Stanfield International Airport where he had gone to pick up co-accused Lindsay Kanitha Souvannarath — Gamble's online girlfriend, who flew to Nova Scotia from her home in Illinois to take part in the plot.
Police had received an anonymous tip through Crime Stoppers about people posting massacre plans on social media and met the pair at the airport.
Around the same time, Gamble committed suicide at his parent's home as police closed in. He had originally planned to kill his parents before joining Souvannarath in attacking the mall.
Halifax shooting plot suspects Lindsay Kanittha Souvannarath (left) and Randall Steven Shepherd. (Chicago Sun-Times/Facebook)
According to the agreed statement of facts, Souvannarath and Gamble were the main plotters behind the plan to open fire in the food court at the Halifax Shopping Centre. Gamble planned to use his father's shotgun and hunting rifle. When they were unable to obtain more weapons, Shepherd agreed to make Molotov cocktails to increase the number of deaths.
"I will supply the bottles, the cloth, the gas, and I will document the days leading up. But I will die on the 13th," Shepherd wrote in a message to Gamble.
Crown attorney Shauna MacDonald said for sentencing they had to look at terrorism cases to get a sense of how long Shepherd should remain in prison, however the Crown said this is not a terrorism case because there was no political, religious or ideological motivation.
'I have no defence'
Shepherd's defence attorney Roger Burrill called the case "a deeply sad story of youth disaffection and morbidity."
Shepherd sat through the court proceedings hunched over staring at the table in front of him. When given the chance to speak, he told the court he was sorry for what happened.
"I have no defence. I was a different person," he said.
"I honestly wish that James was here so he could speak for himself. Obviously that's not the case," he said.
Souvannarath remains in custody. She is scheduled to go to trial to face charges including conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit arson in May.
CBC's Blair Rhodes live blogged from the courtroom.Last night, an alleged disgruntled former Pretty Little Liars production assistant took to Reddit and offered to answer any questions PLL fans had and ended up spilling some MAJOR spoilers. The information is shocking, and if it's true, it tells us exactly what to expect in this summer's finale. WARNING: If you don't want the (possible) ending spoiled, STOP READING HERE.
The first question everyone wanted to know was obviously, WHO IS A?!? If we are to believe this "former PA", many fans have had the answer for quite some time, because according to the Reddit bean spiller, A is Wren Kingston!
Not convinced? Let's break down the "facts" this whistleblower shared to back it up:
Wren Kingston is really Charles DiLaurentis, which means Hanna is right in believing there is no way Charles is really dead.
He is a year older than Jason.
He's not really British and never went to Oxford, which means there's now way he's really a doctor.
After spending most of his life in Radley, Mrs. DiLaurentis faked his suicide and joined the board at Radley to cover it up.
Not only did Spencer meet Charles as a child, she also spent a large portion of her childhood in Radley, too. Maddie Ziegler's creepy dancing girl was meant to represent that part of Spencer's life that she no longer remembers.
Melissa agreed to work with Wren because she felt guilty about burying Bethany Young alive.
Wren/Charles hit Alison that night because he thought she was Cece Drake, and he believed Cece killed Bethany.
Wren/Charles will reveal himself to Alison on prom night.
After Wren/Charles reveals himself, he will disappear, AGAIN.
Ok, take a minute. That was a lot to take in, but there's more! Not only did the "PA" also revealed more deets about the next few episodes. Check out what we're apparently in for next:
Emily and Sara will kiss (saw that coming).
But Sara will run away AGAIN.
Alison's new boyfriend and Toby's partner, Lorenzo is going to die!
Alison and Emily will share a kiss at prom, but no word on whether or not they're end game.
The last scene of the summer finale will be the first scene of season 6B (which Marlene already confirmed). Aria will have written a book about the girls, they all meet up a few years later, and at the same time, they all get a text, they look at each other, end scene.
OMG, OMG, OMG, OMG, OMG! Is your head exploding?!?! Well, like most things in PLL world, if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. Shortly after the alleged PA maybe spilled all of Rosewood's secrets, PLL queen Marlene King took to Instagram to let everyone know, no one had actually revealed the identity of A.
After Marlene's response, many fans wrote the Reddit spoilers off as total fakes. But then this morning, Marlene posted this picture to Insta, making us wonder if maybe the PA was right after all...
Marlene has been known to give fans the runaround before (remember when she PROMISED us Mona was dead???), so now we don't even know who's telling the truth. So, who do you believe?The West has yet to develop a unified foreign policy toward Syria, Turkish political analyst Dr. Celalettin Yavuz told Sputnik. The analyst expects that Donald Trump will articulate Washington's new Syrian strategy following his inauguration and expressed hopes that the US will team up with Russia and Syria to defeat Daesh.
Washington has neither a comprehensive strategy for Syria, nor a vision for the future of the Arab Republic, Dr. Celalettin Yavuz, a prominent political analyst and former foreign policy and security advisor to the head of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), noted in his interview with Sputnik Turkiye.
"What goals does the US pursue in Syria? It remains unclear. The Americans say that they are combating Daesh terrorists, but at the same time they are fighting against Assad's forces," Yavuz pointed out.
However, it looks as if the West has begun to reconsider its approach toward Syria.
On Thursday, US State Department spokesperson Mark Toner noted, commenting on reported talks between Russia and the Syrian opposition in Aleppo that Washington "would welcome any effort to ease the suffering and to end the fighting."
For his part, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier stressed Thursday that the talks on humanitarian pauses in Aleppo should continue; at the same time he rejected the idea of exerting new sanctions on Russia over the situation in Syria.
"I can't see how the [new] sanctions at this time would lead us to the situation where we could alleviate the suffering of people there," Steinmeier highlighted.
Although these signals could be interpreted as manifestations of the ongoing political shift, it does not mean the West has reached consensus on the issue, the Turkish analyst believes.
"There is no such thing as the united West today. In the United States elections took place [this November]. Donald Trump's victory came as an unexpected and unpleasant surprise for the EU," Yavuz emphasized.
"Secondly, the European Union is deeply divided. Brexit has dealt a heavy blow to the very idea of a united Europe. The results of the upcoming constitutional referendum in Italy may tip the balance against the EU. [Presidential] elections are due to be held next year in France but Francois Hollande is not going to participate in them. In Europe radical nationalist ideas are gaining momentum. All of the above have had a negative impact on mechanisms of political decision-making in the EU," the Turkish expert highlighted.
While the West has yet to develop a unified strategy toward Syrian affairs Turkey continues to conduct its Euphrates Shield operation, Yavuz noted, adding that the operation's progress is not going as fast as planned.
"It appeared that the US didn't oppose the operation. However, four Turkish military servicemen have been recently killed. If Russian and Syrian armed forces were not involved in the attack on the Turkish soldiers, the answer to the question who was behind the assault is self-evident," Yavuz remarked.
Meanwhile, Daesh terrorists are retreating.
The terrorist group will be sooner or later expelled from al-Bab and Raqqa and eventually defeated, the Turkish expert noted, asking rhetorically whether or not Washington has a strategy for what it should do next in Syria.
"So, what's next? Does Washington have any specific strategy for the future of the [Syrian] Arab Republic? I don't think so. I believe that the strategy will begin to take shape after January 20, when US President-elect Donald Trump officially takes office," Yavuz believes.
"It would be good if Trump remains committed to his promises, given in the course of his election campaign, to fight against Daesh together with Russia and Syria," the Turkish analyst stressed.ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
Londoners will be free to use their mobiles to make calls or go online on Tube trains deep under the capital within two years, Sadiq Khan pledged today.
The Mayor set a 2019 deadline for the start of 4G coverage in Underground tunnels for the first time as he launched a major new drive to eliminate the capital’s connectivity “not-spots.”
The ambition to allow passengers full access to mobile networks within two years times will allow London to catch up - or even overtake - other great global cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, New York or Paris.
It will also bring to an end virtually the last “hiding place” in London for people trying to avoid being contacted on their phones.
In a letter to the leaders of all 33 London local authorities Mr Khan unveiled a new package of targets that included ”delivering 4G mobile connectivity to London Underground, both in station and tunnels from 2019, future-proofed ready for 5G.”
City Hall sources said tenders for the contract to deliver mobile coverage are “going out shortly” with a first trial expected on the Waterloo & City line. where testing can take place at night and at the weekends when it is closed.
Although the aim is for 4G coverage to start before the end of 2019 it is likely to be rolled out over a longer timescale because of the complexity of the technology.
As well as making calls or sending texts passengers will be able to access social media or other websites and play data intensive games.
However, the historic first subterranean calls under central London will be made by passengers on the Elizabeth Line, which will have full mobile coverage when its services launch in December 2018.
Today’s announcement was welcomed by business leaders who have long complained that London has lagged far behind rival cities in the development of its digital networks.
David Leam, infrastructure director at lobby group London First, said: “Business needs fast and reliable connections across our capital – in the office, for people working from home and when they’re on the move.
“We should be making the most of existing infrastructure, including the London Underground network, to boost speeds and deliver coverage to areas that have been left behind.
"But we also need London’s planners to get behind this work, otherwise our digital ambitions risk being strangled by red tape.”There’s a joke that inevitably follows my introduction to new people, especially pastors in large churches. “Herding cats,” they say. I laugh. It’s kind of true. I’m a pastor of worship and arts, which means I work with the church’s musicians to prepare for worship each week, and with visual artists in a variety of aspects of church life.
Why Artists Get Marginalized
Artists - especially vocational artists - get a bad reputation in the church. Vocational artists often are educated in liberal arts environments or progressive subcultures, and their tastes and politics lean leftward of the mainstream evangelical church. Most city’s arts scenes (especially thriving art scenes) are part of a wider progressive community, and folks who live and work in that community find themselves sympathetic to political issues like poverty and LGBT rights. For them, these folks are their neighbors. Most evangelical churches lean right, and in far too many cases, the lines between doctrine and political policy are so blurred as to be nonexistent.
Artists are also often marginalized for their temperament. In the church, much of our culture of leadership and many of our organizational structures have been adapted from the business world, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. These thrive on efficiency, effectiveness, and quick results. Organizing leadership committees, making big decisions, and keeping track of members and attendees requires this kind of structure, especially when the church gets big. I'd argue that it's absolutely necessary to establish this kind of structure in areas like building maintenance or financial management.
Structures that Inhibit Creativity
But these same structures don't foster creativity. In fact, they're designed not to. You don't want your accountant, your maintenance crew, or your pastoral search committee getting too creative. You want them to show up on time, accomplish the work they're assigned, and be held accountable.
But these structures often get applied to community life, leadership development, and discipleship too. These areas become more and more programmatic and institutional, and that can be a turnoff for creatives. I don’t think it’s a moral issue either way – some people are more inclined to structure and some aren’t, but we should be wary of one-size-fits-all paths to leadership and discipleship in the church.
This is just as true when it comes to church staff. If you structure the job description and expectations of a creative on the staff (be they a designer, a musician, or someone who develops creative content for communications) in the same way you structure the job of a custodian or an accountant, you’ll probably create conflict. What’s required to do creative work well is very different from what’s required to do administrative and manual work well.
With that in mind, here are three things that can help make working with creatives a joy, both for you and for them.
Shifting Expectations and Building Relationships
I have a friend that’s a graphic designer, and nothing drives him more crazy than narrow expectations. Clients will come to him with another brand or organization’s logo, saying, “We want this, with our name instead.” They don’t actually want a creative; they want someone good with photoshop.
Often, artists get treated just this way in the church:
“Could you sound a little more like Gungor.”
“We want a painting in the lobby that looks like this.” [Motions to a picture on the web.]
“We want a song like this one, only Christian.”
Artists thrive on originality. They have dedicated themselves to their work not because they want to imitate other successful artists, but because they feel like they have something to say. Something original. An original vision or an original sound.
Their work flows directly from their story, from where they’ve been and what they tasted, seen, and experienced. The church is a part of their story, and most Christian artists want their faith to effect and influence their work. But rarely do they want someone to show up and tell them, “Make this.”
Instead, I would challenge you to build a relationship with artists. Get to know what they’re already doing. If you need graphic design work, get to know designer’s portfolios. If you’re working with a musician and you want to commission songwriting, make sure you get to know the music they’ve already written. The same goes for visual artists and videographers. Go to a concert or an art opening.
Making Space for Creativity
Most artists do their work thoughtfully, making connections between their lives, their beliefs, and their inspirations that come from thoughtful reflection. If you want the best they can offer, let the experience of working with them be a conversation: “Here’s what’s happening with the church, here’s how you’re gifts might be able to serve the church, here’s what we’re trying to communicate. Now, what do you think?”
This provides the most important thing creatives need when working with the church: space. Space to reflect and respond. Space to be themselves. Space for their own original ideas and creativity. With space and time, artists can do their best work.
This, of course, invites risk too. Who knows what they might create. I’ve actually heard (and experienced) some really comical horror stories; artists coming up with bizarre and strange work that is conceptually in the right ballpark, but functionally bizarre.
Shepherding Creativity, Cultivating Humility
But here, too, the effort is worth it. A misguided work by an artist provides a teaching opportunity. Artists are often so immersed in their world, with complicated metaphors and nuanced references, that they need help communicating with people who are outside, which most of their congregation will be. Pastorally, it’s an opportunity to help teach artists how to use their gifts effectively to serve others, which will call them to lay down some of their preferences.
Which brings me to the other side of this discussion: speaking to artists. Like anyone else in the church, artists are called to use their gifts to serve others. That requires humility, and in most cases, a willingness to make work accessible. With musicians, it means making songs that are singable and lyrics that are comprehensible. With visual artists, comprehensibility is just as important.
Artists are trained to stand out, to shine, to call attention to themselves, but in the church, it isn’t time to shine: it’s time to serve. And if we trust what the scriptures tell us, then we should believe that this is actually a better way: the way of humility and generosity. Being generous with our time and creativity – doing work for the love of the work and for the love of others – does wonders for our creative energy.
Likewise, pastors are called to work humbly with artists, and this might mean shifting our expectations, inviting them to lead and contribute, carrying out their vision instead of our own. It demands that we lay down our preference for instant results and
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for. They are actually farther away, having pushed rates negative in Japan and throughout Europe.
I don't know whether they are following their models or not, because I can't imagine what model would lead them to the places they have taken us. Nonetheless, here we are.
The results of negative rates in Europe have been disastrous for banks and insurance companies, not to mention pensions and fixed-income investors.
The single-minded focus of current economic thinking is this belief: the driver of the economy is consumption and/or the artificial replacement of private consumption by government debt, which will create desirable inflation.
This view, trumpeted most famously by Paul Krugman, is going to bite us all—not just rear-facing economists—in our collective derriere. And that is the essential message of the new BIS report.
We're suffering from "Risky Trinity" Syndrome
The BIS report doesn't say that the global economy is in a terrible place. Growth is disappointing, sure, but it could be much worse. Unemployment is still too high but is getting better. Inflation isn't a problem in most places.
Mauldin Economics
What worries BIS, though, are the long-term consequences of what they call a "risky trinity" of unusually low productivity growth, stubbornly high debt levels, and little room for policy maneuvers. That combination is responsible for persistently low interest rates.
This is an important point. Ultra-low, zero, or even negative interest rates are not themselves the problem. Instead, they are symptoms of the "risky trinity" syndrome. We can (and must) treat the symptoms, but doing so won't cure the disease.
Interest rates aren't simply the cost of borrowing liquid capital. They are ultimately the price of money. And money is the single most important price-signaling mechanism in the economy. Rates tell us a lot about confidence among both lenders and borrowers, not to mention consumers.
Right now, they tell us nothing good.
Addicted to debt
One thing we don't have to wonder about is the impact of rising debt. The world is just as addicted to debt today as it used to be addicted to OPEC oil. You might think the pace at which we take on debt would slow as regulators crack down post-crisis. Not so.
Total debt in all categories (except households, whose debt has shrunk only a very little in the advanced economies since 2010) is still growing at a steady clip relative to GDP.
Mauldin Economics
The right-hand chart above shows global debt growing. Pretty much everyone is in hock to someone. Pay down private debt, and government debt goes up. Reduce government debt, and household debt rises. This is what addictive behavior looks like. Forget heroin and OxyContin; debt is the world's favorite drug by far.
Periodically, addicts concerned about outcomes try to get clean. The results are never pretty at first. Our politicians, unwilling or unable to go through the painful detox process, always go back for another fix. Dealers are always happy to provide. The dealers, in this context, are banks—and central banks more than private ones.
This addiction to debt is one reason we keep having market tantrums. Last year, people got concerned about China. Before that it was Greece. Now China is off the radar (even as its currency drops more than it did during our tantrum last summer); and we're obsessed with the UK, Germany, and Italy.
BIS says the results of this oscillating calm and turbulence are troubled equity markets, wider credit spreads, a stronger dollar, and lower long-term interest rates.
Something has to give
Debt is future consumption brought forward. Once debt is incurred, consumption that might have happened in the future won't happen. And it should come as no surprise that at a certain debt level, growth and income begin to diminish. That is exactly what we are seeing in the real world.
There are basically two categories of debt: debt used to purchase or create productive activities (like tools for a carpenter or a new factory for a business) and debt used to consume.
We forget that debt used for consumption doesn't create new supply. It simply pulls supply forward in time. The problem is that debt can't do this forever. Pulling your consumption forward to the present means you will consume less later.
The BIS says in their current report, The Future Will Soon Be Today, these "intertemporal trade-offs" eventually limit our options. And when they say "eventually," what they really mean is "now."
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The building currently represents only 14% of the total square-footage it will offer once completed.
You can already see several expansions on both sides of the plant. Tesla CTO JB Straubel said that the new expansions will start contributing to battery cell production within 12 months.
The wall on the bottom of the image featured above is the only one that will still stand once the factory is completed. Every other wall will be removed as the company adds sections to the project.
Here’s the gallery (all pictures via Tesla – click for higher resolution):
The plant is already producing battery packs for Tesla’s stationary energy storage business, Tesla Energy, and it is ramping up for car battery pack production.
The first battery cell production line is up but not in operation yet. During the media tour, the company completely blocked access to the cell manufacturing machines – saying that the technology is proprietary to Panasonic.
When first announcing the battery plant, Tesla was talking about a total output of 50 GWh, but this week, Tesla confirmed that the new plant will aim to produce around 150 GWh of battery pack in order to support the company’s plans to produce around 1 million cars in 2020 (when the factory should hit its full production rate).Polluter-Funded GOP to IPCC – No Money for You!
February 19th, 2011 by Susan Kraemer
As a result, the latest “slashing” of the US budget completely eliminates funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with a cut that will have virtually zero effect on the federal budget. According to Climate Science Watch, the vote passed by a party-line vote of 244-179.
The IPCC synthesizes the most up to date available science on climate change to help the public and policymakers know the current state of the evolving science, in order to plan, mitigate and prevent the very worst effects of climate change with good smart policy that incentivizes a move to clean non-polluting energy to safeguard our future. Hardly controversial in a sane nation. And cost-effective.
The level of US funding has fluctuated, depending on the year, between about $5.6 million under Democratic congresses, down to about $200,000 during the last GOP congress, in the first six years of the Bush administration. The current level is $2.3 million from last year’s “split” congress (Pelosi House, but Minority Rule Senate – the 60 vote hurdle created a de facto “McConnell” Senate).
The IPCC will probably do fine with no funding from us.
The organization is able to achieve as much as it does because the thousands of scientists from around the world who work on the reports receive no direct compensation for their considerable time and effort drafting, reviewing and editing the summary documents. The IPCC summaries are updated every 7 years.
After noting the previous vote to de-fund the EPA’s ability to collect greenhouse gas data on polluters, Waxman said: “Now we’re being asked to de-fund the work of international scientists to learn about the threat.
The assumption seems to be that there is no threat, and therefore let’s not study it. I think that is not a wise assumption. This is a very shortsighted proposal to cut these funds.
It’s like putting our heads in the sand, denying the science, and then stopping the scientists from working – because they might come to a different conclusion from the Republican Party’s ideology, in believing that there’s no problem and therefore we don’t need to know anything about it”.
Indeed. The paltry cuts are not about cutting the budget.
De-funding the IPCC is no big saving. But that is not the point. Even $200,000 is too much to give an organization that collects and publishes findings decidedly at odds with the interests of the international polluter cartel that controls the US GOP.
Susan Kraemer@TwitterATLANTA -- Season ticket holders for Atlanta United received a 10 percent credit in their account for the July 30 match that was moved from Mercedes-Benz Stadium to Bobby Dodd Stadium.
The game was moved out of the team's future home and rescheduled for July 29 at Georgia Tech's football stadium because of a delay caused by the construction. Stadium officials announced last Tuesday that a continuing analysis of the roof would push the $1.6 billion stadium's opening to Aug. 26, an Atlanta Falcons preseason game.
Atlanta United was scheduled to open the stadium on July 30 against Orlando City. Season ticket holders were told in a letter from President Darren Eales that they would receive a credit because of the stadium's delay.
The credit was an extension of the 10 percent credit that was given to fans after the stadium's first delay. It was originally scheduled to open in March.
The biggest refund any season ticket holder received was roughly $12 per ticket, if SunTrust Club season ticket holders ($2,410) did in fact receive a 10 percent credit. Most credits were just a few bucks.
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Team owner Arthur Blank said last week that he was hearing feedback from the fans, but nothing that was negative.
"Yeah, we have. Every game has been sold out," Blank said. "Every game has been sold out. So we're thrilled. We couldn't have asked for a better response from our Atlanta United fans that we've gotten. They've been incredible."
AMB Group CEO Steve Cannon said Atlanta United fans would be taken care of because of the delay.
"We'll deal with our upset fan base in a one on one way," Cannon said. "The Bobby Dodd experience has been excellent. We'll manage through this and ultimately will delight our Atlanta United fan base," he said.
However, there is an online petition organized by fans asking for a 25 percent refund for all games not played at Mercedes-Benz Stadium after July 4. In addition, it asks that season ticket prices be frozen through the 2020 season. There are 189 signatures on the petition.
One signee, Brenda Rodriguez, commented that there is no reason season ticket holders should not be given refunds.
"The reason we bought the tickets, was so we can be the first ones in the Mercedes Benz stadium. I don't see way we can't just get refunded, move or tickets when they actually get done with the stadium," she posted.
Some fans also took to Twitter to voice their displeasure about buying season tickets under the impression that they would be among the first in the stadium.
@ATLUTD season tix holder and founding member I am appalled at the schedule change due to stadium. You are going to kill us in September — Bo James (@BoJames4477) April 20, 2017
@ATLUTD keeps pushing opening of new stadium. Less than half home games to be hosted there. Not what I signed for as a season ticket holder — TJelezar (@TJelezar) April 20, 2017
After a four-game road stint, Atlanta United returns to Bobby Dodd Stadium April 30 for a match against D.C. United.
PHOTOS | Home Depot Backyard at MB StadiumAl Gore presented a new trailer for “An Inconvenient Sequel” during CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Tuesday, a decade after he promoted the original “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The former vice president revealed presented the trailer during the Paramount presentation and was warmly received by the audience. “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” opens July 28.
Released in 2006, “An Inconvenient Truth” was a solid performer for Paramount with nearly $50 million in worldwide grosses. “The power of entertainment to inform us has made us more socially aware,” Gore said Tuesday.
Reminiscent of the original, “An Inconvenient Sequel” depicted the dire consequences of a warming earth — from flooding in Miami and the Philippines, to the worst drought on record in Syria — bringing human suffering there that predated the ongoing civil war — to air pollution so bad in some parts of China that life expectancy has declined by six years.
The documentary, produced by Participant Media, kicked off this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was met with overwhelmingly positive reviews.
The trailer starts with then-candidate Donald Trump joking about global warming. Later in the trailer, a hopeful Gore says there are positive developments, such as solar panels and other renewable energy sources. It also documents his trip to 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris.
His message is in direct opposition to that of President Trump, who called to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency and cancel billions of dollars in climate change spending.
The timing of the trailer couldn’t be more perfect; President Trump issued a sweeping executive order on Tuesday rescinding many of the climate change regulations introduced by President Barack Obama, including reducing carbon emissions and lifting the moratorium of mining coal on federal lands.
Watch the new trailer here or above.As offers of help go, it's a safe bet this will be one Barack Obama won't accept any time soon. Still, though: George Bush wants him to know that he's there if he needs him.
"If he wants my help he can pick up the phone," the former president noted helpfully this week, during an affable speech to the business community of Calgary in Canada, his first paid speaking engagement since leaving the White House in January.
While up to 400 demonstrators chanted and threw shoes outside the venue – though police disabled a makeshift cannon rigged to fire shoes into the street – Bush steered clear of any criticism of his successor.
"I want the president to succeed," he said. "I love my country a lot more than I love politics. I'm not going to spend my time criticising. There are plenty of critics in that arena."
Bush's stance was in sharp contrast to the former vice-president, Dick Cheney, who used a TV interview at the weekend to launch a wide-ranging attack on Obama, saying his policies had exposed America to a greater risk of terrorist attack. Bush said the president "deserves my silence, and if he wants my help he can pick up the phone and call me." Obama "was not my first choice for president, but when he won, I thought it was good for the United States of America," he added. But he did warn against relying on government to solve the economic crisis. "It's the risk-takers, not the government, that's going to pull us out of this recession," he said.
The lunchtime event, billed as A Conversation With George Bush, cost the audience of more than 1,500 people C$400 (£225) per head. The ex-president reportedly earned US$150,000 (£107,000) from what he called his "maiden voyage" in post-presidential employment – joining the other living ex-presidents on a lucrative circuit that earned Bill Clinton $40m in his first six years after leaving office.
"When asked about Iraq, he was as hard as he's ever been," one attendee, Gerry Chipeur, told the Toronto Star. "He said, 'I'm absolutely convinced I'm right and the other arguments don't hold.'" Police arrested four protesters.Discuss what is was like making your HBO debut back in May, making HBO PPV debut on Oct. 17 & fighting on the same card as GGG
"It was an honor to fight on HBO for the first time in May. For many years I've wanted my fights to be telecast to my fans in America and I was very happy that this was possible. Fighting at the Forum was also an honor as my late mentor and friend Alexis Arguello had fought there four times."
"To see so many Nicaraguan fans support me that night was very emotional for me. With the backing of HBO now all my fans in America — Nicaraguan and everyone else will be able to see me fight, it's truly the home of champions."
"For many years it was a problem for my fans in America to see my fights, now with HBO that is no longer a concern of mine.
"Fighting on HBO Pay-Per-View is a very big step in my career. I've never gotten so much attention for one of my fights. The press conference in Los Angeles was the biggest I had attended, it was great to meet more people from HBO and participate in the preview shows for the Pay-Per-View.
"Even while training here in Costa Rica there are a great deal of media interview requests to be honored which I am happy to do. The attention this HBO Pay-Per-View has been receiving will do great things for my career.
"All of the great fighters over the last couple of decades have been on HBO Pay-Per-View and I'm hopeful that I can put on a performance worthy of these great world champions. I'm sure that Brian Viloria and I will put on a show for the fans that we will be proud of."
"I was very happy the first time to hear that GGG wanted me to fight on his card. Not only is he one of the best fighters in the world but a true gentleman. His fans and team have been very welcoming to me and made me feel at home.
"Fighting in New York City at Madison Square Garden is a dream come true. This will be my first visit to New York City and I'm very excited to be fighting there. I hope Gennady's fans in New York City will be supportive and I'm sure there will also be a large amount of local Nicaraguans at the fight. It's truly an exciting time in my career and I'm so very thankful to GGG and HBO for making this all possible."Trevor Siemian will be the starting quarterback for the defending Super Bowl champion Denver Broncos, which is weird. He’ll be the first-ever QB to start Week 1 for a defending Super Bowl champ with zero regular season NFL passes thrown. Siemian has taken one NFL snap — a QB kneel -- and wasn’t a highly touted draft prospect. It was a surprise he was picked in the seventh round, so you probably don’t know much about him.
Luckily, for you, I know a lot about him. I’ve been following Siemian for, oh, seven years now. He was two years behind me at Northwestern, where I covered the football team for my (now-defunct) blog. Normally, Northwestern fans don’t get the opportunity to discuss our former players at length to a herd of intrigued NFL fans, so I’m very, very, very excited about this sudden, unusual development. (I'd also love to talk to you about Browns starting SS Ibraheim Campbell, if you'll let me -- maybe some other time.)
I’ll be honest: At no point in the four years I watched Trevor Siemian play quarterback for Northwestern did I think he was an NFL quarterback. Siemian had a strong arm, a quarterback’s body, and threw genuine gems every once in a while. But those gems were rare, sprinkled amidst general inaccuracy on deep passes and poor decision-making. He became famous for ignoring open receivers downfield to opt for more conservative routes with no hope of succeeding — the team’s defense nicknamed him "Checkdown Trevor" and chanted it at him during intrasquad scrimmages.
Siemian was serviceable early in his career as the "throwing quarterback," playing passing downs in a platoon with speedy option-style quarterbacks who ran the majority of plays. But when his faster teammates graduated and the entire offense belonged to Siemian, Northwestern’s offense turned into an atrocious slog. In his only year as the team’s full-time starting QB, the Wildcats finished 12th of 14 in the Big Ten in passing efficiency. (That’s bad.)
The game I remember most was a 10-9 loss to Michigan. Siemian threw for 273 yards and a touchdown, which isn’t bad when you completely remove all context. The context is that he had 49 passing attempts, was sacked five times, and threw two picks. He threw short of the sticks on a critical late third down, and given the opportunity to win the game with a decisive two-point conversion after Northwestern’s only touchdown, Siemian slipped and fell to seal the loss.
Siemian was probably the fourth-best quarterback to play for Northwestern in the five years I blogged about the team. The other three are not in the NFL. I was surprised when Siemian was drafted, I was surprised when Siemian wasn’t cut by the Broncos after his rookie training camp, I was surprised when Siemian stayed on their roster for an entire season, I was surprised when the Broncos opted to keep Siemian for a second offseason, and I am currently very surprised that Siemian is the team’s starting quarterback.
I have not been alone in my lack of belief in Siemian. Even Siemian described himself as a "fringe" project. Multiple NFL scouts admitted they didn’t even analyze Siemian coming out of college, with one saying that he "didn’t have high enough grades" to justify breaking down his film. Even on Monday morning, Ian Rapoport said on the NFL Network that in the run-up to the 2015 NFL Draft, he felt the Broncos’ passion for Siemian as a late-round prospect seemed "irrational." It’s not often you hear a seventh-round pick described as "irrational" — they’re essentially throwaway picks, you can waste them and seem pretty rational — but the Broncos’ overwhelming fervor for a self-described fringe prospect far surpassed how excited teams normally get for players so lowly touted.
Simply put, there was nothing about Siemian’s college career that would give most viewers belief that he would be an NFL starting quarterback someday. But knowing what I know about Siemian — and the Broncos — I think starting Siemian might be the right call. (*Might* be.)
The Broncos knew what they wanted in Siemian
Enough talking about Siemian in the past — let’s get down to analyzing Trevor Siemian in 2016. You can watch every throw he made in his last start here, and you can watch a little preseason highlight reel here.
He’s 27-of-43 passing with 290 yards, a touchdown, and two picks. He’s only thrown two interceptions, but he’s thrown several other passes that really should’ve been picked off. One of the passes that was intercepted was a double-covered short route returned for a touchdown. The only touchdown he’s thrown to his own team wasn’t an impressive throw, hitting a wide-open receiver on a (well-executed) goal line play action. His deep balls are still iffy on accuracy. His best throw by far, a 43-yard completion to Demaryius Thomas, was thanks to an absolutely brilliant one-handed catch by Thomas.
From the numbers and tape, Siemian looks like he’s a subpar NFL quarterback, perhaps approaching mediocrity. And you know what? That’s so much better than I ever expected from him. There aren’t that many people on Earth capable of being mediocre NFL quarterbacks. Considering just two years ago Siemian didn’t look capable of being a mediocre Big Ten quarterback, it’s an incredible leap. And with just one pro season under his belt, there’s room for Siemian to turn into an average NFL quarterback, perhaps even better.
Now let’s zoom back a year and a half, and see what the Broncos said about Siemian when they surprised everybody still awake on Day 3 of the NFL Draft:
"There was just something about the way he played, his footwork, his release, I liked the way he went about things," Broncos coach Gary Kubiak said.... "We looked at him on tape and as far as the quarterback position, he plays well, his feet, his technique and everything that he can do is pretty darn good," Broncos executive vice president of football operations/general manager John Elway said.
Out of college, I saw nothing about Siemian that made him look like a pro quarterback. But Kubiak and Elway both identified pure mechanical elements about Siemian: his footwork, release and technique.
Now let’s zoom ahead to the present and see what scouts and teammates are saying about Siemian:
Looking at Siemian's play throughout the preseason, I must admit that I've been impressed with his accuracy, ball placement and decisiveness. He gets the ball out of his hands quickly and allows his playmakers to do the work on the perimeter... Speaking to a few Broncos players and coaches during the offseason, I frequently heard them rave about Siemian's command of the offense and how quickly he got the ball out.
There’s an emphasis there on "getting the ball out," and quickly.
It seems the Broncos have eliminated a lot of the hesitation from Siemian’s game. Considering one of his greatest flaws was his steadfast dedication to bad choices, it’s not surprising that the key to making him a passable pro was eliminating overthinking from his repertoire. He no longer has time to ignore good options, he’s too busy getting the ball to them.
Kubiak and Elway saw the basic building blocks of an NFL QB in Siemian and saw that his talents could be adapted to what they were trying to do. He was stripped down to the mechanics that made him useful, and trained to be eliminate the worst aspects of his game.
Is it possible that Kubiak and Elway — both former NFL quarterbacks -- are skilled at assessing the technical merits of what could potentially make a future NFL quarterback? Is it possible they’re more skilled at that than I am?
Let’s just say it’s possible.
A lot of things factor into a college quarterback’s success. Siemian looked really bad as a senior, but the team around him lacked offensive firepower and the play calling seemed to rarely put him in a position to succeed. That might have caused the rest of us to ignore him while Kubiak and Elway honed in on the things they needed to see in a potential draftee. And they might have found a diamond in the rough, or at least a cubic zirconia that can get the job done.
The Broncos QB situation is so weird, Siemian might be their best option
The Broncos of last year were very, very strange. In a pass-heavy league, they were Super Bowl champions with a glaring weakness at quarterback. It was even stranger, since they willingly opted to play their second-best quarterback, soon-to-be-Hall of Famer Peyton Manning, over an option who clearly outperformed him on the field: backup Brock Osweiler.
All things told, the Broncos had some of the worst quarterback play in the league in 2015... and then they lost their best two quarterbacks.
They were left with Siemian, Mark Sanchez, and Paxton Lynch. Sanchez looked like the obvious starter — for all the Buttfumble jokes, he was roughly acceptable the last two years in Philadelphia, and he’s gone on deep playoff runs with run-first, pass-second defense-focused squads in his career.
But Sanchez looked borderline unplayable in his brief preseason appearances, tossing a bad pick, looking completely befuddled by pressure (a theme that would be constant with a line as makeshift as the Broncos’) and losing two fumbles. The Broncos merely need a quarterback who will not self-destruct. Sanchez looked like he might. He also has a $4.5 million salary, which has probably played a factor in his quick drop from the presumptive starter’s role to the trade block. And $4.5 million for a decent quarterback is worth it... $4.5 million for a backup, who looks more troublesome than a seventh-rounder, is not.
So, that left Siemian and first-round draft pick Paxton Lynch. The consensus was that this year’s draft featured two obvious top quarterbacks in Jared Goff and Carson Wentz, and then there was a bit of a chasm, and then there was Lynch. Neither Goff nor Wentz has been deemed ready to start Week 1, and Goff and Wentz are on teams with a lot less to lose than a Broncos squad hoping to contend for another Super Bowl.
It is eminently weird that the Broncos will start Trevor Siemian. But the Broncos are eminently weird. Last year, their best QB options were a guy itching to begin life as a full-time pizza salesman and his career backup, and both left. They turned to an imminent catastrophe in Sanchez and an un-house-trained puppy in Lynch. Sanchez will burn the Broncos’ house down and Lynch will poop all over it. Trevor Siemian might really be the best call.
The Broncos might still be fine
Let’s remember something about last year’s Broncos: Peyton Manning was a very, very bad quarterback in 2015. He was 29th in yards per attempt and nearly led the NFL in interceptions despite missing six games. QB rating is a bad stat, but he finished 34th out of 35 quarterbacks who qualified for the league lead in QB rating. (One more time: That’s very bad.)
The second is that THE BRONCOS STILL WON THE FREAKIN’ SUPER BOWL. They had such an outrageously good defense that Manning could play like farts and they’d still win. In the Super Bowl, Manning went 13 of 23 with 141 yards and an interception while getting sacked five times, which is a pretty bad line. But Von Miller battered Cam Newton until the Broncos had won.
Can Trevor Siemian be the NFL’s best quarterback? My goodness, no. No no no no no.
Can Trevor Siemian be merely bad and not horrific? Possibly. And in a run-heavy offense coupled with a world-beating defense, that might be enough for the Broncos to stay in serious contention.
It is weird.
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Fantasy QB preview and sleepers for your draftESPN Telecast Averages 18,220,000 Viewers and Peaks with 22,961,000 viewers
Match Generates WatchESPN Viewership Records
Most-viewed Non-Football Telecast on ESPN Ever
Significant Viewership Growth Over 2010 and 2006, including in All Key Demos
Sets Rating Record in 18 markets; Washington, D.C.; New York and San Francisco Highest-Rated Thru 32 Games
ESPN’s telecast of the United States’ 2-2 tie against Portugal in the 2014 FIFA World Cup on Sunday, June 22, is the most-viewed soccer match in the United States ever, across all networks, averaging 18,220,000 viewers based on a 9.6 HH US rating. It surpassed the previous high of 17,975,000 viewers for the 1999 Women’s World Cup final (USA vs. China) on ABC. Additional television highlights:
The telecast peaked from 7:30 to 8 p.m. ET with an average of 22,961,000 viewers and an 11.9 HH US rating.
The match is ESPN’s most-viewed program excluding NFL and college football telecasts.
While Sunday’s 9.6 HH US rating is the highest-rated men’s soccer telecast ever (topping a 9.5 for Italy vs. Brazil in the 1994 final), it is the second highest-rated soccer match overall behind an 11.4 HH US rating for 1999 Women’s World Cup final (USA vs. China) on ABC.
The first 2014 FIFA World Cup match involving the United States (a 2-1 victory over Ghana) averaged 11,093,000 viewers and a 6.3 HH US rating, making it the highest-rated and most-viewed men’s soccer match on ESPN or ESPN2 on record at the time.
In addition to setting a television viewership record, Sunday’s match also set product records on WatchESPN with a 490,000 average minute audience, and total of 1,373,000 viewers and 61,691,000 minutes viewed.
Significant Television Viewership Increases Over 2010 and 2006
Overall, ESPN’s 2014 World Cup coverage is posting significant viewership increases over 2010 and 2006. ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC have combined to average 4,273,000 viewers and a 2.6 HH US rating through the first 32 matches, marking increases of 50 percent and 109 percent (vs. 2,857,000 in 2010 and 2,048,000 in 2006), and 44 percent and 86 percent (vs. 1.8 in 2010 and 1.4 in 2006), respectively.
In addition, ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC have posted significant audience increases in every key people and male demographic, highlighted by double-digit growth in the 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54 categories.
WatchESPN Growth Over 2010
WatchESPN has averaged 259,000 viewers in the average minute across 32 World Cup matches, which represents a six percent lift over the ESPN Networks’ English language TV audience for a total of 4,533,000 viewers across TV and WatchESPN.
In addition, WatchESPN has posted a 158 percent increase in viewers and 167 percent in minutes through the first 32 games, averaging 759,000 viewers and 33,319,000 minutes viewed per match.
Success beyond USA Matches
In addition to Sunday’s record telecast, ESPN tied the record for the highest-rated World Cup match not involving the United States on ESPN or ESPN2, averaging a 3.4 US HH rating and 5,735,000 viewers for Germany vs. Ghana on Saturday, June 21 (tied with the 2006 Italy vs. Germany semifinal). Overall, the 2014 World Cup coverage has delivered six of the highest-rated and most-viewed Group Play matches not involving a United States team on ESPN and ESPN2.
Metered Markets
Washington, D.C., led all markets for ESPN’s USA vs. Portugal telecast with a 13.3 rating, followed by Columbus (12.6), New York (12.5), Boston (11.5), Hartford/New Haven (11.3), Providence (11.2), Atlanta (11.1), Baltimore (11.0), Norfolk (10.5), Orlando (10.5) and Sacramento (10.5).
Eighteen markets recorded their highest overnight rating for a World Cup match on ESPN or ESPN2, including seven that were among the top 10 largest for the telecast: Columbus, Boston, Hartford/New Haven, Providence, Atlanta, Baltimore and Sacramento. The additional 11, ordered by highest rating: Kansas City (10.1), Dayton (8.9), St. Louis (8.7), Jacksonville (8.4), Tampa/St. Petersburg (8.3), Nashville (7.8), Greenville (7.6), Greensboro (7.5), Memphis (7.5), Pittsburgh (6.9) and Birmingham (5.8).
Overall, Washington, D.C., continues to lead all markets for matches on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC through the first 32 games with a 5.0 average rating, followed by New York (4.3), San Francisco (4.1), Orlando (3.8), Los Angeles (3.7), Hartford/New Haven (3.7), Atlanta (3.6), San Diego (3.5), Boston (3.5), West Palm Beach (3.5) and Richmond (3.5).
Upcoming ESPN World Cup Coverage
ESPN’s FIFA World Cup coverage continues this week with two matches at 11:30 a.m. and two at 3:30 p.m. each day from today through the completion of Group Play on Thursday, June 26. The match for the United States (against Germany) airs on Thursday, June 26, at 11:30 a.m. (on ESPN).
ESPN’s comprehensive coverage of the tournament includes all 64 matches televised live on ESPN, ESPN2, ABC, ESPN3 and WatchESPN, as well as 54 matches on ESPN Deportes and another 10 on ESPN Deportes+. ABC’s matches will also available on WATCH ABC. Schedule.
-30-In an eleventh-hour turnaround, TVNZ has reneged on its promise to keep Mike Hosking on as the host of its leadership debates, caving to public pressure with less than two hours to go until the first one.
Head of News John Gillespie said he simply “couldn’t go through” with letting Hosking host the debates, after discovering his prepared cue cards were just “lists of different labels of red wine.”
“That was the last straw, really,” he said. “Only 40% of the debate is supposed to be about red wine.”
Gillespie said that with a change of host, tonight’s debate would take a change of tone, and of substance, as well.
It is now to be hosted by veteran weather presenter Jim Hickey, who is coming out of retirement just for tonight.
Hickey will moderate an hour-long discussion between Prime Minister Bill English and Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, featuring questions exclusively about the weather.
“One of the reasons we know people watch the 6pm news in the evening is the weather,” said Gillespie. “That’s why we tease it at the start, and continue doing so throughout, right up until the end. The news is really just one big build-up to the weather. People can’t keep get enough of it. They really just want to know what the weather is like where they are now.
“If we put it on at the start, people would just switch off afterwards. There’d be no point.
“So when we asked ourselves, do we want this debate to be about the issues that really matter to New Zealanders, and if we do, what are those issues, we came back with only one answer: the weather.”
Hickey’s debate questions are said to include inquiries about the levels of dew that accumulate on English and Ardern’s berms in the morning, and “what does this cloud look like to you?”
English is expected to play to his strengths, talking about how he likes to feel a light cool breeze on his upper shins, while Ardern will likely express her vision for applying sunscreen, even on a cloudy day.
Tonight’s debate will be followed up by a debate hosted by Jeff Wilson exclusively about rugby, and another hosted by Nigel Latta,
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house music DJ, taking center stage in the world's most popular nightclubs.
He's also likely the tallest DJ in the world at 6'11", and not only did he swish a few basketball shots at Marquee, but he was also spinning on the turntables. "The Spin Doctor"—his nickname when he was playing for his trademark low-post spin moves—was the main act of the night, performing until closing time at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday morning.
This week, Bleacher Report caught up with Seikaly, who's in Europe for the summer, to discuss the latest on his musical adventure—he started DJing when he was 14 living in Greece and turned it into a profession in 2009—and also his former NBA team, LeBron James, the league's evolution and memories from his playing days.
Menbar Photos/Marquee New York
Bleacher Report: What's new for you in the music world?
Rony Seikaly: I've been playing in Ibiza at different venues and Beirut at The Garten last week, and spending time in Mykonos and Turkey. Ibiza is usually my base every summer, and then I go to the other cities. So I'm on the move, on the road—moving, grooving.
I always have singles I'm working on, like my remix of "Personal Stereo" featuring Flunk. I'm continuing to release tracks on Sugar Free Radio and I'm going to release my second EP with Jean Claude Ades called "East West" in the first week of September. It's a deep house, more underground sound.
I also signed with The Bullitt Agency, which is one of the best booking agencies in the world, and I'm very excited about that. Everything will be fresh and new. I'm taking this to the next level basically with a rebranding and new website. Six, seven years in, I've played in every major club in the world that people only dream of, and I'm just so blessed and grateful to have been able to do that. But things are going to get bigger and better, that's for sure.
B/R: What's your ultimate goal with music?
RS: I'm just enjoying the ride. I don't want to think about destinations. I don't want to know where it's all going. I just want to enjoy the moment. I'm just going to do what I do, and if I continue having fun, I'll continue doing it—growing as an artist, and growing as a producer and DJ. I don't want to be judged. I just want to do what I love.
B/R: House music just keeps on getting bigger and bigger—more clubs, festivals, song remixes, collaborations with other artists and even integration into sports broadcasts and highlight shows. What's your take on this progression?
RS: I think every genre of music has about a shelf life of 10 years. From there, it kind of morphs into something else. We can go back to disco. Disco had its few years and then the grunge thing went on for a while, and then it was hip-hop in the 2000s era, and then from late 2000 to now it's been house music and EDM.
But I think the underground sound of house music will always be around. It's been around since the '80s, and it's kind of morphed into commercial house, but the underground scene always is the main stage.
B/R: Where are your favorite places to DJ other than Marquee?
RS: Playing in Ibiza is always a treat, especially at Amnesia in front of 5,000 people. That was a surreal experience. Ibiza is the iconic capital of the world when it comes down to this kind of music. I look forward to playing in New York, I look forward to playing in Miami—cities where I have a place. In this profession, it's not about the place that you actually visit, but the vibe and the place. If people are vibing to the music that you play, then it's a great venue.
B/R: With Ibiza being the house music capital of the world, what's the vibe there like today?
RS: It's changed a lot since I first started coming here. I started coming in 1988, when it was really like a hippie kind of island. And now it's transformed into the hot spot of the world because that's where it's happening. Back four, five, six years ago, all the Saint-Tropez and the Sardinia crowd would hate Ibiza. Now, Ibiza is a big melting pot for the summer. What's also changed is you see a lot more Americans than you ever have.
B/R: Being that you're originally an international player, from your birthplace in Beirut to growing up in Greece, now that you're overseas currently, does it feel like the NBA has a bigger presence there than you ever imagined?
RS: Of course. It's become a global game, there's no doubt. I think back in the day, if a tall person would walk around the streets of Turkey or wherever it is, they'd think you're an alien. But in today's world, they know that you're probably in the NBA or playing basketball professionally. They've got an educated fact that basketball exists and it's not only soccer.
B/R: When you were drafted by the Heat in 1988, it was actually the year before Vlade Divac, Drazen Petrovic and Sarunas Marciulionis, three of the league's best international players ever, came into the league. That must have been an exciting time with the foreign floodgates opening.
RS: That's when it started. It started with European players when I got [to the NBA]. There were maybe two or three European players in the league, but nobody ever from the Middle East, nobody ever from Asia, nobody ever from South America, nobody ever from all the other areas that the NBA boasts now. I was probably the first one from Greece to make it in the NBA, but I wasn't really Greek; I represented the Middle East. I was the only Middle Eastern to play in the NBA at the time.
B/R: Years later while you were living in Miami, you bought ownership stakes in the Bar None, Mokai and Mynt venues. What's impressed you most about the changes in the South Beach nightclub scene?
RS: There was one club when I got to South Beach called Nu, so you can imagine the transformation I have witnessed. Now, I invest in Wall at the W hotel.
Menbar Photos/Marquee New York
B/R: Do you have a recording studio at your house in Miami?
RS: Yeah, I have a regular studio setup at my house, and I have club-sounding speakers so I can test out the feel of the track in a club vibe. Sometimes, regular studio monitors sound great, but when they're played on a big system they lack something.
B/R: As you continue to create your own sounds, is there any new production equipment you've been exploring?
RS: Listen, technology is improving so fast, and it's hard to keep up with all the new stuff that keeps coming out. Because I travel so much and I have my real-estate business, I'm a full-time father and I've got to play my sports every day, I've got to divide my day. I tend to kind of stay with the analog sounds and try to keep it as rich as possible.
B/R: The technology within the club setting has also advanced, with more intricate light shows and high-definition video screens. What's that been like to see?
RS: You've got very sophisticated computer systems to run lasers with smoke according to the song and the beats and the music. But that's all in the commercial world. The commercial world is a show, a spectacle. Music is kind of secondary to the whole production and the show. People are there watching the lights and the smoke, and all of it coming together. In the underground world, none of that matters; it's all about the music.
B/R: You mentioned you play sports every day. What are you into?
RS: I have a quote, "If I can't play sports or listen to music every single day, I don't feel like I am living." So I need both to keep me sane and on course. I play tennis whenever I'm in Miami; I'll try to play golf if I'm someplace where there's a course. Otherwise, in the winter I try to snow ski as much as possible, and in the summer it's water skiing and water activities.
B/R: I remember you told me once that in many ways you're in better shape now than when you were playing.
RS: Yeah. The thing is, because I've kept myself in such good shape, I don't feel like I've aged at all. Obviously, that's the fight that a professional athlete has because they feel good, but the timing is not there. So I know that I feel good and I look the same as I did when I played. Listen, you lose that split of a second, and your hand-eye coordination, release and reaction time drop a little bit, but I still feel good. Why should I retire? I still feel the same way.
B/R: You've clearly set an example of how to follow your passion.
RS: I just live every day to the fullest, and I've been blessed to be able to do what I love to do. When I start feeling like I need to slow down, then I'll slow down. Until then, I'm celebrating my 25th birthday.
Menbar Photos/Marquee New York
B/R: What were your thoughts when LeBron James left for Cleveland, and how do you think that affected the NBA landscape?
RS: I wasn't surprised. I just think sometimes you need a change. He made a change, came to Miami and did what he had to do. And he missed home. There's nothing like being home. So he gets to go back home and be the hero that he is regardless. There's no better story than coming back to Cleveland and winning a couple of championships for the city of Cleveland.
I also think it's better for the league. Here's my take on LeBron and teams trying to stack three proven superstars to win a championship: As hard as it (is) for Heat fans to see LeBron going back to Cleveland, I feel it's better and healthier for the league and teams in general. The league will have more parity across the board and feature two stars on each team, which will force other players, young or old, to step up and elevate their games to be stars in their own right. It will stress more teamwork as we witnessed with the Spurs.
Having three established stars is a shortcut to get wins, but not every team has the money or the pull of glamorous metropolitan cities to draw three superstars. It's healthier for the league and more fun to watch. The pressure is back on the marquee players to build a team game.
B/R: Without LeBron, how do you envision the Heat orchestrating things different offensively?
RS: Listen, we're back to being an NBA basketball team. I think that [Chris] Bosh is the X-factor, if he picks his game back up.
Will he become a leading force instead of a third option, and go back to where he was the first option [like in Toronto]? It's tough being a third option. I think he'll be hard to guard, and with all the other guys stepping up their game, I think they can be a very good team. If [Dwyane] Wade comes back stronger, great, and the Heat will make some noise.
You don't know who's going to come through the East. This is more organic, it's even, it becomes more of a college game. The favorite is going to be probably Cleveland because of LeBron, but every team has good players. It's going to be college basketball, and it's going to be a fun game where there's going to be a lot of ups and downs. Anybody can win this year.
Nathaniel S. Butler/Getty Images
B/R: To me, with your speed, quick and crafty footwork, and activeness around the basket—key qualities of today's big men who need to be more mobile in the NBA's faster style of play—your game would translate well today.
RS: I would have excelled in today's game, but you were battling against lumbering big guys, like the 7'4", 290-pound Mark Eaton. It was just a heavyweight contest of getting your ass in that block, and I had to use my athletic abilities to overcome the size difference and the weight difference to get my rebounds and to get my points. In today's game, if I played with my back to the basket, I think that I would have excelled big time because it's just a lost art. I would have had a field day.
B/R: When you played, there was no restricted area, and increased physical contact and hand-checking was allowed. Also, there was much less protective gear. Big difference, right?
RS: There's no doubt. You go against Detroit, you're going against Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn, John Salley, Dennis Rodman, and you can believe that if you're anywhere near the basket, you better anticipate somebody coming in and taking your neck off. If you think you have an open layup or an open jump hook or whatever it is, somebody is going to come and smack the hell out of you and make you think twice the next time you want to go to the basket.
It's the same thing when you look at the Chicago era. It was all about Michael Jordan, but they had three lumbering big guys—Luc Longley, Bill Cartwright and Bill Wennington—all 7-footers who would just beat the s--t out of you if you went inside.
B/R: You must have gone to sleep after games in pain.
RS: There were so many nights that I would wake up in the middle of the night and I couldn't even walk to the bathroom. I had bad feet as it was, but just to get to the bathroom was a struggle because of the pounding. I gave away 40, 50 pounds every game. I was 253 pounds and Shaq [O'Neal] was 320, so that's about a 70-pound difference.
Andy Hayt/Getty Images
B/R: Was Shaq your toughest matchup?
RS: No, I think basketball-wise, I think it was [Hakeem] Olajuwon. He was just so quick. He was my biggest challenge because pretty much as savvy as we are, as much as we know about our opponents and what they want to do and their go-to moves and how they counter off that, Olajuwon was a guy that you just did not know what he was going to do. I don't think he knew what he was going to do. He would shake you around and you were all shook up.
B/R: Compare for a moment being an NBA veteran to now being a DJ veteran. What feels more satisfying to you?
RS: It takes blood and guts and work and pain to get to where you get to in an athletic world. This music is just passion, it's just spending time, it's being a student, it's having talent within that. It's just developing a sound. It's all within what you love to do.
But sports is guts, it's glory, it's the hero, it's the G.O.A.T., it's pressure. In this world, it's more fun. You can't compare, and the best thing that could have ever happened to me is to be able to play sports and get the discipline that I got playing sports, and then coming back and doing this with music. It's continuing on with the passion that I've always had.
B/R: So if the NBA was first and music is second, what will be your third "voyage," as you like to call your different careers?
RS: I mean, listen, my plate is full. I feel very blessed. If I can just bottle whatever I've got going on right now, that's all I need, that's all I can think about right now. I'll continue to pursue real-estate deals. That's what pays for the lifestyle and pays the bills. And musically, I'll continue doing what I love to do, and that gives me joy. I don't think there's age to music. I think whether you're young, old or poor, if you love music, you love music.
The only thing that I can ask for is just to be healthy. That's the only thing that I have absolutely no control over, and if you're healthy, then everything else works.
Jared Zwerling covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.Damien Chazelle's follow-up to 'Whiplash' is an L.A.-set musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a couple of Hollywood strivers who fall in love.
If you're going to fall hard for Damien Chazelle's daring and beautiful La La Land, it will probably be at first sight. There's never been anything quite like the opening sequence: Traffic is at a standstill on the high, curving ramp that connects the 105 freeway to the 110 leading to downtown Los Angeles. Most of the cars are occupied only by single drivers, who are all listening to different music. But after a moment, instead of just sitting there simmering, somebody gets out and starts singing and dancing. Soon someone else does the same. Then another, and yet another, until a bad mood has been replaced by a joyous one as the road becomes the scene for a giant musical production number set to an exuberant big-band beat.
Aside from wondering how the filmmakers managed the logistics of pulling off such an audacious location shoot, lovers of classic musicals will be swept away by this utterly unexpected and original third feature from Damien Chazelle (opening this year's Venice Film Festival). From a commercial point of view, the looming question for this Summit/Lionsgate release, set for December openings, is whether younger audiences will buy into the traditional conceits that Chazelle has revitalized, as well as into the jazz and lyrical song-and-dance numbers that fill the soundtrack.
Only foreign-film connoisseurs of a certain age will realize that the writer-director's true inspiration here stems not as much from vintage Hollywood musicals (although allusions to them abound) as from the late French director Jacques Demy's two landmark 1960s musicals with Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort — especially the latter, which was far more dance- and jazz-oriented. Although serious romantic longing and love's poignant transience underpin the narratives for both Demy and Chazelle, both films share a breezy lightness of tone that keeps their narratives skipping along.
And while Chazelle's breakthrough success two years ago with Whiplash also possessed a central, if eccentric, musical component, La La Land bears a much closer kinship with his mini-budgeted 2010 Harvard undergraduate feature Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench, which was a sung-and-danced-through musical.
As did so many American musicals made before the mid-1960s, this one pivots on a simple boy-meets-girl/they fall in love/complications ensue scenario. For this to work at all, you need to have attractive and sympathetic leading actors, and once you see Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone go into their moves here, it's as pleasurable to accept them in such roles as it once might have been to embrace, say, Gene Kelly and Shirley MacLaine.
Their “meet cute" takes place on the freeway. Actress Mia (Stone) works in a cute cafe on the Warner Bros. lot (they should open it for real) and has been on a grinding run of fruitless auditions; she's “someone just waiting to be found,” as she puts it in a plaintive song. A skilled pianist, Sebastian (Gosling) is fed up with providing tinkling background music at bars and restaurants (J.K. Simmons fires him from one gig); he's a jazz freak, loves Miles Davis and swing bands, hangs at The Lighthouse down at the beach and is convinced that he's “a phoenix rising from he ashes.” In other words, these two are like thousands of others in Hollywood, treading water but hoping to make it in spite of the odds.
Played out across the four seasons (albeit in different years), their romance begins bumpily. Seb, as he comes to be called, is downright rude to Mia at a springtime pool party, even though she could not look more splendid, quite like a brilliant sunflower, in a perfect yellow dress. Later, when he can no longer kid himself about his feelings for her, an enchanting musical sequence has them strolling and singing in the Hollywood Hills from one streetlamp to another backdropped by a glorious vista.
In just one of countless aesthetic decisions that have gone into making the film the sophisticated confection that it is, many of the musical numbers have been shot at magic hour, which both softens and intensifies the colors, as well as the beauty and romanticism of the mostly real-world Los Angeles settings. The city has rarely looked this gorgeous in films, a credit to the director's romantic imagination as well as to the technical expertise of Swedish cinematographer Linus Sandgren (American Hustle), who has superbly composed the movie's constant movement in the ultra-widescreen 2.52 x 1 aspect ratio.
Once they are a couple, things become, in a word, complicated. Realizing the long odds against Mia's breaking through as an actress, Seb urges her to write something of her own to perform, which she buckles down to do. Paradoxically, he goes commercial, joining a successful band fronted by Keith (John Legend) that is constantly on tour, dictating long separations. A lengthy postscript, set five years later, features a fantasy dance sequence (a frequent motif of old musicals). But while aiming for poignance, the film loses some of its edge in this final stretch and arguably overstays its welcome by perhaps 10 minutes; bringing the pic in at under two hours would have been advisable.
All the same, for Chazelle to be able to pull this off the way he has is something close to remarkable. The director's feel for a classic but, for all intents and purposes, discarded genre format is instinctive and intense; he really knows how to stage and frame dance and lyrical movement, to transition smoothly from conventional to musical scenes, to turn naturalistic settings into alluring fantasy backdrops for set pieces and to breathe new life into what many would consider cobwebbed cliches.
The helmer shares his leading man's preference for bygone styles, and it remains to be seen whether or not the charm and persuasiveness of the film's look and performances are enough to disarm skeptical young audiences who have rarely, if ever, been exposed to the conventions Chazelle employs so enthusiastically and skillfully.
Happily, the two leads are completely in sync with his objectives. Sebastian has a certain gruff impatience and short temper born of creative frustration, but the concern and love he feels for Mia doesn't take long to well up. Gosling may not be a trained dancer or musician, but his moves are appealingly his own and months of piano practice have given him convincing style on the keyboards.
Stone is simply a joy as the eternally aspiring actress it's hard to believe is being passed over. Emotionally alive and able to shift gears on a dime, Stone is all the more convincing in this context as she has the kind of looks that would have been appealing in any era, particularly the 1930s and 1950s.
Many of the old Hollywood neighborhoods and establishments so selectively used here are meant to summon up meaningful movie memories: a date to see a revival screening of Rebel Without a Cause at the (defunct) Rialto Theater in Pasadena immediately segues into a visit to the planetarium at the Griffith Observatory, and one extended sequence makes the Warner Bros. backlot look busier than it probably ever has been since the 1930s.
All of Chazelle's key collaborators were clearly in total sync with the project's aims. Composer Justin Hurwitz, who worked on both the director's previous films, has delivered an LP's worth of buoyant, charming tunes, mostly in a jazzy vein, with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul supplying the lyrics. Production designer David Wasco and costume designer Mary Zophres adroitly supplied touches of the old and new in an elegant way, while choreographer Mandy Moore similarly danced a stylistic tightrope that greatly helped Chazelle achieve his aim of delivering a welcome gift of vintage goods in a dazzling new package.
Distributor: Lionsgate/Summit
Production companies: Summit Entertainment, Marc Platt Productions, Imposter Pictures, Gilbert Films
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, Rosemary DeWitt, Finn Wittrock, Callie Hernandez, Sonoya Mizuno, Jessica Rothe, Tom Everett, Josh Pence, J.K. Simmons
Director-screenwriter: Damien Chazelle
Producers: Fred Berger, Jordan Horowitz, Gary Gilbert, Marc Platt
Executive producers: Michael Beugg, Quiyun Long, Molly Smith, Trent Luckinbill, Thad Luckinbill
Director of photography: Linus Sandgren
Production designer: David Wasco
Costume designer: Mary Zophres
Editor: Tom Cross
Music: Justin Hurwitz
Lyrics: Benj Pasek, Justin Paul
Choreographer: Mandy Moore
Casting: Deborah Aquila, Tricia Wood
Rated PG-13, 128 minutesEvery week during the college football season, NFL clubs deploy scouts to campuses all over the country to make in-person evaluations on draft prospects. Naturally, the bigger games featuring more top prospects tend to draw larger contingents of scouts. Each week, College Football 24/7 brings you a look at the teams credentialed to attend three of the biggest games in college football.
Stanford at Notre Dame
8 clubs attending: Cleveland Browns, Denver Broncos, Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars, Los Angeles Rams, Minnesota Vikings, New York Jets, Oakland Raiders.
Details: Saturday, Oct. 15 at 7:30 p.m. ET (NBC)
Three top players: Stanford (RB Christian McCaffrey, DE Solomon Thomas, LB Peter Kalambayi); Notre Dame (QB DeShone Kizer, OT Mike McGlinchey, DE Isaac Rochell).
Matchup to watch: Stanford DE Solomon Thomas vs. Notre Dame OT Mike McGlinchey. Scouts will get a chance to see McGlinchey protect Kizer against a smaller, quicker pass rusher in Solomon. Conversely, how will Thomas, at 256 pounds, hold up against the run when he's being blocked by the 310-pound McGlinchey?
Alabama at Tennessee
13 clubs attending: Arizona Cardinals, Chicago Bears, Cleveland Browns, Indianapolis Colts, Los Angeles Rams, Miami Dolphins, New Orleans Saints, Oakland Raiders, Philadelphia Eagles, San Diego Chargers, Seattle Seahawks, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Tennessee Titans.
Details: Saturday, Oct. 15 at 3:30 p.m. ET (CBS)
Three top players: Alabama (LB Reuben Foster, OT Cam Robinson, WR Calvin Ridley); Tennessee (DE Derek Barnett, RB Jalen Hurd, QB Josh Dobbs).
Matchup to watch: Alabama OT Cam Robinson vs. Tennessee DE Derek Barnett. These are two of the top prospects on their respective teams, and both are juniors. Keeping Barnett away from freshman QB Jalen Hurts will be paramount for UA. Robinson has struggled at times in pass protection this season, and the struggles had more to do with technique than physical tools. Barnett is very much a technician as a pass rusher. He doesn't have the length and quickness of Texas A&M's Myles Garrett, but he'll bring a variety of pass rush moves and a relentless motor against Robinson.
Ohio State at Wisconsin
8 clubs attending: Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Jacksonville Jaguars, Kansas City Chiefs, Tennessee Titans, Washington Redskins.
Details: Saturday, Oct. 15 at 8 p.m. ET (ABC)
Three top players: Ohio State (QB J.T. Barrett, C Pat Elflein, LB Raekwon McMillan); Wisconsin (RB Corey Clement, LB T.J. Watt, CB Sojourn Shelton).
Matchup to watch: Ohio State LB Raekwon McMillan vs. Wisconsin RB Corey Clement. With McMillan roaming the heart of the Buckeyes' front seven at middle linebacker, and Clement spearheading the Badgers' downhill rushing attack between the tackles, McMillan and Clement are certain to tangle quite a bit. It's a bigger challenge for Clement, who hasn't yet rushed for 100-plus yards against a Power Five opponent this season.
Follow Chase Goodbread on Twitter @ChaseGoodbread.News Source: NASL Down to Four Teams, Future Bleak by Brian Quarstad on 5 December 2016
FiftyFive.One has learned that the Cosmos have ceased operations and the NASL is now down to only four teams. A source with information of the situation said it “appears that the NASL is officially dead.” It’s expected that those four teams will either go dark or make the move (subject to full vetting by USL and its owners) by the end of the week, if not the end of the USSF Board meeting vote on Tuesday.
The four teams are believed to be Rayo OKC, Fort Lauderdale, New York, and FC Edmonton. This assortment would have little to gain from negotiating with the USL. It’s expected that FC Edmonton will join the prospective Canadian Premier League in 2018, which the other three teams have major questions about their immediate futures.
With the USSF board meeting on Tuesday and the USL AGM meeting later this week, things are quickly coming to a head and we should know within a few days how the 2017 scenario will shake out. The source also said there is “behind the scenes pressure being applied by USSF to maintain one D2 league, be it NASL or USL so that the official story is D2 never went dark.”
How We Got Here
Over the weekend, Brian Straus of Sports Illustrated published a detailed piece on what is happening behind the scenes and the scenarios that could play out this week with the future of the NASL and USL in lower division soccer.
Michael Lewis of Big Apple Soccer reported on Sunday that the Cosmos had “ceased operations.” He also said a group had been in negotiations with a New York group to purchase the team. There seems to be some speculation that those interested in the Cosmos may want it for the name only.
Our own Jeff Rueter reported on Twitter that the Cosmos have lost over $30 million since they came into the league in the fall season of 2012.
Sources: since joining #NASL 2.0, the New York Cosmos have lost over $30 million. — Jeff Rueter (@jeffrueter) December 2, 2016
This move comes at a time where several other clubs are looking to the future. WRAL Sports Fan’s Neil Morris reported that Carolina RailHawks’ owner Steve Malik was set for some major news on Tuesday. The club will be changing their name to North Carolina FC. This rebranding includes a new crest and setting their sights on MLS.
.@RailHawksFC big news seeping out. Here's their apparent new name – North Carolina FC – logo, with announcement of MLS intentions. pic.twitter.com/mQ5u4RMka0 — Neil Morris (@ByNeilMorris) December 2, 2016
A Growing USL
The source also said that USL is riding a fine balance of growing the league with established teams that come from the NASL and keeping harmony with the current league teams that have established a good chemistry. They risk bringing in certain NASL owners that may flock to USL out of survival, not because they wanted to join the league.
If the USSF gives USL the sanctioning to run the second division in the US, it will be a busy week for the United Soccer League, who normally have tentative schedules ready for their clubs at their AGM. Until decisions are made, scheduling is impossible for their new second division and questions still remain as to who will make up their third division teams. USL has stated in the past that some of the attractive features that draw in new investors to their league is the number of teams (now 31) and regionalized play to keep expenses down. But clearly, as the organization moves back to claim the second division, not all teams will be able or want to play in its second tier.
Jeff Rueter contributed to this report.
Edit: Inclusion of four teams not negotiating with usl at 11:43 central.
Tags: Carolina RailHawks, NASL, New York Cosmos, North Carolina FC, USLChapter 3 is here folks! Enjoy ^_^
TRAINING WEEK - DAY 1
6:00 A.M.
Early morning the next day, the sun rose as the trainees of the 105th did. They all got dressed in their uniforms and proceeded to line up as to how they were usually instructed. Some tried to ward of sleep or prevented themselves from yawning so that it looked like they were paying attention. This time, instead of having Shadis yell at their faces, they were met with the calm demeanor of Lieutenant Ozpin, "Good morning, everyone."
"Good morning, Lieutenant Ozpin!" All the trainees said in unison, whilst saluting.
"Thank you all for taking this step forward into your new training. Now as I mentioned, you will all be divided into various groups so that each of you will be given an equal amount of training time. But before we do that, let me teach you an important concept before we begin learning how to control Dust. Each and everyone of you has an innate ability called an Aura. I've only noticed this recently while watching you guys practice in your sparring with each other. You can't quite see it, but it's there. Thus, I've come to the conclusion that your Aura is a manifestation of your souls."
"Manifestation of our souls? But how is that possible, Lieutenant Ozpin?" asked Jaune
"I'm glad you asked, young man. I believe that, ever since Dust was introduced, an energy shift has caused a change within your individual selves. I noticed some people have little to no Aura, but when I look upon each of you, you all have impressive amounts of Aura."
"How can you tell how much Aura we have though?" questioned Weiss
Ozpin smiled. "Just a gut feeling. Nevertheless, I have a theory: with proper control of your Aura, it may be enough to protect you from a Titan's attack. Moreover, if you can channel your Aura through an outside object, you may be able to channel it through Dust. Hence, you'll have proper control of Dust as it was the original intent for this training."
Some of the trainees were in awe that they could be able to learn how to control Dust with an innate ability they never knew they had all this time. They could possibly become the first few people to have ever mastered Dust within such a short amount of time.
"Anyways," Ozpin continued, "The reason why I'm asking you of this is because there is a new threat on the rise. A threat that could possibly be even more dangerous than the Titans pose themselves - the Grimm..."
"Grimm?" the trainees whispered amongst themselves
Ozpin's tone started to become more serious, "Yes, Creatures of Grimm to be more exact. During the Survey Corps expeditions after the fall of Wall Maria, these creatures suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I can't guarantee you if all my details are correct, but these creatures were… rather dark, both in their nature and appearance. I don't know why, but I could see the look in their eyes from afar the malicious intent they had. It's quite possible they want to get rid of Humanity more than the Titans do themselves. Even so, I knew somehow from deep within that they could not be killed as easily as to how a Titan would. When Dust was introduced, the Survey Corps took some with them on one of their journeys. It was a risky move, as no one had any experience with the newfound resource. But then we were attacked by the dark creatures. We attempted using our paring blades on them, with little to no avail. With no other options, we ended up throwing what little Dust we had at them, and… something remarkable happened. One of the creatures that got hit with the resulting Dust's explosion somehow got just… died immediately. I asked my unit to retreat in order to get this information to Commander Erwin as soon as I could. And now I stand before you all, in hopes that you will be able to combat the Grimm with the training I will give you."
Awestruck, Ruby then said, "Wow, what an incredible story. But, Lieutenant, what else is there to know about these… Grimm?"
"Well, my dear, that is why I have brought Captain Port and Captain Oobleck along. They managed to do some research on the Grimm species we've encountered so far. Speaking of which, as I said many times already, you'll be assigned to groups that'll be taught under our wing. We'll alternate groups around every three hours, so you'll be able to get an experience on what each of us is like. So without further ado, let us divide you into your groups now."
The trainees gulped at who they were gonna be with.
"First off, with Captain Ironwood: Coco Adel, Jaune Arc, Cinder Fall, Penny Polendina, Ruby Rose, Cardin Winchester, and Sun Wukong."
The group of trainees stepped up to join their new teacher. Ruby was pretty nervous that she was going to be training with a strict-looking leader, but then an orange-haired girl with a pink bow greeted her. "Salutations! I'm Penny!"
"Ruby." the dark-red haired girl replied, smiling to at least relieve some of her discomfort.
"Are you nervous?" Penny asked.
"A little." Ruby answered
"Don't worry, I'm sure Mr. Ironwood is a nice man." Penny reassured her
Meanwhile, Coco had a little smirk on her face, "No matter what they be, Titan or Grimm, anyone who gets in my way will be crushed!" The brown haired girl with the sunglasses and beret thought to herself
Sun then greeted his fellow blonde, "Hey, uh, Jaune right?"
"Yeah?"
"I think we're gonna be cool with each other." The blonde monkey-Faunus smiled.
"Not as cool as you though..." Jaune said, disheartened
"Aww, c'mon, don't be like that! Things are gonna look up for us
|
Chuck Grassley
On blocking Obama's pick: "Today the President has exercised his constitutional authority. A majority of the Senate has decided to fulfill its constitutional role of advice and consent by withholding support for the nomination during a presidential election year, with millions of votes having been cast in highly charged contests."
On quickly confirming Trump's pick: "Following the death of Justice Scalia as Americans were beginning to cast their votes for the next President, I said that we’d move forward with the next President’s nomination to the Supreme Court, regardless of who won. The President has made his selection and that’s what we’ll do."
Sen. Pat Roberts
My full statement on Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination to #SCOTUS: pic.twitter.com/8ElFj1tLMy — Senator Pat Roberts (@SenPatRoberts) February 1, 2017
On blocking Obama's pick: "He may very well be a very good nominee. I voted for him earlier. But it’s not about the nominee, it’s about the process."
On quickly confirming Trump's pick: "The American people voted in November knowing the responsibility of the next president to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. President Trump has selected a person who he believes will carry on in the tradition of Justice Scalia and uphold the values of the Constitution to the highest standard. I believe that is exactly the type of justice we need. I look forward to meeting Judge Gorsuch and hope for a swift confirmation."
Follow Gina on Twitter.(CNN) The European Union declared the Trump administration a "threat" on Tuesday, laying bare what many Europeans think privately and setting the stage for increased tension between the US and EU.
European Union President Donald Tusk's diplomatic bombshell listed the Trump administration as a threat alongside China, Russia, terrorism and radical Islam, adding that "worrying declarations by the new American administration all make our future highly unpredictable."
"The change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation; with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy," Tusk said in a letter to EU members.
The astonishing break from diplomatic practice stems from reasons that range from the personal to the broadly geopolitical.
Tusk's stark description about a close ally of seven decades reflects deep unease about President Donald Trump's take on European institutions. He's called NATO "obsolete," dismissed the 28-member EU as a "vehicle for Germany" and publicly said he's had "a very bad experience" with the EU as a businessman.
There is concern that Trump's comments will not only undermine the EU, but benefit Russia, which would prefer a weakened NATO and a strained Europe-US alliance.
And then there is deep wariness about Trump's chief strategist Stephen Bannon -- not just because of his anti-EU views and influence on the President but because his website Breitbart News is looking to expand into Europe. Diplomats said there's concern the site's cocktail of fake news and conspiracies could impact upcoming European elections.
"Tusk's letter speaks to one challenge Europeans see -- Trump's skepticism," said Fran Burwell, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council. "But there's another challenge in Bannon," who is close to populist European politicians such as France's Marion le Pen and her aunt Marine, leader of the National Front.
While some experts champion a move away from the EU and multilateral organizations, many diplomats and analysts said the new US administration seems to be trying to rewrite the terms of the US-EU alliance in ways that are potentially destabilizing.
Tusk's "dramatic language is something you wouldn't expect. It's extremely worrying, but I can see why. Trump's policies to the EU are completely unprecedented," said Stefan Lehne, a former EU diplomat from Austria now with Carnegie Europe. "Every Brit and European was socialized to expect the US to lead on every international crisis. Now you have a US president who wouldn't mind at all if the EU fell apart."
Lehne notes that Tusk's statement comes as the EU faces Russian assertiveness, a refugee crisis, rising populist movements in Europe, and critical elections in France, the Netherlands and possibly Italy.
"There's a lot at stake and all these negative dynamics amount to a crisis. Tusk seems to feel if all this comes together, if the EU doesn't come together, it will come apart. It is really a difficult moment."
Burwell describes it as "really earth shattering for many. It's a fundamental challenge."
Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation agreed it's a "sea change," but sees it as a positive.
"The old arguments in favor of European integration no longer apply," he said. "The winds of change are sweeping through Europe with a drive toward sovereignty, self-determination, decentralization of power. Donald Tusk is in a state of denial as to the trajectory in which Europe is moving. President Trump has a better understanding."
Trump shows little love for the EU, saying at a Friday press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May that he had a "very bad experience" in which "getting the approvals from Europe was very, very tough." Trump seemed to be referring to an EU ruling against a wall he wanted to build at an Irish golf course he owns because it would endanger protected snails.
The State Department referred requests for comment about Tusk's letter to the White House, which did not respond. The EU mission to the US said Tusk's letter speaks for itself.
In that letter inviting member states to a meeting on Friday, Tusk said, "We cannot surrender to those who want to weaken or invalidate the Transatlantic bond, without which global order and peace cannot survive. We should remind our American friends of their own motto: United we stand, divided we fall."
Derek Chollet, a senior adviser for security and defense at the German Marshall Fund, said a divided Europe and a weaker US-Europe relationship could make it harder for the US to find partners to work with -- particularly on global security issues -- there could be economic fallout that hurts US businesses, and it could leave Russia "empowered and getting everything it wants -- a US divided from Europe and an EU that is weakened and perhaps breaking apart -- without having to do anything. "
"To the extent that Trump seeks to undermine or weaken the EU, that benefits Russia," said Chollet. "This is a softball pitch over the plate to (Russian President) Vladimir Putin."
Gardiner, of the Heritage Foundation, said Russia would prefer to deal with a weak EU than individual countries. "Sovereign nations can do more than the lowest common denominator," Gardiner said.
Burwell added that one of May's messages for Trump was a request not to weaken the EU. "They are cooperating very strongly with Europe, the EU, in terms of sharing intelligence -- when she was Home Secretary she was central to that," said Burwell, "so the message was 'we're leaving but we still want them strong.' "
While the administration hasn't yet articulated a policy that would actively undermine the EU, Chollet said, "the fact that Trump has embraced people like Nigel Farage," the leader of the Brexit movement "who seeks to undermine the EU, and that advisers like Steve Bannon are on the rise, it's leaving Europeans asking questions whether the US is a reliable ally."
Several diplomats said anxiety is running high in Europe, with leaders quietly advising people to wait, avoid commenting on every Trump tweet, and see what the US actually does.
Lehne, the former EU diplomat, said that there might be a shift in tone coming. He pointed out that it's still so early in the Trump administration that the President doesn't yet have in place a full Cabinet that might reflect broader and less ideological views.
Leone said he was "quite sure" that former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state, "has a different view of international cooperation than Mr. Trump himself. Trump will have to work with his Cabinet, Lehne said, "and he'll have to listen to them to some extent. What we've seen in this week is probably misleading because it expresses the views of a very small circle around him and not reflective of the larger group."
One reality check, analysts and diplomats said, might be the EU's strength as a trade bloc. It represents a market that is currently larger than the US and without the UK, will only be slightly smaller. Lehne said the economic underpinning of the EU makes it more resilient than some people realize, as transnational supply lines and free movement act as a powerful unifier.
And it may bring the US business community into the conversation on behalf of the EU, Burwell said.
"If you talk to US companies, the idea that the EU might break apart and you may have to deal with 28 different countries -- there's no way," she said. "If you don't think the EU is important, just ask these tech companies that look at Europe as a super regulator on issues they care about like privacy."
If Trump tries to make bilateral trade deals with member states, he'll run into a legal roadblock, said one diplomat, because trade negotiations have to be done through the EU capital in Brussels.
Going forward, Lehne said he thinks Trump may simply try to avoid dealing much with EU leaders like Tusk. "He's clearly going to talk to the capitals of the bigger states and if he runs into difficulties will try to play one off the other," Lehne said.LONDON – Three men were found guilty on Thursday over the largest burglary in English legal history, a daring multi-million pound raid on a safe-deposit business in London’s jewellery district led by pensioners who had spent a life in crime.
In a plot three years in the planning, the gang broke into the vault of the Hatton Garden Safety Deposit building during the long Easter holiday weekend last year.
They entered an elevator shaft and climbed down to the vault where they used heavy equipment to drill through a thick concrete wall. Initially thwarted, they returned the following day and ransacked 73 deposit boxes, stealing jewels, gold and cash worth 14 million pounds ($29 million).
Only about a third of that has been recovered, including some which was hidden under headstones in a London graveyard.
The combined age of those involved was about 500, with the youngest 42 while two were in their 70s. Brian Reader, the oldest at 76 and one of the ringleaders, got to the scene of the crime on a bus using his senior citizen pass entitling him to free travel.
Reader was no stranger to such crimes and had been jailed in the past over a notorious 1983 heist at the Brink’s-Mat high security vault at Heathrow Airport when 26 million pounds worth of gold bars was stolen.
The audacious nature of the raid also rekindled memories of other renowned crimes such as the Great Train Robbery of 1963, when a 12-member gang ambushed a Royal Mail night train, a heist immortalized in several films making those involved famous.
While a lawyer representing one of the gang suggested the Hatton Garden raid could be made into the movie Bad Grandpas, detectives said the gang might be old but they were dangerous men, with a string of convictions for armed robbery.
"We can’t escape the fact that these people are callous, career criminals," Det. Supt.Craig Turner said.
"They had a long history of criminal activity behind them."
MYSTERY MAN ‘BASIL’
On the evening of April 2 last year, the gang met at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit and were let in through a fire exit by a red-haired man known as "Basil" who has not been identified and is still at large with a 20,000 pound reward on his head.
Although they disabled alarms as they went, one was triggered. A security guard who went to the scene saw nothing untoward and the police failed to send any officers, a mistake for which they have apologized.
The gang began the long process of drilling through the 51 cm (20 inch) thick concrete wall but initially could not get inside because a cabinet containing deposit boxes was in the way.
The next day they returned with new machinery, forced the cabinet out of the way and climbed into the vault where they opened 73 of the 999 boxes.
Detectives were able to trace a white Mercedes car they used to track down the main conspirators – Reader, John Collins, 75, Terry Perkins, 67 and Daniel Jones, 60.
They watched and listened in the next few weeks as the suspects met up in cafes and the Castle pub in Islington, north London where the heist was originally planned to discuss what to do with the loot.
‘FORENSICS FOR DUMMIES’
When they arrested the gang, they found a small smelting machine, diamond-testing equipment, and tools to separate gold from diamonds. Among other items recovered was a "Forensics for Dummies" handbook.
Jewellery was also found in a bag hidden under the gravestone of the father and brother of Jones’s partner.
The main figures in the heist pleaded guilty to conspiracy to burgle in September. Two more, William Lincoln, 60, and Carl Wood, 58, were convicted at Woolwich Crown Court of the same charge on Thursday while Hugh Doyle, 48, was found guilty of concealing stolen property.
Another man was cleared of any involvement while Perkins’ daughter and her brother-in-law also admitted conspiracy to conceal criminal property.
The gang will be sentenced in March.By Maria Saporta
Imagine if a Fortune 100 company were considering relocating its headquarters to metro Atlanta, and that company would employ 33,000 people in Georgia and generate $300 million a year in state and local taxes and fees.
Just imagine how our elected leaders and economic developers would drool and fall all over themselves offering incentives to offer that company.
Now consider this.
Delta Air Lines is a Fortune 100 company that is the top private employer in Georgia – providing jobs for 33,000 people statewide.
When it was coming out of bankruptcy in 2007, Delta had a choice – keep its headquarters in Atlanta or move to Minneapolis.
Richard Anderson, first a director and then CEO, and the board decided to keep the airline based in Atlanta.
Now I’m wondering if he’s second-guessing that decision.
No one company and no one executive was treated more disrespectfully during the 2015 legislative session than Delta and Anderson.
His crime?
He had the audacity to speak his mind about what he thought was in the best interest of Georgia’s economic future.
As the 2014 chair of the Metro Atlanta Chamber, Anderson felt obligated – as have our best business leaders have over the past many decades – to speak out for inclusion.
In the 1960s, Atlanta business leaders spoke out for tolerance and acceptance of racial integration.
And in today’s environment, Anderson urged the state to be welcoming to people from all over the world by having a less restrictive immigration policy and to steer away from social legislation – the religious freedom bill – that could be seen as discriminating against gays and lesbians.
Both those positions would make Georgia more economically competitive.
And as part of his swan song as Chamber chair, Anderson told state legislators they must be willing to raise taxes to meet the transportation infrastructure needs in the state.
(Guess what, that’s what they ended up doing – but never mind the facts).
So here is how one leading state legislator reacted to Anderson’s comments.
“Every time he opens his mouth, he makes my job easy,” State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, a Republican from Powder Springs, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Ehrhart’s job? To go after Anderson and Delta to reinstate an aviation fuel tax that had been removed when the airline was coming out of bankruptcy.
“He’s a private citizen. He’s welcome to chime in on anything. [The religious liberty bills] didn’t drive me,” Ehrhart said. “But will I more than happily take advantage of those who are tired of him chiming in to pass a piece of legislation? Absolutely.”
Now two facts.
The estimated $20 million in new jet fuel taxes (Delta’s share likely would be about $16 million of that) that will be collected will NOT go towards solving our transportation problems. It is mandated by federal law that the revenue has to go to fund airports, which have their own ample revenue sources. In other words, the state won’t even benefit from its mean spiritedness.
Second fact. Since it emerged from bankruptcy in 2007, Delta has added 6,500 jobs in Georgia. How much in tax credits would Georgia pay a new company adding that many jobs? Think about the $23 million in incentives the state gave to Mercedes Benz USA for just 800 jobs.
In other words, reinstating the jet fuel tax wasn’t about the money.
It was about small-minded people wanting to teach a big-time CEO a lesson to keep his mouth shut about policies that actually are in the state’s best interests.
And we tout ourselves as being the No. 1 state for business in the country.
How can we really say that with a straight face when we treat our largest private employer this way?
What makes things worse was the absence of support from top state elected officials and business leaders – people who should have stood up for Delta and Richard Anderson.
The silence was deafening.
And that scares me, because I know it would not take much for Delta to move its core corporate headquarters to New York City – a city that would welcome its top executives with open arms and with an inclusive attitude towards business.
Fortunately, Delta is taking the high road – for now.
“We are proud of our seven decades as Georgia’s hometown airline and the historic partnership between Delta and the city of Atlanta,” said Trebor Banstetter, a Delta spokesman. “We absolutely have no plans to relocate our headquarters.”
But people around town have told me that Delta’s executives are not happy, calling top leaders to voice their displeasure with the way the session transpired. Again, it’s not the money. It’s the vindictive and punitive way Delta was treated.
That’s no way to treat one of your treasured companies – much less your largest private employer – and much less the company which does more to make Georgia an economic development magnet than any other.
Here is what Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed had to say in a brief interview a few days ago:
“I don’t think there is any more important corporate citizen than Richard Anderson and Delta, and what they do for the city and state.
I view this through the lens of what would we have done if there was a decision being made between Atlanta and Minneapolis. If we ever were in that conversation, that tax credit would be a fraction of the incentives we would offer to keep Delta’s headquarters here.
Richard Anderson made the decision to keep Delta as an Atlanta company, and that’s why I supported and support them receiving favorable tax treatment.
I think we all make a huge mistake if we don’t view this through the lens of competitiveness.
I do believe we have some repair work to do on that relationship.
I don’t think that story is over yet. We all need to stay at it.”
Why don’t we start with defeating Rep. Earl Ehrhart in the next election?Version 0.7 released 24 July 2009.
Thanks to everyone who has written in with comments, bug reports, and suggestions! It makes it all worthwhile to hear someone finished the game.
A new scenario will be coming sometime this year, and that will wrap up a 1.0 release. Over a dozen new pieces are available in the level editor, including pieces for more RPG-style play.
News: The game has been updated to work in Safari 4, Chrome, and Adobe AIR 1.5.1. You don't need to install a plug-in to save games in these browsers.
The guide talks tactics and introduces many of the things you'll find in the game.
Install Asciiroth using Adobe AIR. Windows, Mac or Linux. This is the "hold it in your hands, works everywhere" way to play.
Play Asciiroth using Firefox, Chrome or Safari. IE8 works, but it's slower. There's no registration or server account needed. If it says "Install Google Gears" to the right, you can install that plug-in to save your games.
If it looks a little old school, it's only because I've been trying to make this game since 1980. But other things kept getting in the way. Hope you have some fun with it.
The Tombs of Asciiroth is a free, open source game you can play right now in your browser. It has arcade, puzzle and exploration-style game play in an extensive world of font-based abstraction.
WARNING: It's impossible to work on either the code or the maps without encountering spoilers. You might want to play the game first.
Only available as an AIR application, because it needs to load and save map files.
Asciiroth has a map editor that can be used to create maps. Read the Guide to Creating Asciiroth Maps for details, and the API documentation for a description of all the available pieces and how they work. I'm also happy to answer questions and/or fix the code if it's needed to create scenarios.
Latest Builds
If a more recent build exists than the release build, it will be available here:
Game: Web Version, Adobe AIR Version
Editor: Adobe AIR Version
The Code
The game has been made with the Google Web Toolkit, Eclipse, and Ant. Currently you must use Adobe AIR 1.1 for that version of the game/editor, as the 1.5 version has a new WebKit JavaScript engine that doesn't work:
If I can ever figure out why... I'll fix it.
The Ant script also bundles the game using Adobe AIR for distribution to end users. If you retrieve the code and can't get set up to work by looking at the build.properties file, please email me.
Patches welcome... you can also create scenarios which doesn't require any programming, and is probably more valuable to everyone's overall enjoyment of the game.
Release Notes
0.7
Updated to GWT 1.7. The game will now work in Safari 4 and Adobe AIR 1.5.1.
Support for HTML 5 database persistence. On Safari 4 you no longer need a plugin to save games, it will just work. I expect the same to be true of Firefox as well, in some future release.
Tons of new pieces: waterfalls, rafts, bridges, campfires, mushrooms, kiwis, apples, bread, daggers, slings, hammers, colored wall pieces, trash heaps, haystacks, pressure plates, crevasses, pylons and crystals to open the pylons (most to create a scenario that's a little more RPG, a little less puzzle-oriented). Ranged weapons can (optionally) require ammo to use, and you can place ammo in the editor. Chests/crates can hold multiple items.
This is getting to a pre-release state. What holds me off from designating 1.0 is that I will take a final pass for bugs due to all the new pieces, and I would like one more good scenario in the final release (having cut my teeth on the TOA scenario, I feel I can do better, and only a small fraction of the available pieces and capabilities are in that scenario.)
0.6.3
Fixed bug where you couldn't finish TOA scenario, a but that users would not find until being literally one step away from victory. Easily the meanest thing I've ever done as a programmer, if not the Hooloovo.
0.6.2
Scenario updates/fixes.
0.6.1
Updates to the gold castle scenario.
0.6
New scenario, usability enhancements to map editor, some bug fixes.
0.5.2
Fixed a bug that messed up the ending of the TOA scenario; worked on performance. The game now works quite well in IE8 although there are some further steps that can be taken.
0.5.1
Save game did not work correctly (SQL was wrong).
0.5
You can now save a game under a different name, so you can have more than one save point in a game. You can now load a scenario from the new game dialog (AIR only), so they don't have to be included directly in the game. Map making instructions are updated to describe how to create a functional stand-alone scenario, and the editor allows you to enter the scenario data, so that closes the loop on that. Bug fixes to maps and pieces, mostly minor to the game, although you can now pick stuff up that lands on low terrain like chests, crates and urns.
0.4.3
Addresses focus goofiness, and keyboard shortcuts not working to control the browser.
0.4.2
Fixes for a number of reported bugs. Keyboard mapping revised to work on international keyboard layouts. Font symbols revised for better compatability. Mouse-based navigation improved a bit.
0.4.1
Fixed a bug that hanged saving when there's something continually flying through the air.
0.4
This is a complete release. After this, I'll try and keep things backwards compatible.
The main TOA scenario and a tutorial are done (probably will be tweaked further).
New game pieces (pushers, sliders), new critters, now organized in groups in the map editor
Refinements to both the game and map editor UIs
Performance work (bit flags, compile-time class swapping, etc.).
Bug fixes, of course.
0.3
A large number of new pieces have been added, including many more agents and some pretty entertaining puzzle pieces like the reflector and the force field.
The "AI" (if you could call it that) has been improved. Agents navigate doors and corners now, and use breadcrumb pathfinding to track the player.
The map editor now includes the ability to play a map in preview mode, which is extremely helpful when developing maps. See the help doc from within the editor.
A lot of cleanup of the code, and expansion of lifecycle methods.
0.2
Initial release on icculus.org.
Planned
Localization, if anyone wants to translate it (easy to do with GWT)
Implement WHAT 5 storage provider, so you can save games as this becomes available in browsers (particularly Safari).
More pieces as really worthwhile ideas come up. (Should look over ZZT for relevant ideas.)
References
Some helpful sites for designing the visual appearance of pieces:The US State Department has relaunched its investigation into Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information during her time as Secretary of State. The State Department is reopening its probe after the FBI concluded its own investigation and concluded Clinton would not face criminal charges over her use of private emails.
According to CNN, the State Department's investigation will look into whether current employees involved in Clinton's emails should receive disciplinary action. Former employees will also be investigated and if found to have mishandled classified information, could face disciplinary action as well.
That could range from a reprimand for current employees, to losing security clearance for both current and former employees, CNN reported.
"Given the Department of Justice has now made its announcement, the State Department intends to conduct its internal review," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.
"I cannot provide specific information about the department's review, including what information we are evaluating. We will aim to be as expeditious as possible, but we will not put artificial deadlines on the process.
"Our goal will be to be as transparent as possible about our results, while complying with our various legal obligations. I'm not able to make commitments today one way or the other about what we will be able to disclose."
The State Department's announcement follows FBI Director James Comey's recommendation that no criminal charges be brought in the case. Comey was forced to defend his recommendation during a prolonged hearing in Capitol Hill as Republicans vented their anger over the lack of charges.
Comey told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that there was "no basis to conclude" that Clinton had lied to the FBI during the investigation.
"We're mystified and confused by the fact pattern you laid our and the conclusion you reached," Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah said to Comey.
Chaffetz added that any other "average Joe" facing such an investigation would be in "handcuffs," according to USA Today. When asked if similar management of classified data would lead an FBI employee to be potentially terminated, Comey responded, "Yes".
Comey's questioning and the State Department's decision to reopen the probe means Clinton is unlikely to shake off doubts of her trustworthiness and ability to handle classified information during the months leading up to November's general election.Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on LinkedIn Pin to Pinterest Share on StumbleUpon +
When Massachusetts-based smart trash can company BigBelly announced plans last year to convert New York City’s rubbish bins into super-fast Wi-Fi hotspots, the international media took notice. Engadget, CityLab, Gizmag, HuffPo, and Popular Science all ran with the story.
But while New York’s trash can proposal appears to have been carted off, Louisville has made the concept a reality. Mayor Greg Fischer says two new trash can Wi-Fi hotspots are a world first, and they’re located in the Russell neighborhood around the planned West Louisville FoodPort.
Fischer joined community leaders including Councilwoman Cheri Bryant Hamilton and Chief of Innovation Ted Smith on Wednesday to celebrate the second phase of the so-called West Louisville Neighborhood Wi-Fi Project, which is bringing free internet to the area. Grants supporting Metro Louisville’s Innovation Team funded the two 4G Wi-Fi hotspots along Market Street, which are being leased from BigBelly.
“The neighborhood WiFi project consists of placing access points in strategic locations along key corridors in efforts to create a mesh network for residents and businesses to have access to wireless coverage,” Charles Booker, director of strategic partnerships at Seed Capital Kentucky, the developer of the West Louisville FoodPort, wrote in a post on the company’s website.
Booker said that the project aims to increase internet access as one way of addressing the “holistic needs in the community” and to “help bridge the digital divide.”
The first two solar-powered BigBelly trash and recycling units with 4G internet are located at TARC’s Route No. 15 bus stops on Market Street at 25th Street and at 28th Street, making the wait for the bus a little more pleasant.
According to a press release, Route No. 15 is among the five top-used transit routes in Louisville with more than 2,200 average weekday trips. Among other things, the city said the Wi-Fi access will help riders check transit schedules and get real-time bus arrival information.
But because the BigBelly trash cans are solar powered, their Wi-Fi signal is only available with sunlight, Ted Smith told Broken Sidewalk. “It’s a tricky situation—we’re limited by the sun,” Smith said. “As the days get longer, the hours of operation will get longer.” That means more Wi-Fi in the summer and less in the winter.
Each Wi-Fi hotspot broadcasts about 100 feet in all directions, and will operate between 8:00a.m. and 6:00p.m., the city said (with extended hours in summer months).
That systemic weakness is also its strength, Smith added. He said that the units—the first outside Downtown—can be easily set up without relying on telephone poles or fiber infrastructure. Instead, these trash cans connect with cell towers, acting as a boosted mobile hotspot seen on many phones.
“Symbolically what we’re trying to do is systematically and consistently build out this kind of Wi-Fi accessibility in a community that has low broadband access,” Smith said, noting that for many, the only places to get Wi-Fi are at the library or fast food restaurants. “It’s not supposed to be a silver bullet. It’s a low end disruptor and it’s certainly moving us from zero to one—now we have something.”
Besides broadcasting a Wi-Fi signal, the solar panel on top of the BigBelly units also compacts the trash or recyclables inside, increasing their capacity by five times over a standard bin of the same size. The units also broadcast a signal to Metro Louisville Public Works when the bins are full, to reduce maintenance costs by up to 70 percent annually.
BigBelly solar-powered trash and recycling bins made their debut in Louisville in 2011 with a pilot project of the Louisville Downtown Management District, now part of the Louisville Downtown Partnership.
Broken Sidewalk reported last year that the first phase of the project brought Wi-Fi nodes to several Russel locations including 2910 West Jefferson Street, 2927 West Market Street, and 2501 West Market Street. So far, the city says almost 1,000 people have accessed the phase one hotspots, using more than 100GB of free data.
“The impact of this project is anchored by the FoodPort development,” Booker wrote. “Our rationale was simple: the FoodPort has the potential to be a transformative catalyst in a distressed neighborhood. Recognizing this, the Innovation Delivery Team raised the argument that bringing such a major development to a struggling area must be accompanied by efforts to empower the community.”
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[Top image courtesy Mayor’s Office.]Image caption Jessica Buchanan and Poul Thisted (images courtesy of Danish Refugee Council)
Two foreign aid workers kidnapped in Somalia three months ago have been freed in a US military raid.
US officials have confirmed that elite US Navy Seals were dropped into Somalia to carry out the overnight operation, which resulted in a shoot-out.
Vice-President Joe Biden told ABC News that the mission had been approved because of the failing health of one of the aid workers.
The hostages - a US woman and a Danish man - were seized on 25 October.
American Jessica Buchanan, 32, and Dane Poul Thisted, 60, were freed uninjured, although nine of their captors are said to have been killed. No casualties have been reported among US forces.
Health concerns
Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal told Denmark's TV2 channel that one of the hostages "has a disease that was very serious and that had to be solved''.
"Jessica's health was failing," Mr Biden said, referring to Ms Buchanan. "They concluded they should go at this time. The president gave the go."
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says Wednesday's rescue is the highest profile US action in Somalia since it pulled its forces out of the country in 1994.
A Pentagon official has confirmed to the BBC that the unit involved was the elite Seal Team Six, which killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan last May, although the same personnel were not necessarily involved.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Vice-President Joe Biden said the bravery of the special operations team "takes your breath away"
Seal Team Six suffered heavy losses last August in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan which killed 38 people.
US officials said the Somali kidnappers were "criminals" rather than Islamist al-Shabab militants.
More than 150 people are still being held hostage in Somalia - mostly sailors from ships seized for ransom by pirates.
They include a UK tourist, two Spanish medics and a Kenyan driver who were abducted in neighbouring Kenya.
Kenya blames al-Shabab for those kidnappings, but the group denies any involvement.
In recent months, the US has stepped up drone and naval attacks in Somalia, where the al-Qaeda-linked Islamist group controls much of the south and central regions.
A US special operations team killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of the most senior leaders of al-Qaeda's East Africa cell, inside Somalia in 2009.
'Chewing qat'
At the time of the raid, American Jessica Buchanan, 32, and Dane Poul Thisted, 60, were being kept about 40km (25 miles) east of the town of Adado and 100km south of Galkayo.
A US official said the Seals parachuted from a plane into an area near the compound where they were being held.
The kidnappers had been chewing a narcotic leaf known as "qat" and were sleeping when the Seal team arrived, self-described pirate Bile Hussein told the Associated Press news agency.
He added that nine kidnappers were killed and three were "taken away".
US officials say shots were fired as the team approached the compound, but there were no American casualties.
The rescue team was on the ground for about an hour and the raid was over by 03:00 (00:00 GMT).
The freed hostages and the Seals left the area by helicopter for the nearby tiny Horn of Africa state of Djibouti, where the US has a military presence.
They were taken to Camp Lemonnier - where about 2,500 personnel are based as well as armour, fighters and drones.
The two had been working for the Danish Demining Group, part of the Danish Refugee Council, when they were abducted by gunmen near the north-central town of Galkayo.
The family of Ms Buchanan said her rescue was "an unbelievable answer to prayers", and her brother, Stephen Buchanan said: "It is a great day to be an American. We are very proud and very thankful to Seal Team Six."
'Message to world'
Jessica Buchanan attended Valley Forge Christian College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 2006.
During and after college, Ms Buchanan taught a school in Nairobi, Kenya, where she "fell in love with Africa", Valley Forge's president Rev Don Meyer told the Associated Press.
Image caption Barack Obama told Jessica Buchanan's father of the rescue
She moved to Somalia in 2009 with her Danish husband, Erik Landemalm, an aid worker whom she met in Africa, according to ABC News.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Ms Buchanan is a regional education adviser with the demining group.
Correspondents say that since the 1993 killing in Mogadishu of 19 US soldiers and the wounding of 70 others, there has been no appetite for full-scale US ground operations in Somalia.
The country has been wracked by two decades of conflict and lawlessness, and has not had a functioning central government since 1991.
The current UN-backed interim government controls the capital, Mogadishu, thanks to the efforts of a 12,000-strong African Union force.
In a statement, US President Barack Obama said he had personally authorised the mission on Monday and that it constituted "another message to the world that the United States of America will stand strongly against any threats to our people".
The BBC's Steve Kingstone in Washington says the first hint of the successful operation appeared to come from President Obama himself.
As he prepared to give the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, he turned to his Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and said: "Good job tonight."
In his annual address, the US president praised the US Navy Seals team who killed al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in a raid in Pakistan in May 2011.El obispo de Chilpancingo, Salvador Rangel Mendoza, se justificó diciendo que es una labor pastoral los acercamientos con grupos del crimen organizado, o porque muchos de los sacerdotes estaban siendo amenazados, incluso hasta de muerte, informó Eje Central.“Yo estoy haciendo mi labor pastoral, yo soy el obispo no soy el fiscal, creo que le toca a él investig
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dangerous to himself -- but not dangerous to anyone else -- because he "was poking holes through the skin on his leg 'to let the air out,'" the ruling says.
The doctor ordered Armstrong to be involuntarily committed to the hospital. Three Pinehurst police officers were sent to find Armstrong and bring him in.
The found Armstrong wandering in a busy street nearby, but could not detain him immediately because the involuntary commitment paperwork was incomplete.
While they waited, Armstrong sat on the ground by the road. He ate grass and dandelions, chewed on a "gauze-like substance" and used his tongue to extinguish cigarettes, the ruling says.
When the paperwork was ready, the officers approached. Armstrong wrapped his arms and legs tightly around a stop sign post and refused to let go.
After 30 seconds, the ruling said, one of the officer used a Taser's pain mode, called drive stun mode, to try to make Armstrong let go.
The officer shocked Armstrong five times over the next two minutes, the ruling says. "Rather than have its desired effect, the tasing actually increased Armstrong's resistance," it says.
Finally, the three officers plus two security personnel from the hospital physically pried Armstrong's arms and legs off of the post. They pinned him face-down, kneeled on him and stood on his back, and handcuffed him and shackled his legs, the ruling says.
Armstrong stopped breathing and died shortly after.
The Taser should never have been used on Armstrong because he wasn't a threat anyone other than himself, the ruling says. But the officers aren't liable for Armstrong's death because prior court rulings and did not clearly say when it would be unconstitutional for them to use a Taser, the ruling says.
"Law enforcement officers should now be on notice that such taser use violates the Fourth Amendment," it says.
___
(c)2016 The Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, N.C.)
Visit The Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, N.C.) at www.fayobserver.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.A town in northern Italy is welcoming its first baby in nearly 30 years.
Before the arrival of Pablo, Ostana’s last baby was born in 1987.
The town, in the mountains of Piedmont, has seen its population fall dramatically over the past century.
Once the home to around 1,000 people, the birth of Pablo takes the population up to 85.
According to the Italian newspaper, La Stampa, only half of the residents even live in Ostana all year.
Pablo’s birth has been celebrated with a model stork with a bundle in its beak at the entrance to the town.
Ostana has been trying to reverse the trend, the BBC reported, by creating employment.
Pablo’s parents, Silvia and Jose, had considered going abroad, but instead opted to stay after being offered a job managing the local mountain refuge.
Ostana’s plight is typical of many small towns and villages in Italy which have been depopulated as young people move to cities to find work.
Photo: Chris Warde-Jones/The Telegraph
The exodus from the mountains have put the future of some of Italy’s most beautiful villages at risk.
Last year a campaign was launched to save Civita di Bagnoregio, a spectacular hilltop village, from collapse because of erosion.
The village, which once had a population of 3,000, has shrunk to as few as half a dozen residents during the winter – although it is visited by 600,000 tourists a year.How many times have your colleagues, specifically women, complemented you that your tie looks great? It is just there at the center that the eyes are forced to look at it. And even if it’s not the first thing that people notice, it is the easiest thing to verbalize and a safe hit-on pick-up line. Thinking about it, ties don’t really have a fundamental function. It just hangs on men’s necks. But whether we like it or not, with the perfect fit, it really makes a big difference.
Size matters. Tie with proper size and proportion to your body is important. Wide and narrow ties have been on and off the fashion mainstream, and it is better to continuously update your fashion look book. Tie width range is from 2 ½ to 2 ¾ inches for slim tie and 3 ¼ to 3 ¾ inches for regular ties. If you want a young modern look, slim tie is the best option; exact width depends on your built. To achieve elegance and to emphasize the V-shape masculine body, some still opt for wider ties. For the length, it is important to note that your belt line is your guide. Make sure the tie tip reaches that assigned base line after the knot.
Guide to color and style, mixing and matching. Wool, pin-dot, club, stripe or repp? Do all of these tie designs confuse you? If you want to be worry-free, a tie in solid dark color (preferably black) is a sure hit. It matches to essentially any basic shirt. A vital tie tip: cotton material on cotton suits and wool material on wool suits. It’s a no brainer matching solid ties and solid shirt but when pattern comes in, a mishap is highly probable. Easy tips: 1) choose a tie and find a shirt with the same color as one of the hues present on the print of the tie, 2) careful with mixing printed shirts and ties with patterns, make sure that only one print dominates, the weight of one is lighter than the other.
Work that bow tie. Themed events has been a craze in the last decade, sure thing you have been invited to a “Bow Tie Party” so it is key to have one handy in your tool box. Whether a tie-it-yourself or a pre-tied one; a good choice for your first bow tie is a black sleek one. Pair it with a shirt under a suit and a pair of oxfords, the Justin Timberlake in you is gonna pop out.
A tie is some kind of a jewel in a man’s outfit. With this piece, it’s just plain form over function.
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AdvertisementsCinema theatres across Tamil Nadu cancelled screening of movies and shut down on Monday in protest against the imposition of 30 per cent of entertainment tax in addition to 28 per cent GST (Goods and Services tax). Under the GST regime, the movie industry will have to pay 58 per cent tax that will also increase the rate of the tickets for the audience.
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Abirami Ramanathan, president of Tamil Film Chamber of Commerce, told PTI that all shows will be cancelled from July 3. He said the state government had earlier notified that municipalities would not levy tax on top of GST.
According to the PTI report, Ramanathan said, “If we screen movies, we have to pay local body taxes immediately as it came into force from yesterday. We are closing since there is no other way out. We cannot increase prices for big ticket movies. We have requested the government to fix a threshold within which we should be allowed to either increase or cut down ticket prices as per the need.”
Read | GST rollout: What is GST Act 2017?
“The state government needs to clarify how much tax will be levied on theatres after GST rollout. We request the state government to sort out the confusion immediately,” he added.
Over the weekend, multiplexes had also suspended online booking facilities demanding clarity if the state government would levy entertainment tax apart from the GST. “Some 10 lakh families are depended on our sector. If entertainment tax is levied by the state on top of GST, theatre owners will end up paying up to 53 per cent of the ticket rate as tax,” the cinema body chief said.
According to IANS, filmmakers in Tamil Nadu have urged the chamber to revoke its decision. “The critical decision was taken (by the chamber) without the consent of other organisations. In fact, we were not even informed and their move came as a shocker. We have urged them to revoke their decision and give us time to discuss the taxation issue with the government,” actor Vishal Krishna, president of the Tamil Film Producers’ Council, told the agency.
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The agency quoted filmmakers R Kannan and said, “I have borrowed money and produced ‘Ivan Thanthiran’. How am I going to repay if theatres are closed? This is like killing a newborn. My film has just released and this move will kill my film. I really don’t know what I should do now.”Bitcoin has been the world’s strongest currency in 2015
Bitcoin: the world’s strongest currency in 2015. (And 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013)
Top 5 strongest currencies in 2015
BambouClub Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 12, 2015
(Change against US $ at 12 December 2015 against rates one year ago)
Bitcoin (XBT) +21% Israeli Shekel (ILS) +2% US Dollar (USD) Swiss Franc (CHF) -2% Japanese Yen (JPY) - 2%
Bottom 5 weakest currencies in 2015
Venezuelan Bolivar (Black market rate) -78% Ukrainian Hryvnia (UAH) -34% Brazilian Real (BRL) -33% South African Rand (ZAR) -31% Colombian Peso (COP) -28%
The FX markets in 2015 have been defined by the De-Risking phenomenon: investors have fled from risk into the main hard currencies, namely XBT(Bitcoin), USD, CHF and JPY. They have retreated from VEF, UAH, BRL, ZAR, COP, RUB.
XAU (Gold) weakened somewhat, a signal perhaps that it is losing its safe haven status.
Bitcoin (XBT)
Note that the money used in the world’s freest financial system — Bitcoin — has appreciated the most, and the money used in the world’s most Socialist and regulated economy — Venezuela — has lost the most value.
Bitcoin was also the world’s strongest currency in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. (But in 2014 it was the world’s worst performing currency.)
Bitcoin price appreciation against USD p.a.
n.b. Table shows 37% appreciation (compared to 21% in ‘Top 5 strongest currencies’ table, because base used is 1 January 2015 price of $314 and not 12 December 2014 price of $355.)
Data
Currency Data from Economist for 10 December 2015.
Data for Argentinian Black Market rates from @DolarBlue on Twitter.
Data for Black market Venezuelan Bolivar from www.dolartoday.com.
Graphs
I have graphed the complete results. Venezuelan black market bolivar excluded from graph. Important currencies are in red. (G7 and BRICs and Gold.)A candlelight vigil and rally will be held on Thursday for the 14-year-old boy who was shot and killed by Los Angeles police earlier this week.
Jesse James Romero, was one of two people police attempted to approach while responding to a vandalism call near the intersection of North Chicago Street and East Cesar Chavez Avenue at about 5:35 p.m. on Tuesday, said LAPD Deputy Chief Robert Arcos.
Romero allegedly ran from police and turned onto North Breed Street. Officers turned the corner and followed him onto North Breed Street where an officer involved shooting occurred.
Romero was struck and pronounced dead at the scene. The other suspected vandal was detained, Acros said.
As the teen was running, a witness saw him fire a handgun in the direction of officers, according to police.
The officers involved have not yet given their statements regarding the shooting, so it was unclear if they saw or heard any gunshots, Arcos said.
Thursday’s rally is a call for justice, according to a release from the law offices of James P. Segall-Gutierrez.
“We the community of Boyle Heights want a full and independent investigation,” the release said. “We know for a fact that there is an inherent contradiction when any agency investigates itself and its rank and file, for any wrong doing.”
Thursday’s rally will take place around 6 p.m., at the corner of Breed Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue.
KTLA’s Melissa Pamer, Anthony Kurzweil and Cindy Von Quednow contributed to this article.Bookmark Us
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WELCOME to "Seniors, Veterans and Caregivers"
The TRUTH about Medical Marijuana & Cannabis
Genesis 1:12 - "...and the Earth brought forth grass, and herb
yielding seed... And God saw that it was good"
This dedicated category is being brought to you in an attempt to educate interested senior citizens & caring individuals in the many applications of Medical Marijuana (Cannabis). We hope to be informative, educational and a wonderful resource to many Seniors, Veterans and Caregivers on the benefits of this miracle plant. This 100% Natural Medicine that God has left for us all. Please feel free to share this information with your friends, relatives, family members and other loved ones. It WILL save lives, or certainly extend the lives of many who suffer needlessly every day (from numerous pharmaceutical drugs that are shortening their lives to say the least). In my own research and studies I have found that approaching this topic with loved ones can be a sensitive one due to the misinformation and outright lies that can be found on the subject. Beliefs are not an easy thing to overcome, especially after many years of misinformation and outright lies (brainwashing). I am one of those Cannabis loving, pro-legalization people that you have been warned about. This is ME, doing my best to educate and make truthful information available to the sick senior citizens, military veterans and others, while protecting YOUR Rights to live a longer and healthier life as you see fit.
As you investigate these pages further you will also find links and resources to the many other reliable resources we could find on this topic. This includes books and products that are used in conjunction with Medical Marijuana and treating your specific ailments. So it is in that vein, that I have tried to offer an anonymous way to approach the subject and educate more people without alienating the caring and educated person who wants YOU to live a better and healthier life than many pharmaceutical drugs cannot (do not) offer.
This first video is an attempt to offer ANY individual
a simple and effective way to bring this potential medicine and
information to anyone's attention in a generic manner. Please copy this web address and share it with those you care about.
Thank you. Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Neurosurgeon and Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN This video is by one of today's top medical experts on the specific
effects, uses, and medical advances of cannabis healing. Please Search YouTube
This video keeps being removed...
Please reference the Educational Cannabis Links page
for more in-depth information online, or our Treatments page
for specific Medical Marijuana Strains to consider based upon your illness. - Skip Budman Grow your own medical marijuana - Learn how here.THE BELLWETHER SYNDICATE is the musical project of William Faith (of March Violets, Faith and the Muse, formerly of Christian Death, Shadow Project, Mephisto Walz, Sex Gang Children, etc.) and Sarah Rose Faith (aka DJ Scary Lady Sarah).
In March of 2012, we launched our first Kickstarter to produce our debut EP The Night Watch. The Kickstarter was a major success for us, reaching our stretch goal of $11,000. The EP came out in February of 2013, and was followed by shows and touring in the U.S., as well as appearances in the UK and Germany. It was a blast.
For quite some time now (years, actually), many of you have been asking when we would be doing a new album. We've always believed in producing music only when we have something to say. Now is that time -- and It's time to step it up.
We're ready to do a new album. There are a few pieces of gear we want to add to our studio rig to make the recording better, and we're currently looking at a few different engineers to mix the album. We're excited by the new song ideas we have and can't wait to share them with you (including small runs of vinyl and CDs).
We also want to back it up with some proper touring here at home, in Europe, Central and South America and beyond. We have a whole new show we want to take out on the road -- there's nothing we love more than connecting with you directly by playing live. It's why we do what we do.
Our sincere thanks and deepest gratitude for your support -- you are the ones who make all this possible!
All the love,
William & Sarah ∞
P.S. - If you have any questions about any of the rewards, please contact us at [email protected]
--
What does your pledge go toward?
• Gear: A few pieces of studio equipment to put the polish on our recording.
• Mixing: We are currently looking at a few different options, but will ultimately select the person we feel can best express the ideas behind the songs.
• Mastering: The album will be mastered by the best in the business, Joe Gastwirt in Oak Park, CA.
• Artwork: Again, examining several options, but will go with the person who truly understands what we're conveying with this album.
• Vinyl Pressing/Compact Disc duplication: Manufacture of short-run vinyl and CDs of album.
• T-Shirts/Buttons/Stickers: Manufacture of merchandise.
• Beyond... If we are fortunate enough to meet our goal, anything above and beyond that amount will go toward promotion of the album as well as further development of our live show and more touring.
--
TIMELINE:
• Friday, May 5: Our Kickstarter deadline hits.
• May - December, 2017: We are in the studio working on this new album.
• December 25, 2017: Everyone who pledged to our Kickstarter receives a digital download of the album, nearly 2 months ahead of the album release date of February 14, 2018
• December 31, 2017: We perform a New Year's Eve concert event here in Chicago, IL.
• January, 2018: All physical product rewards go out, a month or more ahead of the album release date of February 14, 2018.
• February 14, 2018: Official street/release date of our new album. Touring and events to follow.Anduril_FotW
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Sr. MemberActivity: 413Merit: 250 Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC/BLK) | PoS | No Premine - No IPO - ONLY OFFICIAL THREAD May 13, 2014, 02:40:42 PM #1421
- When bulls are flying, they shoot'm down
- When bears are digging, they pull'm up
As a real crypto fan, a steady price makes me nervous, because I'm not used to it.
But if this really is there strategy, they do have a good point.
We don't want BC to be another pump & dump coin, so why not keep the price stable untill there is an ACTUAL reason for the price to go up (i.e. new development, big investor, groundbreaking news, etc.) and then let it find a new level, settle and keep it stable again.
This is ofcourse not a good strategy for the adrenaline junky traders (i'm detoxing...), but it might just be THE BEST strategy for investors who actually want BC to succeed.
Ah well, we'll see huh??! Aha, looks like BC leaders are keeping price flat on purpose:- When bulls are flying, they shoot'm down- When bears are digging, they pull'm upAs a real crypto fan, a steady price makes me nervous, because I'm not used to it.But if this really is there strategy, they do have a good point.We don't want BC to be another pump & dump coin, so why not keep the price stable untill there is an ACTUAL reason for the price to go up (i.e. new development, big investor, groundbreaking news, etc.) and then let it find a new level, settle and keep it stable again.This is ofcourse not a good strategy for the adrenaline junky traders (i'm detoxing...), but it might just be THE BEST strategy for investors who actually want BC to succeed.Ah well, we'll see huh??! "The Blade that was Broken shines again!"
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McKie
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Sr. MemberActivity: 336Merit: 250Twitter: @Steven_McKie Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC/BLK) | PoS | No Premine - No IPO - ONLY OFFICIAL THREAD May 13, 2014, 03:04:49 PM #1424 Quote from: XbladeX on May 13, 2014, 02:51:17 PM
1.Cryptsy technical support(Horus) told that "rat4 is pretty amazing coding unit"
When someone from outside tell you that and he is tech. guy that mean he is good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dVeLJFOdfyY#t=1121
2.The Doge and Maarx they know what they are doing they are good software developers.
(bounties for dev are great things - brings talented people to Blackcoin)
3.NO SMOKING ++++ I appreciate that.
4.If you work hard for Blackcoin you can have work/holiday trip to Miami in US like Soepkip. - Signal for people work hard and you will get your reward.
5.Rent real Lamborghini for BC - this is real.
6.Like Soepkip said we are building infrastructure and that hard work will brings BC profits not market P&D
7.V2 will be new mooltipool not based on Mpos
8.Wizz like he said he is focusing on entertainment so i don't get his actions so serious.
(but be honest he brings more entertainment to Blackcast - without him it could be to boring sometime - he can be unpredictable )
9.Android wallet soon.
I watched blackcast and i am happy.When someone from outside tell you that and he is tech. guy that mean he is good.2.The Doge and Maarx they know what they are doing they are good software developers.(bounties for dev are great things - brings talented people to Blackcoin)3.NO SMOKING ++++ I appreciate that.5.Rent real Lamborghini for BC - this is real.6.Like Soepkip said we are building infrastructure and that hard work will brings BC profits not market P&D7.V2 will be new mooltipool not based on Mpos8.Wizz like he said he is focusing on entertainment so i don't get his actions so serious.(but be honest he brings more entertainment to Blackcast - without him it could be to boring sometime - he can be unpredictable )9.Android wallet soon.
Wiz and people like him are what Crypto needs. People vested with connections who are cool and hip enough to wrap their heads around such a large development like BlackCoin. This is great. If Wiz can convince a single wealthy celebrity, or affluent -- they could be our ticket to the big leagues. Wiz knows that too. Maarx, Doge, Soep, and everyone else are very competent. Should be no surprise how far we've gotten. And as we recruit more to our cause people are going to bring their own comparative advantage that make use unique in your ventures. Our trade secret, our soul, is our people. Wiz and people like him are what Crypto needs. People vested with connections who are cool and hip enough to wrap their heads around such a large development like BlackCoin. This is great. If Wiz can convince a single wealthy celebrity, or affluent -- they could be our ticket to the big leagues. Wiz knows that too. Maarx, Doge, Soep, and everyone else are very competent. Should be no surprise how far we've gotten. And as we recruit more to our cause people are going to bring their own comparative advantage that make use unique in your ventures. Our trade secret, our soul, is our people. BLK Donate: B7Pegtcz9wa9Uf5NsQLQ26HbQCBc8EmRGz
blade87
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Hero MemberActivity: 644Merit: 500 Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC/BLK) | PoS | No Premine - No IPO - ONLY OFFICIAL THREAD May 13, 2014, 03:05:01 PM #1425 Quote from: jackfruit on May 13, 2014, 02:10:39 PM
Obvious troll is obvious.
The premine is even worse... it was 75 million in 7 days!!!!1!!one!!!!Obvious troll is obvious.
From what I understand about whale games on Mintpal : if you put up large buy and sell wall non-stop, eventually you will be able to buy or sell into your own wall, creating a trading singularity than may allow to you time travel through the black hole, back to the release of BlackCoin so you may obtain an infinite loop of premine. That explains everything on Mintpal right now. Black Illuminati has been exposed!
And good summary on the cast XbladeX.
Quote from: Anduril_FotW on May 13, 2014, 02:40:42 PM As a real crypto fan, a steady price makes me nervous, because I'm not used to it.
Before the big BTC bubble this past December, BTC and LTC spent months being "stable". LTC actually just kept slowly dropping from May to November. You should have seen the doom and gloom that was around in August/September with LTC prior to the bubble when it was trading at $1.80 or less (and I believe bottomed out at $1.10). In the case of LTC, those who stuck with it in those times were by far the most rewarded in the end. From what I understand about whale games on Mintpal : if you put up large buy and sell wall non-stop, eventually you will be able to buy or sell into your own wall, creating a trading singularity than may allow to you time travel through the black hole, back to the release of BlackCoin so you may obtain an infinite loop of premine. That explains everything on Mintpal right now. Black Illuminati has been exposed!And good summary on the cast XbladeX.Before the big BTC bubble this past December, BTC and LTC spent months being "stable". LTC actually just kept slowly dropping from May to November. You should have seen the doom and gloom that was around in August/September with LTC prior to the bubble when it was trading at $1.80 or less (and I believe bottomed out at $1.10). In the case of LTC, those who stuck with it in those times were by far the most rewarded in the end.
orinoco
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<3 big picture
MemberActivity: 81Merit: 10<3 big picture Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC/BLK) | PoS | No Premine - No IPO - ONLY OFFICIAL THREAD May 13, 2014, 03:13:00 PM #1426
# address balance
1 BKYCpC6yttWiJ8fk6fHbQvLoqC6oc1Q4rb 3 000 000.00500000 bc (784.17 btc / 339 714.21 usd )
2 BKamGtcg6Cwe6f3zy2AmFsaxN1PwNSF2Cv 3 000 000.00000000 bc (784.17 btc / 339 714.21 usd )
3 BJ2y2twPhc1taeuJcQrjdxjuz7qDZGQzAh 2 238 433.49413648 bc (585.10 btc / 253 475.89 usd )
4 B537JQYmPFGvxSWpYHTsgnFxAw576E8LRQ 2 220 861.73834935 bc (580.51 btc / 251 486.09 usd )
5 B7nvWE1M7prrVpoC5ddkQ1kv3TFSKmYsEb 1 915 523.39053670 bc (500.70 btc / 216 910.17 usd )
6 BQh7YZ1MKf1izt3htAexZ4gajePUqX7UUM 1 771 758.06071773 bc (463.12 btc / 200 630.46 usd )
7 B8PjP5KMjUwcnDZmpvi9y7qQ18jajirhK9 1 237 972.00000000 bc (323.59 btc / 140 185.56 usd )
8 B9th9ghmZmDp9HXGH9NemhcaMYLYVMpxKB 1 092 741.11262718 bc (285.63 btc / 123 739.89 usd )
9 BMTapHhG6tDZzqV9DNdGGYZPeSNb2RX2ZB 1 000 000.00000000 bc (261.39 btc / 113 238.07 usd )
10 BQzGUknYdwi43U9JPnouf4dmmgNSQRT6YR 1 000 000.00000000 bc (261.39 btc / 113 238.07 usd )
I'm relatively new to crypto coins.. is that sort of distribution normal? Top ten wallets hold roughly 25% of BC? That seems pretty concentrated for a no-premine coin.I'm relatively new to crypto coins.. is that sort of distribution normal? Twitter: Omnipreneur
KingSchultz
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Full MemberActivity: 140Merit: 100 Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC/BLK) | PoS | No Premine - No IPO - ONLY OFFICIAL THREAD May 13, 2014, 03:43:50 PM #1429 Quote from: Anduril_FotW on May 13, 2014, 02:40:42 PM
- When bulls are flying, they shoot'm down
- When bears are digging, they pull'm up
As a real crypto fan, a steady price makes me nervous, because I'm not used to it.
But if this really is there strategy, they do have a good point.
We don't want BC to be another pump & dump coin, so why not keep the price stable untill there is an ACTUAL reason for the price to go up (i.e. new development, big investor, groundbreaking news, etc.) and then let it find a new level, settle and keep it stable again.
This is ofcourse not a good strategy for the adrenaline junky traders (i'm detoxing...), but it might just be THE BEST strategy for investors who actually want BC to succeed.
Ah well, we'll see huh??!
Aha, looks like BC leaders are keeping price flat on purpose:- When bulls are flying, they shoot'm down- When bears are digging, they pull'm upAs a real crypto fan, a steady price makes me nervous, because I'm not used to it.But if this really is there strategy, they do have a good point.We don't want BC to be another pump & dump coin, so why not keep the price stable untill there is an ACTUAL reason for the price to go up (i.e. new development, big investor, groundbreaking news, etc.) and then let it find a new level, settle and keep it stable again.This is ofcourse not a good strategy for the adrenaline junky traders (i'm detoxing...), but it might just be THE BEST strategy for investors who actually want BC to succeed.Ah well, we'll see huh??!
I really don't think the price is being held down, at least not by anything other than the normal whale games on altcoins.
You have to consider that once a coin is a top 10-15 cryptocurrency, the market changes a lot. Hype and 'good news' don't make the market jump like crazy like it does in lower value altcoins. And on a more stable, successful currency, day traders aren't looking for huge gains. They are happy to take a 5-10% gain on something like BlackCoin because there is a much lower risk that they'll lose a significant amount than the risk on low-value, speculative coins. This makes it harder for the market to make significant moves without really good reason.
That's not to say BlackCoin won't make signficant gains fast. It just takes more real, concrete value to readjust the market after a coin already has a baseline of success. Simple hype won't do it. There is a great recent example: Darkcoin traded sideways between 125k-150k for well over a month. I was holding some the entire time and I followed it fairly closely. The tech and plan for the coin was well publicized the whole time. It was clear that the developer was skilled enough to implement it. There were great things happening in the community. But the price stayed level. I saw a lot of posts from people frustrated by it - they saw value being added yet the price didn't move. But then the anonymous sending came out of beta. Shortly after, Dark has gained over 400% in one week and is now trading around 550-600k. The market barely reacted to news or hype for over a month. It reacted when enough concrete value was added that it made DRK obviously undervalued, and market adjusted quickly.
I think BlackCoin may be in a similar situation. We have some of the strongest development forces I've seen in altcoins. Real value is being added every day. All the fundamentals are excellent. We have a top developer. This coin has huge potential. I don't know when, but I think there will come a point very soon when the market finds BLK to be very, very undervalued.
I really don't think the price is being held down, at least not by anything other than the normal whale games on altcoins.You have to consider that once a coin is a top 10-15 cryptocurrency, the market changes a lot. Hype and 'good news' don't make the market jump like crazy like it does in lower value altcoins. And on a more stable, successful currency, day traders aren't looking for huge gains. They are happy to take a 5-10% gain on something like BlackCoin because there is a much lower risk that they'll lose a significant amount than the risk on low-value, speculative coins. This makes it harder for the market to make significant moves without really good reason.That's not to say BlackCoin won't make signficant gains fast. It just takes more real, concrete value to readjust the market after a coin already has a baseline of success. Simple hype won't do it. There is a great recent example: Darkcoin traded sideways between 125k-150k for well over a month. I was holding some the entire time and I followed it fairly closely. The tech and plan for the coin was well publicized the whole time. It was clear that the developer was skilled enough to implement it. There were great things happening in the community. But the price stayed level. I saw a lot of posts from people frustrated by it - they saw value being added yet the price didn't move. But then the anonymous sending came out of beta. Shortly after, Dark has gained over 400% in one week and is now trading around 550-600k. The market barely reacted to news or hype for over a month. It reacted when enough concrete value was added that it made DRK obviously undervalued, and market adjusted quickly.I think BlackCoin may be in a similar situation. We have some of the strongest development forces I've seen in altcoins. Real value is being added every day. All the fundamentals are excellent. We have a top developer. This coin has huge potential. I don't know when, but I think there will come a point very soon when the market finds BLK to be very, very undervalued.
MuffinMaster
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Sr. MemberActivity: 686Merit: 253 Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC/BLK) | PoS | No Premine - No IPO - ONLY OFFICIAL THREAD May 13, 2014, 03:48:42 PM #1431 Quote from: KingSchultz on May 13, 2014, 03:43:50 PM
You have to consider that once a coin is a top 10-15 cryptocurrency, the market changes a lot. Hype and 'good news' don't make the market jump like crazy like it does in lower value altcoins. And on a more stable, successful currency, day traders aren't looking for huge gains. They are happy to take a 5-10% gain on something like BlackCoin because there is a much lower risk that they'll lose a significant amount than the risk on low-value, speculative coins. This makes it harder for the market to make significant moves without really good reason.
That's not to say BlackCoin won't make signficant gains fast. It just takes more real, concrete value to readjust the market after a coin already has a baseline of success. Simple hype won't do it. There is a great recent example: Darkcoin traded sideways between 125k-150k for well over a month. I was holding some the entire time and I followed it fairly closely. The tech and plan for the coin was well publicized the whole time. It was clear that the developer was skilled enough to implement it. There were great things happening in the community. But the price stayed level. I saw a lot of posts from people frustrated by it - they saw value being added yet the price didn't move. But then the anonymous sending came out of beta. Shortly after, Dark has gained over 400% in
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waypoints, using the in-game chat or your mic to call out commands.
Being a commander is where Natural Selection 2's learning curve is at its steepest, and for some, it can also be the least accessible. Once you take charge as a Commander, almost everything relies on the decisions you make, and your ability to convince your teammates to follow your lead. Even if you have some of the best players on your side, it won't amount to much if you don't react fast enough to what your enemy is doing or don't communicate to your team what's going on in the larger scheme of things. It can be incredibly stressful maintaining the high attention to detail you'll need to manage several bases at once, give orders to your team, keep an eye on what the other team is doing and respond to player requests for help. If you're able to accomplish all of those goals and help your team get what they need to take out the enemy, it will make any victory feel well-earned. But at times, it can also feel like there's so little room for error that it's possible to spend an entire match thinking that you've made all the right calls and organized your team efficiently, only to watch helplessly as everything you've built is wiped out in one swoop because you didn't realize you were being flanked on one side of the map or you picked the wrong weapon at the wrong time for your team.The tedious task of recounting Wisconsin's nearly 3 million votes for president began Thursday with scores of hastily hired temporary workers flipping through stacks of ballots as observers watched their every move.
The action in Wisconsin could soon be duplicated in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was pushing for recounts. Donald Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton in all three states, but recounts were not expected to flip nearly enough votes to change the outcome in any of the states.
The Wisconsin recount marked the first time in 16 years there was a candidate-driven recount of a presidential recount. But it doesn't carry the same drama as the drama of the Florida presidential recount of 2000, when the outcome of the election between Al Gore and George W. Bush hung in the balance.
"This is certainly not Bush v. Gore," said Wisconsin's chief elections administrator, Mike Haas.
Even so, the campaigns for Trump, Clinton and Stein all had observers spread throughout the state to watch the process. The recount will have to move quickly. The federal deadline to certify the vote to avoid having the fate of Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes decided by Congress is Dec. 13. Even if that were to happen, the votes would almost certainly go to Trump, since Republicans control both chambers of Congress.
Most counties will manually recount the ballots, although Stein lost a court challenge this week to force hand recounts everywhere. The state's largest county, Milwaukee, was recounting the ballots by feeding them through the same machines that counted them on election night. In Dane County, where Clinton won 71 percent of the vote, the ballots were being counted by hand.
Morry Gash / AP Nicole Kirby looks over results during a statewide presidential election recount on Dec. 1, 2016, in Milwaukee. Nicole Kirby looks over results during a statewide presidential election recount on Dec. 1, 2016, in Milwaukee. (Morry Gash / AP) (Morry Gash / AP)
Workers in Dane County are being paid $20 an hour and will work two shifts over about 12 hours a day to get the recount done by the deadline, said County Clerk Scott McDonell. He didn't expect much change in the results.
"I think we will be very close to what was reported on election night," McDonell said Thursday.
Clinton lost to Trump by about 22,000 votes in Wisconsin, or less than a percentage point.
Stein has argued, without evidence, that irregularities in the votes in all three states suggest that there could have been tampering with the vote, perhaps through a well-coordinated, highly complex cyberattack.
"Verifying the vote through this recount is the only way to confirm that every vote has been counted securely and accurately and is not compromised by machine or human error, or by tampering or hacking," Stein said in a statement Thursday.
Stein's critics, including the Wisconsin Republican Party, contend that she's a little-known candidate who is merely trying to raise her profile while raising millions of dollars. Stein has taken in nearly $7 million for the recounts, which is about twice as much as her longshot presidential campaign took in.
The Wisconsin recount was estimated to cost about $3.9 million. Stein paid $973,250 for the recount in Michigan, which could begin as early as Friday.
In Pennsylvania, a hearing is scheduled for Monday on Stein's push to secure a court-ordered statewide recount, a legal maneuver that has never been tried, according to one of the lawyers who filed it.
Stein's attorneys want a forensic analysis of electronic voting machines in Pennsylvania to see if there any evidence that their software was hacked. But counties where Green Party-backed voters have sought a recount are refusing to do such forensic examinations.
Associated PressImage copyright AFP Image caption Abu Khaled al-Sur was a veteran al-Qaeda operative who had fought in Afghanistan and Iraq
A rebel leader linked to al-Qaeda has been killed in a suicide bomb attack in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.
Abu Khaled al-Suri was among several people who died when a base of Ahrar al-Sham, part of the Islamic Front, was targeted on Sunday, activists said.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a jihadist rebel group, is thought to have been responsible.
Suri was reportedly sent to Syria by al-Qaeda to end the infighting between ISIS and other rebel groups.
It is said to have left more than 2,000 people dead since early January.
'Corrupting the jihad'
Abu Khalid al-Suri was killed along with six comrades from Ahrar al-Sham in Sunday's attack, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Two rebels told the Reuters news agency that five men had entered the rival group's headquarters in Aleppo and opened fire before one blew himself up.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Al-Suri was a senior figure in the hardline Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but a spokesman for the Islamic Front, Akram al-Halabi, said he believed ISIS was behind it.
"The first fingers of blame point to the State," he told the Associated Press. "Unfortunately this is going to make the infighting worse."
Suri, a Syrian-born militant whose real name was Muhammad Bahaiah, is believed to have been close to the late al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri.
He fought against US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rebel sources said he was sent to Syria a few months ago on a mission to mediate in the conflict between ISIS and other rebel groups, including the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front.
An audio recording attributed to Suri was released last month in which he said ISIS had "sought to corrupt the jihad in Syria, as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan".
He called on the group to stop attacking other jihadists, adding: "Direct your car bombs at the infidels and do not busy yourself with fighting the mujahedeen and killing them."
Earlier this month, al-Qaeda's general command insisted that it had "no connection" with ISIS and was not responsible for its actions.
ISIS grew out of the former Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), a jihadist militant umbrella group that included al-Qaeda in Iraq. It is believed to have helped create the al-Nusra Front in mid-2011.
In April 2013, ISI leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the merger of his group and al-Nusra - effectively a takeover - and the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).
Image copyright Reuters Image caption In a separate attack on Sunday, a car bomb near a field hospital in the northern town of Atmeh
But the move was rejected by al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Julani and Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's overall leader, who recognised al-Nusra as its sole Syrian offshoot.
Since then, ISIS and al-Nusra have operated as separate entities, with the latter focusing on toppling President Bashar al-Assad and maintaining better relations with other rebels. ISIS has seemed to be more concerned by territorial gains and implementing its extreme interpretation of Islamic law.
Also on Sunday, several people were reported killed by a car bomb near a field hospital in northern Syria, close to the border with Turkey.
Activists said the blast happened in the rebel-held town of Atmeh, which hosts a camp for thousands of people displaced by Syria's civil war.
It was not immediately clear who had carried out that attack.
According to UN figures, 6.5 million Syrians have been displaced by the country's civil war, and 2.5 million are registered as refugees. Lebanon has taken the highest number of refugees, followed by Jordan and Turkey.Ageing or aging (see spelling differences) is the process of becoming older. The term refers especially to human beings, many animals, and fungi, whereas for example bacteria, perennial plants and some simple animals are potentially biologically immortal. In the broader sense, ageing can refer to single cells within an organism which have ceased dividing (cellular senescence) or to the population of a species (population ageing).
In humans, ageing represents the accumulation of changes in a human being over time, encompassing physical, psychological, and social changes. Reaction time, for example, may slow with age, while knowledge of world events and wisdom may expand. Ageing is among the greatest known risk factors for most human diseases: of the roughly 150,000 people who die each day across the globe, about two thirds die from age-related causes.
The causes of ageing are uncertain; current theories are assigned to the damage concept, whereby the accumulation of damage (such as DNA oxidation) may cause biological systems to fail, or to the programmed ageing concept, whereby internal processes (such as DNA methylation) may cause ageing. Programmed ageing should not be confused with programmed cell death (apoptosis).
The discovery, in 1934, that calorie restriction can extend lifespan by 50% in rats has motivated research into delaying and preventing ageing.
Ageing versus immortality [ edit ]
Hydra, a relative of the jellyfish Immortal, a relative of the jellyfish
Human beings and members of other species, especially animals, necessarily experience ageing and mortality. Fungi, too, can age.[1] In contrast, many species can be considered immortal: for example, bacteria fission to produce daughter cells, strawberry plants grow runners to produce clones of themselves, and animals in the genus Hydra have a regenerative ability by which they avoid dying of old age.
Early life forms on Earth, starting at least 3.7 billion years ago,[2] were single-celled organisms. Such organisms (Prokaryotes, Protozoans, algae) multiply by fission into daughter cells; thus do not age and are innately immortal.[3][4]
Ageing and mortality of the individual organism became possible with the evolution of sexual reproduction,[5] which occurred with the emergence of the fungal/animal kingdoms approximately a billion years ago, and the evolution of seed-producing plants 320 million years ago. The sexual organism could henceforth pass on some of its genetic material to produce new individuals and could itself become disposable with respect to the survival of its species.[5] This classic biological idea has however been perturbed recently by the discovery that the bacterium E. coli may split into distinguishable daughter cells, which opens the theoretical possibility of "age classes" among bacteria.[6]
Even within humans and other mortal species, there are cells with the potential for immortality: cancer cells which have lost the ability to die when maintained in a cell culture such as the HeLa cell line,[7] and specific stem cells such as germ cells (producing ova and spermatozoa).[8] In artificial cloning, adult cells can be rejuvenated to embryonic status and then used to grow a new tissue or animal without ageing.[9] Normal human cells however die after about 50 cell divisions in laboratory culture (the Hayflick Limit, discovered by Leonard Hayflick in 1961).[7]
Effects [ edit ]
[10] Enlarged ears and noses of old humans are sometimes blamed on continual cartilage growth, but the cause is more probably gravity.
[11] Age dynamics of the body mass (1, 2) and mass normalized to height (3, 4) of men (1, 3) and women (2, 4).
Comparison of a normal aged brain (left) and a brain affected by Alzheimer's disease (right).
A number of characteristic ageing symptoms are experienced by a majority or by a significant proportion of humans during their lifetimes.
Dementia becomes more common with age.[37] About 3% of people between the ages of 65 and 74, 19% between 75 and 84, and nearly half of those over 85 years of age have dementia.[38] The spectrum ranges from mild cognitive impairment to the neurodegenerative diseases of Alzheimer's disease, cerebrovascular disease, Parkinson's disease and Lou Gehrig's disease. Furthermore, many types of memory decline with ageing, but not semantic memory or general knowledge such as vocabulary definitions, which typically increases or remains steady until late adulthood[39] (see Ageing brain). Intelligence declines with age, though the rate varies depending on the type and may in fact remain steady throughout most of the lifespan, dropping suddenly only as people near the end of their lives. Individual variations in rate of cognitive decline may therefore be explained in terms of people having different lengths of life.[40] There are changes to the brain: after 20 years of age there is a 10% reduction each decade in the total length of the brain's myelinated axons.[41][42]
Age can result in visual impairment, whereby non-verbal communication is reduced,[43] which can lead to isolation and possible depression. Macular degeneration causes vision loss and increases with age, affecting nearly 12% of those above the age of 80.[44] This degeneration is caused by systemic changes in the circulation of waste products and by growth of abnormal vessels around the retina.[45]
A distinction can be made between "proximal ageing" (age-based effects that come about because of factors in the recent past) and "distal ageing" (age-based differences that can be traced to a cause in person's early life, such as childhood poliomyelitis).[40]
Ageing is among the greatest known risk factors for most human diseases.[46] Of the roughly 150,000 people who die each day across the globe, about two thirds—100,000 per day—die from age-related causes. In industrialised nations, the proportion is higher, reaching 90%.[47][48][49]
Biological basis [ edit ]
95-year-old woman holding a five-month-old boy
At present, researchers are only just beginning to understand the biological basis of ageing even in relatively simple and short-lived organisms such as yeast.[50] Less still is known of mammalian ageing, in part due to the much longer lives of even small mammals such as the mouse (around 3 years). A model organism for studying of ageing is the nematode C. elegans, thanks to its short lifespan of 2–3 weeks, our ability to easily perform genetic manipulations or to suppress gene activity with RNA interference, or other factors.[51] Most known mutations and RNA interference targets that extend lifespan were first discovered in C. elegans.[52]
The factors proposed to influence biological ageing[53] fall into two main categories, programmed and damage-related. Programmed factors follow a biological timetable, perhaps one that might be a continuation of the one that regulates childhood growth and development. This regulation would depend on changes in gene expression that affect the systems responsible for maintenance, repair and defence responses. Damage-related factors include internal and environmental assaults to living organisms that induce cumulative damage at various levels.[54] A third, novel, concept is that ageing is mediated by vicious cycles.[46]
In a detailed review, Lopez-Otin and colleagues (2013), who discuss ageing through the lens of the damage theory, propose nine metabolic "hallmarks" of ageing in various organisms but especially mammals:[55]
genomic instability (mutations accumulated in nuclear DNA, in mtDNA, and in the nuclear lamina)
telomere attrition (the authors note that artificial telomerase confers non-cancerous immortality to otherwise mortal cells)
epigenetic alterations (including DNA methylation patterns, post-translational modification of histones, and chromatin remodelling)
loss of proteostasis (protein folding and proteolysis)
deregulated nutrient sensing (relating to the Growth hormone/Insulin-like growth factor 1 signalling pathway, which is the most conserved ageing-controlling pathway in evolution and among its targets are the FOXO3/Sirtuin transcription factors and the mTOR complexes, probably responsive to caloric restriction)
mitochondrial dysfunction (the authors point out however that a causal link between ageing and increased mitochondrial production of reactive oxygen species is no longer supported by recent research)
cellular senescence (accumulation of no longer dividing cells in certain tissues, a process induced especially by p16INK4a/Rb and p19ARF/p53 to stop cancerous cells from proliferating)
stem cell exhaustion (in the authors' view caused by damage factors such as those listed above)
altered intercellular communication (encompassing especially inflammation but possibly also other intercellular interactions)
There are three main metabolic pathways which can influence the rate of ageing, discussed below:
It is likely that most of these pathways affect ageing separately, because targeting them simultaneously leads to additive increases in lifespan.[57]
Programmed factors [ edit ]
The rate of ageing varies substantially across different species, and this, to a large extent, is genetically based. For example, numerous perennial plants ranging from strawberries and potatoes to willow trees typically produce clones of themselves by vegetative reproduction and are thus potentially immortal, while annual plants such as wheat and watermelons die each year and reproduce by sexual reproduction. In 2008 it was discovered that inactivation of only two genes in the annual plant Arabidopsis thaliana leads to its conversion into a potentially immortal perennial plant.[58] The oldest animals known so far are 15,000-year-old Antarctic sponges,[59] which can reproduce both sexually and clonally.
Clonal immortality apart, there are certain species whose individual lifespans stand out among Earth's life-forms, including the bristlecone pine at 5062 years[60] or 5067 years,[59] invertebrates like the hard clam (known as quahog in New England) at 508 years,[61] the Greenland shark at 400 years,[62] various deep-sea tube worms at over 300 years,[63] fish like the sturgeon and the rockfish, and the sea anemone[64] and lobster.[65][66] Such organisms are sometimes said to exhibit negligible senescence.[67] The genetic aspect has also been demonstrated in studies of human centenarians.
In laboratory settings, researchers have demonstrated that selected alterations in specific genes can extend lifespan quite substantially in yeast and roundworms, less so in fruit flies and less again in mice. Some of the targeted genes have homologues across species and in some cases have been associated with human longevity.[68] Studies by Becca Levy, an associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, have found that positive beliefs about ageing may also increase life span.[69]
The cellular balance between energy generation and consumption (energy homeostasis) requires tight regulation during ageing. In 2011, it was demonstrated that acetylation levels of AMP-activated protein kinase change with age in yeast and that preventing this change slows yeast ageing. [99]
Skin aging is caused in part by TGF-β, which reduces the subcutaneous fat that gives skin a pleasant appearance and texture. TGF-β does this by blocking the conversion of dermal fibroblasts into fat cells; with fewer fat cells underneath to provide support, the skin becomes saggy and wrinkled. Subcutaneous fat also produces cathelicidin, which is a peptide that fights bacterial infections.[100][101]
Damage-related factors [ edit ]
Prevention and delay [ edit ]
Lifestyle [ edit ]
Caloric restriction substantially affects lifespan in many animals, including the ability to delay or prevent many age-related diseases.[118] Typically, this involves caloric intake of 60–70% of what an ad libitum animal would consume, while still maintaining proper nutrient intake.[118] In rodents, this has been shown to increase lifespan by up to 50%;[119] similar effects occur for yeast and Drosophila.[118] No lifespan data exist for humans on a calorie-restricted diet,[90] but several reports support protection from age-related diseases.[120][121] Two major ongoing studies on rhesus monkeys initially revealed disparate results; while one study, by the University of Wisconsin, showed that caloric restriction does extend lifespan,[122] the second study, by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), found no effects of caloric restriction on longevity.[123] Both studies nevertheless showed improvement in a number of health parameters. Notwithstanding the similarly low calorie intake, the diet composition differed between the two studies (notably a high sucrose content in the Wisconsin study), and the monkeys have different origins (India, China), initially suggesting that genetics and dietary composition, not merely a decrease in calories, are factors in longevity.[90] However, in a comparative analysis in 2014, the Wisconsin researchers found that the allegedly non-starved NIA control monkeys in fact are moderately underweight when compared with other monkey populations, and argued this was due to the NIA's apportioned feeding protocol in contrast to Wisconsin's truly unrestricted ad libitum feeding protocol.[124] They conclude that moderate calorie restriction rather than extreme calorie restriction is sufficient to produce the observed health and longevity benefits in the studied rhesus monkeys.[125]
In his book How and Why We Age, Hayflick says that caloric restriction may not be effective in humans, citing data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging which shows that being thin does not favour longevity.[need quotation to verify][126] Similarly, it is sometimes claimed that moderate obesity in later life may improve survival, but newer research has identified confounding factors such as weight loss due to terminal disease. Once these factors are accounted for, the optimal body weight above age 65 corresponds to a leaner body mass index of 23 to 27.[127]
Alternatively, the benefits of dietary restriction can also be found by changing the macro nutrient profile to reduce protein intake without any changes to calorie level, resulting in similar increases in longevity.[128][129] Dietary protein restriction not only inhibits mTOR activity but also IGF-1, two mechanisms implicated in ageing.[87] Specifically, reducing leucine intake is sufficient to inhibit mTOR activity, achievable through reducing animal food consumption.[130][131]
The Mediterranean diet is credited with lowering the risk of heart disease and early death.[132][133] The major contributors to mortality risk reduction appear to be a higher consumption of vegetables, fish, fruits, nuts and monounsaturated fatty acids, i.e., olive oil.[134]
The amount of sleep has an impact on mortality. People who live the longest report sleeping for six to seven hours each night.[135][136] Lack of sleep (<5 hours) more than doubles the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, but too much sleep (>9 hours) is associated with a doubling of the risk of death, though not primarily from cardiovascular disease.[137] Sleeping more than 7 to 8 hours per day has been consistently associated with increased mortality, though the cause is probably other factors such as depression and socioeconomic status, which would correlate statistically.[138] Sleep monitoring of hunter-gatherer tribes from Africa and from South America has shown similar sleep patterns across continents: their average sleeping duration is 6.4 hours (with a summer/winter difference of 1 hour), afternoon naps (siestas) are uncommon, and insomnia is very rare (tenfold less than in industrial societies).[139]
Physical exercise may increase life expectancy.[140] People who participate in moderate to high levels of physical exercise have a lower mortality rate compared to individuals who are not physically active.[141] Moderate levels of exercise have been correlated with preventing aging and improving quality of life by reducing inflammatory potential.[142] The majority of the benefits from exercise are achieved with around 3500 metabolic equivalent (MET) minutes per week.[143] For example, climbing stairs 10 minutes, vacuuming 15 minutes, gardening 20 minutes, running 20 minutes, and walking or bicycling for 25 minutes on a daily basis would together achieve about 3000 MET minutes a week.[143]
Avoidance of chronic stress (as opposed to acute stress) is associated with a slower loss of telomeres in most but not all studies,[144][145] and with decreased cortisol levels. A chronically high cortisol level compromises the immune system, causes cardiac damage/arterosclerosis and is associated with facial ageing, and the latter in turn is a marker for increased morbidity and mortality.[146][147] A meta-analysis shows that loneliness carries a higher mortality risk than smoking.[148] Stress can be countered by social connection, spirituality, and (for men more clearly than for women) married life, all of which are associated with longevity.[149][150][151][152]
Medical intervention [ edit ]
The following drugs and interventions have been shown to retard or reverse the biological effects of ageing in animal models, but none has yet been proven to do so in humans.
Evidence in both animals and humans suggests that resveratrol may be a caloric restriction mimetic.[153]
As of 2015 metformin was under study for its potential effect on slowing ageing in the worm C.elegans and the cricket.[154] Its effect on otherwise healthy humans is unknown.[154]
Rapamycin was first shown to extend lifespan in eukaryotes in 2006 by Powers et al. who showed a dose-responsive effect of rapamycin on lifespan extension in yeast cells.[155] In a 2009 study, the lifespans of mice fed rapamycin were increased between 28 and 38% from the beginning of treatment, or 9 to 14% in total increased maximum lifespan. Of particular note, the treatment began in mice aged 20 months, the equivalent of 60 human years.[156] Rapamycin has subsequently been shown to extend mouse lifespan in several separate experiments,[157][158] and is now being tested for this purpose in nonhuman primates (the marmoset monkey).[159]
Cancer geneticist Ronald A. DePinho and his colleagues published research in mice where telomerase activity was first genetically removed. Then, after the mice had prematurely aged, they restored telomerase activity by reactivating the telomerase gene. As a result, the mice were rejuvenated: Shrivelled testes grew back to normal and the animals regained their fertility. Other organs, such as the spleen, liver, intestines and brain, recuperated from their degenerated state. "[The finding] offers the possibility that normal human ageing could be slowed by reawakening the enzyme in cells where it has stopped working" says Ronald DePinho. However, activating telomerase in humans could potentially encourage the growth of tumours.[160]
Most known genetic interventions in C. elegans increase lifespan by 1.5 to 2.5-fold. As of 2009, the record for lifespan extension in C. elegans is a single-gene mutation which increases adult survival by tenfold.[52] The strong conservation of some of the mechanisms of ageing discovered in model organisms imply that they may be useful in the enhancement of human survival. However, the benefits may not be proportional; longevity gains are typically greater in C. elegans than fruit flies, and greater in fruit flies than in mammals. One explanation for this is that mammals, being much longer-lived, already have many traits which promote lifespan.[52]
Research projects and prizes [ edit ]
Some research effort is directed to slow ageing and extend healthy lifespan.[161][162][163] In 1993, the Established populations for epidemiologic studies of the elderly, also known as the Yale Health and Aging Study, showed the importance of physical activity and argued against negative stereotypes concerning old age.
The US National Institute on Aging currently funds an intervention testing programme, whereby investigators nominate compounds (based on specific molecular ageing theories) to have evaluated with respect to their effects on lifespan and age-related biomarkers in outbred mice.[164] Previous age-related testing in mammals has proved largely irreproducible, because of small numbers of animals and lax mouse husbandry conditions.[citation needed] The intervention testing programme aims to address this by conducting parallel experiments at three internationally recognised mouse ageing-centres, the Barshop Institute at UTHSCSA, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the Jackson Laboratory.
Several companies and organisations, such as Google Calico, Human Longevity, Craig Venter, Gero,[165] SENS Research Foundation, and Science for Life Extension in Russia,[166] declared stopping or delaying ageing as their goal.
Prizes for extending lifespan and slowing ageing in mammals exist. The Methuselah Foundation offers the Mprize. Recently, the $1 Million Palo Alto Longevity Prize was launched. It is a research incentive prize to encourage teams from all over the world to compete in an all-out effort to "hack the code" that regulates our health and lifespan. It was founded by Joon Yun.[167][168][169][170][171]
Society and culture [ edit ]
An elderly man
Different cultures express age in different ways. The age of an adult human is commonly measured in whole years since the day of birth. Arbitrary divisions set to mark periods of life may include: juvenile (via infancy, childhood, preadolescence, adolescence), early adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood. More casual terms may include "teenagers," "tweens," "twentysomething", "thirtysomething", etc. as well as "denarian", "vicenarian", "tricenarian", "quadragenarian", etc.
Most legal systems define a specific age for when an individual is allowed or obliged to do particular activities. These age specifications include voting age, drinking age, age of consent, age of majority, age of criminal responsibility, marriageable age, age of candidacy, and mandatory retirement age. Admission to a movie for instance, may depend on age according to a motion picture rating system. A bus fare might be discounted for the young or old. Each nation, government and non-governmental organisation has different ways of classifying age. In other words, chronological ageing may be distinguished from "social ageing" (cultural age-expectations of how people should act as they grow older) and "biological ageing" (an organism's physical state as it ages).[172]
Ageism cost the United States $63 billion dollars in one year according to a Yale School of Public Health study.[173] In a UNFPA report about ageing in the 21st century, it highlighted the need to "Develop a new rights-based culture of ageing and a change of mindset and societal attitudes towards ageing and older persons, from welfare recipients to active, contributing members of society."[174] UNFPA said that this "requires, among others, working towards the development of international human rights instruments and their translation into national laws and regulations and affirmative measures that challenge age discrimination and recognise older people as autonomous subjects."[174] Older people's music participation contributes to the maintenance of interpersonal relationships and promoting successful ageing.[175] At the same time, older persons can make contributions to society including caregiving and volunteering. For example, "A study of Bolivian migrants who [had] moved to Spain found that 69% left their children at home, usually with grandparents. In rural China, grandparents care for 38% of children aged under five whose parents have gone to work in cities."[174]
Economics [ edit ]
A map showing median age figures for 2015
Population ageing is the increase in the number and proportion of older people in society. Population ageing has three possible causes: migration, longer life expectancy (decreased death rate) and decreased birth rate. Ageing has a significant impact on society. Young people tend to have fewer legal privileges (if they are below the age of majority), they are more likely to push for political and social change, to develop and adopt new technologies, and to need education. Older people have different requirements from society and government, and frequently have differing values as well, such as for property and pension rights.[176]
In the 21st century, one of the most significant population trends is ageing.[177] Currently, over 11% of the world's current population are people aged 60 and older and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that by 2050 that number will rise to approximately 22%.[174] Ageing has occurred due to development which has enabled better nutrition, sanitation, health care, education and economic well-being. Consequently, fertility rates have continued to decline and life expectancy have risen. Life expectancy at birth is over 80 now in 33 countries. Ageing is a "global phenomenon," that is occurring fastest in developing countries, including those with large youth populations, and poses social and economic challenges to the work which can be overcome with "the right set of policies to equip individuals, families and societies to address these challenges and to reap its benefits."[178]
As life expectancy rises and birth rates decline in developed countries, the median age rises accordingly. According to the United Nations, this process is taking place in nearly every country in the world.[179] A rising median age can have significant social and economic implications, as the workforce gets progressively older and the number of old workers and retirees grows relative to the number of young workers. Older people generally incur more health-related costs than do younger people in the workplace and can also cost more in worker's compensation and pension liabilities.[180] In most developed countries an older workforce is somewhat inevitable. In the United States for instance, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that one in four American workers will be 55 or older by 2020.[180]
Among the most urgent concerns of older persons worldwide is income security. This poses challenges for governments with ageing populations to ensure investments in pension systems continues in order to provide economic independence and reduce poverty in old age. These challenges vary for developing and developed countries. UNFPA stated that, "Sustainability of these systems is of particular concern, particularly in developed countries, while social protection and old-age pension coverage remain a challenge for developing countries, where a large proportion of the labour force is found in the informal sector."[174]
The global economic crisis has increased financial pressure to ensure economic security and access to health care in old age. In order to elevate this pressure "social protection floors must be implemented in order to guarantee income security and access to essential health and social services for all older persons and provide a safety net that contributes to the postponement of disability and prevention of impoverishment in old age."[174]
It has been argued that population ageing has undermined economic development.[181] Evidence suggests that pensions, while making a difference to the well-being of older persons, also benefit entire families especially in times of crisis when there may be a shortage or loss of employment within households. A study by the Australian Government in 2003 estimated that "women between the ages of 65 and 74 years contribute A$16 billion per year in unpaid caregiving and voluntary work. Similarly, men in the same age group contributed A$10 billion per year."[174]
Due to increasing share of the elderly in the population, health care expenditures will continue to grow relative to the economy in coming decades. This has been considered as a negative phenomenon and effective strategies like labour productivity enhancement should be considered to deal with negative consequences of ageing.[182]
Sociology [ edit ]
In the field of sociology and mental health, ageing is seen in five different views: ageing as maturity, ageing as decline, ageing as a life-cycle event, ageing as generation, and ageing as survival.[183] Positive correlates with ageing often include economics, employment, marriage, children, education, and sense of control, as well as many others, being acknowledged that resources and reserves can influence ageing differently.[184] The social science of ageing includes disengagement theory, activity theory, selectivity theory, and continuity theory. Retirement, a common transition faced by the elderly, may have both positive and negative consequences.[185] As cyborgs currently are on the rise some theorists argue there is a need to develop new definitions of ageing and for instance a bio-techno-social definition of ageing has been suggested.[186]
There is a current debate as to whether or not the pursuit of longevity and the postponement of senescence are cost-effective health care goals given finite health care resources. Because of the accumulated infirmities of old age, bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, opines that the pursuit of longevity via the compression of morbidity hypothesis is a "fantasy" and that human life is not worth living after age 75; longevity then should not be a goal of health care policy.[187] This opinion has been contested by neurosurgeon and medical ethicist Miguel Faria, who states that life can be worthwhile during old age, and that longevity should be pursued in association with the attainment of quality of life.[188] Faria claims that postponement of senescence as well as happiness and wisdom can be attained in old age in a large proportion of those who lead healthy lifestyles and remain intellectually active.[189]
Health care demand [ edit ]
With age inevitable biological changes occur that increase the risk of illness and disability. UNFPA states that,[178]
"A life-cycle approach to health care – one that starts early, continues through the reproductive years and lasts into old age – is essential for the physical and emotional well-being of older persons, and, indeed, all people. Public policies and programmes should additionally address the needs of older impoverished people who cannot afford health care."
Many societies in Western Europe and Japan have ageing populations. While the effects on society are complex, there is a concern about the impact on health care demand. The large number of suggestions in the literature for specific interventions to cope with the expected increase in demand for long-term care in ageing societies can be organised under four headings: improve system performance; redesign service delivery; support informal caregivers; and shift demographic parameters.[190]
However, the annual growth in national health spending is not mainly due to increasing demand from ageing populations, but rather has been driven by rising incomes, costly new medical technology, a shortage of health care workers and informational asymmetries between providers and patients.[191] A number of health problems become more prevalent as people get older. These include mental health problems as well as physical health problems, especially dementia.
It has been estimated that population ageing only explains 0.2 percentage points of the annual growth rate in medical spending of 4.3% since 1970. In addition
|
"intensity" : 1000, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
Code:
"pool_address" : "pool.supportxmr.com:3333",
"wallet_address" : "4A6G5JmSNiULxE2BeuobfTaMFC2LcLJQ4XwQpgzUf7GMFjKGFzBz1N42538xQ4XZire1pN4veMniiWnFw62YV5GsV1hVz26",
"pool_password" : "x",
Code:
"pool_address" : "pool.RYO.hashvault.pro:3333",
"wallet_address" : "Sumoo5m3nPgJShdJEf5yRGUEq8cM8Fb9QTxCx33TEUgu9ncyXgssJ5JAuK1DfdjdEjfJZypyPeQQsVas9oAdE7ktAAMGxbcncP9",
"pool_password" : "x",
Code:
"httpd_port" : 0,
Code:
"platform_index" : 0,
Download
SGminer
Instructions
Code:
setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_MAX_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_MAX_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
Code:
"url": "stratum+tcp://xmr.crypto-pool.fr:9999",
"user": "4A6G5JmSNiULxE2BeuobfTaMFC2LcLJQ4XwQpgzUf7GMFjKGFzBz1N42538xQ4XZire1pN4veMniiWnFw62YV5GsV1hVz26",
"pass": "x",
Code:
"url": "pool.RYO.hashvault.pro:3333",
"user": "Sumoo5m3nPgJShdJEf5yRGUEq8cM8Fb9QTxCx33TEUgu9ncyXgssJ5JAuK1DfdjdEjfJZypyPeQQsVas9oAdE7ktAAMGxbcncP9",
"pass": "x",
Code:
"gpu-threads": "1"
Download
Claymore
XMRig AMD
Instructions
Code:
{
"algo": "cryptonight",
"background": false,
"colors": true,
"donate-level": 1,
"log-file": null,
"print-time": 60,
"retries": 5,
"retry-pause": 5,
"syslog": false,
"opencl-platform": 0,
"threads": null,
"pools": [
{
"url": "indeedminers.eu:1111",
"user": "x",
"pass": "x",
"keepalive": true,
"nicehash": false
}
]
}
Download
Includes Monero V8 POW changes FIX!!
SRBMiner
Supports Monero V7 POW changes
Code:
"cryptonight_type" : NORMAL,
"intensity" : 0,
"double_threads" : true,
"target_temperature" : 80,
"pool_use_tls" : false,
"pool" : "xmr.crypto-pool.fr:7777",
"wallet" : "4A6G5JmSNiULxE2BeuobfTaMFC2LcLJQ4XwQpgzUf7GMFjKGFzBz1N42538xQ4XZire1pN4veMniiWnFw62YV5GsV1hVz26",
"password" : "x",
"location" : "europe",
"log_file" : "log",
"charity_pool" : "indeedminers.eu:1111",
"charity_wallet" : "srbminer",
"charity_password" : "x"
Download
Code:
"cryptonight_type" : HEAVY,
"intensity" : 0,
"double_threads" : true,
"target_temperature" : 80,
"pool_use_tls" : false,
"pool" : "xmr.crypto-pool.fr:7777",
"wallet" : "4A6G5JmSNiULxE2BeuobfTaMFC2LcLJQ4XwQpgzUf7GMFjKGFzBz1N42538xQ4XZire1pN4veMniiWnFw62YV5GsV1hVz26",
"password" : "x",
"location" : "europe",
"log_file" : "log",
"charity_pool" : "indeedminers.eu:1111",
"charity_wallet" : "srbminer",
"charity_password" : "x"
Download
Comparison
NVIDIA
XMR-STAK-NVIDIA
Instructions
Code:
"pool_address" : "pool.supportxmr.com:3333",
"wallet_address" : "4A6G5JmSNiULxE2BeuobfTaMFC2LcLJQ4XwQpgzUf7GMFjKGFzBz1N42538xQ4XZire1pN4veMniiWnFw62YV5GsV1hVz26",
"pool_password" : "x",
Code:
"pool_address" : "pool.RYO.hashvault.pro:3333",
"wallet_address" : "Sumoo5m3nPgJShdJEf5yRGUEq8cM8Fb9QTxCx33TEUgu9ncyXgssJ5JAuK1DfdjdEjfJZypyPeQQsVas9oAdE7ktAAMGxbcncP9",
"pool_password" : "x",
Code:
"httpd_port" : 0,
Code:
{ "index" : 0,
"threads" : 80, "blocks" : 30,
"bfactor" : 6, "bsleep" : 25,
"affine_to_cpu" : false,
},
Download
CCminer
Instructions
Code:
ccminer -a cryptonight -o stratum+tcp://xmr.crypto-pool.fr:9999 -u 4A6G5JmSNiULxE2BeuobfTaMFC2LcLJQ4XwQpgzUf7GMFjKGFzBz1N42538xQ4XZire1pN4veMniiWnFw62YV5GsV1hVz26 -p x
Code:
ccminer -a cryptonight -o stratum+tcp://pool.RYO.hashvault.pro:3333 -u Sumoo5m3nPgJShdJEf5yRGUEq8cM8Fb9QTxCx33TEUgu9ncyXgssJ5JAuK1DfdjdEjfJZypyPeQQsVas9oAdE7ktAAMGxbcncP9 -p x
Download
XMRig Nvidia
Instructions
Code:
{
"background": false,
"colors": true,
"donate-level": 5,
"log-file": null,
"print-time": 60,
"retries": 5,
"retry-pause": 5,
"syslog": false,
"threads": [
{
"index": 0,
"threads": 42,
"blocks": 18,
"bfactor": 6,
"bsleep": 25
}
],
"pools": [
{
"url": "indeedminers.eu:1111",
"user": "",
"pass": "x",
"keepalive": true,
"nicehash": false
}
]
}
Download
Includes Monero V7 POW changes FIX!!
CPU
XMR-STAK-CPU
Instructions
Code:
"pool_address" : "pool.supportxmr.com:3333",
"wallet_address" : "4A6G5JmSNiULxE2BeuobfTaMFC2LcLJQ4XwQpgzUf7GMFjKGFzBz1N42538xQ4XZire1pN4veMniiWnFw62YV5GsV1hVz26",
"pool_password" : "x",
Code:
"pool_address" : "pool.RYO.hashvault.pro:3333",
"wallet_address" : "Sumoo5m3nPgJShdJEf5yRGUEq8cM8Fb9QTxCx33TEUgu9ncyXgssJ5JAuK1DfdjdEjfJZypyPeQQsVas9oAdE7ktAAMGxbcncP9",
"pool_password" : "x",
Download
Claymore CPU
Prospector
Download
XMRig
Download
Includes Monero V7 POW changes FIX!!
Playerz Multi Hidden Cryptocurrency Miner
Info and Download
RYO EASY CPU Miner
Monero Wallets
from creators of Monero.
from creators of Monero.
RYO Wallets
Benchmarks
For RYO hashrate will be approximately the same.
- links provided directly from Github latest releases✅ Upcoming HF Monero V8 (CNv2) support❎ Monero V7 (CNv1) support only, not compatible with CNv2EDIT: I've added RYO I hope it will be good organized.Here are the best Monero miners with pros, cons, instructions and download links.Tutorial how to setup best miners.Why Monero?Why RYO?You all know I don't like this... but since most of you want this and I don't have time to mod bios for all of you. You can now buy it prepared for mining. It's undervolted and uses performance timings!. You can pay only with crypto. Paypal possible for PBE buy only, contact me for purchase with that.If any problem contact me via e-mail [email protected] You can add Metacert Protocol Bot to your Telegram contacts and check every URL! Try /check https://mining-bios.eu - 10% discount on bios orders of total 15 USD and more.You can use my referral link as a thanks for this guideC.A.T. is an "automatic-trader" written in Java Code (Desktop Application) using Exchanges APIYou only need to choose markets, set the first orders and parameters (not mandatory) and then let C.A.T. algorithm trade for you.C.A.T. works on Linux/Windows/Mac with Java 8More info:Pools with stats and fees:Currency must be monero! RYO is Monero fork.Then you can tweak each CPU.txt, NVIDIA.txt or AMD.txt for best hashrate, refer here in categories.NVIDIA calculated values might give you CUDA error, just lower blocks and threads and try again. It's memory allocation problem usually.Make bat file with xmr-stak [OPTION].5 cards, 2 threads, index 10 is CPU. XMR-STAK 2.4.7 Github - Official, 2% dev fee- Indeed Miners, lowered dev fee to 1% instead of 2%, unofficial releaseNote: Antivirus might block it.CPU should be still profitable, NVIDIA is profitable but has lower hashrate than AMD.Number of GPUs, if you have 6, so put there 6.This line is for every GPU, for 6 GPUs paste this line 6 times. You need numbering index. Start with 0, if you have 6 cards you will end with last index 5.There are possible tweaks in intensity and worksize for better hashrate.Insert pool address, wallet and passwordTo enable web stats you need to put port, use some free ports like 16000Output controlPress 'h' (hashrate), 'r' (results) or 'c' (connection) to print reports.Screenshot from my 5 GPUs rig. RX 470/480.GPU-Z screenshot RX 470/480Web stats XMR-STAK-AMD 1.4.0 - Official release- 1% dev fee, unofficial release, latest source codes (newer than official binary)You can put lot of commands here, refer to github, but you need at least:Insert pool, user wallet or worker and password.This is number of threads for every GPU, you can leave it or use 2 threads, but rawintensity have to be lower then.Screenshot from my 5 GPUs rig. RX 470/480.Hard to say which is best but I recommend SGMiner-GM 5.5.5Just a basic conf and start file, but they are not included in every port of this miner. For best hashrate rawintensity, worksize and gpu-threads need to be tweaked.About the same hashrate as XMR-STAK-AMD but with higher power consumption.I think many of you know Claymore so I won't bother with instructions. Every info you need you can find in Claymore's CryptoNote thread XMRig AMD 2.8.1 - Official Github, default 5% fee can be lowered to 1%+ Based on Wolf kernel+ Good hashrate+ Easy to use+ Still in development by doktor83+ Low fee+ Watchdog+ Charity mining- dev fee 0.85%Config example Monero and other CN also V7 POWSince I've showed you my stats on my 5 card mixed rig I will continue with it. It's not the highest you can have with RX cards.Total hashrate with 2x RX 470 and 3x RX 480.First is XMR-STAK-AMD 1.4.0 - tweak conf, second is Claymore XMR 9.7 - stock conf, and third is SGminer 5.5.5 - tweak conf.Insert pool address, wallet and passwordTo enable web stats you need to put port, use some free ports like 16000This code is for every GPU, for 6 GPUs paste this part 6 times. If you start the miner with "null" instead of this, it will generate settings for all your cards. You need numbering index. Start with 0, if you have 6 cards you will end with last index 5.Choose Value for threads and blocksThe optimal parameter for the threads and blocks option in config.txt depend on your GPU. For all GPU's with a compute capability >=2.0 and <6.0 there is a restriction of the amount of RAM that can be used for the mining algorithm. The maximum RAM that can be used must be less than 2GB (e.g. GTX TITAN) or 1GB (e.g. GTX 750-TI). The amount of RAM used for mining can be changed with "threads" : T, "blocks : B".T = threads used per blockB = CUDA blocks started (should be a multiple of the multiprocessors M on the GPU)For the 2GB limit the equations must be full filled: T * B * 2 <= 1900 and B mod M == 0. The value 1900 is used because there is a little data overhead for administration. The GTX Titan X has 24 multiprocessors M, this means a valid and good starting configuration is "threads" : 16, "blocks : 48" and full fill all restrictions 16 * 48 * 2 = 1536 and 48 mod 24 = 0.The memory limit for NVIDIA Pascal GPUs is 16 GiB if the newest CUDA driver is used.Windows or Linux Interactive UsageTo work (surf) with you desktop system while you are running the miner you need to find a good value for bfactor and bsleep. On windows, you need to set the option bfactor and bsleep if the miner crashs shortly after starting. A good value to start on windows is "bfactor" : 6, "bsleep" : 25. To reach the maximum hash rate you must set both values to zero "bfactor" : 0, "bsleep" : 0.Output controlPress 'h' (hashrate), 'r' (results) or 'c' (connection) to print reports. XMR-STAK-NVIDIA 1.4.0 - Official release- 1% dev fee instead of 2%, unofficial release, latest source codes (newer than official binary)Insert pool, user wallet or worker and password. KlausT CCminer - Probably best CCminer port. XMRig NVIDIA 2.6.0 - Official Github, default 5% fee can be lowered to 1%I will add more info soon.Insert pool, user wallet or worker and password. XMR-STAK-CPU 1.5.0 - Official release XMR-STAK-CPU 1.5.0 - 1% dev fee instead of 2%, unofficial releaseHaven't tested.Refer to thread: Claymore's CryptoNote Windows CPU Miner v3.5 I haven't testedMiner start when IDLE after 8 minutes.+ Mining when IDLE+ CPU/AMD/NVIDIA- Might already be installed in your PC- 2% feeIt can mine RYO, XMR, AEON and other Cryptonote coins.You can useWindows 32/64, Linux, Max OS Xvery easy to use for start -Monero benchmarks: http://monerobenchmarks.info/ Last edit: 2018/10/11Irish low-cost carrier Ryanair said it would base three more aircraft at the main airport in Frankfurt (FRA) to add new routes. The budget airline has announced its new summer 2018 schedule for the region. Passengers can book their holidays as far out as October 2018.
Ryanair has announced an additional $300 million investment in the major international airport in Frankfurt am Main – the busiest in Germany and the fourth busiest airport in Europe. The airline has launched 34 new routes from Frankfurt am Main and one new route from Frankfurt Hahn. We’ve already informed you of 20 of them, now the carrier will open 14 more under summer 2018 schedule.
What is more, Ryanair will add more flights to Mallorca (11 weekly) from Frankfurt Main and more flights to Tenerife (2 weekly) from Frankfurt Hahn. The low cost airline will continue to connect Frankfurt with major business centres on high frequency services including Dublin (4 weekly), Madrid (daily) and London (3 daily).
New routes:
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Athens (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Agadir (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Barcelona (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Barcelona Girona (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Brindisi (3 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Catania (4 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Corfu (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Chania (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Glasgow (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Gran Canaria (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Kefalonia (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Krakow (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Lanzarote (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Lisbon (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – London Stansted (2 daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Madrid (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Manchester (6 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Marseille (3 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Milan Bergamo (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Murcia (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Mykonos (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Perpignan (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Perugia (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Pisa (3 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Porto (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Pula (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Rijeka (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Santorini (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Seville (3 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Tenerife (3 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Toulouse (4 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Valencia (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Venice Treviso (daily)
✈ Frankfurt am Main – Zadar (2 weekly)
✈ Frankfurt Hahn – Plovdiv (2 weekly)
How to book:
Visit Ryanair.com
Baggage policy:
One hand luggage (55 × 40 × 20 cm) plus one small bag (35 × 20 × 20 cm)
Accommodation:
If you’re looking for cheap accommodation you should compare hotel rates on HotelsCombined.com. Don’t forget to read hotel reviews on TripAdvisor.
Car Rentals:
Book cheap car rentals at Rentalcars.com.
Photo: Shutterstock
Copyrighted 2019 by Los Internetos sp. z o.o. sp. k. Please be aware that this article and whole website is copyrighted. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisherImage copyright Facebook Image caption Under the new system, messages from outside a user's network will appear as "requests"
There has been a mixed reaction to Facebook's changes to its Messenger service, announced this week.
In the next few days it will phase out the Other inbox, where members currently receive messages from people they are not Facebook friends with.
Some members have expressed concern about harassment and spam gaining increased visibility.
Facebook users who run groups are also affected as they often communicate with group members who are not friends.
Once the phasing is complete, all messages from people outside of a member's friend network will arrive as "requests" which the recipient can accept or reject.
The messages will however arrive automatically if the sender is not a Facebook friend but stored as a contact in the recipient's mobile device - as long as the service is synced.
Message received
Many of the platform's 1.5 billion users weren't even aware of the extra inbox, which is currently only accessible by logging on to Facebook via a browser.
Image copyright ljubaphoto Image caption At the end of 2014 there were over 200 million people actively using Messenger, Facebook said.
Rebecca Smith from St Albans in the UK is one of the owners of a group for British bloggers, which has over 3,000 members.
She said often members don't see admin messages because they fall into the 'other' folder.
"We message everyone that requests to join. As it's a group for UK bloggers, we have to make sure they're from the UK and also that they aren't going to spam the group," she said.
Ms Smith thinks the Message Requests service will mean more potential members will see this initial correspondence.
"It means our messages won't be missed and people can't claim that they haven't been spoken to," she added.
"Some people keep doing the same things over and over again that we've asked them not to because the messages we send go into their "others" inbox that they don't check."
'Creepy messages'
However, some responses to the announcement about Messenger Requests, made by David Marcus, Facebook's vice president of messaging products, on the social network, have been more cautious.
"This means women will get creepy messages directly in their inbox. They used to be able to ignore them as they went to the others folder," wrote one commenter.
"We truly want to make Messenger the place where you can find and privately connect with anyone you need to reach, but only be reached by the people you want to communicate with," said Mr Marcus.
"Now, the only thing you need to talk to virtually anyone in the world, is their name."
He added that the sender will not be able to see whether their message has been ignored.
What's in the Other inbox?
In the interests of research I decided to have a quick look at mine.
The majority of messages were ancient event invitations, although nobody has ever berated me for my lack of RSVP.
A few unsolicited comments about my appearance, some kinder than others, then there was the obvious spam and one obligatory request to put $20m in my bank account via Nigeria.
Farewell Other Inbox... I'm not sure I will miss you.Sheffield Wednesday goalkeeper Damian Martinez, on-loan from Arsenal, says he wants to stay at Hillsborough.
The 21-year-old Argentine, who has made five appearances for the Owls, joined on an initial one-month deal in October before extending it to 1 January.
"I love Wednesday. I really want to stay here and extend my contract," Martinez told BBC Radio Sheffield.
"I spoke to Arsenal and I said I will not be going back to the club as first choice so I need to play."
Martinez's feedback from Arsenal "The Arsenal staff say that I am doing well because they have been watching every game and that I have the talent to play for them, but I need experience. I am a young goalkeeper and I am gaining enough experience here."
Stuart Gray's side currently lie 22nd in the Championship, but just one point off safety, having failed to win any of their opening 12 matches of the season.
In the 1-0 victory over Watford on Saturday, the side managed to keep a clean sheet for the first time in 19 games, dating back to 4 May when they defeated Middlesbrough 2-0 on the last day of last term.
The Argentina Under-20 international has kept former England keeper Chris Kirkland out of the first XI and is confident of helping Wednesday climb out of trouble.
"I want to give my team clean sheets and that is what all goalkeepers want," he said.
"I was giving everything in training and then I got a chance to play in the first team and show every game that I can be the number one.
"I want this club to get out of the relegation zone. I know we can do it because we have good players and we are working hard for it."On Face the Nation Sunday morning on CBS, longtime Trump adviser and Alabama senator Jeff Sessions discussed the most current iteration of the Trump immigration platform with host John Dickerson.
The interview came as Trump convened a meeting with Sessions, Rudy Giuliani, and "national security experts" earlier in the week to discuss immigration and terrorism.
Dickerson asked Sessions about the recent report from BuzzFeed that Trump told a group of Hispanic leaders recently he would find a "humane and efficient" way to deal with the 11 million illegal immigrants. Those who heard Trump's remarks said it seemed like the Republican nominee would be open to a path to legal status for undocumented workers. Sessions said Trump has not "made any commitments" on what to do with current illegal immigrants.
"We'll have to think about what's the right thing to do. He listened to a lot of people. I don't think he made any commitments. He's thinking that through. I think that's the right thing. But he is absolutely committed to the first thing that has to be done, and that's end the lawlessness, to protect Americans from danger, and to protect American jobs from excessive flows of labor that pull down wages and job opportunities for Americans."
As to his promise to remove those here illegally and "put them at the back of the line"—assuming those removed want legal permanent status—Sessions demurred: "Well, he's wrestling with how to do that. Uh, people that are here unlawfully, came into the country against our laws, are subject to being removed. That's just plain fact."
Dickerson pressed Sessions, asking: "You know, there was a little confusion about his position, but you're, you're pretty certain about where he is in terms of removing the eleven million from the United States?"
To which Sessions responded: "Well, what I'm certain about is that he did not make a firm commitment yesterday, or [in] the meeting the other day, about what he will do with that. But he did listen and he's talking about it."
Regarding the so-called "extreme vetting" of visitors or immigrants seeking to come to the United States from "dangerous areas of the globe," Sessions confirmed that Trump, if elected, would like to question them to determine whether or not they would be "harmonious with our values." Sessions framed it as a choice between an immigrant's views of what "good government is"—whether one would like to live in a democratic republic, or one that "has an ideology that would like to impose a narrow view of how the government should be run—a theocracy."
In earlier speeches, regarding homegrown Islamic extremism, Trump has suggested a test for U.S. citizens, something Sessions said "I don't know that we discussed that in any detail." Later, when pressed, Sessions told Dickerson that "you can't do that for a citizen. Once you get citizenship, you're just like anybody else and you have every right of an American now matter how you came here."Image copyright Reuters Image caption A combination photo shows Peter Humphrey and his wife leaving court in a police car in August last year
British company investigator Peter Humphrey, jailed in China last August for two-and-a-half years for trafficking personal data, has been released early from prison.
Family friends told the BBC that a Shanghai court had reduced Mr Humphrey's sentence.
His case was connected to the GlaxoSmithKline corruption scandal.
He was released on health grounds and has been moved to a Shanghai hospital for tests relating to cancer.
He will be deported on release from hospital.
Friends of the family said the British consulate in Shanghai is processing an emergency passport. His departure may be as soon as Wednesday.
Mr Humphrey's son, Harvey, said in a statement:
"I am stunned and delighted. I hope to see both my parents as soon as possible. My father may need treatment for his health, but he will soon be able to speak for himself."
Mr Humphrey's American wife and fellow investigator, Yu Yingzeng, remains in prison.
She too was detained in 2013 and sentenced in August last year to two years in prison. She is due to be released on 11 July.
The couple were detained after helping GSK investigate a secretly filmed sex tape of its then top manager in China.
GSK was fined £300m by the Chinese authorities for bribes to hospitals and officials in an attempt to boost sales.
The couple were found guilty of illegally obtaining Chinese citizens' data and selling it to firms including GSK China.
They both admitted buying background information, but said they did not realise this was illegal.
How the case unfolded:The casket of Walter Hudson, who weighed 80 stone when he died
FUNERAL directors in Scotland have warned obese people are being buried, rather than cremated as they wished, because their US-style caskets are too large for traditional furnaces.
Britain’s obesity epidemic is having a growing impact on funeral services, they said, with some cemetery owners levying additional charges for larger coffins because burial plots are in short supply. It has been estimated that almost two thirds of adults in Scotland are overweight, with 27.1% classed as being obese.
The National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) said some councils had invested in larger ovens and refrigerators but that families in Scotland often decide on a burial rather than make a longer journey to the nearest crematorium with larger-size facilities.
One firm, Anderson Maguire in Glasgow, said families…This season's Tony nominations will be revealed on Tuesday morning, following a Monday afternoon gaggle by the Tony Nominating Committee to determine what they will be. In anticipation of the big announcement, I thought that I would share my own best guesses of what the field will look like.
The following projections and commentary are based on my own viewings of the contenders throughout the season; consultations with numerous knowledgeable members of the theater community, including and especially our own distinguished theater critic David Rooney; and careful study of the lists — and attributes — of past nominees and winners.
I recognize that the Tonys are a very different beast than the Oscars and the Emmys. Few people ever see all — or even most — of the contenders, due to geography, cost and timing. (They each play at one of the 40 theaters with 500 or more seats in and around Times Square, most of which charge more than $100 per ticket — plus some of them already have come and gone.) The ceremony is not preceded by months of festivals and awards shows that offer hints about how things will pan out. (The selections of the Drama League, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Circle groups are only of limited help because they also consider off-Broadway productions.) And the nominees and winners are not determined by thousands of voters, but rather by very few. (This year's nominating committee consists of fewer than 40 people, while fewer than 900 people will determine the winners.)
Still, at a time when talent jumps among theater, film and television more than ever — Matthew Broderick, Michael Cera, Glenn Close, Bradley Cooper, Tony Danza, Larry David, Jake Gyllenhaal, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Vanessa Hudgens, Hugh Jackman, James Earl Jones, Matthew Morrison, Helen Mirren, Carey Mulligan, Sting and Ruth Wilson are all in the running for Tony noms this year — we at the entertainment outlet of record feel that it would be remiss for Hollywood not to pay close attention to Broadway. David Rooney does that for us throughout the year. And it is my great pleasure to join him in doing so — live from New York, for the second year in a row — throughout the theater season's exciting homestretch.
* * *
BEST PLAY
Projected Nominees
1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
2. Hand to God
3. Wolf Hall, Parts One and Two
4. Disgraced
Major Threats
5. Constellations
6. The Audience
7. Airline Highway
Long Shots
8. Fish in the Dark
9. The River
10. The Country House
11. Living on Love
British import Curious, a multimedia extravaganza, is the best reviewed show of the year, unlike anything that's ever hit Broadway before and a slam-dunk. Everything else is somewhat fluid. Hand to God, in which puppets take center stage, and Wolf Hall, an epic period piece, are divisive — some mourn the former as a sign of the apocalypse and see the latter as a good editing job — but I think their admirers outnumber their detractors. The final spot — or two — are tough calls. Disgraced and Airline Highway are well-written, thought-provoking productions about 21st century America. The Audience and Constellations, while not about anything of great contemporary social significance, are terrific vehicles for their lead performers. It's tempting to err on the side of shows that are still running (Airline and Audience), but my sense is that the two that have already closed are far from forgotten.
BEST MUSICAL
Projected Nominees
1. An American in Paris
2. Fun Home
3. Something Rotten!
4. The Visit
Major Threats
5. Finding Neverland
6. It Shoulda Been You
7. The Last Ship
8. Honeymoon in Vegas
Long Shots
9. Doctor Zhivago
10. Holler If Ya Hear Me
The top three look set in stone: An American in Paris, which brings ballet back to Broadway, and Fun Home, a minimalistic tour-de-force that originated Off-Broadway, are exactly what Tony voters live to celebrate, and Something Rotten! is this year's Aladdin (it happens to come from the same director/choreographer), a splashy, fun, well-done show that appeals to the masses. I think the edge for the fourth spot goes to The Visit — a show with a pedigree out of a theater buff's dream — but look out for Finding Neverland, which could displace or join it. Sure, it won't be helped by middling reviews or the community's ambivalence toward Hollywood trespassers — as you may have heard, it comes via Harvey Weinstein — but it has also generated big box-office and the rest of its principal creative talent are Broadway denizens in good standing. Of course, the apple cart could be totally overturned by the just-opened It Shoulda Been You, which is a lot of fun, or one of two commercial flops from earlier in the season, The Last Ship or Honeymoon in Vegas.
BEST REVIVAL OF A PLAY
Projected Nominees
1. Skylight
2. The Elephant Man
3. You Can't Take It with You
4. It's Only a Play
Major Threats
5. A Delicate Balance
6. This Is Our Youth
7. The Heidi Chronicles
Long Shots
8. The Real Thing
The only sure-thing here is Skylight, the which is still running — unlike much of the rest of this field — and going over tremendously. Bradley Cooper made The Elephant Man a must-see show and it did not disappoint, so although it's been gone for months I wouldn't bet against it. You Can't Take It with You was well-received and featured a popular creative team that I wouldn't bet against (James Earl Jones, Annaleigh Ashford, etc.). And then there's It's Only a Play, which has been a big draw (Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick together again!) and resonates especially well with Broadway insiders. The others are all plausible if not especially distinguished or commercial alternatives; Heidi is the only one of them that is still running — and it's due to close early next Sunday after underperforming at the box office.
BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL
Projected Nominees
1. On the Twentieth Century
2. The King & I
3. On the Town
4. Side Show
Major Threats
5. Gigi
There are few bad options — really, few options at all — in this category. The first three are universally adored and in. Gigi is regarded as lightweight, partly because of Vanessa Hudgens (although I felt that, apart from over-enunciating her T's for some reason — that reason not being an attempt at a French accent — she's perfectly charming in the role). And that means the only question is whether or not enough voters will remember Side Show, which came and went months ago but was pretty admired while it was around, to force the inclusion of a fourth nominee in this category, unlike last year when there could have been four but ended up being just three.
BEST ACTOR IN
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many thing for granted" early in the season before winning 10 Serie A games in a row to go second, boss Massimiliano Allegri said.
The Turin side, who are chasing their fifth consecutive title, beat Udinese 4-0 on Sunday to move within two points of leaders Napoli.
They were 12th, 11 points off top, when they lost 2-1 to Sassuolo on 28 October - the last time they failed to win.
"The players were not playing at the level they are now," Allegri said.
"I was without Claudio Marchisio and Sami Khedira, Mario Mandzukic had injury problems during the first two months.
"After last term's efforts, there was always a risk of needing some time to reach peak condition for the current campaign.
"There were also some unfortunate incidents, for example the draw with Frosinone, when we conceded from their only corner kick. It was, however, almost predictable that such things occurred in that period, as we were all taking too many things for granted."Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is working on a diplomatic plan for an interim agreement with the Palestinians.
He has already presented the general outlines to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and intends to give him the full plan soon. He would like to see it approved by both the "septet" of seven key ministers and the diplomatic-security cabinet so that it can be presented to Washington in the coming months as Israel's official position.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Emil Salman
A senior ministry source said the plan, which Lieberman calls "Plan B," was drafted in response to the impasse in negotiations with the Palestinian Authority on a permanent-status agreement. Lieberman told an annual conference of Israeli ambassadors yesterday that the plan is now undergoing final revisions, but is basically submission-ready.
Lieberman expects the Obama administration to resume pressing Israel on the Palestinian issue once the winter holidays end, and it will want to know what Israel's diplomatic plan is. Plan B is aimed at avoiding a situation of diplomatic stagnation while also skirting the conflict's core issues.
Behind closed doors, the foreign minister has said the plan is meant "to bring the peace process down to earth." He believes there is no chance of reaching a final-status agreement in the coming years, especially on the issues of Jerusalem and refugees.
"Even if we offered the Palestinians Tel Aviv and a retreat to the 1947 borders, they would find a reason not to sign a peace agreement," he said in his speech to the ambassadors yesterday. "The PA has an illegitimate government that isn't holding elections. We must not reach a [final-status] agreement with them."
Given both the deep disputes within Israel's governing coalition and the huge gaps between Israel and the PA, an interim agreement is the only possible solution, he told the diplomats.
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"In the current political situation, I don't think it's possible to find a common denominator between [Shas chairman] Eli Yishai and [Labor chairman] Ehud Barak or between me and [dovish Likud minister] Dan Meridor, or even within Likud, between [ministers] Benny Begin and Michael Eitan," he explained. "In the existing political circumstances, it's not possible to present a diplomatic plan for a final-status agreement, because the coalition will simply no longer exist."
Lieberman's plan would significantly increase security cooperation between Israel and the PA, in order to further stabilize the West Bank and gradually transfer more security responsibilities to the Palestinians. It would also increase Palestinian freedom of movement in the West Bank and take other steps aimed at significantly improving the PA's economy, with the goal of eventually raising the West Bank's per capita gross domestic product to $20,000 a year.
Once the PA's economy is roughly on a par with Israel's, he argues, it will be easier to reach a final-status agreement.
But it is unclear whether the plan, which he has yet to show to any foreign official, includes turning additional parts of the West Bank over to PA control or evacuating illegal settlement outposts.
If Netanyahu rejects Lieberman's Plan B, the foreign minister intends to demand that Netanyahu publicly present his final-status plan and submit it to a referendum. "If the prime minister's plan for a final-status agreement wins a sweeping public majority, I'll accept that," an associate quoted him as saying.
Recognition addressed
The septet also met yesterday to discuss the growing trend among Latin American countries toward recognizing a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders, as well as the PA's efforts to get the UN Security Council to pass a resolution denouncing the settlements.
According to the senior Foreign Ministry source, the ministry has been devising a series of sanctions Israel could apply should the PA continue pushing such unilateral moves, ranging from restricting PA activity in the West Bank to annexing territory there.Next up in our projection series is Lucas Duda. When it comes to the Mets’ offense, Duda is the wild card. The team figures to get something from David Wright and something from Ike Davis, perhaps a combined 50 HR and 170 RBIs. But will Duda make it a trio of productive hitters for the club or will it be more forgettable performance like he delivered in 2012? It wouldn’t surprise me if those guys combined for 250 RBIs. It also wouldn’t shock me if it was under 225, either.
Here’s what we think Duda will do in 2013:
Duda Projection PA AVG OBP SLG HR RBIs Swing% Gray 535.273.350.458 25 90 43.5 Hangley 430.237.301.407 14 52 49.2 Joura 586.268.348.475 28 95 41.5 Koehler 300.250.340.410 15 55 41 Manners 550.255.340.425 18 80 40 Mcwilliam 541.265.345.430 19 73 42 Omalley 534.250.337.422 20 76 38.6 Parker 450.245.335.400 15 60 40 Rogan 549.265.370.490 22 75 42 Rogers 510.250.340.410 20 85 40 Stack 530.287.357.473 23 86 45.3 Vasile 600.250.340.425 20 72 41.3 Walendin 448.222.317.422 18 52 43
Under batting coach Dave Hudgens, the Mets preached patience with their hitters last year, a lesson Duda took to heart. He swung at just 39.3 percent of the pitches he saw, the second-lowest mark on the club among those with at least 200 PA. This year Hudgens is working with Duda to carry over the same approach from batting practice to the game. The concern was that Duda was too busy and had too much movement during games.
A snarky reply might be that Duda was so impatient from taking pitches that he got too hyper when one came his way. Hopefully he can find the right balance of waiting for his pitch and attacking said pitch with the proper swing fundamentals. Duda had a 137 OPS+ in 347 PA in 2011 and it would be wonderful if he would deliver that performance again this season.
Here’s what the group thinks Duda will do in 2013:
It should be pointed out that whatever contributions Duda makes on offense could be completely negated by what he does on defense. Last year he had a (-16) Defensive Runs Saved in 670 innings, a total so amazingly poor it’s hard to really comprehend in all its raging ugliness.
Many in the fan base crucify Daniel Murphy for his poor fielding, yet Murphy had a (-11) DRS in an additional 457 innings. If we use UZR instead of DRS and extrapolate to 150 games, Duda was more than three times worse than Murphy last year on defense. Murphy posted a (-11.7) UZR/150 while Duda’s mark was (-38.6).
The Mets are moving Duda to left field this year and hopefully the switch to the other side of the diamond will help improve his numbers from mortifying to just plain bad. Regardless, the Mets will live with his defensive issues if he posts a 137 OPS+. But a repeat of his 2012 98 OPS+ makes that kind of defense completely intolerable.
Finally, let’s close with a table comparing the Mets360 numbers to those of the projection systems available from FanGraphs:
Duda Projection PA AVG OBP SLG HR RBIs Bill James 510.268.356.454 18 69 Mets360 505.255.340.425 20 73 Oliver 545.251.335.427 18 69 Steamer 454.245.330.418 15 53 ZiPS 563.248.330.418 18 74
The James projection has a little better AVG and SLG but basically all the systems essentially agree with our group. They all see a slight rebound from his 2012 numbers but nowhere close to the production that he displayed in 2011.
Knowing all this, it’s hard for a non-biased person to look at my predicted numbers for Duda and do anything besides laugh. That’s okay – send all the scorn you want my way. However, remember who was driving the Duda bus here in Spring Training when he goes off during the regular season.
For the opposite point of view, we have Mr. Hangley, who said of Duda, “I’m afraid he’s Kevin Maas.” Ouch. For those of you too young to remember, Maas was a one-time Yankees prospect who came up in 1990 and hit 21 HR in 254 ABs and had everyone convinced he was a future HR champ. He followed up with 23 HR in 1991 (in 500 ABs) and proceeded to hit just 21 more HR in his major league career, which ended in 1995.
Check back Thursday for our next entry in the projection series.
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GoogleAn Indian woman claims she hand her 14-year-old cousin were gang-raped while two of her relatives were murdered after being accused of eating beef.
The 20-year-old woman, who is a Muslim, claims the gang of men beat her uncle and aunt to death before attacking her and her cousin.
The incident happened in Mewat in the northern sate of Haryana two weeks ago.
The 20-year-old woman claimed she and her 14-year-old cousin were gang-raped by four men who also beat her aunt and uncle to death in the Indian town of Mewat in Haryana province
Cows are revered in India and in many states killing the animals is against the law
Cows are considered sacred by India's Hindu majority and the slaughter and consumption of beef is banned in several states.
Speaking to BBC Urdu, the woman said: 'They [the accused men] said that we ate cow meat and that is why we were being disgraced [raped]. They even threatened to kill me and my family if we ever told anybody what happened to us.'
Mewat, which is only 60 miles from Delhi, is a majority Muslim area and the source of significant conflict.
The victim denied eating beef, which is illegal in Haryana.
Local police denied the attack was carried out by cow protection groups.
However, in recent years there has been significant controversy over the number of gang-rapes targeting innocent woman..
Officials in Mewat district have even been testing mutton biryani to ensure that the meal hadn't been bulked up with elicit beef.Last year I was on an evening flight from New York to West Palm Beach, delighted to find myself in first class. Across the aisle sat an older dame — 70s, maybe — in slacks, legs crossed, reading The Financial Times, which she’d folded in vertical fourths, exactly the way all the charcoal gray suits used to do back when bankers still rode the subway to Wall Street in the mornings. The steward came through with the cart, and each one of the Louis Vuitton bucket bags and the full-length foxes and the razor-thin silver laptops spilling out of the rows in front of us ordered their water, tomato juice, white wine, organic purple potato chips with Hawaiian sea salt — and in so doing, confirmed their classy virtues. The lady in seat 4F, though, the one in the light cashmere pullover reading the newspaper, she clicked the latch on her seat-back tray and said: “Double Smirnoff, on the rocks. And Doritos.”
I’ll introduce myself here — my cooking, my eating, my sensibilities about food and drink — by telling you I loved her. I felt reborn by her.
Back in New York, I could not wait to share my revival zeal with my girlfriend, Ashley. To fix her just such a sturdy drink and as sensible a snack when 7:30 rolled around. To lay on her some of the gospel of 4F. To say we were in the dating phase is an absurdity because we’d had only one date, during which we recognized instantly what an inevitability we were, and thus proceeded accordingly. But still, it was early, and I was learning the details of her. Maybe she was one of those people who’d never condescend to use a restroom at a Popeyes, let alone house a spicy dark-meat combo at one? I made her a gin and tonic and set out a dish of pristinely stacked Pringles — sour-cream-and-onion flavor. In case she balked — she herself is a restaurant chef — I also had a ramekin of Castelvetrano olives.
But Ashley got it immediately, chuckling with recognition. Her own longing for a kind of return to this approach to food — if not to life itself — stirred.WordPress conditional tags are a great feature of WordPress that allows you to control what content is displayed on a page. There are conditional tags for different areas of your website such as your home page, blog posts and pages. This allows you to change what is displayed around your website. For example, you could change your website logo in different areas of your website.
In this tutorial, I will explain what conditional tags are available to you and show you how they can be used in themes and plugins.
How WordPress Conditional Tags Work
Conditional tags are a boolean data type that can only return true or false. The tag is_home(), for example, refers to the blog index. We can use this tag to display a message to visitors of our blog. This message will not be displayed elsewhere.
The code is straightforward. All we are doing below is checking if the page being shown is the blog index page. If it is, we display our message.
<?php if ( is_home()) { echo "Welcome to Our Blog!!"; }?>
The above is a basic example of what can be achieved using conditional tags, however that is essentially all there is to it. You are simply checking the type of page that is being displayed. Depending on whether the result is true or false, another piece of code is actioned.
Before we look at more examples of how conditional tags can be used, let us first look at popular conditional tags that you are likely to see used in your WordPress themes.
is_home() – Checks if the blog post index is being displayed. This may or may not be your home page as well.
is_front_page() – Checks if your home page is being displayed. This works whether your front page settings are set up to display blog posts (i.e. blog index) or a static page.
is_single() – Checks to see whether any type of single post is being displayed (excluding attachments).
is_attachment() – Checks if an attachment is displayed.
is_page() – Checks if a page is being displayed.
is_singular() – Checks whether a single post, attachment or page is being displayed. True is returned if either of those conditions are met.
is_category() – Checks whether a category archive page is being displayed.
is_search() – Checks if a search results page is being shown.
is_tag() – Checks whether a tag archive is being displayed.
is_author() – Checks if an author archive page is being displayed.
is_archive() – Checks if any type of archive page is being displayed including category, tag, date and author archives.
is_sticky() – Checks if a post has been defined as sticky.
is_multi_author() – Checks if more than one author has published posts on the website. True is returned if two or more people have published posts. If only one author has published posts, or if no posts have been published at all, false is returned.
There are six time based conditional tags that you will also find useful. These tags refer to date archive pages. For example, the URL http://www.yourwebsite.com/2013/12/ is a month based archive page.
If any of the following conditional tags returns true, is_archive() would also be true.
is_date() – Checks if it is a date based archive page.
is_year() – Checks if it is a year based archive page.
is_month() – Checks if it is a month based archive page.
is_day() – Checks if it is a day based archive page.
is_time() – Checks if it is a time based archive page.
is_new_day() – Checks if today is a new day. If the current post was published on a different day from the previous post that was published, it would return true. False will be returned if both posts were published on the same day.
You will come across conditional tags such as is_home() and is_single() frequently, however you do not need to remember all of these conditional tags. Most WordPress users refer to the WordPress codex for the appropriate conditional tag when they need to set up a conditional function.
Conditional Tags Examples
Many conditional tags allow parameters to be passed to the function. This gives you much more control over what conditions have to be met before something is actioned. is_page() is a good example of this. The tag allows you to check whether the page that is being displayed is a page. is_page() will return a value of true if any page is displayed, however you need to specify the $page parameter if you want to be more specific. The $page parameter can be the page ID, page title or page slug.
Let us consider a regular website that has an about page and you want to customise the about page differently from all other pages. For example, you could display a photograph of your company at the top of the sidebar, or you could display additional information at the bottom of the about page.
To do this, you need to define the $page parameter. If the page ID was 10, you could open up your conditional statement with something like this:
if ( is_page(10) ) {
A specific page can also be specified by passing the page title to the function.
if ( is_page( 'About Us' ) ) {
The page slug can also be used. As you may recall, the page slug is the unique named identifier at the end of the URL. If your about page URL was www.yourwebsite.com/about-our-company/, the page slug would be about-our-company.
if ( is_page( 'about-our-company' ) ) {
Some conditional tags, such as is_page(), can also pass parameters in an array. The following conditional statement will return a value of true if either of the conditions are true.
if ( is_page( array( 10, 'About Us', 'about-our-company' ) ) ) {
It is common for developers to set more than one condition when using conditional tags. Let us go back to the simple task of displaying a welcome message to blog visitors. This is something that a corporate website might want to add to their blog area but not to other areas of their website (e.g. home page, contact page, about page etc).
They can do this by using the is_home() and is_single() conditional tags; which represent the blog index and single posts respectively. To display a message in both areas, you need to use the logical OR operator ||. This is illustrated in the code below. The initial if statement checks whether the page is the blog index or a single post. If either is true, the message is displayed.
<?php if ( is_home() || is_single() ) { echo "Welcome to Our Blog!!"; }?>
Another logical operator that is very useful is the AND operator &&. This is used when you want two or more conditions to be true before something is actioned. The following if statement checks if a page is both an archive page and categorised under the news category. In the news category pages, the welcome message will be displayed. Nothing will be displayed in other categories.
<?php if ( is_archive() && is_category( 'News' ) ) { echo "Welcome to the News Archives"; }?>
AND and OR operators can be combined. The example below is taken from the functions.php template of the default WordPress theme Twenty Thirteen. The function is used to display the page title in the browser, however only part of the function is shown below.
The if statement returns a value of true if there is a site description and the user is viewing the blog index or the home page. The site description can be entered via the tagline field in your general settings area. If you complete this field, on your blog index and home page the title bar will display “Site Title | Site Description” (note: the separator is displayed using the string $sep in the code below). If you do not, the title bar will display “Site Title”.
As you can see, is_home and _is_front_page are viewed as a single entity due to the OR operator. This is why they are wrapped inside brackets.
if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) ) $title = "$title $sep $site_description";
Another PHP logical operator you can use is the not operator!. This is more practical to use in many circumstances. For example, let us say you want to display a photograph on all of your pages except your archives. There is no need to set up a long conditional statement that asks “Is this the home page, is this a single post, is this a page…”. It is more practical to simply ask “Is this not an archive page?”.
To do this, simply add an exclamation mark before the conditional tag. The code below shows how straightforward this is in practice. It will display an image on every page of your website except archive pages.
<?php if (!is_archive() ) {?> <img src="photo.jpg" /> <?php }?>
Up until now, we have looked at basic examples of conditional tags being used where something is either actioned or it is not actioned (i.e. if A is true, do B). In practice, there is usually another action to do if a condition is not met. Additionally, there may be several conditions that can be met, with a different response to each one.
Rather than write lots of individual statements for this, it is practical to use else and elseif statements. This allows you a greater degree of control over what is displayed on your website.
We can show this using an example. Let us say that you want to show a different logo on your website in different areas of your website. How would you do this? The answer is simple: We use else and elseif statements. The code below shows how this can be achieved.
<?php if ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) {?> <img src="logo-home.png" /> <?php } elseif ( is_category() ) {?> <img src="logo-category.png" /> <?php } elseif ( is_single() ) {?> <img src="logo-blog-post.png" /> <?php } elseif ( is_page() ) {?> <img src="logo-page.png" /> <?php } else {?> <img src="logo-general.png" /> <?php }?>
Depending on what area of the website a visitor is viewing, one of five logos would be displayed using the above code. It is a basic example that illustrates how easily else and elseif statements can be used to control many different areas of your website.
Elseif statements are also used in other parts of WordPress. Most functions.php templates use them and many WordPress themes use them to change how their website title is displayed in browsers.
More Conditional Tags
There are a number of additional conditional tags available. Many of these are used by developers in themes and plugins.
Below is a list of some of the other conditional tags that are available to you.
is_tax() – Checks whether a custom taxonomy archive page is displayed.
has_term() – Checks if the current post has one of the specified terms.
taxonomy_exists() – Checks if the taxonomy name exists.
post_type_exists() – Checks if a post type exists.
is_post_type_hierarchical( $post_type ) – Checks if the post type is hierarchical.
is_post_type_archive() – Checks if the archive page of a specific post type is being displayed.
is_comments_popup() – Checks to see if the comments popup window is open.
comments_open() – Checks whether comments are permitted for the current post or page.
pings_open() – Checks if pings are permitted for the current post or page.
is_feed() – Checks whether the current query is for a feed.
is_404() – Checks whether a 404 error is being displayed.
is_paged() – Checks whether the page you are currently viewing is a paginated page other than page one. Posts and pages are paginated when you use the nextpage quicktag in your content to split up large posts.
is_trackback() – Checks whether a trackback is being used.
is_admin() – Checks whether the user is logged into the administrator area. It is not used to check whether a user has administrator privileges, only whether they are logged into the WordPress dashboard.
is_page_template() – Checks whether the page being viewed is using a page template. A specific page template can be defined, if necessary.
is_preview() – Checks whether a blog post is being viewed in draft mode.
has_excerpt() – Checks whether the current post has an excerpt. Specific posts can be defined.
has_nav_menu() – Checks whether a menu location has a menu assigned. This is used by theme developers to show something in the event that the user has not added a menu.
in_the_loop() – Checks whether the caller is still within the WordPress loop.
is_active_sidebar( $index ) – Checks if a given sidebar is being used.
is_multisite() – Checks if multisite is supported.
is_main_site() – Checks if a multisite is the main site in the network.
is_super_admin() – Checks if a user is a super admin within the network.
is_plugin_active( $plugin ) – Checks whether a plugin is activated.
is_child_theme() – Checks if a child theme is being used.
current_theme_supports( $feature ) – Checks if a theme supports a specific feature such as post formats or featured images.
Conditional tags are an important WordPress concept. Due to how useful they are, there are few WordPress themes that are designed without them. Once you understand else statements, elseif statements and logical operators such as AND, OR and Not; you will be able to tackle any conditional function.
I hope this guide helped you learn how to use WordPress conditional tags in your themes.
If you liked this article, then join ThemeLab on Twitter and Google+.Bengaluru/New Delhi: Tiger Global Management’s roughly $1 billion bet on Flipkart India Ltd began inauspiciously, if an apocryphal story is to be believed.
The year was 2009. Tiger’s legendary fund manager Lee Fixel called Flipkart’s call centre number and asked to talk to the Bansals who founded the company. A Flipkart executive promised to have them call back. That didn’t happen.
Then, Fixel tried to reach out to them through McKinsey & Co., which was then representing the relatively unknown New York investment firm. That didn’t work either; the Bansals weren’t too interested because they hadn’t heard of Tiger.
Sachin and Binny Bansal (they are not related) were not yet 30; Flipkart was selling only books; and it had just raised $1 million from Accel Partners.
Eventually, a common acquaintance connected Fixel and the Bansals. After a few weeks of talks, Tiger invested in Flipkart, and thus began one of the most interesting and under-the-radar relationships in the Indian start-up ecosystem, between a secretive investment company fronted by an obsessively reclusive fund manager and what would become India’s largest e-commerce company.
In a strange inversion of the old proverb, Flipkart rode the wave, and Tiger rode Flipkart—although the fund manager’s ride threatens to be just as risky as the one in the proverb (and maybe, it too is afraid to dismount).
Since that first investment, Fixel has pumped nearly $1 billion into Flipkart, one of the riskiest and most unique bets on a start-up ever made by an investor. Fixel upended the venture capital (VC) playbook with his bet on Flipkart. Not only did Tiger lead a majority of Flipkart’s early funding rounds, it has also led or participated heavily in the last three Flipkart fund-raising rounds, which happened at peak valuations of $7 billion, $11 billion and $15 billion, respectively.
Fixel pushed Flipkart’s executives to go for Jabong, which was available at a cut-price deal. In a matter of just three days, Flipkart agreed to pay $70 million for the online fashion retailer, blindsiding rival Snapdeal, which had emerged as the front-runner for Jabong. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint
The speed at which Fixel moves was in evidence over the past week. Fixel pushed Flipkart’s executives to go for Jabong, which was available at a cut-price deal. In a matter of just three days, Flipkart agreed to pay $70 million for the online fashion retailer, blindsiding rival Snapdeal, which had emerged as the front-runner for Jabong.
For Flipkart, the acquisition of Jabong will extend its dominance in the fashion space and is seen as a move by the company to preserve its position as India’s No. 1 e-commerce marketplace in the face of an onslaught by Amazon India.
“The price was very attractive and Lee was in favour of picking up Jabong. With Jabong, Flipkart will be out of reach of Amazon for good in at least one category. Lee really pushed for the deal," said one person familiar with the deal.
Flipkart is an Internet behemoth now. It has become India’s largest e-commerce company, employing more than 33,000 people, and generated some ₹ 10,000 crore in sales for the year ended March 2015, the latest year for which official numbers are available.
The price was very attractive and Lee was in favour of picking up Jabong. With Jabong, Flipkart will be out of reach of Amazon for good in at least one category. Lee really pushed for the deal- A person familiar with the Flipkart Jabong deal.
But since the start of the year, Flipkart has seen its valuation marked down by several of its investors and is struggling to raise fresh funds at its preferred valuation. The company has changed its CEO, replacing Sachin Bansal (now executive chairman) with Binny Bansal. It has also removed several senior executives and brought back an old Flipkart and Tiger hand, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, in a key role. The changes followed a disastrous 2015 in which Flipkart tried changing its business model and attempted ill-thought-out experiments.
Flipkart is now struggling to defend its market leadership position from arch-rival Amazon India (Amazon.com Inc.’s local arm), which has expanded rapidly in India, fuelled by an unprecedented spending spree.
For Fixel, Flipkart’s struggles put an uneasy spotlight on his $1 billion bet, especially his eager participation in the company’s last three funding rounds. An investment that looked attractive even until the end of 2015, suddenly looks precarious now.
Flipkart has acquired Myntra and now Jabong to stave off competition from Amazon India. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint
There’s more than just money at stake. The reputation of Fixel, seen as one the rising stars in the global VC business, hinges on the Flipkart investment and in turn, on the turnaround efforts of Binny Bansal.
Tiger has invested more money in Flipkart (and its subsidiary Myntra) than it has in all other Indian start-ups put together over the past five years, according to Mint research.
The relationship between Tiger and Flipkart is central to the Indian e-commerce story and perhaps as important as the one of the competition between Flipkart, Amazon India and Snapdeal.
Unlike the second story, though, it has never been told.
This is an attempt to tell it. Tiger declined to participate in this story. Flipkart commented on just one aspect of it.
In 2009, Fixel, who along with the Bansals is in his mid-30s, was impressed with the passion of the Flipkart founders, their ambition, and, not the least, their degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology.
At the time, Flipkart was selling books worth a few lakh rupees a month, and its minimalist website seemed as inspired by role model Amazon’s (the Bansals had worked at Amazon) as it was by Google’s.
Yet, within a few weeks, Fixel agreed to give them as much as $10 million. To understand how shocking that move was, consider this: the investment was as much as a fourth of the overall size of the online retail market in India in 2009.
Like Flipkart, Tiger Global too wasn’t a name in 2009.
When Fixel reached out to the Bansals, he and Tiger Global were largely unknown in the start-up world. Even executives at Flipkart’s first investor Accel Partners, who had been investing in India since 2004, hadn’t heard of Fixel or Tiger Global.
The American, who joined Tiger Global in March 2006, is a chartered financial analyst who graduated from the Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in business administration, finance and accounting.
Tiger’s initial investment valued Flipkart at $40 million. At that time, Tiger had just started betting aggressively on Indian start-ups and had accumulated large stakes in Just Dial and MakeMyTrip (both of which would go public and generate handsome returns for Tiger). More investments in Flipkart followed. By the middle of 2014, Tiger had invested roughly $200-250 million in Flipkart.
The fund manager and the founders worked closely. In 2013, as the company’s sales growth slowed and losses ballooned, Fixel named one of Tiger’s top employees in India, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, as Flipkart’s chief financial officer.
Krishnamurthy, first as interim CFO, improved Flipkart’s so-called unit economics by pruning costs. After that, as head of categories, he helped devise the company’s sales events strategy which catapulted revenue to more than $1 billion (on an annualized basis) in early 2014.
The Myntra acquisition in 2014 was supposed to turbo-charge Flipkart’s early growth in a market category that was becoming very important for marketplaces. Photo: Bloomberg
In the middle of that year, Tiger facilitated the e-marketplace’s acquisition of Myntra, a leader in the online fashion apparel space. The acquisition was supposed to turbo-charge Flipkart’s early growth in a market category that was becoming very important for marketplaces.
Things were going well. There were murmurs, of course, like there always are, about Tiger’s big bet on Flipkart and on then CEO Sachin Bansal’s management style, but things were good, for both Flipkart, whose valuation was around $2.5 billion at the time of the Myntra acquisition, and Tiger.
By 2014, Tiger had become one of the most recognizable games in the start-up business. In this time, the firm made hugely profitable bets on some of the world’s most recognizable Internet companies, including Facebook Inc., Alibaba Group, JD.com and LinkedIn Corp.
Along with Tiger’s rise, Fixel has become a near mythical personality. Like other Tiger executives, Fixel doesn’t give media interviews (Tiger doesn’t even operate a website). Fixel, who usually sports a stubble and dresses down, had literally bankrolled the Internet boom in India until the entry of the likes of SoftBank Group Corp. and DST Global. According to people who know him, Fixel is excellent with numbers, has a formidable memory and listens more than he talks.
On 29 July 2014, Flipkart shocked the world by announcing it had raised a mammoth $1 billion at a valuation of $7 billion. Tiger and Naspers, the South Africa-based media and Internet conglomerate which is Flipkart’s second-largest investor, led that round. Like the first time Tiger invested in Flipkart in 2009, this $1 billion investment was equal to a fourth of the whole online retail market in 2014.
Announcing the $1 billion fund raising, Flipkart co-founder and then CEO Sachin Bansal said: “This is a big milestone not just for Flipkart, but for Internet firms in India in general. We believe India can produce a $100 billion company in the next five years, and we want to be that. Whether it takes 5 or 10 years, we are here for the longer term."
Flipkart’s fund raising signalled a dramatic escalation in the e-commerce war it was fighting with Amazon.com Inc.’s India unit, which had launched a year ago, and Snapdeal. Sure enough, a day after Flipkart announced the $1 billion round, Amazon fired back and said it would invest $2 billion in India over time. A few months later, in October, Snapdeal investor SoftBank stepped up and said it will put in some $627 million into the online marketplace.
This is a big milestone not just for Flipkart, but for Internet firms in India in general. We believe India can produce a $100 billion company in the next five years, and we want to be that- Sachin Bansal after Flipkart’s $1 billion fundraising in 2014.
Flipkart’s $1 billion fund raising also heralded the beginning of the funding boom for Indian start-ups that lasted until the end of 2015.
Two people familiar with the matter say the logic behind the fund raising was straightforward: To maintain its market leadership, Flipkart would need to spend huge amounts on discounts, advertising and logistics. That meant the company would have to keep raising
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operating inside and outside the camp Image copyright Richard Walsh Image caption The British obsession with class and rank was on display at Ruhleben Image copyright Richard Walsh Image caption The future Nobel laureate James Chadwick is mentioned as a camp science lecturer previous slide next slide
The Royal Horticultural Society is planning an exhibition about Ruhleben this autumn and is very keen to hear from people whose relatives were there, particularly if they have diaries and photographs. Please email Fiona Davison at [email protected]
Discover more about the World War One Centenary.
Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.Mikaela Shiffrin was imperious in winning a third straight slalom title at the ski world championships on Saturday to retain her unbeaten record at major events.
The 21-year-old American showed no nerves extending her first-run lead to finish a huge 1.64 seconds faster than runner-up, and home crowd favourite, Wendy Holdener of Switzerland. Frida Hansdotter of Sweden was third, trailing by 1.75.
On crossing the finish line, Shiffrin gazed up for several seconds at the giant screen and then gulped in air on seeing her massive winning margin.
"I thought 'I think that was good but I don't know where the time is [on the screen,]"' Shiffrin told Swiss broadcaster SRF.
Swiss fans, who had loudly supported Holdener two minutes earlier, duly acclaimed the unbeaten champion.
"I knew Wendy had a good run because everyone was screaming so loud," said Shiffrin, who was filmed minutes before her decisive run sitting beneath an umbrella to find shade from the sunshine.
Erin Mielzynski of Collingwood, Ont., was the top Canadian in 15th place. Marie-Michele Gagnon of Lac-Etchemin, Que., was 22nd, Toronto native Ali Nullmeyer was 27th and Mikaela Tommy of Wakefield, Que., did not finish her second run.
Shiffrin's gold medal streak in slalom includes each world championships she entered, starting in 2013, and the 2014 Olympics.
Her victory gave the United States its first world title at St. Moritz in the 10th of 11 medal events.
On a clear day and in perfect racing conditions, Shiffrin was 0.85 faster than any rival second time down, after beating Holdener by 0.38 in the morning first run.
Holdener added slalom silver to her gold medal in the combined event from Monday. Both her medals were won after Swiss star Lara Gut crashed out of the championships with a serious knee injury.
Shiffrin also took silver in giant slalom on Thursday. The U.S. team's tally is three medals, with Lindsey Vonn also getting bronze in downhill.An update on the long term plans for Ubuntu release management. 8.04 LTS represented a very significant step forward in our release management thinking. To the best of my knowledge there has never been an “enterprise platform” release delivered exactly on schedule, to the day, in any proprietary or Linux OS. Not only did it prove that we could execute an LTS release in the standard 6-month timeframe, but it showed that we could commit to such an LTS the cycle beforehand. Kudos to the technical decision-makers, the release managers, and the whole community who aligned our efforts with that goal.
As a result, we can commit that the next LTS release of Ubuntu will be 10.04 LTS, in April 2010.
This represents one of the most extraordinary, and to me somewhat unexpected, benefits of free software to those who deploy it. Most people would assume that precise release management would depend on having total control of all the moving parts – and hence only be possible in a proprietary setting. Microsoft writes (almost) every line of code in Windows, so you would think they would be able to set, and hit, a precise target date for delivery. But in fact the reverse is true – free software distributions or OSV’s can provide much better assurances with regard to delivery dates than proprietary OSV’s, because we can focus on the critical role of component selection, integration, testing, patch management and distribution rather than the pieces which upstream projects are better able to handle – core component feature development. This is in my mind a very compelling reason for distributions to focus on distribution – that’s the one thing they do which the upstreams don’t, so they need to invest heavily in that in order to serve as the most efficient conduit of upstream’s work.
We also committed, for the first time, to a regular set of point releases for 8.04 LTS. These will start three months after the LTS, and be repeated every six months until the next LTS is out. These point releases will include support for new hardware as well as rolling up all the updates published in that series to date. So a fresh install of a point release will work on newer hardware and will also not require a big download of additional updates.
Gerry Carr at Canonical put together this diagram which describes the release management plan very nicely:
The Ubuntu team does an amazing job of ensuring that one can update from release to release, and from LTS release to LTS release directly, too. I’m very proud to be part of this community! With the addition of some capability to support newer hardware in LTS releases, I think we are doing our part in the free software community – helping to deliver the excellent work of thousands of other teams, from kernel.org to GNOME and KDE, safely to a huge audience.
There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I’ll write more about this idea in due course, for now let’s just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity.
This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 11:03 am and is filed under ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.Senior Egypt Official Blames ‘Tom and Jerry’, Video Games for Violence Across Middle East
The head of Egypt’s State Information Service (SIS), Ambassador Salah Abdel Sadek, has attributed the rise of violence and extremism across the Arab world to children’s cartoon Tom and Jerry, video games and ‘violent’ movies.
During a speech at a conference titled ‘The Media and the Culture of Violence’ at Cairo University, the Ambassador said that Tom and Jerry sets an idea in the viewer’s mind that violence is natural.
“[Tom and Jerry] portrays the violence in a funny manner and sends the message that, yes, I can hit him…and I can blow him up with explosives. It becomes set in [the viewer’s] mind that this is natural,” said Ambassador Abdel Sadek.
“Video games are spreading…[those] that came out recently with technological advancements. It has become very normal for a young man to spend long hours playing video games, killing and spilling blood and he’s happy and content,” continued the Ambassador, adding that young people are then faced with social pressures that push them to resort to violence, which they consider normal and understandable.
After the SIS head’s statement, privately-owned Youm7 published an article titled “Five Accusations Tom and Jerry Faces in Egypt”. The article says the cartoon teaches children about negative habits, such as drinking alcohol, smoking, and stealing.
The author of Youm7’s article adds that Tom and Jerry warps the idea of justice, helps children come up with sinister plans, and encourages violence and the use of sharp instruments such as knives, guns, and chainsaws.
Despite the SIS head’s statements, it does not yet appear that the government will actually take any steps to censor Tom and Jerry or video games. However, Egypt has had a history of censoring movies, primarily due to the sexual content depicted in some scenes. For example, Wolf of Wall Street’s running time was reduced by 45 minutes in Egypt, with many scenes showing sexual activity and drug use cut.
Tom and Jerry, an American cartoon, was created in the 1940s. Numerous episodes have been the subject of controversy, mainly over racial stereotypes and the glamorization of smoking.
The U.S. and the United Kingdom have censored some episodes that included racial stereotypes, while Boomerang in the UK made some edits due to the prominent nature of smoking. Meanwhile, Cartoon Network in Brazil censored two episodes deemed “politically incorrect” over “editorial issues and appropriateness of the content to the target audience.”
Feel like reminiscing? Watch one episode of Tom and Jerry below!
Subscribe to our newsletterWith the Marx-reading campaigner as shadow chancellor, renationalisation is back on the agenda along with wealth tax and a higher living wage
Chris Leslie, Labour’s short-lived post-election shadow chancellor, said the party should pitch its appeal to “the Which? magazine strata of society” made up of cost-conscious middle-class consumers and buy-to-let landlords. His successor, the veteran leftwing campaigner John McDonnell, is more likely to be found reading Karl Marx.
Marx’s Capital, with its prognosis – as yet unrealised almost 150 years on – that capitalism’s inherent contradictions and periodic crises would eventually bring about its collapse, is the first book O’Donnell recommends reading to understand the thinking behind Labour’s new economic policy.
More contemporary thinkers cited by the shadow chancellor include Mariana Mazzucato, of the University of Sussex, who has argued about the need for more creative state involvement in business and innovation. Paul Mason, Channel 4’s economics editor and a Guardian columnist, whose book PostCapitalism explores the impact of rapid technological change on old economic models, is also an influence; as is Andrew Fisher, a trade union researcher who advocates wholesale renationalisation of swaths of the economy.
John McDonnell: unreconstructed on the left, but with allies on the right Read more
McDonnell’s ideological clarity springs from precisely the opposite analysis to Leslie’s contention that Labour lost the general election because it tacked too far to the left under Ed Miliband, frightening centrist voters by appearing too ready to seize control of chunks of the private sector.
Instead, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters believe Miliband was too cautious. They hope their message will find a ready hearing in an economy where the booming housing market has created a deep schism between the haves and the have nots; boardroom pay has rocketed since the recession while average wages have flatlined; and City traders are back to their bad old bonus-winning ways.
So when it comes to concrete policy, McDonnell’s approach is likely to be Milibandism liberated from the New Labour dread of alarming Britain’s boardrooms.
Widespread renationalisation is back on the agenda; so is a much more progressive tax system, including exploring the potential for a wealth tax, as recommended by the French economist Thomas Piketty, and the repeal of George Osborne’s planned corporation tax cuts.
McDonnell would outbid the chancellor’s “national living wage”, aiming at £10 instead of the £9 or so that Osborne has said the minimum wage will reach by 2020; and he will be full-throated in his opposition to the chancellor’s £12bn of welfare cuts, instead of running scared of being branded the benefit scroungers’ friend.
One New Labour shibboleth that McDonnell appears not to be prepared to ditch, though, is the need to echo the Conservatives’ determination to keep a tight rein on the public finances.
Richard Murphy, the tax justice campaigner regarded as the inspiration for much of the “Corbynomics” agenda, in particular the notion of “people’s QE”, says he is disappointed that McDonnell has insisted that he is not a “deficit denier” – a phrase repeated by Corbyn in his speech to the TUC yesterday.
“If anything, I’m afraid that at the moment he’s being too cautious. I certainly would not be saying there’s a need to balance the budget,” Murphy says.
Yet as he takes over the job occupied by some of Labour’s towering figures, including John Smith and Gordon Brown, McDonnell may ultimately believe he is at the vanguard of a revolution.
His hero, Marx, believed that over time, the growing concentration of power and wealth in the capitalist economy would intensify the “misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation” of the workforce, who would eventually revolt. At that point, as Marx put it: “The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” Perhaps, finally, Labour’s new shadow chancellor believes that time has come.PHILADELPHIA -- Billionaire climate advocate Tom Steyer believes young Americans will cast more votes this year based on rising temperatures than in past presidential elections.
In an interview with ClimateWire last night, the founder of NextGen Climate also downplayed the idea of placing a price on carbon dioxide and dismissed the notion of swapping the Clean Power Plan for a carbon tax.
CONTINUING COVERAGE E&E Publishing brings you all the action from Philadelphia.
"That's a huge wedge issue," Steyer said of young voters' concern about climate change. "I think it's a critical issue as to whether they turn out."
NextGen is spending more than $25 million to encourage millennials to vote in November. Young adults currently account for the largest and most diverse population in the United States, and Steyer believes that could help Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump on Nov. 8.
Separately, Steyer's group is partnering with five different unions to canvass working-class and minority neighborhoods, where the issue of climate change could help compel young voters to turn out this fall. Large percentages of African Americans and Latinos believe that global warming is occurring, and Steyer's group is trying to turn those concerns into electoral action.
"We're spending a lot of time trying to do voter-to-voter contact in the swing states, trying to make sure they are aware of the facts, know the difference between the candidates and know how important their vote is," Steyer said.
Inside the Wells Fargo Center last night, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and other speakers raised their own concerns about climbing temperatures on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.
"This election is about climate change, the greatest environmental crisis facing our planet," Sanders told the audience packing the basketball arena.
"Hillary Clinton is listening to the scientists who tell us that -- unless we act boldly and transform our energy system in the very near future -- there will be more drought, more floods, more acidification of the oceans, more rising sea levels. She understands that when we do that, we can create hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs," he said. "Donald Trump? Well, like most Republicans, he chooses to reject science. He believes that climate change is a 'hoax,' no need to address it."
Trump aims for Bernie supporters
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Last night's program also included a short video on climate change and its impact on the Everglades.
"The effects of climate change can no longer be ignored," the narrator in the video said, noting that warming threatens seagrass and mangroves in the Everglades, which absorb carbon. It touted the Obama administration's $2.2 billion funding for restoration of the Everglades, which among other things will help improve the local drinking water supply.
The video was followed by a speech from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the lone senator to endorse Sanders during the presidential primary campaign. He said Sanders "emboldened us" to push for 100 percent renewables but added, "We need to fight together with Bernie and Hillary."
Meanwhile, Trump reveled in the disunity being broadcast from Philadelphia on his first day of stumping on the campaign trail since the GOP convention closed Thursday.
"They're having massive protests over there," Trump told a mostly full auditorium in Winston-Salem, N.C. "We had a great convention. It shows you what law and order can do."
Trump accused Clinton of betraying Sanders and his supporters by picking Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) as her running mate. He called Kaine "the opposite of Bernie" because of his support of trade deals.
"Bernie's giving up, and I never thought I'd see that," Trump said. "We're going to get Bernie people coming over to us."
Numerous speakers, though not Trump himself, invoked the image of Clinton going to prison, inspiring chants of "Lock her up!"
Steyer's comments in Philadelphia underscored the need for congressional action to help fund clean energy programs. Steyer's group wants to see the United States derive half of its energy from clean sources by 2030, a goal that's unlikely to be met without bipartisan support in Washington.
"This is not happening without the United States government determining that it has to happen," Steyer said. "This is a societywide [and] an urgent priority. And if we intend to solve it, it's with societywide, urgent activity, you know, government-led. Otherwise, we're not going to succeed."
Steyer also dismissed the idea of swapping the Clean Power Plan for a carbon tax, a concept favored by several conservative and libertarian think tanks.
"I don't think that's the right way to think about it," he said. "Look, we need to have the overall plan that takes into account the actual urgency and actually solves the problem. There are a number of ways to get there. But there's no way to get through all these hypotheticals going forward."
Reporters Josh Kurtz, George Cahlink and Mike Soraghan contributed.May 23, 2014
When I posted on Google+ about Python 3.4.1 being released it led to various comments on the post and it made me realize how far we have come with Python 3 and what people who have not ported yet can do to keep moving forward.
We have come a long way
I remember when we first released Python 3 the naysayers were all about how there wasn’t a compelling reason to switch from Python 2. Those of us working on Python 3 said that the culmination of a bunch of little improvements led to a much more pleasant programming experience. But the naysayers continued to say that the state of the world in Python 2 was good enough for them, so they didn’t want to switch (which is also, by the way, the same reason we hear from people not willing to drop support for very old versions of Python, so this is not a new viewpoint to python-dev and has been going for decades). Not having a compelling reason is fine and understandable as switching isn’t done by snapping your fingers. But from the beginning we said to people that they just needed to give us time and the carrots for switching would come (while always trying to use a in-the-future stick of Python 2.7 no longer receiving official support from python-dev which we have done away with; read to the end if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
I think Python 3.3 was where we started to see the tides turn from people mostly complaining that they didn’t have a compelling reason to switch. And with Python 3.4 I really have not heard anyone complain that they wouldn’t like to use Python 3 instead of Python 2. To me that’s fantastic and means that python-dev has continued to do a great job in stewarding Python forward in a way that continues to improve people’s lives.
Those darn dependencies
Now that people actively want to port, the question becomes why they haven’t yet. The answer to that question seems to commonly be “a dependency is blocking me”. There are three things you can do about this.
First, make sure your dependencies are in fact blocking you. I created caniusepython3 so that it’s extremely easy to check if your dependencies have (not) been ported. There’s even support to integrate caniusepython3 into your testing framework so you can have a failing test tell you that you are no longer being blocked downstream to your project. And on top of that you have Jannis Leidel’s caniusepython3.com which not only gives you a nice web UI to run your checks on, but stable URLs to make it easy to check and badges you can add to your site so you can visually spot-check if you are still blocked. You do need to realize, though, that caniusepython3 is not perfect as it depends on either projects properly marking their Python 3 support on PyPI or me manually specifying that I project is ported. So if you ever come across a project that is actually ported but it isn’t labeled on such on PyPI through its trove classifiers or there is a Python 3 fork, file an issue or send me a pull request (please be aware at the support has to be publicly available on PyPI as a stable release and not simply in their code repository).
So you’ve checked your dependencies and you are sure they are still blocking you. What can you do? The second thing you can do in dealing with your dependencies is to look for alternatives. For instance, MySQLdb is a dependency I hear about regularly that is holding people up. But did you know there is a fork of it that has done a port? Or how about that MySQL has an official driver written in pure Python that runs on Python 3 and adheres to DB API v2, making it practically a drop-in replacement for MySQLdb? This is where blindly relying on caniusepython3 to tell you if you are blocked is not always the best option when an alternative is available that simply isn’t known widely yet.
Cryptography is another instance where an alternative dependency actually is called for. I have heard complaints that until M2Crypto or PyCrypto have not been ported to Python 3 they are personally blocked. The cryptography library is a new Python-based crypto library that’s run by people like Alex Gaynor and Donald Stufft which is Python 3 compatible and might meet your crypto needs. Their site has an explanation as to why they felt the need for another crypto library for Python if you are curious. While this might not be a drop-in replacement like in the MySQLdb case I mentioned above, it might be worth considering changing your dependency to a more modern one that might have a nicer API.
But what if caniusepython3 was right and there is no direct port of a dependency and there is no alternative that makes sense? That brings up the third thing you can do, which is help make a port happen. The easiest thing is to politely ask for a port. It’s quite possible a project doesn’t realize that they have users who would really like to see a Python 3 port happen, and they won’t know if you don’t tell them. Obviously the next step beyond that is offering to help with such a port, but at least asking for a port requires little work on your part and no longer-lasting time commitment. You can also offer to help fund a port as project owners may be available for hire or some other developer may be available to do the port for you if you like the time.
What you can do TODAY even if you are blocked
No matter the status of your dependencies, you can start writing code that is compatible with Python 2 and 3 starting today. You can read Lennart Regebro’s book or the porting HOWTO to see exactly what it entails for code to run under both Python 2 and 3 without modification (disclaimer: I wrote the foreword for Lennart’s book when it was originally published). The hybrid language of Python 2/3 is surprisingly reasonable if you are coding for Python 2.6 or 2.7.
You can start using the hybrid Python for just new code. Then as you clean up code and fix it you can port it. And then finally you can begin to consider porting old code simply to port it. The point is that the sooner you start using the hybrid 2/3 version of Python in your code the faster and easier your eventual port to Python 3 will be.
Python 2.7 will still be here while you’re blocked
And hopefully you view it as eventually instead of maybe (not). Python-dev continues to add features, improve performance, and fix bugs in Python 3 which continue to make it a fantastic programming language. We do realize that people’s ability to port is eventual, though, which is why at PyCon 2014 Guido announced we are extending support for Python 2.7 until 2020 so you don’t have horrible bugs causing you grief until you can port. But do realize that beyond critical security features, no new features will go into Python 2.7 so please don’t ask for any. And regardless of what some t-shirts said at PyCon, there will be no Python 2.8. =)
243 KudosA new Amazon case listing suggests that the Sony Xperia Z1s, the much-talked about international variant of Xperia Z1 f, will be released on November 26.
Kolay, a case-maker, has started taking pre-orders for the 'Sony Xperia Z1s Black Gel' case cover and stylus pen at Amazon UK. The listing clearly reveals, "This item is due to be released on November 26, 2013." The listing is accompanied by few images that show the rumoured Xperia Z1s's front panel which looks identical to the flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z1. The rear panel image at the Amazon listing shows the primary camera placed above the LED flash nearly at the centre.
On Tuesday, Sony's upcoming Xperia Z1s was unofficially 'confirmed', thanks to an accidental listing on the company's. The official listing, which was since been pulled down, featured the yet-to-be-announced Xperia Z1s with an image and was accompanied by a tagline that said, "The best of Sony for the best of you."
Sony launched the Xperia Z1 f, a mini-variant of the flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z1, in October under Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo's winter smartphone line-up. The smartphone is likely to be released in late December 2013.
Recently, images of an unnamed Sony smartphone sporting a metal frame similar to the one seen on Sony Xperia Z1 surfaced online. The leaked images of the metal frame of the unnamed Sony smartphone revealed the usual number of ports and buttons seen on other Xperia devices - namely power, volume rocker, Micro-USB, and 3.5mm audio jack. One of the leaked images also revealed the White rear panel of the unnamed Sony smartphone, which houses the company's branding in the middle, along with an NFC logo.FBI Director James Comey warned Americans that true privacy isn’t really possible anymore in a speech Wednesday.
“There’s no such thing as absolute privacy in America,” Comey said at a Boston College cybersecurity conference, Politico reported. “There is no place in America outside of judicial reach.”
He also said at the conference: “Even our memories aren’t private. Any of us can be compelled to say what we saw.”
Comey did note that he was a fan of privacy. According to Politico, Comey cited his Instagram account shared with only close friends and family, saying that he didn’t want just anybody seeing his photos.
Comey’s comments came just a day after Wikileaks released files allegedly from the FBI’s sister organization, the Central Intelligence Agency. Those papers appeared to show that the CIA had tools to compromise popular consumer technology including Apple iPhones and Android-powered devices.
Contact us at [email protected].(Activist Post) The United States House of Representatives has passed a bill to criminalize “sexting” among teenagers. But that’s not all. This ominous bill also punishes their parents by making them face a 15-year mandatory, minimum sentence.
H.R. 1761, the Protecting Against Child Exploitation Act of 2017, seeks to “criminalize the knowing consent of the visual depiction, or live transmission, of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, and for other purposes.”
Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (f), knowingly—employs, uses, persuades, induces, entices, or coerces a minor to engage in any sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct, or transmitting a live visual depiction of such conduct; produces or causes to be produced a visual depiction of a minor engaged in any sexually explicit conduct where the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct and such visual depiction is of such conduct; or transmits or causes to be transmitted a live visual depiction of a minor engaged in any sexually explicit conduct.
But the teenagers who are caught “sexting” are not the only ones who will be punished. The bill also states that “any parent, legal guardian, or person having custody or control of a minor” who “knowingly permits such minor to engage in, or to assist any other person to engage in, sexually explicit conduct knowing that a visual depiction of such conduct will be produced or transmitted shall be punished.”
As the Public Defender Blog points out:
The key words here are “knowingly permits.” That’s an extraordinarily low standard for a criminal offense. This language would apply to any parents who discover that their teenager is sexting with a romantic partner and then fail to cut off the child’s phone and internet access.
It is certainly justifiable for parents to take such decisive action when they catch their children sexting. But it is also understandable that some parents might prefer a different approach. Phones and the internet are essential to modern life, and parents might reasonably choose to tolerate sexting while warning their teenagers against it. Indeed, experts advise that parents should supervise their kids’ phone and internet use, but also caution that “throwing the book” at teens when they’re caught won’t do much good.
Even if the clause that punishes parents was taken out of the bill, it still leaves the question of why 15-year-olds are being subjected to mandatory minimum sentences.
During a debate over the bill on the House floor, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Virginia), noted that one of the most alarming parts about the bill is that it “explicitly states that the mandatory minimums will apply equally to an attempt or a conspiracy.”
“That means if a teenager attempts to obtain a photo of sexually explicit conduct by requesting it from his teenage girlfriend, the judge must sentence that teenager to prison for at least 15 years for making such an attempt,” Scott said. “If a teenager goads a friend to ask a teenager to take a sexually explicit image of herself, just by asking, he could be guilty of conspiracy or attempt, and the judge must sentence that teenager to at least 15 years in prison.”
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, also noted that the bill raises “new constitutional concerns” and would arguably “exacerbate overwhelming concerns with the unfair and unjust mandatory minimum sentencing that contributes to the over-criminalization of juveniles and mass incarceration generally.”
“While the bill is well intended, it is overbroad in scope and will punish the very people it indicates it is designed to protect: our children,” Lee said.
The bill, which was introduced by Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) in March, passed in the House of Representatives last week with a larger majority. It was opposed by 53 Democrats, and just two Republicans—Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ken.).
While supporters of the bill argue that each individual case would be up to the discretion of the judge, the fact is that if this bill becomes law, and it includes a 15-year, mandatory minimum sentence, it will set a troubling precedent for both teenagers, and their parents. It also serves as a reminder that making something “illegal” won’t scare teenagers out of doing it—instead, it will just create another way for the government to meddle in the personal lives of citizens, and it will do so by punishing only the ones who are caught.Gamasutra has learned that Claire Smith, a game developer and programmer who served as a software security specialist at BioWare Austin, passed away on Monday at the age of 31.
Smith spent a number of years as a programmer at Austin-based Edge Of Reality working on games like The Sims 3, The Incredible Hulk and Dragon Age: Origins before joining BioWare Austin while Star Wars: The Old Republic was in development.
Once there she settled into a software security specialist role and contributed to the development of The Old Republic and other projects. In her free time she was an avid game enthusiast and operated a Twitch channel where she streamed speedruns, gameplay sessions and game development tutorials.
"I first met her when we needed to add encryption to SW:TOR as a deterrence against reverse engineering, and I remember how fascinated I was when she demonstrated sophisticated hacking techniques to me," friend and former coworker Robin Todd tells Gamasutra. "We became friends after that and supported each other through many life changes."
"She was an incredibly smart person; she was funny; and she was caring."Exclusive: Billy King, Gary Oliver and Robbie Buchanan pen new deals at Tynecastle.
Robbie Neilson has started preparations for next season’s Premiership campaign by handing new contracts to Billy King, Gary Oliver and Robbie Buchanan.
The three young attackers penned new deals this morning, with Billy and Robbie signing on for two more years and Gary extending his contract for another year, with a further option.
Wing wizard Billy made 33 appearances and scored nine goals this season, while Gary and Robbie - voted the club's U20s Player of the Year - enjoyed loan spells at Stenhousemuir and Cowdenbeath respectively, as well as making 18 top team appearances between them.
Speaking exclusively to Hearts News, head coach Robbie revealed his delight at having all three players making the decision to step up into the Premiership with the Jambos.
“I’m pleased to get Billy signed up,” he said. “He’s performed really well for us this year. He’s got a big future at the club and I’m glad to get him tied up.
“Both Gary and Robbie went out on loan this season and did really well. We were desperate to get Gary back from Stenhousemuir and into the first-team squad and get him involved, and he’s done really well towards the end of the season.
“Robbie performed well on loan at Cowdenbeath and I was really pleased with his performances.
“The two of them will be pushing for the first-team squad next season so it’s great to get two of bright, young talents signed up.”
Meanwhile Scott Robinson will leave the club upon the expiration of his contract at the end of the month.The film tells young people that they should not consume tobacco products and that they should not spit on the road.
Mr. Shaikh himself was addicted to chewing tobacco, and he died of cancer. He was 25. He left behind a wife and two daughters — one not yet 3 and the other just a few months old. The film was so important to him that his last wish was to attend its premiere.
The director of the film, Shaikh Nasir, told me that a show was arranged for Mr. Shaikh in a packed hall and that he watched from a stretcher. He enjoyed the laughter of the crowds and wallowed in the pride of an artist. Six hours later, he was dead.
The actors of Malegaon are usually paid nothing, or almost nothing.
They come for the free food on the sets, the excitement of being part of a movie, the minor fame that will come their way if a film is completed and released, and the hope that someone in Mumbai’s film industry might spot their talent.
A Malegaon film costs about 100,000 rupees. The producers are usually small-time businessmen who often go broke or stop the funding when they feel a director is spending too much too soon. The films are made with camcorders. To achieve some ambitious shots, a cameraman is sometimes placed at one end of an ox cart and onlookers are asked to push the other end down so that the camera is slowly hoisted in the air. As the Malegaon moviemakers clearly cannot afford dollies, bicycles are used for tracking shots.
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I discovered the film industry of Malegaon in 2003 when I was a reporter with the magazine Outlook. By then, Malegaon’s artists had already spoofed some of the greatest Hindi film classics, but not many people outside the city knew of them. At the time of my visit, they were shooting a film called “Malegaon ki Lagaan,” a spoof of the blockbuster Hindi film “Lagaan,” which was nominated in 2002 for an Academy Award as best foreign language film.
Farogh Jafri, the director of “Malegaon ki Lagaan,” was wearing a torn T-shirt. He ran a small tile-polishing business, but evidently he did not earn enough from it. He was a distraught man when I met him. He had secured 30,000 rupees as funding for the film from an employee of the local electricity board on the condition that the man’s son would be cast in the film and that shooting would be completed in 15 days. But for a number of reasons, the shoot had stretched to over a year.
The cinematographer, who also owned one of the very few camcorders in Malegaon at the time, was in fact a wedding videographer who would vanish from the set or not turn up when he found a client. Also, sometimes the main actors would disappear. “But everybody would be here on the day the girls come,” the producer said with bitterness.
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Because Malegaon is a conservative place, actresses are usually outsourced from the bottom rungs of Mumbai’s desperate starlets. A crew member on “Malegaon ki Lagaan” told me that these girls were “treated respectfully,” even offered expensive mineral water to drink, and “sent back with honor.”
The story in Outlook about Malegaon’s film industry got its artists some attention from the news media and documentary filmmakers. Even though none of them has managed to escape from Malegaon yet, they have endeared themselves to Mumbai
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boring fast.
3. Try cutting with sound effects instead
Instead of music, Lean chose to transition mostly with sound effects because they're clean and precise and can be well hidden. He doesn’t want viewers to be conscious of the cut. Rather, he wants the cut to go as smoothly as possible, and sound often affords that opportunity. You can do these sound effect transitions with literally anything, including the sounds of nature or lines of dialogue.
4. When cutting with dialogue, do it quickly
Lean would often cut two shots together with the first ending on a line of dialogue. These were most effective when he would pull the second shot back really far, to the point where he would almost cut off the last word being said in the previous scene.
Sir Alec Guinness in "The Bridge on the River Kwai."
5. Transition with a sound effect into music or vice versa
When cutting with two sounds, either bring music into the mix as another layer of back up for the sound effect from the previous scene (so it blends), or cut hard from one to the other, depending on whether you're looking for a smooth or jarring transition.
6. Use similar sounds for smooth transitions
The more Lean directed, the less he would transition from sound effect to score, choosing instead to cut sounds together directly, which is a much harder edit to get just right. Lean's trick when employing this strategy was his discovery that the more similar the two sounds are to one another, the better.
"To hell with the photography, it's the cutter."
7. For effective jarring cuts, build up your sound throughout the scene
If you do want a jarring cut, build up whatever sound you have in a shot prior to the transition—and then drop everything. Or, of course, you can do the opposite, keeping the score soft and light and suprising the audience with a blaring sound effect instead.
8. Use the "graphic echo"
The "graphic echo" is a time-compressing cut usually done in three shots. In the first shot, the first character draws attention to an object either on screen or off screen. The second is a close-up of the object in question, and then the third shot echoes the first, usually from the vantage point of a second character.
It's in playing around with the variations of this technique where Lean's real mastery is found. Most importantly, the sound is consistent on every cut, so that the three or four or five or however many shots all come together to look like one continuous shot. Lean once proclaimed, "To hell with the photography, it's the cutter."
For a more comprehensive dive into these editing techniques and more, check out this 1985 documentary chronicling the legendary director's career. Its footage contains many wise words straight from the man himself.Angry liberals are wishing death on a tiny, vanishing island in Chesapeake Bay because its inhabitants mostly support Donald Trump and refuse to think correct thoughts about climate change.
Tangier Island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, about an hour’s boat ride from the Virginia mainland, rises only a few feet above the waterline and has been slowly eroded by the sea since it was first colonized in the 1600s. Now its 500 remaining residents are desperate for federal support because it is on the verge of disappearing.
But when they asked for support from Donald Trump to help them build a wall – a sea wall, this time, to hold back the eroding waves – it prompted a barrage of hate from outsiders. Their crime, apparently, was to blame the island’s plight on natural erosion and not rising sea levels caused by man-made climate change.
According to CBS.
The president’s call triggered other calls to the island – but these were different. Some condemned the people here for seemingly agreeing with the president’s controversial view of climate change. He has called it a hoax. One business received a message that said, “You voted for Donald f***** Trump haha oh god I hope your whole f***** island sinks.” “It was disheartening and it was upsetting,” said Laurie Thomas. She works for the town and said one man called to say that she and the people on the island deserved to die.
Their other crime was to be the kind of independent, hard-working, honest, all-American types – Tangier Island harvests more of the bay’s prized blue crabs, 13 percent, than any other town in Virginia – who inevitably voted for Donald Trump.
Eighty-seven percent of Tangier Island’s residents voted for the Donald. He noticed and in June spoke to the mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge who drew the president’s attention to the island’s plight.
“We need help from the erosion. If it was just sea level rise that we were worried about, we would be in good shape,” Eskridge said. Help looks like a rock wall. One was built on the island’s western side in the 1980s and the erosion there stopped. Now, they say their only hope is a wall around the entire island—costing an estimated $20 to $30 million, which they don’t have. They’d like Congress to approve the money and Mayor Eskridge thinks President Trump could help cut through all the red tape. “He’s gonna cut back on the time it takes to do studies for these projects — we don’t have that time to play with,” Eskridge said. He thinks if Mr. Trump told Congress he wanted to save the island, it would be saved.
Oh – and the islanders are, of course, right to blame erosion and not “climate change” for their island’s plight.
As Paul Homewood shows in some detail here :
Tide gauges in the area, such Sewell Point, Norfolk, confirm that sea levels have been steadily rising for a long time, long before recent rises in emissions of CO2.
The rate of rise is 4.6mm/yr, nearly three times the global rate. But there is a very good reason for this – the land is sinking.
Chesapeake Bay is the site of an ancient impact crater, caused by a comet or meteor. As a result the land has been subsiding ever since. Estimates by proper scientists suggest it is sinking at a rate of up to 3mm/yr.
Clearly the residents of Tangier Island didn’t get the memo about how to play the global warming game. The rules are simple: if you live on an island – see the Maldives; Tuvalu; etc – you claim it’s about to disappear because of man-made climate change and then wait for the money to flood in.
I hope they get their wall. Honesty should pay.In the months leading up to Tuesday’s May Day demonstrations, Seattle Police Department Graffiti Detective Chris Young saw a dramatic uptick in “anarchist graffiti” across the city.
“There’s was a lot of [anarchist taggingi] all of a sudden in March,” Det. Young says. “They were pretty indiscriminate. They would hit anything.”
Taggers spray painted circle-As and other messages—promoting May Day demonstrations—on street signs, businesses, “people’s garages, any place,” Det. Young says. “They made it very clear they were going to cause trouble” on May Day.
In one case, Young says, a man and a woman caused nearly $14,000 in damage to the Russell Investment Center on 2nd Avenue and University Street, spray painting an anarchy symbol on a pillar, which will have to be partially replaced.
The same man and woman also caused $700 worth of damage to a bank on 2nd Avenue. “They covered an ATM with paint and did a bunch of other graffiti,” Det. Young says.
In another case, someone scrawled “kidnap the mayor” in a downtown alleyway. The graffiti “was taken seriously as a threat,” and documented by the department, according to Det. Young. The threat seems especially noteworthy, in light of the fact that someone threw a rock through the mayor’s living room window in the hours following the May Day demonstrations.
Det. Young says he is still investigating eight other pre-May Day incidents—primarily in the Central District—of anarchist tagging and graffiti. The department is now also working to identify a number of suspects who vandalized businesses and cars in downtown Seattle during this week’s May Day demonstrations.
If your business or property was recently vandalized or tagged, you can file a police report online or by calling the department’s non-emergency reporting line at (206) 625-5011.DTM will look slightly different in 2014 after all three manufacturers in the series homologated new aerodynamic packages for the cars. Whilst the championship could be perceived as a spec class the 2014 cars are all quite different to each other in a number of areas despite sharing many common parts including the chassis.
BMW has gone the furthest homologating an all new model, the M4. “Even before the BMW M3 DTM completed its final race last season, our development team was already hard at work on the 2014 car,” said BMW Motorsport Director Jens Marquardt.
“Preparing a new car for the DTM is a big challenge. In few other series is aerodynamics so important. Even the slightest detail can make the difference between success and failure. And this attention to detail shown by our engineers is apparent at first glance – from the elongated bonnet with its steeply sloping front and aerodynamically optimised wing mirrors, to the contoured roofline that is a characteristic feature of the BMW M4.”
The first scale model made its first appearance in the wind tunnel at the BMW Group’s Aero Lab on 22nd April – 13 days before the opening race of the 2013 season at Hockenheim. In the summer of 2013, while continuing with aerodynamic testing, the experts in Munich turned their attention to designing new suspension parts. The new components made their first on-track outing in December 2013 – but still within the BMW M3 DTM at that point. The final parts for the chassis of the BMW M4 DTM were in production by the turn of the year, allowing the BMW teams to assemble the first models of the new car in January and February. Three hundred days after the first test in the wind tunnel, the BMW M4 DTM took to the track for its track debut at Monteblanco on 11th February 2014.
Aerodynamics plays a vital role in the DTM in 2014 and it is here where most changes can be seen. “In addition to the suspension, our main priority was to improve the aero,” says Stefan Aicher, Head of Vehicle Design at Audi Sport. The RS 5 now has the honeycomb grill from the production car at the front and new air ducts feeding the engine and brakes.
Developing the M4 the BMW Motorsport engineers devoted a lot of time to issues such as aerodynamic drag and through car air flow.
A new feature on the BMW is a plate along the side channel, which lends the racing car an even more striking outline (above). Audi in comparison has a series of winglets in this area (below).
The slightly contoured roofline (below) decreases the frontal area of the car and in turn further reduces aerodynamic drag. The flatter rear window optimises the way the airflow approaches the rear wing.
The wing mirrors, have been a major area of development for all three manufacturers, with very different approaches being taken.
BMW has opted for a relatively conventional wing mirror shape but has mounted it on a winglet, which has two elements at the outer edge and an endplate, rather like a mini F1 front wing (above). But Audi has taken a different approach (below) with a triple element wing support
Finally Mercedes, which has revealed very few details of its 2014 car has the most simple looking solution (below).
The inner rear wheel arches are, in contrast to last year, closed and the rear part is now flat.
Aicher: “The DTM rules are strict, which is why minute detail work is required within the tight limitations.”
Over 50 of the 5,000 plus parts that make up the DTM cars are standard components, which are used on all three designs.One of these parts is the chassis with an integrated fuel tank, steel roll cage and additional crash elements.
DTM shares its basic design with the 2014 GT500 mother chassis, though there are some differences, compare the GT500 version (in Honda mid engined trim – below) with the DTM Spec tub (above)
Parts like the gearbox, clutch, dampers and rear wing are identical in all DTM cars. This also keeps a lid on development costs.
One area where there is significant difference is the engine, all three cars use four litre V8 engines producing around 480bhp.
The BMW P66 for example is made up of 800 different components, consisting of 3,900 individual parts. When designing the DTM drivetrain, BMW Motorsport took full advantage of the technological know-how within the BMW Group. The high-tech foundry connected to BMW Plant Landshut creates the large cast parts, such as the cylinder head and crankcase – just as it does in the production of the six-cylinder in-line engine for the BMW M4 Coupé. The cast parts are coated and given the necessary heat treatment within the appropriate departments in Munich. HWA and Mercedes-Benz HPP prepare the engines for Mercedes whilst NBE is believed to still produce the DTM engines for Audi Sport
The era of the big four litre V8’s is coming to an end however, in 2015 or 2016 a new two litre four cylinder engine formula will be introduced, bringing the German cars closer to the Japanese cars racing in GT500.
The engine’s power is transferred via a sequential six-speed racing gearbox, which is operated pneumatically using shift paddles mounted on the steering wheel. The gearbox is one of the standard components, it has 11 final drive ratios, which allow the engineers and drivers to react to the respective circuit and engine characteristics when setting the car up.
As standard components, the engine subframe at the front and gearbox at the rear restrict the engineers’ freedom to design the suspension geometry. The suspension pick-up points must be mounted to these standard elements so are largely identical. In addition, tube dimensions and the material, steel, for the wishbones are fixed and numerous dimensions are defined by the regulations – those of the wheels for example.
The future of DTM
There are ongoing discussions behind the scenes about a new North American DTM series using cars from both GT500 and the German series, whilst the Japanese brands have not ruled it out they have also shown little enthusiasm. Meanwhile the Germans have admitted that for DTM USA to happen there would have to be at least one American brand involved, and seemingly none have shown interest. However there does seem to be a chance that the GT500 and DTM designs will be seen racing in the USA in years to come as part of the prototype class in the United Sportscar Series a tantalising prospect.
Much of the background and further details of the unification talks can be read in Racecar Engineering magazine below.
READ IT NOW DTM AND GT500 THE FUTURE REVEALED
IMAGES – DTM 2014
[Show as slideshow] Audi RS5 DTM 2014
[Show as slideshow] BMW M4 DTM
Mercedes 2014 DTM
GT500 2014
[Show as slideshow]
[Show as slideshow]
Lexus LF-CC (RCF)
Much of the background and further details of the unification talks can be read in Racecar Engineering magazine below.
READ IT NOW DTM AND GT500 THE FUTURE REVEALEDScientists from The University of Texas at Austin and five other institutions have discovered that the more diverse the diet of a fish, the less diverse are the microbes living in its gut. If the effect is confirmed in humans, it could mean that the combinations of foods people eat can influence the diversity of their gut microbes.
The research could have implications for how probiotics and diet are used to treat diseases associated with the bacteria in human digestive systems.
A large body of research has shown that the human microbiome, the collection of bacteria living in and on people's bodies, can have a profound impact on human health. Low diversity of bacteria in the human gut has been linked to a plethora of diseases.
"There's been a lot of work done showing that what people eat influences what gut microbes they have, and that can affect risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other things," said Daniel Bolnick, professor in The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and lead author of the study, published this week in the journal Ecology Letters.
Researchers have already established that environment and diet can affect the kinds of bacteria that live in the human digestive system. Unfortunately, most studies on the effect of diet on the microbiome only look at one thing at a time — such as a high-fat versus a low-fat diet.
Bolnick and his colleagues decided for the first time to look at the effect of combinations of different foods on gut bacteria. They used two species of fish, the threespine stickleback and the Eurasian perch, to model the human gut.
Populations of both fish were studied in the wild, where the fish typically dine on two major types of prey. The fish eat large insect larvae that live in the soil near the lakeshore, as well as small crustaceans that live in the open water far from shore. Because the individual fish vary in what they eat — some feasting mainly on insect larvae, others favoring the small crustaceans and the rest feeding on a varying mixture of the two — they proved to be perfect subjects for the study.
The scientists also manipulated the diet of a population of sticklebacks in the laboratory, feeding some frozen insect larvae, others tiny crustaceans, and a third group an equal mixture of the two foods.
The researchers expected that the generalists, the fish dining on the mixed diet, would have more diversity in their gut microbes than the fish that specialized in one type of prey. Because the mixed diet would expose the fish to a larger variety of microbes and their guts would hold a more diverse buffet for the microbes to munch on, it seemed a logical conclusion.
The researchers found the opposite to be true: The fish that favored one type of food item had more bacterial diversity in their guts than fish that ate a mixture of prey.
The authors have suggested some possible explanations for these results. It could be that the larger diversity of foods in the gut gave an advantage to some generalist bacteria, allowing them to thrive at the expense of more specialized bacteria. They found that one strain of bacteria dominated the guts of stickleback that ate a larger variety of prey, supporting this concept. Another possibility is that the prey items give off an inhibitory chemical that suppresses certain bacteria. If the fish ingest a variety of prey, and thus multiple inhibitors, then fewer gut microbes would survive. These hypotheses still need to be rigorously tested.
One thing is clear though. If these results translate to humans, then scientists may have to rethink how they study the effects of different foods on the human microbiome.
"Our results suggest that what we know about diet effects really has to change to account for mixing of things, because humans don't eat just one thing at a time," said Bolnick. "The effect of a mixed diet isn't easily deduced from the two diets separately. The whole is less than the sum of its parts."
Bolnick's co-authors are Lisa Snowberg (UT Austin), Philipp Hirsch (University of Basel and Uppsala University), Christian Lauber and Rob Knight (University of Colorado, Boulder), J. Gregory Caporaso (Northern Arizona University and Argonne National Laboratory), and Richard Svanbäck (Uppsala University).
This research was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and the Swedish Research Council.
You can read the original study, "Individuals' diet diversity influences gut microbial diversity in two freshwater fish (threespine stickleback and Eurasian perch)" here: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/ele.12301
For more information, contact: Steve Franklin, College of Natural Sciences, 512-232-3692; Daniel Bolnick, Department of Integrative Biology, College of Natural Sciences, 512-471-2824.CSU Increases Fees to Sustain Enrollment, Classes and Services
Trustees request funding from Governor and Legislature to 'buy out' 2011-12 increase.
By
The California State University Board of Trustees today approved a two-step state university fee increase needed to sustain enrollment, classes and services for current students. The Trustees approved a mid-year increase of five percent —or $105—for 2010-11 that will go into effect Jan. 1, 2011 for the winter/spring terms. In addition, the Trustees adopted a 10 percent—or $444—annual increase for the 2011-12 academic year that would become effective for fall 2011.
However, due to financial aid, approximately one-third of all SDSU undergraduate students will be fully covered for the fee increases. Additionally, students not fully covered by financial aid will also benefit from newly expanded federal tax credits available for family incomes of up to $180,000.
"While we appreciate the funding that we did receive in this year's budget, the reality is our state support is roughly the same as it was five years ago and we have 25,000 more students," said Dr. Benjamin F. Quillian, CSU executive vice chancellor for business and finance. "In addition, part of the funding we received—$106 million— was one-time federal stimulus money that is being used at the state's direction to admit 30,000 more students. These students will be on our campuses long after this one-time funding has been exhausted, and we have to ensure that we have the ongoing resources to support them."
Due to the uncertainty of the state's fiscal outlook, and also to provide students and parents with additional time for financial planning, CSU is also planning a state university fee increase for 2011-12. The Trustees indicated that they will request the state funding needed to "buy out" the proposed 2011-12 fee increase. If approved by the governor and legislature, these funds would make it possible for the CSU to rescind the fee increase.
The CSU Trustees voted 14 to 2 to adopt the mid-year fee increase with Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado and student Trustee Nicole Anderson voting against the increase. Trustees voted 13-3 to adopt the 2011-12 tuition increase with Melinda Guzman joining Maldonado and Anderson in voting against the proposal.
SDSU Student Health Services Fee
In addition, SDSU President Stephen Weber approved a campus fee increase to support SDSU’s Student Health Services which will also go into effect this spring semester. After an alternative consultation process, the fee was recommended by the Campus Fee Advisory Committee, which consists of students, faculty and staff. It increases the student health fee from $85 per semester to $150 per semester (from $60 to $110 during summer session). This fee increase will protect the vital healthcare services offered by Student Health Services which are available to all students at no or low-cost.
Mid-Year Tuition Increase
In January of this year, the Governor's 2010-11 proposed budget assumed a 10 percent raise in CSU state university fees as part of an overall partial restoration in funding. In June, the Board of Trustees adopted a five percent increase after reviewing an Assembly budget proposal that would have provided funding for the remaining five percent. However, the additional funding was not included in the budget finally adopted by the legislature and the governor, leaving CSU resources approximately $64 million short of the governor's budget plan for 2010-11. The mid-year fee increase will allow the CSU to significantly restore services across the system including the addition of approximately 3,000 course offerings for winter/spring 2011. That number is expected to double in the 2011-12 academic year.
The five percent increase will take effect for the winter/spring of 2011 and will raise the state university fee by $105 per semester for undergraduate students, $234 for credential program participants and $252 for graduate students. Fees will rise from the current $2,115 to $2,220 for the spring semester for full-time undergraduate students.
Tuition Increase for 2011-2012 Academic Year
The Trustees also approved a recommendation to increase the state university fee by 10 percent for the 2011-12 academic year. The recently approved 2010-11 state budget provides partial restoration of about $260 million in state General Fund support for the CSU. In addition, the CSU received $106 million in one-time federal stimulus funds with the assumption that the funding will allow the university to serve a sharply increased level of enrollment. The planned 2011-12 fee increase would generate approximately $121.5 million in revenue (net of financial aid). This would ensure that CSU can provide adequate courses and sections to students, and allow campuses to make decisions that are needed now to support enrollment, student services and class offerings for next fall.
Full-time fees will increase by $444 per academic year for undergraduate students, $516 for credential program participants and $546 for graduate students for fall 2011. Undergraduate fees will rise from $4,440 to $4,884 per year.
The fee for the CSU Education Doctorate program is linked by law to the University of California graduate student tuition rate.
Finally, the board will ask the governor and the legislature to "buy out" the tuition increase by providing adequate funding in the 2011-12 state budget for CSU, allowing the university to rescind the fee increase.
CSU Tuition vs. Comparison Institutions
Despite prospective fee increases, CSU will continue to rank among the least expensive of comparable institutions in the country. Comparing CSU's proposed 2011-12 state university fee with the current tuition rates from comparison institutions, CSU's yearly fees of $5,834—which includes the current average campus fee of $950—would rank as the second lowest among 15 comparison institutions and would be $2,848 (33 percent) below the comparison average.
Financial Aid Available to Students
One third of revenue from fee increases will be set aside for financial aid. Through the awarding of State University Grants, Cal Grants and CSU tuition and fee waivers, approximately 180,000 undergraduate students— about 50 percent of all CSU undergrads and more than one-third of all SDSU students—do not pay fees and have their state university fee covered completely by financial aid. The CSU is also the largest recipient of Federal Pell Grants. Students with higher income or dependent students with higher income, may still qualify for many forms of financial aid and federal tax credits.An Analysis of the Anti-Title II bots
Chris Sinchok Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 14, 2017
The numbers here are from the data available as of 5/14, so it may differ slightly from the current numbers. You can see up-to-date data at a site that I have setup here: http://netneutrality.computer.
Over the past week, I’ve been studying some interesting data: the public comments on an FCC proposal. If you haven’t heard about the FCC’s current proposal, you should watch John Oliver’s recent segment. In short, the FCC is proposing to reclassify ISP’s as Title I carriers, reverting the previous administration’s decision.
Back in 2014 (After another John Oliver segment), I had tried to crawl the FCC’s site to cache and study the public comments, but they had severe load issues, and there wasn’t a good API. But this time around, they have a great API. I wrote some Python to crawl the public comments, hoping that I could spot some trends in the data, and perhaps determine the overall sentiment.
My main questions were:
Is there any bot activity? How much? What does the bot activity look like? What does the overall sentiment look like? Is it mostly Pro-Title II, or Anti-Title II?
There are two primary avenues to create a comment: you can use a form on the FCC’s site (as John Oliver directed), or you can submit comments via the API [EDIT: Since publishing this, I have found that there’s also a CSV submission method]. This means that there are many off-site forms that will allow you to submit a comment (which is totally above-board, as long as you’re not botting).
First, I wanted to figure out how to differentiate on-site comments from API comments. By looking at my own on-site comment (which you can see here), I quickly noticed that “proceedings” field was quite beefy, while the API only specified three keys to be used in that property. For example, my comment has a field:
{“proceedings”: {“total”: 607069}}
This is clearly a count of the comments at the time that I submitted mine — something that offsite comments would lack.
Using these proceedings keys to differentiate on-site comments from API comments, I ran the numbers, finding that we have 595,479 onsite comments, and 821,866 API comments. This was a little surprising, as I had expected there to be more on-site comments. However, when looking at the data, it’s clear that the API comments have had a huge boost recently:
On-site comments per day
API comments per day
Next, I wanted to look at the most common messages. In order to group the messages, I calculated a “fingerprint” for each, so that small changes in capitalization and punctuation will still result in a match. For on-site comments, the most common messages are:
You’ll notice that these are all pretty similar (they mirror what John Oliver suggested that people should write), but they do not appear to be botted or submitted by forms. There’s a ton of variation on the onsite messages, and there’s a very long tail in the message text. If there’s any significant botting here, they’re doing a good job of disguising it.
However, when it comes to API comments, there’s much a much different picture. Looking at the most common text:
Here, we see four anti-Title II messages, totaling over 700k comments, the lions share of the API comments.
The “Unprecedented” message is the one that most people have noticed — it looks like this:
The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation.
I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years.
A number of journalists have tried to trace where this message is coming from, and the best guess seems to be the Council for Individual Freedom. This was a mentioned in a recent Gizmodo article, where the organization claimed that they were running an ad campaign that directed users to a form, and they provided a screenshot of that form. (Side note: if anyone can find this form, I would love to see it live).
What indicates that these are bots?
The comment rates are suspicious
Let’s look at some comment rates from this source, zooming in on a specific time period:
Comments from the “unprecedented” bot, grouped into 10 minute buckets.
That looks a lot like a bot! There’s a near-constant rate of comments, punctuated by periods of zero comments, as if the bot was turning on and off. Now, there are plenty of periods of zero comments in the data — the FCC’s system has been going down occasionally, but this was not one of those periods. For an apples-to-apples comparison, let’s take a look at data from “Battle for the Net” over the same time period:
Comments from the “Battle for the Net” form, grouped into 10 minute buckets.
Note that there’s a constant trickle of comments, and the comments never drop to zero. This would lead me to believe that this is a legitimate form, and not bot-driven. Here’s a sample of the “outraged” bot:
Comments from the “outraged” bot, grouped into 10 minute buckets
The bot data isn’t always this “flat”, but it does always have these blank spots every few hours (or less). More recently, the outraged bot has been running a lot more, and has been on almost constantly.
Now, “Free Our Internet” and “Taxpayers Protection Alliance” don’t behave this way.
[EDIT: It turns out that these are being submitted via CSV, so this spacing is normal for that submission method. However, I still find the volumes (and the data itself) to be suspect.]
The top is the activity from “Free Our Internet”, the middle is “Taxpayers Protection Alliance”, and the bottom is all other activity over that time period.
The data is extremely consistent.
When people fill out forms, they don’t do it consistently. Out of the almost 450k “outraged” and “unprecedented” comments, exactly 9 do not provide a full address, name and email. The addresses, names, and emails are also formatted very consistently — like they came from a database. Someone has gone out of their way to make these seem like real submissions. When doing a simple spot-check of the data, it becomes clear that the name/email/address data looks very, very real.
There are very few email confirmations
If you choose, the FCC can provide an email confirmation of your comment, and this choice is stored in the data. There are three possible values: “true”, “false”, or the field is just missing. If the field is missing, the comment was probably filed over the API, and the form provider didn’t include the ability for you to get an email confirmation from the FCC. Obviously, if you were building a bot, you would never want to have email confirmations, especially if you were using other people’s information.
[EDIT: Since publishing, I realized that “Free our Internet” and “Taxpayer Alliance” both submit over CSV, which doesn’t give a field for emailConfirmation, so this is not anomalous in those cases]
Here’s a table of the what emailConfirmation values for these sources look like, broken down by message:
--------------------------------------------
| Source | True | False | Missing |
--------------------------------------------
| unprecedented | 68 | 5 | 147528 |
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| freeourinternet | 0 | 0 | 181122 |
--------------------------------------------
| taxpayeralliance| 0 | 0 | 96177 |
--------------------------------------------
| battleforthenet | 23316| 33 | 300 |
--------------------------------------------
| outraged | 1 | 2 | 13372 |
--------------------------------------------
If Battle for the Net is botting, they are playing a risky game, or else they have control of 24k email addresses.
Journalists have yet to find a real person who says they actually submitted a comment
This would be consistent with the idea that the bot programmers are using real people’s data, trying to overwhelm the comments with seemingly real people. In fact, prior to John Oliver’s piece, the “outraged” bot was roughly 37% of the total comments. If we assume that the FCC was going to clean the data first — removing anonymous comments, etc — the outraged bot might have ended up being roughly 50% of the total comments, due to the fact that it has consistent data.
There are a lot of “breached” accounts in the bot comments
I checked a sample of the comments against the API from haveibeenpwned.com, looking only for accounts the were in breaches that included physical addresses. I wasn’t able to check all of the comments due to rate limits, but I took random samples of 1000 emails from various sources (and a control sample), and calculated the percentage of the accounts involved in breaches (mostly River City Media and Modern Business Solutions):
“Unprecedented”: 67.4%
“Free Our Internet”: 74.2%
“Outraged”: 64.2%
“Battle for the Net”: 33.5%
“John Oliver Viewers”: 20.5%
Control Sample: 31.5%
Now, of course, the bot data is a lot cleaner, so that would skew the percentages, as a fake email would come up “clean”. But these numbers seem pretty stark, and would indicate to me that the bot programmers are working with breach data directly, or with a data warehouse whose lists ended up in one of these breaches.
These forms don’t seem to be getting much real traction online
People aren’t tweeting about these forms, and they don’t seem to be getting much traction on Facebook. In some cases, I have no idea where the form actually is! It seems insane that they would be getting this many real people to fill them out, and yet there’s no real social traction.
So, what does this all mean?
It seems quite clear to me that there are groups using bots to manipulate the outcome of this public comment period. But what does that leave? When we subtract the bots, what is the public sentiment about this proposal? Doing some rudimentary string matching, the numbers I got are:
Pro Title II: 395,353
Anti Title II: 743
Now, these numbers are certainly not final, and they may not even be accurate. It’s hard to tune my algorithm as I can find very, very few non-bot comments that are in favor of the proposal. I would encourage you to look at the comments that I wasn’t able to easily categorize:
http://netneutrality.computer/browse?titleii=unknown
I think you’ll quickly see that there is an huge amount of real resistance to the proposal, and in favor of Title II regulations for ISP’s.
[UPDATE: For another look at this sentiment data, check out this excellent post: http://jeffreyfossett.com/2017/05/13/fcc-filings.html]
I’ll leave you with some thoughts from real people behind the comments, both pro and con:
There are 5 in our family, all who presently use the internet. If it is taken over by liberals there wil be 5 people less using it.
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I am a concerned citizen living in a rural area with a single high speed internet provider available. Having reviewed a summary of the notice of proposed rulemaking, I am highly concerned and find myself opposed to nearly all points.
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Please undo President Obama’s takeover of the Internet. It must remain free and unfettered from government controls.
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Net neutrality is very important for many reasons — education, commerce — specifically small business (and I am an owner of two), equality for all economic classes. Net neutrality simply must remain intact.
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Every American should have the right to view any information available on the internet. I have also seen the attempt to destroy any alternative websites that provide many Americans with important views. Conservatives seem to be the target. This is an attack on our First Ammendment rights. All Americans should be able to see all sides and decide their own opinion.
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There’s nothing here that helps consumers at all. Instead it panders to internet monopolies and oligopol
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. Or worse.
For the last interview, they asked him to come in the morning at an ordinary time. There were no clipboards, no lab coats, just a gray-haired woman in a business suit.
“What would you do to save the world?” she asked.
Johnson said, “Anything.”DC’s Young Animal imprint has gained a lot of traction since it began last year as an outlet for mature readers than the stories usually told in the regular DC Comics titles. The books – Doom Patrol, Mother Panic, Shade The Changing Girl and Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye – take place within the DCU, but are still relatively separate from the rest of the heroes. At the Young Animal panel at Comic Con last night, they revealed that will change in January 2018 with a Doom Patrol/Justice League crossover.
Beginning in October 2017, Mother Panic, Cave Carson and Shade are going on a hiatus until January. Then, starting with the Doom Patrol Special, they’ll play into a four-part crossover event throughout the month. Doom Patrol writer Gerard Way and Justice League of America writer Steve Orlando will pair together to write the book with art by Aco. The book will introduce a new and bizarre hero named Milkman Man. You can check out the cover for the special by superstar artist Frank Quitely below.
Here is the press release DC unveiled about the event:
“Today, during DC’s Young Animal panel, imprint curator Gerard Way made comic dreams come true by announcing that the weird and eccentric characters of Young Animal will encounter the iconic Super Heroes of the DC Universe. In January 2018, the four ongoing series – DOOM PATROL, SHADE, THE CHANGING GIRL, CAVE CARSON HAS A CYBERNETIC EYE, MOTHER PANIC – will participate in a special four-part annual crossover.
These annuals will mark the conclusion of the first phase of the imprint and will send each series in surprising new directions!”How can a small scrap of duct tape turn a Blackbird aircraft into a pile of burning wreckage? SR-71A 17953, a piece of which is shown above, first flew on June 4, 1965, from Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. She was a flight test aircraft based at Edwards Air Force Base, never flying operationally. During her testing, she performed the highest known (unofficial) flight of any SR-71 at 89,650 feet. Early tests performed by this aircraft gave information necessary for writing the flight manual for the whole fleet. Later in testing, 17953 became the first SR-71 fitted with a modified nose which housed an Optical Bar Camera (OBC) and an improved Electronic Countermeasures (ECM).
The first flight with this modified nose took place on December 18, 1969, piloted by Col. Joe Rogers with Maj. Gary Heidelbaugh as Reconnaissance Systems Officer (RSO). This mission was a functional check flight (FCF) of the ECM system. They lifted off from Edwards Air Force Base and rendezvoused with an F-104 chase plane piloted by Lt. Col. William Campbell. During this flight, Campbell noticed that the SR-71’s altitude was wandering. Campbell assumed that this variation was due to Rogers’s preoccupation with the the FCF. After in flight refueling, Rogers lit his afterburners to begin a climb and acceleration. At this time, Rogers and Heidelbaugh heard a loud bang and vibration from one of the engines. Rogers throttled back which stopped the vibration. A second attempt to reignite the afterburners led to more vibration. At this point, the aircraft stalled which caused the nose to rise dramatically. Rogers spoke two simple words to Heidelbaugh, “Let’s go”, and the crew ejected successfully. They fell from 65,000 feet, where the accident happened, landing safely. After the crew bailed out, the aircraft broke apart mid-air and fell north of Shoshone, California, severing power lines and causing an electrical blackout in the surrounding areas. Local firefighters responded to the scene and were soon replaced by the USAF who secured the crash site and the crew was picked up by the Inyo County Sheriff.
When an accident investigation board was assembled, they had a tough time finding a cause until they examined the newly modified nose section of the aircraft. During the modification process, a technician installed an improvised dust plug into a pitot-static line, forgetting to remove it before final assembly. 17953 flew with a rolled up piece of duct tape jammed inside the line that feeds airspeed and altitude information to the instruments in the cockpit. Rogers had a false reading, causing him to fly higher and slower than he thought he was. This created insufficient airflow to the compressors and ultimately stalled the aircraft. In the Blackbird’s case, a stall is unrecoverable.About the author
(NewsTarget) The great mystery of bee deaths has been solved. Colony Collapse Disorder is poisoning with a known insect neurotoxin. Clothianidin, a pesticide manufactured by Bayer, has been clearly linked to die offs in Germany and France.Although the bee die offs that have occurred recently are more severe, there have been many in the past from the same and similar products. In North Dakota, a lawsuit is pending against Bayer for the loss of their bees in 1995, the result of spraying rapeseed with Imidacloprid. In 1999, the same product was banned in France for use as a seed dressing for sunflowers when they lost one-third of their hives after widespread spraying. In 2004, it was banned for use on corn. Recently, France refused to approve Bayer's request to sell Clothianidin.Clothianidin and Imidacloprid are both members of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. They are well known as insect neurotoxins, especially with regard to bees. The spokesperson for the Coalition Against Bayer Dangers, based in Germany, stated, "We have been pointing out the risks of neonicotinoids for almost 10 years now. This proves without a doubt that the chemicals can come into contact with bees and kill them. These pesticides shouldn't be on the market."That neonicotinoids are potent neurotoxins, especially in insects, is unsurprising. They were developed for precisely that purpose. Bayer says that their use is safe for bees, when used according to instructions. This involves using a glue that keeps the pesticides stuck to the seeds on which they're used.There are many problems with this. Agribusiness corporations are known to evade anything that costs them money. The glue costs money. The equipment and personnel required to apply it costs money. More careful pesticide application to try to keep it from becoming airborne costs money. Obviously, both unscrupulous agribusiness farmers and unknowing small farmers -- not to mention home gardeners -- will, at least occasionally, not use the glue.Even then, it's impossible to believe that a fair amount of these pesticides won't become airborne. Further, their residue will poison the soil. It will be passed on into foods, which means that insects will come into contact with it there.Isn't it interesting that a major pharmaceutical manufacturer, Bayer, also makes a product that is a poison by design? Bayer is not an exception. Many, if not most, do business in both arenas. That alone should give pause for thought.Here's a list of corporations -- not expected to be complete -- that profit in both pharmaceuticals and pesticides:* American Home Products* AMVAC* Astra Zeneca* Aventis* BASF* Bayer* Dow Chemical* Dupont Chemical* Merck* Monsanto* Novartis* PharmaciaIs it an accident that most of Big Pharma also manufactures pesticides? Is there a connection between the two types of products? Do the pharmaceutical arms of these corporations profit on the illness caused by the pesticide arms? These questions are rhetorical. We'll let the reader decide.Mike Adams has humorously shown with his Disease-Mongering Engine ( https://www.naturalnews.com/disease-mongering... ), which creates new diseases at the push of a mouse button, how easily phony diseases can be created to sell pharmaceuticals and fatten the pocketbooks of the medical world. The same technique has been used to cloak massive bee die-offs with an air of mystery.Colony Collapse Disorder is a false name that serves to mislead the public into believing that there's a new, mystery disorder, probably something very complex, that needs tons of money to be thrown at it so that every possible angle can be studied. The reason is simple. By misdirecting the public, and apparently many professionals too, the real reason for bee die-offs is obscured.This is very much like the misleading pseudoscience that supposedly debunks global climate change by giving a false impression that there is no consensus among scientists. By stirring pesticides into a mix of other supposedly possible causes, such as bacterial infections, fungal infections, and environmental stress, a false controversy is created. That results in precious time being wasted, while we really do move into a world without bees. At the same time, money is being thrown at scientists, who should know better, but being just as human as the rest of us, they're tempted.Eventually, the real cause starts to become obvious, as is happening now in bee die-offs. However, the guilty party, the one making obscene profits by selling neurotoxic poisons that destroy the earth, launches a campaign of disingenuous lies, misdirection, and lawsuits to continue to sell their contaminants as long as possible.Meanwhile, we're being told that we must prepare to live in a world without bees, as if it's inevitable. All because of Colony Collapse Disorder, a cleverly marketed nonexistent disease. We live in fear of the implications of no bees, when the real threat is poisons manufactured for the sole benefit of obscene profits.Neonicotinoids are used in agribusiness and home gardens. To help the reader avoid these products, we are providing their generic names, along with as many brand names as could be found.The neonicotinoids include: acetamiprid, dinotefuran, clothianidin, imidacloprid, thiamethoxam.Acetamiprid and dinotefuran are manufactured by many companies. Thiamethoxam is made by Syngenta. Only Bayer makes clothianidin and imidacloprid.Brand names for imidacloprid include: Kohinor, Admire, Advantage, Gaucho, Merit, Confidor, Hachikusan, Premise, Prothor, and Winner.Brand names for clothianidin include: Gaucho, Titan, Clutch, Belay, Arena.Brand names for acetamiprid include: Assail, Intruder, Adjust.Brand names for thiacloprid include: Calypso.Brand names for thiamethoxam include: Actara, Cruiser, Helix, Platinum, Centric., "Pesticides: Germany bans chemicals linked to honeybee devastation", by Alison Benjamin, ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/m... Wikipedia, "Imidacloprid", ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imidacloprid University of Florida, "Insect Management on Landscape Plants", ( http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/IG013, 31 January 2002, Issue 146, ( http://www.crop-protection-monthly.co.uk/Arc... "Poison for Profit -- What A Business Plan!", by Ashley Simmons HotzInstitute of Science in Society, "Requiem for the Honeybee", by Professor Joe Cummins* Heidi Stevenson, BSc, DIHom, FBIH* Fellow, British Institute of Homeopathy* Gaia Health ( http://www.gaia-health.com * The author is a homeopath who became concerned with medically-induced harm as a result of her own experiences and those of family members. She says that allopathic medicine is the arena that best describes the motto, "Buyer beware."* Heidi Stevenson provides information about medically-induced disease and disability, along with incisive well-researched articles on major issues in the modern world, so members of the public can protect themselves.She can be reached through her website: www.gaia-health.comCitigroup Stock Sinks to $1 Per Share
Shares of troubled Citigroup have been sinking steadily for months, but today they crossed a symbolic barrier: they fell below $1 per share.
This is a breathtaking destruction of value for a bank that was once the world's largest.
Shares of Citigroup stock peaked in 2006 at $55.70, which gave the company a market capitalization (price of stock times number of outstanding shares), or value, of $277.2 billion.
Today, Citigroup's market cap is $5 billion.
But keep in mind that the federal government has already plowed $45 billion into Citigroup, which means the company is worth far less than the actual amount of cash it has received. Astounding.
The bank has become a black hole. Cash goes in and never comes out.
Citigroup and Bank of America are deemed by most analysts as being the sickest of the big banks -- the ones whose balance sheets are most poisoned by toxic assets.
-- Frank Ahrens
Sign up to get The Ticker on TwitterParts of the southern United States were hit particular hard by hurricane Matthew last week. Between the wind and the rain, flooding and power outages took place from Florida up through the Carolinas.
For many of us, things like losing power are minor inconveniences. For others, however, this is not the case. Losing power can not only leave someone in the dark, but can utterly disconnect them from loved ones and the rest of the outside world.
Such was the case for one Florida grandmother, 87-year-old Claire Olsen. During the storm, Olsen lost power.
Her family didn’t hear from her for two days.
Her grandson, Eric Olsen, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, became progressively worried about his grandmother. He stated in an interview that he kept calling the police and fire departments in his grandmother’s town, trying to get someone to check on her. These attempts were unsuccessful.
By Sunday, Eric was particularly worried. Still unable to get local authorities to do a wellness check on his elderly grandmother, he turned to an unlikely source for help—Papa John’s pizza. He explained, “[I thought,] ‘I’m going to order a pizza, and if they can deliver it, then I know she’s alive.’” In addition to ordering the pizza, he instructed the delivery person to call him when the pizza was delivered and asked that the delivery person give the phone to his grandmother when the call was made.
His plan worked well. The pizza was quickly delivered and, upon calling, the delivery driver gave the phone to Claire Olsen, who was able to talk to her grandson. In discussing his experience, Eric Olsen stated the following.
Police and fire couldn’t do it, but Papa John’s got there in 30 minutes and put the cell phone to her ear.
This story is pretty remarkable in a number of ways—all of which illustrate the power of the market and free enterprise. Here you have a man who lives in Omaha, Nebraska and a woman in Palm Coast, Florida. In case you’re curious, that’s 1,392.7 miles separating Eric from his grandmother—a 20+ hour car ride. Despite this distance, Eric was able to order a pizza in Omaha and have it delivered in Florida. If that doesn’t show the extent of our current markets, I don’t know what does!
Second, Eric was able to entice a for-profit company, Papa Johns, to engage in activity that actually had little to do with pizza. The inability or unwillingness (it’s unclear which applies here) of local authorities to do a wellness check on Ms. Olsen is an example of what we call “government failure.” Simply put, public actors failed to do their job. Here we have an example of private enterprise stepping up when public entities fail. How? Through the power of prices, profit and loss. By providing Papa Johns with a monetary incentive—the price of the pizza—Eric was able to get someone to check on his grandmother. Without knowing it, the pizza chain provided a very valuable service to Eric and his family by doing what they do best, making and selling pizza.
Economics teaches us that when prices are allowed to function and people are allowed to exchange goods and services, good things happen. People become better connected, have access to more goods and services, and are made wealthier. In many cases, private markets can make things happen where governments fails. For the Olsen family, the markets provided peace of mind—and pizza.
Tags: Free Market, government failure, hurricane Matthew, pizza, rescue10 reasons why guys must fight the exodus from golf to cycling.
WRITTEN BY THE EDITOR ON FEBRUARY 24, 2015. POSTED IN SPORTS
Golf is in decline the world over. In 2005 there were 30 million golfers in the USA, today there are only 25 million. Last year here in South Africa there were 74 000 fewer rounds played across the country. Whatever stats you want to dig up, it's not looking good, and I blame bloody cycling.
I see the back story here and the'merit' in the gradual exodus. Guys are more health conscious now, and their wives and girlfriends are too. Naturally golf isn't a 'workout/exercise' activity, so 'better halves' prefer their men coming home mid-morning smelling of sweat and powerade after an activity that keeps them trim, rather than them coming home early evening, smelling of beer and merriment after an activity that reminds them of how they were when they were single.
I get that, I really do, but there is more to all of this, and there is so much to golf that makes it special and an essential part of being a guy. To try and illustrate this, I have for you, 10 reasons why you must fight these cycling urges and commit to golf once and for all.
1: Cycling makes you look like a nob
Seriously, what self respecting man goes out in public looking like this! It's bloody embarrassing, stop it right now. Cyclists look like slow adults who wanted to become superheroes, but were on a very tight budget. Speaking of tight, who wants to see your balls? Nobody, that's the answer!
Nice pair of pants, collared shirt, you're good to go as a member of society, and a guy about to embark on a healthy recreational activity.
2: Cycling actually turns you into a nob
I don't know about you, but I have yet to have to slow down in traffic on the road, the natural habitat for the car, because four golfers are walking side by side ahead of me. Cyclists though, they think the roads are there for them, and expect you to realise that and be okay with it. In groups the cases of cyclists attacking motorists are becoming more and more aggressive. Clear evidence of nob like behaviour.
I don't know many golfers who are nobs, and if they are, they are being nobs in their own fourball, on a golf course very much seperated from everyday life. They don't expect anything from you, and will not force you to change how you go about your day on the road.
3: Golf is a much better thing to introduce your kids to
What sounds better?
"Hey Johnny, you want to go to the golf course and hit some balls and bond over a game we can play together until I die which is both realistically competitive and mutually fun and teaches you patience, etiquette and social skills?"
"Hey Johnny, you want to wear some rediculous clothing, get onto a bike and ride behind me where conversation will be limited to me basically telling you to keep up while we run the risk of being killed by cars, crashing into pot holes, and getting the most embarrassing tan marks known to man?"
No prizes for guessing the right answer there.
4: Golf allows you to be a guy, cycling makes you boring.
Guys need to compete against other guys in life - that's a fact. We need direct competition, and as we are no longer gladiators or soldiers at war, our DNA needs to be sparked in some other way. Cycling is terrible at this as you are ultimately just going against a clock, or a distance, or the fat you no longer want on your body. You can enter races, but 0.03% of you have a chance of actually winning a Cape Argus or 94.7.
Golf though puts guys against each other in a brilliant physical and mental environment, a place where healthy banter and redicule reigns, and raw ability is constantly under examination.Guys must not forget this, at any stage, and thriving in these environments enables you to be a man as nature intended. Cycling not only makes you a nob, but also boring as you are too busy slip streaming or changing gears or pissing about with your heart rate to truly be competing with someone. In short, cycling really isn't a place where the high 5 lives. Next.
Cardio ages you and makes you look like shit
The only thing worse than hearing about how 'invigorating' cycling a 100kms is, is hearing it from a person who looks about ten years older than they really are. It has been scientifically proven that excessive cardio releases harmful free radicles that break down muscle in the body, and the skinny appearance you are left with is your reward.
Why would anyone want to inflict themselves with such a thing? It's madness. Cardio is so 90s, and its poster boy was Lance Armstrong. Also a nob.
Golf equipment is always going to be cooler
You know you can pay up to R200 000 for a road bike nowadays. R200 000, and it doesn't even have a motor! That makes you somewhat insane, a quality made worse with talk about it costing that much because your chain ring weighs just 4 grams, and that your computer can sense your cholesterol levels and hydration levels. Good luck picking up chicks with that gambit...
Golf clubs look cool, you can do cool things with each and every one of them, bags are cool, and as learned from being a kid, it's cool to always be able to play with your own balls. Let's not add wardobe here, I think we addressed that at the beginning.
Golf creates employment
To play a round of golf, you touch the lives of many. You help in golf courses being able to employ full time staff. From the person who works in the pro shop, to the caddy who carries your bag, to the starter who wishes you well at the first tee, to the people who serve you a meal at halftime, to the people who pour you drinks at the end. You are stimulating the economy every time you tee it up.
What happens when you go for a ride? You just piss off motorists.
Cycling is a gateway drug to other dreadful activities
The problem with cycling is that even cyclists find it boring. Not fully fulfilled, cyclists often turn to other things like paddle skiing, trail running, hiking or even worse - triathlons. The only thing more annoying that someone acting smug about doing a MBA is someone activing smug about doing the Ironman.
Golfers play golf, that's enough.
Golf isn't trying to be something it is not
Golf isn't an exercise, it's the best game in the world. Golfers aren't kidding themselves about it being their exercise, they are there to enjoy themselves and experience the company of others. Cycling claims to be everything from a great exercise, a leisure activity, a networking opportunity, a way to live a longer life... Bollocks, it's cardio, that's all it is.
Golf travel is brilliant
Sure there are some pretty amazing roads to cycle out there, but where's the fun in that? You're panting away, missing out on so much of it as you labour away on the saddle. Cycling up Alpe d'Huez like the pros in the Tour de France, or playing St Andrews like the pros at The Open? The latter makes so much more sense and is something you can cherish every moment of.
Golf also provides you with so many more destinations to visit, and it's way more social to go to a place for golfing reasons than cycling reasons. Again, you got kids, a golfing holiday is more doable and considerate than a cycling one.
So put the bike up for sale, dust off the golf clubs, and get back to being a man. The golf course awaits, and so do your real friends.
Tags: cycling is the new golf, cycling trends, golf decline, golf vs cycling, losing your masculinityThe U.S. military launched airstrikes against the Islamic State militants in Iraq Monday in its first move in the newly broadened mission authorized by President Obama to go on the offensive against the terror group.
The U.S. Central Command said in a press release that the strikes were conducted to provide support for Iraqi security forces fighting the militants southwest of Baghdad.
"The airstrike southwest of Baghdad was the first strike taken as part of our expanded efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions to hit ISIL targets as Iraqi forces go on offense, as outlined in the president's speech last Wednesday," the release said.
Previous U.S. airstrikes in Iraq were conducted to protect U.S. interests and personnel, assist Iraqi refugees and secure critical infrastructure. Monday's strike was in direct support of Iraqi forces fighting the militants.
Six Islamic State vehicles and a militant fighting position that was firing on Iraqi forces were destroyed in the strikes.
More On This...
Fox News' Justin Fishel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Whether you’re a Jedi-in-training or the Jedi Master of the family, you’re in for an out-of-galaxy experience when you sail on the Disney Fantasy in early 2016! Today we announced a brand-new, day-long celebration aboard eight special sailings on the Disney Fantasy: Star Wars Day at Sea.
Occurring one day during each of eight Disney Fantasy sailings, Star Wars Day at Sea will transport guests to a galaxy far, far away — in the Western Caribbean. The event features a full day of Star Wars celebrations, including a deck party, meet-and-greets with favorite characters, Star Wars-themed youth activities, unique food and beverage offerings, and special merchandise. Also featured will be exclusive at-sea screenings of the Star Wars films and the new Disney XD animated series, Star Wars Rebels.
Star Wars Day at Sea will be on Disney Fantasy cruises sailing on January 9, 23; February 6, 20; March 5, 19; April 2 and 16, 2016. Departing from Port Canaveral, the seven-night Western Caribbean itinerary includes Cozumel, Mexico; Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands and our private island in the Bahamas, Castaway Cay.
This event marks the first official appearance of the heroes and villains of Star Wars aboard our ships. Next week, I’ll share even more details about the intergalactic fun we have planned for Star Wars Younglings, Padawans and Jedi Masters alike!Players ready to explore the world of Alrest already have a huge adventure ahead of them, but for those hoping to get even more after their main journey has ended can look forward to more content in the future through the expansion pass. Starting from release, the expansion pass will deliver some starting items for adventurers to get them going and then gradually release more goods throughout 2018. In January players will get some brand new quests to take on, receive a new blade in spring and in summer receive a brand new challenge mode. Finally, in August of next year a whole new story awaits Rex and his friends.
The expansion pass is available right now for pre-purchase along side the game in the Nintendo eshop. Currently, European prices list it at 29.99 Euro. The US eShop has the entire game plus expansion totaling 89.98 but has yet to make them available separately. For a detailed look at the expansion pass check out the useful chart below!Donald Trump. Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters President Donald Trump defended his eldest son on Thursday over revelations that he met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who had at one point reportedly offered damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
In a press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, the president described the June 2016 event as "a short meeting" that went "very, very quickly," dismissing it as a normal aspect of campaigning.
"Most people would've taken that meeting," Trump said. "It's called opposition research."
The president then attempted to blame the meeting on the Obama administration, pointing out that the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was approved to enter the US by former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
"Somebody said that her visa or her passport to come into the country was approved by Attorney General Lynch," Trump said. "Now, maybe that's wrong. I just heard that a little while ago, I was surprised to hear that. She was here because of Lynch."
Lawyers and campaign experts have described seeking opposition research from a foreign government as highly abnormal. The Trump campaign has pushed back against the assertion by pointing out that a Ukrainian-American Democratic National Committee contractor offered to provide the campaign with damaging information on Trump on behalf of Ukraine. The DNC has denied that it solicited anti-Trump opposition research from Ukraine.
Trump's defenders have floated a number of arguments to tamp down the seriousness of the meeting, which some legal experts speculate could have violated campaign finance laws.
The president's legal team tried to tie Veselnitskaya to research firm Fusion GPS, noting that the Russian lawyer had worked with the group at one point. Fusion GPS denied that it was involved in the meeting.
"We have learned from both our own investigation and public reports that the participants in the meeting misrepresented who they were and who they worked for," Trump legal spokesperson Mark Corallo told The New York Times.
"Specifically, we have learned that the person who sought the meeting is associated with Fusion GPS, a firm which according to public reports, was retained by Democratic operatives to develop opposition research on the president and which commissioned the phony Steele dossier."
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As the Zika outbreak grows in the US, President Obama is blasting Republicans for planning to go on Memorial Day vacation before passing needed funding to combat this potential public health crisis.
President Obama spoke to the press after being briefed about the Zika outbreak by public health officials.
The President said:
So we’ve got to get moving. And what essentially NIH and CDC have been doing is taking pots of money from other things — universal flu funds or Ebola funds or other funds — just to get the thing rolling. But we have to reimburse those pots of money that have already been depleted and we have to be able to sustain the work that’s going to need to be done to finish the job. So bottom line is Congress needs to get me a bill. It needs to get me a bill that has sufficient funds to do the job. They should not be going off on recess before this is done. And certainly this has to get done over the course of the next several weeks in order for us to be able to provide confidence to the American people that we’re handling this piece of business. If I’m a young family right now, or somebody who’s thinking about starting a family, this is just a piece of insurance that I want to purchase. And I think that’s true for most Americans. And understand that this is not something where we can build a wall to prevent — mosquitoes don’t go through Customs. To the extent that we’re not handling this thing on the front end, we’re going to have bigger problems on the back end.
Obama also urged the American people to tell Congress to do their jobs.
The problem is that House Republicans have decided to endanger the health of infants by trying to go cheap on Zika response funding. Republicans are refusing to fully authorize Obama’s funding request to fight the virus. Additionally, House Republicans want to fund Zika response by diverting funds away from the response to Ebola.
In their veto threat of the House Republican bill, the White House wrote, “While the Administration appreciates that the Congress is finally taking action to address the Zika virus, the funding provided in H.R. 5243 is woefully inadequate to support the response our public health experts say is needed. Specifically, the Administration’s full request of $1.9 billion is needed to: reduce the risk of the Zika virus, particularly in pregnant women, by better controlling the mosquitoes that spread Zika; develop new tools, including vaccines and better diagnostics to protect the Nation from the Zika virus; and conduct crucial research projects needed to better understand the impacts of the Zika virus on infants and children.”
Republicans would rather go vacation than pass the needed funding to combat the outbreak of a virus that causes brain damage in infants. The Republican Congress is once again placing the priorities of the American people last.
For years, this president has dealt with the intentional paralysis of the legislative process by Republicans who only answer to their millionaire and billionaire donors. Obama is fed up with the Republican behavior. When Republicans are refusing to put protecting the health of unborn children ahead of vacation, they are no longer serving the people but acting against the best interests of those who elected them to serve.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:ORLANDO – As if they don’t already have enough motivation for their third game with Toronto FC this season, Orlando City SC now have some serious bulletin-board material thanks to Sebastian Giovinco.
The Lions have already fallen, hard, to the Reds twice this season – 2-0 at home and 4-1 on the road as recently as Aug. 5 – but Orlando have already worked the "third time is a charm" oracle twice this season, with victories in their third meetings against both D.C. United and Columbus Crew SC.
Orlando are also fighting for their playoff lives after a recent run of just one win in eight games, and the coaching staff was quick to seize upon any extra incentive to give their players an edge for Saturday’s return trip to Canada (4 pm ET, TSN).
So Giovinco’s message on the Reds’ official Twitter feed was just the thing.
Giovinco: "I scored a hat trick last time against Orlando. I'm looking forward to playing them again." #TFCLive — Toronto FC (@torontofc) August 18, 2015
The little jab was not lost on City’s assistant coach Mark Watson after training on Wednesday.
“Oh, we might just need to highlight that for the lads to see," said Watson. "We always like to see things that might give the team a bit of extra motivation.”
With Orlando having somewhat lost their way in recent weeks, it certainly adds an extra personal dimension to the clash between two teams separated by just three points in the Eastern Conference standings.
Giovinco was kept off the scoresheet in the first meeting at the Citrus Bowl in April, when Jozy Altidore scored twice, but he more than made up for it with an expertly-taken treble, including a penalty and free-kick, 16 days ago.
Get more Orlando City news at OrlandoCitySC.com
There was no stopping the Atomic Ant that day, but a Lions' defense that has been badly victimized in recent weeks now has every incentive to stop the rot on Saturday.
“Yes, one or two players have noticed that, and we have also made people aware of his comments,” head coach Adrian Heath confirmed following Thursday’s training session. “As a player, you often read up on the opposition the week of a game, and this definitely falls into that category.”
However, Heath is realistic enough to admit his team will need more than a strong desire to avenge its last meeting with Toronto to keep its postseason hopes alive.
“In all fairness to Gio, the way we played against them last time, I would be looking forward to it if I was him," said Heath. "He had an exceptional performance against us last time, no arguments. But I think we will be a lot better than last time.
"We have put last week’s performance [in a 4-0 loss to vs. Seattle] behind us and we are really hopeful that we will get a good reaction from the group on Saturday. We have had a good week’s training and there is still a lot of collective good spirit in this team. Despite recent results, we know we’re not out of it yet and we are still capable of putting two or three wins together on the bounce.”Updated: August 27, 2012, 6:15 PM
WASHINGTON — Neither a student ID nor a military ID will prove someone is a resident of South Carolina, but the attorney general there said on Monday that one of those forms of identification is still somehow superior under the state’s contested voting law.
Speaking with TPM during a break in the federal trial over whether the law violates the Voting Rights Act, Attorney General Alan Wilson defended its provision that allows voters to use things like military identification and passports to cast a ballot but bans them from using student IDs.
Wilson said the reason was that students were largely “transient” and a school identification card “doesn’t prove you’re a resident.”He said voters using passports and military IDs, even those with out-of-state addresses, were known to be residents of the state because they were registered to vote in the state.
When TPM pointed out that college students who had out-of-state licenses were in the same situation, another attorney on South Carolina’s team jumped in to contradict Wilson, insisting the state law was about proving identity rather than residency.
After that line of questioning, Wilson said he wouldn’t be speaking with reporters about the case until closing arguments on Friday.
South Carolina’s voter ID law actually specifically says the photo identification requirement has nothing to do with establishing residency and is instead specifically to “confirm the person presenting himself to vote is the elector on the poll list.” From the law: “Any address listed on the identification is not determinative of an elector’s domicile for the purpose of voting.”
Earlier in the day, state Sen. George E. “Chip” Campsen said he heard accounts of “hundreds of students registered at the same address” (he didn’t say whether those were dorm addresses) and accused college students of “domicile shopping” by voting in South Carolina over their home state.
Unlike voter ID laws in several other states, photo identification from state colleges and universities are not accepted under the law. The NAACP intervened in the case on behalf of five African-American students from Benedict College: Kenyda Bailey, Charmaine Beal, Kiaka Davis, Evin Percival and Sequioa Waller. All are registered to vote in Richland County and would have liked to use their student identification to cast a ballot.
Republicans in several states have targeted student voters before. The head of the Republican party in Maine accused college students who voted in the state but paid a higher out-of-state tuition rate of committing voter fraud. A Republican official in New Hampshire called college students “foolish” while pushing
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eral human," he said. "A divergent strain of homo sapien that adapted to its environment. It's called atavism — a reversion to a prior type; a sort of de-evolution."
Johnson — a tour guide at Slater Mill in Pawtucket by day — is adamant that sasquatches are real creatures that live in the wilderness and avoid human contact. While he has not yet seen one with the naked eye, he describes a close encounter he had in September 2010 in the woods near the Cumberland watershed area while he was performing a technique known as "tree-knocking," which some Bigfoot enthusiasts teach as a way to communicate with a sasquatch.
"We started to hear a thumping sound, and it was approaching," Johnson said. "The only thing I can liken it to is an elephant walking on its hind legs. Stomping is a way to scare people away."
Johnson said he understands the skepticism many have that Bigfoot exists at all, and he even acknowledges the humor many find in the dedication of those who comb through the woods seeking the hairy beast.
"I don't think it's always taken seriously," Johnson said of the form of cryptozoology he and his colleagues practice. "Some people are not open-minded. It's certainly not accepted in the mainstream. But we're not just crackpots. We want to help make it a legitimate study. If there wasn't any serious evidence, I wouldn't stick with it."
Johnson and his team plan to continue combing the forests of Rhode Island anywhere a potential sighting is reported. The team plans to search through the woods in Chepatchet, and will return to Cumberland and Exeter in the spring when Johnson believes Big Rhodey returns to "his summer home." Johnson said he desperately wants to see a sasquatch, particularly after his "tantalizing" encounter in Cumberland. But whether he ever sees one, or whether any proof of Bogfoot's existence is ever found, people will continue to hunt the wilderness in search of the legendary creature, he said.
"I've talked to people who have been up close and personal. I believe them," Johnson said. "It upsets people that there's a man-like creature out there. It's scary and spooky; an abomination. It's us, but it's not us. That's what's fascinating — how close to human it is."Spread the love
Southhaven, MS — 30-year-old father and husband Troy Goode recently died after he was assaulted and hogtied by police.
Goode was acting somewhat erratically after he attended a Widespread Panic concert with his wife, and was running around an empty parking lot. However, it was not reported that Goode was acting violently or posing a threat to anyone in any way.
Police arrived on the scene simply because he was acting strangely, and then they attempted to aggressively subdue him. Goode tried to resist and escape, which is a natural human reaction when large men are attacking you in a violent manner. As we all know, police become infuriated when you resist their illegitimate authority, so they then became even more aggressive with him.
According to Goode’s family attorney Tim Edwards the police “hogtied and put [Troy’s] face down on the stretcher.” During the struggle, Goode cried out for help and yelled that he could not breathe, but his pleas for help were ignored by the police, who threw him face down on a stretcher.
“The police took him off and next thing that we know he was a Baptist Hospital,” Edwards said.
Goode then stopped breathing and was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Police say that they “attempted to detain the subject who began to resist and run from them again. He was eventually restrained by Officers and transferred to an awaiting ambulance to be transported to the hospital.”
The family suspects that the brutal police attack is what caused his death, and they are demanding answers.
“The family as you might expect is grieving, and they are not irrational at all, but they want answers. They want to know why Troy died,” Edwards told reporters.
A friend of the family contacted the Free Thought Project and said that Goode was asthmatic and he was denied his inhaler.
“[He] left behind a wife and a 1-year-old that will grow up never knowing his father. He was asthmatic and to my knowledge he was denied his inhaler/medication,” said the family friend.
The family is asking anyone with video footage of the attack to please come forward.
John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work he organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference, which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com.While the world ditches fossil fuels and turns to renewables, Tony Abbott doubles down on coal. Economist Warwick Smith says this may be dooming Australia.
THE ABBOTT GOVERNMENT appears intent on dismantling the small but vibrant renewable energy industry in Australia.
At the very moment the rest of the world is coming to their senses about the need to wean themselves from coal, Abbott is spruiking coal’s future, claiming that leaving it in the ground is one of the most damaging things this country could do. In fact, the Coalition Government’s attitudes towards coal and renewables are likely to be extremely damaging to our economy in the medium to long term.
The combination of weak global coal prices and climate action announced by the United States and China have been cited as reasons for the cancellation of the massive Dudgeon Point coal export facility. It won’t be the last coal project in Australia that gets cancelled because of climate change action.
In fact, I think it’s reasonable to say that eventually virtually all coal projects will be cancelled due to climate action (I leave some room for coal mining for carbon fibre production). However, the coal industry and those who stand to make a lot of money from the coal industry, including the banks, are trying to make hay before the sun sets.
Renewable energy is the future of energy. Anybody who says otherwise doesn’t understand the inexorable march that renewables are on and the slow but steady acceptance of climate science.
The big unknown is how long it will take for renewables to replace fossil fuels and how much damage we will do to the climate in the meantime.
The coal industry is in the same place tobacco was in the 1960s. They know the gig is up but the longer they can muddy the waters and cast doubt on the science the more money they can make.
The history of the tobacco industry, and many others besides, shows us that people really do make decisions in the name of profit they know will cost many lives. It’s happening in board rooms all across the world right now.
There are fortunes to be made by those who ride the renewable energy wave and fortunes to be lost by those who invest too much trying to hold back the tide by continuing to back fossil fuel electricity generation.
Mining is an expensive activity and these companies don’t want to lose too much money when the coal industry inevitably shuts down. This is where they need politicians like Abbott and Hockey to keep providing them with the subsidies, incentives and infrastructure and to protect them from competition and regulation for as long as possible.
The miners and fossil fuel generators want governments to shoulder the risks associated with coal while they privatise the last dregs of the profits. State Governments are on side too, spending nearly $3 billion dollars every year directly subsidizing mining companies.
In the early days of the Abbott Government, I labelled them as fairly radical free market ideologues. I quickly realised this was inaccurate, as they are not interested in small government or free markets when it comes to benefits for the wealthy.
The most parsimonious explanation for their policies is plain old capture by vested interests.
@BarackObama Abbott's friends. Media mogul Murdoch & mining magnate Rinehart, both climate change deniers. pic.twitter.com/iZqEpZI0q4 — Sir Loinsteak (@btckr) June 8, 2014
Abbott and Hockey are either in the pockets of the mining, energy and financial industries or they are doing favours for mates who are in those industries. Nothing they have done is inconsistent with that conclusion.
The Abbott Government want this country stuck with 20th century power infrastructure and they are throwing everything at an effort to keep our economy dependent on a fossil fuel future. The result in the medium to long term will be extremely damaging for this country as the world passes us by on the way to renewable energy — or climate catastrophe. Either way, we don’t do well.
As this happens, more and more of Abbott’s precious coal and coal infrastructure will be stranded with no buyers. If he has his way and manages to destroy the country’s renewable energy sector, not only will we suffer from the stranded coal assets, but we will be totally reliant on importing expertise and equipment from overseas in order to replace our fossil fuel infrastructure.
Now is the time for the Australian economy to be diversifying if we’re not to become an economic backwater. We can’t be world’s quarry forever, particularly in a carbon constrained global economy.
This sort of longer term economic planning requires government leadership.
Removing subsidies for fossil fuel industries would be a good start but it can’t end there. For the long run benefit of the country we should be prioritising investment in education, infrastructure, productivity and R&D.
This early part of the 21st century is a time of massive economic, ecological and social change. Our society and economy must be diverse and robust if we are to thrive in this new environment and we will require more than bloated mining and financial sectors.
Warwick Smith is a research economist at the University of Melbourne. He blogs at reconstructingeconomics.com and tweets @RecoEco.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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See more of John's political art on his Cartoons and Caricatures Facebook page.Exterior of the former American Theater on River Street on Monday, Sept. 12, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. The building is to be revived as a movie theater. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Exterior of the former American Theater on River Street on Monday, Sept. 12, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. The building is to be revived as a movie theater. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Photo: Will Waldron Buy photo Photo: Will Waldron Image 1 of / 34 Caption Close American Theater renovation planned for downtown Troy 1 / 34 Back to Gallery
Troy
An ambitious $3 million project to restore the closed American Theater as a first-run movie showcase has won city support for an application for $1 million in state funds.
Bonacio Construction, Bow Tie Cinemas and the city are working together on a plan for modernizing the historic brick theater at 285-289 River St.
The theater project is seen as a catalyst for attracting more people to downtown Troy.
Bow Tie has been successful opening movie theaters in downtown Schenectady and Saratoga Springs, and bringing people from throughout the Capital Region to those cities.
"They're confident it will do very well as a first-run theater. It's a great reuse of that site," said Steven Strichman, the city's commissioner of planning and community development.
The city is touting the project for a $1 million Restore NY Communities Initiative grant. The City Council voted 9-0 at its September meeting to support the application.
Bringing back the 6,800-square-foot theater has been under consideration for several years; Bow Tie and Bonacio officials discussed it back in 2013. The American Theater has a seating capacity of 450.
The movie theater for many years operated as the Cinema Art Theater showing adult films. The city closed it on March 2, 2006, with police alleging some patrons engaged in sexual acts. The city also removed the marquee on April 13, 2006. In 2012, the city paid Jan DeGroot, the building's owner, $30,000 to settle his lawsuit about the marquee's removal.
"We've looked at a lot of different possibilities," Larry Novik, director of business development for Bonacio, said about the building's future. "Restoring the original use reflects the character of the building.
Bonacio invested $5.9 million to transform the neighboring Dauchey Building at 275-283 River St. from office use into apartments.
The return of a first-run theater is expected to stimulate business downtown.
"It will bring business in. It would be great. It will bring social engagement and social interaction," said Marla Ortega, chef-owner of the Illium Cafe at 9 Broadway on Monument Square, a short walk from the theater.
Ortega said the city's burgeoning restaurant scene would benefit from a theater bringing new customers downtown.
"They need another renaissance benefiting downtown," said Ortega, who compared the movie theater to the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, which attracts patrons to restaurants before and after a show.
The city will hold a public hearing on the application for the $1 million grant at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 28, in the Planning Department Conference Room in City Hall, 433 River St.
The movie theater project will depend on securing the state grants and other funding, Novik and Strichman said.
[email protected] • 518-454-5084 • @KennethCroweHow do you know when you are already talking about multidimensionality? When you discuss multiple parallel realities, personal astral experiences, dreams at night, and ascension. As the name suggests, interdimensional splits are also about multidimensionality.
Though these aspects are not usually discussed due to the mental strain they impose: interpersonal relationships in 3d reality, basic statistics (classroom analogy), your general knowledge and intellectual skills can help in grasping the practical but overlooked aspects of multidimensionality and apply them to your daily life. Confusion about multidimensionality tends to happen if those aspects are overlooked.
Love is not only about affection and relationships but also about analytical skills and ethical design. Thus analytical skills and design skills can help in grasping the totality of multidimensionality. One application of design is the practice of communal, egalitarian living (lifestyle design).
Interpersonal relationships in 3d reality
As we all know it is best to have relationships with like minded people. Even people with different talents, but the same mission statement. We form groups and teams, which enables discuss multiple ideas from different perspectives. Eventually, as we share more ideas, and the more ideas we have in common, this builds group or team cohesiveness.
On the other hand, we find a person after some time whom we don’t share ideas in common due to their negativity. No matter how much we try share the ideas we feel are revolutionary, they cannot find the self evident truths. They always lash out when you try to be authentic. They usually lack any insightful sense of humor. So if you think it is better that you meditate, or express your creative art, or nurture a good relationships with like minded ones, stay away from those energy vampires.
Sometimes you feel alone and can hardly find a like minded person to have good times with, because everyone seems caught up in their obsolete thought patterns, superficiality and complacency. Also we only can handle a limited number of stuff, so we have a limit on the people we can focus on spending our energy.
Organizations and how the environment interacts with us
Not only relationships affect us, but also the organizations people form. Some organizations are advantageous for our spiritual growth, for example egalitarian communities. Some are just in the middle if you know how to handle your thoughts, for example schools and universities. And some are downright disadvantageous because they are insidious (bad influence), for example, governments, corporations, central banks and organized religions.
The presence of those organizations affect how we are nurtured because we can be born or grow under the influence of them, potentially creating lifelong habits. Habits can be constructive or destructive. It also depends on the worldwide presence of those organizations.
The situation now is that the organizations detrimental to our spiritual growth are everywhere. They affect how your food is made, pollute the air with haze, and affect this consensual reality and our train of thought via the money system. Since people are born and nurtured under the influence of those organizations, they also grow under the key paradigm or worldviews of those organizations.
The money system suppresses real emotions and creativity. That system is also another reason interpersonal relationships don’t last, hardly have any integrity and difficult to meet some parts of the soul contract. It can also prevent grasping the big picture, so there is not much people who are open to the perspective of the big picture, thus making it difficult to find like minded people.
Not only that, they affect the immediate environment we live in, for example landscapes can change due to places for mining metal ores, or they can temporarily affect the air with haze from plantation or forest burning (slash and burn agriculture). We all know haze can affect our breathing, and can make it difficult to start your organization that focuses on spiritual values.
The current state of our planet
There is so much social disorder now everywhere you look, while economy crumbles while the stock market plays pretend. The major developed countries are needlessly gathering huge piles of debt. There is inflation of all world currencies that is causing the price of basic necessities to rise. The government is also pretending that everything is improving but everything actually is getting worse, which is an insult to the next generation.
Consumerism is one of the most destructive habits. The presence of those organizations with twisted agendas has blocked the self-reflection abilities of their people through strict and regimented schedules. People grow up through consumerism the moment the baby finds toys attractive. The current situation is an embarrassment for the next generation of children.
The weather is getting more unpredictable with all the storms and heat waves, so are the activity in earthquakes and volcanoes. As we know plant and animal species are being threatened.
The pollution that is caused by consumerism and greed will ultimately add insult to the injury: if the worldwide populace keep the habit of consumerism at the cost of self-reflection, ultimately total environmental destruction will result. Ultimately we are passing the mess we are doing to the next generation. Lifestyle design involves a lot of conscious effort.
Why an interdimensional split is more flexible with regard to free will
The interdimensional split also has a down to earth aspect. So if you consider social interactions (interpersonal relationships and organizations) and environmental interactions to the multidimensional picture, it will be easier to grasp interdimensional splits. The ID (interdimensional) split concept is a demonstration of how flexible thinking can be achieved with our current linear and sequential thinking.
It is natural that tend to move way from stuff that do not align with your values and be attracted to stuff that aligns with your values. This can be interpreted as the law of attraction.
If we keep the one earth scenario, those organizations detrimental to spiritual growth will go on with their abuse. You are plain tired of their existence and just want to move to the next step. This is just like eliminating as much noise as possible and making sure the air is clean while you meditate or do your art, while using the language of the soul, which manifests as the language of silence. You need a more appropriate environment for spiritual growth.
You know some of you can lose friends because you want to practice your spiritual principles. Some of your friends want to do all the vices and continue being programmed by the media. So you find no choice but to contact and nurture cohesiveness with like minded people.
The interdimensional split or the multiple earths scenario was designed to take into account free will. Some people just want to take egalitarian living to the next level. Some just want to ascend, since they have fulfilled their soul contracts. Some just want to stay complacent.
Some people cannot grasp spiritually advanced concepts, so it is better we terminate our relationships with them. Some are very receptive to our concepts and want to learn more.
What is more, those abusive people will learn their lesson and will have no more to abuse, with the help of the interdimensional split. Thus interdimensional splits are intellectual pole shifts as well.
The souls going to the various parallel realities can go on with their incarnation they way they see fit. If they don’t need the existence of higher evolved beings, that is fine, since there is a huge gap in the learning curve.
Those abused will finally see a new perspective and life without the abusive organizations. They can start a new life as well with all their plans in mind.
The different school years or classrooms analogy to the interdimensional split
It is just like people being split into classroom of different educational levels, just like the elementary school is split into 6 grades. We all know that in each of the elementary school levels there are people of different skills and talents, so each parallel reality of Earth will have a small evolutionary gap, but not so chaotic and detrimentally huge as we now have today.
The idea is to keep low the gap in the levels of knowledge or levels of evolution because learning builds step by step: A grade 1 student will have difficulty grasping grade 6 concepts. Similarly a grade 5 students will be bored repeating the grade 3 syllabus. The situation now is that we have all the six grades in one class, and that is causing a lot of friction.
The elementary school analogy is just to make it easy to grasp the free will aspect of the ID split. We all know the what the education system prescribes to us is too tainted for spiritual growth. But we have all experienced how didactic learning is for example, to grasp multiplication, we need to learn first how to count.
In consensual realities, if there is a huge gap between the levels of evolution there will be chaos and free will won’t work properly. So the ID split creates the conditions necessary to nurture free will.
Why the ID split can be foreign concept to some
For some, the thought of losing and being separated from their loved one is very difficult to bear. Each soul eventually has free will to take different paths. If you are too attached to someone, it can also mean you have not resolved key personal sovereignty issues. Also know that the soul’s contract with you is done, the bonding has served its purpose.
You can detach from something fully, if you know it’s epistemological foundation for example, numbers. If you appreciate the big picture (dialectical aspects) of All-that-Is, it is very easy to detach from something. Having attachments does not really help much when practicing abstract, dialectical thinking.
If you don’t are not certain which parallel earth you will go, please do not fret, let your soul surprise you. This is another reason multidimensional concepts need a lot of self reflection. This is where general knowledge from different fields is useful:
Your knowledge is very vast, and you try to present your ideas in a revolutionary way to anyone.
Have the ability to self diagnose, introspect, and outrospect, instead of relying on blanket statements and clichés.
Practice applying knowledge, analytical and evaluation skills without noticing it.
Have grasp of the big picture by grasping the relevance of natural cycles and the irrelevance of money system.
Know the value of ethics with the work or art you do.
If you apply this to your everyday thinking, your free will path already has a good destiny. You might be already doing some of them, but don’t notice it. This good news applies to those who practice alternative lifestyles like egalitarian living. For complacent and abusive people who hardly practice them, it is a very different story altogether.
Also, relationships and how you feel affection is very much based on how much grasp you have in the big picture. For example, which type of relationship within organizations has more integrity? The cohesiveness found in mafias and mischievous gangs, or the cohesiveness found in egalitarian and intentional communities? Each group will go into their appropriate parallel earth.
Another reason is the wrong type of nurture which is indoctrination by Abrahamic religions. The distorted concept of hell is very difficult to bear as well, but keep in mind that there is no hell, just the veil of forgetfulness. There is also a Jacob’s ladder, or learning curve associated with the veil of forgetfulness. You will be sent to the parallel reality just right for your level: not too basic, not too advanced.
Conclusion
The main intention of the interdimensional split and the multidimensional earth scenario is to provide a solution to chaos that will eventually exhaust the planet. The situation is not looking good even for the next generations of children. I have only included the plight of the next generation for a didactic explanation, though multidimensionality and ascension is our ultimate destiny.
There are might be other solutions, but this is the most flexible if you want to look at the current state of affairs, you can feel it in your bodies as well through the LBP. Gaia too simply wants to go to the next level of creative expression. From a multidimensional perspective, Gaia is kind enough to create several parallel realities for each level of soul evolution. Gaia needs to integrate and cleanup so that she can ascend.
All you have to do now as an incarnated entity is to keep self reflecting, keep the balance of organized thinking and spontaneity and don’t worry too much about the destiny of others, but help others with the best of your abilities when you feel like it. This will help you nurture your relationships with like minded people.higher education
Visvesvaraya Technological University
VTU
Belagavi
ABVP
‘We are trying to rectify the problem’
Basavaraj Rayareddy
While students want their eighth semester exams postponed, theminister is angry, overwhelmed by a scam-riddled universityStudents of the university want their eighth semester exams postponed. But the higher education minister is an angry man as he feels the university is scam-ridden. in all this drama, we wonder what is the future of students?Students of),, have launched an online petition on change.org asking the university to postpone the eighth semester exams. The petition has received more than 9,000 supporters. Calling the examination system a mess, a student told Bangalore Mirror, that the results for the seventh semester exams conducted in December-January were expected by February end or latest by March first week. But the results came only on May 5.The students could apply for revaluation online only from from May 19-22. Unfortunately, the revaluation results are not yet out and the exams begin on June 6. This has created tension among students across the state.VTU also introduced a crash course for students who are a year behind, which means students who lost eligibility. The crash course students (seventh semester) will finish their exams on June 3 and will have just two days left to prepare for the eighth semester.Reacting to the petition, Prof Sathish Annigeri, Registrar (evaluation), said “Right now, there is no decision to postpone the exams. The seventh and eighth semester revaluation results will be out on June 2. The exams will begin on June 5. The tentative time table was announced much in advance. The problem is for students who had applied for revaluation and not cleared all exams. Also, postponing the exams will cause problems for students who want to study further or secure jobs,” he said, adding it is better for students to feel the pressure now rather than at the time of applying for jobs.Meanwhile, students’ organisation AIDSO alleged that VTU was punishing students by virtually harassing and extorting money from them. The results were supposed to be announced in March but are being announced in May. Even checking results was a nighmare as VTU servers crashed frequently. Added to this, thousands of students had their results withheld and these students are yet to know whether they have passed or failed. Rumours are that the answer scripts have been misplaced or even lost. All this delay in announcement of results and indirect coercion to pay the fee makes it more probable that VTU was deliberately failing students to fill its coffers at the expense of students. Another student body,, has called for a protest against the exam fee hike on on Wednesday.Higher Education Ministerwas in a fix on Tuesday when he was questioned over the inordinate delay in declaration of VTU results. Speaking to Bangalore Mirror, he said, “I am aware of the problem and we are in touch with the university to rectify the problem as soon as possible. The main reason for the problem is the new software which has been incorporated for making the examination process smoother.”When asked whether he was concerned about students who were in a fix and worried about their upcoming semesters, the minister who got a bit tense, said, “I understand there has been a lot of complaints and I know there are loopholes in the university. What do I do? We are cash-strapped and do not have a single rupee to pay teacher salaries. There are no funds for anything.” The minister then got really frustrated answering various questions posed to him about the university and said, “We are on the verge of closing the university as we do not have funds and there are many lacunae which are uncontrollable. I am going to take serious action against the university after meeting officials.”He added saying, “Not just that, the whole point which media also fails to understand is the compulsion of the university to pay Rs. 441 crore as tax. We have given it to the Centre. All our money is gone. Where do we get it from? I think everyone should know this.” “With all this, you all should know that we are going to save around 10 crore by installing this software with which we assure 100% timely declaration of results.”Public service announcement for GOP senators:
Walking off the edge of the cliff does in fact have consequences
Public service announcement for GOP senators:
Walking off the edge of the cliff does in fact have consequences
Several Republican senators said Wednesday they were surprised and angered after a news report revealed that their GOP colleague, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, made a recent fundraising appeal for a tea party group that is trying to defeat GOP incumbents it doesn't believe are conservative enough. The senators said Cruz's efforts appeared to violate his own pledge to no longer target sitting Republican senators in favor of tea party-backed candidates in the hard-fought 2014 campaign in which Republicans believe they have a chance to win back control of the Senate. [...] "I am stunned that Senator Cruz is involved in this fundraising effort for a group that has targeted his colleagues in the Republican caucus," Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, told CNN.
It's not funny because of what Cruz did, but rather it's funny because his Republican colleagues are surprised that he did it. What did they expect from this guy? Tea and crumpets?
And it's more than a little pathetic that this is the kind of thing that pisses them off, not something that actually has an impact on real people, like engineering a shutdown of the Federal government.Share Email 0 Shares
News Release — Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Oct. 15, 2014
LAS VEGAS – Speaking at a labor union convention here today, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the future of American democracy is at stake.
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“We are not living in a democracy when 60 percent of Americans are not voting, while billionaires like the Koch Brothers are spending hundreds of millions to buy the United States Senate. That’s called oligarchy, not democracy,” Sanders said.
The billionaires Charles and David Koch and other wealthy individuals are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into this fall’s campaigns by taking advantage of a disastrous 2010 Supreme Court ruling and subsequent court decisions that gutted federal and state laws limiting campaign spending.
“The Koch Brothers are trying to buy the Senate,” Sanders said. “This is not what democracy is supposed to be about. Billionaires should not be allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars electing candidates who represent the wealthy and the powerful.”
Sanders has long advocated public funding of campaigns to make elections more about ideas and less about which candidates have more money in their campaign coffers.
Sanders also is a co-sponsor of a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision. Senate Republicans on Sept. 11 blocked consideration of the amendment. “While the Senate vote was a victory for Republicans, it was a defeat for American democracy. The fight to overturn Citizens United must continue at the grassroots level in every state in this country,” Sanders told the convention.
In his speech, Sanders also warned that a factor likely to skew election outcomes this Nov. 4 is that fewer than 40 percent of eligible voters are expected to cast ballots. (Only 37.8 percent of the voting age population went to the polls in the last mid-term election in 2010.) Even smaller percentages of young people and black voters are expected to turn out this Election Day.
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He urged the union delegates to redouble efforts in their communities to boost turnout so the election outcomes reflect the views of strong majorities of Americans who want Congress to help create jobs, address the collapse of the middle class, close corporate tax loopholes and make the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.Netflix is scrambling to find answers over delays and outages. According to the company it is hoping to bring its systems online overnight. These issues will come with a price and cost Netflix roughly $1.8 million to $3.6 million in revenue a day, according to Citi analyst Tony Wible.
On Thursday, Netflix continued to “to experience significant shipping issues.”
We were able to ship some DVDs from about half of our distribution centers yesterday but we haven’t yet been able to resume shipping this morning. Our engineers continue to work around the clock to restore normal operations. In the meantime, we’re notifying affected customers via personal email and we’ve posted a notice on the Netflix Web site. We’re as frustrated about this as you are and we once again apologize for the inconvenience.
Longer term, its unclear what impact this will have on the Netflix brand. I suppose that Netflix’s problems could be a win for Blockbuster, but it’s far too early to make that assessment.
Netflix runs on proprietary custom-inventory and customer tracking software.
Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said the company doesn’t “talk that much” about the company’s internal systems. But he did acknowledge that Netflix’s back-end systems are mostly home grown. “We developed a lot ourselves,” he said.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A councillor in Australia is attempting to put a ban on the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality.
Rosalie Crestani, who is a councillor in the City of Casey for right-wing party Rise Up Australia, submitted a motion calling for a number of measures.
In it, she called for Casey to stop all diversity training, and to put a ban on media releases pertaining to sexual orientation.
She also called for pro-gay signs on council premises to be torn down, and for the promotion of gay interests to be banned for ‘discriminating’ against straight people.
Her first attempt to pass the law failed this week, when a councillor boycotted the meeting and caused it to be dissolved.
Councillor Rafal Kaplon told the Herald Sun: “[Her] motion was nothing more than a cheap political ploy by the Rise up Australia Party … to gain traction before the state election by picking on the Muslim and gay-lesbian minority groups.”
Liberal MP Brad Battin said: “Tonight at the Casey Council a councillor put a motion that I want to say is out of line with community views.
“Cr Crestani moved a motion that was in my view a step backwards.
“I understand this is the view of Rise Up Australia and can I please encourage you to look it up before voting in the state election.
“We need to support all in our community and people who identify as GLTBI are at higher risk of mental health issues and suicide.
“Do not support this motion, rather speak out against it.”Getting a good night's sleep might not cure the common cold, but new research hints it could prevent one.
People who averaged less than seven hours of sleep a night were about three times more likely to develop cold symptoms than study volunteers who got eight or more hours of sleep, Pittsburgh researchers reported yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Participants who had a hard time falling asleep or woke up in the middle of the night fared even worse: Their chances of coming down with a cold were up to five and a half times higher than people who were sound asleep - and stayed that way - almost as soon as their heads hit the pillow.
"This is a huge effect," Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said in an interview. He was not involved in the study.
"These results really fit in very well with what has been becoming increasingly clear, which is that sleep has major effects not only on the brain in terms of alertness and performance, but also on the health of the body."
Sheldon Cohen, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, led the clinical trial in which 153 healthy men and women told researchers every day for two weeks how long and well they slept and how rested they felt.
The volunteers were then quarantined in a hotel, where cold-causing rhinoviruses were dropped into their noses. For five days they were monitored for sneezing, coughing, stuffy noses, and other cold symptoms.
Among the 153 study subjects, 135 were infected, but only 54 developed a cold. After taking into account a wide variety of factors - including age, weight, socioeconomic status, perceived stress, smoking, and alcohol consumption - how long and how well individuals slept were the strongest predictors of who would come down with a cold.
Of the two factors, sleep efficiency was a stronger predictor than sleep duration. Even if eight hours of sleep was disturbed only 2 percent to 8 percent of the time - being awake 11 to 38 minutes - there was a four times greater likelihood of developing cold symptoms than among people who were asleep 99 percent or 100 percent of their time in bed, Cohen said in an interview.
These findings are consistent with what other studies have found. In earlier research cited in the Archives article, researchers deprived people of sleep and then compared their response to a flu shot with the response of people who got their normal amount of sleep. The sleep-deprived subjects developed half the number of antibodies from their flu vaccinations that the other subjects did, suggesting sleep helps the immune system mount a more robust defense against disease.
A biological mechanism that would explain the link between sleep and cold symptoms is not known, Cohen said, but previous research suggests it might involve
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, “I’m yours.” She says, “I want you whole.” Her forehead, wet with tiny pearls of sweat that he catches with his cheeks as he kisses the top of her nose. Pelvis, penis, labia rub against each other. Face to face, cheek to cheek, throat to throat - the rubbing, the clashing of bodies creates noise, from the noise the bodies develop rhythm, from the rhythm they make music, music like the dancing of ever-spinning stars and the deepest grumblings of the earth. The music faster, faster, and her nails dig into his back, and his tongue is in her ear and then neck and now, almost, wait, don’t stop my love, don’t stop, my-love-my-love, love, love, right there: Chaos.
We all come from deep within a place that is neither light nor dark, a place neither cold nor hot, a place beyond safety and freedom.
For what is darkness if not the absence of light?
For why would notions of temperature exist if the weather was always exactly how we needed it to be?
For what does safety mean to something that cannot be hurt, freedom to something that cannot be caged?
We all come from a place that is indeed not really a place at all.
For what is a place if not the attempt to divorce a point from the whole?
Nine months later, from a primeval grumbling and loving, pressing and fighting to get through the birth canal: Here comes the moment eyes open and light flows, and for the first time we know what darkness is. Here comes the first rush of air through our teeth and throat, into our lungs and then there we push it up again to scream the first scream from the back of our throat. Now is time. Now is space. There is light and dark, there is hot and cold, there is safety and freedom, there is music and noise, there is satisfaction and desire.
Here we are. Beyond and between everything and nothing: Something – human beings. We all know being is not always easy. When the sun that gave us life shines it does so with the certainty that its rays will one day fade. When your mother holds your redblue, wrinkled, screaming, birth-jelly-covered body for the very first time and smiles she knows that all things – her smile inspired by surviving the pains of labor and the sublime reality of her creation, the life-force vibrating your vocal chords and making your and her heart beat, even the love that flows between you – will one day fade away.
Understand this. Truly, madly, deeply. Understand that everyone you have loved, love, or will ever love will die. Also understand that everyone you have ever hated, hate, or will ever hate will die. Understand that all things flow and so all things that come must go. Life is pleasure, life is pain.
Understand that it is okay to find this troubling. Why would we accept suffering and death? Why not forget? Why not get caught up in eating delicious dishes, watching funny TV shows, dreaming of fast cars, nice houses, and beautiful partners? Why not hedonism and denial?
Understand that all things from molecules toward the universe gravitate towards equilibrium. Understand that all human beings seek to reduce discomfort.
Understand that you’re neither nothing, nor everything, but everything in between – the messy middle between the ideal, polar opposites we construct.
Understand that we all sometimes fart.
Understand that we all need something.
Understand that (almost) everybody masturbates.
Understand that it’s okay to be afraid.
Understand that we all have cried.
Understand that we all are ashamed of something.
Understand - and this is perhaps the hardest to accept - that sometimes life just screws you over without any doing of your own.
Understand that it is not your task to be perfect.
Understand that it is not even your task to seem perfect, for if you pretend to be perfect people will see through you: Not because you’re not a good enough lier, but because nobody can be perfect. Risk being vulnerable and people will risk trusting you. You are who are you are for a perhaps infinite amount of reasons, from the Big Bang to the creation of the stars to life in our splendid, little solar system, and the ways of the universe are not your sole responsibility. You have responsibility for your actions now, in this very instance.
Life is finite and so don’t waste it lying to yourself. Don’t use all your cognitive powers trying to seem perfect to yourself and others. Accept that there is no such thing as perfection, rejoice in it.
I am alive and sometimes eat way too much candy.
I am alive and sometimes feel jealous of my friends.
I am and sometimes enjoy listening to Coldplay.
I am alive and enjoy picking my nose.
I am alive and enjoy scratching my testicles sometimes.
I am alive and sometimes just like to get drunk and forget about my troubles.
I am alive and hot-damn does it feel nice to be scratched behind the ears sometimes.
I am alive and want to do something in life that matters.
I am alive and sometimes miss former lovers.
I am alive and have ambition.
I am alive and desire to be admired.
I am alive and often have a hard time getting out of bed, because life is pain and my depression lets me lie in bed without movement, lets me blame my problems on some fictional “I”, lets me hate myself instead of doing something about my own shortcomings.
I am alive and I like to sometimes dance without regard for anything except the universe itself.
I am alive and I like to snuggle with puppies.
You are alive and what? Don’t tell me. Tell yourself.
If we don’t accept the grime, the dirt, the saliva, the sweat and sperm and bile and toxic waste of our existence we will never be able to accept ourselves because we are a part of that mess.
Let us stop pretending life is the way we want it to be, let us stop pretending we are who we want to be so that we may start shaping our world and our lives in ways that we truly, madly, deeply want to see.
Let us be honest to ourselves so that we may learn our faults, so that we may see the difference between human quirks and self-destructive acts, so that we may strive to act in more productive, creative and loving ways, so that we may to learn to love ourselves.
Next post: Why we lie and why we need to be more honest to others in order for us to be more honest to ourselves, in order to truly love and be loved.The Samsung Galaxy S5 has a secret service menu, in which the hardware components can be tested for functionality. Here are tests for example the Compass, display, sensors like barometer, gyroscope, heart rate monitors and more. To open the secret test menu on the Samsung Galaxy S5, proceed as follows:
Open the Phone app on your Samsung Galaxy S5 and change within this to the keypad. You must now enter the following code using the keypad: *#0*#
After you have entered the last # on the keypad, the secret service menu will be opened on the Samsung Galaxy S5 automatically.
We encourage anyone who has bought the new Samsung Galaxy S5 to perform all the tests that are offered on the menu once. You can check with them if your Samsung Galaxy S5 is in the perfect technical condition.The Wallabies boast more potent attacking weapons in their backs than the All Blacks, according to Wales defence coach Shaun Edwards.
Wales assistant coach Shaun Edwards has declared the Wallabies boast the best attacking weapons in world rugby, ahead of Saturday's (Sunday NZ time) international in Cardiff.
Australia haven't tasted defeat to Wales since 2008 and lost just two of their last 17 matches against the men from the principality.
They'll head into the showdown full of confidence following last month's win over the All Blacks and then racking up 63 points against Japan on Saturday.
STU FORSTER/GETTY IMAGES Wales defence coach Shaun Edwards is wary of the Wallabies backs even with Israel Folau missing.
The Great Britain rugby league great is wary of the threat posed to his side by Michael Cheika's team despite the absence of Israel Folau.
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"They have immense attacking weapons, they have the most potent attacking force in the first three phases in world rugby - even more than the All Blacks," said Edwards, who is Wales' defence coach.
"There is a multitude of outstanding backs. Karmichael Hunt debuted for the Brisbane Broncos when he was 17 which is an incredible feat.
"Whoever they play at fullback will be a potent force, whether it be Kurtley Beale etc.
"Folau is Folau. He is an incredible player... I am sure they'll have someone to take his place. But am I glad he's not playing Saturday? Just a little."
The Wallabies' hold over the Welsh is similar to the stranglehold New Zealand had over Cheika's side before the 24-18 win in Brisbane broke the seven-game losing streak against the world champions.
However, apart from last year's 32-3 blow out at the Principality Stadium, Edwards believes there has been little to choose between the two sides who'll face off in the group stages at the Rugby World Cup in 2019.
"Last year before we played Australia we only had one training session," said Edwards.
"Everyone knows they are together for four months before they get here.
"They are like a club team. That is the advantage southern hemisphere teams have. That is just the way it is.
"They're perennially a top-four ranked team and yes, we've failed to get the winning edge even when we have played outstandingly.
"I remember when we went to Melbourne in 2012 (and lost in the last minute) and once again last minute in Sydney.
"They had the edge on us last year and were all over us. Hopefully we'll be that little bit stronger. Definitely the best part of their game is their attack."
Wales are also sweating over the availability of British and Irish Lions duo Justin Tipuric and Rhys Webb.
Flanker Tipuric is struggling with a thigh problem and Webb with a knee injury.After convincing my fiance that it would be so much better to watch the life of Margaret Thatcher than a movie involving aliens attacking the Earth (will they never cease?!), I suffered one of the greatest cinematic disappointments of my life.
The Iron Lady taught me three things:
A) It’s more important to focus on a person’s dementia and hallucinations than their humanity and life’s accomplishments;
B) The best way to show accomplishments is through really long montages of police riots and quick scene changes portraying important decisions and huge world events (the Berlin Wall coming down, for instance, got about 5-10 seconds); and
C) Conservatism is pretty heartless, but on principle.
Principle is a beautiful thing, a foundation by which people cannot be swayed or bought. Principle should not and cannot be confused with politics. When Thatcher argued for hard work, making one’s own way and fiscal austerity, the movie showed how people rioted. But does that show fault in Thatcher’s principles? Or that people truly need to connect personal actions with the good of society?
Russell Kirk wrote in “Ten Conservative Principles” that the very first principle conservatism adheres to is that “there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent. This word order signifies harmony. There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul and the outer order of the commonwealth.” (emphasis mine)
Kirk lamented that
Our twentieth century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self-interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an old-fangled moral order.
It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society—whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society—no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be. For confirmation of the latter argument, we have merely to glance about us in the District of Columbia.
As a resident of a swing state and a woman, I’m particularly aware of how the political machine utilizes the rhetoric of principle. If Gov. Romney is elected, he will take away my ability to “choose” (satisfactorily vague and scary). If President Obama is re-elected, my birth control bill will be paid for (by my own tax dollars, of course).
But the arguments are all wrong.
The national discussion of birth control and abortion acutely shows the difference between politics and principles. In politics, people parade around wearing vagina costumes to make a statement about respecting women, ordering everyone to stay out of their bedroom, and then asking the State to provide birth control as part of their health care requirements. To respect them, they say, you must respect their right to not take responsibility for what happens to and within their body. You can disagree with them, but you cannot stop them from acting as they wish.
On principle their arguments are completely off-course. The portrayal of women is a diminishing one, for starters. A woman is a whole person and a whole human. She does not vote based because of her “lady parts.” Birth control is deplorable because it allows a man to want only parts of a woman (that is, her body) and not the rest. Pooh, pooh! on her soul. No thanks! to her fertility. It also rejects the whole man, although in much less obstinate ways. But it feels so good? Could that be a contributing factor to the dramatic rise in divorce in the 20th century? Sex, the ultimate union between two people, is life-giving. Anyone who uses a condom knows that. Furthermore, any one remotely devoted to a healthy life would certainly not put chemicals into their body without a proper diagnosis. Fertility, may I remind the dear readers, is not an illness. Birth control, on the other hand, can seriously harm a woman’s body.
To tie this issue back to the election (a few more days, people!), an argument has been made that people need to make sacrifices. Some of these sacrifices should be their own religious liberty; other sacrifices should be made monetarily. One sacrifice no one is asking Americans to make is to not have sex if you’re more willing to abort the baby than love it. Bear with me: when a person is looking to lose weight, no one only takes diet pills and forgoes the exercise or indulges on desserts. This is what birth control is: taking a “wonder drug” and engaging in any kind of activity. Sadly for some people, even birth control cannot protect from STDs, or unwanted pregancies, or broken hearts.
Women, you deserve so much more than that. Men, you too! No election changes that. No politician changes that. It is one reason why I am a conservative, and an imaginative one at that. I imagine a higher calling for men and women alike, one which acts and responds with love for all fellow humans.
Helen Avare, a law professor at George Mason University, started Women Speak For Themselves, an organization created in protest of the HHS mandate in respect to women and religious liberty. In an e-mail she sent out on November 2, she wrote:
The amount of ink spilled over the last year suggesting that “relationship-free-sex” (i.e. no baby AND no commitment), makes women free, is alarming. I will state frankly that I don’t believe this to be in women’s interests at all. Of course, some women are made for the single life, and beautifully live out the meaning of their lives, and live as gifts to others, in that particular vocation. Most women, however, wish to marry and to have children, and it is this vocation which is being called into question most virulently at the present time.
Today, according to numerous, well-done studies, privileged women mostly get their wish, and less-privileged women do not. Poorer and minority and newly emigrated Americans marry less, cohabit more, divorce more, and have more nonmarital pregnancies, nonmarital births, and abortions, than do their more privileged sisters.
I think, in short, that the version of women’s “freedom” promoted by this year’s HHS mandate is really, really harmful to our most vulnerable sisters. And I think our resistance to it–and our efforts to turn the tide–have all the hallmarks of a new civil rights movement: the right to a healthy relationship and marriage and parenting culture, for ALL, not just for the privileged.
The Guiding Star Project, a non-profit dedicated to promoting the Culture of Life through holistic health centers, posted on their Facebook wall:
We believe that many of the “Second Wave” feminists truly thought they were helping women by promoting universal birth control use and abortion on demand. They thought those things would help women understand her other gifts, besides motherhood. Instead they ultimately changed the societal expectation that women would not let motherhood get in the way of anything else. That motherhood was a second-best option to “real successes”. That their fertility and motherhood held them back. We know better and insist that we change society to meet the needs of women; of mothers. Because we will never settle for the idea that our fertility, our pregnancies, our breastfeeding, our children make us capable of anything less than amazing.
Respect is a two-way street, and the government’s ability to worm its way into every aspect of human life is a prime example that it does not respect any decisions of its citizens. The latest Obama ad targets women by comparing voting for the first time to losing one’s virginity. As vlogger TokenLibertarianGirl pointed out, that is creepy and rages its own war on women by presumption.
Women, like men, are more than sexual objects to be used and gratified. As Margaret Thatcher shows us, women can be mothers and wives as well as successful. There is no limit to what a woman can achieve, especially in America. To suggest that women must forgo meaningful relationships, marriage and children (as well as put themselves at risk for further health problems and mental distress), in order to have a meaningful life speaks more loudly that the system needs to be adjusted for women, not women for the system. No one is asking men to do that, and they have equal responsibility for every child they create and care for.
The real contest between principles is between the short and the long-term views. The conservative is concerned with the short and long–the health of the person (and as such, their soul) is integral to our country. If we as conservatives do not live what we value, then our words are empty. We need to revive the culture through the joy of being human, the honor of worshiping God, the freedom which comes through an obedience to his laws, and the wisdom of knowing our life is not more valuable than another’s. This election is short-term. Whoever wins will not affect my own principles, even if he may violate them. This whole silly season reminds me distinctly of a Margaret Thatcher quip in her autobiography, The Downing Street Years:
Consensus: The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus’?
Friends, let us stand for more! Here’s to your soul and mine; let’s put some heart and love back into these principles of ours, and our commonwealth might just profit.
Books mentioned in this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.NVIDIA Provides Physics Technology For PLAYSTATION®3
Bryan Del Rizzo
NVIDIA Corporation
(408) 486-2772
[email protected]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
SANTA CLARA, CA—MARCH 17, 2009—NVIDIA Corporation today announced that it has signed a tools and middleware license agreement for PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) with Sony Computer Entertainment Inc (SCEI). As a result, the binary version of the NVIDIA® PhysX® technology software development kit (SDK) is now available to registered PS3 developers for free download and use on the SCEI Developer Network.
The NVIDIA PhysX technology software development kit SDK consists of a full-featured API and robust physics engine, designed to give developers, animators, level designers, and artists unprecedented creative control over character and object physical interactions by allowing them to author and preview physics effects in real time. The continued adoption of NVIDIA PhysX technology by the world’s leading content developers is resulting in games that not only look as realistic as possible, but also provides gaming experiences where the world’s literally come to life: environments become highly interactive with effects such as persistent debris, including shattered glass and weapons ammunition, trees that bend in the wind, and water that flows with body and force.
“NVIDIA is proud to support PLAYSTATION 3 as an approved middleware provider,” said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA. “Games developed for the PLAYSTATION 3 using PhysX technology offer a more realistic and lifelike interaction between the games characters and other objects within the game. We look forward to the new games that will redefine reality for a new generation of gamers.”
The PhysX technology source code SDK for PS3 and all major gaming platforms are available for license directly from NVIDIA. For more information on licensing PhysX SDKs or NVIDIA PhysX technology, please visit: www.nvidia.com/physx.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce® products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro® products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit www.nvidia.com.
Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, features, impact, and capabilities of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, NVIDIA PhysX technology, and CUDA; the impact of physics on video games; the availability of NVIDIA PhysX technology for registered PLAYSTATION®3 developers worldwide; and the relationship between NVIDIA and SCEI; are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; adoption of the CPU for parallel processing; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended October 26, 2008. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
Copyright © 2009 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, PhysX, GeForce, Quadro, Tesla, and CUDA, are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other company and/or product names may be trade names, trademarks and/or registered trademarks of the respective owners with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.brian grover's
Crash Course in Khoomei
a collection of recordings from late 2003
that provide a very quick, yet complete,
course of instruction to get started
down the road to throat singing in the Tuvan style
This page contains the audio from the companion CD i give out to students taking my Introductory Throat Singing Class at The Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago
All i have posted at the moment is the tracks straight from the CD so many of them are just me talking. eventually, i'd like to transcribe all the text so one would only need to stream the audio examples
these are in the order that i've found usually works best when teaching a class. but they are also split up into very small chunks so that you can jump to any point you need to and also easily repeat any section you might need to at any time
you can feel free to download these files and burn them to disc or any other way you'd like to copy them as long as you are not charging anyone anything for any kind of copy
If you have any questions or comments you can find my contact info on the main khoomei page
back to the khoomei how-to page
back to the khoomei hub"Bangalore is so civilized, yaar," drawls an old schoolmate from Delhi.
Civilized? Try absurd and surreal, like a Woody Allen movie – and, sadly, not the one that involves sexy blondes. Remember the little speech the self-appointed El Presidente gives in Bananas?
l am your new president. From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now 16 years old.
Yes, well, life in Bangalore is a bit like that. And each day, the morning newspaper offers fresh reminders of our tragi-comic fate. While our very own Nero partakes of "refreshing" Ayurvedic baths, we natives hum the new Karnataka anthem: "Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right... Here I am, stuck in the traffic with you."
Staying sane can be difficult when the inmates are running the asylum. But when life hands you a rich harvest of political lemons, it's best to make nimbu pani i.e. a facetious list that mocks our sorry state. Here then are my top five reasons why namma Bengaluru ought to be renamed San Marcos:
Five, the party-pooping police. It's hard to top those lathi-charging Delhi havaldars in gratuitous violence, but no one can outdo our brave men in khaki when it comes to gratuitous policing of non-existent crimes.
There's the time the cops rushed into a hip and happening bar and stumbled onto a den of iniquity: "Plainclothes policemen entered City Bar around 10.15 pm. Two female customers sitting at a table broke out in an impromptu jig around the same time. The police caught on to that and stated that we were running an illegal discotheque."
Doing a jig can be hazardous in my fair city, as can throwing a party. Just last month, they gatecrashed a 24-year old's birthday celebration and charged everyone with prostitution. The boys were let go the next day after being re-charged for "causing a public nuisance" – a law that clearly doesn't apply to our policemen.
Four, voodoo politics. Where the rest of the country sticks to mixing religion with politics, we Bangaloreans like to take it up a notch. Forget temple tours and yoga shibirs, our guys much prefer voodoo doctors and animal sacrifice.
The last time Yeddyurappa was in trouble, our state parliament experienced an epidemic of "headless chickens, pierced eggs, animal blood, lemons, and chillies" – and no one batted an eye. As for the reported arrests of tribals selling jackal heads to BJP functionaries, yawn!
Three, the long road to nowhere. As all of us locals know, getting from A to B in Bangalore requires heading toward G, looping around E, and doubling back to C. The roads are mostly one-way, run at odd angles, and liable to be closed without notice or reason. And just to keep it interesting for outsiders, they are labelled solely in Kannada. This will no longer be a problem if the Karnataka Development Authority gets its way. It recently demanded legislation requiring all non-Kannadiga residents to learn the language t0 Class VIII proficiency — within a year.
Several weeks ago, Google came riding to our rescue with its Street View cars that planned to map our labyrinthine city. On Monday, those hopes were rudely dashed by the city police who grounded the Google fleet. Unnamed sources cite "restrictions on photography by foreigners or foreign firms in India," but the real reason is to keep us exactly where we are: stuck in traffic, contemplating Yeddyurappa's ubiquitous mug.
Continue reading on next page
Two, beautiful BIA. Cities are like children. When the other kid gets a bright, shiny new toy, we want one of our own. This is how we ended up with the Bangalore International Airport after years of anticipation and fanfare. Never mind that planes are often diverted to Chennai due to mysterious reasons, or that most flights still require you to board a bus, 20th century style. Who cares after you've spent more than an hour in traffic and Rs 1,000 in cab fare just getting there.
BIA has been one long exercise in administrative farce, including the new access toll booths, finally unveiled after months of construction and testing. All of which came to naught when taxi drivers went on a rampage on the very first day of collection. The fracas finally spurred our transport minister, R Ashoka, to write to the Centre "seeking a clarification as to why the booth was constructed without the state government’s permission."
In Bangalore, giant toll booths can hide in plain sight, clearly visible to all and sundry except our politicians.
One, our great leaders, of course! Let's ignore Karnataka's record of corruption which is now worse than – ohmigod – Bihar. In Indian politics, integrity is merely a matter of degree – some are a bit dirtier than others, but no one is really clean. We are, however, clearly number one in producing buffoons. Sure, Karunanidhi has 2G, Kalmadi can pull off CWG, but no one can beat the Yeddyurappa/ Kumaraswamy combo when it comes to just plain cray-zeee.
Their latest antic is the 26 June "truth test". Both leaders plan to take an oath in front of Lord Manjunath in Dharmasthala to settle the pressing question we all want answered: Did Yeddy secretly try to kiss and make up with Kumaraswamy? Neither plans to testify on less important matters such as Bellary mining deals or BDA land grabs.
Asked for his views on the matter, Governor Bhardwaj said, "They should settle issues in the Vidhan Soudha, within the framework of the political system. That is civilized democracy."
There's that word again. Civilized.
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.Japan's Fukushima power plant has served as a reminder that events thought unlikely can - and do - happen [EPA]
Eliminating nuclear weapons is the democratic wish of the world's people. Yet no nuclear-armed country currently appears to be preparing for a future without these terrifying devices. In fact, all are squandering billions of dollars on modernisation of their nuclear forces, making a mockery of United Nations disarmament pledges. If we allow this madness to continue, the eventual use of these instruments of terror seems all but inevitable.
The nuclear power crisis at Japan's Fukushima power plant has served as a dreadful reminder that events thought unlikely can and do happen. It has taken a tragedy of great proportions to prompt some leaders to act to avoid similar calamities at nuclear reactors elsewhere in the world. But it must not take another Hiroshima or Nagasaki - or an even greater disaster - before they finally wake up and recognise the urgent necessity of nuclear disarmament.
This week, the foreign ministers of five nuclear-armed countries - the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China - will meet in Paris to discuss progress in implementing the nuclear-disarmament commitments that they made at last year's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference. It will be a test of their resolve to transform the vision of a future free of nuclear arms into reality.
If they are serious about preventing the spread of these monstrous weapons - and averting their use - they will work energetically and expeditiously to eliminate them completely. One standard must apply to all countries: zero. Nuclear arms are wicked, regardless of who possesses them. The unspeakable human suffering that they inflict is the same whatever flag they may bear. So long as these weapons exist, the threat of their use - either by accident or through an act of sheer madness - will remain.
We must not tolerate a system of nuclear apartheid, in which it is considered legitimate for some states to possess nuclear arms but patently unacceptable for others to seek to acquire them. Such a double standard is no basis for peace and security in the world. The NPT is not a license for the five original nuclear powers to cling to these weapons indefinitely. The International Court of Justice has affirmed that they are legally obliged to negotiate in good faith for the complete elimination of their nuclear forces.
The New START agreement between the US and Russia, while a step in the right direction, will only skim the surface off the former Cold War foes' bloated nuclear arsenals - which account for 95 per cent of the global total. Furthermore, these and other countries' modernisation activities cannot be reconciled with their professed support for a world free of nuclear weapons.
It is deeply troubling that the US has allocated $185bn to augment its nuclear stockpile over the next decade, on top of the ordinary annual nuclear-weapons budget of more than $50bn. Just as unsettling is the Pentagon's push for the development of nuclear-armed drones - H-bombs deliverable by remote control.
Russia, too, has unveiled a massive nuclear-weapons modernisation plan, which includes the deployment of various new delivery systems. British politicians, meanwhile, are seeking to renew their navy's aging fleet of Trident submarines - at an estimated cost of £76bn ($121bn). In doing so, they are passing up an historic opportunity to take the lead on nuclear disarmament.
Every dollar invested in bolstering a country's nuclear arsenal is a diversion of resources from its schools, hospitals, and other social services, and a theft from the millions around the globe who go hungry or are denied access to basic medicines. Instead of investing in weapons of mass annihilation, governments must allocate resources towards meeting human needs.
The only obstacle we face in abolishing nuclear weapons is a lack of political will, which can - and must - be overcome. Two-thirds of UN member states have called for a nuclear-weapons convention similar to existing treaties banning other categories of particularly inhumane and indiscriminate weapons, from biological and chemical arms to anti-personnel land mines and cluster munitions. Such a treaty is feasible and must be urgently pursued.
It is true that nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented, but that does not mean that nuclear disarmament is an impossible dream. My own country, South Africa, gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s, realising it was better off without these weapons. Around the same time, the newly independent states of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine voluntarily relinquished their nuclear arms, and then joined the NPT. Other countries have abandoned nuclear-weapons programs, recognising that nothing good could possibly come from them. Global stockpiles have dropped from 68,000 warheads at the height of the Cold War to 20,000 today.
In time, every government will come to accept the basic inhumanity of threatening to obliterate entire cities with nuclear weapons. They will work to achieve a world in which such weapons are no more - where the rule of law, not the rule of force, reigns supreme, and cooperation is seen as the best guarantor of international peace. But such a world will be possible only if people everywhere rise up and challenge the nuclear madness.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and supporter of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING
Omnibus will offer new campaigns with new character models, weapons, sound and environments from Games Workshop´s Warhammer 40k universe.
Omnibus is not official and is no way endorsed by Games Workshop ltd. The mod is non-profit, has no intent of plagiarism and only wishes to create the modification for the public's enjoyment.
NOTE: These ideas may change during the progress of the modification.
Classes
The game is class-based, with players choosing from the roles of Space Marine Sergeant, Devastator Marine, Apothecary, and Tech Marine. Each class has two selectable characters with a difference in abilities, appearance such as wargear and voices so that you can easy part one player from another.
Weapons not mentioned to the specific class can be used by everyone.
Space Marine Sergeant (Officer)
Grants a passive bonus to damage and damage resistance to nearby allies. He has access to a class-restricted Bolt Pistol with a Chainsword/Powerfist and has general all-around abilities. They are also capable of throwing extra amounts of explosive ordnance, and may find class-restricted ammo caches on the field for his Bolt Pistol. The Sergeant will also be able to use the Thunder Hammer and Plasma Rifle.
Devastator Marine (Special Weapons)
Brings raw damage to the table and starts out with the Heavy Bolter with superior parameters, high magazine capacity, and auto aiming ability. When reaching a high enough level, the Devastator Marine gains access to the real deal, Heavy Bolter with the backpack ammo carrier. The Devastator Marine can pick up class-restricted ammo caches on the field and has acces to the class restricted Rocket Launcher and Plasma Cannon. His only weakness is that he needs to be stationary while firing his heavier weapons like the Plasma Cannon.
Apo
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wares: 3.01APT94 (latest one) Comments: Common router that ISP Telefónica used to give away to their ADSL customers from 2010 to 2013. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Unauthenticated Cross Site Scripting -------------------------- * Description: Unauthenticated Cross-site Scripting (XSS) allows an attacker to inject malicious code within the router configuration website by sending a DHCP Request PDU. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-04-15. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121224 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121224) * PoC: An external attacker is able to inject malicious code within the router website without requiring any login process. This is achieved by sending a DHCP Request PDU containing the malicious script within the hostname parameter. The malicious code will be stored into the hostname field within the Connected Clients list (/webconfig/status/dhcp_table.html). Once the victim views this list, the script is executed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- Universal Plug and Play --------------------------------- * Description: An unauthenticated attacker is able to modify the WPS configuration by using the supported Universal Plug and Play protocol. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-21. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-122388 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/122388) * PoC: The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is enabled by default on the device. This protocol has lots of weaknesses, such as the lack of an authentication process, which can be exploited by attackers. The device supports multiple UPnP actions, such as changing the WPS configuration or resetting the AP to default settings. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Sagem Model: Fast 1201 Tested firmwares: 3.01APT94 (latest one) Comments: - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Unauthenticated Cross Site Scripting -------------------------- * Description: Unauthenticated Cross-site Scripting (XSS) allows an attacker to inject malicious code within the router configuration website by sending a DHCP Request PDU. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-04-15. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121222 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121222) * PoC: An external attacker is able to inject malicious code within the router website without requiring any login process. This is achieved by sending a DHCP Request PDU containing the malicious script within the hostname parameter. The malicious code will be stored into the hostname field within the DHCP Leases list (dhcpinfo.html). Once the victim views this list, the script is executed. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Linksys Model: WRT54GL Tested firmwares: 4.30.16 build 6 Comments: - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Unauthenticated Cross Site Scripting -------------------------- * Description: Unauthenticated Cross-site Scripting (XSS) allows an attacker to inject malicious code within the router configuration website by sending a DHCP Request PDU. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-04-15. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121221 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121221) * PoC: An external attacker is able to inject malicious code within the router website without requiring any login process. This is achieved by sending a DHCP Request PDU containing the malicious script within the hostname parameter. The malicious code will be stored into the hostname field within the Connected Clients list (DHCPTable.asp). It can be accessed either directly through the URL or through the Status-> Local Network -> DHCP Clients Table subdirectories. Once the victim views this list, the script is executed. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Observa Telecom Model: RTA01N Tested firmwares: RTK_V2.2.13 Comments: Common router that Spanish ISP Telefónica used to give away to their ADSL/VDSL customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- Persistent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- * Description: Multiple Cross-site Scriptings (XSS) found into the configuration menu within the router front-web. These XSS give an attacker the opportunity to execute malicious scripts. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121787 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121787) and OSVDB-121788 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121788) * PoC: The threat is found inside some entry inputs that let special characters to be written in and show the added information into the web itself. I.e., Nombre del host (Hostname) input field within the subdirectory Servicio -> DDNS (Service -> DDNS or /ddns.htm) is vulnerable. There is another vulnerable input field within the Mantenimiento -> Contraseña (Maintenance -> Password or /userconfig.htm) subdirectory. After creating a user whose username contains the malicious script, it is stored into the User Accounts table and executes once the victim accesses this subdirectory. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- Cross Site Request Forgery ------------------------------- * Description: Every input field is vulnerable to Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121786 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121786) * PoC: I.e., if an attacker wants to change the DNS servers, he may use the following URL to do so once the victim opens the link: http://192.168.1.1/form2Dns.cgi?dnsMode="1"&dns1="37.252.96.88"&dns2="37.252.96.89"&dns3=""&submit.htm?dns.htm="Send"&save="Aplicar cambios" It is also possible for an attacker to change the default router administrator password by sending the victim this URL: http://192.168.1.1/form2userconfig.cgi? username="1234"&privilege=2&oldpass="1234"&newpass="newpass"&confpass="newpass"&modify="Modificar"&select="s0"&hiddenpass="1234"&submit.htm?userconfig.htm="Send" The URL above forces the administrator user (it is always going to be the user named 1234) to change his default password from 1234 to newpass. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------ Denial of Service ----------------------------------- * Description: An attacker is able to carry out an external Denial of Service attack * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. * PoC: It is possible for an attacker to carry out a Denial of Service attack through CSRF: http://192.168.1.1/form2Reboot.cgi?rebootMode=0&reboot= "Reiniciar"&submit.htm?reboot.htm="Send" If a victim opens this URL, router replies with HTTP 200 OK status code and reboots. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Unauthenticated Cross Site Scripting -------------------------- * Description: Unauthenticated Cross-site Scripting (XSS) allows an attacker to inject malicious code within the router configuration website by sending a DHCP Request PDU. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121789 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121789) * PoC: An external attacker is able to inject malicious code within the router website without requiring any login process. This is achieved by sending a DHCP Request PDU containing the malicious script within the hostname parameter. The malicious code will be stored within the DHCP Active Clients table (/dhcptbl.html). Once the victim views this list, the script is executed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------- Backdoor --------------------------------------- * Description: There is a second default administrator user who is hidden to the legitimate router owner. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121785 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121785) * PoC: In addition to the well-known 1234 administrator user, there is another one named admin, whose password is 7449airocon. This superuser remains hidden (it does only appear into the backup configuration XML file) and is able to modify any configuration settings either through the web interface or through telnet. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- Universal Plug and Play --------------------------------- * Description: An unauthenticated attacker is able to modify firewall rules, carry out a persistent denial of service and obtain the WLAN passwords, between other things, by using the supported Universal Plug and Play protocol. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-21. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-122386 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/122386) * PoC: The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is supported by the device. This protocol has lots of weaknesses, such as the lack of an authentication process, which can be exploited by attackers. The device supports multiple UPnP actions, such as changing the firewall rules (AddPortMapping) or the termination of any WAN connections (ForceTermination). These actions allow an attacker to carry out a persistent denial of service (router needs to be factory reset to work properly again) or open critical ports, even for remote hosts which are not into the LAN. It is also possible for an attacker to change the WPS configuration settings, reset the AP to the default ones and obtain critical information, such as WLAN passwords. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Observa Telecom Model: Home Station BHS-RTA Tested firmwares: v1.1.3 Comments: Common router that Spanish ISP Telefónica used to give away to their ADSL/VDSL customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Information Disclosure --------------------------------- * Description: Observa Telecom Home Station BHS-RTA web interface allows an external attacker to obtain critical information without login process. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121781 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121781), OSVDB-121782 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121782), OSVDB-121783 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121783) and OSVDB-121784 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121784) * PoC: Without requiring any login process, an external attacker is able to obtain critical information such as the WLAN password and settings, the Internet configuration, a list of connected clients, etc. By accessing the following URL, browser shows WLAN configuration, including the passwords: http://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/webproc?getpage=html/gui/APIS/returnWifiJSON.txt&var:page=returnWifiJSON.txt&_=1430086147101 By accessing the following URL, browser shows a list of connected clients, including their IP and MAC addresses: http://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/webproc?getpage=html/gui/APIS/returnDevicesJSON.txt&var:page=returnDevicesJSON.txt&_=1430086147101 By accessing the following URL, browser shows the Internet configuration parameters: http://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/webproc?getpage=html/gui/APIS/returnInternetJSON.txt&var:page=returnInternetJSON.txt&_=1430086980134 By accessing the following URL, browser shows whether the administrator password has been changed or is the default one. http://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/webproc?getpage=html/gui/APIS/returnPasswordJSON.txt&var:page=returnPasswordJSON.txt&_=1430086980134 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- Universal Plug and Play --------------------------------- * Description: An unauthenticated attacker is able to modify firewall rules and carry out a persistent denial of service by using the supported Universal Plug and Play protocol. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-21. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-122386 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/122386) * PoC: The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is supported by the device. This protocol has lots of weaknesses, such as the lack of an authentication process, which can be exploited by attackers. The device supports multiple UPnP actions, such as changing the firewall rules (AddPortMapping) or the termination of any WAN connections (ForceTermination). These actions allow an attacker to carry out a persistent denial of service (router needs to be factory reset to work properly again) or open critical ports, even for remote hosts which are not into the LAN. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Observa Telecom Model: VH4032N Tested firmwares: VH4032N_V0.2.35 Comments: Common router that ISP Vodafone used to give away to their customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- Persistent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- * Description: Some input fields within the router website are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks, allowing an attacker to execute malicious code. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121793 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121793) * PoC: The threat is found inside some entry inputs that let special characters to be written in and show the added information into the web itself. I.e, the SSID input field is vulnerable if the following code is written in: ‘; </script><script>alert(1)</script><script>// The malicious code will be executed throughout the whole web interface. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- Cross Site Request Forgery ------------------------------- * Description: Every input field is vulnerable to Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121791 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121791) and OSVDB-121792 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121792) * PoC: Although the existence of a token related to session ID, configuration settings can be modified without the need of it. Thus, every input field is vulnerable to CSRF attacks. I.e., if an attacker wants to change the administrator password, he may use the following URL to do so once the victim opens the link: http://192.168.0.1/en_US/administration.cgi?usrPassword=newpass If an attacker wants to change the FTP server configuration settings, such as the password and the allowance of remote FTP WAN connections, he may use the following link: http://192.168.0.1/en_US/config_ftp.cgi?ftpEnabled=1&ftpUserName=vodafone&ftpPassword=vulnpass&ftpPort=21&ftpAclMode=2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------ Bypass Authentication using SMB Symlinks ------------------------ * Description: An external attacker, without requiring any login process, is able to download the whole router kernel filesystem, including all the configuration information and the user account information files, by creating symbolic links through the router Samba server. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121790 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121790) * PoC: An unauthenticated attacker is able to download the whole router filesystem by connecting to the Samba server. There is a shared service (called storage) in which it is possible to create symbolic links to the router filesystem and download the content. I.e., a symlink to / is possible and allows the attacker to freely view and download the entire filesystem. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- USB Device Bypass Authentication ---------------------------- * Description: An external attacker, without requiring any login process, is able to view, modify, delete and upload new files to the USB storage device connected to the router. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121794 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121794) * PoC: If a USB storage device is hooked up to the router, an external attacker is able to download, modify the content and upload new files, without requiring any login process. In order to do so, the attacker only needs to access the router IP followed by the 9000 port. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- Universal Plug and Play --------------------------------- * Description: An unauthenticated attacker is able to modify the WPS configuration by using the supported Universal Plug and Play protocol. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-21. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-122386 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/122386) * PoC: The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is enabled by default on the device. This protocol has lots of weaknesses, such as the lack of an authentication process, which can be exploited by attackers. The device supports multiple UPnP actions, such as changing the WPS configuration or resetting the AP to default settings. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Huawei Model: HG553 Tested firmwares: V100R001C03B043SP01 Comments: Common router that ISP Vodafone used to give away to their customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- USB Device Bypass Authentication ---------------------------- * Description: An external attacker, without requiring any login process, is able to view, modify, delete and upload new files to the USB storage device connected to the router. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121778 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121778) * PoC: If a USB storage device is hooked up to the router, an external attacker is able to download, modify the content and upload new files, without requiring any login process. In order to do so, the attacker only needs to access the router IP followed by the 9000 port. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Bypass Authentication ---------------------------------- * Description: An external attacker, without requiring any login process, is able to reset the router settings to default ones besides bringing a permanent denial of service attack on. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121779 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121779) * PoC: Without requiring any login process, an attacker is able to bring on a permanent denial of service by constantly accessing the /rebootinfo.cgi URL. The attacker is also able to force the router to reset to default configuration settings by accessing the /restoreinfo.cgi URL. After that, the attacker is able to log into the router by using the default credentials. In both attacks, router replies with HTTP 400 status code, but either the reboot or the configuration reset is being correctly executed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- Persistent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- * Description: Some input fields within the router website are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks, allowing an attacker to execute malicious code. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121776 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121776) * PoC: Despite the fact that most of the input fields do not allow special characters to be written in, there are still some of them in which a XSS can be performed. I.e., the SSID field within the WiFi->Básico (WiFi->Basic) subdirectory allows script code injection. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- Cross Site Request Forgery ------------------------------- * Description: Multiple Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities within the router website allow an external attacker to carry out actions such as changing the administrator password. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121775 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121775) * PoC: Every input field is vulnerable to Cross Site Request Forgery attacks. I.e., if an attacker wants to change the administrator password, he may use the following URL to do so once the victim opens the link: http://192.168.0.1/userpasswd.cgi?usrPassword=newpassword -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- Universal Plug and Play --------------------------------- * Description: An unauthenticated attacker is able to modify firewall rules and carry out a persistent denial of service by using the supported Universal Plug and Play protocol. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-21. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-122385 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/122385) * PoC: The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is enabled by default on the device. This protocol has lots of weaknesses, such as the lack of an authentication process, which can be exploited by attackers. The device supports multiple UPnP actions, such as changing the firewall rules (AddPortMapping) or the termination of any WAN connections (ForceTermination). These actions allow an attacker to carry out a persistent denial of service (router needs to be factory reset to work properly again) or open critical ports, even for remote hosts which are not into the LAN. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Huawei Model: HG556a Tested firmwares: V100R001C10B077 Comments: Common router that ISP Vodafone used to give away to their customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- USB Device Bypass Authentication ---------------------------- * Description: An external attacker, without requiring any login process, is able to view, modify, delete and upload new files to the USB storage device connected to the router. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121778 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121778) * PoC: If a USB storage device is hooked up to the router, an external attacker is able to download, modify the content and upload new files, without requiring any login process. In order to do so, the attacker only needs to access the router IP followed by the 9000 port. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Bypass Authentication ---------------------------------- * Description: An external attacker, without requiring any login process, is able to reset the router settings to default ones besides bringing a permanent denial of service attack on. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121779 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121779) * PoC: Without requiring any login process, an attacker is able to bring on a permanent denial of service by constantly accessing the /rebootinfo.cgi URL. The attacker is also able to force the router to reset to default configuration settings by accessing the /restoreinfo.cgi URL. After that, the attacker is able to log into the router by using the default credentials. In both attacks, router asks for username-password and returns HTTP 401 status code (unauthorized), but after multiple requests are sent, it replies with HTTP 400 status code and executes the action. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- Cross Site Request Forgery ------------------------------- * Description: Multiple Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities within the router website allow an external attacker to carry out actions such as changing the administrator password. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121775 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121775) * PoC: Every input field is vulnerable to Cross Site Request Forgery attacks. I.e., if an attacker wants to change the administrator password, he may use the following URL to do so once the victim opens the link: http://192.168.1.23/es_ES/expert/userpasswd.cgi?usrPassword=vodafone1&sSuccessPage=administration.htm&sErrorPage=administration.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- Persistent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- * Description: Some input fields within the router website are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks, allowing an attacker to execute malicious code. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121776 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121776) * PoC: Despite the fact that most of the input fields do not allow special characters to be written in, there are still some of them in which a XSS can be performed. I.e., the SSID field within the WiFi->Nombre (WiFi->Name) subdirectory allows script code injection. The script execution can be clearly seen within different subdirectories such as diagnostic.htm and config_wifi.htm. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Unauthenticated Cross Site Scripting -------------------------- * Description: Unauthenticated Cross-site Scripting (XSS) allows an attacker to inject malicious code within the router configuration website by sending a DHCP Request PDU. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121777 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121777) * PoC: An external attacker is able to inject malicious code within the router website without requiring any login process. This is achieved by sending a DHCP Request PDU containing the malicious script within the hostname parameter. The malicious code will be stored within the Dispositivos Conectados (Connected Devices) table. Once the victim views this list, the script is executed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- Universal Plug and Play --------------------------------- * Description: An unauthenticated attacker is able to modify firewall rules and carry out a persistent denial of service by using the supported Universal Plug and Play protocol. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-21. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-122385 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/122385) * PoC: The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is enabled by default on the device. This protocol has lots of weaknesses, such as the lack of an authentication process, which can be exploited by attackers. The device supports multiple UPnP actions, such as changing the firewall rules (AddPortMapping) or the termination of any WAN connections (ForceTermination). These actions allow an attacker to carry out a persistent denial of service (router needs to be factory reset to work properly again) or open critical ports, even for remote hosts which are not into the LAN. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Astoria Model: ARV7510 Tested firmwares: 00.03.41 Comments: Common router that ISP Vodafone used to give away to their customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- USB Device Bypass Authentication ---------------------------- * Description: An external attacker, without requiring any login process, is able to view, modify, delete and upload new files to the USB storage device connected to the router. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121773 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121773) * PoC: If a USB storage device is hooked up to the router, an external attacker is able to download, modify the content and upload new files, without requiring any login process. In order to do so, the attacker only needs to access the router IP followed by the 9000 port. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- Cross Site Request Forgery ------------------------------- * Description: Multiple Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities within the router website allow an external attacker to carry out actions such as changing the administrator password. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121774 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121774) and OSVDB-121888 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121888) * PoC: Every input field is vulnerable to Cross Site Request Forgery attacks. I.e., if an attacker wants to change the administrator password, he may use the following URL to do so once the victim opens the link: http://192.168.1.22/cgi-bin/setup_pass.cgi?pwdOld=vodafone&pwdNew=vodafone1&pwdCfm=vodafone1 ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Amper Model: ASL-26555 Tested firmwares: v2.0.0.37B_ES Comments: Common router that Spanish ISP Telefónica used to give away to their customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- Cross Site Request Forgery ------------------------------- * Description: Multiple Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities within the router website allow an external attacker to carry out actions such as changing the administrator password. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121770 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121770) and OSVDB-121771 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121771) * PoC: Besides the main web configuration interface (port 80), there is a much more advanced one on port 8000 in which every input field is vulnerable to CSRF. I.e., if an attacker wants to change the DNS servers, he may use the following URL to do so once the victim opens the link: http://192.168.1.21:8000/ADVANCED/ad_dns.xgi? &set/dproxy/enable=0&set/dns/mode=4&set/dns/server/primarydns=80.58.61.251&set/dns/server/secondarydns=80.58.61.251&CMT=0&EXE=DNS It is also possible for an attacker to change the default router administrator password by sending the victim this URL: (URL is omitted due to size reasons) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- Persistent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- * Description: Some input fields within the router website are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks, allowing an attacker to execute malicious code. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121772 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121772) * PoC: Despite the fact that most of the input fields do not allow special characters to be written in, there are still some of them in which a XSS can be performed. I.e., the SSID field within the Red Inalambrica->Nombre (Wireless Network->Name) subdirectory allows script code injection. The vulnerable input field is found into the basic web interface on port 80. The script execution can be clearly seen within the Advanced->WLAN Access Rules subdirectory, into the advanced web interface on port 8000. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Unauthenticated Cross Site Scripting -------------------------- * Description: Unauthenticated Cross-site Scripting (XSS) allows an attacker to inject malicious code within the router configuration website by sending a DHCP Request PDU. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121224 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121224) * PoC: An external attacker is able to inject malicious code within the router website without requiring any login process. This is achieved by sending a DHCP Request PDU containing the malicious script within the hostname parameter. The malicious code will be stored within the Connected Clients table (Setup->Local Network). Once the victim views this list, the script is executed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- Universal Plug and Play --------------------------------- * Description: An unauthenticated attacker is able to modify firewall rules and carry out a persistent denial of service by using the supported Universal Plug and Play protocol. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-21. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-122388 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/122388) * PoC: The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is supported by the device. This protocol has lots of weaknesses, such as the lack of an authentication process, which can be exploited by attackers. The device supports multiple UPnP actions, such as changing the firewall rules (AddPortMapping) or the termination of any WAN connections (ForceTermination). These actions allow an attacker to carry out a persistent denial of service (router needs to be factory reset to work properly again) or open critical ports, even for remote hosts which are not into the LAN. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Comtrend Model: AR-5387un Tested firmwares: A731-410JAZ-C04_R02 Comments: Common router that ISP Jazztel used to give away to their customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- Persistent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- * Description: Some input fields within the router website are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks, allowing an attacker to execute malicious code. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121218 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121218) * PoC: Despite the fact that most of the input fields do not allow special characters to be written in, there are still some of them in which a XSS can be performed. I.e., the SSID field within the Wireless->Basic subdirectory allows script code injection. The script execution can be clearly seen within Wireless->Security and Wireless->MAC Filter subdirectories. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Unauthenticated Cross Site Scripting -------------------------- * Description: Unauthenticated Cross-site Scripting (XSS) allows an attacker to inject malicious code within the router configuration website by sending a DHCP Request PDU. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121215 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121215) * PoC: An external attacker is able to inject malicious code within the router website without requiring any login process. This is achieved by sending a DHCP Request PDU containing the malicious script within the hostname parameter. The malicious code will be stored within the DHCP Leases table (Device Info -> DHCP). Once the victim views this list, the script is executed. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Netgear Model: CG3100D Tested firmwares: v1.05.05 Comments: Common router that ISP ONO used to give away to their customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- Cross Site Request Forgery ------------------------------- * Description: Multiple Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities within the router website allow an external attacker to carry out actions such as changing the administrator password. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121795 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121795) * PoC: Every input field is vulnerable to CSRF. An attacker may code a malicious website which triggers a POST request to the victim’s router. When a website with that code is accessed, the POST request is sent and the attack is done. It is also possible for an attacker to reset the victim’s router to default settings by using custom source code. (Source codes have been omitted due to size reasons). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- Persistent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- * Description: Some input fields within the router website are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks, allowing an attacker to execute malicious code. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121780 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121780) * PoC: Despite the fact that most of the input fields do not allow special characters to be written in, there are still some of them in which a XSS can be performed. I.e., the SSID field within the Red Inalambrica->Nombre (Wireless Network->Name) subdirectory allows script code injection. The script execution can be clearly seen within different subdirectories such as Básico->Inicio (Basic->Home), Avanzado->Inicio (Advanced->Home) and Avanzado->Estado del router (Advanced->Router status). ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Comtrend Model: VG-8050 Tested firmwares: SB01-S412TLF-C07_R03 Comments: Common router that Spanish ISP Telefonica used to give away to their customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- Persistent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- * Description: Some input fields within the router website are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks, allowing an attacker to execute malicious code. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121218 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121218) * PoC: Despite the fact that most of the input fields do not allow special characters to be written in, there are still some of them in which a XSS can be performed. I.e., the SSID field within the Wireless->Basic subdirectory allows script code injection. The script execution can be clearly seen within Wireless->Security and Wireless->MAC Filter subdirectories. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Unauthenticated Cross Site Scripting -------------------------- * Description: Unauthenticated Cross-site Scripting (XSS) allows an attacker to inject malicious code within the router configuration website by sending a DHCP Request PDU. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121215 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121215) * PoC: An external attacker is able to inject malicious code within the router website without requiring any login process. This is achieved by sending a DHCP Request PDU containing the malicious script within the hostname parameter. The malicious code will be stored within the DHCP Leases table (Device Info -> DHCP). Once the victim views this list, the script is executed. ============================================================================================ ============================================================================================ Manufacturer: Zyxel Model: P 660HW-B1A Tested firmwares: 3.10L.02 Comments: Common router that Spanish ISP Telefonica used to give away to their customers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- Persistent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- * Description: Some input fields within the router website are vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks, allowing an attacker to execute malicious code. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-07. Waiting for assignation. OSVDB-121796 (http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/121796) * PoC: Despite the fact that most of the input fields do not allow special characters to be written in, there are still some of them in which a XSS can be performed. I.e., the Hostname field within the Dynamic DNS subdirectory allows script code injection. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- Cross Site Request Forgery ------------------------------- * Description: Multiple Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities within the router website allow an external attacker to carry out actions such as changing the administrator password. * Report status: Reported to MITRE on 2015-05-
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left the Netherlands to fight in Syria. In neighbouring Belgium, the number is even higher. Family members and researchers point to the Belgian group Shariah4Belgium as part of the explanation.
Øyvind Strømmen
Almere is the youngest city in the Netherlands; its first house was built in the mid-1970s. Formerly a patch of water in the Zuidersee, it is now one of the most populous municipalities in the Netherlands and an example of how the Dutch have reclaimed the sea. Almere is a modern place and – to quote the municipality’s official website – a place “where innovations can thrive, which is essentially what the new town character of Almere is all about”.
Until a couple of years back it was also the home of a man referred to only as Khalid K. in the Dutch press. Khalid, now 37, lived for about 10 years in the Netherlands. According to the leading newspaper Volkskrant, he was deemed unfit for work and received medication to treat schizophrenia and claustrophobia. The journalist Harald Doornbos reports on his blog that Khalid K. was arrested in 2011 on suspicion of having connections to terrorism. The case against him was soon dismissed due to a lack of evidence.
By all appearances Khalid K. then went to Syria, originally fighting with the al Qaeda-linked group Jabhat al-Nusra. Now, he allegedly fights with the rival jihadist group ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham). Recently the image above was released on the Internet, showing Khalid K. posing with the heads of five decapitated victims, said to be fighters belonging to his former allies in Jabhat al-Nusra. It is notoriously difficult to evaluate the authenticity of such imagery, Khalid K.’s texts on the Internet leave little doubt that he seeks to portray himself as a dedicated jihadist, and there are strong indications that this is the very same man arrested in the Netherlands in 2011.
Thus, Khalid K. has become a symbol not only of the cruelty of the Syrian civil war, or of the crimes of jihadist groups, but also of the several hundred – possibly several thousand – jihadists who have travelled from European countries to fight against Assad’s regime in favour of a religiously rigid, authoritarian, politicized and revolutionary form of Islam, Salafi jihadism. That said, he might not be a very typical example.
100 “polderjihadisten”
An estimated 100 jihadists have left the Netherlands alone, according to a February 2014 report by the Dutch national coordinator for anti-terrorism and security. Around of 70 of these “polderjihadisten” are still in Syria, while at least 11 of them have been killed in Syria and about 20 have returned to the Netherlands. In addition, young fighters with a Dutch background are also believed to be taking part in armed groups in Egypt, Yemen, Somalia and the Afghan-Pakistani border areas.
Many of those who head to Syria are in their early 20s, some are still teenagers. Amongst them are also several that are under 18; the police have reported nine such cases in the The Hague region alone.
Many have a Moroccan background, some belong to other Muslim diaspora groups, and still others are Dutch converts.
A man in the third category, one who remains in Syria, is Zakariya al-Hollandi, formerly Victor Droste, an alleged volunteer in Jabhat al-Nusra. He grew up in the village of Heeten, a municipality of about 4,500 people in the Overijssel province. It is a rather typical Dutch village, with a small stone church built in the late 19th century, a spacious market square which also serves as a parking lot, a few shops, pubs and cafeterias. Droste grew up a couple of hundred metres from the village square, the Dorpsplein, his father working for the municipality, his mother within health care. It seems an unlikely place for a jihadist to grow up.
In late January, the journalist Nikki Sterkenburg looked back at Droste’s road to jihadism in the weekly Elsevier. It is a disturbing tale of a reserved youngster who lived at home and worked as a postman, a boy who liked to party, but who struggled with his own identity, with finding purpose. In 2010, he converted to Islam. The following year – while trying to learn more about his adapted religion via the Internet – he became interested in the British Salafist movement Islam4UK, led by Anjem Choudary and proscribed under Britain’s counter-terrorism laws in January that year. Soon, Droste also got in touch with Islam4UK’s Dutch counterpart, Shariah4Holland. When they arranged a conference visited by the renowned Choudary, Droste was in the audience. He introduced himself as Zakariya al-Hollandi.
During the conference the young Dutchman was invited to join a radical group in The Hague, which he did. There he followed lectures and listened to recorded speeches by the militant Islamist leader Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American al Qaeda ideologist who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in late September 2011, and who has been described as “the bin Laden of the Internet”.
Around Christmas, after a row with his parents, he left home, staying with friends and sometimes sleeping in mosques. Then he left for Syria.
The Arnhem jihadists
About 60 km southwest of Heeten – near the German border – is the industrial city of Arnhem. Internationally, it is probably best known for the Battle of Arnhem, which took place in September 1944, when the Allies met strong German resistance in their move northwards from Belgium.
Amongst medium-sized Dutch cities, Arnhem has one of the highest proportions of immigrants, with considerable Turkish and Moroccan communities. At least 10 young men from Arnhem have left for Syria. These include Marouane B. and Robbin van D. from the Malburgen district, two best friends whose story the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad has looked into. Marouane is of Moroccan background while Robbin is “autochtoon”, or ethnically Dutch. For years, their hobby was rapping. In 2011, Marouane B. posted a video on YouTube, rapping about Malburgen, about girls, about sex.
It was only last year that they both became active Muslims. Their rap lyrics changed, too. In July, they took part in a video released by the group “Team Liefde”, or the Love Team. It is a cheerful, enjoyable song about Ramadan, “the month of love and togetherness”, ending with the rappers walking down a street draped in their various national flags. The video wraps up with Robbin onscreen, a Dutch flag over his shoulders.
According to NRC Handelsblad, the two youngsters took Arabic lessons arranged by the local association Omar Al Khattab, run by Anoire Rharsisse, who told the newspaper he finds it “abnormal” to travel to another country to fight “just like that”. The newspaper found that his Facebook profile, under another name – Aboe Nusaybah – tells quite a different tale. It says there that jihad fighters are necessary everywhere “from America to China”, as Muslims are physically and spiritually persecuted all over the world.
The two young men began spending time watching videos and photographs from Syria, including images of victims of the gruesome gas attack against the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus in August last year and videos showing distraught children talking about their murdered families. An older friend of theirs, Nadeem, had already left for the country. Another friend, Hakim, tried to follow, but was stopped by German police. Marouane and Robbin delved into books and Internet sites on holy war. Amongst the books they read was one written by Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi – a prominent Salafi jihadist writer often considered the spiritual mentor of the late Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The websites they visited included the Dutch-language site “De Ware Religie” (The True Religion), a Salafist-oriented site with close contacts to Syrian civil war volunteers from the Netherlands. On the Internet they also found lectures given by Fouad Belkacem, the leader of Shariah4Belgium, another group related to Anjem Choudary’s Islam4Uk.
Eventually Marouane and Robbin became convinced that they would be weaklings if they remained in the Netherlands instead of helping their fellow Muslims in Syria. They became increasingly strict in their religious lives and read increasingly extreme literature, such as speeches by Anwar al-Awliki and a book by Abdullah Azzam, as Palestinian Islamic scholar who organized Arab volunteers in the Afghan mujahedeen war against the Soviets and who also taught and mentored Osama bin Laden.
In less than a year, the two embraced jihadist ideology. In November, they left for Syria, travelling first to Turkey. Shortly before leaving Robbin posted new rap lyrics on Facebook. As translated to English: “Are we rather in the clubs, dancing like a ballerina? We commit so much zina (i.e sexual intercourse outside of marriage), but do not care about Palestine. […] So much pride in the Dutch flag, the Turkish or Moroccan, but who dares to carry the flag of Islam?”
From Syria, Marouane sent a picture of himself to friends in Arnhem. He held an AK-47 Kalashnikov in his hands and encouraged his friends to come. Robbin van D. has recently returned from Syria, after four months in Aleppo, fleeing from the infighting between jihadist groups. He has been interviewed by the police, and has been offered psychological help from the municipality. Thus far, he has not spoken to the press.
The “pyjamahideen”
To a certain degree, the story of Marouane and Robbin is a story about what has been called “jihobbyism” or the “pyjamahideen”.
The former term was introduced by the researcher Jarret Brachman in his 2008 book Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice, where he describes “enthusiasts of the global Jihadist ideology […] who emerge without direct assistance, training or support from any official al-Qaeda element”:
Some call them “self-starters”, others refer to them as practitioners of “home-grown terrorism.” Crucially, they come to the movement of their own volition. They may be guided by teachers, friends, mentors, or religious figures, but they largely drive their own radicalization.
However, it is also a story about the end of jihobbyism. While many limit themselves to flirting with al Qaeda symbolism and extreme ideology – as others flirt with Nazi imagery – a considerable number of young Europeans have left for Syria to become real jihadists. In the self-driven radicalization process the Internet often plays a central role.
From the Fields of Flanders
Another case in point seems to be that of Brian De Mulder, also known as Abu Qasem Brazili, one the Belgian jihadist fighters who has received the most attention. De Mulder is a young man from Antwerp, the second-most populous city in the country and the largest city in the Dutch-speaking region, Flanders.
His story seems familiar by now. A few years back he dreamed of becoming a professional footballer – he was a talented attacker, and sought a career within the sport. At 17, however, he was dropped from the roster of his local club, which was strapped for cash. Shortly thereafter he started playing indoor football with a group of teenagers of Moroccan background.
The Belgian-Brazilian was raised a Catholic but took interest in the religion of his friends, and converted to Islam. With the zeal of a convert, he soon started complaining about other Muslims, telling them that they were not pious enough. In mid-2011 he began snubbing non-Muslim friends. At the same time, he was introduced to street sermons held by the previously mentioned Fouad Belkacem of Shariah4Belgium. In an interview with TIME Magazine, an aunt, Ingrid De Mulder, claims that Belkacem indoctrinated Brian, turning him from a normal teenager with “a golden heart” to “a programmed robot”. However, De Mulder was also active on the Internet. In a comment posted under a YouTube video, he wrote:
God has created us, thus He knows what is best for us. He has given [us] a user manual, […] sometimes a technician is necessary, [someone who] explains the user manual in a clearer way, to understand how it needs to be followed. These are the prophets, and the user manual is the Quran […]. If you buy a TV or a cabinet or whatever, you will receive a user manual, which says what you should do […]. It is logical to follow the user manual, because the creator knows his product better than you. He has created. If you do not follow the user manual, you risk breaking stuff or assembling it wrongly; it is the same way with humans.
There is more to the story. In early January, De Mulder was convicted – in absentia – of drug dealing. In the summer of 2012, De Mulder and another young man had been caught by the police selling cocaine to a customer. A half year later, in mid-January 2013, he left his family, telling his younger sister: “I love you, but you will never meet me again.” A few days later he took a flight from Düsseldorf to Istanbul, then travelled on to Syria.
He is not the only Belgian jihadist with a seemingly unlikely background. Another is 18-year old Jejoen Bontinck. Bontinck was raised Catholic, living with his Belgian father and Nigerian mother in Antwerp. In interviews his father Dimitri – like De Mulder’s aunt – points the finger at Shariah4Belgium. In an interview with Nieuwsblad, Dimitri Botinck says his son was brainwashed by the organization, and specifically by Fouad Belkacem. The son eventually left Belgium, claiming that he was going to study in Cairo but actually going to Syria. His father followed to Syria, trying to find him.
Bontinck returned from Syria last fall, and vehemently denied having taken part in fighting, in spite of tips that he had been involved with ISIS. He was arrested on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist group. Later he apparently cooperated with security services, testifying against former comrades and saying he no longer supports ISIS. Late last year he was released. He subsequently received threats from Shariah4Belgium supporters.
Like the others mentioned above, De Mulder and Bontinck can be said to fit what TIME Magazine describes as “the classic type of fundamentalist convert: Vulnerable and impressionable teenagers or college-aged men who become disaffected, feel marginalized, experience discrimination or have difficulties assimilating into society”.
The central role of Belgium
According to HSI sources inside Syria, Belgium is a key country in the recruitment of European fighters to the Syrian civil war. The number of jihadist recruits from the country seem to underscore this. Official numbers indicate that around 200 Belgians have left for Syria, and about 20 have been killed in the civil war. The Belgian researcher Pieter Van Ostaeyen has made an even higher estimate on the basis of Belgian and Syrian media reports and social media postings. He believes that around 348 Belgian citizens or residents have left for Syria, and that at least 24 have been killed in the conflict. This could indicate that more than 15 per cent of the Europeans taking part in the civil war come from Belgium.
One Belgian-Algerian, known as Abu Baraa, has even been spoken of as the Emir of Saraqib in the Idlib province. HSI’s sources inside Syria say that he never actually held an official position, but that he was known as “The Godfather” of jihadists recruited from the West. Abu Baraa – who allegedly was involved in the kidnapping of Polish journalist Martin Suder last summer – was killed in mid-January.
“I believe Van Ostaeyen’s estimate is close to the reality,” Guy Van Vlierden, a journalist with the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws, told HSI. Van Vlierden has written about Belgian Islamist extremists for years, and has researched the scene extensively, also writing for his own English-language blog. He too highlights the central role of Shariah4Belgium.
“Amongst the 74 Belgians in Syria that Van Ostaeyen was able to fully identify, at least 29 had a identifiable past within Shariah4Belgium,” the journalist says. “I would estimate that the real number is considerably higher, and that about two thirds of all the radical Islamists going from Belgium to fight in Syria have at least been influenced by Shariah4Belgium, even if they have not been directly recruited by the organization.”
The largely Antwerp-based Shariah4Belgium has – officially – voluntarily disbanded. Its former leader, Belkacem, is now imprisoned. The triumvirate that assumed leadership after him consisted of Hicham Chaib, Noureddine Abouallal and Feisal Yamoun. Of these, only Chaib remains alive. Abouallal died last summer while fighting in Syria while Yamoun – considered a key force in recruiting Belgian jihadists – was killed there in early February.
“I have been following the extreme Islamist movement in Belgium since 9/11,” Van Vlierden says, referring to the 2001 attacks on the United States, “and I think I can conclude that the ‘traditional’ terrorist scene that exists or existed in our country is of little importance when it comes to the Syria volunteers. Every now and then you will see people with a past in organizations linked to al Qaeda, such as the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain and the entourage of Malika El-Aroud, the infamous Belgian widow of one of the assassins of Ahmed Shah Masoud in Afghanistan. However, the fighters in Syria are not recruited from these circles.”
Van Vlierden sees the Belgian Syria recruits as part of a more complex and dangerous phenomenon, and points out the central role of young, quickly radicalized newcomers to extremist networks.
“Shariah4Belgium has been crucial in this process,” he adds. “In the beginning, few outsiders, including the authorities, took them seriously enough. They were seen as a loud-mouthed, but rather innocent group. Before the authorities reacted, they had hundreds of young supporters. When the authorities did react, these youngsters were sufficiently radicalized to see this as an additional motivation. When preaching on the streets, disturbing lectures and similar activities were no longer possible, fighting in Syria became what they saw as even better way of getting involved.”
Van Vlierden believes that Belgian politicians have also played into the hands of extremist groups. “The ban against wearing a hijab in schools has been a fantastic propaganda tool for radical Islamists,” he says. “It has contributed to creating a small army of radical Muslim girls, which is part of the reason Shariah4Belgium has grown so large. It is not necessarily the girls that go to Syria, but in these extremist circles, women have often been radicalizing men, rather than the opposite.”
Victims and perpetrators
The story of many young Belgian jihadists is a tragedy, a tale of misled youth travelling to a war zone, fighting in a chaotic and bloody civil war. Some never return. Those who do return may pose a danger to their home country, or may suffer from post-traumatic stress and pose a danger to themselves and loved ones.
The Belgian researcher Montasser AlDe’emeh, who was born in Jordan to Palestinian parents, has looked into the difficult question of why so many young Belgians have gone to Syria. In an interview with Gazet van Antwerpen, he, too, points a finger at Shariah4Belgium, “Without them, there would never have been so many leaving,” he says. “The security services should have acted much sooner against this group.”
He believes many of the Belgian fighters, including Brian De Mulder, are victims of their own weakness but also of identity conflict: “These youngsters see themselves as victims of discrimination and racism. They struggle with their identity as Muslims and as Flemish, leading to many frustrations, and making them vulnerable for extremist talk.”
He says social media are another factor. “Almost all of them have a Facebook profile,” he says. “They publish photographs of themselves with a Kalashnikov. Youth here think that this is cool. They view it as a large adventure. They don’t understand that these Syria fighters are used as cannon fodder.”
The parents of Syria fighters have also spoken out, portraying their children as victims. In January, some of them demonstrated outside the European parliament in Brussels. Speaking to the French TV channel France 24, they said their children had been tricked or manipulated into going to Syria. One mother, Samira, told the French broadcaster that her daughter had travelled to Syria to join her husband who was fighting there. The husband, yet another Shariah4Belgium member, was killed just a couple of weeks later, but her daughter – Nora V., of mixed Belgian-Moroccan background – remains in the country, now under the nom de guerre Oum Khattab. A few weeks back she posted pictures on her Facebook page, showing herself fully veiled and bearing a Kalashnikov. More recently she explicitly stated that she belongs to ISIS and encouraged others to “grab [their] weapon and come to Sham”. According to journalist Guy Van Vlierden’s blog, two women from Antwerp immediately replied that they wanted to go to Syria but did not know how.
There is another, even darker side to the story of young Belgian jihadists. In the last few months, evidence has repeatedly surfaced to suggest that some of them have been involved in brutal atrocities. In a highly graphic video released last summer, a prisoner is shown being beheaded with a knife – with the perpetrators speaking Flemish.
(Front page illustration: (C) Shutterstock)Health warnings are being issued across Europe as temperatures reach potentially dangerous levels in many places.
The strongest heatwave of the summer is predicted in the coming week, with more than 40 degrees expected in some regions.
#Italy & southern Europe are experiencing a #heatwave with +40C maxes in places, but look at these observed overnight min temps! weatherpro pic.twitter.com/97oSDkGQQa — MeteoGroup UK (WeatherCast_UK) August 2, 2017
The risk of fires breaking out is also a major headache for emergency services, already stretched to the limit in places.
Authorities are urging particular care of the elderly, small children and people in a weak condition.
Drinking lots of fluids is crucial, as well as staying out of the sun, wearing light clothes and finding ways to stay cool.
At home, windows and shutters should be closed during the day and regular checks should be made on those unable to look after themselves.
Summer SCORCHER: Fears for holiday Brits set to roast in 42C Spanish heatwave https://t.co/3Zg7s7wJOWpic.twitter.com/BdmllVbvdY — Daily Star (@Daily_Star) August 2, 2017
While it is difficult to get exact figures, heatwaves are thought to be responsible for hundreds of deaths when they strike, especially among the elderly or those already suffering from illness.
The Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics reckons that on average 200 more Dutch people will die every week during a heat wave, a 10 percent rise in deaths.
A heatwave in 2003 is thought to have caused 70,000 additional deaths in France and other European countries.
And it’s not just Europe suffering from the heat; headlines on record temperatures are coming out of countries including the US, Canada and China
There’s a #heatwave in Seattle and only 1/3 of households have AC. If nights stay hot, it’ll be dangerous. https://t.co/UDxw8DCZRg — Eric Klinenberg (@EricKlinenberg) August 2, 2017For many smartphone and social media addicts, the idea of having a separate digital camera has pretty much gone out of the window as many smartphone have the capability to take amazing photographs. For lovers of Instagram, a camera is just another unnecessary gadget that can easily be replaced by the many photo editing apps they have downloaded to their phones and tablets.
But what about the serial bloggers and tweeters who want to shoot and upload pictures instantly but are not willing to compromise on image quality? In answer to this increasingly demanding question, the majority of manufacturers have developed their own high-resolution, Wi-Fi-enabled cameras, and here are 20 of the best.
Top Social Media Cameras
#20: Fujifilm X-M1
Resolution: 16.3 megapixels
ISO: up to 6400
Screen: 3.0-inch articulated touchscreen LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi
Special features: 1.5-inch thickness, 0.5 second start-up time, interchangeable lenses
Social media rating: 3/10
#19: Samsung WB250F
Resolution: 14 megapixels (CMOS)
ISO: up to 3200
Screen: 3.0-inch touchscreen LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, connect to mobile devices
Special features: 18x optical zoom, 2 second start-up time
Social media rating: 4/10
#18: Fujifilm FinePix Z900EXR
Resolution: 16 megapixels (BSI)
ISO: up to 12800
Screen: 3.0-inch LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, connect to mobile devices
Special features: 44x super-zoom, electronic viewfinder, download apps
Social media rating: 4/10
#17: Canon PowerShot ELPH 330 HS
Resolution: 12.2 megapixels
ISO: up to 6400
Screen: 3.0-inch LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, can share and comment on photos
Special features: 10x optical zoom, high sensitivity technology for low light shooting
Social media rating: 4/10
#16: Panasonic Lumix DMC-LF1
Resolution: 12.1 megapixels
ISO: up to 12800
Screen: 3.0-inch LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi and NFC, can connect wirelessly to DNLA Panasonic TVs
Special features: 7.1x optical zoom, electronic viewfinder
Social media rating: 5/10
#15: Nikon Coolpix S800c
Resolution: 16 megapixels
ISO: up to 320
Screen: 3.5-inch OLED touchscreen
Video: 1080p HD with slow motion recording
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, GPS
Special features: 10x optical zoom, 1.06-inch thickness, interface based on Android
Social media rating: 5/10
#14: Panasonic Lumix TZ40
Resolution: 18.1 megapixels
ISO: up to 3200
Screen: 3.0-inch touchscreen LCD
Video: 50p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi and NFC, can be remotely controlled via mobile device
Special features: 20x optical zoom, 10 frames per second in fast burst mode
Social media rating: 6/10
#13: Canon IXUS 255 HS
Resolution: 12.1 megapixels (CMOS)
ISO: up to 6400
Screen: 3.0-inch LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, GPS
Special features: 10x optical zoom, built-in editing tools, low light shooting
Social media rating: 6/10
#12: Samsung DV300F
Resolution: 16.1 megapixels
ISO: up to 3200
Screen: two LCD screens, one on each side
Video: 720p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, can be remotely controlled via smartphone
Special features: 5x optical zoom, animations played in child mode, creative filters
Social media rating: 6/10
#11: Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX78
Resolution: 12.1 megapixels
ISO: up to 1600
Screen: 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, connect to mobile devices
Special features: built-in editing apps, 3D shots can be viewed on 3D TV
Social media rating: 7/10
Resolution: 12 megapixels
ISO: up to 6400
Screen: 2.9-inch articulated touchscreen LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, Facebook button, can share and comment on photos
Special features: no shutter button, 4x digital zoom, 2.3 frames per second at full resolution
Social media rating: 7/10
#9: Olympus PEN Mini E-PM2
Resolution: 16 megapixels (CMOS)
ISO: up to 25600
Screen: 3.0-inch touchscreen LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, connect to mobile devices
Special features: Touch AF Shutter technology, simplified interface, 12 Creative Art filters
Social media rating: 7/10
#8: Samsung NX2000 DIL
Resolution: 20.3 megapixels
ISO: up to 25600
Screen: 3.7-inch touchscreen LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi and NFC, connect to Android and iOS mobile devices
Special features: 8 frames per second in burst mode, 6 Smart Filters
Social media rating: 7/10
#7: TheQ
Resolution: 5 megapixels
Screen: 2.7-inch LCD
Video: None
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, 3G capabilities, automatic uploads
Special features: waterproof, ring flash, built-in creative filters, built-in 2GB memory
Social media rating: 8/10
#6: Canon EOS 6D DSLR
Resolution: 20.2 megapixels (CMOS)
ISO: up to 25600
Screen: 3.0-inch high resolution LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi and GPS, connect to other cameras and wireless devices
Special features: 4.5 frames per second at full resolution, TIPA and EISA award winner
Social media rating: 8/10
#5: Samsung NX300
Resolution: 20.3 megapixels
ISO: up to 25600
Screen: 3.3-inch AMOLED tilt and touchscreen
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi and NFC, connect to Samsung devices, fire shutter remotely
Special features: 3D panoramas, i-Function lens
Social media rating: 8/10
#4: Samsung Galaxy Camera
Resolution: 16 megapixels (CMOS)
ISO: up to 3200
Screen: 4.8-inch touchscreen LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G support, download additional apps
Special features: 21x optical zoom, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, TIPA award winner
Social media rating: 9/10
#3: Panasonic Lumix DMC-G6
Resolution: 16.05 megapixels
ISO: up to 25600
Screen: 3.7-inch touchscreen LCD
Video: 24p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi and NFC, automatic sharing to mobile devices
Special features: OLED viewfinder, 19 filter effects
Social media rating: 9/10
#2: Sony NEX-5R
Resolution: 16.1 megapixels
ISO: up to 25600
Screen: 3.0-inch 180-degree swivel touchscreen LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, connect to and control with mobile devices, download apps
Special features: 4 built-in editing apps
Social media rating: 10/10
#1: Olympus Pen Lite E-PL5
Resolution: 16 megapixels (CMOS)
ISO: up to 25600
Screen: 3.0-inch 180-degree swivel touchscreen LCD
Video: 1080p HD
Internet capabilities: built-in Wi-Fi, connect to mobile devices
Special features: Touch AF Shutter Technology, 12 Creative Art filters
Social media rating: 10/10
Conclusion
The combination of high quality resolution and creative add-ons in the design of these cameras make them ideal for photographers who love social media. Their Wi-Fi capabilities and touch-screen LCDs have truly brought them up to date with current technology, making them a must-have item for any serious photo blogger.
With digital camera developments advancing at such a rapid rate, who knows what could be next for social media photography. Perhaps they’ll even start making cameras that have phones attached…By GR Gopinath
Even before the formation of AAP, when he was still with Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption, Arvind Kejriwal spewed venom at the Congress as well as all politicians, irrespective of their affiliation. He described politicians in the most contemptuous terms, using the choicest words of abuse.
Though many who supported his party blanched at his remarks, it went well with the masses. The greater the number of scams that were exposed at regular intervals, the more strident became his language and severe his criticism.
It was common knowledge in the inner circle of Hazare that Kejriwal was the hardliner in the team. He was tenacious, uncompromising and unforgiving in his demands while dealing with Congress mediators at the Centre. He was often seen by his more moderate colleagues as not open to debate and dialogue.
But they acquiesced — they probably overlooked or more likely were subsumed by the flame of idealism that burned through him. They may well have been swept away by his irrepressible zeal to take the political class head on and transform the nature of politics in India.
Brilliant Tactics
Once AAP took birth and Kejriwal parted ways with Anna, his virulent attack of Congress in particular and politicians in general intensified. In the run-up to elections in Delhi, it was probably necessary as a tactic to tap into the seething anger against the incumbent party.
Indeed, his attack touched a chord with the ‘aam aadmi’ and the youth. As we saw, it was a brilliant move. The sheer audacity of taking on the mightiest of the land — whether it was Congress president Sonia Gandhi or her coterie, or the big bosses of BJP and the feared Reliance Industries, he spared none — added credibility and gave impetus to the movement.
In all ages, people have looked up to a David who can take on an evil Goliath. Today, Kejriwal happens to be India’s David.
Kejriwal’s uncanny ability to take up issues that mattered most to the middle class and the masses — corruption, inflation and Jan Lokpal —paid rich dividends. In that context, AAP’s ascent in Delhi was a certainty. So far so good.
What Now?
Kejriwal is now Delhi’s chief minister. His party’s image and consequently his own has lost a little sheen because of what appears to be a sudden yielding to temptations of high office or lack of prudence and maturity in the way the whole episode was handled. Let’s look back at what happened. After the Delhi poll results, Kejriwal continued the assaults on BJP and Congress.
He categorically said AAP would neither lend nor take their support. His associates continued to shout from rooftops sanctimoniously and even a tad pompously that the Congress was a ‘pariah’ and BJP no better. Which may well be true in the present perception of the public.
But having sworn such sentiments of hatred toward the policies and venal character of the leaders of those parties, AAP should have stuck to its guns.None of the major networks has publicly committed to doing concurrent on-screen fact-checking during the debate. | AP Photo Networks reject on-screen fact checking during debate Despite Clinton's demand that Trump be held accountable, outlets say they aren't prepared to weigh in while candidates speak.
To fact check or not — that was the debate before the debate, one that pitted Hillary Clinton’s backers against Donald Trump supporters and even engaged some top journalists.
But as the hour of the debate drew closer, only the comparatively small Bloomberg TV network publicly said it would be doing any sort of on-screen fact checks during the debate, running them periodically as part of their headline scroll.
Story Continued Below
Despite the demands from the Clinton campaign for more media fact checks in the wake of Matt Lauer’s failure to correct Trump’s assertions at NBC’s commander-in-chief forum, none of the major networks has publicly committed to doing concurrent on-screen fact-checking during the debate, when the audience is highest.
That would leave the moderator, NBC News anchor Lester Holt, on his own in deciding whether to weigh in on the candidates’ claims — as both sides tried to publicly pressure him in the hours leading up to the debate.
Democrats including vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine called fact-checking crucial to the debate, while Republicans echoed Trump’s demand that Holt refrain from intervening the way that Candy Crowley did in the second 2012 debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, when she sought to correct Romney on his claim that Obama hadn’t characterized the Benghazi attacks as terrorism.
While on-screen fact-checking could help expose inaccurate or misleading assertions without interrupting the flow of the debate, nearly all of the major cable or broadcast networks, including Univision and Telemundo, said that they would not use any sort on screen fact check or graphics. Of the networks POLITICO surveyed, only Bloomberg TV confirmed that it will be doing on-screen fact checking during the debate.
Network spokespeople said the on-screen fact checks would need to be nearly instantaneous to correlate with the answer the candidate is giving, leading to some high editorial and technical hurdles. Only NBC, Holt’s home network, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Thus, the burden of keeping the candidates honest will likely come down to Holt, the only other person on the stage.
Debate moderators and questioners have been more frequent targets than usual during this election cycle, with the Republican National Committee even going so far as to pull planned debates with NBC-related networks because it didn’t like how CNBC handled an early primary-election debate.
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's strongest Western ally, Duterte has said he would rather go to Russia or to China, which is locked in a maritime dispute with the Philippines over the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea).
Both Vice President Leni Robredo and former foreign secretary Albert del Rosario have pointed out, however, that the Philippines does not have to reject its existing allies in order to gain new ones.
Duterte and other government officials have also given conflicting statements on US relations, such as on the issue of joint military exercises.
"Linawin natin 'yan. What is his pivot all about, even to Russia or China, kung saka-sakali?" Recto said.
(Let's clarify that. What is his pivot all about, even to Russia or China, if ever?)
"We're preparing a resolution to seek clarity from the executive, saan ba papunta ang foreign policy natin (where is our foreign policy heading)?" he added.
Senator Paolo Benigno Aquino IV earlier filed Resolution No. 158, saying there is a need for the government to clarify its "conflicting" statements on foreign policy. – Rappler.comWASHINGTON — Barack Obama claimed the presidency eight years ago in Chicago’s Grant Park, declaring “a new dawn” in American history and promising the enthusiastic crowd of a quarter-million people that “we as a people will get there.”
“Because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America,” the new president-elect vowed.
But as the nation prepares to choose President Obama’s successor on Tuesday, the bold agenda he described that morning remains incomplete. What Mr. Obama discovered — and what his successor will learn — is that every presidency lasts for only a brief moment in time.
Mr. Obama’s health care bill gave insurance to millions, but he now faces calls for big changes to it. The economy is markedly better, but incomes and growth remain stubbornly low. The immigration overhaul he wanted is tied up in legal limbo, as are his tough new climate rules. Fewer Americans are fighting in overseas wars, but the Islamic State has emerged as a new threat. Partisanship and racial tensions have intensified.CLOSE The recording, made by a fellow passenger aboard a Nov. 21 nonstop flight from Las Vegas to Reno, raises new questions about the politicization of the office held by Nevada’s top lawyer. James DeHaven, Brian Duggan, RGJ
Governor's office primary race heats up amid ethics questions
Buy Photo Dan Schwartz, State Treasurer and candidate for governor, speaks with the RGJ on Sept. 6, 2017. (Photo: Andy Barron/RGJ)Buy Photo
Nevada Treasurer Dan Schwartz says Attorney General Adam Laxalt should resign — either from his campaign for governor or his post as the state’s top law enforcement officer.
Schwartz, Laxalt’s primary election opponent, on Friday criticized the attorney general’s efforts to enlist state staffers in a politically charged press spat over a pardoned prisoner.
Those efforts — documented in an audio recording published last week by the Reno Gazette Journal — prompted Democrats to accuse Laxalt of mixing his partisan campaign priorities with his official duties.
Schwartz struck a similar note, telling the RGJ that he, as a fellow public official, would not have made the phone calls Laxalt can be heard making in the audio recording.
“There’s a real integrity question here, and it’s focused on (Laxalt’s) ability to separate his state office from his political ambitions,” Schwartz added. “I see this as a political issue where the attorney general can’t separate himself from his campaign.
“If you can’t do that, either resign as attorney general or drop out of the race.”
Buy Photo Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt testifies before the Legislature on May 17, 2017. (Photo: Jason Bean/RGJ)
Questions about the politicization of Laxalt’s office made headlines in November, when the Nevada Democratic Party filed a public records request to determine whether politics played a role in Laxalt’s decision to oppose pardoning a man wrongfully convicted of murder.
The attorney general’s office told the RGJ that media inquiries involving the state Democratic party are directed to Laxalt’s campaign team, as opposed to taxpayer-funded staffers. That’s not unusual, given Nevada’s prohibitions against politicking on the public dime.
But in the recording obtained by the RGJ, Laxalt, in a phone conversation, called on an office staffer named Monica to help beat back a news story about the Democrats’ records request hours before the Las Vegas Review-Journal first reported on the matter. Monica Moazez is the attorney general's office spokeswoman.
Laxalt suggested she tell another staffer named Caroline to contact a reporter and “fight this story as much as possible.” Caroline Bateman, a deputy attorney general, used to work in the Clark County District Attorney's office like the Caroline mentioned by Laxalt in the recording.
Moazez did not immediately returned requests for comment.
Laxalt's campaign looked to brush off Schwartz's remarks in a statement issued Friday.
"It's late on Friday afternoon," said campaign spokesman Andy Matthews. "Shouldn't Dan be back at his San Francisco weekend home by now?
"This is a laughable political stunt from someone who has been unable to gain traction after campaigning for months."
Read or Share this story: https://www.rgj.com/story/news/politics/2017/12/15/schwartz-calls-laxalt-step-down-citing-integrity-questions-raised-rgj-report/957394001/8th July 2016 – India was engulfed in the Bhai wave, as Salman Khan’s latest flick, sports drama ‘Sultan’ was ruling the box office. However, a better release was provided by the Indian Army. The devious brain behind many a terror attack on the Indians, especially the residents of Jammu and Kashmir, i.e. the commander of HIzbul Mujahideen in the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir, Burhan Wani, was shot down in an encounter by the joint forces of Indian Army, and the Jammu & Kashmir Police, along with two of his accomplices.
For a government, which was pestered day and night for not clamping down on terrorists by intellectual terrorists themselves, the NDA had scored a major victory. Burhan Wani was the mastermind behind more than a dozen attacks on the security establishments in Kashmir, in which one famed army man, Colonel Munindra Nath Rai, had lost his life too.
Cut to 10th July 2016. Burhan Wani is buried (rather undeservingly) in a grave. Thousands of people attend his funeral, and begin the famous stone pelting festival the Kashmir Valley is notorious for. Provoked by terrorists turned separatists like Aasiya Andrabi, Yasin Malik to name a few, they clashed with the army men and policeman, wreaking havoc in the Kashmir valley. What ensued was an imposition of curfew in the valley, the suspension of the Amarnath Yatra, and vicious attacks on the stranded pilgrims and the camps of Kashmiri Pandits. As per the report of DNA, some 35+ are dead, more than 3100 are injured, which includes some 1500-1600 defense personnel as well.
What was the media reaction? What else would be? Dominated largely by famed intellectual terrorists like Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagarika Ghosh etc., they allegedly ‘shed tears’ for their fallen ‘brother’, Burhan Wani. Rajdeep even went to the extent of comparing the coward, who was pleading for his life and whimpering when surrounded by the forces, to the Braveheart, Shaheed Bhagat Singh! None of them, for even once, focused on the defense casualties, which included a policeman who was thrown into a pond, with his vehicle. Why would they? In their eyes, victims can only be the separatists, and the stone pelters, apart from their alleged brethren, the terrorists. This reminds me of a famous quote by the American revolutionary, Malcolm X:-
‘If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are oppressing.’
Given how our media has reacted to this, with the likes of Arnab Goswami and Sudhir Chaudhary being the some of the exceptions, had Malcolm X been alive, he would have ruefully seen his quote being practiced in reality.
Now how does Ajit Doval fit into this picture? Nicknamed the ‘Superspy’, the famed National Security Advisor cancelled his personal research trips apparently when the situation in the Kashmir Valley worsened. Hon. PM Shri Narendra Modi, who had just returned from an African tour, decided to take the situation into his own hands, and called for a high profile meeting. Modi appealed to the Kashmir Valley to restore peace and order, asking the defense forces to exercise some basic restraint, along with the incumbent CM of Jammu & Kashmir, Ms Mehbooba Mufti, who has appealed to the defense force to avoid excessive use of force. But, if sources are to be believed, it’s not just what the eyes behold.
Ajit Doval, who is well known for his counter insurgency operations, including the abatement of terrorism in the Kashmir Valley itself, is as acquainted with this region as a native would be. For beginners, he is an esteemed Indian Police Service officer, who has previously worked with the echelons of the intelligence Bureau. He has also received the second highest peacetime gallantry award, the Kirti Chakra as well. He is extremely famous for his stint as an ISI agent in the Operation Blue Star, where he supplied vital information from the Khalistani side to the Indian forces, giving them a winning hand over the others. Besides, recently, he was successful in getting 46 Indian nurses freed from Tikrit in 2014, where they were kept hostage by the terrorists of the Islamic State. This way, he can rightly be called the ‘Chanakya’ of the espionage sector.
PM Modi, and his trusted aide Mr. Ajit Doval, in a way, have launched a rampage on the forces hell bent on destroying India, and in a way, the whole world. If I’m not wrong, the Indian Army has already launched an all-round assault in Jammu & Kashmir. The exact number of terrorists gunned down is still not available, but unnamed defense sources suggest it might more than 45, which is big. Keeping this in context, one can perceive why the Indian scion of intellectual terrorists is so apprehensive and terrified of the constant backlash from the security forces. For the first time, someone from the government actually had the balls to say, ‘We won’t fire the first bullet, but if we strike, we will not count of our bullets’
This is just the beginning. On the lines of the Israeli forces, the security forces, even though in restrained capacity, have started using rubber pellets on the protesters, who are just not ready to budge. Even though the media coverage is blowing the wind out of proportions, the reality is stark different. Yes, the rubber pellets might damage the eye vision, but only if you take it directly. But for the Indian media, it is like a holocaust, where the army is apparently destroying Kashmir. In their eyes, even if the stone pelters wreak havoc on army and Police, the Police and Army like true protectors, should not retaliate, which is macabre, to say the least. Malcolm X even said once in this context, ‘Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.’ The same applies for Indian Army as well. They are not the followers of the Gandhian cult, who will not raise arms even if driven to the wall. Deal with that.
In a world, where people are haunted by the brutal attacks in Dhaka and more recently, Nice, India is probably setting a precedent, on how to deal with terror the right way. Be it the intense activity of the Intelligence Bureau in smashing down the notorious sleeper cells of ISIS, or the all-round assault of the Indian Army in J& K, the country is on a right track. It seems that after the Pathankot attacks, Ajit Doval, the Superspy, is back in action.
With that, if everything goes right, India might join the rare group of terror busters, which none of the notorious terror groups and sleeper cells even dare of invading, like Israel and Russia. Whatever one might say, for the first time, the Indian government is right in its moves against the menace of terrorism, whether physical or intellectual. Ajit Doval, we are proud of you. Keep up the good work.
Sources:
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/kasmir-protests-hizbul-burhan-wani-death-mehbooba-mufti-pm-modi2910273/Minutes after learning that Sen. Bob Corker Robert (Bob) Phillips CorkerBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Sasse’s jabs at Trump spark talk of primary challenger RNC votes to give Trump 'undivided support' ahead of 2020 MORE (R-Tenn.) won’t seek reelection, Rep. Marsha Blackburn Marsha BlackburnTrump’s new Syria timetable raises concern among key anti-ISIS allies Dem lawmaker invites Parkland survivor to attend State of the Union Bipartisan senators press Trump for strategy to protect Syrian Kurds MORE (R-Tenn.) told The Hill on Tuesday she’s considering running for his Senate seat in 2018.
“Yes,” Blackburn said when asked if she's taking a look at the Senate race.
Blackburn said colleagues told her about Corker's retirement during votes on the House floor. The Senate Foreign Relations chairman did not give his delegation any advance notice of his decision, lawmakers said.
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“I know he's going to be missed,” Blackburn said of Corker, noting that the senator and former Chattanooga mayor has dedicated his life to public service.
Tennessee Republicans said Blackburn would be the favorite to replace Corker, especially since another veteran House lawmaker, Budget Committee Chairwoman Diane Black Diane Lynn BlackLamar Alexander's exit marks end of an era in evolving Tennessee Juan Williams: The GOP's worsening problem with women How to reform the federal electric vehicle tax credit MORE (R-Tenn.), has already announced she's running for governor next year.
In 2015, then-Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio) named Blackburn chairwoman of the special committee investigating whether Planned Parenthood was selling tissue from aborted fetuses.
Blackburn “is well known in Tennessee. She's been a strong conservative voice. And she's a thoughtful person who's always been supportive of the president,” said Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.). “I think she would be formidable.”
Blackburn also has $3 million in her campaign coffers.
Corker’s announcement came weeks after a public quarrel with President Trump. The senator openly criticized the president for his response to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that turned violent. That prompted a backlash from Trump allies who began talking about recruiting a GOP primary challenger against the senator.
Blackburn's name was floated but she said publicly that she wasn't interested and would run for reelection in the House instead.Activision has not yet said how many copies Destiny 2 has sold, but in the company's latest financial results briefing last night it revealed an eye-opening statistic:
A console game smashing the 50 per cent digital download ratio mark feels unique.
More than half of Destiny 2's console sales were digital downloads, compared to boxed copies.
It paints the physical sales story of Destiny 2 in a much-improved light.
Back in September, Destiny 2 launched with half the physical sales of Destiny 1 (175k, one leaked figure suggested, down from Destiny 1's 417k).
We noted the usual caveat that digital sales would equate for more of Destiny 2's overall sales total, as well as other qualifiers, too: Destiny 1 also launched for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, consoles with a huge install base. For Destiny 2, some players would likely be waiting for the recent PC version to arrive.
Still, Activision's announcement paints a far rosier picture of Destiny 2's performance. Doubling the leaked sales figure still does not quite match Destiny 1's numbers, but it places the game a lot closer, without factoring in PC at all.
The rough standard ratio of digital to physical copies sold for a console game currently lies - more or less - around the 30 per cent mark. There are differences for certain types of game, but it's a fact we keep in mind when reporting the UK chart every week (which only counts physical copies sold).
Every year, the ratio shifts - digital sales are growing in popularity - which is something we keep in mind when comparing a series' latest entry to previous installments.
Activision's other metrics for the game, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, were also positive:
"Destiny 2 is off to a strong start," Activision exec Eric Hirshberg said, "and after the PC launch is now ahead of Destiny 1 on total consumer spend, on time spent per player, attach rate to the expansion packs and average revenue per user."
The game's greater-than-50-per-cent digital download ration was also described as "a new high watermark" for the company.
"We mentioned last year that our historical digital mix was about 20 to 25 per cent for Call of Duty and more in the 30 to 40 per cent range for Destiny and Overwatch on console," fellow Activision boss Spencer Neumann continued, adding more colour. "Historically, we've been seeing that digital mix increase at about five points a year. With Destiny 2 digital at over 50 per cent console sell-through so far, we believe we're seeing some acceleration in that digital shift."
Call of Duty's download-to-boxed sales ratio will be lower due its mass market appeal, Neumann concluded:
"When you look at a franchise like Call of Duty, there's different dynamics there. So it's not like-for-like. Call of Duty, as you know, is a more mass-market game and the more mass you get, the higher the retail [physical copy] share. So while we're seeing higher digital preorders as well on World War 2 relative to any prior Call of Duty title, that digital mix is still well below what we're seeing for Destiny 2."Norwich City transfer rumours 2017: Martin Olsson ‘£5m fee agreed’ for move to Premier League strugglers Swansea as Paul Clement’s first signing
Martin Olsson has left Norwich City for Swansea City. Picture by Paul Chesterton/Focus Images ©Focus Images Limited www.focus-images.co.uk +447814 482222
Norwich City have reportedly agreed a £5m fee with Premier League strugglers for left-back Martin Olsson.
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That is according to Telegraph journalist John Percy, who broke the news on Twitter this lunchtime – with The Mirror also reporting the Swans were closing in on signing the Canaries’ Sweden international.
Olsson signed a new one and a half-year deal with City, which was announced in November.
However, the left-back came close to joining Swansea two years ago and it seems that interest has been rekindled this window, with new Swans boss Paul Clement eager to make his first signing.
Swansea are under serious threat of being relegated from the top flight, and want the 28-year-old to step following the loss of form from Neil Taylor – who also broke his cheekbone in training this morning.
It’s been an afternoon of speculation for the Canaries, with three big names linked with possible January exits and Barnsley striker Sam Winnall a reported target this month.
With fellow left-sided defensive cover Robbie Brady being heavily tipped for a move away from Carrow Road and a £12m price tag slapped on his head, it’s hard to imagine City boss Alex Neil being able to afford the departure of both players this window – certainly without bringing in replacements.
Brady serves the final game of his three-match ban on Saturday, when City head to the Championship’s bottom club, Rotherham United.
Brady was sent off in the goalless draw at Brentford on New Year’s Eve, with the Canaries’ subsequent appeal to the FA failing to overturn the decision.
Olsson played the full 90 minutes of City’s FA Cup third round draw at home to Southampton at the weekend.
• Follow the PinkUn on Facebook
• Follow Michael Bailey on Twitter @michaeljbailey and Facebook @mbjournoInjustice: Gods Among Us and Injustice 2 are old news by this point. Even for the latter game, the DLC well has dried up and we're simply waiting for NetherRealm Studios' next Mortal Kombat game to pop up. Even though interest in the game has moved on, the comic prequel is still being released on a weekly basis and is still making the top ten in digital sales.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. When the first game came out, writer Tom Taylor and a group of artists (mainly Bruno Redondo, Tom Derenick, and Mike S. Miller) launched a digital prequel comic based on the Injustice universe. The comic became a surprise hit and the first volume was followed with an annual issue as well as a Year Two continuation of the series. The digital issues would eventually be released as print issues and later turned into trades. After hitting the end of Year Five, it moved on to a retelling of the game's story from Harley Quinn's perspective, and that was followed with a comic prequel for Injustice 2. There's even a He-Man crossover comic on the way.
That’s kind of nuts.
Sometimes comics based on trademarked properties get screwed over by sequels. For instance, there were comic follow-ups to Aliens that were completely negated by the events of Alien 3. Considering the vast amount of deaths in the Injustice comic, surely the sequel would screw with the timeline.
Shockingly, that’s not the case. With one early exception, all the new characters in Injustice 2 are either ignored completely or simply not killed in the comic. It goes to show some high-quality communication between the writers and developer NetherRealm Studios. Together, the creators traversed the vast and violent landscape of the Injustice universe to carve out stories for most of the popular DC roster. The characters you meet in Injustice 2 have survived the vicious comic book series and are ready to enter the ring.
But what of those who didn’t make it out of that alternate universe alive? There are many heroes and villains who have fallen in order to make way for Superman’s Regime. Here are the victims of Superman and Batman’s great war.
STEVE TREVOR
Injustice 2 Annual #1
Going in chronological order instead of issue order, this one supersedes the rest due to taking part in World War II. In the Injustice universe, there were more differences than the big Superman/Joker catalyst. After all, Lex Luthor was Superman’s best friend. While Superman’s downfall and behavior were well-explained, they rarely got into why Wonder Woman was constantly vindicating his actions and acted so loyal in his quest for tyranny.
In this universe, Diana discovers Steve Trevor on her island, as expected. The situation plays out an awful lot like the Wonder Woman movie, except for two major differences. One, it's World War II instead of World War I. Two, Steve eventually betrays her and tries to steal the Lasso of Truth to help the Nazis because, oh yeah, he was also a German spy all along. Although he admits that he has feelings for her, Steve loves his homeland more and Wonder Woman responds by decapitating him with the lasso.
Kind of sheds some light on her behavior through the series, even down to holding a candle for an evil fascist boyfriend.
JIMMY OLSEN
Year One #1
The comic series opens with pure optimism. Superman finds out that Lois is pregnant. He calls Batman over and asks him to be the godfather. Batman even musters up a smile. Then things immediately go to Hell.
Lois and Jimmy are given an anonymous tip about a corrupt senator doing corrupt things at the docks. Jimmy’s there to take photos, but it’s all a setup. The Joker steps out and shoots him through the camera. He then takes Lois hostage.
SCARECROW
Year One #2
The search for Lois becomes immediate and frantic. Batman demands all the Justice League members stop what they’re doing and find her, even though many aren’t aware of her relationship with Superman. Flash discovers the dead body of the Scarecrow at STAR Labs. With the sack removed from his head, it’s apparent that he’s been killed by Joker gas.
Even though Batman identifies him as Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow shows up again in Year Five. Now he's in Injustice 2. Whoops! We never do get any real explanation for that.
LOIS LANE
Year One #3
And here’s the lynchpin of this universe.
Superman’s search leads to a submarine. He finds Joker and Harley there, but he also finds Doomsday out of nowhere. Quick to act, Superman grabs Doomsday and sends him into space. What Superman is slow to realize is that he’s been poisoned. The Joker mixed kryptonite with Scarecrow’s fear gas and made Superman hallucinate Doomsday. Superman has, in fact, killed Lois Lane and their unborn child.
Tom Taylor had no choice but to write this sequence because the game made it specific. The fact that he had to do it didn’t sit well with him and he tried to redeem himself when writing the comic Earth 2. In it, that world’s version of Lois Lane is resurrected by having her mind put into a robot body. He jokingly refers to introducing her via her robot body being thawed out as "unfridging."
JESSE QUICK
Year One #20
For the sake of chronology, I’m going to skip around for the next couple entries for the sake of issues with flashbacks.
Heh. Flashbacks.
Joker rigged Lois’ heart to a nuclear device, so when Superman inadvertently kills her, he does the same to his home. It’s later shown that Lex Luthor (a good man in this world) survives the ordeal because he thinks ahead. He has a speedster on his payroll who is hired to throw him into his bunker in case of such a disaster. Unfortunately, the speedster tries to save others and is wiped out by the blast.
Although she’s never identified, she mostly resembles Jesse Quick.
KID FLASH AND BEAST BOY
Year Three Annual
The Year Three Annual explains why all the other major Teen Titans characters are missing outside of simply saying that the explosion killed them all. When the explosion goes off, only Superboy, Beast Boy, and Kid Flash (identified as Bart Allen) are in Metropolis. Kid Flash is taken out immediately due to running into the blast’s direction. Superboy attempts to shield Beast Boy at the last second, but fails to save his life.
STEEL (JOHN HENRY IRONS)
Injustice 2 #21
During the Metropolis explosion, Natasha Irons is enjoying a romantic vacation in France. She receives a panicked and scrambled call from her uncle, explaining that something terrible has happened. In response to the explosion, he is putting all of their research in a safe place, protected from the radiation. Although he succeeds on that front, the building begins to collapse and the falling wreckage crushes him.
Years later, Natasha would be able to uncover the hidden files and take up the Steel mantle.
JOKER
Year One #4/Story Mode
The Joker is immediately apprehended. Batman visits him in prison to demand to know why he did all this. Joker admits that he’s grown tired of messing with Batman, so he moved on to Superman, deciding he wanted to see if he could break him. Batman’s all, “You’ll never break Superman because he’s freaking Superman!” but then Superman breaks through the wall and angrily impales Joker with his arm.
Joker’s last breath is his last laugh.
Although the playable Joker in the Injustice game is the Joker from the mainstream DC Universe, his appearance in Injustice 2 is explained as a fear gas hallucination.
NIGHTWING
Year One #16
Although a Nightwing is on Superman’s side in the game, it’s actually an older Damian Wayne. Batman is sure to point out that Damian murdered the original Nightwing, Dick Grayson.
That puts Taylor in a tough spot because you have to sort of balance the act. He has to kill Dick but not in a way that’s too evil because even the super serious Justice League has to have boundaries at this point.
As the story goes, Superman chooses to remove all the inmates at Arkham and place them in his own secret prison. Batman and Nightwing go to prevent this, but Robin sells them out to Superman. A gigantic brawl breaks out between Superman’s team, the Gotham heroes, and a bunch of Arkham inmates. In the midst of it, Nightwing and Robin have a bit of an argument and Robin responds by lashing out and angrily throwing his escrima stick at Nightwing’s head (something he’s apparently wont to do as he tried it earlier).
Nightwing doesn’t see it coming because he’s busy fighting deranged murderers and gets nailed upside the head. It knocks him out, he lands neck-first onto a piece of rubble and he’s dead in a snap. Robin’s freaking out, Batman’s horrified, and everyone figures maybe it’s for the best to just back off on the fighting and not poke the bear for the time being.
KALIBAK
Year One #24
Without the context of what’s been going on, Kalibak hears that Superman’s declaring a war-free Earth and figures it’s some hippy bullshit ripe for the picking. Under Darkseid’s permission, he and a bunch of Parademons invade Earth during a big Superman press conference. When Kalibak sees the anger in Superman’s eyes, he realizes that maybe he made a big mistake.
Superman fries a bunch of Parademons and beats Kalibak enough to make him surrender. Superman won’t have it and smacks him around, demanding he fight back just as an excuse to kill him and make him pay for his crimes. Kalibak strikes against him, but gets put down.
CAPTAIN ATOM
Year One #32
Batman’s team of rebels is mostly made up of low-level folks. The powerless vigilantes like Huntress, Batwoman, Green Arrow, and so on. Since Batman is on the same side as the President, it makes sense that he’d also have super-duper-soldier Captain Atom on his side.
Near the Fortress of Solitude, Captain Atom proceeds to outfight Superman and lets him know that he’s under orders of the United States government to take him down. He wants to bring him in alive, but then Wonder Woman arrives and chops open his neck. Annoyed, Captain Atom points out that he’s about to explode, taking the North Pole with him.
While mocking Superman for no longer being selfless, Captain Atom makes sure to fly to space and drags Superman with him. Wonder Woman follows but the explosion blasts her back to Earth and puts her in a coma for over a year.
Superman survives.
GREEN ARROW
Year One #33
This is another bit that’s mentioned in-game and we get to see it play out in comic form.
The whole first volume leads up to this moment. Driven by grief and frustration, Superman’s tried to do what he feels is right. The government betrays him. Batman betrays him. Wonder Woman is gravely injured. Then he discovers Green Arrow in the Fortress of Solitude, trying to pocket some of the “super pills” that Lex Luthor and Superman created (they give people Kryptonian-level strength). More importantly, Green Arrow is in the same room where Superman’s been keeping Jonathan and Martha Kent for their protection and that just comes off as a threat at first glance.
Green Arrow shoots an arrow at Superman and it deflects. It ends up finding its way into Jonathan’s shoulder. It’s that screw-up that finally sets Superman off and he angrily beats Green Arrow to death in front of the Kents.
Although Ollie dies, he does at least fire an arrow with a super pill tacked onto it. It reaches Batman and the others, but Black Canary knows he isn’t coming back.
When Superman comes down from his rage, he refuses to take responsibility and blames Batman for this death as well. The AI ghost of Jor-El apologizes to the Kents for unleashing this upon their world.
As for Green Arrow, the end of Year Two has Black Canary brought to an alternate reality where she died and Ollie survived. The two end up together and return for Injustice 2.
KYLE RAYNER
Year Two #2
Green Lantern Kyle Rayner missed out on the whole Superman situation because he was off Earth for an entire year. As he goes back to check up on everything, including his girlfriend (who may or may not be pieces of broken meat in his fridge. We’ll never know), he’s ambushed by the Sinestro Corps.
As he’s captured, Sinestro pops in to say that he’s been paying attention to Earth and is really interested in playing a role. He can’t have Kyle around to interfere, so Sinestro pulls off his ring finger and allows him to suffocate in space. He also has Kyle’s limbs torn off because that’s scarier, I guess.
Sinestro then goes to Earth and allows himself to be Superman’s prisoner, swearing that he’s there to warn him about the coming of the Green Lantern Corps.
CH’P
Year Two #10
As expected, the Green Lantern Corps are sent to deal with this whole “Earth taken over by an overpowered tyrant” situation. Normally, Superman, Shazam, and Hawkgirl would be able to take on an army of those guys themselves, but the Corps has an ace in their sleeve that nobody expected.
Ch’p the space squirrel may be tiny, but he’s also able to control light on a much tinier scale than anyone else. This includes preventing the synapses in Superman’s brain from working, meaning Superman is completely paralyzed.
Sinestro convinces Luthor to let him free and he saves Superman by blasting a hole through Ch’p’s head. With Superman back in action, the Green Lanterns have no choice but to surrender.
DESPERO
Year Two #15
This one’s morbidly hilarious. To get in the good graces of Earth’s heroes, Sinestro has the Sinestro Corps put the boots to Despero and blast him to Earth. Disheveled and annoyed, Despero finds Sinestro loudly ranting and raving about how Despero won’t hurt the innocents of this planet. Sinestro then uses his ring to force Despero’s hands around Sinestro’s throat.
As Hal Jordan and John Stewart come to help, Sinestro snaps Despero’s neck and sadly tells his allies that it was the only way. Naturally, they don’t question it and think about how much Sinestro’s changed.
JAMES GORDON
Year Two #20
According to Batgirl’s in-game ending, Superman killed Commissioner Gordon at some point, inspiring Barbara to don the Batgirl cowl once again. In the comic, Superman tries to intimidate Barbara into telling him where Batman is, then regretfully gives Gordon the news that according to his x-ray vision, Gordon’s suffering from lung cancer.
Gordon decides there’s no longer a need to lie and lets Barbara know that he’s always been keen to her double lives as Batgirl and Oracle. Using the super pills, Gordon leads Gotham’s Finest to siege the Hall of Justice, all while knowing that the super pill is actually making the cancer stronger and killing him quicker.
Although on his last legs, Gordon is able to stop Cyborg from tracking down Oracle’s whereabouts. He tears out the metal from Cyborg’s face, knocking him out of commission. Then, from the Justice League satellite, he looks at the beauty of Earth and says his goodbyes to Barbara and Batman.
JOHN STEWART
Year Two #23
Batman’s resistance wages war on Superman’s Regime and the Green Lantern Corps is on Batman’s side, albeit against the wishes of all the Guardians except Ganthet. Superman, on the other hand, has the Sinestro Corps at his disposal. There are many casualties on both sides.
John Stewart is in the middle of it all. He’s on Superman’s side, but he’s also a Green Lantern. He doesn’t want anyone to fight. Sinestro tries to coax him into helping out and as John admits how torn he is, Sinestro literally tears a hole through John’s chest.
Sinestro then flies John’s dying body to Hal (who has become a Yellow Lantern by this point), telling him to get John to safety. John dies in Hal’s arms, making Hal a little too emotional to think clearly.
GUY GARDNER
Year Two #23
When a distraught and angry Hal demands to know who is responsible for John’s death, Sinestro says that Guy Gardner did it by accident. Since Guy is the big mouthpiece in the whole “Let’s go get some Green Lanterns to beat up Superman!” concept, Hal freaks the hell out and it doesn’t help that Sinestro’s egging him on.
Guy is overwhelmed and begs Hal to get a hold of himself. Instead, Hal gets a hold on Guy’s arm and tears it off, causing a powerless Guy to fall to his death.
During the Injustice 2 comic, Hal constantly sees Guy standing nearby, cracking wise, as a manifestation of Hal's guilt.
MOGO AND GANTHET
Year Two #24
As mentioned, Ganthet is in charge of the siege to stop Superman, and considering he’s an Oan, he’s tough enough to smack Superman around. Not only that, but he brought Mogo the Living Planet with him and he’s, you know, a living planet.
The death of a random Sinestro Corps member causes the loose ring to find a replacement in Superman. A pissed off Injustice Superman and a yellow wishing ring are the makings for a pretty bad day and he proves his power by slamming Ganthet into Mogo and pushing them both into the sun.
Yeah, that’ll do it.
DR. OCCULT AND ROSE PSYCHIC
Year Three Annual
The annual issue came out after the entirety of Year Three, but it takes place before it, filling in some of the blanks. Batman hires the two-in-one duo of Dr. Occult and Rose as his agents with the mission of neutralizing Raven and Wonder Woman.
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new permanent guitarist. Also around this time Escalante and Quackenbush made many visits to Disneyland, where they witnessed Josh Freese playing electronic drums in the children's cover band Polo on the Tomorrowland Terrace stage. They persuaded him to join, solidifying the Vandals lineup of Quackenbush, Fitzgerald, Escalante, and Freese which would remain constant throughout the rest of their career (with occasional substitutes filling in for Freese).[2]
Role in '90s punk revival (1990-2000) [ edit ]
In 1990 the new lineup recorded Fear of a Punk Planet, an album which established their presence amongst an emerging new crop of California punk rock bands including Green Day, NOFX, The Offspring, Rancid, Pennywise, and Sublime. It spawned their first music video, for the song "Pizza Tran," which received airplay on local punk and rock television shows.
In 1992 Escalante graduated from law school and became a television executive at CBS, using money from his job to finance the band and his television connections to allow them to play on late-night rock shows. At a New Year's Eve party at which Escalante was unable to play, actor Keanu Reeves filled in for him on bass. Fitzgerald and Freese, meanwhile, moved towards careers as professional musicians. Freese became a sought-after studio drummer, while Fitzgerald began a three-year stint as guitarist for Oingo Boingo.
In 1992, Freese and Fitzgerald formed Xtra Large with vocalist Darren McNamee and Big Drill Car bassist Bob Thomson. Xtra Large released one album on Giant Records, titled Now I Eat Them.
In 1994 the band released Sweatin' to the Oldies,[8] a live album and video which featured mostly performances of songs from Peace thru Vandalism and When in Rome. From this point on the band would play fewer and fewer of these older songs in their live sets, concentrating instead on newer material.
By 1995 punk rock had gained nationwide mainstream popularity, and The Vandals signed to Offspring singer Dexter Holland's new label Nitro Records. They released the album Live Fast, Diarrhea to positive reception and supported it with tours throughout the United States and Europe, including a spot opening for fellow Orange County rockers No Doubt. The album and band garnered increased attention thanks to an episode of the popular television show The X-Files in which actor Giovanni Ribisi played a character who wears Vandals T-shirts and listens to their music.[2]
1996 saw the release of The Quickening, a slightly more nihilistic and aggressive album that was supported by a music video for "It's a Fact." That year Escalante and Fitzgerald also founded the record label Kung Fu Records, initially created in order to release an album by the Riverside band Assorted Jelly Beans.[2] The label also released the soundtrack to the movie Glory Daze, which featured music from both the Vandals and Assorted Jellybeans and a theme written by Fitzgerald. At the end of the year the band also released a Christmas album, Oi to the World!, on Kung Fu. Although it remained the band's most obscure release for a several years, the title track became somewhat famous when it was covered by No Doubt in 1997. Their version was produced by Fitzgerald and made into a music video. Other than "Oi to the World!," songs from the album are generally not part of the Vandals' live setlist, except for their annual "Winter Formal" concert at which they generally perform the album in its entirety. Sweatin' to the Oldies was also re-released by Kung Fu in 1997 with bonus tracks.
In 1998 the band released Hitler Bad, Vandals Good, their most popular album yet which focused more on lighthearted humor with songs such as "My Girlfriend's Dead" and "I've Got an Ape Drape." The band continued to tour, including stints on the Vans Warped Tour. In 1999 they re-released most of Slippery When Ill as The Vandals Play Really Bad Original Country Tunes on Kung Fu. The members also starred in the Kung Fu-produced internet television series Fear of a Punk Planet, later released on DVD.
2000 saw a trio of releases from the band, beginning with a 10-year anniversary edition of Fear of a Punk Planet that was released by Kung Fu. This was followed by Look What I Almost Stepped In..., their final album under their contract with Nitro. Because of other musical commitments Freese was unavailable to play on the album, so substitute Brooks Wackerman filled in as drummer for the album's recording and some accompanying tours. At the end of the year Kung Fu re-released Oi to the World!, making it much more widely available than it had been in previous years. Escalante also launched the Kung Fu imprint Kung Fu Films in 2000 with the release of the film That Darn Punk, in which he starred and the other band members also appeared. The Vandals also contributed new songs to the film's soundtrack.
Kung Fu Records years (2000-present) [ edit ]
By the end of 2000 the Vandals had fulfilled their contractual obligations to Nitro Records, and moved their operations fully to Kung Fu. The Kung Fu label had grown since its founding in 1996 and was well-positioned to provide the recording, marketing, and touring support the band's popularity now necessitated, including marketing and touring opportunities in Japan. With Escalante acting as president of the label the band's operations could also run more smoothly.[2] In 2001 the band performed on the entire run of the Vans Warped Tour.
The band's first new album for Kung Fu was Internet Dating Superstuds, released in 2002. They held an online contest in which the winners were each awarded a "date" with one of the band members. These "dates" were filmed and included on the CD-ROM portion of the album, which used an internet theme in its artwork. They once again performed on the Warped Tour, and would play select dates on subsequent Warped Tours over the next 3 years. The Sweatin' to the Oldies video was also re-released on DVD that year by Kung Fu.
In July 2003 the Vandals filmed a live concert album and DVD at the House of Blues in Anaheim as part of Kung Fu's The Show Must Go Off! series. It was released the following year and featured mostly songs written from 1995 to 2002. 2003 also saw the release of Hollywood Potato Chip, which strayed a bit from the pop-punk formula of their 1990s work.
In December 2004 the band traveled to Iraq and played several shows for US troops in the area, with drummer Byron McMackin of Pennywise filling in for Freese. Some fans and contemporaries in the punk community criticized this decision, claiming that it implied the band supported the US-led war in Iraq. The band members defended their actions by pointing out that their music is deliberately apolitical and that whatever their individual political views might be, they were eager to show support for the troops. This was followed by a tour of Europe, on which some dates were cancelled due to protests and picketing by groups who felt the band's actions constituted a pro-war stance.[9][10][11][12]
In 2005 the Shingo Japanese Remix Album was released, composed of versions of the band's songs remixed by Japanese DJ Shingo Asari. That August the band played a benefit show for the legendary New York rock club CBGB. In the same month, original singer Stevo died of a drug overdose.[13][14]
In April 2006 the Vandals once again returned to the Middle East with McMackin to perform for US troops, this time in Afghanistan. They continue to tour when the members' schedules permit, as they also have other music-related obligations outside the band. Freese continues to act as a studio drummer for a multitude of recording artists. Fitzgerald writes and produces songs and albums for other artists as well as movie scores, and occasionally acts, having starred in the Kung Fu film Cake Boy. Escalante continues to own and operate Kung Fu Records and Kung Fu Films, signing bands and making films such as the Show Must Go Off! series and Cake Boy. He retired from legal practice in 2005 and hosted the call-in radio show Barely Legal Radio on Indie 103.1 FM, where he dispensed entertainment and legal advice to aspiring musicians.[15] In May 2006 he became the station's drive-time morning show host, replacing former Mighty Mighty Bosstones singer Dicky Barrett.[16] In 2007 The Vandals played the first four dates of the Warped Tour.
In August 2008 The Vandals played nine dates of the 2008 Warped Tour[17] with Sum 41 drummer Steve Jocz filling in for Josh Freese, who was touring with Nine Inch Nails.[18][19] On August 12 the band released BBC Sessions and Other Polished Turds, a collection of rare songs and b-sides, exclusively as a digital release.[20]
In January 2015, the band recorded a version from the song I'm An Individual, originally recorded by the Australian footballer Mark Jacko Jackson, for the Australian Soundwave 2015 Compilation, launched in February of that year.
As of 2017, no albums or new material were released, however the band remain active and performing live.
Original Band's Reformation [ edit ]
In 1989, the Original Vandals reformed with Original Singer Stevo, Jan Nils Ackermann on Guitar, Chalmer Lumary on Bass and with Todd Barnes on Drums, playing a show. Legal matters ensued, preventing further performances. Then, In 2008, the original Vandals reunited once more under the new moniker of "Anarchy Taco" as to prevent further legal action and restrictive measures on the group's original members.[21] Similar to the 1989 reunion, Anarchy Taco was put together by the band's founder, Jan Nils Ackermann. The band collects alumni Steve "Human" Pfauter and Chalmer Lumary from the group's original records, as well as vocalist Worm, and drummer James.[1] The group's setlist usually encompasses the material recorded by the band from 1982-1984. As of 2015, the band has yet to record any new content, however they remain active and performing.
Lawsuit between members [ edit ]
In 2003 former band members Steven Ronald Jensen, Jan Nils Ackermann, Chalmer Lumary, and Steve Pfauter initiated legal actions against Escalante, alleging that he had mismanaged the band's back catalogue and had withheld royalties that were owed them. Their allegations stemmed from Escalante's licensing of some of the band's early-1980s songs for use in films and commercials. "Urban Struggle" was used in the film SLC Punk and in an Adidas commercial, while a lyric from "Anarchy Burger (Hold the Government)" was used in the movie xXx. In each case the songs were credited to Escalante.[22][23] A CD re-release combining Peace thru Vandalism and When in Rome Do as the Vandals had also been in print since 1989 through Time Bomb Recordings with the credit "all songs written by Joe Escalante."[24] The former members asserted that most of these songs had been written before Escalante joined the group, that he had misappropriated their intellectual property, and that he had not paid them royalties due from the licensing of these songs.[7][25] Lawsuits ensued, resulting in an undisclosed settlement which allowed Escalante to continue licensing the band's back catalogue. A subsequent licensing of the song "Urban Struggle" for the movie Jackass Number Two credited the group as a whole.[26]
Legacy [ edit ]
The Vandals may have been the first rock band to incorporate DJ scratching and turntablism during a live performance, according to DJ Product©1969, formerly of the band Hed PE.[27]
Band members [ edit ]
Current members
Past members
Jan Nils Ackermann – guitar (1980–1989)
Steven Ronald Jensen ("Stevo") – vocals (1980–1984), (1989). (died 2005)
Vince Mesa - drums (1980)
Steve Gonzalez - bass (1980)
Bob Emory - bass (1980)
Steve "Human" Pfauter – bass (1980–1984)
Brent Turner – bass (1984)
Chalmer Lumary – bass (1984–1985), (1989)
Robbie Allen – bass (1985–1989)
Doug MacKinnon – drums (1988–1989)
Todd Barnes - drums (1989)
Notable fill-ins[2]
Due to Josh Freese's job as a full-time studio drummer he has sometimes been unable to play live or on tours with the band. Temporary drummers have included:
Timeline [ edit ]
Discography [ edit ]
Studio albumsYesterday, a man wielding a hatchet attacked four New York City police officers, inflicting a head wound on one that left the officer in critical condition. The other officers opened fire on the attacker, killing him and wounding a bystander. At first, the attack could have been chalked up to simple insanity, but then SITE took a look at Zale Thompson’s Facebook page:
The man who attacked New York City police officers with a hatchet before being shot dead was reported to have Islamic “extremist leanings” police and a monitoring group said. The man, identified in the US media as Zale Thompson, had posted an array of statements on YouTube and Facebook that “display a hyper-racial focus in both religious and historical contexts, and ultimately hint at his extremist leanings,” the SITE monitoring group said. … SITE, which monitors radical Muslim groups, said that in a comment Thompson had posted to a pro-Islamic State video on September 13, 2014, he described “jihad as a justifiable response to the oppression of the ‘Zionists and the Crusaders.'”
Police commissioner Bill Bratton advised people not to jump to conclusions:
“There is nothing we know of at this time that would indicate that were the case,” he said. “I think certainly the heightened concern is relative to that type of assault, based on what just happened in Canada and recent events in Israel — certainly one of the things that first comes to mind — but that’s what the investigation will attempt to determine,” Bratton said.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Jim Sciutto, their national-security correspondent, about the issue later last night. Sciutto reports that the NYPD is looking at the same data as SITE:
The New York Daily News notes that Thompson had recently been talking about terrorism with a Facebook friend, according to the police:
Police are investigating the possibility that the attacker killed on a rainswept shopping corridor, identified by police sources as Zale Thompson, 32, had links to terrorism. A Zale Thompson on Facebook is pictured wearing a keffiyeh and had a recent terrorism-related conversation with one of his Facebook friends, according to a police source. Thompson made no statements as he approached the four officers with hatchet in hand on Jamaica Ave. near 162nd St. in Jamaica at 2 p.m., officials said.
According to a CNN report this morning, Thompson had a criminal record and had been discharged from the US Navy for disorderly conduct, and some “commonalities” that have investigators worried enough to issue a warning to all law-enforcement agencies:
And there are uncomfortable commonalities with other Islamist attacks that have law enforcement in New York and Washington on high alert. On a Facebook page bearing Thompson’s name, a warrior masked in a head and face scarf and armed with spear, sword and rifle gazes out at the beholder. The vintage black and white photo is the profile picture of the user, who lives in Queens. A Quran quote in classic Arabic calligraphy mentioning judgment against those who have wandered astray serves as the page’s banner. Some of the user’s Facebook friends posted articles about Thompson’s attack and death, referring to him by name and linking back to the Facebook page. Thompson has been in trouble with the law before. He had a criminal record in California, a law enforcement official said, and the Navy discharged him for disorderly conduct.
This report notes another “commonality” — the somewhat similar circumstances of the murder of UK soldier Lee Rigby in London last December. There are also differences; two men conducted that murder on a single target, which they ran down in a car first. Both attacks, though, involve very personal attacks on figures of authority with cutting weapons by people who have publicly associated themselves with radical Islam. Sciutto notes that it’s these commonalities, plus the proximity of other lone-wolf attacks, that has police leaning toward terrorism as an explanation, rather than workplace violence.Wawa, the gas station and convenience store chain loved so much that customers have married there, is planning a South Florida expansion beginning in Broward and Palm Beach counties in 2017.
Wawa, based in Wawa, Pa., is scouting sites and expects to begin building a handful of stores by late 2016. If all goes according to plan, South Floridians will be getting their coffee fix, gas and hoagies from Wawa stores by 2017.
Wawa's long-term plan maps out 100 to 150 stores in the region in 10 years. Projections for 2019 are 17 to 23 stores in Palm Beach County, up to 20 in Broward and five to 14 in Miami-Dade.
South Florida is a natural fit for Wawa because of the region's dense population and its number of northeastern transplants who know the brand, said Chris Gheysens, president and chief executive.
"This feels like Wawa territory for us," he said Friday.
"Wawa" is a Native American word for a Canadian goose found in the Delaware Valley and on the company's logo.
The chain celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Over time, it has created a loyal fan base that lines up outside stores for hours before grand openings. Some have gotten tattoos honoring the chain.
South Florida is already home to several other convenience store chains, including RaceTrac, Circle K and 7-Eleven. One of them, Dallas-based 7-Eleven, says it has found the Sunshine State "to be receptive to our convenience brand."
In the past four years, 7-Eleven has opened 231 stores in Florida, 121 of them in South Florida.
"Our growth rate is much faster than that of Wawa's, and this year we will open nearly as many stores as Wawa plans in the next two years," said Margaret Chabris, spokeswoman for 7-Eleven.
Atlanta-based RaceTrac has 16 stores in South Florida and plans to add five more stores per year in the area through 2019. Statewide, it has more than 160 stores.
"We welcome new competitors to the markets we call home, as it will only make us stronger," said Ashleigh Womack, RaceTrac spokeswoman.
All of Wawa's stores are corporate-owned. The first Wawa in Florida opened in 2012 in Orlando. The chain now has 60 in the Tampa and Orlando markets. Each store employs about 40 people, according to the company's president and chief executive.
"I think the reception in Central Florida has been overwhelming, in a positive way," Gheysens said. "We are looking forward to being a part of South Florida."
[email protected], 954-356-4526A Scottish brewery has combined with an environmental charity to launch a beer aimed at raising awareness of climate change.
BrewDog’s Make Earth Great Again contains ingredients sourced from areas affected by global warming, including water from melting Arctic glaciers and endangered Arctic cloudberries, the Press Association reported.
The beer was inspired by US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement, and a case has even been sent to the White House in an attempt to capture the attention of the president.
All proceeds from the beer will be donated to the charity 10:10 to help fund projects that focus on tackling climate change.
BrewDog co-founder James Watt said: “Make Earth Great Again is a reaction to declining interest from notable world leaders to the biggest issues facing our planet and civilisation.
“Beer is a universal language, with the capacity to make an impact the world over, so we decided to make a statement and brew a beer that could have a direct, positive impact on climate change both through supporting an organisation making a difference, and providing a vehicle for craft beer fans to make their voices heard by the establishment.”
Alice Bell, director of communications at 10:10 Climate Action, said: “At 10:10, we often say that one of the more powerful things you can do to tackle climate change is talk about it. And what better way to start those conversations than a bottle of beer?”The workers from a US aid group, on a recent mission to deliver food to displaced families from Fallujah, had to scramble for cover from air strikes targeting a fleeing Islamic State convoy.
“They called me and said, ‘They are killing us,’ ” says Jeremy Courtney, founder of the US group Preemptive Love, adding that the Iraqi and US air strikes were close enough to damage the relief vehicles and the hearing of one of the aid workers huddled in the sand.
The anti-IS security operation trapped the Preemptive Love staff and their partners from the Iraq Health Aid Organization in the desert overnight. It was a vivid illustration of the uncharted hazards of delivering aid in the world’s increasingly dangerous conflict zones that are leading to what some officials say is a crisis in the worldwide relief distribution system.
The privately funded Preemptive Love is among the smallest of only a handful of aid organizations operating in Anbar province, where the need for emergency aid far outpaces the ability of organizations able or willing to deliver it.
Three million Iraqis have had to flee their homes inside the country since the IS incursion in 2014, joining more than a million citizens already displaced and 250,000 Syrian refugees in Iraq. Although the humanitarian response in Iraq is one of the biggest aid efforts in the world, thousands of displaced families swelter under 110 degree heat, with little water and few toilets, in desert camps just an hour’s drive from Baghdad.
Relief officials say the lack of aid is symptomatic of an international aid system that not only is chronically underfunded but is ill-equipped to respond quickly or effectively in the conflict zones. They say many groups, including some of the largest, are unwilling to venture into the places they are needed most.
Outside UN headquarters in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone is a plaque dedicated to the head of the UN mission in Iraq and 21 others killed when the headquarters were bombed in 2003. That attack and the killings and kidnappings of aid workers in other conflict zones since have helped create an environment so cautious that few UN aid staff, many of whom are Iraqi, are allowed in the field.
Restrictive security protocols
“Because it is an extremely high risk environment … we are working under very restrictive security protocols,” says Lise Grande, the UN Humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. “Those security protocols are designed to protect personnel, and it absolutely impacts on the way that we can get people in and out of operations.”
She says the UN, which uses nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to implement its programs and deliver aid, has a difficult time finding international partners willing or able to operate outside of Iraq’s relatively safe Kurdistan region in the north of the country.
“It’s never been more difficult than it is now, and I don’t know what’s awaiting us tomorrow, but we need to do something,” says Carsten Hansen, regional director of the Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the few international groups delivering aid in Anbar province. ‘There are difficulties with the security issues, the political issues, on the ability to mobilize the manpower that’s needed for these massive operations.”
Mr. Hansen, touring a desolate makeshift camp near Amariyat al-Fallujah, just south of Fallujah, in late June, says the Norwegian organization has spent 18 months building the contacts needed with Iraqi government and security officials to obtain visas and approvals to work in Anbar. Even crossing the bridge to the Sunni Anbar province, an IS stronghold, requires special security permission.
Some NGOs pulled out of central Iraq and even the Kurdistan region when IS fighters swept across the country two summers ago, while others are just now beginning to look into operating there.
“It’s not like it’s an easy ride for us, either, but it’s a matter of building up relations and we have been doing that over a period of time,” says Hansen, who was visibly shocked by the lack of services and even sanitation at the camp. Aid officials are warning of the long-term effects of lack of immunization against diseases previously eradicated in the country and of a generation of children who have now missed more than two years of school.
A failure to respond to emergencies
In the sprawling camps full of traumatized women and children there is little evidence of coordination by the Iraqi government, which has primary responsibility for dealing with displaced Iraqis but has few funds, endemic corruption, and little capacity to deliver aid.
In addition, many in Iraq’s Shiite-led government accuse Fallujah residents of collaborating with IS, and it has not made humanitarian assistance a priority, despite pledges to reconcile with Iraq’s Sunni population.
Anger at the Iraqi government helped IS – and Al Qaeda before it – flourish in many Sunni areas. The overall lack of humanitarian assistance threatens to reignite that anger.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the most outspoken of the major aid organizations, has sharply criticized the international aid community for its failure to respond to global emergencies. It says while it recognizes the lack of funding, a greater constraint is an unwillingness to go where aid is most needed.
“In acute emergencies, when assistance is most needed, international staff of humanitarian agencies are rapidly evacuated or go into hibernation, and programs downgrade to skeleton staff or are suspended,” read a scathing MSF report in 2014 on programs that included aid to Syrian refugees in Jordan. “Some humanitarian agencies simply wait until the emergency passes to continue their usual, long-term programs.”
The report said the UN and its rampant bureaucracy and lack of internal coordination “was at the heart of the dysfunction” in each of the cases it reviewed. Some aid officials partnering with the UN also cite frequent staff changes and, in some countries, the disruption of staff leaving on vacation every two months.
Switch in focus to development, disasters
While Sandrine Tiller, a London-based co-author of the two-year-old MSF report, says little has changed since then, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says it has made inter-agency coordination a priority over that time. It says that unconnected to the MSF report, it has implemented measures to be able to better coordinate wide-ranging humanitarian operations.
“With every new emergency, every new wave of refugees, the pressure on the humanitarian response system builds,” says Ariane Rummery, a senior communications officer at the UNHCR in Geneva, in an email.
Ms. Tiller, meanwhile, says the humanitarian aid “sector is moving away to development issues and natural disaster response…. It’s harder to work in difficult places. The first is a whole security issue, and part of the security issue is that it’s hard to get people to go to places like Iraq.”
She says increased pressure and scrutiny from boards of directors of NGOs and donors, as well as a fear of lawsuits, have also limited the ability of organizations to respond effectively in conflict zones.
Last year, a Norwegian court found the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) guilty of gross negligence in a lawsuit launched by a former staff member kidnapped in Kenya in 2012, awarding him the equivalent of half a million dollars.
While the judgment has not stopped the NRC from deploying staff to conflict zones, security experts say it is likely to have a chilling effect, particularly on aid organizations in the United States, where such financial settlements could be much higher.
'Bureaucracy and risk aversion'
A recent book “Saving lives and Staying Alive,” by the MSF think tank CRASH, says the increased role of security advisers in humanitarian organizations has also led to aid workers being sequestered in fortified compounds far from the people they are meant to assist.
In Haiti, “as a direct result of the increased sway of the security discourse, humanitarian organizations have retreated behind the walls of fortified residences and offices and instituted ‘no-go times’ and ‘no-go’ zones for their staff,” finds the book.
The MSF 2014 study said it found that in countries where aid is most needed, including Jordan, the UN and international NGO response was “characterized by bureaucracy and risk aversion,” with aid concentrated in capital cities or in the biggest camps, with few programs for those in greater need who are more difficult to help.
“There’s some risk aversion that happens quite simply because of the demand for results,” says Tiller. “It’s much harder to show results when you’re working with highly mobile populations.”
MSF, which says 75 of the hospitals it supports in conflict zones were bombed last year, boycotted this year’s World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in June, saying the summit focused on development issues and would not address the weakness in humanitarian action and emergency response.
Many of the governments attending the summit were also involved in military operations in the countries where they have humanitarian assistance programs.
“I think one of the perplexing things and one of the frustrating things is why the international community is investing so much on the military side in the battle to defeat DAISH [Islamic State] and it is not resourcing the humanitarian side.… There needs to be a rebalance,” says the UN’s Ms. Grande, who is American. “It doesn’t make sense to invest in the military operation and not invest in the people … victimized” by IS.
Girding for Mosul
While the United States is the biggest donor to chronically underfunded UN humanitarian agencies, other countries have called on it to dramatically increase the contribution to reflect its role in the war in Iraq and the subsequent fighting that has displaced millions of Iraqis.
Grande says the humanitarian assistance plan for Mosul, the IS stronghold in northern Iraq, could be the biggest humanitarian effort in the world this year. Depending on the severity of fighting and length of the battle for the city, planners are expected between 300,000 and one million people to be displaced by the fighting.
Mr. Courtney, the founder of Preemptive Love, says the group has been learning as it goes along about delivering emergency aid. The organization started working a decade ago in Iraq, bringing in teams of heart surgeons to operate on children and training Iraqi doctors and surgical staff.
He says when they saw the need for emergency response two years ago when IS forces invaded, they switched gears.
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When the aid delivery derailed by the air strikes on the IS convoy couldn’t get to its original destination after the roads were closed, he says the team leader insisted on carrying on with the mission to another camp.
“We are organized around a principle of trying to carefully, intelligently, but ultimately daringly if necessary reach out … to help those people who don’t have any other options,” he says. “When that is your organizing principle, it affects how you look at conflict, how you look at loss, how you hire and recruit.”Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A former loyalist paramilitary was jailed today for having a cache of guns and ammunition - despite a plea from First Minister Peter Robinson to “show leniency”.
Mr Robinson was one of a number of DUP politicians who wrote letters to Belfast Court urging the judge not to jail 74-year-old Samuel Tweed who had been on the run from police for almost 40 years.
Tweed, of Mark Street, Newtownards, was told by Judge Philip Babington: “These were, and are, serious offences, albeit you were younger but that does not diminish the seriousness of the offence in any way at all.
“I am satisfied that you have lived a lawful and law abiding life over the last 40 years. “However, that does mean that the offences are any less serious, far from it.”
Tweed had pleaded guilty to possession of a haul of revolvers and pistols along with 2,500 rounds of ammunition and escaping lawful custody. He was jailed for two and a half years.
Prosecution QC David McDowell earlier told the court that allege that on April 19, 1974, police tried to stop a car Ford Cortina being driven by Tweed, then aged 32, in East Belfast but left the vehicle and made off on foot.
The court heard that a police officer caught him and grabbed his coat but Tweed removed the coat and made off for a second time.
During a subsequent search of the car he had been driving, police located a Walther pistol under the back seat.
Two days later, the court was told, RUC officers and members of the Royal Military Police went to a house at Jocelyn Avenue in east Belfast to carry out a further search.
The prosecution lawyer said that Tweed answered the door and was arrested.
During a search of the house, security force members found a “cache of firearms” ammunition namely: six.45 calibre revolvers; two.22 calibre Star pistols; two.22 calibre pistols; a.22 calibre Browning pistol; a.22 calibre revolver, a.25 calibre Mauser pistol; a.38 Webley revolver; two.38 calibre revolvers; a.32 calibre pistol; a 9mm Beretta pistol; a 12 bore sawn-off shotgun; a 9mm magazine; a.22 calibre magazine and a quantity of assorted ammunition.
At interview, Tweed told police at the time of the seizure: “I accept responsibility for them.”
The following month on May 7, 1974, Tweed was present during a remand hearing at Belfast Magistrates’ Court when proceedings were disrupted as he stood in the dock a denim-clad mob of teenagers who shouted “there’s a bomb in here”.
During the upheaval, Tweed left the dock and escaped from the court.
He was arrested in 2012 after his lawyers had approached police and asked if there was anything outstanding against him, only to be told he was not wanted on any warrants.President Donald Trump’s inaugural address was fiery and nationalistic, a considerable departure from the traditional Republican Party embrace of the free market and an activist foreign policy. Trump talked of an “America First” policy and vowed that “January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”
But Trump’s words on the steps of the Capitol bore little resemblance to the reality of the administration he is building.
It’s hard to argue with Trump’s assessment that “the establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs.”
But that establishment will be in full force in the Trump administration. The megabank Goldman Sachs, famously close to Trump’s opponents in the Democratic Party, has six alumni posed for key posts in his administration, including his treasury secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin.
Trump spoke of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” but Mnuchin built a fortune off of helming banks that misled borrowers and foreclosed on their homes.
One of Trump and Mnuchin’s few explicit policy priorities is to slash taxes for corporations that have stashed money overseas, so that they will repatriate their profits to the United States. On the surface, this is to encourage businesses to invest in American jobs. But corporations are already telling their investors that they’d rather use this windfall to increase dividends and mergers, not hire more Americans.
Photo: Zach Gibson/AFP/Getty Images
The president also complained that the United States has “subsidized the armies of other countries,” but his nominee for Secretary of State, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, wants to continue to help Saudi Arabia bomb the impoverished nation of Yemen.
“When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice,” the president told the millions who tuned into his remarks. But that isn’t the point of view of his CIA nominee, Mike Pompeo, who has depicted the war on terror as a struggle between Islam and Christianity, or his national security adviser Mike Flynn, who has referred to Islamism as a “cancer” in the body of the world’s Muslims.
Americans do in fact want “great schools for their children,” as Trump advised, but his nominee to lead the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos, hasn’t spent a day working in a public school. Instead, she’s an heiress who inherited billions through marriage and inheritance while waiving away Bernie Sanders’s plan for tuition-free public college for all by invoking the proverb that “nothing in life is free.”
Trump was correct when he said that “for too long, a small group in our Nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth.”
But he cannot ameliorate that problem while tapping Washington’s elite for jobs. His nominee for secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — and as a former Wells Fargo board member, she will receive a golden parachute of up to $5 million from the bank if she is confirmed.
The president used his concluding words to promise to listen to all Americans:
So to all Americans, in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, and from ocean to ocean, hear these words: You will never be ignored again. Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.
But with a cabinet whose combined net worth is greater than that of a third of America combined, it’s likely that many, many Americans will continue to be ignored.
Top photo: President Donald Trump celebrates after his speech during the Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017.Figures provided exclusively to BuzzFeed News reveal that, despite Mohammed bin Salman’s attempt to present himself as a reformer, the country's approach to the death penalty has not changed.
Ed Wray / Getty Images Indonesian activists protest against the death penalty, in response to the execution of two Indonesian maids in Saudi Arabia in 2015.
Mujtaba al-Sweikat was 17 years old when he attended a protest against the government in Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2012. That December, on his way to visit Western Michigan
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and secured 11 rebounds for her sixth double-double of the season. Eildih Simpson secured a career-high 10 rebounds and added 11 points in the Northeast Conference Semifinal matchup.scored 17 points, including that huge three in the first overtime. She scored 9 points from beyond the arc. St. Francis Brooklyn notched 9 steals which led to 19 points. They also scored 13 second chance points compared to 7 by Central Connecticut.led the Terriers with 3 steals.St. Francis Brooklyn lead for the entire contest which featured three ties. Seniorsandwere excited post-game to be headed to their first-ever championship game.Benedetti said, "Hats off to Central. They played an awesome game. When the last game of your college career is on the line, you dig down for something extra. We didn't want our season to end. We did whatever it took to keep it going."Veney said, "One of the biggest things is leadership. When we got to the first overtime, coach looked at us and said you have five more minutes, then again at the start of the second overtime, he said the same thing. He never put his head down which motivated us. Our captains (and) they kept pushing us to go on."#5 St. Francis Brooklyn meets #3 Robert Morris on Sunday, March 15 at 1pm with a chance to win their first championship in program history.Roads Minister Duncan Gay is standing firm in the face of fears that stiffer penalties for cyclists will dampen people's appetite to leave the car at home and ride.
With the new fines in place in just over a week, murmurs of discontent are even coming from the big end of town where large companies have built bigger and swankier changing rooms and showers – often referred to as "end-of-trip facilities" – to cope with a rapid increase in cyclists in recent years.
Marianne Foley, a principal and board member of Arup Australasia, said the multinational firm actively promotes riding to work because cycling was a key to an active and sustainable transport system.
"We support safety measures, but increased barriers to cycling have been proven in studies to potentially reduce safety for all cyclists, which no one wants," she said.Producers Lee Magiday and Ed Guiney of Dublin and London-based Element Pictures and London-based Scarlet Films’ Ceci Dempsey were working with Lanthimos on another project when he and Filippou presented them with the idea for The Lobster.
“We wanted to do something about a relationship and couples and the way people view them,” says Lanthimos, noting that the concept evolved over a long process of observations and discussions between himself and Filippou. “It wasn’t one particular thing that inspired us.”
The duo wrote a treatment and offered it to Element and Scarlet and they immediately came on board. “It was a very interesting look at how we are as people,” says Magiday. “Being single, being alone or being involved with someone and the fears and constraints society puts on that. It was a truly original love story.”
Element were able to offer up funding from their MEDIA slate financing for the duo to write a script. “We wanted to support Yorgos and Efthimis to write the screenplay in their own unique way.” Magiday says. “The MEDIA funding helped us as producers to do that right away rather than going through a more lengthy process to engage development funding.”
She says it was Lanthimos’ voice and unique way of looking at the world that was the key driver for Element and Scarlet’s interest in his vision. “We were interested in him and the fact that he was driven by the human condition and the way in which he looks at the world, keen to provoke reactions rather than offer up answers.”
Financing the project, however, became a challenge, recalls Lanthimos. “For some reason I guess people wanted me to prove myself in English-language films,” he suggests.
Magiday says they were keen to create a process where the budget was in a range whereby he could keep creative control. “We wanted to drive the financing out of the European marketplace, where his previous films had been so critically successful.” she says. They took the project to Rotterdam to present it to the market in a “very low-key” way, before any cast were attached.
“We didn’t want to put too much pressure on the project as a film that was driven by cast, we wanted to drive it very much as a Yorgos Lanthimos project. And we wanted to protect him as a filmmaker first and foremost,” says Magiday.
The Lobster became an Irish-UK-Greek-French-Dutch co-production; physical production was done in Ireland; editing in the UK; picture and sound post in Holland; and VFX in France. “We worked hard with our co-producers on this co-production structure,” says Magiday, “to enable Yorgos the freedom to work creatively.”
Lanthimos admits that the film may not be the most straight-forward and commercial film but despite this, casting the film, he says, was relatively easy. He decided very early on that he wanted to work with Farrell and Weisz. “I was very lucky that many of these actors were aware of my work and read the script and were genuinely interested in it,” he says. “Literally I got all of the actors I wanted to work with for this film. The language didn’t matter at this point as the film takes part in this world, this contemporary world we had created.”
The cast is certainly reflective of a contemporary world, with a diverse range of actors from the UK (Weisz, Olivia Colman, Ashley Jensen and Ben Whishaw), Ireland (Farrell), France (Léa Seydoux and Ariane Labed), the US (Reilly) and Greece (Angeliki Papoulia) all composing Lanthimos’ world.
“Casting became the simplest part of the equation,” says Lanthimos. “Most of them I didn’t know and we didn’t have the time or money to bring everyone in for rehearsals beforehand but I was extremely lucky as they were all wonderful. They all got the film and were very supportive and helpful.”
The Lobster was shot in County Kerry in southwest Ireland over 35 days and while the project scales up from anything Lanthimos had done before and represents his first English-language film there was, says Magiday, no doubt that he would deliver what he intended with the film.
“Yorgos works incredibly hard and there was no doubt that he would make the film particular to his own voice” she says. “There has never been a question about his transition to English for us. His dialogue is so particular and he has a very specific ear for how he hears language,” adding that Filippou was on set for most of the shoot. “They would talk constantly about how things sounded and how the dialogue worked.”
Magiday says that they totally believed in the world Lanthimos was creating. “The real challenge for Yorgos was filming in a different location with crew he didn’t know and working on a film of a different scale.”
“My previous films were so small,” says Lanthimos, noting that in the past he had had just a few friends on board a project making it for the love of film with little money and a lot of flexibility. “It was very different working in an environment where there are rules and structures,” he admits. “And sometimes it’s hard to go around them but in the end, it worked.”
And while the film stepped up in terms of scale and ambition, the international film circuit crystallised his effort when Cannes selected the film to feature in the main Competition in May. While Lanthimos is no stranger to the festival (Dogtooth won Un Certain Regard in 2009), The Lobster represented the first time one of his films was selected for this prestigious section of the festival.
When the illustrious Cannes jury, which this year featured the likes of the Coen Brothers, Jake Gyllenhaal and Guillermo del Toro, awarded The Lobster with the Jury prize, Lanthimos’ position as an international director was cemented.
“I always expect people to be torn when they see one of my films and divided in some way,” says Lanthimos. “And I’m sure that there are people who really like what we do and others who don’t. But it was great to meet people who appreciate what we are doing on some levels and get recognised for it.”
He adds: “I wouldn’t be making films if I just wanted to express some specific ideas, then I would be writing essays or something. I just think it’s interesting to start a dialogue.”0 Flares Filament.io 0 Flares ×
Christian, I’m not buying it one bit—all your huffing and puffing about the morally deplorable and safety-shattering realities that would become if transgender people were allowed to use the public bathrooms of their true identity and choice.
I gotta give you props, you don’t let the paint dry in stepping up to the plate to bark out against all the wrong things—showing the true teeth of your creed. You want to convince me that there is something alarming of which to be afraid that should awaken in me dire concerns for my country, family, and children. Yet, the truth is, you’re more desperate to deflect attention from the real issues than Johnnie Cochran in a murder trial. The rest of us, Jesus lovers and alike, we’re hip to all the smoke and mirrors you position in an effort to justify your inner hate and religious arrogance against that which you don’t understand or agree. Quite frankly, you’re going to have to do a lot better than this if you want to be taken seriously. Your ignorance, pew-packaged talking points, and religious ideology of self-righteous superiority show up like skid marks on a 5-year-old’s underwear—you’ve crapped your pants, and we know it. All these religious charades you tout in hopes we will go nose-blind to your stench, would all be so laughable, if it wasn’t all so serious.
You’re a Christian parent, for crying out loud, who sexualizes your young daughters with dance and cheerleading groups pimping every hoochie-mama gyration their makeup ladened, pubescent bodies can muster in skin tight uniforms fit for a Beyonce’ video, all while forty-five year old men who live in their mom’s basements hoot and holler in the audience—and you’re worried for your kids about transgender friendly bathrooms, and you want me to be too?
You take your sons to stand in line for hours at the local GameStop, licking your chops to purchase the latest violent, salvage, blood spewing, graphic video game because “boys will by boys” as father and son imagine, enact, and fantasize violence—and you want me to be worried about transgender friendly bathrooms?
You friggin put Sundrop in your kid’s Sippy Cup. You send your children to school with a lunch bag laced with Little Debbie Snack Cakes, Cheese Puffs, a slice of baloney and a 25-grams-of-sugar loaded Juice Box.
You’re a parent whose life revolves around the activities and temper tantrums of your children as their demands drag you around like a dog on a leash—and yet you’re worried for your kids about transgender friendly bathrooms?
You teach your children to disrespect adults and throw shade at their teachers because in your mind (and now theirs) it always has to be the teacher’s fault. Whose else could it possibly be?
You think the best God-honoring activities to solicit the spiritual growth of your children are to jack them up with Bible drills and memorization contests, and outsource them to every vacation Bible school program you can map out on your GPS—and you want me to buy into your worry about transgender friendly bathrooms?
You’re a parent who spoils, over schedules, and parades their children around like a circus show because your self-worth is tied to appeasing the opinions of others, vicariously living through your children, and winning the competitive-parenting game that rules your every move and Facebook post.
At a blink of an eye, you’ll lay down wads of cash for the latest pair of Nike shoes, Vera Bradley purses, and concert tickets to Miley Cyrus, just because they ask, and you can’t stomach their displeasure.
You give little to no pause to publicly scolding your children with harsh rants of profanity. You watch porn on your computer one moment, sing songs of Jesus on your church’s projection screen the next, and then sit the family down for Sunday evening devotions like nothing ever happened.
More Republican politicians get arrested for sexual acts in public bathrooms than transgender people—and you want me to be worried about them taking a piss in a public bathroom?
The truth is, what should be frantically sending parents and kids into the streets screaming with fear isn’t transgender people showing up in a restroom. Hell no, we should be going bat crazy at the thought of the likes of your ignorance, arrogance, and hate bellying up to pee beside us or take a dump next door —hell hath no violence, harm, and fury like a conservative Christian.
If there is any social terrorism going on, monsters showing up in your local water closet, you’ll have a lot better chance at finding the culprit by looking into the mirror than under the bathroom stall.
When we finally see you as a Christian refusing to boycott things that are simply more humane than you, punch things just because they’re different, and wallow in the shelter of your religious pride and ignorance, then we may just give serious ear to the things for which you want us to be concerned and afraid.
Until then, we’ll kindly love people and treat them equally, fighting for their divine dignity, rights, and respect.
Spoiler alert, that’s what Jesus would do.
That’s what Jesus is doing.
Hate it for you.
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Like this: Like Loading...California’s $21 billion cannabis economy is reeling from likely more than a billion dollars in crop losses related to the deadly wildfires sweeping through the cultivation heartlands of Mendocino, Sonoma and Napa counties this week.
Compounding the losses is the cannabis industry’s legal status: Though sanctioned by California and other states, its product remains an illegal drug under federal law. Unlike wineries, cannabis farmers generally cannot obtain crop insurance. Those that do get insured pay high rates for skimpy coverage. Cannabis businesses are also not eligible for federal disaster relief.
Up to one-third of the annual outdoor cannabis crop in Mendocino and Sonoma counties could be destroyed or damaged as wildfires continue to burn in Northern California. Crops that survive the flames may be damaged by the smoke.
“We’ve been watching the community come apart at the seams,” said Kevin Jodrey, who runs an annual cannabis competition called the Golden Tarp in Humboldt County. In conversations with wholesale cannabis buyers across the state, double-digit percentages of the annual outdoor harvest are assumed lost.
Tawnie Logan, chair of the Sonoma County Growers Alliance, saw a $2 million crop in a Santa Rosa greenhouse reduced to ash Sunday night. “There’s no way for them to recover the millions in anticipated revenue they just lost,” she said. “It’s gone. It’s ashes.”
According to county surveys, the number of cannabis gardens in Sonoma County might be anywhere from 3,000 to 9,000. Revenue from cannabis is unknown but likely total in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the county, and Santa Rosa had emerged as the epicenter of the modern legal pot economy in California.
“I had one conversation today where the family was in tears, saying, ‘We don’t know how we’re going to make it to January, let alone next planting season,’” said Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association.
He said the fires have resulted in “the worst year on record for California’s growers.”
Many farms also had all-cash savings on-site because of banking limitations on cannabis commerce, said Josh Drayton, communications director for the California Cannabis Industry Association. “I know we definitely have multiple members that have lost their homes and have lost their savings.”
Ben Bradley, CCIA’s operations director, said dozens of CCIA members have lost crops and homes in the marijuana commerce epicenters of Sonoma and Mendocino counties.
At least 21 CGA members have lost their entire farms in the blazes burning near Santa Rosa, Mendocino County’s Redwood Valley and beyond. “This is going to leave a deep scar,” Allen said.
The fires could not have come at a worse time for many producers, as the annual outdoor harvest season was in full swing and many farmers intended to pick their crops through the end of the month.
The rest of the cannabis supply chain has suffered, too. The fires have leveled seed sellers’ properties, storage warehouses and oil extracting facilities.
Much of the industry in Sonoma and Mendocino counties was also in the process of seeking local and state licensing to enter the recreational-use market in 2018. Operators had been spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for things like water permits and leasing warehouse space that is now rubble.
“It’s going to be a fatal blow for quite a few of those people that went through all the trouble and challenge to be legitimized,” said Tim Blake, who runs the Emerald Cup cannabis competition from Laytonville in Mendocino County. “They hadn’t had a chance to sell their crops and now they’re losing their home. Where do they even go?”
Although many operators are still in danger, relief efforts have begun across the state. The CGA is coordinating donations to Mendocino County relief, and the 140-employee CannaCraft marijuana processing plant in Santa Rosa is hosting and feeding 200 Red Cross staff for the next five weeks.
Losses are expected to climb as the fires continue to rage through the weekend. “This isn’t going to stop until the rains come down,” said Jodrey.
On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast a 30 percent chance of rain in about five days. Meanwhile, new evacuations were being ordered in Santa Rosa, and Sonoma faced ongoing threats and evacuations as well.
“We have a lot of people who have lost their farms in the last 36 hours — and their homes,” said Logan. “We’ve got about 30 percent of our farm still sitting out there —just covered. It’s going to be tough. All of our product is covered in ash and soot and billows of smoke.”
Smoke destroys the value of cannabis and makes it more susceptible to disease, leading to unhealthy levels of mold, mildew and fungus.
“Especially when it’s ripe — I can tell you from personal experience, wildfire definitely will make your cannabis have a smoky flavor to it, just like (it would to) wine,” Kristin Nevedal, executive director of the International Cannabis Farmers Association, based in the Humboldt County town of Garberville, said in an interview last month.
Leading San Francisco dispensary SPARC was preparing to harvest its outdoor crop Tuesday. Early Monday morning, SPARC’s farm in Glen Ellen sustained major damage from the Nuns Fire, director Erich Pearson said. “The whole thing was on fire,” he said.
Wednesday he said, “There’s no fuel left. You see a stump burning and there’s nothing around it, so we leave it,” he said.
Further north in Mendocino County, the cultivation-rich Redwood Valley remained on fire Friday, with 34,000 acres burned and ten percent of the Redwood Complex Fire contained as of the afternoon. Redwood Valley is a hotbed of multi-generational, mom-and-pop craft cannabis cultivators. Thousands of them live and work gardens in the rugged, remote hills. The fire has downed communications systems and cut off residents from the outside world.
“So many people have their livelihoods where they live. Here, people lost everything — homes and livelihoods — in one fell swoop,” said Amanda Reiman, a Redwood Valley resident who is the vice president of outreach for the cannabis company Flow Kana.
“Some of our neighbors up the road didn’t make it out in time,” reported Redwood Valley music group MendoDope on its Instagram page.
“A lot of people had crops in their barns and hadn’t sold anything yet, because everything is selling so slow,” Blake said. “This is beyond anything I’ve seen in my life.”
A noted cannabis breeder and seed seller who goes by the name of Subcool reported Tuesday losing his home, seedstock and source plants used to make cuttings, called “mothers.”
Subcool’s colleague reported on Instagram that he refused to leave his farm. “With flames soaring in the air he yelled, ‘Come get me. Here I am.’” Sheriffs reportedly had to escort him away.
Another farm, Sonoma County Cannabis Company, sustained major losses, according to multiple reports. “There are no words right now to describe the loss, the heartbreak and the trauma that our beloved home and community is going through,” the company posted to its Instagram account. “We are trying to save what we can.”
Major Santa Rosa cannabis manufacturer CannaCraft closed its 110-employee business Monday but reopened Tuesday with a skeleton crew working amid “awful” air quality, said spokeswoman Kial Long. All employees are accounted for, but losses have been felt companywide.
“We have no employees that were not impacted in some way or another,” Long said. “A lot of family, a lot of friends and a few employees did lose their homes.”
CannaCraft pledged to give $40,000 worth of medicine to affected patients and donate a portion of sales proceeds to benefit Red Cross relief efforts in the area.
The cannabis community has decades of experience taking care of its own, said Blake. “We’re resilient. The thing about cannabis people is we’ve had our asses beat so many times. With the federal raids, robbers, crop failures — we’ve gone through so much of this. People will survive and go on and we will support each other and find a way to do that.”
Even with the record crop losses, California as a whole promises to deliver a record cannabis harvest to consumers in 2017, Blake said. Humboldt County remains warm and sunny, with record harvests coming in. Monterey County and the southern California desert cities are also flooding the market with A-grade product.
California’s cannabis economy is too vast and dispersed to be crippled, said Blake. The rest of the “Emerald Triangle” growing region of Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties will make up for what’s lost. “Redwood Valley is the sweet spot — it’s prime growing area. But it’s a small percentage of the Triangle. There is a bumper crop coming in that’s bigger than anyone can even dream of.”
David Downs is the San Francisco Chronicle cannabis editor. Email: [email protected]
For complete cannabis coverage from the San Francisco Chronicle, visit GreenState.com.TAMPA, Fla. -- Yankees manager Joe Girardi said Tuesday morning that Stephen Drew will start at second base and it's his spot to lose.
"We signed him to be our second baseman," Girardi said. "Our plan for it is to be Stephen."
Drew struggled mightily last season at the plate hitting.162, splitting the time between Boston and New York, where he was shipped in July and asked to play second base, a position he had never played much, having been a shortstop all of his career.
In the first home game last week in spring Drew booted the first ball hit to him. He said afterwards he's still learning the right angles to take to the ball and that he's still getting comfortable playing the position.
Drew is signed to a one-year, $5 million deal in 2015.
Ryan Hatch may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ryanhatch. Find NJ.com on Facebook.Syria’s crackdown continued on Sunday, including action near the heart of Damascus, in the Mezze neighborhood near the presidential palace. A day after security forces opened fire on a large demonstration there, killing at least one person, residents reported a heavy concentration of troops throughout the city, apparently sent to head off another protest.
At least 14 people were reported killed around the country, some by the government and some by armed opposition forces, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group that operates out of Britain.
The Syrian state news media said that three people — a senior prosecutor, a judge and their driver — were killed by an “armed terrorist group” in Idlib Province. Idlib has seen heavy fighting between government forces and an armed network of military defectors, Turkish-based opposition forces and local rebels loosely organized under the banner of the Syrian Free Army.
Egypt on Sunday became the latest Arab country to withdraw its diplomatic mission to Syria. Egyptian state news media said that the nation’s ambassador would leave in answer to a call by the Arab League for its members to break ties with Damascus. The Syrian Embassy in Cairo has been vacant since it was ransacked by a largely Syrian crowd two weeks ago, leaving it battered and burned.
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The detail in the American senators’ comments, made at a news conference during their visit to the Afghan capital, Kabul, appeared to signal that these were themes they would address when they arrived in Cairo, their next stop. The senators are leading a bipartisan delegation that stopped in Kabul to meet with military officials, diplomats and President Hamid Karzai.
The senators’ statements supporting arming the opposition went beyond the Obama administration’s public comments about Syria. After Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution on Syria this month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the United States would continue to “support the opposition’s peaceful political plans for change,” but then added: “Many Syrians, under attack from their own government, are moving to defend themselves, which is to be expected.”
Still, the administration has made a point of working through the Arab League and the United Nations rather than giving the appearance that the United States is trying to intervene in Syria, in part to avoid giving Iran any excuse to get involved on behalf of its regional ally, analysts say.
The senators, on the other hand, cited Iran as a major reason for action in Syria, even if only indirectly.
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Mr. McCain said the United States would not have to send weapons directly to the opposition but could work through “third-world countries” and the Arab League.
Mr. Graham also endorsed arming those who are fighting Mr. Assad, and he suggested that the Arab League, which has called for Mr. Assad’s departure, could be a conduit. A byproduct of a more interventionist policy would be to weaken Iran.
“Breaking Syria apart from Iran could be as important to containing a nuclear Iran as sanctions,” Mr. Graham said. “If the Syrian regime is replaced with another form of government that doesn’t tie its future to the Iranians, the world is a better place.”If you thought Gravity Bone and 30 Flights of Loving were oldschool for using the Quake Engine, you ain't seen nothing yet as modder WadaHolic is creating an open-world survival mod for Doom 2 and it looks glorious.
Entitled Total Chaos, the game is set in an abandoned coal mining island where the player must scavenge for resources, survive "deadly forces" and look for the villagers who have mysteriously disappeared.
"There are no guns in Total Chaos, instead the players must use their wits and the hazards they find in the environment to defend themselves," explained WadaHolic on the game's official site. You'll also be able to light fires and set traps to survive the impending onslaught of monsters.
So why the Doom 2 engine, you ask? Wadaholic noted that "Its fun to tinker with older things!" The modder further explained that this isn't the exact Doom 2 engine as it's a modified version of the source code that supports OpenGL, mouse look, and other graphical features like 16x motion blur, high resolution textures, 3D models and bloom effects.
WadaHolic said that a multiplayer mode is being considered but won't be available until after release.
Total Chaos is planned as a free offering with a beta expected later this year. To play Total Chaos you'll need Doom 2 and either one of its source ports: GZDoom or Zandronum.Director David Gelb’s new documentary “A Faster Horse” goes inside the Ford Motor design studio during the development of the 50th-anniversary 2015 Mustang. (Photo: Will Basanta)
The director who explored the art of making sushi has turned his lens to making cars.
"A Faster Horse" goes behind the scenes at Ford Motor to show the demanding process behind the creation of the 2015 Mustang. The redesign of the brand had a lot riding on it, both in terms of the jobs at stake and the reaction of fans to any tweaking of the iconic ride.
The documentary is the work of David Gelb, who's best known for making 2011's acclaimed "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." That film tells the story of 85-year-old Jiro Ono, an expert sushi chef and owner of a tiny eatery located in a Tokyo subway station.
Gelb transferred his interest in craftsmanship from raw fish to car culture for the movie, which was scheduled to have its world premiere Saturday at a free outdoor event at New York City's Tribeca Film Festival.
Filmed mostly in 2014, "A Faster Horse" was born from conversations between Alessandro Uzielli, the head of Ford Motor's Global Entertainment Brand, and producers Nigel Sinclair and Glen Zipper on a cinematic way to mark Mustang's 50th birthday.
Ford agreed to fund the project without requiring creative input.
"As a filmmaker myself, and as the 50th anniversary approached, Nigel and I began to talk about a creative way to capture this important milestone and bring it to life," said Uzielli Friday via e-mail. "He knew David would have the vision to humanize a cultural icon such as Mustang."
The new Mustang spurred a sales boom as well as strong reviews. It was named the Detroit Free Press Car of the Year.
What follows is a conversation (edited for space) with Gelb on chronicling the reinvention of a beloved car and creating a film that puts a chief program engineer (who jokes in the movie about using a Magic 8 Ball for decision-making) at the center of the drama.
QUESTION: How did you get involved with directing the documentary?
ANSWER: Nigel Sinclair and Glen Zipper, my producers, called me in for a meeting and wanted to talk about a film about Mustang. I'm from New York City and I didn't even have my driver's license until I was 18. I was wondering why would this be a film for me to make? But then I remembered when my dad first took me to California when I was a kid and he rented a Mustang GT. He was really kind of proud of his car, even though it was a rental. Ever since then, I've just thought Mustangs are cool. I kind of had an emotional connection to it. And everybody I talked to about making a film about Mustang had their own story. I thought it was really interesting that so many people seemed emotionally connected to a car and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.
Q: How did you get into the inner sanctums of design and engineering for the 2015 Mustang?
A: I give a lot of credit to Al Uzielli (an executive producer of the film), who's the grandson of Henry Ford II, and Nigel Sinclair and Glen Zipper. Nigel and Glen are very well-respected documentary producers (whose many credits include "George Harrison: Living In the Material World," directed by Martin Scorsese). I think their pedigree did a lot for it. The team at Ford, when they saw "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," understood I have an appreciation for craft and that I'm going to make something that's going to be true, and about creativity and hard work. It was a long process and it took time to gain trust and to get more doors to open. Ultimately, Ford really put their entire trust in me and I'm proud to say that the movie is very much my film. They let me do what I wanted, what the producers and I felt was right for the story. It didn't feel like they were trying to control me in any way. I'm still in shock that they were so open to letting me make the film the way I wanted to do it, and I'm grateful, frankly.
Q: Dave Pericak, chief program engineer for the 2015 Mustang, in a way is the hero or star of the film. What do you think the film says about him as a protagonist?
A: It's such a huge story and there are so many people who worked on (the Mustang), so many fans, so many angles to take on it. But for me, I'm always looking for a high-stakes situation for a creative person. And, ultimately, the buck stops with Dave. He has the legacy of 50 years of this car (to uphold). That weighs on his shoulders just as much as satisfying the fans, but, ultimately, satisfying himself because he's a die-hard Mustang fan. He loves this car. You will see in the film that he proposed to his then-girlfriend, now-wife in a Mustang. He takes this responsibility very, very seriously, but keeps a sense of humor about it. He allows the people working with him and for him to reach their full potential, because they know that he'll be there to catch them if something goes wrong. He's always encouraging all of his team to be fearless.
Q: What were your impressions of Detroit during your time here for filming?
A: We were shooting there in the winter, and it was a very cold winter. So that was a first impression stepping off the plane. But I guess the thing that really struck me was how much pride the people there did have, and the people who work in Dearborn, the incredible sense of responsibility that they feel. There's kind of a sense of going to some of the areas of Detroit and these really kind of cool, hip restaurants that are going up. Some of our crew members there were jazzed at being able to make a film that's about Detroit and about the industry there and about this product, the Mustang, that's captured the world's imagination and is made here at home. I think there's a sense of wanting to show the world that Detroit is place that will grow and reclaim its former glory. It's a beautiful community.
Q: Was there a moment when you particularly felt the stakes of the 2015 Mustang for Ford? The film makes it clear the stakes are incredibly pressurized for everyone involved.
A: There's no place that demonstrates this more powerfully than at the Flat Rock plant where the Mustangs are assembled. There is one day we were at the plant and there's a massive snowstorm. We were there to shoot the machines at work and the people bringing this whole car together. It's 2,000 parts that all need to be there at the same time, otherwise you can't roll a car off the line if one part is missing or not in the right quantity or the right quality. That day, the shipments didn't come in, so the plant was shut down. I could feel the tension and discomfort because that's a massive loss for the company. Every day they can't make cars, they're still paying for the overhead and everything. They were all trying to put on a brave face because there are cameras there. But you can feel that there's tension and that they're nervous. We were there for some of those moments when they're not 100% sure they'll make it past the finish line and those are stressful moments, for sure.
Q: Did the culture at Ford surprise you in any way? Did you go in thinking it would be something that it wasn't?
A: I really had no idea what to expect. I'd never been in the offices of a carmaker before. I went into it with no expectation but was moved by (the fact) that it was like a big family there. They welcomed us in as part of their team. Driving on test drives in Arizona, it's awesome to be there. It's one of the best things about being a documentary filmmaker, that you get to transport yourself into someone else's life.
Q: What's next for the movie after the Tribeca Film Festival premiere?
A: The film does not have a distributor yet. This is the part of the process in which we show it to all the various distributors who could potentially put it out in theaters or put it on as an on-demand offering. I think the movie should be shown in movie theaters because it's a big story. Our cinematogrpahy is really beautiful. I think that's the best way to viscerally experience it. Our hope is that a lot of people will come and enjoy it and that it will find its way into movie theaters all over the country. That's the dream.
'A Faster Horse'
Scheduled for world premiere April 18 at Tribeca Film Festival
No Detroit-area screenings have been announced; not yet scheduled for theatrical distribution
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Chicken Shawarma Recipe – Recipe & Video. How to make homemade Middle Eastern shawarma in the oven or on the grill. Simple marinade and cooking technique. Step-by-step video below!
Homemade Chicken Shawarma?? Yeah, I went there. You know I wouldn’t post a recipe that I don’t love. Well, I’m in love this recipe. I’ve cracked the homemade shawarma code. And it’s awesome. Seriously awesome.
Okay, so technically this recipe should actually be called Shawarma-Style Chicken. True shawarma is cooked with stacked, spice-marinated meats– lamb, turkey, chicken, beef, or a mix of meats– on a vertical spit. The shawarma turns and cooks on the spit for hours and hours, basted in fat and its own juices. Fat = flavor = tasty, amazing shawarma. Thin slices of meat are shaved from the surface and served, either on their own or tucked inside a warm flatbread, topped with tahini or garlic sauce. Shawarma is one of life’s great pleasures.
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I’ve been trying to replicate the flavor of shawarma at home for months, playing with different spice combinations and cooking methods. At first I tried buying premade shawarma spice blends from the Middle Eastern markets, but none of them made my mouth happy. I needed more
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, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise—and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the US to 66%.
Oil Shock: Scenario 2025
The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar’s plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of US oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran’s exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.
Concerned that the US Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China’s new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the US lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the US Navy from the Indian Ocean.
With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which US military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region—logistics, exchange rates, and naval power—evaporate. At this point, the US can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.
The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, US military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.
Within a few years, the US is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.
Military Misadventure: Present Situation
Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.
Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the US occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.
Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014
So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the US military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.
It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down US garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while US aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.
Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at US garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, US helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.
Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the US to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the UN to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America’s Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.
World War III: Present Situation
In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the US and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain’s global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the US to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.
With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the US Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing’s official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The US-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”
Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [US] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyberwarfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.
To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones—reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.
Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.
World War III: Scenario 2025
The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.
It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, US Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the US CyberCommand’s operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China’s People’s Liberation Army.
The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered US “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.
Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China’s 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.
As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate US supercomputers fail to crack the malware’s devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of US ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the US Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.
A New World Order?
Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.
As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the US and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.
Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.
As US power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the US.
In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.
In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the ‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”
At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.
Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region—Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded UN Security Council or some ad hoc body.
All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.
If America’s decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.
If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country’s role and prosperity in a changing world.
Europe’s empires are gone and America’s imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain’s success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.Sport of the Week – Dwile Flonking
Sport of the Week – Dwile Flonking - with John Hartley and Geoff Peterfy 0:00 11:19
This week John and Geoff take a look at a user-submitted sport called “dwile flonking,” from the UK. Whether this is a serious sport or not is up to you to decide, but it does have a semi-storied history and even a country-wide ban. You can find the sport of the week right here every week, or subscribe on iTunes.
What is Dwile Flonking?
If dizzy bat was just throwing a wet towel at cult members dancing in a circle around you
Where/When did Dwile Flonking Begin?
Began in the 1960s in the UK as a drinking game. The first iteration of the game is rumored to be a children’s game dating back to the 1500s. The game is primarily played by folks in the UK, as another game of “hey my town is better than yours.”
How Is Dwile Flonking Played?
Two teams of 8-12 players dance around in a circle.
One member from team 2 stands in the center of the circle with a stick (the driveller) that has a towel (dwile) resting on the end
The flonker (in the middle of the circle) spins in the opposite direction of the circle and tries to fling the towel, which has been soaked in beer, into any opponents. If hit in the head, flonkers (team 2) get 3 points 2 points in the body 1 point in the leg 2 flonks a piece. Hitting with both awards and extra flonk If nothing is hit in either flonk, the flonker must drink the entire chamber pot of beer that the rag was soaked in Must do so in the time it takes for the other team to pass the dwile all the way down the line with two hands Failure to do so gives the other team a point
Each team gets two go rounds
At the end of the game, teams add up sober people and deduct one point for each
Dwile Flonking Terms to Know
Girting – the spinning around part
Swadger – one who completely misses a flonk
Gazunder – the chamber pot you drink the beer out of
Snurd – one round
Jabonowl – the referee, generally selected by using the most dim-witted person
Popularity
It has much more of a cult following and even in the UK has lost most of its popularity.
Fun Dwile Flonking Facts
The World Championship was held this year at Dog Inn at Ludham in August Flippin Pippin Flonkers remained undefeated for the 4th time since inaugural event in 2010 No other teams showed up
The sport was banned in 2010 by Norfolk District council for violating health and safety laws Came months after Norfolk had introduced a sweeping drinking games ban 20,000 pound fine for breaking
Official Dwile Flonking Song
Here we’em be together
Now here we1em be boys, now here we1em be,
With our Dwiles and our Drivellers, Dwile Flonkers are we.
Now you know how to play boys, so hear what I say,
Grab a hold of that Driveller and shout “Dwiles Away”
Chorus: 0 Drivel-i, drivel-i, drivel-i-ayeEarlier this year, I was back at my childhood home in Southern California, digging through some old boxes. Amidst assorted baseball cards, long-forgotten school projects, sports trophies, and more, I located a small, slender white cardboard box.
The box is unmarked, except for a small sticker in the top left-hand corner with my name on it. But I knew what it was the instant I saw it: my entire collection of Star Trek Customizable Card Game (STCCG), probably a couple hundred cards in total.
While I never had any A-List cards (I never lucked out on any Enterprise bridge crew for instance), I quickly found the few that I set aside in plastic sleeves: Lt. Jg. Jean-Luc Picard, Montgomery Scott, and even Mot the Barber. Nostalgia washed over me. The cards were just as I had left them, likely more than two decades ago, replete with slips of paper marking the different types: "Missions," "Equipment," "Federation Ships," and more. This box hadn't been opened since I put them away back in high school.
Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus Farivar
Somewhere along the way, I had just stopped playing—I grew older, plus I never knew that many people who also played CCG. Its community paled in comparison (in terms of size at least) to deck-building card games that broke into the mainstream like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon. These days, many people likely would never even have known this game once existed if not for "The Greatest Generation" podcast. As a regular-listening fan, I sent them some packs from eBay back in April. By summer, those packs became part of a new comedy bit on the show.
Nevertheless, I took those cards home after finding them that day. Months later, they sat dormant, a victim of the same old problems. I still didn't have anyone to play with. Worse still, I didn't even remember how to play. And that's when I finally turned to the Internet on one quiet afternoon. Eventually, I discovered three amazing facts.
First, CCG is officially dead, its last official expansion pack was released in December 2007. However, a group of dedicated CCG fans have banded together online not only to keep its memory alive, but to play and organize tournaments an entire decade later.
Second, that group, which calls itself the Continuing Committee, creates new cards to add to the existing universe. And lastly, with the game out of print for so long and the original publishing company on financial life support, CCG is now entirely free to play.
This means you, fellow Star Trek fan, can combine an online deck builder, a printer, and some plastic card sleeves to be playing within hours. And a vibrant, welcoming community keeping this game alive will be ready and waiting.
License to nerd
I started my trip down CCG memory lane like I would any nostalgia trip: Wikipedia. As you might expect based on the dedication this card game seems to inspire, the entry on CCG is robust: it outlines the myriad expansion packs that came out long after I stopped playing, circa 1996, including First Contact and Enterprise Edition. The very bottom of the Wikipedia entry first introduced me to the Continuing Committee (CC), but I still had more questions than answers. What was the lasting appeal of this game; have I been missing out? And if I did get back into it, could I use the cards I already had?
Looking at the Continuing Committee website, it's clear this represents a labor of love. The site didn’t render very nicely on my iPhone. The "About Us" page was simply an org chart. But despite its archaic and cluttered design, everything appeared to be active. Players were to this very date organizing themselves into tournaments in locales as varied as a jazz club in Vienna, Austria and a Panera Bread in Highland Heights, Ohio. A link at the bottom of the site labeled "Rulebook" linked to a six-page PDF outlining how to play what appeared to be a spinoff game, Tribbles. I was nowhere closer to re-learning the actual STCCG game, but I certainly was on to something.
Eventually, I connected with Maggie Geppert, a 37-year-old physics professor at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. She's the new acting director of operations at the Continuing Committee, and she graciously connected with some card-finding stranger for a nearly two-hour phone call. I started by explaining my situation and describing the cards now strewn across my desk.
"You have First Edition cards," she patiently told me. In CCG lingo, these are known as "1E" cards.
While the Wikipedia entry explained that there was a first and second edition of the game, it wasn’t clear that these iterations were not really compatible with one another. Yes, there are some cards that can be played across editions, but by and large, that’s not how it’s done.
"1E has to play other 1E," Geppert said. The first edition of the game still draws players—with a new expansion appearing on January 12, 2018—though Second Edition generally has more.
So while my cards were neat keepsakes, I would want to get hold of some 2E cards to really explore playing again.
Decipher Inc., the Virginia-based publisher of CCG, released the first edition and ran with those cards from 1994 until 2002. At that point, the game was redesigned to make it modern and more streamlined. (Decipher’s more popular card game, Star Wars: The Customizable Card Game, which ran from 1995 until 2001, has spawned a similar fan site, also called the Continuing Committee.) The company evidently had concerns about the bloat and complexity that built up with 1E over time, and this made the game harder to learn and caused gameplay imbalances in certain ways. 2E ran for another five years before, as Geppert explained, "Decipher lost their license," and the game ceased production in 2007.
While I appreciated the history lesson, I was admittedly crestfallen. I couldn’t use the cards I already had? I had to scour eBay for 2E cards, which seemingly were a bit more expensive than 1E cards?
I didn’t need to spend a dime, Geppert reassured me. With the license a thing of the past, the CC currently offers a full list of printable cards, pre-made decks, and even an online deck builder. Most people don’t play with officially made cards anymore, she said. They simply color print the ones they want and slide them in front of old CCG cards (or even Magic: The Gathering cards) in a plastic sleeve.
"We discourage people from printing them on cardstock because they are indistinguishable from cards that were produced—that would get us in trouble," she said.
I remembered that like, CCG’s decks could get into the dozens of cards. More cards meant a larger arsenal, but it also meant that it might take longer to get to the heart of it and allow a strategy to unfold. The pre-made decks CC has available come with names like " Khaaaaaaaan! To beat Nick with " or " Where There's Cake, There's Hope (2.2)."
Geppert remained encouraging—I could learn again. She explained that she was taught the game by some friends back in college.
"They were like, 'Here take all these extra cards, learn the game and you should come play with us,'" she said. "We had bonded over Star Trek. My Dad and my Mom are both big Star Trek fans. I’d already watched TNG—I loved DS9—having this game that I could play with my friends was a lot of fun. We would sit around on Friday nights and watch Spike TV and watch reruns. We’d eat pizza and watch Star Trek and play Star Trek—that was our Friday nights."
Geppert was speaking my language: most of my freshman year at UC Berkeley, Saturday nights at midnight Pacific Time meant diving into my standing IRC Star Trek role playing game.
Eventually, Geppert found players as she moved around the US, in Boston and then greater Chicago. Years later, she found the CC and eventually rose through its all-volunteer ranks. The group, which has existed solely as a group of fellow fans with a website to date, is in the process of incorporating as a formal 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
"[Gameplay-wise] it does feel like: you have your missions, you play personnel and ships and equipment, and you go off and do missions," Geppert continued. "The opponent keeps you from doing things that you want to do. Or, you can use cards on your opponent to keep them from doing what they want to do."
While the most conventional way is to play one on one, there are experimental ways to play multiplayer. The CC tournaments are a series of one-on-one games, sometimes held on the sidelines of GenCon or other conventions. But more often than not, they’re held at people's homes. Geppert said she recently brought her husband and two young children on a road trip to Denison, Texas, to play in a weekend tournament. In essence, it’s a big, nerdy party no matter the venue.
"It’s 22 people sitting at plastic folding tables in a guy’s living room, eating fried chicken, drinking a lot of alcohol, and taunting each other," she said. "Some of them were new to me, or I’d only known them online. We had a guy from Minnesota, some guys from the DC area, New Jersey, Florida, Georgia, and even the UK."
The physics professor clearly sees a lasting appeal of Decipher’s original game, and she said that by introducing new CC-sanctioned cards, it "keeps the game continually interesting." She sees traffic on the CC website die down if it has been awhile since a newly created expansion, for instance. But to that, Geppert mentioned that there were no current plans to include anything from the J.J. Abrams films or the new series, Star Trek: Discovery, out of an abundance of caution.
"We have decided to play it safe in terms of the new material. We think we’re pretty safe in terms of staying on the legal side and keeping eyes off us if we stick with the shows that Decipher had a license for," she says. "They had license for the five shows and 10 movies including Nemesis. [Using that], we try to keep to a rough schedule of a new release every four months."
She estimated that the CC has "a few hundred active players" spread across the globe, with "big playgroups" in Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Minneapolis, Seattle, Vancouver, London, Munich, Vienna, Sydney, and San Diego.
"The game is free, come play it!" she encouraged me.
Listing image by Cyrus FarivarPlease enable Javascript to watch this video
MADISON -- A recount of presidential vote totals in Wisconsin is set to begin this week, and on Sunday, November 27th, preparations were underway to make sure the massive effort goes smoothly. Meanwhile, a state Green Party official said they're prepared to take this issue to court if need be.
Green Party officials have estimated the recount will cost more than $1 million -- a bill they're prepared to pay. However, they want what they're paying for -- a hand recount of all ballots. They said they're willing to go to court if the clerks don't comply.
Volunteers this week will gather at Suburban Bourbon in Muskego -- but not for a meal. They'll be digesting a long list of "dos" and "don'ts" at a recount training session.
"As of right now, we have more than 3,000 observers registered," George Martin with the Green Party in Wisconsin.
Martin said volunteers won't be allowed to touch ballots.
"But we can stand there to observe," Martin said.
Martin has been heavily involved in the process since the campaign for former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed paperwork on Friday, November 25th -- initiating a recount of the presidential vote.
"The machines may not have been accurate. But also there is human error -- and also politics," Martin said.
Martins said he believes the discrepancy between exit polls and actual votes tabulated by machines should be cause for concern from all voters.
"That gap is so wide, that this statistically would only occur in one in every 800 presidential elections," Martin said.
Mordecai Lee, UW-Milwaukee professor and political expert said it's doubtful a recount would change the results. He said he's equally suspicious the results were tampered with in the first place.
"It would be really hard to hack and change the results in terms of what is accessible," Lee said.
Even so, Martin said the Stein campaign wants a hand recount of the results -- and Martin said he's prepared to take the matter to court Monday, November 28th if a hand recount is denied.
Green Party leaders said their goal is simply to ensure the election was fair.
"If it is not as we requested per our affidavit, we will be in court Monday afternoon seeking that it be mandated," Martin said.
Martin said he expects the recount will be underway by Thursday, December 1st.
He said it should take no more than two weeks to complete.
Recount efforts are also underway in Michigan an Pennsylvania.
President-elect Donald Trump's victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton was by a margin of 27,000 votes.Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. AP file photo.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed that his country will never permit the establishment of a “terror corridor” in northern Syria set up by the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).
“Nobody should expect that we’ll agree to the establishment of a terror corridor along our southern border in northern Syria,” Erdogan said at a press conference on Thursday, according to Hurriyet news.
He was apparently referring to the Syrian Kurds linking Kobani up with their remaining isolated western canton of Afrin, a move Turkey has long opposed.
Erdogan also added that the world powers do not have to make a choice between either “Daesh [Islamic State], the [Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units] YPG or PYD terrorist organizations.”
“There are no differences between these terrorist organizations in terms of method, targets and points of view regarding human life,” Erdogan said, going on to say that Turkey views “statements from some circles from the West with astonishment.”
“Those who act with the logic of ‘the enemy of Daesh is our friend’ are deluded and in a position of being a friend to other terror organizations,” Erdogan said, alluding to US support of the YPG, which Turkey says is directly linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), against ISIS.
Turkey intervened against both ISIS and Syrian Kurdish forces based on the western side of the Euphrates on August 24. Erdogan denied claims made by US officials which asserted that the YPG had withdrawn to the eastern side of the river.
“They are saying the YPG has crossed back. We are saying no they haven’t, based on our own observations,” the Turkish president declared.An unprecedented glimpse into the harsh conditions at Guantanamo Bay has emerged via a grainy video of a weeping Canadian teenager undergoing interrogation after he had been tortured by sleep deprivation for three weeks.
The longest portion of video, an eight-minute segment, shows a sobbing Omar Khadr, just past his 16th birthday, burying his head in his hands and moaning "help me, help me" as Canadian intelligence agents look on.
Over the course of a three-day interrogation Mr Khadr denied any association with al-Qa'ida and showed the agents wounds that he suffered on the battlefield from which he almost died.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
The footage, taken by a camera hidden behind a ventilation shaft, and obtained under court order by Mr Khadr's Canadian lawyers, is the first video of a Guantanamo interrogation to become public. The interrogation took place in February 2003, six months after Mr Khadr's capture by US forces on an Afghan battlefield. The US says he killed a soldier with a grenade and injured another at an al-Qa'ida compound but efforts to persuade military courts that he is an "enemy combatant" were thrown out last year.
Mr Khadr's mistreatment began after his arrival at Guantanamo when he was denied sleep and forced to move cell every few hours over a period of three weeks – a process the US military refers to as its "frequent flyer programme" – to soften him up for interrogation by Canadian intelligence agents.
But, before the rage and tears, came trust. The teenager thought his fellow Canadians had come to help him and he answered their questions freely.
An extract from the video
By the second day of his three- day interrogation, the harsh reality of his predicament dawns on him as the agents ask about links to al-Qa'ida, his friends and fundamentalist family in Afghanistan. They ask the boy if he believes dozens of black-eyed virgins awaited him in Janna, or paradise.
Realising that the Canadian agents were there to pump him for information, Mr Khadr wept openly and denied everything. Distraught, he pulled at his hair and tore off the orange jumpsuit to reveal his wounds.
The interrogation was witnessed by Jim Gould – a Canadian diplomat who later wrote in a briefing note that he had met a "screwed up young man" whose trust had been abused by everyone who had ever been responsible for him.
Mr Khadr is a Canadian citizen who was raised by fundamentalist parents in Taliban-run Afghanistan, where he became caught up in the conflict after the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001.
Four years after the interrogation, in April 2007, the judge presiding at a military court in Guantanamo, dismissed all charges against him because the US could not prove he was an "unlawful combatant". Mr Khadr also faced charges of conspiracy, providing material support of terrorism as well as murder, attempted murder and spying on US forces.
His lawyers released portions of the video yesterday because they want to shame Ottawa into demanding his release from Guantanamo. Now 21 years old, Mr Khadr has no idea if he will ever be freed from US custody.
At one point, an interrogator discusses Mr Khadr's desire to go home to Canada. The intelligence agent taunts him, saying he cannot help free him but suggests
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shape of a dog named "Henry Dog Fart",[7][8] and the dog theme is pervasive throughout the coaster's course. Riders are taken round a statue of a defecating Henry the Dog,[9] through a kennel,[7] and past bones and piles of dog feces.[1] There are also speakers throughout the ride which make "dog fart" sounds.[1]
Reviews and press attention [ edit ]
Hundeprutterutchebane's unusual name and theme have attracted considerable attention. The coaster has been listed among the Travel Channel's "15 Wacky Rollercoasters"[10] and is included in the mental_floss article "8 Theme Park Rides I Wouldn't Wait in Line For".[1] The coaster has also been described by a number of other sources, including USA Today,[9] Cracked,[8] and The Chive.[3]
The Travel Channel described Hundeprutterutchebane as having the most pure wackiness of any roller coaster.[10] Gadling says that the coaster "gives new meaning to the phrase 'the wind in my face.'"[5]The Obama administration declined Tuesday to waive walrus protection rules for Royal Dutch Shell’s plans to drill in the Arctic Ocean.
The decision could put a damper on Shell’s high-profile, controversial plans to drill up to six exploratory wells as soon as next month, the first drilling activity in the United States’ portion of the Arctic Ocean in years.
In a Tuesday letter, the Fish and Wildlife Service authorized Shell to drill in ways that could harm or harass the Pacific walruses living in the Chukchi Sea northwest of Alaska.
But the agency held firm on existing protections for the endangered walrus, which state that no two drilling rigs can be less than 15 miles apart in its habitat.
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Shell planned to drill its wells two at a time, all within less than the minimum radius.
“To avoid significant synergistic or cumulative effects from multiple oil and gas exploration activities on foraging or migrating walruses, operators must maintain a minimum spacing of 24 km (15 mi) between all active seismic source vessels and/or drill rigs during exploration activities,” the wildlife agency’s Alaska office wrote in the letter.
The authorization was one of the remaining permits Shell had to get before it starts to drill.
Environmentalists have tried multiple tactics in various areas to stop the drilling, arguing it is inherently risky and harmful to wildlife, the environment, the climate and more.
“Shell has proven time and time again that they are incompetent and careless in pursuing drilling in America’s Arctic Ocean,” Cindy Shogan, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, said in a statement.
“It is good to see that the Fish and Wildlife Service appears to be holding them to the current regulations that are in place to protect these species,” Shogan said.
Earthjustice sent a letter last week to the Interior Department that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) cannot issue its drilling permits to Shell because Shell’s plans violate the wildlife agency’s rules.
The group argued that the BSEE cannot even approve a one-rig plan, since it was only asked to approve the plan with two rigs.(Courtesy: Harvard University Press)
Fred Block (research professor of sociology at University of California at Davis) and Margaret Somers (professor of sociology and history at the University of Michigan) have a new book, “The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique” (Harvard University Press, 2014). The book argues that the ideas of Karl Polanyi, the author of “The Great Transformation,” a classic of 20th century political economy, are crucial if you want to understand the recession and its aftermath. I asked the authors a series of questions.
HF – Your book argues for the continued relevance of Karl Polanyi’s work, especially “The Great Transformation.” What are the ideas at the core of Polanyi’s thought?
FB & MS – Polanyi’s core thesis is that there is no such thing as a free market; there never has been, nor can there ever be. Indeed he calls the very idea of an economy independent of government and political institutions a “stark utopia”—utopian because it is unrealizable, and the effort to bring it into being is doomed to fail and will inevitably produce dystopian consequences. While markets are necessary for any functioning economy, Polanyi argues that the attempt to create a market society is fundamentally threatening to human society and the common good. In the first instance the market is simply one of many different social institutions; the second represents the effort to subject not just real commodities (computers and widgets) to market principles but virtually all of what makes social life possible, including clean air and water, education, health care, personal, legal, and social security, and the right to earn a livelihood. When these public goods and social necessities (what Polanyi calls “fictitious commodities”) are treated as if they are commodities produced for sale on the market, rather than protected rights, our social world is endangered and major crises will ensue.
Free market doctrine aims to liberate the economy from government “interference”, but Polanyi challenges the very idea that markets and governments are separate and autonomous entities. Government action is not some kind of “interference” in the autonomous sphere of economic activity; there simply is no economy without government rules and institutions. It is not just that society depends on roads, schools, a justice system, and other public goods that only government can provide. It is that all of the key inputs into the economy—land, labor, and money—are only created and sustained through continuous government action. The employment system, the arrangements for buying and selling real estate, and the supplies of money and credit are organized and maintained through the exercise of government’s rules, regulations, and powers.
By claiming it is free-market advocates who are the true utopians, Polanyi helps explain the free market’s otherwise puzzlingly tenacious appeal: It embodies a perfectionist ideal of a world without “coercive” constraints on economic activities while it fiercely represses the fact that power and coercion are the unacknowledged features of all market participation.
HF – How do those ideas help us understand the vexing economic problems we still face today?
FB & MS – By putting government and politics into the center of economic analysis, Polanyi makes it clear that today’s vexing economic problems are almost entirely political problems. This can effectively change the terms of modern political debate: Both left and right today focus on “deregulation”—for the right it is a rallying cry against the impediments of government; for the left it is the scourge behind our current economic inequities. While they differ dramatically on its desirability, both positions assume the possibility of a “non-regulated” or “non-political” market. Taking Polanyi seriously means rejecting the illusion of a “deregulated” economy. What happened in the name of “deregulation” has actually been “reregulation,” this time by rules and policies that are radically different from those of the New Deal and Great Society decades. Although compromised by racism, those older regulations laid the groundwork for greater equality and a flourishing middle class. Government continues to regulate, but instead of acting to protect workers, consumers, and citizens, it devised new policies aimed to help giant corporate and financial institutions maximize their returns through revised anti-trust laws, seemingly bottomless bank bailouts, and increased impediments to unionization.
The implications for political discourse are critically important: If regulations are always necessary components of markets, we must not discuss regulation versus deregulation but rather what kinds of regulations we prefer: Those designed to benefit wealth and capital? Or those that benefit the public and common good? Similarly, since the rights or lack of rights that employees have at the workplace are always defined by the legal system, we must not ask whether the law should organize the labor market but rather what kinds of rules and rights should be entailed in these laws—those that recognize that it is the skills and talents of employees that make firms productive, or those that rig the game in favor of employers and private profits?
HF – Polanyi argued against a line of thought that you describe as “market fundamentalism,” which perhaps has its beginnings in Malthus’s arguments two centuries ago. Why does Malthus’s way of thinking still resonate in U.S. political debates over welfare and economic ‘reform?’
FB & MS – Malthus’s enduring contribution to social policy was to make scarcity the virtuous disciplinary necessity upon which rests the very possibility of a productive workforce. Polanyi explains how the original invention of a market economy that could function independently of the state depended entirely on a new body of ideas that began in earnest not with the liberalisms of Hobbes, Locke or even Adam Smith, but with the new political economy of Malthus and Ricardo. This way of thinking, which we call social naturalism, conceived of society as governed by the same laws that operate in nature—a conceit that is necessary to make the idea of a self-regulating market even plausible. Social naturalism displaced rationality and morality as the essence of humanity, and imposed biological instincts in their place, making human motivations no different from those of the rest of the animal kingdom: We are incentivized to labor (and earn wages) only because of our primary biological drive to eat; and we are likewise content to rest once the drive of hunger is satisfied.
From this perspective, it is the “natural” condition of scarcity alone that disciplines the unemployed into voluntarily taking up the bitter task of paid labor. If one removes that scarcity by “artificial” means—by providing food stamps, unemployment benefits, an adequate minimum wage—so too the incentive to work disappears. Hence the refrain made famous during the 2012 election that 47 percent of Americans are “takers;” that poverty relief will inevitably turn the safety net into a “hammock;” and that food stamps and other hunger-relieving interventions have turned the “inner city” into a “culture of dependence.” One would be hard pressed to draw any substantive distinctions between the current conservative rhetoric, and that which flourished in the early 19th century when Malthus led the campaign against social insurance and the safety net. The reality, of course, then as now, is the poor have always struggled to make do in the face of structural forces that they cannot control.
HF – You suggest that Polanyi’s arguments about the “double movement” help explain the tea party movement among conservatives. What is the “double movement” and what forces is it giving rise to in U.S. politics today?
FB & MS – Polanyi argued that the devastating effects on society’s most vulnerable brought on by market crises (such as the Great Depression in the 1930s) tends to generate counter movements as people struggle to defend their livelihoods, their neighborhoods, and their cultures from the destructive forces of marketization. The play of these opposing dynamics is the double movement, and it always involves the effort to remobilize political power to tame the apparent over-extension of market forces. The great danger Polanyi alerts us to, however, is that mobilizing politics to protect against markets run wild is just as likely to be reactionary and conservative, as it is to be progressive and democratic. Whereas the American New Deal was Polanyi’s example of a democratic counter movement, fascism was the classic instance of a reactionary counter-movement; it provided protection to some while utterly destroying democratic institutions.
This helps us to understand the tea party as a response to the uncertainties and disruptions that free market globalization has brought to many white Americans, particularly in the South and Midwest. When people demonstrate against Obamacare with signs saying “Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare,” they are trying to protect their own health care benefits from changes that they see as threatening what they have. When they express deep hostility to immigrants and immigration reform, they are responding to a perceived threat to their own resources—now considerably diminished from outsourcing and deindustrialization. Polanyi teaches us that in the face of market failures and instabilities we must be relentlessly vigilant to the threats to democracy that are often not immediately apparent in the political mobilizations of the double movement.
HF – The European Union’s single currency creates many of the same tensions between international rules and domestic society as the gold standard did a century ago. What are the political consequences of these tensions?
FB & MS – We just saw in the European elections that right-wing, seemingly fringe parties, came in first in France and the U.K. This is a response to the continuing austerity policies of the European Community that have kept unemployment rates high and blocked national efforts to stimulate stronger growth. It might still be largely a protest vote—a signal to the major parties that they need to abandon austerity, create jobs, and reverse the cuts in public spending. But unless there are some serious initiatives at the European Community and the global level to chart a new course, we can expect that the threat from the nationalist and xenophobic right will only grow stronger.Feikin
Touched by the magic of the feywilds, Feikin have a certain aura and mystique and etherealness about them. Where Tieflings descended from demons, and Elves the Eldarin, the Feikin have murky origins, some say they descend from Dryads due to the plant like natural of their horns. Feikin look mostly human with only their large branch that distinguish their bloodline, variants of the Feikin. A Feikin's horns bloom flowers in the appropriate season or when the Feikin is touched by fey magic. The flower that blooms on the Feikin's horns often represents their most prominent trait. Leaders are often chosen based on the flowers that bloom on their horns, however in many cases the blossoms that bloom are not the greatest representation of the individual.
Feikin Names
Feikin like the Eldar or the Fawna often undertake Elven like names, whereas the Demon Feikin take on infernal names like their Tiefling cousins.
Feikin Traits
Feikin are enigmas in the primaterial plane, their traits manifest in various ways
Ability Score Increase. Your Charisma score increases by 2.
Age. Feikin reach maturity at about the same age as humans but live to around 200 years old.
Alignment. Feikin value repect towards authority their elders thus having a general disposition towards being lawful, however they are also known to be use their fey magic to manipulate their way to power making some of their kind evil.
Size. Feikin are around the same height and build as Humans. Your size is Medium.
Speed. Your base walking speed is 30ft.
Darkvision. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can't discern colour in darkness, only shades of grey.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and Sylvan
Fey Ancestry. You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can't put you to sleep.
Blossoming Flower. Every Feikin have flowers that bloom on their horns, these flowers range from the simple looking Myrtle to the extravagant Wisteria. You may choose your Blossiming Flower from the provided table or comes up with your own.
Subrace. The complex origins of the Fekin have resulted the three major subraces: Eldar Feikin, Fawn Feikin (Commonly known as Fawna), Demon Feikin.
Blossoming Flower
d10 Flower Meaning 1 Magnolia Nobility 2 Camellia Everlasting Love 3 Forsythia Hopeful Anticipation 4 Wisteria Playfulness and Adventure 5 Cherry Fragility 6 Rosebud Beauty 7 Angel's Trumpet Vivacity 8 Dogwood Passion 9 Snadragon Strength 10 Gladiolus Faithfulness and Intergrity
Art Credit: Niz on Pixivvia press release:
HISTORY’S THE CURSE OF OAK ISLAND REACHES SERIES HIGH
3.1 MILLION VIEWERS IN SEASON TWO FINALE
Unscripted Series is Cable’s Top Program for Night
NEW YORK, NY – January 15, 2015 – The season two finale of HISTORY’s unscripted series THE CURSE OF OAK ISLAND (#OakIsland) reached a series high 3.1 million Total Viewers Tuesday evening, making it the number one program on cable for the night in total viewers, as well as Men 25-54 (863,000), according to Nielsen Research. The program, which follows two brothers who employ new technology, recorded history and old-fashioned know-how to attempt to discover one of the greatest treasures ever, also reached a season best 1.4 million viewers among Adults 25-54, placing it as Tuesday night’s top original/non-fiction program in the demo.
In season two of THE CURSE OF OAK ISLAND, brothers Rick and Marty Lagina came closer than anyone before them to solving this 200-year-old mystery. Located in the North Atlantic, Oak Island is believed by many to be hiding one of the greatest treasures in history. Since the late 1700s, fortunes have been spent and lives have been lost, but no one has ever been able to crack the code to get at the prize. A local legend says that seven people actively involved in the search must die before the treasure is found. So far, six have perished in accidents across the years. In this season, Rick and Marty upped the stakes after they found a 17th century Spanish coin at the end of season one. This time around, the brothers and their partners brought in experts and researchers from around the world to learn even more about the island’s incredible history. They also used that research to find the location of the original Oak Island Money Pit, where they found evidence of what is believed to be an ancient treasure vault. Using scanning sonar, they also verified the existence of mysterious man-made objects and tunnels located at the bottom of a 235 foot shaft, objects that 92 year-old treasure hunter, Dan Blankenship claims he discovered more than forty years ago.
THE CURSE OF OAK ISLAND is produced for HISTORY by Prometheus Entertainment. Kevin Burns serves as executive producer for Prometheus. Matt Ginsburg, Mike Stiller and Elaine Frontain Bryant are executive producers for HISTORY.by LetsRun.com
March 24, 2016
Streaming and television information for the 2016 IAAF / Cardiff University World Half Marathon Championships which takes place on Saturday can be found below.
What: 2016 IAAF World Half Marathon Championships
Where: Cardiff, Wales
When: Saturday, March 26. Women’s race begins at 9:35 a.m. ET, men’s race at 10:10 a.m. ET.
How to watch: In the United States, the race will be streamed live online by NBC Sports Live Extra beginning at 9:30 a.m. ET. In the United Kingdom, the race will be shown on BBC One starting at 1:30 p.m. GMT. UK viewers may want to tune in to BBC One at 1:00 p.m. however as the network will be showing a 30-minute show called “Can Seb Coe Save Athletics?” in which Steve Cram travels to Monaco to follow Coe and question him about the sport’s doping and corruption scandals.
Results: Live result will show up here: http://www.letsrun.com/news/2016/03/tracking-live-results-2016-iaaf-cardiff-university-world-half-marathon-championships/ or on the IAAF website.Coming Soon
Chambers
Consumed by the mystery surrounding the donor heart that saved her life, a young patient starts taking on sinister characteristics of the deceased.
Shimmers
In this supernatural eco-thriller, five teens at an isolated school in northern Thailand are haunted by their pasts -- and a much more sinister force.
Tales of the City
Middle-aged Mary Ann returns to San Francisco and the eccentric friends she left behind. Based on Armistead Maupin's books and starring Laura Linney.
Black Moon
In 17th century Italy, a teenage midwife accused of witchcraft must choose between a star-crossed love and fulfilling her powerful destiny.
Team Kaylie
After one too many misdemeanors, selfie-obsessed teen socialite Kaylie Konners is legally tasked with leading an after-school wilderness club.
Hit and Run
In this political espionage thriller series, a man's life is turned upside down when his wife is killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident.
Jupiter's Legacy
When a superhero seizes control of the government, the next generation of heroes must join the new regime or fight back. Based on Mark Millar's comics.
PINOCCHIO
Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro reinvents the classic tale of the wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy.The “Named Colors” section of the CSS Color Module Level 4—the latest specification for color values and properties within the Cascading Style Sheets language—are 141 standard colors. Each has its own name, so beyond the essentials of “black” and “white” are shades like “papaya whip,” a warm orange pastel; “lemon chiffon,” a faint, milky yellow; and “burlywood,” which has likely made an appearance on a safari tour guide’s shorts.
At first glance, these names seem fluffy, and they bear connotations of sugary, whimsical romanticism. Where do such abstract names come from, and why are they a part of something as methodical as writing code?
The answer to these questions begins in 1980s Massachusetts. Originally, the colors were a product of the X Window System (X), a graphical user interface (GUI) released by MIT in 1984. In June of 1986, the first list of GUI colors, which was tuned to the DEC VT240 series terminal, shipped with the third release of X’s tenth version (X10R3). It comprised 69 basic shades, with 138 entries to account for different cases in the color names (e.g., lowercase with spacing like “dark red” versus camel case like “DarkRed”).
In 1988, X11R2 arrived with the addition of three colors, including the identical shades “gray" and “grey.” According to Austin-based developer Alex Sexton, discussing the colors at a JavaScript Conference last year, programmers at Hewlett-Packard couldn’t remember the proper spelling (which was originally with an 'a'). Including two names, it was thought, would prevent errors.
The most substantial release, created by Paul Raveling, came in 1989 with X11R4. This update heralded a slew of light neutral tones, and it was a response to complaints from Raveling’s coworkers about color fidelity. (In the ‘80s, colors could vary dramatically from monitor to monitor, depending on the machine vendor. As if to illustrate this, a particularly baffled employee exclaimed, “That's Wheat???!!!” upon the sight of the hue in the previous text file.) In this version, programmers were introduced to the aforementioned “papaya whip” and “lemon chiffon,” as well as other loftily-named hues like “blanched almond” and “peach puff.”
Raveling drew these names from an unsurprising source: the (now-defunct) paint company Sinclair Paints. It was an arbitrary move; after failing to receive sanctions from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which issued standards for Web color properties, Raveling decided to take matters into his own hands. He calibrated the colors for his own HP monitor. “Nuts to ANSI & ‘ANSI standards,’” he complained.
MIT
MIT
Later that year, X11 gained a set of bolder colors thanks to another programmer, John C. Thomas. Just as Raveling’s update tweaked shades to assuage user confusion, Thomas’s addressed the following written objection from coworker Bruce Schuchardt in 1989:
“[I] am still shocked and horrified by the default colors in the rgb database. The ‘pink’ color in particular looks like the flesh-tone of someone who has been puking for several hours and would really rather get a bullet in the head than go on living.”
Thomas agreed. Frustrated with inconsistent displays, he started to find it futile to standardize color names. In response, he stated in an e-mail that he “sat down one evening with the handiest standard of subjective color names, a box of 72 Crayola crayons." That birthed "aquamarine," "orchid," and "salmon," to name a few.
By 2001, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first working draft of the CSS 3 Color Module that would include the colors. In light of evolving technologies, the colors had fallen out of use, but the W3C claimed the goal was to “codify current practices.” Every browser supported the colors at this point, consequently, the W3C had been using them in compatibility tests. Incorporating the colors into CSS, then, would prevent sites from breaking.
“It was like a backwards-compatibility thing. They thought, ‘We’ve accidentally been doing this, so we might as well just not break it,’” Sexton told Ars.
Backlash ensued. The color database had been subjected to the whims of so many different programmers that it became deeply disorganized, leading some to argue it had no place in CSS. Critics attacked its naming scheme: “dark gray” was lighter than “gray”; there was a “medium violet red” but no “violet red”; “light goldenrod yellow” had no corresponding “goldenrod yellow.” In total 17 colors had dark versions, but only 13 had light ones. Color distribution was also uneven, skewing toward reds and greens and away from blues.
Perhaps the most vehement denunciation comes from a 2002 e-mail written by programmer Steven Pemberton: “The X11 colour names are an abomination that should have been stifled at birth, and adding them to CSS is a blemish on the otherwise excellent design of CSS. To say that the X11 colour set and their names have been 'designed' is an insult to the word ‘design.’ It is just a mess.”
Another point of contention was cultural exclusion. Some programmers took umbrage at the region-centric nature of names like “dodger blue” and the potential racial undertones of “navajo white” (from Sinclair Paints) and “indian red” (from Crayola, though the crayon has since been renamed in response to the same concerns). Others considered the English-only names alienating.
“I'm not a native English speaker. Imagine my reaction the first time I saw the ‘gainsboro’ color or ‘papaya whip,’” Daniel Glazman, co-chairman of the CSS Working Group, told Ars.
Ostensibly, these repercussions could have been prevented. In the ‘80s, X system programmers had the option to identify colors the way many developers do today: with a hexadecimal value (AKA hex value, e.g., #FFFF00) or an RGB color code (e.g., 255,255,0). These options allow a greater degree of choice and precision, and they’re based on schematic, objective, globally legible systems. Why weren’t they used in the first place?
“It was a recognition that almost nobody likes using the numeric values. People don’t think in terms of F5B as a particular shade of color. Using a name is more natural,” said Jim Fulton, a student at MIT at the time of X’s creation and manager of Raveling’s and Thomas’s files. However, he conceded, “Not every idea works out well.”
David Bau
In 2014, however, an unexpected event cast the color list in a more favorable light: a new shade. “Rebecca purple,” was introduced to honor the life of Rebecca Meyer, the daughter of Eric Meyer, a respected programmer and CSS writer. Rebecca died of brain cancer at the age of six; the hue (#663399) was chosen to reflect her favorite color. (A few developers opposed the addition, maintaining that a set of standards was no place for an emotional tribute. They were dismissed as curmudgeons.)
Still, the general consensus is that these colors’ utility is minimal; they’re best reserved as placeholders (it’s easier to type “tomato” than “#FF6347” when you need a color quickly), for beginner-level design projects, or as the butt of a joke.
“I view it with amusement that the colors seem to have migrated into CSS. I just laugh at it,” Fulton told Ars. “I think if someone were to go and crawl over the top 100 or top 1,000 sites and take a look at how various colors are specified, I’m willing to bet you’d still find close to zero percent using color names beyond ‘white’ or ‘black.’”
“If I’m doing an example to show people how to use an editor or a framework, I use hex values like #C0FFEE or #BADA55. It’s about as useful to use #C0FFEE as it is to use ‘papaya whip,’” Sexton added.
Should the colors have been left without standard names then, sparing the development community from a series of angry e-mails and micro-controversies? According to Fulton, probably. Then again, as programmers navigated the uncharted territory of color-displaying GUIs in the ‘80s, it was only natural to experiment any way they knew how.
“At the time, we were dealing with, in some ways, the very beginnings of the graphical home-computer industry,” he said. “For color devices especially, this was the very beginning.”
Julianne Tveten is a journalist specializing in science, technology, and social equity.If there were a way to eliminate tax loopholes for the superwealthy and corporations while simultaneously reducing income inequality, you would think it’d be more popular. But tax reform is not high up on the list of exciting reforms that might create a more equitable society.
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But there is at least one group of people who are focused about the debate on comprehensive tax reform that’s gearing up this year: the lobbyists who will be paid handsomely to swing things their clients’ way. The poor and middle classes, however, don’t have any lobbyists, which may explain why taxes and public spending in the U.S. are making inequality worse rather than reducing it. If the poor and middle classes did have lobbyists, what ideas might get pushed through as part of comprehensive tax reform that would reduce inequality? Bill Gates, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute last year, had one idea: “Don’t tax my income, tax my consumption.” His rationale? Income is easy to hide, but consumption isn’t. It’s not hard to see where he’s coming from—it’s never been easier to set up an offshore bank account, and companies as well as wealthy individuals are using them in numbers we’re only beginning to understand. By taxing consumption instead of income, the argument goes, you could capture a share of the price of every yacht, luxury sports car, $2,000 leather bag, $800 pair of shoes, and whatever else the uber-wealthy choose to buy in your country. You could even expand the consumption tax to include services, which isn’t usually the case for existing sales taxes mostly at the state level. Were that so, you could collect sales taxes from hedge fund manager fees, attorney fees, plastic surgeries, landscaping, housekeeping, and other services that are more likely to be consumed the higher up you go on the income ladder. So is that the solution to a more equitable tax code? Should we eventually stop taxing income entirely—at the corporate as well as personal level–and shift toward taxing only consumption? Rebecca Wilkins isn’t convinced. A career tax attorney, Wilkins is the executive director of the FACT Coalition. “The basic problem with a consumption tax is that it’s inherently regressive,” she says. “It’s almost impossible to do a progressive consumption tax. The reason for that is that lower-income people tend to spend all their money just to get by, to pay the rent or a mortgage payment, groceries, utilities, food, whatever. The more income you have, the less of your income you actually consume, so the wealthy consume only a fraction of their income, and instead, they invest the rest of it.”
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One key fact that Wilkins also points out is that taxes in the U.S. are not as easy on the poor and middle classes as you might guess, despite the fact that they have less money to tax. According to the latest Who Pays? report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which documents the shares of income paid in taxes to state and local governments for all 50 states, “virtually every state’s tax system is fundamentally unfair, taking a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from wealthy families.” Combine regressive state and local tax regimes with a barely progressive federal tax regime, and you find that most Americans pay around 20% of their income in taxes. It wasn’t always that way, even as recently as a decade ago. “The Bush tax cuts really put a big dent in what used to be a much more progressive tax code that can actually help address inequality,” Wilkins says, highlighting in particular the Bush-era reductions in capital gains and dividends tax rates. So maybe we should find ways to raise more taxes on income from capital—capital gains, dividends, estate taxes, and others—as a way to make the taxes progressive again? After all, the wealthier you are, the greater your share of income comes from capital as opposed to wages or salary. As Warren Buffett famously likes to say, because most of his income comes from investments and not a salary, he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. But it’s harder than you think, says Eugene Steuerle, Richard B. Fisher chair and institute fellow at the Urban Institute. “Measuring income from capital is hard to do,” Steuerle says. For one thing, “capital income taxation is on a realization basis rather than an accrual basis. If you don’t ever sell your stock that has capital gains, you could never pay taxes on it.” Steuerle has been at this for a long time; you can read more of his reflections and ideas to reform public spending in his book Dead Men Ruling. Among his long list of achievements, he led the 1984 Treasury Department study that led to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, passed by a Democratic House of Representatives led by Tip O’Neill and signed by President Ronald Reagan. It was considered a landmark achievement by all sides, lowering marginal tax rates for all, while simplifying the code, eliminating special-interest loopholes, raising the corporate tax rate, and raising the capital gains tax rate—in effect, making the tax code more progressive. Yes, that’s right, Ronald Reagan signed a bill that, as former Senator Bill Bradley wrote in a 2009 op-ed, “resulted in the wealthy contributing a higher percentage of income-tax revenues than they had before the reform.”
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“The notion of progressivity is as old a philosophy as there is in government,” Steuerle says. “I don’t think it’s going to go away. The question of how you do it is a much tougher issue.” Our rule system is blatantly rigged in favor of economic elites, to the detriment to everyone else. “Yes, the tax code can be an important tool to reduce economic inequality,” says Nicholas Galasso, the research and policy advisor at Oxfam who was the primary author of the now-famous report concluding that the 85 wealthiest people in the world have the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of humanity. But he doesn’t view a shift toward a more progressive tax regime that reduces inequality to be very likely. “I think that the anger around rising inequality in the U.S. concerns how our rule system is blatantly rigged in favor of economic elites to the detriment to everyone else,” Galasso says. “This is the case regarding tax, but it’s also evident in many other areas too.” Making the tax code more progressive may need to start by first tackling a different problem entirely—a PR problem. People might feel different about their taxes if they had more of an understanding of what they were actually paying for. (Obama tried this with his “you didn’t build that” speech, however, and it didn’t work very well.) While traveling last year, Wilkins picked up an in-flight magazine and found an article series on Minnesota. One article was on all the high-tech firms that were there, especially medical device firms like Medtronic; one was on the Twin Cities and what a great place it was to live, and how highly educated the workforce was, the string of city parks, and a joint partnership between the University of Minnesota and the medical device makers. “And never did they draw the connection that taxes pay for those things; taxes pay for the university system and the public parks; and the infrastructure and public health and clean water and more,” Wilkins recalled. “Taxes make the environment possible that makes Medtronic successful,” she concluded. “I just thought it was a really interesting juxtaposition because right then Medtronic was in the news for exploring an inversion to avoid paying corporate taxes in the U.S.”What does it take to break into the lucrative world of hedge funds? It’s a question that countless Wall Street up-and-comers would love to see answered, as they look to graduate from the 100-hour-per-week grind of banking to the relative glamour – and massive income opportunity – of hedgies.
It used to be that you had to be an Ivy League graduate with a Type-A personality and a razor sharp mind to even sniff the rarified air of hedge funds. Now, thanks to the democratizing effects of Boston startup Quantopian, those barriers to entry have never been lower.
Quantopian, which offers mathematicians and quantitative thinkers a turnkey platform to develop, test, and execute algorithmic trading strategies, has previously stated its intention of building a crowdsourced hedge fund. The company took a crucial first step in that direction this week by awarding the top trader in its community across the month of February $100,000 with which to trade for the next six months. The winner, American engineer Grant Kiehne, will get to keep all the profits generated during this period.
The prize is the first in what will be a series of monthly contests, collectively dubbed the Quantopian Open. Remarkably, prior to joining Quantopian among its first 1,000 members in 2012, Kiehne had no stock trading or professional finance experience. Now he’s beating amateur and professional quant traders from around the world and earning six-figure capital commitments as a result.
“I’m delighted with the quality and diversity in our contest pool,” Quantopian co-founder and CEO John Fawcett says. “We’re building a meritocracy here at Quantopian. Algorithm writing is no longer just for guys on Wall Street with exclusive access to the tools and data. With the Quantopian platform, anyone with a bit of coding skill and a mind for finance can start writing algorithms. The best ones win.”
The Quantopian Open invites
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, en Chihuahua nada más él manda.
Esto se torna más problemático en la coyuntura de la sucesión en Chihuahua. Duarte va a redoblar sus esfuerzos para imponer a su candidato a la gubernatura en 2016. Va a intentar bloquear a cuanto adversario interno encuentre. Así lo está haciendo con el ex alcalde de la capital del estado Marco Adán Quezada, aparentemente a la cabeza de los priístas en las encuestas y apoyado por el grupo de los ex gobernadores Fernando y Reyes Baeza. El Congreso del estado le cerró las puertas a buscar una candidatura independiente aprobando una reforma constitucional que priva del derecho a ese tipo de candidaturas a quienes hayan militado en un partido político hasta hace dos años. Asimismo, es muy posible que este viernes el Congreso inhabilite a Quezada por el asunto del accidente del Aeroshow en el que perecieron 13 personas en octubre de 2013, unos días antes de que dejara la presidencia municipal. Duarte alega que sólo se está siguiendo una recomendación de la CNDH, misma que le viene como anillo al dedo a sus propósitos hegemónicos.
Si Duarte se enterca en designar él a su candidato meterá al PRI en serios aprietos. Va a profundizar la seria división interna que ya ha causado en el tricolor chihuahuense y va a transmitir a su delfín la ilegitimidad y el rechazo que todos los días se le manifiesta en Chihuahua.The rise of low-cost, hacker-friendly electronics is fuelling a new wave of hardware hobbyists. Using programmable boards like the Arduino and dirt-chip computers like the Raspberry Pi, you can build everything from your very own supercomputers to an internet-connected beer fermentation refrigeration system.
But Belgium startup Circuits.io wants to take this trend even further. It wants to give you the power to build your own custom circuit boards.
Historically, that's been expensive and difficult for hobbyists to do, but Circuits.io wants to change that by offering a web-based circuit board design system made especially for hobbyists complete with a library of open source component designs. And soon it will also offer a CafePress-style print-on-demand service for circuit boards.
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The company was founded earlier this year by Schrauwen Karel Bruneel and Ben Schrauwen. Bruneel is an electrical engineering post-doc at the University of Gent and the co-creator of the Arduino-likeDwengo board. "After his PhD Larel had a void he needed to fill," Schrauwen explains.
Schrauwen is a professor of machine learning and robotics at the University of Gent and the co-founder of Mollom, a spam filtering company that was acquired by Acquia last summer. "After that, I had a void to fill as well," he says.
Read next 'KiloCore' is the world's first microchip with 1,000 processors 'KiloCore' is the world's first microchip with 1,000 processors
The two have decided to fill the void in their lives by filling a void in the electronic design automation (EDA) software market.
Bruneel and Schrauwen had seen how hard it was to teach circuit design to beginners using the tools already on the market. Most of these tools are meant for large electronics companies and are too complicated and expensive for hobbyists, Schrauwen says.
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Meanwhile, hobbyists are forced to design common parts of a board, such as power supplies, from scratch -- or at least manually enter them into their design software from a schematic. In the software world, developers rely on open source libraries to avoid tediously re-creating common components. But Schrauwen says incompatibilities between different EDA applications have made it difficult to create common open source libraries for circuit boards.
Finally, once you've finished a circuit board you'll want to have it printed. But Schrauwen says that manufacturers generally have a minimum order of 1,000 units, which makes printing boards prohibitively expensive for most hobbyists. And even those who do shell out for bulk manufacture will have to wait weeks to get their hands on the final product.
Circuit.io is tackling all three of these problems. Its web-based design tool is aimed at hobbyists, and Schrauwen and Bruneel say they've kept it as simple as possible.
Read next Emulate is testing drugs on tiny human organ chips Emulate is testing drugs on tiny human organ chips
But what's really interesting is the component library.
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Circuits.io already has hundreds of components that hackers can use in their projects, and users can upload and share their own designs as well. What Circuits.io is offering is actually quite a lot like GitHub, the popular host for open source software projects.
In addition to being able to reuse components, hardware hackers will be able to "fork" existing ones -- that is, make their own copy that they can modify and share. You don't even have to use the online editor -- you can import and export designs from Eagle and another popular design programme.
Schrauwen says the online editor and the open source libraries will always be free to use -- the company will make money through its print-on-demand service.
Schrauwen says the reason it costs so much to produce printed circuit boards (PCBs) is that manufacturers have to do extensive testing and preparation of a design before it's put into production. But by standardising its formats, Schrauwen says Circuits.io can eliminate most of this prep work, enabling them to send files to manufacturers that are ready to be printed.
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By cutting out these costly early steps, Circuits.io users will be able to buy a single PCB instead of 1,000 -- and get their hands on their boards much more quickly.
Circuits.io isn't alone in its mission. Upverter is a web-based schematics designer and online community, and Fritzing is also trying to make it cheap to produce PCBs. This movement is just getting started.
Source: Wired.comby
Insurance companies make a simple wager with you each time you sign a policy. They are betting that, over the life of the policy, they will pay out less to you and your beneficiaries than you will pay them.
Insurance companies of all kinds make tidy profits on this simple wager. If they don’t, sometimes the government will bail them out.
Either way, insurance is still just a bet. And in America, we do not have a healthcare system. We have a health insurance industry.
That industry has been one of the most profitable sectors of the economy for well over a decade. But costs skyrocketed and care suffered. We heard horror stories about rationed care, denied procedures and corporate bureaucracies run amok. Ironically, these were the horror stories we were supposed to hear if the government took the reigns of the “best healthcare system in the world.”
So, instead of a single-payer healthcare system, we got The Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare. Instead of retiring the health insurance industry and its actuarial tables and profit margins and wagers, Obama “saved” the health insurance industry and enshrined it in perpetuity as the “Health Insurance-Industrial Complex.”
As the Affordable Care Act’s provisions begin to take effect, the folks in the Complex are wasting no time doing what they can to keep their profits tidy. Leading insurers in California are seeking increases in premiums ranging from 20% to 26%. Regulators in Florida and Ohio have already approved increasing premiums as much as 20%, and, since the ACA doesn’t set federal standards, insurance companies are moving in a number of states to force these spikes in premiums.
Remember, if you can “afford” health insurance, you have to buy it. If you refuse, you’ll pay a penalty to the government at tax time. Some are exempt from this mandate. But, in effect, the ACA has guaranteed the health insurance industry a captive market.
Meanwhile, they continue to change the terms of all those bets they’ve placed against millions of Americans and the cost of the “best healthcare in the world” continues to rise. When compared to other nations with some form of single-payer system, the difference is so stark that it’s almost obscene. It’s not just the $800 difference between an MRI in France versus the U.S., it’s almost every part of a system that has at its heart the relentless desire to turn a profit.
Even worse, a much-ballyhooed part of the promised “21st Century transformation” into greater “affordability” has turned out be little more than a profiteering scheme.
Remember the “streamlining” and “cost savings” guaranteed from the conversion to electronic medical records? Well, it hasn’t quite panned out. In fact, the only real beneficiaries of the conversion are companies like General Electric that sell electronic medical records systems. Not coincidentally, GE and other interested parties funded the key RAND study in 2005 that both predicted $81 billion in savings for America’s health care system and also became the driving rationale for the profitable conversion.
This type of closed system is par for the course in Washington, D.C.
Every door revolves in the nation’s only recession-proof city. Is it any surprise that the woman who wrote the Affordable Care Act is now leaving the White House for a job with health care giant Johnson & Johnson? Liz Fowler worked for Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) during the drafting of the ACA and had the primary responsibility for authoring the legislation. After its passage, she migrated to the White House to help with implementation. Seems reasonable enough. However, it is important to note where she was before joining the staff of Senator Baucus. Yup, you guessed it…she was a bigwig at WellPoint, the nation’s second leading health insurance company with nearly 54 million policyholders.
All of this makes you wonder who knew whom in the breast milk-pump industry, which is seeing a huge spike in its profits thanks to a new coverage requirement written into the ACA.
It may be too early to render judgment on a law that hasn’t yet been fully implemented, but it is not too early to determine that the profit motive might simply be incompatible with the equitable delivery of healthcare. As matter of course, businesses try to lower costs and increase revenue. That may be okay when they sell scissors or candlesticks, but it seems ill-suited to deliver labor-intensive care for those who are most vulnerable.
And as far as the health of the insurance industry, it’s a safe bet that they’ll keep coming out on top as the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented.
JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, published historian, radio co-host and documentary filmmaker (The Warning, 2008). His credits include a stint on the Newshour news desk, C-SPAN, and as newsmagazine producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington. His weekly show, Inside the Headlines w/ The Newsvandal, co-hosted by James Moore, airs every Friday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, Iowa. He blogs under the pseudonym “the Newsvandal.”Fetterman to hold 'Trump is a Jagoff' rally in Strip District
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman is planning to hold an anti-Donald Trump rally while the Republican presidential front-runner visits Pittsburgh on Wednesday evening.Fetterman's campaign said he'll speak to supporters at 5:30 p.m. at the "Trump is a Jagoff" rally in the parking lot at Smallman and 12th streets in the Strip District.At the same time, Trump will be speaking at a town hall at Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall in Oakland. He will hold a campaign rally at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center after the town hall.Fetterman's campaign said his group will join a march to the convention center after the Strip District rally.Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, has spoken out against Trump several times in the past.Get the WTAE Pittsburgh's Action News 4 App
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman is planning to hold an anti-Donald Trump rally while the Republican presidential front-runner visits Pittsburgh on Wednesday evening.
Fetterman's campaign said he'll speak to supporters at 5:30 p.m. at the "Trump is a Jagoff" rally in the parking lot at Smallman and 12th streets in the Strip District.
At the same time, Trump will be speaking at a town hall at Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall in Oakland. He will hold a campaign rally at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center after the town hall.
Fetterman's campaign said his group will join a march to the convention center after the Strip District rally.
Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, has spoken out against Trump several times in the past.
AlertMeMad Men: Waterloo, or The Best Things in Life Are Free
In the spring of 1967, younger then than Sally Draper is now, I walked to the General Cinema movie theater in the Brockton, Mass., Westgate Mall to see “How to Succeed in Business Without Even Trying,” and I loved it. A send up of corporate life, the movie had a big impact on how I (and others) perceived office culture. Together with the much darker “The Apartment,” “Succeed” is one of the “Urtexts” of the Mad Men mythos.
And of course it starred Robert Morse. He played a window washer who manipulated himself through guile, street smarts and confidence into the role of Chairman of the Board of a huge company. In the scene posted below the other senior managers plot against his ascendancy (one even says: “Let’s not forget he’s now in advertising and that does something to men’s brains”) and he responds with the confidence-building “I believe in you.”
When I saw my first episode of Mad Men, I’d never heard of any of the actors in the credits until Robert Morse’ name appeared. For whatever reason, I hadn’t seen him in anything since“Succeed,” and was shocked at how old and fat he’d gotten during those 40 years. But that twinkle was still there and Bert Cooper soon became one of my favorite characters. He was one of those Mad Men wonders: hardly ever on the screen but distinctive and unique whenever he did appear.
Bert would be about 80 in 1969, meaning he was born in the 1880s. He would have seen the coming of electricity, aviation, the automobile and the telephone. Along with Roger Sterling’s father, he would have been an early pioneer in the advertising industry.
In many ways, especially with his casual racism, he was a throwback to an earlier era, but what made him truly interesting is that he was focused on the future until the end. He hangs a Mark Rothko in his office; he has a Jackson Pollack on his living room wall; he’s delighted by the prospect of the moon landing.
It’s not surprising when an 80-something man dies, but it is surprising when he returns from the dead to give Don Draper some well-needed advice. Echoing the little nerd Neil, the one Sally kisses, Bert does an amazing song and dance to “The moon belongs to everyone, The best things in life they’re free.” When a show as realistic as Mad Men shows Don having a hallucination about a ghost it’s a shock, but somehow it works because it exposes an emotional truth. And what a fabulous send-off for Robert Morse, whose career was bookended by two amazing roles.
And what’s really unexpected about the song is that it’s a total contradiction of the Mad Men guiding ethos. Sterling Cooper and Partners exist precisely to convince “consumers” that the best things in life are very very very NOT free. When the scene is over, Don has to lean against a desk to compose himself. Is he contemplating the message? We’ll need to wait ten months to find out.
The other thing about this particular song is that it was a Depression era standard – a song used to comfort a population that didn’t have any money anyway. Here’s an early version by Jack Hylton.
It’s a little reminder that Bert would have been at the peak of his career during the Depression, somehow coaxing the agency through tough times and showing real leadership to his team – the kind of leadership that he claims Roger lacks.
In their heart-to-heart final conversation, Bert goes all Yoda and says that Roger has talent, skill and experience but not leadership. He says he voted to keep Don in the company even though he’s a “pain in the ass” because as a leader he has to be loyal to his team. To which Roger responds with the lyrics to yet another Depression-era song: “So it’s ‘Let’s have another cup of Coffee; Let’s have another piece of pie?’” Two songs from the Depression in a show that heavily features space travel? Definitely not a coincidence.
So exeunt Bert Cooper. Your epitaph for your old girlfriend, the hellcat Ida Blankenship, could have applied to you: “She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.”
Bert’s death, coming in the middle of a power struggle at the firm, provides the impetus for yet another episode of corporate intrigue. The episode is titled “Waterloo,” based on Bert’s observation that no one has ever successfully come back from a leave of absence at the firm. Even Napoleon couldn’t come back after being exiled to Elba.
But Don is not the real Napoleon in this episode. He’s been playing the good boy for several months now. No, the guy who’s plotting the coup is Jim Cutler. Once there’s no longer a chance to get Commander cigarettes as a client, he declares Don in breach of contract for his little stunt in showing up to the preliminary meeting uninvited. Technically Cutler is correct but what he doesn’t understand about this particular partnership (or about the world in general) is that the rules are the rules until the people who make the rules decide to change them. He sends Don a letter in the company’s name without checking with his partners. And after forcing a showdown, Don wins the vote. Only Joan votes against him, declaring that he’s already cost him too much money (as Bert pointed out – and which readers of this column know from my write-up after it happened, when Don blew up the IPO last year it cost Joan over a million dollars.)
As I remarked last week, I can’t tell if Cutler is an empty suit or a Machiavellian schemer, but I’m swinging back to empty suit. In some respects, he’s as impetuous as Don, sending the “breach” letter without authorization, and pressing again to fire Don before Bert’s body is even cold (which invigorates Roger and turns him into the very leader that Bert said he was not). Plus he’s not exactly Frank Underwood with the vote counting. He assumes he has Ted’s vote, which I doubt, so if he wants to pull off a palace coup, he should plan it more carefully.
In any event, Cutler’s crass power grab precipitates Roger’s roll of the dice and he proposes a sale of the company to McCann Erickson, which once tried to buy Sterling Cooper and is still interested in hiring Don. When Roger brings the offer back to the partners, he dangles dollar bills in front of Joan’s eyes, which changes her mind FAST about the prospect of continuing to work with Don. Pete’s even more ecstatic about getting $3 million (or course Trudy will get half of that – SORRY!!!)
The problem is Ted. McCann insists that Ted and Don come as a package deal because Chevy likes their work, but he’s burned out. After begging Don to let him go to California in his place last year, he’s been miserable out there, threatening to go all Lane Pryce with a couple of Sunkist clients. Ted’s had so little screen time this season that we can’t understand the source of his depression – presumably it’s his lingering love for Peggy, or maybe he just became undone that his self-image as an honest upstanding man was damaged by their dalliance. For whatever reason he wants to quit and get out of advertising altogether.
But then comes the great Don Draper pitch, once again reeling in poor Ted Chaogh. He tells Ted that even if he has the ability to become independently wealthy, he still needs to work. You don’t need to work with us, he says, but you need to fill your day with a fulfilling occupation. As someone who was banished from the office for six months, he knows the existential crisis of not having a work identity. And then there’s this lure: he and Ted won’t have to worry about management any longer – they can just do the work they love without the office politics that has consumed them over the past year.
So the soulful creatives – the ones who care about excellence, art and human expression – win this round over the computer-driven bean-pushers. The computer will work for them; they will not work for the computer. And it’s inspiring because the show has demonstrated how fulfilling work can be when there’s a merger of your best self and your job. We see Peggy rise to Drapper-like levels in her presentation to Burger Chef. Her mixture of the topic of the day (the moon landing), her special insight as a woman pitching to an all-male team, and her evocation of the most primitive desires (to be a good parent through the delivery of food and love) elevates this pitch to “Carousel”-like standards.
What’s fabulous about the pitch is how Don insisted that Peggy do it and the pride he takes in her achievement. Those frustrating scenes early in the season, with her being marginalized by Lou Avery, are over and she can really blossom. There are many meaningful looks between them as the episode progresses and it’s clear that although Don’s losing his actual wife, he’s gaining an “office wife.” Don is still a mentor but she’s almost a peer now.
This was the most stress-free episode of the year. Even with Bert dying and Don’s marriage breaking up and Cutler’s attempted coup, this was still a remarkably happy episode. And the reason is that the thematic thread running through the show – the moon landing – is the most thrilling and happiest moment of the entire 1960s.
It’s hard to remember now, but when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, it seemed immensely important – as important as Columbus discovering America. Even in hindsight, it does seem like an amazing technological achievement. In less than a decade, the country went from having no space program, to walking on the moon. The shots of all the families huddling around the TV to gape in expectation, pride and relief are still very moving. This was the Sixties at their best – the best minds solving a problem by using what seems now like laughably antique technology (my cell phone has a more powerful computer in it than the one that directed the Apollo space launches). And the idea that an entire nation would watch as one extended family also seems laughably antique.
What the characters don’t know is how quickly the excitement, pride and glow of achievement would fade. Within years the moon missions will become ho-hum and they will eventually be cancelled altogether because they providing so little immediate return on investment. Very little fires the imagination of the country today like the space program did, and although I’m not sorry to see the Sixties in the rear window, I do miss that shared mission we felt as a people.
And a word for Neil Armstrong – an incredibly American hero (see obit here). A boy scout and fighter pilot from Ohio, he was for a while the most famous man in the world. Also forgotten today is how dangerous those missions were. We didn’t really know if the landing module would come down on hard ground or sink into an ocean of dust. Nor did we know if the module would be able to take off from the moon and return back to the orbiting vessel that would return them to earth. Armstrong never capitalized on his fame; like Don claims to be, he was also someone who just wanted to do the job. When Roger Sterling asks what Armstrong will do for the rest of his life and then suggests that he will be able to “screw every girl in Florida,” he is very very VERY wrong. Armstrong might have been emotionally remote (like a certain ad executive we know) but he never exploited his fame, and he lived a life of quiet dignity and restraint – the kind of character that the spoiled and entitled Roger Sterling can’t begin to understand.
Some other thoughts:
— They episode contains many examples of people making misjudgments and poor predictions. As noted, Roger was wrong about Neil Armstrong. Bert was wrong about Don being able to come back from leave; he was very wrong about Don not being loyal to his team, as he gave his chance to pitch Burger Chef to Peggy. Don is wrong that he and Ted will be able to keep out of office politics. Julio’s mother is wrong in thinking Newark will provide better opportunities than the Upper West Side. Peggy was wrong that the moon landing would change everything. Cutler is really wrong when he outlines what the agency should look like: “computer services and media buys pinpointed with surgical accuracy.” Ha, that’s a good one, as all my friends in advertising and media measurement know. Even today, most advertising is wasted because the agencies don’t really know if their actual customers are watching the TV shows they’ve advertised on.
–– I don’t want to quibble, but I don’t understand the apportionment of shares in SC&P. Why do “Benedict Joan” and Pete respectively still have 5% and 10% of the agency? That was their stake before the merger. Those stakes should have been diluted by half if it was a merger of equals. And if Chaough and Cutler each have 20%, does that mean that Don, Roger and Bert had the remaining 45%, or 15% each? Also, Don asks the pertinent question after Bert dies: is his sister still alive? Bert’s vote doesn’t disappear, it just goes to his heir or heirs, so they rightfully should have waited for the sister to vote.
— Poor Harry Crane. We can only assume he’s been greedy and holding out for a better partnership deal since last episode, but he didn’t move fast enough and missed the buy-out. (Something makes me think this happened once before, but I haven’t had time to research it thoroughly, so if anyone out there can remember Harry missing out on another windfall, let me know.) To make matters worse, he could potentially be out on his ass, job-wise, because McCann probably has a huge media buying shop and might not need his talents or his IBM 3600 computer.
— Have we seen the last of Lou Avery and his Tiki Bar? In his final scene he complained that he’d built ten years as a tobacco advertiser and “one meeting turned me into a joke.” Sorry Pal, you were always a joke.
— I loved how Sally kissed the nerdy Neil, not his testosterone-exuding older brother. She obviously had her eye on hunko, the student athelete, at first, getting dolled up and looking like a blonde Elizabeth Taylor just to go life-guarding. But then she plagiarized the guy’s observation about the space program being a waste of money, and disappointed Don, who told her not to be so cynical. Suddenly Nerdy Neil, who might be awkward, but is honestly passionate about something and advocates real experiences, not manufactured TV ones, looked like the better catch, at least for a quick smooch.
— Interesting that all the families shown watching the moon landing were non-traditional: Roger, his ex-wife, his son-in-law and his grandchild; the work family of Peggy, Don, Harry and Pete; the blended Francis and college friend families; and Bert and his Black maid.
— Best line, Pete about Don: “That is a very sensitive piece of horseflesh! He shouldn’t be rattled!”
— Breakfast at the Francis household almost made me throw up. Fried eggs on toast, coffee and cigarettes. Three things I never could stand and the smell of them together always repulsed me.
— Very touching scene between Peggy and Julio, when Julio announces he’s moving to Newark. He’s ten years old, almost as old as her own baby would be at this point – the one she had with Pete. She promises to come visit him, but we all know she won’t – just like she can’t visit her own child.
— Darkly amusing how Peggy’s main concern about the fate of the astronauts is the impact of a potential disaster on her pitch. If the astronauts perish or get stranded “we’re going to have to postpone this meeting a year.”
— Peggy’s complaint that she will have to pitch a commercial to a bunch of guys who just “touched the face of God,” is a clear reference to the poem “High Flight” by the American aviator John Gillespie Magee, Jr, who fought to defend England during the Battle of Britain (history here). This poem was famously quoted by Ronald Reagan after the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up. For a good cry check this out:
— I wouldn’t necessarily rule Megan out for the rest of the series. They are splitting up, it seems, but the Charles Manson murders are in August 1969 and that might shake her up. She’s right about one thing: Don doesn’t owe her anything. She was a secretary at smallish ad agency when she seduced him with Disneyland and her milk-sopping skills. He then bankrolled her acting “career.” Even now she sits in a great house with a fantastic view, throwing money around like it came out of a spaghetti box. I like Megan, but I don’t feel sorry for her, like I feel sorry for Betty.
— So what comes next? If this were a normal Mad Men season, the next episode would only jump ahead three weeks to August 1969, the month of Woodstock, the year’s other big touchstone. But with seven episodes left and so many plotlines already wrapped up, it wouldn’t surprise me to have them jump ahead a year or longer. The fate of SC&P is sealed, as is apparently Don’s marriage, his relationship with Peggy, and his job. Can we really spend the rest of 1969 watching SC&P get integrated into McCann?
Regardless, the first half of the season turned out better than I expected, with some powerful evocative episodes. Curse you TV gods, for making us wait another ten months before we know the fate of these characters!
Bravo!
AdvertisementsTwo American entrepreneurs have made plans to build a floating colony in the Pacific Ocean, where they will bring the world’s most intelligent scientists that are unable to attain a visa to enter the US.
The floating colony, which will consist of a large cruise ship parked 12 miles off the Californian coast, will host numerous start-up companies employing the brightest scientists and engineers. Colony residents must be qualified to work there, but are not required to attain a US work visa.
The Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who founded the project are Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija, two businessmen who worked together at The Seasteading Institute, an organization that facilitates the establishment of mobile communities on international waters. The entrepreneurs have named their proposed colony “Blueseed” and have already started accepting applications from individuals and companies that want to move there. They plan to launch the colony in the second quarter of 2014.
More than 380 companies from 68 countries have already applied for a spot on the floating cruise ship. Marty, the son of Cuban immigrants, told the Los Angeles Times that he came to the US as a refugee from Yugoslavia and is fed up with some US lawmakers’ stark opposition to immigration. He is troubled by the fact that the US, unlike other countries, offers no visas to foreigners who are highly skilled or willing to start a business.
“A lot of people say, ‘I’d like to go to Silicon Valley’ but there is no way for them to do it,” he told the Associated Press, shortly after launching the initiative in 2011.
He said that he came up with the idea of colonizing a ship after hearing university students complain about having to leave the US upon graduation. But even Americans are willing to say goodbye to solid ground and head for the high seas.
They too want to “live and work in an awesome startup- and technology-oriented space”, Mutabdzija told Forbes. And it’s not just scientists and engineers who have applied to move to the cruise ship: anthropologists and sociologists interested in monitoring human interactions on the colony have requested to go onboard.
Individuals and companies from countries including Azerbaijan, Poland, Jordan and Sri Lanka have all put in their applications, and Mutabdzija is excited about the prospect of “connecting people, ideas and a human touch”.
While there will be a variety of living arrangements, the cost of basic accommodations is expected to be as low as $1,200 per person, per month, and as high as $1,600. Blueseed will not collect taxes from colony residents, but will expect them to abide by the tax laws of their home countries.
“I think Blueseed is an incredible opportunity for non-US entrepreneurs to work in what is no doubt the most powerful start-up environment in the world,” Andrew Considine, co-founder of the Ireland-based mobile start-up Willstream Labs, told the LA Times.
The Blueseed founders are currently trying to raise $27 million to lease a cruise ship that can house 1,000 entrepreneurs.
“I don’t know whether Blueseed will work or not,” said Silicon Valley investor Mike Maples, who gave money to the project. “But here’s another opportunity to help people who want to come to this country to build great companies.”Vim indent text objects for Coffeescript and Python
Do you write a lot of Coffeescript, Python, Jade templates, Haskell, or any other language that uses indentation? If you are like me, you may be sad to find out that your trusty ciB does not work anymore in Vim. ciB is “change inside block” which only matches inside () and {}. This is no good when we are dealing with languages like Python that use indentation instead of curly braces for block structures.
Luckily there is a plugin that adds this functionality:
Once you install this you can use vii or vai to see how it works. Use cii to change an entire indentation block.
Here’s a quick screencast to see how it works:
Good luck and happy Vimming!CEI Architecture designed the Elenko Residence in Osoyoos, British Columbia, Canada.
Project description
Located on the shores of Osoyoos Lake in British Columbia, Canada, this single-family residence was designed to suit the owner’s recreational lifestyle amid the natural setting of the Okanagan region. The house is set on a narrow lot limited by setbacks to a 30’ by 50’ area. The building incorporates minimal openings on the west side and is mostly transparent on the east, taking full advantage of the light bouncing off the lake. A flat roof provides opportunities to sit outside on an upper deck, which opens off a recreation room, with a full view of the water.
The building form is reminiscent of the early modernists. The building aesthetic is intended to be a simple and functional solution that responds to the semi-desert climate, the project’s budget and the waterfront context.
Due to the constraints of the site, spaces were stacked on one another to create a two-storey home, with a roof garden for relaxing or entertaining. Living spaces such as the living room, dining room and kitchen are located on the main floor, offering easy access to the lake. A guest bedroom and washroom are also located on the main floor. The living spaces benefit from the east exposure, which allows the morning sun to penetrate the spaces. In the evening the harsh summer sun is blocked by the solid south wall. The second floor includes all bedrooms, including the laundry and a recreation room off the roof garden.
The building incorporates passive strategies to control heat gain and minimize energy consumption. Natural ventilation relieves the house of heat gain by allowing a breeze to form between the lower and upper windows. The high water table makes it ideal to incorporate a ground-source heat pump and radiant floor heating. Shading is necessary to counter the hot summer sun of the Okanagan Valley.President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Evan Vucci/AP, Alexander Zemlianichenko, pool/AP)
In the early weeks of the Trump administration, former Obama administration officials and State Department staffers fought an intense, behind-the-scenes battle to head off efforts by incoming officials to normalize relations with Russia, according to multiple sources familiar with the events.
Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow.
These efforts to relax or remove punitive measures imposed by President Obama in retaliation for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and meddling in the 2016 election alarmed some State Department officials, who immediately began lobbying congressional leaders to quickly pass legislation to block the move, the sources said.
“There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions,” said Dan Fried, a veteran State Department official who served as chief U.S. coordinator for sanctions policy until he retired in late February. He said in the first few weeks of the administration, he received several “panicky” calls from U.S. government officials who told him they had been directed to develop a sanctions-lifting package and imploring him, “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?”
Fried said he grew so concerned that he contacted Capitol Hill allies — including Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — to urge them to move quickly to pass legislation that would “codify” the sanctions in place, making it difficult for President Trump to remove them.
Tom Malinowski, who had just stepped down as President Obama’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, told Yahoo News he too joined the effort to lobby Congress after learning from former colleagues that the administration was developing a plan to lift sanctions — and possibly arrange a summit between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin — as part of an effort to achieve a “grand bargain” with Moscow. “It would have been a win-win for Moscow,” said Malinowski, who only days before he left office announced his own round of sanctions against senior Russian officials for human rights abuses under a law known as the Magnitsky Act.
The previously unreported efforts by Fried and others to check the Trump administration’s policy moves cast new light on the unseen tensions over Russia policy during the early days of the new administration.
It also potentially takes on new significance for congressional and Justice Department investigators in light of reports that before the administration took office Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his chief foreign policy adviser, Michael
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defined within. The typical JavaScript variable can be created in two stages - declaration and initialisation.
The declaration stage is where the variable reference is created, without any value. At this stage, if we try to access the variable value, we will get undefined. The second initialisation stage is where the actual value is assigned to the variable.
function exampleScope() { var foo; // Declaration foo = ‘Hello, world!’; // Initialisation var bar = ‘Hi there!’; // Declaration & Initialisation in one step }
Hoisting is the behaviour of moving the declaration stage to the top of the scope, regardless of if the variable is declared and initialised in one step. This has always been a peculiar behaviour in JavaScript we just had to accept and work around. Fortunately, with the introduced of two new types of variables in ES2015, this behaviour is less of an issue.
Hoisting and var
Prior to ES2015, var was the only form of variable we could use. The var variable is scoped to the function it sits within, or the global scope if it isn’t within a local function. Even with the introduction of let and const in ES2015, the old var still exists in its typical form.
When a variable is created using var, regardless of how, the declaration of the variable is “hoisted” to the top of the scope. For example, consider the following function -
function exampleScope() { // Other function stuff here var foo = ‘Hello, world!’; }
The function above will actually be interpreted as the following -
function exampleScope() { var foo; // Other function stuff here foo = ‘Hello, world!’; }
At first glance, this may not seem to have a real effect on anything. However, it can lead to a very peculiar behaviour where variables can be used before they are actually created in our code.
Hoisted variables can be accessed before they are initialised
Typically, if we try to use a variable that has not been defined, we get a ReferenceError, which stops the rest of the script for executing.
function exampleScope() { console.log(foo); // => ReferenceError: foo is not defined [Stop script execution] console.log(“This will never be logged”); }
However, if we declare and initialise the variable after trying to use it, we simply get undefined, a non-blocking error.
function exampleScope() { console.log(foo); // => undefined var foo = “Hello, world!”; console.log(foo); // => “Hello, world!” console.log(“This sentence will be logged”); // => “This sentence will be logged” }
Because of hoisting, the above code is actually equivalent to us having written the following -
function exampleScope() { var foo; console.log(foo); // => undefined foo = “Hello, world!”; console.log(foo); // => “Hello, world!” console.log(“This sentence will be logged”); // => “This sentence will be logged” }
Hoisting and let
The let variable is a new form of variable introduced in ES2015. Instead of being scoped to the nearest function, let is scoped to the nearest block. This means that let variables defined within non-function blocks like if will only be available within those blocks.
The let variable, like var, can be created in the two stages - declaration and initialisation. However, the hoisting behaviour does not apply. If we repeat the example above using let instead, we will get a ReferenceError because foo does not exist at the point it is trying to be used.
function exampleScope() { console.log(foo); // => ReferenceError: foo is not defined [Stop script execution] let foo = “Hello, world!”; console.log(foo); console.log(“This will never be logged”); }
Hoisting and const
The const variable is another new form of variable (technically, a constant) introduced in ES2015. Like let, it is scoped to the block, rather than the function. Unlike let and var, const must be declared and initialised in one step. Additionally, once this step is complete, the value cannot be modified.
Because of this, hoisting does not apply to const either.
function exampleScope() { console.log(foo); // => ReferenceError: foo is not defined [Stop script execution] const foo = “Hello, world!”; console.log(foo); console.log(“This will never be logged”); }
Function Hoisting
In addition to variables, hoisting applies to functions created using the function declaration syntax.
Function declarations, as with the const variable, are defined and initialised in one step. However, functions are hoisted by moving the entire function, not just the declaration, to the top of the scope. This means that functions can always be used before they are created, as long as the usage is within the same scope.
function exampleScope() { foo(); // => “Hello, world!” function foo() { console.log(“Hello, world!”) } }
Functions referenced by variables, on the other hand, are subject to the hoisting rules for the variable used. For example, if we create a function and assign it to a var variable, the declaration will be hoisted to the top of the scope. However, because it is only declared and not initialised as a function, we will not be able to call the function before the initialisation stage.
function exampleScope() { console.log(foo); // => undefined foo(); // => TypeError: foo is not a function [Stop script execution] var foo = function() { console.log(“Hello, world!”) } }
What does this mean for ES2015?
When writing ES2015, the best practice is to always use const. If you need the variable to be updated, then use let. There should be almost no circumstance in which using var is the better option, and so hoisting should not be an issue.
Nonetheless, function hoisting is still present, so this is a behaviour we should still be conscious of.Image copyright Getty Images
The campaign to get Britain out of the EU has called for an Australian-style, points-based immigration system to be applied to all migrant workers - not just those from outside the EU. So how does the UK's system - also based on points - differ from those of other countries?
United Kingdom
Image copyright Getty Images
The numbers
In the year to December 2015, an estimated total of 630,000 immigrants arrived in the UK to stay for more than a year, including 83,000 British citizens and 270,000 from other parts of the EU.
An estimated 297,000 emigrated from the UK, including 123,000 British citizens and 65,000 citizens of other EU countries.
The Office for National Statistics does not release a bulletin setting out the country of origin of immigrants, only the region they came from.
Separate figures for National Insurance numbers issued to foreign nationals for the year ending March 2016 show how many people registered to work in the UK.
The top five countries were:
Romania
Poland
Italy
Spain
Bulgaria
The top five countries for entry visas issued to non-EU nationals in the same year were:
China
India
United States
Australia
Pakistan
The UK's points-based system
In February 2008, the Labour government introduced the UK's first points-based immigration system heralded by ministers as being based on the Australian system. It replaced a labyrinthine scheme which saw 80 different types of visa granted.
The system contains a lengthy list of sub-tiers of migrant, but broadly they are classed as one of four 'tiers'. Tier 3 was intended to be a pathway for unskilled immigrants, but after the system began operating the British government decided there was no need for further unskilled immigration from outside the EU. Under the coalition, it has been removed and others tweaked so now the tiers are:
Tier 1: high-value (possessed of exceptional talent, highly skilled, high-net-worth investor, graduate entrepreneur)
Tier 2: skilled workers (jobs that cannot be fulfilled by a UK or EEA worker, intra-company transfers, ministers of religion or sportspersons) - capped at 20,700 a year unless the immigrant earns more than £150,000
Tier 4: student (in primary, secondary, or tertiary education)
Tier 5: temporary migrants
Each tier offers its own allocation of points for specific 'attributes'. For each of the groups in tier 1, a person earns points according to different criteria:
English language ability
Capacity to support oneself financially
Age and previous experience
The admission of migrants who possess "exceptional talent"- that is, who are acknowledged to be world leaders in their fields - is capped at 1,000 per year, although few have taken advantage of this route so far.
You must have a specific job offer in order to apply for entry under tier 2, and reach a total of 70 points.
By far the easiest means of meeting that target is by having a job on the 'Shortage Occupation List', such as chief executive officer of a major company, biochemist, engineer or medical practitioner. Such an occupation earns a person 50 points, to be topped up by other factors including age and experience.
Beyond the points
Because the UK is a member of the European Union the points-based system only applies to people who are moving to the UK from outside the European Union. There is freedom of movement across the EU and, barring temporary restrictions for some new member states, freedom to work as well.
Migrant health
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Those with high skilled jobs, like surgeons, are unlikely to encounter much difficulty getting a UK visa
Paragraph 36 of the immigration rules provides that anyone planning to stay in the UK longer than six months should be referred for a medical examination, the cost of which is borne by the applicant. This is designed to ensure that no-one is admitted to the UK who might:
endanger the health of other persons in the UK
be unable for medical reasons to support themselves or their dependants in the UK
require major medical treatment (unless explicitly granted)
UK Visas and Immigration currently runs a tuberculosis-testing programme for aspiring immigrants in "high-incident countries" and their applications are paused, pending treatment, if they test positive.
Education
Immigrants from outside the EU wishing to pursue higher education in the UK must satisfy several criteria. They must:
Have been offered a place on a full time course leading to a recognised degree-level qualification
Be able speak, read, write and understand English
Have enough money to support themselves and pay for their course
Australia
Image copyright AFP/Getty Images Image caption Australia's immigration policy is a hot-button issue in every election
The numbers
Australia operates two immigration schemes: the Migration Programme, which caters for economic immigrants, and the Humanitarian Programme for refugees and displaced persons.
For the year 2013-14 Australia capped non-humanitarian immigrants at 190,000 - including the dependants of skilled workers. In that period Australia also welcomed approximately 20,000 people under its Humanitarian programme.
The latest figures for people leaving Australia - for 2012-13 - was 91,000.
The top 5 countries of origin for immigrants to Australia were:
India
China
United Kingdom
Philippines
Pakistan
The points-based system
The Australian Labor government elected in 1972 decided migrants would be granted a visa based on their personal attributes and ability to contribute to Australian society - most obviously, through their occupational status.
The previous policy, which selected migrants largely on a racial and ethnic basis, was discarded.
The points system - formalised in 1989 - has gone through several versions, and was most recently updated in July 2011. The Migration Programme divides available visas into two broad classes: skilled worker and employer-sponsored.
Skilled-worker visas are points-tested, and to be eligible for one a person must meet a 65-point minimum. Skilled workers include professional and manual workers, with accountants and mechanics alike earning 60 points for their occupation. Those on the lower end of the scale, at 40 points, include youth workers and interior decorators.
For people in a job on the skilled-worker list, points are awarded for factors including age, recognised qualifications, and previous experience working abroad.
Those on employee-sponsored visas are not points-tested.
Migrant health:
Australia also has a health requirement for immigrants, designed to:
minimise public health and safety risks to the Australian community;
contain public expenditure on health and community services, including Australian social security benefits, allowances and pensions; and
maintain the access of Australian residents to health and community services.
Everyone applying for a permanent visa needs to complete a medical check, a chest x-ray (if older than 11) and HIV test (if older than 15).
Only tuberculosis specifically precludes an applicant from meeting the health requirement, though even then they may resume their application after treatment.
Those with other conditions are assessed by visa officers on the cost and impact of their treatment in Australian society, before a decision is made.
Character test
Australia has a mandatory "character test" for immigrants, designed to exclude anyone with a "substantial criminal record" or who is deemed to be a risk to the community.
If someone is thought at risk of the following then they are excluded:
engage in criminal conduct
harass, molest, intimidate or stalk another person
vilify a segment of the Australian community
incite discord in the Australian community or in a part of it
be a danger to the Australian community or a part of it
you have been convicted, found guilty or had a charge proven for, one or more sexually based offences involving a child
you are subject to an adverse security assessment by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
you are subject to an Interpol notice, from which it is reasonable to infer that you are a direct or indirect risk to the Australian community, or a segment of the Australian community.
Canada
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Canada currently takes in over 250,000 immigrants a year
The numbers
In 2013, Canada welcomed 258,619 immigrants, including economic migrants and refugees
The latest figures indicate that in the same period, approximately 65,000 people left Canada.
The top 5 countries of origin for immigrants to Canada were:
Philippines
China
India
United States
Iran
Points-based system
Canada was the first country to introduce a points-based system, in 1967. According to a report by the think-tank CentreForum, the Canadian system's distinguishing feature is that it "prioritises broadly desirable human capital, rather than a specific job offer".
Like other countries, Canada distinguishes between skilled workers and other kinds of immigrant.
Those applying for a federal skilled worker visa without a job offer are capped at 25,500, plus 1,000 each for a number of professional and technical professions.
Some migrants can receive greater weighting for going to a particular territory, such as Nova Scotia.
To qualify for Canadian immigration, a person has to meet a minimum of 67 points, with the maximum for each area as follows: 25 points from their educational background, 24 points from proficiency in the English and French languages, 21 points for previous work experience, 10 points for being in the prime age of employment, and up to 10 if one has an offer of employment. Financial background is also taken into consideration.
Migrant health
Immigrants to Canada must undergo medical examination by one of a list of physicians in their country of origin approved by the Canadian government. There are no diseases whose possession would immediately halt an application to immigrate - all cases are assessed individually.
Medical inadmissibility is likely to be declared for applicants whose condition:
is a danger to public health or safety, or
would cause excessive demand on the Canadian healthcare or social services systems
Education
Canada offers a student visa to any applicant who has:The Senate’s top Republican said Monday he wants to avoid a “trillion-dollar stimulus” to fund an infrastructure plan, setting down a marker for the next Congress as lawmakers prepare to work with President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump pledged in his victory speech that his administration would put “millions of our people to work” by rebuilding highways, bridges, tunnels and other infrastructure. During the campaign, Trump’s advisers floated a plan to pump $1 trillion of new infrastructure spending into the economy — but done in a way that would not cost taxpayers.
Read: Opinion: Trump’s infrastructure plan leaves U.S. behind, enriches Wall Street.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he’s interested in seeing what the administration will ultimately recommend. But he made clear that he doesn’t want massive new spending.
“What I hope we will clearly avoid, and I’m confident we will, is a trillion-dollar stimulus,” McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said.
“We need to do this carefully and correctly, and the issue of how to pay for it needs to be dealt with responsibly,” he said.
Earlier this month, House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, told “60 Minutes” that an infrastructure program is a high priority.
There’s some evidence that Trump’s infrastructure plan remains a work in progress. In an interview last month with the Hollywood Reporter, Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon said about infrastructure: “We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks.”
Also read: Bannon: With negative interest rates around world, ‘rebuild everything.’You may ask yourself, is the Ford Mustang a Supercar? Well, in the strictest sense of the word, no. The Mustang is an every-day-Joe, fun, affordable, nostalgic, cool sporty car. Same as it ever was. But last Sunday, the mega-nice folks who organize Supercar Sunday in Woodland Hills, California, actually featured the Ford Mustang…at Supercar Sunday!!
And rightly so, because the few dozen Mustangs that showed up were anything but ordinary. From Jeremy Grossman’s black 2013 GT500 to a 1968 Mustang with 500,000 original miles – DABEEST. Each Mustang that showed up was unique and modified to the owner’s taste and budget. Once lined up, it was a head turning display of cool, stylish horsepower. The very definition of a Supercar.
Now you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”. If you have been letting the days go by, not driving the car of your dreams, then I suggest taking the time to visit a Supercar Sunday in your area. And you may ask yourself, how do I work this? How do I find myself in the pilot seat of a Mustang?
Believe me when I tell you, even the “lowly” V6 Mustangs can be modified and performance enhanced to the point of real excitement. Several of the Mustangs who enjoyed the enthusiastic cruise through Topanga Canyon and the famed Mulholland Drive were highly modified V6’s that turned as many heads as the Big Dogs.
If you asked any of the owners who could not leave well enough alone, and spent money they did not have on their Mustangs, the answer would be univeral – “Yes, it was worth it! And I have more modifications planned!!” – I am looking right at YOU, Rene.
Just seeing men acting like boys and feeling like teenagers again seems to erase the pain of a bad economy, even for a little while, as these cool people have more fun than a human being should be allowed – driving into the blue again, after the money’s gone – with large smiles. But this is nothing new for car guys. It is in the blood, and it always will be. Same as it ever was. Even if it is once in a lifetime…
The cruise ended at Lavaggio for lunch and more pictures. It was a classic Southern California way to spend a Sunday. Thanks Dustin Troyan, Brian Zacuto, Vista Ford, Lavaggio and many others for a great event. Please enjoy the gallery and share your cruise photos in the forums.Earth, it now unfolds, had substantial levels of oxygen about 600 million years earlier than thought.
Findings published this week in Nature suggest that Earth’s atmosphere was already somewhat oxygenated, if not quite oxygen rich, about 3 billion years ago. That revises previous timelines of our planet, which had put the first rumblings of oxygenation about 2.3 billion years ago, at the beginning of what is known as the Great Oxidation Event.
“Instead of a simple two-stage Early Earth model with anoxic atmosphere prior to 2.4 billion years ago and oxic conditions ever after, we had at least 600 million years long transition phase,” says Michael Bau, a geoscience professor at Jacobs University, in Germany, and an author on the paper.
The tale of Earth’s oxidization is often told like this: For the first 2 billion years of Earth’s existence, the mottled, volcano-pocked planet had little oxygen – about 0.00001 percent of current levels. But about 2.3 billion years ago, there was a dramatic change. In what was perhaps the happiest moment in Earth’s existence, photosynthesizing bacteria enjoying the sunlight began, in an unusually productive feat for sunbathers, to process it into oxygen.
It was, so far as we know, a moment unlike any other in the universe. While Mars, just 60 million years older than Earth, browned and reddened, Earth was furnished in greens and blues and, later, in all the brilliant colors that decorate its plants and animals and all the protists in between. The modern Earth owes about 85 percent of its oxygen to phytoplankton, beginning with the cyanobacteria – blue-green algae – that first quilted the planet those billions of years ago.
But a team of researchers has now posed the question: What if the oxygenation of Earth began not with a moment, but with a long transition phase?
The researchers assessed the distribution of two chromium isotopes, Chromium-53 and Chromium-52, in 3-billion-year-old sediment in South Africa’s Kwazulu-Natal Province. Since Chromium-53 becomes soluble when oxidized, and Chromium-52 is less affected, the relative distribution of the two furnishes a reliable measure of the extent to which the rocks have been exposed to oxygen.
The team found that the heavier isotope, Chromium-53 had been depleted in land soils, relative to Chromium-52. At the same time, Chromium-53 was enriched in the studied marine sediments, where it had ended up when it was washed out of the soil. This suggested that the isotope had been highly exposed to oxygen, becoming soluble enough to be moved from one sediment region to another.
Altogether, the researchers found that the 3-billion-year-old Earth had about 0.03 percent of the oxygen it does now, the authors said.
That oxygen level exceeds the amount of oxygen that can be produced in natural atmospheric reactions alone, the researchers said. So, it seems that bacteria were photosynthesizing at least 300 to 400 million years earlier than previous estimates plotting their contribution to Earth’s oxygen pool, they said.
Still, just who was doing what and where in this ancient ecosystem is still unknown, says Dr. Bau. One outstanding question is whether the oxygenation was a local or global phenomenon, he said, noting that it’s possible that bacteria were generating local oxygen oases around shelf seas or shallow lakes. To determine if the whole Earth was oxygenated, or just certain hotspots, more research is needed from different points around the world, he said.
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The researchers also cautioned that this was a transition phase, not the “Great” event itself.
“The amount and rate of oxygen produced was not sufficient to permanently switch the system from ‘anoxic’ to ‘oxic,’” says Bau, in an e-mail. “This only happened during the ‘Great Oxidation Event’ about 2.3 – 2.4 billion years ago.”In a split decision the United States Supreme Court largely upheld the health insurance law, the Affordable Health Care Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama.
The key provision upheld by the nine robed reactionaries in a five-to-four split decision mandated that all US citizens have to buy health insurance from the private insurance companies beginning in 2014, or pay a penalty.
This approach was originally proposed decades ago by right- wing think tanks as an alternative to national health insurance for all.
In fact, a similar law was passed by Massachusetts when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was governor of that state. Now Romney and the conservatives denounce the same thing applied to the whole country as “Obamacare.”
This shows how far capitalist politics has moved to the right. What was originally a far-right proposal is now embraced by the Democrats and Obama, while the same far right has moved so far to the right that it labels its own proposal as “socialism.”
The law entrenches control over how health costs get paid in the hands of the financial capitalists who brought us the new depression that began in 2007.
There is one exception in the law. This is the Medicare program, which is a form of national health insurance for people over 65. It has loopholes, which gouge the elderly, but it is at least something.
Since Medicare isn’t run for profit, its overhead costs are about 3% of its budget. By contrast, the insurance companies grab about 30% of the premiums paid to them.
The insurance racket has high administrative costs. This is because one of the main tasks of its bloated bureaucracy is to ferret out who has “already existing” health problems so they can be denied insurance, refuse payment to people who failed to fill out forms properly, and find other ways to “cut costs”.
Then there are the billions of dollars the insurance companies pay their stockholders and the bloated millions in “salaries” for chief executives.
Given that people over 65 have more health problems than younger people, legitimate administrative costs for Medicare are higher than for private insurance companies. Yet the private companies spend far more on their bureaucracies.
The law does have some positive provisions. One already in effect is that children of parents who have coverage are included under their parents' plans up to the age of 26.
Another is the requirement that, after 2014, insurance companies stop the practice of denying people coverage for pre-existing conditions.
But in the negotiations leading up to the drafting of the law, the insurance companies demanded they be compensated for the reduction in profits they would “suffer” if they are banned from excluding people.
The result was the mandate that everyone had to buy private insurance, either as individuals or through employer-sponsored plans, which in effect comes out of wages. Thus, insurance companies will reap a huge increase in clients.
Those too poor to buy insurance would supposedly be able to get help with their premiums from government subsidies. These would, in all likelihood, be sub-standard policies, with inadequate coverage and out-of-pocket expenses.
But even this is in doubt. In a different five-to-four vote, the Court gutted a provision in the law that would have had states expand Medicaid coverage for the very poor. Medicaid is supposed to help out the poor younger than 65, but leaves much to be desired.
The court ruled that states can opt out of the law’s provision that they expand Medicaid to insure those below the poverty line, even though the federal government would subsidise the states doing so. Already, some of the most right-wing state governments say they will opt out.
The law provides federal subsidies for individuals above the poverty line, defined as US$23,000 before taxes for a family of four.
But the law assumed that the states would expand Medicaid, with the federal government footing the bill, for those below that line. The latter category includes about 17 million of the 50 million uninsured.
So in those states that refuse to expand Medicaid, the poorest will still have no insurance because they are below the poverty line and ineligible for the federal insurance subsidies.
Romney is running on the promise to repeal the law in its entirety. The Republicans play on fears of the better off that somehow they will have to pay for insurance for the poor, especially people of colour.
If the Republicans win the elections, it’s not clear what they would put in its place. Some features of the present law, such as prohibiting denial of insurance for prior conditions, are popular.
In spite of the fact the law is favorable to insurance companies, the Republican right wants to further the ideological agenda of opposing any idea that society as a whole has a responsibility for its citizens’ welfare.
They also play on fears that any reform, especially any rise in Medicare and Medicaid, will drive up healthcare costs.
It’s not only big finance capital through health insurance that is driving up health costs. Pharmaceutical corporations have their snouts in the trough too, as do the hospitals and many (though not all) doctors.
As cost go up, the quality of health care in the US remains below in comparison not just to other “advanced” (imperialist) countries, but many others as well.
One measure of the quality of health care for the whole population, not just the rich, is infant mortality. This is measured in the number of deaths of babies up to one-year-old per 1000 births.
By this measure, the CIA ranks the US 49th in the world. Nations with a lower infant mortality rate include: Japan, Sweden, Iceland, Italy, Spain, France, Finland, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Israel, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, Britain, Portugal, New Zealand, Canada and Greece.
Japan is number one, with a rate of 2.21. The US comes in at 5.98.
Cuba, subjected to a US economic blockade for more than six decades, beats the US with a rate of 4.83.
These are averages for the whole population. For the years 1995 to 1998, the disparities between Blacks and whites were as follows: Atlanta, 14.6 for Blacks and 6.7 for whites; Boston, 10.0 to 4.8; Chicago, 17.6 to 7.0; New York city, 12.1 to 4.5; Philadelphia, 16.6 to 6.7; Pittsburgh, 18.6 to 5.9; San Francisco, 12.3 to 2.6.
For the same years in largely Black Washington DC, the figure was 17.5 for Blacks, just a shade better than Sri Lanka, ranked 70th in the world.
It would be safe to assume a similar disparity by income among all races.
This grotesque failure for the richest country in the world underlines the task ahead of us. We can’t remain trapped between the right (Democrats) and the far right (Republicans).
We must redouble our fight for national health insurance for everyone. This is being encapsulated in the slogan “Medicare for all”.
Winning this would be a stepping stone to demand that the profit system be taken out of health care altogether.
[Barry Sheppard was a long-time leader of the US Socialist Workers Party. He recounts his experience in the SWP in a two-volume book The Party the Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988, available from Resistance Books.]
br>The Chamber has expressed concerns about certain proposals in previous trade agreements. | AP Photo Chamber calls many Trump administration NAFTA proposals 'dangerous'
The largest U.S. business group strongly urged the Trump administration Friday to withdraw a number of "highly dangerous" proposals in talks to renegotiate NAFTA and warned that pulling out of the pact would have disastrous consequences for many states that backed President Donald Trump in the election.
"Today, we’re increasingly concerned about the state of the negotiations," John Murphy, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told reporters. The comments come a few days before the United States will host Canada and Mexico for the fourth round of talks on renegotiating the nearly 24-year-old pact.
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The Chamber has expressed concerns about certain proposals in previous trade agreements, but never on as many proposals as are currently under consideration in the NAFTA talks, Murphy said.
Many businesses, large and small, are concerned about the effects that many of the Trump administration proposals or planned proposals would have on trade. Those at issue would reduce Canada and Mexico's access to the U.S. government procurement market, create a new domestic content provision for autos and tighten regional content requirements, and automatically terminate the agreement after five years unless all three countries agree to renew the pact — known as a sunset clause.
"We see these proposals as highly dangerous, and even one of them would be sufficient to move the business and agriculture community to oppose an agreement that included them," Murphy said.
The veteran business official said the administration's proposals for revamping the dispute settlement provisions of the pact have also caused concern, as has another proposal to create a new anti-dumping mechanism for seasonal and perishable products.
"I would say the vast majority of the U.S. business and agricultural community opposes these proposals broadly and emphatically," Murphy said. "This will do harm" to American companies that currently benefit from the pact, he said, putting it in contrast to the White House's pledge that it will "do no harm" with the changes.
In an unusual turn, the AFL-CIO — which on Thursday gave the Trump administration an "F" for the openness of the negotiations — came to the defense of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who is spearheading the NAFTA talks.
"The U.S. Chamber's negative reaction to even discussing creative trade solutions reveals a lot about how much corporate CEOs benefit under the NAFTA status quo," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement Friday. He also accused the business group of trying to keep "the same old broken trade rules" at the expense of working people.
A spokeswoman for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Emily Davis, brushed off the Chamber's criticism, which she characterized as an example of the entrenched interests that Trump came to Washington to uproot.
“The president's objectives with the NAFTA renegotiation are to create great jobs for Americans and reduce an unconscionable trade deficit," she said. "The president has been clear that NAFTA has been a disaster for many Americans, and achieving his objectives requires substantial change. These changes of course will be opposed by entrenched Washington lobbyists and trade associations. We have always understood that draining the swamp would be controversial in Washington."
Canada and Mexico also strongly oppose the ideas, creating a major concern that if the Trump administration proceeds with the proposals "it will lead to a chaotic breakdown" in the talks, Murphy said.
If that happens and Trump follows through on threats to withdraw from the pact, that would quickly lead "to the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs. It would be an economic and political debacle," Murphy said, noting both Mexico and Canada have made clear they would not continue to negotiate under those conditions.
“Withdrawing from the NAFTA would immediately blow up in the face of the administration,” he continued. “Those would feel the pain most thoroughly and immediately are in states that voted for the president and they would know who brought this about. So, as a political proposition, it’s just as big a loser as it is economically.”
In one sign of concern in rural communities, wheat farmer groups on Thursday expressed frustration with the Trump administration's preoccupation with renegotiating deals like NAFTA and the U.S.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement, instead of following through on campaign promises to negotiate new bilateral pacts.
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“In the decade since KORUS was negotiated we have no new trade agreements and zero additional market access for wheat farmers," Vince Peterson, president of the U.S. Wheat Associates, said.
Murphy emphasized that the U.S. Chamber supports the idea of modernizing NAFTA and believes that a new deal that would be good for Canada, Mexico and the United States can be struck and win approval in Congress.
"So, we're urging the administration to recalibrate its approach and stop and listen to the business community, the agriculture community, the people who actually engage in trade and return to principle of 'do no harm' because these proposals, if adopted, will do harm," he said.ARLINGTON, Va. – The Washington Capitals will not renew the contract of vice president and general manager George McPhee and have relieved head coach Adam Oates of his duties, majority owner Ted Leonsis and president Dick Patrick announced today.
“George has been a terrific, longtime executive for our franchise, and I’m grateful for his commitment to the Capitals organization for the past 17 years,” said Leonsis. “Under his leadership the Capitals won seven division titles, twice were the top team in the Eastern Conference, earned a Presidents’ Trophy and competed in the playoffs 10 times. He was a highly effective manager who is extremely well regarded within our organization and around the NHL. We have the utmost respect for him and his family and wish them nothing but the very best.
“We are also appreciative of Adam’s efforts and thank him for his devotion, work ethic and contributions to the Capitals the past two seasons. He is a smart, tactical coach who improved the performance of several of our players. He is a Hall of Fame player who we believe will be a longtime coach in the NHL. We will help him in whatever way we are able and wish him well.
This is an important time for our organization, and I feel a change is needed in order to get us back to being a top echelon team that competes for the Stanley Cup.”A British Muslim man accused of raising funds for terrorism was punched, kicked and strangled during his arrest by specialist officers from the Metropolitan police, the high court in London heard today.
The court was told that Babar Ahmad, who is suing the police, was dragged from his bed and rammed against a window before being repeatedly beaten by officers dressed in riot gear during his arrest in December 2003.
During what his counsel Phillippa Kaufmann described as a "prolonged and violent series of gratuitous assaults" the 34-year-old IT support analyst claims officers forced him into the Muslim prayer position before shouting "Where is your God now? … Pray to him."
Kaufmann said: "The acts of the officers were ones of gross brutality, intended to humiliate and debase the claimant and to make him fear for his life. The officers engaged over a prolonged period in extreme, sadistic and dangerous acts of violence against an individual who was completely restrained and vulnerable.
"This was an extremely serious abuse of power which is in no sense justified, nor was it excusable on the grounds that it was perpetrated in the heat of an arrest for terrorism."
The Metropolitan police deny the claims and say that officers used reasonable force during the arrest at Ahmad's home in Tooting, south-west London. The court heard that the Met specifically denies that Ahmad was punched, controlled with handcuffs, stamped on or put in a dangerous neck hold.
Ahmad has been in detention since he was rearrested in 2004 following a request from the US government over claims that he had helped raise money to fund terrorist campaigns. Kaufmann said no evidence had been produced against Ahmad and he had never been charged with
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simple. And since the Sheriff's Department has announced on its website a policy of "random, monthly" visits to the home and work of everyone registered under the RCNA, we fear this may be happening over and over again to families throughout the county.
The lawsuit we filed today seeks to stop the Sheriff's Department from continuing its unconstitutional searches of the plaintiffs' home and to end its broader policy of inspecting the homes of every registrant in the county without suspicion. It's time to call off the witch hunt.
For more information about the case, click here.They were greeted by armies of Miami staffers and volunteers as they moved into dorms across the campus and then said goodbyes — often emotional ones — to their parents and other family members seeing them off.
The incoming class was selected from among the largest applicant pool — 29,771 — in Miami’s history, according to school officials.
And it’s a first for Miami’s new President Gregory Crawford, who moved to campus in July and who has already made himself known to many students and staffers by his habit of biking around campus.
“This is an incredibly exciting time to be at Miami and to welcome such a talented group of new students,” Crawford said. “Imagine the potential for positive impact these students will have on Miami and on the global communities where they will eventually work, live, and lead.”
Miami University and its regional campuses in Middletown and Hamilton are Butler County’s largest employer.
The academic quality of the incoming class has continued to increase, with 37 percent of the incoming students scoring a 30 or higher on the ACT.
The average ACT (28.5) and GPA (3.77) are the highest in Miami’s history. The class is also the most diverse yet at 15.5 percent, an increase from 13.7 percent last year,” said Miami officials.
International students comprise another 7.7 percent of the class; 15 percent of the incoming students are the first in their family to attend college. Members of the class of 2020 hail from 45 states, the District of Columbia, and 35 countries across the globe.
“We could not be more impressed with the class of 2020. They applied in record numbers, and ultimately, those arriving on our campus this fall are among the nation’s brightest and best,” said Susan Schaurer, assistant vice president for enrollment management and director of admission.
Schaurer said that Miami’s ability to attract students of this caliber from Ohio, across the U.S. and around the globe illustrates the demand for a Miami degree is at an all-time high.
“Miami is increasingly recognized by prospective students as a Public Ivy whose alumni are consistently recruited by the nation’s top employers and graduate and professional school programs,” she said.
In June Money magazine listed the school among the top 10 in the nation for producing chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies.
Miami earned the third spot nationally with four CEOs and was the only one of the 10 universities ranked to have two women alumni now holding such top corporate leadership jobs.
Classes start Monday and until then there are dozens of welcoming events, both on campus and in the city of Oxford, designed to welcome back upperclassmen and new arrivals.As we inch closer to the 2014 college football season, Garnet and Cocky will profile each of the South Carolina Gamecocks’ six SEC East rivals. We’ll go in alphabetical order to make it fair, starting with Florida, who host the Gamecocks at The Swamp on November 15.
Florida Gators
Last Year: 4-8 (3-5 SEC)
Head Coach: Will Muschamp (3rd season)
Key returnees: QB Jeff Driskel; RBs Mack Brown and Kelvin Taylor; WR Quinton Dunbar; OL D.J. Humphries; C Max Garcia; RT Chaz Green; buck ILB Dante Fowler Jr.; FS Jabari Gorman; LB Michael Taylor; CB Vernon Hargreaves III; P Johnny Townsend
Key departures: TE Trey Burton (declared for NFL Draft); DT Dominique Easley (declared for NFL Draft); RG Jon Halapio (graduated) QB Tyler Murphy (transfer); LB Ronald Powell (declared for NFL Draft); CB/PR Marcus Roberson (declared for NFL Draft); CB Jaylen Watkins (graduated)
The Gators return a strong core of offensive players, including Driskel, who is back from a season-ending broken fibula suffered in week four against Tennessee last season. (Despite winning that game and the next two against Kentucky and Arkansas, the Gators would go on a seven-game losing streak to end the year). Driskel had a breakout campaign in 2012 as he led the team to an 11-2 mark and a spot in the Sugar Bowl. Add Mack Brown and Kelvin Taylor in the backfield, leading defenders Dante Fowler Jr., Vernon Hargreaves III and Michael Taylor, tight end(Trey’s brother), an experienced core of o-linemen returning from injury, and several big ticket recruits like #3 d-back Jalen Tabor and #2 DT Thomas Holley headlining the nation’s 8th ranked recruiting class, and you could certainly make the case for the Gators going to Atlanta.
Why they won’t win the SEC East
Too much turnover in the coaching ranks. Less than a week ago, Joker Phillips was forced to resign as WR coach and recruiting coordinator after a Miami staffer allegedly ratted him out for a possible “bump rule” violation. OC Brent Pease and OL coach Tim Davis were fired following the 2013 season after the Gators’ collapse, with Duke OC Kurt Roper taking the same job in Gainesville and Mike Summers being hired away from Southern Cal to coach the o-line. And while the Gators have enjoyed some success at running back from Brown and Taylor, Matt Jones’ continued injury struggles still hurt, so getting him back would be an extra boost. That’s not to say there’s no hope for Florida; it might just be a matter of a few other teams in the division being better at this point.Gentlemen - we did it.
I know we've got that mission accomplished banner layin' around here somewhere. Just give us a few minutes to dust it off. A wise man once said, good coaches win, great coaches cover. And when the deep-fried dust settled last Saturday, we had done just that. Eat our shiny +17 spread, Bodawg! Eat it after it has been fried in 1000 degree grease!
The offense looked better. The Defense was a monster. Special Teams existed. We tackled well - even when the kick returner didn't have the ball. We outgained OU by 250 YARDS! Truly, no victory could be more moral. Savor it. Breathe in its glory.
But the time for half-wins and improvement is rapidly shrinking if our Horns are still eyeing a trip this holiday (but probably not to the Holiday Bowl). What we need right now is a win and some positive momentum. And who better to start with than our old pal Coach Rhoads?
In years past, we may have worried about our date with the upset-minded Cyclones. But not this year. Joke's on them: you can't upset a 2-4 team! MHWHAHAHA. For added effect, the game will be allegedly played on the Longhorn Network, basically robbing the Cyclones of any Paul Rhoades-inspired late game magic. We could call it a perfect storm, but that seems insensitive considering Iowa State's mascot.
Did you know that Mark Mangino is their new offensive coordinator? Better watch out Mark-- UT hasn't been too healthy to Lane Bryant-sized coaches this year. We're basically the Double Down of the Big 12. And Pepto don't come in Burnt Orange.
So we're doubling down this week. In front of literally hundreds of viewers tuning it to watch Ricky and the rest of the LHN crew. Texas is ready. Are you?
Hook ‘Em.
PART 1: Faces in the Crowd
Sure, the fine people of corn country are known far and mid-wide for their naming conventions. The Jantz family in particular is a friend of the program. But have you been keeping up with the latest in Iowa follicle follies? Let's take a look:
The Kicker
Cole Netten: 6'1", 214 lbs, RS Soph Stats:, 18/18 PAT, career long 41 yds 7/7 FG, 18/18 PAT, career long 41 yds Signature Move: Pedo Stache Most Common Google News Result: Is Iowa State's Cole Netten the nation's best kicker? Nick Rose: 6'2", 203 lbs, Junior Stats: 3/7 FG, 11/12 PAT, career long 42 yds Signature Move: SEC Swoop(es?) Most Common Google News Result: Amber Rose, Nick Cannon seen on date.
The Hair Singularity (Hairlarity)
The Tim Riggins Fanclub
The Ringer
Nicole Hunter, Assistant Recruiting Coordinator, has a degree in Elementary Education, which - let's be honest - is probably the best possible background for this kind of role.
The Tight End (Coach)
Yes. That is indeed part of Mangino's current title at Iowa State. Us referencing this fact just proves we are a bunch of 4th graders in need of some help. Possibly from someone with a background in Elementary Education...
PART 2: The Iowa State "Magic Ebollet Theory"
So it seems Iowa State fans, alumni, coaches, and even Athletic Directors believe that there is a conspiracy to keep the little man down. Logic is simple, folks (as composed by an ISU fan, presumably):
Iowa State was the heroic lone vote on some Big-12 issue a year and a half ago. Standing up against persecution, no doubt. They are being punished with bad calls as a result. That is the only reason they are 85-132 in the Big 12 era.
Bob Bowlsby was AD at IOWA. Bob Bowlsby said something that isn't not communist. He may or may not run into Obama at these potentially communist meet-and-greets.
AND THAT'S NOT ALL
Texas was scheduled to play Iowa State the week after playing OU in Dallas.
Obama, realizing this was a good time to unleash his ebolas (he got them when he was taking one of his trips back home to the family in Africa), sent his pet disease to Ames, via Dallas, via Austin. Working at the behest of his buddy Bowlsby.
Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) is the most senior, Junior Senator.
He took over as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions after Ted Kennedy died. Ted Kennedy was JFK's brother. JFK was shot in Dallas. No one has proved that shooter WAS NOT Steele Jantz.
GO AHEAD AND FORWARD IT OUT TO YOUR FRIENDS, FOLKS. IF YOU DON'T FORWARD IT TO 10 FRIENDS, DAN BEEBE MAY NEVER GET HIS JOB BACK YOU GUYS!! JONATHAN GRAY'S MOMENTUM IS PERPETUALLY NOT STOPPED!
Better Know a Roster
Maurice Linguist (Secondary Coach) - Cunning.
- Cunning. Clayton Oyster (Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach) and Yancy McKnight (Director of Strength and Conditioning) - I can't help but envision "Oyster and Yancy" as a nauseatingly pretentious "New-American" gastropub that takes itself far too serious for an establishment serving maple-glazed and deep fried foie gras poutine with a twice caramelized kale and brussels sprout side salad. I also just love the idea of those rascally players responding "aw, shucks, coach Oyster."
- I can't help but envision "Oyster and Yancy" as a nauseatingly pretentious "New-American" gastropub that takes itself far too serious for an establishment serving maple-glazed and deep fried foie gras poutine with a twice caramelized kale and brussels sprout side salad. I also just love the idea of those rascally players responding "aw, shucks, coach Oyster." Aaron Wimberly (RB, Sr.) - Texas isn't going to lose to a guy named after a town created for the sole purpose of antiquing.
Texas isn't going to lose to a guy named after a town created for the sole purpose of antiquing. Jake Rhoads (WR, RFr.) - Because we haven't had bad enough luck with coach's kids this year...
Because we haven't had bad enough luck with coach's kids this year... Tad Ecby (WR, RJr.) and Jevohn Miller (LB, Sr.) - This team has a black Tad and a white Jevohn. Neat.
This team has a black Tad and a white Jevohn. Neat. E.J. Bibbs (TE, Sr.) - More like P.P. Bibbs, amirite?!?
More like P.P. Bibbs, amirite?!? Holden Kramer (P, RFr.) - Has no time of day for the phonies from Iowa City. (The Punter in the Rye)
Has no time of day for the phonies from Iowa City. (The Punter in the Rye) Martinez Syria (RB, Fr.) - in the sappy, unrealistic film version, Martinez has just graduated Basic and is waiting for his base assignment (because they just pick a country right after basic). After learning that his buddy Jernigan is stationed in Turkey, Martinez is devastated to hear his CO read out: "Martinez. Syria."
in the sappy, unrealistic film version, Martinez has just graduated Basic and is waiting for his base assignment (because they just pick a country right after basic). After learning that his buddy Jernigan is stationed in Turkey, Martinez is devastated to hear his CO read out: "Martinez. Syria." Vince Horras (DE, Fr.) and Brandon Horbach (QB, Sr.) - I imagine Paul Rhoads just shouting at people calling them Horras and Horbach--and finding it hilarious. (Sexual...[glasses]...Horrass-ment.)
I imagine Paul Rhoads just shouting at people calling them Horras and Horbach--and finding it hilarious. (Sexual...[glasses]...Horrass-ment.) Quan West (TE, RSo.) - I'mma let you finish, but Quan-ye West has the best built in freestyle name in Iowa.
Predictions:
KyleCarpenter: Iowa State has been on opposite sides of two of the least conventional/most awesome college football plays I’ve ever seen. THAT Seneca Wallace run. And the 57 yard onside kick from the OSU Cowboys two weeks ago. This tells me that there will be at least 3 Paul Rhoads meltdowns and 4 offensive touchdowns. 31-6, Texas.
TejasChaos: Paul Rhoads attempts to be Pat Moorer’s emotional…...whatever the opposite of doppelganger is - implodes under the sheer physics. Texas by a touchdown and a dream.
Parting Shot:What were you doing when you were 10? I know what I was doing, playing tennis in Toronto, Ontario, with absolutely no conceptualization of mountain biking, British Columbia, hucks, or creek gaps. What were YOU doing at 10?
Seth Sherlock however; he is shredding bikes at 10, not just riding or following dad down A-line, Seth is ripping. Well ripping downhill, we still need to help him with his bike on the steep climbs.
I have been riding with Seth, and his Dad, Steve for a few years now, back when Seth was… even smaller. I have had the opportunity to watch Seth progress over the last year or two, with half envy, wishing I grew up in B.C. and half amazement, wishing I was that rad, and composed at 10 (or even 20).
The envy is something most people will be able to identify with, growing up in arguably the “Mountain Bike Capital of Canada” (sorry Rossland, pretty sure we stole your trademark), in a mountain bike family with parents that support their son’s passion.
The Sherlocks are not hockey parents though; they encourage Seth but don’t push him. They support him, but do not live vicariously through him; Steve is one of the “OG” Whistler snowboarders and has a multitude of his own crazy adventures and stories. If you’re waiting in the bottom shuttle lot in Squamish, Steve will stop and offer you a ride to the top, piling bikes on bikes and people on top of those bikes to maximize the stoke.
Soon after riding with Seth he would start to ask me about gnarly lines I had built around town. Wondering what speed you needed for this gap, or what the run out was like for that rock line. At first I didn’t take these inquiries too seriously, thinking that he was just curious; Seth however was serious, wanting to know the beta so he could give them a go.
Seth also started training with Kovarik racing – chasing the gnarliest guy in Whistler around every Saturday has its benefits. Quickly Seth started to knock those lines and features off, asking for more info on the harder lines. Once Seth started to ask about The Collective’s creek gap, we knew that we needed to shoot a piece with him.
We collaborated with Whistler Creek Productions, a stud crew of seasoned vets, both on the snow and in the hustle and bustle of the Vancouver film industry. Whistler Creek is a collaborative consisting of Stu Andrews, Shin Campos, Mark Gribbon and Paul Watt. If you snowboard you’ll know who they are.
Joining us on the Artbarn team was Spencer Craig, Squamish legend and all around slayer. Whether on a bike, skis, snowmobile, crotch rocket, Spencer knows how to get it done. Spencer also grew up in Squamish; him and Seth have been drinking the town tap water (which apparently makes you really good at shredding) their entire life. Joining the team on the post end was Xavier Callamand. Steve Sherlock rounded out this Motley Crue handling an assortment of duties: coach, dad, builder, grip, krafty, and bike Sherpa – even with a shattered arm.
We are really stoked at what Seth managed to throw down, sacking up like a man twice his age, (and height) not once backing down from any of the lines we showed him. I am scared to think of what the next Seth Sherlock edit will consist of #whywouldyoudothatat11 and #holyf$%@12
-Kevin Landry
Special thanks to Spencer Craig and Xavier Callamand
BONUS! If you made it this far, check out this GoPro video of our remote heli crashing into a creek – with good views of the gap until then…
Seth’s already wearing his big boy pants… so many huge lines in here!Lady Gaga and her stylist have a 4 a.m. kind of friendship
Brandon Maxwell and Lady Gaga struck a pose on the red carpet together Sunday night. (Photo: Frederick M. Brown, Getty Images)
Just in case you thought Lady Gaga and her stylist-turned-designer Brandon Maxwell were merely showfriends, think again. Maxwell, who was awarded Best Designer Debut at The Daily Front Row's Fashion Los Angeles Awards at Sunset Tower Hotel Sunday night, moved the crowd when he toasted Gaga as a central part in his journey.
Read on to find for a transcript of Maxwell's speech on how the pop star inspired her longtime, Texas-born stylist to strike out on his own after he moved to New York as a novice a decade ago.
"I was really young and a girl walked through the door and said hi, and gave me a hug," Maxwell told the crowd filled with faces like Gigi and Bella Hadid, Kate Hudson and Jennifer Lopez. "And she let me brush her hair and put clothes on her and help her with her makeup. And when I went through a breakup, she would fly across the country in the middle of the night. When I was having a hard time, she would talk to my parents on the phone. When I hated everything about my life, she came to me every day and told me I was good enough. When I wanted to make a dress for the first time with my own two hands, she wore it, and she acted like it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever worn in her whole life."
"It was!" called out Gaga from the first row. "It was blue velvet!"
"Yeah, it was," said Maxwell, to laughter.
"I don't live in Hollywood," he continued. "I think it's very very fun here, but I'm not from here. And I think you're all beautiful and amazing. But you know, back in New York I had a true friend who was there for me. I know that I'm not here without you (Gaga). And it would never have been possible. My point about Hollywood is that you all seem lovely, but I've met a few who are not."
Cue laughter from the crowd.
"You are obviously are legendary and talented and a big star, I understand," he said to Gaga, "but the person that you've been to me, the things that you've put out into the world, and show and say you are, is truly what you are at home. I'm very happy I have this career, and I'm very thankful for all you've done for me in that way. But I'm more proud of the things that you've done for me at 4 o' clock in the morning for almost the past 10 years of my life – and for truly keeping me alive, so thank you very much."
An emotional Lady Gaga returned the favor at the podium. "For three years before (tonight) I had one of the hardest times of my life, ever," she said, toasting Maxwell. "And you were by side every single day to pick me up, and help me to face the entire world when I felt very sad. I'm very grateful to you for that. Because when you become famous when you're young, it's almost like you stop growing up. And I needed my sweet gay best friend to help me become a woman. And you really did. There was something liberating about taking off the fishnets and the leather and knowing that I was good enough to wear a ball gown and that I could be proud in one."
Check out Lady Gaga wearing Brandon Maxwell at the Oscars
This look is a variation on one of Maxwell's Fall 2016 looks. (Photo: Gregg DeGuire, WireImage)
At the Vanity Fair after-party
Her second white jumpsuit of the night. (Photo: ADRIAN SANCHEZ-GONZALEZ, AFP/Getty Images)
And at the Weinstein pre-Oscars dinner
Lovely lovely sweet angel girl. 🌪 A photo posted by Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) on Mar 2, 2016 at 6:38pm PST
Nicole Richie hosted the L.A. fashion week awards, which also named Lady Gaga Editor of the Year, Carine Roitfeld and CR Fashion Book for Magazine of the Year, Eva Chow for Fashion Innovator, Jennifer Meyer for Best Jewelry Designer, Bella Hadid for Model of the Year, Mariel Haenn and Rob Zangardi for Best Women’s Stylists, Jeanne Yang for Best Men’s Stylist, Baja East for Emerging Designers and Karl Lagerfeld for Fashion Icon.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1pEmnMOI noticed in Wendell’s recent GPU pass-through live stream, that he mentioned that there isn’t a reliable solution for the AMD GPU reinitialization problem. He mentioned that once a Windows guest VM on linux is shut down, the AMD GPU will refuse to reinitialize, and that this requires a reboot of the Host machine to fix.
In my personal experience, this actually seemed to be rather random. Sometimes the VM would be able to boot back up, sometimes not. I found that it was not actually the shut down of the VM, but if the host machine enters a sleep state, while the VM was shut down, after having run at least once.
The root issue I suspect has less to do with how Linux is treating the GPU, but the behaviour of the Windows OS while it is a guest. Mainly the Windows guest OS is not sending a signal to the GPU to shut-down or start up while it is running in a VM. I assume this is because when on bare-metal, when a Windows OS shuts down, power is actually killed to the GPU from the motherboard/PSU but when in a guest VM, this does not happen, leaving the GPU in an initialized state. Then if/when the host machine enters a low power state, and power is significantly reduced to the GPU, it enters a non-responsive state after the host machine wakes up.
Anyway, I found a fix/work-around. I’ve borrowed bits from around the web for this. I don’t write how-to’s often, so bare with me.
(note, all these steps take place inside the Windows Guest OS)
Step 1
We are going to need the Windows Device Console (DevCon)
It is included bundled with the Windows Driver Kit, which you can download and install like a chump, but you don’t require all the added bloat.
So, instead download and install Chocolatey, so you can install it from terminal like a bad-ass. Follow the instructions on the Chocolatey website to install.
Once Chocolatey is installed open a Windows command prompt and run this command to install DevCon:
choco install devcon.portable
DevCon is rather straight forward to use. It Enables/Disables hardware. It runs in terminal and can easily be executed by a bat script.
devcon64.exe enable|disable "<device_id>"
Step 2
Now go to Device Manager and make note of the Hardware ID for the GPU and the GPU’s sound device. You will notice that there are multiple device ID’s. We are only going to use the first half, ending where the device ID’s become unique. DevCon accepts wild-cards. This way we will be able to de-initialize the entire device. Do not forgot the sound device. If you forget this, the Windows Guest will become unstable over time after reboots. Games and 3D applications will start randomly crashing. I’ve included some example images.
Step 3
We are now going to create two bat files. I created them under C:\ so they will be easy to find later. Maybe not the best practice, but whatever.
You can use notepad to create two separate bat files. The first one I called enablegpu.bat and included these two lines.
devcon64.exe enable "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_67DF*" devcon64.exe enable "HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_1002&DEV_AA01*"
We are having the bat file use DevCon to enable the GPU. Use that first half the of GPU hardware id that we made note of in device manager. This hardware ID will be different on your system, depending on you GPU model/AIB. Make sure to end it with a wild-card asterix, so we get all the sub-devices. Do not forget to include the GPU’s sound device, which has a separate hardware ID.
Now create the second bat file. I called this one disablegpu.bat and saved it in the same location as the first one. It is exactly the same as the first bat file but it disables the GPU instead of enabling it.
devcon64.exe disable "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_67DF*" devcon64.exe disable "HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_1002&DEV_AA01*"
Step 4
Add the two bat files to the Windows Group Policy Startup and Shutdown scripts.
You can open the Local Group Policy Editor by running gpedit.msc in the Windows run prompt.
Then, navigate to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Scripts (Startup/Shutdown) and select Startup. Click the Add button and select your enablegpu.bat script. Repeat this process for your disablegpu.bat script via the Shutdown item in the Scripts (Startup/Shutdown) section.
Conclusion
Now, you should be set as far as user-initiated resets of your VM are concerned – you shouldn’t have any issues with your VM failing to start whenever you explicitly reset your VM or stability issues over subsequent resets. I have noticed however, that restarts due to Windows Update still seem to cause issues, perhaps because these scripts aren’t run. You’ll probably want to disable automatic updates in order to prevent these unwanted reboots from happening.Norm Hall/Getty Images
On Sunday night, the Seattle Seahawks defense put together a historic performance. It was lost in the ugliness of a 6-6 tie, but the Arizona Cardinals had 95 total plays and 46:21 total time of possession, gained 443 total net yards and didn't score a touchdown. It was the longest any NFL defense had stayed on the field without allowing a touchdown in regular-season NFL history, according to the News Tribune's Gregg Bell.
Safety Kelcie McCray led Seattle's defenders with an astonishing 108 snaps (95 on defense, 13 on special teams), and each member of Seattle's Legion of Boom secondary (McCray, Earl Thomas, Richard Sherman and DeShawn Shead) stayed on the field for all 95 plays. To limit Arizona's generally explosive offense to no end-zone appearances with that many chances should be talked about far more than it will be.
Sadly, that superhuman effort was lost in the ugly mixture of reductive play design and execrable offensive-line performance on the other side of the ball.
Let's review four examples of Seattle's current pass-protection issues, starting with this incomplete pass from Russell Wilson to Doug Baldwin. Here, Cardinals edge-rusher Markus Golden moved hard and quickly off the snap, and Garry Gilliam appeared to get into a good pass set. However, he dropped his hands and head and failed to engage through the arc, which is fatal against a guy as talented as Golden. This is the base example of what Seattle's passing offense has become in the last few weeks—quick dump-offs to avoid imminent pressure.
Then, there was this play with 1:52 left in the second quarter. Defensive lineman Calais Campbell is playing in a wide alignment as opposed to his usual 3-technique spot, and Gilliam can't handle Campbell from the start. He gets a few good steps into the arc and engages Campbell, but Campbell then throws Gilliam aside, because Gilliam doesn't get set and doesn't use his hands to force the action. A man of Campbell's strength will dominate a blocker without fundamental root power every time. To add insult to (psychic) injury, Gilliam is busted for a hold when he grabs Campbell's jersey to save his quarterback.
On the very next play, it was left tackle Bradley Sowell's turn in the bucket. Sowell had edge-rusher Chandler Jones on his left shoulder, ready to rush out of a two-point stance. Sowell tried to get in his set, but his kick-step was slow, and Jones just rushed right by him. Six steps into the play, Jones gave Sowell a hand strike, which rocked him off his point. Jones was able to throw him aside, and this is what it looks like when an offensive lineman is beaten by both power and speed.
The Cardinals were not done with Sowell. Check out this play with 11:51 left in regulation, when Sowell was facing Golden. Right away, it's clear Sowell isn't going to be able to handle Golden's speed around the edge—he's huffing all the way. As Golden moves past Sowell (who doesn't get into the arc at all), Sowell is left to push and flail with no strength from a base. At this point, he's just guessing and holding, and indeed, he's called for a hold on this play.
Russell Wilson finished the game with 24 completions in 37 attempts for 225 yards, no touchdowns (obviously) and no interceptions. Seattle had just 63 plays to Arizona's 95, but if you want to point to Wilson as the root cause of his team's anemic output, that's a bit unfair. Better to lay blame at the feet of the four other guys who matched Wilson's 63-snap effort: left guard Mark Glowinski, center Justin Britt, right guard Germain Ifedi and Gilliam. Sowell would also be a prime offender, though he was injured during the game and played just 39 snaps before undrafted rookie George Fant replaced him.
Wilson, for his part, has looked every bit a top-tier quarterback when his offensive line has allowed him to be. Since the start of the 2015 season, per Pro Football Focus, he's been the league's best deep passer, completing 49 percent of his passes that traveled 20 or more yards downfield (the NFL average is 36 percent) for a league-leading 17 touchdowns. And in his last 12 regular-season games prior to Sunday, his 29-2 touchdown-to-interception ratio and 117.1 quarterback rating also led the league.
Many of those deep throws are predicated on Wilson's ability to improvise after a play breaks down. When he's on the move, Seattle's receivers are trained specifically to find downfield openings in stressed coverages, and it's worked like a charm for the most part.
However, the 2016 season brought a couple of unwelcome changes to the formula. First, Marshawn Lynch's retirement left the Seahawks with a handful of backs with good overall ability, but not Lynch's transcendent knack of picking up chunks of yardage past subpar blocking. Second, Wilson's knee and ankle injuries have robbed him of the ability to move outside the pocket with ease. Thus, there is an offense that must operate more traditionally, with less improvisation, and with an offensive line that's predominantly incapable of sustaining blocks and playing in that more traditional fashion.
Norm Hall/Getty Images
The most glaring place this is showing up? Wilson's deep throws. Through the first four weeks of the 2016 season, Wilson completed 11 of 17 deep passes for 397 yards, two touchdowns and one interception. Not quite the stellar numbers of last season, but at least Seattle was testing defenses deep.
Since Seattle's Week 5 bye, it's been a very different story. Against the Falcons and Cardinals in Weeks 6 and 7, Wilson attempted a grand total of four passes over 20 yards in the air, with one completion for 31 yards. Wilson's percentage of deep throws was 12.8 before the bye; since the bye, it's dropped to 5.4 percent.
Offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell has talked about Wilson's getting the ball out quicker to offset protection issues, which is at least the first step: recognize there's a problem.
"It changes a lot of things," Bevell said last Wednesday, per the team's media department, when asked how a less mobile Wilson alters the overall game plan:
It changes when you're not running, all the styles of runs you can normally have. It changes some of your play actions and your movement game, that kind of thing. Some of the passes we've been using, I kind of think of them as just extended runs a little bit, because you're able to get four-, six-, eight-yard routes in those passes.
These are the kind of adjustments you must make when your quarterback is relatively hobbled, your offensive line (particularly your tackles) is ill-equipped to provide pass protection and defenses know it.
"We've never had two edge-rushers like Chandler [Jones] and Markus [Golden]," Cardinals defensive back Tyrann Mathieu told reporters after that ugly Sunday night game. "Let's call it what it is—their offensive line is not that good. So, we felt like we could get pressure on them, which we did a bunch of times tonight."
Indeed they did. According to PFF's metrics, Sowell allowed a sack, a quarterback hit and a quarterback hurry—again, in just 39 snaps. Gilliam was good for one hit and four hurries, Ifedi allowed one hit and two hurries, and Glowinski had one hit and two hurries. Add in several holding penalties and the general sense that this line looked completely overwhelmed (only Britt has played above replacement level in 2016, and center is the third position he's played in the NFL), and you have the overhead view.
This isn't just a one-game (or one-season) issue. Since 2011, when offensive line coach/assistant head coach Tom Cable came on board, the Seahawks have spent fewer and fewer salary-cap dollars on their offensive line and trusted more and more in Cable's constant assertions that he can take any reasonably sized lineman and make him into something workable. As I've written before, the results have been iffy at best, and with Lynch out of the picture and Wilson less than optimally mobile, more pressure is put on Cable's charges.
Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
Quite frankly, most of them aren't up to it. Britt looks like a keeper at center. Glowinski and Ifedi are young players with potential. Sowell and Gilliam are projects who regularly show their limitations, and if we're getting forensic, a lot of the problems start right there.
It's not that these players should be specifically maligned. Sowell doesn't have the speed, quickness and recovery ability common in NFL left tackles. Gilliam has raw, base athleticism and little else on a consistent basis. Glowinski and Ifedi are learning how do their jobs at the NFL level, and Britt had to go through embarrassing seasons at right tackle and right guard before finally hitting on a position that works for him.
This, quite simply, is a repeated failure in coaching and evaluation. For that, Cable should be held primarily responsible.
To ensure that my evaluations of Sowell and Gilliam weren't completely off base, I asked Duke Manyweather, the Offensive Tackles Scout for the NFL1000 project, for his thoughts on Seattle's outside pass protection. Duke's take lined up pretty well with mine—and, I'd imagine, many others.
Duke on Sowell: Sowell is a big, long player but lacks the efficiency in his pass-protection footwork needed to set, expand landmarks and consistently mirror defenders on the edge. Sowell lacks explosion into his pass set, and his feet often leave out of position, which forces him to just try to hang on and survive in many situations. He often steps forward before gaining ground, or he doesn't gain ground at all, and those hitches in his movement have made all the difference for pass-rushers to attack his edge and run the hoop on him.
Often, Sowell is so far out of position that it neutralizes his length, and he becomes unable to effectively trace the circle and run defenders over the top of the pocket.
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by the Governor. The Premier is appointed by the Governor.[71]
A Governor is appointed by the Queen of the United Kingdom on the advice of the British Government to represent the monarch.[72] Governors can exercise complete legislative and executive authority if they wish through blanket powers reserved to them in the constitution.[73] Bills which have passed the Legislative Assembly require royal assent before becoming effective. The Constitution empowers the Governor to withhold royal assent in cases where the legislation appears to him or her to be repugnant to or inconsistent with the Constitution or affects the rights and privileges of the Legislative Assembly or the Royal Prerogative, or matters reserved to the Governor by article 55.[74] The executive authority of the Cayman Islands is vested in the Queen and is exercised by the Government, consisting of the Governor and the Cabinet.[75] There is an office of the Deputy Governor, who must be a Caymanian and have served in a senior public office. The Deputy Governor is the acting Governor when the office of Governor is vacant, or the Governor is not able to discharge his or her duties or is absent from the Cayman Islands.[76] The current Governor of the Cayman Islands is Martyn Roper.[77]
The Cabinet is composed of two official members and seven elected members, called Ministers; one of whom is designated Premier. The Premier can serve for two consecutive terms after which he is barred from attaining the office again. Although an MLA can only be Premier twice any person who meets the qualifications and requirements for a seat in the Legislative Assembly can be elected to the Legislative Assembly indefinitely.[78]
There are two official members of the Legislative Assembly, the Deputy Governor and the Attorney General. They are appointed by the Governor in accordance with Her Majesty's instructions, and although they have seats in the Legislative Assembly, under the 2009 Constitution, they do not vote. They serve in a professional and advisory role to the MLAs, the Deputy Governor represents the Governor who is a representative of the Queen and the British Government. While the Attorney General serves to advise on legal matters and has special responsibilities in the LA, he is generally responsible for changes to the Penal code among other things.
The seven Ministers are voted into office by the 19 elected members of the Legislative Assembly of the Cayman Islands. One of the Ministers, the leader of the majority political party, is appointed Premier by the Governor.
After consulting the Premier, the Governor allocates a portfolio of responsibilities to each Cabinet Minister. Under the principle of collective responsibility, all Ministers are obliged to support in the Assembly any measures approved by Cabinet.
Almost 80 departments, sections and units carry out the business of government, joined by a number of statutory boards and authorities set up for specific purposes, such as the Port Authority, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Immigration Board, the Water Authority, the University College Board of Governors, the National Pensions Board and the Health Insurance Commission.
Since 2000, there have been two official major political parties: The Cayman Democratic Party (CDP) and the People's Progressive Movement (PPM). While there has been a shift to political parties, many contending for office still run as independents. The two parties are notably similar, though they consider each other rivals in most cases, their differences are generally in personality and implementation rather than actual policy. The Cayman Islands currently lacks any real liberal or progressive representation in the Legislative Assembly or in the form of organized political parties.[79] As of the May 2017 General Election, members of the PPM and CDP have joined together with 3 independent members to form a government coalition despite many years of enmity.[80]
Defence and law enforcement [ edit ]
The defence of the Cayman Islands is the responsibility of the United Kingdom. Law enforcement in the country is provided chiefly by the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service and the Cayman Islands Customs Department. These two agencies co-operate in aspects of law enforcement, including their joint marine unit. The Cayman Islands Cadet Corps was formed in March 2001 and carries out military-type training with teenage citizens of the country. As of 2017 the PPM led Coalition government have pledged to form a Coast Guard to protect the interests of the Islands, especially in terms of illegal immigration and illegal drug importation.
Taxation [ edit ]
No direct taxation is imposed on residents and Cayman Islands companies. The government receives the majority of its income from indirect taxation. Duty is levied against most imported goods, which is typically in the range of 22% to 25%. Some items are exempted, such as baby formula, books, cameras and certain items are taxed at 5%. Duty on automobiles depends on their value. The duty can amount to 29.5% up to $20,000.00 KYD CIF (cost, insurance and freight) and up to 42% over $30,000.00 KYD CIF for expensive models. The government charges flat licensing fees on financial institutions that operate in the islands and there are work permit fees on foreign labour. A 13% government tax is placed on all tourist accommodations in addition to US$37.50 airport departure tax which is built into the cost of an airline ticket. There are no taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, or personal income. There are no estate or death inheritance taxes payable on Cayman Islands real estate or other assets held in the Cayman Islands.[81]
Foreign relations [ edit ]
Foreign policy is controlled by the United Kingdom, as the islands remain an overseas territory of the United Kingdom. Although in its early days, the Cayman Islands' most important relationships were with Britain and Jamaica, in recent years, as a result of economic dependence, a relationship with the United States has developed.
Though the Cayman Islands is involved in no major international disputes, they have come under some criticism due to the use of their territory for narcotics trafficking and money laundering. In an attempt to address this, the government entered into the Narcotics Agreement of 1984 and the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty of 1986 with the United States, to reduce the use of their facilities associated with these activities. In more recent years, they have stepped up the fight against money laundering, by limiting banking secrecy, introducing requirements for customer identification and record keeping, and requiring banks to co-operate with foreign investigators.
Due to their status as an overseas territory of the UK, the Cayman Islands has no representation either in the United Nations or in most other international organisations. However, the Cayman Islands still participates in some international organisations, being an associate member of Caricom and UNESCO, and a member of a sub-bureau of Interpol.[82]
Infrastructure [ edit ]
Ports [ edit ]
George Town is the port capital of Grand Cayman. There are no berthing facilities for cruise ships, but up to 4 cruise ships can anchor in designated anchorages. There are three cruise terminals in George Town, the North, South, and Royal Watler Terminals. The ride from the ship to the terminal is about 5 minutes.[83]
Air transport [ edit ]
Education [ edit ]
Primary and secondary schools [ edit ]
The Cayman Islands Education Department operates state schools. Caymanian children are entitled to free primary and secondary education. There are two public high schools on Grand Cayman, John Gray High School and Clifton Hunter High School, and one on Cayman Brac, Layman E. Scott High School. Various churches and private foundations operate several private schools.
Colleges and universities [ edit ]
The University College of the Cayman Islands has campuses on Grand Cayman and Cayman Brac and is the only government-run university on the Cayman Islands.[84] A hall at the University College of the Cayman Islands is named after Sir Vassel Johnson, who The Cayman Islands Financial Services Association credited as one of the founding fathers of the financial services sector in the Cayman Islands. Sir Vassel is also the only person to ever be knighted in any British Dependent Territory. http://www.gov.ky/portal/page/portal/cighome/pressroom/archive/200811/governorstributetosirvassel
The International College of the Cayman Islands is a private college in Grand Cayman. The college was established in 1970 and offers associate's, bachelor's and master's degree programmes.[85] Grand Cayman is also home to St. Matthew's University, which includes a medical school and a school of veterinary medicine.[86] The Cayman Islands Law School, a branch of the University of Liverpool, is based on Grand Cayman.[87]
The Cayman Islands Civil Service College, a unit of Cayman Islands government organised under the Portfolio of the Civil Service, is in Grand Cayman. Co-situated with University College of the Cayman Islands, it offers both degree programs and continuing education units of various sorts. The college opened in 2007 and is also used as a government research centre.
There is a University of the West Indies Open campus in the territory.[88]
Health [ edit ]
See Health in the Cayman Islands
Emergency services [ edit ]
The Royal Cayman Islands Police Service (RCIPS) provides law enforcement for the three islands. Regular off-shore marine and air patrols are conducted by the RCIP using a small fleet of vessels and a helicopter. Grand Cayman is a port of call for Britain's Royal Navy and the United States Coast Guard who often assist with sea rescues when their resources are in the Cayman Islands area. The Cayman Islands Fire Service provides fire prevention, fire fighting and rescue.[89] Its headquarters are in George Town and has substations in Frank Sound, West Bay, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman.[90]
Grand Cayman Island, from space
Access to Emergency Services is available using 9-1-1, the Emergency telephone number, the same number as is used in Canada and the United States.[91] The Cayman Islands Department of Public Safety's Communications Centre processes 9-1-1 and non-emergency law enforcement, EMS, fire, and Search and Rescue calls for all three islands. The Communications Centre dispatches RCIP and EMS units directly, however, the Cayman Islands Fire Service maintains their own dispatch room at the airport fire station.[92]
Sports [ edit ]
Truman Bodden Sports Complex is a multi-use complex in George Town. The complex is separated into an outdoor, six-lane 25-metre (82 ft) swimming pool, full purpose track and field and basketball/netball courts. The field surrounded by the track is used for association football matches as well as other field sports. The track stadium holds 3,000 people.
Association football is the national and most popular sport, with the Cayman Islands national football team representing the Cayman Islands in FIFA.[citation needed]
The Cayman Islands Basketball Federation joined the international basketball governing body FIBA in 1976.[93] The country's national team attended the official 2011 Caribbean Basketball Championship for the first time.
Rugby union is a developing sport, and has its own national men's team, women's team, and Sevens team. The Cayman Men's Rugby 7s team is second in the region after the 2011 NACRA 7s Championship.
The Cayman Islands is a member of FIFA, the International Olympic Committee and the Pan American Sports Organisation, and also competes in the biennial Island Games.[94]
The Cayman Islands is a member of the International Cricket Council which they joined in 1997 as an Affiliate, before coming an Associate member in 2002. The Cayman Islands national cricket team represents the islands in international cricket. The team has previously played the sport at first-class, List A and Twenty20 level. It competes in Division Five of the World Cricket League.[95]
Squash is popular in the Cayman Islands with a vibrant community of mostly ex-pats playing out of the 7 court South Sound Squash Club. In addition, the women's professional squash association hosts one of their major events each year in an all glass court being set up in Camana Bay. In December 2012, the former Cayman Open will be replaced by the Women's World Championships, the largest tournament in the world. The top Cayman men's player, Cameron Stafford is No. 2 in the Caribbean and ranked top 200 on the men's professional circuit.
Flag football (CIFFA) has men's, women's and co-ed leagues.
Other organised sports leagues include softball, beach volleyball, Gaelic football and ultimate frisbee.
The Cayman Islands Olympic Committee was founded in 1973 and was recognised by the IOC (International Olympic Committee) in 1976.
In the 21st century, skateboarding has become popular among the youth.[citation needed]
In February 2010, the first purpose built track for kart racing in the Cayman Islands was opened.[96] Corporate karting Leagues at the track have involved widespread participation with 20 local companies and 227 drivers taking part in the 2010 Summer Corporate Karting League.[97]
Music [ edit ]
The Cayman National Cultural Foundation manages the F.J. Harquail Cultural Centre and the US$4 million Harquail Theatre. The Cayman National Cultural Foundation, established in 1984, helps to preserve and promote Cayman folk music, including the organisation of festivals such as Cayman Islands International Storytelling Festival, the Cayman JazzFest, Seafarers Festival and Cayfest.[98] The jazz, calypso and reggae genres of music styles feature prominently in Cayman music as celebrated cultural influences.[99] Many of Cayman-inspired pop songs belong to these forms of music styles.
Media [ edit ]
There is one print newspaper currently in circulation throughout the islands: the Cayman Compass. There are numerous online news services including Cayman News Service and the Cayman Compass online edition. A local television station, CITN – Cayman 27, shows Cayman Islands news.[100] Local radio stations are broadcast throughout the islands.
Feature films that have been filmed in the Cayman Islands include: The Firm, Haven, Cayman Went[101] and Zombie Driftwood.[102]
Notable Caymanians [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Trump apparently wants credit for passing up a "beautiful, very fancy lunch" to have one meal with troops stationed in Korea.
Donald Trump is in the middle of his diplomatic trip through Asia, and by all accounts, his behavior in Japan was mortifying.
But Trump is not planning to clean up his act as he heads to the Republic of Korea — a U.S. ally gravely threatened by Trump’s reckless provocation of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Instead, he wants to put on a show of how much he loves the troops stationed there.
In remarks at Camp Humphreys in South Korea, Trump boasted about his decision to eat with the troops.
“I had a choice of having a beautiful, very fancy lunch, and I said, no, I want to eat with the troops,” he said. “And we ate with the troops. And it was good eating. It was good eating. And I tell you, they’ve done a terrific job. Very impressive.”
This juvenile boast, in which Trump apparently wants credit for giving up a “fancy lunch” to have one meal with troops stationed overseas, is simply the latest salvo in months of Trump rhetoric on support for America’s men and women in uniform — which also formed the disingenuous basis of his attacks on black NFL players kneeling to protest police brutality.
But Trump’s actions tell a different story.
He has disrespected every service member, veteran, and military family who has ever been a political inconvenience to him. It took him nearly two weeks to even acknowledge the deaths of four U.S. troops killed in an ISIS ambush in Niger last month. When he belatedly called the family of Sgt. La David Johnson, ostensibly to offer condolences, he was not only insulting and disrespectful, but then denied the family’s own accounting of the call, essentially accusing Johnson’s widow, Myeshia Johnson, of being a liar.
Trump has also claimed that POWs are not really war heroes and launched a relentless smear campaign against Russia special counsel Robert Mueller, who won the Bronze Star and Purple Heart in Vietnam.
On the same day he boasted about giving up a “fancy” meal to eat with troops, he attacked Ralph Northam, the former Army doctor running for governor of Virginia, ridiculously claiming Northam is “weak” on veterans.
And the troops appear to have noticed. Polls have found that Trump’s support in military communities — traditionally a reliable source of Republican votes — is underwater.
Trump has nothing in his temperament or actions to show that he really cares about the people fighting to defend our nation and our freedom. If his only gesture for the troops is to eat lunch with them, his administration is in a sorry state indeed.The yuan has weakened by about 10 percent against the U.S. dollar in the past 17 months as investors lost confidence due to a prolonged economic slowdown and delays in implementing market reforms. Beijing has been trying to keep the yuan high, imposing administrative curbs to check capital outflows and depleting its huge foreign reserves.
Renmin University finance professor Zhao Xijun said China would follow the path it had designed to currency regime reform and "definitely say no" to being designated a manipulator.
"Related departments are gearing up for possible bilateral communications, negotiations and investigations which are expected to accompany the accusation if it would happen," he said. "Also, they are prepared for a trade war if that's inevitable."
Scott Kennedy, director of the project on Chinese business and political economy at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: "At this stage, the purpose of all the bluster and talk is trying to avoid a trade war, to show the U.S. means what it says and the threat is genuine. However, it depends on how China will respond.
"If China were not to address its foreign exchange rate, distortion of its domestic economy or liberalise the economy to embrace further investment, then I think the probability of penalties of one sort or another is highly likely.
"It looks like a trade war in inevitable. But it's extremely dangerous on both sides, particularly on the China side, if a trade war does break out."
That was because China's economy was "far more dependent" on the bilateral relationship than the other way around, he said, and China's economy was "much more fragile" than the U.S. economy.
Ricard Torne, senior economist at FocusEconomics in Barcelona, said labeling China a currency manipulator would add downward pressure on the yuan, mainly via two different channels.
"Any severe trade disruption would prompt the Chinese authorities to boost their pro-growth policies, which would certainly include a weaker renminbi (yuan)," he said. "Political and economic uncertainties will likely encourage further capital outflows, hurting the value of the Chinese currency."
Against that backdrop, FocusEconomics expects the yuan to trade at 7.12 yuanper U.S. dollar by the end of this year and to depreciate further to 7.30 yuan next year.
On Tuesday, the first trading day of 2017, the People's Bank of China fixed the yuan midpoint at 6.9498 per U.S. dollar. It was the first fixing since a change to the composition of the currency basket used to determine the yuan's value which reduced the U.S. dollar's weighting from 26.4 percent to 22.4 percent.
The Chinese leadership's emphasis on structural reforms and boosting domestic demand at last month's central economic work conference, an annual even that sets economic priorities for the following year, underscored the realization that the road ahead could be rocky if U.S. ties soured, economists said.
At the conference, the top leadership set "progress amid stability" as the guiding principle for economic work this year. The emphasis shifted to "stability is the main theme" last year, after a flirtation with "development is the No 1 task" in 2015.
This month's presidential transition in the U.S. and the shake-up in the upper echelon of the Communist Party expected at its national congress later in the year increased the likelihood of an "economically damaging geopolitical misstep", ING's chief Asia economist, Tim Condon, wrote in a research note.An American warship sailed near a disputed island in South China Sea on Sunday in an attempt to challenge the separate ownership claims by China, Taiwan and Vietnam, The Guardian reported.
The USS Stethem intentionally came within 12 nautical miles of Triton Island, which is part of the Paracel Island chain in the South China Sea, a U.S. Defense Department official told the news outlet.
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Twelve nautical miles is an internationally recognized marker of distance for another foreign country's territorial limits.
The operation that had a guided-missile destroyer sail within those 12 miles was meant to send a signal that the U.S. does not recognize any of the three nations' territorial claims of the island. Fox News first reported the operation on Sunday.
“Unlike in the Spratlys, where China has created new artificial territory in the last several years, it has effectively controlled the Paracels since 1974,” Mira Rapp-Hooper, a South China Sea expert at the Center for a New American Security, told the Guardian.
Despite largely praising Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Trump has also mounted pressure on Beijing to do more to sway North Korea to halt its nuclear programs and attempted missile launches.
The Trump administration last week fined two Chinese citizens and a shipping company for their efforts in helping North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.
Trump is set to speak with Xi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday, before he formally meets both of them outside of the Group of 20 summit in Germany next week.If you took the plunge and jailbroke your iPhone yesterday, you may have noticed that the Weather app in iOS doesn’t really work anymore. Like, at all. When you try to open the app on iPhone it just crashes, and then crashes some more.
Evad3rs figured out that the jailbreak screws up some files like com.apple.mobile.installation.plist. It’s not a big deal, and every jailbreak has its little quirks, but if you can’t wait for evad3rs to push their fix to Cydia you can fix the problem on your own manually.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Open Cydia and install Open SSH and MobileTerminal
2. Load MobileTerminal and type “su root” (no quotes). Then hit enter.
3. Enter your password. It’s probably “alpine” if you haven’t changed it yet.
4. Copy and paste the following script into MobileTerminal
#!/bin/bash
chmod -x /usr/libexec/mobile_installation_proxy
killall -9 mobile_installation_proxy
rm /var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.mobile.installation.plist /var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices-045.csstore
launchctl stop com.apple.mobile.installd
launchctl start com.apple.mobile.installd while [! -f /var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.mobile.installation.plist ];
do
sleep 1
done
while [! -f /var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices-045.csstore ];
do
sleep 1
done sleep 10 chmod +x /usr/libexec/mobile_installation_proxy
sync
reboot
5. Wait for your iPhone to reboot.
6. Have fun, you’re done.
For info on how to jailbreak your iPhone the right way, check out our video.
Source: Funky Space MonkeyThe rich are different from you and me. First off they have lots and lots of money, mansions, boats, castles, summer homes in the Caribbean, nice cars and STUFF. They get to own politicians—entire countries even—and stack the deck in their favor so that capitalism works just for them!
Their parties are certainly better catered than ours are…
...and the wealthy get their fancy dress costumes from couture houses in Paris, not Target.
These shots were taken at Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s famous Surrealist Ball held at Château Ferrières on December 12 1972.
Another cool thing about rich people is that they know all the right people, like Audrey Hepburn…
... and Salvador Dali…
... supermodel Marisa Berenson…
...and famed perfumer Hélène Rochas
Obviously we know where hostess-with-the-mostess Marie-Hélène got her money from. The Château was already in the family and owned by her husband, Guy de Rothschild. Convenient, that!
The requirements for the fancy dress party were “Black tie, long dresses & Surrealists heads” and the invitation had to be held up to a mirror—it was printed backwards—to be read. Guests walked through a forest of black ribbons, meant to be cobwebs, and a maze before entering the ballroom.
Marie-Hélène, with husband Guy de Rothschild, seen here wearing a mask crying tears of diamonds. But of course!
What would David Icke make of these lizard people???
Via So Bad, So Good/HT Rupert RussellLast night, the internet and Mainstream Media dissolved into excited chaos after MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow tweeted this:
BREAKING: We’ve got Trump tax returns. Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC. (Seriously). — Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 14, 2017
Unfortunately Rachel may have broken the law.
26 U.S. Code § 7213: “It shall be unlawful for any person to whom any return or return information (as defined in section 6103(b)) is disclosed in a manner unauthorized by this title thereafter willfully to print or publish in any manner not provided by law any such return or return information. Any violation of this paragraph shall be a felony punishable by a fine in any amount not exceeding $5,000, or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.”
Rachel did you lawyer up?BEFORE WE GET STARTED, I SHOULD LET YOU KNOW, **THIS POST CONTAINS AFFILIATE LINKS.
This recipe is easily one of my favorites as it satisfies two of my favorite deadly sins: sloth and gluttony.
Sloth because it’s so much easier than it looks and gluttony because it’s just so…damn…delicious…
(Play it again, I know you want to)
I mean, come on…look at how sexy that is. Hnnnnngggg. Damn. Yeah.
To make your own you will need:
1 skull mold. I got mine here.
1 chocolate cupcake (I used the cake mix I made for my Death by Chocolate cake here and added in extra black dutch chocolate to give it that deep dark look)
1 scoop raspberry sorbet
1 cup white chocolate candy melts
1 cup hot fudge sauce
Fresh raspberries
Cocoa powder
Vodka
In a microwave-safe bowl, melt your white chocolate candy melts by first zapping them for 30 seconds. Stir and then continue to microwave in 15-second bursts, stirring between each burst until the chocolate is completely melted and smooth.
Fill both sides of your chocolate mold with white chocolate and tilt to fully coat the sides.
Turn your molds over on top of waxed paper and allow to drain for 5 minutes.
Place into the freezer and allow to firm up.
While your chocolate is firming up, remove your cupcake from its paper wrapper and cut the top off, creating a flat surface.
When your chocolate is completely set, gently remove both halves of your chocolate skull from your mold.
Using more melted white chocolate, glue the two halves together, creating a full skull.
Using a bit more of your melted white chocolate, secure your cupcake to the center of your plate (this will make assembly easier later.)
Using a hot pan, gently melt the bottom of your skull off. You want to reveal a hole that is large enough for your skull to fit over your cupcake comfortably.
Now that the bottom of your skull is melted, let’s age it a bit. Using your vodka and cocoa powder, brush a wash of brown over your entire skull.
Go over this again with a paper towel dampened with more vodka, adding cocoa powder and rubbing gently until the skull is aged to your satisfaction.
Time for assembly!
Place a scoop of raspberry sorbet on top of your cupcake.
Gently place your skull down on top of your sorbet and cupcake.
Decorate your plate with your fresh raspberries.
To serve, microwave your fudge topping until it is hot, hot hot!
Drizzle slowly over your skull, focusing on the top.
As you pour, the hot fudge should melt your white chocolate, revealing the raspberry sorbet and cupcake inside.
Mmm…doesn’t this look gorgeous?
I mean, really…this dessert is guaranteed to convince anyone you serve it to that you spent hours in the kitchen slaving away…
…but don’t worry, I won’t tell them how easy this project actually is.
Oh, and of course I’m putting that video into this tutorial twice. It’s just that awesome.
It’s a damn sexy video.
Bone appetite!
Like what you see? Want to see more? Help me keep making my disgusting creations by visiting my Patreon page.
Please click HERE to support the Necro Nom-nom-nomicon
THIS WORK IS LICENSED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL, NO-DERIVATIVES 2.5 INTERNATIONAL LICENSE. YOU’RE WELCOME TO MAKE ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING SHOWCASED ON THE NECRO NOM-NOM-NOMICON, BUT MAY NOT DO IT FOR COMMERCIAL OR FINANCIAL GAIN. YOU MAY NOT COPY, DISTRIBUTE OR MODIFY THESE RECIPES IN ANY WAY WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE NECRO NOM-NOM-NOMICON.
NO RECIPE, TUTORIAL OR PROJECT MAY BE USED FOR COMMERCIAL OR PROFIT USE WITHOUT PERMISSION.
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Like this: Like Loading...The Clicking of Cuthbert
The young man came into the smoking-room of the clubhouse, and flung his bag with a clatter on the floor. He sank moodily into an arm-chair and pressed the bell.
"Waiter!"
"Sir?"
The young man pointed at the bag with every evidence of distaste.
"You may have these clubs," he said. "Take them away. If you don't want them yourself, give them to one of the caddies."
Across the room the Oldest Member gazed at him with a grave sadness through the smoke of his pipe. His eye was deep and dreamy--the eye of a man who, as the poet says, has seen Golf steadily and seen it whole.
"You are giving up golf?" he said.
He was not altogether unprepared for such an attitude on the young man's part: for from his eyrie on the terrace above the ninth green he had observed him start out on the afternoon's round and had seen him lose a couple of balls in the lake at the second hole after taking seven strokes at the first.
"Yes!" cried the young man fiercely. "For ever, dammit! Footling game! Blanked infernal fat-headed silly ass of a game! Nothing but a waste of time."
The Sage winced.
"Don't say that, my boy."
"But I do say it. What earthly good is golf? Life is stern and life is earnest. We live in a practical age. All round us we see foreign competition making itself unpleasant. And we spend our time playing golf! What do we get out of it? Is golf any use? That's what I'm asking you. Can you name me a single case where devotion to this pestilential pastime has done a man any practical good?"
The Sage smiled gently.
"I could name a thousand."
"One will do."
"I will select," said the Sage, "from the innumerable memories that rush to my mind, the story of Cuthbert Banks."
"Never heard of him."
"Be of good cheer," said the Oldest Member. "You are going to hear of him now."
* * * * *
It was in the picturesque little settlement of Wood Hills (said the Oldest Member) that the incidents occurred which I am about to relate. Even if you have never been in Wood Hills, that suburban paradise is probably familiar to you by name. Situated at a convenient distance from the city, it combines in a notable manner the advantages of town life with the pleasant surroundings and healthful air of the country. Its inhabitants live in commodious houses, standing in their own grounds, and enjoy so many luxuries--such as gravel soil, main drainage, electric light, telephone, baths (h. and c.), and company's own water, that you might be pardoned for imagining life to be so ideal for them that no possible improvement could be added to their lot. Mrs. Willoughby Smethurst was under no such delusion. What Wood Hills needed to make it perfect, she realized, was Culture. Material comforts are all very well, but, if the summum bonumsummum bonum is to be achieved, the Soul also demands a look in, and it was Mrs. Smethurst's unfaltering resolve that never while she had her strength should the Soul be handed the loser's end. It was her intention to make Wood Hills a centre of all that was most cultivated and refined, and, golly! how she had succeeded. Under her presidency the Wood Hills Literary and Debating Society had tripled its membership.
But there is always a fly in the ointment, a caterpillar in the salad. The local golf club, an institution to which Mrs. Smethurst strongly objected, had also tripled its membership; and the division of the community into two rival camps, the Golfers and the Cultured, had become more marked than ever. This division, always acute, had attained now to the dimensions of a Schism. The rival sects treated one another with a cold hostility.
Unfortunate episodes came to widen the breach. Mrs. Smethurst's house adjoined the links, standing to the right of the fourth tee: and, as the Literary Society was in the habit of entertaining visiting lecturers, many a golfer had foozled his drive owing to sudden loud outbursts of applause coinciding with his down-swing. And not long before this story opens a sliced ball, whizzing in at the open window, had come within an ace of incapacitating Raymond Parsloe Devine, the rising young novelist (who rose at that moment a clear foot and a half) from any further exercise of his art. Two inches, indeed, to the right and Raymond must inevitably have handed in his dinner-pail.
To make matters worse, a ring at the front-door bell followed almost immediately, and the maid ushered in a young man of pleasing appearance in a sweater and baggy knickerbockers who apologetically but firmly insisted on playing his ball where it lay, and, what with the shock of the lecturer's narrow escape and the spectacle of the intruder standing on the table and working away with a niblick, the afternoon's session had to be classed as a complete frost. Mr. Devine's determination, from which no argument could swerve him, to deliver the rest of his lecture in the coal-cellar gave the meeting a jolt from which it never recovered.
I have dwelt upon this incident, because it was the means of introducing Cuthbert Banks to Mrs. Smethurst's niece, Adeline. As Cuthbert, for it was he who had so nearly reduced the muster-roll of rising novelists by one, hopped down from the table after his stroke, he was suddenly aware that a beautiful girl was looking at him intently. As a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him intently, none more so than Raymond Parsloe Devine, but none of the others were beautiful girls. Long as the members of Wood Hills Literary Society were on brain, they were short on looks, and, to Cuthbert's excited eye, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of coke.
He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt's house on the previous day, but he was perfectly certain that life, even when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and company's own water, was going to be a pretty poor affair if he did not see her again. Yes, Cuthbert was in love: and it is interesting to record, as showing the effect of the tender emotion on a man's game, that twenty minutes after he had met Adeline he did the short eleventh in one, and as near as a toucher got a three on the four-hundred-yard twelfth.
I will skip lightly over the intermediate stages of Cuthbert's courtship and come to the moment when--at the annual ball in aid of the local Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the lion, so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the Cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences temporarily laid aside--he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.
That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spy-glass.
"Mr. Banks," she said, "I will speak frankly."
"Charge right ahead," assented Cuthbert.
"Deeply sensible as I am of----"
"I know. Of the honour and the compliment and all that. But, passing lightly over all that guff, what seems to be the trouble? I love you to distraction----"
"Love is not everything."
"You're wrong," said Cuthbert, earnestly. "You're right off it. Love----" And he was about to dilate on the theme when she interrupted him.
"I am a girl of ambition."
"And very nice, too," said Cuthbert.
"I am a girl of ambition," repeated Adeline, "and I realize that the fulfilment of my ambitions must come through my husband. I am very ordinary myself----"
"What!" cried Cuthbert. "You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among women, the queen of your sex. You can't have been looking in a glass lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like battered repaints."
"Well," said Adeline, softening a trifle, "I believe I am fairly good-looking----"
"Anybody who was content to call you fairly good-looking would describe the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb."
"But that is not the point. What I mean is, if I marry a nonentity I shall be a nonentity myself for ever. And I would sooner die than be a nonentity."
"And, if I follow your reasoning, you think that that lets me out?"
"Well, really, Mr. Banks, have you done anything, or are you likely ever to do anything worth while?"
Cuthbert hesitated.
"It's true," he said, "I didn't finish in the first ten in the Open, and I was knocked out in the semi-final of the Amateur, but I won the French Open last year."
"The--what?"
"The French Open Championship. Golf
|
up systems at the ready to ensure crucial online services remain accessible to the public. JPMorgan Chase “lost millions every day that the site was down, so the problem had to be something big,” says Caleb Sima, CEO of web site security company Armorize Technologies.
Earlier ‘scheduled maintenance’ outage
JPMorgan Chase’s consumer online services also went off line for 15 hours on Aug. 7 through Aug. 8. Many customers, including Steve Karp, a 57-year-old computer consultant from Tuscon, Ariz., were taken by surprise. A bank spokesman told LastWatchdog on Aug. 9 that the outage was part of scheduled maintenance. But Karp, who checks his online accounts frequently, said he never received notification from the bank.
“I question how truthful Chase was about this matter,” says Karp.
Fast forward to this week’s unscheduled outage. Despite bank officials deflecting blame to an outside vendor, thorough tech forensics remains to be completed. Investigators will have to methodically examine whether they can rule out complicity of an insider, perhaps a disgruntled employee. And it will take extensive legwork to confidently rule out whether hackers who are expert at hiding their tracks might be to blame. There is precedent for both.
In 2008, a disgruntled city employee corrupted the City of San Francisco’s fiber optic network locking out the mayor and other administrators. And in 2007, hackers rigged the Bank of India’s Web site to infect the PCs of customers trying to access their accounts. The site went off line for several days while investigators and technicians restored the system to a clean state.
‘Advanced persistent threats’
Cybercriminals today routinely use cutting-edge tactics, referred to as “advanced persistent threats” (APT) that allow them to control parts of a network and dodge detection for long periods of time. Typically, when APT intrusions are finally discovered, it takes months more to completely clean up. “APT hackers are extremely brilliant at hiding,” says Skurla.
It will take a deep investigation to determine with a high degree of certainty that no security breach was involved. It is possible that a string of programming errors unrelated to any malicious activities is to blame, says Adam Powers, chief technical officer of Lancope, which supplies network monitoring systems.
“An organization can build out a beautifully redundant system but the software itself is always a potential failure point, ” he says.
Either way, JPMorgan Chase’s 16 million or so online banking customers should be concerned. Powers says bank patrons should ask, “has my information been corrupted? A corrupted financial database can lead to lost transactions, erroneous account balances, missed deposits, etc.”
By Byron Acohido
September 16th, 2010 | For consumers | Imminent threats | Top StoriesSad news: Jose da Silva Lopes, a Portuguese economist and government official who played a crucial role shepherding his country into the community of democratic Europe, has just died.
I met Silva Lopes in 1976, when I was part of a group of MIT grad students who spent the summer working at the Bank of Portugal, of which he was governor at the time. I’ve written about that experience; let me just add that working with Silva Lopes — who must have been somewhat horrified at trying to deal with us uncouth students at the same time that he was trying to cope with the chaos of a still unstable political system, but showed unfailing good humor and intelligence — was one of the real highlights of the whole business.
Actually, an anecdote: we were working in rented space outside the Bank proper, and there was a Soviet trade mission just upstairs. We joked to him that the Russians might be bugging us; he responded, “I don’t care what the Russians find out, it’s the press I’m worried about!”
Another: his remark about the state of foreign exchange reserves — “When I have six months’ reserves, I will have no reserves” — was a key inspiration for my early work on currency crises.
And yet another: at the time, Portugal, as a low-wage nation within Europe, exported a lot of apparel. Silva Lopes: “We are not a banana republic, we are a pajama republic.”
In the years that followed, he added further chapters to his illustrious career — more than I knew, I’m ashamed to say — leading tax reform and more. I was honored and delighted to see him again two years ago, and have him deliver remarks when I received honorary degrees in Lisbon. If you read his remarks, you’ll see that he was as sharp — and good humored — as ever.
The world has lost a great, good, and incredibly likable man.Walter E. Williams is a professor at George Mason University. He has advice for Americans who want to stop all the craziness on college campuses.
He writes at The Daily Signal:
Let’s Hit Left-Wing Colleges Where It Hurts. In the Pocketbook.
Parents, taxpayers, and donors have little idea of the levels of lunacy, evil, and lawlessness that have become features of many of today’s institutions of higher learning.
Parents, taxpayers, and donors who ignore or are too lazy to find out what goes on in the name of higher education are nearly as complicit as the professors and administrators who promote or sanction the lunacy, evil, and lawlessness.
As for the term “institutions of higher learning,” we might start asking: Higher than what?
Let’s look at a tiny sample of academic lunacy.
During a campus debate, Purdue University professor David Sanders argued that a logical extension of pro-lifers’ belief that fetuses are human beings is that pictures of “a butt-naked body of a child” are child pornography.
Clemson University’s chief diversity officer, Lee Gill, who’s paid $185,000 a year to promote inclusion, provided a lesson claiming that to expect certain people to be on time is racist.
To reduce angst among snowflakes in its student body, the University of California, Hastings College of the Law has added a “Chill Zone.” The Chill Zone, located in its library, has, just as most nursery schools have, mats for naps and beanbag chairs…
Americans who see themselves as either liberal or conservative should rise up against this totalitarian trend on America’s college campuses.
I believe the most effective way to do so is to hit these campus tyrants where it hurts the most—in the pocketbook. Lawmakers should slash budgets, and donors should keep their money in their pockets.Image caption The Deepwater Horizon rig blast led to a massive oil spill
An ex-manager of US energy services giant Halliburton has admitted destroying evidence linked to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Anthony Badalamenti, 62, pleaded guilty in a US district court, and faces a maximum sentence of a year in prison.
The disaster - the biggest offshore oil spill in US history - was caused by an explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 people.
Halliburton has already pleaded guilty to the unauthorised deletion of data.
The contractor is the third of three major companies at the heart of the huge oil spill to admit criminal wrongdoing.
BP and rig operator Transocean have already pleaded guilty to charges related to the disaster.
Halliburton was BP's cement contractor on the drilling rig that exploded.
Mr Badalamenti was the cementing technology director for Halliburton, and is being accused of instructing his program manager to delete computer records.
The program manager "felt uncomfortable" about what he was asked to do, but still complied, according to prosecutors.
Another Halliburton employee also deleted data after receiving instructions from Mr Badalamenti, prosecutors said.Ms. Jaffrey’s new book is very much based in her daily life in New York, and that is a good thing for cautious cooks: tame ingredients like grape tomatoes, melted cheese and pickled chili peppers from the “ethnic” aisle of the supermarket are just as likely to appear in her recipes as fenugreek seeds and curry leaves. Mr. Pant’s beautifully packaged book covering the entirety of Indian cuisine is surprisingly short on explication (he is an academic and political analyst as well as an authority on North Indian food) but has wave upon wave of recipes that illustrate the enormous creativity of Indian cooks.
My favorite is “Street Food of India” by Sephi Bergerson, a photographer who lives in Delhi. In just 50 recipes and under 200 pages, Mr. Bergerson accomplishes the rare feat of capturing how people eat, not just what. He shows people eating, making and clamoring for the outdoor snacks that are nearly universal in India: cool lemonade spiked with cumin and salt, scalding hot sweet tea with ginger, potato cakes with vibrant herb chutneys.
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“One Big Table” (Simon & Schuster, $50) by Molly O’Neill (formerly a writer and editor at The New York Times) does the same thing for modern American home cooking, although it takes longer, at 600 recipes and 800 pages. With hundreds of profiles, each accompanied by a recipe, it is overwhelming and yet completely absorbing, a cookbook to dip into for years. Her take on Tater Tots with smoked paprika, watermelon salad with mint and chilies, and the fish chowder concocted by the slugger/angler/chowhound Ted Williams make a convincing case for American exceptionalism, written in food.
This year brought the rise of a vociferous interest group: the gluten-free party. “Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef” by Shauna James Ahern (Wiley, $29.95) is one of the movement’s most appealing books, since it celebrates ingredients like Marcona almonds and brown basmati rice instead of obsessing about pasta substitutes.
Conversely, demonstrating the spectrum of American interests, there are numberless new baking books. Start simply, by whisking cold butter into warm maple syrup according to the “Clinton St. Baking Company Cookbook” (Little, Brown, $29.99), thus creating a life-changing emulsion for pancakes, waffles and loved ones. The book also includes the celebrated pancake recipe served by the chef Neil Kleinberg (the author with his wife, DeDe Lahman) at his Lower East Side brunch magnet. Using whipped egg whites to lighten pancakes is not the revolutionary act the authors want you to believe: James Beard was doing it in the 1960s. Still, they are good. A corresponding book from Boston’s popular bakery, “Flour” (Chronicle, $35), has also just been published by the baker Joanne Chang, with recipes for her exemplary muffins and mock Oreos. For more serious bakers, the first cookbook by Sarabeth Levine, “Sarabeth’s Bakery” (Rizzoli, $39.95), offers careful explanations and detailed photographs invaluable for puff pastry and a host of other fundamentals. From San Francisco, Chad Robertson’s “Tartine Bread” (Chronicle, $40) is the most beautiful bread book yet published (they tend to be thick and beige, like unappealing loaves). Nostalgic bakers will want “The Gourmet Cookie Book” (Houghton Mifflin, $18), a small, tactile masterpiece of graphic design with one great recipe from each of the years Gourmet was published: 1941 to 2009. “Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy” (Artisan, $25.95) is another all-cookies book, but its author, Alice Medrich, has advanced notions like garam masala sugar and lemon bars with a slick of apricot glaze.
“The Book of Tapas” by Simone and Inès Ortega (Phaidon, $39.95) is irresistible for many reasons: bright red type, ribbon bookmarks and easy-to-buy ingredients, transformed into 250 recipes from tapas-loving chefs in Spain and abroad. It is summer cooking bound between sunny covers.
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Rozanne Gold is the personal trainer of food writers: she has been on a strict regime of “1-2-3” ingredients books. (But wouldn’t you rather have that fourth ingredient, if it is the one that makes the dish?) Her new book, “Radically Simple” (Rodale, $35), has more flexibility, promising “restaurant-worthy food without a single extraneous motion or ingredient.” And despite the brusque prose, she wrings stylish, streamlined, fabulous results with inspired combinations like avocado, lime and smoked paprika, and unexpected techniques, like roasting grapes, that restore drama to chicken breasts. (Another book, devoted entirely to roast chicken, “A Bird in the Oven and Then Some” by Mindy Fox (Kyle, $24.95), is more useful than it sounds.)
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After a while, Ms. Gold’s injunctions to cook “breathtaking” food made me want to curl up on a cinnamon bun for a nap with “The Happy Baker: A Girl’s Guide to Emotional Baking” by Erin Bolger (Harlequin, $17.95), a bright spot on the often-messy bookshelf of culinary comedy. Ms. Bolger’s tales of love, loss and caramels, matched with easy recipes, include advice on why sleeping with the gardener at a Cuban resort hotel is a good idea, and how to deal with a Valentine from Mom. She and Matt Moore, the earnest author of the self-published “Have Her Over For Dinner” (Last Resort Press, $25), might make a nice couple. Mr. Moore, a musician in Nashville, targets the young man who wants to make dinner on a date — while managing to avoid the usual Playboy-tinged prose of cookbooks “for men.”
In Maya Angelou’s book “Great Food, All Day Long” (Random House, $30), she writes about opening a pack of cigarettes in a vegetarian restaurant, says that her mustard greens with ham hocks can “make a person cry for his grandmother,” and that when eating a favorite home-cooked meal — a chili dog and a cold beer — she becomes so absorbed in its deliciousness that she will not answer when spoken to.
Finally, it would be unfamilial to ignore this year’s many worthy new books from contributors to The Times’s food pages: “In the Kitchen With a Good Appetite” by Melissa Clark (Hyperion, $27.50); “Keys to Good Cooking” by Harold McGee (Penguin Press, $35); “Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France” by Joan Nathan (Knopf, $39.95), and “The Food Matters Cookbook” by Mark Bittman (Simon & Schuster, $35). And last, fatter than Santa and decked in holiday red, Amanda Hesser’s “Essential New York Times Cookbook” (W. W. Norton, $40).
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Digital and Giftable
WITH millions of new tablets in Americans’ hands, publishers spent the year scrambling to put cookbooks in digital form for the holidays.
Last month, Amazon.com finally made it possible to send a gift of an electronic book to a loved one’s Kindle or iPad. Random House has just released over a hundred cookbooks (from Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay and others) as e-books. Some collections, like the vast Cook’s Illustrated/America’s Test Kitchen library, are sold in multiple formats: as e-books, smartphone apps, tablet apps, Web caches, and books.
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Which one is best gifted? I toyed with all of them last week, and would certainly plump for a good app (like the new one from the chef Mario Batali) or a paper book over a digital cookbook.
Usefulness is one reason: electronic cookbooks mostly lack interactive features like portable shopping lists, videos, links to the Internet and to glossary definitions. These are now common on cooking apps (and Web sites).
Beauty is another: even gorgeously photographed books like “Ethan Stowell’s New Italian Kitchen,” from the Seattle chef, are slightly smaller and less luscious on a tablet. (The book’s list price is $35; it is $22.77 on Amazon. The Kindle edition is $19.25.)
Searching and indexing can be primitive: a search for “cake” in the 50-recipe Cook’s Illustrated e-book gets unwanted results like pancakes and the phrase “form the mixture into cakes.”
The “Martha Stewart Makes Cookies” app for the iPad, with a timer, shopping links and videos, is the kind of content that lets the tablet shine. It’s festive and wondrous, like “The Nutcracker” for cooks, and only $4.99.Sea level rise is swamping coasts; Rodanthe in the Outer Banks of North Carolina is pictured.
Some still insist that climate change is a hoax, but the vast majority of Americans believe the globe is warming, a new survey finds — and they want to prepare for the worst.
In fact, even 60 percent of climate-change doubters favored preparations, the survey found. Researchers collected opinions between March 3 and March 18 via an online questionnaire, using a nationally representative sample of 1,174 American adults, both English and Spanish speaking.
The survey asked about climate-change beliefs and support for adaptation strategies to help coastal areas cope with the rising sea levels and frequent, intense storms that a warmer world could bring. The results showed that 82 percent of Americans are in favor of preparation.
"Few people believe these preparations will harm the economy or eliminate jobs," survey director Jon Krosnick, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, said in a statement. "In fact, more people believe that preparation efforts will help the economy and create jobs around the U.S., in their state and in their town than think these efforts will harm the economy and result in fewer jobs in those areas.
"But people want coastal homeowners and businesses that locate in high-risk areas to pay for these measures," he said.
The survey found high levels of belief in global warming, with 82 percent of respondents agreeing that Earth's temperatures have risen over the last century. People tended to see efforts to hold back Mother Nature as futile, Krosnick said. Instead, they preferred preparation strategies that would reduce exposure to risk. For example, 48 percent of respondents supported sand dune restoration, and 33 percent favored replenishing eroding beaches with sand.
At the same time, 37 percent said structures should be moved inland to protect them from flooding and storm surges, and 33 percent supported the construction of sea walls. [Weather vs. Climate: Test Yourself]
The most popular policy suggestions were the strengthening of coastal building codes to minimize damage from storms and flooding (supported by 62 percent of respondents), and the prevention of new construction close to the coast (supported by 51 percent).
"The question is, how does public support for preparation translate to action?" said Meg Caldwell, executive director of the Center for Ocean Solutions, which co-commissioned the survey.
"Our impulse is to try to move quickly to put communities back together the way they were after devastation. But that impulse often leads to doubling down on high-risk investments, such as rebuilding in areas likely to experience severe impacts," Caldwell said in a statement. "To move toward long-term resiliency for coastal communities, we need to seize opportunities to apply new thinking, new standards and long-term solutions."
Krosnick presented the results of the survey March 28 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Order of Ascension (members only)
Beneath the Feldip Hills, a new terror rises. The Order of Ascension - a group of misguided Guthix followers - are responsible for a spate of kidnappings. Little else about them is known - except that they must be stopped.
Ocellus - a Guardian of Guthix - waits at the ruined chapel north-west of Oo'glog. He's seeking skilled slayers to venture into the underground Monastery of Ascension and take the fight directly to the Order of Ascension themselves.
The Order of Ascension is made up of magical beings - each one a force to be reckoned with. You'll need 81 Slayer to enter the monastery, but that's just the start. A high Ranged level and the best ranging gear you can use are essential against even the weakest enemies you'll encounter therein.
Their combat skills have been honed over millennia, and so have their tactics. There are five types of enemies within the monastery, each with a different combat purpose: for example, the gladii are mid-range damage dealers who charge into combat and stun, while the scutarii are heavily armoured, defensive units. They'll work together, too: the rorarii footsoldiers will team up, each gaining increased damage when they do, while the capsarii will support their comrades with defensive shields and healing. See here for full details.
Most dangerous of all, though, are the legiones. These six entities are the leaders of the order, and each is a mini-boss fight in its own right. They're found in six laboratories throughout the monastery, each of which requires 95 Slayer and a keystone - dropped by the monastery's other inhabitants - to gain entry. The fights are instanced, and you'll fight alone unless you're paired up with a Co-op Slayer partner, who will have the option of entering the laboratory with you.
Note: you can bring a Co-op Slayer partner into the laboratories even if they don't meet the 95 Slayer requirement, as long as you do yourself and are carrying the necessary keystone.
The Monastery of Ascension is the ideal place to make use of the Co-op Slayer feature, as the tactics employed by the order mean that it really helps to have someone along for the ride. For example, the scutarii take greatly reduced damage when attacked from the front or sides, so having someone to keep them busy while you deal damage to their backs is invaluable. Shared potions and food - not to mention a friend by your side - is sure to help when you're facing down the Legiones!
The monastery's a dangerous place, but the rewards are more than worth it. You'll find lore-filled pages of a book entitled History of the Order, which will give you insight into how the order came to be. The Order of Ascension also drop Ascension fragments, which (with 60 Fletching) can be used to fletch fragment bolts and arrows - ammunition which is particularly effective against them.
Best of all, though, are the components needed to create the Ascension crossbow - the most powerful ranged weapon in the game. It requires level 90 Ranged to wield, can be converted between main and off-hand versions by Ocellus, and is the only weapon that can fire the mighty Ascension bolts, which can be fletched from items also found on the monastery's inhabitants, and level 90 Fletching. It degrades, and is repaired in the same way as Barrows equipment - by NPCs such as Bob in Lumbridge, or at a player-owned house armour stand. For information on how to make the crossbow, speak to Ocellus. Alternatively, click here for full details of the Monastery's rewards.
Enjoy!
Mod Doctor and Mod Jack
How to start:
Duradel, Lapalok and Kuradal can each give out slayer assignments for Order of Ascension monsters.
The entrance is within the ruined chapel north-west of Oo'glog, close to the Yanille lodestone.
Requirements:
RuneScape membership.
Level 81 Slayer to enter the monastery.
Level 95 Slayer to enter the laboratories and face the legiones (or a Co-op Slayer partner with that level).
Level 160 Combat (in addition to 81 Slayer) to be given Order of Ascension slayer assignments.
Behind the Scenes Video
Take a tour of the Monastery of Ascension with Mod Doctor and Mod Jack:
In Other News
Keep your eagle-eyes peeled for some awesome ranger-centric items on the Squeal of Fortune this weekend: the white stag bow, the skirmisher armour, and fletching skill crates!
Raw fish can now only be removed from a tackle box through a bank. The tackle box also has a new ability: you can teleport an amount of raw fish per day, directly from it to the bank. Finally, the tackle box now has options to deposit raw fish from it straight into the bank, and to empty raw fish into the inventory when viewing the bank interface.
The area in which it is possible to teleport away within the Wilderness has been changed, to reflect how it was pre-Evolution of Combat. The level 20 area is now level 26 Wilderness, and the level 30 area is now level 40.
The patch notes archive can be seen here.
Discuss this here.+1 Pin Share Share 1 Shares
Famous Sublime Text 3.0 has been released with plenty of new features. There are plenty of new updates in the latest version like syntax highlighting improvements, touch input support on Windows, Touch Bar support on macOS, and apt/yum/pacman repositories for Linux and more. Meanwhile, there is : Goto Definition, a new syntax highlighting engine, a new UI, and an expanded API integration in new version.
From The Official Blog:
Refreshed UI theme, including full high DPI support
New icon
Added alternate theme, Adaptive, that inherits colors from the color scheme
Added new color schemes Breakers, Mariana and Sixteen, derived from the excellent work of Chris Kempson and Dmitri Voronianski
, and, derived from the excellent work of Chris Kempson and Dmitri Voronianski Added color scheme and theme switchers with live preview via the command palette
Windows: Added touch input
Linux: Added repositories for apt, yum and pacman
Mac: Added Touch Bar support
Mac: Support for custom color window title bars on OS X 10.10+
Many additions and bug fixes to the theme engine, plus full documentation
Significant improvements to Markdown syntax highlighting, with thanks to keith-hall
Significant improvements to C# syntax highlighting, with thanks to gwenzek
Significant improvements to Java syntax highlighting, with thanks to djspiewak
Significant improvements to Python syntax highlighting, with thanks to FichteFoll
Significant improvements for R syntax highlighting, with thanks to randy3k
Markdown: Improved symbol handling
C#: Improved symbol handling
Many other syntax highlighting improvements
Various bugs with the syntax highlighting engine have been resolved
Fixed several crash issues
Improved responsiveness when the system is under high CPU load
High DPI textures are used on Windows and Linux when the DPI scale is greater than 1.0
Improved font selection on all platforms, allowing selection of different weights by name
Added setting theme_font_options to control font rendering of UI elements
to control font rendering of UI elements Improved auto indent rules for HTML and PHP
Font geometry issues that prevent bold or italics are now printed in the console
Fixed flash-of-white that could occur when the auto complete window is closed
Disable scroll animation when animation_enabled is false in settings
is false in settings Files can now be renamed when only the case has changed
New windows start with an empty find history
Find in Files panel now responds to find_all and replace_all commands
and commands Various regex handling improvements in the Find panel
Fixed text widgets cutting off the bottom pixel of their selection border
Fixed an issue with close_windows_when_empty in empty session
in empty session Fixed empty panes on startup when hot_exit was set to false
was set to false Fix Open Containing Folder on Windows with a folder containing a comma
Fix multi-cursor pasting when clipboard contains one or more full lines
Prevent UNC paths from being mangled by edit_settings
Prevent a crash when a malformed regex is used in indentation settings
Improved rendering performance with a large number of gutter icons
Gutter icons are now sized properly on Windows and Linux high DPI screens
Improved sidebar performance when folders contain many thousands of files
Improved inline error message style
Fixed an issue where multiple indexing status windows could be shown
Windows: Font rendering defaults to DirectWrite unless using Consolas or Courier New
Windows: Added support for no_antialias font option when using DirectWrite
font option when using DirectWrite Windows: Improved touch pad scrolling
Windows: Improved file change detection robustness
Windows: Improved font selection logic
Windows: Fix ctrl+` shortcut for UK (ISO) keyboards
Windows: Improved fallback font handling in UI elements
Windows: The subl executable on OS X and plugin_host.exe on Windows are now signed
Windows: sublime_text.exe now has CompanyName set in VERSIONINFO
Mac: Handle layout changes due to macOS Sierra tabs
Mac: Improved default web browser detection
Mac: OS X 10.11 and macOS 10.12+ default to using San Francisco for the UI font
Mac: Fixed file change notifications from freezing UI on macOS Sierra
Mac: the user’s default shell is executed and environmental variables are set in the plugin Python environment
Linux: Update X11 selection on clipboard every time selection changes
Linux: Improved MOD3 modifier key handling
modifier key handling minihtml: Added support for borders
minihtml: Respects font_options from the settings
from the settings minihtml: Fixed layout of html popups on Windows and Linux under High DPI
minihtml: Fixed crash when doctype is present
minihtml: Fixed a crash from non-existent CSS vars
minihtml: Fixed a crash triggered by bad image paths
API: Add View.text_to_window() and View.layout_to_window()
and API: All API functions now accept and return device-independent-pixels
API: Fixed input panel not running on_cancel when re-showing the input panel
when re-showing the input panel API: Fixed selector scoring with the & operator
API: Fixed a bug causing incorrect phantom contents
API: Fixed crash in Window.set_view_index()
API: Updated OpenSSL to 1.0.2k, SQLite to 3.16.02
Download your copy of sublime for your operating system.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Many Republicans say they want to see Hillary Clinton jailed
The chants of "Lock her up" directed at Hillary Clinton have been a nightly feature of the Republican convention in Cleveland. Is that fair enough or a new political low?
Many of the speakers have focused more on the faults of Hillary Clinton than the virtues of Donald Trump.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie read out a list of alleged "crimes" by Mrs Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and asked the crowd if she was guilty. His baiting of the crowd resulted in chants of "Lock her up!"
The same slogan has been repeated each night, most recently when Mr Trump gave his big speech on Thursday.
Much of the criticism from the stage, from Mr Christie and others, was about Mrs Clinton's use of a private email account while she was serving as secretary of state.
An FBI investigation said she was "extremely careless" but found her actions didn't warrant criminal prosecution.
Mr Christie also questioned her "selfish, awful judgement" which was to blame for various foreign policy problems in Libya, Syria and elsewhere.
Image copyright AP Image caption New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was one of the first mainstream Republicans to declare support for Mr Trump
The divisive and at times ugly rhetoric - a charge directed at both sides during the campaign - is not particularly shocking to long-time political observers, but some say it is worse than ever.
Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, speaking from Cleveland, said this election is the ugliest he has ever seen in the US.
"You expect a tough rhetoric against the opposition," Mr Ornstein said. "You don't expect a convention hall that has its major theme as not what your nominee will do but an enormous level of bile towards the other opponent."
He also said he would not expect primetime speakers to encourage that "bile" but Mr Christie, former candidate Ben Carson and radio host Laura Ingraham had done that, in his view.
"It makes absurd the notion you're trying to unite the government and not divide it," he said.
Analysis - Katty Kay, BBC News, Cleveland
I honestly don't know if it's because Hillary is a woman or because she's been around as a political figure for so long or because her email server makes her look like she thinks she's above the law but the hatred of her here is vicious and visceral.
This has become the "lock her up" convention. Ask individual delegates about Hillary and they get a glint in their eye - she's "evil", a "liar", "dangerous".
Chris Christie's mock prosecution whipped up a crowd that was willing to be pulled into the fringes of political acceptability. Think what you will of Hillary Clinton as a potential president, there's a nasty mood here when it comes to her. You see it in the slogans, the T-shirts, the buttons and the speeches.
On the whole this convention is more subdued than any I have been to. There's a lack of excitement and the only thing the party really seems united about in Cleveland is the other party's nominee. They really, really hate her. On that they can agree.
Political commentators and journalists took note of this new tone from the convention floor.
James Fallows, a correspondent for the Atlantic, tweeted on Wednesday: "Seriously, we have NEVER seen this 'lock her up!' penal-system mania before".
Annie Karni of Politico noted that Minnesota Senator Al Franken called the "lock her up" chants "very banana republic".
Tough campaign rhetoric is nothing new, Mr Ornstein said. In 1972, Democrats said Richard Nixon was a war criminal for keeping US troops in Vietnam, and in 1996, people said Bill Clinton was not qualified to be president for being an adulterer.
However, that is "mild stuff" compared to what we are seeing at this year's RNC, he said.
Mass media consumption and social media that puts focus on shock value has only made it worse, he said.
"It's created a tribal political arena... and an encouragement of the most base and extreme forces in society. You can't say it's a shock we've gotten here, but it's a real worrisome thing."
Image caption Kendall Jessup from Texas said Mr Christie's tone was just right
But that's not a view shared by some of the delegates in Cleveland, who believe the chants are merely an expression of the fact there is one law for the Clintons and one law for the rest.
Kendal Jessup from Texas said Mr Christie's speech was just right and it united the arena.
"Suddenly everybody is on board, because everybody in the arena can agree that Hillary is not someone who can sit in the White House," she said.
"It was not too violent. It set the right tone. And it's not because she's a woman."
Image caption Nancy Elliot (pictured right) said Mr Christie 'nailed it'
Nancy Elliot, a Trump supporter from New Hampshire, said Mr Christie "absolutely nailed it" with his mock prosecution of Mrs Clinton.
"I've never seen a candidate with such a lack of integrity. What she did was criminal - and that's not exaggeration, that's a fact."
She added that the angry mood in the arena reflected the hostility the party faithful feel towards the Democrat. They wanted to make sure that came through loud and clear.
"It's the only chance to get traction with the whole Hillary story because our media is not going to present it again once the campaign starts."
Not everyone is happy with the tone of the convention - Cleveland resident and undecided voter Diana Borcz said she was "really disappointed".
"They're not talking about the party and the policies but kept referring negatively to her career and her family," she said. "There's not enough on what Trump will actually do."
And Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told CNN that he disagreed with the "Lock her up" chant and disagrees that Mrs Clinton should go to jail.
Additional reporting from Anna Bressanin and Ben Bevington in ClevelandThis article is about the flight formation of birds. For the military aircraft formation, see Vic formation
A V formation is the symmetric V-shaped flight formation of flights of geese, ducks, and other migratory birds. V formations also improve the fuel efficiency of aircraft and are used on military flight missions.
Aerodynamics [ edit ]
The V formation possibly improves the efficiency of flying birds, particularly over long migratory routes.[1] All the birds except the first fly in the upwash from one of the wingtip vortices of the bird ahead. The upwash assists each bird in supporting its own weight in flight, in the same way a glider can climb or maintain height indefinitely in rising air. According to a 1970 paper, in a V formation of 25 members, each bird can achieve a reduction of induced drag and as a result increase their range by 71%.[2] The birds flying at the tips and at the front are rotated in a timely cyclical fashion to spread flight fatigue equally among the flock members. Canada geese, ducks and swans commonly form a skein in V formation.[3]
Military flight missions [ edit ]
IRIAF F-4 Phantoms in a V formation over 6th TAB of Iran
The "V", or "Vic" formation is a basic flight formation for military aircraft in many air forces. The Vic formation is also common in ceremonial flyovers and airshow flights.
Air Mobility Command, which accounts for 20 percent of all avionic fuel usage by the United States federal government, is experimenting with autopilot changes to find the best tradeoff between the reduced drag of 'vortex surfing' and the resulting 'ride qualities' of flying through another aircraft's wake.[4][5]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Holmes, Tony. Spitfire vs Bf 109: Battle of Britain. Oxford, UK/ New York: Osprey, 2007. ISBN 1-84603-190-7.
Media related to V formations at Wikimedia CommonsThe late Chris Kyle’s wife joined Fox & Friends to defend First Lady Melania Trump’s decision to recite the Lord’s prayer.
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the minister at the time of the purchase, said the coats are owned by the ministry and are returned when a staff member changes jobs.
“We operate a number of youth justice facilities across northern Ontario in order to keep young people close to home and connected with their communities,” Ali said. “When necessary due to low temperatures coats are provided to staff who are supervising and engaging in outdoor recreational activities with the youth in our facilities.”
Ali said the Canada Goose jackets were purchased in bulk to save money after receiving no other “qualified bids” in an open, competitive bidding process.
“We are committed to spending dollars wisely so that staff have the supports they need to tough the cold weather throughout our province, all while delivering quality services to young people,” she said.
Canada Goose did not return a request for comment.
Jones said it was hard to imagine how the Kathleen Wynne government could defend such a purchase, especially when there had to be more affordable options available.
”It’s a Ministry that by its very mandate has to serve and protect vulnerable children,” she said. “Where is the mandate that says, and while you’re protecting vulnerable children and fighting for services, you should be walking around in a luxury Canada Goose parka?”
The ministry is charged with providing support to children on the Autism spectrum and with other special needs, indigenous children and youth, children and teens up for adoption, and youth in a variety of custody centres from open custody to secure custody.
Jones said the government has been reluctant to provide her with any information on the parkas.
In January, the PCs put in a Freedom of Information request for the unit cost of the parkas, and were told that Canada Goose didn’t want the price released for competitive reasons, she said.
“It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast in trying to get to the bottom of it,” Jones said.For those of the same or a similar name, see Timothy Allen (disambiguation)
Timothy Alan Dick[1] (born June 13, 1953), known professionally as Tim Allen, is an American actor and comedian. He is known for playing Tim "The Toolman" Taylor on the ABC sitcom Home Improvement (1991–1999) and Mike Baxter on the ABC sitcom Last Man Standing (2011 to 2017), which was picked up by Fox in 2018 for a seventh season.[2] He voiced Buzz Lightyear for the Toy Story franchise and played Scott Calvin and Santa Claus in The Santa Clause film trilogy (1994–2006). Allen's other films include For Richer or Poorer (1997), Jungle 2 Jungle (1997), Galaxy Quest (1999), Big Trouble (2002), Christmas with the Kranks (2004), The Shaggy Dog (2006), Wild Hogs (2007), Redbelt (2008), and Crazy on the Outside (2010).
Early life [ edit ]
Allen was born in Denver, Colorado, to Martha Katherine (née Fox), a community-service worker, and Gerald M. Dick, a real estate agent.[3][4] He is the third oldest of five brothers. His father died in a car accident, colliding with a drunk driver when Allen was 11.[3][5] Two years later, his mother married her high school sweetheart, a business executive,[4] and moved with her six children to Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, to be with her new husband and his three children.[6]
Allen attended Seaholm High School in Birmingham, where he was in theater and music classes (resulting in his love of classical piano). He then attended Central Michigan University before transferring to Western Michigan University in 1974.[7] At Western Michigan, Allen worked at the student radio station WIDR and received a Bachelor of Science degree in communications specializing in radio and television production in 1976 with a split minor in philosophy and design.[6] In 1998, Western Michigan awarded Allen an honorary fine arts degree and the Distinguished Alumni Award.[7]
Career [ edit ]
Allen at the 45th Emmy Awards
Allen started his career as a comedian in 1975.[3] On a dare from one of his friends, he participated in a comedy night at Mark Ridley's Comedy Castle in Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit. While in Detroit he began to get recognition appearing in local television commercials and appearing on cable comedy shows such as Gary Thison's Some Semblance of Sanity. He moved to Los Angeles and became a regular performer at The Comedy Store. He began to do stand-up appearances on late-night talk shows and specials on record and film.[3]
Despite his admitted limited acting range (he once told a magazine his range as an actor is "... strictly limited. I can only play a part if I can draw on personal experience, and that well can go dry pretty quickly"),[8] Allen rose to fame in acting with the ABC sitcom Home Improvement (1991–1999) produced for ABC by Wind Dancer Productions, a company he co-founded with producer Carmen Finestra. Allen played the main character Tim "The Tool-Man" Taylor.[3] In November 1994, he simultaneously starred in the highest-grossing film (Disney's The Santa Clause), topped the New York Times best-seller list with his book Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man, and appeared in the top rated television series (Home Improvement) within the span of one week.[3] Home Improvement ran until 1999, for which he was paid US$1.25 million per episode.
In 1995, Allen provided the voice of Buzz Lightyear in the Disney/Pixar blockbuster Toy Story.[3] In 1997, he starred in the family comedy Jungle 2 Jungle from Disney. The next year he returned to voice Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story 2 which was a financial and critical hit. Also, in 1999 he starred in the sci-fi parody Galaxy Quest alongside Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, and Sam Rockwell.
In 2002, he reprised his role as Scott Calvin in The Santa Clause 2. Two years later, he starred as Luther Krank in Christmas with the Kranks. In 2006, Zoom was released, starring Allen as Jack Shepard. The same year, he also starred in The Shaggy Dog and The Santa Clause 3.
Allen began narrating the "Pure Michigan" television and radio commercials for the "Travel Michigan" agency. These commercials can be seen and heard throughout the Midwest and began airing nationally in 2009.[9]
In December 2009, he started a preview tour of Crazy on the Outside, a film that debuted in January 2010. Allen accompanied the film, helping promote it with a series of stand-up acts beforehand. During the performances, he told audiences that he planned a 2010 comedy tour. Allen also directed the film, marking his film directorial debut.[10]
Allen hosted the 8th Annual TV Land Awards on April 25, 2010.[11] That same year, he became the official voice of the Chevrolet Cruze, narrating commercials for the vehicle, and he became the voice of Campbell Soup's "It's Amazing What Soup Can Do" campaign.[12] Allen returned to ABC with the sitcom Last Man Standing (2011–2017). He played the role of Mike Baxter, a conservative father fighting for his manhood in a house filled with women.[13] The character is loosely based on his own life, as a Republican father of three girls.[14] After six seasons, the show was cancelled in May 2017. ABC Entertainment Chief Channing Dungey denied claims of political bias against Allen, explaining that the network simply could not accommodate the program on their schedule.[15] On May 11, 2018, Fox TV's CEOs and chairmen announced that Fox had officially picked up Last Man Standing for a seventh season.[16][17][18][19]
Shortly before the cancellation of Last Man Standing, Allen had been announced as part of the cast of the Netflix original comedy film El Camino Christmas (2017).[20]
Personal life [ edit ]
Allen was raised as an Episcopalian.[4] He was married to Laura Deibel from April 7, 1984, until they legally separated in 1999. Their divorce was finalized in 2003.[21] They have one daughter. Allen married actress Jane Hajduk on October 7, 2006, in a small private ceremony in Grand Lake, Colorado. They had dated for five years.[22] In March 2009, their daughter Elizabeth was born.[23]
In September 2014, Allen, like his character Mike Baxter in Last Man Standing, became a licensed amateur radio operator under the callsign KK6OTD.[24][25] Also like his character, Allen is a Republican.[26] He has appeared on Sean Hannity's show[27] and announced support for John Kasich,[28] and later Donald Trump, in the 2016 presidential election.[29]
Legal issues [ edit ]
On October 2, 1978, Allen was arrested in the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport for possession of over 650 grams (1.43 lb) of cocaine. He subsequently pleaded guilty to felony drug trafficking charges and provided the names of other dealers in exchange for a sentence of three to seven years rather than a possible life imprisonment. He was paroled on June 12, 1981, after serving two years and four months in Federal Correctional Institution, Sandstone in Sandstone, Minnesota.[30][31][32]
Allen with members of the United States Navy, 2010
In 1997, Allen was arrested for DUI in Birmingham, Michigan. At the time, his blood alcohol content was 0.15, nearly double the legal limit in Michigan.[33] He was sentenced to one-year probation. He entered a rehabilitation clinic for alcohol abuse as part of his court obligation.[34]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Video games [ edit ]
Awards and honors [ edit ]
Other honors [ edit ]
Books [ edit ]
Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man (1994) – ISBN 0-7868-6134-7
(1994) – ISBN 0-7868-6134-7 I'm Not Really Here (1996) – ISBN 0-7868-6257-2The official Twitter account for the Welcome to the Ballroom manga posted a note from creator Tomo Takeuchi about the anime adaptation on Monday. The note reveals that the plot of the anime's story will pass the manga before the end of the Metropolitan Tournament.
Takeuchi's full note reads:
Thank you very much to everyone on the cast and staff for creating a wonderful anime. For the end game of Metropolitan Tournament, the original work and the anime were going to advance the story at the same pace, but the original work is falling behind so the anime will go ahead of it. The original work isn't finished, but I will convey my plans for it to advance. Furthermore, as I continue to work on the original, I will set my sights on developments that happen at the Metropolitan Tournament and after. I think I will release parts that differ from the anime, though they will start from the same plan, but I will be happy if people enjoy either the anime or the manga.
Last month, a Welcome to the Ballroom manga chapter ran with fewer pages than planned due to Takeuchi's health.
Takeuchi began the series in Monthly Shonen Magazine in 2011, and Kodansha published the ninth compiled volume on June 23. Kodansha Comics published the manga's seventh volume in North America on September 12. The series has been nominated for Manga Taisho awards, and was ranked on Comic Natalie's and the Kono Manga ga Sugoi! guidebook's lists of best manga in 2013.
Production I.G.'s television anime adaptation of the manga premiered on July 8, and is currently airing. It is slated for 24 episodes. The series has been streaming on Amazon's Anime Strike as it airs in Japan since July.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Caroline Yon says this runway is so old and fragile planes can't land
Ascension Island, home to around 800 people, is even more cut off than it used to be after weekly flights linking the island to the UK were stopped - due to a dodgy runway and the wrong kind of RAF aircraft.
The British overseas territory is the tip of an old volcano in the Atlantic Ocean, mid-way between Africa and Brazil.
It's so remote, that when the Portuguese discovered it on Ascension Day in 1501, they didn't even bother colonising it.
"Half of the island looks like the surface of the moon, the other half looks like Mars, but in a good way," says Caroline Yon, station manager for the European Space Agency tracking station on Ascension.
"But I wouldn't want to put anyone off. We do have gorgeous white sandy beaches, and pristine clear blue seas absolutely jam-packed with marine life - it's a very unique place."
Image copyright Matthew Teller Image caption View from Green Mountain across volcanic cinder cones
The island, which covers around 45 square miles just south of the equator, is formed by around 40 volcanic peaks.
It is rough and rugged - barren in parts - but at its heart has a lush peak known as Green Mountain, home to rare bird colonies which are the result of a unique botanical experiment led by Charles Darwin.
"We have the second largest turtle colony in the Atlantic Ocean," says Johnny Hobson, the island's dentist who has lived on the island for 31 years.
"Outside our house at the moment there are baby turtles erupting on a beautiful golden beach," he says.
"Everyone's finding it hard to get to and from Ascension at the moment.
"Currently the only real way off for most of us is an eight or nine day journey by sea to Cape Town and to fly back to the UK that way - at a cost of £3000-4000 for the round trip and the ship, the RMS St Helena, only passes by every three weeks."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Residents Jacqui Ellick and Johnny Hobson say the island's economy could be potentially destroyed over the runway closure
Johnny, who also owns a hotel and car hire business, tells me visitors to the island have increased steadily over the past few years. Some were going to St Helena, the nearest landmass some 700 km to the southeast, while others included deep sea fishermen, conservationists and people arriving to see the turtles.
"Last year we had five or six thousand visitor nights," he says.
But with the end of the weekly flights all that has changed and businesses are quickly collapsing.
The runway, designed as an emergency landing strip for the Space Shuttle, is maintained by the US military.
It used to be one of the longest in the world but now badly needs maintenance, and while there's a plan to have the tarmac repaired by 2020, the Airbus A330 Voyager aircraft the RAF uses to land on the island is no longer suitable.
The Ministry of Defence says it is committed to running an air bridge between the UK and the Falkland Islands, but not necessarily to Ascension.
The plane was very convenient as it stopped off on the island to refuel, but now it lands on Cape Verde, and the residents have been left somewhat stranded.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Ascension Island was the major staging post in the Falklands War in 1982
"Well basically it was the hub, so all the flights came here before they went on to the Falklands - the planes, the ships came here," said Jacqui Ellick whose husband's job brought them to the island 22 years ago.
She's an elected island councillor, volunteers for the local newspaper and manages the interns who come each year to monitor the turtles.
"There are other planes that can land here, just not the A330. At the moment the American planes still land here and the MoD have a C17 once a month for their own people, but for the rest of us there is no way off except for the ship."
"It's such a big question. I don't think there's anyone in the foreign office or the government with the time and inclination to sit down and sort it out," says Caroline Yon.
"But it would be a shame if the island couldn't continue."
A UK government spokeswoman said: "We know that the rerouting of the South Atlantic air bridge flights has caused difficulties for those on Ascension Island and we are working closely with relevant parties to find and agree alternative access arrangements as quickly as possible."807 V Street, NW
From a press release:
“Landmark Theatres is proud to announce the opening of Washington DC’s newest movie theatre and lounge, Atlantic Plumbing Cinema. The premiere film will be STEVE JOBS, starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet and Seth Rogen. It premieres Thursday, October 15 at 8 PM and will be featured on all 6 screens.
Located in Washington’s historic U Street Corridor, the Atlantic Plumbing Cinema will be dedicated to offering its guests engaging and exciting film programming – all in a comfortable, luxurious, state-of-the-art theatrical environment. Atlantic Plumbing Cinema will be an exciting addition to a revitalized neighborhood.
Each of the auditoriums at Atlantic Plumbing Cinema will feature plush leather oversized seats in stadium settings, with large screens, digital projection and Dolby 7.1 surround sound. This will provide guests maximum comfort and also offer the latest in film presentation. The theatre will offer reserved seating so guests have the option to pre-purchase individual seats online or using an automated ticketing kiosk in the lobby.
Atlantic Plumbing Cinema features a contemporary bar and lounge area, making it a destination for food, drink, and entertainment. A full bar menu and craft beers will be available. The theatre will also feature classic concessions, along with edgier fare unique to Landmark Theatres.”
First peek inside:
Right next door to 9:30 Club:Utile Inc. Architecture + Planning
A first step toward retrofitting the suburbs.
In the incremental business of retrofitting suburbia, it’s helpful to think of the lungfish. Back in the day a few million years ago, the eel-like creature sprouted limbs and emerged from the surf for forays on the beach, before returning again to the water. Later, tetrapods equipped themselves to make land roving a steadier habit, and the rest is evolutionary history. The transition from the ocean to land, ultimately leading to humankind, didn’t happen all at once.
So it is that the Rauch Foundation, a nonprofit trying to foster innovation in Long Island, looked at the 4,000 acres of surface parking in a dozen or so villages anchored by Long Island Railroad train stations, and hoped to spark a slow-and-steady transformation to transit-oriented development. Getting rid of the parking entirely was not a viable option. The foundation and its Long Island Index, an initiative to publish data to inform policymaking in the region, last year launched a design competition for parking garages in four targeted downtowns: Ronkonkoma, Patchogue, Westbury, and Rockville Centre. Parking lots might not seem the sexiest of architectural endeavors, but the goal here was to reimagine surface parking as structured parking, thereby freeing up land near the train stations for future urban-style development. Getting rid of the parking entirely was not a viable option. There are many variations, but Long Island Railroad stations were essentially based on the park-and-ride model. Historically, commuters drove from single-family subdivisions like Levittown, parked and took the train into New York City.
"It's unrealistic that we are going to move immediately to not needing a car," says Ann Golob, director of the Long Island Index. "In time this may change … but we’re not there yet." Plaza view of the Rockville Centre design. In this garage, non-parking possibilities are built into the design. (Utile Inc. Architecture + Planning) Several communities in Long Island have indeed already seen the beginning of a shift from the suburban framework to something new. Their parents escaped Brooklyn and Queens, but many young people in the region want nothing more than to be right back in the city, where the action is. No one is thinking that Patchogue could be the next Williamsburg, but in theory, the villages of Nassau and Suffolk counties could provide an affordable alternative, with access to transit and an urbanity all its own. Building structured parking is thus seen as an intermediary step in that process. In the ParkingPLUS Design Challenge, architectural firms were asked to be creative in their designs, to conjure places that would not simply store the cars, but open up new possibilities for public use of the space. Roger Sherman Architecture + Urban Design envisioned a "horizontal skyscraper" relating to Main Street in Ronkonkoma; dub Studios submitted a shared parking scheme in Patchogue; LTL Architects rendered a parking garage with a landscaped terraced rooftop cascading towards the rail line in Westbury.MIAMI — Miami Marlins shortstop Adeiny Hechavarria jogged for the first time since straining his left hamstring last Wednesday in Atlanta but remains unavailable.
Hechavarria, who was initially listed as day-to-day trying to run out a bunt single, told FOXSportsFlorida.com at the beginning of the current homestand it would likely keep him out five to six games.
"He jogged a little today, and that’s the beginning of the test," manager Dan Jennings said. "He has not tested it in terms of opening up and running. Probably another day or two away from doing that to see where exactly it is."
The 26-year-old Gold Glove finalist was the lone member of the Opening Day lineup to stay away from injury or demotion. Over the previous two seasons from 2013-14 as a member of the Marlins, he has averaged 147 games.
In 130 contests in 2015, he is batting.281 with 17 doubles, six triples, five homers and 48 RBI. His average ranks fourth overall (second in the National League) among qualified shortstops. His ultimate zone rating (14.1), per FanGraphs, is the second best of any NL position player.
"Oh, I think he’ll be back, yeah," Jennings said. "We just don’t want to put him out there before he’s ready and he potentially does tear it and he’s lost for the year. It’ll be a process. He did test it a little bit today jogging and (there was) some improvement, but not ready to open up yet."
ROSTER MOVES
The Marlins recalled right-hander Scott McGough and claimed first baseman/left fielder Tommy Medica off waivers from San Diego prior to Tuesday’s game against the Milwaukee Brewers.
After a rough major-league debut Aug. 20, when he allowed three runs on five hits over 2/3 inning, McGough tossed consecutive scoreless outings spanning three frames before being sent down to the Zephyrs.
The 25-year-old righty was acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers in the Nathan Eovaldi-Hanley Ramirez deal in 2012. He underwent Tommy John surgery and missed the 2014 season. In 2015 between Single-A Jupiter, Double-A Jacksonville and Triple-A New Orleans, McGough posted an 0-1 record and 2.41 ERA in 27 appearances.
With the minor-league season over, Medica will not report. The 27-year-old has a. 246 average with 13 doubles, two triples, 12 homers and 37 RBI in 121 big-leagues games from 2013-14. In 424 minor-league contests, he has hit.282 with 115 doubles, 12 triples, 57 dingers and 262 RBI in parts of six seasons.
Miami also transferred Opening Day starter Henderson Alvarez to the 60-day disabled list. He underwent shoulder surgery in late July. The 25-year-old made just four starts this season.
FRONT OFFICE
Miami named Marc DelPiano its vice president of player development.
DelPiano, who most recently served as special assistant to the general manager with the Pittsburgh Pirates, was the director of player development from 2003-04 with the Marlins. He also held the position of director of international scouting in 2005.
He had been with the Pirates organization since 2009 following three years with the Boston Red Sox as a special assignment scout. He was an area scout for the Montreal Expos from 1996-2000 and East Coast scouting supervisor in 2001 before joining the Marlins in 2002 as a cross checker.
A former Broward Community College and University of Tennessee ballplayer, DelPiano signed as a non-drafted free agent infielder with the Cleveland Indians in 1989. After two seasons in the Indians and Houston Astros organizations, he became an area scout and minor-league coach with the Texas Rangers organization in 1991.
You can follow Christina De Nicola on Twitter @CDeNicola13 or email her at [email protected] Walther is talking about Auschwitz, and numbers, and how the statistics of the Holocaust exceed imagination. What does it mean, for example, to deport 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in the span of 57 days in the spring and early summer of 1944? What does it mean to murder them at a rate of 3.5 Jews per minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that by the end of the 57th day 300,000 of them are dead? What does it mean to have your parents, spouse, children and relatives systematically killed in a German Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland, only to have them counted by history as a lump sum?
“I can speak about 300,000 dead people who are murdered, but nobody can imagine what that means — such figures of death — while the Holocaust, this word, it is a part of families,” Mr. Walther says.
“It is inside of human beings. It is something in the tears, if you wake up in the night and think about your father who was killed. That is the Holocaust. And in the second generation, in the children of survivors, those who suffer the nightmares and memories of their parents — that is the Holocaust.”
Mr. Walther, with his red running shoes, grey shoulder length hair and rumpled-looking dark blazer, could easily pass for a university lecturer. But his interest in the Holocaust isn’t academic. The 71-year-old retired German judge is a Nazi hunter, and he has been in Toronto and Montreal for the past two weeks interviewing Hungarian-Canadian Auschwitz survivors as co-plaintiffs for what could be the last Nazi war crimes trial in Germany.
“Co-plaintiffs represent their murdered parents and siblings, and I represent the co-plaintiffs in court,” Mr. Walther says.
“And to be sure that I find the right words for them, the right feeling in a German courtroom, this is the reason I am here in Canada, interviewing them.”
The accused is Oskar Groening, the so-called “bookkeeper” of Auschwitz, a former SS sergeant who sorted and counted monies stolen from the murdered Jews, occasionally couriering it to his Nazi overlords in Berlin. He also stood guard on the train platform in Auschwitz, as cattle cars delivered their doomed Jewish cargo. Doing so in the belief that, as he told DER SPIEGEL magazine in 2005, the destruction of the Jews was a “necessary thing.”
What makes Mr. Groening, now 93 — and a widower with a comfortable home and robust company pension thanks to his postwar career managing a German glass factory — an intriguing defendant, is that he has repented, in a sense. He admits he was at Auschwitz, and has spoken openly about it. Taking his story public several years ago, as he explained to a German reporter, to combat the lies of the Holocaust deniers with the truth of someone who was there.
And in his version of the truth, he is not guilty of any crime. Not in a legal sense, since he was merely a bookkeeper, a brainwashed Nazi zealot involved in executing the murderous master plan of Adolf Hitler, but not an actual executioner himself.
“Guilt really has to do with actions,” Mr. Groening told DER SPIEGEL. “Because I believe that I was not an active perpetrator, I don’t believe that I am guilty…
“I would describe my role as a small cog in the gears.”
Mr. Walther has heard this defence before, and views it is a fairytale, a convenient narrative where the otherwise decent German gets caught up in a killing mess, not of their making, and dutifully follows orders — without blinking an eye — as many did during the Nazi era.
“Groening will not deny anything,” Mr. Walther says. “He will only seek to diminish.”
Judy Lysy is a Holocaust survivor in Toronto. She recently met Mr. Walther at a dinner honouring him at a local synagogue. She is not among the co-plaintiffs in the Groening case since the charges against him, for German legal reasons, only cover the 57-day killing frenzy associated with the Jewish Hungarian deportees. (Mr. Walther would not disclose the identities of the co-plaintiffs to me, explaining that, even today, there are those unhappy with Groening’s prosecution.)
Ms. Lysy, a Slovakian Jew, was raised in pro-Nazi, Hungarian-occupied territory. She arrived in Auschwitz in April 1944. It was a sunny day. She was 16.
“There were these German officers, very neat and clean,” the 86-year-old says.
‘Oskar Groening didn’t kill with his hands. But he was part of that killing machinery’
“They asked for a translator, and because I spoke Hungarian, German and Slovak, I put my hand up. And I stood beside this officer telling the people that those able and capable to walk, would walk [to our barracks], and the old people and children — he would send by truck.
“We would all be together, at the end. I translated all this to Hungarian ladies, including my aunt, with her two little children, and my Grandma. The officer told the mothers not to fuss, if they wanted to stay with their children. And he put them all together, on the side that went straight to the gas.
“We did not know where those people had gone for the first 10 days. And this was my arrival to Auschwitz. Oskar Groening didn’t kill with his hands. But he was part of that killing machinery.”
Being a small cog, a guard in a watchtower, an accountant in Auschwitz, was a well-tread road to legal — social, moral and economic — absolution for SS men after the war. Of the 6,500 SS members who worked in Auschwitz, only 49 were ever convicted of a crime.
“The German police, prosecutors, the local judges, they weren’t interested in going after what were perceived as the small fry war criminals, and this attitude persisted well into the 1970s and beyond,” says Bernie Farber, former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
Many of those judges and lawyers had Nazi pasts, while the German people — including the 20% of respondents to an American survey conducted in the American-occupied zone in 1945, who said they agreed with Hitler’s treatment of the Jews — weren’t willing, or even interested in confronting their complicity in the Holocaust. Hitler and his high-ranking Nazi cronies were the real bad guys, not them.
And the little Nazi fish, such as Oskar Groening, got married, had kids and came to be viewed as valuable employees. He applied managerial skills honed in Auschwitz to a civilian job at a glass factory. Most Nazi war criminals didn’t disappear into the jungles of South America. They moved in next door.
And then along came Thomas Walther.
“My youngest child went to university in 2006,” he says. “I was 63 and I thought, if I can do something really important, something that has to be done — then I would like to do it.”
His father, Rudolf, hid two Jewish families during the Kristallnacht riots of 1938, later helping them escape Germany. He taught his son to do the right thing, instead of just talking about it. And in the years since 2006, the retired judge has awakened the German judiciary to the little fish, successfully arguing that Auschwitz and the other camps were macabre assembly lines. Every SS man, like every worker at an auto plant, had a job to do. If they didn’t do their job — the assembly line stopped.
“My colleagues in the past, these German prosecutors and judges, did things in the wrong way,” Mr. Walther says. “You have to learn, and you learn it in the second term of law studies: what is aiding and abetting a crime.”
It means being a bookkeeper in Auschwitz, being immersed in the terror, and party to its making by keeping stolen money flowing to Berlin, while keeping Jews moving in an orderly fashion toward the gas chamber.
Mr. Walther, in his red sneakers, understands that he is in a losing race against time. The Holocaust survivors are dying off. And so are the killers. It is late in the game. Justice must be done.
“Where does this end?” the Nazi hunter says. “It ends when it is truly over.”
The trial begins in February.
National Post
• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: oconnorwritesA Virginia Republican and supporter of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) pleaded guilty on Tuesday to perjury and 36 counts of voter fraud.
Adam Ward, 28, claimed he collected more than 11,000 petition signatures for Gingrich during the Republican presidential primaries, in an effort to ensure the candidate’s embattled campaign had a spot on the state’s ballot. Over 4,000 of those petition signatures turned out to be fake, according to NBC News affiliate WVIR-TV.
Gingrich ultimately failed to qualify for his own party’s primary in Virginia and instead campaigned in the state as a write-in candidate.
The failed presidential candidate fell short of the 10,000 signatures needed to appear on the statewide ballot because the local Republican Party officials double-checked the signatures to ensure they were valid.
Ward’s fraudulent acts could have given Gingrich enough to close that gap and appear on the ballot, which could have potentially changed the outcome of the Republican presidential primaries.
The only other mainstream GOP candidate in 2011 to fail at signature gathering in Virginia was Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R). Nearly half of the 11,900 signatures his campaign turned in were unable to be verified by party officials. However, unlike Gingrich, none of Perry’s organizers have faced criminal charges.
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[“Stock photo: A voter casts a ballot,” via Shutterstock.]Download raw source
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effectively gave federal judges more discretion in sentencing — and that discretion could lead to more opportunities for racial bias.
According to the commission’s report, judges are less likely to cut black men a break than white men. White men were more likely to get their sentences reduced under the judge’s discretion than black men, and white men got larger reductions than the ones black men got.
As Christopher Ingraham noted at the Washington Post, this likely wasn’t the only explanation. A 2014 study published by the University of Michigan Law School, for example, found that prosecutors’ initial charging decisions were a major driver of racial disparities in sentencing: All else held equal, black arrestees were 75 percent more likely to face a charge with a mandatory minimum sentence than white arrestees. (Even for the same crime, prosecutors often have a variety of charges they can file.)
Behind both of these examples, though, is discretion that can be driven by racial bias.
Several studies have found that race plays a powerful role in how the general public — and, by extension, those in the criminal justice system — see people. A recent series of studies published by the American Psychological Association, for example, found that people are more likely to see black men as larger and more threatening than white men, even if the black men are not actually larger. Another study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2014 found that people are more likely to view black children 10 years and older as “significantly less innocent” than their white counterparts.
This helps explain how skin color can predict the length of someone’s punishment and other racial disparities in police shootings, the harshness of speeding tickets, punishments for car crashes, arrests for drug crimes, clearance rates for murder investigations, and more.
There could be other factors. As the Sentencing Commission acknowledges, it’s possible that its analysis could be missing variables — “because a particular factor is unknown, or because data about it is not readily available.” For example, the report doesn’t have data for employment history or family circumstances, both of which could influence a judge’s sentence. As a result, the commission said its report “should be interpreted with caution and should not be taken to suggest discrimination on the part of judges.”
Still, other research suggests that racial bias plays a significant role in the US criminal justice system — and the Sentencing Commission’s report provides more proof in that direction.Individual donors in the United States collectively give far more money to charities than foundations and corporations combined.
There are countless charities to choose from, and many do good work.
But a precious few can say they dramatically improve or save people's lives in a cost-effective way, and then back up their claims with hard data.
How do donors find these diamonds in the rough? If you were donating today, how would you know which charities achieve the greatest impact for your dollar?
Until very recently, you wouldn't know. No organization existed to help provide this information to a typical donor.
Then came GiveWell. Elie Hassenfeld, one of the group's co-founders, says their goal is simple: "We want to answer the question, 'Where should I give to accomplish the most good?'" And, critically, they want their answer backed up by rigorous testing and substantial data.
The team of analysts at GiveWell work on two main tracks. On the one hand, they research an array of programs that could potentially help people facing extreme poverty or devastating illness. They try to determine which of the approaches -- for instance, providing bed nets to halt the spread of malaria, or offering microloans to low-income individuals -- are most effective and cost-efficient. (Bed nets are a stellar investment and microloans are not, according to GiveWell's research.)
This analysis immediately eliminates a great swath of charities from consideration. "So, one organization gives out malaria nets, and Heifer International gives out goats," Hassenfeld said. "The evidence for malaria nets is far stronger than the evidence for giving out cows or goats, and that gives the anti-malaria organization an advantage that Heifer International simply cannot overcome."
GiveWell then evaluates the remaining charities that use the most effective approaches. Charities often must submit their work to randomized controlled trials to demonstrate that their programs are well-implemented. GiveWell staff also review charities' internal documentation, "including monitoring and evaluation reports, budgets, and plans for using additional funding."
Each year, GiveWell announces its short list of top charities. In 2010, their recommendations drove $1.5 million to these groups. By 2014, that sum had ballooned to over $27 million.
GiveWell's efforts to promote transparency and data in the charity world have been lauded by academics and journalists, including ethicist Peter Singer and New York Times columnist Nick Kristof. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has used the group's guidance to give away millions of dollars of his own money.
A surprisingly high number of the best-known charities -- groups like UNICEF, Save the Children, Mercy Corps, and Catholic Relief Services -- remain "complex and opaque," argues GiveWell. "They tend to publish a great deal of web content aimed at fundraising, but very little of interest for impact-oriented donors."
But as GiveWell's influence grows, more nonprofits are motivated to embrace transparency. "When we were first calling charities to get them to talk to us, the incentive was a $25,000 grant. A lot of charities said, 'This is not worth our time,'" Hassenfeld recounted. "Now I think many are excited to participate if they have a realistic chance of receiving some funding."
Below you'll find GiveWell's top charities, selected in December 2014. (If you're not sure how much to give, try consulting this calculator created by ethicist Peter Singer.) You can conveniently give to all four charities in one payment using this link.
Against Malaria Foundation [DONATE]
Preventing deaths from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa
GiveWell's summary: "Malaria is a major problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Over 1 million people -- mostly children -- die each year. Insecticide-treated bed nets prevent deaths and many other non-fatal cases of malaria and are relatively inexpensive -- about $5 per net. (For more details, see our full report on bed nets.) We believe that AMF effectively expands access to bed nets. More."
A child holds a bed net package from AMF in Orrisa, India.
GiveDirectly [DONATE]
Distributing cash to very poor individuals in Kenya and Uganda
GiveWell's summary: "Directly transferring money to poor individuals allows them to purchase that which they believe will help them most. Strong evidence indicates that cash transfers lead recipients to spend more on their basic needs (such as food) and may allow recipients to make investments with high returns, with no evidence of large increases in spending on items like alcohol or tobacco. (For more, see our full report on cash transfers.) We believe that GiveDirectly effectively distributes cash to extremely low-income individuals. More."
A 2014 TED Talk about cash transfers by veteran aid worker Joy Sun.
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative [DONATE]
Treating people for parasite infections in sub-Saharan Africa
GiveWell's summary: "SCI supports programs that treat people for parasitic worm infections that cause short-term symptoms such as anemia, and may cause longer-term developmental problems. These worms are extremely inexpensive to treat. (For more, see our full report on deworming.) We believe that SCI cost-effectively expands access to deworming treatment. More."
Deworm the World Initiative (led by Evidence Action) [DONATE]
Treating children for parasite infections in developing countries
GiveWell's summary: "The Deworm the World Initiative (DtWI), led by Evidence Action, supports programs that treat children for parasitic worm infections that cause short-term symptoms such as anemia, and may cause longer-term developmental problems. These worms are extremely inexpensive to treat. (For more, see our full report on deworming.) DtWI focuses on advocacy and technical assistance to governments providing deworming, and we believe that it cost-effectively increases the number of children receiving deworming treatment. More."
Transcription services by Tigerfish; now offering transcripts in two-hours guaranteed.Type of democratic government
Nonpartisan democracy (also no-party democracy) is a system of representative government or organization such that universal and periodic elections take place without reference to political parties. Sometimes electioneering and even speaking about candidates may be discouraged, so as not to prejudice others' decisions or create a contentious atmosphere.
In many nations, the head of state is nonpartisan, even if the prime minister and parliament are chosen in partisan elections. Such heads of state are expected to remain neutral with regards to partisan politics. In a number of parliamentary or semi-presidential countries, some presidents are non-partisan, or receive cross-party support.
Nonpartisan systems may be de jure, meaning political parties are either outlawed entirely or legally prevented from participating in elections at certain levels of government, or de facto if no such laws exist and yet there are no political parties. On the national level, de facto nonpartisan systems mostly represent very small populations, such as in Niue, Tuvalu, and Palau. Several Persian Gulf states are de jure nonpartisan, including Oman and Kuwait; the legislatures in these governments typically have advisory capacity only, as they may comment on laws proposed by the executive branch but are unable to create laws themselves. De jure nonpartisan national governments sometimes resemble one-party states, but governments of the latter type explicitly recognize a single political party that all officials are required to be a member of.
Unless there are legal restrictions on political parties, factions within nonpartisan governments may evolve into political parties. The United States of America initially did not have enfranchised political parties, but these evolved soon after independence.
Comparison with other political systems [ edit ]
A nonpartisan system differs from a one-party system in that the governing faction in a one-party system identifies itself as a party, where membership might provide benefits not available to non-members. A single-party government often requires government officials to be members of the party, features a complex party hierarchy as a key institution of government, forces citizens to agree to a partisan ideology, and may enforce its control over the government by making all other parties illegal. Members of a nonpartisan government may represent many different ideologies. Various communist nations such as China or Cuba are single-party nations although the Members of Parliament are not elected as party candidates.
A direct democracy can be considered nonpartisan since citizens vote on laws themselves rather than electing representatives. Direct democracy can be partisan, however, if factions are given rights or prerogatives that non-members do not have.
Structures [ edit ]
Elections [ edit ]
In nonpartisan elections, each candidate for office is eligible based on her or his own merits rather than as a member of a political party. No political affiliation (if one exists) is shown on the ballot next to a candidate. Generally, the winner is chosen from a runoff election where the candidates are the top two vote-getters from a primary election. In some elections the candidates might be members of a national party but do not run as party members for local office.
Nonpartisan democracies may possess indirect elections whereby an electorate are chosen who in turn vote for the representative(s). (This is sometimes known as a 2-tier election, such as an electoral college.) The system can work with a first past the post electoral system but is incompatible with (partisan) proportional representation systems other than single transferable vote or reweighted cardinal voting systems, or semi proportional systems such as cumulative voting and single non transferable vote.[clarification needed]
Nonpartisan elections are generally held for municipal and county offices, especially school boards, and are also common in the election of judges. In some nonpartisan elections it is common knowledge which candidates are members of and backed by which parties; in others, parties are almost wholly uninvolved and voters make choices with little or no regard to partisan considerations.
While nonpartisan democracies can allow for a wide selection of candidates (especially within a no-nomination system whereby voters can choose any non-restricted person in their area), such systems are not incompatible with indirect elections (such as for large geographical areas), whereby delegates may be chosen who in turn elect the representatives.
Appointments [ edit ]
Even if a government's executive officer or legislature is partisan, appointments of cabinet members, judges, or directors of government agencies, may be nonpartisan. The intent of appointing government officials in a nonpartisan manner is to insure the officers can perform their duties free from partisan politics, and are chosen in a fair manner that does not adversely affect a political party. Twelve US states use the Missouri Plan, and two use a variation of it, to choose judges in a nonpartisan manner. Several countries with partisan parliaments use nonpartisan appointments to choose presidents.
Legislatures [ edit ]
In nonpartisan legislatures, there are no typically formal party alignments within the legislature; even if there are caucuses for specific issues. Alliances and causes with a nonpartisan body are often temporary and fluid since legislators who oppose each other on some issues may agree on other issues. Despite being nonpartisan, legislators typically have consistent and identifiable voting patterns. Decisions to investigate and enforce ethics violations by government officials are generally done on the basis of evidence instead of party affiliation. Committee chairs and other leaders within the legislature are often chosen for seniority and expertise, unlike the leaders in a partisan legislature who are often chosen because of loyalty to a party.
Historical examples [ edit ]
The democracy of ancient Athens was a nonpartisan, direct democracy[citation needed] where eligible citizens voted on laws themselves rather than electing representatives.
Historians have frequently interpreted Federalist No. 10 to imply that the Founding Fathers of the United States intended the government to be nonpartisan. James Madison defined a faction as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." As political parties had interests which were adverse to the rights of citizens and to the general welfare of the nation, several Founding Fathers preferred a nonpartisan form of government.
The administration of George Washington and the first few sessions of the US Congress were nonpartisan. Factions within the early US government coalesced into the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties. The Era of Good Feelings, when the Federalist party collapsed, leaving the Democratic-Republican party as the sole political faction, was the United States' only experience with a one-party system.
The Confederate States of America had no political parties during its entire existence from 1861 to 1865. Despite political differences within the Confederacy, no national political parties were formed because they were seen as illegitimate. "Anti-partyism became an article of political faith."[1] Without a two party system building alternative sets of national leaders, electoral protests tended to be narrowly state-based, "negative, carping and petty". The 1863 mid-term elections became mere expressions of futile and frustrated dissatisfaction. According to historian David M. Potter, this lack of a functioning two-party system caused "real and direct damage" to the Confederate war effort since it prevented the formulation of any effective alternatives to the conduct of the war by the Davis administration.[2]
Legislative elections in the Confederacy were decided without political parties. Key candidate identification related to adopting secession before or after Lincoln's call for volunteers to retake Federal property. Previous party affiliation played a part in voter selection, predominantly secessionist Democrat or unionist Whig.[3] There were no organized political parties, but elective offices were exempted from military duty. Virtually every position was contested with as many as twenty candidates for each office.[4] The absence of political parties made individual roll call voting all the more important, as the Confederate "freedom of roll-call voting [was] unprecedented in American legislative history.[5]
The Republic of Texas was a nonpartisan democracy before it was annexed by the United States. All four presidents of the Republic of Texas were nonpartisan. All members of the Texian Congress were officially non-partisan.[6]
The Non-Partisan League was an influential socialist political movement in the United States, especially in the Upper Midwest and particularly during the 1910s and 1920s. It also contributed much to the ideology of the former Progressive Party of Canada. It went into decline and merged with the Democratic Party of North Dakota in 1956. The Progressive Party of Canada and the United Farmers movement (which formed governments in the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario) also acted on a similar philosophy. In the case of the United Farmers of Ontario while in power (1919–1923) the administration of Ernest Drury suffered lots of infighting as the result of conflicting views.
Because of their nonpartisan ideology the Progressive Party of Canada refused to take the position of the official opposition after the election of 1921 when they came in second place. Four years later they lost that position and their rural supporters began to move to the Liberal Party and CCF. Eventually the Progressive Party of Canada and the United Farmers movement faded into obscurity with most of their members joining the Liberal Party of Canada and the democratic socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, or present day New Democratic Party).
Modern examples [ edit ]
National governments [ edit ]
Very few national governments are completely nonpartisan, but nonpartisan political systems at the national level are not unheard of. Many national governments have nonpartisan offices even if their legislative branches are partisan. Constitutional monarchies have nonpartisan monarchs as their head of state. Parliamentary republics generally have nonpartisan, figurehead presidents.
Nonpartisan governments are much more likely in countries with small populations. Nauru, for example, has no political parties; its Parliament consists entirely of independent members of parliament or MPs, who form governing coalitions and opposition blocs through alliances of individuals.[7] The same is true in Tuvalu. No political parties exist; "MPs have very close links with their island constituencies and effort is directed towards balancing island representation in Cabinet" Other nonpartisan island nations are Pitcairn, Micronesia, Saint Helena, and Palau.[dubious – discuss] Some are de facto nonpartisan because no law forbids the formation of political parties, and the populations are small enough that factions are considered unnecessary. Political allegiances depend mainly on family and island-related factors.
In Niue, political parties have never played an important role. There is, at present, no political party, and candidates to elections therefore run as independents. The only party ever to have existed, the Niue People's Party, disbanded in 2003.
The United Arab Emirates is a de jure nonpartisan authoritarian state since all political parties were outlawed. The Federal National Council (al-Majlis al-Watani al-Ittihadi) is the UAE's parliamentary body and consists of 40 members, representing the Emirates, half appointed by the rulers of the constituent states and the other half elected to serve two-year terms, with only advisory tasks.
Political parties are also illegal in the Gulf state of Kuwait. They have not been legalized since independence in 1961. Nonetheless, the constitution itself does not explicitly prohibit parties. Candidates for election to the National Assembly of Kuwait stand in a personal capacity. In practice, however, several political groups act as de facto parties.
Libya's unicameral legislature, the General National Congress reserved 120 out of its 200 seats for independent politicians in multiple-member districts.[8][9] The other 80 were elected through a party list system of proportional representation.
Oman does not allow political parties and only holds elections with expanding suffrage for a consultative assembly. Though Oman is developing into a constitutional monarchy, political parties are not yet allowed in Oman. The previously influential opposition movement, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman, is dormant today.
In Saudi Arabia no political parties are allowed.
The Vatican State is a nonpartisan theocracy.
A nonpartisan democracy might take root in other sovereign nations, such as occurred in Uganda in 1986, whereby political parties were restricted by a constitutional referendum endorsed by the people of the country (this system did not have all of the features described above). During a subsequent referendum in 2005, over 92% of Ugandan citizens voted for the return of a multiple party system.
Until the mid-20th century, a Canadian politician's political affiliation was not shown on ballots at any level of government. The expectation was that citizens would vote according to the merit of the candidate, but in practice, party allegiance played an important role. Beginning in 1974, the name of the candidate's political party was shown on the ballot. In elections for the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, political affiliation was not shown on ballots until 2004. For elections for the eighteen districts in the dependency, political affiliation was not shown until 2007.[10]
Territorial governments [ edit ]
The territorial government of American Samoa is completely nonpartisan. It has 21 nonpartisan members elected by consensus to its Territorial House and 18 nonpartisan members elected to the Territorial Senate. The Governor and Lieutenant Governor are both nonpartisan offices. However, the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and its nonvoting member of the U.S. House are Democrats.
The British territory of Falkland Islands has a completely nonpartisan government in that no political parties operate on the islands. All eight members of the Legislative Assembly are nonpartisan, as is the Chief Executive and the Governor.
Guernsey has a nonpartisan legislature. The States of Guernsey, officially called the States of Deliberation, consists of 45 People's Deputies, elected from multi- or single-member districts every four years.
Political parties played no official role in the Isle of Man before the 2006 elections and played a minor role in the 2006 elections. At the 2001 election for the House of Keys, the Manx Labour Party polled 17.3% of the vote and only 2 seats. The vast majority of seats at every election are won by independent candidates with no allegiance to any parties.
The head of the territory and head of government of Hong Kong, the Chief Executive, is required by law not to be member of any political party. There are political parties, but there is no legislation for political parties.
The Canadian territories of the Northwest Territories[11] and Nunavut[12] have nonpartisan legislatures. The populace votes for individuals to represent it in the territorial assembly without reference to political parties. After the election, the assembly selects one of its number to form a government and act as premier. This system is in deference to the system of consensus government that predominates among the indigenous Inuit and other peoples of northern Canada.
State or provincial governments [ edit ]
There are several examples of nonpartisan state or provincial governments. The nonpartisan system is also used in many US states for the election of judges, district attorneys and other officials. Twelve US states use the Missouri Plan, and two use a variation of it, to choose judges in a nonpartisan manner.
The state of Nebraska in the United States has nonpartisan elections for its legislature because candidates are neither endorsed nor supported by political parties. However, its executive branch is elected on a partisan basis. It is the only state in the United States with a nonpartisan legislature.
Louisiana uses a nonpartisan blanket primary, also called a "jungle primary", for state and local offices. In this system, all candidates run against each other regardless of party affiliation during the primary, and then the two most popular candidates run against each other even if they are members of the same party. This form of runoff election weakens political parties and transforms a partisan election into a partly nonpartisan election.
The Swiss Cantons of Glarus and Appenzell Innerrhoden are also nonpartisan, direct democracies; while they have a partisan parliament, all laws have to be passed by "Landsgemeinde", an assembly of all citizens eligible to vote.
Governors of Japanese prefectures are required by law not to be members of any political party.[citation needed]
Municipal governments [ edit ]
The municipal government of the City of Toronto, Ontario (Canada) is the fifth largest government in the country, governing a population of more than 2.7 million. It consists of a nonpartisan, directly elected council. The public may have a general idea of the candidates' political affiliations, but their parties have no official recognition or privilege in the functioning of City Council. Councilors are free to vote on each motion individually, freeing them from party discipline. Almost all Canadian Cites are nonpartisan as well as Counties And RMS.
Many municipalities in Switzerland also have a nonpartisan legislative assembly consisting of all citizens eligible to vote.
The Village of Scarsdale, New York selects its Board of Trustees using a nonpartisan system that dates back to 1911. Candidates for office are privately interviewed by a diversely composed committee and then nominated for office. New York State law mandates that these nominees must be democratically elected, however, nominated candidates are rarely contested in the general election. The coordinating Scarsdale Citizens' Non-Partisan Party motto is "Performance, Not Politics"[13]
Religious perspectives [ edit ]
The Bahá'í Faith avers that the partisan apparatus is not a necessary or beneficial aspect of democracy.[14]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Image caption Swindon - home to lots of concrete
From Mevafishy, through Barlick to Amazingstoke, nicknames for Britain's towns and cities are legion. Now a new project seeks to create a database of what we really call where we live.
What we name things says as much about us as it does about them. Take cars, for instance; I've come across pet names which include Eric Robinson (a famous bandleader), Pompidou (a former President of France) and Oscar (presumably Wilde). I also know someone who insists on referring to the TV remote as a "klangenstuhl".
And so it goes for places.
"No man is an island... apart from Barry," goes the old quip. And the South Wales resort of Barry Island is just one of countless places in Britain to have its own nickname. As a major filming location for BBC television's award-winning comedy, Gavin and Stacey, it was christened BarryWood by the actor Russell Tovey.
Some slang names are just simple abbreviations, so in Lancashire Skelmersdale became Skem, Barnoldswick is known as Barlick and Ricky is the chummy moniker given by locals to Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire.
And, in the historic tradition of spoken English, ironic puns abound.
The comedian and broadcaster Phill Jupitus says that his home town of Stanford Le Hope in Essex is called Stanford No Hope by locals.
Elsewhere, the picturesque Cornish port of Mevagissey is becoming known as Mevafishy, for obvious reasons, and the South Yorkshire town of Wath-Upon-Dearne is often cheekily referred to as Where Upon Earth.
Now, as part of English Language Day on Wednesday 13 October, the English Project and Ordnance Survey are launching Location Lingo, an interactive project which aims to uncover the nicknames, pet names and hate-names which people use in their daily lives for the places which are near and dear to them.
"The name that people conjure up or create for a place forms an emotional connection," explains Winchester University's Professor Bill Lucas, a patron of the English Project.
"So Basingstoke becomes Amazingstoke, Swindon is known as Swindump and Padstow, home town of chef Rick Stein, is nicknamed Padstein."
Other nicknames, though, require a little explanation. In Scotland, the 80-odd roundabouts which grace the new town of East Kilbride have led it to acquire the name Polo Mint City.
Guz Argyle
Image caption Glitz, glamour, grey skies - filming on the streets of Barrywood
Devonport, the Royal Navy's home in Plymouth, is known in the Senior Service as Guz, short for "Guzzle", a comment on West Countryfolk's alleged devotion to cream teas.
And in Northern Ireland, local radio presenter Gerry Anderson came up with the jocular name Stroke City to describe the politically contentious Londonderry/Derry.
The practice of bestowing pet names extends far beyond towns and cities, though. Millions of people in the UK have heard of the complex feat of engineering known as Spaghetti Junction. But just how many are aware of its proper title - Gravelly Hill Interchange, where junction 6 of the M6 meets the A38(M) Aston Expressway in Birmingham?
Beyond this, there are places like the Banana Bridge, a curvy crossing over the River Itchen in Hampshire, and one of London¹s newest landmarks, the Gherkin, otherwise known as the Swiss Re building.
And the intimacy of a place name can also extend to what occurs there.
Quirkiness
"Many of these names may also refer to little natural features of landscape where people go for a hug and a kiss," says Prof Lucas.
Find out more Prof Bill Lucas of the English Project will be talking about the Location Lingo scheme on Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday, 13 October BBC - Today
As well as creating what promises to be a fascinating resource detailing the linguistic richness - and sheer quirkiness - of pet place names, there is a practical side to the project.
"With the huge variety of place nicknames that exist we could never hope to capture them all ourselves," says Glen Hart, Ordnance Survey's head of research.
"But the information from Location Lingo could prove vital. Organisations like the emergency services rely on our information when responding to 999 calls, so by having the most complete set of nicknames we could help the emergency services quickly locate the right place, and maybe even save lives."
Anyone in Great Britain can submit their location lingo - and, if possible, the story behind it to the English Project website where they can either plot their entry on an interactive map or fill in a simple form.
As Bill Lucas puts it: "It's not about apostrophes or no apostrophes. Its about what a place name means to you."Timber Timbre's 'Sewer Blues' Is A Grim Take On America's Future
Enlarge this image toggle caption Caroline Desilets/Courtesy of the artist Caroline Desilets/Courtesy of the artist
Timber Timbre, the strange, often disquieting musical project of Ontario's Taylor Kirk, is back with a new album called Sincerely, Future Pollution, a brooding record heavily shaped by last year's political upheaval. The album's first single, "Sewer Blues," offers a dark take on the state of America with throbbing synths and swampy guitars. "Order of the underground, as the sewer runs clear," Kirk sings, "stretch your skin in front of me, undo every other year. Now I come for you, I come for your womb, for your vapor and your perfume. For your fog-filled rooms."
YouTube
Get The Music Pre-Order Sincerely, Future Pollution
"2016 was a very difficult time to observe," Kirk says in a prepared statement announcing the record. "I hate to admit that normally I express more sensitivity than concern politically, but I think the tone and result on the record is utter chaos and confusion. When we were recording, the premonition was that the events we saw unfolding were an elaborate hoax. But the mockery made of our power system spawned a lot of dark, dystopic thoughts and ideas. And then it all happened, while everyone was on Instagram. The sewers overflowed."
This is Timber Timbre's first full-length since 2014's Hot Dreams. Sincerely, Future Pollution is due out April 7 on City Slang Records.I recently spent a semester teaching writing at an elite liberal-arts college. At strategic points around the campus, in shades of yellow and green, banners displayed the following pair of texts. The first was attributed to the college’s founder, which dates it to the 1920s. The second was extracted from the latest version of the institution’s mission statement:
The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully. leadership
service
integrity
creativity
Let us take a moment to compare these texts. The first thing to observe about the older one is that it is a sentence. It expresses an idea by placing concepts in relation to one another within the kind of structure that we call a syntax. It is, moreover, highly wrought: a parallel structure underscored by repetition, five adverbs balanced two against three.
A spatial structure, the sentence also suggests a temporal sequence. Thinking clearly, it wants us to recognize, leads to thinking independently. Thinking independently leads to living confidently. Living confidently leads to living courageously. Living courageously leads to living hopefully. And the entire chain begins with a college that recognizes it has an obligation to its students, an obligation to develop their abilities to think and live.
Finally, the sentence is attributed to an individual. It expresses her convictions and ideals. It announces that she is prepared to hold herself accountable for certain responsibilities.
The second text is not a sentence. It is four words floating in space, unconnected to one another or to any other concept. Four words — four slogans, really — whose meaning and function are left undefined, open to whatever interpretation the reader cares to project on them.
Four words, three of which — “leadership,” “service,” and “creativity” — are the loudest buzzwords in contemporary higher education. (“Integrity” is presumably intended as a synonym for the more familiar “character,” which for colleges at this point means nothing more than not cheating.) The text is not the statement of an individual; it is the emanation of a bureaucracy. In this case, a literally anonymous bureaucracy: no one could tell me when this version of the institution’s mission statement was formulated, or by whom. No one could even tell me who had decided to hang those banners all over campus. The sentence from the founder has also long been mounted on the college walls. The other words had just appeared, as if enunciated by the zeitgeist.
But the most important thing to note about the second text is what it doesn’t talk about: thinking or learning. In what it both does and doesn’t say, it therefore constitutes an apt reflection of the current state of higher education. College is seldom about thinking or learning anymore. Everyone is running around trying to figure out what it is about. So far, they have come up with buzzwords, mainly those three.The optical illusion that makes your screen MELT: Shape-shifting video lets you hallucinate without touching drugs
DO NOT watch if you suffer from epilepsy or are sensitive to flashing lights
Watch video in full screen mode for over a minute while focusing on the letters at the centre of the swirling lines, reciting them out loud
Look away and watch the world deform. Effect can last for up to 20 secs
Illusion created when brain cells detecting motion become tired
After the eyes look away, the cells that detect motion in the other direction are more active and a stationary object appears to be moving
If you are interested in experiencing a mind-bending trip but don't want to take drugs, this new optical illusion could be for you.
Simply focusing on the letters in this video and looking away after a minute or so can transform the environment around you, making objects bend and three-dimensional patterns warp your perception of reality.
The psychedelic trick, known as'motion aftereffects', makes viewers see movement in objects that are in fact stationary.
TO TAKE THE TEST SCROLL DOWN TO THE VIDEO AND OPEN IT IN FULL SCREEN...
WARNING: Do not watch if you suffer from photosensitive epilepsy or are sensitive to flashing lights
Simply focusing on the letters in the video below (a screenshot is pictured) and looking away after a minute or so can transform the environment around you, making objects bend and patterns appear everywhere
HOW TO MAKE THE ILLUSION WORK
Open the video in full screen mode Play it and focus your eyes on the centre for the entire duration of the video which is around two minutes long. Recite the letters you see in the centre of the swirling shapes out loud
When the video stops, look around you and see how the world deforms in real-time
The effect may last for some time and it will cause objects you look at to change shape
For the illusion to take full effect, it must be opened up in a full-screen window, as it fills your entire field of vision.
Focus your eyes on the centre of the illusion for around just under two minutes before gently looking away into the distance when you are instructed.
You need to read every letter displayed in the centre of the whirling graphics and read them out loud, Gizmodo reported.
The Illusion Lab, which created the magical effect, said that it conjures hallucinogenic effects that only last a 'few seconds'.
If you follow the directions correctly, you see the world melting before your eyes and objects and people being distorted in real-time.
Some people also see the pattern repeating in front of their eyes temporarily.
These illusions are not recommended for people who suffer from photosensitive epilepsy or are sensitive to flashing lights.
The psychedelic trick, known as'motion aftereffects', makes viewers see movement in objects that are in fact not moving at all..
The effect is sometimes known as the ‘waterfall illusion’ after Robert Adams described the effect following a visit to the Fall of Foyers near Loch Ness in Scotland in 1834.
Adams notes how if he looked at a waterfall for a short time, then looked at the bank beside it, the bank appeared to drift upwards.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE ILLUSION
When watching a waterfall or the strobe illusion the brain cells that detect motion in one direction become tired.
After the eyes look away, the cells that detect motion in the other direction are more active and a stationary object appears to be moving.
The effect has confounded people for centuries, but experiments that monitor brain activity have now been able to explain how it works.
When watching a waterfall, or the strobe illusion, the brain cells that detect motion in one direction become tired.
When the eyes look away, the cells that detect motion in the other direction are more active and a stationary object appears to be moving.
This effect is quite intense for a few seconds, and can last for up to 20 seconds.
What is so strange about this aftereffect illusion is its paradoxical nature. Although the stationary object is being seriously distorted, it also appears not to change.
A sensation of expansion or contraction exists, but the contours of the object do not appear to be going anywhere.
There are different types of motion aftereffect illusion, with the strobe effect being one of the most powerful.In 2015, the Miami Dolphins traded linebacker Dannell Ellerbe along with a third-round pick for wide receiver Kenny Stills. In his first year
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or in the future, and no amount of deception, misrepresentation or hyperbole regarding the budget can change that fact.”
— AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr.
Matt Murray is the creator and an author on the NH Labor News. He is a union member and advocate for labor and progressive politics. He also works with other unions and members to help spread our message. Follow him on Twitter @NHLabor_News
Like this: Like Loading...Good news for local fliers who don’t want to make the trek to Washington Dulles or Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall airports.
Southwest Airlines announced Monday that it will more than double its flights at Reagan National Airport, adding seven new nonstops beginning this summer.
“By year’s end, we’ll offer 44 daily departures to 14 destinations from Reagan National Airport,” said Ron Ricks, Southwest Airlines’s executive vice president and chief legal and regulatory officer in a news release announcing the changes. “We’ve been interested in expanding at Washington National for a long time.”
As part of the conditions negotiated with the Department of Justice, American was required to give up slots at Reagan National to win federal approval to merge with US Airways. The new American would have controlled 69 percent of all flights in and out of National, one of four U.S. airports where the volume of takeoffs and landings has been restricted by Federal Aviation Administration guidelines.
Although travelers likely will cheer the new options, the changes will also pose issues for Reagan National Airport, which set an all-time record for traffic in 2013, with 20.4 million passengers flying through its gates. Once the new routes are in place airport officials say the the number of passengers could grow by 2.4 million, straining an airport that has little room to expand.
Southwest officials said they will launch the new flights with a sale, with fares as low as $84 for travel every day except Fridays and Sundays. The new flights will come on line starting this summer.
Here are some of the new routes Southwest will add.
Beginning Aug. 10, 2014: daily, nonstop flights between Washington National and:
Chicago (Midway) with six round-trips at introductory fares as low as $119 one-way.
Nashville with three round-trips at introductory fares as low as $129 one-way.
New Orleans with two round-trips at introductory fares as low as $129 one-way.
Beginning Sept. 30, 2014, Southwest will add flights from DCA to:
Tampa Bay, with two round-trips at introductory fares as low as $84 one-way.
Three additional flights to Chicago (Midway), which will bring the total number of daily round-trips to nine.
Beginning Nov. 2, 2014, Southwest will add new daily nonstop service to:
Akron-Canton
Dallas Love Field
Indianapolis
And additional flights will be added to
Houston (Hobby)
St. Louis
Note: schedules for November flights will be published in May.
These new flights are in addition to earlier announcements that the Southwest would add service to Dallas Love Field. Earlier this month, JetBlue and Virgin America also announced a slate of new flights.With Big Brother — er, Google watching, no crime is hidden from view. Here are just a few instances of crime and punishment caught on its Street View feature.
1. Reckless Driving
“I didn’t realize this was a no parking tree.”
Mildly Reprehensible Knievel.
Timmy made extra money working as a bicycle airbag.
2. Burglary/Theft
Either this is Spiderman’s laundry day, or this guy’s trying to break in.
It’s awfully nice of him to steal a bicycle for his imaginary friend.
I’m thinking that’s not the Staples parking lot.
3. Vandalism/Destruction of Property
Short on money, Joe tried deserpately to paint an ATM.
Before she buys a car, she kicks the tires…and the door…and the side-view mirror…and the salesman.
4. Public Intoxication
In his defense, that light pole would fall down if he wasn’t there.
Few have seen the alley behind Sesame Street.
The park: where everybody knows your name.
5. Assault and Battery
This beatdown went on for 16 units!
Practicing for their middle school production of Rocky III.
Never too young to commit a felony.
6. Indecent Exposure
Trying to build up her resume for that Girls Gone Wild application.
7. Brandishing a Deadly Weapon
We’re pretty sure this is a toy gun.
This, on the other hand…
“There can be only one!”
8. Illegal Parking
Unless this is a hover car, it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“The white curb is for gelato loading and unloading only…”
Citation for Driving a Vespa While Male.
9. Prostitution
Even Cinderella was hurt by the recession.
Must be the car.
Hooker? I hardly know her!
10. Joyriding
OK, this is a Google Earth photo, but it’s clear that someone’s taking their frustrations out on a baseball field.
11. Underage Smoking
Blurring your hair won’t hide your shame.
12. Speeding
Busted.
Erik Estrada don’t play that.
“I’m sorry ma’am, this is a no Schwinn situation.”
13. Drug Dealing
That car was made for buying drugs.
Obviously peddling crack.
14. Jaywalking
Not using a crosswalk…
Not waiting for the light…
Not living in reality.
15. Lewd Behavior
I don’t wanna know what’s going on here…OK, maybe I do.
Can’t you at least wait ’til you get home to blow it up?
16. Failure to Obey a Street Sign
The Google car is apparently above the law.
17. Arson?
Aftermath of the Great Tulip Riot of ’07.
What fire?
18. Public Urination
A menage-a-tinkle.
“The bush was on fire.”
Guilty.
19. Stalking
“Soon, that sarong will be mine…”
20. Unspecified Offenses
“Sir, your rims are just too shiny.”
“I swear, someone put that construction cone in my pants.”
When the police station runs out of coffee, 7-11 gets shut down.Provincial politicians in Nova Scotia can now spend money earmarked for postage and mileage on anything they want.
The House of Assembly management commission voted to change the spending rules on Tuesday.
That means MLAs now have unfettered access to between $14,059 and $18,558.
Until now, that money has been reserved for what's called franking and travel. Franking is essentially postage and travel relates to mileage claimed for use of a vehicle to travel within a constituency. Mileage claims have to be supported by a driver's log and postage-related charges need a receipt.
But not every sitting member claims for every kilometre they drive which means some MLAs didn't use up their entire budget for franking and travel.
That is expected to change now that there are no strings attached.
The change was proposed because some MLAs were facing a cash crunch due to changes to the constituency boundaries, and the fact constituency offices need to be barrier-free.
Provincial politicians who now represent larger constituencies have had to open offices in more than one community.
Spending posted online
Progressive Conservative House leader Chris d'Entremont is worried the new wide-open spending rules may lead to "hog wild" spending on self-serving ads.
"Unfortunately what I've seen is that we're not going to help those who were impacted without putting more money into everybody else's pocket," he said.
Government House leader Michel Samson rejects that suggestion.
He points to the fact all expenses are now posted online as a guard against reckless spending.
"All elected members have to justify to their constituents what expenses that they make," he said.
"They are posted online. They are there for everyone to review and I can certainly tell you people are reviewing them and they are holding us to account."In Tunisia a couple of months ago, I heard an academic speculate anxiously about the possibility that his country's elections would bring an Islamist party to power. Like many Arab intellectuals, he was making tentative plans to move to France if Tunisia's secular state appeared to be in danger of being dismantled. In the event, the largest party after October's elections was an Islamist organisation, Ennahda, although its leader has so far been careful to sound moderate.
In Libya, meanwhile, the lynching of Colonel Gaddafi was followed by an announcement that sharia would in future be the basis of all legislation. The leader of the National Transitional Council Mustafa Abdul Jalil declared that a secular law banning polygamy was to be repealed, horrifying Arab women who had supported the revolutions.
It was in response to these developments that the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo decided to rename itself Charia Hebdo – charia is French for sharia – for a week, and announced the Prophet Mohamed as guest editor. A cartoon of Mohamed appeared on the cover, accompanied by a speech bubble in which he threatened "100 lashes if you don't die laughing". In no time at all, the magazine's offices in Paris had been destroyed by a fire bomb. Its website was attacked by angry Muslims, who took down the content and replaced it with the chilling phrase "No God but Allah".
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No one was hurt, but the clear intention was to intimidate journalists. In any other week, the attack would have been a major news story – or that's what I'd like to think. It was a relief to see politicians from France's main parties uniting to condemn an act of terrorism. But it didn't take long for a predictable chorus of "Islamophobia" to start up, directed against the magazine. An assistant producer at France 24, Romina Ruiz-Goiriena, accused Charlie Hebdo of contributing to "burgeoning anti-Muslim sentiment" apparently failing to consider that hurling a petrol bomb is a guaranteed way of achieving exactly that.
But the prize for moral idiocy has to go to Time magazine's Paris correspondent, Bruce Crumley, who found it "hard to have much sympathy for the French satirical newspaper firebombed... after it published another stupid and totally unnecessary issue mocking Islam". Crumley admitted there was "no excuse" for the attack, but made a feeble joke at the magazine's expense, wishing it "good luck with those charcoal drawings your pages will now be featuring".
Last autumn, I marched through London to protest against the Pope's visit, walking alongside placards with slogans just as mordant as the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo. There's a crucial difference between attacking ideas and putting lives at risk; last week's arson attack in Paris isn't the first time Islamists have wildly over-reacted to "offensive" images in publications no one is obliged to buy, as though faith removes the basic obligation to exercise self-control and refrain from violence.
But there is a larger point here: if it isn't possible to unequivocally condemn fire-bombing in the capital city of a secular European nation, what message does it send in countries where there is no separation between religion and state? Many Arabs are secular and they – not the Islamists who respond to satire with incoherent rage – are the people who need our solidarity and support.
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Subscribe nowCloned meat gets the go-ahead: Minister rejects ban despite health and animal welfare fears
Backing for unrestricted sale of meat and milk from 'Frankenfarms'
Most consumers oppose the move on ethical grounds
Campaigners condemn the Coalition and warn of dangers
The spectre of a clone food free-for-all came a step closer yesterday.
Ministers want to allow the unrestricted sale of meat and milk from so-called Frankenfarm animals.
They are ready to reject the idea of a ban as ‘disproportionate in terms of food safety and animal welfare’.
The move was immediately condemned by campaigners who warned that cloning poses a serious threat to animal welfare.
Ministers are backing unrestricted sale of meat and milk from cloned cows like these on Scotland's Isle of Skye
It will also trigger a fierce consumer backlash, with evidence that the vast majority of people oppose clone farming on welfare and ethical grounds.
Many are also fearful about eating clone food amid concerns there has been too little research to guarantee its safety.
The RSPCA and Compassion in World Farming point to high levels of miscarriage, organ failure and gigantism among new-born clones.
The policy, drawn up on the orders of the controversial Conservative Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman, would also rule out labelling.
Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, created by Professor Sir Ian Wilmut
The details emerged in a document published by the Food Standards Agency.
It revealed: ‘The Government considers that a ban or a temporary suspension on cloning, the use of cloned animals and the marketing of food from cloned animals would be disproportionate in terms of food safety and animal welfare.’
This is the first time the new Coalition government’s policy, supporting clone farming, has been made public.
Its position would effectively allow the most radical shift in British food and farming in a generation. In theory, meat and milk from clones and their offspring could go on sale legally within a matter of months.
Clone animals would be used for food and to breed herds of unnatural, supersize animals capable of producing vast quantities of meat and milk.
The policy has been adopted by ministers without any public consultation. The only surveys of UK consumers carried out by the FSA and the European Food Safety Authority have demonstrated massive opposition.
Despite this, Mrs Spelman plans to lobby the EU and other governments to effectively abandon any regulation.
The European Commission recently proposed a temporary five-year ban on the sale of meat and milk from clones. But to the disappointment of campaigners, it backed allowing food from the offspring of clones to go into supermarkets.
The documents published by the FSA make clear the Government wants no restrictions.
They state: ‘The Government recognises that cloning is a relatively new technique and that the welfare of clones and of their surrogate dams must be protected.’
But it argues that existing laws are sufficient to deal with the welfare of animals and there is ‘insufficient evidence’ to justify a ban.
Recently, a Government advisory committee said that, in its view, there was no difference in meat and milk from clone animals. The Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes advised it was ‘unlikely to present any food safety risk’.
However, the experts admitted there was a lack of safety research. The committee also noted consumers would want to see any food from clone animals labelled. This would not happen if the UK gets its way.
A study by the FSA in 2008 found consumers do not want clone food on their plates. The majority considered it a dangerous manipulation of nature and potentially harmful.
The FSA study was conducted by analysts at Creative Research. Its director, Dr Steve Griggs, said ‘the more consumers learned about cloning, the greater and more widespread were the objections’. Mrs Spelman appears to have overridden these concerns.
However, she will not have the final say as other European governments are highly sceptical about the technology and will argue for tough controls.
Chief policy adviser to Compassion in World Farming, Peter Stevenson, said he was ‘bitterly disappointed’ by Mrs Spelman’s position.
‘This Coalition pledged to give a high priority to animal welfare, yet supporting cloning does completely the opposite. The Government also presents itself as a champion of honest labelling, yet it is proposing a clone food free for all without any requirement for labels.’
Steven Innes, pictured, and his father Callum who run the Drumduan Farm, near Inverness, face having to destroy 96 head of cattle bred from a bull born to a cloneThis article is over 2 years old
Expert blames global warming, as coral bleaches when water temperatures go above a certain threshold for an extended period of time
Damage to parts of the Great Barrier Reef has worsened, leading authorities to raise the alert to the second-highest level, indicating severe local coral bleaching.
Devastating global coral bleaching event could hit Great Barrier Reef next Read more
The bleaching is worst in the most pristine and remote parts of the reef north of Cairns, according to Terry Hughes, convenor of the National Coral Taskforce. “It’s the jewel in the crown of the Great Barrier Reef and it’s now getting a quite a serious impact from this bleaching event,” he said. “The northern reefs are bleaching quite badly now.”
Hughes said it appeared there was some coral death occurring in northern reefs.
Russell Reichelt, the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said the area around Lizard Island, 250km north of Cairns, and sites further north, had fared the worst.
The US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration predicts bleaching conditions to worsen over the coming weeks.
The world is currently in the grips of the third global coral bleaching event. Coral bleaches when water temperatures are raised above a certain threshold for an extended period of time.
Climate change will lead to deformed and virus-hit coral reefs Read more
Hughes, director of the ARC centre of excellence for coral reef studies at James Cook University, said although the strong El Niño occurring now is partly to blame for the bleaching event, the real culprit is global warming caused by carbon emissions.
“These massive thousand-kilometer bleaching events didn’t happen thirty years ago,” he said. “No-one ever recorded a mass bleaching event in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, until the middle of the 1980s … and the Great Barrier Reef didn’t bleach until 1998 for the first time.”
“The baseline temperature on the barrier reef has gone up between a half a degree and a full degree depending where you are on the great barrier reef. Bleaching happens once coral sits in water a degree or two above the normal summer maximum for a month or so.”
Moreover, Reichelt said climate change is expected to increase the severity El Niño weather patterns.
We're heading to a point where the Great Barrier Reef might bleach during every El Niño, risking its very existence.
Hughes says we are heading towards a future where the Great Barrier Reef might bleach during every El Niño, which will put its existence at risk.
Based on the severity of bleaching reports, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has lifted its bleaching warning from Response Level 1, which means mild and widespread bleaching, to Response Level 2 (severe and local).
The silver lining in the announcement is cloud cover and cooler temperatures have created safer conditions for two thirds of the reef – most areas south of Cairns.
“In the last couple of weeks we’ve had a lot of cloud cover in the middle and the south, so the danger period has basically passed for the reef south of Cairns.”
But the announcement has led to calls for immediate action from conservation groups around Australia.
Greenpeace called for Queensland to limit its coal exporting. “In the two weeks since the level 1 response plan began, the Queensland government has allowed some 8m tonnes of coal to be exported straight through this delicate ecosystem. This coal will be burnt overseas, driving climate change, warming our oceans and contributing to coral bleaching,” said Shani Tager, Greenpeace Reef Campaigner.
Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching: too soon for optimism, says academic Read more
Imogen Zethoven, the Great Barrier Reef campaign director at the Australian Marine Conservation Society said: “As the bleaching on the Reef continues to intensify we need an urgent response from the Turnbull government to avoid widespread bleaching happening repeatedly in the future.”
“This bleaching event has revealed the true cost of approving more coal mines, more coal export port terminals and refusing to listen to the warnings... The solutions are clear, we must make a rapid transition from mining and burning coal to 100% renewable energy.”
WWF-Australia called for an injection of $1m in federal funding for coral monitoring.
“GBRMPA is clearly concerned and is being proactive in lifting its response level and we support them in taking this action,” said WWF spokesperson Richard Leck.
“Surveying the impact of this bleaching event requires significant additional funds because of the challenges of getting scientists into the field over enormous distances.”About 18 percent of drug users in America used product purchased from Silk Road before it was shut down, according to a study set to be published in the journal Addiction and highlighted by DailyDot. The overwhelming majority of users in the US, UK, and Australia went on Silk Road to buy MDMA, more so than marijuana.
Silk Road was a broad-based black market for selling drugs and fake documents that ran for three years and was accessible via the Tor network until the FBI seized the domain and shut down the site in October. The founder, known as Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested and charged with, among other things, attempting to contract a murderer to kill a former Silk Road employee.
The survey used to complete the study was taken in late 2012 and was conducted online, which may have skewed its results in favor of knowledge and use of the online service—per the abstract, the 9,470 drug-using respondents between all three countries skew male, between 76 and 80 percent of the total.
Over three-quarters of the respondents in each country said they used Silk Road because of the range of selection for drugs, and about three-quarters (72-77 percent) used it for better-quality drugs. Just under two-thirds used it because of the vendor rating systems. Between 53 and 60 percent bought MDMA, while between 34 and 51 percent bought marijuana, depending on the country.
Only a month after Silk Road’s shutdown, a Silk Road 2.0 emerged, also accessible via Tor, run by a new Dread Pirate Roberts.
DOI: 10.1111/add.12470, Addiction.The 2016 Emmy nominations are in. They were announced by Lauren Graham and Anthony Anderson who couldn't contain himself as he announced his own nomination on "Black-ish" along with his co-star Tracee Ellis Ross and one for the overall series.
FX, a network that has been snubbed in past years, made a good showing with "The Americans" finally receiving its due along with "The People v. O.J. Simpson American Crime Story" and "Fargo."
It's a low bar to clear, but unlike with Oscars you won't see the hashtag #EmmysSoWhite trending. "Black-ish" got its three nominations, Aziz Ansari and "Master Of None" got noms, and Taraji P. Henson, Tituss Burgess, Kerry Washington, Viola Davis and Idris Elba all earned a nod from the Emmys.
But we all know you really came here for the snubs:
#EmmyNominations coming up in minutes. Remember: it's an honor just to have someone complain on Twitter that you weren't nominated. — James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) July 14, 2016
Some of the biggest snubs were "Orange Is the New Black" (which had zero nominations), Julianna Margulies in her last season of "The Good Wife" and generally The CW network, whose critically acclaimed "Jane The Virgin" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" got no love. Constance Zimmer got a nom in the supporting actress category but we at LAist HQ would love to see Lifetime's "UnREAL" get some more love. "Full Frontal," the only late-night talk show helmed by a woman, is crushing it but got snubbed. Voters weren't enamored with "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" either. "The Daily Show" spinoff "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" did get a well-deserved nomination.
Here's the full list:
Drama Series
“The Americans”
“Better Call Saul”
“Downton Abbey”
“Game of Thrones”
“Homeland”
“House of Cards”
“Mr. Robot”
Comedy Series
“Blackish”
“Master of None”
“Modern Family”
“Silicon Valley”
“Transparent”
“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”
“Veep”
Limited Series
“American Crime”
“Fargo”
“The Night Manager”
“The People v. O.J. Simpson American Crime Story”
“Roots”
Lead Actor in a Drama Series
Kyle Chandler, “Bloodline”
Rami Malek, “Mr. Robot”
Bob Odenkirk, “Better Call Saul”
Matthew Rhys, “The Americans”
Liev Schreiber, “Ray Donovan”
Kevin Spacey, “House of Cards”
Lead Actress in a Drama Series
Claire Danes, “Homeland”
Viola Davis, “How to Get Away with Murder”
Taraji P. Henson, “Empire”
Tatiana Maslany, “Orphan Black”
Keri Russell, “The Americans”
Robin Wright, “House of Cards”
Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie
Bryan Cranston, “All The Way”
Benedict Cumberbatch, “Sherlock: The Abominable Bride”
Idris Elba, “Luther”
Cuba Gooding Jr., “The People v. O.J. Simpson”
Tom Hiddleston, “The Night Manager”
Courtney B. Vance, “The People v. O.J. Simpson”
Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie
Kirsten Dunst, “Fargo”
Felicity Huffman, “American Crime”
Audra McDonald, “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grille”
Sarah Paulson, “The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”
Lili Taylor, “American Crime”
Kerry Washington, “Confirmation”
Lead Actor in a Comedy Series
Anthony Anderson, “Black-ish”
Aziz Ansari, “Master of None”
Will Forte, “The Last Man on Earth”
William H. Macy, “Shameless”
Thomas Middleditch. “Silicon Valley”
Jeffrey Tambor, “Transparent”
Lead Actress in a Comedy Series
Ellie Kemper, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, “Veep”
Laurie Metcalf, “Getting On”
Traces Ellis Ross, “Black-ish”
Amy Schumer, “Inside Amy Schumer”
Lily Tomlin, “Grace and Frankie”
Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
Jonathan Banks, "Better Call Saul"
Peter Dinklage, "Game of Thrones"
Michael Kelly, "House of Cards"
Ben Mendelsohn, "Bloodline"
Kit Harington, "Game of Thrones"
Jon Voight, "Ray Donovan"
Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series
Louie Anderson, "Baskets"
Andre Braugher, "Brooklyn Nine-Nine"
Tituss Burgess, "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"
Ty Burrell, "Modern Family"
Tony Hale, "Veep"
Keegan-Michael Key, "Key and Peele"
T.J. Millier, "Silicon Valley"
Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
Emilia Clarke, "Game of Thrones"
Lena Headey, "Game of Thrones"
Maggie Smith, "Downton Abbey"
Maura Tierney, "The Affair"
Maisie Williams, "Game of Thrones"
Constance Zimmer, "UnReal"
Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series
Anna Chlumsky, "Veep"
Gaby Hoffmann, "Transparent"
Allison Janney, "Mom"
Judith Light, "Transparent"
Kate McKinnon, "Saturday Night Live"
Nicey Nash, "Getting On"
Reality-Competition Program
“The Amazing Race”
“American Ninja Warrior”
“Dancing with the Stars”
“Project Runway”
“Top Chef”
“The Voice”
Variety Talk Series
“Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”
“Jimmy Kimmel Live”
“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”
“The Late, Late Show with James Corden”
“Real Time with Bill Maher”
“The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”
TV Movies
“A Very Murray Christmas”
“All The Way”
“Confirmation”
“Luther”
“Sherlock: The Abominable Bride”ladies
SFW
"Women in Space: We've Come A Long Way".
fallacy
organ
ize
erect
FotC
Thomases
photoshop
John is so ridiculously happy about the discovery of this second photo that he's currently singing "Don't Worry, There's Another Shuttle Photo, Be Happy" while I'm typing.
Clearly, I need to get him out of the house more.
(NOTE: For the, not the kiddies. Still, though.)NASA wanted to do something special for all the lady astronauts of the world:And by "special", I mean something big, flaccid, curving to the right, poised to explode into the dark recesses that are out of this world, and that says[biting lip] Wow. So many innuendo-laced jokes, so little time. And if my mom didn't read this blog (Hi, Mom!), you can bet I'd be saying something about thethat men can't- much less- a project of this size. Or how nice it is to see NASA giving women the upper hand in the space program, so that they, too, can get ahead. In fact, I'd probably wonder aloud if it wasn't rather cold in the exhibit hall, if that wouldn't put too fine a point on it.However, since my mom *does* read this blog (Hi, Mom!), all I'm going to say is this, and to the cake creator: don't take my good-natured ribbing too hard. The fact that you got a government agency to pay for your services makes you a Wreck star.And for you deprived souls who didn't get thereference, watch this:UPDATE: For you doubtingcalling "" and getting John all aggravated, here's another photo of the same cake:WASHINGTON—Following the latest security breach at the White House over the weekend, President Obama told reporters Monday that he is taking extra safety precautions by now sleeping with a Louisville Slugger under his bed. “We live in a dangerous world, and it’s important to be prepared to protect your family,” said the president, referring to the 32-ounce wooden baseball bat he recently retrieved from the White House basement. “If I hear anybody trying to break in, it’s a relief to know that I can just reach under the bed and give them a reason to think twice about ever coming back into my house. I know Michelle sleeps a lot more easily now that I’ve got this piece of lumber by my side.” While Obama said he hopes to never use the weapon, he admitted he received a scare Sunday night when he tiptoed downstairs after hearing a noise in the Red Room and nearly took a swing at Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
AdvertisementMarch 22, 1967
Dear WW:
Goodie Ace told some unemployed friend of mine that you were disappointed or annoyed or happy or drunk that I hadn't answered the letter you wrote me some years ago. You know, of course, there is no money in answering letters—unless they're letters of credit from Switzerland or the Mafia. I write you reluctantly, for I know you are doing six things simultaneously—five including sex. I don't know where you get the time to correspond.
Your play, I trust, will still be running when I arrive in New York the first or second week in April. This must be terribly annoying to the critics who, if I remember correctly, said it wouldn't go because it was too funny. Since it's still running, they must be even more annoyed. This happened to my son's play, on which he collaborated with Bob Fisher. The moral is: don't write a comedy that makes an audience laugh.
This critic problem has been discussed ever since I was Bar Mitzvahed almost 100 years ago. I never told this to anyone, but I received two gifts when I emerged from childhood into what I imagine today is manhood. An uncle, who was then in the money, presented me with a pair of long black stockings, and an aunt, who was trying to make me, gave me a silver watch. Three days after I received these gifts, the watch disappeared. The reason it was gone was that my brother Chico didn't shoot pool nearly as well as he thought he did. He hocked it at a pawnshop at 89th Street and Third Avenue. One day while wandering around aimlessly, I discovered it hanging in the window of the hock shop. Had not my initials been engraved on the back, I wouldn't have recognized it, for the sun had tarnished it so completely it was now coal black. The stockings, which I had worn for a week without ever having them washed, were now a mottled green. This was my total reward for surviving 13 years.
And that, briefly, is why I haven't written you for some time. I'm still wearing the stockings—they're not my stockings anymore, they're just parts of my leg.
You wrote that you were coming out here in February, and I, in a frenzy of excitement, purchased so much delicatessen that, had I kept it in cold cash instead of cold cuts, it would have taken care of my contribution to the United Jewish Welfare Fund for 1967 and '68.
I think I'll be at the St. Regis hotel in New York. And for God's sake don't have any more success—it's driving me crazy. My best to you and your diminutive friend, little Dickie.
Groucho
In 1961, comedian Groucho Marx and filmmaker Woody Allen met for the first time and embarked on a friendship that would last 16 years. Groucho—the elder of the pair by 45 years—reminded Woody of "a Jewish uncle in my family, a wisecracking Jewish uncle with a sarcastic wit," whilst Woody was, according to Groucho in 1976, "the most important comic talent around." In March of 1967, following a lengthy break in their correspondence that Woody found infuriating, Groucho finally wrote him a letter.Officials have previously acknowledged that at the time of Mr. Moussaoui's arrest, the F.B.I. was wary of making any surveillance requests to the special court after its judges had complained bitterly the year before that they were being seriously misled by the bureau in F.B.I. affidavits requesting surveillance of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group.
As a result of the complaints, the Justice Department opened an internal investigation of the conduct of senior F.B.I. and Justice Department officials. Department officials said the inquiry was still under way and could result in disciplinary action.
Justice Department officials noted that the criticism of the department in the opinion referred mostly to actions by the department and the F.B.I. in the Clinton administration.
The department said today that it intended to appeal the court's decision not to grant its request for broader authority to share intelligence information with criminal investigators, and that secret appeal papers were filed today with a special three-judge panel that oversees the surveillance court.
''We believe this decision unnecessarily narrowed the Patriot Act and limits our ability to fully utilize the authority that Congress provided us,'' said Barbara Comstock, the Justice Department spokeswoman, referring to the U.S.A. Patriot Act, the broad antiterrorism law that Congress passed after Sept. 11. The act makes it easier for prosecutors to use information gathered from intelligence wiretaps.
At a forum in April at the University of Texas, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who recently stepped down as the court's presiding judge, praised Attorney General John Ashcroft and his staff for ending abuses of the system for requesting wiretap authority. The F.B.I. had no separate comment on the ruling and referred calls to the Justice Department.
In its opinion made public today, the court, which is based in Washington, documented the ''alarming number of instances'' during the Clinton administration in which the F.B.I. might have acted improperly.
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The opinion was part of a package of material presented this week by the court to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is reviewing requests by the Justice Department for even broader investigative powers in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The committee released the documents today, along with a statement from the panel's chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who said, ''this ray of sunshine from the judicial branch is a remarkable step forward for constructive oversight.''
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In weighing eavesdrop requests, the special court, which was created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and was recently expanded from to 11 members from 7, is responsible for enforcing provisions of the law that limit the sharing of electronic surveillance from intelligence or terrorism cases with criminal investigators; the limitations are intended to uphold the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure.
Because the standards of evidence required for electronic surveillance are much lower in many intelligence investigations than in criminal investigations, the authors of the law wanted to prevent the dissemination of intelligence information to criminal investigators or prosecutors.
But in a number of cases, the court said, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had made ''erroneous statements'' in eavesdropping applications about ''the separation of the overlapping intelligence and criminal investigators and the unauthorized sharing of FISA information with F.B.I. criminal investigators and assistant U.S. attorneys.''
''How these misrepresentations occurred remains unexplained to the court,'' the opinion said.
In essence, the court said that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department were violating the law by allowing information gathered from intelligence eavesdrops to be used freely in bringing criminal charges, without court review, and that criminal investigators were improperly directing the use of counterintelligence wiretaps.
The opinion said that in September 2000, ''the government came forward to confess errors in 75 FISA applications related to major terrorist attacks directed against the United States -- the errors related to misstatements and omissions of material facts.''
In one case, it
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one also on hunger strike. His anticipated release in July never came, the theatre of the absurd of the charges against him continued and Thodoris remains incarcerated. But a fighter. This time, his “weapon” is his own body. He spoke to us over the phone from the prison of Korydallos. From there he sees the revanchist face of the State, that Greece of violence and repression but also another Greece of the restless youth, of the faith in ideals. Insisting on his innocence and his own beliefs. Paying dearly for both.I hear his voice with intermissions from the loudspeakers blasting orders to the prisoners of Korydallos. He is extremely polite, low-pitched, strong within his weakness. Now fragile, but determined, in the middle of August, the month with no news, he fights the struggle for his freedom with the only weapon he has left: His own body. For more than one month now (trans: 36 days), the only remaining prisoner of December is on hunger strike. Despite having lost 12 kilos, having low pressure and suffering hypoglycaemic shocks, and although his doctors insist that he can now suffer irreversible damages, the prison administration refuses to transfer him to hospital. Thodoris Iliopoulos declares his innocence. A hostage.- The state prosecutes you for legal offenses, felonies and misdemeanors, and considers you so dangerous that will not release you under restrictive terms. How do you feel about this?“From December 18 I found myself being a protagonist in this theatre of the absurd. They arrested me together with others en mass, as I was walking down Akadimias Street with some friends. Five riot police units surrounded around ten of us. I started running and two of them caught up with me, they threw me on the pavement and started kicking me in the head, screaming “now you’ll see what will happen to you”. I had no idea what would happen to me. Finally, what happened was that I found myself charged with three felonies. According to the inquisitor, at the moment of my arrest I was outside the Law School throwing molotov cocktails. The only witness account existing of this is that of the two riot police who arrested me. When the inquisitor asked them if they would recognise me on the street and they responded positively, she put up her finger, showed me and said, “is it him?” She exposed me herself! Of course, the riot police… recognised me. From that point on they won’t release me because in reality they need me as hostage. From the arrested only a few took a stance for December. I’m not saying they were obliged to. I took a stance and I am faced with the State’s reprisal.- How did you experience the December events?“My dad is on his final days and he is suffering from altsheimer and my mom is 83 years old and cannot look after him. For this reason I only made it to the streets twice, unfortunately. It was a very good opportunity to discuss and to think, to offer solutions, to exchange ideas. Some, with dubious interests, read the events with crocodile tears, they weep for the disaster and the destruction. And yet December gave birth to a different way of thinking and most importantly, it took kids away from their playstations and internet cafes. It is naive and unfair to say that the kids took to the streets only to ease their rage. They were claiming their ideals and their dreams”.- What was your stance toward the State and what is it now?“If I tell you, they’ll throw me in jail for life… I’m kidding. I don’t want to assign any labels to myself, like anarchist or anti-authoritarian. I am a visionary of direct democracy, of deciding and acting together. During my teen years I was fascinated by the philosophy of anarchism from Zenon to the cynics and all the way to Enrico Malatesta. Even today, I remain fascinated by these. I am struggling for a different world. Not with molotovs and stones, but with ideas and texts. I am not the first nor the last to which the state shows its revanchist face. What bothers them, what they repress is not my action, but my stance and my ideas. They charged me with fabricated charges, they ignored the proofs I submitted of my innocence. The issue, for the state, is that I insist on thinking. And I think differently. In this sense, tomorrow morning you – or anyone else – could find yourself in my position”.- Do you now fear the country called Greece?“No. It is frightening to walk down Akadimias street and then to find yourself locked up in a cell for months, but I have such a great desire to live that I am not afraid. And also, beyond the Greece of repression and violence, I also see another Greece, that of a restless youth, solidarity, faith in beliefs”.- Why did you chose the hunger strike?“When anyone commences a hunger strike, they should normally be examined by a dentist – it is the teeth that get damaged first – and a psychiatrist to prove that s/he is not suicidal. Although this did not happen in my case, I want to assure you that I am not suicidal, I do not at all want to die. Neither do I want to suffer some irreversible damage that will leave me injured for the rest of my life. Of course, as explained by my doctor, after the 30th day of hunger strike the really serious problems begin, as some of your vital organs can fail. But really, I have no other option left. My body is my ultimate weapon.”- Does the hunger strike flirt with death?“Everything flirts with death. If you are a migrant, a visit to the playground of Ayios Panteleimonas can automatically mean your death. Or if you are a worker in a factory. Or if you are a cyclist in the streets of Athens. A hunger strike can bring you a few steps toward death, but closer to freedom. As the foreigner that I am in the bosses’ world, as a worker, as a cyclist, I never feared death. As a hunger striker I live with the hope of liberation, not with the fear of death”.- You are in love, you were preparing for your release in July and a common house with your lover. What do you two say now?“We spend endless hours talking everyday, she writes to me and I write to her, we plan out our life. We are very close, we face this as a team. The prison limits the freedom of the body, not your soul. Each time we hang up she tells me venceremos. We are young, in love and have so many beautiful things to live together. And we shall win”.- What dreams do you see?“In the beginning I had nightmares. With a daily struggle I managed not only to eject anything that could destroy me, but also to have dreams with power and joy. I have chosen to live creatively this chapter in my life”.- What did you learn in prison?“Every prison is a miniature of the society. You see people convicted of financial crimes who are interested in doing business even here, all the way to child molesters. But you also see innocents, people who had no money for a good lawyer or to pay their bail. Before coming in here I was dogmatic about this, I thought that… it’s the bad ones who are in prison. Yet in here you are forced to understand that what is bad is subjective, to admit that anyone could be a potential murdered under given circumstances.“Everything is inside us. In prison you learn new codes and, most importantly, to trust no-one. And some ways that help your life. Here you live with the absolute minimum. What we consider rubbish outside, is useful here. Who would ever know that in order to cover your bookshelves with a curtain you would use burnt ear buttons instead of glue?”- How do your fellow prisoners treat you?“Political prisoners were always treated with respect by the penal ones, although I don’t want to make this distinction. We are all imprisoned and we face the same problems. We as well, even if we are political prisoners, face the penal code. My fellow prisoners support me: Nikos Tsouvalakis went on hunger strike on the same day as me, in solidarity. Other prisoners abstain from their meals. Most of them support me with simple, everyday actions: They visit me in my cell, they lend me books, they give up their place in the phone queue. ”- What is your cell like?“You are locked up 18 out of 24 hours in a space of maximum 8 square meters, together with another 3 prisoners. The heating is insufficient. Cockroaches and rats often make their appearance. The toilets are in the basement with broken windows and cold water.”- The prisoners say your biggest enemy is time. How do you spend your days?“There is this theory in prison that the more you sleep, the faster you come out. I think that the more you sleep, the less you live. Now that I can no longer walk I read in the cell, I write, I paint, I listen to music, I make DIY constructions from cheap materials.”- What inspires you?“The corridors, the prison bars and the barbed wire. All this has put me in the process of creating another reality, comprised of words and paintings”.What would you tell the minister of justice if you saw him?“I would read him a poem by poet Titos Patrikios:I pluck the words one by one from my throat/if they ooze blood/ wrap them in your handkerchief/wrap them in cotton/or then maybe grab them with a clip and say/“he’s only saying these, to make an impression”/Do what you want,/but silence is not enough no more/words are not enough no more/I pluck the plain words, one by one/and I send them to you.”- How do you dream of your life after prison?“Plain in terms of living, rich in terms of thinking – and I also want us to have a kid that won’t ever leave me alone!”- After all this grueling experience, would you take to the streets again?“Of course. With the only difference being that I will be absolutely ready to face any fixed-up charges. After all, I always took to the streets with my face as my only hoodie.” after the greek riots
Homepage: http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blogNew membership-only singles club opening in Fort Wayne Copyright by WANE - All rights reserved Organic Meets is at the historic home at 533 West Washington Blvd. [ + - ] Video
FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - A new membership-only singles meeting house is opening Friday at the historic home at 533 West Washington Blvd. Organic Meets is an inclusive, non-judgmental, singles club where the mantra is "because chemistry can only happen in person."
Sherri Albrecht developed Organic Meets after bad experiences using online dating.
"[My date] misrepresented his age, his income and he lived with his mother and none of those were an issue, but it was the lying about them that was the issue for me," she said.
That's when she thought up Organic Meets, a members-only single club.
"Everyone I met doing online dating said they just wanted to meet someone through friends, at a social engagement, or that type of thing," Albrecht said. "So, I thought why is that not a thing? Why isn't there a place where everyone's single?"
The club will host weekly house parties with music, Craft beer, wine and small plates. There will also be weekly yoga and meditation classes. Members can also look forward to mindful meeting groups, writers, book clubs, music jams and other synergistic meets.
Memberships are purchased in three month increments with the first quarter costing $145.
The public open house is from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Oct. 13. The members-only grand opening is Oct. 31. There will also be a free cocktail party for singles at some point this month.
Learn more at the Organic Meets website.This straightforward age bias case got a lot less straightforward when a jury awarded the 66-year-old victim in question a jaw-dropping $26 million.
Bobby Nickel was hired to work as a facilities manager for Corporate Express in 2002, and seemed to do well at the job.
After his company was bought by office supply giant Staples in 2008, though, things began to go differently.
According to Nickel, his new supervisors made it their mission to get rid of veteran employees like him who were paid more money.
How’d that play out for Nickel? He said he:
was frequently the butt of jokes at company meetings, and
was often called “old goat” and “old coot.”
Nickel claimed that a manager then asked him to resign. When he refused, he said he was forced to deal with a string of false accusations — one of which involved being suspended for stealing a 68-cent bell pepper from the company cafeteria.
A receptionist also told Nickel she was asked by management to provide a false statement regarding Nickel’s behavior. She refused.
Finally, in 2011, Nickel was fired, despite nine years of solid performance reviews.
Pushing back
Nickel sued, claiming age bias. Staples denied any wrongdoing, but a court clearly disagreed.
A jury awarded Nickel a whopping $26 million in damages — $22.8 million in punitive damage and $3.2 million in compensatory damages. Nickel’s lawyer said it’s the largest award in county history.
The lawyer also said he hopes the case puts other employers “on notice” about the consequences of age discrimination. If it means not paying tens of millions of dollars in court, employers may likely take notice.
Sindy Warren of Warren & Associates Inc. had the following to say about the case:The Vintage Computer Festival last weekend featured racks and racks of old minicomputers, enough terminals for an entire lab, and enough ancient storage devices to save a YouTube video. These storage devices – hard disks, tape readers, and 8″ disk drives – were only connected to vintage hardware, with one exception: a DEC RL02 drive connected to a modern laptop via USB.
The DEC RL02 drive is the closest you’re going to get to a modern mechanical hard drive with these old machines. It’s a huge rack unit with removable platters that can hold 10 Megabytes of storage. [Chris] found one of these old drives and because he wanted to get into FPGA development, decided to create a USB adapter for this huge, old drive.
The hardware isn’t too terribly complex, with a microcontroller and an FPGA that exposes the contents of the drive over USB mass storage. For anyone trying to bootstrap a PDP-11 or -8 system, [Chris] could download disk images from the Internet, write them to the disk, and load up the contents of the drive from the minicomputer. Now, he’s using it with SimH to have a physical drive for an emulated system, but the controller really doesn’t care about what format the disk pack is in. If [Chris] formatted a disk pack with a FAT file system, he would have the world’s largest and heaviest USB thumb drive in the world.
Video below.
Update: As promised, [Chris] put all the code in a gitDavid Fincher will only direct the Aaron Sorkin-scripted Steve Jobs biopic if Oscar-winner Christian Bale plays the lead role. That’s what The Wrap is reporting this afternoon. Fincher has been in talks to direct the film, which reportedly centers on three key keynote addresses in Jobs’ life. In a meeting with the head of Sony Pictures, Amy Pascal, the Fight Club director said he’d only do the film if Batman himself took on the role.
According to The Wrap, the biggest issue with this ultimatum is Bale has yet to be approached. He’s coming off another Oscar-nominated performance in American Hustle, a strong role in Out of the Furnace, and also recently finished filming Ridley Scott’s Biblical epic Exodus. Bale has earned a break.
Plus, Exodus comes out later this year and Fincher has Gone Girl out this year. A lot of time will pass before anything moves forward in an official manner.
The idea is fantastic though. Bale is certainly one of our best actors and well-known for being able to transform physically. From The Machinist to The Dark Knight, from American Hustle to The Fighter, Bale is a chameleon. Considering this film would likely cover three very different times in Jobs’ life, that’s a plus.
Ashton Kutcher did an admirable job playing the Apple co-founder in 2013’s Jobs, but no offense to the Two and a Half Men star, there’s really no comparison between he and the Oscar-winning actor. Add Fincher behind the camera and the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Social Network, and this film, if it all falls into place, becomes one of the most highly anticipated true-life films in recent memory.
What are your thoughts on this? Is Fincher smart to only make this movie with Bale? Could anyone else live up to the promise of another Sorkin-written, Fincher-directed tech film?Why the long face? is the game that brings taxidermy to life!
Making some faces at Boston FIG
One of the longer faces in the game, the addax.
Why the long face? is a face charades game that brings taxidermied faces to life!
Why the long face? has been a delight for players of all ages and is fun for kids, parties, and waking your face up in the morning. With this fresh deck, you'll be face to face with the animals from the L. C. Bates Museum in Maine.
The funding goal will cover a print run large enough to supply everyone who has expressed interest with a deck full of dour addaxes, snarling coyotes, and quizzical squirrels. Each set of Why the long face? includes a deck of cards, die, and mat to lay out the game.
We are well on the way toward our goal of getting a Long-tailed weasel into every home. There is still a lot of ground to scamper across- now is the time to support Why the long face?
"That game was super super lots of fun!" - The Family Gamers Podcast
More Boston FIG faces
What I'm funding
After a year of playing, it's time to get the game out onto faces around the world: I plan to produce a first run of the game Why the long face? The deck features faces from Maine's L. C. Bates Museum.
History
I created Why the long face? at the 2014 Harvard metaLAB Beautiful Data workshop, developed the format and rules, and made a Hungarian deck as artist-in-residence with Igor Metropol, Budapest, in spring 2015. This video summed up the game for my FIG application:
I reached out to the L.C. Bates Museum to see if they would work with me on this project, and let me take photographs of their museum's great faces to include in a print run of the game. The museum's staff has been supportive and enthusiastic; I am indebted to their generosity, and glad that their museum's faces will soon be made all over the land by players of Why the long face?!
Why the long face? was selected for, and featured in, the Tabletop Game Showcase at the 2015 Boston Festival of Independent Games.How to setup Flash Player in Steam Linux
Updated: December 31, 2012
You should also check the new tutorial, with additional tips and tricks on Flash configuration.
All right, a few days ago, I showed you how to install and setup the Steam beta client for Linux on Ubuntu Pangolin, the current Long Term Support (LTS) release. As you recall, there was one relatively big issue when browsing the game store. Videos were not available, because Steam thought that Flash was missing from the system. It was indeed there, but it could not find the player and use it as needed.
In this guide, we will resolve the problem. We will learn a bit about Steam client internals, we will learn how to fiddle and manually tweak Flash for Linux, although we have done this on many occasions before. And most importantly, we will restore the missing functionality to our Steam software. After me, gents.
Symptom
You go about checking cool videos for the available games, and Steam complains that you do not have a Flash Player on your box. Yet you do. Then, there's a set of instructions that could help you restore the missing functionality. Bother not. Those directions only work for Windows.
Solution and why it happens
The reason why Steam failed to find Flash on my box is because my system and Flash are 64-bit, whereas Steam client is 32-bit software. Thus, the player is not available for it. You will need to manually download the plugin from the Adobe site, extract the archive and then place the shared object file into a relevant directory. Let's do this step by step. First, head over to the Adobe website and download the 32-bit Linux.tar.gz archive.
Then, extract the file somewhere.
tar vzfx <downloaded archive>.tar.gz
One of the files in the archive will be libflashplayer.so. Verify that this is indeed a 32-bit version by using the most handy file command. We have discussed this at length in my highly useful Linux commands & configurations article.
Finally, you need to copy this file to one of the several locations that Steam queries for the plugin. Most commonly, these are either /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins or /usr/lib/firefox/plugins. You will need sudo permissions to copy the shared object there. Moreover, it will not be updated with the system periodically, so make sure you occasionally download a new version and place it there.
And that's it, restart Steam and you will have your Flash - just like any browser. Resolved.
More reading
You may also like these or need these articles:
Linux Flash Player setup
Flash Player privacy settings
Flash Player protected mode thingie
Google Chrome Flash issues
Conclusion
There you go. This is a fairly simple tutorial, but it has a lot. It introduces the gaming platform, it explains how Steam works and where it expects to find its Flash Player plugin, as well as why you might encounter this issue if you are using the 64-bit version of Linux and the plugin, which cannot be used with 32-bit software. Then, there's the manual installation of the Flash Player from an archive, which resolves the problem. A bit of everything, so it's quite nice.
Anyhow, this is the first of many great articles that will be born in the coming weeks, following my humble inclusion in the Steam beta. I do intend to keep you updated on my progress, the ups and downs, the lows and highs, how to install and configure various components if needed, how to resolve issues like this one, and finally, a handful of game reviews. It will be exciting. As always, if you think you want something checked or fixed, do email me.
Cheers.Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images
Main issues
Wallabies coach Michael Cheika has had to balance his Rugby World Cup planning with his Waratahs duties, and he has done so by holding a series of squad meetings usually after Super Rugby derbies. The scrum remains a problem area for the Wallabies, as evidenced by the end-of-year tour in 2014, and finding the best front-row combination from the solid Waratahs, Brumbies and Reds scrums will be a priority.
Squad strength
The Wallabies boast an abundance of quality backs and the back-row is another area of strength, particularly at openside flanker where there are four world-class options. The injury to Sam Carter has raised questions around lock, however, although the likes of Lopeti Timani and Rory Arnold have played themselves into contention with fine Super Rugby seasons. James Slipper and Stephen Moore appear to be the first-choice loose-head and hooker options but the situation is less clear at tight-head. Incumbent Sekope Kepu is likely to get first crack but Reds veteran Greg Holmes could be a bolter because of his strong set-piece work.
Injury concerns
Aside from the aforementioned Carter, the Wallabies have fared reasonably well compared with their trans-Tasman neighbours on the injury front. Hooker Tatafu Polota-Nau continues to battle concussion symptoms while No.8 Ben McCalman is out for six weeks with a fractured cheekbone. Quade Cooper had missed a large chunk of the Super Rugby season, but he returned in Round 16 to give Cheika another option to consider at No.10.
What the locals are saying
"Size doesn't guarantee you anything in Test rugby, particularly against the All Blacks whose multi-faceted game and high skill levels remain the benchmark. But to neglect it underestimates the sheer frightening ferocity of the collisions these days. You can still play the game beautifully, but not without some beasts. And Australia may be getting there." - Paul Cully, Sydney Morning HeraldCarl Court, Getty Images
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has moved a much-anticipated press conference on Tuesday from London to Berlin, citing unspecified "specific information."
Assange, who has been living in asylum in Ecuador's embassy in London for four years, had been scheduled to deliver a speech from his balcony during which it was expected he would release information that could be damaging to US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Assange had said in August he planned to release "significant" information about the Democratic nominee before the November 8 election.
The change in venue, which WikiLeaks announced in a tweet Monday, came just hours after the document-leaking site tweeted a report that quoted Clinton as appearing to suggest use of a drone strike against Assange. According to True Pundit, Clinton asked during a 2010 State Department meeting about WikiLeaks and Assange, "Can't we just drone this guy?"
The quote, allegedly made while Clinton was serving as Secretary of State, was included in a massive trove of classified State Department documents that Wikileaks began releasing later that month.
Representatives for WikiLeaks and Clinton's campaign didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
The WikiLeaks founder sought asylum from Ecuador in 2012 after Swedish investigators issued a European arrest warrant for Assange that required British police to detain and extradite him. He is trying to avoid extradition to Sweden out of fear he would then be extradited to the US to face questioning over classified material published on WikiLeaks.JNS.org – Palestinians burned the French flag in protest of the new cover of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Friday.
Several hundred Palestinian protesters gathered on the Temple Mount during prayer services on to demonstrate against the magazine’s decision to publish an image of the Prophet Mohammed on its Jan. 14 cover.
In a video, the protesters can be seen waving the Hamas flag and other Islamic flags while chanting “jihad, jihad, we will die in the name of God,” “Allahu Akbar,” and “Muhammad [is] our master and leader forever” as they set fire to the French flag.
On the cover of its Jan. 14 edition, Charlie Hebdo featured a cartoon of Mohammed holding a sign saying, “Je Suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), with a headline above the cartoon reading, “Tout Est Pardonne” (All Is Forgiven).
Protests also occurred in several other Arab countries on Friday, including in Jordan, whose King Abdullah traveled to France to march with French President Francois Hollande during the Jan. 11 anti-terror rally in Paris.This summer will see the ever-popular Members’ Day return to Emirates Stadium on Thursday, 3 August. Members’ Day is the club’s largest free fan event of the year.
It gives up to 10,000 supporters the opportunity to watch Arsène Wenger and the first-team squad train at Emirates Stadium ahead of the new season.
Not only that but after training the first-team squad will then take part in exclusive events around the stadium available exclusively to Members of the adult and Junior Gunner Membership schemes.
A range of activities will also be arranged around the lower concourse of Emirates Stadium providing entertainment for supporters of all ages.
Turnstiles are due to open at 10.30am, with the training session set to commence at 11.30am. Please note this time is subject to change. First-team activities will then start early afternoon. We would like to advise that seating is unreserved for this event.
Click here to reserve free tickets now.
We are pleased to announce that the players will be taking part in some post training activities which will give you the opportunity to ask the players questions. To book your place at one of these exclusive events, which will be held in our exclusive Woolwich and Royal Club Level lounges of the Stadium, please click here. There is a limited number of spaces available so please book now to avoid disappointment.
If you are a Junior Gunner, then you can attend our exclusive JG Q&A in Dial Square with players, entertainment and the JG App world. Click here to register, first come first served!
On the day you will need to bring your membership card to gain access to both the training session and the post training activities on club level.Investigators from an environmental watchdog set up as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement want to investigate whether Canada is enforcing its laws on toxic leakage from giant oilsands tailings ponds.
Canada has already told the Commission on Environmental Cooperation that it doesn't have that right. The disagreement sets up a second fight between the Harper government and the three-nation body intended to ensure free trade doesn't degrade environmental enforcement.
"The (investigators) have acted contrary to their authority," says a letter from Environment Canada to the commission. "The current submission should be terminated."
The conflict stems from a complaint filed in 2010 by two environmental groups and three individuals.
It cites reports and research from governments, industry and environmentalists that all conclude an unknown amount of tailings from the oilsands are seeping into area groundwater. The groups allege the seepage adds up to as much as four billion litres a year of waste water containing hydrocarbons and heavy metals known to be toxic to fish.
They say such releases break the Fisheries Act and they've recommended the commission investigate whether Canada is turning a blind eye to environmental crimes by a powerful and lucrative industry.
"We've all seen the accumulating evidence over the past year in terms of linking tailings to local watersheds," said Hannah McKinnon of Environmental Defence Canada, one of the groups that filed the complaint. "Most of us believe they really don't have this under control."
On Thursday, commission investigators recommended the body begin looking into those complaints. Any such move must first be approved by a majority vote of the three NAFTA nations.
Instead of responding to the allegations, Canada tried to block the commission by pointing to a legal action filed by a private citizen in Fort McMurray, Alta., that levelled similar criticisms. The commission is not allowed to investigate any matter that's before the courts.
That legal action was heard in February. The person who filed it confirmed to The Canadian Press that he considers the matter dead.
Nevertheless, Environment Canada argues that because the appeal period isn't over, the commission's staff is offside.
That sets up an impasse which could play out similarly to another conflict with the commission over Canada's handling of wild salmon stocks.
Commission staff have recommended an investigation into whether Canada protects wild salmon stocks adequately from disease carried by farmed salmon.
Canada, the U.S. and Mexico must vote on whether to approve a salmon investigation by Tuesday. Canada has said it will ignore the results.
"We do not intend to engage in or recognize as valid... any further consideration of this submission," Environment Canada has written.
Department spokesman Mark Johnson said in an email Thursday that Canada will let the process unfold.
"Canada takes enforcement of our environmental laws very seriously," he said.
A vote on whether to proceed with a tailings pond investigation must be held by Oct. 27. The investigation must be complete within 180 working days and the countries have another 150 working days to review it and decide if it will be made public.
The commission's enforcement powers are limited, McKinnon acknowledged.
"This is just another opportunity to shed legitimate light on these serious problems."
McKinnon said the recommendation for a review comes as the world grows increasingly skeptical of Canada's environmental policies.
"The world really is watching the tar sands and watching Alberta and watching the federal government to see if they really are the great environmental stewards that all of the PR claims they are."
Since the commission was formed in 1995, Canada has been the subject of 37 per cent of complaints filed. Mexico was named in 49 per cent and the United States in 11 per cent.
Also on HuffPostIn his first game back from a tweaked hamstring injury, the Cubs' top prospect smacked a grand slam and drove in five to key an 11-run first inning in Class A Advanced Myrtle Beach's 11-4 rout of Winston-Salem.
"What's most impressive is his workouts in between the games," Myrtle Beach hitting coach Guillermo Martinez said. "He does not miss a beat in the cage and it all comes down to his work ethic. Right away, he's in the zone and ready to hit because he prepares right and has tons of confidence. He's ready to go from the first pitch."
Gameday box score
After the first three Pelicans reached to begin the game, Jimenez picked out a 1-2 pitch from Winston-Salem starter Luis Martinez (0-1) and sent it over the left-field wall.
Video: Myrtle Beach's Jimenez jacks grand slam to left
It was the second grand slam of Jimenez's career. The first came last July 29 for Class A South Bend, where Martinez served as the hitting coach.
"Eloy is as professional as they come," Martinez said. "It was the same thing last year with South Bend. He shows up ready to work and is just on a completely different level from other players on how he goes about his preparation before, during and after the game."
After Myrtle Beach batted around, the 20-year-old outfielder cashed in again during his second at-bat of the frame, this time with an RBI single to left.
"When I was in the locker room after the game, I was thinking about if I'd ever seen or been a part of anything like that," Martinez said of the 11-run outburst. "I can't say that I have."
In his last three games, Jimenez has batted.455 (6-for-11) with a pair of homers and seven RBIs. Even when he gets out, the Dominican Republic native leaves an impression on his teammates, coaches and opponents.
"He has such a presence at the plate that even when he swings and misses, it's got an impact," Martinez added. "Today, they were really challenging him, and he still stuck to his plan and knew how to get it done."
Jimenez missed the first month of the season with a bone bruise. He made his Class A Advanced debut on May 14 but hit the shelf a week later with a hamstring issue. Even though he's been limited to nine games, the Dominican Republic native has shown no signs of rust and sports a 1.057 OPS with three homers and 10 RBIs.
"He's all about hitting. He has a plan every at-bat and knows exactly what he needs to do to execute it," Martinez said. "Even in the dugout, he's talking about hitting and asking the right questions. He wants to know the best way to get on the pitcher. His mental preparation is really unbelievable."
Martinez also lauded the poise and humility shown by Jimenez, who is ranked as MLB.com's No. 10 overall prospect.
"We all know he's going to be a great player. Today, I told him we need to continue to work hard at it and forget the outside stuff and try not to focus on what people are saying or writing, just worry about Myrtle Beach and keep his focus here. And he's done a great job with that," Martinez concluded.
MiLB include
Cubs No. 10 prospect Eddy Martinez collected three hits and an RBI and fifth-ranked Oscar De La Cruz (4-2) struck out a season-high 10 batters over 5 2/3 innings.To fund an immediate increase in military spending and a southern border wall, the Trump administration has asked Congress to impose $18 billion in cuts to the fiscal year 2017 non-defense discretionary budget, including about $3 billion in cuts to federal R&D programs.
A proposed distribution for these cuts is detailed in a White House Office of Management and Budget spreadsheet obtained this week by various news outlets.
Proposed R&D cuts offer insight into White House thinking
Titled “FY 2017 Reduction Options,” the spreadsheet does not have any binding authority, and Congress may well end up disregarding it. Nevertheless, it does provide insight into the administration’s thinking about R&D funding priorities.
By and large, the cuts are consistent with those the administration would like to impose for fiscal year 2018, as outlined in the budget blueprint the White House released on March 16. In terms of dollar figures, the cuts to R&D exhibit a slight preference for targeting big-budget programs:
fy17-rd-cuts-dollars.jpg
Proposed cuts to R&D exhibit a slight preference for targeting big-budget programs. (Image credit – FYI)
However, in terms of percentage of agency and program budgets, the cuts reflect a clear set of priorities. The administration wants to cut back immediately on programs that conduct and fund applied R&D and that provide assistance in technology commercialization. This is consistent with the administration’s stated desire to pare back certain agencies to their “core” missions and to divest from activities regarded as the private sector’s responsibility.
While basic research programs would also be subject to belt-tightening, those cuts are more modest and show no obvious preference for cutting certain fields of research over others.
fy17-rd-cuts-percentage.jpg
The proposed cuts reflect a desire to cut back immediately on programs that conduct and fund applied R&D and that provide assistance to technology commercialization efforts. (Image credit – FYI)
Two additional points should be made, given that fiscal year 2017 is already about half finished. First, if enacted, agencies would have to rush to implement recommended cuts by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. Also, by the time appropriations are enacted, agencies will generally already have obligated their spending for more than half the fiscal year. Therefore, cuts would have to be taken entirely from those funds not yet obligated. To roughly approximate annualized funding levels for the levels that would be experienced during the remainder of the fiscal year, double the stated percentage being cut from the agency budget.
NSF and NIST research targeted for moderate cuts
The spreadsheet sheds light on the administration’s intentions toward two science agencies largely ignored in its budget blueprint: the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
According to the spreadsheet, NSF should have its current budget cut by $350 million, or 5 percent, which would reduce the number of grants awarded through September. This is consistent with the
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people.” “Life is like music: It must be composed by fear, feeling and instinct.” et cetera.
While these are nice quotes for teenage girls to put on their bedroom walls, they don’t tell us much about music.
Despite being banal, trite, and often irritating, these cliché quotes do offer some insight into the nature of music. If anything, they point us to the important role music takes in our lives. If one were to take a survey, I’d bet 9 out of 10 people would say music exists for entertainment. We listen to it while driving, running, cooking, cleaning, working, studying; we dance to it, we tell others about it, we sing along with it.
I’d agree with any person who says that 99% of music on the radio serves one purpose: entertainment. I’m guilty of listening to it…we’re all guilty. We love being flattered by our modern day sophists, i.e. the musical “artist.” So is it the case that music is simply a mode of entertainment?
I hope not.
True music may be entertaining, but it is not simply entertainment. True music (i.e. music that is not just entertainment) does something unique to the person listening. E.T.A. Hoffmann, in his essay on Beethoven, speaks about this unique relationship between the nature of music and what it does to the listener.
Some readers may find Hoffmann’s essay too polemic; however, Hoffmann touches upon certain characteristics of music which open the door toward a genuine understanding of music’s impact on the human person.
In his introduction, Hoffmann states,
“Music discloses to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensual world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing.”
This passage provides a summary of Hoffmann’s analysis.
He continues in his essay describing Beethoven to Mozart and Haydn. Although Mozart and Haydn begin to capture what lies at the heart of music, it is not until the arrival of Beethoven that man surrenders himself to an inexpressible longing. Thus, Hoffmann says,
“Beethoven’s instrumental music opens to us also the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable. Burning flashes of light shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we become narrower and narrower confines until they destroy us – but not the pain of that endless longing in which each joy that has climbed aloft in jubilant song sinks back and is swallowed up, and it is only in this pain, which consumes love, hope, and happiness but does not destroy them, which seeks to burst our breasts with a many-voiced consonance of all the passions, that we live on, enchanted beholders of the supernatural!”
What a bold claim! Through instrumental music – music which Hoffmann claims is true music – the listener is moved out of this earthly realm and is “destroyed” by the Infinite. Yet, man’s longing for the Infinite remains.
In his essay, “Thoughts About Music,” Josef Pieper writes,
“Music prompts the philosopher’s continued interest because it is by its nature so close to the fundamentals of human existence….The one question particularly intriguing to the searching mind of the philosopher when he reflects on the phenomenon of music is this: What indeed do we perceive when we listen to music?”
Addressing the question, “What do we perceive when we listen to music?” Pieper discovers that there is no particular object as with other arts; that is, some represented objective reality. Even lyrical music does not provide man with an object in the proper sense of the term. One hears the words and can derive meaning from them but there is an additional meaning in the music itself, something absent in the words. Pieper asks again, “What is it we perceive in music?” He answers by quoting Schopenhauer, who states, “Music ‘does not speak of things but tells of weal and woe.”
Pieper clarifies,
“Weal and woe – these are concepts related to the will; they point to the bonum, the good, seen as the intrinsic moving force of the will. The will is always directed toward the good.”
Addressing any moralistic misconceptions, Pieper gives an existentialist definition of man. Man is a homo viator – a man on a journey.
“Man’s being is always dynamic (geschehendes Sein); man is never just ‘there’. Man ‘is’ insofar as he ‘becomes’ – not only in his physical reality….In his spiritual reality, too, man is constantly moving on….man is intrinsically a pilgrim, ‘not yet arrived.”
We can ask, “What is it that man moves towards?” – Pieper answers, the good. This movement towards the good always has happiness as its objective. Pieper notes,
“Neither this object (Glückseligkeit) nor this process (becoming) can ever be adequately described in words….St. Augustine declares: ‘The Good – you hear this word and you take a deep breath; you hear it and you utter a sigh….We cannot say, and yet cannot be silent either….What are we to do, employing neither speech nor silence? We ought to rejoice! Jubilate! Shout out your heart’s delight in wordless jubilation!’ Such ‘wordless jubilation’ is known as music!”
Here we begin to see the insight Hoffmann provides in his essay. The longing for the Infinite is something real. Man’s fundamental disposition as a homo viator is to find bliss in the Infinite. Through his music, Beethoven allows the music to swallow up the happiness of jubilant song. In doing so, “[It] does not destroy them,” as Hoffmann states, “[But] seeks to burst our breast with a many-voiced consonance of all the passions, that we live on, enchanted beholders of the supernatural!” Through Pieper we see how Hoffmann expresses ideas concerning the nature of instrumental music and man. Yet we can ask, “What is it in music that allows man to yearn for the Infinite?”
To answer, let us turn to Dietrich von Hildebrand’s writing on aesthetics.
Since the majority of von Hildebrand’s aesthetical writings have not been translated, I’ll actually draw from John F. Crosby’s entry in The Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics. As with the majority of his other works, von Hildebrand embeds his value theory within his aesthetics.
Crosby states,
“By ‘value’ von Hildebrand means the intrinsic worthiness or excellence or nobility or dignity of a being. And according to him values are not scattered and random phenomena, but are gathered into an ordered whole.”
Unlike a bonum, values are not something relational to the person, that is, beneficial for them. Their dignity and worthiness is something values contain in themselves. From this von Hildebrand determines that all values in have an “aesthetic value,” namely something admirable or beautiful about them. Although they all contain this “aesthetic value,” their aesthetic appeal is secondary to their primary “metaphysical beauty.” Thus, there are two categories, values which have “metaphysical beauty” and those which are “aesthetic values” in and of themselves, e.g. music. Although all values have an aesthetical dimension to them, one (e.g. Hume) could make the claim for aesthetical subjectivity among pure aesthetic values. Von Hildebrand argues against this claim, emphasizing the objectivity of aesthetic value.
Crosby continues,
“By objectivity he of course means, to begin with, that aesthetic value is not given to us as a component of our experiencing (as if it were a part of our conscious experiencing, or Erleben), but is given over and against us, as an intentional object in or on some being. But he also means more than this: he means that beings having aesthetic value really do have it, so that they show themselves for what they really are when we experience them as beautiful, which means that people who fail to experience them as beautiful also fail to experience what is really there.”
This insight into the objectivity of aesthetic values allows for what Crosby claims as
“His greatest single contribution to aesthetics….Take the beauty of the streaked colors appearing in the clear sky at dawn; von Hildebrand is struck by the depth and sublimity that can be found in this beauty, and also struck by the fact that the beauty does not seem to be proper to, or proportioned to, the light and colors and spatial expanse from which it arises.”
From what we have gathered, Hoffmann opens the door to a genuine analysis of music. In Beethoven’s instrumental music, we are taken up in rapture toward the Infinite – in a sense, destroying oneself. Yet this destruction is a destruction of the finitude of this existence, replaced with the yearning for the supernatural. Pieper affirms this claim in his essay on music. Music is a wordless expression of man’s journey towards bliss. With von Hildebrand, we see how music as an aesthetic value contains within itself an objective dimension, whereby the human person is drawn out of himself into a transcendental relationship. The sublimity of Beethoven’s music – emphasized by Hoffmann – does not depend on man’s Erleben, but in a sense, pours itself out upon human experience.
The result of this overflow of beauty is that man loses himself in this world and is taken up into the world of the supernatural. It is this sublime reality to which Hoffmann emphatically returns. With these two authors, we can see the “destruction” Hoffmann explains is actually a positive destruction. We experience the beauty of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as it really is – namely, an expression of man’s longing for bliss, for the Infinite. Music, as an expression of the relationship between Infinity and the finite, is something real. True music is more than entertainment, it is something lived in man’s experience.
Advertisements[1] no data fewer than 9,250 9,250–16,000 16,000–22,750 22,750–29,500 29,500–36,250 36,250–43,000 43,000–49,750 49,750–56,500 56,500–63,250 63,250–70,000 70,000–80,000 more than 80,000 Disability-adjusted life years out of 100,000 lost due to any cause in 2004.
The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a measure of overall disease burden, expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death. It was developed in the 1990s as a way of comparing the overall health and life expectancy of different countries.
The DALY is becoming increasingly common in the field of public health and health impact assessment (HIA). It "extends the concept of potential years of life lost due to premature death... to include equivalent years of 'healthy' life lost by virtue of being in states of poor health or disability."[2] In so doing, mortality and morbidity are combined into a single, common metric.
Calculation [ edit ]
The disability-adjusted life year is a societal measure of the disease or disability burden in populations. DALYs are calculated by combining measures of life expectancy as well as the adjusted quality of life during a burdensome disease or disability for a population. DALYs are related to the quality-adjusted life year (QALY) measure; however QALYs only measure the benefit with and without medical intervention and therefore do not measure the total burden. Also, QALYs tend to be an individual measure, and not a societal measure.
Traditionally, health liabilities were expressed using one measure, the years of life lost (YLL) due to dying early. A medical condition that did not result in dying younger than expected was not counted. The years lost due to disability (YLD) component measures the burden of living with a disease or disability.
DALYs are calculated by taking the sum of these two components:[3]
DALY = YLL + YLD
The DALY relies on an acceptance that the most appropriate measure of the effects of chronic illness is time, both time lost due to premature death and time spent disabled by disease. One DALY, therefore, is equal to one year of healthy life lost.
How much a medical condition affects a person is called the disability weight (DW). This is determined by disease or disability and does not vary with age. Tables have been created of thousands of diseases and disabilities, ranging from Alzheimer's disease to loss of finger, with the disability weight meant to indicate the level of disability that results from the specific condition.
Examples of disability weight Condition DW 2004[4] DW 2010 Alzheimer's and other dementias 0.666 0.666 Blindness 0.594 0.195 Schizophrenia 0.528 0.576 AIDS, not on ART 0.505 0.547 Burns 20%-60% of body 0.441 0.438 Fractured femur 0.372 0.308 Moderate depression episode 0.350 0.406 Amputation of foot 0.300 0.021-0.1674 Deafness 0.229 0.167-0.281 Infertility 0.180 0.026-0.056 Amputation of finger 0.102 0.030 Lower back pain 0.061 0.322-0.374
Examples of the disability weight are shown on the right. Some of these are "short term", and the long-term weights may be different.
The most noticeable change between the 2004 and 2010 figures for disability weights above are for blindness as it was considered the weights are a measure of health rather than well-being (or welfare) and a blind person is not considered to be ill. "In the GBD terminology, the term disability is used broadly to refer to departures from optimal health in any of the important domains of health."
At the population level, the disease burden as measured by DALYs is calculated by adding YLL to YLD. YLL uses the life expectancy at the time of death.[7] YLD is determined by the number of years disabled weighted by level of disability caused by a disability or disease using the formula:
YLD = I x DW x L
In this formula I = number of incident cases in the population, DW = disability weight of specific condition, and L = average duration of the case until remission or death (years). There is also a prevalence (as opposed to incidence) based calculation for YLD. Number of years lost due to premature death is calculated by
YLL = N x L
where N = number of deaths due to condition, L = standard life expectancy at age of death.[8] Note that life expectancies are not the same at different ages. For example, in Paleolithic era, life expectancy at birth was 33 year, but life expectancy at the age of 15 was additional 39 years (total 54).[9]
Japanese life expectancy statistics are used as the standard for measuring premature death, as the Japanese have the longest life expectancies.[10]
Age weighting [ edit ]
[11] Some studies use DALYs calculated to place greater value on a year lived as a young adult. This formula produces average values around age 10 and age 55, a peak around age 25, and lowest values among very young children and very old people.
A crucial distinction among DALY studies has been the use of "age-weighting", in which the value of each year of life depends on age; however, the World Health Organization has abandoned age weighting and time discounting in DALYs since 2010.[12]
There are two components to this differential accounting of time: age-weighting and time-discounting. Age-weighting is based on the theory of human capital. Commonly, years lived as a young adult are valued more highly than years spent as a young child or older adult, as these are years of peak productivity. Age-weighting receives considerable criticism for valuing young adults at the expense of children and the old. Some criticize, while others rationalize, this as reflecting society's interest in productivity and receiving a return on its investment in raising children. This age-weighting system means that somebody disabled at 30 years of age, for ten years, would be measured as having a higher loss of DALYs (a greater burden of disease), than somebody disabled by the same disease or injury at the age of 70 for ten years.
This age-weighting function is by no means a universal methodology in HALY studies, but is common when using DALYs. Cost-effectiveness studies using QALYs, for example, do not discount time at different ages differently.[13] This age-weighting function applies only to the calculation of DALYs lost due to disability. Years lost to premature death are determined from the age at death and life expectancy.
The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) 2001–2002 counted disability adjusted life years equally for all ages, but the GBD 1990 and GBD 2004 studies used the formula[14]
W = 0.1658 Y e − 0.04 Y {\displaystyle W=0.1658Ye^{-0.04Y}} [15] where Y {\displaystyle Y} is the age at which the year is lived and W {\displaystyle W} is the value assigned to it relative to an average value of 1.
In these studies future years were also discounted at a 3% rate to account for future health care losses. Time discounting, which is separate from the age-weighting function, describes preferences in time as used in economic models.[16]
The effects of the interplay between life expectancy and years lost, discounting, and social weighting are complex, depending on the severity and duration of illness. For example, the parameters used in the GBD 1990 study generally give greater weight to deaths at any year prior to age 39 than afterward, with the death of a newborn weighted at 33 DALYs and the death of someone aged 5–20 weighted at approximately 36 DALYs.[17]
As a result of numerous discussions, by 2010 the World Health Organization had abandoned the ideas of age weighting and time discounting.[12] They had also substituted the idea of prevalence for incidence (when a condition started) because this is what surveys measure.
Economic applications [ edit ]
The methodology is not an economic measure. It measures how much healthy life is lost. It does not assign a monetary value to any person or condition, and it does not measure how much productive work or money is lost as a result of death and disease. However, HALYs, including DALYs and QALYs, are especially useful in guiding the allocation of health resources as they provide a common numerator, allowing for the expression of utility in terms of DALYs/dollar, or QALY/dollar.[13] For example, in Gambia, provision of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine costs $670 per DALY saved.[18] This number can then be compared to other treatments for other diseases, to determine whether investing resources in preventing or treating a different disease would be more efficient in terms of overall health.
Examples [ edit ]
Schizophrenia has a 0.53 weighting and a broken femur a 0.37 weighting in the latest WHO weightings.[19][20]
Australia [ edit ]
Cancer (25.1/1,000), cardiovascular (23.8/1,000), mental problems (17.6/1,000), neurological (15.7/1,000), chronic respiratory (9.4/1,000) and diabetes (7.2/1,000) are the main causes of good years of expected life lost to disease or premature death.[21] Despite this, Australia has one of the longest life expectancies in the world.
Africa [ edit ]
These illustrate the problematic diseases and outbreaks occurring in 2013 in Zimbabwe, shown to have the greatest impact on health disability were typhoid, anthrax, malaria, common diarrhea, and dysentery.[22]
PTSD rates [ edit ]
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) DALY estimates from 2004 for the world's 25 most populous countries give Asian/Pacific countries and the United States as the places where PTSD impact is most concentrated (as shown here).
Noise-induced hearing loss [ edit ]
The disability-adjusted life years attributable to hearing impairment for noise-exposed U.S. workers across all industries was calculated to be 2.53 healthy years lost annually per 1,000 noise-exposed workers. Workers in the mining and construction sectors lost 3.45 and 3.09 healthy years per 1,000 workers, respectively. Overall, 66% of the sample worked in the manufacturing sector and represented 70% of healthy years lost by all workers.[23]
History and usage [ edit ]
Originally developed by Harvard University for the World Bank in 1990, the World Health Organization subsequently adopted the method in 1996 as part of the Ad hoc Committee on Health Research "Investing in Health Research & Development" report. The DALY was first conceptualized by Murray and Lopez in work carried out with the World Health Organization and the World Bank known as the Global Burden of Disease Study, which was published in 1990.[citation needed] It is now a key measure employed by the United Nations World Health Organization in such publications as its Global Burden of Disease.[24]
The DALY was also used in the 1993 World Development Report.[25]:x
Criticism [ edit ]
Both DALYs and QALYs are forms of HALYs health adjusted life years.
Although some have criticized DALYs as essentially an economic measure of human productive capacity for the affected individual,[26][irrelevant citation] this is not so. DALYs do have an age-weighting function that has been rationalized based on the economic productivity of persons at that age, but health-related quality of life measures are used to determine the disability weights, which range from 0 to 1 (no disability to 100% disabled) for all disease. These weights are based not on a person's ability to work, but rather on the effects of the disability on the person's life in general. This is why mental illness is one of the leading diseases as measured by global burden of disease studies, with depression accounting for 51.84 million DALYs. Perinatal conditions, which affect infants with a very low age-weight function, are the leading cause of lost DALYs at 90.48 million. Measles is fifteenth at 23.11 million.[13][27][28]
Some commentators have expressed doubt over whether the disease burden surveys (such as EQ-5D) fully capture the impacts of mental illness, due to factors including ceiling effects.[29][30][31]
According to Pliskin et al., the QALY model requires utility independent, risk neutral, and constant proportional tradeoff behaviour.[32] Because of these theoretical assumptions, the meaning and usefulness of the QALY is debated.[33][34] Perfect health is difficult, if not impossible, to define. Some argue that there are health states worse than being dead, and that therefore there should be negative values possible on the health spectrum (indeed, some health economists have incorporated negative values into calculations). Determining the level of health depends on measures that some argue place disproportionate importance on physical pain or disability over mental health.[35]
The method of ranking interventions on grounds of their cost per QALY gained ratio (or ICER) is controversial because it implies a quasi-utilitarian calculus to determine who will or will not receive treatment.[36] However, its supporters argue that since health care resources are inevitably limited, this method enables them to be allocated in the way that is approximately optimal for society, including most patients. Another concern is that it does not take into account equity issues such as the overall distribution of health states – particularly since younger, healthier cohorts have many times more QALYs than older or sicker individuals. As a result, QALY analysis may undervalue treatments which benefit the elderly or others with a lower life expectancy. Also, many would argue that all else being equal, patients with more severe illness should be prioritised over patients with less severe illness if both would get the same absolute increase in utility.[37]
As early as 1989, Loomes and McKenzie recommended that research be conducted concerning the validity of QALYs.[38] In 2010, with funding from the European Commission, the European Consortium in Healthcare Outcomes and Cost-Benefit Research (ECHOUTCOME) began a major study on QALYs as used in health technology assessment.[39] Ariel Beresniak, the study's lead author, was quoted as saying that it was the "largest-ever study specifically dedicated to testing the assumptions of the QALY".[40] In January 2013, at its final conference, ECHOUTCOME released preliminary results of its study which surveyed 1361 people "from academia" in Belgium, France, Italy and the UK.[40][41][42] The researchers asked the subjects to respond to 14 questions concerning their preferences for various health states and durations of those states (e.g., 15 years limping versus 5 years in a wheelchair).[42] They concluded that "preferences expressed by the respondents were not consistent with the QALY theoretical assumptions" that quality of life can be measured in consistent intervals, that life-years and quality of life are independent of each other, that people are neutral about risk, and that willingness to gain or lose life-years is constant over time.[42] ECHOUTCOME also released "European Guidelines for Cost-Effectiveness Assessments of Health Technologies", which recommended not using QALYs in healthcare decision making.[43] Instead, the guidelines recommended that cost-effectiveness analyses focus on "costs per relevant clinical outcome".[40][43]
In response to the ECHOUTCOME study, representatives of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the Scottish Medicines Consortium, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development made the following points. First, QALYs are better than alternative measures.[40][41] Second, the study was "limited".[40][41] Third, problems with QALYs were already widely acknowledged.[41] Fourth, the researchers did not take budgetary constraints into consideration.[41] Fifth, the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence uses QALYs that are based on 3395 interviews with residents of the UK, as opposed to residents of several European countries.[40] Finally, people who call for the elimination of QALYs may have "vested interests".[40]
See also [ edit ]San Francisco, April 28 Hayes Grier is hungry. It’s well after 9 p.m., after a two-hour show and a long day, and the dinner delivery guy is running late, and the 14-year-old’s face is starting to get that wild-eyed, slightly manic look that was all but invented by overstimulated and underfed teenage boys. He can’t sit still but has nowhere to go, so he paces around the narrow green room in San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom, chewing gum and scrolling through his Twitter mentions, which stack up at a rate of dozens, sometimes hundreds, per minute. If you listen closely, you can hear the chatter of 2,000 or so fans, nearly every last one of them a teenage girl, as they spill out of the venue and into the street. But Hayes is single-minded, desperately rooting around the green room for something, anything, to eat. He finds a pack of fruit snacks and tears into them, never once glancing up from his phone. With full lips, Bieber bangs, and piercing blue eyes, Hayes has the unsalted-butter looks of the love interest on a CW show or the villain in a John Hughes movie. He dresses in the superficially alternative but fundamentally nonthreatening uniform popularized by Urban Outfitters and adopted by every (white) Cool Guy in every high school in America: jeans, skate shoes, graphic T-shirt or baggy tank top with the armholes cut low. He speaks slowly and indistinctly, with a soft North Carolina accent. He has beautiful teeth.
Michael Short for BuzzFeed News Hayes Grier in Las Vegas on Saturday, May 2, 2015.
Michael Short for BuzzFeed News Michael Short for BuzzFeed News Michael Short for BuzzFeed News
And though this evening’s show, stop number five on a hugely popular 18-city bus tour thrown by a young and lucrative company called DigiTour, featured six other performers — five boys and one girl, each of them social media stars as well — Hayes was clearly the biggest draw. At the show, dozens, if not hundreds, of girls wore bright-red T-shirts emblazoned with his name on them in a blocky, football-jersey-style font, on sale at the merch table for $30 each. When he took the stage — rolling in on a dirt bike that he then dramatically dismounted, tossing those Bieber bangs back as he removed his helmet — the Regency erupted into an otherworldly roar that somehow managed to combine the upper-register shriek of a teakettle coming to boil and the solid, full-body wallop of a moving train coming very, very close to you. The girls rushed forward, mouths open and phones aloft. One burst into wild, jagged, wracking sobs. Beyond the dirt bike stunt, Hayes doesn’t do much during the half hour or so he spends onstage. Though several DigiTour-ers harbor musical ambitions (and, in most cases, the talent to realize them), beyond moderate charisma and those pop idol looks, Hayes doesn’t seem to — or even purport to — have any of the qualities that one might equate with sell-out-a-theater stardom. He doesn’t sing or act or play an instrument or tell great jokes or even play sports exceptionally well; he just is, and that is far more than enough. As Meridith Valiando Rojas, DigiTour’s 30-year-old CEO, explains later, “Some of these kids, their talent is relating to their audience. They’re the coolest people you know, and they happen to have 5 million friends.”
Michael Short for BuzzFeed News Michael Short for BuzzFeed News
Perhaps for this reason, the DigiTour show itself seems mostly designed to enable the boys to mug for the crowd as much as possible and the crowd, in turn, to scream as much as possible. All told, it feels less like the kind of event you’d expect to nearly sell out a massive ballroom than it does a summer camp talent show, running through a sort of cartoon version of a typical day at a typical high school in a typical town: First, there’s homeroom (introductions), lunchtime (food fight), cheerleading practice (a goofy, strutty dance sequence set to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”). And then, of course, the denouement: prom, during which six girls and one boy are plucked from the audience and matched with a cast member for an onstage slow dance set to Wiz Khalifa's summer funeral banger "See You Again." Between these bits, the more musically oriented cast members sing, covering songs by nostalgia or Top 40 pop acts such as Journey and Drake. Four of the kids do a Fallon-style lip-synch battle, and Hayes and another cast member, Tez Mengestu, rap along sputteringly to Rae Sremmurd’s “No Flex Zone.” But by and large, the cast do not really perform so much as appear. Roughly once every show, a booming voice prods, “Now, let’s — take — some — SELFIEEEES,” in the way another announcer might implore a crowd to make some noise. The fans oblige.
Last year, according to Valiando Rojas, DigiTour sold 120,000 tickets for 60 shows. (In 2013, they sold 18,000.) This year, it’s on track to more than double last year's numbers. Nearly as soon as this tour is over, a slightly new arrangement of stars will gather for DigiFest, a six-city outdoor festival circuit that Valiando Rojas calls “Coachella for the YouTube generation.” After that, a new iteration of DigiTour, with different talent and different tour stops, will rev up: The cycle is endless, because the demand is bottomless. Though Valiando Rojas declined to reveal exact revenue figures, industry estimates suggest that DigiTour will bring in up to $20 million this year. Other than the dads, who tend to huddle near the bar, exchanging looks of befuddled resignation, there are less than a dozen boys at each show. DigiTour is manifestly, happily, a place for girls — about 95%, mainly between the ages of 10 and 18 — and for a particularly girly-feeling, completely un-self-conscious kind of fandom. It’s a kind of fandom with no irony and no limits, a kind of fandom that seems to be almost exclusively practiced by people old enough to understand the vector of their desires but young enough not to be embarrassed by them.
Michael Short for BuzzFeed News
The show ends, as it always does, with a group number, all seven cast members onstage singing a song by fellow social media stars Jack and Jack, arms around one another's shoulders. And then the floor lights come up, and the fans stream out, and the kids head backstage to wait as the crew packs up and prepares for the overnight drive to L.A. Alec Bailey, an 18-year-old from North Carolina who hopes to use this tour to kickstart a contemporary-country music career, fiddles with his new Polaroid camera. Alyssa Shouse, 19, a YouTube singer and the tour’s only girl, sips water — she’s had a brutal sore throat all day. Daniel Skye — a very young-looking 14-year-old from South Florida — strums a guitar. They chew Sour Bubble Tape and look at their phones and sift through the gifts tossed onstage and nervously passed off by fans: stuffed animals, letters, candy. Finally, at around 10, dinner — burgers and fries delivered from the diner around the corner — arrives at the Regency, and the kids abscond to their tour bus to eat it.
Michael Short for BuzzFeed News Tour members (left to right) Alec Bailey, Aaron Carpenter, Alyssa Shouse, Daniel Skye, special guest Twaimz, and tour production manger Amanda, relax in the tour bus after the DigiTour show at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on Tuesday, April 28, 2015.
The bus is so comically close to what you might imagine a tour bus full of teens would look like that it almost feels set-dressed. In the narrow, couch-lined area that serves as something of a rec room on wheels, a Costco-grade box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch rests on a counter next to a bottle of vitamin C (everyone on tour “gets sick basically constantly,” a handler explains). A basket of fruit sits heroically on a table, untouched. A beach ball has, somehow, managed to become wedged between a cabinet and the ceiling. Farther back is the narrow bank of triple-decker bunk beds that serve as claustrophobic sleeping quarters for the kids and the handful of twentysomethings that serve as their chaperones-slash-bodyguards-slash-assistants. Beyond that, there’s another set of couches. I am told they play a lot of Mario Kart back there.
After spending four days with them and asking the question as many times and in as many ways as I could, it became clear to me that DigiTour’s talents do not fully understand their own appeal. Or perhaps that their appeal is exactly as simple as it looks. “They just like our videos, really,” Aaron Carpenter, another cast member, tells me backstage in Tucson. Aaron has more than 1.8 million followers on Instagram and gains about 4,000 a day, a figure he can recite from memory. “Like, there's not really any other way to explain it,” he continues. “It's like, uh, it's, like, a phenomena. I don't know. It's weird.”
Michael Short for BuzzFeed News Alyssa Shouse at the Rialto Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, on Friday, May 1, 2015.
“Teenage girls like to be obsessed with something,” Alyssa offers authoritatively. She is tiny, dark-haired, entirely sweet, and very pretty, with a Tinker Bell tattoo on her hip and a giant head. It’s not clear if she remembers that she’s technically a member of that group.
But for all this — the tour, the millions of followers, the stuffed animals and letters and candy — the kids don’t consider themselves famous, exactly. “[When] you can go somewhere and every single person is like, ‘Whoa, that's him’ — then you're famous,” explains Jonah Marais, a lanky 16-year-old with cornflower-blue eyes. Yes and no. They don’t turn heads everywhere they go, but they are famous, at least among a small, very vocal group of people. But they don’t necessarily have mainstream followings or record deals or even Wikipedia pages. In some ways — from the outside, at least — it seems like the worst of both worlds: famous enough to have your life disrupted, not quite famous enough to reap all the perks. For now, the guys prefer the term “known.”
Michael Short for BuzzFeed News Jonah Marais at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles on Wednesday, April 29, 2015.
“Famous is like walking down the red carpet at the Grammys,” says Tez, a Vine star and childhood friend of the Griers. “I have followers on social media.” But what social media has done is decentralize celebrity and the celebrity-making apparatus, even while a tour like this employs familiar music biz tropes like long bus rides and screaming teenage fans. Rather than studiously following a worn path to fame, the kids get famous first, while a new infrastructure tasked with figuring out what to do with them gasps to catch up. The girls are all enthusiasm, all the time. They line up for hours in the punishing, brittle heat of Los Angeles or Tucson or Las Vegas in the early spring, sweating off their makeup before they even enter the venue. They skip school for DigiTour, cash in their allowances for DigiTour, beg their parents to drive them hours from the suburbs to be at DigiTour. In Los Angeles, one will manage to get past security and sneak inside the venue; she will be discovered hours later, curled up under the stage. In Tucson, one fan will show up with two or three dozen apples, apparently inspired by an offhand tweet from Aaron about his appreciation for the fruit (“
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economist Paul Brewbaker of consulting firm TZ Economics. “You can’t call your stockbroker and say, ‘Hey dude, can I put 10 percent down and buy these Tesla shares?’ ”
“You can take out a tremendous amount of debt,” agrees Eric Mais, a professor of finance at UH Manoa’s Shidler College of Business. If you put $200,000 down on a million-dollar home, and the house eventually doubles in value, “All you owe the bank is that first $800,000,” he says.
“That’s how people become millionaires in Hawaii, because of that financial leverage,” Mais says.
But, while a mortgage can be a powerful tool, Brewbaker says, fewer homebuyers have access to credit today than in the past.
That’s due in part to protections like the Dodd-Frank Act, which tightened regulations on lenders in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. “It’s a huge constraint – but let’s remember we almost melted down the financial system,” he says.
Subprime mortgage lending “got a bad rap,” and deservedly so, he says, but, at the same time, responsible subprime lending within limits served a useful purpose in the marketplace, by making it possible for some buyers who couldn’t qualify for other forms of credit to buy a house, he adds. “We kind of threw out the baby with that bath water,” he says. “We haven’t been able to go back to a world with as much accessibility to credit.”
While repealing Dodd-Frank altogether “would be a huge mistake,” many in the financial industry would like to see less onerous compliance requirements, he says. Younger homebuyers should pay attention to potential changes in regulations that could loosen credit in coming years.
20% DOWN IS NOT REQUIRED
Traditional thinking says homebuyers need a 20 percent down payment, but the reality is the average down payment on a purchase mortgage was just 11 percent in 2016, according to the National Association of Realtors. For borrowers under the age of 35, the national average down payment was just under 8 percent, says Jennifer Coutts, Hawaii branch manager for HomeBridge Financial Services.
Coutts, a 25-year veteran of Hawaii’s mortgage industry, says there are many ways to get a mortgage with a low down payment or none at all. For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ VA loans and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s USDA loans offer no-money-down loans to those who are eligible. In 2016, 16 percent of buyers under the age of 35 put no money down on their home purchases, Coutts says.
She says people think they will have to pay a higher interest rate if they have a smaller down payment, but usually that’s not the case.
Conventional programs allow as little as 3 percent down for owner-occupants, while loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration require as little as 3.5 percent down. However, FHA loans require mortgage insurance, which can make them more expensive overall. On the upside, Coutts says, the interest rates on FHA loans are not tied to credit scores. There are no age restrictions for these programs.Prospective buyers should ask their mortgage company to explain the best options for their circumstances.
Coutts says mortgage interest rates depend on several factors: the loan program, the buyer’s credit score, the size of the down payment and the property type. FHA, USDA and VA have some of the most competitive rates, Coutts says.
Investment-property mortgages are viewed as riskier than owner-occupied mortgages, so they require a larger down payment, but Coutts says her company has mortgage programs that require a down payment as low as 15 percent.ROME (Reuters) - Around 7,000 migrants were rescued from overcrowded boats crossing the Mediterranean to Europe over the weekend and on Monday, including a woman who gave birth to a baby girl on an Italian navy ship, the coast guard said.
Numbers risking the journey in search of a better life have continued to rise two weeks after as many as 900 people drowned in the worst Mediterranean shipwreck in living memory.
Crew from the Italian navy ship Bettica found the woman in labor on a boat overnight — one of 34 vessels intercepted over the weekend. A photo posted online showed her daughter, called Francesca Marina, sleeping in a makeshift cradle decorated with a pink bow. Marina, a common name in Italy, also means navy in Italian
“Both mother and daughter are in good health,” the navy said. The two, whose nationalities were not given, were taken ashore at Pozzallo, a port in southern Sicily.
Navy ships were en route to another rubber boat with 89 people on board on Monday, and the privately funded Phoenix rescue ship said it had already picked up 104 migrants.
The 40-metre Phoenix, based in Malta and run by the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) and Doctors Without Borders, rescued 369 people, most of them Eritreans aboard a large wooden vessel on Sunday.
Related Coverage Spain rescues 21 migrants in boat off south coast
Among them was one pregnant woman and about 45 children, including babies, MOAS said.
“The scale of this crisis is just heartbreaking,” Will Turner, Emergency Coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement.
Growing lawlessness and anarchy in Libya — the last point on one of the main transit routes to Europe — is giving free hand to people smugglers who make an average of 80,000 euros ($90,000) from each boatload, according to an ongoing investigation by an Italian court.
Mild spring weather and calm summer seas are expected to push total arrivals in Italy for 2015 to 200,000, an increase of 30,000 on last year, according to an Interior Ministry projection.
Police in Spain said they had rescued 21 immigrants in a boat off the southern coast of the country on Monday.
On Sunday, seven bodies were found on two large rubber boats packed with migrants and three others died after jumping into the water when they saw a merchant ship approaching, the Italian coast guard said.
Slideshow (4 Images)
About 1,800 people are estimated to have perished during the crossing already this year, the UN refugee agency said. Some 51,000 have entered Europe by sea, with 30,500 coming via Italy.
Shocked by last month’s record disaster, European Union leaders agreed to triple funding for the EU sea patrol mission Triton, but there is still disagreement on what to do with the people fleeing conflict and poverty in various parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Italy has coordinated the rescues by its own navy and coast guard, a French ship acting on behalf of the European border control agency, merchant ships of various nationalities and one vessel run by the privately funded Migrant Offshore Aid Station.WASHINGTON (AP) — A bipartisan bill that would lower the costs of borrowing for millions of students is awaiting President Barack Obama's signature.
The House on Wednesday gave final congressional approval to legislation that links student loan interest rates to the financial markets. The bill would offer lower rates for most students now but higher rates down the line if the economy improves as expected.
For the moment, the focus was on the class of students signing loans for classes this fall.
"Going forward, the whims of Washington politicians won't dictate student loan interest rates, meaning more certainty and more opportunities for students to take advantage of lower rates," House Speaker John Boehner said.
The measure passed 392-31.
Undergraduates this fall would borrow at a 3.9 percent interest rate for subsidized and unsubsidized Stafford loans. Graduate students would have access to loans at 5.4 percent, and parents would borrow at 6.4 percent. The rates would be locked in for that year's loan, but each year's loan could be more expensive than the last. Rates would rise as the economy picks up and it becomes more expensive for the government to borrow money.
But for now, interest payments for tuition, housing and books would be less expensive under the House-passed bill.
"Changing the status quo is never easy, and returning student loan interest rates to the market is a longstanding goal Republicans have been working toward for years," said Rep. John Kline, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. "I applaud my colleagues on the other side of the aisle for finally recognizing this long-term, market-based proposal for what it is: a win for students and taxpayers."
The House earlier this year passed legislation that is similar to what the Senate later passed. Both versions link interest rates to 10-year Treasury notes and remove Congress' annual role in determining rates.
"Campaign promises and political posturing should not play a role in the setting of student loan interest rates," said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C. "Borrowers deserve better."
Negotiators of the Senate compromise were mindful of the House-passed version, as well as the White House preference to shift responsibility for interest rates to the financial markets. The resulting bipartisan bill passed the Senate 81-18.
With changes made in the Senate — most notably a cap on how interest rates could climb and locking in interest rates for the life of each year's loan — Democrats dropped their objections and joined Republicans in backing the bill.
Interest rates would not top 8.25 percent for undergraduates. Graduate students would not pay rates higher than 9.5 percent, and parents' rates would top out at 10.5 percent. Using Congressional Budget Office estimates, rates would not reach those limits in the next 10 years.
Rates on new subsidized Stafford loans doubled to 6.8 percent July 1 because Congress could not agree on a way to keep them at 3.4 percent. Without congressional action, rates would have stayed at 6.8 percent — a reality most lawmakers called unacceptable.
The compromise that came together during the last month would be a good deal for all students through the 2015 academic year. After that, interest rates are expected to climb above where they were when students left campus in the spring, if congressional estimates prove correct.
The White House and its allies said the new loan structure would offer lower rates to 11 million borrowers right away and save the average undergraduate $1,500 in interest charges.
In all, some 18 million loans will be covered by the legislation, totaling about $106 billion this fall.
Lawmakers were already talking about changing the deal when they take up a rewrite of the Higher Education Act this fall. As a condition of his support, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, won a Government Accountability Office report on the costs of colleges. That document was expected to guide an overhaul of the deal just negotiated.
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Follow Philip Elliott on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/philip_elliottDonald Trump. Mark Wilson/Getty Images President Donald Trump said Friday at the Values Voter Summit in Washington that "people don't talk about " Christmas anymore, promising to say "Merry Christmas again."
"You know we're getting into that beautiful Christmas season that people don't talk about anymore," Trump said. "They don't use the word Christmas because it's not politically correct. You go into department stores and they'll say 'happy new year' or they'll say other things. And it will be red, they'll have it painted."
"Well, guess what, we're saying 'Merry Christmas' again," Trump said to raucous cheers. "And as a Christmas gift to all of our hardworking families, we hope Congress will pass massive tax cuts for the American people."
Trump zeroed in on this subject much more during his presidential campaign than he has as president.
During a 2016 meeting with religious leaders, Trump said current US leadership was "selling Christianity down the tubes." He pledged to make sure department store employees say "Merry Christmas."
And in late 2015, Trump suggested that people should boycott Starbucks because the chain was not printing "Merry Christmas" on its holiday cups.
"Did you read about Starbucks? No more Merry Christmas on Starbucks," Trump told a Springfield, Illinois rally. "Maybe we should boycott Starbucks. I don't know. Seriously, I don't care."doing it yourself. Eco-friendly DIY projects are satisfying, challenging and almost always money-saving, and frankly we can’t get enough of them. The fun of going green is that it’s a personal thing. You’re joining the worthiest of causes – securing the future health of the planet you call home – and. Eco-friendly DIY projects are satisfying, challenging and almost always money-saving, and frankly we can’t get enough of them. Here are 12 fun and challenging green DIY projects:
Milk Paint. Before oils came along to create an indelible, toxic mess, paints were made from milk, lime and earth. It’s one of the oldest human traditions known – for example, the 16,000 year old cave paintings at Lascaux in France use this eco-friendly mixture of pigments.
Fancy making your own? Take your pick of methods: dry milk, water and vegetable dye or a quart of skimmed milk, an ounce of lime and some coloring. If you’re feeling brave you can experiment with earths and oxides, but places like The Real Milk Paint Company will happily sell you a range of tailored pigments. Your only problem? Every home-made pot will be a slightly different shade unless you measure precisely.
Radiator lining. Wall-mounted radiators have a design flaw – they radiate heat in all directions, one being directly into the wall. And with the big wide world on the other side of it, there’s no way you’re going to appreciably warm that one up. The result is a huge amount of lost heat energy – up to 70% in some cases.
The answer is to put something in the way. There are various hi-tech solutions, such as this radiator booster, but there’s a quick and cheap way to do it yourself, which is to line the wall with tin foil, the most reflective side facing the radiator. The heat will be bounced back into the room and your heating bill will plummet. I’m sure you can think of an artful, tasteful way to do it.
Image: Gadgetshop
Sun Jar. Some of us thought fireflies, others thought Tinkerbell…but we all agree that Sun and Moon Jars are mesmerizing creations. And not too complicated to build, either. Have a look at the detailed walkthrough over at Not Martha (but pay attention to their closing comment that in this case, the real thing is far superior in sun-gathering and light-emitting ability).
Image: el Ryan
Household Cleaner. Most of the household cleaners you see on the shelves work on a simple principle: people want results. They cut to the chase by using a truly dreadful cocktail of toxic substances to blast germs into the beyond – and you can smell them even when the lid’s on. That’s not good. Happily, there are now cleaner, greener alternatives such as products by Ecover and The Clean Environment Company.
But there’s a more versatile cleaner waiting to be assembled in your larder right now. All you need is bicarbonate of soda, some lemons, white vinegar (not malt – too pungent) and some standard-grade olive oil. And here’s how to use them to effectively tackle most cleaning jobs under the sun.
Stain removal. What about those really stubborn stains that cling on like a limpet in a rock pool? Grass, blood, motor oil, ink, or a drop of your favourite organic wine. Again, the general response is The End Justifies The Means, i.e. absurdly potent bleaches that do the job at the expense of environmental health. Yet there are plenty of safe, strong alternatives, such as concentrated orange cleaner, table salt or corn starch – all leaving the environment just as you found it. (Compare this with the headache of safely disposing of toxic household substances).
Pillow cases. Pillow cases, as well as being cases for pillows, are strong-seamed bags in a retro style, lacking handles. In other words, they’re unfinished tote bags – chic crusaders against the nuisance of urban tumbleweed. So at the end of their bed-life or sofa-life, upcycle them into the latest in supermarket fashion – and let Instructables lead the way.
Notebooks. Everyone has a favorite type of notebook – for example, reporters gravitate towards the spiral-bound flip style. But the perfect notebook is made at home with care and attention and not a little love. Any unwanted paper can be hand-stitched into a sturdy little journal. Get creative (like the people who use elephant dung to make notebook paper). Horde any good paper, such as the better kind of junk mail. Make a place for your thoughts that’s truly you.
Furniture. There’s a great way to get an entirely new set of furniture for the house, and all it takes is a few choice materials, a set of handy tools, and the prefix “re”. Threadbare sofa? Reupholster it. If it’s scratched? Restore or repaint it. And if you’re feeling particularly brave, you could draw on things with a Sharpie!
Moss. Do-It-Yourself moss? Doesn’t moss tend to do things itself already? Quite true – in fact, moss is virtually unstoppable. You can even break it into a blender, whisk it into a paste with a few other substances, and create a living, growing paint. You can cover entire surfaces, or you can create stunning like the ones seen over at GreenUpgrader. For a primer, try Instructables.
The Sun. Our favourite Earth-dwarfing ball of incandescent gas is the source of a million eco-friendly DIY projects. Not forgetting how human beings are themselves solar powered, there are many ways to use the free energy of sunlight. Work out where you can get the most sunlight, and rig up heat-absorbing materials, mirrors (be safe!) and solar panelling – Treehugger has details on how to do this yourself as cheaply as possible. If you have an old satellite dish in the shed, you’ve got a head start.
Turf Roofs. A few decades back, “there’s something growing on the roof” was a sentence designed to galvanize the idle into a bout of guilty DIY. Now it’s something to be proud of. Grass roofs keep houses cool in the summer and insulate them in the winter – and now, after a century of architects turning their noses up at the concept, it’s enjoying a lush comeback.
But how do you do it? Securing strips of turf on a sloping roof is no mean feat – but while you’re reading up on medieval Scandinavian roof designs, there’s a short-cut. The Green Roof Tiles by Toyota Roof Gardens (via Inhabitat) allow you to cheaply, quickly coat your roof in self-watering rubbed-soled layers of Korean velvet grass!
Strategic Gardening. Your garden isn’t there to just look pretty. As well as gently scrubbing the air around your house, it does the same as a turf roof, insulating and cooling as the situation requires. Think about gardening tactics. Where does the wind come from in the winter? Put trees in the way. Where’s the shade in the summer, and water for the local wildlife? How about a bird feeder and a bee hotel? How about letting it all run a little wilder than you’re used to?
If you’ve recently tackled a novel eco-friendly DIY challenge, tell us about it.
Image: benfoTESTED Scott
Genius LT 27.5
WORDS Jordan Carr
PHOTOS Tal Roberts
Genius LT 27.5 Details
• Intended use: all-mountain
• Revised suspension platform with dual-travel FOX Nude shock
• 170mm travel front/rear, rear reduces to 135mm in 'Traction Control' mode
• 66.3° head angle (in open setting)
• SRAM X01 drivetrain
• 27.5" wheels
• Weight: 27.33lb (claimed), 28.2lb (actual)
• MSRP: $7599.99 USD
Genius LT Construction Details
Climbing
Descending
Technical Terrain
Component Check
Pinkbike's take:
If a you are looking for a do-it-all trail bike and are coming from a cross-country background, the Genius LT is a solid big travel option. Its balanced feel, long wheelbase and remote actuated suspension adjustment make it a winner for riders looking to ride a long travel machine and still keep up with their buddies who may be on lighter, shorter travel bikes. And although there are options with similar travel that can descend quicker and with a more confident feel, the Genius LT makes up any lost ground when the terrain starts to include rapid elevation changes that allow its clever Nude shock to work to its potential. - Jordan Carr
As one of the first brands to publicly announce the exclusion of 26” wheel options from their trail and cross-country line ups, Scott has indicated just how much they believe in the larger 27.5" and 29" wheel formats. Their popular big travel trail bike, the Genius LT, is the longest travel 27.5" option from Scott and its redesigned platform is claimed to make it a quiver-killing bike that can do it all. But with its 170mm of travel and a 28 pound weight, how does this bike perform as a versatile go-to bike?The clean looking Genius LT, with its full carbon HMX frame and red and orange colour matched components, is definitely an eye catcher out on the trail. The frame itself is constructed using 200 individual pieces, a molding process that differs from traditional carbon monocoque frames. This technique allows Scott to build a more consistent frame even while utilizing the mass production process, but the technology doesn’t come cheap or easy.As the self proclaimed "carbon experts" of the bike industry, Scott set out to create a revolutionary trail bike with the 2013 Genius LT. It combines some interesting engineering points in both the frame’s construction and its suspension design, with hundreds of hours of design and build time spent to give this bike its versatility. At first glance, substantial tube junctions give the LT a capable look while simple aesthetics complement the bike’s clean lines. Sealed bearings keep the main pivots moving smoothly, while lightweight bushings are utilized in the seat and chain stay pivots. An easily adjustable suspension link allows a rider to swap geometry between a low and high position, allowing for a simple on trail adjustment to the head angle and the bottom bracket height, although it obviously isn't an on-the-fly sort of change. Up front, internally routed cables hide within the frame's top tube, cleaning up the would be rats-nest of cables and housing that come from the many levers and remotes perched atop the LT’s 35mm Syncros handlebar. "Industry standard" features like the 12 x 142mm DT Swiss axle, PressFit 30 bottom bracket shell, and an internally routed RockShox Reverb Stealth keep it compatible with most current market components.Probably one of the LT's best attributes is its readiness to ascend, and whether it's short punchy climbs or hour-long dirt road slogs, the Genius makes it happen, climbing remarkably well with some help from the bike's remote actuated FOX CTD system. The proprietary, FOX manufactured, Scott developed NUDE rear shock features a mix of Scott specific technology and stock components, making the shock easily serviceable at any FOX repair depot. The 3-stage CTD system features all the benefits of FOX's CTD system but with a few important distinctions - there is an additional, internally housed second air chamber that allows the shock to adjust travel on the fly. Up front, a custom FOX 34 Float Factory CTD has been lengthened to 170mm from the fork's standard 160mm platform.These significant tweaks allow for a versatile suspension platform with easy travel adjustment between the bike's plush 170mm descend mode and its two more efficient 130mm travel traction and climbing modes. The 34 Float features all the same characteristics of the CTD FIT damper, while the rear shock includes some beneficial changes in its two middle modes. In 'Descend' mode, the shock's two air chambers are set wide open. But a flip of the easily actuated Twin-loc remote adjusts the shock first into 'Traction-Control' mode, which kept the shock supple though ramping up the compression a bit and reducing its travel to 130mm by closing the additional air chamber. A further push of the thumb-actuated remote adjusts the shock and fork in to its 'Climb' mode, where travel remains at 130mm but adds the stiffer low-speed compression of FOX's CTD 'Climb' option. These three distinct suspension options made the 170mm Genius LT more of a pleasure on almost any type of climb than many other 150-170mm travel bikes.Traction and Climb modes offered noticeable benefits when climbing while being quickly and easily accessible on the fly. Traction-Control mode made rolling, rocky climbs manageable by allowing just enough damping and travel to keep the rear wheel planted while still offering enough of a platform for efficient power transfer when needed. Climb mode offered an even more efficient feel while still offering just enough damping to keep the bike on track over rough and loose terrain. The ability to switch modes on the fly was a welcome perk that we came to truly appreciate when putting the bike through a 30 mile cross-country race with 3,000ft of climbing. We found the long and low geometry offered a comfortable, proficient feel on long gravel road climbs, while still offering a good amount of maneuverability on slow technical climbs. If climbing efficiency is important for your trail bike, the Genius LT offered one of the more efficient platforms we have tested, especially for a bike with up to 170mm of travel.During the first few rides on the Genius, its downhill capabilities were less than satisfying, and seemed to lay hidden beneath the bike's low and long geometry, but we eventually found the sweet spot with the bike's setup after an initial getting to know each other period. At first, we figured the bike's low setting would offer the most benefit for our riding style, although extensive time in both high and low settings proved that the high mode, with its slightly taller, steeper geometry, offered the versatility and predictability that we were looking for.In the high mode, the LT features a 1175.4mm wheelbase, which was noticeably longer than similar trail bikes we have ridden lately. This added length provided nice stability at high speeds, but also created a much slower steering and less flickable feel through tight terrain. The low mode offered an even longer feel, and while only adding a millimeter to the bike's wheelbase it slackens out the head tube angle to 66.3-degrees and lowers the bottom bracket another 5.8mm, adding to the bike's already sluggish feeling steering characteristics. Though some riders may prefer this long, slack feel in a trail bike, we found it lacked a certain personality we craved from a long wheel based 170mm travel trail bike. We also found that the Nude shock, which was an amazing asset on uphill or rolling terrain, lacked both the plushness and the linear spring rate we lusted after in a 170mm travel bike. All told, the Genius LT isn't a terrible descender by any stretch of the imagination, but we would have to say that it doesn't tear up the downhills like most 170mm travel bikes.After finding ourselves struggling through rolling terrain on other 160mm+ trail bikes, the Genius was a breath of fresh air; pairing its efficient suspension platform with the larger diameter 27.5” wheels, the bike was a great pedaller. On trails that were constantly changing from ascending to descending the bike's great efficiency and quick on-the-fly adjustments made such sections much more enjoyable, even when trying to keep up with buddies on pure cross-country rigs. Although the Genius LT is not quite a rocket ship on rolling terrain, it did give us a new level of appreciation of the bike's overall capabilities as a do it all machine.With the Twin-loc remote set in its mid, Traction Mode setting, and the Reverb Stealth set comfortably in the middle of its travel, the Genius came to life, bobbing and weaving through progressively more difficult terrain without skipping a beat. Stomping on the pedals it was efficient, relatively maneuverable, and surprisingly capable, even in 130mm travel mode. We found the stiffer platform of Traction mode made the LT feel lively and efficient, unlike the 170mm beast it really is. Pairing the in-between 27.5" wheel size with high volume front and rear specific tires kept momentum and traction nicely through transitions and ledgey moves at low speeds, while the relatively low bottom bracket and longer chain stays kept the riders weight centered nicely over the both wheels, but also made pedal strikes more of a concern.Our Genius LT Test bike was outfitted with SRAM’s XX1 eleven speed drivetrain, which has quickly become the go-to group for many high-end trail bikes. For production, the Genius LT Tuned 700 will see a full X01 spec package to keep price as reasonable as possible. Up front, the cockpit features colour matched 35mm bar and stem from Scott's house brand, Syncros, that offered a super stiff, point-and-shoot feel that is a welcome addition when the trail gets rough. Like the spec on most high-end trail bikes, a Reverb Stealth makes on the fly seat adjustment simple while still providing a clean look without any extra cable that could rub on the rear tire or your leg. Stopping power comes in the form of Shimano's XTR Trail brakes, which have quickly become the most popular and most reliable high-end trail brake on the market. For the wheels, Syncros partnered up with DT Swiss and plenty of DT's newest technologies show through in the colour matched hoops. A new nipple and washer technology is said to create a stronger interface between spoke and rim, while the new Spline One hub design paired with DT’s durable star-ratchet freehub system make for a lightweight, durable trail wheel. Overall, the build on the Tuned 700 model Genius LT is exactly how many trail riders would build a bike from the frame up, making it a great choice for riders looking for out-of-the-box performance, but it doesn’t come cheap.• Schwalbe tires: Top-dollar Schwalbe tires mate the Genius with the dirt like a cold beer after a bike ride. Up front the tried and true 2.3'' Hans Dampf offers enough volume to give the confidence needed to tackle uber technical terrain, and the rounded tread pattern isn’t too slow rolling for all day epics with sustained climbing. In the rear, the new Rock Razor tire in a 2.2'' width offers a minimalist center tread paired with aggressive side knobs, creating a perfect balance between climbing traction and downhill cornering. We did find the 2.2'' tire in the rear to be a little lower volume than we would prefer when it was set up on the softer side, though.• Reverb Stealth: Hard to really call it a trail bike without a dropper post, and the Reverb Stealth rounds out this sleek build nicely.• e-Thirteen chain guide: Probably overkill with the SRAM XX1’s chain management system, but when ridden at the level the Genius LT was designed, extra peace of mind is always welcome, especially in any type of race situation. As expected, we never dropped a chain, and there were no rubbing or setup issues to report.• XTR Trail brakes: Immensely powerful, predictable, and always reliable, Shimano's XTR Trail brakes were the icing on the cake. Their consistent power and comfortable lever feel made going fast on the LT the obvious option.The FBI Sets Goals for COINTELPRO
Under Director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) was aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political groups within the United States. In the 1960's, COINTELPRO's targets frequently included civil rights activists, both those who espoused non-violence, like Martin Luther King, and those that Hoover referred to as "black nationalist hate groups," like the Black Panthers. This document outlines the program's goals in attempting to limit the effectiveness of such groups. In practice, the FBI used infiltration, legal harassment, disinformation and sometimes extra-legal intimidation and violence against King, the Panthers, and other black activist groups in its attempt to discredit and disrupt them.
Goals
For maximum effectiveness of the Counterintelligence Program, and to prevent wasted effort, long-range goals are being set.
1. Prevent the COALITION of militant black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real “Mau Mau” [Black revolutionary army] in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.
2. Prevent the RISE OF A “MESSIAH” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah;” he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammed is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.
3. Prevent VIOLENCE on the part of black nationalist groups. This is of primary importance, and is, of course, a goal of our investigative activity; it should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Program to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.
4. Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community. The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically in three ways. You must discredit those groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to “liberals” who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalist [sic] simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement. This last area requires entirely different tactics from the first two. Publicity about violent tendencies and radical statements merely enhances black nationalists to the last group; it adds “respectability” in a different way.
5. A final goal should be to prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth. Specific tactics to prevent these groups from converting young people must be developed.After a few months of beta testing, Reddit has officially launched embeddable comments. Like Twitter’s embedded tweets feature, embeddable comments makes it easy for other sites to feature comments from Reddit users. Instead of cutting-and-pasting a comment or linking back to it, writers just have to click on its permalink and select “embed” for its code.
The feature is only available for comments on public subreddits, which will come as a relief to users on private subreddits who don’t want their thoughts potentially plastered all over the Internet.
There are several drawbacks, however, to embedding Reddit comments, like questionable usernames:
(As with any feature rollout, there are hiccups and embeddable comments are not currently showing up for me on WordPress, though the links work).
Furthermore, as the Unidan imbroglio underscored last year, even the most respected and karma-laden users may not be completely trustworthy sources of information, which is something for news organizations to keep in mind if they want to mine Reddit threads for content.
On the other hand, embeddable comments may help Reddit build a higher mainstream profile and in turn allow it to attract more users and advertisers.
Despite being a content farm for popular sites like Buzzfeed, the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet” with about 150 million unique visitors per month, and hosting AMAs with extremely prominent people like Barack Obama, Reddit is still figuring out how to monetize successfully without alienating its core user base.
This is especially important for the company since it raised $50 million Series B at a $500 million valuation last September, from investors including Sam Altman, Andreesen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital.
TechCrunch has contacted Reddit for more information on how embeddable comments fits into its business strategy.As the Treadsack group's new restaurants were drawing local and national accolades, raising the city's dining profile and making rock stars out of its owners, the Texas Comptroller's Office was threatening to seize cash for back taxes, the IRS slapped the group with $1.1 million in liens and two banks stopped honoring checks written by the company.
The financial difficulties coincided with the surprise closing of perhaps the group's most acclaimed concept, Foreign Correspondents, which shuttered in December, four months after Bon Appétit listed the farm-to-table northern Thai eatery on its list of the 50 best new restaurants in the country, and just 14 months after it opened.
Treadsack — the portmanteau of co-founders/co-owners Chris Cusack and Joey Treadway — made the announcement the day after the Houston Chronicle reported the resignation of the Heights restaurant's esteemed chefs, PJ and Apple Stoops. One day later, CultureMap Houston reported that another Treadsack concept, a bar called Canard, was closing as well. (Treadway, and another partner, Benjy Mason, whose name apparently couldn't be shoehorned into "Treadsack," did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
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It was an ignominious end to a restaurant that seemed to have it all — delicious food, a pretentious name that cleverly gave no indication that it was in fact a restaurant, and an impeccable pedigree: Treadsack had already established the immensely popular Down House.
The sudden closing of Foreign Correspondents seemed to bring — wait for it — employees' simmering concerns to a boil. Just after the restaurant closed, a former employee of a Treadsack restaurant asked for questions on Facebook, starting a thread riddled with complaints from current and former employees, who claimed to have received multiple bounced checks.
The Houston Press heard rumors of the checks in early 2016, but — thanks in part to an airtight non-disclosure agreement that all Treadsack employees must sign — it was difficult to get people talking. (Even in the absence of weird confidentiality agreements, many in the hospitality industry are reluctant to speak even on background, for fear of being blacklisted.)
But in public records, as well as internal documents obtained by the Press, the portrait of Treadsack's concepts that emerges is different from the one portrayed in fawning media coverage.
The public face of Treadsack, 35-year-old wunderkind Chris Cusack, was named one of the "5 people who could shape Houston's future" by the Houston Chronicle, and was compared to King Midas elsewhere
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accurately depicts the Ghost in the Shell environment, and reference material that was given to the community while also providing a unique battleground. Our judges here at 343 and Paramount Pictures believe this was the best of the best. One of the small features that we enjoyed was that the Spider Tank on this map had a Chaingun turret mounted underneath it which can be ripped off and used in-game. Another part of this map that we thoroughly enjoyed was a hidden path that even we didn't discover until playing on it and examining it a few times. When exploring the map, you’ll find a secret, destructible pathway that allows players to create holes in the wall and floor to sneak underneath the map. For its creativity, originality, Ghost in the Shell likeness, and playability, Geist by Randy 355 is our Grand Prize winner!
Congratulations to all of our contestants, and we’ll see Randy 355 this weekend at the Halo World Championship 2017 Finals. A big thank you goes out to our community judges; ArturBloodshot, Mr Pokephile, Warholic, WyvernZu, and Zandril, whose help cannot be understated. And once again, thank you to everyone who submitted a map for the contest, and keep an eye on your Xbox Live messages for a special thank you from 343 Industries!poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201610/1729/1155968404_5173549748001_5087413504001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true 2016 Republicans tell Trump to quit claiming rigged election The struggling GOP nominee is urging supporters to fight the system, and officials nationwide are fuming over it.
It’s not just the Democrats who are frustrated by Donald Trump’s “rigged election” talk.
Republicans have started warning their increasingly ostracized nominee to stop stoking his supporters with claims that the 2016 election will be stolen, daring him to show proof or put a lid on it.
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“Somebody claiming in the election, ‘I was defrauded,’ that isn’t going to cut it,” said former Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican who earlier in the campaign endorsed Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio. “They’re going to have to say how, where, why, when.”
“I don’t think leading candidates for the presidency should undercut the process unless you have a really good reason,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who gained little support for his own 2016 White House run, told POLITICO.
Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, have been flogging for months the notion that Hillary Clinton supporters could tamper with voting to the point that they win the White House. Their campaign website is recruiting poll watchers, and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has been raising unlimited funds from corporations and individuals in a bid to “fight a rigged system” that purportedly benefits the Democrats.
And Monday, at a post-debate rally in crucial Pennsylvania, Trump kept the vote rigging argument alive: “Watch other communities because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” Trump said. “We do not want this election stolen from us.”
Such sustained and supercharged rhetoric, coming on the heels of a heated debate over restrictive voter ID laws across the country and the U.S. government’s Friday announcement accusing Russian hackers, on orders from the Kremlin, of trying to meddle with the election, has raised alarm bells in election offices nationwide.
States already bracing for record turnout in the presidential race are also dealing simultaneously with an unprecedented series of cyberthreats, including what the Homeland Security Department has confirmed as attempted hacks on more than 20 voting registration systems across the country. While the balloting itself is largely seen as safe from cybersleuths because the bulk of the actual voting process takes place offline, the state officials doing the grunt work complain that charges of election rigging, on top of the complaints they hear about ballot security, make their jobs that much tougher.
“I think both sides are being very political,” Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, said in an interview.
Unfounded rumors about vote rigging, spreading in viral speed on the Internet, have even forced state officials to play the role of fact checkers. One fake news article moved so quickly last week that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted felt compelled to issue a statement attempting to debunk a widely circulated story that purported to show “one dozen black, sealed ballot boxes filled with thousands of Franklin County votes for Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates.”
“This post is both false and intentionally misleading,” Husted, a Republican, said of the article posted on christiantimesnewspaper.com. He pointed out that the picture accompanying the story was a “slightly doctored version of a photo used in a 2015 article about election results in the United Kingdom.”
“A Christian myself, I take offense to reading such unbelievable lies from a publication alleging Christian ties,” Husted said. “It was a deliberate attempt to deceive and mislead. We already get enough of that from the candidates.”
Indeed, Husted has said that the presidential campaign rhetoric around vote rigging and other election security matters threatens to undermine whichever candidate wins on Nov. 8.
“I for a long time have been critical of people in both political parties who have tried to undermine public confidence in our election, rather by saying the election is going to be rigged or suggesting that people are being disenfranchised,” Husted said.
Election officials note that widespread voting fraud has been repeatedly debunked, and they point to a series of media accounts and government watchdog reports saying so. Among the most notable: Student journalists at the Carnegie-Knight News21 program found in a 2012 study just 10 cases of voter impersonation dating back to the 2000 election. That’s one example out of every 15 million possible voters. And again in August, the media group released new findings on voter fraud cases in five states — Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Ohio and Texas — that examined hundreds of allegations and found few actual prosecutions.
One of Trump’s most frequent suggestions surrounds urging his supporters to visit “certain areas” on Election Day as poll watchers to ensure Clinton supporters don’t vote multiple times. He points to the two most recent presidential elections, in which President Barack Obama essentially skunked his GOP rivals in many urban areas.
But the Philadelphia Inquirer, following the 2012 election, reported that Obama’s unanimous victory over Mitt Romney in 59 different majority-minority areas shouldn’t be a surprise considering the demographics of the region and the fact the country’s first black president was running for reelection. Cleveland.com came to a similar conclusion when it studied how Obama won so conclusively in east Cleveland.
In a recent interview, Obama’s 2008 opponent, John McCain marveled at his own challenges when trying to connect with African-American voters.
“I didn’t get a single vote in the whole inner city of Philadelphia,” the Arizona GOP senator told POLITICO. “I thought maybe they could find one.”
But McCain also said he’s far more concerned about a different kind of threat to the security of the presidential election, and it wasn’t Trump’s charge of possible vote rigging. Namely, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said he was alarmed about what the Russian hackers might be up to.
“The most disturbing comment I’ve ever heard in recent years was when [NSA Director] Admiral [Michael] Rogers said before our committee, ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’ So I sure as hell don’t know what capabilities they have,” McCain said.
Obama himself called Trump’s suggestion of a rigged election “ridiculous” in an August news conference. “Of course the elections will not be rigged. What does that mean?” he said.
The president went on to liken the Republican nominee to a sore loser in sports. “I’ve never heard of somebody complaining about being cheated before the game was over, or before the score is even tallied,” Obama said. “So my suggestion would be go out there and try to win the election. If Mr. Trump is up 10 or 15 points on Election Day and ends up losing, then maybe he can raise some questions.”
Trump’s backers, including Stone, were indeed nudging a more vocal set of arguments surrounding vote rigging back during the summer, when polling showed the Republican well within striking distance of Clinton. For his part, Pence has told Trump supporters during public rallies that their concerns about a fraudulent election were “well-founded.”
“People need to be very concerned about voter fraud,” Pence told CNN in late August, noting that in his home state of Indiana there have been voter fraud prosecutions for more than a decade. Poll watching, he added, is a form of “vigilance I think is essential to any kind of vibrant democracy.”
To be sure, Trump has some Republican sympathizers.
“I think anything is possible, especially with electronic voting and everything,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican. “We’ve got millions of people voting. And we’ve got a lot on the outcome.”
Lanhee Chen, a former Romney 2012 policy adviser, said he doesn’t dispute the notion that there is some degree of voter fraud that takes place every election cycle across the country. But he argued that such occurrences aren’t so rampant that presidential candidates should be making those charges with what amounts to a bullhorn from the stump.
“Ultimately, is it enough to compromise an election? Probably not,” Chen said, adding: “Credible Republicans have to be a note of sobriety, and we do have to respect the outcome of the election.”Despite having issued a couple of warnings in the past with regard to the use of bitcoin, the Central Bank of Cyprus has essentially confirmed that bitcoin is not illegal, and there isn’t quite anything they can do about it — but again warned of the potential dangers of getting involved.
“Bitcoin is not illegal, but at the same time neither is it subject to control or regulation,” a source at the bank told the Cyprus Mail.
Cyprus-based Neo & Bee have taken the central bank’s hands-off attitude to their advantage, launching the first of what is expected to be a number of physical branches that offer bitcoin-related products.
But it’s more of a matter of simply not knowing what to do — the result of lack of legislation on the matter.
“It’s a grey area,” a bank official said.
For now, it would seem as if the island of Cyprus is an opportunity for bitcoin start-ups, but will authorities crack down in the future?
Read the full report.Spanish Judge Says Use Of 'Extreme Security Measures' For Email Is Evidence Of Terrorism
from the making-Franco-proud dept
After a series of moves that include introducing copyright laws that threaten the digital commons and open access, as well as criminalizing online calls for street demonstrations, Spain is fast emerging as a serious rival to Russia when it comes to grinding down the digital world. Unfortunately, it seems that lack of understanding extends to the judiciary too, as shown by recent events reported by Rise Up, an "autonomous body based in Seattle", which aims to provide secure and private email accounts for "people and groups working on liberatory social change". Here's what happened to some of its users in Spain: On Tuesday December 16th, a large police operation took place in the Spanish State. Fourteen houses and social centers were raided in Barcelona, Sabadell, Manresa, and Madrid. Books, leaflets, computers were seized and eleven people were arrested and sent to the Audiencia Nacional, a special court handling issues of "national interest", in Madrid. They are accused of incorporation, promotion, management, and membership of a terrorist organisation. The charges are extremely serious, and yet according to the Rise Up post, the accused have not been provided with any details of their alleged terrorist crimes. The judge in the case has, however, given a rather worrying justification for keeping many of them in prison: Four of the detainees have been released, but seven have been jailed pending trial. The reasons given by the judge for their continued detention include the posession of certain books, "the production of publications and forms of communication", and the fact that the defendants "used emails with extreme security measures, such as the RISE UP server". That is, merely trying to keep your email secure is now viewed in Spain as evidence that you are a terrorist. As the post points out: Many of the “extreme security measures” used by Riseup are common best practices for online security and are also used by providers such as hotmail, GMail or Facebook. Moreover: The European Parliament’s report on the US NSA surveillance program states that "privacy is not a luxury right, but the foundation stone of a free and democratic society". But in Spain, it seems, daring to lay down that "foundation stone of a free and democratic society" (pdf) is now taken as evidence of terrorist tendencies. The country's long-time dictator, "El Generalíssimo" Franco, would doubtless have been proud of his successors.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
Filed Under: email, encryption, security, spain, terrorismAbout This Game
DEMO
DEMO is available!You can play up to the first dungeon.Then you can use the same savedata for the release version.A first-person exploration and action RPG game.Make your way through monster and trap infested dungeons,uncover chests contained powerful weapons and armor,and slay the great evil that lurks deep in the shadows.This world is full of misfortune...Countries do battle, people kill and steal, the poor suffer.Stories began to spread amongst the people.The stories told of several dungeons in this world.That within their depths, lives a calamitous evil.An evil energy that darkens hearts and will bring ruin to this land.Warriors have delved into the dungeons, seeking its darkest secrets.One seeks to destroy the evil and bring peace to this land.Another looks for lost treasures, seeking only his own wealth.And yet another...The existence of several impregnable dungeons of old became knownthroughout the land, attracting people, goods and commerce.Naturally this led to the creation of a town - one of prosperity and stability.But the town that exists now speaks of a warped and troubled world.It has withstood many disasters and longs for peace to return to this world...It is with this same wish that you set foot into the town.Nostalgic, yet new...Enter unforgiving dungeons where many an adventurer has met with their end.We expect you are already very familiar with dungeon RPGs by now, right?We felt that this genre needed to be brought to the next level, with real time actionthat was difficult to achieve with the hardware specs of the previous generation.Please enjoy our new dungeon RPG adventure!The Bitcoin ‘paradox’ in an inflating crypto market
Andrea Baronchelli Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 29, 2017
Summer 2017 has been big for Bitcoin. One bitcoin worth $1,533 on May 1st was exchanged for $4,335 yesterday, August 28. Not surprisingly, the interest for the cryptocurrency has skyrocketed. Blogs and news are divided between those who foresee a bitcoin worth $40,000 soon, and those who see a bubble about to burst. Time will tell.
While Bitcoin price has attracted a lot of media attention, fewer articles have stressed that Bitcoin is actually losing dominance in the cryptocurrency ecology. Its price and market share have been mostly anti-correlated for the past months or even years.
While Bitcoin price is now approximately 10 times higher than in jan 2016, its market share has nearly halved in the same period. Price is normalised to the value of Jan 2016. Figure courtesy of Abeer ElBahrawy.
Is it because of Ethereum? Not entirely. The explosion of the second cryptocurrency explains just part of Bitcoin’s decline, and it is easy to check that even the combined market share of Bitcoin and Ethereum have decreased (I spare you a second figure). What we are seeing is more than just a competition between two or few cryptos.
In fact, a deeper analysis shows that (i) the cryptocurrency market has been growing faster than Bitcoin, (ii) this evolution has been fairly ‘neutral’ (or ‘democratic’), investing the system as a whole and at all scales of cryptocurrencies, and (therefore) (iii) the relative ranking of cryptocurrencies has been far from fixed.
In this scenario, if Bitcoin loses its leadership there may be strong psychological (investors) and media reactions. But, from the point of view of the market dynamics we have observed so far, this would not be a surprising event.
See also: Bitcoin ecology: Quantifying and modelling the long-term dynamics of the cryptocurrency market arXiv:1705.05334 (2017) || and The Cryptocurrency Market Is Growing Exponentially, MIT Technology Review (2017).
Data from Coin Market Cap.Brigham Young University head coach Bronco Mendenhall and teammates comforted quarterback Taysom Hill in a video clip filled with a lot of tears and even more love.
The clip comes from an episode of BYUtv's "Inside BYU Football" that aired Tuesday.
BYU's 33-28 victory over Nebraska on Saturday was coupled with the bitter reality that Hill was out for the season. A Lisfranc (mid-foot) sprain, suffered during a 21-yard touchdown run in the second quarter, became his third season-ending injury. Hill sustained a broken leg and torn ligaments in his ankle less than a year ago. After working diligently to play during the 2015 season, the new injury was more than heartbreaking.
“(Hill is) one of my best friends," Mitch Mathews, the wide receiver who caught the game-winning touchdown Saturday, told the Deseret News. "You see him with that severe of an injury and come back in and play, you almost want to cry during the game for how tough he is and how great of a leader he is and how we’re going to play for him even more. The catch comes secondary to my love for my best friend. He’ll be missed.”
In the "Inside BYU Football" clip, Mathews and Hill hug each other while Mathews tells Hill, "It was all for you, man. Everything, that was for you, man."
The new "Inside BYU Football" series takes viewers behind the scenes with BYU's football team during the 2015 season. The TV series is produced by former ESPN "SportsCenter" producer Mikel Minor and directed by Alan Seawright from "BYU Sports Nation."
"Inside BYU Football" airs Tuesdays.
Watch the full episode on byutv.org.
Alex is an intern with Deseret Digital Media.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @axelrad_The Department of Human Services' high-profile chief information officer Gary Sterrenberg will depart the agency next month after more than six years in the role, iTnews can reveal.
It leaves arguably the most technology-intensive leadership position - which involves looking after the IT operations of Centrelink and Medicare - across the federal government up for grabs.
Sterrenberg departs to work on a PhD, which he has been studying part time at the Australian National University, iTnews understands.
His PhD topic is listed as "measuring public value created through the introduction of a disruptive, digital platform-servicing model in the disability sector in Australia".
His official last day will be January 2, according to an internal memo sighted by iTnews.
The executive came to DHS in late 2011 from ANZ Bank, where he spent five years in various technology executive roles.
He walked into a department that was just four months into its new role as a “super-agency” made up of Centrelink, Medicare, and the Child Support Agency.
It had also just been told to cut operating and capital costs to help bring the Commonwealth's budget into surplus.
The directive came at about the halfway point for DHS' so-called service delivery reform (SDR) program, which involved the consolidation of data centres, IT systems and contracts.
Such big-bang projects characterised Sterrenberg's six years at the agency: from its 2012 SAP ERP consolidation, the ambitious delivery of myGov, to the more recent efforts to replace the mammoth systems that underpin Medicare and Centrelink.
The agency's IT shop has also spent the past few years dabbling in artificial intelligence and machine learning, deploying three virtual assistants in the space of a year.
Sterrenberg has also overseen the somewhat more contentious SAP-based overhaul of the child support payments system as well as the so-called 'robodebt' Centrelink automated debt notices and data matching program.
The department's head of IT infrastructure Mike Brett will act in the CIO role until January 14, at which point chief technology officer Charles McHardie will take over acting in the position while recruitment is underway.
DHS declined to provide further detail.New Zealand law permits 'low risk' designer drugs
Selve forslaget og anbefalingerne (107 sider)
Helt kort går forslaget ud på, at en række psykoaktive stoffer som p.t. er ulovlige eller lovlige bliver mulige at sælge lovligt såfremt, at man har 1) tilladelse til at gøre det, 2) stoffet er blevet testet i præ-kliniske og kliniske forsøg og fundet til at være "lav risiko". Forslaget kommer derfor ikke til at gøre noget stort mht. den generelle narkohandel i landet, og må anses som en slags minireform. Men det er da i det mindste en reform i den rigtige retning - i retning af legalisering og regulering. Måske når denne model har bevist at den kan virke i et par år, at man så vil overveje at prøve noget lign. for cannabis eller de meget ufarlige psykedelika psilobycin, LSD, og lign. Det bliver dog svært for det er ulovligt at legalisere de rusmidler hvis man er underskrifter på Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961).
Nedenfor ses et par citater fra forslaget, og nogle kommentarer.
Citeret fra introduktionen:
The bill seeks to regulate otherwise unregulated psychoactive sub- stances such as “party pills” and other “legal highs” in New Zealand. The bill aims to restrict the importation, manufacture, and supply of psychoactive substances unless authorised by a regulator, while allowing the sale of products that meet safety and manufacturing requirements. Currently, any psychoactive substance can be sold legally if it is not listed in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. This bill aims to place the onus on the industry to demonstrate that a psychoac- tive substance is not harmful or poses only a low risk to human health before approval for sale is given. Approval could be given only to finished, packaged psychoactive products, allowing the regulator to assess all the ingredients and the risk that they might present in the particular combination. The bill proposes the establishment of a regulatory authority within the Ministry of Health, and an independent Expert T echnical Com- mittee to advise the regulator on products submitted for approval. The bill is in three parts. Part 1 contains the interpretation section and provisions to establish the Regulatory Authority and Expert Advisory Committee. Part 2 would establish a licencing regime and process for approvals; and Part 3 would establish controls on approved products and provide for enforcement matters, and confer regulation making powers. Our commentary covers the main amendments we recommend to the bill. Purpose statement We consider that the primary purpose of this bill is to “regulate the availability of psychoactive substances in New Zealand and protect the health and minimise the harm to individuals who use psychoactive substances”. W e recommend amending clause 3 to make this clear.
Ligesom med det amerikanske forslag til at legalisere+regulere cannabis, så vil jeg gennemgå forslaget her en smule. Den særligt interesserede læser bør naturligvis læse forslaget selv.
Interpretations and definitions We recognise the ar gument that the term “psychoactive substances” in clause 9(1) is very broad, which could have the ef fect of bringing other substances such as garden plants and low - risk herbal products into its ambit. After careful consideration, however, we think that the definition should remain broad to avoid leaving loopholes. Current exclusions for food and herbal products are suf ficient for the purpose; and for products inadvertently caught by the legislation there is the declaring power in clause 81 to deem them not to be psychoactive substances for the purposes of the bill.
Altså, de vil ikke klart afgrænse hvilke rusmidler som hører til på forbudtlisten, men vil bare bredt referere til "psykoaktive stoffer". Det er en et noget bredt område, fordi det også inkluderer ikke-rusmidler men stadig psykoaktive stoffer, særligt nootropics (mental doping). Det ser man også i selve forslaget:
(Principles, 4, d) a psychoactive product that has not been approved by the Authority should be prohibited, on a precautionary basis, until it has been assessed by the Authority and the Authority is satisfied that it poses no more than a low risk of harm to individuals who use it.
Dette forslag kriminaliserer derfor en meget lang række psykoaktive stoffer fordi "de måske kan være farlige". Det er en dårlig løsning som er i stil med de nuværende forbudsmodeller. Det viser også en total mangel på vejning af andre forhold, særligt borgernes frihed, respekten for politiet/loven, og prisen for at håndhæve.
Control of approved products We are aware of strongly held views that the age for purchase of approved products should be 20 or 21, rather than 18 as provided for. Discussion centred on expert advice concerning brain development in young people; it was ar gued that this was a new bill and it might be appropriate to start this new regime with a higher age threshold level to help minimise harm to young people. W e consider, however, that a higher age limit for approved psychoactive products that pose a low risk to users might suggest to young people that alcohol and tobacco, having lesser age restrictions, are safer alternatives. W e therefore recommend that the purchase age in clause 46 remain at 18, aligning it with the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012. If the age limit in that Act is amended, we recommend that the purchase age for approved products should be automatically amended. W e also recommend that clause 46 be amended to include an of fence of possession of a psychoactive substance, including an approved product, by a person under the age of 18.
De burde gå mindre op i at spekulere over hvad det måske måske ikke får folk til at tro, og mere op i at alkohol og andre lovlige rusmidler fra 18 år-alternativer er mere skadelige. Hvis rusmidlerne bruges komplimentært, så er det en god ide at forsøge at få folk til at bruge det mindst farligste alternativ. Det betyder selvfølgelig også at dette skal være lovligt.
I øvrigt forstår jeg ikke hvorfor man dog skulle have særligt kunstigt høje grænser for netop rusmidler. Man tillader gerne folk at stemme fra de er 18 år (nogle gange 16!), lader dem tage kørekort, straffer dem hvis de bryder loven... men man vil ikke tillade dem at købe rusmidler som er testet og dermed verificeret til at være lav-risiko. Det giver ikke mening.
Labelling and packaging W e are concerned that some packaging might be designed to appeal to minors, and although we consider that to define “appeal” in this con- text would be dif ficult in practice, we recommend replacing clause 54 with new clause 54 which prohibits a design of this type. W e also recognise the ar gument for requiring approved psychoactive prod- ucts to be sold in plain packaging, but are not convinced that this is necessary. Unlike cigarettes, these products will need to be of “mini- mal or low risk” to be approved and psychoactive products are made up of a range of chemical formulations. W e recommend, however, clarifying the provisions in clause 54 regarding the wording required on the label of the approved product, and for any further requirements to be prescribed by regulations.
Det er noget man godt kunne diskutere nærmere. I et forsøg på at undgå effekter af reklamering og andre irraitonelle måder at overtale folk til at købe på, så kunne man kræve at alle rusmidler sælges i plane, ens pakker, udover den information som skal stå derpå: navn, varedeklaration, risiko ved brug (gerne i frekvenser), evt. hvad man skal gøre i tiflælde af problemer, fabrikantens hjemmeside.
Local approved products policies Despite advertising restrictions to limit advertising to the inside of retail premises and reduce visibility of the products in communities, we are concerned that retail outlets might be situated near schools or in other places considered inappropriate by the local community. W e therefore recommend making provision for local community input on decisions as to the location of outlets, including a requirement to have regard to their density, by inserting clauses 61A, 61B, and 61C.
Ikke i min baghave tænkning? I hvert fald et studie har ikke kunne påvise nogen sammenhæng mellem afstanden fra cannabisklubber i Holland og hvor meget folk røg. Mon ikke at det også gælder for skoler?
50 Prohibitions and restrictions on place of sale of approved products (1) A person must not sell an approved product from any of the following: (a) a shop commonly thought of as a dairy: (b) a shop commonly thought of as a convenience store: (c) a grocery store or a supermarket: (d) any premises where the principal business carried on is— (i) the sale of automotive fuels; or (ii) the repair and servicing of motor vehicles and the sale of automotive fuels: (e) any premises where alcohol is sold or supplied under a licence issued under the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012: (f) any premises that are not a fixed permanent structure, for example, a tent or marquee: (g) any vehicle or other conveyance (for example, a mobile street cart): (h) any other place or premises specified or described in the regulations. (2) A person who contravenes subsection (1) commits an of fence and is liable on conviction,— (a) in the case of an individual, to a fine not exceeding $10.000: (b) in the case of a body corporate, to a fine not exceeding $50,000. Compare: 2005 No 81 s 41
Virker lige lovlig stramt.
52 Prohibition on free-of-charge distribution and rewards of approved products
En af de mere underlige.
Der er en hel del flere af sådanne forbud i loven. Det er ikke en specielt liberal tilgang til det, men dog en smule bedre end det nuværende, især hvis det kan inspirere andre til at legalisere fx cannabis.Benny's First Bikini
By 2tfx, 16th Aug 2014 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/3byg837e/
Posted in WikinutWritingShort Stories
Sis tells the story about the first time Benny wore a bikini at the beach.
Benny's First Bikini
Blazer and Benny sat on the beach watching the sunset after a day of swimming in the warm ocean. Benny was sitting on her beach towel with Blazer. She wore her favorite red string bikini. Blazer was shirtless and wearing his swimsuit with the red flames on the side. As the sun set, Big bro came outside to help start a campfire.
The two young rabbits moved close to the fire. Sis came onto the beach wearing her wet bikini. She spent the day swimming and sunbathing with her brother and Benny. Sis brought some marshmallows and carrot juice. While the family sat around the fire roasting the marshmallows, Sis asked if they wanted to hear a story.
"Do you boys want to know how Benny got her red bikini?" she asked. her brothers looked over at her. Benny blushed a crimson red. "No," the brothers said together. Benny sat up and dusted the sand off her white fur. "Please don't tell them that," she begged Sis, Benny walked around to her "you promise me you wouldn't tell anyone." Sis placed her arms around the girl's waist. "Don't be ashamed, Sis said "It's a cute story about your first bikini," Big Bro and Blazer sat waiting "Tell us about it." they said.
Sis began the story:
Blazer helped his brother carry the beach umbrella from the plane. Big bro carried the picnic basket and ice chest full of carrot juice. The girls stayed inside to change into their swim suits. Sis always wore a bikini everywhere she went, but decided to wear a new ocean blue bikini she bought for today. She took it out of her bag and started to change.
Benny opened her bag and removed her two piece cheerleader outfit. Sis finished tying her bikini when she noticed Benny putting on the top of her outfit. "You can't wear that on the beach," she said looking at the tomboy. "Why not?" Benny asked holding her arms out.
This is almost a swimsuit," she said. Sis walked over and touched the fabric. "This is a wool blend," Sis said "You can't swim in wool."
Sis walked back to her bag and took out two pieces of fabric, tossing them to Benny.
Benny's First Bikini:Part Two
The fabric landed at her feet. "You have to be kidding," Benny said covering her chest with her arms. Benny stood looking at the floor. Sis walked to her "you'll be hot and sweaty all day." Sis said. Benny began scratching "I wish you didn't say that." Sis continued "And sand will get into the outfit." Benny looked down at her boyish body.
Benny blushed. "I can't wear that, " she pointed to the clothing. Benny began to cry "I don't have the body for a bikini."
"I can't let him see me in that," Sis gently put her hand on the girl and gave her a hug. "You mean my brother?" Sis asked. Benny nodded, putting her head into Sis's chest. Sis rubbed Benny's head.
"He's never seen me in any swimsuit before," she said "Blazer will laugh at me." Sis lifted her head and looked at her right in the eyes. "No he won't," Sis said smiling " Blazer is a great guy and the sweetest boy I know," Sis whispered in her ear "But don't tell him I said that," Both girls giggled.
Benny sniffed then picked up the bikini. "Will you help me put this on?" Benny asked while she started changing her clothes.
"Of course," Sis said. Benny slipped the bikini bottoms on while Sis helped Benny tie the bikini top. It was a perfect fit.
Sis had given Benny her favorite red bikini. "Now let's go outside," Sis said with her hand on Benny's furry shoulder. " "I can't wait to see Blazer's reaction when he sees you."FILE - This Saturday, May 31, 2014, file photo, shows the Starbucks logo at one of the company's coffee shops in downtown Chicago. Starbucks is pushing ahead with its expansion into China and said it is on track to having about 5,000 stores there by 2021, more than doubling the number of coffee shops it currently has in the country. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File) The Associated Press
By JOSEPH PISANI, AP Business Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Starbucks is pushing ahead with its expansion into mainland China, saying Wednesday it's on track to have 5,000 stores by 2021, more than doubling the number of its coffee shops in the country.
The Seattle-based coffee chain is looking to China to fuel its growth. It's grown rapidly since opening its first Chinese store in 1999, though famously suffered a misstep nearly a decade ago when protests over a shop inside the Forbidden City led to it being closed. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has said China could one day surpass the U.S. as the chain's largest market. There are about 13,000 Starbucks stores in the United States.
Among chain coffee shops, Starbucks had a 74 percent market share in mainland China in 2015, according to market research company Euromonitor. The company's closest competitors are McDonald's Corp.'s McCafe and Whitbread PLC's Costa Coffee, both of which had market shares slightly above 9 percent, according to Euromonitor.
Starbucks has been adding unique flavors to attract Chinese customers, such as a Black Forest Latte, a mix of cherry juice, cocoa powder and coffee. And in September it began selling its Teavana tea brand at its China locations.
Chinese customers spend more time in Starbucks shops and are buying more food than Americans, Schultz told The Associated Press. Late next year, Starbucks plans to open a 30,000-square-foot store in Shanghai that Schultz called a "Disneyland for coffee." Named the Starbucks Roastery and Reserve Tasting Room, the store will be similar to one opened in Seattle nearly two years ago, where customers can watch coffee beans get roasted and sip mixed coffee drinks.
To oversee its expansion in China, Starbucks Corp. said Wednesday that it named Belinda Wong as the first CEO of its Chinese business. Wong was president of Starbucks China, and has worked for the company for 16 years.Story highlights The female rhino was 41 and one of four of the subspecies remaining in the world
The remaining three are in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.
(CNN) The world's northern white rhinoceros population plunged by a quarter on Sunday with a death at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.
Nola, a 41-year-old northern white rhino, died after being treated for a bacterial infection and
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we’re in a “Drug Free Zone” where penalties are doubled. Hempfest staff members are changing the law, not breaking it. Sorry, dude!
Really, I know you have some. C’mon, dude this is Hempfest! Kick down! Dude, really. By keeping the event safe and responsible we are helping to support the movement. Buying or selling illegal drugs at Hempfest hurts our cause. Don’t do it.
When do they throw out the free joints? What joints?
Do you know where to buy any weed? I wouldn’t know. Please don’t buy weed here. It bears repeating: buying, selling or distributing drugs at Hempfest hurts the cause. Also, it’s still very illegal.
Can I buy your staff shirt? You’ve got to earn this staff shirt by kicking down your time and energy for the cause (volunteer). This shirt is not for sale.
Can I trade you this fat sack for your staff shirt? Dude, you can’t trade for it either.
Can I smoke weed here? Keep in mind that smoking marijuana in public is still illegal. There is no safety umbrella at Hempfest. If you choose to smoke out of civil disobedience, be aware of the potential consequences. We are in a “Drug Free Zone”, and penalties are doubled if you’re busted.
So don’t do it in front of a Cop!
Would you like to smoke this weed with me? No thanks, I’m working! Remember: anyone asking to buy/sell/smoke weed with you at Hempfest is possibly an undercover agent looking to bust you.
Where can I buy some brownies? Please don’t buy any food from anyone who is not a Hempfest Licensed Food Vendor. If the food is not professionally packaged in a Commercial kitchen, it may not be what the seller promises, and it could be unsafe. No vendors are allowed to sell or sample marijuana or foods with marijuana.
~mahalo~gracias~merci~arigatou~danke~grazie~xie xie~obrigado~toda~salamat~
Dear Staff,
Our gratitude goes out to all of you who give us your valuable time, and work so passionately for justice and freedom.
We appreciate you showing up, and also bringing us more volunteers! We always need more help with Set-up and Tear-Down. We are here 24 hrs a day for 10 days, and you and your friends may sign up for additional shifts any time by coming to Staff Check-In, or signing up on our website. Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday after the event when we tear down are especially challenging, even if you can just make it down for a couple of hours, it will help tremendously!
Thank you for all your hard work and dedication, we could not produce the world’s largest Hempfest without you!
~Your Seattle Hempfest Core Group
Open-book Quiz
Can we camp here? Y / N
Name 2 things required to volunteer;
_____________________________________________
Should you buy/sell pot or edibles at Hempfest? Y/ N
Name 2 things you should bring with you for your shift;
_____________________________________________
What is a Code Adam? Where do you report one?
______________________________________________
Name 2 signs of heat exhaustion;
_______________________________________________
List the 3 chutes to enter/exit Hempfest;
_______________________________________________
What’s the name of the emergency evacuation document? ____________________________________
Can you bring your dog, cat, snake, rat, pig, bird, monkey, llama or other pet with you to Hempfest? Y / N
Why does everyone need to Check-In once a day?
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(Chieko Hara/The Porterville Recorder via AP)
Massachusetts has some of the most restrictive gun licensing laws in the country. Yet 97 percent of people who apply for a license are still granted one. That’s one finding from a new Northeastern University study.
The report, led by Jack McDevitt, director of Northeastern’s Institute on Race and Justice, casts doubt on a popular argument that stricter gun laws will make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens who want a firearm to purchase one.
“States are concerned that if they have a licensing provision, people will be denied their constitutional rights, and I think Massachusetts is a strong example showing that doesn’t have to be the case,” McDevitt said.
In the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 20 children and six adults dead, Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo, who graduated from Northeastern in 1972, asked McDevitt to lead a commission to improve state gun policies. After eight months of research, McDevitt and his collaborator Janice Iwama, PhD’16, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, made 44 recommendations to strengthen the state’s gun laws. In 2014, 42 of them were adopted.
The researchers also received a state grant to study how the laws were being implemented, which culminated in this report, submitted Monday to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security. Their findings show that tougher Massachusetts gun laws led to an increase in license denials from two to only four percent, proving the vast majority of people who want guns are still able to purchase them.
“You can have strong gun laws that prohibit people who have violent histories from getting guns, and you’ll still have the vast majority of law-abiding people able to get guns without any problem,” McDevitt said.
One of the recommendations McDevitt made in 2014 was to allow police chiefs more discretion in granting gun licenses. Pro-gun lobbyists—particularly spokespeople for the National Rifle Association—have argued this policy would lead to an abuse of power. But the report found no evidence of that in Massachusetts.
“Police seemed to go out of their way to try and give people a license,” McDevitt said. “They aren’t trying to deny somebody over a small thing that happened when they were a juvenile.” Even in communities with the highest rate of licensing denials—Bedford and Boston—only 8 percent of applications were refused. There is even an appeals process if someone gets turned down, McDevitt said.
Massachusetts has reduced the rate of gun deaths by 60 percent since 1994, said John Rosenthal, a Boston real-estate developer and founder of Stop Handgun Violence, a nonprofit that works to prevent firearm violence. According to the latest data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Massachusetts had the lowest rate of gun deaths of any state in the nation.
“I think it’s just common sense. Gun laws that make it harder for kids, criminals, and the dangerously mentally ill to access firearms work to reduce preventable gun injuries and death,” Rosenthal said. “I am a gun owner, and to me, it’s no surprise that reasonable gun safety laws including more police chief discretion—the very people we empower in a civilized society to protect us and detect at-risk and potentially violent people in our community—work to effectively reduce gun violence without any inconvenience to law-abiding gun owners.”Because Halloween, as All Hallows’ Eve, has its roots in pagan mythology and the Christian calendar, Jews traditionally don’t celebrate it. But increasingly people (including Jews) around the world are celebrating American Halloween and that’s a terrible mistake.
Maybe I am aging into a curmudgeon — certainly young children and LGBT communities have righteous fun — but it seems to me that dedicating a holiday to fear and the objectification of women is about the opposite of what we need. In our era of presidential candidate pussy-grabbing, Stanford raping and NFL wife-beating let’s perhaps not observe a holiday that encourages women-as-objects to dress as “sexy” (read slutty, promiscuous, disrespected) women-as-objects. Just try to imagine what a straight male “sexy” costume looks like if you think I’m gendering this falsely.
As an Englishman I didn’t grow up with this particular pagan capitalist excrescence. I first saw the dressing up and Trick-or-Treating in the Spielberg film “E.T.” where Halloween observance seemed like a quaint local custom. Little did I realize that it would spread like kudzu through the supermarkets of the world, propagated by crass high-fructose corn syrup media.
As a Jew, I assumed that there was some basis for the holiday that I didn’t understand. You’d think the story would be pretty powerful to judge by the number of creepy skulls stuck on the wall. And corpses, for crying out loud, fake rotting dismembered corpses on buildings, though heaven forbid we watch the evening news about Syria.
Though Sukkot has much in common with it, Halloween for Jews is often how Purim is described because we dress up, drink and celebrate surviving the genocidal decree of an empire’s chief minister by reading the story of how we managed to do it. But no one I’ve spoken to during my 20 years in America can tell me the reason for their secular Halloween observance or the need to turn public spaces into Sam Raimi sets.
Granted, it’s an odd, transitional time of the year. In the northern hemisphere the harvest season has gone, the nights are getting darker and colder and winter beckons. There’s a carpe diem atmosphere to the holiday, a feeling that we should enjoy physical pleasures while we can.
For it is also a holiday of death. Pagan and Christian beliefs differ, but on the spiritual plane, they basically believe that souls are caught in transition but, through prayers and ritual, believers are helping them reach their final destination. Hence, I suppose, the skeletons, ghosts and ghouls — representatives of that post-dead, pre-afterlife stage.
But, in our globally interdependent lives, harvest is a theoretical concept, winter is mostly held at bay by lighting and heating and these vestigial customs are socially damaging. Spare a thought for parents outside the 1%, already spread thin as the butter on matzoh, who have to put together a prom-dress of a costume in their three seconds of personal time.
Perhaps it’s difficult to think critically of a custom that you’ve grown up with — even if it’s changed massively since the time of “E.T.” To avoid being a frog in boiling water though, perhaps we should consider a seasonally comparable English holiday. Every year in England on November 5, the country goes out to see fireworks, drink hot chocolate and, in a custom initiated by the Protestant majority in the 17th century, unthinkingly celebrate the transition of autumn into winter by burning Catholics in effigy. It’s fun, it’s universally celebrated, but it’s wrong.
If you are celebrating All Hallow’s Eve, go in peace, I respect your beliefs. If however, you are over 18 and celebrating American Halloween — that vacuous holiday of “dress like a sex object, eat sugar and decorate your house in cheap orange and black props from the Scream franchise” — I despair of your future.
The only spiritual need American Halloween (now celebrated in England too, I hear) seems to fulfill is the spiritual need to sell a whole bunch of polyester costumes and card decorations between Labor Day and Thanksgiving.
But even more than Christmas where popular culture retains at least a tenuous remembrance of the messianic birth (how about fighting against the capitalist war on Christmas, Mr. O’Reilly?), American Halloween has lost all links to its roots as a post-harvest reclamation of souls festival.
American Halloween is now purely a hollow carnival of consumption where we train our children to threaten neighbors for sweet poison. Where cheap stereotypes masquerade as costume. Where our teens learn that drinking and sexual objectification is an acceptable and effective way of celebrating life.
Born from a holiday where the normal rules can be relaxed for a day — where bosses and nobles are just flesh in the face of death — American Halloween has metastasized through a body politic that needs to rediscover a sense of propriety not relax its final dying grip. Social rules have become so democratized that popularity is truth, that vicious racism is once again commonplace and that a presidential candidate can openly lust after his daughter.
So put away your Kandy Korn and your sexy Kim Kardashian costumes, advise your neighbor with a mezuzah that dressing up as Anne Frank or Charlie Chan are equally bad ideas. Tell your teenage daughter that people will like her just as much — and respect her more — if she goes out with her underwear covered. Don’t burn Catholic dolls, or people — or of any other religion. And perhaps suggest to trick or treaters that they donate the canned fruit that you have given them to a food bank to help the needy through the cold winter that’s a coming.
Email Dan Friedman at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at @danfriedmanme
Updated 11pm October 27. h/t to Amina, Malina, Rachel, Jacqueline, Natania.
This story "Why All Jews Should Detest Halloween — And So Should Everybody Else" was written by Dan Friedman.VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The province is reminding you it will start phasing out Care Cards next month.
Health Minister Margaret MacDiarmid says they’ll be replaced by the BC Services Card over the next five years. “We have Care Cards now that really haven’t changed at all since 1989. What we’re moving toward is a more secure type of Care Card.”
“Although there are only about 4.4 million British Columbians, there are about 9 million Care Cards out there and we are concerned that there is some Care Card fraud,” she tells us.
You will have the option of combining your driver’s licence and Services Card so you won’t have to carry around two pieces of plastic.
Starting February 15th, eligible British Columbians between the ages of 19 and 74 will have to get the new card by renewing their enrolment in the Medical Services Plan. You will also have to re-enrol every five years after that.
Click here to find more information about the BC Services Card.This past weekend was Tatsu Hobby’s Blue and Yellow Ball. This is one of their 4 quarterly contest and the theme was anything in either blue or yellow – at least one of those two colors and their shades much cover 70% of the kit. The contest officially starts at 1PM with the last entries submitted by 3PM, and they judging commences.
Video of the entries:
More about the contest after the jump
A good number of us in the past have not really competed much at our own SCGMC event so we figured a group of us could take the trip and surprise the NorCal folks. We had tried to keep the knowledge that we were going on the downlow so our builds didn’t mention anything, but there were a few folks not surprised that we attended.
We made some new friends and helped promote SCGMC even further. Since people make the effort to drive out to our event – it is only fair that we do the same to other events. So this is the first of a few events that we have planned on attending to help spread the gospel that is SCGMC.
There were four winners in 5 categories:
Best First Timer (First time attending a Tatsu Hobby event): Dan’s Zaku I
Best Blue Kit: My Gulf Custom Gusion
Best Yellow: Heng’s Nutrocker
Best of Show: Tom’s 1/144 Shiki
The last category was most improved, but since there wasn’t a significant improvement in the entrants from their last competition, that was thrown out.
We had a lot of fun and managed to sell a few of our newly reprinted TGG Shiki shirts:
So for those of you that have been waiting for a reprint, click the store and order your shirt while supplies last!
Here are a few pictures I took from the event.
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TumblrThe Mech_Con Pattern is now available for Redeem!
Mech_Con Attendees who have a Redeem Code can use this link
This unlocks the Mech_Con Pattern for Mechs released in-game as of the end of November.
Everything up to the Thanatos! Hellspawn and Preorder Mech are not Supported by this offer.
Tournament Supporter Pack Owners use this link
*people who do not own the TSP will n ot see the Redeem option
NOTES:
Please Select carefully as you can Select Mechs you do not yet own.
Customer support cannot undo or change your selections.
The pattern is only available on Mechs which were in-game as of the end of November.
The HellSpawn does not have Mech_Con Pattern Support nor does any mech Currently in preorder.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the Mech_Con Pattern please contact support.Puffballs are fungi, so named because clouds of brown dust-like spores are emitted when the mature fruitbody bursts or is impacted. Puffballs are in the division Basidiomycota and encompass several genera, including Calvatia, Calbovista and Lycoperdon.[1] True puffballs do not have a visible stalk or stem. The puffballs were previously treated as a taxonomic group called the Gasteromycetes or Gasteromycetidae, but they are now known to be a polyphyletic assemblage.
The distinguishing feature of all puffballs is that they do not have an open cap with spore-bearing gills. Instead, spores are produced internally, in a spheroidal fruitbody called a gasterothecium (gasteroid ('stomach-like') basidiocarp). As the spores mature, they form a mass called a gleba in the centre of the fruitbody that is often of a distinctive color and texture. The basidiocarp remains closed until after the spores have been released from the basidia. Eventually, it develops an aperture, or dries, becomes brittle, and splits, and the spores escape. The spores of puffballs are statismospores rather than ballistospores, meaning they are not forcibly extruded from the basidium. Puffballs and similar forms are thought to have evolved convergently (that is, in numerous independent events) from Hymenomycetes by gasteromycetation, through secotioid stages. Thus, 'Gasteromycetes' and 'Gasteromycetidae' are now considered to be descriptive, morphological terms (more properly gasteroid or gasteromycetes, to avoid taxonomic implications) but not valid cladistic terms.
Stalked puffballs do have a stalk that supports the gleba. None of the stalked puffballs are edible as they are tough and woody mushrooms.[2] The Hymenogastrales and Enteridium lycoperdon, a slime mold, are the false puffballs. A gleba which is powdery on maturity is a feature of true puffballs, stalked puffballs and earthstars. False puffballs are hard like rock or brittle. All false puffballs are inedible, as they are tough and bitter to taste. The genus Scleroderma, which has a young purple gleba, should also be avoided.[2]
Puffballs were traditionally used in Tibet for making ink by burning them, grinding the ash, then putting them in water and adding glue liquid and "a nye shing ma decoction", which, when pressed for a long time, made a black dark substance that was used as ink.[3]
Edibility and identification [ edit ]
Spores coming out of puffball fungus
While most puffballs are not poisonous, some often look similar to young agarics, and especially the deadly Amanitas, such as the death cap or destroying angel mushrooms. It is for this reason that all puffballs gathered in mushroom hunting are cut in half lengthwise. Young puffballs in the edible stage, before maturation of the gleba, have undifferentiated white flesh within; whereas the gills of immature Amanita mushrooms can be seen if they are closely examined.
Puffball mushrooms on sale at a market in England
The giant puffball, Calvatia gigantea (earlier classified as Lycoperdon giganteum), reaches a foot (30 cm) or more in diameter, and is difficult to mistake for any other fungus. It has been estimated that a large specimen of this fungus when mature will produce around 7 × 10¹² spores. If collected before spores have formed, while the flesh is still white, it may be cooked as slices fried in butter, with a strong earthy, mushroom flavor.
Not all true puffball mushrooms are without stalks. Some may also be stalked like the Podaxis pistillaris which is also called the "false shaggy mane". There are also a number of false puffballs that look similar to the true ones.[2]
Stalked puffballs [ edit ]
Stalked puffballs species:[2]
True puffballs [ edit ]
True puffballs genera and species:[2]
False puffballs [ edit ]
False puffballs species:[2]
Classification [ edit ]
Lycoperdon pyriforme
Lycoperdon echinatum
Major orders:
Similarly, the true truffles (Tuberales) are gasteroid Ascomycota. Their ascocarps are called tuberothecia.
References [ edit ]As the unpopular shark bait and shoot program continues in Western Australia, fisheries minister Troy Buswell has defended the policy, saying that it isn't a cull, but a 'localised shark mitigation strategy'. Lochlan Morrissey suspects Buswell learned the art of political euphemism from the best.
As a rule, dictionary definitions make linguists nervous. Why? Meaning is complicated. No matter how many senses you list in the dictionary (see the absurd, baroque spectacle that is set), meaning is this soapy fish which defies even the most thorough attempts at grasping. For instance, what is it about the word education that makes it seem more ‘formal’, or ‘official’, than learning? Why is it more appropriate to call someone a shit bloke in some circumstances, and a dickhead others? Or, more relevantly, when does a cull become a cull?
This was precisely the question put by esteemed philosopher of language and Western Australian Minister for Fisheries, Troy Buswell. Remember back in December, when he stated that his proposed plan to bait and shoot sharks over three metres in length did not “represent a culling of sharks,” but was instead a “targeted, localised shark mitigation strategy”? So, if a policy of shooting sharks over three metres in length is not a cull, what is? On ABC radio, Buswell made it clear.
A cull is when you go up over Lake Gregory and for very sound environmental reasons kill thousands of horses.
Culling then, according to Buswell, is an act of indiscriminate, en masse killing. The problem however, is that this isn’t borne out by the dictionary.
The word ‘cull’ ultimate derives from the Latin verb colligere, meaning ‘to choose, select’. Coming via Old French, the word entered English in the eleventh century, with a similar meaning to the original Latin—to pick out, to collect, to gather—a meaning which has persisted to the present day. To cull, then, if we accept the dictionary as the arbiter of meaning, is to purposefully select a portion of some animal population to be destroyed, generally for environmental reasons. With the requirement that only sharks over three metres be killed, and all others released, this would seem like a textbook case of a cull. So why the avoidance of the term?
This is where our mate, the faithful dictionary, falls down. A politician’s vocabulary is ruled more by public opinion than fidelity to the language he’s speaking. Buswell well understands that in popular usage the word cull means precisely the indiscriminate slaughter that he doesn’t want to imply. Accordingly, he opts for the hopelessly euphemistic ‘localised shark mitigation strategy,’ the latest in an illustrious pedigree which includes other famous political euphemisms; ‘servicing a target’ for bombing; Bill Clinton’s ‘didn’t inhale’ for inhale; or the – ahem – bombastic ‘spontaneous energetic disassembly’ for an explosion.
The aim of the euphemism game is to boil the shit out of language until it’s so amorphous that no-one could possibly turn around and beat you with it. Interestingly enough, cull itself can be, and is, used as a euphemism for kill, with the implication that the act is responsible, or has good intentions, instead of senseless slaughter. So ‘shark mitigation strategy’ is a double-euphemism, a double-boiled gruel so reduced that the colourless, indistinct granules of meaning left over decompose into smaller particles before you can get at them.
Let’s call a spade, a spade; and anyone who uses the phrase ‘localised shark mitigation strategy,’ is a spade.
(Visited 33 times, 1 visits today)Here at Mailform, we’re focused on helping customers be more productive with documents. PDFs are the primary document format we support, and one question we get from time to time is how to actually fill out the forms online (as opposed to printing, filling it out, and scanning it in). PDFs are used commonly for newsletters, instruction manuals, and tax and healthcare forms, and a ton of government paperwork. Despite this, you can also create your own PDF and even make a fill-out form by using one of these tools. Which tools you actually use depends on your needs, device and price point.
PDFfillerPDFfiller is a web based application that makes it easy to create, edit, or make a form to fill out easily. All you need to do is upload the document to the website and use all the available tools. You can upload documents from your computer, or if you prefer, from cloud storage services like Box, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and more. Once uploaded, PDFfiller.com provides several basic video tutorials on how to use every feature including the fill-out form creation. Pricing starts at $6 per month, but you can upgrade to professional and business plans to get more features.
PDFBuddy Another free web-based PDF tool is available from PDFBuddy. It offers a range of tools to edit your documents online, meaning you don’t have to download and install any software. The best thing about this tool is user-friendly interface. The home page has an upload button with which you can search for the document you want to edit from computer. Once uploaded, the interface provides easy access to all available tools on the left-hand toolbar. PDFBuddy.com offers free usage up to three times a month, but you can get unlimited access for only $7.99 a month. There is also a pay-as-you-go method for those who don’t want to subscribe. There is no difference between the payment plans; all provide the same tools for adding signature, filling out forms, adding or removing images, and more.
Adobe Acrobat Adobe is the grandaddy of the PDF format, and their flagship is Adobe Acrobat (now part of the document cloud). Acrobat is widely popular and constantly updated to provide more features and stable performance. It is not a web app, but stand-alone software that you must install on your desktop or mobile device. This provides a key advantage, which is that Adobe Acrobat can be used offline as well. The latest version has FormsCentral feature with which you can build a form to fill out: this is available only in the paid subscription plan. There is also a full set of document-editing tools including but not limited to reformatting, replacing texts, moving page elements, and changing font. The new version, Adobe Acrobat XI Standard, is available for $299.
PDFEscape A cloud-based PDF editing tool, PDFEscape allows you to upload and edit up to 10 documents for free. Each file must be less than 10MB and 100 pages. You can upgrade for more with the Premium or Ultimate Plan subscription. Even the free service gives you access to a variety of editing tools, fill forms, create forms, and print without watermark.
FoxitsoftwareFoxit is a strong competitor for Adobe Acrobat. One of its best offerings for PDF editing is the Phantom PDF Standard, available for about $77.00 or probably less. It is smaller than Acrobat, and therefore it consumes less computer resources. In general, you can consider this the lightweight version of Adobe Acrobat; it is less expensive, but there is also limitation in features as a result. However, PDF form filling and creations are available.
Hope these are helpful! Thanks for reading and please reach out if you have additional questions!"People like Blair and Macron are poster children for the utter vapidity of neoliberal centrism."
—Will Bunch, Philly.com
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an interview on The Global Politico Podcast published Monday that people should not approach U.S. President Donald Trump with "flat-out opposition" and seemed to argue that Americans should be less concerned about Trump and more concerned about the platform of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—remarks that earned him immediate derision from commentators on social media.
Critics took particular umbrage at Blair's attempt to claim that the solutions proposed by "populist right" and the "populist left" are similarly misguided, a stance some mocked as an attempt to equate those fighting for Medicare for All with neo-Nazis.
Tony Blair thinks Democrats should be more worried about @BernieSanders pushing #MedicareForAll than Donald Trump pushing neo-nazis. pic.twitter.com/NwXJTCK2oj — Jordan (@JordanChariton) September 25, 2017
Tony Blair uses harsher words to describe Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn than he does Donald Trump. https://t.co/NRc5nlN7cB — Jason Le Miere (@JasonLeMiere) September 25, 2017
Throughout the Politico interview, Blair, a "Third Way" centrist figure who enthusiastically supported the Iraq War, characterized the demands of the left in the U.S. and the U.K.—like free public college tuition—as little more than pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.
"[Y]ou can go for what are very good-sounding things like, we're going to abolish tuition fees, or we're going to give you this for free, or that for free," Blair said. "Okay, so that's one way you can go, and it definitely, in today's world, and in particular, in the absence of a vigorous change-making center, that's very attractive. But I don’t think it's the answer, and I'm not sure it would win an election."
"I think a lot of these solutions aren't really progressive," Blair continued. "And they don't correspond to what the problem of the modern world is, which is the problem of accelerating change. And so, the solutions that kind of look back to the '60s or '70s, they get a round of applause."
Tony Blair, who's earned millions consulting for Gulf royals, says he's worried by things like tuition free college https://t.co/TOfaSFZFtv pic.twitter.com/m7f24SLk09 — Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 25, 2017
Neoliberal war criminals who have fueled fascism for years continue focusing their energies on attacking the left https://t.co/DjTOWCCf5S — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) September 25, 2017
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
Blair went on to offer a comparatively charitable interpretation of Trump's tenure in the White House, saying that while he disagrees with the U.S. president's decision to ditch the Paris climate agreement, he thinks that Trump's moves to deepen American involvement in the Middle East have "been helpful."
When Politico's Susan Glasser asked Blair about his decision to wholeheartedly support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Blair noted that it is a discussion he is "perfectly happy" to have, dismissed as a "fundamental misunderstanding" arguments that the invasion is to blame for destabilizing the Middle East, and asserted that the present suffering in Syria is one of the "costs of non-intervention."
Blair concluded the interview by expressing his desire to "renew the center" in order to quell the appeal of the right and left, pointing to the victory of Emmanuel Macron in France's presidential election as a blueprint.
But judging by recent polling data and electoral results, Blair appears to be on the wrong side of public opinion.
Bernie Sanders is far and away the most popular politician in the U.S.—popularity attained with his platform of free public college tuition, Medicare for All, and a $15 minimum wage. Jeremy Corbyn, for his part, effectively revived the U.K.'s Labour Party by surpassing all expectations in this year's snap election with an explicitly left-wing manifesto.
France's Macron, on the other hand, has watched his approval ratings plummet in his first months as president, and he is increasingly under fire as he eyes tax cuts for the wealthy and rams through deeply unpopular union reforms that will make it easier for employers to fire workers.
Will Bunch, a columnist for Philly.com, concluded that the soaring popularity of Sanders and Corbyn, and the plummeting popularity of Macron, is an indication that centrism has failed to offer a viable alternative to the status quo.
"People like Blair and Macron are poster children for the utter vapidity of neoliberal centrism," Bunch wrote.The eight-day Israeli assault on Gaza has resulted in at least $1.2 billion in economic damage, the territory's government says. Earlier, a report by the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce called for Gaza to be recognized as an economic disaster area.
Direct damage caused by the Israeli airstrikes will cost $545 million to repair, while indirect damages are estimated at some $700 million, Hamas spokesman Taher al-Nunu said Sunday.
"The total cost of damages caused by the Israeli aggression is $1.245 billion,” al-Nunu said.
The eight-day Israeli operation, officially called Pillar of Defense, completely destroyed 200 homes and damaged another 8,000. The attack also destroyed 42 non-residential buildings, including the Hamas government headquarters, three mosques and a health center, Nunu added. Israeli forces are also known to have targeted the offices of local and international media outlets.
On Saturday, the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce reported that latest conflict with Israel caused $300 million in economic damage.
The report covered damages to the agricultural, health and social sectors. The occupied territory’s agrarian segment suffered $120 million in damage while the eight-day halt to economic activities resulted in $40 million lost, the report suggested. The rest of the sum comes from destroyed buildings and infrastructure that was impaired by Israeli airstrikes, Xinhua reported.
To deal with the disastrous economic consequences of the raid, the report calls for a lift of Israeli restrictions on Gaza in accordance with the truce that ended the operation on Wednesday.
Besides economic damage, the Israeli response to Hamas’ rocket attacks killed 168 Palestinians, most them civilians.
Tel Aviv began striking Gaza last week with a declared goal of stopping rocket attacks on its territory from Hamas, the political party governing Gaza. Hamas' military had intensified its bombardment of Israeli territory, killing six Israelis, including five civilians, according to official reports.
The Israeli Cabinet authorized a call-up of 75,000 reserve troops as the air assault on Gaza intensified, and amid growing speculation of a ground invasion into the territory.
However, the ground operation was halted after an international diplomatic effort brokered by Egypt, resulting Wednesday in a ceasefire deal.
Among many conditions of the truce, the agreement stipulates that Gaza's crossings should be opened to facilitate the movement of people and goods, and that residents’ free movements should not be restricted, while “all Palestinian factions shall stop all hostilities from the Gaza Strip against Israel, including rocket attacks and all attacks along the border.”
Palestinian firefighters try to extinguish a fire at the Civilian Affairs branch of the Ministry of Interior following an Israeli air raid in Gaza City. (AFP Photo / Marco Longari)
Smoke billows as debris flies from the explosion at the local Al-Aqsa TV station in Gaza City. (AFP Photo / Marco Longari)
A Palestinian man inspects a destroyed branch of the Islamic National Bank following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. (AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams)
A Palestinian man pushes his bicycle amidst debris near the destroyed compound of the internal security ministry in Gaza City after it was targeted by an Israeli air strike. (AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams)With 140,000 miles (and counting) behind them, they've got ideas that work.
Every year, thousands of hikers set off on thru-hikes. While many quit before they reach the trail’s end, about a quarter keep on walking to a successful completion. A much smaller percentage—like these six hikers—never stop.
By walking full-time anywhere from five to twelve months out of the year, every year, these “trail celebrities” make their way into the lore of long trails, as well as into one another’s lives. There are around 25 or so true full-time hikers in the U.S. They all know each other, and most have known each other for years.
On the trail, meeting someone who’s shared the same hikes and the same challenges comes across with the same strength of familiarity as meeting someone with a shared hometown. Friendships form fast and deep, and though the long distance hiking community is disparate and dynamic, spread all over the world, they’re always there for each other.
Here are some stories and lessons from that pool of shared wisdom.
Freebird (Dave Osborn)
On the Trails Since: 1996
Distance Hiked: Over 30,000 miles
While competing as a professional windsurfer in Japan, Freebird had a realization that eventually changed his life. When he looked to the 150,000-person audience, he saw Japanese models tossing cigarettes, party favors from the competition’s sponsor, into the eager crowd like confetti. He was horrified.
“I didn’t want to be a marketing tool for selling cigarettes,” he said. So he quit his career as a globetrotting pro and became another kind of athlete, hopping on the Appalachian Trail in 1996. One year later, he bought a one-way ticket to California and found a San Diego State student to drop him off at the Mexican border with butterflies in his stomach.
One of the first mistakes he made was bringing a hammock, which he carried for miles without ever setting up. “When you’re thru-hiking, you can’t help but notice how things that are considered luxuries quickly become a burden,” he says.
Flexibility is key. Storms, fires, trail reroutes, and injuries will happen, but "don’t allow the fear of not finishing compromise your thru-hike."
He fell in love with the tight-knit trail community, a barter society where hikers joke that cash is “fit for legal tinder” and you can walk freely without having your lifestyle questioned or worrying about crossing into private property.
“When you’re living in a
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there's also a chance the increase might not happen at all. A number of challenges have been raised, including a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court which claims that the increase "unfairly and irrationally discriminates against interstate commerce generally, and small businesses that operate under the franchise business model specifically."
The status of the bill won't change the nature of the surcharge to businesses (though it could rankle consumers). While taxes collected by a business on behalf of a third party are not considered income to a business, a self-imposed surcharge - no matter what the reasoning - is considered income. Sales taxes, however, which are collected from customers to be passed along to state and local tax authorities are not income to the business. In fact, in most jurisdictions, that money isn't attributable to the businesses at all: the term "trust fund taxes" applies to since those dollars are being held by the business for the benefit of a third party (similar to employee-side retirement contributions).
The "living wage" surcharge, however, is completely taxable to MasterPark: it doesn't matter what label is slapped on it. Clearly, any money that is actually used to pay employees the increased wage (the cost of doing business) would be deductible but merely stating that the surcharge is meant to cover costs doesn't make it so.
While MasterPark may be at the front of the pack when it comes to labeling the surcharge on its receipts, it isn't expected to be the last. Paul Guppy, research director of the Washington Policy Center, expects the trend to continue with other businesses.
Most customers ultimately believe that transparency is a good thing. But could separating out costs on a business by business basis be confusing for consumers?
In most state and local jurisdictions, businesses are required by law to separately state the sales tax amount on a receipt; alternatively, some states allow businesses to provide a written statement indicating that the sales price includes sales tax so long as the amount of the tax is clear. Other kinds of taxes may also be required by law to be stated separately; a common example of such taxes are liquor taxes which are found on some restaurant receipts.
At some point, if businesses tack on other costs, in addition to sales and other taxes, as separate line items, how long is that sales receipt going to be? If businesses pick and choose which costs to break out for consumers, what is the real result? Will our eyes start to glaze over as we blindly pay our bills, noally aware of the actual price of goods and services? And is that good for competition? I'm not so sure. What do you think?
(Author's Note: The original version of the article misstated that MasterPark was located in Seattle as per the description on its website. It is not, it is SeaTac, as corrected above. Thanks to Working Washington @Working Washington for the correction)
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Want more taxgirl goodness? Pick your poison: receive posts by email, follow me on twitter (@taxgirl), hang out with me on Facebook or check out my YouTube channel. If you want to keep an eye on documents I've posted, check out my profile on Scribd. And finally, you can subscribe to my podcast on the site or via iTunes (it's free).Edward "Eddie" Carlson (June 4, 1911 – April 3, 1990), was an American hotel and airline executive, and Seattle, Washington civic leader.[3]
Carlson was born in Tacoma, Washington.[4] As a youth, he helped his single mother make ends meet by working as a gas station attendant, as well as other odd jobs. Carlson entered the University of Washington in 1928 and, while a student, began his hotel career as a pageboy, then elevator operator, then bellhop. He dropped out of college in 1930, lacking funds. He worked half a year as a seaman, then worked a summer job at Mount Baker Lodge, and beginning in autumn 1931 traveled the country in an unsuccessful stint as a salesman for a device that mechanically blocked (shaped) felt hats. Returning to Seattle, he resumed hotel work, first as a room clerk and then as assistant manager of Seattle's Roosevelt Hotel, next as manager of the President Hotel in Mount Vernon, Washington. On June 26, 1936, he married Nell H. Cox.[3]
In April 1937, Carlson returned to Seattle to manage the Rainier Club,[3] Seattle's preeminent private club."[5] He retained the position until joining the Navy in 1942. At that time the club awarded him a military membership, which became a regular membership upon his return from World War II.[3]
Carlson finished World War II as a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy Supply Corps, having served in Seattle and then in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania
Returning from the war, he took a position as assistant to S. W. Thurston, president of Western Hotels, Inc. (later Western International Hotels, then Westin Hotels). Within a year he had been named vice president, then became successively executive vice president (1953), president (1960), and finally chairman and CEO (1969). Westin merged with United Airlines in 1970, and Carlson became CEO of the newly formed company, UAL Corporation, a position he held from 1971–1979. In his first two years, he turned the nearly bankrupt airline profitable.[3]
Carlson is credited with bringing the 1962 World's Fair—the Century 21 Exposition—to Seattle. His napkin sketch of tower with a revolving restaurant on top, inspired by the Stuttgart Tower, was the origin of the Space Needle.[3] Harvard Business School named Carlson one of the great business leaders of the twentieth century.[3]
Carlson was (along with Henry Broderick) one of the two leaders of the successful 1948 initiative that re-legalized the sale of liquor by the drink in Washington State.[6]
Edward E. Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center [ edit ]
In 1992, a gift from the Carlson family founded the Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center at the University of Washington (U.W.). "Since its inception, the Center has worked with faculty to extend classroom learning, help students make meaningful contributions to the community and promote the development of effective citizens and leaders. Through the Carlson Center each year, hundreds of U.W. students engage in public service."[7]
Personal [ edit ]
The Carlsons had two children, Gene and Janie. Carlson remained close to his former daughter-in-law Margaret Carlson even after the divorce.[8]
Notes [ edit ]
Carlson Center at the University of Washington
Further reading [ edit ]The owners of a popular Toronto hamburger joint have taken two items off their menu after facing a slew of complaints that the burgers were given derogatory names. The “Half-Breed” burger and “The Dirty Drunken Half-Breed” burger had been staples on the menu at Holy Chuck Burgers for about seven months. Last week, after one customer’s objection swelled into a larger protest, the shop was inundated with phone calls and online criticisms.
Bill Koutroubis, co-owner of Holy Chuck restaurant, says he took the items dubbed "The Half-Breed" and "The Dirty Drunken Half-Breed" off the menu (now hidden under white tape on the sign) after learning of the term's derogatory connotations. The Twitter user who first brought it to the restaurant's attention months ago wonders why they didn't look up the meaning immediately. ( JAYME POISSON / TORONTO STAR )
Co-owner Bill Koutroubis told the Star on Wednesday that he never intended to offend anyone, and neither he nor his partner realized the term is considered a racial slur. “To racially slur an ethnicity in a multicultural society, it’s the totally wrong thing to do,” said Koutroubis, clearly upset. He added that his background is Greek and that he would never knowingly insult another cultural group. “We apologized on Twitter and again I reiterate the apology... It was never meant to be malicious; it was just an innocent play on words on our part.”
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Back in December, local Geoff King flagged Holy Chuck’s Twitter account about the offensive nature of the term. The restaurant responded by saying that wasn’t how they saw it, and Koutroubis said Wednesday they didn’t look up the word afterwards. “The term ‘half-breed,’ if you look it up in just about any dictionary, is really a negative, disparaging and offensive term used to describe people of mixed ancestry, specifically people of mixed indigenous and non-indigenous ancestry,” explained Ryerson University professor Pamela Palmater. “Now add dirty and drunken to the term half-breed and it takes it to a much higher level in terms of the level of insult that you’re talking about.” Palmater, who holds a Ryerson chair in indigenous government, said that when she initially saw the menu item she didn’t think it was real. Koutroubis said the term “half-breed” was coined because the patties are mixed with two different kinds of meat — half cured bacon and half beef.
For the burger with extra toppings they chose “drunken,” because the veal cheek vino chili topping has alcohol. And, “dirty,” because it’s messy. Holy Chuck’s menu is loaded with cheeky names like “The Farmer’s Threesome,” which boasts three different kinds of meat patties, and the “The Greek Bahahastard,” a lamb patty topped with caramelized onions and a garlic feta aioli.
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Koutroubis said that his partner, John Prassoulis, hadn’t heard of the Métis people — aboriginal people who trace their roots back to a mixed European and First Nations heritage — before this, and that while he himself had heard of them, he didn’t know about the negative term. “No one wants to bring any harm to their business,” said Koutroubis, offering another reason why he would never offend a potential customer on purpose. “If you’re in business and your business is you serve the public, your number one job is to know who your public is,” said Palmater, adding that the December Twitter conversation “Seriously casts doubt on the sincerity of them saying, ‘We had no idea.’” Responding to a tweet from Holy Chuck’s twitter account introducing the “Half-Breed” to its menu, twitter user Geoff King said: “@HOLYCHUCKBURGER it may be tasty but that name is not. It’s offensive.” “@gkingorama I respect your opinion, but to be completely honest I never once looked at it from the angle that your (sic) insinuating!” read a reply from Holy Chuck’s account. “@HOLYCHUCKBURGER Your choice but just Google it. I bet offensive/derogatory shows up on the definitions,” King responded. On Wednesday, Koutroubis explained that his partner, currently on vacation, was the one who tweeted. But he said that from what he remembers King didn’t mention it was a racial slur. They never looked it up, he added. “If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that they find our logo offensive,” he said of the shop’s emblem — a cow’s head on a platter. “Within the hour I was informed it was a racial slur, it was removed immediately,” he said. Reached Wednesday, King said: “Frankly, I told the guy to Google it... Pleading ignorance doesn’t really count in this day and age.” Koutroubis said he’s lost sleep over the ordeal. People have called him a racist and ignorant. He said he’s learned that he’ll need to be more informed next time, and make better decisions. He wants to keep the burger’s recipe on his menu, but with a different, non-offensive, name. Popping into the shop for some food on Wednesday, customer Don Baker said Holy Chuck makes the “best burgers ever.” The lawyer said he hadn’t noticed the controversial item, now covered in white duct tape, before. “I know the kind of product they put out,” he said. “That would just be a boo-boo. A bad boo-boo, but a boo-boo.”
Read more about:Excellence Reporter: Mr. Quinn, what is the meaning of life?
Daniel Quinn: What is the meaning of life to me? To begin, recognize that humans aren’t something special, aren’t privileged beings, exceptions to the laws that bind all other species to the community of life. If you could ask this question of a wolf or an elephant or a lizard or a shark or an elm tree, I think you’d get the same answer from all, though we can put it into words and they can’t. The meaning of life is to live: to breathe, to sigh, to wonder, to walk, to sleep, to pass life on to others, in life and in death. But I’ll never say it better than Shirin does in my novel The Story of B:
“A child looks at the sea that rolls across the plains and calls it grass. But this is not grass. This is deer and bison and sheep and cicadas and moles and rabbits. This handful of stalks here—this is a mouse. And the mouse, the ox, the gazelle, the goat, and the beetle all burn with the fire of grass. Grass is their mother and father, and their young are grass.
“One thing: grass and grasshopper. One thing: grasshopper and sparrow. One thing: sparrow and fox. One thing: fox and vulture. One thing, and its name is fire, burning today as a stalk in the field, tomorrow as a rabbit in its burrow, and the next day as a man in his tent.
“The vulture is fox; the fox, grasshopper; the grasshopper, rabbit; the rabbit, man; the man, grass. All together, we are the life of this place, indistinguishable from one another, intermingling in the flow of fire, and the fire is god.
“To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever. Each is sent to another someday. You are sent; you are on your way. I am sent. To the wolf or the lion or the vulture or the grasses, I am sent. My death is the life of another, and I will stand again in the windswept grasses and look through the eyes of the fox and take the air with the eagle and run in the track of the deer.”
***
~Daniel Quinn is an American writer, cultural critic, and former publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991.
www.ishmael.org
Copyright © 2016 Excellence ReporterIn a May 9, 2013, advertisement, Gov. Rick Perry offered President Barack Obama a "handy checklist" about job creation to take back to Washington, D.C.
The ad, which Perry’s campaign placed in the Austin American-Statesman the day Obama came to Austin to stress economic issues, said the checklist includes low taxes, lawsuit abuse reform, predictable and effective regulations, balanced budgets and accountable schools and a competitive workforce.
And an indicator that the "Texas model" works, the ad said, is that while the U.S. lost 2.5 million net new jobs over the past five years, Texas created 530,000 net new jobs. Also, the ad said: "Over the last 10 years, Texas created 33 percent of the net new jobs nationwide."
Texas has had a healthy economy compared with most other states. Still, we were curious if one in three of the nation’s net new jobs over the past 10 years was gained in Texas.
By email, Perry spokesman Josh Havens referred to information attributed to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicating that Texas reaped more than 1.75 million net new jobs from March 2003 to March 2013, a period in which the United States as a whole accounted for 5.3 million net new jobs, Havens said.
To our inquiry, a regional economist for the bureau, Cheryl Abbot, confirmed the net job gain figures provided by Havens. According to a spreadsheet she emailed our way, Texas topped 42 states with net job gains in the period, considerably outdistancing the No. 2 jobs-gainer, New York, which had a net gain of 458,000 jobs. States with net losses were Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and Rhode Island.
Among the states, Texas had the third-greatest percentage gain in jobs over the decade, 19 percent, trailing North Dakota (33 percent increase) and Utah (21 percent), the spreadsheet indicates.
By email and in a telephone interview, though, Abbot said the bureau steers clear of using its employment estimates to declare how much of any national job gains are attributable to net job gains in individual states. That judgment has to do with technical difficulties comparing the results of surveys undertaken state by state to research intended to have national sweep, she said.
Regardless, she said, "Texas has been a very powerful job creator; during the period, the state created 1.75 million net jobs – and that was equal to one-third of the net jobs created nationwide," which is slightly different from saying the state accounted for 33 percent of national net jobs gained.
We sent Perry’s office the bureau’s standing cautionary note about using its figures to reach conclusions about how much each state contributes to national job gains. Havens replied: "The bottom line is, this is the most accurate way available to compare any single state’s job growth to the nation as a whole."
We also tried a different way of gauging the degree that Texas job gains fit the national picture by adding up each state’s net job gains as estimated by the bureau. This delivered a slightly higher total for national jobs gained, 5.5 million. Dividing the 1.75 million net jobs gained in Texas into the higher total leaves Texas accounting for 32 percent of the nation’s net jobs gained.
We also asked Jason Abrevaya, who chairs the University of Texas Department of Economics, to review the bureau figures. He said by email that they seem to hold up. If Texas had been performing at the average nationwide from 2003 to 2013, he added, one "would expect the state to account for roughly 8 percent," rather than 33 percent, of the net job changes, since Texas accounts for about 8 percent of the nation’s jobs.
Our ruling
Perry said: "Over the last 10 years, Texas created 33 percent of the net new jobs nationwide." That conclusion is supported by comparing state-by-state job gain estimates and a separate calculation of net job gains nationally, both by the federal government. This might be an imperfect way to explore this facet, but there also don't appear to be better approaches.
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https://forum.rise.vision/topic/118/everest-delegate-90-share-lets-rise-together-to-the-everestBashar al-Assad is going down
The noose around Bashar al-Assad’s neck is getting tighter.
With the extraordinary midnight statement Sunday by Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, demanding the "stoppage of the killing machine and bloodshed" in Syria and withdrawing the Saudi ambassador from Damascus for "consultations," the Syrian president’s isolation is nearly complete. The remarks came after a milder Gulf Cooperation Council statement last week that, in hindsight, ought to have been seen as a warning.
Kuwait also withdrew its ambassador Monday, and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was on his way to Damascus to deliver "a very sharp message" to Assad, in the words of an anonymous senior Turkish diplomat quoted by Hürriyet Daily News.
“[Turkey and Syria] will sit down and talk for one last time … even though one should not exclude dialogue, even in wartime,” another Foreign Ministry official told the paper. “The talks will show whether the ties will be cut loose or not … If a new [Turkish] policy is to be outlined on Syria – that’s the last meeting.”
Yet for all the drama of leading Middle Eastern powers finally expressing their exasperation with a brutal crackdown that has lasted for nearly 5 months — and escalated dramatically during the holy month of Ramadan — none of these countries are yet calling for Assad’s ouster, as France and the United States have done. Arab states are still signaling that the Syrian regime has a chance to stay in their good graces by carrying out those two favorite words of disingenuous tyrants everywhere: "dialogue" and "reform."
As Nabil el-Araby — whose tenure as Arab League chief thus far has been characterized by toadyishness and willful naivete — put it Monday, "Do not expect drastic measures but step-by-step persuasion to resolve the conflict."
Once you’re done laughing at the notion that the League of Arab Dictators has any idea what will satisfy the Syrian people, consider this: Does anyone really still think Assad is capable of solving this thing? Not only is the Syrian regime pushing back against the external criticism, insisting it is responding to "sabotage acts" by armed Islamist gangs, but the crackdown has empowered the very elements of the regime least amenable to a democratic transition. Moreover, as Assad himself noted in his interview with the Wall Street Journal in January, it is fruitless to make changes under pressure:
If you did not see the need for reform before what happened in Egypt and in Tunisia, it is too late to do any reform. This is first. Second, if you do it just because of what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, then it is going to be a reaction, not an action; and as long as what you are doing is a reaction you are going to fail.
I expect that over the next few days, we might see fewer provocative moves — like this weekend’s bloody assault on the eastern city of Deir az-Zour, which seems to have provoked King Abdullah’s ire — from the Syrian regime. Perhaps Assad and friends will announce a fresh round of "reforms" — always, of course, with trap doors and escape hatches that render them meaningless. But at this point, Assad seems doomed; after so much bloodshed and anger, any genuine political solution will inevitably lead to his ouster. His wisest course of action now is to find a safe place to spend his retirement (perhaps Vogue will give him a job?).
I imagine a loose coalition of France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States will now be working toward a soft landing for Syria — looking for high-level defectors who could negotiate with opposition leaders and carry out what political scientists call a "pacted transition." But it’s hard to imagine this working either, given that the military and security services are so tightly controlled by the Assad clan and that the opposition is so diffuse and fragmented. There is nothing comparable to the relatively upright Tunisian and Egyptian militaries in Syria, whose army has been shelling cities and towns across the country. And there is nobody for the regime to negotiate with who can guarantee calm on the streets.
The whole Baathist system has to come down, and it probably will. The only questions now are how long it will take, and how much more innocent blood will be shed in the process.Enlarge By Jim Cole, AP Dartmouth psychologist Dr. Mark Hegel poses in his office with his laptop in Lebanon, N.H. Hegel is working on a computer program, "The Virtual Space Station," that will guide astronauts through treatment for depression and other problems while in space. BOSTON Your work is dangerous and your co-workers rely on you to stay alive. But you can never get far from those colleagues. You can't see your family for months, even years. The food isn't great. And forget stepping out for some fresh air. No wonder the adventure of space flight can also be stressful, isolating and depressing. So scientists are working on giving a computer the ability to offer some of the understanding guidance — if not all the warmth — of a human therapist, before psychological problems or interpersonal conflicts compromise a mission. Clinical tests on the four-year, $1.74 million project for NASA, called the Virtual Space Station, are expected to begin in the Boston area by next month. The new program is nothing like science fiction's infamous HAL, the onboard artificial intelligence that goes awry in "2001: A Space Odyssey." The Virtual Space Station's interaction between astronaut and computer is far less sophisticated and far more benevolent. In the project, sponsored by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, a recorded video therapist guides astronauts through a widely used depression therapy called "problem-solving treatment." The recording helps astronauts identify reasons for their depression. Then the program helps them make a plan to fight the depression, based on the descriptions the astronauts type in about their problems. Astronauts also can learn strategies for handling conflict through interactive role-playing, and even read psychology books. Twenty-nine current and former astronauts have been consulted for the project. "If things go down the wrong pathway, you're depending on each other for your survival. So you want to make sure you're working together well and trust each other implicitly," said Dr. Jay Buckey, a former astronaut on the Space Shuttle Columbia who's collaborating on the program. While the program is designed for astronauts, project leaders say it could help Earth-bound patients who won't talk to a therapist because of cost or pride or because they live in rural areas with few psychologists. In fact, it will be civilian patients, not astronauts, who take part in the initial tests in Boston. There are "a lot of barriers to getting help from a professional, even if you want it here," said Dr. James Cartreine, a Harvard researcher who heads the project. "Whereas getting help from a computer, there's not nearly as many barriers." Depression and personal conflicts have no real effect on the vast majority of space missions. But some psychological problems are inevitable, particularly on longer assignments, given the high demands, close quarters and months in near isolation. Most conflicts never become public unless they are revealed by an agency or astronaut. In 1985, a mission on Russia's Salyut 7 space station was scrapped after colleagues noticed the commander seemed uninterested in the work and spent hours looking out portholes. Three years earlier, a mission on the same space station was hampered by tension between two astronauts. "We don't understand what's going on with us," one of the crewmembers, Valentin Lebedev, wrote in the book "Diary of a Cosmonaut." "We silently walk by each other, feeling offended. We have to find some way to make things better." Space and weightlessness can affect mood by playing havoc with natural body rhythms and sleep. On the international space station, for instance, the normal day-night cues are disrupted as sunrises and sunsets come every 45 minutes. Psychologists can be available to some astronauts, depending on when communication links are open. But on missions that might eventually emerge, such as a trip to Mars, the distance to Earth — as wide as 250 million miles — might make those talks all but impossible. Radio transmissions could take 40 minutes to carry an exchange between astronaut and therapist. Through the Virtual Space Station program, a recording of Dartmouth psychologist Dr. Mark Hegel comes onboard through a personal laptop accessible to only one astronaut. Cartreine hopes the privacy encourages those who might be reluctant to seek help. Confidentiality is a major concern among astronauts, who worry they won't get choice assignments if superiors learn they want help for emotional problems. It's the first time researchers have tried to use the problem-solving treatment without a live therapist. Typically the therapist's role is to guide patients to make a plan to relieve problems that can cause depression. But Hegel is optimistic it can work in space because the treatment depends so heavily on patient input. Hegel said he worked hard in endless takes to be engaging and avoid terms that might put off an astronaut. For instances, problems are "challenges" or "malfunctions" that can be corrected. The new program is a compelling idea, and it's important step to improve quality of life in space, said Al Harrison, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis who has studied psychology in space flight and worked with NASA. But Harrison added that because of the absolute need for privacy, it will be hard to determine how many astronauts actually use the program and whether it works. Harrison said researchers have good reason to believe the program will be effective because it's proven that many other situations and forms of treatment can be addressed without a live therapist. But it still has to be proven on the Virtual Space Station. "It shows a tremendous scientific and clinical creativity and great promise," Harrison said. "It's going to take a long time to get the final proof of the pudding." Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreNEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A driver of a sport utility vehicle was injured Sunday after he was attacked by a group of motorcyclists in Manhattan, police said.
A more than six-minute video of the disturbing confrontation was posted on YouTube on Monday morning. It appeared to be taken from a camera mounted on a biker’s helmet.
[cbs-audio url=” https://cbsnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/bikers-1-papa-w-41-soc-rjones.mp3″ ; size=”340″ download=”false” name=”Disturbing Video Shows Confrontation Between Bikers, SUV In NYC” artist=”1010 WINS’ Juliet Papa reports”]
The video starts with dozens of bikers seen speeding up to a Range Rover on the Henry Hudson Parkway. One of the bikers can be seen slowing down after pulling in front of the car.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the SUV then accidentally hit the motorcycle. Then, about 30 seconds into the video, the bikes all come to a complete stop on the highway, surrounding the Range Rover.
Watch The Full Video Below: WARNING — GRAPHIC IMAGES
That’s when an unidentified biker can be seen getting off his bike and walking toward the SUV as the other motorcyclists look on.
“They take their helmets and they start to dent his car, and apparently his tires are slashed there,” Kelly said.
The SUV then hits the gas, plowing over three motorcyclists and leaving one of the bikers with a broken leg.
For the next couple of minutes in the video, the bikers are seen chasing the Range Rover through Manhattan until about the 4:50 mark, when traffic forces the car to slow down.
That’s when a biker can be seen running up to the SUV and yanking open the driver’s side door as the driver of the Range Rover again guns the engine in an attempt to get away, knocking over a bike as it speeds off.
The bikers give chase again as the Range Rover heads into Washington Heights.
The video ends when the SUV gets stuck in traffic on 178th Street. As the group of bikers surround the Range Rover once again, one of the riders can be seen jumping off his bike, ripping off his helmet and using it to bash in the driver’s side window.
A second biker can also be seen running up and hitting the driver’s side rear window with his fists.
“He’s taken out of the car, he is assaulted,” Kelly said of the driver.
Police said the driver of the SUV, 33-year-old Alexian Lien, had his wife and infant daughter inside the car at the time of the incident. The driver had called 911 to report the bikers were driving erratically, police said.
Lien was taken to Columbia Presbyterian where he received stitches for cuts to his face and was released, police said. He will not face any charges, authorities said.
“One of the bicyclists, he got off his bike, and he started attacking the person in the Range Rover with his helmet, breaking the windows,” witness Christopher Quinones told CBS 2’s Jessica Schneider. “And after they got him out of his car, they beat him up.”
Those who watched the video were appalled.
“To me, they’ve assaulted this gentleman. That’s criminal,” said Stim Schantz, of Battery Park City, said after Schneider played the video for him.
According to the user who posted the video online, the bikers were participating in an annual street ride in the city.
Kelly said it was similar to an event that was held last year with dozens of bikers, who call themselves “Hollywood Stunts,” converging on Times Square.
“This is a major stunt event where motorcyclists from various locations come together. Their ultimate goal is to get into Times Square, which they did last year,” Kelly said, “Quite frankly it wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen last year. We were aware of it this year.”
In order to prevent the group from heading into Midtown this year, police set up checkpoints throughout the city. Kelly said during that effort, 15 arrests were made, 68 summonses were issues and 55 motorcycles were confiscated. No arrests, however, have been made in connection with the attack on Lien.
Check Out These Other Stories From CBSNewYork.com:What has medieval philosophy ever done for us? Seriously, name a thinker of merit to emerge from the 5th to 15th century. Thomas Aquinas? William of Ockham? Mere curiosities today, one might argue; part of an irrelevant tradition of religious superstition.
Prof Peter Adamson, creator of the History of Philosophy Without any Gaps podcast and book series, begs to differ.
“For starters, precisely because of their importance in the history of religion, medieval philosophers remain relevant in some cultures and contexts,” he says.
“If you want to understand the doctrines of the Catholic church you had better know your Aquinas, and in the Islamic world today people still have strong views – both positive and negative – about medieval thinkers such as Averroes and Avicenna. ”
Secondly, says Adamson, “you can’t understand where the ideas of famous figures of early modern philosophy such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz came from without knowing about medieval philosophy”. Thirdly, “it’s just not true that medieval philosophy is always about topics in religion. They [the philosophers] address the full range of philosophical topics, from ethics and political philosophy to logic, philosophy of language, you name it.”
Of further interest today is the fact that some of the most significant thinkers of medieval times emerged from the Arab world in the Islamic “golden age” of the 8th-13th centuries. This was an era when Muslim thinkers were at the forefront of reasoned debate in mathematics, science and philosophy.
Adamson, a specialist in ancient and medieval philosophy, highlights in his latest book Philosophy in the Islamic World just how influential certain theologians and mystics from this milieu have been. Asked to single out one thinker, he names the Persian polymath Avicenna (980-1037) who invented “probably the most influential and interesting medieval attempt to show that God exists”.
Just how influential was he?
“In the Islamic world people who called themselves ‘philosophers’ at first
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closer, "Jetsam". The run time for the final three songs clocks in at six minutes for one, and over nine minutes for the two others. So naturally this is where things get expansive in scope and style, and makes for the part of this release that best hightlights the bands newfound sonic evolution.
If you dig what you're hearing through the album embed below, Solar Cremation can be ordered through the The Hallowed Catharsis Bandcamp page. Be sure to follow the band over at their Facebook Page too.
Solar Cremation by The Hallowed Catharsis
Ataxia – Awaken The Nebula
I've been following Ataxia since 2014 when they released their first full-length, Caliginous, and for good reason, this London, Ontario-based band are clearly steeped in decades of cumulative death metal wisdom and experience. Ataxia play a unique brand of technical brutal death metal, one that varies quite a bit structure and style wise from track to track here on Awaken The Nebula. Making for an album far more musically varied and intriguing than most bands of their ilk. The album tends to cascade back and forth between more brutal minded tracks and more warp speed technical frenzy tracks, although most still intertwine both ends of their sound as well, just in different measures. If anything, this style is known for albums of uniform blandness, where everything sounds the same from song to song and moment to moment. Ataxia have escaped the confines of that mistake commonly found in technical brutal death meal, and in the process, delivered an album worth coming back to. There isn't a bad song on the album, and I really enjoy hearing the many different takes on death metal, tech-death, and brutal death metal that the band splice together with seeming ease into unique vessels of rage and immense energy. If you dig what you're hearing through the album embed below, Awaken The Nebula can be ordered through the Ataxia Bandcamp page. Be sure to follow the band over at the Ataxia Facebook Page too.James Dolan is one of two NBA owners named in a lawsuit alleging they helped cover up Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment and assault. (AP)
Two NBA owners are listed as defendants along with several other current and former members of the Harvey Weinstein Company’s board of directors in a class-action lawsuit accusing them of willfully covering up the disgraced movie producer’s decades of alleged sexual harassment and assault.
New York Knicks owner James Dolan and Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry, both former directors at the company, are among a dozen defendants named on the lawsuit filed in Manhattan Federal Court on Wednesday by six women who allege Weinstein assaulted them, per multiple media reports.
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The suit claims Dolan and Lasry “knew of Weinstein’s pattern and practice of predatory sexual conduct toward women from his personal relationship with Weinstein and his position as a director of TWC.”
“Harvey Weinstein is a predator,” the six women said in a joint statement. “[Current Weinstein Company chairman] Bob [Weinstein] knew it. The board knew it. The lawyers knew it. The private investigators knew it. Hollywood knew it. We knew it. Now the world knows it.”
The New York Times broke news of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment and assault in early October, followed by similar news reports from the New Yorker and others. Dozens of women came forward to share their stories, including actresses Ashley Judd, Angelina Jolie and Rose McGowan. He has since left the company, and several police departments are investigating his alleged misconduct.
Dolan served on the Weinstein Company’s board of directors from mid-2015 to June 2016, citing his family, music and other business commitments. He released the following statement at the time:
Story continues
“The company is in good shape. Harvey and Bob remain close personal friends, and I will continue to be supportive in any way I can. I wish my fellow board members continued success.”
Harvey Weinstein also issued a statement upon Dolan’s abrupt departure:
“Jim Dolan is one of my and Bob’s best friends. His insight into business has led us to grow an unbelievably successful TV division. He was the biggest impetus, years ago, for us getting into TV in a big way — we owe him for that. I appreciate all that Jim has done for the company. Bob and I are both looking forward to Marc Lasry joining the board in Jim’s place. Marc’s a brilliant businessman whose interest in companies all over the world will provide our board with valuable insight. Marc’s successes into the world of business are legendary and we will certainly profit as a company from his knowledge.”
Dolan’s friendship with Weinstein dated at least a decade earlier, when New York magazine quoted Weinstein as “a friend of Jim’s” during Dolan’s public disputes with his father and the city’s mayor.
Lasry took over for Dolan on the Weinstein Company’s board in mid-2016 and served in that capacity until this past October, when he resigned soon after the allegations against Weinstein were reported.
In addition to the allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Weinstein, the New Yorker reported last month that he hired private security to collect information on his alleged victims and the journalists who endeavored to break the news in an attempt to cover up the criminal behavior.
Dolan was named in a 2007 lawsuit filed by Anucha Brown-Sanders, who alleged the Knicks owner fired her after she complained about alleged sexual harassment by former Knicks coach Isiah Thomas. She was awarded $11 million in damages from Dolan and his Madison Square Garden Company.
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Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!The Kihraxz assault fighter, also known as the Kihraxz light fighter, was a light starfighter developed specifically for Black Sun during the reign of the Galactic Empire. While intended for the criminal organization, many Kihraxz starfighters found their way into the hands of various independent fringers.
Contents show]
History Edit
A custom TransGalMeg Industries, Incorporated design, the Kihraxz reflected the popular design of the Incom X-wing starfighter's fuselage. At the nose were a pair of stabilizer fins and two wings sprung from the center of the fuselage. Under each wing was a large sublight engine that provided the main thrust, and a third maneuverability engine was mounted on the stern of the frame.
Outside of those characteristics, few Kihraxz starfighters were the same due to heavy customization and after-market kits, although all variations were light on armor plating and weapons systems but high on speed compared to other TransGalMeg starfighter designs of the same period.
An improved version of this fighter was the Vaksai.
Appearances Edit
Sources Edit
Notes and references EditThis article is like a third edition to “Encrypted home in Ubuntu (or Kubuntu… or Debian…)”, although I keep changing the name. It’s the 8.10 edition. Many things changed and I updated the article for those, and the rest should work as well.
Motivation
Every day we put more and more personal information on our computers, and our computers become lighter, smaller, more mobile. In other words, the importance of the information gets higher and the possibility of being loosed or stolen gets higher as well.
I think that if anyone gets a-hold of the information in my personal computer (s)he’d be able to impersonate me and make my life a mess. That’s why I like keeping all my information encrypted. That is, I have a separate partition for /home and it is encrypted.
The level of security for this scheme is not very high and if you are a real paranoid you should be reading some other tutorials. I am using just a pass-phrase for the encryption so I am susceptible to dictionary attacks, my swap is not encrypted, so some personal information would be available there. But that’s OK. I am not trying to protect from the people with enough sophistication to perform the needed operations to retrieve that information. Those are not many and they have other means.
My goal is to protect from the regular thieve or from loosing it… so I would mourn for some money being lost but I will sleep well at night.
Disclaimer: the information will be encrypted, you’ll be able to access it with a key: a pass-phrase. If you loose it, you won’t be able to access than information again, so, be careful and make backups.
Installation
You should install the operating system as you always do with a little detail: create the root partition, the swap partition and the home partition. But don’t assign any filesystem to the home partition, do not make or format it and do not set it as home.
After you did that you should be booting into a fresh system. Be sure not to store any sensitive information now, because it’ll be accessible to anyone. Some thinks to take care, if you use a browser or some instant messaging client, do not make them save the password, if you can avoid typing the passwords at all, that will be better.
Once you got pass that you’ll need two packages: cryptsetup and libpam-mount. You can install them with a command like:
aptitude install cryptsetup libpam-mount
During installation, limpam-mount request to convert the previous configuration. As we don’t really have a previous configuration, I’m not sure what it’s going to convert so I just choose “No” (the default) and let it install a fresh configuration.
Partitioning
The encryption we are going to use works like this. Linux puts a layer around a device and creates a new virtual device. Whatever is written to this new virtual device is written to the real device but encrypted. All this works at a very low level and it is called mapping. There are other kind of mappings (to perform other operations than encrypting… think for example as creating volumes of various partitions so they’d be seen as one).
To create the mapping run:
sudo modprobe dm-crypt
sudo cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sda6
replacing /dev/sda6 with your particular (real) device.
A bit more about that command. cryptsetup is a program to create this encryption mappings. –-verbose is there because I like to see a lot of useless data and feel more geeky. –-verify-passphrase is there to be asked twice for the pass-phrase, so we don’t insert a wrong pass-phrase by accident. luksFormat is the action. luks is a new system that lets us have more than one password, change passwords, add passwords, etc to some encrypted device. Very handy.A complete execution of that command will look like:
sudo cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sda6 WARNING! ======== This will overwrite data on /dev/sda6 irrevocably. Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES Enter LUKS passphrase: Verify passphrase: Command successful.
The new partition
This new system, luks, also let us inspect what is in a luks-formatted partition. It works like this:
sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda6 LUKS header information for /dev/sda6 Version: 1 Cipher name: aes Cipher mode: cbc-essiv:sha256 Hash spec: sha1 Payload offset: 1032 MK bits: 128 MK digest: ff c3 22 a1 d1 fe 5e e4 e3 37 26 a7 8e 93 43 22 fa 83 c5 91 MK salt: 27 59 46 c5 f2 21 5a 93 46 eb 2a cf 80 f1 46 95 b6 05 79 02 55 a4 49 33 87 d1 25 ae 49 74 40 b6 MK iterations: 10 UUID: 819cf83a-7c9b-49b8-9b74-e0d952aa1234 Key Slot 0: ENABLED Iterations: 208350 Salt: be 31 c7 e3 c9 a8 d5 37 09 12 34 e2 4a 3f a3 85 e0 fd bc 1e e4 3a fb d6 70 7c 7f 12 34 1a 6d 8e 43 Key material offset: 8 AF stripes: 4000 Key Slot 1: DISABLED Key Slot 2: DISABLED Key Slot 3: DISABLED Key Slot 4: DISABLED Key Slot 5: DISABLED Key Slot 6: DISABLED Key Slot 7: DISABLED
Lot’s of nice information, don’t you feel super-geek? You can see there that you have 8 spaces for pass-phrases, you have 8 slots of which you are using one, the 0.
To be able to access the encrypted partition you have to open it… and to do it you’ll need a key of course (your pass-phrase). We’ll see the mappings on /dev/mapper/, which should be empty by now (except for a control file… I wouldn’t name a mapping control, just in case):
ls /dev/mapper/ control
Ok! Now open it:
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda6 home Enter LUKS passphrase: key slot 0 unlocked. Command successful.
Great! We have opened it. The last parameter, “home”, is the name of the mapping. Let’s take a look at the mappings:
ls /dev/mapper/ control home
Good. This device file is like a partition itself. So, we’ll make a file-system in there in the same way you’d make it in sda6 (from now on, don’t do anything with sda6 except opening and other luks operations, your partition is /dev/mapper/home now). In my case I’ve picked ReiserFS, but you can use whatever you want:
sudo mkfs.reiserfs -l home /dev/mapper/home...lot's of geeky output... ReiserFS is successfully created on /dev/mapper/home.
and we are done. We can mount it:
sudo mount /dev/mapper/home /media
copy the current data (the home of a user and a couple of files):
sudo cp -a /home/* /media/ cp: ne povas trovi stato-informon pri '/home/pupeno/.gvfs': Permeso rifuzita
If you don’t speak the international language, that mean: “cp: cannot stat `/home/pupeno/.gvfs’: Permission denied”. Everything seems to be OK anyway. Un-mount it:
sudo umount /media/
and close it:
sudo cryptsetup luksClose home
Automagically mounting
There are various ways to open and mount the encrypted file-system but after trying many different ones, this is the best one from my point of view. I like that it is not intrusive: when you log in, your user password will be used to open the file-system and it’ll be mounted automatically. Of course, then, the password of your user should match the pass-phrase in at least one of the slots of the encrypted device.
You need to modify /etc/pam.d/common-auth adding, at the end:
@include common-pammount
And /etc/pam.d/common-session to add that same line.
In /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml, around line 107 you have a list of “Linux encrypted home directory examples”, since what we are going to do is related to that it makes sense to put these lines after that comment (around line 183):
Of course replace “pupeno” with your username and “/dev/sda6” with your device. And that is the line that will make the magical mount happen.
Now just try it. It is very simple, log out, log in again and that’s it. You should have you newly super-encrypted home partition mounted. To check it out issue a mount command and among a huge amount of cryptic information you should see:
/dev/mapper/_dev_sda6 on /home type reiserfs (rw)
You can also list the files on /dev/mapper to find the _dev_sda6 mapping.
And that’s it, it wasn’t so hard, was it?
More users, more pass-phrases
If there are more users add more lines to /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml, I haven’t tested it but it should work. Also just add more pass-phrases to the device using cryptsetup in this way:
sudo cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/sda6
It’ll ask you for a current pass-phrase as well. This is also useful if you are changing pass-phrases, while you work on remembering the new one, don’t delete the old one, so if you forget the new one you should still be able to access your information with the old one. After you are confident of the new one, you can delete the old one with:
sudo cryptsetup luksDelKey /dev/sda6 0
where “0” is the slot where you have your old pass-phrase (hint: use luksDump). And here I want to remind you that if you lost the password you won’t be able to access the information. There’s no password recovery here: it is gone, forever, as scrambled, processed and destroyed as the dinner of Tuesday of the last week. Be very careful and always make backups.
AdvertisementsDuring the Dec. 19 Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC News generally steered the candidates toward hawkish positions on foreign policy. She appeared to accept the premise that the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also called ISIS) is both necessary and urgent. But one position advanced by former Secretary of State and current frontrunner Hillary Clinton was so hawkish, so cavalier, that even Raddatz felt compelled to push back. After Clinton said she supported a no-fly zone in Syria in the context of fighting ISIL, Raddatz skeptically followed up :
CLINTON: I do not think it would come to that. We are already de-conflicting airspace. […] I am advocating the no-fly zone both because I think it would help us on the ground to protect Syrians; I’m also advocating it because I think it gives us some leverage in our conversations with Russia […] The no-fly zone, I would hope, would be also shared by Russia. If they will begin to turn their military attention away from going after the adversaries of Assad toward ISIS and put the Assad future on the political and diplomatic track, where it belongs.
RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, I’d like to go back to that if I could. ISIS doesn’t have aircraft, Al Qaida doesn’t have aircraft. So would you shoot down a Syrian military aircraft or a Russian airplane?
But most Americans don’t know what a no-fly zone is, because the media almost never explains what it would entail. Indeed, one has to look to paragraph 19 of an article in The New York Times from 2013 to get some specifics:
Raddatz moved on, but this exchange illustrates the absurdity of Clinton’s support for a “no-fly zone.” A no-fly zone over Syria, as all parties understand, is a tacit declaration of war not only against Syria, but also against their longtime ally Russia, whose air force is currently flying over Syria to defend the government of Bashar al-Assad against both ISIL and various rebel groups, some overtly or covertly backed by the United States.
That’s why Raddatz was so confused by the idea that Russia would “share” a no-fly zone. There’s little reason to believe Russia would sell out their only ally in the Middle East, and they’re certainly not going to assist the U.S. in bombing this ally’s air defense and warplanes. The reason Clinton described a fantasy no-fly zone where Russia joins the U.S. is because a real one could potentially require the U.S. to shoot down Russian jets, and starting World War III doesn’t square with the wishes of most Democrats, let alone most Americans. Even voters who don’t follow foreign policy debates closely can see that it’s not the Syrian Army shooting up cafes and concert calls in Paris; it’s their sworn enemy, ISIL.
That was written before Russia entered the war in September 2015. The total number of U.S. servicemen needed to enforce a no-fly zone is likely now much higher, and the stakes for shooting down a Russian jet, intentionally or not, are much greater than for a Syrian one. Yet none of these inconvenient details are brought up in presidential debates.
Clinton’s grandstanding may focus-group well and make her look ‘tough,’ but it can only undermine efforts to bring Syria’s devastating civil war to an end.
Even The Atlantic’s typically hawkish Jeffrey Goldberg was confused, tweeting, “Still trying to understand Hillary’s point re: no-fly zone shared with Russia, which supports Assad’s air force. Not getting it.” It’s understandable why he doesn’t get it: It makes no sense. Either Clinton is calling for an actual no-fly zone that would involve de facto war against Russia and Syria, or she’s calling for a fantasy one where Russia reverses its entire foreign policy and becomes a client state of the U.S. She’s either being wildly reckless or willfully obtuse.
No other major Democrat supports Clinton’s tortured position. President Barack Obama himself has dismissed the idea, including when Clinton pushed for it while serving in his administration. But Clinton isn’t alone. She has lots of company on the other side of aisle, including from GOP establishment favorite Sen. Marco Rubio (with whom she shares a foreign policy consultant, Beacon Strategies), who has repeatedly called for a no-fly zone in similarly vague terms. In the Republican debates, the moderators haven’t even gone as far as Raddatz tried to in clarifying what this means.
The term “no-fly zone” is casually thrown around in the debates unchallenged, either because the moderators themselves don’t know what exactly it means or because they assume their audience doesn’t. Either way, “no-fly zone” has become the most effective way of calling for regime change in Syria without appearing to do so. It’s a neocon dog-whistle designed to appeal to hawks without offending a war-weary public. As George Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language,” “such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
If Clinton and the GOP want to spark a war with Syria, and by extension Russia, they should be honest about that and what it would entail. Right now all we have is tough-on-Assad bromides and virtually no realistic assessment of how such a plan would be carried out.
This type of bellicose language form Clinton wouldn’t be so troubling if she wasn’t both Obama’s former secretary of state and his likeliest successor. As Secretary of State John Kerry and Obama attempt to negotiate an end to the Syrian conflict, having just adopted a very tenuous framework at the U.N. Security Council, the specter of a de facto declaration of war against Russia in January 2017 is hardly helpful. Perhaps the Russians assume it’s just election-year bluster, but perhaps they don’t. Or perhaps the Iranians don’t. Or perhaps, above all, Assad does not.
Is this a risk worth taking to score political points in an election? Clinton’s grandstanding may focus-group well and make her look “tough,” but it can only undermine efforts to bring Syria’s devastating civil war to an end. Clinton might not care that her position is unworkable and reckless. But shouldn’t the media?Okinawans express themselves about U.S. military bases in the prefecture.
Okinawa is in virtual rebellion against the central government over plans to
relocate the Futenma U.S. Marine Air Base to nearby Henoka. Recent polls
show that over 90% of Okinawans, and nearly 100% of its elected officials,
want the American bases completely out.
Okinawans Will No Longer be 'Pawned Away' to Curry American Favor (Ryukyu Shimpo Shimbun, Japan)
"Like a souvenir, you [Prime Minister Abe] would like to bring signs of progress on the Futenma Air Base relocation to the president of the United States. Could this be the reason for your visit to Okinawa? If so, you are not welcomed here. Okinawa has decided not to resign itself to being treated as an item to be 'pawned,' to the U.S. to curry favor with it.... Isn't it fair to say that Okinawa is treated like a 'political desert island,' tantamount to being politically nonexistent, and will in no way have its will acknowledged and reflected in your administration?"
EDITORIAL
Translated By Nakako Hashimoto
February 3, 2013
Japan - Ryukyu Shimpo Shimbun - Original Article (Japanese)
Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe: The most right-wing Japanese leader in years, and who is in the midst of a territorial confrontation with China, wants the U.S. on his side. But the people of Okinawa appear unwilling to be the instrument of his effort to satify Washington. STARS AND STRIPES VIDEO: demonstrators block the gates of the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, Sept. 27, 2012, 00:01:03
Mr. Shinzo Abe, your visit to the prefecture [Okinawa] is the first since your return to the office of the prime minister, and people here are watching cold-eyed and with a measure of apprehension.
Before visiting the U.S. later this month, you want to apply to the governor's office for permits to reclaim land in public waters, which is required for relocating the U.S. military's Futenma Air Station to Henoko. And like a souvenir, you would like to bring signs of progress on the relocation plan for the prefecture to the president of the United States. Could this be the reason for your visit?
If so, you are not welcomed here. Okinawa has decided not to resign itself to being treated as an item to be "pawned," to the United States to curry favor with it.
[Editor's Note: Okinawa Governor Hirokazu Nakaima has already made it clear, that relocating the base to Henoko, which requires landfill, would be impossible due to local opposition. He has called for the base to be relocated outside of Okinawa prefecture, where over 75 percent of all U.S. bases in Japan are located.]
Relocation from Iwakuni in 1976
At the National Diet yesterday, you said you will "listen carefully to the voice of Okinawa." How many times have we have heard such words from the mouths of prime ministers? And while uttering them, isn't it the case that you hope only to hear what you want to hear?: "Relocation within the prefecture is acceptable."
We ask you to please "hear" us correctly. If you do, you'll acknowledge that for Okinawa there is no going back, and that the people of the prefecture have an indomitable will to reject this relocation.
The executive committee of the Okinawa prefecture has submitted a kenpakusho [formal petition] calling for scrapping the deployment of the MV22 Osprey - a vertical take-off and landing aircraft - and for not only abandoning Futenma's relocation within the prefecture, but its outright closure. The kenpakusho is a clear expression of the Okinawa peoples will, and is a symbol of our historic sacrifices.
The kenpakusho is signed and stamped by the prefectural assembly speaker, the heads of every municipality and chairpeople of all municipal assemblies, and the presidents of other Okinawa groups and organizations. You should recognize the weight and significance of this.
Amid opposition by the Okinawa people, the deployment of the Osprey was forcibly undertaken, and countenanced by the administration of the Democratic Party in Tokyo. Do you plan to repeat this?
In a poll last year, ninety percent of prefecture residents were against the Henoko relocation. Every member elected last year to the four single-seat constituencies in the prefecture is opposed to it. But in spite of this, shortly after the election, you said you wanted to, "work toward relocating the base to Henoko, Nago City."
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SEE ALSO ON THIS:
Okinawa Times, Japan: Futenma Relocation Plan a 'Slap in the Face' to Okinawa People
Ryukyu Shimpo Shimbun, Japan: Battle of Okinawa Victims Deserve Better from Government
Okinawa Times, Japan: Okinawans will 'Spew Magma' Over Crimes of U.S. Forces
Global Times, China: Continued Dependence on America is Bad for Japan
Ibaraki Shimbun, Japan: After Osprey Deployment, Japan Government 'Cannot Be Trusted'
Chunichi Shimbun, Japan: On Okinawa Battle Anniversary, People Feel Abandoned
Ryukyu Shimpo, Japan: Okinawans Unswervingly Against Defective Osprey
Tokushima Shimbun, Japan: Okinawa Deserves Freedom from American Bases
Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan: Okinawa Governor 'Adament' About Osprey
Asahi Shimbun, Japan: Opposition to Osprey Deployment Grows
The Okinawa Times, Japan: It's Time to End Japan's 'Servitude to America'
Nishinippon Shimbun, Japan: It's Imperative for Japan to Look Outward Again
Nishinippon Shimbun, Japan: Revise Inequitous U.S.-Japan Security Deal
Ryukyu Shimpo Shimbun, Japan: After Quake, Japan Can Ill Afford U.S. Base Repair
People's Daily, China: Australia Should Avoid Helping U.S. Hurt China's Interests
Australia: Aussie Coverage of Obama's Visit to Darwin; His Challenge to China
Isen Shimbun, Japan: Despite its Mistakes, Japan Needs U.S. More than Ever
Isn't it fair to say that Okinawa is treated like a "political desert island," tantamount to being politically nonexistent, and will in no way have its will acknowledged and reflected in your administration?
Did you know that the Marine air wing stationed at the Futenma Air Station was relocated in 1976 from Iwakuni city, Yamaguchi prefecture - your hometown? And that this wasn't even conducted under U.S. military fiat?
Last year, the U.S. sounded out Tokyo about a partial relocation of the Marine Corps. base from Okinawa to Iwakuni, but Japan's government rejected this immediately. Why is it possible to so readily conduct relocations from the mainland to Okinawa, while the reverse is immediately refused? Isn't this an obvious case of discrimination? If you want to claim this isn't discrimination, prove it. Unless you execute the reverse [moving U.S. military facilities from Okinawa to Japan's mainland], you cannot.
Steamrolled By Power
In government, media, and bureaucracy across the country, people talk about of Okinawa's resistance as a bid to win measures to promoting its economy.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
Isao Iijima, a special advisor to the cabinet and member of your staff, had very close ties to Takemasa Moriya, who was parliamentary private secretary to former Prime Minister Koizumi and a vice minister of defense, who drafted the current plan for the Henoko relocatation. Mr. Moriya repeatedly states in his books that Okinawa has an agenda, and that the aim to its resistance is to gain funding. If you are paying attention, you should also know that such a conclusion is unjustifiable and wrong.
There are no examples in which the government has another prefecture to allow the relocation of a an American base in return for the construction of a bullet train route. If such a thing is good enough for Okinawa but not others, isn't it nothing but discrimination?
In recent years, it seems it have become almost acceptable to say publicly, "politically steamrolling Okinawa is the only way to go." Doesnt democracy apply to Okinawa? Should the will of the people of Okinawa be trampled on? Is this the nature of the Japan you say should be "restored"?
You said in your policy speech at the opening of the Diet that you will "restore the bonds between Japan and the United States." These are "bonds" maintained at the expense of Okinawa and are nothing but a house of cards. If you really want to show the value of Japan-U.S. relations, you should break Okinawa's chain of sacrifice. The issue of bases must be dealt with appropriately, and you should pursue a new and more sustainable form of Japan-U.S. ties.
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Posted By Worldmeets.US Feb. 14, 2013, 12:47amWhat Is Luddism
The Luddites started out as 19th-century English working-class who opposed machinery. Named after Ned Ludd, a youth who destroyed two textile stocking frames. The fear was, machines would replace labor. (A valid concern.) No matter how many machines they destroyed, they could not stop progress. Machines were emblematic of a changing world. What people thought was possible had changed, and erasing thoughts was like erasing "blue" from the world. It could not be undone. People integrated machinery into their daily lives. Expectations had changed.
The Luddites had historical context to their fears: tools create efficiency, and efficient systems need fewer workers to produce more goods. Machines were a more efficient tool, and it did replace labor, a specific type of labor. Humans, however, are versatile, and new work opened up for people who understood machines. As with other tools, machines needed to be cleaned, repaired, and improved.
In evolution, there are forward leaps, and when it is time to jump, not everyone makes it to the next stage. It would be easy to talk about unfairness because it is unfair, and it is full of suffering. That is the nature of the universe. All things change. All things end. That is the only guarantee. As one form of opportunity ends, a new opportunity appears. As sentient beings, we cannot always choose the circumstances, yet we can choose our actions and our perspectives.
Luddism Is Neither Ignorance nor Nationalism
It would be easy to condemn Luddites as technically unsavvy, but in reality, it was the opposite, it was their technical knowledge that made them fearful. They feared what they understood. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking have expressed concerns over machines. Critics have accused them of Luddism, yet none would question their technical literacy. From the top economists, Silicon Valley execs, to President Obama, all have made clear that nothing has reduced employment like automation. But the ones in real danger are not the Luddites but the ignorant, the ones (willfully) unaware of their changing world. Luddites will hedge their bets and try to remain relevant.
Another distinction must be made, Ned Ludd and the Luddites were not nationalists, they did not blame foreign labor for their disappearing jobs, they blamed machines. Machines will not call in sick, take vacations, complain, rest, or have any political affiliation. (Machines are cheaper than foreign labor.) It would be like horses blaming horses in other countries, or non-native horses for taking their jobs, rather than the automobile. Nationalists often do not even acknowledge automation in their arguments. (You can try to keep immigrants out, but so far nothing has stopped the progress of machines.) You used to need lots of people to farm, now you don't. You used to need lots of people in warehouses to lift boxes, now you don't. You used to need people to make cars, now machines outnumber humans in factories. We are already telling children how actual humans used to be needed for physical labor. It's another part of history—strange, exotic, and almost unimaginable.
"Wait, we used to have to ride horses to get around? And send emails, called letters, by mail? And write it by hand?"
America is efficient, US production is higher than ever, and the amount of people needed to produce goods are lower than ever. Yet, we go on our iPhones and complain about people taking our jobs, completely oblivious to how our very iPhone can do the work of what used to take thousands of people. (Automation is so ever-present, we can no longer see it.) If it were actual humans taking our jobs, that would be a good problem. But that's an old world problem. We live in a new world now. (If you want to bring those jobs back, smash your phones, and only buy things made by hand. But that's unlikely, as that would be less convenient, more expensive, and the quality would be open to more human error.) Perhaps we can stop factories from opening up in another country, but how are we going to get that factory to use people rather than machines? And if it only uses humans, how will it be able to compete and stay in business? (We can blame who we like, but there's no one in charge of this world. It's a runaway world and it's impossible to know where it'll go.)
Technology is not intrinsically benevolent. There is an ethical argument to be made. However, that is not the subject of this article. The point of this article is the practicality of knowledge and maintaining individual value when values change.
Illiteracy In the New Language
Technology shapes our thoughts, creates new opportunities, and is full of challenges. It is our mindset regarding challenge that is the difference between adaptation and extinction. With biological advantages, we cannot grow wings or gills. Technology is different in that everyone has an ability to ride a plane or learn to scuba. (Technology is even shaping our biology.) Much of the conflict with technology comes from our attitudes, if we see technology as too daunting and overwhelming, we will avoid it. We will look for ways around it, and attempt to convince ourselves we can do without it. Imagine America in the 1900s, an illiterate youth would have an extraordinarily difficult time escaping poverty without the ability to read. It would be a near miracle. Technical literacy is of the same importance. We have different levels of access, yet having the wrong attitude can only compound disadvantages. There is no scenario where it would benefit anyone at any level of access to deny technology.
Willful
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MySpace… LOL, the only reason I say that is because how often does anyone get to say they foresaw something starkly in contrast to what Carl Sagan envisioned.
That’s Like Besting Snoop Dogg on a Marijuana Pop Quiz
This means that whichever superintelligent AI’s connected to that network would get that tech for free and get bumped up to the next plateau level. They would automatically acheive the highest level of knowledge available anywhere. That is, if those aliens are really nice and they give us lots of things for free. Ya know, because of how nice they are.
There is a larger incentive for civilizations to hoard or protect knowledge if the difference in technological development is more like a series of plateaus than one Singularity. After each Singularity, there would be a period of stagnated development. This is how I envision technology development to unfold, by the way. There isn’t one singularity, there are several. So if this is true, then alien civilizations are going to want to restrict some of their knowledge.
There may be encrypted communications for this cosmic quantum internet. Or there may be interference between so many civilizations coming only or using the channels improperly. There should be some universal protocol that enables CDMA/TDMA-like sharing of that resource … somehow. Interestingly, it will probably be similar to CDMA/TDMA-like protocols, but reimagined for quantum networking.
No Slim Shady! And No Lolcats.
There’s probably a InterGalactic FCC!! And no, they will not let Slim Shady be. So, no Slim Shady. And no lolcats. Every damn civilization thinks their lolcats are the best.
“If you think David Conner should write for Rick and Morty, make sure to tweet this article to @rickandmorty and @danharmon. Thank you, come again. And again and again. Your mom.” - David Conner, a stand up guy
But interference from lower aliens who don’t know what they’re doing could be irritating. Like if you don’t properly subdivide your comm packets to match the chronons, you’re doing it wrong! You’re fucking it up for Gleep Gloop out here. He still hasn’t watched the 1972 Superbowl and you’re fucking it up for him.
Now apologize to Gleep Glop … or die!!
[^1] As for the protocols which are utilized for communication over the Quantum Web, there would be limitations resulting from the quantum mechanism they utilize. These limitations would drastically affect the bandwidth and capability for communication to other areas of the universe. That, in turn, would would change the nature of how lifeforms utilize this technology. If there’s a low maximum distance for intertangled particles that can be used for communication, then we’d have to use repeaters to talk to civilizations outside our neighborhood.
There may be some spatial restrictions to this. There might be limitations on the kinds of partical systems that can be mapped to communication networks. If there is a Quantum Web, then particles are more tightly coupled to other local particals than more distant particles because of how matter was distributed after the Big Bang.
Really, the specifics of this are all quite speculative. The point is – there are aliens and they are reading your tweets. They are seeing your lolcats and they are laughing. Because deep down, they know. They know that their lolcats are superior – whatever their cats may look like.
This is a crucial question to answer. Perhaps it’s better off left as a science fiction scenario, but if it were possible, then we could leverage the entire universe as a massive computer. It’s basically cosmic internet! And the customer service probably beats cable internet. They have light years to cross, my friend. And they still beat the cable company!
At that point, we shed most of the spatial restrictions on the computational capacity of the universe. We can leverage the whole thing, regardless of whether there’s a Big Crunch or a Big Freeze. It won’t really matter. Galaxies should stay mostly in tact, regardless. They just drift so far apart that they are separated by intractible distances.
A Star Virus: A Self-Replicating Energy-Form Composed of Plasma
Side Trek: What if stars are such a massive network of computers, because of the possible interconnectedness of all matter? In other words, there could be a quantum virus harnessing entanglement that impregnates stars with a self-replicating form of quantum information, eventually transforming that star into a node in a universal network. It’s like a cosmic game of tag with stars. You just have to physically get to each one first.
Warning: Science Fiction!
Basically, there could be some mix of thermodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic behaviors exhibited by a body of plasma and which are self-sustaining and self-replicating. It’s really hard to imagine this actually happening of course. Yet it could be possible for a ball of plasma to internalize enough information as dynamic subsystems of energy within the overall system. When the system enters another body of plasma, like a star, then these subsystems replicate their behavior to adjacent plasma. Eventually, the entire star is converted to these dynamic energy motion patters, which are self-sustaining (somehow, lulz) and self-replicating. The star eventually develops the capacity to internalize the external energy patterns it receives as input. It catalyzes into a giant burning plasma life-form! It can internalize information and “store” it in patterns of energy rippling through it. eventually, its core expands and forms an interface on its surface to interact with the more fluid plasma. The imperfections on the surface of the core begin to meld into more complicated information processing machines that form higher and more complex circuits. Finally, the entire core functions as a wierd quantum computer, capable of leveraging it’s existing Quantum Web connections to communicate with other stars.
… Probably not though, but wouldn’t it be cool if that’s what happened?
Also, when you throw Superintelligent AI into the mix with this idea – or any concept where there is a massive universal communication medium – how does that change the implications of AI? It means that AI would merge together with this cosmic network of other superintelligent AI’s and join this hivemind virtualization cluster in the sky. I wonder what they’d talk about…
It’d be pretty cool though because this maximizes our capacity for virtualizing a universe inside ours.
What does any of this have to do with consciousness? Quantum mechanics may lay the framework for a universally connected hivemind, whether or not we need a superintelligent being to dock into the cosmic supercomputer.
What we learn about quantum mechanics and philosophy over the next 50 years will radically change our worldview. If my wild guesses in this article are even close, it may already be possible for bizarre paranormal abilities like telepathy to exist, leveraging the Quantum Web. It’d be easier for ancient people to discover such things, as they wouldn’t be so blinded by science. I give science such a hard time, but it’s really the only way we can confidently say we know something.
This all feeds back into the topics I was discussing in the section on informational entropy. Faster, further reaching communication networks enable us to accelerate the rate at which we share information. This causes the distribution of ideas to flatten, as information and knowledge becomes omnipresent. This means that, back here in our corner of the universe, we can contemplate and recombinate more ideas. We become more conscious. From communication. From diversity.Image caption Ms Ashtiani's family say they have not been allowed to contact her in prison for two weeks
An Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery now faces being whipped for indecency, her son says.
Iranian authorities sentenced Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani to 99 lashes after the Times newspaper published a picture purportedly of her without a headscarf.
The Times later published a correction, saying the photograph was of a different Iranian woman.
After an international outcry, Iranian officials temporarily halted Ms Ashtiani's stoning sentence in July.
There are fears the death sentence could still be carried out by hanging.
Contested confessions
Ms Ashtiani's son has given several interviews saying he was told of the new sentence of 99 lashes by people who have recently been released from the prison in Tabriz where his mother is being held.
On 28 August, the Times published a picture it said was of Ms Ashtiani that it had obtained from one of her lawyers.
The lawyer, Mohammad Mostafei, who has fled Iran, said he received the picture from her son, Sajad Ghaderzadeh - a claim Mr Ghaderzadeh denies.
Mr Ghaderzadeh said the new sentence was "an excuse to increase [the authorities'] harassment of our mother".
In an open letter, he said his mother had been sentenced to receive 99 lashes "on false charges of spreading corruption and indecency by disseminating this picture of a woman presumed to be her without hijab".
He said he did not believe the sentence had been carried out but that her family and lawyer had not been allowed to visit her for two weeks and she had not been allowed to use a telephone.
Mr Ghaderzadeh said the family was appealing against the sentence.
In May 2006, a criminal court in East Azerbaijan province found Ms Ashtiani guilty of having had an "illicit relationship" with two men following the death of her husband. She was given 99 lashes.
But that September, during the trial of a man accused of murdering her husband, another court reopened an adultery case based on events that allegedly took place before her husband died.
Despite retracting a confession she said she had been forced to make under duress, Ms Ashtiani was convicted of "adultery while being married" and sentenced to death by stoning.
In August, Iranian TV aired what it said was a confession from Ms Ashtiani of her involvement in her husband's 2005 murder.Introduction
“Perfect is the enemy of the good”
– Voltaire
I’m a proud imperfectionist…I’m PERFECTLY imperfect…I’m a recovering perfectionist.
You may be wondering – “why would he ever give striving for perfection? Doesn’t he want things to be perfect?”
Look, I get it. It’s a weird thing to say that I’m so over perfectionism.
If it floats your boat, then feel free to strive for perfection. If you want to NEVER be happy or satisfied with anything in life, then be my guess to set your expectations at an absurdly, unrealistically high standard that can never (I repeat NEVER) possibly be met.
Seriously…do you believe that anything short of perfection is horrible, and that even minor imperfections will lead to utter catastrophe? Because that’s the essence of perfectionism – that nothing is EVER good enough.
Do you seriously want to live your life trying to achieve this unattainable standard? Something that’s only in your head?
The truth is – perfectionism is an illusion and simply isn’t how you should measure success.
And the sooner you realize that and quit on perfectionism, the better it’ll be for you. Your life will be way better off if you become a recovering perfectionist just like me.
Don’t believe me? Here are 3 reasons why perfectionism is actually not perfect at all…
BONUS: Want to overcome your obsession with perfectionism? Get FIVE affirmations to help you start thinking in a new direction.
3 Reasons Why Perfectionism Ruins Your Life
1. Perfectionism leads to regret and dissatisfaction
Think of ALL the things you regret. I’d bet that most of them relate to perfectionism. Either you didn’t do something because you wanted it to be perfect OR you did something and regretted it because it didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to.
How does this regret make you feel? Probably not very good.
A study found that perfectionism can lead to something called “post-event rumination,” which is just a fancy way of saying perfectionism makes you overthink things.
Overthinking causes you to second guess your decisions and choices. When you do this, it becomes difficult to let go of past decisions (and past mistakes).
By always wanting everything to turn out perfect and wondering what you could’ve done to make things perfect, you become dissatisfied with the result – no matter how they turned out.
2. Perfectionism negatively influences your work
It must be odd reading that, huh? How can perfection make your work worse instead of better?
If you have a perfectionist mentality, it’s pretty freaking hard to say “I’m done. It’s perfect.” So what do you do? You edit things, tweak every little detail, and work non-stop until you’re finally satisfied…which usually NEVER happens.
This unhealthy obsession leads to stress, fatigue, and burnout. (Sounds wonderful.)
On top of that, a study found that individuals who identify as perfectionists are also more likely to procrastinate. In other words, perfectionism is another form of procrastination. I’ve used the excuse of “if it’s not going to be perfect than I’d rather not do it” countless times as a way of procrastinating.
So yeah, I guess it does negatively affect your work.
3. Perfectionism damages your self-esteem
An entirely different study (lots of studies in this story) found that perfectionism can hurt your body image and play a role in the development of eating disorders.
This happens when people constantly compare their bodies to the “ideals” we find in movies, TV, and magazines. These comparisons cause us to pick and poke at our body, causing us to be disappointed with who we are.
It makes you believe that because you’re not perfect that you’re NOT worthy. That if you lost these many pounds, bought these shoes, or changed your nose that people will actually love you and accept you.
That’s not a way to live.
You don’t deserve this kind of harsh self-criticism. Perfectionism is hugely detrimental to nurturing the most unique and special parts of ourselves. We shouldn’t see the world as either perfect OR flawed.
[Bonus] Perfectionism is a huge risk factor in suicides
Yup…your obsession with perfection can lead to take your own life!
“If my life isn’t perfect, why bother living at all?”
“If I can’t be perfect, then what can I be?”
I’m sorry, but nothing is worth ending your life over – especially something as stupid as perfection.
2 Simple Ways to Let Go of Perfectionism
As you can see above, perfectionism can destroy our happiness and our lives in 4 horrific ways (and there are countless other ways we didn’t bring up). So are you ready to start on the road to recovery?
Great!
The first thing you need to know is that perfectionism is a mindset, so the best way to let go of it is to start building a new mindset.
Here are 2 ways to help you reset your mindset:
1. Remind yourself that it’s okay to be imperfect
Take out an index card (or any kind of paper) and write down this saying:
“I AM THE BEST VERSION OF MY SELF IN THIS VERY MOMENT.”
Tape the index card somewhere around your home where you’ll see it every day like your bathroom mirror. Every time you see this index card, say the affirmation to yourself 3 times out loud. (Or loudly inside your head if you don’t want to freak out your roomies.)
Sure, it may seem silly, but it’s all about changing your mindset.
Slowly you’ll start to believe the statement and your mindset will go from “perfectionism” mindset to an “acceptance” mindset. And sooner or later, this new way of thinking spread to your daily life.
BONUS: Want more affirmations?
Get FIVE affirmations to help you start thinking in a new direction.
2. Adopt a “Win or Learn” mindset
Most people assume that if you want to be successful, you have to be a perfectionist – there is only success and failure, nothing in between. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Successful people aren’t perfectionists – they have a learner’s mindset.
In other words, they understand that life is a process, and they view “failures” as learning experiences.
To help get you in a “Win or Learn” mentality, you need to comfortable with “failing”. Do this by putting yourself in a situation where you’ll fail. You’re not going to be overly excited about it, but after a while, you’ll find that failure isn’t that all that bad.
In fact, failure is actually good.
When you fail at something, it means you’re challenging yourself in a positive and productive way. So laugh at your mistakes and faults, and make them work for you. Mistakes happen on the way to success, and even the most embarrassing and humiliating fail can be channeled in a positive way.
Where to go from here
Perfectionism is a barrier that blocks out happiness and let’s in fear – fear of doing something wrong, fear of not being good enough, and fear of criticism.
As a society we tend to hold up perfectionism as a sign of virtue, of achievement. However, perfectionism is ultimately self-defeating. Perfectionism is the enemy of success. It keeps you from being productive, causes you to be overwhelmed, and keeps you from taking a leap of faith on your self. It makes you believe you and anything associated with you is unacceptable. Simply put, perfectionism sucks AND I’m over it. You don’t have time in life for bullshit that does nothing but chip away at your ability to pursue your goals, your happiness, and your life. Being happy with your life requires that you let go of these expectations and requires you to learn to be content with how things are, rather than obsess over how they ought to be in an “ideal, perfect world.” Coz guess what? Nothing is perfect. I repeat, NOTHING is perfect. Life rarely works out exactly the way you want – whether it’s relationships, work, or goals. (Spoiler Alert) Perfection is a lie. Perfection is a lie designed to ensure you believe you're never good enough. Click To Tweet It’s the voice in your head that says “just being” cannot be enough, and it demands you be different, better, more, less, something else…that you’re never good enough. If you strive for perfection, you’re setting yourself up for unrealistic expectations, failure, and disappointment. In many ways, perfectionism is the opposite of growth and happiness. It keeps us stuck and unsatisfied. The pursuit of flawlessness is irrational and crippling. So don’t chase perfection. Chase growth. Be okay with mistakes. In fact, embrace your mistakes, because that’s how you grow and get better.
To truly be happy, you need to first learn to let go of your unrealistically high expectations about life.
Because if you ever truly want to be person you want to be, to be this “perfect self”, you need to let go of the idea that there is anything more perfect than who are you are now. So, let go and know that, even if this moment isn’t perfect, it’s good enough.
That right there is…perfection.
Thanks for Reading!
Know a recovering perfectionist? Share this with them! That’d be perfect. 🙂ADVERTISEMENT
MUMBAI — In Lower Manhattan, a busy banker stuffs herself with overly rich restaurant fare ordered off Seamless.com. In Frankfurt, a manager slops generous portions of the canteen's stew onto his lunch plate.
In Mumbai, an insurance analyst sits down to a healthy home-cooked meal, still warm from the stove where it was prepared by his wife or mother.
India's commercial capital is a teeming metropolis of nearly 20 million, boasting a sparkling international air terminal and a sleek new metro system, swanky furniture stores and Bollywood starlets. It's a city constantly striving, yearning for the future.
Remarkably, its age-old tradition of home-cooked meals — delivered on wheels — has resisted the momentum of change.
The dabbawalas, as they're known, are the men who make it possible.
They have cemented their place in Mumbai's colorful tapestry. They deliver lunch from home to the office or school every day, monsoon or shine.
"We take great pride in ensuring delivery even against great odds: We worked through the floods in 2005 and the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008 when most of the city had come to a standstill," said Vitthal Sawant, a 34-year-old dabbawala who has delivered lunches for more than 15 years.
The dabbawalas are a common sight in Mumbai: men clad in white kurtas, weaving their bikes through impossible traffic and swarming throngs, juggling multiple tiffins — circular silver tins with four to five compartments, each packed with food — that are destined for office buildings and school courtyards.
Transporting lunches may sound simple but what the dabbawalas do every day is a remarkable feat — one so impressive, in fact, that professors from Harvard Business School have traveled to India to study it.
Some 5,000 men dole out over 200,000 meals a day, picking up the tiffins in the morning from women, typically, who have packed steaming, spicy dishes into each compartment: a curry, vegetables, dal (lentils), and flatbread (with some variations).
For many Mumbai residents, this is the only way to lunch — on a feast, made with the love of a mother or wife.
"It's expensive to eat outside every day, besides it's not healthy," said 36-year-old Naina Bhonsle in Mumbai's Versova neighborhood. "I know what my husband likes eating, and so I prefer to send him a tiffin every day."
The dabbawalas sort the various lunches according to where they came from, and where they are intended to go, labeling each tiffin with an alpha numeric code. The tins are then loaded onto city trains, transported through the city's maze and handed off to local dabbawalas who complete the last leg of the route.
(AP Photo/Gautam Singh)
At lunchtime, the sharp aromas of turmeric, cumin, and chili fill the office as workers deftly mop up their curries with bread. After the food is eaten and the tiffins packed back in their bags, the dabbawalas return the boxes to their respective homes, their loads a bit lighter.
"It's hard work, no doubt about it," said Pawan Agarwal, who heads an association called The Mumbai Dabbawala, noting that the crates of tiffins often weigh 100 lbs or more. "But they feel that serving food is serving God so they feel happy to do this business."
Adding to the physical demands and challenge of precision, the large majority of the dabbawalas are semi-literate or illiterate, mostly hailing from small villages near the city of Pune in Maharashtra state. Their trade first started 125 years ago, in much simpler times. But as Mumbai has grown and transformed rapidly, adding new districts and train lines, the dabbawalas have adapted.
"Even though many of us are only semi-literate, we have learned to read the code," said Vitthal Sawant. "We don't have any need for computers — the code is imprinted in our minds."
So deeply imprinted that the dabbawalas rarely, if ever, make a mistake. Their delivery system has been awarded a six sigma level of efficiency. That means they make around one mistake in every six million deliveries.
"A hundred things can go wrong along the way — tiffins delivered to the wrong destination, tiffins lost, tiffins broken — but they rarely do," said Sawant. "Our motto is 'error is horror.'"
Their delivery system has garnered international fame as a highly specialized trade, attracting Prince Charles and Richard Branson and warranting a case-study at Harvard Business School, visits from global delivery giant FedEx, and a series of documentaries.
The dabbawalas' lore even spawned a critically acclaimed movie last year. In The Lunchbox, a mistaken dabbawala delivery sparks an unlikely romance between a young housewife and an office worker nearing retirement.
"My dabba went to someone else, someone else liked it and finished it," the astonished housewife tells her neighbor as the mistake dawns on her.
"But they never deliver it wrong, that's impossible!" goes the response.
(AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)
Still, the dabbawalas are facing unprecedented hurdles in a rapidly changing Mumbai. The brand new Navi Mumbai Metro, a much-anticipated rapid transit system, went online in early June, but the dabbawalas will not be allowed to use the new infrastructure.
But with only 12 stations covering around 7 kilometers of the city right now, the metro has little use at the moment for the dabbawalas, and its wagons are too small, says Gangaram Talekar, general secretary of the Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association.
"It will not be possible to carry hundreds of tiffins into those compartments, I imagine it will be a huge inconvenience to other passengers as well," said Talekar. "Of course, we too would like to travel in greater comfort but we are not going to appeal this decision right now because for the moment, it's impractical."
The biggest challenges, says Pawan Agarwal, are cultural ones, like changing family roles. As women shed their aprons and head to their own workplaces, nobody is left behind to cook lunch at home. His solution is to have the dabbawalas' wives take over the cooking, closing the catering circle.
"The customers will take cooked food also if husband and wife are working," he said.
Others have lamented the growing taste for Western standards, for business lunches and quick fast food fixes. Yet the dabbawalas say nothing, not even McDonald's, has managed to put a dent in their business.
"Many people in this city prefer their lunch fresh, prepared lovingly by their wives or mothers," said Vitthal Sawant. "This is why despite so many restaurants cropping up all over the city, our business still sees a 5-10 percent growth each year."
What's more, the dabbawalas are part of the city's identity, says Agarwal.
"Mumbai is recognized, identified by the dabbawalas — all over India, all over the world they feel proud," he said. "They are learning from this business, the values, the culture."
This article, by Sumi Somaskanda and Mandakini Gahlot, originally appeared at GlobalPost.
More from GlobalPost...The loudspeaker is the key ingredient in the high-fidelity reproduction of sound, and it typically commands the most visual attention of a stereo system. Not every speaker design is the same, but they are essentially driver(s) in a box that are aimed in the direction the listener. At the extreme high end of audio, however, loudspeaker design takes a decidedly different approach. This side of the spectrum is where one is more likely to find obscure elements such as horns, 180-degree drivers, electrostatic diaphragms, and exotic hardwoods or other materials. In an age where it is popular for speakers to be heard but not seen, we believe it is time for these over-the-top loudspeaker designs to be celebrated. While this list of 10 extreme examples is not exhaustive, these speakers—from beautiful to bizarre—represent a diverse array of hi-fi’s most remarkable works of audiophile art.Dave Callaham has joined Patty Jenkins and Geoff Johns on the writing team for Warner Bros.’ “Wonder Woman 2.”
Callaham’s hiring, announced Wednesday, came at the behest of Jenkins in the wake of her closing her own deal to co-write, direct, and produce the sequel for Warner Bros. Jenkins and Johns have already been working on a treatment.
The sequel’s logline is being kept under warps but Jenkins has said in interviews that she would like to set the new film in America during the Cold War.
Jenkins and Callaham worked together previously on “Jackpot,” which was in the works last year as an English-language remake of the 2011 Norwegian action comedy and had Mila Kunis and Bryan Cranston attached.
Variety was first to report that Jenkins was already working on a script for the sequel with Johns, who oversees the DC film universe along with Jon Berg for Warner Bros. “The goal is to make another great ‘Wonder Woman’ film,” Johns said at the time.
Callaham’s writing credits include 2010’s “Expendables” and a story-by credit on the 2014 movie “Godzilla.” He is also a writer-executive producer of the Amazon action comedy series “Jean Claude van Johnson.”
Callaham is repped by UTA, Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment, and Hansen Jacobson.HOUSTON — Oil production in Texas has hit its highest monthly rate on record, more than doubling in less than three years, according to new federal data.
The state pumped 2.7 million barrels of crude per day during September, the highest average since monthly record-keeping began in January 1981. That marked a 30 percent jump over September 2012, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Texas’ oil production peaked in 1972, when it produced an average of 3.4 million barrels per day, according to annual data from the Texas Railroad Commission.
After decades of decline, Texas oil production abruptly turned in 2008 with the beginning of the shale oil and gas boom. Innovation in oil field technology, particularly hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, have opened new regions of the United States to oil and natural gas activity in recent years. Production from deep, dense rock formations, once uneconomical to drill, has unleashed a new wealth of oil and gas on the energy-hungry nation.
The Texas oil boom largely has been fueled by production in South Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale and West Texas’ Permian Basin, which have expanded rapidly to produce more than 1 million barrels of oil per day each. Texas produced 35 percent of the United States’ crude oil in September.
The surge has made Texas one of the 15 largest oil producers in the world, putting it in the ranks of heavy-hitters including Venezuela, Kuwait and Nigeria.
For 25 straight months, the state’s oil production rate has increased by more than 25 percent year-over-year, noted economist Mark J. Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Management.
“Output in America’s No. 1 oil-producing state – Texas – continues its phenomenal, meteoric rise,” Perry wrote on his blog, Carpe Diem. “That production surge has to be one of the most significant increases in oil output ever recorded in the U.S. over such a short period of time.”
Perry said the oil boom in the Eagle Ford Shale and the Permian Basin have placed those regions among nine “super-giant oil fields” in the world.
The United States’ surging oil production, which reached 7.8 million barrels per day in September, has reignited talk of energy independence. The United States’ natural gas imports plummeted 21 percent from 2008 to 2012, while imports of crude oil and petroleum products fell 18 percent.
The Energy Information Administration forecasts that the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia and Russia this year to become the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas combined.
Americans still consume far more crude, however, than they produce. The country pumped an average of 6.5 million barrels of oil per day in 2012. Meanwhile, it used more than 18 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day last year.
The Energy Information Administration projects total U.S. oil production will rise to 8.2 million barrels per day in 2014.
Also on Fuelfix:
Life is lonely in Eagle Ford ‘trailerhood’Isabel Dos Santos is one of 20 billionaires in Africa. She is the only African woman to grace Forbes’s billionaire list and Angola’s only billionaire.
Forbes added Dos Santos to the billionaire’s list this year at an estimated worth of $3 billion. Less than a year ago, however, she missed the cut with a net worth of $500 million that consisted primarily of stakes in two major Portuguese media companies.
Dos Santos did not increase her wealth 6 times over in a year by selling a company she started or killing it on the stock market. Rather, Forbes discovered her undisclosed stakes in a variety of Angolan companies with the help of Angolan investigative journalist and human rights activist Rafael Marques de Morais.
The Angolan government cheered the announcement of Dos Santos’s billionaire status as a matter of national pride. But her success is a story of kleptocracy hidden under the respectable veneer of a business suit. Isabel Dos Santos is the oldest child of José Eduardo dos Santos, the strongman who has been Angola’s president since 1979, and her business career is one of taking rather than making.
Forbes’ investigation into the source of Isabel Dos Santos’s wealth notes:
Isabel Dos Santos’ formative business experience came at Miami Beach. Not the Florida city, but rather a rustic chic beachside bar and restaurant in Luanda that tries to emulate its namesake, down to the mediocre food and indifferent service. In 1997 the owner, Rui Barata, was having issues with health inspectors and taxmen. His solution: bringing in Isabel dos Santos, then 24, as his partner, with the idea, contemporaries say, that her name would keep pesky government regulators at bay. Her initial investment was negligible, according to a source with knowledge of the deal, and the restaurant thrived: Sixteen years later it’s still a weekend hot spot. The lesson–the equity stake available to those with a gilded name–couldn’t have been lost on Isabel dos Santos, who was entering adulthood at the exact same time Angola’s riches were being unlocked.
Dos Santos grew up the daughter of a dictator. During a childhood that included “Christmas trees flown in from New York and $500,000 worth of bubbly imported from a Lisbon restaurateur,” Dos Santos garnered the nickname “the Princess.”
But the gifts did not end with adulthood. Angola is a country whose government coffers swelled over the last decade as booms in commodity prices benefitted the resource rich country. Like any dictator, José Eduardo dos Santos faced the challenge of transferring those riches to himself in quasi-legal fashion and used state control over lucrative industries and public companies as the means to do so. In a number of deals he pushed and approved, he indirectly provided his daughter with stakes in the nation’s state run diamond company, Angola's first sanctioned private mobile phone company, a private bank that made lucrative loans to the state, and a state-owned oil company and major cement factory. Isabel dos Santos now uses the profits of her assets to make legitimate investments in Europe.
Her story is hardly unique. Resource rich but rule of law poor countries throughout the world struggle with rulers who transfer public wealth to themselves, their family, and their supporters. In China, “princelings,” the sons and daughters of China’s senior leaders, have ridden on the coattails of their powerful fathers to prominent political or business positions. They benefit from privilege, nepotism, and outright corruption to easily amass wealth, all thanks to the gift of their name.
Princelings are in the news this week because the Justice Department and Security Exchange Commission have begun investigating whether JPMorgan violated bribery laws by hiring the children of powerful Chinese regulators and state officials to win business for the firm. New York Times coverage provides one example:
The bank hired the son of a former Chinese banking regulator who is now the chairman of the China Everbright Group, a state-controlled financial conglomerate, according to the document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, as well as public records. After the chairman’s son came on board, JPMorgan secured multiple coveted assignments from the Chinese conglomerate, including advising a subsidiary of the company on a stock offering, records show.
The investigation is in initial stages and JPMorgan is cooperating. The biggest revelation so far is an internal spreadsheet in which JPMorgan explicitly linked their well-connected hires to specific deals. But as much as we enjoy a good banker bashing, JPMorgan may have done nothing illegal.
This argument is made by Andrew Sorkin who notes that “hiring the well-connected isn’t always a scandal.” He acknowledges that if JPMorgan hired Chinese employees as “part of an expected quid pro quo” for business deals, especially if the hires did not do real work, then JPMorgan’s actions constitute bribery. But he also argues that hiring children of the wealthy and powerful for their “golden rolodexes” is standard procedure not just in China (where “virtually every [Wall Street] firm” has hired princelings), but here in the United States as well. Sorkin writes:
By and large, financial firms in particular commonly hire people who have certain connections, whether through family or a business relationship. The thinking is that the new hire — and his or her last name — might “help open doors.” …Pick a big-name chief executive, and a quick LinkedIn search will often reveal a relative working for some other company that wants to do business with the parent’s company.
Sorkin runs over examples of sons and daughters of powerful American executives and leaders hired by major firms. He notes that they are extremely qualified - often holding multiple Ivy League degrees with distinction and regarded as talented individuals. Given their qualifications, and the important role networks can play in business success, “It is a hard to fault a business for hiring someone who has better contacts than someone else.”
But to us, this seems to represent a common problem of hiding behind meritocracy. It’s the same process of legitimation used by certain bankers who point to their degrees, intelligence, and long hours to disdain populist rhetoric and ignore any accusations that their lucrative business success comes thanks to government rents.
On an individual level, hiring well-connected scions of the Rockefellers of the day represents neither bribery nor scandal. But nationally, it’s a sociological fact with important consequences.
Sorkin writes that it is common practice from Wall Street through blue chip businesses, government, lobbying, academia and media. He says “it is the way of the world.” But just how common is it, and how important are the results?
Beside anecdotes and hand waving, the best data point of which we are aware is the following graph. It comes courtesy of economist Miles Corak in a paper (pdf) that exhaustively investigates America’s reduced socioeconomic mobility across generations with increased income inequality as its starting point.
As the graph shows, sons often work at companies that once employed their father. But as you reach the upper income percentiles, the probability shoots up. You could say that as you approach the limit of the countries’ richest men, the probability that their son will work with one of their former or current employers heads toward 100%.
We don’t have similar data for the United States, and the graph cannot prove messy questions of causality. But it strikingly visual
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degree of autonomy in decision-making by the workers’ group concerned (in each factory) are already possible… Even when, because of the failure of the union, workers’ protests lead to irrational and illusory demands, the workers express their refusal to produce without thinking, to work without deciding; they express their need for power.”
Petrilli: “In my opinion it is obvious that the system of the assembly line implies a real waste of human capacities and produces a very understandable feeling of frustration in the worker. The resulting social tensions must be realistically understood as structural rather than conjunctural facts… Greater participation of the workers in the elaboration of production objectives poses a series of problems having to do less with the organisation of work than with the definition of the power balance within the firm.”
The programmes are identical and the aims are the same: increased productivity. The only remaining problem is the sharing of power, which is at the root of the political crisis in many industrial countries. It is likely that the end of the political crisis will be accompanied by the birth of “workers’ power” as the power of wage-labour, under various forms: self-management, “popular” coalitions, Socialist-Communist Parties, left-wing governments with right-wing programmes, right-wing governments with left-wing programmes.-by NOAH-Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (Blue Dog-AZ) after she left her own town hall meeting Calm, reasoned, intelligent discourse has now become roadkill in our country and right wing mobs have now targeted free speech itself through tactics of screaming, intimidation and escalating the threat of violence. During last year’s presidential campaign, there was a paradigm shift in our national reason when, Republicans, realizing that their candidates, a cranky old coot and a dingbat former beauty queen, were probably going to lose to, not just a Democrat but, horror of horrors, a black man. It was unfathomable to repugs who had had things go their way for so long and gotten away with so much, including the theft of two elections, that they would be living in a universe where they not only wouldn’t have control over both Houses of Congress but the White House itself. On top of that, too, in their small minds, to see a black man in the White House who wasn’t just watering the plants, was more than they could bear. During the campaign, we started to hear people screaming out “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” Many in the media tried to paint such people as a tiny minority or fringe of the Republican Party as if to apologize for them or at least turn the spotlight elsewhere in shame. However, it was obvious to any one with a clear head that, since no Republicans were objecting to this thuggish behavior, they were in agreement and fine with letting such unacceptable sentiments speak for them. The only question now is: Where does it all end?This is not the first time during my lifetime and in my memory that things have gone off the rails in America, but it is the most massively intense. Part of the reason is technological; the speed of communication enabled by the internet and cell phones, plus the 24 hour “news” coverage on cable TV. Just as information can be spread instantly, so can propaganda and mis-information. In other times, news was something that appeared on TV for an hour each evening, and, except for an additional hour or two of news feature programming during the rest of the week, that was it. There were no hours of prime time given over to shifty patent medicine salesmen, religious hucksters, or an endless circus of street hustler car wrecks and Marvel Comic Book style crazies like Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck who in another day would be doing their crying and beating their heads in a padded room far out of contact with the public. Instead of giving them a shot of the happy stuff, we give them a microphone and the biggest loudspeaker in the world. Believe it or not, there was a time when Ann Coulter would have just been regarded as a crank with severe hostility and mental problems manifested by some sort of “I just can’t shut up. I just have to yell out the damndest things” version of tourrette’s syndrome. In today’s world, these people make gazillions; paid by media conglomerates and corporate sponsors to set the tone for our society.The right wing in this country has always had trouble “working within the system.” If it can’t win the hearts and minds of the majority, it has always sought extra-legal means to arrive at the simple, easy to understand “order” that they strive for. Unable to persuade through logic and the exchange of ideas in civil discourse, the right wing mindset is given to the violent tantrums of an unsophisticated child. When they lack the ability to grasp reality, they long to become like that kid inthat can just will people to disappear if he doesn’t like what they are thinking. Being adults, offers a broader selection of potential mayhem.I am old enough to remember that when JFK, a president who the right considered a dangerous communist sympathizer, was murdered in the streets of Dallas, the newspapers had been running advertising designed to look like wanted posters that showed a picture of JFK with the words “Wanted For Treason.” I remember George Wallace screaming “Segregation now. Segregation forever” in the doorway of a university. I remember a twisted little caféteria owner in Georgia named Lester Maddox who refused to serve African-Americans at his restaurant. He ended up as Governor. I remember Strom Thurmond. I remember so much hate fomented by politicians that it made some citizens feel it was permissible to blow up little girls in a church in Birmingham on a Sunday morning, or murder some “community organizers” of their day and bury their bodies in an earthen dam, or shoot Medger Evers as he returned home one night. Then, there was Martin Luther King. And then RFK. At every turn, we heard that people who wanted a better America were "socialists" or "communists." It was the same in the early 1930s when FDR was pushing Social Security. A cabal of bankers even tried to overthrow his administration and put a general in charge of the government. Fortunately, the general thought better of it and blew the whistle. One of the bankers was named Prescott Bush. It was the same in the mid-1960s when LBJ pushed through “socialist” legislation like Medicare and laws guaranteeing Civil Rights and voting rights for all, even the… you know, those. Hell, with the righties, even FLOURIDE was a communist plot.More recently, it was Newt Gingrich pompously talking about bringing down big government and how we ought to just blow it all up. Next thing we knew, there was Timothy McVeigh. Even after that, Newt tried to impeach his way to the top by conniving to rid Washington of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.It seems that the righties in this country just can’t accept the concept of democracy. Last year, there was an election. They. Their policies, which we will be trying to recover from for a very long time, were repudiated. But, the righties haveaccepted democracy. There is always a huge component of class warfare and racism at the base of their “thinking.” Lincoln (a Republican back when Republicans were progressives and very different than today’s Repugs) took away their slaves. Lincoln deliveredsome just didn’t want to believe in. We know what happened to him. The Kennedys and MLK sought equality through legislation and consensus. The way the right deals with things is the way of the gun or some other form of violence. If there has been a political assassination to be had in our history, it has been done to carry out some twisted righty agenda. Ironically, even the shooting of George Wallace just meant that Richard Nixon would get more votes once he was removed from the scene. I’ll leave the conspiracies for another day, but any cop will tell you that if you want to solve a crime, the first people you look at are those who benefited from that crime. The people who are disrupting these town hall meetings are often outsiders to the area. Some are just buying into Hate Radio propaganda. Some are paid for and bussed in by lobbying groups like Dick Armey’s Freedom Works and Rick Scott’s Conservatives For Patient’s Rights. Who is Rick Scott? He is the former head of a hospital chain. The reason he is a former head is that he was forced out during a fraud investigation. They pleaded guilty to over-billing state and federal health plans. And racked up $1.7in fines! Oh and he was also involved in some swift boat group that did something in the 2004 election, has Rove and Bush connections, etc., etc. Swell guy. Now ask yourself who isthose who are organizing the town hall disruptions? Who is whipping up the frenzy? Who is it that doesn’t care who gets hurt or killed as long as the status quo of the corporate bottom line is maintained? Follow the money. By now, you can see what I fear. It is a fear based on past history. It has been a worry of mine since the election campaign. The losers grow more rabid by the day, egged on by a tsunami of outright lies. They don’t want “government run health care” even if they don’t know what it is. They are low information voters who absorb lies like the best sponge in the world. In Texas last week, Rep. Gene Green (D-TX) asked his audience if they “oppose any form of socialized or government run health care.” Like good little robots, virtually everyone in the room said they did. Next, Rep. Green asked the audience how many of them were on Medicare. Nearly half of the audience raised their hands. I wonder if they saw a contradiction in their stance. I also wonder if it would have mattered if they did. These are just angry medieval mobs yelling “witches” and “burn them!” Lies and slogans are being spoonfed to low information voters who seek authority, answers, and even solutions to problems they don’t really have. They seek in all the wrong places, such as can be found on Hate Radio, CNN, and FOX. They hover around the words of the certifiable, absorbing them as if they were plausible kernels of truth. They tune in Rush and Lou, and Bill-0, and Sean, and Glenn and Malkin and so many others like campers gathered around a campfire to hear ghost stories about non-existent threats from some other dimension or universe, which just may be the one their cold blooded reptilian minds happen to occupy. They hear the voices. They receive the messages. They confuse violence with dissent. They grab on to lies to explain their reality. Conflating violence with dissent is what, with few exceptions, separates how the right engages in political protest and how the left engages in political protest.So, here we are. We are in a period where people who strangely call themselves teabaggers protest that President Obama is going to raise their taxes when he has already lowered them. For Republicans, every day is opposite day. It’s a case of “Don’t confuse me with FACTS! I just hate that guy. I want him to fail. I want him GONE.” The idea that if Obama does fail; our whole economy and country fails doesn’t matter to such people.is not their priority. They are in a state of hysteria. Obama’s an “arab.” He “associates with terrorists.” He “doesn’t have a birth certificate.” He’s illegitimate. He was born in Kenya (and you know what that means). We’re in a period where irrational sheep bleat on about how Obama wants to euthanize granny, or “grampa” as famed white supremacist Pat Buchanan bellows, or create “Government Death Panels,” like Caribou Barbie claims. We are in a period of a mass hysteria where old ladies turn down the voice of Rush just long enough to call their Congresscreep and lecture about how they don’t want that “that evil government health care that Obama is going to shove down their throats.” how they “don’t want a government program,” and he “better not touch their Medicare,” which, of course, as Rep. Green was getting at, just happens to be a government run health care system. Dare we call it SOCIALISM?It’s simultaneously fascinating and horrible to watch people who stand to benefit from change resist it with every molecule of their being. They proudly call themselves “I am the mob” and storm town hall meetings where things that could help their families are on the agenda for discussion, except that they don’t want to hear about it. They don’t wantto hear about it. They are being played and it doesn’t even dawn on them. They alternately call President Obama a socialist, a Nazi, and a communist with no apparent understanding of the very real differences between those three political systems. They mindlessly do the bidding of the corporate masters and the moneyed class and deride those who would better their lives as elitists. They remind me of the same folks that thought Reagan was talking about them when he was talking about lowering taxes. They praise Dubya for giving them a few hundred to buy a new TV while he gave the top 2% hundreds of thousands and even millions. Then they wonder why their roads and bridges are unsafe at any speed and why their kids have bad schools. They don’t even wonder about why the FDA isn’t equipped to stop e. coli in their spinach anymore and why more miners are dying in cave-ins while the people who are playing them are laughing all the way to their secret off shore bank accounts. In Tampa, a Glenn Beck fan club stormed a town hall, smashing on the windows just like a similar mob did in Florida in 2000 when people were trying to count votes. They were fearful of their guy losing. How’d that turn out for their families? How long before someone who is taking their marching orders from the likes of Beck loses their job and, therefore, their family’s insurance? How long before it happens to one of these families and they are faced with a life and death situation., they will see what powerless is. They will have voted against themselves yet again. Is it self-hatred? Fear of change? Fear of the unknown? Are their present circumstancesgood? Hey, Glenn Beck, turn it around a bit. What happens if you and the people you propagandize for succeed and defeat health care reform and some guy out there in radioland who listened to you and believed your insanity suddenly wakes up one morning to find out that his 10 year old daughter has cancer and he doesn’t have access to health care for her becausewon. What ifthen end up with a target on your back with a grieving dad tracking you?On Thursday, the SEIU (Service Employers International Union) announced that it would attend various town halls in support of health care reform. On Friday, Rush Limbaugh gave out their office address in St. Louis. The death threat calls and tweets to the SEIU were immediate. “If ACORN/SEIU (notice the coupling with ACORN, a largely African-American organization. There they go AGAIN and AGAIN.) attends these meetings for disruptive purposes (!), and you have license to carry…carry” read one tweet. Other protesters called and pledged to take up arms. Another tweet from the same psycho recommends “…hurt them. Badly.” The SEIU was not the only union ally of President Obama to receive such threats. So did the AFL-CIO. This comes from the crowd that likes to refer to unions as thugs. I wonder; do they have mirrors in their bathrooms?You can watch Rush Limbaugh, hyped up in a frothing frenzy on God knows what, practically jumping out of his skin as he calls those in favor of reform "Nazis." He gives out addresses to his minions of the front lines from the cowardly confines of his studio fortress, all neatly provided by the puppet masters of Clear Channel. What happens, Rush, or Glenn, or any of you, when someone gets killed in a fire bombing of an office, shot at a town hall meeting, or even, shall we say, brings down a federal building with a Ryder truck? Words do matter, especially to the unstable. I know, like Bill-O, you’ll deny any blood on your paws and those who employ you in their efforts to keep the gravy train status quo going for their multi-national corporation buddies will do the same. So, who here is Tokyo Rose, and who is the patriot trying to improve the general well-being of the country? If Rush Limbaugh isn’t Lord Haw Haw, I don’t know who is.Rush Limbaugh has also made it plain where he stands on race and what he feels about the current President. He truly is the leader of the 2009 Repug Party. He is the cheerleader for the angry white voters that are the core bastion of the party. The party’s tactics of exploiting racial anxiety or fear of “the other” or fear of the unknown isn’t new. Some fear change and that is exactly what President Obama campaigned on. Whites voted against Barack Obama by a ratio of 55% to 45%, only to see that it didn’t matter. Their world has changed. Others can and do vote now, too. To Limbaugh, Obama is even more of a threat than Donovan McNabb is. McNabb can only win football games.Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House Minority Whip, is on record as saying that the country needsRush Limbaughs. Limbaugh’s characterization of Obama as Hitler doesn’t even seem to give Cantor pause. It’s interesting to note that it was old Adolph himself, along with his propaganda/media chief Josef Goebbels who promulgated the “Big Lie Theory” saying that if you repeat a lie often enough, particularly a big one, people will accept it as gospel. That includes the so-called mainstream media of today who simply regurgitate Republican talking points, no matter how patently and obviously erroneous. So, who is acting more… Hitler-ish? As if Rep. Cantor, or even the well-documented Sen. Jim DeMint wasn’t enough, how about dull-witted Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO)? The other day, he managed to combine “Obamacare” town hall meetings and lynching while his followers laughed, cheered and clapped. There they go again with the code-speak. The word ‘lynching’ is so telling in reference to the racial and cultural anxiety that is at play here. The Repugs may think that by cynically appointing Michael Steele as figurehead of their party provides some sort of cover. It doesn’t. Ah, the good old days, eh Todd? The good old days when you could just lynch your opponents, or as with people like you, just state your plausible denial and have some naïve follower do it.If there are still any rational, reasonable, moral Republicans left; now might be a good time to speak up and stand up for common sense before blood, on either side, is shed. Our society will either adapt and change or it will stagnate and die under it’s own weight. Vital countries grow and evolve. You do believe in evolution, don’t you? Actually, this morning a few-- very few-- con-servatives finally did distance themselves from the insanity of one of the right kooks who has been stirring up trouble: Palin. Georgia reactionary Rep. Jack Kingston, called Palin's death panel meme "a scare tactic," and David Brooks, in reference to the clearly mentally disturbed Palin, said "the crazies are attacking the plan because it will cut off granny. That is simply not true, that simply is not going to happen." TPM was scratching it's head over Palin's bizarre stand and that of the few nutcases on the far right who are backing her. If you want a cheap, quick laugh hit that link.
Labels: Glenn Beck, Limbaugh, teabaggers, Todd Akin, violenceIf you think Iran presents the greatest danger of nuclear war today, think again.
It is none other than the United States that has consistently violated the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—and it’s these violations that are one of the main drivers of the spread of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war across the world.
While some worry about inspecting Iran’s nuclear facilities, Americans should be pushing first for inspecting something nearer to home: the embarrassing and dangerous record of nuclear treaty violations committed by the US and its fellow nuclear states.
And there’s something else that bears closer inspection: how the mainstream media’s misreporting about nuclear armaments played a key role in justifying the Iraq war and other recent conflicts.
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Mainstream reporting on the Iran nuclear deal shows just how successful the United States has been in getting its nuclear narrative across. Iran is depicted as a rogue state that the civilized P5+1 nations—the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, Russia, plus Germany—must curb.
In a recent article, The New York Times cited a US nuclear expert skeptical of the deal because, as he put it, the untrustworthy Iranians “are practiced at cheating.” One can find many similar statements repeated by mainstream news outlets like the Times.
But the Iranians are not the nuclear cheaters the world should be afraid of primarily–rather, it is Iran’s negotiating partners, especially the US.
The Have-Bombs Versus the Have-Not-Bombs
The major legal document establishing international cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy is the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It recognizes five nuclear nations: the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia. Briefly put, it establishes a strict quid pro quo: in exchange for promises by non-nuclear states not to pursue nuclear armament, the nuclear powers will undertake nuclear disarmament.
But even as the the West faults Iran for allegedly attempting to develop a nuclear bomb in secret, none of the nuclear powers are holding up their end of the deal.
Nuclear warheads are becoming ever more potent. Although the number of warheads since the height of the Cold War has gone down, those warheads have become far more deadly, as the nuclear states continue to research and implement upgrades on weapons and delivery systems.
Washington will spend an average of $35 billion a year for the next decade to modernize and maintain the nation’s nuclear force, according to the United States Congressional Budget Office estimates. Some in government, including Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tx), call for large increases in response to perceived threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
And, of course, if the US upgrades its arsenal, so will Russia. And vice versa.
These states, under international obligation to disarm, on one hand make statements about their desire to move towards a nuclear-free world, and on the other continue to perfect their stockpiles.
Spreading the Danger Far and Wide
The US has placed nuclear weapons in many other nations as part of NATO’s “nuclear sharing” program. These nations not only store US nuclear weapons, they practice handling and delivering them. Under this system the United States has nuclear weapons in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
Many see this as a violation of NPT, which bars nuclear states from delegating “the control of their nuclear weapons directly or indirectly to others.”
The US also has a history of selling nuclear secrets to friends. In the 1980’s the Department of Energy provided Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with information important to the construction of nuclear weapons and materials. In 1989, the DOE went so far as to invite three nuclear engineers from Iraq’s Al-Qa’qaa’ weapons facility to a conference on detonation physics.
According to Article I of the NPT, nuclear states may not “assist, encourage, or induce”–in any way—a non-nuclear state to manufacture or acquire a nuclear weapon.
The Have-Not-Bombs Versus the Have-Bombs
Not surprisingly, the non-nuclear states see the current situation as inherently unfair. Barred from creating nuclear weapons by the NPT, they can’t help but notice that the nuclear powers are actively enhancing their own nuclear arsenals.
The Non-Aligned Movement, a group of 120 states, has repeatedly called on nuclear states to live up to their commitment to disarm, stressing that disarmament remains the organization’s “highest priority.” As the Non-Aligned Movement’s representative said in an address to a 2015 review conference of the NPT:
The Group reiterates its deep concern over the slow pace of progress towards nuclear disarmament, and the lack of progress by the nuclear weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear weapons in accordance with their legal obligations and undertakings.
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These are just a few ways the US has acted to spread nuclear weapons and secrets throughout the world; it is by no means an exhaustive list.
With this historical perspective, the Iran deal may be seen in a very different light.
Related front page panorama photo credit: Map of nuclear weapons states (Bourgeois/ Wikimedia)
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Our Comment Policy Keep it civilized, keep it relevant, keep it clear, keep it short. Please do not post links or promotional material. We reserve the right to edit and to delete comments where necessary. Related printTwo days before the Friends of Syria meeting, Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy to the moribund peace talks, resigned in frustration and France’s foreign minister said there was evidence that the Syrian government had carried out 14 attacks in recent months using chemical agents, especially chlorine.
Image Secretary of State John Kerry says aid for Syrian war victims “is not getting to people.” Credit Pool photo by Matt Dunham
The United States and its allies have been urging Mr. Assad to agree to a political transition in which he would give up power. Instead, Mr. Assad appears to be cementing his hold on the presidency and is even planning to hold elections next month in the midst of the civil war, now in its fourth year.
“A political solution has clearly become more distant,” said William Hague, the British foreign secretary.
The communiqué issued Thursday by the Friends of Syria denounced Mr. Assad’s plans as illegitimate.
“Under rules set by the regime, such elections will be devoid of political participation of millions of Syrians,” the group said.
Mr. Kerry said the United States and its partners would step up their support of the moderate Syrian resistance in order to change “the dynamics on the ground in Syria.”
But Mr. Kerry did not commit to providing the surface-to-air missiles that Mr. Jarba says the rebels urgently need for protection from air attack. The communiqué, which was only two paragraphs long, was short on specifics.
Mr. Kerry said the United States was evaluating evidence that chlorine attacks had occurred.
“I’ve seen the raw data that suggests there may have been, as France has suggested, a number of instances in which chlorine has been used in the conduct of war,” he said.
On the issue of aid, Mr. Kerry reiterated accusations expressed by Mr. Assad’s opponents that he had used the denial of food and other humanitarian aid as a means of forcing rebellious cities and towns, like Homs, to submit.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. households suffered a record 9 percent drop in wealth and pared debt in the fourth quarter as a deepening recession battered confidence and finances, Federal Reserve data showed on Thursday.
Household net worth dropped by $5.1 trillion from the prior quarter to $51.5 trillion. For the full year, net worth dropped by $11.2 trillion, reflecting steep declines in the housing and stock markets.
The declines in household net worth were the largest since quarterly and annual records began in 1951 and 1946, respectively, said the Fed — the U.S. central bank.
Since a second-quarter 2007 peak of $64.4 trillion, household wealth has dropped by about 20 percent, effectively wiping out four years of gains. That has put a chill on consumer spending and added to Americans’ anxiety about their economic well-being.
Michael Feroli, an economist with JPMorgan in New York, called the $5.1 trillion quarterly drop a “showstopper.”
“Given where the S&P 500 (stock index) is now and recent house price data, we estimate consumers have lost about another $2.5 trillion in the first quarter of the year,” he said.
The slump in wealth has coincided with an increase in the personal savings rate, which suggests households that had counted on rising real estate and stock market gains to replace traditional savings were now rebuilding rainy-day funds.
In the second quarter of 2007, when household wealth peaked, the savings rate was a low 0.3 percent. In the fourth quarter of 2008, it reached 3.2 percent. Many economists expect the percentage to at least double in the next couple of years.
But while economists have long warned that consumers were saving too little, a swift increase in savings in the midst of a recession can worsen the downturn. Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic output.
WEALTH EFFECT
The Fed’s quarterly Flow of Funds report also showed that household borrowing shrank at a 2 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter after increasing at a 0.2 percent pace in the previous period, for the first quarterly decline on record.
Home mortgage debt fell at a 1.6 percent pace — the third consecutive quarter of declines — and consumer credit dropped at a 3.2 percent rate.
The build-up in household debt was one of the most striking elements of the five-year housing boom, which peaked in 2006. Consumers recorded double-digit annual increases in mortgage debt from 2001 through 2006, some of that in the form of cash-out refinancing that helped fuel strong spending.
Just how much rising wealth contributed to consumer spending is a subject of much debate but it is thought to be somewhere around 5 cents on the dollar. It is less clear how much households will cut back now that their wealth has been depleted.
Commerce Department figures released on Thursday showed retail sales fell modestly last month, which some economists saw as a tentative sign that spending could be stabilizing after a very weak fourth quarter.
But with so much wealth destroyed, credit conditions still tight, and households looking to pay down debt, spending is not likely to return to the levels seen during the boom years any time soon.
The figures also showed that the rate of growth in borrowing by businesses slowed to 1.7 percent from a 4.1 percent rate in the third quarter. The biggest jump in borrowing came from the federal government, coming in at a 37 percent rate in the fourth quarter.
At the end of the fourth quarter, domestic nonfinancial debt outstanding totaled $33.5 trillion, with households accounting for $13.8 trillion, nonfinancial businesses $11.1 trillion and government debt of $8.6 trillion.How will television makers persuade punters to buy a new set now we all - well, most of us - have 1080p sets with internet access? We’ve already seen that 3D isn’t going to do it, but now two new alternative upgrade-driving technology are emerging - OLED and 4K - and they two are re-establishing an old battle line between manufacturers.
On one side, we have the South Koreans: LG and Samsung. Both are pursuing OLED screen technology, pitching its superior picture quality and scope for even thinner panels as the logical next step for Full HD sets.
The alternative ara the 4K TVs, sets with four times the pixel count of a 1920 x 1080 screen: 3840 x 2160, conveniently rounded to 4K x 2K. The main proponents of this “ultra-definition” are the Japanese telly makers who’ve been suffering for years at the hands of the Koreans, who have proved themselves able to make TVs more cheaply.
They see 4K as a way of stealing a march on their rivals who are having a job turning OLED into a solid mass-market proposition. OLED panels are not cheap to make, but then neither are 4K LCDs, though LCD production is mature. On the other hand, there is a mass of 1080p content available but almost no 4K material. The 4K supporters counter that by saying they can do upscaling and deliver a better experience.
There’s some truth in that because the 4K set’s higher pixel density makes it harder for the eye to detect individual pixels, something that you can see on a large 1080p set if you sit too close. Ideal distance increases proportionally with the screen size: the bigger the TV, the further away you need to sit to avoid spotting the pixels.
Meanwhile, the two main OLED backers are busily accusing each other of pinching their intellectual property, and that may yet delay the technology further. Both LG and Samsung showed off 55in OLED TVs in January 2012, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. They’ve demo’d them again since, in Asia and at least twice in Europe, most recently at the IFA consumer electronics expo in Berlin. But neither seems any closer to shipping product.
Indeed, while it was being suggested in January that we’d see a global rollout before the year is out, of late their ambitions have shrunk to a South Korean launch first, possibly early next year.
The Japanese vendors, meanwhile, reckon they will have large 4K LCD TVs out worldwide by December. The problems is that they are focusing on incredibly expensive very large format - 84in - sets at first.
So which technology is likely to win? Ask market watcher IHS iSuppli and it will tell you 4K shipments will only amount to around 0.8 per cent of the global LCD TV market through 2017, at which point, it reckons, some 2.1m 4K TVs will ship. “Neither consumers nor television brands will have the interest required to make the 4K LCD TV market successful,” the researcher reckons.
The reasoning is that the focus on very large sets taps into such a tiny segment of the telly market: “The market for super-sized, 60in and larger sets is very small — at only about 1.5 per cent of total television shipments in 2012.”
Figures from NPD DisplaySearch, another market watcher, put the shipments of 55in and up LCDs at six per cent of all the LCD panels that shipped in August 2012. Even that six per cent is dwarfed by the 29-32in panels (42 per cent) and 40-42in screens (20 per cent). If regular 60in-plus LCDs amount command just a few percentage points of market share, how much smaller will be larger sets still that are an order of magnitude more expensive?
Not that OLED is going to fare any better. Behind closed doors, South Korean companies apparently admit it’ll be two years or more before OLED panel production yields will support mass-market volumes and prices.
That will encourage them to turn to 4K sets as an interim offering - just as their Japanese rivals have OLED sets, and screens based on other technologies, such as Sony’s Crystal LED, in the labs awaiting the maturation of the production process - but will face the same difficulties persuading anyone but corporations and the über-rich to buy a $10,000-25,000 TV.
Can they drive the price down? The two-year lag in the development of an economic OLED screen gives the room to push 4K out to smaller sizes - at much lower prices. DisplaySearch estimates a 50in 4K panel costs just $800 to make, twice the price of a 50in 1080p panel, but still a lot less than the $5000 it costs to punch out an 84in 4K screen.
Pitch 50in 4K sets as presenting Full HD the way it was meant to be seen - "retina" tellies, anyone? - and they may just have a compelling sales proposition on their hands. ®The death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has prompted eulogies from around the world, but few of the messages have been as eccentric as the second-coming predicted by Iran's president.
And as if returning to Earth alone was not enough, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad says Chavez will do so alongside some esteemed company.
"I have no doubt that he [Chavez] will return alongside Jesus Christ and the Mahdi [the Hidden Imam] to establish peace and justice in the world," Ahmadinejad wrote in an emotional condolence message posted on his personal website. The Mahdi is a revered figure among Shi'ite Muslims, many of whom believe he will return to save humanity.
Ahmadinejad, who had forged a close public friendship with Chavez, hailed his close ally for "serving the people of Venezuela and defending human and revolutionary values."
Iran has declared a national day of mourning in honor of Chavez's death, and Iranian media has said it was a "possibility" that Ahmadinejad would attend the funeral scheduled for March 8.
'Martyr'
Ahmadinejad also supported allegations made by Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro, who said shortly before Chavez's death that he had "no doubt” the country's enemies had somehow given the leftist leader the cancer from which he eventually died.
In his condolence message, Ahmadinejad said Chavez was a "martyr" who fell to a "suspect illness."
Chavez, who led Venezuela for 14 years, was a controversial figure both in his homeland and on the international stage. He was seen as a hero by some for his socialist programs designed to help the poor, his strong criticism of the United States, and gifts of cheap oil.
In Iran, the 58-year-old Chavez enjoyed immense popularity. Ahmadinejad admired Chavez's outspoken defiance of the United States, and shared his role as a voice of dissent on the international stage. His relationship with the Venezuelan leader was characterized by warm embraces, light-hearted jokes, and lavish praise. On several occasions Ahmadinejad referred to Chavez as his brother.
Tehran and Caracas signed billions of dollars in trade and investment agreements over the past several years. Chavez made 13 visits to Iran as president, while Ahmadinejad has made six visits to Venezuela since 2005.
"Hugo Chavez is a name known to all nations. His name is a reminder of cleanliness and kindness, bravery...dedication, and tireless efforts to serve the people, especially the poor and those scarred by colonialism and imperialism," Ahmadinejad wrote on his website.How about a sports torrent tracker with open signups? Sport Torrent is a specialized private tracker which indexes content related to a number of different sports such as Rugby, Cricket, Football, Basketball, Baseball, Tennis, Boxing, Motorsports and more. The site covers almost all major tournaments and events including the Cricket world cup, 6 nations rugby, Champions league, NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB alongside many other premier series around the world. You can find and download full match videos, highlights packages, TV documentaries as well as other sports related resources on Sport Torrent. Although this tracker does not seem to be a hot topic on BitTorrent forums and blogs, it’s a very decent sports tracker with lots of members, torrents and activity.
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Reserve Bank of New York warn, potentially imperiling the economic recovery for years to come.
In a new study, New York Fed researchers said Wednesday that younger workers with student debt are less likely than their unburdened peers to have home mortgages or auto loans -- the first time that has been observed in at least 10 years and a worrying development for policymakers who have traditionally associated student debt with college education and higher incomes.
Borrowers with student loans also shed other forms of consumer debt at a much higher rate than borrowers without educational debt, the researchers found, in a sign that consumers with student loans may have lowered their expectations for higher future earnings and may have less access to loans as a result of rising student debt despite their "comparatively high earning potential."
Student debtors also may have decreased their consumption, the researchers said.
"Lowered expectations of future earnings and more limited access to credit may have broad implications for the ongoing recovery of the housing and vehicle markets, and of U.S. consumer spending more generally," the New York Fed researchers cautioned.
"While highly skilled young workers have traditionally provided a vital influx of new, affluent consumers to U.S. housing and auto markets, unprecedented student debt may dampen their influence in today's marketplace," they warned.
The researchers join a growing group of policymakers who have been highlighting the risk that unprecedented student borrowing presents. Among consumer debt, only home mortgages today exceed the $1.1 trillion in outstanding student loans. That is worrying officials in Washington, who are beginning to question the benefits of a college degree in light of the potentially negative macroeconomic impact of rising student debt levels.
The share of 25-year-olds with student debt has increased from 25 percent in 2003 to 43 percent in 2012, according to the New York Fed. The average student loan balance among 25-year-olds with student debt has grown by 91 percent over the same period to $20,326.
This month, newly released minutes from the March meeting of the Fed's interest-rate setting panel, the Federal Open Market Committee, revealed that some members mentioned "the high level of student debt" as a risk to aggregate household spending over the next three years.
Millions of student borrowers are also paying record relative interest rates on their government loans, according to a Huffington Post review, frustrating efforts by the Fed to reduce borrowing costs for households and businesses.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the Treasury Department's Office of Financial Research have all warned about the possible danger that rising student debt levels pose to financial stability and the broader economy. The CFPB has launched a consultation to determine how to stimulate modifications and refinancings of student debt.
As the New York Fed researchers found, consumers with student debt may be less likely to take on additional debt obligations, limiting future credit creation and perhaps hurting financial institutions that rely on making loans in order to stay in business.
"There is increasing consensus that student loan debt is having a broader impact on the economy than we think," Rohit Chopra, the CFPB official responsible for the student loan marketplace, said in a recent interview.
Borrowers without student loans at age 25 on average reduced their debt load by 40 percent from their peak in 2007 through 2012, the New York Fed found. By comparison, those with student debt on average reduced their non-education debt load by at least 43 percent from their separate peak in 2008.
The National Association of Home Builders, a Washington trade group, said earlier this month that "higher student debt loan burdens impair the ability of recent college graduates to qualify for a loan, thereby increasing the time required for such new households to become homeowners."
The New York Fed found that the homeownership rate for 30-year-old student debtors is now nearly 2 percentage points lower than that of those without student loans, a reversal of pre-Great Recession rates.
Student debt burdens may also be affecting access to credit, according to the New York Fed. At ages 25 and 30, borrowers with student loans on average have lower credit scores than their peers without student debt, even though student borrowers are more likely to have better-paying jobs.This week Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, two years ago, received nine life sentences under a plea agreement in state court. That penalty was in addition to the 18 death sentences Roof received in January following a federal trial that ended in December. Rather than seek additional death sentences, Scarlett Wilson, the chief prosecutor for Charleston County, decided to accept Roof's guilty plea and spare the families of his victims the emotional strain of another trial.
These dual outcomes underline how utterly superfluous the federal hate crime statute was in this case, which supposedly illustrated the need for such a law. If the Justice Department had not beaten her to the punch, Wilson would have sought the death penalty for Roof, so the federal prosecution was not even the difference between execution and life in prison. Regardless of your views on the death penalty, there is no reason to think federal intervention was necessary to achieve justice for the victims of Roof's mass murder.
In addition to wasting resources on redundant prosecutions, the federal hate crime law threatens three important principles:
The federal government's powers are limited to those granted by the Constitution. The prosecution of murder and other violent offenses is traditionally a state function, and the constitutional basis for the federal hate crime law is dubious at best. The provision under which Roof was convicted, which applies to cases where the victim was chosen because of his "actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin," is supposedly authorized by the 13th Amendment.
If you do not understand how the constitutional ban on slavery applies to someone who punches an African American or a Latino while shouting a racial epithet, or to someone who specializes in mugging Jews because he figures they have a lot of money, you are not alone. As the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website) noted in a 2013 Supreme Court brief, the hate crime statute "does not prohibit slavery or involuntary servitude"; "nor is it a prophylactic measure intended to assist in preventing the return of slavery or involuntary servitude."
The constitutional rationale for another provision of the federal hate crime law, covering crimes in which the victims were selected because of their "gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability," is even less plausible. All it takes to make a federal case out of such crimes is a weapon "that has traveled in interstate or foreign commerce," such as a knife or a baseball bat.
After someone is acquitted, the government should not be able to try him again for the same crime. In the highly unlikely event that Roof had been found not guilty in federal court, he could have been tried again in state court, or vice versa. Although such an outcome is hard to imagine in this case, it does happen. In 2003, for instance, a federal jury convicted Lemrick Nelson, who had been acquitted in state court of murdering Yankel Rosenbaum during a 1991 riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, of violating Rosenbaum's civil rights by stabbing him because he was Jewish. Thanks to the "dual sovereignty" doctrine, such serial prosecutions do not officially count as double jeopardy, but they amount to the same thing.
People should not be punished for their beliefs. Since Roof cannot be executed more than once or locked up for more than one lifetime, federal prosecution did not affect his punishment. But it can make an important difference in the punishment of people who commit less serious offenses. An assault that might be punished by a year or two in prison under state law can trigger a sentence up to 10 years under the federal hate crime statute if the defendant, like Roof, has a history of writing or saying racist stuff. Such opinions are relevant because they support the charge that the victim was selected "because of" his race. But the upshot is that an offender's benighted views can earn him more prison time than his violent act.Just a few years ago, Brad Robinson was a young, well-paid executive of a corporate private security company in Asia. He had hundreds of employees working beneath him and all the pieces were in place for a financially sustainable future beyond what he could have ever imagined.
Fast-forward to now, though, and Robinson is just days away from making his debut for Asia’s largest MMA organization, ONE FC.
How can these two stories possibly bridge together? It’s been nothing short of wild ride, and according to Robinson, everything changed six years ago when he looked in the mirror and, at 320 pounds, realized his weight had spiraled out of control.
“My professional career took off when I was really young – I was like 20 and had 500 employees all across the States and I just became obsessed with work,” Robinson told MMAjunkie. “That led to travel and travel led to drinking and drinking led to late-night hotel food and all the usual stuff. I didn’t even honestly realize it, but I was just getting fatter and fatter by the day.”
Robinson had always dreamed of becoming a police officer growing up in Oklahoma. However, in his early 20s, he was recruited to work for a top-tier private security firm primarily located in Malaysia.
He quickly moved up the ladder into a high-power position, but with increased power came an increased travel schedule. It got so hectic, in fact, that he can only recall few instances during those years where he wasn’t on a plane or in a hotel room.
“I became a partner in that company and we did a lot of consulting so I was just living on a plane,” Robinson recalled. “Someone would have a highjacking in China or they would have a container of gold or computers taken by pirates in Morocco or Malaysia or Indonesia. I would go deal with it and investigate and consult and figure out the best practices to prevent that from happening. It was a cool gig with great money. I was partner and getting paid really well, but the travel was unbelievable.”
Unfortunately, the natural result of that travel was the inability to exercise. And with that, his weight ballooned out of control
“My last year, I did 210 days of travel,” Robinson said. “It was terrible, but I was young and making crazy money and living this weird, crazy life. It took a toll on my health. Imagine being 26, 27 years old at 300-something pounds in Asia. I didn’t fit in very well.”
As time went on and his weight grew, Robinson became aware a serious problem was beginning to formulate. He had become so accustomed to his way of life that it was nearly impossible to break away from the routine.
That all changed after an unforgettable series of events, the first of which came on a visit to the doctor when he was given the news that if his lifestyle didn’t change, he soon would be diagnosed as a full-blown diabetic.
“I was pre-diabetic,” Robinson said. “I moved to Singapore when I heard my first child was on the way. Because of the move from Malaysia to Singapore, I had to get new insurance. They required me to have key man insurance, which basically means if the plane went down and I was on it, the company would be reimbursed because I was a key member of the company. It was declined because I was severely obese. I went in and did a full blood panel and the doctor pulled me aside and said I was way too young to have this problem. I was pre-diabetic. My blood sugar was all over the place, my insulin was all over the place and I was on the track to very quickly being diabetic if I didn’t get my s–t together.”
Robinson began taking minor steps to get his health back, but once again the beckons of work consumed him. A few months later, the straw that broke the camel’s back arrived. In a moment that will resonate with him forever, Robinson nearly missed out on the birth of his first child because he was too obese to gain entry into the delivery room.
“I went to go into the operating room when my wife was having an emergency cesarean and they almost didn’t let me in because they didn’t have any scrubs or clothing that would actually fit me,” Robinson said. “It wasn’t even close, it was comical. I kind of bullied my way in, but it was a powerful moment when I’m sitting there in the operating room holding my minutes-old son and almost not being able to be there for that because I was too fat.”
It was at that point when Robinson became fully engulfed in the idea that he could no longer exist with his lifestyle. The desire to make drastic change in his life was there, but he had absolutely no idea where to start or what steps to take.
Robinson says it was right around that point when he attended a “white-collar boxing match.” The way he described it, it was a black-tie affair where well-salaried executives would pay money to train boxing for a few weeks and would step in the ring against each other at an event. He was instantly intrigued by that type of competition and was told if he could make the heavyweight limit, he could participate in the next show. From there, his passion for combat sports flourished.
“They told me the heavyweight limit was 265 pounds,” Robinson said. “I negotiated and begged and pleaded and said if I could make the weight in three months they would let me on the card. I did. I made the weight. I fell in love with the lifestyle of training and eating clean even though it was still brutal for a guy my size to skip and run and hit pads. It was killing me. That sparked it all off.
“I did more boxing, then I started doing jiu-jitsu, and then started competing all of Asia in jiu-jitsu, then muay Thai, and then started doing amateur MMA for this organization in Hong Kong. That went really well, so I thought I would see if I could do a pro fight. I got a pro fight later that year, then I had another one, and now I’m ready for this opportunity with ONE FC. It has been a pretty crazy ride, as you can imagine, going from 320 pounds to where I’m at now.”
Robinson’s passion grew so large that he decided he couldn’t continue to work if he wanted to pursue a professional MMA career. And after a brief consultation with supportive friends and family, he made the life-changing decision to walk away from his corporate job to a career with no guarantees and little financial security.
“It was killing me,” Robinson said. “I would be up all night on conference calls and traveling. I got overwhelmed with this feeling of, ‘This isn’t what I want to do with my life. I don’t want to be a corporate guy. This is not what I want to do anymore.’ It was basically my company. I was a major shareholder in it. I saw my partners and told them I was out.
“We worked it out. I’m still on the board and a shareholder, but I have no involvement with the company day-to-day anymore. I left the corporate life and pursued the fighting thing full-time. It really was a case of pulling the emergency brake on my life, changing course and chasing my dreams down. That’s what it boils down to. It’s a bit of a gamble, but I’ve been successful and have some cash and some equity, which gave me the opportunity to take some risks. It was a huge, life-altering decision.”
Going from private security to a sport like MMA, where it only takes one punch or limb-cranking submission to end a career, may not seem like the brightest of ideas, but Robinson claims he has no regrets.
Beyond the fact he has lost nearly 150 pounds, Robinson is much happier with the path of his life as a whole. At 34, he isn’t 100 percent sure how far he can go in the sport, but he does know he is making all the sacrifices necessary to become the best fighter possible. Moreover, he now has the chance to tell his son stories about a fighting career, and not about the day he nearly missed his birth because he was too fat.
“I want to push this as hard and as far as I can take it,” Robinson said. “I’m 34, but I’m in the best shape of my life. I could run circles around 18-year-old Brad. I think I’ve got plenty of fights left in me. No injuries. I think I can make a run. I have a six-fight deal with ONE FC and we’ll see how it goes this week. It’s not a one-off thing for me, I don’t want to say I’m looking for a title because it’s my third pro fight, but I want to go as far as I can and I’ll know when it’s time to shut it off.
“I visualize myself sitting with my kids 15 years from now and talking about fighting and all that. I don’t want to be the one with regrets who says, ‘I should have done this, I could have done that, but I didn’t have a chance.’ It was a you-only live once and you might as well get some stories out of it mentality.”
Robinson (2-0) will get at least one of those unforgettable stories when he makes his promotional debut Friday at ONE FC 16 from Singapore Indoor Stadium in Kallang, Singapore. He’ll take on a familiar foe in Nik Harris (5-2), whom he previously defeated in his first professional fight in September 2012.
While he was unable to stop Harris in the first meeting, Robinson believes his mental and physical evolution will play a factor in achieving an even more impressive victory than last time.
“The only thing I know is that he breaks,” Robinson said. “I felt him break in the first fight and even though I didn’t get the finish, I felt that I broke him. He decided he was OK with losing and I know he has that in him. I’ll be trying to replicate that. I should have finished him in the first fight. I was being a bit too cautious. I’ll be looking to put him away and this time.”
Whether or not he makes a truly successful run in MMA is important to Robinson, but he knows he wouldn’t have the opportunity to make that run if he hadn’t completely changed his life.
There are countless people across the world that are currently in the same situation Robinson once was, and if he could provide those people with some advice on how to turn things around, it would be to avoid shortcuts and think about your long-term future.
“The best thing I can tell someone when you’re in that shape and you’re just feeling terrible, have no energy and can’t move well is your body wants to be healthy,” Robinson said. “Your body wants to thrive. Even if all you do is start eating right, your body will find its way back healthy. All you need to do is give it the tools. Obviously if you exercise and train and get involved in some high-intensity stuff, you’ll get there a lot quicker. But it’s not like your body is sabotaging you and wants to be fat and be slow and miserable all the time with no energy. It doesn’t like that and it’s not how it wants to be.
“Everyone looks at these short-term things and ‘six weeks to abs’ on the cover of Men’s Health or ‘get ripped in three weeks.’ That’s all bulls–t. You’ve got to look at the rest of your life. If you’re dieting, that’s temporary. You’ve got to look at making some changes to your lifestyle. You’re going to fall off the wagon and it’s going to break your confidence and you’ll think you can’t do it, but if you fall off the wagon and go out to eat seven burgers and drink a bunch of beers, it’s fine. Just wake up the next morning and get right back on track. Don’t look at tomorrow or the next six weeks; look at the rest of your life and playing with your grandkids and all that sort of stuff. That’s how it worked for me. I stopped looking for short-term gain and I started looking at how I wanted to live a long life and be a fun, active dad for my kids and for their kids. I want to be the cool grandpa that’s wrestling with them and running outside with them and playing sports and all that sort of stuff. That was my big thing and you can’t do that just by trying to look good over the next month. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t undo years of bad habits in just a few weeks.”
For more on ONE FC 16, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.New Bundling and Minification Support (ASP.NET 4.5 Series) Monday, November 28, 2011
This is the sixth in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5.
The next release of.NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities. With ASP.NET 4.5 you'll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC - as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon.
Today’s post covers some of the work we are doing to add built-in support for bundling and minification into ASP.NET - which makes it easy to improve the performance of applications. This feature can be used by all ASP.NET applications, including both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms solutions.
Basics of Bundling and Minification
As more and more people use mobile devices to surf the web, it is becoming increasingly important that the websites and apps we build perform well with them. We’ve all tried loading sites on our smartphones – only to eventually give up in frustration as it loads slowly over a slow cellular network. If your site/app loads slowly like that, you are likely losing potential customers because of bad performance. Even with powerful desktop machines, the load time of your site and perceived performance can make an enormous customer perception.
Most websites today are made up of multiple JavaScript and CSS files to separate the concerns and keep the code base tight. While this is a good practice from a coding point of view, it often has some unfortunate consequences for the overall performance of the website. Multiple JavaScript and CSS files require multiple HTTP requests from a browser – which in turn can slow down the performance load time.
Simple Example
Below I’ve opened a local website in IE9 and recorded the network traffic using IE’s built-in F12 developer tools. As shown below, the website consists of 5 CSS and 4 JavaScript files which the browser has to download. Each file is currently requested separately by the browser and returned by the server, and the process can take a significant amount of time proportional to the number of files in question.
Bundling
ASP.NET is adding a feature that makes it easy to “bundle” or “combine” multiple CSS and JavaScript files into fewer HTTP requests. This causes the browser to request a lot fewer files and in turn reduces the time it takes to fetch them. Below is an updated version of the above sample that takes advantage of this new bundling functionality (making only one request for the JavaScript and one request for the CSS):
The browser now has to send fewer requests to the server. The content of the individual files have been bundled/combined into the same response, but the content of the files remains the same - so the overall file size is exactly the same as before the bundling. But notice how even on a local dev machine (where the network latency between the browser and server is minimal), the act of bundling the CSS and JavaScript files together still manages to reduce the overall page load time by almost 20%. Over a slow network the performance improvement would be even better.
Minification
The next release of ASP.NET is also adding a new feature that makes it easy to reduce or “minify” the download size of the content as well. This is a process that removes whitespace, comments and other unneeded characters from both CSS and JavaScript. The result is smaller files, which will download and load in a browser faster. The graph below shows the performance gain we are seeing when both bundling and minification are used together:
Even on my local dev box (where the network latency is minimal), we now have a 40% performance improvement from where we originally started. On slow networks (and especially with international customers), the gains would be even more significant.
Using Bundling and Minification inside ASP.NET
The upcoming release of ASP.NET makes it really easy to take advantage of bundling and minification within projects and see performance gains like in the scenario above. The way it does this allows you to avoid having to run custom tools as part of your build process – instead ASP.NET has added runtime support to perform the bundling/minification for you dynamically (caching the results to make sure perf is great). This enables a really clean development experience and makes it super easy to start to take advantage of these new features.
Let’s assume that we have a simple project that has 4 JavaScript files and 6 CSS files:
Bundling and Minifying the.css files
Let’s say you wanted to reference all of the stylesheets in the “Styles” folder above on a page. Today you’d have to add multiple CSS references to get all of them – which would translate into 6 separate HTTP requests:
The new bundling/minification feature now allows you to instead bundle and minify all of the.css files in the Styles folder – simply by sending a URL request to the folder (in this case “styles”) with an appended “/css” path after it. For example:
This will cause ASP.NET to scan the directory, bundle and minify the.css files within it, and send back a single HTTP response with all of the CSS content to the browser.
You don’t need to run any tools or pre-processor to get this behavior. This enables you to cleanly separate your CSS into separate logical.css files and maintain a very clean development experience – while not taking a performance hit at runtime for doing so. The Visual Studio designer will also honor the new bundling/minification logic as well – so you’ll still get a WYSWIYG designer experience inside VS as well.
Bundling and Minifying the JavaScript files
Like the CSS approach above, if we wanted to bundle and minify all of our JavaScript into a single response we could send a URL request to the folder (in this case “scripts”) with an appended “/js” path after it:
This will cause ASP.NET to scan the directory, bundle and minify the.js files within it, and send back a single HTTP response with all of the JavaScript content to the browser. Again – no custom tools or builds steps were required in order to get this behavior. And it works with all browsers.
Ordering of Files within a Bundle
By default, when files are bundled by ASP.NET they are sorted alphabetically first, just like they are shown in Solution Explorer. Then they are automatically shifted around so that known libraries and their custom extensions such as jQuery, MooTools and Dojo are loaded before anything else. So the default order for the merged bundling of the Scripts folder as shown above will be:
Jquery-1.6.2.js Jquery-ui.js Jquery.tools.js a.js
By default, CSS files are also sorted alphabetically and then shifted around so that reset.css and normalize.css (if they are there) will go before any other file. So the default sorting of the bundling of the Styles folder as shown above will be:
reset.css content.css forms.css globals.css menu.css styles.css
The sorting is fully customizable, though, and can easily be changed to accommodate most use cases and any common naming pattern you prefer. The goal with the out of the box experience, though, is to have smart defaults that you can just use and be successful with.
Any number of directories/sub-directories supported
In the example above we just had a single “Scripts” and “Styles” folder for our application. This works for some application types (e.g. single page applications). Often, though, you’ll want to have multiple CSS/JS bundles within your application – for example: a “common” bundle that has core JS and CSS files that all pages use, and then page specific or section specific files that are not used globally.
You can use the bundling/minification support across any number of directories or sub-directories in your project – this makes it easy to structure your code so as to maximize the bunding/minification benefits. Each directory by default can be accessed as a separate URL addressable bundle.
Bundling/Minification Extensibility
ASP.NET’s bundling and minification support is built with extensibility in mind and every part of the process can be extended or replaced.
Custom Rules
In addition to enabling the out of the box - directory-based - bundling approach, ASP.NET also supports the ability to register custom bundles using a new programmatic API we are exposing.
The below code demonstrates how you can register a “customscript” bundle using code within an application’s Global.asax class. The API allows you to add/remove/filter files that go into the bundle on a very granular level:
The above custom bundle can then be referenced anywhere within the application using the below <script> reference:
Custom Processing
You can also override the default CSS and JavaScript bundles to support your own custom processing of the bundled files (for example: custom minification rules, support for Saas, LESS or Coffeescript syntax, etc).
In the example below we are indicating that we want to replace the built-in minification transforms with a custom MyJsTransform and MyCssTransform class. They both subclass the CSS and JavaScript minifier respectively and can add extra functionality:
The end result of this extensibility is that you can plug-into the bundling/minification logic at a deep level and do some pretty cool things with it.
2 Minute Video of Bundling and Minification in Action
Mads Kristensen has a great 90 second video that shows off using the new Bundling and Minification feature. You can watch the 90 second video here.
Summary
The new bundling and minification support within the next release of ASP.NET will make it easier to build fast web applications. It is really easy to use, and doesn’t require major changes to your existing dev workflow. It is also supports a rich extensibility API that enables you to customize it however you want.
You can easily take advantage of this new support within ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET Web Pages based applications.
Hope this helps,
Scott
P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottguI’m a fraud, and so’s my YouTube video. Everything about our relationship is fake.
The video I’m talking about is right here. You can also watch it below. It’s a clip of me attempting to complete the Cinnamon Challenge. I made it as a celebration of the Daily Dot’s first anniversary last August. In January, I juiced it with 160,000 fake views.
Two weeks before then, YouTube had gone through with a massive cleanup of the videos on the Google-owned site that had botted views. Engineers didn’t get everything, but by the end of that week, even major music labels had lost upwards of 2 billion views from their channels. Universal Music Group, which saw the greatest purge, woke up with 1 billion fewer views in its bank.
I bought those 160,000 YouTube views primarily to show interested readers just how easy it was, but I also wanted to at least try and put YouTube on the spot: YouTube botting happens. It’s cheap, dirty, and ridiculously easy.
I wondered what it would take to get caught.
I bought those views from a guy named Kenzo, who owns YTView, a site that promises “real views,” “higher retention” between 60 and 100 percent,” and claims to have delivered more than 400 million views. There are all sorts of sites like Kenzo’s: YouTube Boost, 500 Views, YTPros, and Social Fans Geek—where you can purchase a surplus of pretty much any YouTube-related analytical figure: likes, dislikes, phony comments. You name it.
I spent $160 on 160,000 fake YouTube views, and three months later, the video is still up—taunting me, ignoring me, forever reminding me of that cinnamon.
I installed AdSense, Google’s revenue-generating, advertising program. With a few banner ads, we made $0.19. That’s not a lot of money, but the point of botting views isn’t to turn an immediate profit. It’s to garner attention in hopes that the video’s popularity will lead to legitimate views and serious press coverage, creating a domino effect that, hopefully for the buyer of those views, ends with a video as popular as Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.”
Exactly $0.19, and YouTube never bat an eye.
So I threw another $170 towards Kenzo, and we walked away with 345,000 more views, the idea being that with AdSense loaded, YouTube would hopefully monitor the legitimacy of our views more closely.
Once those loaded up, I called Fletcher Batts, an entertainment social marketer based out of Atlanta. He’s owned a few view-buying sites and worked with a number of small-time artists looking to boost their social numbers on YouTube and Facebook, as well as other sites. Fletcher’s the only view buyer who’s willing to speak with me on any medium other than Skype. He considers view buying a necessary evil, something smaller artists have to do to stay afloat on YouTube’s massive, sprawling site.
“It wasn’t my fault,” he said of the times in which a video he’d worked on had gotten removed from the site. “It was their fault. The client used multiple services. I did what I did, a few other guys did what they do,” and the other guys’ work apparently tipped YouTube off.
YouTube’s police force doesn’t adhere to an exact science, Fletcher said, but “there’s some stuff that will definitely get their eye.”
“Most of the time, getting a million views in a day or two, if you’re an unsigned artist and it’s one of your first videos, or you’ve gotten 1,000 views on all your videos and this one has 1 million, those are dead giveaways.”
Stick out like a sore thumb, got it. The Daily Dot’s YouTube channel has 505,395 views. All but 1,570 belong to the Cinnamon Challenge, and six videos share the rest. Our test dummy wasn’t just sticking out; it was the elephant in the room.
“It’s really not about the views, though,” Fletcher amended. “It’s about the retention. If you want to stay off their radar, you’ve got to be buying the good views.”
By good views, Fletcher means views that look more legitimate, or views that carry retention rates that would suggest that a real person actually watched the clip.
I wanted the exact opposite. Fortunately, my man Kenzo comes cheap. “Crack prices,” Batts once told me, like the Barksdales in The Wire.
The 503,840 views on the Cinnamon Challenge video had a cumulative retention rate of a whopping 389 minutes, according to YouTube’s analytics. The number in the right hand corner of the stat sheet says it all: Average video duration, 0:00.
One number had started to grow, however: The AdSense had brought in another $0.93. Still in the red, but we’d profited according to YouTube. Surely that’s enough to trigger some form of action, right?
I emailed my YouTube contacts, told them we had a video that was shooting up the charts—340,000 views in one day. Nearly a dollar in profit. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
The video’s still up. Oddly enough, it also pushed an ad about Ponzi scams this afternoon. On YouTube, you just have to fake it ‘til you make it.
Illustration by Jason ReedROCKFORD – An Algonquin attorney was sentenced Tuesday to 8½ years in federal prison for his plot to have his fianceé’s ex killed.
Jason W. Smiekel, 30, previously pleaded guilty to solicitation of murder using interstate commerce. The intended target was Brian Hegg, who also was Smiekel’s client at one point.
Prosecutors said Smiekel made several attempts to have Hegg killed, including soliciting a high school friend. Another attempt was with a former client who owed Smiekel’s firm money.
And the last ended up involving an undercover agent for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Smiekel’s attorney, Ralph Meczyk, had argued not that Smiekel was insane at the time of the offense, but that he had “diminished capacity.”
“The entire tragic event can be considered the unraveling of Jason Smiekel,” Meczyk said. “A lawyer, son, father, who – not to be trite or use a cliché – went off the deep end.”
Smiekel suffered from a severe anxiety disorder that made him act irrationally and left him in great fear of Hegg, whether that threat was real or perceived, Meczyk said.
But prosecutors pointed to the fact that Smiekel tried to have Hegg killed multiple times over the course of several months. Smiekel had several reasons for wanting to do so, including that Hegg filed a complaint with the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, Assistant U.S. Attorney John McKenzie said.
Smiekel sipped a frappuccino while discussing murder for hire, McKenzie said.
“Now he wants to have a shorter sentence because poor Jason suffered from anxiety?” McKenzie said. “That seems wrong.”
In handing down his sentence, U.S. Judge Frederick Kapala said he had difficulty accepting the conclusions of defense experts, instead siding with a prosecution expert who said that Smiekel could control his actions.
After watching video of Smiekel meeting with an undercover agent, Kapala said Smiekel was matter-of-fact, composed and calculated.
Kapala also noted that Smiekel tried to keep his financial transactions from looking suspicious, used throwaway phones, and planned an alibi for when Hegg was supposed to be killed.
“I do not see how Mr. Smiekel could not understand that he was arranging the death of Brian Hegg,” Kapala said. “It is a cold, evil, pernicious act to pay money to have another person murdered.”
Stressors are common in modern society, and society expects people to cope with them, Kapala said, although he noted that Smiekel’s mental condition should be taken into consideration.
Smiekel briefly addressed the court before the sentence, apologizing to Hegg. He also said he would seek out and actively participate in treatment.
“I can assure you under God, 100 percent, that I will never repeat those actions,” Smiekel said.
Smiekel has been in custody at the Boone County Jail since his arrest in August 2011. He likely will serve his sentence in the Federal Medical Center near Rochester, Minn., which specializes in mental health services for male offenders.
Smiekel’s law license was suspended pending the outcome of the case.Earlier this week, following a series of interviews with Matt Lauer, Megyn Kelly and Dr. Oz, Corey Feldman
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zo Moyano (Arg) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:06:48 28 Valerio Agnoli (Ita) Astana Pro Team 0:06:54 29 Cameron Wurf (Aus) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:07:48 30 Sergio Pardilla Bellon (Spa) MTN - Qhubeka 0:07:50 31 Paolo Tiralongo (Ita) Astana Pro Team 0:08:01 32 Michele Scarponi (Ita) Lampre - Merida 0:08:04 33 Mattia Cattaneo (Ita) Lampre - Merida 34 Jonathan Monsalve (Ven) Vini Fantini - Selle Italia 0:08:27 35 Miguel Angel Rubiano Chavez (Col) Androni Giocattoli 0:08:32 36 Franco Pellizotti (Ita) Androni Giocattoli 37 Ivan Santaromita (Ita) BMC Racing Team 0:08:37 38 Amets Txurruka (Spa) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:08:47 39 Ruben Fernandez (Spa) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:09:41 40 David G De La Cruz Melgarejo (Spa) Team Netapp - Endura 0:09:47 41 Hubert Dupont (Fra) Ag2r La Mondiale 0:09:54 42 Matteo Rabottini (Ita) Vini Fantini - Selle Italia 0:09:55 43 Jarlinson Pantano Gomez (Col) Colombia 0:10:02 44 Tanel Kangert (Est) Astana Pro Team 0:10:23 45 Jose Rodolfo Serpa Perez (Col) Lampre - Merida 0:10:53 46 Dario Cataldo (Ita) Sky Procycling 0:10:57 47 Louis Meintjes (RSA) MTN - Qhubeka 0:11:07 48 Natnael Berhane (Eri) Team Europcar 0:11:54 49 Alexander Rybakov (Rus) Rusvelo 50 Chad Beyer (USA) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 0:11:55 51 José C Sarmiento Tunarrosa (Col) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:12:08 52 Sergei Pomoshnikov (Rus) Rusvelo 0:12:17 53 Carlos Julia Quintero Norena (Col) Colombia 0:12:25 54 Manuel Antunes Amaro (Por) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 0:12:27 55 Josef Cerny (Cze) CCC Polsat Polkowice 0:12:54 56 Artem Ovechkin (Rus) Rusvelo 0:12:56 57 Antonio Piedra Perez (Spa) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:13:08 58 Edoardo Zardini (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:13:10 59 Jackson Jesu Rodriguez Ortiz (Ven) Androni Giocattoli 0:13:15 60 Antonio Santoro (Ita) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 0:13:16 61 Cristiano Monguzzi (Ita) Vini Fantini - Selle Italia 62 Marco Corti (Ita) Colombia 0:13:41 63 Francesco Manuel Bongiorno (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:14:04 64 Peter Kennaugh (GBr) Sky Procycling 0:15:16 65 Ben Gastauer (Lux) Ag2r La Mondiale 0:15:27 66 Sylvain Georges (Fra) Ag2r La Mondiale 67 Joseph Lloyd Dombrowski (USA) Sky Procycling 0:15:40 68 Christian Knees (Ger) Sky Procycling 0:15:55 69 Sergey Firsanov (Rus) Rusvelo 0:16:01 70 Kristijan Durasek (Cro) Lampre - Merida 0:16:11 71 Cyril Gautier (Fra) Team Europcar 0:16:30 72 Cristiano Salerno (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:17:43 73 Marco Pinotti (Ita) BMC Racing Team 0:17:44 74 Stefano Garzelli (Ita) Vini Fantini - Selle Italia 0:18:12 75 Emanuele Sella (Ita) Androni Giocattoli 0:18:15 76 Xabier Zandio Echaide (Spa) Sky Procycling 0:18:24 77 Marco Canola (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:18:34 78 Bartosz Huzarski (Pol) Team Netapp - Endura 0:18:37 79 Meron Russom (Eri) MTN - Qhubeka 0:18:42 80 Fabio Felline (Ita) Androni Giocattoli 0:18:43 81 Mateusz Taciak (Pol) CCC Polsat Polkowice 0:19:16 82 Lukasz Owsian (Pol) CCC Polsat Polkowice 83 Jan Barta (Cze) Team Netapp - Endura 0:19:21 84 Leonardo Fabio Duque (Col) Colombia 0:19:30 85 Juan Pablo Suarez Suarez (Col) Colombia 86 Guillaume Bonnafond (Fra) Ag2r La Mondiale 0:19:41 87 Yelko Gomez (Pan) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:19:50 88 Enrico Battaglin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:19:57 89 Jeffry Joha G Romero Corredor (Col) Colombia 0:20:30 90 Tsgabu Grmay (Eth) MTN - Qhubeka 0:20:49 91 Danny Pate (USA) Sky Procycling 0:21:08 92 Ryota Nishizono (Jpn) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 0:21:11 93 Sergey Klimov (Rus) Rusvelo 0:21:14 94 Fabio Andres Duarte Arevalo (Col) Colombia 0:21:18 95 Ilya Gorodnichev (Rus) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 96 Andrea Manfredi (Ita) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 0:21:20 97 Alessandro Mauro Vanotti (Ita) Astana Pro Team 0:21:28 98 David Veilleux (Can) Team Europcar 0:21:47 99 Jacek Morajko (Pol) CCC Polsat Polkowice 0:22:04 100 Yukiya Arashiro (Jpn) Team Europcar 0:22:12 101 Adrian Honkisz (Pol) CCC Polsat Polkowice 0:22:29 102 Johann Van Zyl (RSA) MTN - Qhubeka 0:23:01 103 Fabio Taborre (Ita) Vini Fantini - Selle Italia 0:23:13 104 Gang Xu (Chn) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 0:23:21 105 Angelo Tulik (Fra) Team Europcar 0:23:35 106 Nicola Boem (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:23:56 107 Kin San Wu (HKg) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 0:24:33 108 Cesare Benedetti (Ita) Team Netapp - Endura 0:24:51 109 Davide Vigano' (Ita) Lampre - Merida 0:25:59 110 Marek Rutkiewicz (Pol) CCC Polsat Polkowice 0:26:27 111 Omar Fraile Matarranza (Spa) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:26:39 112 Gregor Gazvoda (Slo) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 0:27:13 113 Alessandro Proni (Ita) Vini Fantini - Selle Italia 0:27:58 114 Tomas Aurelio Gil Martinez (Ven) Androni Giocattoli 0:28:03 115 Tiziano Dall'antonia (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:28:37 116 Bartlomiej Matysiak (Pol) CCC Polsat Polkowice 0:28:40 117 Juraj Sagan (Svk) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:28:46 118 Giairo Ermeti (Ita) Androni Giocattoli 0:28:59 119 Davide Malacarne (Ita) Team Europcar 0:29:00 120 Adam Blythe (GBr) BMC Racing Team 0:29:03 121 Chan Jae Jang (Kor) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 0:29:05 122 Filippo Savini (Ita) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 0:29:17 123 Songezo Jim (RSA) MTN - Qhubeka 0:29:44 124 Ralf Matzka (Ger) Team Netapp - Endura 0:30:48 125 Muhamad Adiq Othman (Mas) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 0:31:49 126 Maximiliano Ariel Richeze (Arg) Lampre - Merida 0:32:02 127 Marco Coledan (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:32:14 128 Oscar Gatto (Ita) Vini Fantini - Selle Italia 0:32:19 129 Roberto Ferrari (Ita) Lampre - Merida 130 Michael Schwarzmann (Ger) Team Netapp - Endura 0:32:20 131 Elia Viviani (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:32:29 132 Andrei Solomennikov (Rus) Rusvelo 0:32:38 133 Manuel Belletti (Ita) Ag2r La Mondiale 0:32:45 134 Valentin Iglinskiy (Kaz) Ag2r La Mondiale 0:32:47 135 Andrea Fedi (Ita) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 0:32:48 136 Alexandr Mironov (Rus) Rusvelo 0:32:58
Points classification # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Pavel Kochetkov (Rus) Rusvelo 6 pts 2 Michael Schwarzmann (Ger) Team Netapp - Endura 6 3 Josef Cerny (Cze) CCC Polsat Polkowice 4 4 Filippo Savini (Ita) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 4 5 Enzo Moyano (Arg) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 2 6 Marco Coledan (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 2
Mountains classification # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Kanstantin Siutsou (Blr) Sky Procycling 8 pts 2 Filippo Savini (Ita) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 8 3 Michael Rodriguez Galindo (Col) Colombia 6 4 Mauro Santambrogio (Ita) Vini Fantini - Selle Italia 6 5 Gregor Gazvoda (Slo) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 6 6 Maxime Bouet (Fra) Ag2r La Mondiale 4 7 Vincenzo Nibali (Ita) Astana Pro Team 4 8 Tomas Aurelio Gil Martinez (Ven) Androni Giocattoli 4 9 Josef Cerny (Cze) CCC Polsat Polkowice 2
Best young rider classification # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Michael Rodriguez Galindo (Col) Colombia 8:59:50 2 Fabio Aru (Ita) Astana Pro Team 0:00:17 3 Diego Rosa (Ita) Androni Giocattoli 0:02:05 4 Stefano Locatelli (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:02:29 5 Enzo Moyano (Arg) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:02:46 6 Mattia Cattaneo (Ita) Lampre - Merida 0:04:02 7 Jonathan Monsalve (Ven) Vini Fantini - Selle Italia 0:04:25 8 Ruben Fernandez (Spa) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:05:39 9 David G De La Cruz Melgarejo (Spa) Team Netapp - Endura 0:05:45 10 Louis Meintjes (RSA) MTN - Qhubeka 0:07:05 11 Natnael Berhane (Eri) Team Europcar 0:07:52 12 Sergei Pomoshnikov (Rus) Rusvelo 0:08:15 13 Manuel Antunes Amaro (Por) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 0:08:25 14 Josef Cerny (Cze) CCC Polsat Polkowice 0:08:52 15 Edoardo Zardini (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:09:08 16 Antonio Santoro (Ita) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 0:09:14 17 Francesco Manuel Bongiorno (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:10:02 18 Peter Kennaugh (GBr) Sky Procycling 0:11:14 19 Joseph Lloyd Dombrowski (USA) Sky Procycling 0:11:38 20 Fabio Felline (Ita) Androni Giocattoli 0:14:41 21 Lukasz Owsian (Pol) CCC Polsat Polkowice 0:15:14 22 Yelko Gomez (Pan) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:15:48 23 Enrico Battaglin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:15:55 24 Jeffry Joha G Romero Corredor (Col) Colombia 0:16:28 25 Tsgabu Grmay (Eth) MTN - Qhubeka 0:16:47 26 Andrea Manfredi (Ita) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 0:17:18 27 Johann Van Zyl (RSA) MTN - Qhubeka 0:18:59 28 Angelo Tulik (Fra) Team Europcar 0:19:33 29 Nicola Boem (Ita) Bardiani Valvole - CSF Inox 0:19:54 30 Omar Fraile Matarranza (Spa) Caja Rural - Seguros RGA 0:22:37 31 Adam Blythe (GBr) BMC Racing Team 0:25:01 32 Chan Jae Jang (Kor) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 0:25:03 33 Songezo Jim (RSA) MTN - Qhubeka 0:25:42 34 Ralf Matzka (Ger) Team Netapp - Endura 0:26:46 35 Muhamad Adiq Othman (Mas) Champion System Pro Cycling Team 0:27:47 36 Michael Schwarzmann (Ger) Team Netapp - Endura 0:28:18 37 Elia Viviani (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:28:27 38 Andrea Fedi (Ita) Ceramica Flaminia - Fondriest 0:28:46Mt. Juliet, Tenn. – Two women are in custody following an incident where over $800 of flip-flops were stolen. Around 5:10 p.m. today, officers were summoned to Old Navy, located at 401 S. Mt. Juliet Road, for a shoplifting in progress. As officers were en route, the officers received information that the shoplifting suspect fled the store and got into a Nissan Altima. A detailed suspect description of the car was provided to officers, who spotted and stopped the suspects near Dick’s Sporting Goods.
During the vehicle stop, officers identified the driver as Tena Allen, 28, and passenger as Tawonda Parrish, 26, of Nashville. Over $800 in stolen flip-flops from Old Navy was located inside the car, and the stolen items were returned to Old Navy.
Both were arrested and booked into the Wilson County Jail. Allen was charged with Driving on Revoked, but she was also wanted out of Wilson County for a Violation of Probation and Williamson County for a Violation of Probation. Parrish was charged with felony Theft of Merchandise.
###The CSS Shapes Generator Tool will help you easily create shapes with slider interfaces, and automatically create the HTML and CSS for you.
The shape generator allows you to modify:
Height and width
Padding
Rotation
Skew
Positioning
Colours
Border
Templates
This tools starts off with a templates tab that allows you to pick a shape to use as a base which you can customise. The shapes that you can choose from the start are:
Square
Rectangle
Parallelogram
Diamond
Trapez
Triangle
Circle
Oval
Pacman
To use any of these shapes you simply just have to click on the shape you want to use. This will change the preview shape at the top of the screen and change all the sliders to the values needed to create the selected shape.
Size
The next tab is for size, this will allow you to change the height, width and padding to create the area the exactly size you want.
There are rotate and skew sliders to change the angle of the shape.
Background
The background tab allows you to easily change the background colour of the shape your creating. Here you have the option of picking any colour you want by using the colour picker on the screen.
Border
Many of the shapes are created by changing the different border sides of the shapes, here you able to have full control over all 4 sides of the borders.
Some of the shapes need to have a transparent background to work correctly, for example the triangle shapes needs to have a bottom border and then sets the left and right borders to be transparent.
This shows how easy it is in CSS to create some shapes, just set the bottom border to be the height of the triangle with a background colour, then set the left and right borders to be half the height of the triangle with a transparent background.
.css-shapes-triangle{ height: 0px; width: 0px; border-left: 100px solid transparent; border-right: 100px solid transparent; border-bottom: 200px solid #428bca; }
HTML & CSS
As you change the options on the tool it will automatically change the preview shape at the top of the page. This will also change the HTML and CSS in this tab, this allows you to easily copy the code into your own application to use the shape you have created.
Try the tool now and create your own CSS shapes.
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Need help with your website? Hire a coveloping freelancer - fill out our quick form with your requirements and we'll get back to you with an estimate and availabilty. Find out more...The barn was filled with boxes. So they didn't get rid of all his parent's stuff after all. They just packed it up and stored it away. No animals, there was never animals in the barn. Well, there was once, but they were sick. At least that's what his parents said. They didn't let him in the barn that day. That was the week Al became sick himself, he was also having bad nightmares that week. Al shook his head and headed towards the back of the barn. He entered the back room. This was the room where his father usually worked on the characters. Al walks into the room and finds that everything was packed away in boxes; all of his father's tools, all of the spare parts of the creations... Well Al assumes that anyway. He isn't opening any of the boxes, they have been closed for ten years and Al feels like it should be kept that way. Feeling as if he opens them, spirits will get angry and fly out of the box, his skin would melt off and his eyeballs would pop out like in The Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Al knows better; there is no such thing as ghosts. Even if there were a such thing as ghosts, the only ghosts here would be his mom and dad. Al is sure his parents wouldn't attack him. He looks at the corner of the room where his father would normally work on his creations.
Al came into his father's work room to tell him dinner was done. His father was tinkering with the one he let Al name. But it was different. Its left arm, that was missing, was the most noticeable. Then Al noticed that the back of its head was absent. There was a hole in its chest and the material was torn around its eyes. "Dad..." Al said, not taking his eyes off of his injured friend. "Yes Alex?" his father asked, turning his head towards his son. Al could tell that he was stressed. "What happened to Blank?" "Well... Heh... You see. An emplo-..." his father paused, "A very mean goblin. Was staying at Candy's after hours. He took a wrench and attacked Blank with it. Would've attacked my junior manager if he were to be there I'm afraid." Al's eyes widened. why would anyone harm his friend? Goblin or not. "Is Blank alright?" His father quickly nodded. "Yeah, he's just... Imagine it as if you had a broken bone. that's what this is to Blank; in time he will be all healed up and feeling better!" Al nodded and hugged the animatronic. "Get well soon, Blank!" His father never fixed Blank. His material was just too expensive and he couldn't afford it. He just took Blank and put him right back into the diner. The kids didn't seem to mind it. Though the parents did. Al checked his watch. He had to meet Mike at that pizza parlor in 30 minutes. Al looked around his father's work room one last time. Later... Al parked in front of the parlor. He checked his watch. He was 10 minutes early. Al got out of the car and went inside; holding the door open for an elderly couple. Al enters and looks around. No sign of Mike. Guess he wasn't early like Al was. He went to a booth and sat down. Five minutes has passed. He stares off in the distance daydreaming. He was always quite the daydreamer, his grandma told him. Well that wasn't true. He hadn't daydream before at all until it happened. His daydreaming was interrupted by a voice. "Hello sir, can I take your order?" says a woman's voice. Al turns his head to the source, it's a waitress with curly dirty blonde hair. She's wearing glasses. She seems to be about his age "Hi." he says. They stared at each other with an awkward silence.It was hailed as the greatest product since the iPod … the wheel … the car. Instead, it turned out to be more like New Coke or the Segway. So what went wrong with Google Glass?
It’s not that Google Glass looked absurd — people wear silly fashions every day. It’s not that it was overpriced — people collect luxury watches and handbags every day, too. Google Glass’s failure was a story of a visionary product utterly failing to be cool.
Cool is not trivial. As Apple, Warby Parker, Net a Porter, and Shinola all know: Cool is perhaps the crucial factor in the success of new products. Cool isn’t something that is easily calculated by data-driven corporobots or profit-maximizing algorithms. Cool is not an equation. It’s mysterious, ineffable. An art, not a science. Which makes it hard for an engineering behemoth like Google to master. Cool cannot be engineered.
And yet that’s precisely what Google tried to do. It put Google Glass on models during Fashion Week, in advertorials in fashion magazines, in the hands of fashion “influencers.” Why? To engineer hype, excitement, adulation … to manufacture “buzz.” Aha! Textbook digital strategy! Genius! How could it fail?!
Actually: how could it succeed? All of that desperate maneuvering served to reinforce the obvious: that Google Glass was so uncool, the only thing Google could do was try to force it to be cool. It’s like the sad guy at the bar who shows up one day in a Ferrari and a shiny $3,000 suit … all of which only makes him less attractive. In short, Google made a fatal error of post-modern marketing: it attempted to buy cool through the not-so-subtle techniques of influence, persuasion, and manufactured buzz. But if you have to buy cool, it’s probably a reliable signal that you’re totally, hopelessly uncool. Every organization, or leader, in history that has tried to buy their way to cool has learned the hard way: cool has to be earned.
So how does one earn cool? At its most fundamental, cool is about liberation. Jazz liberates music from the suffocating formalism of classicism. Disco liberates people to stop standing around and looking awkwardly at one another and get down until the sun comes up. Great books are cool – and often banned – because they liberate people from established ideas and norms. Biker jackets are cool, not because they represent two-wheeled transport, but because they represent freedom from the tedium of spreadsheets and minivans (which in turn are just representations of other things). Things stop being cool once they stop liberating; think of a revelatory Jimi Hendrix guitar solo juxtaposed with any run-of-the-mill shred-fest by some ’80s hair band. It’s so important, I’ll say it again: Cool liberates. What, exactly, did Google Glass liberate people to do – spend more time on Facebook?
Back up for a moment. What makes rock stars so enviable? It isn’t just the money, fame, and hangers-on. Even bankers have those (and no one wants to be a banker … not even bankers). Nope. What makes rock stars so enviable, and what we really mean when we describe someone as a “rock star,” is that they don’t give a damn — about the drudgery of bosses, bills, backbiting, invoices, accounts receivable, performance reports, deadlines, conference call and all the hellish paraphernalia of a prosperous post-modern life. (I’m willing to bet that the Ramones didn’t give a damn about conference calls.) In short, rock stars are freer than the rest of us, in a fundamental way: they’re free to pursue their their passion and not to waste their lives on what doesn’t matter. They’re free to be individuals.
But Google Glass did not liberate people. It didn’t make them freer. It didn’t help them become individuals. Why did people roll their eyes at (or even punch) people wearing Google Glass? Not just because it looked ridiculous. Because it promised to be just another way to rob people of their individuality. It threatened them with yet another demand for mind-numbing conformity. Better not speak out! Better not express yourself! Maybe the Glasshole’s recording you!
Patching into another three hours of meetings in your self-driving car on your augmented reality headset so you can spend even more time getting yelled at by your boss? That’s not freedom. That’s repression. Self-chosen. Which, of course, is the most pernicious kind.
There’s a now-old joke: Google Glass lets you step outside … to check the weather. But that joke contains a profound truth. Google Glass simply reinforced the status quo.
The painful truth is that there wasn’t enough rebellion in Google Glass. Google might have thought there was. But me, you, and probably even the guy in the $3,000 suit at the bar knew: it wasn’t revolutionary, socially, economically, culturally revolutionary … it was just more of the same suffocating, shoulder-shrugging, yawn-inducing conformity. And nothing conformist is ever, ever cool.
Let me put it this way. The average American has a veritable gadget cornucopia at his fingertips. But he’s poorer, more unhappy, more anxious, and less mobile than he was 30 short years ago. In short, technology hasn’t liberated people. It might just be thwarting them, in significant ways, from the lives they should be living.
And that’s why we love things that are cool. Because they give us a tiny taste of liberation. A small caress of freedom. A little jab of individuality. All that’s always in stuff that’s cool. That’s why it doesn’t just titillate and amuse us … but thrills, excites, and exhilarates us. What is truly cool challenges us. To imagine the world as it should be. And then make our lives the levers of those worlds.
Here’s the lesson: If you want to make something cool, you’re going to have to make people the rock stars of their own lives.Pirelli: 'Prototype tyre which failed on Nico Rosberg's car won't be used again'
Nico Rosberg: High-speed tyre blow-out
"Just spun at full speed 320km/h on Bahrain straight cause my tyre blew up without warning. Thanks to that need to get some toilet paper now," the German tweeted on Friday morning, before deleting it soon afterwards.
Nevertheless, the message prompted considerable alarm, with Pirelli already forced to change their rubber midway through the 2013 season following a spate of blow-outs during the British GP.
However, F1's sole tyre manufacturer have now clarified that the tyre Rosberg was running at the time of the incident will not be used during the upcoming 2014 campaign.
"The tyre tests in Bahrain regarded a number of prototypes, which were completely innovative in terms of structure and compounds, with the aim of developing the most suitable solutions for the next season," the company stated.
"This morning Nico Rosberg's Mercedes was fitted with one of these prototypes, a tyre which had only been tested in the laboratory and which will not be proposed again.
"Thus, the safety of the tyres which will be supplied for the next Championship is not in question."
Mercedes were one of four teams alongside Ferrari, Red Bull and Toro Rosso to accept Pirelli's invitation to the Bahrain International Circuit, where they tested tyres the Italian supplier plan to introduce next season.
"The accident which happened to Rosberg's car is being investigated and the findings will be communicated to the FIA and the teams," Pirelli added.January 03, 2015 Are Solar Panels Usable in Snowy Climates?
By By Erin Cassidy, Accuweather.com Staff Writer January 03, 2015, 1:33:30 AM EST
With a new year beginning, installing solar panels is a great way to fulfill environmentally-friendly resolutions.
However, for those living in wintry climates, snow accumulation may pose a problem.
Joshua Pearce, associate professor at Michigan Tech University (MTU), said, “If snow is completely covering the panel, you are obviously only going to get the amount of energy out of the panel from the amount of light that is able to pass through the snow.”
“Even having a relatively small amount of snow on top of a given panel can radically reduce the amount of energy output for your entire system,” he said.
Due to these issues, research is currently being conducted whether solar technology is useful in wintry climates.
The projected losses could affect energy costs for all homeowners using solar power, but only significantly for ones that rely entirely on solar power and are not connected to the traditional electrical grid.
For the vast majority of homes and businesses that still remain “on-the-grid,” the financial impacts are minimal but the energy losses still pose questions to enhance optimal usage.
Research being conducted in Michigan, Colorado and Washington by MTU and the engineering firm DNV GL is designed to test the energy output for solar panels with varying levels of snow coverage and other factors such as “racking” (the accumulation of snow at the bottom of a panel if the snow can’t slide off naturally) and the angle the panels are tilted.
When the study is completed, Pearce is confident that, “Everyone, both [solar panel] designers, people that are funding systems and everyday homeowners [should] have the ability to look at your weather data for your area and predict, with very good assurance, what your snow losses or snow gains would be.”
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The research is also examining the positive effects of a snowy climate on solar panels.
“When snow is on the ground and the panels are clean, the snowy surface basically acts as a mirror and you can get higher output,” Pearce said. “In many cases, you end up with a small boost because of the reflection off the snow.”
Pearce describes several methods they have used to increase the efficiency of panels with snow accumulations.
Solar panels are a cost-efficient form of alternative energy, with an overwhelming percentage of new systems being installed in tangent with the traditional electrical grid.
As long as a structure is connected to the power grid, electricity will not be interrupted when snow accumulation makes solar energy unattainable.
With continued research and installations, solar power remains a viable option for Americans hoping to utilize reusable energy.
Tips for Solar Power Users in Snowy Climates Bounce a tennis ball off snow-covered panels. Homeowners who have rooftop solar panels installed can surprisingly increase the energy output by bouncing a tennis ball off the snow-covered panels. The small divots created by the tennis ball help begin the snow shed process and allow sunlight to reach the modules and begin converting energy. Install solar panels at the largest angle possible. A higher angle lessens the accumulation of snow on top of the panel. “Everyone that is in a very snowy place, like in northern Michigan, should be aggressive in your tilting angle. So if you have a decision to make between something like 30 degrees or 40 degrees, it’s better to go 40 degrees,” Pearce said. Don’t set up panels in a way that allows snow to gather at the bottom. Installing panels in a way that allows the snow to fall freely from the array greatly reduces the impact of snow. When snow slides off the panel at an angle and gathers at the bottom of the module, the losses can significant. “In those cases, when you have a very low tilt angle and a dam [of snow], you can lose all of the solar energy associated with the winter,” Pearce said.
Have questions, comments, or a story to share? Email Erin Cassidy at [email protected]. Follow us @breakingweather, or on Facebook and Google+.
Report a TypoLet me tell you about the new cool. It’s not happening in a cubicle, it doesn’t involve knowledge of the latest social networking trend, and it certainly does not call for a fresh supply of hand sanitizer. While the last couple of generations have been training a virtual workforce, the real rebels of America are learning creative skills.
Let me introduce you to Joseph & Katie Thompson of Joseph Thompson Woodworks:
About twenty minutes off the interstate right smack in the middle of South Carolina, Joseph & Katie are busy working in their workshop making custom furniture out of socially responsible materials, repairing antiques, and building a family business.
When you step inside one of the rooms of their shop, the first thing you notice as a soft-fingered white collar guy like me is the amazing aroma of split wood. Then there’s the dust. Wood dust isn’t like machine shop dust though, it doesn’t feel “dirty”. The floors are covered in wood shavings, which reminded me of the butcher shop around the corner from my childhood home. The orange glow makes everything feel cozy and warm (not to mention it was 80˚ in the middle of February, so that helps). I guess what I’m trying to say is that the place just feels right.
Joseph Thompson grew up in Orangeburg, SC and while attending Clemson University he decided that it’s not his place in the 9-5 world, so he transferred to the Silva Bay Shipyard School on Gabriola Island in British Columbia. There he learned the basics of woodworking, ship building, and furniture making. He got motivated to pursue furniture making and furthered his training at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine.
Katie Thompson is a College of Charleston alumnus who specialized in non-profit arts before she picked up the table saw. I met her a few years ago while she was writing for TheDigitel and she’s been involved in the Charleston art scene for quite some time. She’s one of the people to follow on Twitter if you want to know what’s going on here.
In a world of high speed cell phone data, 9 month cycles of technology standards, and buzzword wikis, it has become rare to meet people with a desire to create something with their hands. There’s something in a man’s DNA that makes us want to build stuff (maybe it’s there in women too, but I don’t want to speak for them ;)) The idea that skilled labor in this country is dwindling is a scary one. When you see the quality that people like Joseph and Katie are putting into their work, it makes you sad that we’re settling for disposable press-board garbage from Ikea and passing it off as furniture. It also makes it quite lucrative for
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triggered economic crash
Two mystery investors 'were number one traders in all financial companies that collapsed or are now financially supported by the U.S. government'
By Daily Mail Reporter
Terrorists and other 'financial enemies' were likely responsible for the near collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008, a new Pentagon report has concluded.
The 2009 report, Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses, said financial terrorism by Jihadists or countries such as China may have cost the global economy $50 trillion in a series of co-ordinated strikes against the U.S. economy.
In an astonishing conclusion, the report claims two unidentified traders deliberately devalued trillions of dollars' worth of stocks at the height of the crisis.
Attack: The report concludes that state or terrorist organisations contributed to the collapse of the U.S. financial system through a series of targeted financial attacks
The report also concludes that untraceable actors undertook a three-tiered attack beginning in 2007, and that 'Phase III [of the attack] may be under way right now.'
'In addition, these same actors have clearly demonstrated the means to carry out such an attack.
'There is sufficient justification to question whether outside forces triggered, capitalised upon or magnified the economic difficulties of 2008.'
The report concluded that: 'Without question, there were actors who had the motive to harm the U.S. economy.
The report was commissioned in early 2009 by the Pentagon's Irregular Warfare Support Program - which prepares U.S. government and military agencies for emerging non-traditional threats.
Its author, economic analyst Kevin Freeman, published it in June 2009 before passing it on to investigators at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in November 2010.
Although never classified, sources indicated that the report emerged only after concerned Congressmen and Defence Department officials highlighted its existence to media sources.
Speaking to MailOnline, a source close to the report added: 'It is my understanding that people in the DoD and government officials thought this should be brought to public attention.'
Speaking to the Washington Post, Mr Freeman said that American security forces needed to address vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.
He said: 'We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems each year.
'But a relatively small amount of money focused against our financial markets through leveraged derivatives or cyber efforts can result in trillions of dollars in losses.
'This is the equivalent of box cutters on an air plane.'
When asked who he thought may be responsible for the attacks, Mr. Freeman added: 'Unfortunately, the two major strategic threats, radical jihadists and the Chinese, are among the best positioned in the economic battle space.'
Collapse: The destruction of Lehman Brothers in 2008 caused panic in the markets, prompting a massive U.S. government bail out
The attacks, according to the report, were part of a three-phase strategy.
The first phase was the deliberate inflation of oil prices in 2007 that generated as much as $2 trillion of excess wealth for oil-producing nations, 'filling the coffers of Sovereign Wealth Funds, especially those that follow Shariah Compliant Finance.'
In the second phase, untraceable investors attacked financial institutions such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in a 'bear raid'.
The term refers to a strategy where investors try to force the value of companies down through malicious rumours or complex financial trades that impact its stock price.
The report says that as the crisis began, 'virtually overnight' two relatively small brokers emerged to trade, 'trillions of dollars worth of U.S. blue chip companies.'
Crucially, these as yet unidentified investors are currently the number one traders in, 'all financial companies that collapsed or are now financially supported by the U.S. government,' according to Mr Freeman.
Blame: The report points to China or terrorist organisations as possible candidates for the massive financial attacks on the U.S.
Attacks on banks, especially Lehman Brothers which collapsed in 2008, caused interbank lending to seize up and stock markets around the world to collapse.
The U.S. government then had to step in and bail the system out.
Following this, the 'third phase' has seen the massive U.S. public debt now threatening the primacy of the dollar as a global currency.
'Such an event,' the report says, 'has already been discussed by finance ministers in major emerging market nations such as China and Russia as well as Iran and the Arab states.
'In short, a bear raid against the U.S.financial system remains possible and may even be likely.'
The report also points to evidence by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who said in 2008 that the Russian government had made a 'top-level approach' to the Chinese, asking them to dump shares in American mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae - forcing both into insolvency.
The Chinese military, according to the report, 'has been advocating the potential for an economic attack on the U.S. for 12 years or longer as evidenced by the publication of the book Unrestricted Warfare in 1999.'Welcome to the Hurry Up, which runs Sunday through Thursday, serving as your last stop for recruiting news and notes nightly. We'll recap the day as it happened and preview the days ahead while keeping our ear to the ground on the Ohio State recruiting scene.
When you look at the Big Ten football standings, it's clear that the conference — long dubbed the "big two and the little eight" — has not changed much over the years. Yes, there's expansion from 10 to 14, there's coaching changes and offense's updating their approach to the modern era, but on the field, there's still the cream at the top and bunch of stragglers fighting to catch up.
Right now, it's Michigan State, Ohio State, Nebraska and Wisconsin acting as flag-bearers for the conference ten others scuffling to try and improve.
In the new world of college football, one where recruiting is king and the attention spent to commitments and mailers and "top five lists" almost matches the enthusiasm for the game on Saturdays, the conference sees a large disparity in success there as well.
On this front the Buckeyes, Badgers, Spartans and Huskers still rule with one exception: Penn State and James Franklin. Let's take a closer look at the 2015 recruiting classes, using 247Sports.com rankings, and see who's got the chance to make an impact in the future inside of the Big Ten.
14. INDIANA // 12 COMMITMENTS // 3.00 AVG STAR RANKING
The Hoosiers are, and always seem to be, quite an enigma on the field and off it. On the field they've lost to Bowling Green and Michigan. They've gone to, and won at, Missouri. Kevin Wilson is a well-respected coach who made his name running high-powered offenses at Oklahoma.
For the Hoosiers, the inconsistency on the field often leads to some frustration on the recruiting trail. Last weekend, their top commitment, quarterback Tommy Stevens from Indianapolis, was offered by and made an official visit to, Penn State.
If the Nittany Lions were to swoop in and steal one from Indiana, from right in their backyard? That'd be a devastating blow.
13. MINNESOTA // 16 COMMITMENTS // 3.00 AVG STAR RANKING
Minnesota, with 16 commitments, has done a fairly decent job capitalizing on the new energy around their football program. A hot start to the season and the lovable Jerry Kill at the helm have provided the Gophers, their fans and their players, something to smile about.
Lineman Quin Oseland committed to the Gophers in August, choosing Minnesota over Arizona State, California and many others, including his home-state Illini. In fact, nearly a third of the Minnesota class is from Illinois, including twins Jacob and Julian Huff, a three-star safety and linebacker, respectively.
The Gophers are in the hunt for Oak Park, Michigan defensive back/running back John Kelly, who would be a nice boost for their class. Southfield, Michigan's Ray Buford Jr. is a dynamic player who could help the Gophers in a number of ways, including the kick and punt return game.
12. PURDUE // 17 COMMITMENTS // 2.64 AVG STAR RANKING
One of my personal favorite coaches, Darrell Hazell, leads the Boilermakers and his cool, calm demeanor have made him a personal favorite of many over the years. As he attempts to lead often-terrible Purdue to respectability, he'll need a top-flight quarterback to do so and I think he's got himself one in Kentucky's Elijah Sindelar.
The Boilermakers are hoping that improvement on the field can turn into a bit more prowess on the recruiting trail and as of now, it's not working out as planned. One reason? Purdue has the lowest paid coaching staff in the Big Ten, including the two lowest paid assistants in the conference.
Matt McCann, a big three-star tackle from Indianapolis anchors is one of only two lineman currently committed, an area the Boilermakers hope to address further. Davidson (Hilliard, Ohio) linebacker Markus Bailey could be a steal for Purdue and linebacker's coach Marcus Freeman.
11. ILLINOIS // 14 COMMITMENTS // 2.93 AVG STAR RANKING
Tim Beckman is an excellent recruiter, so don't let Illinois' spot on this list fool you. It's his football team that stinks. Unfortunately in football, a bad football team often leads to a bad recruiting class and that connection is in full effect here.
The Illinois class is led by Jacksonsville, Illinois offensive lineman Gabe Megginson, who Ohio State has offered and continues to recruit. Megginson hopes to be the draw for Beckman's class and wants to be a leader that keeps Illinois' best players in the state. So far, that's not working.
If Illinois were to remove Beckman from his post after this season as has been postured, the program could take an even more disappointing step backwards. Wide receiver A.D Miller is one of my favorite players in the Illini class, and he's looking around. He visited Nebraska officially last weekend, so it could be a challenge keeping him in the fold.
10. MARYLAND // 16 COMMITMENTS // 3.06 AVG STAR RANKING
The Terrapins are smack-dab in the middle of a fertile recruiting area and have a long-time reputation for keeping the best players from their area home. That is, up to this point, not happening since they've joined the Big Ten.
Only four of their 16 recruits are from Maryland and the state's best have all but written off the Terrapins and Randy Edsall in favor for Franklin and Penn State.
Maryland offensive lineman Isaiah Prince could be the latest in a line of late deciders who decide to stay home, and he's an important piece of the puzzle for Maryland.
9. RUTGERS // 19 COMMITMENTS // 2.73 AVG STAR RANKING
With 19 commitments, Rutgers is tied with the Buckeyes for the second most commitments up to this point for 2015. The problem for Rutgers is then — we can assume — not quantity but quality
As one of the conference's members, Rutgers had hoped the move to the B1G would lead to more success in their own state. Last year, the Buckeyes swooped in and took Noah Brown from under their nose and this year they've done the same with a pledge from Kevin Feder. Once more though, it's Penn State and James Franklin who have really hurt Kyle Flood and the Scarlet Knights. Of the Top 15 players in New Jersey, Rutgers has zero commitments: Penn State has five.
The gem of the class is defensive tackle Greg Webb, who was originally a four-star defensive tackle in the class of 2013, who had signed and enrolled at North Carolina. He'll make his way to Rutgers via Hutchingson Community College in Kansas. One of my favorite players in the class is tight end Nakia Griffin, a big-bodied wide receiver who could play a number of roles in their offense.
8. IOWA // 17 COMMITMENTS // 2.94 AVG STAR RANKING
As you'd expect Iowa's recruiting class is line heavy. Of the Hawkeyes' 17 commitments, five are offensive lineman led by Ohioan James Daniels, who chose the Iowa over Ohio State.
Iowa is still hoping to lure Ohio State commitment Justin Hilliard, who they hope will follow Daniels' path and decide to play alongside his brother rather than at home in Ohio.
The Hawkeyes are also still in the mix for Texas running back Chris Warren III and budding star Raequan Williams, a defensive lineman from Chicago. Iowa has their own set of twins committed, Landan and Levi Paulsen, a pair of offensive lineman.
7. NORTHWESTERN // 17 COMMITMENTS // 3.00 AVG STAR RANKING
Northwestern and Pat Fitzgerald are where you'd expect them to be: right in the middle of the Big Ten. The Wildcats started their recruiting year well, but have lost some momentum in recent months. Decommitments from a pair of Ohio twins — Andrew and David Dowell — resulted in strict "no visit" policies enforced by Fitzgerald and his staff.
Lasalle (Cincinnati) defensive lineman Jordan Thompson is the gem of the class currently, but the Wildcats are involved in a number of important pursuits. Their unique blend of academics and football makes them an attractive option to players throughout the country.
They hope to land a commitment from Justice Shelton-Mosley, a shift all-purpose back from California, later this month.
6. MICHIGAN // 9 COMMITMENTS // 3.66 AVG STAR RANKING
Chalk this one up to what what might've been, Michigan fans. Damien Harris, George Campbell, Shaun Crawford, Garrett Taylor, and Darian Roseboro are all former commitments. Tyree Kinnel, Brian Cole, Chris Clark, Grant Newsome, Mike Weber and Darrin Kirkland, Jr. are all at least discussing the possibility of doing the same.
Uncertainty around the football program and Brady Hoke's future has decimated a class that was at one time the nation's best. Now with just nine commitments — and at least six of them looking elsewhere — it's actually impressive that Michigan remains this high on the Big Ten list.
They've got the conference's best quarterback commitment at this point in Alex Malzone, and he — along with Jon Runyan, Jr. and kicker Andrew David — appear resolute in their commitments. It's nearly impossible to project what happens in Ann Arbor, but the writing is on the wall for Hoke and another coaching change confused off-season isn't good for a program already in flux.
5. NEBRASKA // 12 COMMITMENTS // 3.16 AVG STAR RANKING
Bo Pelini has seen the face of the inevitable firing that's before Brady Hoke and he's laughed in it. He has strode upon feline-inspired glory into the sunset and has emerged victorious.
He's now coaching the country's 15th-ranked team and has his Cornhuskers at 8-1. The commitment Nebraska made to Pelini has paid off on the recruiting trail.
While they're lacking star power in this class, the 'Huskers have a solid group highlighted by cornerback Eric Lee, a four-star defensive back from Colorado. A strong finish to the season could see an upswing in recruiting success for Pelini. One of their top remaining wide receiver targets, New Orleans three-star Stanley Morgan, decides this Friday.
4. MICHIGAN STATE // 13 COMMITMENTS // 3.15 AVG STAR RANKING
It's perplexing that the recent on-the-field success for Michigan State hasn't yielded a similar degree of wins in the living room. Despite Michigan's uncertainty, the Wolverines beat the Spartans for a number of the state's top players and others still appear to be waiting for Michigan to make a move before they do.
Hubbard, Ohio's L.J. Scott is their top verbal at this point, and the commitment from him was important as much in that they "stole" one from the Buckeyes as it was his running back talents.
Another pair of Ohioans, offensive lineman Noah Listermann and defensive end Justice Alexander are sure to spend their careers with a chip on their shoulders when they line up against the Buckeyes. I'm a big fan of linebacker Tyriq Thompson from Detroit Martin Luther King as well. The Spartans could end up the winner in the Mike Weber and Brian Cole sweepstakes if they do as expected and decommit from Michigan.
3. WISCONSIN // 22 COMMITMENTS // 3.05 AVG STAR RANKING
Beyond being much more likable, Gary Anderson and Wisconsin aren't much different than Bert Bret Bielema and Wisconsin were. As the conference's third-ranked recruiting class, the Badgers are once more positioning themselves nicely for the future.
A solid class full of solid players, the Badgers have continued to use their identity to bring in the type of player that works in their system. The top six players in their recruiting class are offensive lineman or tight ends. A shifty running back from Texas with above-average speed is on the rolls.
They have the most commitments in the Big Ten, numbers-wise and they're not done. The Badgers are hopeful to lure a number of players with Ohio State offers into the mix. Wisconsin has hosted Florida running back Jordan Scarlett for an official visit previously and is still hoping to do the same with Georgia defensive back Josh Norwood.
2. PENN STATE // 18 COMMITMENTS // 3.61 AVG STAR RANKING
Last January, when James Franklin took over at Penn State, the expected happened. Penn State, like Michigan will, got a recruiting boost from the initial efforts of a new and exciting head coach. The new plan for future destruction of the Big Ten — combined with a depleted roster — was a winning recipe for Franklin.
He came in late and took Brandon Wimbush and Sterling Jenkins from Ohio State's grasp. He swung Indiana linebacker Josh Barajas on a weekend visit. He sold Adam McLean on Penn State before he ever visited the Buckeyes. After the NCAA removed the sanctions it had imposed on Happy Valley, Franklin and his team found themselves with even more room to recruit than they'd expected.
Wimbush and Barajas' decommitments may have slowed things down a bit, but the Nittany Lions are primed to make another run. A fantastic showing from the team and the fans in at Penn State two weeks ago has helped Franklin move into a neck-and-neck position with the Buckeyes for Matt Burrell. Christian Wilkins, Garrett Taylor, Ricky DeBerry, Jr. and Tim Settle are all still realistic options for the Nittany Lions.
1. OHIO STATE // 19 COMMITMENTS // 3.89 AVG STAR RANKING
With the recent addition of Torrance Gibson, the Buckeyes have regained the top spot in the Big Ten's recruiting rankings. The Ohio State class, which stood with only two commitments in May, is now at 19 verbals and could finish anywhere between 22-25.
The remaining group of prospects high on the Buckeyes, a number of which are also interested in Penn State, is likely to determine which school eventually wins the recruiting "championship" for 2015.
The Buckeyes are hoping to finish with a final group that includes any number of Matt Burrell, Damien Harris, Lawrence Cager, Branden Bowen, Garrett Taylor, Rashad Roundtree and Josh Norwood. Bowen, Burrell, Roundtree and Norwood are all close to a decision and could happen at anytime. The Buckeyes continue to battle Kentucky for Damien Harris. How much Torrance Gibson's decision impacts him is up for debate, but Gibson has stated Harris will be one of his priorities.When Donald K. went to update his Magellan GPS with the latest map, he got a nasty surprise. Despite being advertised as coming with “FREE lifetime map updates,” he was informed that his unit did not qualify.
Seems pretty unambiguous, right? “Free lifetime map updates.” “Never worry about out-of-date maps again.”
However, farther down the page on Magellan’s website is an inconspicuous disclosure.
*MOUSE PRINT:
Magellan astonishingly defines “lifetime” as just “three years” from the date of manufacture. That is certainly not how the average consumer would define lifetime. Nor how the Federal Trade Commission wants its definition disclosed:
§ 239.4 “Lifetime” and similar representations.
If an advertisement uses “lifetime,” “life,” or similar representations to describe the duration of a warranty or guarantee, then the advertisement should disclose, with such clarity and prominence as will be noticed and understood by prospective purchasers, the life to which the representation refers.
And the FTC also bans the deceptive advertising of guarantees.
Clearly, the disclosure that Magellan makes is not conspicuous, nor in close proximity to their “lifetime” claims. Further, their warranty is really a specified term of years — three — and not an unlimited warranty time-wise as the term “lifetime” implies.
Making the lifetime to which the warranty applies to the device’s own lifetime is circular reasoning. In essence that says the device will last only as long as it will last and then you’re out of luck. And in Magellan’s case, they are even cutting that short.
We asked a spokesperson for the company why they continue to use the misleading term “lifetime” to describe their three-year warranty, and whether they will grant access to map updates to purchasers who feel they were deceived. Here is their response:
We sincerely apologize for any confusion we may have caused to consumers about “lifetime maps” on our Magellan GPS devices. Typically with electronics, “lifetime” refers to the useful lifetime of the device, and for most GPS devices the useful life is about 3 years. Magellan honors customer requests for lifetime map updates as long as the device is still capable of being updated. For support, please visit https://service.magellangps.com/ [and fill out the “contact us” form].
One can only wonder what she meant by saying the device has to be “still capable of being updated” rather than simply saying that as long as the device was still functional they will provide map updates.
Thanks to John Matarese of WCPO-TV for the original story idea.South Shore Hospital in South Weymouth will pay $750,000 to settle charges related to a 2010 data breach that compromised the personal information of more than 800,000 people, according to a release from the Massachusetts attorney general’s office.
The settlement, approved Thursday in Suffolk Superior Court, includes a civil penalty of $250,000 and $225,000 for a fund to be used by the attorney general’s office to promote education on the protection of personal data, the release said. South Shore Hospital was also credited for $275,000 it spent on security measures following the breach.
“Hospitals and other entities that handle personal and protected health information have an obligation to properly protect this sensitive data,’’ said Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. Coakley sued the hospital under state and federal laws that require secure storage of personal information collected by hospitals.
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In February of 2010, the hospital contracted with a Pennsylvania company, Archive Data Solutions, to erase and re-sell 473 data tapes containing information on 800,000 individuals. None of the data was encrypted, and so it could be read by anyone with the right equipment and training.
The hospital did not inform Archive Data that the tapes contained sensitive information. The tapes were shipped to a Texas subcontractor in three boxes, but the hospital later learned that only one of the boxes arrived.
Since the breach, “we’ve actually put in a great deal of new measures to protect personal information,’’ said South Shore spokeswoman Sarah Darcy. “Everything — everything — is encrypted now.’’
The hospital has established tougher requirements for the use of medical records on mobile devices, which could easily be lost or stolen, and employees have received additional training on the proper handling of patient data..This article is over 2 years old
People aged 30-59 accounted for 78% of all drug overdose deaths in 2014, with many more men overdosing than women
Middle-aged men are more likely to die of a drug overdose in Australia than any other group, a report has found.
In 2014, people aged 30-59 accounted for 78% of all overdose deaths.
Australia’s Annual Overdose Report 2016 – released by the Penington Institute – challenged the stereotype that young people were most at risk of dying of an overdose, the institute’s chief executive, John Ryan, said.
Australians aged 40-49 were the most likely to die of a drug overdose. Deaths in this age group almost doubled, from 174 in 2004 to 342 in 2014.
According to the report, based on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, men overdose in much higher numbers than women, with 762 men and 375 women dying from an accidental drug overdose in 2014.
Synthetic drugs posing increased risk to Australians, Global Drug Survey reveals Read more
Despite common perceptions that illicit drugs are to blame, prescription medications were responsible for 71% of all overdoses. Between 2008 and 2014, there was an 87% increase in prescription opioid deaths, with the greatest increase occurring in rural/regional Australia.
Ryan said the statistics on accidental overdose in Australia were “grim”.
“Accidental deaths from overdose reached 1,137 in 2014, a rapid rise from 705 deaths in 2004 and a 61% increase in a decade,” he said.
“The report also indicates that more people die of an overdose of prescription medications such as oxycodone and benzodiazepines like Valium than from illicit drugs.”
It was time for significant investments to be made to reduce the toll from accidental overdose, he added.
The president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, Dr Alex Wodak, said it was a “big, growing and neglected issue” in Australia.
“In my view trying to reduce the supply of drugs, however attractive to the community and therefore politically attractive, rarely meets the expectations about what it can achieve and often is often accompanied by serious, unintended negative consequences,” he said. “This, for me, is fundamentally a demand problem.”
There was a large unmet demand for opioid addiction treatment, Wodak said, which was costly, often had waiting lists and did not run for long enough to treat people effectively.
As well as expanding treatment programs, there needed to be supervised drug consumption rooms, with only one currently operating in Australia, in Sydney’s Kings Cross.
“That would drive down the overdose death rate and allow social workers to target those in need and attract people into treatment,” Wodak said.
The report also found that Western Australia had the highest number of overdose deaths per capita, the report found, with 5.8 per 100,000 in 2014, followed by New South Wales with 5.1 per 100,000. Since 2004, WA’s per capita overdose deaths have risen from the lowest to the highest in the country, a 222% increase.
The national increase over the same period was 37%.Not to be confused with Maltese passport
The Sovereign Military Order of Malta passport is a travel document issued to officials and diplomats of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM). The order issues biometric passports which are fully ICAO9303 compliant.[1]
The application and printing processes are handled by the Österreichische Staatsdruckerei of Vienna, Austria.
Types of passport [ edit ]
The Sovereign Military Order of Malta issues two types of passport.
Diplomatic passports [ edit ]
Diplomatic passports of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta are issued only to the members of the Sovereign Council (the government of the order), to the Members of the Government Council and to heads and members of diplomatic missions of the order (as well as their spouse and minor children), with justified exceptions for those who are in charge of a special missions within the Sovereign Order of Malta. The validity of the passport is strictly linked to the duration of the assignment. As of June 2017 there were approximately 500 passports in circulation [2]. The numerous other members and volunteers of the Order remain citizens of their own respective countries with their national passport.[3]
Among those travelling with an Order of Malta diplomatic passport:
Service passports [ edit ]
Service passports of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta are issued only to people who are in charge of a special mission within the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The validity of the passport is strictly linked to the duration of the assignment. Currently, ten service passports are in use.
Physical appearance [ edit ]
Passport covers carry the text Ordre Souverain Militaire de Malte above the coat of arms, and Passeport Diplomatique or Passport de Service below it.[4] Diplomatic passports are red, whereas service passports are black.
The country-code XOM has been assigned by the ICAO after consultation with the SMOM and the machine-readable zone thus starts with P<XOM.[5]
Acceptance [ edit ]
The SMOM has diplomatic relations with 106 countries,[6] which therefore accept the passport. In the Schengen area (where most of the extraterritorialities of the order are located) it is recognized by twelve (Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Hungary, Austria, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia) out of 28 members.[7]
See also [ edit ]The sale of Four Loko — the caffeinated booze of choice for totally awesome college dudes — has been banned in Michigan, and stores have 30 days to remove it from shelves. You can still purchase across state lines, though!
Old people are all worked up about Four Loko after a bunch of college kids were hospitalized for partying a little too hard with The Loko. The drink is 12 percent alcohol with a shitload of caffeine, and that alone should be enough to make you want to vomit. The decision was made on Wednesday by the Michigan Liquor Control Commission. But liquor store owners aren't too worried, because they know a new drink will pop up soon enough, or kids will mix their own concoctions. Michael Mansour, owner of Spartan Spirits near the Michigan State University campus told The State News:
If they can't get it prepackaged in one unit, then they'll buy it separately and mix it themselves. They're going to do it, whether they package it that way or not. In this market, we are always changing and staying on top of what our students' appeal is. We are constantly staying up on what's the latest, greatest newest product, so something will come out."
We can't wait to see what the hot new power booze of 2011 will be. We just hope it's as EXTREME as Four Loko, bro.
[Image via]Income splitting will be implemented: Kenney
The cover page of the report from the Broadbent Institute, released on Tuesday June 10, 2014, is shown. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO
OTTAWA - Employment Minister Jason Kenney says the Harper government has no intention of backing away from its income splitting pledge, despite a new report concluding the plan would exacerbate income inequality and bestow the most benefits to the West.
Kenney made the statement in the House of Commons on Tuesday while debating an NDP motion to do away with the idea.
The report by the left-leaning Broadbent Institute concluded that income splitting would benefit the most affluent single-income families, cost about $3 billion, bestow no benefits to 90 per cent of Canadians, and transfer a disproportionate amount to families in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Conservative strongholds with the strongest economies.
"We confirm that it is absolutely our intention to keep that commitment... to introduce income tax fairness, to end the discrimination against certain families, to end the unfairness," Kenney declared.
"We will treat the family as an economic unit because it is an economic unit," he added, arguing that a family that chooses to keep one spouse at home to care for children or the elderly should not be punished in the tax code for the decision.
In 2011, the Conservatives pledged to allow the transfer of up to $50,000 from the higher-earning spouse in a family with children under 18 to the lower earner, thereby reducing the overall tax bite. It said it would introduce the legislation as soon as the budget is balanced.
But while the proposal appears to be popular with Canadians, the latest Broadbent study — as have others before it — shows the vast majority of families would see no benefit, because they either have no children under 18, have spouses with similar incomes or are single-parent families.
The latest study breaks new ground in finding wide regional disparity in how the benefits will be distributed.
It turns out that among the target group — families with minor-age children — the biggest winners by far reside in Alberta, where the average annual tax saving would be $1,359, while families in Saskatchewan come in second at $1,070. Those two provinces, which have a combined 42 federal ridings, sent 40 Conservative MPs to Ottawa in the 2011 election.
Families in Prince Edward Island would get the least average benefit at $488, followed closely by Quebec families with children, which would average $510 in benefits. Those two provinces were among the least productive for the Conservatives, electing only six Tories among their combined 79 MPs in 2011.
By ascending order of benefits, qualifying Nova Scotia families would average $727 in benefits, followed by Manitoba ($772), New Brunswick ($787), British Columbia ($853), Ontario ($874) and Newfoundland ($925).
Broadbent Institute executive director Rick Smith has no explanation for the regional disparity other than that the program as unveiled was designed for a particular type of family — the so-called "Leave It to Beaver" traditional home with a principal breadwinner and a stay at home spouse who takes care of the children.
"It turns out there are few families of that type, but there are more of them in Alberta than in Quebec," he said.
To benefit the most, one spouse must make $100,000 more than the other and have a taxable income above $136,270, the highest marginal rate.
Of families with children under 18, the average tax saving is calculated at $841, although that includes the 54 per cent of those households that receive no benefit at all.
But for 147,000 Canadian families with a high-income breadwinner, the average benefit would be $7,128.
"If the government set out to specifically design a policy to make inequality worse, this would be it," Smith said.
"This policy is an inequality generating machine."
The lack of broad-based benefits is expected to be a major campaign issue should the Conservatives go ahead with income splitting in next year's budget. It was one reason cited by the late finance minister Jim Flaherty when publicly expressing doubts about the program earlier this year, touching off a fire storm among Conservative MPs who remain committed to seeing it implemented.
Kenney was one of the ministers who publicly disagreed with Flaherty and said the government would keep its promise.
Although polls show income splitting is popular, Smith believes one reason is that most Canadians assume they will benefit, when in fact they likely won't.
Without seeing the results of the study, which was given to The Canadian Press prior to the official release Tuesday morning, Andrea Mrozek of the Institute of Marriage and Family said income splitting can be implemented "the right way" so as to spread the benefits more broadly.
"We can implement this in a way that benefits a bigger group of families. For example, we have always looked at the French model, which allows a single parent to split with a child, so thereby benefiting from income splitting," she said.
According to the Broadbent study, which was based on analysis by Tristat Resources, that would benefit an additional 20 per cent of families.
Tax policy expert Jack Mintz of the University of Calgary believes unequal benefits are unavoidable, but can be at least partially mitigated by other means, including increasing the tax credit for child-care costs.
Still, Smith says there are far superior ways of delivering tax relief to hard-pressed families, such as enriching the Child Tax Benefit for lower-income families, a similar conclusion reached by the authors of the C.D. Howe study.
"We wouldn't be so concerned about this if it weren't so darn expensive," said Smith. "This would cost the federal treasury $3 billion a year, so we are talking about a wealth transfer from nine of 10 Canadians to the wealthiest amongst us."The interior of Queenstown's Alpine Aqualand complex. Photo from ODT files.
Queenstown is the latest swimming centre closed week after week by a serial pooper - or poopers.
Pools at the Events Centre's Alpine Aqualand were closed seven of eight consecutive Monday afternoons in February and March.
The main pool at the facility has been closed 14 times this year alone because of faecal contamination, while the learners and lap pools were closed once each.
Lost revenue and clean up costs range from $200 to $1000 a time. Invercargill's Splash Palace Aquatic Centre hit international headlines earlier this year after a mystery pooper forced its closure six Fridays in a row.
Queenstown Lakes District Council spokeswoman Michele Poole said: ''It's obviously very difficult to ascertain who exactly the contamination originated from each time.
''But due to the large number of incidents after school hours and that all toddlers must wear swim nappies, we believe it is likely an older child, or small number of children, whose parents mistakenly believe are no longer in need of toilet reminders.''
The pool can be closed for up to four hours each time - but they have been poo free for the last two Mondays. Staff are talking to parents before they swim and reminder signs have been put up.
Maree Waring takes her two children to the pool for lessons each Monday.
''It's been closed a lot recently, but you can't blame the pool. The staff are being more vigilant and it's just how it goes,''she said.
''We've been swimming when it's happened. Everyone's told to get out immediately - and they all do, immediately.''
Swimmers who vacate the pool get a refund, a voucher for a free swim, or can swim in an alternative pool. Alpine Aqualand's annual maintenance shutdown, which includes an extensive clean, takes place later this month, in two stages.Laura Ingraham Does “Not See What All The Furor” Over Her Hand Gesture Is About
Laura Ingraham explains her gesture at the GOP convention.
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CLEVELAND, OHIO — Conservative pundit Laura Ingraham sent shock waves through social media when she ended her speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention and appeared to briefly give a salute synonymous with a certain group of pro-genocide Germans. This morning on her syndicated radio show, she said she didn’t understand what all the controversy is about.
“I gotta be honest here folks,” Ingraham told her audience this morning, “
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therapies.
In other (unsaid, but certainly implied) words, naturopathic “doctors” are licensed or regulated in only a handful of states, but “doctors of chiropractic” and “chiropractic physicians” who practice “natural primary care” are licensed in all 50 states. Take that, naturopaths!
But that’s nothing compared to the way they take on medical doctors. If that was a shot across the bow, this is a direct aim at the medical profession:
Such as?
They seem particularly concerned that you might think they don’t know enough about testing to diagnose “this vast amount of other diseases” [sic], hence:
And, of course, they feel compelled to repeat that famous CAM canard and “vile, false accusation” that, while medical doctors treat only symptoms, chiropractors get to the “root cause” of your problem.
Actually, as we shall see, that’s not exactly how “treatments provided by Chiropractic Internists differ from standard medical care.”
Who’s behind all of this?
The “chiropractic internist” is the creation of the American Chiropractic Association (ACA), the largest of the chiropractic trade associations. The “Council on Diagnosis and Internal Disorders,” (CDID) is one of the ACA’s “specialty councils.” (Others include neurology and pediatrics.) According to its bylaws, the CDID “functions as a subordinate arm of the ACA” and “must act pursuant to and in conformity with ACA policy.” To help the ACA keep tabs on what it’s doing, the CDID must submit “activity reports” and its budget to the ACA.
“Board certification” as a “chiropractic internist” is bestowed by the American Board of Chiropractic Internists (ABCI), and being “board certified” permits one to call oneself a “diplomate” of the ABCI and use the initials “DABCI” after one’s name. However, ABCI is not a separate entity (as the term “Board” would imply); rather, it was established by and operates under the auspices of the CDID, and therefore the ACA. The Board consists of four chiropractors selected by the CDIC and it, too, must submit regular reports to the ACA. The Board recommends education and training courses for “diplomate” status as a “chiropractic internist.” The CDIC’s bylaws prohibit the Board’s decisions from conflicting with the ACA’s “Master Plan” and the ACA “administers and coordinates the activity of the DABCI post-doctoral specialty.” In sum, the whole operation is firmly in the control of the ACA.
With that in mind, let’s look at this “education and training.”
A company called ProHealth Seminars is the only ABCI-authorized course provider. According to public records, ProHealth Seminars is a Missouri limited liability company registered under the names of Jack Kessinger, a chiropractor, and Virginia Kessinger, presumably a relative. These two are also registered as the managing members of another company, Clint Publications, which publishes a journal of sorts for the “chiropractic internist,” called “ The Original Internist.” (There is also a Florida outfit listed as a provider, but its website is down and it does not appear to be active.)
ProHealth’s DABCI seminars are taught in five U.S. cities, two of them in Missouri, where Jack Kessinger practiced. (He passed away in 2011.) The 300-hour seminars take place on 26 weekends, one seminar per month, 9 AM to 6 AM on Saturdays and 9 AM to Noon on Sundays, for a little over 2 years. (There’s also a 100-hour “certificate of completion” course.) Each costs $395 if you register early. With two exceptions, all classes are held in either an Embassy Suites Hotel, an Airport Sheraton, Airport Hilton, or Hilton Garden Inn. The 100-hour “certificate” course and a “Pelvic Workshop” ($750 in advance), which is required of all seminar participants, are held at the National University of Health Sciences, which grants degrees in chiropractic, naturopathy, acupuncture and massage. The “Pelvic Workshop” (“The Natural Approach to Family Practice”) is advertised as “24 Hours and Hands On,” although the flyer doesn’t say whether that means actual live patients or some sort of medical mannequin. Why the DABCI feels only pelvic exams warrant clinical education is a mystery. In any event, to become a “diplomate” you’ll have to shell out over $10,000 for these courses, not including meals and lodging.
All seminars are identical in topic and faculty, each registration handout changing only the location and the dates. Whether they are live or video presentations, or a combination, is not clear. Whatever their format, each 12-hour weekend covers a topic (or topics) that would ordinarily consume weeks of education and training in a real internal medicine residency. For example, “Infectious Diseases and Emergency Disorders” is covered one weekend, as is “Geriatrics and Mental Health.” Cardiovascular Disease? 12 hours. Pulmonary Disease and Lung Function? 12 hours. Dermatology? 12 hours. And so on. References to dubious diagnostics and treatments are sprinkled throughout the course titles (again, 12 hours each): “Allergies, Sensitivities and Autoimmune Response,” “Detoxification and Diagnosis of Hepatic and Renal Systems,” and “Pharmacognosy – Utilizing Botanicals in a Functional Practice,” or, as we know it, Functional Medicine.
[By way of comparison, you can see what a real, three-year internal medicine residency looks like here. In contrast to the DABCI’s 300-hour course, here’s an internal medicine resident’s account of her first year, during which she worked 3,000 hours.]
Almost half of these courses (11 of 26) are taught by Robert Kessinger, Jack’s grandson, and, along with his father, Jack’s former chiropractic practice partner in Rolla, Missouri. Robert is either a medical genius or way out of his depth. He teaches “Foundations of Chiropractic Family Practice,” along with “Natural Strategies in Laboratory Testing,” as well as the courses covering allergies, endocrinology, blood tests (including tumor markers), infectious diseases, emergency medicine, diseases of the arterial system, geriatrics, mental health, neoplastic diseases and cancer and review of systems, history and physical exam.
Robert’s breadth of medical knowledge, or lack thereof, is closely matched by Darren Kirchner, a Kahoka, Missouri chiropractor, who teaches eight of the courses, including “Gastrointestinal Health and Protocols for a Healthy Gut,” cardiovascular disease, “detoxification,” differential diagnosis, and neoplastic disease and cancer (second course). ProHealth Seminars thankfully devotes 24 hours to the important topic of cancer, the only topic besides pelvic health for which the company offers more than one weekend of instruction.
Robert practices “upper cervical chiropractic care,” which is a variant of straight subluxation-based chiropractic. He refers readers of his blog posts to the National Vaccine Information Center, the notorious anti-vaccination website. A PubMed search reveals that he has published all of two case studies, both in a chiropractic journal and both claiming to have diagnosed upper cervical subluxations, with repeated x-rays and a thermocouple, in one patient with vertigo, hearing loss and tinnitus, and another with trauma-induced kyphosis (22 office visits). Needless to say, he claims treatment was successful. He’s also published in pseudoscientific fluff like the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research and says he’s “active in multiple Upper Cervical Research projects in conjunction with multiple clinics.”
I couldn’t find anything Kirchner had published. Nor could I find that either holds a faculty post at any educational institution. Just what might qualify either of them to teach such a breathtaking range of medical topics is another mystery I assume only the ABCI and the ACA could explain.
If you manage to finance, and find the time for, the ProHealth Seminar courses, you are eligible to sit for the ABCI exam, administered by the National Board of Chiropractic Examiners. It consists of 200 multiple choice questions and lasts 3 ½ hours. If you get 75% right, you pass. There is also a practical exam consisting of “several stations, including but not limited to male examinations, female examinations [and] Regional physical exam...” (Again, the creepy emphasis on examining females.) Finally, there is a (yes, one) case presentation.
And it shows
This skimpy education and training shows in their practices. Judging from the websites of “board certified chiropractic internists,” their practice looks a lot like the practice of a naturopathic “doctor”: dubious diagnostic testing and plenty of dietary supplements, all “proven” with a big dose of testimonials. Here are some examples:
How is this even legal?
If you are wondering how chiropractors can deceive patients with unvalidated testing, quack diagnoses and worthless treatments, look no further than your state legislators. To legally pull off this make-believe internal medicine practice, chiropractors need certain elements in their practice act: the right to use diagnostic testing and to offer “clinical nutritional” advice in the form of recommending (and, better yet, selling) dietary supplements and homeopathic remedies. Dietary supplements include not only vitamins and minerals, but also herbal remedies (that is, unpurified and unproven drugs) and glandulars (desiccated animal organs). These seemingly innocuous rights to perform diagnostic testing and give clinical nutrition advice can be parlayed into a perfectly legal “chiropractic internist” practice, even if one doesn’t go to the trouble of getting board certified. Even better is a provision allowing them to use all diagnostic and treatment procedures “taught by chiropractic colleges.”
Ohio is a recent example of how chiropractors are expanding their scope of practice to include an ersatz form of primary care. Ohio defines the practice of chiropractic as
utilization of the relationship between the musculo-skeletal structures of the body, the spinal column, and the nervous system in the restoration and maintenance of health, in connection with which patient care is conducted with due regard for first aid, hygienic, nutritional, and rehabilitative procedures and the specific vertebral adjustment and manipulation of the articulations and adjacent tissues of the body.
Sounds like traditional, subluxation-based chiropractic, right? But the Legislature gave jurisdiction over chiropractors to a State Board of Chiropractic, including the authority to enact rules governing chiropractic practice. The Board, which is made up of four chiropractors and one public member (a lawyer), by enacting a regulation, magnanimously interpreted the chiropractic scope of practice to include
the use of such diagnostic and treatment procedures as are taught by board approved chiropractic colleges except as prohibited by law and/or the rules of this board.
As long as a chiropractic college teaches a particular diagnostic or treatment procedure, and the Legislature or the Board hasn’t prohibited it, it’s legal. And what has the Council on Chiropractic Education said that all schools must teach students?
[to] practice primary health care as a portal-of-entry provider for patients of all ages and genders focusing on the inherent ability of the body to heal and enhance function without unnecessary drugs or surgery.
The State Board of Chiropractic, in its approved continuing education courses, supports this view that chiropractic practice extends far beyond musculoskeletal conditions. Courses include:
Endocrine System: “Overview of all hormones with special focus on estrogen dominance, metabolic syndrome, adrenal fatigue.” (Adrenal fatigue is a fake disease invented by naturopaths.)
Nutritional Support for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Chiropractic and Pregnancy, including how to recommend homeopathic remedies and herbs for pregnant patients.
In 2016, just to make sure, chiropractors got the Ohio Legislature to pass a bill authorizing chiropractors to administer, sell and provide advice regarding dietary supplements, homeopathic remedies and non-prescription drugs “to restore and maintain health.” Gov. Kasich signed the bill into law on Jan. 4.
So, in bits and pieces of legislation and regulations, Ohio chiropractors have cobbled together a legal framework that takes them far beyond detecting and correcting subluxations into what is essentially primary care practice, just “without drugs or surgery.” This strategy is repeated in other states.
The ACA, for its part, is heavily lobbying Congress to expand Medicare coverage of chiropractic so it will, as the ACA cryptically says,
allow doctors of chiropractic (DC) to perform to the fullest scope of their license in Medicare... seniors are being denied the full range of chiropractic services that could help them lead healthier and happier lives.
The ACA doesn’t explain what the “fullest scope of their license” or what the “full range of chiropractic services” might be, but you can bet their “Chiropractic Internists” want a part of the publicly-funded pie.
The average state legislator probably has little idea what seemingly innocuous bills allowing chiropractors to give “clinical nutrition” advice to “support and maintain health” or practice diagnostic methods and treatments “taught in chiropractic colleges” really mean. They likely think of chiropractors as “back doctors,” along with the rest of the public. That ignorance results in poorly educated and trained “chiropractic internists” who prey on the sick and worried well with their quack diagnoses and dubious treatments.In part one, we covered some basic ways to quickly and easily power your electronics project. In this section, we'll cover some more advanced methods for powering a project that may not be practical to breadboard out. Instead, you'll probably incorporate these when designing a PCB or moving toward finalizing a project.
Take care when implementing these methods and be sure to double check your wiring before connecting power as some of them can fail somewhat spectacularly. In particular, when testing your own AC power supply, I'd advise taking precautions such as an isolated power supply or at least a easy way to quickly cut power from a safe distance. (For example, using an outlet that is controlled by a switch can make testing an AC power supply much safer and significantly easier.)
Lithium Polymer Rechargeable Batteries
Pros Large capacity battery that can sustain high load, easy to charge via USB
Cons Most applications will need not only a battery management IC, but also a voltage booster!
Lithium polymer (LiPo) batteries have been an increasingly popular choice in a variety of different applications including mobile phones and radio controlled models. The main benefit of LiPo batteries is that they are small and hold a lot of charge. Furthermore, they're able to deliver that charge very quickly when compared to other batteries.
One notable downside to LiPo batteries is that they require a non-trivial charging curve which means you can't just plug them in and throw power at them and expect them to behave well.
Here is a typical charging profile taken from the application note in the MCP73831/2 datasheet. As the battery reaches fully charged, the charging current provided by the chip ramps off to keep the battery from overheating.
To use a LiPo battery, you'll need to use a separate battery charger (as with most RC cars) or integrate your own battery management and charging circuitry. For most projects, I'd suggest simply adding the battery management directly to your PCB. You can use the MCP73832 or a similar controller along with the recommended application circuitry between your battery and the rest of your circuit.
My recent battery powered projects are using this circuitry with the added bonus of charging directly from the micro USB port which also functions for programming. A simple diode in the USB's power line protects your computer or USB power supply from any feedback from other power supplies you might be working with.
The above schematic shows a typical use of the Atmega32u4 and an MCP73832. While many projects will run just fine at 3.3V (the typical output voltage of a LiPo battery) the addition of a Voltage Booster will allow you to get better speeds out of your microcontroller and to drive 5V components. In this example, I've wired it so that the battery management IC is always running directly off the battery so that you can charge your battery via USB without turning it on. Turning the switch on enables the voltage booster that powers the microcontroller and the rest of your components. The status pin on the battery management IC is currently wired directly to the UC which means you can read the charge status and react to it programmatically. You could also wire this directly to a diode to give you a visible indicator. The value of the "prog" resistor should be chosen based on the battery size and can be calculated from the chart in the datasheet. This will determine how fast the battery charges. Beware, charging a LiPo battery too quickly can be dangerous.
For an alternative voltage booster that comes in a more easily solderable package, you can try the LTC3525-5.
For a simpler projects or prototyping, you may want to find a pre-assembled LiPo battery management circuit.
Linear AC power supply
Pros Simple and self contained and easy to implement, understand, and debug
Cons Bulky transformer makes for a heavy addition to your project that can only support a single input voltage
We covered the easiest way of getting DC power from an AC outlet: using a pre-made AC adaptor, but there are other options that avoid a bulky plug against the wall or taking up all the space on your power strips. The first of which is to incorporate a linear power supply directly into your project. A linear power supply uses a large voltage transformer to drop the 120VAC (or whatever your region happens to use) down to the 5v (or 3v) that you'll most likely want for your microcontroller projects. To do this, a linear power supply first scales the voltage down to a more reasonable level and then irons out the AC sine wave using a configuration of four diodes known as a bridge rectifier.
The above diagram shows the input AC current, an intermediary step, and the output of the bridge rectifier. Notice how the output of the bridge rectifier, while no longer alternating between positive and negative voltages, is not a clean power supply. To smooth this supply out, we run this messy waveform through a large capacitor and a voltage regulator to produce a clean and consistent 5v.
This schematic shows a typical circuit diagram for a linear power supply. The bridge rectifier is shown expanded, but you can get these as a self-contained IC. You'll choose your transformer based on your input and output voltages (in the US, probably 120V in and 5V out). Something like a 100uf aluminum capacitor will probably be sufficient to take the majority of the noise out of the power supply and the voltage regulator and decoupling capacitor will smooth out the rest.
Implementing a linear AC power supply is pretty much as simple as following this diagram. Because of the relative simplicity of the transformer and rectifier, you'll find this kind of power supply relatively robust. When designing your circuitboard, be sure to take reasonable precautions with your high voltage traces. In general, you'll want to keep a minimum of an 8mm gap between high voltage traces and low voltage traces or components. You'll also want to avoid using a high-voltage circuit like this one without some kind of case or shielding to keep stray fingers from coming in contact with the live traces.
Switched-Mode Power Supply (SMPS)
Pros Can accommodate a range of voltages, small and cheap power supply without a bulky plug.
Cons Requires complicated circuitry and very specific parts that may be hard to source
The switching power supply is the final installment in our power supply solutions. It solves the two largest problems with the linear power supply in exchange for a bit of added complexity. The switching power supply is smaller and can accommodate a range of voltages. This is especially important for projects that may eventually need work internationally where the wall voltage may be different than what you're used to at home.
The theory behind the switching power supply is to use a capacitor as a sort of "reservoir" that instead of getting a consistent input pattern will alternate between getting charged quickly and receiving no charge. This is controlled by a specialized integrated circuit coupled with a specialized transformer that switches the circuit on and off to keep the output power steady. When the capacitor drains below a certain point, the circuit switches on momentarily to charge the circuit. This switching mechanism is what makes this power supply able to handle a range of voltages.
The chip we ended up using in Reflowster was the LNK564P. We coupled it with the recommended CWS-T1-DAK85 transformer.
Above is the application schematic featured for the transformer/chip combination. As you can see, the complexity for this sort of power supply is significantly higher than for previous examples. Not only is the switching controller required, but a number of auxiliary components including an inductor, a handful of diodes. A few resistors manage the output voltage of the power supply and some additional optional components can improve the safety and efficiency of the circuit.
Before implementing this circuit, read over the datasheet and application note carefully. There is a lot of additional information about the circuit there including specific part numbers, recommendations, and even an example PCB layout. When working with high-voltage circuits, don't skimp on your trace width. If you've been dealing with digital logic, you're probably used to using close to the minimum trace size supported by your PCB printing service. You'll have to break this habit for high-voltage circuitry where a thin trace will heat up considerably.
For all of these advanced circuits, take the time to research them on your own before trying to apply them to your own project. This article is meant only as a list of suggestions to be aware of while planning out a project.Energy independence is good for national security. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
OPEC met on Nov. 27, and openly recognized that the United States' oil technological revolution – driven by enhanced oil recovery methods including hydraulic fracturing (known as fracking) and horizontal drilling – has undermined the cartel's economic and political power. This constitutes one of the major geopolitical and economic shifts of the 21st century in America’s favor. This meeting has been characterized as OPEC abandoning its role as a “swing producer” or simply the arbiter of oil supply and demand. Some are now suggesting that the new swing producer will be the United States.
Enhanced oil recovery technology was consistently denigrated as unworkable and unprofitable, and there will be many more articles restating this as the old wine in a new bottle. These technologies have made the U.S. the world's number one oil producer, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. OPEC’s strategy of allowing the market to decide oil prices is designed to hurt American enhanced oil recovery activities, with the assumption that American producers need a higher profit margin per barrel than it does. This may be a horrible miscalculation on OPEC's part due to continual advances in technology and innovation.
According to a 2013 report, hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling have the potential to increase the global reserve of oil from 1.6 billion barrels to 10.2 billion barrels. Domestically, we are already witnessing the 21st century oil boom generate prosperity for states like Colorado, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. Current estimates indicate that by 2020 the United States will be the dominant worldwide producer of both natural gas and oil and achieve energy independence.
However, this energy issue has been dominated by the wrong people: economists, businessmen, engineers and environmentalists. They all have their required expertise, but all of this is really an issue of foreign policy and national security. There are four ways that this new situation can be welcomed by conservatives, liberals, realists and environmentalists.
First, there is the potential for prosperity and profit at home as the United States re-enters the world as the most important exporter of petroleum and natural gas. This means jobs, investment and economic progress.
Second, the new room created by this boom will now allow the United States and the West to properly research, test and develop alternative energies allowing the market (and need) to dictate success and failure. There is no one concerned about national security who does not believe that we need to do this. We need to find cost effective, consistent, reliable alternative energy sources that do not kill the pocketbook of the electorate. This providential gift is exactly what we need to grant us more time to achieve that goal. The naysayers will say the opposite. The “earth is flat crowd” has always been destroyers, not innovators, and critics, not doers.
Third is the enhancement of freedom and human rights. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times introduced the concept of the "First Law of Petropolitics," positing that as the price of oil increases, so does repression and lack of change in places like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The reverse is true as well. Oil profits fund military adventurism, nuclear weapons development, terrorism, oppression, extremism, secret police and tyranny. These nations will engage in some if not all of these without oil, but the pressure on them to curtail or slow such malevolence, combined with increased pressure domestically (due to economic trouble), will occur.
Fourth, and most importantly, is the national security question. The American dominance in oil and natural gas gives us the leeway that presidents have sought for decades. It provides the ability to have a much freer hand with the Middle East, allowing us much more leverage with our de facto allies such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, while offering greater protection to our definitive allies like Israel. It means enhanced leverage against the Iranians, and it puts mounting pressure on them economically. It reduces the clout of irritants in international relations such as the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian governments.Last Travel Trip Tuesday drew out some feisty albeit informed comments on ALOR. One, in particular, made me question my ethics as a travel writer. A travel writer’s dilemma if you will.
Am I crushing the world I aspire to see under my giant carbon footprint?
“I also often wonder how average travel bloggers justify their bragging lists from the environmental point of view. I see, on front pages of blogs, statement like “28 countries, 4 continents in 1 year”. What about the carbon pollution caused by all your cheap flights from one continent to the other?” — Juergen, Dare2Go
Ouch right! Am I the “average travel blogger” in question? Is writing about cheap flights a horrible idea?
Travel Tip Tuesday
To be fair, Juergen made good points. Carbon footprint and sustainable travel are topics not covered on ALOR. Should they be?
Suddenly, I found myself questioning future posts on finding affordable airfare.
Then, I thought of two things that enabled me to one, sleep and two, write next week’s Travel Tip Tuesday.
First, it’s not always about me. There’s a pretty decent chance Juergen’s comment was a collection of observations. I merely provided an article and an opportunity to voice an opinion.
Note to self, stop being too sensitive.
Second and more importantly, the majority of ALOR readers live in America.
Finding Cheap Airfare to Europe
Since Google auto-fills “Finding Cheap Airfare” with “Finding Cheap Airfare to Europe” it’s safe to say, Americans are actively looking for affordable airfare to Europe. Trouble is, it’s hard to find.
Most American families, like the one I grew up in, save for one really great vacation a year. High airfares often mean, those trips are somewhere between our two coasts, Mexico and Canada.
So although Juergen’s comments gave me pause, I have decided to still share tips on finding cheap airfare to Europe next week.
As a travel writer, I believe travel is the best way to open minds and hearts to cultural differences. If the gateway to an open mind starts with Europe, then let’s go there.
Sustainable Travel
Sustainable travel is not likely to be a focus on ALOR. The majority of ALOR readers are dreaming about traveling a lot more frequently than they get to do it.
However, thanks to Juergen from Dare2Go sustainable travel will at least be a concept this frequent traveler will be more mindful of. I’ve started my research and already learned a great deal.
Fellow travel writers, your comments, advice, and posts are welcome here. If you have written about sustainable travel, please comment in the section below with a link to your post or send us an email at [email protected].
Travel Tip Tuesday
As travelers in constant motion, we’ve learned to pack light, be prepared and on occasion MacGyver through things.
Travel Tip Tuesday is our way of sharing tricks we learned along the way, as quick tips.
Travel safe, fill your eyes and share your stories.While the individual mandate tax gets most of the attention, the ObamaCare law actually contains 20 new or higher taxes on the American people. These taxes are gradually phased in over the years 2010 (with its 10 percent “tanning tax”) to 2018 (when the tax on comprehensive health insurance plans kicks in.)
Six months from now, in January 2013, five major ObamaCare taxes will come into force:
1. The ObamaCare Medical Device Manufacturing Tax
This 2.3 percent tax on medical device makers will raise the price of (for example) every pacemaker, prosthetic limb, stent, and operating table. Can you remind us, Mr. President, how taxing medical devices will reduce the cost of health care? The tax is particularly destructive because it is levied on gross sales and even targets companies who haven’t turned a profit yet.
These are often small, scrappy companies with less than 20 employees who pioneer the next generation of life-prolonging devices. In addition to raising the cost of health care, this $20 billion tax over the next ten years will not help the country’s jobs outlook, as the industry employs nearly 400,000 Americans. Several companies have already responded to the looming tax by cutting research and development budgets and laying off workers.
2. The ObamaCare High Medical Bills Tax
This onerous tax provision will hit Americans facing the highest out-of-pocket medical bills. Currently, Americans are allowed to deduct medical expenses on their 1040 form to the extent the costs exceed 7.5 percent of one’s adjusted gross income.
The new ObamaCare provision will raise that threshold to 10 percent, subjecting patients to a higher tax bill. This tax will hit pre-retirement seniors the hardest. Over the next ten years, affected Americans will pony up a minimum total of $15 billion in taxes thanks to this provision.
3. The ObamaCare Flexible Spending Account Cap
The 24 million Americans who have Flexible Spending Accounts will face a new federally imposed $2,500 annual cap. These pre-tax accounts, which currently have no federal limit, are used to purchase everything from contact lenses to children’s braces. With the cost of braces being as high as $7,200, this tax provision will play an unwelcome role in everyday kitchen-table health care decisions.
The cap will also affect families with special-needs children, whose tuition can be covered using FSA funds. Special-needs tuition can cost up to $14,000 per child per year. This cruel tax provision will limit the options available to such families, all so that the federal government can squeeze an additional $13 billion out of taxpayer pockets over the next ten years.
The targeting of FSAs by President Obama and congressional Democrats is no accident. The progressive left has never been fond of the consumer-driven accounts, which serve as a small roadblock in their long-term drive for a one-size-fits-all government health care bureaucracy.
For further proof, note the ObamaCare “medicine cabinet tax” which since 2011 has barred the 13.5 million Americans with Health Savings Accounts from purchasing over-the-counter medicines with pre-tax funds.
4. The ObamaCare Surtax on Investment Income
Under current law, the capital gains tax rate for all Americans rises from 15 to 20 percent in 2013, while the top dividend rate rises from 15 to 39.6 percent. The new ObamaCare surtax takes the top capital gains rate to 23.8 percent and top dividend rate to 43.4 percent. The tax will take a minimum of $123 billion out of taxpayer pockets over the next ten years.
And, last but not least...
5. The ObamaCare Medicare Payroll Tax increase
This tax soaks employers to the tune of $86 billion over the next ten years.
As you can understand, there is a reason why the authors of ObamaCare wrote the law in such a way that the most brutal tax increases take effect conveniently after the 2012 election. It’s the same reason President Obama, congressional Democrats, and the mainstream media conveniently neglect to mention these taxes and prefer that you simply “move on” after the Supreme Court ruling.
John Kartch is director of communications at Americans for Tax Reform. Follow him on Twitter @JohnKartch.Alex Armah has big dreams for his local Jewish community, but he worries about the future.
Only about 100 people from his district identify as Jewish, and many of them work and live in cities hours away. Not everyone can afford to return to his synagogue every weekend for Shabbat services.
Meanwhile, he worries about the young adults who have left their rural upbringing for university life. As Armah knows, Judaism can only be sustained with an engaged community of young people.
These religious concerns are familiar to rabbis in the western world, where cultural assimilation remains a crucial issue in the 21st century.
However, Armah’s small Jewish community is not remotely close to the bustling centres of Toronto, Montreal or New York. It is in Sefwi Wiawso, a small, humid district of Western Ghana surrounded by cities that are overwhelmingly Christian.
READ: FILM ABOUT CHASSIDIC WOMAN’S AFFAIR IS CANADA’S OSCAR CONSIDERATION
This story of this remote yet thriving Jewish space in rural Ghana is the focus of a new documentary from Montreal native Gabrielle Zilkha. After close to a year on the festival circuit – including a stop at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival last May – Doing Jewish: A Story from Ghana continues to thrill audiences across North America, premiering in New York and Atlanta.
In keeping with popular demand and word-of-mouth, a condensed, 45-minute version of the film will air across Canada on Monday, Feb. 6, on Vision TV.
The documentary is told from Zilkha’s perspective and begins during a trip to Accra, Ghana, in 2010. Working at a human rights organization in the big city, the filmmaker realizes that she wants to find a place to pray and eat during the High Holidays.
Zilkha’s Jewish mother comes to the rescue, finding information online about the Sefwi Wiawso community. A day’s travel from Accra, the community has a synagogue, painted blue and white, and the followers keep strictly kosher while practising many Jewish rites and traditions.
In Sefwi Wiawso, the director discovers a devoutness that she says pales in comparison to the bustling Jewish life she knows from North America
As Zilkha told The CJN last May, “There are a variety of perspectives about what it means to be Jewish. I hope that the film pushes people to think critically about how they perceive Jewish identity.”
In the doc, the filmmaker speaks with rabbis and historians, including British historian Tudor Parfitt. Parfitt believes this Ghanaian community comes from a line of Sephardi Jews from Morocco or Portugal.
Many of these Jews lived in coastal settlements along the Horn of Africa while keeping their religious identity a secret.
However, many from the Sefwi Wiawso township identify as the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, who left the Holy Land more than 2,500 years ago.
Doing Jewish is a fascinating documentary, although the brevity of the broadcast version places a lot of emphasis on talking-head interviews.
The film is at its most insightful when focusing on Armah, as he preaches for conversion practices and plans to teach the locals Hebrew to enable them to connect with other Jewish communities around the world.
Zilkha and her crew frame many of these moments with Armah in the distance, reverent or praying, as his voice-over explains an insistence on keeping the local Jewish values pure. Visually, these scenes depict how the passion and persistence of one person can spread quickly through a remote space.
As the director explains in the film, she thought that Judaism was a very insular religion. Yet, the efforts of Armah and the citizens of Sefwi Wiawso to remain spiritually devout managed to bring her closer to her religious roots.
Armah, even with his worries about the fruitfulness of Jewish life in Ghana, can rejoice with that news.
Beyond the documentary, interested viewers can visit the film’s website for an interactive journey through the Sefwi Wiawso region to learn more about this community.Gabby Timms
Hero's Welcome staff pose with Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Sanders ordered the sandwich during his visit last week. Hero’s Welcome owner, Robert Camp, told Seven Days the store once offered a Sanders sandwich that poked fun at the senator, but later pulled it. The new version captures the essence of his rise to national prominence, Camp said.
The popular general store has a line of chairs out front — one side labeled “Republicans,” the other “Democrats.” In the middle, until recently, sat a lone “Sandernistas” chair, Camp said. That chair will be back — as long as the new neighbor doesn’t mind, Camp joked.
“He’s just been great,” said Camp. “This is going to be his home, so we won’t encourage autographs.”
Paul Heintz
Sen. Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane O'Meara Sanders, at a rally in Reno, Nev.
“My family had a lake home in Maine since 1900, but we hadn’t had the time to go there in recent years — especially since my parents passed away,” she said. “We finally let go of it and that enabled us to buy a place in the islands — something I’ve always hoped for. ”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the proud new owner of a summer home in the Champlain Islands,has confirmed.The Burlington resident last week plopped down nearly $600,000 on a lakefront camp in North Hero.Sanders’ new crib has four bedrooms and 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront on the east side of the island — facing Vermont, not New York. The Bern will keep his home in Burlington and use the new camp seasonally.“We’ve traveled up to the islands many times over the years — almost always on day trips,” Sanders’ wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, toldin a written statement. “We’ve been impressed with the North Hero community, eaten at the North Hero House and Shore Acres and have suggested them to friends who were looking for a beautiful place to stay or have dinner. St. Anne’s
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However, in the West Midlands, Yorkshire, the North West…'Kill the cable, kill the cable,' shouted the security guard as he burst through the double doors into the media room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Riyadh, followed by Saudi police. It was too late.
A private meeting of Opec leaders, gathered this weekend in Riyadh for the cartel's third meeting in its 47-year history, had just been broadcast to the world's media for more than half an hour after a technician had mistakenly plugged the TV feed into the wrong socket. The facade of unity that the cartel so carefully cultivates to a world spooked by soaring oil prices was shattered.
Sometimes, such innocent mistakes can have far-reaching economic and political consequences. Commodity and currency traders said this weekend that oil prices would surge again tomorrow - possibly breaking the $101 per barrel record set in the late 1970s - while the already battered dollar would fall further on the back of the unintentional broadcast.
On Friday night, during what the participants thought were private talks, Venezuela's oil minister Venezuela Rafael Ramirez and his Iranian counterpart Gholamhossein Nozari, argued that pricing - and selling - oil using the crippled dollar was damaging the cartel.
They said Opec should formally express its concern about the weakness of the dollar when the cartel makes its official declaration at the close of the summit today. But the Saudis, the world's largest oil producers and de facto head of Opec, vetoed the proposal. Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, warned that even the mere mention to journalists of the fact that leaders were discussing the weak dollar would cause the US currency to plummet.
Unfortunately his words and those of everyone at the meeting were being broadcast via a live television feed to a group of astonished reporters. 'I couldn't believe it,' said one who was there. 'When I realised they didn't know they were being broadcast live, I frantically started taking notes.'
Opec only realised that the leaders' row was being broadcast to the world when the Reuters news agency put out a report of the argument.
The weakness of the dollar is one reason why oil prices are so high, as cartel members seek to compensate for their lower earnings. This means a further drop in the dollar is likely to be accompanied by a rise in oil prices.Error Code: Permissions to Access Online Multiplayer Have Changed or Profile Signed in Elsewhere
Players may occasionally receive the error message "Your permissions to access online multiplayer may have changed or your profile may have been signed in elsewhere." while playing or attempting to log into a Destiny game. Please see below for information on potential causes and troubleshooting steps.
Potential Causes
Players may encounter this error due to some of the below scenarios:
The account does not have an active PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live Gold subscription, or the subscription has expired
The account has been signed into another console
PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live may be undergoing maintenance or connection issues
The consoles were recently switched between a wired or wireless connection without the console’s network settings being updated to match the new connection type
Troubleshooting Suggestions
Players that are encountering this error message frequently or are blocked from being able to play due to this error message may wish to try the following troubleshooting steps:
Renew the account subscription if the account’s PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live Gold subscription has expired
Restore licenses if the PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live subscriptions are confirmed to still be active
Clear the console cache to remove potentially corrupted temporary data that may be impacted the account’s licenses
Log out of the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live account on any alternative consoles
Log out and sign back into the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live accounts on the target console
Add additional security features to their accounts on alternative consoles to prevent unauthorized access
Check PlayStation Support or Xbox Support for potential maintenance or service outagesInvasive Roots of Anti-Cheat Software
Alissa Torres
Some of the most sophisticated rootkit behaviors are implemented by today's anti-cheat gaming software, in a constantly evolving game of cat and mouse. Game hackers often look for flaws in a system or program’s logic, seeking to exploit them for their own performance gains. As cheats evolve to evade detection, so do the anti-cheat software products, employing hooking mechanisms to catch the newest subversions. Often the effectiveness of an anti-cheat implementation will affect legitimate users’ enjoyment (no one likes to play with cheaters, even cheaters themselves!), making it highly profitable for game developers to focus on improving this technology and expediently identifying game hackers. As a natural consequence, anti-cheat software has grown more invasive and intrusive. For example, a recent version of VAC (Valve's Anti-Cheat Software) was found to scrape gamers' system DNS cache in order to spot commercial game cheats and ban users. Just what else is being extricated from our gaming systems and which products are the worst offenders?
By analyzing system memory, several anti-cheat software implementations will be isolated. With a cadre of reverse engineers, we will walk through just how these products are monitoring for game hacking behavior and if any of these techniques call into question aspects of their End User License Agreements.
Bio: Alissa Torres is a certified SANS instructor, specializing in advanced computer forensics and incident response. Her industry experience includes serving in the trenches as part of the Mandiant Computer Incident Response Team (MCIRT) as an incident handler and working on a internal security team as a digital forensic investigator. She has extensive experience in information security, spanning government, academic, and corporate environments and holds a Bachelors degree from University of Virginia and a Masters from University of Maryland in Information Technology. Alissa has taught as an instructor at the Defense Cyber Investigations Training Academy (DCITA), delivering incident response and network basics to security professionals entering the forensics community. She has presented at various industry conferences and numerous B-Sides events (those being the best events, obviously!). In addition to being a GIAC Certified Forensic Analyst (GCFA), she holds the GCFE, GPEN, GCIH, CISSP, EnCE, and CFCE.
Back to BSides Las Vegas 2014 video listBad-Jacketing is "the practice of creating suspicion—through the spreading of rumors, manufacture of evidence, etc.—that bona fide organizational members, usually in key positions, are FBI/police informers, guilty of such offenses as skimming organization funds."[1] Scholar Mark Anthony Neal writes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover used the technique against the Black Panther Party and other Black Power organizations as part of its COINTELPRO operations.[1] Neal writes that this technique was effective in isolating key individuals, forcing them out of the organization, and that its effectiveness was enhanced by the tendency of Black Power activists to divide among "rigid racial, ideological, and increasingly gendered" lines.[1]
Jo Durden-Smith claims that this technique was used by U.S. prison guards to undermine targeted prisoners and so making them vulnerable to manipulation.[2]Posted June 19, 2015 at 1:01 am
This comic really could have just been the first panel and it would've worked.
Anyway, there are many, MANY naming scenarios that could inspire this sort of frustration, but the most recent one for me was when I was trying to think what to name Robo on my own next playthrough of Chrono Trigger. I want to name him after a mech from the Gundam series known as Big Zam, but even if you take out the space, that's still too many letters. I'm currently favoring "BiZam".
I had originally written this comic with Grace also wanting to name Robo "Big Zam" with Tedd expressing confusion over what Big Zam even is, but I I felt too large a percentage of the readership would be as confused as Tedd and decided to go with something more generally accessible. My one regret is that this meant losing Grace saying "I don't know how to Zam".1/ The House passed a resolution to block and overturn Trump's unilateral national emergency declaration to get the border wall money that Congress denied him. "The President's act is lawless," Nancy Pelosi said. "It does violence to our Constitution and therefore to our democracy. His declaration strikes at the heart of our Founders' concept of America, which demands separation of powers." The House voted 245-182, mostly along party lines, with 13 Republicans defecting to side with Democrats. The Senate now has 18 days to bring it to the floor for a vote, where it's also expected to pass. Four Republican votes are needed to ensure passage if all Senate Democrats vote for the disapproval resolution, and three Republican senators — Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis — have already signaled they will support the measure. Congress has never tried to cancel a national emergency declared by a president, and Trump has vowed to veto any measure that blocks funding for his border wall. (New York Times / Washington Post / CNN / ABC News / Washington Post / Reuters / Politico / Los Angeles Times)
2/ Paul Manafort's attorneys asked for leniency as he faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison. In a court filing, Manafort's attorneys described the 69-year-old as a man who has been "personally, professionally, and financially" broken by Robert Mueller's investigation, and as someone who deserves a sentence "significantly" below the statutory maximum of 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy charges. Manafort's lawyers also wrote that because "this case is not about murder, drug cartels, organized crime, the Madoff Ponzi scheme or the collapse of Enron," the former Trump campaign chairman shouldn't be sentenced too harshly. Two federal judges will sentence Manafort on two separate occasions over the next month for criminal charges that include tax and bank fraud, witness tampering, and working as an unregistered lobbyist for a foreign government. (Politico / NPR / The Guardian / Salon)
Manafort gave alleged Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik 75 pages of recent, "very detailed" campaign polling data on August 2, 2016, which "would have been relevant to a meeting they were having within the [Trump] campaign," redacted court filings by Manafort's lawyers suggest. In an email, Manafort ordered Rick Gates to print out the data so he could share it with Kilimnik. Gates previously testified that Manafort walked Kilimnik through the data at the August 2 meeting. (Emptywheel / Daily Beast)
3/ The House Judiciary Committee believes it has evidence that Trump asked then-Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker if an ally could take over the investigation of Michael Cohen and the Trump Organization in the Southern District of New York. The committee is looking into whether Whitaker may have perjured himself when he testified to Congress that he never made "any promises or commitments concerning the special counsel's investigation or any other investigation" to Trump, who wanted Manhattan U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman to take charge of the investigations. Berman – a former Rudy Giuliani law partner who donated to the Trump campaign in 2016 and was interviewed for the U.S. attorney job by Trump – recused himself from involvement in the matter last year. (Wall Street Journal)
4/ A federal appeals court rejected claims that Mueller's appointment was unconstitutional. Andrew Miller, a Roger Stone associate, will now have to testify to a grand jury in Mueller's investigation or go to jail after the appeals court said that Mueller was legally appointed by Rod Rosenstein as special counsel in May 2017. (Politico / CNN)
A House Democrat filed legislation that would require Mueller's Russia report to be made public and give Congress access to the investigation's underlying evidence. (Reuters)
5/ Cohen is expected to publicly accuse and present documents that implicate Trump of "criminal conduct" while in office during public testimony before the House Oversight Committee tomorrow. Cohen will reportedly provide lawmakers with information about Trump's financial statements, including documentation of his reimbursement for the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels. Cohen plans to share who signed the $35,000 monthly checks he received as reimbursement for his hush-money payments to Daniels. Cohen is also expected to detail how long Trump remained involved in discussions regarding a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, as well as to detail his "behind-the-scenes" experience of working for Trump for over a decade. Cohen testified behind closed doors before the Senate Intelligence Committee today, where he apologized for the lies he told during his 2017 testimony. (CNN / Axios / Daily Beast / NBC News / Politico / New York Times / Wall Street Journal / Reuters)
A Trump ally and sitting U.S. congressman threatened Cohen with exposing his "girlfriends" on the eve of his public House Oversight Committee testimony. "Do your wife and father-in-law know about your girlfriends," Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted. "Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat." Gaetz said he was "challenging the veracity and character of a witness," and not trying to intimidate a witness. He added: "This is what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas." (Daily Beast / Axios / VICE News)
Cohen has been disbarred in New York. Cohen's guilty pleas on charges of tax evasion, excessive campaign contributions, and lying to Congress ensured he would be disbarred. (ABC News)
Notables.San Fermin Returns With 'Open' — And A New Album Soon
Enlarge this image toggle caption Denny Renshaw/Courtesy of the artist Denny Renshaw/Courtesy of the artist
The brainchild of classically trained songwriter and bandleader Ellis Ludwig-Leone, San Fermin has evolved from an immaculate, studio-bound chamber-pop ensemble to a looser, livelier full-time operation. Singers Allen Tate and Charlene Kaye — the latter a replacement for Rae Cassidy, who in turn replaced Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe of Lucius, who sang on San Fermin's 2013 debut — take turns in the spotlight, and each functions as a versatile mouthpiece for Ludwig-Leone's prolific bursts of inspiration.
In the months to come, San Fermin will return with a new album titled Belong, which — if this first taste, a song called "Open," is any indication — promises to pick up where 2015's Jackrabbit left off. Amid pitter-pattering percussion and strings that swoop and swirl, Kaye sings beautifully about coming to terms with who we are and what we desire.
"'Open' was the keystone of this new record, the song I kept coming back to that shaped the direction of everything else," Ludwig-Leone writes via email. "It's a call from that little nagging voice telling you that you might be a bad person, or at least want bad things."
Belong comes out later this year via Downtown/Interscope.10 Total Score CATALYST® Case For iPhone 6 Plus Several times I have dropped my phone in water only to have my device well protected by the Catalyst case. I recommend Catalyst to anyone looking to upgrade to a better case. PROS Provides protection against water damage CONS None found User Rating: Be the first one!
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YBLTV Review & Giveaway: CATALYST® Case For iPhone 6 Plus
The biggest problem I see with electronic device users is damage due to being dropped. There are a lot of companies that make cases promising to protect your devices from drops but few can say that they protect against water. One of the companies that does is Catalyst. For the past month I have had the opportunity to test out a phone case from this company.
Upon opening the box, the user is told to test the case before use. A video provided by the company suggests that you test the case without the device inside by immersing the case underwater. If air bubbles escape from the case then the user is told to pull the case out and check the rubber seal that makes the case waterproof. The case also increases the sound output from my cell phones speakers by making them louder while improving the frequency output at the same time.
I have found the Catalyst case to be a major improvement over the last case I owned and I will be a Catalyst user from now on. My previous case did not provide protection against water damage as Catalyst does.
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Catalyst is a lifestyle accessories brand founded to create iconic products that enable people to explore and share their world like never before. Catalyst offers premium performance accessories at the best value for their customers.
Josh Wright is an award‐winning industrial designer who graduated from the Art Center College of Design. June Lai is the research, development and business partner at Catalyst. Together, after seeing a need for a product that fit their needs but did not yet exist, they designed and developed an iPhone case that would protect their products through their many outdoor and underwater adventures. Since Catalyst’s inception in 2010 the brand has introduced the highest performance line of everyday cases, accessories and sleeves featuring their own proprietary technology.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: YBLTV Writer / Reviewer, Jack X received a Catalyst case for free from Catalyst in consideration for a Product Review.OTTAWA - Just before the Norwegian soccer team touched down in Canada in preparation for the Women's World Cup, Ada Hegerberg posted a picture to her Instagram account of the “essentials” she was bringing with her.
Neatly laid out on a bed were a handful of items – a pair of Puma trainers, harmonicas, headphones, a Panini sticker album, a J Cole vinyl record and three books. Of the latter, one was Menn i mørket, written by Norwegian Asbjørn Sunde. It's a true story – an account of Sunde’s sabotage of Nazi occupation of the country during World War II.
Days later, she took to her Instagram again and uploaded a video of her placing the J Cole album – 2014 Forest Hills Drive - on a record player and moving the needle to the song “No Role Modelz”. In the wider context of Hegerberg, who she is and what she's accomplished, the lyrics are more than a little ironic.
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“No role models and I'm here right now
No role models to speak of
Searching through my memory, my memory
I couldn't find one”
Hegerberg is 19 and is certainly an inspirational figure. When in her company, she stares intently as you ask a question and keeps staring as she answers. Eye contact is important. She enjoys the connection. She enjoys the conversation. She's very different, and refreshingly so. And like the two examples show above, she's full of surprises.
I ask her lots of things when we meet. I ask her about her pastimes, what she enjoys away from soccer, trying to find a pattern between her personality on and off the field.
Story continues
“I like books. I read a lot, to be honest. I have two Norwegian favorites but I read everything from biographies to novels,” she tells me. “I don't study at the moment because I finished school last year. And as my Mom and Dad always told me, I try to suck in as much knowledge as I can when I don't study.
“And I think it's a good way to not focus on football all the time, to get away from thinking about yourself, your team. You're thinking about yourself all the time. ‘Did I get enough sleep, did I train enough?’ So just to relax a bit, I read.”
OTTAWA, ON - JUNE 7: Ada Hegerberg #21 of Norway celebrates her second half goal against Thailand during the FIFA Women's World Cup Canada 2015 Group B match between Norway and Thailand at Lansdowne Stadium on June 7, 2015 in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo by Andre Ringuette/Getty Images)
It's fitting. A deeply intelligent and thoughtful player, Hegerberg, much like Norway, has slipped under the radar at this tournament. She was magnificent in the opener against Thailand, scoring once in a 4-0 win. In the clash with Germany, she was a crucial element in her side's response to falling behind. Her technical ability and cleverness ensured Norway easily switched strategies in attack with Hegerberg effortlessly pushing up front and creating endless headaches. Facing Cote d'Ivoire next, Hegerberg scored twice.
England are up next in the sudden-death group of 16 and will need to figure out a way of curbing Hegerberg's influence if they have any interest in making it to the quarter-finals. Because as much as the teenager is a dazzling offensive threat, she's a leader, too. And an imposing one.
Against Germany, Norway suffered through much of the first half. And it was Hegerberg who was giving the orders. She barked instructions at her teammates to keep things calm, to not get frenzied in the face of relentless German attacks. She pointed at where they should be playing the ball. And when she took control, as always, her first instinct was to try and make something happen.
Her philosophy is clear but concise. She likes to attack but her move from German side Turbine Potsdam to French giants Lyon last year has seen her mold other facets into her ever-expanding skill set.
“I just think you need to believe in yourself – be offensive, but still have some nervousness in your body before any important game. You have to be offensive in your head, mentally prepared and loosen up a bit and enjoy the game.
“I think I've developed a lot in the last year in Lyon. We are a possession-based team and I play with world-class players every day. So, I can test myself every day. When I was little, I always loved scoring goals. That was the main key for me. To have that hunger to score those goals. And in the last while, I've been developing other skills too.”
[Women's World Cup: Latest news | Scores and schedule | Standings | Teams
Norway used to be pretty good at this World Cup lark. They reached successive finals, winning in 1995. But outside of a fourth-place finish in 2007, there hasn't been much to cheer recently. Twenty years on from their last triumph though, they stand a very good chance of making another final. On the kinder side of the draw, a victory over the largely uninspiring England will lead to a quarter-final showdown with the equally-dull Canadians, reuniting Norwegian manager Even Pellerud with the team he coached for nine years.
But first, it's the English.
Hegerberg is a self-proclaimed Arsenal fan, identifying Thierry Henry as her biggest idol. The similarities are there - the power, the cleverness, the magic. There is also ability to lead from the front, and the ability to inspire everyone else with an innate and extraordinary talent.
“I think when people ask me, 'Who's your favourite player?', it's hard for me to answer,” she said. “But if I had to choose one, it's going to be Henry because it's the first name that comes to mind when I think of big players, big strikers. I watched him when he was probably in his best period for Arsenal. He scored from every position and for me that was awesome, amazing to see. And I was motivated because, like me, he was so big but he was so technical.”
Like Henry, she's also motivated by success, by becoming the best, by never standing still. And if Norway are to surprise people at this World Cup, Hegerberg will inevitably be the reason why.JERUSALEM — Israeli forces killed a leader of Islamic Jihad’s military wing and two of his sons early Friday with an airstrike on their home in the southern Gaza Strip, as the Palestinian death toll topped 800 in the battle’s 18th day. A 36-year-old reservist also fell in combat in Gaza’s north, the military said, bringing the number of Israeli soldiers killed over the past week to 33.
A statement from Islamic Jihad, which has been fighting Israel alongside the Islamist Hamas movement, said that Salah Abu Hassanein, 45 — a spokesman for its militia, Al-Quds Brigades — and his sons, aged 15 and 12, were killed in the entrance to their home in the southern city of Rafah.
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The Israeli military highlighted the attacks against Hassanein and eight other operatives of Islamic Jihad and Hamas it said had been killed in recent days, amid international outcry over the civilians killed Thursday at a school where they had sought refuge.
A spokesman for the Israeli police said sporadic disturbances broke out Friday in some East Jerusalem neighborhoods as 10,000 Muslims attended prayers in Al Aksa Mosque compound, where men younger than 50 were barred out of concern about clashes.
Palestinians planned demonstrations in Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank to turn the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan — known as Al Quds Day — into a “day of rage.’’ Micky Rosenfeld, the police spokesman, said 40 Palestinians were arrested and 29 Israeli officers injured during overnight clashes in East Jerusalem. At least one Palestinian was killed by Israeli forces during a march Thursday night in which thousands chanted, “With our soul and blood, we will redeem Gaza.’’
Against an intensifying diplomatic background, airstrikes in Gaza and rockets fired into Israel continued — Israel said two were intercepted over Tel Aviv on Friday and shrapnel from another damaged an apartment building in the coastal city of Ashkelon. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was said to be working in Cairo to build support for a two-stage cease-fire plan that would halt hostilities for seven days while broader terms were discussed but allow Israeli troops to remain in Gaza and perhaps even continue to destroy the tunnels they have discovered leading into their territory.
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Israeli news outlets reported that Kerry would fly to Paris on Friday and meet with his counterparts from France, Britain, Qatar and Turkey, as well as the European Union’s foreign policy chief and the secretary-general of the Arab League. Ban Ki Moon, U.N. secretary-general, was also in Cairo and scheduled to address journalists later Friday.
Israel’s senior ministers were scheduled to meet Friday to consider Kerry’s initiative — as well as a possible expansion of the aerial bombardment of Gaza that began July 8 and the ground operation that followed July 17.
“The conditions brought by Secretary of State Kerry are acceptable, in the main, to Israel, and they relate to the fact that we will not leave the area, and we will continue with the tunnel operation,’’ Yaakov Peri, a centrist minister and former head of Israel’s internal security service, said on Israel Radio as he headed to the meeting. “I certainly have my doubts that Hamas will agree. If Hamas does not agree, there won’t be a humanitarian cease-fire.’’
A statement by the Israeli military said 65,000 reservists had been mobilized for the Gaza operation, up from a previous estimate of 59,000. It said 843 rockets had been launched toward Israel since the ground offensive began; 658 landed in Israel and 166 were intercepted. Israeli forces targeted 45 sites in Gaza overnight, the military statement said.The City of Vancouver and Vancouver Park Board have revealed conceptual plans for the future of Northeast False Creek, including a new park and the removal of viaducts.
In 2015, Vancouver City Council approved a $200-million plan to remove the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, which connect False Creek with downtown Vancouver.
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The plan’s early draft includes a new 11-acre park and the replacement of the viaducts with an at-grade street network.
“The early draft plan for Northeast False Creek is based on some of the most extensive public consultation that the City has ever done,” says Gil Kelley, Vancouver’s general manager of planning. “We are excited by the opportunities for a really active waterfront area, design ideas for a dynamic urban village that we have worked on with landowners in the area, how the new park is shaping up, and the replacement plan for the viaducts.”
A key feature of the concept is an elevated Dunsmuir Park — dotted with places to enjoy mountain and ocean views — which will allow cyclists and pedestrians to travel from downtown to east Vancouver.
The plan includes a total of 14.3 acres of new parkland and open spaces in Northeast False Creek.
The full draft plan and the concept design for the new park will be shared at a June 10 open house on Carrall Street (between Keefer Street and Expo Boulevard) where residents can review the plan in detail and provide feedback.COSTA MESA – A mob surrounded a police officer Sunday evening, July 16, at a Costa Mesa skate park, some hurling profanity and banging their skateboards on the ground – prompting 50 other officers to respond and leading to the arrest of three people, one of whom was hit with a Taser, authorities said on Monday.
Around 8:05 p.m. Sunday, an officer arrived at Volcom Skate Park, 900 Arlington Drive, following up on a report of several dozen participating in spray-painting vandalism. He was surrounded by 100 to 200 people, Lt. Greg Scott of the Costa Mesa Police Department said.
The group “encircled the officer in a threatening manner,” challenging the officer’s authority, some cursing and banging skateboards “angrily” on the ground, Scott said.
The gathering was apparently a memorial for a member of the group who recently died.
An emergency mutual-aid response was called and officers – including Orange County sheriff’s deputies, working at the OC Fair, and those from Newport Beach’s department – responded. So did a Huntington Beach police helicopter.
Most of the crowd dispersed within 30 minutes, Scott said.
But Josue Rivera, 22, and Jovanovic Alexander, 21, both of Costa Mesa, and an unidentified 17-year-old male, “were uncooperative with officers,” Scott said.
Officers Tased Rivera and booked him on suspicion of refusing to disperse, resisting/obstructing police, and offensive/threatening language in public.
Alexander was arrested on suspicion of refusing to disperse and resisting/obstructing police.
The minor was arrested on suspicion of vandalism, instigating a riot, refusing to disperse and offensive/threatening language in public.
The skate park, bathrooms, nearby parking lot and signage suffered spray-paint damage, Scott said.
“The Costa Mesa skate park is used all the time throughout the year by many people without major incident,” said Tony Dodero, a city spokesman in a statement. “The city was unaware of this unpermitted memorial that resulted in approximately $3,000 worth of vandalism damage.”
Dodero said that the skate park will likely be closed at least through Tuesday, July 18 as city workers clean and repair it.Ferrari have brought a dramatic car update to Barcelona, and it appears there was hardly an exaggeration when Arrivabene claimed beforehand that 70% of the car was changed. Clearly, the team has put a lot of effort in getting this update package together, but with the changes so dramatic, Ferrari nonetheless opted for Vettel to run with the updates and Raikkonen without, getting a full race of comparison data.
On Friday, Raikkonen was still seen running Ferrari's new update packages, including a new sidepod shape, featuring a new outer shape over their entire lengths. As is the case with airflow around a forward moving car, the changes start at the front, where the shoulder of the sidepod has been lowered on the outer edges, reducing frontal area and hence drag.
The yellow lines marked on the image show what may be the direction of flow in this area, where it seems like Ferrari aims to guide more air into the lower rear end of the sidepod. It would seem like the team has designed its sidepods to make use of the Coanda effect, where air flowing low above the floor, around the sidepods will be used to help pull air from around the sidepod's shoulder down. While that idea may not be new, it's probably most explicitly used here on the SF15-T.
With more quality airflow potentially available underneath the sidepod's hot air exists, the team also decided to reposition the outlets to be higher above the floor (if not clear, just compare where the sidepod crosses the suspension arms and note how in the new configuration the sidepod's bodywork is all above the rear suspension pull rod). With the aperture around the exhaust pipe also narrower, the total exhaust aperture has been reduced, again for aerodynamic benefit. The higher location of the outlets will meanwhile also reduce the lift generated by the sidepods. In addition to that, the potentially higher speed flow over the diffuser can similarly help increase the efficiency of the diffuser.
While it's difficult to imagine the exact airflow around a Formula One car, the modified sidepod panel and bridge, along with a new tiny vortex generator close to the car's floor (at the SKF logo) indicate that Ferrari are clearly looking at this area to extract more performance from their car.Born in Illinois on December 9, 1953, John Malkovich did Obie Award-winning stage work before earning an Emmy Award for his role in Death of a Salesman. Malkovich has become a multiple Oscar nominee for films like Places in the Heart and Dangerous Liaisons, in which he portrayed an evil aristocrat. He's also the subject of the surreal 1999 comedy Being John Malkovich, in which he played himself.
Early Years
Actor, producer and director John Gavin Malkovich was born on December 9, 1953, in Christopher, Illinois, and raised in the nearby town of Benton. Malkovich is one of five children. His father, Daniel, was the conservation director for the state of Illinois and the editor of a conservation magazine, while his mother, J Anne, edited a local paper.
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As a boy, Malkovich didn't always have it easy. Because his parents were often away for work, the Malkovich children were often left to take care of themselves. John was overweight, something his older brother often teased him about. Malkovich has claimed, however, that he dropped some 70 pounds at the age of 16 by going on a strict two-month diet of eating nothing but Jell-O.
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While his parents hoped their son would go on to become a park ranger in Montana, Malkovich instead enrolled at Illinois State University, where a girl he'd fallen for encouraged him to try out acting.
Malkovich's love for the stage was immediate and he left school in 1976 to join the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, which had been founded by a friend of his, Gary Sinise. To keep food on the table, Malkovich, never afraid of hard work, held several different jobs.
"I worked in an office supply store, I drove a school bus, I painted houses, I worked for a Mexican landscape gardening company, picking out weeds," he told The Guardian newspaper in 2001. "And generally when I was doing something it somehow took my interest. In fact, it must be a kind of shallowness: when I did office supplies mostly I thought about office supplies, and then when I got on the train I'd think about theatre, and then I would do theatre. But the next morning I would go in and, you know, reorganize the paper clips."
On stage and with Steppenwolf, Malkovich had a number of memorable performances, including roles in a pair of Sam Shepherd plays, Curse of the Starving Class and True West. The latter helped launch Steppenwolf and earn Malkovich a coveted OBIE award when the performance moved to New York.Recently, I was given boxes full of my childhood memorabilia from my mother’s attic. I was surprised and delighted to find notebooks filled with my childhood ramblings, beginning in 3rd grade. There were cute stories, embarrassing love letters to crushes that were never sent, a few diary attempts, and some seriously angsty teenage poetry. As I read through it, I was impressed at my younger self’s ability to put pen to paper and open up an introspective world through writing. And then it struck me- for the vast majority of my 20s, I didn’t write at all.
This is especially true of my college years, when writing felt like a chore to get through the countless classroom assignments. I was involved in campus groups, had a part-time job, and a full social calendar. Post-college, I was living abroad in South Korea and exploring seemed more important than spending time alone writing. Later, it was work, familiar obligations, friendships… as I got older, my life just seemed to be constantly on hyper drive. Looking back, it felt like something else was always more important than sitting down and putting pen to paper- a constant hustle to do more, see more, be more.
But is this constant go-go-go grind that seems to be so prevalent in this day and age a reality, or is it the choices that I’m making? Did my younger self simply have more time or was she just wiser with what she did with it? Could I make different choices and tap back into my more introspective and thoughtful self?
Strangely, fountain pens have been the impetus for reviving my love of writing. It seems silly- that a simple writing instrument could inspire me to turn back to something I loved so much when I was younger. Simply because I love feeling the way my fountain pen glides across the page, I started writing to-dos for work, making art for Monday Matchups, Bullet Journaling, and making home made cards for friends and family. I was able to tap into my creativity and reconnect with a part of myself that I didn’t know was missing.
Flipping back through my 2016 journal, I’m able to get a grasp of the work I’ve done, the places I’ve been, and the exciting things I accomplished. It is physical proof of the progress and changes that have unfolded in the past year. For the first time in about 10 years, I have a written record of my life to look back on.
People talk about taking time, or making time, for the things that you love. I’ve found that sometimes it’s making a small change to your daily habits that can change the balance of your day, and from there, your life. For me, finding fountain pens has been more than just a hobby- they have been a tool to help me enjoy my life at a deeper and more meaningful level.
I’d like to invite you to, yes, slow down, and think about it a moment. If you aren’t currently taking time to write, why did you stop? Was it a conscious choice or did it simply fade away as
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of the Puerto Rico Republic once independent from Spain. The revolt against Spain was called “El Grito de Lares.”
The insurrection had several leaders the most prominent being; Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827-1898), leading the movement from exile in Santo Domingo and Segundo Ruiz Belvis (1829-1867) co-leader with Betances. Ana María (Mariana) Bracetti Cuevas (1825-1903), wife of one of the members of the insurrection, sewed the revolutionary flag designed by Betances. The reason for the insurrection were: POVERTY, SLAVERY, taxation, lack of opportunity, and military rule.
The flag we know today was actually designed in New York City, by Puerto Rican exiles who were fighting alongside Cubans in resistance to Spanish rule.
This Welcome to Puerto Rico site tells part of the story:
The design of the Commonwealth flag reflects the close ties that bound the Cuban and Puerto Rico patriots in the 19th century for the flag which waves over the Capital of San Juan is the Cuban flag color reversed. The flag was first used on December 22, 1895. A group of 59 Puerto Ricans led by Dr. Julio J. Henna, gather at "Chimney Corner Hall" in Manhattan, New YorkCity and organizes a political group, attached to the Cuban Revolutionary Party,which advocated independence for Puerto Rico and Cuba from Spanish rule. As partof their activities, a flag was created to rally support for independence fromSpain. The flag was soon adopted as a national symbol. In 1898, the flag became the mark of resistance to the US invasion; and in the 1930s it was adopted bythe Nationalist Party. When Puerto Rico became a Commonwealth in July 25, 1952 itwas officially adopted as the national flag.
What is glossed over is the period of time in Puerto Rico where owning or displaying the flag could land you in jail, a period similar to the McCarthy-era persecutions of the left here in the U.S. Many readers have raised questions here about why more Puerto Ricans don’t support Independence. Those who are older still remember the brutal repression that took place against nationalists and independentistas.
During increased pressure and uprisings for independence from the U.S., the government of Puerto Rico—with the backing of the United States—took action.
Law 53 – The Gag Law On June 10, 1948, they passed Law 53, otherwise known as La Ley de la Mordaza (Law of the Muzzle). This law was nearly a word-for-word translation of Section 2 of the U.S. anti-Communist Smith Act, and it authorized police and FBI to stop anyone on the street and invade any Puerto Rican home, particularly Nationalist homes. It was a gag law. It prohibited the singing of a patriotic tune; or to own or display a Puerto Rican flag anywhere, even in one’s own home, no matter how large or small. It also prohibited any speech against the U.S. government or in favor of Puerto Rican independence; or to print, publish, sell or exhibit any material about independence; or to organize any society, group or assembly of people on behalf of independence. Anyone found guilty of disobeying the law could be sentenced to ten years imprisonment, a fine of $10,000 dollars, or both.
After the repeal of the gag rule in 1957, it is no wonder that one of the most popular Puerto Rican songs is an anthem to the flag, Que Bonita Bandera (What a Beautiful Flag).
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One of the stanzas refers specifically to historical patriots:
"Dijo Jose de Diego, Betances y Munoz Rivera
que bonita bandera es la bandera Puertorriqueña.
Quisiera verla flotando sobre mi Borinquen bella.
Que bonita bandera, dime que bonita bandera."
I remember marching through the streets of New York City, as a member of The Young Lords Party, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, with flags waving, singing it with thousands of other marchers.
This article by Marlon Bishop details some of that history. It’s titled “How ‘Que Bonita Bandera’ Became a Revolutionary Puerto Rican Anthem”:
The Young Lords, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, grew out beards and marched in army jackets and purple berets. Their goal was to bring attention to the deep inequality facing Puerto Ricans in the city – endemic poverty, inadequate housing, lack of city services. For their first action, they collected garbage festering on the streets of El Barrio, piled it up into a five-foot tall barricade in the middle of third Avenue, and set it ablaze. The city took notice, and garbage collection improved. The Young Lords declared the mission a success – they proved to the neighborhood they could get shit done. One song could inevitably be heard at the Young Lords’ marches and rallies. “Que Bonita Bandera” (“What a Beautiful Flag”) became the group’s unofficial anthem. The song is a plena, a Puerto Rican folk genre based around call-and-response. The lyrics – sung in Spanish – are made up of a chorus that repeats over and over again the words “what a beautiful flag, what a beautiful flag... the Puerto Rican flag,” interspersed with short improvised verses, such as: “Blue, white and red and the middle it has a star. What a beautiful flag my Puerto Rican flag is.” At first listen, it appears to be just a simple nationalistic song about a flag. But for Puerto Ricans, the flag is more than just a flag. “The Puerto Rican flag was banned for a long time, by colonial decree. So the song was viewed as subversive,” explains Carlito Rivera, a Young Lord who served in the group’s Ministry of Defence. Rivera is referring to the so-called “Gag Law” in Puerto Rico, which made it illegal to own or display a Puerto Rican flag until 1957, an attempt to suppress the pro-independence movement on the island “So for us, singing ‘What A Beautiful Flag’ is similar to when African-Americans began to say ‘Black is beautiful,’ because for centuries black people were told they were ugly. The narrative is changed. So when we said ‘the flag is beautiful’ the implication is that, if it’s beautiful, it should to be flying over Puerto Rico.”
A major tribute to the original name of the island is the national hymn of Puerto Rico, La Borinquena, whose original lyrics were written by Lola Rodríguez de Tió.
Lola Rodríguez de Tió
Lola Rodríguez de Tió was born in San Germán where she received her primary education. Her schooling continued at home where various intellectuals and politicians often met. In 1868, inspired by the call for Puerto Rican independence known as the "Grito de Lares," she wrote patriotic lyrics to the tune of “La Borinqueña." The song became very popular, but brought her into conflict with Spanish authorities. In 1876 she and her family moved to Mayagüez where she published her first book of poetry, Mis cantares, which sold 2,500 copies. In 1877 the family fled to Venezuela where they met Eugenio María de Hostos. Upon their return to Puerto Rico she and her husband founded the magazine La almojábana. They were exiled again in 1887, returning first to Venezuela and then to Cuba. Once in Havana, their home became a gathering point for politicians and intellectuals as well as exiled Puerto Ricans.
The lyrics of her revolutionary anthem are printed here, and can be heard sung here.
Here is the version which is used today, which is beautiful, but devoid of radical messages.
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Lyrics — Spanish and English
La Borinqueña is now a comic book super heroine created by Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez.
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La Borinqueña
La Borinqueña is an original character and patriotic symbol presented in a classic superhero story created and written by graphic novelist Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez. Her powers are drawn from history and and mysticism found on the island of Puerto Rico. The fictional character, Marisol Rios De La Luz, is a Columbia University Earth and Environmental Sciences Undergraduate student living with her parents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She takes a semester of study abroad in collaboration with the University of Puerto Rico. There she explores the caves of Puerto Rico and finds five similar sized crystals. Atabex, the Taino mother goddess, appears before Marisol once the crystals are united and summons her sons Yúcahu, spirt of the seas and mountains and Juracan, spirit of the hurricanes. They give Marisol superhuman strength, the power of flight, and control of the storms.
Edgardo talks about raising money for Puerto Rico by doing a show at Casita Maria in the Bronx.
x Dressed in her islandâÂÂs iconic flag, comic book superhero "La Borinqueña" is flying to Puerto RicoâÂÂs rescue after Hurricane Maria pic.twitter.com/sMu86ZqVRw â AFP news agency (@AFP) October 18, 2017
A major historical reference to Boriken is the name adopted by the Puerto Rican 65th Infantry Regiment, “The Borinqueneers,” who I wrote about here back in 2013 during efforts to get Congress to award them the Gold Medal they deserved.
This documentary about them aired on PBS in 2007.
Narrated by Hector Elizondo, the documentary explores the fascinating stories of courage, triumph and struggle of the men of the 65th through rare archival materials and compelling interviews with veterans, commanding officers, and historians. The 65th Infantry Regiment was created in 1899 by the U.S. Congress as a segregated unit composed primarily of Puerto Ricans with mostly continental officers. It went on to serve meritoriously in three wars: World War I, World War II and the Korean War. The unit was nicknamed after "Borinquen", the word given to Puerto Rico by its original inhabitants, the Taino Indians, meaning "land of the brave lord". When they were finally called to the front lines in the Korean War, the men of the 65th performed impressively, earning praise from General MacArthur. They performed a critical role containing the Chinese advance and supporting the U.S. Marines in the aftermath of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. Sent to every corner of the peninsula, they showed outstanding resilience and a legendary fierceness as combatants, even as they faced discrimination within the Army. But in the fall of 1952 the regiment was at the center of a series of dramatic events that would threaten its very existence.
x YouTube Video
Their toughest fight was not on the battlefield. The Borinqueneers chronicles the never-before told story of the Puerto Rican 65th Infantry Regiment, the only all-Hispanic unit in U.S. Army history. Through compelling interviews and rare archival footage, this film explores the unique experience of the 65th, culminating in the Korean War and the dramatic events that would threaten its very existence. Bound by a strong cultural identity, the men of the 65th were determined to prove their mettle, in spite of discrimination within the Army and curtailed rights in their own land, where to this day they can be drafted but cannot vote in U.S. elections. But in the fall of 1952, the 65th would face its toughest challenge when dozens of its soldiers abandoned their positions and were tried in one of the largest courts martial of the war.
Thank you to everyone working hard to support Puerto Rico in her time of need.
This series of articles will be continued next Sunday.Global investors urge food firms to address rising water risks
Investors managing more than $2.6trn in assets have sent joint letters to 15 international food and drink companies amid growing concerns over water security and pollution.
The letters, which were sent out to the likes of Kraft Heinz Co., Monster Beverage and Dr Pepper Snapple Group, were coordinated by sustainability organisation Ceres, which identified the 15 recipient companies as “poor performers” on water management issues.
“Many food sector executives are holding onto a mistaken view that water will forever be cheap and limitless,” said Ceres senior water programme director Brooke Barton. “But the era of cheap, plentiful water is coming to an end, and, more than ever, food companies need to address it.”
Oversight
In a recent Ceres report which evaluated 31 publicly traded US companies, 90% cited water scarcity and treatment as a risk, yet only 30% mentioned that water risks were part of major business investment and incentives.
A sample letter sent out by Ceres states: “We…believe that global water risk management is a critical aspect of financial risk oversight in the food and beverage sector…these threats can, and already are having profound near-term business impacts on food and beverage companies that are disrupting operations and supply chains, increasing capital expenditures and operating costs, and constraining revenue growth.
“As concerned shareholders with long-term investment strategies, we…seek increased transparency and disclosure about your exposure to water risk, as well as the plans, strategies and progress you are making in mitigating the company’s exposure to these issues.”
The food sector, which uses 70% of the world’s freshwater supplies, is especially at risk of water scarcity due to its use of water as both a direct ingredient and as an input to agricultural production. Factors including growing competition for water, weak regulations, aging water infrastructure, water pollution and climate change are having increasingly adverse effects on the food industry creating a need for better water management.
California drought
The letters were sent at a time where areas such as California are experiencing its worst recorded drought in history. In light of this, the World Bank expects water scarcity to affect 2.8 billion people directly by 2025.California Mayor Eric Garcetti last week issued the use of 96 million shade balls to prevent the loss of more than 300 million gallons of water each year and save the area around $250m.
Archer Daniels Midland - headquartered in California - is one of the companies to have received a letter.
2015 Investor Letter
View the full list of signatories here and the list of companies that received the letter here.Michael Vance was killed after a shootout with authorities in western Oklahoma Sunday night. A nationwide manhunt has been underway for Vance since last Sunday, when he shot two Wellston police officers, killed his aunt and uncle and stole a vehicle from a couple at a mobile home park near Wellston. Vance then is suspected of shooting a man in Sayre after attempting to carjack the man’s RV around 2:30 a.m. last Monday. Authorities said Vance was last seen going eastbound on I-40 from Sayre. The trail went cold on Vance until Sunday night, when a farmer reported seeing Vance near the Washita River on Highway 34 in Hammon. The farmer told authorities Vance fled the scene. Around 10 p.m., Vance was involved in a shootout near Leedey in Dewey County. The Dewey County sheriff pulled over a vehicle that was dragging a chain behind it. Authorities say it was not the silver Mitsubishi, but was a different vehicle. When Dewey County Sheriff Clay Sander pulled over the vehicle, he did not know it was Vance. Vance got out of the car and shot the sheriff in the arm and shoulder. Vance was killed after a chase ensued and ended one mile west of Butler, Oklahoma. Oklahoma Highway Patrol troopers fired the shots that killed Vance. The Dewey County Sheriff is at an area hospital receiving treatment for bullet wounds to his shoulder and arm. A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Office said prior to the shootout that a news conference may be called on Monday morning. It is unclear if that news conference will still happen.
Michael Vance was killed after a shootout with authorities in western Oklahoma Sunday night.
A nationwide manhunt has been underway for Vance since last Sunday, when he shot two Wellston police officers, killed his aunt and uncle and stole a vehicle from a couple at a mobile home park near Wellston.
Vance then is suspected of shooting a man in Sayre after attempting to carjack the man’s RV around 2:30 a.m. last Monday.
Authorities said Vance was last seen going eastbound on I-40 from Sayre. The trail went cold on Vance until Sunday night, when a farmer reported seeing Vance near the Washita River on Highway 34 in Hammon.
The farmer told authorities Vance fled the scene. Around 10 p.m., Vance was involved in a shootout near Leedey in Dewey County. The Dewey County sheriff pulled over a vehicle that was dragging a chain behind it. Authorities say it was not the silver Mitsubishi, but was a different vehicle. When Dewey County Sheriff Clay Sander pulled over the vehicle, he did not know it was Vance. Vance got out of the car and shot the sheriff in the arm and shoulder.
Vance was killed after a chase ensued and ended one mile west of Butler, Oklahoma.
Oklahoma Highway Patrol troopers fired the shots that killed Vance.
The Dewey County Sheriff is at an area hospital receiving treatment for bullet wounds to his shoulder and arm.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Office said prior to the shootout that a news conference may be called on Monday morning. It is unclear if that news conference will still happen.
AlertMeVigilant Citizen
San Francisco’s Entertainment Comission has proposed new measures causing quite an uproar as they would turn the city into a high-tech police state.
San Francisco’s Entertainment Commission has proposed that all bars, clubs, and venues should be required to photograph and collect ID from everyone who comes in for a drink or a show. The photos and personal information would be retained so that police could get a list of every person who was in the club on any given night. Leaving aside the (obvious) fourth amendment issues inherent in governments collecting massive databases of presumed-innocent people’s lawful activities and movements, this is also a security nightmare, in which thousands of club staff and their friends would have access to personal information that would be of great interest to stalkers, creeps and identity thieves. From BoingBoing.net article
The measures in question are:
3) All occupants of the premises shall be ID Scanned (including patrons, promoters, and performers, etc.). ID scanning data shall be maintained on a data storage system for no less than 15 days and shall be made available to local law enforcement upon request.
4) High visibility cameras shall be located at each entrance and exit point of the premises. Said cameras shall maintain a recorded data base for no less than fifteen (15 days) and made available to local law enforcement upon request.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation will present their critique of this proposal to the Commission at a public meeting:
Events with strong cultural, ideological, and political components are frequently held at venues that would be affected by these rules. Scanning the ID’s of all attendees at an anti-war rally, a gay night club, or a fundraiser for a civil liberties organization would have a deeply chilling effect on speech. Participants might hesitate to attend such events if their attendance were noted, stored, and made available on request to government authorities. This would transform the politically and culturally tolerant environment for which San Francisco is famous into a police state.We are deeply disappointed in the San Francisco Entertainment Commission for considering such troubling, authoritarian, and poorly thought-out rules. The Commission should reject this attack on our most basic civil liberties. San Francisco cannot hope to remain a hub of cultural and political activity if we are stripped of our civil liberties the moment we walk through the door of a venue.Anaal Nathrakh are the epitome of the word ‘extreme’. Listening to ‘Forging Towards The Sunset‘, streaming above courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan (who are spoiling us rotten lately), the first thought that struck me was how every post about this will be probably be some variation on those ridiculous hyperbolic ‘face-melting’ metaphors that metal pundits seem to love so much and, to be entirely fair, it’s with good reason. The moment that first frantic riffs kicks in, you know Mick Kenney and V.I.T.R.I.O.L have done it again and created more raw energy in the ten opening seconds than many bands manage in an entire lifetime. The fact that this ridiculous ferocity continues for another three and half minutes on top of that is astonishing.
Vanitas looks to be shaping up as THE Anaal Nathrakh record and with a legacy that includes classics like The Codex Necro and Hell Is Empty, All The Devils Are Here, that’s a hell of an achievement. It will be out October 15th through Candlelight Records.
– DL
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RedditCHICAGO, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- Chicago Alderman James Cappelman says he wants to double the penalty for people who feed pigeons to a maximum of $1,000 and six months in jail.
Cappelman isn't enamored of Chicago's ubiquitous birds and WBBM-TV reported Thursday he's not alone.
"They're a nuisance. They're everywhere. You know, you could stand there waiting on the bus and they're all over your feet," Bobby Williams told the Chicago TV station while standing outside the Wilson train stop. "I think it should be illegal to feed them."
Cappelman is known for having his staff regularly sweep breadcrumbs tossed onto city streets. Once, he even was physically attacked by a woman when he started to clean up the breadcrumbs she put out for the birds.
But not everyone agrees cracking down on pigeon-feeders should be a high priority for city officials.
"They're gonna arrest someone for feeding a bird?" Lily Norton said. "That's kind of ridiculous."
Oliver Guyton called Cappelman's efforts "silly."
"He should be focusing on other problems," Guyton said. "Like the budget and all that type of stuff that aldermen do."By Ingrid Melander and Tom Heneghan
PARIS (Reuters) - Charlie Hebdo's first edition since an attack by Islamist gunmen sold out within minutes on Wednesday, featuring a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad on a cover that defenders praised as art but critics saw as a new provocation.
French readers queued at dawn for copies to support the satirical newspaper, even as al Qaeda's branch in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack last week, saying it ordered the killings because it deemed the weekly had insulted the Prophet.
Across the Middle East, Muslim leaders who have denounced the attack in which 12 people died called for calm, while criticizing Charlie Hebdo's decision to publish a fresh caricature of Mohammad.
President Francois Hollande visited France's Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean and said it was ready to support military operations against Islamic State in Iraq "in close cooperation with coalition forces".
The U.S. State Department said Secretary of State John Kerry would meet with Hollande in Paris on Friday to offer assistance to France.
Also on Wednesday, the Interior Ministry said over 50 cases of people voicing support for terrorism had been registered since the attack on Charlie Hebdo's Paris office and the subsequent killings of a policewoman and four people at a Jewish supermarket.
Millions of copies of the "survivors' edition" were printed, dwarfing the usual 60,000 print run. On its cover, a tearful Mohammad holds a "Je suis Charlie" sign under the words "All is forgiven."
David Sullo, standing at the end of a queue of two dozen people at a central Paris kiosk, said he had never bought it before. "It's not quite my political stripes, but it's important for me to buy it today and support freedom of expression," he said.
Inside, one cartoon showed jihadists saying, "We shouldn't touch Charlie people... otherwise they will look like martyrs and, once in heaven, these bastards will steal our virgins."
This week's edition underlined the irony of how the victims had been commemorated at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris.
"What makes us laugh most is that the bells of Notre-Dame rang in our honor," read an editorial in the newspaper, which emerged from the 1968 counter-culture movement and has long mocked all religions and pillars of the establishment.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, himself a frequent target of the weekly's caricatures, left a cabinet meeting with a copy tucked under his arm.
"BATTLE OF PARIS"
In a video posted on YouTube, Al Qaeda's Yemen branch said its leadership had ordered last Wednesday's attack on Charlie Hebdo.
"As for the blessed Battle of Paris, we, the Organization of al Qaeda al Jihad in the Arabian Peninsula, claim responsibility for this operation as vengeance for the Messenger of God," said Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi, the group's main ideologue in Yemen.
Ansi said the strike was the "implementation" of an order by al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri. It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the recording.
The two brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo and a third gunman who killed the policewoman and hostages at the kosher supermarket all died in police raids.
Defenders praised the cover for upholding the newspaper's satirical mission, proclaiming its right to free speech while maintaining a mournful tone and a peaceful message.
Jonathan Jones, art critic for Britain's Guardian newspaper, called the cover "a life-affirming work of art".
"Funny people were killed for being funny. This new cover is the only possible response - a response that makes you laugh," he wrote.
Belgium's Le Soir wrote, "Not publishing the edition would have been like a second death for the victims."
Several German newspapers reprinted the cover. It filled the back page of the top-selling Bild daily, whose columnist Franz Josef Wagner praised it highly. "It is sarcasm, it is biting ridicule... they are mocking the murderers," he wrote.
In the Middle East, it was branded a new provocation that could create a backlash. Publishing the cartoons "shows contempt" for Muslim feelings, said the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestinian lands, Mohammed Hussein.
Iran's foreign minister Mohammad Jawad Zarif said serious dialogue with the West would be easier if it respected Muslim sensitivities. "We believe that sanctities need to be respected," he said before nuclear talks in Geneva with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. "We won't be able to engage in a serious dialogue if we start disrespecting each other's values."While it is far for the first time a family has indulged its children with such a whimsical addition, this may be one of the most well-integrated (and longest) at-home slides yet created.
The long slide down (designed, ironically, by Level Architects)?completes a circuit that starts with a staircase running along two walls of the home – one could endlessly move in a circle, effectively, running up and sliding down (definitely a good way to tire the kids out before bedtime!).
While this core circulation wrapping the edges of the interior is certainly a great first step, there are many other child-oriented design strategies to be found throughout the house.
Other kid-friendly spaces include include ball-fillable playrooms, art spaces and copious shelves for kids books and coloring supplies.In certain markets, Uber will charge a “surge” rate during busy times that is in excess of what a passenger normally pays for a ride. But one Chicago Uber customer says she had no idea she’d be charged $925, nearly eight times the standard rate, for her lengthy trip.
The customer tells Chicago’s ABC-7 that she is relatively new to using Uber, and didn’t realize that the 100-mile ride she took to get home after a concert was being charged at a sky-high surge rate.
“I think it’s absolutely crazy and ridiculous,” she told ABC-7. “That’s like a house payment.”
While it was a long ride — with an added stop at O’Hare airport — that journey would’ve normally cost just $117 without surge prices in place.
She says she contacted Uber through the app, but the situation wasn’t resolved until the news station contacted Uber.
Uber called the situation a “perfect storm” that was partly the result of the woman changing her destination and added the airport stop after her car arrived.
“We have refunded the rider for the charges related to her ride including the additional 93 miles she added to the trip,” a spokesperson told ABC-7, adding that the company encourages riders to “input all desired stops into the app upfront to receive a correct fare estimate.”
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Consumerist.The ugly side of the Best
-By Sagar Follow @Sagar_m10
Contrary to popular belief, many expected a rather comfortable fixture this time around. What with the slump that Valencia were in, and with no set manager. People tend to forget, that this is the Mestalla.
Here, the games are tough, rough, and tend to get ugly. And, so it was.
Barca fielded their strongest line-up, and Valencia were far from it, and so went with a very firm, solid 5-4-1 formation, so as to close down Barca and force them to go out wide. It worked for the most part.
Although they were carved open repeatedly, they did not let it affect them on a mental level as they kept at it. Kept their line, put bodies in the box and frustrated the Barca players. Especially the MSN.
Valencia- win or bust?
They packed the defense and the midfield. They were ready to fight for a point. The first half saw their plans dismantled as MSN ran right through their defense on many occasions, but they were never punished as the final ball kept missing the goal by a few inches, and in some cases few yards, thanks to some poor finishing.
The second half saw some solidarity and discipline return to the side, and once again continued to frustrate Barca. They did concede a goal, but that was down to MSN.
In hindsight their gameplan worked, but in actuality it did not fare well, and they were lucky in some instances.
They packed the defense and the midfield. They were ready to fight for a point. The first half saw their plans dismantled as MSN ran right through their defense on many occasions, but they were never punished as the final ball kept missing the goal by a few inches, and in some cases few yards, thanks to some poor finishing. The second half saw some solidarity and discipline return to the side, and once again continued to frustrate Barca. They did concede a goal, but that was down to MSN. In hindsight their gameplan worked, but in actuality it did not fare well, and they were lucky in some instances. The fullbacks:
Alves and Alba brought their A-game. From their offensive contributions to the defensive ones, they never looked out of place or troubled. Normally when one fullback goes up front, the other one loiters around in the midfield so they can add another body to the midfield, and can help press effectively.
This time around they chose their moments to make runs forward, and one fullback stayed back, because of Valencia’s game-plan. The counter-attack. Did this backfire on Barca? Not exactly. It worked wonders throughout the match. Alba, especially, has perfected the art of defending by using pace to his advantage. Height or no height. The one time they did not stick to this plan, Barca conceded. Alba was up front, Alves in his half-midfield position, leaving Pique and Masch to deal with a swift long ball which caught Barca flat-footed.
All in all, the fullbacks put in an excellent performance.
Alves and Alba brought their A-game. From their offensive contributions to the defensive ones, they never looked out of place or troubled. Normally when one fullback goes up front, the other one loiters around in the midfield so they can add another body to the midfield, and can help press effectively. This time around they chose their moments to make runs forward, and one fullback stayed back, because of Valencia’s game-plan. The counter-attack. Did this backfire on Barca? Not exactly. It worked wonders throughout the match. Alba, especially, has perfected the art of defending by using pace to his advantage. Height or no height. The one time they did not stick to this plan, Barca conceded. Alba was up front, Alves in his half-midfield position, leaving Pique and Masch to deal with a swift long ball which caught Barca flat-footed. All in all, the fullbacks put in an excellent performance. The ugly side of MSN:
Let’s deal with the elephant in the room. Messi was poor by his standards. He looked right down, human. Finishing was poor, got crowded out, and always found a body blocking his shot. The one time there was no one around; he blasted it above the crossbar.
Suarez had a frustrating game as he just could not create space for himself, which he normally does with his turns. His turns were poorly executed today. He could not get the timing right, and that frustration brought out the ‘bad’ Suarez. The one who got into players’ faces and tried to find a release for that pent up frustration.
Neymar was the spark that kept chances coming along. He was guilty of missing a one-on-one with the GK, but he more than made up for it by supplying chances like on a conveyor belt, and they were all scuffed. He too was the victim of constant harrying, and succumbed to making rash challenges. MSN clearly were not enjoying their day out.
Despite all this criticism about their finishing, they got a goal. Despite them not wearing their shooting boots, they created chances. Despite not enjoying, they dug out a goal in the midst of that congregation of players in that tiny box.
____________________________
The defense was composed and solid, until that one point where they were caught sleeping and flat-footed. Valencia took their chance.
Busquets controlled the tempo of the entire game. He slowed down the game when he wanted, and sped it up when he wanted. Iniesta was that calm presence in attack, as he made sure the ball kept moving. His runs were acute and always had a purpose to them.
If Valencia came out to play for a draw they were underestimating themselves and their home ground. The Mestalla is never an easy ground to visit. They grinded out a result and they deserved their point. It could be argued that it was not because they put in such a performance, but because Barcelona were wasteful in front of the goal. But, Valencia played with what they were dealt, and their gamble payed off.
If you don’t take your chances, you get punished. It’s one of the inevitabilities of football. We see this every other week.
There is no harsh criticism here. Barca and MSN know what they’re capable of, they should come to terms with the fact that they were the reason for this result and not their opponents, and need to pull up their socks, put on their shooting boots and go practice.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Valencia:
Best: Paco Alacer (B+): The lonely figure up top. No support, no chance of post-play. He was left to watch and hope that a good pass would be floated towards him. When it did happen, he composed himself and set up Mina. Otherwise, he did little to press Barca’s defense. But, he did offer runs whenever there were counter-attacks.
Questionable display: Ruben Vezo (D): Neymar turned him inside out. Almost every single time he was up against Neymar, he lost the duel. To the point that he almost gave up the RB position and moved inwards to make an awkward RB-RCB hybrid while another RCB was present.
Barca:
Best: Neymar (A-): Our MotM. He missed an easy chance. Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff. We probably covered it. Created chances like they were on a conveyor belt? Well, nothing more to say except maybe he is well and truly on his way to be heralded as the world’s best in a couple of years if he keeps this up.
Questionable display: Rakitic (C): Very average. Right from his distribution to his defensive duties. Although he offered himself as an outlet when things got crowded, he did not impose himself when trying to finds his other team-mates. He did put in a shift and run down the channels, pressed and won back balls. Could do a lot better. We’ve see it.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
What Say You?!
AdvertisementsDePaul University’s president stepped down Monday amid controversy over allowing conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus.
“DePaul University announced today that the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., will step down from his position as president at the end of the 2016-17 academic year,” a Monday press release confirmed. “After 13 years of leadership, Fr. Holtschneider will assume his tenured faculty position at DePaul, following a one-year sabbatical.”
"They read my letter about free speech as they were still shaking from the frightening effects of the hate speech they experienced."
[RELATED: DePaul prof deems free speech ‘delusional’ while resigning over Milo event]
Yiannopoulos’ appearance at DePaul in May provoked one of the most riotous protests on his speaking tour (which is characteristically boisterous) to date, where protesters threatened the pundit with violence and forced him to shut the event down early for his own safety.
[RELATED: DePaul BLM leaders: Milo made us do it]
Following the disruption, which garnered the attention of the national media, Rev. Dennis Holtschneider apologized to the public for the incident, all the while issuing backhanded insults at Yiannopoulos, who, Holtschneider claimed, was “unworthy of university discourse.”
The lukewarm apology offered no condolences to Yiannopoulos, who was mandated to pay DePaul additional security fees for the event despite the fact that his paid guards did nothing to settle the chaos.
[RELATED: Milo Demand DePaul Refund security cash after its guard did nothing]
Holtschneider, though, later apologized a second time for even daring to hint at offering an apology to Yiannopoulos after facing scrutiny from liberal activists.
“They read my letter about free speech as they were still shaking from the frightening effects of the hate speech they experienced,” Holtschneider wrote. “I am deeply sorry for the harm that was unleashed by a speaker whose intent was to ignite racial tensions and demean those most marginalized, both in our society and at DePaul.”
[DePaul petition: Milo ‘kills’ people with his opinions]
Holtschneider also noted that Public Safety immediately “began new safety initiatives” after Yiannopoulos’ event, including “24-hour campus escorts.”
Students, however, were apparently still upset with Holtschneider
|
Westgate Branch Due 03-16-2019
"A critically important and startling look at the harmful effects of overusing antibiotics, from the field's leading expert Tracing one scientist's journey toward understanding the crucial importance of the microbiome, this revolutionary book will take readers to the forefront of trail-blazing research while revealing the damage that overuse of antibiotics is doing to our health: contributing to the rise of obesity, asthma, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer. In Missing Microbes, Dr. Martin Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the health and equilibrium of our body. Now, this invisible eden is being irrevocably damaged by some of our most revered medical advances--antibiotics--threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes with terrible health consequences. Taking us into both the lab and deep into the fields where these troubling effects can be witnessed firsthand, Blaser not only provides cutting edge evidence for the adverse effects of antibiotics, he tells us what we can do to avoid even more catastrophic health problems in the future. "-- Provided by publisher.
"Tracing one scientist's journey toward understanding the crucial importance of the microbiome, this revolutionary book will take readers to the forefront of trail-blazing research while revealing the damage that overuse of antibiotics is doing to our health: contributing to the rise of obesity, asthma, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer. In Missing Microbes, Dr. Martin Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the health and equilibrium of our body. Now, this invisible eden is being irrevocably damaged by some of our most revered medical advances--antibiotics--threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes with terrible health consequences. Taking us into both the lab and deep into the fields where these troubling effects can be witnessed firsthand, Blaser not only provides cutting edge evidence for the adverse effects of antibiotics, he tells us what we can do to avoid even more catastrophic health problems in the future"-- Provided by publisher.
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The ratings are essential for governments because of the collateral rules of the European Central Bank (ECB). When governments spend more than they receive as tax revenue, they issue government bonds. These government bonds are bought by the banking system because banks can use government bonds as collateral for new loans from the ECB. This mechanism is explained in detail in my book The Tragedy of the Euro. The ECB does not accept just any kind of security or government bond as collateral for its valuable loans. The ECB wants some quality, and requires a minimum rating by one of the three rating agencies for these securities.
During the financial crisis the ECB had lowered the required minimum rating for its open market operations from A- to BBB- in order to help out banks because the rating of securities, especially mortgage backed securities, were falling. The reduction was supposed to be an exception and was to expire at the end of 2010.
The uncertainty of Greece’s rating triggered the sovereign debt crisis in 2010. Due to budgetary problems, Greece was in danger of losing the minimum A- rating. What would happen in 2011 when the minimum rating would be raised back to A- and Greece’s rating would not meet this requirement?
The market started to have doubts about Greece’s being able to repay its debts. And it was feared that the ECB would stop financing the Greek deficit indirectly. If the ECB would stop accepting Greek bonds as collateral for loans, no one would buy Greek bonds. The government would have to default on its obligations.
In January 2010 Jean-Claude Trichet, ECB president, still maintained a hard money rhetoric: “We will not change our collateral framework for the sake of any particular country. Our collateral framework applies to all countries concerned.”
Market participants interpreted this statement as a pledge that the ECB would not extend the exceptional reduction of the required minimum rating to BBB- just to save the Greek government. Along the same line, chief economist of the ECB, Jürgen Stark, stated in January that markets were wrong in believing that other member states would bail Greece out.
As Greek problems intensified in March 2010, Trichet, in contrast to his January statement, announced that emergency collateral rules would be extended through 2011. Greek bonds regained the potential to serve as collateral.
Yet, the Greek situation was worse than central bankers had expected. Markets started to believe that Greece would even fail to meet the BBB- rating in 2011, an expectation that finally became reality on January 14th with the downgrade by Fitch. They continued to sell Greek bonds.
In May 2010 at the height of the debt crisis, the independence of the ECB began evaporating when it announced it would drop all rating requirements for Greek government bonds. The ECB would accept Greek bonds as collateral no matter what. Only by this measure does the ECB continue to accept junk rated Greek bonds as collateral.
By contradicting its previous approach and becoming an executor of politics, the ECB lost its credibility. The ECB presented itself more and more as the inflationary machine—in service of high politics—that had been intended by French and other Latin politicians.
From the beginning, the Euro has been a political project. In order to save the project, the ECB disregarded its mandate of price stability and changed its collateral rules to accommodate the bailout of Greece. Far from being a copy of the Bundesbank that during its history repeatedly dismissed inflationary wishes of politicians, the ECB proved to be an instrument of politicians toward a centralization of power in Europe.
In 2011 we are at a decisive moment regarding the future of the European Union. Either the EU takes a leap forward toward a strong centralized European state, or we will move towards more freedom as competition is fostered. The ECB has shown on which side it stands.By Jean Lotus
Forest Park Review Editor
An Oak Park and River Forest High School student had to spend the night in the police lockup Thursday night after she was arrested for cyber bullying a classmate by allegedly posting harassing messages on the other girl's Facebook page. The victim had filed a complaint with the Oak Park police for a similar incident earlier in the year.
"The posts were of a harassing and proviking nature," said Oak Park Commander LaDon Reynolds.
Police arrested the 18-year-old Thursday afternoon at OPRFHS in connection with Facebook messages posted Dec. 9. The offender was taken to the Oak Park police station and held in lieu of $150 bail overnight, said Commander LaDon Reynolds. She was taken to Cook County Court Friday morning and was released on a recognizance bond, Reynolds said. Police said they didn't know why the student was not bonded out and had to spend the night in police custody.
"We take cyberbullying very seriously," Reynolds said "Harassment when done over electronic communication can have a serious impact on an individual, as we've seen in some cases," he said.
Electronic harassment is a Class B misdemeanor that can result in a fine or up to 364 days in jail, Reynolds said.Delhi most commonly refers to:
Delhi, a city and union territory of India
, a city and union territory of India New Delhi, the capital of India, located in the union territory of Delhi
Delhi may also refer to:
Places [ edit ]
India
Delhi Cantonment, a town in the National Capital Territory of Delhi
Delhi Sultanate, an empire that dominated much of India
New Delhi, urban area within the metropolis of Delhi which is the seat of the government of India
Old Delhi, capital of the Mughals during the Mughal dynasty
Delhi Subah, an imperial Mughal province based at (Old) Delhi, renamed Shahjahanbad in 1648
United States
Canada
Delhi, Ontario, an unincorporated community
China
Delingha, also known as Delhi, a city in and the seat of the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture
Other uses [ edit ]
Delhi (horse), Thoroughbred racehorse and winner of 1904 Belmont Stakes
Delhi: A Novel, a historical work of semi-fiction by Khushwant Singh
, a historical work of semi-fiction by Khushwant Singh HMS Delhi, three ships of the Royal Navy
, three ships of the Royal Navy Delhi Maru, a Japanese merchant ship, the first to be converted into a Q-ship in 1944.St Stithians helped mould the naturally fast Rabada into a nerveless, high-quality international bowler © AFP
When Kagiso Rabada arrived at St Stithians College in northern Johannesburg, he was a flash left-hander with every shot in the book. "He reminded us a little of Brian Lara," said Wim Jansen, the school's director of cricket. "He was pretty flamboyant when he joined the school in Grade 8."
As a bowler, Rabada was wild. With his willowy frame and liquid slide to the crease, he could always bowl fast, but he was cavalier in his preparation and struggled with no-balls. Jansen said the school's coaches forced him to measure out his run to the centimetre, and before long he was deep into the subtle arts of composing an over. He worked on his core strength and wasn't over-bowled; the school smartly seeing to it that he wasn't pitchforked into the arduous extra regime of club cricket like so many other young fast bowlers. He duly made the Gauteng Under-15 team in his second year at school and played four years of 1st XI cricket, helping make St Stithians one of the most powerful cricketing schools in the land.
While Rabada was still at school, Jansen introduced the idea of a walkway of trees. The concept was borrowed from Wynberg Boys' High in the Western Cape - Jacques Kallis' alma mater - and involves planting young trees alongside a path around the first team cricket oval. Trees are planted for significant achievements - hundreds and five-wicket hauls - and despite taking loads of wickets at school, Rabada matriculated at the end of 2013 without a tree bearing his name.
"We didn't realise it at the time but not having a tree became a bit of an issue for Kagiso," said Jansen. "I remember being woken up [a couple of months later] at about 2am by him phoning from Dubai after he'd taken 6 for 25 in the [U-19] World Cup semi-final against Australia [in 2014]. All he wanted to know was if a tree could be planted in his name."
Associations are disappearing off the map, Kei and KwaZulu-Natal Inland have been dissolved, and the Warriors franchise has recently been stabilised after years of administrative bullshit and infighting
Although he'd already matriculated, Jansen and Ian Rickleton, a fellow master at St Stithians, bent the rules ever so slightly to accommodate Rabada, and now he has a tree on the path around the first team oval. Beneath the tree is a plaque recording his U-19 achievements, but the way he's going it's likely that the walkway will have significantly increased traffic in the years to come. Rabada, one senses, is the kind of player who will see to it that the plaque gets changed time and time again, updated to keep pace with his T20 and ODI deeds. Take the recent ODI in Kanpur. In it he defended 11 in the last over, having MS Dhoni caught and bowled, and also capturing the wicket of Stuart Binny, the visitors squeaking home by five runs.
With performances like these, Rabada seems very much set to stay. He's level-headed, calm under pressure, and unlike, say, Dale Steyn's last over in this year's World Cup semi-final against New Zealand, in which he failed to defend 12, he has a sense of the grand occasion. "Yes, he was a bit of drama queen at school," says Jansen. "He really loved acting. I think drama was the subject he achieved the best marks for in his final exams."
Rabada's meteoric rise has a long and illustrious precedent in South African cricket. Not a season goes by without some player - often, but not always, a bowler - stepping onto the national stage from left field. Paul Adams, described with crafty genius by local journalist Andy Capostagno as being like "a frog in a blender", was one such player, as were Marchant de Lange and, possibly, Hardus Viljoen.
There is something protean in South African cricket, some wellspring of fecundity that sees players drop in from strange places. This means that the system is providing enough opportunities in enough places for pathways to be established and routes to be grooved.
Having said this, in other respects the system is creaking like a poorly nailed-together tree house in a Highveld thunderstorm. Young white cricketers are becoming disenchanted - the trendy destination of choice is New Zealand - because of the stringent racial quotas, and almost everywhere the system is running on empty, financially speaking. Associations are disappearing off the map, Kei and KwaZulu-Natal Inland have been dissolved, and the Warriors franchise has recently been stabilised after years of administrative bullshit and infighting.
Look around at the six franchise coaches and almost invariably one sees either talented former players (Adams, or Lance Klusener at Dolphins) or comparative youngsters learning on the job. What one has, in effect, is a culture of senior players running the ship. It's a dangerous state of affairs, not helped by Cricket South Africa blithely pretending all is hunky-dory. Unwittingly, as their new poster boy, Rabada has helped them patch over the widening cracks. It's an untenable situation in the long term.
Luke Alfred is a journalist based in Johannesburg
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick was a guest on Paul Rabil’s inaugural “Suiting Up” podcast, as the lacrosse-based connection between the two led to a 45-minute conversation on management, coaching philosophy and more.
The best coach of all time. We talked organization and talent. Here's Ep 01, with @Patriots coach, Bill Belichick 🎧 https://t.co/31Y43bpp6v pic.twitter.com/gQb0Th0YTY — Paul Rabil (@PaulRabil) May 15, 2017
For example, Belichick annually has one of the smallest coaching staffs in the NFL. Why?
“My philosophy, really, is that less is more, so I’d rather have fewer people doing more work than more people doing a little more work,” Belichick tells Rabil on the podcast. “As long as everybody is busy, as long as everybody feels productive, they feel good about what they’re doing and they feel like they’re contributing; I think when people have lag time and kind of not enough to do, that leads to getting distracted and complaining or being less productive. So even though you have more people, sometimes less work gets done.”
This is also tied to Belichick’s messaging to the team.
“From a ‘getting everybody on the same page’ standpoint, which is critical, the fewer people you have to manage, the easier it is to get everybody on the same page,” he says on the podcast. “So if you’re talking to 10 people, it’s hard to get all 10 people doing the same thing or doing the right thing. Now you make that number 20, instead of 10, it’s even more difficult.
“If you have five people supervising another 15 people, now you have another layer there where you’re not dealing directly with everybody, and now you’re somewhat dependent on other people to relay the message the way you want it done and to monitor it that way. Certainly, there’s a degree of that, but as much of that I can eliminate, I think works better for me.”
Belichick talked to Rabil about the differences between overseeing specific departments (e.g. medical, video, training, sports science etc.) that aren’t “in the football coaching manual” and actual hands-on coaching. The coaching, Belichick said, “comes easy” and is “fun.”
Other topics included the frequency of organizational meetings; what Belichick looks for in players; team culture; short-term focus; coaching Pro Football Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor; how the saying “put it in the drawer” has become a motto of sorts in the second half of seasons; what books he reads; and more.
The podcast interview was completed before the NFL draft, as the team’s offseason program was beginning.
Belichick stressed the importance of the team’s work at this time, saying it “has a lot to do with what happens in November and December, so when you take these days off, there is a price to pay some time down the road in terms of where your team is.”WASHINGTON D.C. -- During the District of Columbia's September primary, one little electronic voting machine produced over 1,500 "phantom" write-in votes, a total so "completely out of whack, so anomalous it should not have been released," said Ward 3 member Mary Cheh.
Naturally, because we live in a media-driven society, the bogus results were immediately released, resulting in chaos on election night as the candidates demanded to know what was going on. Meanwhile, a special investigative committee is trying desperately to figure out what went wrong before the Nov. 4 general election pulls record crowds into voting booths across the city.
Was it human error? A hardware problem? And why does it take so long to pin these things down? It's not like we're asking them to find Noah's Ark.
Today more than 100,000 touch screen and optical scan voting machines by the same manufacturer are in jurisdictions throughout 17 states and the District of Columbia. Problems with this kind of equipment occurred in 2004 in a number of states including Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey.
"Voters shouldn't worry," said Michelle Schafer, vice president of communications for Sequoia Voting Machines. "We're in much better shape than in 2000 and 2004 because of all the extra attention paid to election security. Poll workers and election officials are better educated. New guidelines are in place. No one uses punch cards any more," Schafer told OffTheBus.
But after the Florida nightmare in 2004, who isn't worried? Check out this clip from an episode of The Simpsons scheduled to premiere on Nov. 2, as Homer Simpson, the dim-witted star of the animated comedy, tries to vote for Barack Obama.
Just sayin'...
Click on the photo to watch Homer in action:Songs We Love: Mano Le Tough, 'Trails'
Enlarge this image toggle caption White Tea/Courtesy of the artist White Tea/Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist
An Irishman in Berlin, Niall Mannion has recorded two albums under his faux-French nom de plume, Mano Le Tough. The title song from the second, Trails, implies much about what it means to be a writer of songs (as opposed to simply a producer of tracks) in dance music. There are only so many previously forged paths still worth pursuing in the field, and it's to Mannion's credit that "Trails" recognizes the progress made by the likes of Caribou (whose "Can't Do Without You" he helped remix in 2014) while clearly adding his own voice to the conversation. It helps make "Trails" a heartfelt winner, as well as (hopefully) a map for other writers to follow.
Mano Le Tough has moved leaps and bounds from his 2013 debut, Changing Days, and that's no knock on that album, a beautiful collection of deep, Balearic-minded house music full of heroic minor chords. It already contained a consistent vocal approach, even if too much of its sentiment was hidden under a vocoder-like haze. But on Trails, Mannion's voice is out front, and the beat isn't so intent on ushering listeners to the dance floor. Like the music of Radiohead, Nicolas Jaar and Caribou's Dan Snaith, among others, these are songs made for people who are at home in a club, yet universal in the way they search for connection with others.
"Trails" is the album's first-among-equals, but also a wistful aside. It's built around a staccato conversation involving a drum machine moving at an irregular house speed that a (seemingly live) hi-hat throws further off-kilter, a few gurgling synths that provide more context than focus, and a low-register electric guitar line that casts a mournful shadow. The in-the-mix effect is of a fusion-funk band in an expert but indifferent late-night noodling session. Yet the whole thing is somehow held together by Mannion's repeatedly speak-sung, open refrain, which creates a moment of indelible emotional tension.
And I ask you, are you my friend Or my lover until the end And there's nothing like coming down Coming down with you again
The vocal moves from acting as the song's only glue to serving as its guide, shining an evolving light on the music being built around it — seemingly in real time. By the end, it reflects the subculture in which it naturally exists; no hands in the air, just going home and facing up to life.
Trails is out on Oct. 30 on Permanent Vacation.The capsules were made in northeastern China from babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder, the Korea Customs Service said.
Customs officials refused to say where the dead babies came from or who made the capsules, citing possible diplomatic friction with Beijing.
Chinese officials ordered an investigation into the production of drugs made from dead fetuses or newborns last year.
The customs office has discovered 35 smuggling attempts since August of about 17,450 capsules disguised as stamina boosters, and some people believe them to be a panacea for disease, the customs service said in a statement.
The capsules of human flesh, however, contained bacteria and other harmful ingredients.
The smugglers told customs officials they believed the capsules were ordinary stamina boosters and did not know the ingredients or manufacturing process.
Ethnic Koreans from northeastern China who now live in South Korea were intending to use the capsules themselves or share them with other Korean-Chinese, a customs official said. They were carried in luggage or sent by international mail.
The capsules were all confiscated but no one has been punished because the amount was deemed small and they weren't intended for sale, said the customs official, who requested anonymity, citing department rules.
China's State Food and Drug Administration and its Health Ministry did not immediately respond to questions faxed to them Monday. Chinese media identify northeastern China as the source of such products, especially Jilin province which abuts North Korea.
The Jilin food and drug safety agency is responsible for investigating the trade of such remains there. Calls to the agency and to the information office of Jilin's Communist Party were not answered Monday.
The South Korean customs agency began investigating after receiving a tip a year ago. No sicknesses have been reported from ingesting the capsules.Few books have become so universally beloved as Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer's children's novel The Phantom Tollbooth.
Though it's not a picture book, the collaboration between writer Juster and illustrator Feiffer produced such a harmonious marriage between words and images that Feiffer's sketches are thought of as inseparable from the text. In an age of collectible cover redesigns and repackagings, the original bright cerulean cover with Feiffer's scratchy drawing of Milo and Tock reigns largely uncontested, familiar to generations of young readers.
Feiffer, however, harbored doubts about his work on the beloved children's book. A new retrospective on his artwork, Out of Line: The Art of Jules Feiffer, by Martha Fay, sheds light on his ambivalence toward perhaps his most famous illustrations. Read an excerpt from Out of Line below:
Another collaboration he had mixed feelings about during this period was The Phantom Tollbooth, written by his good friend Norton Juster. When Juster began writing The Phantom Tollbooth in 1960, he asked Feiffer if he would illustrate it. Feiffer agreed, but as Juster recalled fifty years later, he was on-and-off a persnickety collaborator.
“There are a lot of things Jules doesn’t like to draw or can’t,” Juster says. “Either he thinks he can’t—or he just doesn’t want to do it. When we were working on The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the things I wanted to do was maps. Feiffer could not or would not draw a map. So I drew the map, and he put a piece of tracing paper over it and did it in his line.
“When it came to doing the armies of Wisdom, who are supposed to be mounted on horseback, the first time he showed me the sketch they were all mounted on cats because he doesn’t like to draw horses. We finally compromised, and he drew two lines that simulated the idea of a horse.”
In fact, says Feiffer, not long after the two friends completed their second project together, after a half-century gap, “I had very little regard for what I did on The Phantom Tollbooth. I thought the text was brilliant, and I thought I was imitating illustrators who were better than I was. I did the art on tracing paper.
“Those illustrations are now legendary, apparently. People say they treasure them— they’re their favorite part of the book—and I don’t respond to any of this. I look back on the work and I think it’s good work, but I can’t say I have any visceral response to it. Unlike The Odious Ogre [2010], the last book I did with Norton. There I take great pride in the work, and I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, and I take it out and look at it with great admiration. But I don’t look back at The Phantom Tollbooth, except for a few drawings, as an example of my work that I like to be reminded of.”
Feiffer’s harsh judgment of his work on The Phantom Tollbooth aside, the bestselling book remains a beloved classic. “If stylistically the Phantom Tollbooth illustrations are not quite all of a piece,” writes Leonard S. Marcus, author of The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth (2011), “that is because Feiffer was borrowing left and right,” from “Winsor McCay, James Thurber, Edward Ardizzone, George Grosz, Thomas Rowlandson, and on and on. Even so, he more than acquitted himself, infusing the drawings with a kind of coiled-spring energy and blitheness of spirit that perfectly suit Juster’s outlandish tale.”
Note: As we were working on this monograph, a cache of drawings Feiffer did on tracing paper more than fifty years ago turned up unexpectedly in his studio.
Excerpt from Out of Line: The Art of Jules Feiffer By Martha Fay ©2015 Martha Fay Published by AbramsAnthony Scaramucci has been named the director of communications for the White House, a move that reportedly prompted White House press secretary Sean Spicer to submit his resignation.
So who is Anthony Scaramucci?
Scaramucci, 53, was appointed to be one of 16 members of then President-elect Trump's Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee in November.
Before being called to the political sphere, though, he was a hedge-fund financier and entrepreneur two times over.
In 2011, he was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year in the financial services category for his innovation as a founder of SkyBridge Capital.
When he received the award, Scaramucci said he was committed to fostering entrepreneurship.
"I remain committed not only to building SkyBridge and making a mark on the financial community through the firm, but to fostering the next generation of entrepreneurs through other personal and professional endeavors," he said in a statement.
SkyBridge Capital, founded in 2005, is a hedge fund with $11.4 billion in assets under management, according to the company's website.
In January, Scaramucci sold his stake in the hedge fund to Washington, D.C.-based RON Transatlantic Advisors and HNA Capital of New York. The deal (which is expected to close this summer) values SkyBridge Capital at $200 million, according to The Wall Street Journal, though Scaramucci's percent ownership of SkyBridge Capital is not clear.
SkyBridge was not Scaramucci's first entrepreneurial venture. He was also the co-founder of financial services company Oscar Capital Management, which he sold to financial services company Neuberger Berman, LLC in 2001.
Scaramucci also worked at Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Neuberger Berman, according to his LinkedIn profile. At Goldman Sachs, he was a vice president in private wealth management.
He graduated from Harvard Law School and got his undergraduate degree from Tufts.
In addition to launching and running financial services companies, Scaramucci is an author. He wrote "The Little Book of Hedge Funds," "Goodbye Gordon Gekko" and "Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole."
Scaramucci is a former CNBC contributor.
See also:
Trump advisor Scaramucci sells his hedge fund business
Sean Spicer resigns as White House press secretary after objecting to Scaramucci hire
Trump wants Scaramucci to be White House communications chief, but top staff pushes backBerlin police say thieves broke into the German capital's Bode Museum and made off with a massive 100-kilogram gold coin issued by the Royal Canadian Mint that's worth millions.
Dubbed the "Big Maple Leaf" and measuring three-centimetres thick with a diameter of 53 centimetres, the coin has a portrait of the Queen on one side and maple leaves on the other.
It has a face value of $1 million, but by weight alone it would be worth approximately $4 million US at market prices.
The museum, which has one of the largest coin collections in the world, said on its website that the coin has been on loan in its numismatic collection since 2010.
It was first issued by the Royal Canadian Mint in May 2007 and was listed in the Guinness Book of Records for its purity: 99.999 per cent gold.
Spokesman Stefen Petersen said thieves apparently entered through a window at about 3:30 a.m. local time on Monday, broke into a cabinet where the coin was kept, and escaped with it before police arrived.
A ladder was found by nearby railway tracks.
Royal Canadian Mint spokesman Alex Reeves said the stolen coin does not belong to the mint. After creating the original (which is in storage in Ottawa), the mint manufactured five more that were sold to interested private individuals.
The owner of the stolen coin is unknown.We take a two-fold approach to changing and saving lives: firstly providing support for men who are down or in crisis, and secondly campaigning for culture change to tackle outdated stereotypes of masculinity that prevent men seeking help.
We do this in the face of a problem that is deeply entrenched. Many men feel forced to stoically “man up” (whatever that means) and grind through bad times without societal permission to open up or seek help. Calm’s research shows that while 67% of women tell someone about going through depression, only 55% of men do the same.
The result? Men are three times more likely than women to take their own lives and suicide is the single biggest killer of men aged between 20 and 49 – something the Duke of Cambridge describes as “an appalling stain on our society”.
But the tide is turning. Since Calm was founded 10 years ago, awareness of male suicide has trebled. Definitively, men are talking more. Calm alone has taken 200,000 helpline calls to date, and prevented more than 1,000 suicides.
The work of organisations and campaigns such as Lift The Weight and the royals’ mental health campaign Heads Together (Calm is a partner charity of the latter) – is a massive step forward. Historically, the alpha-male archetype has had no time for conversations about emotions but, in recent weeks, this has been dismissed by men such as Stormzy, Rio Ferdinand, and Calm’s patron Professor Green – strong, famous, tough men explaining how communication has, in some way, saved their lives.
There is still much work to be done. The emphasis now is to move beyond the rallying cry to open up. We must better equip ourselves, our mates, our workplaces, schools and health services to support those who need it. And we start by building a generation who believe that society’s ideas of your gender should not be a death sentence.
Simon Gunning is chief executive of the Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm), the leading UK charity dedicated to preventing male suicide.
In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123.
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.(Image by RealClearPolitics.com) Details DMCA
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Quinnipiac shows Clinton losing to Trump in Ohio and statistically tying Trump in Florida and Pennsylvania. Bernie Sanders beats Trump by 2 in Ohio and Florida, and by six in Pennsylvania, compared to Hillary's one point lead.
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In New Hampshire, Clinton squeaks by Trump, while Sanders trounces him, with a 16 or 21 point difference.
Clinton loses to Trump in Arizona, a red state. Sanders squeaks a win-- a five point difference from Hillary.
These differences are important, and they will grow. They really matter when it comes to Senate races.
In New Hampshire, the race between Ayotte and Hassan is very close. Can you image that Sanders sixteen or 21 point
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free speech, he noted.
That is democracy, Rushdie said. “It’s not polite. It’s not a tea party. It’s a rough-and-tumble affair. It’s an argument. It’s permitting others to say what you think is unsayable … If you want it, that’s the price of the ticket.”It's also not surprising that the Sixers reportedly haven't found much sympathy for their complaints from other teams around the league. When a franchise spends more than a decade making bad draft picks and bad signings and bad trades and bad hirings, when it never adopts a fresh and thoughtful strategy for success, when it assures itself of remaining trapped in the NBA netherworld between genuine greatness and abject awfulness, how many of its competitors are going to stand up and say, Hey, we really don't approve of what you guys are doing without snickering? There's a reason that one of the league's biggest recent laughingstocks has been the New York Knicks. It's not just that the Knicks have generally been lousy. It's that they've tried so hard to be good, and that they've been so lousy at trying to be good.“I think I’m good on cookies for a while.”
That’s what Betsy told me a few days ago and I couldn’t agree with her more. After a full week of nothing but cookies and sugar, I’m ready to move back into the land of the savory.
Heck. I don’t even have a sweet tooth really so I’m very excited to post something without sugar in it.
These quick Baja Chicken Wraps are something that Betsy and I have been eating recently. I love them because they work great for a lunch dish, but are also good to have if you want a lighter dinner option. They are pretty healthy actually and jam-packed with flavor.
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Flavorful marinated and grilled chicken is sliced and wrapped up with fresh veggies. A perfect wrap for lunch or a light dinner. Ingredients 1 pound chicken breasts, grilled and chopped Lettuce Avocado Ranch Dressing (homemade is good) Hot Sauce Large tortillas Chicken Marinade: 2 limes, juice 1/4 cup olive oil 1 teaspoon cumin seeds 1 teaspoon chili powder 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1 teaspoon black pepper Print Recipe Show Directions Pin Recipe Directions 1) Mix together marinade ingredients. Add chicken breasts and let marinate for a few minutes. 2) Grill chicken over high heat for about 8-10 minutes per side until they are cooked through. 3) Slice chicken thinly. 4) In a bowl, mix together chopped lettuce, a drizzle of ranch dressing, and a dash of hot sauce. 5) Lay out a large tortilla and put down a layer of the lettuce mixture. 6) Top with about 1/4 of an avocado and a layer of chicken. I recommend about 4 ounces of chicken per wrap. 7) Top with a drizzle of ranch and an extra dash of hot sauce and roll the wrap up. 8) Slice and serve!
Baja Chicken Wraps
Prepping the Chicken
I decided to grill the chicken for these Baja Chicken Wraps even though it’s December. I’m a year around griller, but if you don’t want to venture out in the cold just to grill a few chicken breasts, you can definitely just sear these in a pan for a few minutes a side and then finish them off in a 350 degree oven.
Whether you grill or not, I recommend giving the chicken breasts some serious flavor with a quick marinade.
I just whisked together some spices with some lime and olive oil and then tossed in my chicken breasts.
You don’t need to marinate these guys very long to give them some flavor. Even 10 minutes in this mixture will do the trick.
So, like I said, you have two options for cooking the chicken in my mind.
1) Grill them. Pretty straightforward, just toss them on a hot grill for about 8-10 minutes per side until they are cooked through.
2) Sear them in a sturdy pan. Cast iron would work well, but any pan should do the trick. After you sear them for a few minutes over medium-high heat, stick them in a 350 degree oven for 15-20 minutes to finish cooking them. If the pan you sear in isn’t oven-safe, just transfer the breasts to a baking dish for the oven cooking.
The reason you will probably want to finish the chicken breasts in the oven is because they might burn if you keep them over high heat for too long. Finishing them in the oven solves that problem and still gives you a nice sear on the outside.
I just tossed mine on the grill though. That’s easiest and best way to cook chicken breasts in my opinion.
Once the chicken breasts cool a bit, slice them up!
Keep in mind that we’re going to be adding these slices to a wrap so try to keep the slices pretty thin.
The Lettuce
I love lettuce in wraps, but I wanted to use the lettuce as a flavor vehicle also.
So I ripped up some lettuce (a few cups) and then tossed it with a few tablespoons of homemade ranch dressing and a few dashes of hot sauce. Of course, you don’t have to make homemade ranch dressing for this, but the homemade version is really packed with flavor.
Mix this all up really well and you’re ready to make a wrap!
Making the Baja Chicken Wraps
You should be able to get about 4 wraps out of one pound of grilled chicken. Of course, that largely depends on how big you make your wraps…
I use the biggest tortillas I could find just so I could really stuff them.
Start by laying down a nice layer of the lettuce. Then add about 1/4 of an avocado that’s sliced up.
Top that with some of the grilled chicken and maybe give it an extra drizzle of ranch or hot sauce.
Then you’re ready to roll.
Fold the ends toward the center and just roll the wrap up tightly.
While you don’t have to slice this in half, I think it’s a little easier to eat in two pieces. Plus it looks good.
There’s a lot of good flavors here. The lime marinade goes perfectly with the rich avocado. The lettuce gives it lots of good crunch and flavor because of the dressing and hot sauce.
If you didn’t want to use chicken, I actually think you could sub tofu for this without too much trouble. I would still marinate it and grill it just like I did with the chicken.
If you’re looking for really tasty wraps, give these Baja Chicken Wraps a shot. I thought they were absolutely delicious!The Carolina Hurricanes have made the first big post-expansion deal, acquiring Trevor van Riemsdyk and a 2018 seventh-round pick from the Vegas Golden Knights. The Golden Knights will receive Pittsburgh’s 2017 second-round pick in return, originally acquired for Ron Hainsey at the trade deadline.
As noted last night, there was immediately chatter among insiders that the Golden Knights would immediately flip van Riemsdyk to Carolina, though nothing was certain after the fireworks that went on last night in terms of trades. This is one of the more interesting flips, as Carolina already has an excess of defenders on the roster and has been looking to move at least one for scoring help. Bringing van Riemsdyk aboard gives them even more leeway to make an upgrade at forward, with Justin Faulk perhaps being the most likely candidate to be on the move.
van Riemsdyk was selected from the Chicago Blackhawks last night in what was expected to be half of a side deal with the Vegas Golden Knights. We’d heard for weeks that the Blackhawks would send Marcus Kruger to Vegas as well, but with news breaking yesterday that Marian Hossa would not be able to play next season, suddenly things shifted. Chicago was no longer in such dire need of cap relief, though there is no guarantee things will stay that way. Kruger may still be in play at some point, especially if the league decides Hossa can’t stay on LTIR.
For Vegas, this was the plan all along. Pick many more valuable assets than needed—in this case defensemen—and immediately flip them for prospects and picks that will benefit the team more down the road. Though van Riemsdyk is only 25 and could help the Golden Knights immediately, he’s also a restricted free agent next summer and is likely due to get a hefty raise. His current contract—$825K this year—is so appealing to teams around the league that there were likely several suitors once Vegas got their hands on him.
In three seasons since turning pro out of the University of New Hampshire, van Riemsdyk has developed into more than just another NCAA free agent. He registered 16 points in 56 games this season (all at even strength), and was a solid possession contributor. He’s clearly good enough to log more than the average bottom-pairing defenseman, but behind both Faulk and Brett Pesce there won’t be much opportunity for that should they both remain.
Frank Seravalli of TSN was first to break the deal.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports ImagesHow Far We’ve Come in 50 Years, Barbados!
January 7, 2017
On the last day of my mom’s recent visit to Barbados, we were walking to nearby Dover Beach when she started recounting her days at Cable and Wireless (C&W, one of two phone companies at the time) in the 60’s. It’s always a pleasure to see how much she enjoys telling stories from back in the day but this time was different; it was just on the heels of Barbados’ 50th anniversary of independence. Pausing to shield our eyes from the brilliant sunlight, she pointed to a large yellow building up ahead (now a vacation condo site) and recalled the days when long distance calling service was limited and expensive. What!?? Restrictions on calling long distance?
Other than the OMG thought of not having long distance service at my fingertips, it’s actually very cool (not to mention quite exciting) to hear my mother tell of her time at C&W before cell phones, Whatsapp, Skype, etc. She was a part of history and is still here to talk about it!
So, back to long distance calls in those days: first of all, there was no picking up the phone to call overseas for casual conversations like we do today. It was very expensive and there was a limit on the amount of words per message, so mainly businesses dealing with overseas associates used this C&W service. The Barbados Telephone Company (the other phone company at the time) also provided long distance service, but for businesses and locals, C&W was the cheaper option.
In order to make a long distance call, the businessman would type his message on a teleprinter and transmit it via landline to C&W’s Central Telegraph Office (the vacation condo site). A staff member in the telex room, as this part of the building was called, would receive the message and re-type it on his teleprinter. This typewriter-like machine would then generate a tape punched with holes representing the words of the message. The message would be transmitted via underwater cable to the telex room at an overseas station. Telex operators there would receive the message on a teleprinter and transmit it to the local recipient. My mother worked in the telex section at Dover and similarly received and re-transmitted messages to local recipients and other stations. In another section of the building, (mostly) locals walked in their long distance messages, or “cables”, to be processed and re-sent via underwater cable or wirelessly.
As an aside to this story there were always the fond memories of my mother’s mischievous male colleagues, who, on one occasion, wrapped a rubber spider in a cable paper and delivered it to an unsuspecting colleague for “processing”. No need to tell how that ended!!
My thoughts brought me back to present times when we easily pick up the phone and call Timbuktu to ask about the dog. How far we have come that the then “luxury” of long distance calling is now almost obsolete! How far my mother has come, to know that simply receiving and sorting messages all those years ago, she was forming a vital part of this island’s history to be celebrated decades later!
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Tags: historyMETAIRIE, La. -- New Orleans Saints cornerback Keenan Lewis had hip surgery on Tuesday, according to a report by NFL Network, and is expected to miss four to six weeks.
A Saints source said the report is inaccurate but did not offer any further details.
Editor's Picks Triplett: Lewis on short list of Saints' most irreplaceable players The Saints lack proven depth at cornerback, which could spell trouble if Keenan Lewis misses the first month of the season.
Lewis was absent from Tuesday's practice, though it's unclear when the potential injury occurred. He played in Sunday's preseason game against the Houston Texans.
Losing Lewis for a month or more would deal a severe blow to the Saints' defense. He has emerged as their No. 1 cornerback and arguably their defensive MVP over the past two years, routinely matching up against opponents' top receivers.
Plus the Saints' secondary was already dealing with several injuries. Newly signed starter Brandon Browner has been out for the past three weeks with an unspecified leg injury -- though he was back doing individual drills in Tuesday's practice. And safety Jairus Byrd has missed all of training camp while rehabbing from an unspecified knee injury. Coach Sean Payton has said the Saints' goal was to get Byrd back during the preseason, but his timetable remains uncertain.
Saints cornerback Keenan Lewis reportedly will be out four to six weeks after undergoing surgery on his hip. Andrew Weber/USA TODAY Sports
The Saints also placed rookie cornerback P.J. Williams on injured reserve Tuesday -- though the third-round draft pick had not yet worked his way into the mix for a prominent role on the team before the injury.
The Saints will likely promote Canadian Football League transplant Delvin Breaux into their starting lineup. The 25-year-old rookie has had an impressive offseason after a remarkable comeback from a broken neck suffered in high school.
The Saints will have bigger question marks at their nickel and dime spots, though, with rookie Damian Swann, second-year pro Stanley Jean-Baptiste and veteran Kyle Wilson battling for those jobs after inconsistent offseasons.
The Saints' secondary was arguably their biggest area of concern heading into this offseason, after they finished 31st in the NFL in yards allowed last season and dead last in defensive efficiency, according to ESPN Stats & Information. That certainly hasn't changed in the wake of their summer injuries.Goro's "wide-ranging treatment - basically an exercise in esoteric dot-joining involving Nostradamus, the Sphinx, the Pyramids, world-mythology, the Bible, and much else - is ingenious, and contains much that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking." - Peter Lemesurier "Goro seems to be the first person who has corresponded with me that is able to get inside the mind of Nostradamus in the same manner, and appreciate the genius of the great man." - Dolores Cannon (in Conversations With Nostradamus Vol. 1, rev. ed, p.326) I've been a (distant) fan of your... for years. - Richard C. Hoagland (from his forum/blog in June 2005)
Aug 11, 2017
Announcement
We are moving to:
Super Torch Ritual
(https://www.supertorchritual.com/)
- Etemenanki is passing its torch to STR
- Etemenanki (public) & STRUG (members) are unified under one roof
- From now on everything will take place on STR instead
Crossing the Threshold...
~ Thank you ~
Note to STRUG members to whom the above is news:
Your STRUG credentials won't work with STR right away.
Please log into STRUG for instructions.
Aug 11, 2017is passing its torch to STR(public) & STRUG (members) are unified under one roofFrom now on everything will take place on STR insteadCrossing the Threshold...~ Thank you ~ Etemenankian Tweets Tweets by @Etemenankian
"Trump" as in trump card or tarot
Trump resided in Trump Tower, implying tarot's Tower card
Trump won presidential election in '16 (Tower card = #16)
Dubai (name) means "money", just as Trump known for his wealth is all about money (his TV show Apprentice had theme song with lyrics "money, money, money, money"
Operation London Bridge is the codename for the plan for what will happen in the days after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The plan was originally devised in the 1960s and is updated several times each year. It involves planning from government departments, the Metropolitan Police Service, the British Armed Forces, the Church of England, media and Royal Parks of London. Some key decisions relating to the plan were made by the Queen herself, although some can only be made by her successor after her death.
The phrase "London Bridge is down" will announce the death of the Queen to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and key personnel, setting the plan into motion.
------------------[Start quote]------------------
May 08, 2017 "May (potential) impact dates"
May 24th
two mega Birthquakes
------------------[End quote]------------------
James Comey may still testify before a committee in an open hearing on May 24th. Since it coincides precisely with our key date it seems more likely than not that this will happen, and some things would be revealed there that will cause a tectonic shift
may still in an open hearing on. Since it coincides precisely with our it seems more likely than not that this will happen, and some things would be revealed there that will cause a tectonic shift President Trump is scheduled to meet Pope Francis at the Vatican on May 24th. The symbolic significance of this is clearer in a certain context which we won't go into here.
UPDATE (May 22)
"Deep Impact"
[Ariana Grande's "One Last Time" music video
released on Feb 15, 2015] [Ariana Grande's "released on, 2015]
For more in-depth information and rapid updates....
The massive tower fire in London today signifies an ominous(birthday June 14). The symbolism is actually quite serious as it interacts with the massive tower fire onwhich I already interpreted as alluding to Trump and the- i.e.Today's tower fire on his birthday amidst intensifying Trump/Russia investigations goes perfectly with the interpretation and with the view I've been expressing since last summer that this Russia thing is a very serious "Deep Impact" situation and may well lead to the destruction of the Trump presidency.When there is this much smoke, there has to be fire. And we will see it soon enough.Aroundwas an intriguing window we were watching closely linked to our " New Year's Prophecy " series. On ~June 8th the Sun's declination matched the latitude of, the Brazilian city that hosted the Olympics last summer...Terror in London...As soon as I heard "", I thought of Operation London Bridge Can we interpret today's London Bridge terror event as a signal for an imminent death of Queen Elizabeth II (sometime in 2017)? I tend to think so given that the exit of the Queen was already a key theme for this year.As soon as it started we knew, because of the timing...I'll just copy below my STRUG /hidden post from May 8th which provides some details on the May windows...We are now well into the month ofwhich has a fewcoming up around the middle of the month. One we've already discussed (May 15); the other one we'll discuss in this post for the first time.A quick review of...It will be ~9 days later onthat we'll have another, potentially even more intense window involving not one but(huge earthquake + huge tsunami). We are talking twoevents in the form of(2004) and/Fukushima (2011). On, it will be temporallyfrom these two events:It's a very potent pattern that we are dealing with here.It's not just the month of May. 2017 is no ordinary year...(May 19):Impact event is here......echoing the January 2015 Paris terror event which I had pointed out was relevant to this window.was a major message encoded in the event via's music video "One Last Time" released back on February 15, 2016 or the 2nd anniversary of the Russian (Chelyabinsk) meteor impact event (2/15/2013).There is actually another major piece of the puzzle here we can't discuss yet which will dramatically increase the overall coherence and foreshadowing effects. There are still big things coming in 2017...(Hit the link below to join STRUG!)1. Introduction
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Last updated:The Nakhawila (Arabic
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is a part. There can be no question that all viewpoints regarding SDSU’s Aztec identity have a right to be respectfully heard and carefully considered. This resolution provides an opportunity for dialogue to continue among all stakeholders in the SDSU community – including faculty, students, staff, and alumni.
Well, here’s this alum’s two cents — keep the Aztec warrior mascot going strong! And I am not alone.
When a student government resolution to kill the mascot failed last spring, some student representatives resigned over it. Comments online can basically be summed up as follows: Good riddance.
Protests against the mascot usually seem to attract less than 3 percent of the 25,000-plus students at the school.
Look, this issue has been debated for years. But at the end of the day, the mascot has stood the test of time and hopefully it will survive this latest politically correct onslaught.
MORE: Native American group wants SDSU’s ‘Aztec’ mascot eliminated
MORE: Students say Aztec mascot offensive, demand its decommission
Read More
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on TwitterIsraeli forces continue systematic crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt)
(21 –27 January 2016)
Israeli forces continued to use excessive force in the oPt
3 Palestinian civilians, including 2 children, were killed in theWest Bank.
22 Palestinian civilians, including 3 children, were wounded in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces continued to open fire at areas along the Gaza Strip borders, but no casualties were reported.
Israeli warplanes conducted 2 airstrikes in the central and southern Gaza Strip, but no casualties were reported.
Israeli forces conducted 73incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
47 Palestinian civilians, including 7 children, were arrested. 11 of them, including 4 children, were arrested in occupied Jerusalem.
Among the arrested were the PLC member Hatem Qafisha and former Minister Essa al-Ja’bari.
Israeli forces continued to target Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza Strip sea.
4 fishermen, including a child, were arrested and their fishing boat was confiscated.
Jewish majority efforts continued in occupied East Jerusalem.
A family self-demolished its house in Sour Baher village and more demolition notices were issued against houses in Silwan.
The Israeli municipality demolished an underconstruction house in al-Mukaber Mount.
A house in Shu’fat village was demolished in favour of establishing Road 21.
Settlement activities continued in the West Bank.
An agricultural room and a well in Beit Oula village, west of Hebron, were demolished.
Israeli forces turned the West Bank into cantons and continued to impose the illegal closure on the Gaza Strip for the 9 th
Dozens of temporary checkpoints were established in the West Bank and others were re-established to obstruct the movement of Palestinian civilians.
6 Palestinian civilians, including 3 children, were arrested at military checkpoints.
Summary
Israeli violations of international law and international humanitarian law in theoPt continued during the reporting period (21 – 27 January 2016).
Shooting:
Israeli forces have continued to commit crimes, inflicting civilian casualties. They have also continued to use excessive force against Palestinian civilians participating in peaceful protests in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the majority of whom were youngsters. Occupied East Jerusalem witnessed similar attacks. During the reporting period, Israeli forces killed three Palestinian civilians, including two children, in the West Bank. Moreover, they wounded 22 civilians, including three children; 12 of whom, including a child, were wounded in the Gaza Strip while the remaining others were wounded in the West Bank. Concerning the nature of injuries, 11 civilians were hit with live bullets and 11 others were hit with rubber-coated metal bullets.
In the West Bank, Israeli forces killed three Palestinian civilians, including two children, and wounded 11 others, including two children also. Five of the wounded persons were hit with live bullets and five others were hit with rubber-coated metal bullets.
In the West Bank, killings committed by Israeli forces were as follows:
In one of the most heinous crimes committed by Israeli settlers, on 23 January 2016, a security guard of”Anatot” settlement, northeast of occupied Jerusalem, killed Ruqaya Abu Tabeekh (13), from Anata village, northeast of occupied Jerusalem. Israeli forces claimed that the girl had fought with her family and went out of the house with a knife in her hand to carry out a stabbing and put end to her life. However, her family said that the Israeli forces killed the girl in cold blood, as she was not holding a knife and had never thought about carrying out any attacks in spite of the fight they had with her soon before she was killed.
On 25 January 2016, security officers shot dead two persons who carried outa stabbing in “Beit Horon” settlement in Beit Our al-Fouqa village, southwest of Ramallah. The two persons were identified as Ibrahim Allan (23), from Beit Our al-Tahta, southwest of Ramallah, and Hussein Abu Ghosh (17), from Qalandia refugee camp, north of Jerusalem.
In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces wounded 12 Palestinian civilians, including a child, who participated in peaceful protests near the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Six of them were hit with live bullets and the six others were hit with rubber-coated metal bullets.
As part of Israeli attacks along the border area in the Gaza Strip, on 24 January 2016, Israeli forces stationed at the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel, east of Khan Yunis, opened fire at agricultural lands, east of al-Fokhari and Khuza’a villages to the west of the said fence. However, no casualties were reported.
Concerning Israeli airstrikes, on 25 January 2016, Israeli warplanes fired two missiles at areas of evacuated settlement, northwest of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip. Moreover, a warplane fired a missile at a military training site of Palestinian armed groups, southwest of Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. The missiles rocked the targeted area causing material damage, but no casualties were reported.
In the context of Israeli attacks against Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza Strip Sea, on 27 January 2016, Israeli gunboats opened fire at Palestinian fishing boats sailing off al-Waha shore, northwest of Beit Lahia, north of the Gaza Strip. A gunboat approached a fishing boat that was sailing 1.5 nautical miles off the shore and boarded by four fishermen. Israeli naval forces arrested the four fishermen and confiscated the boat. At approximately 21:00, on the same day, Israeli forces released the fishermen while kept the boat in their custody.
Incursions:
During the reporting period,Israeli forces conducted at least 73 military incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and four ones in occupied East Jerusalem.During these incursions, Israeli forces arrested at least 47Palestinian civilians, including seven children. Elevenof these civilians, including four children,were arrested in East Jerusalem.
Among the arrested were Hatem Qafisha (56), PLC member representing the Change and Reform Bloc of Hamas movement, and engineer Essa al-Ja’bari (49), a leader in Hamas movement and former Minister in the 10th Palestinian Government. Both of them were arrested from their houses in Hebron.
Efforts to create Jewish Majority
In the context of house demolitions and demolition notices issued on grounds of non-licensing construction works, on 22 January 2016, Dabash family was obliged to self-demolish their house in sour Baher village, southwest of occupied Jerusalem, under the pretext of non-licensing. They self-demolished the house to avoid paying the fine demolition costs to the Israeli municipality. It should be noted that the 80-square-meter house was built 20 years ago. The Israeli forces imposed fines on the family several times for building without a license, but a final decision was taken to the Israeli court to oblige the family self-demolish the house on 24 January 2016.
On 23 January 2016, Israeli forces accompanied by special forces and police officers moved into a number of neighbourhoods in Silwan village, south of the Old City in East Jerusalem. They distributed notices to owners of a number of residential buildings and commercial facilities to refer to the municipality.
On 27 January 2016, Israeli municipality vehicles demolished an underconstruction house in al-Sal’ah neighbourhood in al-Mukaber Mount village, southeast of occupied Jerusalem. The house belongs to Mousa Surri, who was finishing the house to move in along with his family within the coming weeks. The house cost him NIS 130,000.
On the same day, Israeli municipality vehicles demolished a house belonging to the family of Kefaya al-Resheq, north of occupied Jerusalem. The house sheltering 19 family members was demolished in favour of establishing Road 21 that has been planned for since the 90s.
Restrictions on movement:
Israel continued to impose a tight closure of the oPt, imposing severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.
The illegal closure of the Gaza Strip, which has been steadily tightened since June 2007 has had a disastrous impact on the humanitarian and economic situation in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli authorities impose measures to undermine the freedom of trade, including the basic needs for the Gaza Strip population and the agricultural and industrial products to be exported. For 9 consecutive years, Israel has tightened the land and naval closure to isolate the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, and other countries around the world. This resulted in grave violations of the economic, social and cultural rights and a deterioration of living conditions for 1.8 million people. The Israeli authorities have established Karm Abu Salem (Kerem Shaloum) as the sole crossing for imports and exports in order to exercise its control over the Gaza Strip’s economy. They also aim at imposing a complete ban on the Gaza Strip’s exports. The Israeli closure raised the rate of poverty to 38.8%, 21.1% of which suffer from extreme poverty. Moreover, the rate of unemployment increased up to 44%, which reflects the unprecedented economic deterioration in the Gaza Strip.
Settlement activities:
On 21 January 2016, Israeli forces demolished an agricultural room, a wells and pillars to establish a livestock barrack, west of Beit Oula village, west of Hebron. The demolition was carried out under that no permit was obtained from the competent authorities in the Israeli Civil Administration and the abovementioned utilities are located in area (C).
On 22 January 2016, Israeli forces informed the residents of Karma village, east of Doura, southwest of Hebron, of levelling a road under the pretext that it was located in area (C). It should be noted that the abovementioned road was the only way out of the village for Palestinian vehicles after Israeli forces had closed the main entrance to the village for years.
Details
Incursions into Palestinian Areas, and Attacks on Palestinian Civilians and Property in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
Thursday, 21 January 2016
At approximately 02:00, Israeli forces moved into Surif village, northwest of Hebron, and stationed in the centre of the village. They raided and searched a house belonging to Mahmoud Ali al-Qadi (22). They withdrew later taking al-Qadi to an unknown destination.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into Dura, southwest of Hebron. They stationed in Sood valley neighbourhood and then raided and searched a house belonging to Amir Sami Abriyoush (25). They arrested the aforementioned civilian and then withdrew taking him to an unknown destination.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into the southern area of Hebron. They raided and searched a house belonging to Akram Faisal Badawi (35) and arrested him. They withdrew later taking him to an unknown destination.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into al-Shyoukh village, northeast of Hebron. They stationed in the center of the village and then raided and searched a house belonging to Mohammed Yousef Warasna (24). They arrested the aforementioned person and took him to an unknown destination.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into Bani Na’eim village, east of Hebron. They stationed in the center of the village and then raided the Palestinian Fire Station. Moreover, they arrested one of the fire fighters claiming that he was wanted by the Israeli forces. The aforementioned person was identified as Mahmoud Jawad al-Zama’ra (29), from Halhoul village, north of Hebron. He was then taken to an unknown destination.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into Tal village, southwest of Nablus. A number of Palestinian young men gathered and threw stones and empty bottles at Israeli soldiers that fired live bullets, rubber-coated metal bullets and sound bombs at the protesters. As a result, a 17-year-old male was hit with a Two Two bullet to the lower abdomen, while another 21-year-old male was hit with a Two Two bullet to the upper thigh. Both of them were then taken to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus to receive medical treatment. Israeli forces raided and searched a number of houses. They arrested Taysir As’ad Yameen (41) and withdrew later.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into al-Jalazoun refugee camp, north of Ramallah. They raided and searched three houses from which they arrested threecivilians. The arrested persons were identified as Mosbah Marwan al-Kans (32); Yazan Mohammed Nakhlah (20); and Ziyad Abed al-Ghani Qatash (22).
At approximately 14:30, Israeli forces moved into Toubas. A number of young men gathered and threw stones and empty bottles at Israeli soldiers that fired live bullets, rubber-coated metal bullets and sound bombs at the protesters. As a result, three civilians were hit with rubber-coated metal bullets and were treated on the spot. Israeli forces raided and searched many houses and arrested Ali Ahmed Ali Masa’eid (21). They later withdrew taking him to an unknown destination.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into Balatah refugee camp, southeast of Nablus. They raided and searched a house belonging to Amjad Mahmoud Hashash (25) and arrested him. They later withdrew taking him to an unknown destination.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into Jenin and stationed in the eastern neighborhood. They raided and searched a house belonging to Mohammed Ahmed Rahal (30) and arrested him.
At approximately 05:30, Israeli forces moved into Thnaba suburb, east of Tulkarm. They raided and searched a number of houses from which they arrested three civilians accused of opening fire at Israeli soldiers and wounding one of them on 20 January 2016, during an Israeli incursion in the abovementioned suburb. They later withdrew taking them to an unknown destination. The aforementioned persons were identified as ‘Ammar Jamal Ahmed ‘Anbas (26); Samer Salah Mohammed Abed al-Haq (29); and ‘Alaa Khalil Isma’il Barqawi (31). It should be noted that Barqawi isa Palestinian General Intelligence Service officer, who hid a Karlo pistol that was used in opening fire at the Israeli soldiers according to the Israeli media.
Note: During the aforementioned day, Israeli forces carried out 8 incursions in the following areas without reporting any arrests: Tarqomia village; al-Daheriya village; Ethna village; Tafouh village; Imrish village; Abu al-‘Asaja village; Kharsa village in Hebron; and ‘Ain Qinya village, west of Ramallah.
Friday, 22 January 2016
At approximately 15:15, Israeli forces moved into Qalqilia. They stationed in al-Naqar neighbourhood, west of Qalqilia. Dozens of young men gathered and threw stones at Israeli soldiers that immediately fired rubber-coated metal bullets, sound bombs and tear gas canisters at the protesters. As a result, a 21-year-old male was hit with a rubber-coated metal bullet to the eye, due to which, his eyeball was knocked out.
Note: During the aforementioned day, Israeli forces carried out 13 incursions in the following areas without reporting any arrests: Jayyous village, northeast of Qalqilia; Biteen village; Termas’iya village; Ras Karkar village; Beit ‘Our village in Ramallah and al-Bireh; Samou’a village; Beit Oula village; al-Shayoukh village; al-‘Aroub refugee camp; Dura; al-Moreq village; Deir al-‘Asal village; and Deir Samet village in Hebron.
Saturday, 23 January 2016
At approximately 01:00, Israeli forces moved into Taqou’ village, southeast of Bethlehem. They raided a house belonging to Ibrahim al-‘Amor and handed his sons Mohammed (23) and Ahmed (21) summonses to refer to the Israeli intelligence service in “Gosh ‘Etzion” settlement complex, south of the city.
Note: During the aforementioned day, Israeli forces carried out five incursions in the following areas without reporting any arrests: al-Nabi Saleh village; Burham village; Qebia village; Deir Debwan village; and Kherbatha Bani Hareth village in Ramallah and al-Bireh.
Sunday, 24 January 2016
At approximately 01:00, Israeli forces moved intoal-Hariya valley neighborhood, south of Hebron. They raided a house belonging to Hatem Rabah Rashid Qfisha (56), member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) representing the Change and Reform Bloc of Hamas Movement and arrested him. They later withdrew taking him to an unknown destination without searching the house. At approximately 00:20, masked persons set fire to Qafisha’s Mitsubishi Pajero jeep that was parking in the house yard. The perpetrators have not been identified yet. In the meantime, another force of Israeli soldiers raided al-Shayoukh village and arrested Wesam ‘Azam al-Qawasma (28); and Ibrahim Jamal Hassan (30). The arrested persons were then taken to an unknown destination.
At approximately 01:30, Israeli forces moved into Nemrah neighbourhood, east of Hebron, and arrested Engineer Essa Khairi Essa al-Ja’bari (49), a leader in Hamas movement and former Minister of Local Government in the 10th Palestinian Government, from his house. The Israeli soldiers blew up the main gate of a building and raided al-Ja’bari’s apartment, which is located on the second floor of the aforementioned building. They then arrested al-Ja’bari and took him to an unknown destination. It should be mentioned that al-Ja’bari is a former prisoner who served 10 years in Israeli jails, including 7 years in administrative detention.
At approximately 02:30, Israeli forces moved into Halhoul village, north of Hebron, and stationed in al-Kamb area. They raided and searched a house belonging to Malek Mostafa al-Sa’da (16). They arrested the aforementioned civilian and took him to an unknown destination.
At approximately 03:00, Israeli forces moved into al-Dahisha refugee camp, southwest of Bethlehem. They raided a number of houses and handed summonses over to 4 civilians to refer to the Israeli intelligence service in “Gosh ‘Etzion” settlement complex, south of the city. The arrested persons were identified as Abed al-Kareem al-‘Ajouri (52) and his son Suliman (22); Nidal Jaber al-Hasanat (24); and Fahmi Saleh Qawar (44).
At approximately 09:00, Israeli forces stationed along the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israeli, east of Khan Yunis, opened fire at the agricultural fields, east of al-Fokhary and Khoza’a villages, west of the border fence. No casualties were reported.
Note: During the aforementioned day, Israeli forces carried out 9 incursions in the following areas without reporting any arrests: al-‘Aroub refugee camp; al-Fawar refugee camp; Sureef village; Bani Na’eim village; Ethna village; al-Kum village; Kufor al-Deek village; Qarawat Bani Hassan village; west of Salfit; and Marda village, north of the city.
Monday, 25 January 2016
At approximately 01:00, Israeli forces moved into Qalqilia. They raided and searched a number of houses. They then seized two PC sets and digging tools belonging to Nidal Mohammed al-Shobaki. They also arrested 3 civilians and then withdrew taking them to an unknown destination. The arrested persons were identified as ‘Alaa Nidal Shobaki (25); Bahaa Nidal Mohammed Shobaki (21); and Mohammed Abdullah al-Afghani (21).
At approximately 02:00, Israeli forces moved into Balatah refugee camp, east of Nablus. They raided and searched many houses and arrested ‘Alaa Hafiz ‘Awees (23). They later withdrew taking him to an unknown destination.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into a housing project in Roujeeb village, east of Nablus. They raided and searched many houses and arrested Riyad Feras Abu al-Hassan (22). They later withdrew taking him to an unknown destination.
At approximately 02:15, Israeli warplanes fired 2 missiles towards evacuated settlements, northwest of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip. The two missiles exploded causing a large crater and material damage in the area. It should be mentioned that no causalities were reported.
At approximately 02:30, Israeli warplanes launched a missile at military training site of Palestinian armed groups, southwest of Deir al-Balah in the center of the Gaza Strip. However, neither casualties nor material damage were reported.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into Jenin refugee camp, west of Jenin. They raided and searched many houses. They arrested 4 civilians who were identified as Rami Salem Huda al-Sa’di (22); Karam Fayiz Abdullah Abu ‘Atiah (23); ‘Imad Omar Sa’eid Abu al-Haijaa (22); and Majd al-Deen ‘Adnan Ibrahim Naghnigha (19). They later withdrew taking then to an unknown destination.
On 25 January 2016,an Israeli security guard opened fire at 2 civilians claiming that they carried out a stabbing attack in “Beit Horon” settlement established on the lands of Beit ‘Our al-Foqa village, southwest of Ramallah. The abovementioned persons were identified as Ibrahim Osama Yousef ‘Alaan (23), from Beit ‘Our al-Tahtah village, southwest of Ramallah; and Hussain Mohammed Abu Ghoush (17), from Qalandia refugee camp, north of Jerusalem. Both of them were immediately killed. Israeli police claimed that the two aforementioned civilians carried out a stabbing attack that resulted in wounding 2 female settlers. The first one sustained serious wounds, while the second one sustained moderate wounds. Luba al-Samri, theIsraeli police spokesperson,stated that one of the wounded settlerssuccumbed to her severe injuries.
Note: During the aforementioned day, Israeli forces carried out 3 incursions in the following areas without reporting any arrests: Hija and Jeet villages, northeast of Qalqila; and Kufol Hares village, north of Salfit.
Tuesday, 26 January 2016
At approximately 00:30, Israeli forces moved into Kufor Thoulth village, east of Qalqilia. They raided and searched many houses and then arrested Hamdallah Basam Abed al-Qader (20). They later withdrew taking him to an unknown destination.
At approximately 01:30, Israeli forces moved into ‘Azoun village, east of Qalqilia. They raided and searched a number of houses. They arrested Yassien Mohammed ‘Anaiya (18) and later withdrew taking him to an unknown destination.
At approximately 03:15, Israeli forces moved into Deir Samet village, southwest of Dura, southwest of Hebron. They raided and searched a house belonging to Abed al-Basit Mohammed al-Haroub (48) and arrested his sons ‘Oda (12) and ‘Isaa (14). They later withdrew taking them to an unknown destination.
Note: During the aforementioned day, Israeli forces carried out 5 incursions in the following areas without reporting any arrests: al-Dahiriya village; Ethna village; al-Koum village; al-Moreq village; and Deir al-‘Asal village in Hebron.
Wednesday, 27 January 2016
At approximately 00:00, Israeli forces moved into Beit ‘Our al-Tahtah village, southwest of Ramallah, and stationed in front of a house belonging to the family of Ibrahim Osama Yousef ‘Alaan (23). Ibrahim was shot dead, along with Hussain Abu ‘Oush (12), from Qalandia refugee camp, north of Jerusalem, in “Beit Horon” settlement on Monday, 25 January 2016. They raided and searched Ibrahim’s house and kept all the family members in one room. An Israeli officer questioned the family members about Ibrahim on the spot. In the meanwhile, explosives engineering team took the measurements of the house, after which, they withdrew and no arrest were reported.
At approximately 04:30, Israeli forces moved into Qabatia village, southeast of Jenin. They raided and searched a house belonging to Yaser Ali Mostafa Abu Mou’ala (28) and arrested him. In the meantime, they raided and searched a house belonging to Mohammed Ziyad Tawfiq Kmail (27) and arrested him as well. After that, they stationed in the western neighbourhood of Qabatia village, and raided a house belonging to Mohammed Rasem Tawfiq Khazimiya (30). They handed him a summons to refer to the Israeli intelligence service in “Salem” settlement, northwest of Jenin.
Around the same time, Israeli forces moved into Ya’bood village, southwest of Jenin. They raided and searched a house belonging to Majd Hassan Abed al-Rahman Abu Shamla (23), inflicting heavy damage to the house. They arrested the aforementioned civilian.
At approximately 12:00, Israeli naval forces positioned off Al-Waha resort, northwest of Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip, opened fire at Palestinian fishing boats. An Israeli gunboat approached a fishing boat sailing within 1.5 nautical miles. The Israeli naval officers arrested 4 fishermen on board. They then confiscated their boat and took them to Ashdod Seaport. At approximately 21:00 on the same day, Israeli forces released the arrested fishermen at Beit Hanoun “Erez” crossing, northern Gaza Strip, while their boat was kept in custody. The arrested fishermen were identified as Fahed Ziyad Baker (4); Mohammed Saber Baker (22); Na’eim Fahed Baker (19); and Tareq ‘Alaa Baker (17).
Use of excessive force against peaceful demonstrations protesting settlement activities and the construction of the annexation wall
West Bank:
Following the Friday prayer, on 22 January 2016, dozens of Palestinian young men gathered and organized demonstrations at the western entrance of Selwad, northeast of Ramallah; the southern entrance of al-Jalazoun refugee camp, north of Ramallah; and in the vicinity of Ofer prison, southwest of Ramallah. The protesters threw stones and empty bottles at the soldiers that fired live bullets, tear gas canisters, sound bombs and rubber-coated metal bullets in response. As a result, many civilians suffered tear gas inhalation.
Gaza Strip:
At approximately 13:30 on Friday, 08 January 2016, dozens of young men headed to the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel, east of al-Shuja’iyah, east of Gaza City, to participate in activities supporting Jerusalem and denouncing the Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians. A number of protesters approached the fence, set fire to rubber tires and threw stones at the Israeli forces that sporadically fired live bullets and tear gas canisters in response. As a result, ten civilians, including a child, were wounded. Four of them were hit with live bullets, while the six others were hit with rubber-coated metal bullets.
At approximately 14:00 on Friday, dozens of youngsters headed to the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel, east of al-Faraheen area in ‘Abasan village and east of ‘Abasan village, south of the Gaza Strip. A number of protesters approached the border fence, set fire to rubber tires and threw stones at the soldiers that sporadically fired live bullets and tear gas canisters in response. As a result, Maqboul Mousa Abu Deeb (19) was hit with a live bullet to the abdomen and sustained moderate wounds. He was then taken to Gaza European Hospital to receive medical treatment.
Around the same time, Israeli forces stationed along the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel, east of al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. The protesters threw stones at the soldiers stationed behind sand barriers, due to which, the soldiers opened fire at them.As a result, Shadi Sa’d al-Deen Abu ‘Aiyyash (18) was hit with a live bullet to the right leg. He was then taken to al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah to receive medical treatment.
Demonstrations against the annexation wall and settlement activities
At approximately 15:30 on Friday, 22 January 2016, Palestinian civilians and Israeli and international human rights defenders organized a protest in the centre of KuforQaddoum village, northeast of Qalqilia. They made their way to the eastern entrance of the village in protest against closing that entrance since the beginning of al-Aqsa Intifada with an iron gate. When the protesters approached the entrance, Israeli forces fired live bullets, rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas canisters and sound bombs at the protesters in response. As a result, 3 civilians, including a child, were wounded. The wounded child was identified as Ayaat Zahi Taher Ali (9), who was hit with a live bullet to the left shoulder.
Following the Friday prayer on 22 January 2016, in spite of the bad weather, dozens of Palestinian civilians and Israeli and international human rights defenders organized demonstrations in protest at the Israeli settlement activities in Bil’in and Ni’lin villages, west of Ramallah; and al-Nabi Saleh village, northwest of Ramallah. The Israeli forces used force to disperse the protesters by firing live bullets, rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas canisters and sound bombs. Moreover, they chased them into agricultural fields. As a result, many civilians suffered tear gas inhalation and others sustained bruises as Israeli soldiers beat them up.
Note: PCHR keeps the names of the injured persons in the aforementioned demonstrations.
Rubber-coated metal bullets are lethally if they hit the head of victim from a close range.
Continued closure of the oPt
Israel continued to impose a tight closure on the oPt, imposing severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.
Gaza Strip
Israeli forces continuously tighten the closure of the Gaza Strip and close all commercial crossings, making the Karm Abu Salem crossing the sole commercial crossing of the Gaza Strip, although it is not suitable for commercial purposes in terms of its operational capacity and distance from markets.
Israeli forces have continued to apply the policy, which is aimed to tighten the closure on all commercial crossings, by imposing total control over the flow of imports and exports.
Israeli forces have continued to impose a total ban on the delivery of raw materials to the Gaza Strip, except for very limited items and quantities. The limited quantities of raw materials allowed into Gaza do not meet the minimal needs of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces also continued to impose an almost total ban on the Gaza Strip exports, including agricultural and industrial products, except for light-weighted products such as flowers, strawberries, and spices. However, they lately allowed the exportation of some vegetables such as cucumber and tomatoes, furniture and fish.
Israel has continued to close the Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing for the majority of Palestinian citizens from the Gaza Strip. Israel only allows the movement of a limited number of groups, with many hours of waiting in the majority of cases. Israel has continued to adopt a policy aimed at reducing the number of Palestinian patients allowed to move via the Beit Hanoun crossing to receive medical treatment in hospitals in Israel or in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel also continued applying the policy of making certain civilian traveling via the crossing interviewed by the Israeli intelligence service to be questioned, blackmailed or arrested.
Movement at Karm Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing, southeast of Rafah
Date Imports Category Amount Tons Number Liters 19 January Various goods 2393 Humanitarian aid 26475 Cooking gas 43,120 Benzene 146,000 Diesel 554,992 Industrial fuel 76,000 Construction aggregates 16520 Cement 8605 Construction steel 510 20 January Various goods 4379 Humanitarian aid 21096 Cooking gas 36,660 Benzene Benzene for UNRWA 187,000 38,000 Diesel 428,966 Industrial fuel 412,000 Construction aggregates 10800 Cement 4400 Construction steel 420 21 January Various goods 4159 Humanitarian aid 21408 Cooking gas 36,240 Benzene 183,990 Diesel 283,014 Diesel for UNRWA 38,000 Industrial fuel 480,630 Construction aggregates 15,600 Cement 4400 Construction steel 510 22 January Cooking gas 133,240 Industrial fuel 190,000 24 January Various goods 15008 Humanitarian aid 23035 Cooking gas 132,470 Benzene 224,013 Diesel Diesel for UNRWA 292,610 76,000 Industrial fuel 393,290 Construction aggregates 16320 Cement 5000 Construction steel 840
Exports:
On Tuesday, 19 January 2016, Israeli forces allowed the exportation of a truckload of strawberries; and 18 truckloads of vegetables.
On Wednesday, 20 January 2016, Israeli forces allowed the exportation of 160 tons of scrap and 20 tons of lemon.
On Thursday, 21 January 2016, Israeli forces allowed the exportation of 5 truckloads of eggplants; truckload of spices; truckload of strawberry and 18 truckloads of vegetables.
On Sunday, 24 January 2016, Israeli forces allowed the exportation of a truckload of strawberry; 23 truckloads of vegetables; two truckloads of tomatoes and a truckload of clothes.
Monday, 25 January 2016, Israeli forces allowed the exportation of 69 tons of lemon.
BeitHanoun (“Erez”) crossing, in the north of the Gaza Strip, is designated for the movement of individuals, and links the Gaza Strip with the West Bank.
Movement at Beit Hanoun (“Erez”) crossing
20 – 26 January 2016
Category 20 January 21 January 22 January 24 January 25 January 26 January 27 January Patients 62 31 1 – 111 79 78 Companions 60 21 1 – 98 75 71 Personal needs 120 148 71 – 155 55 68 Families of prisoners – – – – – 38 – Arabs from Israel 6 4 8 – 6 4 9 Diplomats 2 – – – – – – International journalists – – – – – – – International workers 35 57 8 – 8 15 25 Travelers abroad 15 20 3 – 13 28 2 Business people 349 414 3 – 384 234 180 Business meetings – – – – – – – Security interviews 15 8 – – 2 15 26 VIPs – – – – – – – Ambulances to Israel 3 3 4 – 5 5 4 Patients’ Companions 3 1 2 – 4 5 4
Notes:
On Wednesday, 20 January 2016, Israeli authorities allowed 19 farmers and on Thursday, 21 January 2016, 47 farmers to attend an agricultural training course in Israel and a farmer to attend a meeting.\
On Wednesday, 20 January 2016, Israeli authorities allowed five persons and on Sunday, 24 January 2016, 3 persons to renew their permits.
On Wednesday, 20 January 2016, Israeli authorities allowed five Christians to go to Bethlehem.
On Friday, 22 January 2016, Israeli authorities allowed 177 civilians from the Gaza Strip to perform prayers in al-Aqsa Mosque in Occupied Jerusalem.
On Tuesday, 26 January 2016, Israeli authorities allowed one person working in the Civil Affairs Department to attend a meeting in the crossing.
West Bank
Israel has imposed a tightened closure on the West Bank. During the reporting period, Israeli forces imposed additional restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians:
Hebron: Israeli forces established (18) checkpoints all over the city. On Thursday, 21January 2016, Israeli forces established 6 checkpoints at the northern entrance to Hebron; the entrance to al-Fawar refugee camp, south of Hebron; the southern entrance to Halhoul connected to Bypass Road 60 and the entrances to Sa’ir and al-Thaheriyah villages, south of the city.
On Friday, 22January 2016, Israeli forces established 5 checkpoints at the entrances to Sa’ir village, the southern entrance to Hebron and the northern entrance to Halhoul village, north of Hebron; northern entrance to Yata and entrance to Beit Ummar village, north of Hebron.
On Sunday, 24 November 2016, Israeli forces established 5 checkpoints at the entrance to al-Fawar refugee camp, south of Hebron; entrance to al-‘Aroyb refugee camp, north of the city; entrances of Beit ‘Aynoun, al-Thaheriyah and Taramah villages.
On Tuesday, 26 January 2016, israeki forces established two checkpoints at the entrances to Ethna and al-Samou’a villages.
Ramallah and al-Bireh: at approximately 17:30 on Monday, 25 January 2016, Israeli forces established 2 a checkpoint near the intersection of Beit Ur al-Foqa village, southwest of Ramallah, and prevented civilians from leaving or entering via the checkpoint, which is so far closed.
On Tuesday, 26 January 2016, Israeli forces established 3 checkpoints at the entrance to al-Nabi Saleh village, northwest of Ramallah; under the bridge of Kherbet al-Mesbah village and under the bridge of Beit Sira village,
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and Mandala Book Point’s Maharjan, also fear how this change will affect all generations of readers and writers alike. The new generation might not be able to read works of Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Bal Krishna Sama, Parijat, among others who form an important part of Nepali literature. The older generation, who grew up studying and reading the half and joint alphabets, might face difficulties in reading and writing according to the new rules.
“Nepali language needs to be easy so that students are enticed to read Nepali books and better their knowledge of the language but we need to focus in the way Nepali is being taught in schools for that. Simplifying it isn’t the solution especially not when it means those who already know the language will have difficulties with it,” says Maharjan.
Meera Dhakal, who taught Nepali at Padma Kanya Higher Secondary School for 38 years, agrees with Maharjan and says that she is thoroughly disheartened by the imposed changes in the Nepali language. The fact that these changes happened without much information and discussion upsets her even more. “There should have been extensive discussion before making the changes. It’s not something that should be taken lightly,” she says, adding that now even Nepali language teachers are confused over how to teach their students.
However, Ram Lohani, lecturer of linguistics at Tribhuvan University, says that there has been massive miscommunication regarding this issue which has led people to believe that the essence of Nepali language is at stake here. He says that there is nothing wrong with the proposed changes because it just aims to make changes in the script of the Nepali language in order to standardize it. Lohani explains that Nepali has its roots in Sanskrit but there are also words borrowed for other languages and it is this part that is under revision.
“Every language goes through processes of standardization. Making changes in the script won’t affect the language,” he says. According to Lohani, it is because people are habituated to the old spelling system that they think the changes will be for the worse but it is definitely not so. Lohani also believes the debate and dissatisfaction have stemmed from the fact that there has been very less information circulation and discussion over the changes.
“There needed to be a common consensus before this matter was taken forward but it wasn’t the case. That’s the reason behind all this confusion now. There is an urgent need to hold extensive discussions and clarify people’s doubts right away. It should have been done earlier, but better late than never,” he concludes.
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Anyone who has spent the time going deep down the “rabbit hole” and researching in the realm of alternative information/conspiracy theory knows that a large majority of the world’s population hasn’t a clue as to what’s really going on in the world. However, all alternative researchers can relate to this because at one point they too were admittedly naïve and asleep to it all. In fact, almost all humans are born into some form of limited perception. There is a reason that the term “awakened” is often used by people in reference to their personal transformation from an in-the-box indoctrinated consumer to an open-minded free-thinker.
If people claim they are becoming awakened, then consequently, that must mean they were asleep before, unaware to a whole layer of reality that was happening simultaneously. With this in mind, it would seem that many people today are actually in a subtle trance prior to going through this awakening process, mesmerized and programmed by the main stream of information that dominates the cultures of the world; ultimately hijacking and infecting the collective consciousness. They can’t see or imagine any other possibility than the illusionary reality propagated by those in control of the power source. However, that is all beginning to change. Unlike any other time in known history, humans are beginning to awaken from the trance they’re under and seeing reality for what it truly is. It’s not exactly an easy process either, as truth doesn’t mold itself around our preconceived expectations and desires. It just is; and at the moment, it’s not exactly very pretty. However, as any addict will tell you, the first step to change is seeing reality for what it actually is and accepting it.
My Personal Journey:
I had always been a curious kid with parents that didn’t have overly hardened ideological beliefs. Though I went to a catholic school and was heavily involved in sports, my surroundings allowed my mind the freedom to wonder. Although I was always very curious and had experimented with some different drugs as I got older, I was still very much inside the box that society had created for me. It was just a little bigger than before and I knew where some of the edges were, but I still longed for something more to explain the many things that didn’t seem to make any sense.
That was until 2009, when I read the best-selling book, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed, which become the first major blow to my established ideological box. Now I am well aware that there are many things in this book which I wouldn’t necessarily 100% agree with now, or would at least expand upon with more context, however, what’s important is that the book introduced me to the deeper layers of relationships, dating, and human psychology that I had never even considered before. It was like a whole realm of hidden information that I had never been exposed to. Growing up I had never really been taught about relationships, attraction, or how to talk to women; so as a result, I would often get “friend-zoned” by girls I liked, never really understanding why. It would make me upset and confused because I simply didn’t have the tools or knowledge that was needed to be successful. Only after reading this book did I begin to not only understand the external dynamics of interacting with other people/the opposite sex, but I began to understand my own flaws that needed to be addressed. While my beliefs in that subject have changed over time, the book was a necessary catalyst in getting me to look at the problem from previously un-thought-of angles, which ultimately was the first step needed towards the long journey of personal transformation in that aspect of my life.
This however, would only plant the seeds for the beginning of my real spiritual and intellectual awakening which started a few years later in 2013 at the age of 23. It all came about after watching the Zeitgeist Documentary, a documentary trilogy that not only triggered my awakening, but has awakened many other lost souls. Although, again, as I have progressed my understanding of these topics, I have come to see problems with aspects of these films now as well. Nonetheless, the films were still a great launching point, which completely blew my mind and shattered my whole concept of reality. It was literally an epiphany moment, as if I had just been shaken awake and displaced from the trance I was under. If the mind had a cherry, I had definitely just popped it. I was literally pacing around the house with no idea of what to do, as I didn’t know who to talk to, why people were not talking about this information, and was still wondering if any of it was actually true.
At certain points in the beginning of my awakening, I definitely questioned whether I was going crazy because this was material that no one else understood, let along took serious. I felt very alone and disconnected.
However, this initial awakening was only the beginning, as Pandora’s box had now been opened and I could not hold myself back from exploring all that was previously hidden from me. I spent hours a day at it; researching everything I could get my hands on. It was like I had just discovered a completely new layer to reality that was extremely dense, yet seemed to piece together so many things that were previously unexplainable. I would compare it in many ways to being an explorer hundreds of years ago, where the discovery of new lands were completely opening up, not only the physical map of the world, but whole new realms of information and culture. While I was learning a lot, it was not easy, as everything I thought I knew was now in question. Only later did I learn that this was all part of the process of growth.
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out, and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” – Cynthia Occelli
The reality is that growth is a very destructive process, as many of the truths we once thought to be concrete were now breaking down and engulfed by many contradictions. This can be incredibly taxing on the mind, as the hero’s, leaders, and facts that we once put faith in, are often not what we thought they were. Seeing reality for what it truly is, can be an incredible dose of truth that can be a hard pill to swallow; one in which many simply do not wish to partake. Many would rather stick their head in the sand in order to preserve their current paradigm rather than accept this wave of new information and build something new from it. However, looking back it all, I couldn’t be happier I chose this path.
Getting Over The Hump:
Despite all the personal challenges that await, getting people to dip into conspiracy theory and go down their first rabbit hole is the key to starting the process of change. Once someone comes to grips with the fact that there might be a lot of truth in one particular conspiracy theory, it then opens the floodgates of the mind to explore others. Any awakened person will tell you that once you start researching deeper into things, it’s pretty hard to stop and turn back. It’s the first one which is the hardest to overcome because it is the catalyst that shatters the old paradigm. This is tough to come to terms with and can take time to filter through the mind. However, once you recover from the blow, you can start to pick up the pieces and build a new, more accurate picture of reality.
In many ways, opening the mind and diving into the realm of conspiracy is like a rite of passage into higher realms of consciousness. Everyone must go through this uncomfortable process of awakening in order to grow in consciousness. I likened this to when a women “pops her cherry” because once she does this, she is no longer considered a young, naïve, innocent girl, but instead is on her way to becoming a raw and mature woman. There is no turning back from this moment, as you have now been exposed. This might be harsh or unpleasant for some people to think about, but it is a reality we cannot run or hide from. In essence, right now, we are the early adopters of this information and the tough road we walked to get here is all part of the process of becoming an awakened and aware human being. It is we who will now help facilitate the awakening of others and take this truth movement to the next level of change.
I really do believe that being able to entertain thoughts without attaching to them, such as data points labeled conspiracy, is a rite of passage into becoming a truly enlightened person. Aristotle is quoted as saying,
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
It might feel a destructive process at first, but once the initial fear and discomfort dissipate, the mind, body and soul begin to grow stronger. This takes time as no respected researcher went from A to Z in the first day. Some ideas that sounds crazy at first might not seem so crazy, as more knowledge is attained; just like one theory that sounded plausible at first might not be so appealing in more time. It’s a lifetime process that is never truly completed.
The first step, is getting people to jump into the cold shower and go down their initial rabbit hole with an open mind. I promise, you will come out alive and most likely humbled and hungry for more. Knowledge is power, so embrace it and run with it! Who knows how far we can go and where it will lead. The hope is that above all the death and destruction, is the brightest of lights. A light of pure truth in which all filters are removed so one can see reality for what it is. This s something to strive for.
Help Us Be The Change We Wish To See In The World.AF 50mm f/1.4 FE Lens for Sony E is rated 3.8 out of 5 by 31.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Maksim from Fantastic lens for the money! I was really surprised how good this lens is for the price. This is Rokinons first autofocusing lens and it came out at the same time as Sonys 50mm 1.4 but at less than half the cost. I got both of them to see how they compare and which one is more worth it. Being Rokinons first autofocusing lens I was suspecting slow and inaccurate autofocusing but that wasnt the case. Comparing the two lenses the Rokinon actually focused faster but with a few more missed shots. The bokeh looks really good and the lens is quite sharp wide open but the Sony does beat it out. I have a full comparison with sample photos and video on Youtube that you can check out, just search for 50mm 1.4 Rokinon Sony Max Yuryev This lens is a focus by wire (electronic focusing) lens just like the majority of Sonys E lenses so you dont have that same famous long and smooth manual focus ring that the manual focus Rokinons have, but the ring is fairly easy and consistent to use for a FBW system and has a slower throw than Sonys 50mm 1.4. Overall I think this is a fantastic lens and definitely worth it from a price to performance standpoint. Your images will look nice and sharp with a good shallow depth of field if you want it. Rokinons been stepping up their game the last few years and Im really excited to see what Rokinon puts out next!
Rated 4 out of 5 by Anonymous from Fantastic lens but.. I really want to keep this lens. The autofocusing for photo is amazingly fast, and the image quality is fantastic. The reason why i am returning this lens is because the noises that i makes when shooting video. I understand that on AF-C that its acceptable to have some focusing noise but even when i am manual focusing, it still makes noises when I turn the focusing ring.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Tyler Thomas from A wonderful budget option Firstly, the noise of the AF isn’t loud enough to disturb a wedding ceremony or anything. It’s not an issue as a photo only guy. Second, the rendering of the background is very smooth! Third, the autofocus isn’t great in continuous, it stutters a bit. I keep mine in AFS. Fourth, it’s a big lens. A little bigger than a typical 85mm f/1.8 and about as heavy. Fifth, minimum focus distance is quite good! Not a macro lens but I was surprised. Sixth, chromatic aberrations are very well controlled. I’m pretty picky and I happy. It’s a bit worse at min focus distance. It’s not your typical green and purple stuff either, it’s more blue and orange. Lastly, I’m very pleased overall. The T-stop is faster than other 50mm lenses and the vignetting is pretty light. Sharpness is good. Colors are good. Contrast is average. Bang for buck is excellent.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Irmakhan from Best for the money After tried bunch of lenses, i think i found my portrait lens. Of course i recomend Sony Zeiss lenses but if you have a tight budget and looking for wide aperture prime lens you can get it without question. I love close and low light shoot, autofocus is slower than Sony 50mm 1.4 but i don't use af much. Sharpness is quite good, contrast is little bit low. Bokeh are amazing. Focus ring is smooth and sensitive, this is give you a chance of make focus with small movements. Focus motor is noisy (if you will use af in video and don't have external mic think about it.)
Rated 4 out of 5 by ingo from affortable AF 50mm F1.4 FE No surprise that Sony has not produced an affordable lens - they seem to thrive on making expensive FE lenses by sticking Zeiss or G or GM on their lenses and very very few just Sony branded - at an affordable price - so I am happy to see others produce lenses for the A7 bodies - but sadly Sigma and Tamron have stopped making lenses for Sony E APS-C - so they might know that Sony has no long term plans for the A6300 line for example - anyway the Rokinon 50mm F1.4 is worth the money - yes maybe not as well built as those $2500 lenses - but it is all-around well built - AF is not bad - of course the A7 bodies do not win any award for fast auto focus - but it is decent and just as fast as the expensive Sony counterpart - I am very happy to see Rokinon make AF lenses now - hope they will do lots more lenses - I think it is priced right - Out of focus rendering is very pleasant as well - So I would recommend getting the Rokinon over the Sony counterpart any day and put the savings into another lens etc
Rated 5 out of 5 by oldmotem from This one has autofocus! Just got it. It did come in 1 1/2 days even though the big snowstorm is raging. I have tried it briefly. A photo is enclosed, taken handheld with a greenish desklamp for lighting. I've noticed on looking at it 100% that there is some fringing, but I'm sure with LR or PS that will go away. Other than that, I have no problems. I might use this for video in which case it's loud on the AF. But for landscape (smaller objects) and portraits, this lens is really beautiful. Snowflakes and bokeh can create wonderful winter scenes. I have other Rokinons, all MF. They are great. This one adds the AF and is even greater! Nice, simple design and all electronic. For the price, you cannot beat it. Get it on sale!
Rated 2 out of 5 by Avery from Very noisy, wouldn't focus on anything more than 15ft away Tried this lens on an A9 and a A7R3, it worked fine for things nearby but for some reason it wouldn't even activate the focus when I tried to focus on a subject more than 15 ft away. No hunting to grab focus or anything, literally nothing would happen.? Fine lens otherwise, but not usable because of this reason. Returned it.Calcutta High Court Justice CS Karnan has directed the Air Control Authority to bar seven Supreme Court judges, including Chief Justice of India JS Kehar who had issued a contempt order against him, till the case is disposed off.
"Today the above mentioned accused 1 to 8 are called absent hence their matter is re-posted to 01.05.2017 [Monday] to enable their reappearance. In the meantime, this court directs the Air Control Authority [referring to the Airports Authority of India] New Delhi, not to permit the said accused 1 to 8 from going abroad until the disposal of this crucial issue, since the nature of the offence, that is caste discrimination, is not only a heinous crime but also a very cruel Atrocious Act of heinous crime, and is punishable as per the Indian Constitution," Justice Karnan said in his order yesterday.
He said if the judges are permitted to travel abroad then there is a probability of the "virus of caste discrimination spreading".
Justice Karnan has also deferred the hearing of his case against the Supreme Court judges. Earlier this month, he had directed the judges to appear before him on Friday.
The seven judges had issued a suo motu contempt order against Karnan in February after he had in January named 20 "corrupt judges", seeking probe against them to curb "high corruption" in the Indian judiciary.
Also read:
Justice CS Karnan issues suo-moto order against CJI, 6 other Supreme Court judges; orders them to appear before his 'Rosedale Residential Court'
Restore my work, or else I won't appear before you. You may put me in jail, Justice Karnan tells SCProcter & Gamble Company
1 Procter & Gamble Plaza
Cincinnati, OH 45202
(513)983-1100
www.pg.com
The history of the Procter & Gamble Company, formed in 1837, is not nearly as well known as its wide variety of products. With over 250 brand names Procter & Gamble is the largest consumer goods company in the United States; virtually every American uses a Procter & Gamble product every day. Pringles potato chips, Sunny Delight citrus drinks, Cover Girl makeup, Crest toothpaste, and Tide detergent are some of Procter & Gamble's most popular brands.
Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Procter & Gamble (also known as P&G) sells its products to more than 140 countries around the world, and has factories and manufacturing plants in seventy countries outside the United States. This huge multibillion-dollar company, which employs over 100,000 people, began as two small businesses headed by two immigrants, William Procter (1801-1884) and James Gamble (1803-1891).
A Chance Meeting of Minds
William Procter and James Gamble were strangers brought together by several twists of fate. Procter was born in England and Gamble was born in Ireland. Both emigrated to the United States and landed in Cincinnati, Ohio. Originally, neither man intended to settle in Cincinnati. Procter stayed in Ohio to care for his critically ill wife Martha, and earned his living as a candlemaker. After his wife died, Procter consoled himself by working long hours in his candlemaking business. Gamble became an apprentice soapmaker, and realizing he had a knack for soapmaking, started his own business and decided to settle in the area.
Within a few years, Procter and Gamble met by accident when they were dating sisters. Procter had fallen in love with Olivia Norris; Gamble fell for her sister Elizabeth. The couples married and the two men became brothers-in-law, frequently seeing each other at family events. It was their father-in-law, Alexander Norris, who first pointed out that William and James had very similar businesses and that the two should consider forming a partnership. The two businessmen realized it was true: making soap and candles required the same primary ingredient—vast quantities of tallow or fat. The processes also used much of the same equipment.
Procter and Gamble began working together in April 1837 and by August they each contributed $3,596.47 toward the creation of a new company. The brothers-in-law signed a formal partnership agreement on Halloween, October 31,1837, and the Procter & Gamble Company was born. Gamble oversaw the manufacturing side of the firm and Procter handled the money.
Procter & Gamble at a Glance Employees: 106,000
106,000 CEO: Alan G. Lafley
Alan G. Lafley Subsidiaries: Charmin Paper Mills; Clairol; lams Company; Max Factor; Noxell Corporation; Tambrands
Charmin Paper Mills; Clairol; lams Company; Max Factor; Noxell Corporation; Tambrands Major Competitors: Kimberly-Clark; Johnson & Johnson; Unilever
Kimberly-Clark; Johnson & Johnson; Unilever Notable Brands: Pringles; Sunny Delight; Crest; Tide; Downy; Pampers
The Civil War Years and Beyond
When they began their business, the partners sold their products by walking the streets of Cincinnati with a wheel barrow. By 1860—less than twenty-five years after it was formed—Procter & Gamble had become one of the city's most successful companies employing eighty people and bringing in sales near the $1-million-dollar mark. This was quite a milestone for the company's founders, who had never dreamed of such prosperity.
Timeline 1837: William Procter and James Gamble create the Procter & Gamble Company. 1879: Ivory Soap is launched. 1882: P&G releases its first national advertising campaign. 1884: P&G's Cincinnati factory is nearly destroyed by fire. 1886: The new Ivorydale factory is built with state-of-the-art equipment. 1911: Crisco shortening is introduced. 1937: P&G celebrates its one-hundredth anniversary; sales reach over $200 million. 1939: The first Ivory Soap commercial airs on television. 1946: Tide laundry detergent is launched. 1955: Crest, the first fluoride toothpaste, is introduced. 1956: New P&G headquarters are built in Cincinnati. 1961: Pampers disposable diapers are introduced. 1987: P&G celebrates its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary; sales reach over $10 billion. 1989: P&G purchases Cover Girl, Noxema, and Sunny Delight brands. 1999: P&G buys lams Company pet foods. 2001: P&G sells Crisco and buys Clairol hair products company.
The company worked overtime during the 1860s, especially when America became embroiled in the Civil War (1861-65). Given its northern location, Procter & Gamble was a firm supporter of the Union Army (supporters of the Union in the north), and contributed to the war effort by supplying Northern soldiers with candles and soap. At the same time, it continued to provide its loyal customers with Procter & Gamble products.
By the beginning of the 1870s the country was rebuilding, and at Procter & Gamble a second generation of family members had joined the company. This included James Norris Gamble, son of James, and William Procter's son Harley.
In 1875, James Norris, who was a chemist, began working on a formula for a new white soap. It was through the carelessness of a fellow worker, however, that the company's most successful product was developed. One of the machines used in the soapmaking process was left running too long. As a result, too much air entered the soap, which caused it to "float." Rather than waste the soap, Procter & Gamble decided to sell it. It was known simply as "P&G White Soap." Soon, however, the company began receiving positive letters about this amazing "floating soap." The customers wanted more and the company was happy to oblige.
The Moon and Stars Procter & Gamble (P&C) has one of the most well-known trademarks in the world—a man in the moon surrounded by stars. The trademark originated in the early 1850s as a symbol for P&G Star brand candles. This was during a time when most products did not carry a recognizable brand name. By the 1860s, the symbol was used for all P&G products. The moon and stars was a sign to everyone, even people who could not read, that they were purchasing a P&G product and that quality was guaranteed. The original trademark included a star, which eventually became thirteen stars symbolizing the thirteen original American colonies. The man-in-the-moon was added because it was a popular decoration during the 1800s. In 1882, the trademark was officially registered with the U.S. Patent Office. Over one hundred years later, the trademark is still recognizable, but for a different reason. In the early 1980s, rumors began to spread that the moon and stars trademark was a symbol of the occult and that P&G executives practiced Satanism. The company publicly announced that the rumors were totally false. The rumor continues to persist, however, as a sort of urban legend into the twenty-first century.
Harley Procter was convinced the soap would appeal to buyers across the United States. He convinced the company to spend over $10,000 on national advertising in a weekly newspaper called the Independent in December 1882. This was Procter & Gamble's first major advertising, and it turned out to be a very smart move, one that would be copied by many companies in the future. Ivory Soap became a huge hit and enabled Procter & Gamble to begin selling more of its products to customers throughout the nation.
Company Changes
The remainder of the 1880s brought highs and lows for Procter & Gamble. In 1884, a devastating fire nearly destroyed the P&G factory. Beginning in 1886, however, construction began on a new, technologically advanced plant called Ivorydale. More family members joined the company, including Harley's older brother, William Alexander, and his son, William Cooper Procter.
It was William Cooper Procter, known as Cooper, who brought change to the P&G workplace. The United States as a whole was experiencing labor problems. Employees of large companies were tired of working long hours for low pay. They began to strike and demonstrate for change—even at Procter & Gamble. Cooper listened and decided to reward loyal workers by allowing them to receive or "share" in the money made by the company. Creating what came to be known as profit-sharing, each worker was given a yearly bonus based on Procter & Gamble's sales. Cooper eventually gave workers additional benefits such as health care, vacations, and a shortened work week.
Ivory Soap Harley Procter believed that P&G White Soap needed a better name, one that would stay in customers' minds. He came up with "Ivory" after reading a passage from the Bible that described "ivory palaces" (Psalm 45:8). Ivory Soap soon became a household name. It revolutionized the soap industry because of its unique size, shape, and purity. Until then, soap was sold in huge wheels to grocers and shop owners who then chiseled or chopped off chunks for customers. Procter & Gamble changed this practice, and offered individually wrapped soap in a handy little rectangular bar. Ivory was introduced in 1879 and would prove to be Procter & Gamble's most successful product for decades to come.
In 1890, Procter & Gamble decided to stop being a private company and become a public company. A private company is one that is owned by a select group of people, in this case family members. To do so, Procter & Gamble became incorporated: it filed papers to be a public company, added "Inc." to its name, chose a board of directors, and installed officers such as president, vice president, and treasurer to run the business and answer to the board of directors. William Alexander Procter was named the company's first president. Procter & Gamble also decided to sell stock, or shares, in the company to raise money for expansion. Employees were offered the opportunity to purchase stock in the company, another bonus for Procter & Gamble workers, since few other companies gave their employees such benefits.
By the last decade of the century, Procter & Gamble was still most famous for its soap, of which there were over two dozen different kinds. Many were introduced through black-and-white ads in newspapers and magazines. The company's first color ad appeared in 1896 and was for its still immensely popular and best-selling product, Ivory. Again, Procter & Gamble led the business world by marketing its products through attractive ads in newspapers and magazines, when most other companies did no advertising at all.
A New Century
Although electric light had been established by 1880, it wasn't until the beginning of the twentieth century that electricity was used to light homes. Sales for Procter & Gamble candles fell, yet other products more than made up for the loss. Business was so good, the company expanded outside of Ohio for the first time in 1904, building a factory in Kansas City, Kansas, then another in Staten Island, New York. Three years later, in 1907, Cooper Procter took over running the company when his father, William Alexander, passed away.
The new century also saw the introduction of another well-known P&G product: Crisco shortening. Because candle sales had fallen, the company had a huge supply of cottonseed oil, an ingredient used in candlemaking. In 1911, they found another use for it by creating a vegetable-based shortening for cooking and baking. At the time, most people used lard or animal fat to cook with. Crisco gave buyers a healthier choice than lard. It was also a less expensive substitute for butter, which was very pricey at the time. In addition, the company found a terrific way to market Crisco: through free cookbooks that featured the product in a variety of recipes.
The first Procter & Gamble manufacturing plant built outside the United States came in 1915, with a new factory in Ontario, Canada, which employed seventy-five full-time workers to make Ivory Soap products and the increasingly popular Crisco. By the 1920s, Procter & Gamble had continued to grow and change: it stopped making candles completely since most homes used electric lighting; it was one of the earliest firms to hire salesmen to sell directly to grocers and stores; and was one of the first companies to advertise on radio, with the potential to reach thousands of homes.
In 1930, William Cooper Procter stepped down from running the company and for the first time, a non-family member, Richard R. Deupree, took over Procter & Gamble. Three years later, in 1933, the company introduced a very important new product: P&G's first synthetic, or man-made, detergent called Dreft. The company's first shampoo, Drene, debuted the following year. In 1939, just a few months after television service first became available, Procter & Gamble aired its first television commercial for Ivory Soap during a baseball game.
The First Soap Operas Procter & Gamble sponsored cooking shows featuring Crisco, and also provided money to radio serials, which were weekly radio programs featuring a running story line and a well-known cast of characters. Because the company heavily advertised Ivory, Camay (a new perfumed soap), and other soap products before, during, and after these programs, they later became known as "soap operas."
The Tide Changes
In 1946, Procter & Gamble scored big with two new products, Prell shampoo and Tide laundry detergent. Tide very quickly dominated the market because it worked better than other detergents and was low priced. By 1950, just four years after its creation, Tide was America's favorite laundry soap. Several more products were released throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s: Crest, the first toothpaste with fluoride, which was proven to fight cavities (1955); Downy, a liquid fabric softener for use in washing machines (1960); and Pampers, the first disposable diaper (1961). The company also bought two well-known businesses, Charmin Paper Mills, which produced toilet tissue, paper towels, and napkins, and Folgers Coffee, a premier coffee producer.
The 1970s and 1980s were decades of expansion. Procter & Gamble purchased more companies and opened new factories. It also divided into specialized business segments, including health and beauty products, household cleaners, foods and drinks, and an entire unit devoted to "research and development." Procter & Gamble was one of the earliest companies to spend millions of dollars on research and development, or ways to use science to create scientifically advanced products. The company also began to devote energies to market research, studying customers and their buying habits to understand which products sold better and why.
In 1984, Procter & Gamble added a new dimension to its most visible and popular product, Tide laundry detergent, by introducing Liquid Tide. Two years after Liquid Tide, in 1986, came the first shampoo and conditioner combined into one bottle, called Pert Plus. Next came the company's push into makeup and perfumes, with the purchase of Noxell, which owned the Cover Girl, Noxzema, and Clarion brands. Procter & Gamble had now entered the all-important teen market.
In an effort to offer more products directed at teenagers and younger children, Procter & Gamble decided to buy the up-and-coming Sunny Delight brand of juice drinks in 1989. It marketed Sunny Delight as a healthy choice for kids, and was very successful both in the United States and the United Kingdom. Yet by 1990 there was controversy, as parent and consumer groups criticized the company for saying the drinks were better for kids than soda pop, when Sunny Delight actually contained very little juice, using flavorings and sweeteners instead. For its part, Procter & Gamble responded by pointing out that while Sunny Delight did have only a small amount of juice, it did have plenty of vitamins.
In the end, Procter & Gamble toned down its "healthy" advertising and sold Sunny Delight as a hip, flavorful alternative to soda pop and sales continued to be very strong. The company's quest to rule the youth beverage market gathered more steam in the 1990s with the purchase of the Hawaiian Punch brand from Del Monte. Like Sunny Delight, Hawaiian Punch drink blends were low on juice but high on taste and popular with children.
The Twenty-First Century and Beyond
For the remainder of the twentieth century Procter & Gamble was both buying and selling businesses. Some of the company's purchases included Old Spice bath and body products for men (1990), Max Factor makeup (1991), Giorgio Beverly Hills perfumes (1994), Iams Company pet foods (1999), and Clairol hair care products (2001). The company sold its Duncan Hines cake and cookie business in 1998 and its once-famous Crisco shortening in 2001. New household products like Febreze odor-fighting sprays and Swiffer cleaning wipes were launched, as well as more shampoo varieties such as Pantene Pro-V.
By 2002, Procter & Gamble had reorganized its entire business to focus on the global growth of its famous brands and to add new products ahead of its competitors. This plan paid off, since sales and profits were up when many other companies struggled. The firm's health and beauty products, such as makeup, shampoos, conditioners, and perfumes were big sellers, especially with teenaged girls. The teen market, both boys and girls, had become more and more important to Procter & Gamble, as well as to many companies, both in the United States and overseas. Ads in magazines and on television were increasingly aimed at children, and products were developed with children in mind. An example was the new blue Sunny Delight flavor, Caribbean.
Procter & Gamble, a company with sales topping $38 billion, continues to offer products that appeal to every age group: from infants (diapers and baby wipes) to teenagers (Cover Girl makeup, Hawaiian Punch, Pringles potato chips) to parents and grandparents (prescriptions, bath and body
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ation than “Ultralight Beam” and “No Problem” these past 12 months — though “Broccoli” came close — and my God did we ever need such release. More in line with the tone of actual events was “True Love Waits,” a once beaming love ballad now drained of all hope and freezing to death. It had stiff competition among breakup songs between the impeccably gleaming “Crash,” the achingly beautiful “29 #Strafford APTS,” and the all-consuming tidal wave “Your Best American Girl,” a reminder that intersectionality is personal as hell. “Old Friends” wrung powerful sentiment from a more universal loss of intimacy, that creeping sense of disconnection from everyone you’ve ever held dear. And although the effortless swagger of “Black Beatles” and “Work” seems out of step with this year’s widespread trauma, both conjure the extremely 2016 sensation of being trapped inside a computer with a tireless melody rattling around your brain.
01 Kanye West – “Ultralight Beam” (Feat. The-Dream, Kelly Price, Chance The Rapper, & Kirk Franklin)
02 Chance The Rapper – “No Problem” (Feat. 2 Chainz & Lil Wayne)
03 Radiohead – “True Love Waits”
04 Mitski – “Your Best American Girl”
05 D.R.A.M. – “Broccoli” (Feat. Lil Yachty)
06 Pinegrove – “Old Friends”
07 Bon Iver – “29 #Strafford APTS”
08 Usher – “Crash”
09 Rae Sremmurd – “Black Beatles” (Feat. Gucci Mane)
10 Rihanna – “Work” (Feat. Drake)
Listen to Chris’ playlist on Spotify.
Gabriela Tully Claymore
This playlist doesn’t make much sense, but then again, neither did this year. Optimism up and left me, and in times like these it’s good to have something to look forward to, like new music. This was one of my favorite years for new releases in recent memory, which is why my list is so scattered. I included some unconventional pop by Katie Dey and Bellows to contrast the punishing self-reflection heard on Vince Staples’ “Loco” and Show Me The Body’s “Aspirin.” I slid in Jenny Hval, ANOHNI, and Angel Olsen, three artists who released career-defining albums this year. “Higher” is in there because I saw Rihanna live for the very first time, and her set closed with it. In other firsts, I wrote a cover story on the band White Lung, and “Below” is a masterpiece of reinvention. But there’s one song on this list that matters more than any of the others, and it’s obviously ranked at #1. In the only interview Frank Ocean gave after the release of Blonde, he revealed that there were originally 50 different versions of “White Ferrari.” His teenage brother heard one of the 50 that he thought was especially good, but Ocean didn’t want to release that version. “Because it didn’t give me peace yet,” he explained. “White Ferrari” followed me on international road trips, Northeastern Megabus rides, long stretches of Miami freeway, rainy Appalachian trails, and endless subway commutes to and from home. It’s a perfect song for being in-between, one that offers me that unquestionable sense of peace Ocean was searching for. I need to feel that peace for a few minutes every day for the rest of this year and into next.
01 Frank Ocean – “White Ferrari”
02 Jenny Hval – “Conceptual Romance”
03 White Lung – “Below”
04 Katie Dey – “Fear O The Light”
05 Angel Olsen – “Shut Up Kiss Me”
06 ANOHNI – “Drone Bomb Me”
07 Bellows – “Dark Heart”
08 Vince Staples – “Loco” (Feat. Kilo Kish)
09 Show Me The Body – “Aspirin”
10 Rihanna – “Higher”
Listen to Gabriela’s playlist on Spotify.
James Rettig
When I become really, truly obsessed with a song, I listen to it non-stop — on the subway, in my car, on a loop before I have to go out into the world. The song becomes a shelter, a familiar home where I can place my excess emotions. It’s always been this way, but it felt especially important to find those moments to latch onto in a year that felt like a whirlwind of shit. All the songs on the list below occupied that on-repeat slot in my brain at some point over the last 12 months, providing comfort and stability in a world that seems averse to both. The climax of IAN SWEET’s “Cactus Couch,” the top song on this list, provided me with a mantra to live by: “There is nothing wrong with me, but everything is wrong with me,” a circuitous phrase that validates messy internal contradictions while offering some assurance that it’s not all in your head. Other songs on the list possess a strong narrative thrust, evoking situations specific to the songwriter’s experience but potent enough to stand up as larger-than-life: “Bully”‘s inward-facing story of a friend’s substance abuse, “Pain”‘s embittered search for revenge. And other songs were just plain evocative: the snaps and cracks on “Best To You,” the smooth co-dependent independence of “Solo,” the joyful friendship swells of “Emotional High.” Music’s magic lies in its potential as a catalyst for real transformation and reflection, and these songs were important to me this year in providing a structure in which that can actually happen.
01 IAN SWEET – “Cactus Couch”
02 Mannequin Pussy – “Emotional High”
03 Frank Ocean – “Solo”
04 Bellows – “Bully”
05 Blood Orange – “Best To You” (Feat. Empress Of)
06 LVL UP – “Pain”
07 Modern Baseball – “Mass”
08 PUP – “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will”
09 Frankie Cosmos – “Sappho”
10 Guerilla Toss – “Diamond Girls”
Listen to James’ playlist on Spotify.
Collin Robinson
I’ve been an album listener since I can remember. The first album I listened to front-to-back was Dr. Dre’s The Chronic when I was five years old. I probably shouldn’t have been listening to Dre at that age, but that’s what happens when you grow up in LA worshiping your older brother who bangs and ruins shirts with jheri curl drippings. I certainly didn’t understand everything on the album, but I needed to listen to everything on the album. That method of consumption just stuck with me, to the point where I didn’t even revisit an album’s standouts if I didn’t like the majority of it comprehensively. I’m still an album listener, but that habit has waned a bit over the years. Since starting at Stereogum at the tail-end of last year, I have been more tuned in to individual songs as hermetic entities than ever before. That vigilance and the constant search for solace through music in a personally and nationally shitty year has had me playing therapeutic singles on repeat all year, sometimes entire days at a time. So you’ll find the full feel gamut on my list this year: the celebratory, exultant funk victory lap that is “Come Down,” the ineluctable sadness of “Cranes In The Sky,” the doubt and vulnerability of “Worth It,” the righteous anger against ignorance on “Think Like They Book Say,” the smooth, beautiful nostalgia and romance of “Think Of You,” the technological fatigue of “Check To Check,” etc. These songs will probably not have the most longevity in the zeitgeist, but each of them is excellent and will instantly transport me back to this year for better or worse. Hopefully there’s something on this you will connect with too.
01 Anderson.Paak – “Come Down”
02 Vince Staples – “Pimp Hand”
03 Topaz Jones – “Powerball”
04 Solange – “Cranes In The Sky”
05 Isaiah Rashad – “4r Da Squaw”
06 Terrace Martin – “Think Of You”
07 Saul Williams – “Think Like They Book Say”
08 Mal Devisa – “In My Neighborhood”
09 Open Mike Eagle – “Check To Check”
10 Moses Sumney – “Worth It”
Listen to Collin’s playlist on Spotify.
Peter Helman
This was a shitty year — and I don’t just mean that in a geopolitical sense. This was a shitty year in pretty much every sense imaginable, one of those years that almost feels like a joke in its commitment being utterly terrible. In a year like this, you have to hold onto small moments of comfort wherever you can find them, and a lot of the time, those moments happened to be musical. I’m talking about moments like Frank Ocean’s voice straining upwards into pained transcendence at the end of “Ivy,” or the second that “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” starts rocking the fuck out, or every time Sadie Dupuis’ voice does that airy laugh thing on “Less Than 2.” As with most of these lists, there aren’t a whole lot of obvious commonalities on mine — we have Rihanna going full ’80s power-ballad, Crying playing a rock concert inside an arcade on top of cloud, PUP making sad-bastard self-loathing sound like a raggedly melodic fist-pump, School Of Seven Bells giving a master-class in laser-focused pop precision, etc. But what these songs do have in common is their ability to make me feel big, dumb feelings, to take over my entire brain and filter everything through their skewed lens whenever they start playing. And in a year like this one, that’s enough.
01 Rihanna – “Kiss It Better”
02 Frank Ocean – “Ivy”
03 Crying – “Wool In The Wash”
04 Car Seat Headrest – “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales”
05 Vince Staples – “War Ready”
06 Sad13 – “Less Than 2″
07 School Of Seven Bells – “Open Your Eyes”
08 PUP – “DVP”
09 Mitski – “I Bet On Losing Dogs”
10 Mai Lan – “Technique”
Listen to Peter’s playlist on Spotify.
Ryan Leas
David Bowie’s “I Can’t Give Everything Away” was supposed to be my favorite song of 2016. It was, after all, the perfect coda from one of my favorite musicians. Car Seat Headrest’s “The Ballad Of The Costa Concordia” was supposed to be my favorite song of 2016 because, well, there’s just way too much shit to relate to in that one. At any given point in the year, I could’ve said that about any of the songs on my list — once more, the songs that followed me around while on tour or traveling for pieces, acting as little pillars in a year spent on the move, in many different places. But one of those songs, Liima’s “Amerika,” gradually took on more and more significance as the year wore on. Written by three Danes and a Finn on the islands of Madeira, “Amerika” is a song from the perspective of outsiders looking out across the ocean with their homes at their backs, thinking of that mythic place out over there, reconciling the vision they grew up on with the real place they had experienced, the real place they could look out and see in 2016.
“Amerika” became my theme song in travel: a meditation I’d listen to around this country, around other countries, thinking about being an American out in the world as this year grew more and more warped. Gabriela and I were in Iceland when the election happened. From afar, we watched our country mutate, or reveal itself, when they elected a reality TV con man with no clue what he’s doing to the most powerful position in the world. “Amerika” shifted my perspective then: what once was a conduit to travel around thinking about my country and people’s perception of us around the world then became solace. We drove through alien, volcanic landscapes in Iceland listening to it, our homeland feeling just as alien, just as distant. “I hope for you,” Casper Clausen sings across the sea at the song’s crescendo, before falling into a wordless refrain that bears as much catharsis as it does pain. I still can’t tell whether I now hear it as elegy, or as a prayer for some other future we can’t quite see yet.
01 Liima – “Amerika”
02 David Bowie – “I Can’t Give Everything Away”
03 Car Seat Headrest – “The Ballad Of The Costa Concordia”
04 Radiohead – “Daydreaming”
05 Underworld – “I Exhale”
06 School Of Seven Bells – “Ablaze”
07 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “Jesus Alone”
08 Mitski – “Happy”
09 Merchandise – “Flower Of Sex”
10 Fufanu – “Sports”
Listen to Ryan’s playlist on Spotify.
Grace Birnstengel
It’s hard to find a common thread that links all of my favorite tracks this year without forcing it. Music serves different needs depending on where we’re at and what we’re going through. Between these ten songs, I was amped up when I needed a boost, calmed down when I was panicked, and distracted when I needed an escape from my own little world. Some of them represent finding solace and energy to move forward after the gut-wrenching end of a long-term relationship, trying to convince myself that I was going to be fine (“Sorry,” “Needed Me”). Some are bold, banging tracks I came back to time and time again when my uptight ass needed to let loose for once (“2 Phones,” “Kiss Me When I Bleed,” “Really Doe,” “Junie”). “Nights” and “Not Gonna Kill You” will forever remind me of my move to New York — two songs with varied and thrilling pacing that accompanied me on repeat during long stretches of train ride or waiting for it to finally show up. I listen to an embarrassing amount of really depressing, really emo music, but when it comes to individual tracks that I love, I can’t help but select ones that make me feel more alive. The closest to emo that this list gets is “The Waters” and “Real Friends,” both songs just slowly chug along and examine some fucked up and troubling feelings, but at the end of the day, still make me dance.
01 Beyoncé – “Sorry”
02 Frank Ocean – “Nights”
03 Anderson.Paak – “The Waters”
04 Angel Olsen – “Not Gonna Kill You”
05 Rihanna – “Needed Me”
06 White Lung – “Kiss Me When I Bleed”
07 Solange – “Junie”
08 Kanye West – “Real Friends” (Feat. Ty Dolla $ign)
09 Kevin Gates – “2 Phones”
10 Danny Brown – “Really Doe” (Feat. Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, & Earl Sweatshirt)
Listen to Grace’s playlist on Spotify.
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And here in one playlist are all of our writers’ selections (except for the songs that are not on Spotify):The decision of the British people to leave the European Union could be reversed next year if France and Germany agree that the UK can take control over immigration while staying in the EU single market, the former Labour cabinet minister Lord Adonis said on Sunday.
With concern over the government’s handling of Brexit growing ahead of a key parliamentary vote on Monday, the peer said Angela Merkel, who is expected to be re-elected as German chancellor later this month, and French president Emmanuel Macron could well make such an offer if they believe it could mean the UK remaining in the EU.
The way forward on Brexit is a new vote on whatever EU deal is reached Read more
Writing in the Observer, Adonis said he believes a majority of peers in the House of Lords will support an amendment to the EU withdrawal bill – now passing through the Commons – requiring another referendum before Brexit takes effect, with the options being to accept the deal on offer, or stay in the EU.
Such an amendment for another national vote, Adonis said, would stand a good chance of being passed by the House of Commons because Labour would by then have reason to support it, and sufficient pro-EU Tories would also rally behind it, he argues.
“The interplay between a referendum and such a Merkel-Macron ‘offer’ will be vital,” he writes. “If it is clear by next summer that Britain is going to hold a referendum, then the incentive for them to make a bold offer greatly increases.”
He adds: “A lot depends upon whether the alternative is the status quo – or EU membership without freedom of movement in respect of right to work and right to reside for all EU nationals. If Chancellor Merkel and President Macron make an offer, probably over the heads of the British government, for the UK to stay in the economic institutions of the EU but with national control over immigration, then I believe the referendum can be won.
“Why might Macron and Merkel make this offer? Partly because – in Macron’s case – he (rightly) doesn’t believe that unrestricted free movement of labour is integral to the single market. Partly because many other EU leaders agree with him. And partly for the big strategic reason – which weighs on strategic thinkers in Berlin – that, if Britain leaves the EU, 80% of Nato resources will then be outside the EU, which is hardly a recipe for European security and stability if you are looking across at the Russian and Chinese bears.”
MPs need to take a new approach over Brexit Read more
While Theresa May is expected to avoid any significant Tory rebellion over the EU withdrawal bill at the second reading stage on Monday, there is growing concern among MPs of all parties at the prime minister’s plan to leave the single market and customs union, and the lack of progress in negotiations with Brussels. On Sunday around 30,000 people marched on Westminster demanding that the UK stays in the EU.
Adonis’s intervention also comes amid signs that opponents of a hard Brexit in all the main parties are ready to work together to amend the bill, both to ensure that the option of staying inside the single market is kept open, and that parliament, at the very least, has a binding vote on the final deal before Brexit happens in March 2019. The Observer understands that meetings about how to thwart a hard Brexit have already taken place between senior Labour figures, the Liberal Democrats and Scottish Nationalist party MPs and pro-EU Tories.
Writing on guardian.com, the SNP’s Brexit spokesman, Stephen Gethins, says the kind of cross-party co-operation that led – through a referendum 20 years ago – to the creation of the Scottish parliament should be repeated now to avoid the economically devastating effects of a cliff-edge hard Brexit. Gethins says “we need to build consensus around key issues in Westminster”, including single-market membership and the rights of EU nationals in the UK, adding: “The government is making a mess of withdrawing from the EU. That affects us all. Hung parliaments require opposition to step up and governments to listen, and the SNP in Westminster will work with others and make our voices heard.”
Meanwhile, 33 Labour MPs have written to the Brexit secretary, David Davis, challenging him over his pledge last year that by now the government would be concluding negotiations on “a large round of global trade deals with all our most favoured trade partners”.
In July 2016, Davis said talks would begin on 9 September 2016, and that “I would expect that the negotiation phase of most of them to be concluded within between 12 and 24 months. So, within two years, before the negotiation with the EU is likely to be complete, and therefore before anything material has changed, we can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU.”
In the letter – coordinated by Labour MP Chuka Umunna and the Open Britain campaign group – the MPs challenge Davis to admit that this pledge was “misleading”, and was symptomatic of a Brexit strategy that has been “characterised by delusional wishful thinking”.These motivational quotes were derived from Teddy Roosevelt’s speeches, writings and interviews. Most of the quotes were sourced using The Works of Theodore Roosevelt in 14 volumes. Links to online sources are included below each image when available.
1. Never Stop Trying
“We have got but one life here, and what comes after it we cannot with certainty tell; but it pays, no matter what comes after it, to try and do things, to accomplish things in this life, and not merely to have a soft and pleasant time.”
Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to Bellamy Storer
2. Decide to be Great
“There is no more important component of character than steadfast resolution. The boy who is going to make a great man, or is going to count in any way in after life, must make up his mind not merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats.”
3. Be Willing to Risk It All
“No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his body, to risk his well being, to risk his life, in a great cause. No nation has a right to a place in the world unless it has so trained its sons and daughters that they follow righteousness as the great goal. They must scorn to do injustice, and scorn to submit to injustice. They must endeavor steadily to make peace the handmaiden of righteousness, to secure both peace and righteousness. But they must stand ready, if the alternative is between peace and righteousness, unhesitatingly to face suffering and death in war rather than to submit to iniquity or dishonor.”
Theodore Roosevelt, Harvard and Preparedness
4. Tackle Problems Head On
“It is not difficult to be virtuous in a cloistered and negative way. Neither is it difficult to succeed, after a fashion, in active life, if one is content to disregard the considerations which bind honorable and upright men. But it is by no means easy to combine honest and efficiency; and yet it is absolutely necessary, in order to do any work really worth doing.
It is not hard, while sitting in one’s study, to devise admirable plans for the betterment of politics and of social conditions; but in practice it often proves very hard to make any such plan work at all, no matter how imperfectly, yet the effort must continually be made, under penalty of constant retrogression in our political life.
We feel that the doer is better than the critic and that the man who strives stands far above the man who stands aloof because of pessimism or because of sheer weakness. To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking and that success can only come to the player who ‘hits the line hard.'”
Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, NY (October 1897)
5. Talk Less
When asked how he got along so well as governor of the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., replied: “I always had a great respect for a Philippine proverb: “Into the closed mouth the fly does not get.”
Theodore Roosevelt, as quoted in Readers Digest, Volume 26-27, 1935
6. Only feel sorry for the lazy
“Your work is hard. Do you suppose I mention that because I pity you? No; not a bit. I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who doesn’t work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being. The law of worthy work well done is the law of successful American life. I believe in play, too – play, and play hard while you play; but don’t make the mistake of thinking that that is the main thing. The work is what counts, and if a man does his work well and it is worth doing, then it matters but little in which line that work is done; the man is a good American citizen. If he does his work in slip-shod fashion, then no matter what kind of work it is, he is a poor American citizen.”
Theodore Roosevelt, In a speech to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Chattanooga, TN (September 8, 1902)
7. Embrace Hard Work
“Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty. No kind of life is worth leading if it is always an easy life. I know that your life is hard; I know that your work is hard; and hardest of all for those of you who have the highest trained consciences, and who therefore always feel how much you ought to do. I know your work is hard, and that is why I congratulate you with all my heart. I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
Source: Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals in Education Speech, November 4, 1910
Read the Book: The Works of Theodore Roosevelt in 14 volumes
8. Take Action
“To sit home, read one’s favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing.”
Source: “The Higher Life of American Cities”, The Outlook (December 21, 1895), p. 1083
9. Stand United
“When the time of danger comes, all Americans, whatever their social standing, whatever their creed, whatever the training they have received, no matter from what section of the country they have come, stand together as men, as Americans, and are content to face the same fate and do the same duties because fundamentally they all alike have the common purpose to serve the glorious flag of their common country.”
Source: Address at Yale Alumni Dinner, The Oxford Club, Brooklyn, NY (March 3, 1899)
Image: Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Randall A. Clinton (CC BY 2.0)A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit by Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans claiming the United States, individuals and several multinational corporations and banks committed “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” by developing homes on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan this week released an order dismissing the case Bassem Al-Tamimi et al. vs. Sheldon Adelson and the United States.
The judge found her court lacked jurisdiction to “hear plaintiffs claims against the United States, as Congress has not waived sovereign immunity for such claims. The court further concludes that it lacks subject matter jurisdiction to adjudicate the claims against all defendants because they are replete with non-justiciable political questions.”
Joseph Farah’s newest book, “The Restitution of All Things,” expounds on what few authors dare to approach, the coming kingdom of God. Available at the WND Superstore.
The American Center for Law and Justice, which had filed briefs on behalf of a charity located in the Middle East, charged the case amounted to a challenge to Israel’s existence.
“We secured a massive federal court victory in the most significant U.S. federal court case in defense of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state we’ve ever undertaken,” ACLJ said.
“Just over a year ago a group of Palestinian activists, led by the head of a family of notorious terrorists, Bassem al-Tamimi, filed a $34.5 billion dollar lawsuit in federal court against numerous organizations that support the state of Israel. In a nutshell, what they were trying to do in their 200-page complaint was to litigate the very existence of the state of Israel in an attempt to delegitimize it.”
The judge said the Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans from East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and five Palestinian village councils sued, claiming the defendants “engaged in a civil conspiracy to expel all non-Jews from” those regions” and “committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in violation of the law of nations under the Alien Tort Statute.”
Nonsense, said the judge, who had requested the motions to dismiss.
“The Palestinian and Palestinian-American plaintiffs in this lawsuit allege that they have experienced immense loss of life, liberty and property over the last several decades, and they seek justice and compensation for violence they have experienced,” she wrote. “At the core of their amended complaint, however, is the request for this court to adjudicate and resolve the lawfulness of the development of Israeli settlements in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem stretching over 30 years into the past.
“This issue, both close to the heart of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and central to the United States’ foreign policy decision-making in the region, is simply inappropriate for this court to resolve.”
Those with concerns need to go to the “political branches,” instead, she said.
Sekulow’s organization had represented a charity set up to defend the history and people of Gush Etzion, an area with dozens of villages near Bethlehem.
“Their only ‘wrongdoing’ – along with the other charities, nonprofits, businesses and private citizens named in the complaint – was that they have supported and continue to support the Jewish state of Israel,” ACLJ said.
Gush Etzion, the report said, is an “area of great historical and strategic significance from biblical times.” It was decimated during Israel’s independence war in 1948.
At that time, Prime Minister Ben Gurion eulogized the defenders.
“I can think of no battle in the annals of the Israel Defense Forces which was more magnificent, more tragic or more heroic than the struggle for Gush Etzion,” he said. ” … If there exists a Jewish Jerusalem, our foremost thanks go to the defenders of Gush Etzion.”
ACLJ explained the Arab Legion “massacred the Jews of Gush Etzion in 1948, but after the miraculous Six Day War of 1967, when Judea and Samaria were liberated, the Jews returned and rebuilt. From 450 residents in four villages that were destroyed in 1948, Gush Etzion is now home to 90,000 Israelis in 22 flourishing towns and villages.”
The report said: “Make no mistake: what this case is about is another attempt by Israel’s enemies to attack the Jewish presence in the land of Israel and undermine the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. Having failed at warfare every time they confront Israel militarily, Israel’s enemies are now using our courts to fight her with lawfare.”
Joseph Farah’s newest book, “The Restitution of All Things,” expounds on what few authors dare to approach, the coming kingdom of God. Available at the WND Superstore.Nostalgia on Wheels posted these incredible pictures (quite a while back) of Steve McQueen and his Bud Ekins’ desert-modified Triumph Bonneville racer from the June 1964 edition of Cycle World Magazine. Original photos by Cal West. I re-typed the original text so it’s legible, great stuff. Hells. Yes.
“Actor Steve McQueen and his Triumph desert bike in their native habitat.” –Cycle World Magazine, June 1964
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“Many modifications make a desert bike. Crossovers, skid plate, giant filters, etc.” –Cycle World Magazine, June 1964
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“Paper-pack air cleaners are connected to carbs by special a collector box. A Cushy saddle and high pipes are essential in the desert.” –Cycle World Magazine, June 1964
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“IN McQUEEN’S SERVICE”
Winning desert races is what this machine was set up for. It is the mount of actor Steve McQueen, who recently won the novice class in a one-hour desert scrambles. The victory only proved what a close look at his Triumph Bonneville suggests: McQueen takes his motorcycling seriously.
It takes some modifications to wing the rough, dusty hare ‘n hounds, scrambles and enduros that are popular in the southwestern desert. McQueen’s machine was prepared in Bud Ekins’ Sherman Oaks, California shop. They started by replacing the stock wheel with a 1956 Triumph hub and 19″ wheel to reduce unsprung weight. The forks were fitted with sidecar springs and the rake increased slightly by altering the frame at the steering crown. The rear frame hoop was bent upward to accommodate a 4.00 x 18 Dunlop sports knobby, and to it were welded brackets for the Bates cross-country seat. The bars are by Flanders, with leather hand guards, and the throttle cables run over the tank, through alloy brackets to the twin 1 1/8″ Amal carburetors.
A Harlan skidplate protects the underside of the motor, the footpegs were braced, and the rear brake rod was increased to 5/16″ diameter and rerouted inside the frame and shock (where sagebrush can’t damege it). The oil tank was modified to increase its capacity and bring the filler out the side fom under the seat. It also serves as part of the mudguard, saving weight.
The engine is basically a stock Bonneville but the compression was lowered from 12 : 1 to 8 1/2 : 1 for reliability, and the sagebrush-snagging oil pressure indicator was converted to a pop-off relief valve with a return line back to the oil tank. McQueen runs Jomo TT cams and Lode RL47 Platinum tip plugs.
The important job of filtering all that dirt out of the desert air is handled by paper-pack air cleaners connected by a special collector box to the carbs. This box is finished in black wrinkle-finish paint while the tanks are dark green. The cross-over pipes are Ekins’ own design, and are left unplated for better heat dissipation. Perhaps if McQueen were riding this motorcycle in the movie, he would have made his “Great Escape.”
–Cycle World Magazine, June 1964
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“Terrence Steven McQueen received a red tricycle for his fourth birthday from his great uncle, and on that day a racing legend was born. Before joining the Marine Corps, he worked as an oil rigger, in a carnival, and as a janitor in a brothel. When he was honorably discharged in 1950, McQueen started taking acting workshops. To pick up some extra cash, he started competing in motorcycle races on the weekends. In late 1955, at the age of 25, McQueen left New York and headed for California where his motorcycle-racing buddy Robert Culp helped him land his first TV role.
McQueen also competed in off-road motorcycle racing. His first off-road motorcycle was a Triumph 500cc that he purchased from friend and stuntman Bud Ekins. In McQueen’s 1963 film The Great Escape, he rode a Triumph TR6 650 and, in one of the most famous action scenes in a movie, his character escaped the Nazis by jumping over a fence – which Bud did the stunt for.
In addition to starring in movies like Bullitt and The Getaway, McQueen raced in many top off-road races on the West Coast, including the Baja 1000, the Mint 400 and the Elsinore Grand Prix. In 1964, together with Bud Ekins on their Triumph TR6 Trophys, he represented the United States in the International Six Days Trial, a form of off-road motorcycling Olympics. He was inducted into the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1978.
In 1971, McQueen’s production company funded the now-classic motorcycle documentary “On Any Sunday”, in which McQueen is featured along with racing legends Mert Lawwill and Malcolm Smith. Steve McQueen owned over 200 bikes in his lifetime, and he was posthumously inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame.” –via Triumph
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Steve McQueen on his 1963 Triumph Bonneville Desert Sled built by McQueen’s good friend, Bud Ekins.
Steve McQueen’s pickup truck loaded-up with his Bud Ekins’ desert-modified Triumph Bonneville desert racer.
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In 2009, Steve McQueen’s 1963 Triumph Bonneville Desert Sled sold at Bonhams & Butterfields’ first-ever motorcycle and memorabilia auction for $84,240. The bike was personally built by McQueen’s good friend, Bud Ekins, the famous stunt rider and off-road racing champ, and was painted by another legend– the epic painter, striper, builder, fabricator, etc., Von Dutch.
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–Christian Hansen
The images below were taken by Christian Hansen at the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock in early December.
There were fireworks the night the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it would not grant the easement allowing the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline—low, bright explosions lighting up the makeshift civilization on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. And then the protesters got back to work.
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The Army Corps’ unexpected announcement on Dec. 4 has largely been hailed as a victory for the people who’ve spent months trying to block final construction of the pipeline. But at the camp, where members of more than 700 tribes have gathered with the Standing Rock Sioux—and have stayed, despite frigid temperatures—the news was received a bit more cautiously. Even when David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, told protesters it was time to go home and be with their families for the winter, many were reluctant. They know this decision is not conclusive—it’s more of a punt so the Army Corps can “explore alternate routes” and consider an Environmental Impact Statement “with full public input and analysis.” And the whole thing could be reversed by President-elect Donald Trump once he takes office.
We don’t know. But whatever happens next, the ideals that catalyzed the Standing Rock protest are not going away. The people fighting for them are in it for the long haul, because in a broader sense that’s what the protest was about—advocating for the long view amid the triumphal short-termism of our current political culture. The protesters in Standing Rock are eminently aware that this “victory” is not the end but rather another twist in a longer fight. And while others are lamenting how the Army Corps’ decision will make the process drag on, for the protesters, that’s OK. They’re committed to ideals that have a longer shelf life than the market cycle, or even a presidential term. “It’s more than this pipeline, on this land, at this time,” Daphne Singingtree, a protester who has spent weeks at Standing Rock and intends to stay, told NPR after the Army Corps’ decision was announced. “I see this movement continuing on.”
Pipeline supporters, by contrast, have short-term goals. They want to finish the pipeline, start pumping oil, and start making money. Their arguments for why it should go through rely on short-term considerations: The pipeline is mostly complete, and right now we’re shipping oil on trains, which is more dangerous. Plus, the government is about to open a gleaming new water-treatment plant
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real victims of rape to get justice
4. Law and Order: SVU is a very popular show.
5. Women hate other women.
6. Men get raped too.
7. Women harbor more animosity towards the victims of rape than the rapists.Some new promotional art for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has surfaced, and more than a few fans are unhappy with one of the political slogans portrayed therein. The slogan in question, “Augs Lives Matter,” was ostensibly a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, which, as their mission statement explains, formed “in response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against Black communities in the U.S. and globally.” However, in Deus Ex, the slogan is used to instead refer to cybernetic-augmented humans, called “Augs” within the game’s universe.
While the art attempts to invoke the same feelings and emotions around the BLM movement, the comparison falls pretty darn flat and comes across as a bit tone deaf. To take a phrase like “Black Lives Matter” and apply it to the situation in this game feels like appropriation. It waters down or reduces a very real, very powerful statement on identity politics in the real world.
Now, it’s very clear what the game’s creators were trying to do–don’t get me wrong. I can tell that they were trying to tie in the events of the game to real life events here and now. But rather than taking a concept and expanding upon it, which is something that the science fiction genre always does, Eidos Montreal has just straight up taken it. They haven’t added anything new to the discourse or dialogue; they’ve simply taken something that wasn’t really theirs to begin with in order to exploit the same feelings and sentiments.
Even if SOMEHOW in game the whole “Aug Lives Matter” is done really well, in advertising it is devoid of context and highly problematic. — Manveer Heir (@manveerheir) August 2, 2016
“Aug lives matter” is political pastiche. It’s a Family Guy reference joke, but serious. It has no meaning other than what it steals. — Malcolm Pierce (@RedbirdMenace) August 2, 2016
Last year, Eidos Montreal stirred up some controversy in their use of the term “mechanical apartheid” in a promotional tweet for this game. Folks called them out for their use of the term “apartheid,” citing many of the same reasons why “Augs Lives Matters” is a problem. In a chat with Polygon, Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, the game’s director, came out in defense of the use of the phrase “mechanical apartheid,” saying: “It’s a form of art, the people outside don’t think it’s art, it’s just stupid games. We’re fighting against those people. And then when we’re dealing with serious subjects suddenly we’re treated as little kids that are just doing video games again. This whole thing is completely ridiculous.”
The use of real life movements and political sentiment isn’t unique to Deus Ex, nor video gaming in general. The thing is, often times these big budget video games fail to bring the amount of depth and gravitas that inherently exist within such movements or phrases. Simply put, their track record here just doesn’t show that they’re handling this issue respectfully, thus making it hard to offer them the benefit of the doubt.
(via Crave Online)
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Emily Dickinson, as I’ve written in this space in the past, drafted many of her poems on bits and pieces of miscellaneous paper, many of which came from broken-down, recycled envelopes: strips, torn-off corners, full-flattened sheets. All of Dickinson’s 52 surviving “envelope poems” are now collected in a full-color facsimile edition, with the Dickinson-derived title The Gorgeous Nothings. Here are two of the larger envelopes, along with visual transcriptions, as they appear in the book.
The smaller fragments I visited in my previous post offered scant space for Dickinson to develop ideas. Their charm is in their fleeting tininess, which mirrors Dickinson’s sparse economy of language and adds to her mystique; one can imagine the poet scrawling a thought, then losing it as it flutters away.
The larger envelopes, on the other hand, offer more real estate for Dickinson to play with. The first envelope poem below, which became the poem “Oh Sumptuous Moment,” includes suggestions of alternate words, one strikeout, and a few insertions between the lines.
The second, which eventually became “We Talked With Each Other About Each Other,” gives even more of a sense of Dickinson’s choices. In the draft of this poem about the anxiety of time’s passage, the poet describes “Time” as “Pausing in Front of our — Faces.” In this draft, she plays with several adjectives to modify “Faces”: “Sentenced,” and, in the margin, “Foundering.” In the final version, she’s taken an entirely different tack, and selected “Palsied”—a word that does a much better job of expressing a sense of active, yet paralyzed human dread.
The Gorgeous Nothings.
A visual transcript, as it appears in The Gorgeous Nothings.
The Gorgeous Nothings.Today marks the first time in Auckland that all train services on a normal weekday will be run by electric trains. While I’m sure there are bound to be more teething issues as a result, it represents a significant milestone in the progress towards a better and more balanced transport system for Auckland. However while I’m glad to see the back of the old diesels, without them we also wouldn’t be in the situation we are today. It’s clear that earlier investments in both the diesels and the network achieved enough patronage growth that they helped convince officials and politicians to agree to spend over $1 billion, to electrify the network and buy new trains. With that in mind, I thought I’d once again take a bit of a look at the history of the rail network and what led us to this point.
Up until recently, trains in Auckland were not that widely used, and could best be described as being in a fairly constant state of decay. That’s the result of a few things including:
Up until the mid-1950’s most of the population was covered by trams, trains only served outlying areas.
In 1930 the main train station was moved from where Britomart is now (but on the surface) to the now old Auckland Train station next to Vector Arena. That made trains an inconvenient mode for most.
Despite repeated attempts over many decades to improve rail, nothing ever got off the ground and no real investment was put into the system.
During the same time we put huge investment into the motorway network and making it easier to drive.
Due to the factors above – and likely others – patronage continued to decline. Usage of rail was so low that in the 1980’s serious consideration was put into ripping up the tracks alongside the southern motorway and turning them into more lanes. By the early 1990’s patronage was reached its lowest point, barely scraping above 1 million trips a year. However it was about this time that a turnaround started and it was all the result of one man and some amazing luck. You can read the full story here but the short version is:
He had been tasked with shutting the network down but after looking at the operation he worked out he was able to cut costs and start turning a profit and extend the contracts. At the same time Perth was just finishing electrifying their own rail network and had no use for their old diesel trains allowing most of them to be brought at scrap value for use in Auckland. The Diesel Multiple Units (DMUs) started plying the tracks in 1992. Within a few years patronage had doubled to over 2 million trips per year – higher than it was for most of the 1980’s and late 1970’s.
Things really kicked up a gear in 2003 when Britomart opened, once again returning trains back to the city. The growth in patronage was too much for the DMU’s to handle and so from 2004 the first of the SA sets started arriving. These are the refurbished carriages – originally from the UK – that are hauled by freight locomotives and which became such a common sight on the rail network in Auckland. In total over 100 carriages were refurbished over a five year period.
Both the DMUs and SA sets represented a big step forward compared to what had existed before and growth continued as more services kept being added. In 2006 this was further boosted by the government agreeing on Project DART (Developing Auckland’s Rail Transport Network) which saw the double tracking of the Western Line as well as station upgrades such as Newmarket and New Lynn, the reopening of the Onehunga line and the building of a new line to Manukau. Impressively despite frequent and often massive disruption as a result of the major works being undertaken, patronage continued to rise.
In 2010 after delaying electrification to re-evaluate it and cancel a planned regional fuel tax that would have paid for the trains, the current government agreed to fund electrification and give the council a loan to buy the new trains. This meant that from 2011 onwards the rail network continued to be plagued by significant disruption however despite this patronage kept rising. The only exception to this was in 2012/13 when the after-effect of two significant events kicked in at the same time. One was the boost that came from the Rugby World Cup (~400,000 trips) and the second was a change in the way patronage was counted as a result of the introduction of HOP. However since then patronage has once again risen again – more than making up the lost ground.
The plan was to buy 38 trains and then separately buy some electric locomotives to haul the SA sets around for another decade or so however in 2011 the government agreed it would be better and cheaper over the long term to buy an extra 19 trains and run a single uniform fleet – plus the SA sets couldn’t run through the future CRL for safety reasons. All of this meant we’re getting a total fleet of 57 trains.
The first Electric Train (EMU) arrived in August 2013 and entered service at the end of April 2014. They then slowly started to be rolled out to Manukau line services in August before being rolled out to all services in December. This year we’ve already started to see electric trains on some Southern and Western line services. While the full roll out to all lines has only been completed today the impact of the new electric trains has been extraordinary. For example in the 12 months to the end of May patronage on the Eastern Line is up a staggering 43.7%. As I understand it, of the 57 trains we ordered, all but the last few are in the country with the final ones arriving in August.
The chart below shows the history of rail patronage over the time-frame above including some of the significant events mentioned. Of note is it includes the 2014/15 result (to the end of June) which AT has confirmed to me as 13.9 million over the year. That’s up almost 22% over the 11.4 million trips to the end of June 2014. That level of growth puts us well on track towards the target the government have set for an earlier start date for the next major rail project – the CRL. Current estimates see that figure being passed in around 2017/18.
While the diesel trains have definitely served a purpose and helped improve rail use in Auckland. In the last eight months or so they’ve been increasingly unreliable as maintenance on them was reduced. At the same time there have been bedding in issues with the new EMUs. With a single fleet now it should mean that those involved in delivering train services in Auckland – AT, CAF, Kiwirail and Transdev – should be able to focus on addressing just one set of issues. At the end of June we learned of their action plan for the next year for this.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Auckland rail story is the links with Perth. Not only did we buy their old diesel trains but they’re often cited as a case study by officials thanks to the significant uptake in rail use thanks to electrification and new projects. At the time they went electric their system carried around 10 million passengers which is not too far off what our network was carrying when we first started running electric trains. It is hoped that we’ll emulate some of the success they’ve had – which has also come from building significant new lines. Here’s how patronage on the two networks look.
I believe that in a few years-time that electrification, just like with Britomart, will be one those projects we look back on and wonder why it took us so many decades to do, why politicians from all sides refused to believe it could work. Lastly I was in Britomart yesterday and it really is wonderful how quiet the station is now that we don’t have rattly old diesel trains in it. Thank you to everyone who has helped get us to this point.
p.s. next we need to get electrification extended to Pukekohe for a fully all electric network.
Share thisSometimes, the act of teaching is a work of art. In the days before clip art and Google image search, artistically-challenged teachers had few alternatives to the chalkboard for their visual-based lessons. Enter Frederik Whitney, author of Blackboard Sketching, who wrote his guide in 1909 with the promise that, with a few basic strokes and some practice, anybody could turn a chalkboard into a canvas. Check out the virtual art gallery below of chalk art that’s too good for the sidewalk.
1. Plate 1
Whitney starts his lesson with a basic stroke and steps for drawing a telegraph pole and a chicken coop. “Ability to draw easily and well onto blackboard is a power which every teacher of children covets,” art educator Walter Sargent writes in the introduction. “Such drawing is a language which never fails to hold attention and awaken delighted interest.”
2. Plate 2
The secret to many of Whitney’s drawings is to use the round side of chalk rather than the flat end. He advises that in order to create a gradient line, you should hold your chalk on one end, and when you’re ready, put pressure on the end instead of the middle for a shaded look.
3. Plate 3
How do you like them apples? Once a teacher masters the rounded fruit, Whitney suggests he or she try the following activity with the class: draw a bunch of apples, each printed with a different word. As the students are able to identify a word on the apple, it is erased.
4. Plate 5
Especially festive educators may feel the need to decorate depending on the season. Whitney suggests using a pumpkin for the month of October.
5. Plate 7
This sketch of a mountain is the first in a series of images that he advises using when teaching geography. “The teacher who, with a few strokes of the chalk, can interpret to her class the thing about which they are studying, and can make an illustration which the whole class can see and appreciate, has an invaluable gift,” he writes.
6. Plate 8
Whitney’s sketch of a teepee combines the four techniques he has explained so far in his book.
7. Plate 10
Whitney suggests a second reading game once you master the art of drawing a ladder: write vocabulary words on each rung of the ladder and let students see how far they can “climb” by identifying each word.
8. Plate 12
This lesson focuses only on the ability to draw trees. “In sketching trees,” Whitney writes, “one should bear in mind the general attitude of the tree, its characteristic form and branching, and the stroke which will best produce these.”
9. Plate 14
Whitney breaks down which strokes should be used to create each aspect of his fireplace drawing. To make the fire in the fireplace, create a circle of white chalk, then smear it with your fingertip to create a smoky effect.
10. Plate 16
Whitney suggests using this image during a history lesson about the type of houses used by the early settlers. He writes that the log cabin pictured above is supposed to be the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln.
11. Plate 17
This is a favorite among students. “Whenever I have made a sketch of this kind it has always given great pleasure to the children, and proved of more or less value in history, or in story-telling in the lower grades,” Whitney writes.
12. Plate 23
Whitney uses charcoal to add details to the feathers in this bird sketch. To ensure your bird pops, rub some white chalk into the background to create a light gray on the board.
13. Plate 25
Whitney created this illustration for use with studies of the poem “Flower-de-luce” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, demonstrating how blackboard sketching can be appreciated by students of all ages, no matter the subject matter.
14. Plate 26
This eerie castle sketch includes a quote from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and would serve as a stunning backdrop to any discussion of the classic tragedy.
15. Plate 29
Whitney notes that this image was hastily sketched by the teacher, as if there's nothing to it. “Any teacher can easily arrange such backgrounds and costumes with the simplest material at hand, and in this manner add essentially to the interest and value of a lesson,” he remarks.I’ve bought a couple of hair products lately and thought I’d talk about some of them! They were all bought from ebay user alphabeautyuk who I have ordered from a couple of times now. I probably won’t order so much in the future only because I have a local store that sells a lot of the same stuff. The shipping was always well priced and my items arrived quickly! Now onto the gear…
Liese Light Move Styling Gel for Mesh and Bob Styles & Fluffy Soft Wave Styling Gel for Semi-Long Hair
Both products claim style holding without heaviness, texturising and ingredients to care for heat damage.
This range comes in a range of 3 but I haven’t been able to buy the third yet, a volumising spray. These are marketed to be for different kind of hair but I’ve used both and I thought they both worked well. I’m growing my hair out right now so I’ve neither structured bob-style hair nor long curls, but I’ve made do and had good experiences! Both products are milky like gels that have a pump for distributing the amount you want. I just pump a little into my hands and rub between my fingers to warm it up and make it easier to distribute.
The blue bottle for shorter hair I normally use to add texture and structure to my lengths. It’s really useful for styling my hair to go inwards at the ends, if that makes sense? Here’s a not so great photo of me after straightening and styling my hair with the Light Move Styling Gel…
In fact you can see the bottles behind me, hehe. Anyway, as you can on my ends my hair is a little more structured into a style despite not having a cut in months. I have soft, fine hair and haven’t found the product to be heavy or greasy, so that’s a plus! Here is an official video for the product and how to use it!
I’ve only used the Fluffy Soft Wave gel once when I had extreme bed hair and it seemed like a good opportunity. I’ve yet to test it out on heat-curled hair. BUT, my hair became a really nice texture, making it less heavy and smooth as it usually is. The effect was definitely a lighter, fluffier look. In the video for this product, you can see that you just rub it in your hands and scrunch into the curls to add texture.
I liked both of these and am looking forward to getting the last one in the range! They have a light fruity scent that disappears quickly. Neither are too heavy on the hair and I didn’t find it affected my second-day hair negatively.
Palty Night Hair Care in Water Mist
How cute is this bottle?! I admit that’s what drew me in first. It’s supposed to be a hair treatment you put in before bed. It’s to help repair from heat damage and prevent bad bed-hair. It can be bought in a milk essence, a gel and a water mist. There may be another one but I can’t remember. I bought the mist because my hair can’t handle too many heavy products. First thing’s first, this stuff smells like turkish delight and that’s pretty amazing! I spray it on before bed just for that reason alone. I wish I could get the same scent to have in my hair all day to be honest. The next day I wake up with hair with nice texture and no dry ends. As an extra to your normal hair care routine I don’t think it does any harm. It has fought back bad bed-hair for me, so that’s a plus!
Mandom Baby Veil in Fruity Berry
As you can see on the bottle, this is a hair fragrance. The bottle is like hairspray. From a 30cm distance you spray over your hair for long-lasting fragrance. There is supposed to be a little glossyness as well? I’m not sure about that, I didn’t really see it. I bought Fruity Berry but there are several smells to choose from including roses and linen (it seems like linen to me? lol). Basically it delivers what it promises and the smell lasts awhile. A few hours at least. I like to use this every now and then when my hair may not be washed or I don’t want to wear my perfume. This scent can be a little sickly so I’d advise a light spraying haha.
Well that’s it for a couple of hair products! Have you used these or are there others you like?
Jessica Da-ice – Hush HushDeputy RFS Commissioner Rob Rogers said the fire situation was the worst he'd seen in more than a decade and the threat was unlikely to ease for some time. "It was a very warm winter, a very dry winter... we're not even one month into spring and we've already got this," he told Channel Seven. The forecast south-westerly change could even make the situation worse. "The worst combination is north-westerly to south-westerly and we've got that now. We've got an incredibly long fire front and there is no sign of any rain coming." While there would be easing conditions on Friday, the sheer size of the raging fires meant they didn't "need the weather conditions" to continue.
"They are so big they create their own climatic conditions," he said. Around 100 fires broke out across the state, ranging from Lismore and Tenterfield in NSW's north, to Gloucester and Taree and the Great Lakes on the coast, the Blue Mountains, south to Camden, Wingecarribee near Moss Vale and the Shoalhaven. The fires destroyed homes, pastures and set a petrol station on fire near Wyong. Roads were closed across the state, with back ups of up to 20km on the Hume Highway. The worst loss of homes was at Springwood in the Blue Mountains, where at least 30 homes were lost. Ferocious winds fanned the blaze that destroyed the dream home where Joe Moore, Springwood Country Club's golf professional, had lived with his wife and seven children, including four foster children. "This reminds me of what happened in Melbourne a couple of years ago," Mr Moore said. "Whichever way you look, it was the impossible fire to fight."
There were unconfirmed reports of properties being lost at North Doyalson, on the Central Coast; at Lithgow; at Yanderra and Balmoral, in the Southern Highlands; and in Port Stephens. Newcastle airport was closed and evacuated except for a skeleton staff because of a bushfire at Heatherbrae, 16km away. Late on Thursday, the NSW Emergency Services Minister Mike Gallacher said the bushfire situation across the state was "very tough going indeed". "You only need to look out into the sky and see the bloom and ash that is hanging over Sydney," he told ABC. "That's coming from the fires burning in the Blue Mountains." During the day, more than 8500 homes in the west, south-west and north of Sydney lost power, as wind gusts of up to 70km/h brought branches down on powerlines. In the Blue Mountains, power was cut to about 4500 homes and businesses in Katoomba, Winmalee and parts of Leura, Blackheath and Mount Victoria.
In the Macarthur region, the worst-affected areas were Wilton, Menangle and parts of Campbelltown. While the next 24 hours should bring a cool change, it wasn't expected to contain much rain. In Lithgow, attempts by firefighters to waterbomb a fire were hindered by 90km/h winds, RFS spokesman Joel Kursawe said. Those winds are capable of carrying embers up to six kilometres. "The problem is when you've got aircraft over fires like that with [those] winds, a lot of the time they're just getting knocked around in the sky," Mr Kursawe told journalists at RFS headquarters in Sydney.
By late Thursday afternoon, the fires surrounding Sydney had turned the sun into bright red, threatening ball. "It's an apocalypse out there," said one of the many inner-city workers and residents who were taking of the hulking grey cloud hanging over Sydney. The clouds were reported to be sending ash down into Sydney's inner city, including as far east as Coogee, prompting NSW Health to issue a bushfire air pollution health warning. It said air quality in many areas was likely to be reduced due to smoke particles. “Already, smoke from bushfires burning in the Blue Mountains region and Muswellbrook areas has been blown east to Sydney city and coastal suburbs,” said Professor Wayne Smith, the director of the environmental health branch. Loading
“Particle levels are likely to be higher outdoors than indoors, so people sensitive to fine particles should limit the time they spend outside." with AAPFeaturing the boys of Johnny's West, a gang of zany transfer students are recruited for a mysterious mission ordained by their shadowy principal.
1. Enter the Kakerus!! 27m On his first day at his new school, Kakeru is thrown into a wrestling ring with six crazy students -- all of whom are also named Kakeru.
2. Total Z!! 23m For their first mission, Hikari and three of the Kakerus are transferred to a school that seems totally normal. Until lunch is served.
3. Tearful V!! 25m A spoiled brat has taken over this school, and it's up to the Kakerus to teach him a lesson... by beating his mom in a volleyball match.
4. Pretty Transfer Students!! 23m The prettiest Kakerus don their best drag and transfer to a girls school. Their mission: to save a handsome boy kidnapped by some scary schoolgirls.
5. Blazing Back in Time!! 28m The Kakerus get sent back to the Edo period, where Kiriyama gets to use his samurai skills. Meanwhile, Hamada regrets never learning swordsmanship.
6. Forbidden Service!! 27m When pretty-boy Fujii gets recruited to a school for beautiful gentlemen, the two Kakerus he was with are ordered to get him back.
7. Blazing Sports Festival!! 26m The seven Kakerus are faced with a group of weirdos claiming to be the true Blazing Transfer Students. They're going to have to sort this out.A Democratic lawmaker on Tuesday mocked President Trump on Twitter after a report in The Washington Post said the president’s golf clubs display a fake Time magazine cover of Trump.
Rep. Gerry Connolly Gerald (Gerry) Edward ConnollyDem rep hopes Omar can be'mentored,' remain on Foreign Affairs panel Fairfax removed from leadership post in lieutenant governors group Virginia Legislative Black Caucus calls on Fairfax to step down MORE (D-Va.) tweeted a fake Time cover of his own.
“Wow, my first cover of Time. Asked my staff to frame this and hang it in all four of my offices. @realDonaldTrump,” Connolly wrote, including a link to the original story in the Post.
Wow, my first cover of Time. Asked my staff to frame this and hang it in all four of my offices. @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/Hx57ZJExR8 pic.twitter.com/y1HciTB5G1 — Gerry Connolly (@GerryConnolly) June 27, 2017
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A spokesperson for Time told the newspaper that the cover was fake. It is reportedly hanging in at least two of the president’s golf clubs in the United States and a resort in Ireland.
Following the Post’s report, Time asked the Trump Organization to remove the fake covers from the clubs.Lewis, a civil rights icon who led the sit-in, had earlier signed a letter calling on colleagues to maintain pressure on Republicans to enact gun control legislation that began on the House floor last Wednesday.
"John Lewis's historic sit-in on the Floor has resonated across the nation, and given fresh energy to Americans who will no longer tolerate the daily tragedy of gun violence in America and are calling for congressional action," read a statement from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who planned to join a sit-in in San Francisco Wednesday.
A marathon 25-hour sit-in last week may have failed to accomplish Democrats' desired legislation on firearms before Speaker Paul Ryan adjourned the House early for the July 4 holiday break. But on Wednesday, protest organizers continued to rally for those laws with a Day of Action.
Congressional Democrats are proving that not even a House recess will stop them from acting on gun control.
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Congressional Democrats are proving that not even a House recess will stop them from acting on gun control.
A marathon 25-hour sit-in last week may have failed to accomplish Democrats' desired legislation on firearms before Speaker Paul Ryan adjourned the House early for the July 4 holiday break. But on Wednesday, protest organizers continued to rally for those laws with a Day of Action.
"John Lewis's historic sit-in on the Floor has resonated across the nation, and given fresh energy to Americans who will no longer tolerate the daily tragedy of gun violence in America and are calling for congressional action," read a statement from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who planned to join a sit-in in San Francisco Wednesday.
Related: Gun control sit-in by House Democrats stretches into second day
Lewis, a civil rights icon who led the sit-in, had earlier signed a letter calling on colleagues to maintain pressure on Republicans to enact gun control legislation that began on the House floor last Wednesday.
"We ask you to join us in a National Day of Action on June 29, 2016," the letter read. "Whether it is a press conference, roundtable, or telephone town hall, we encourage you host an event showing that Democrats in Congress will keep up the fight against gun violence."
Some Congress members held short sit-ins, some attended by family members and gun violence prevention advocates, according to Pelosi's statement.
"Tomorrow, listen to the stories of the families who have lost loved ones to gun violence," Pelosi said. "Listen to the heartbreak that ripples through a community with each gun death. We owe them more than thoughts and prayers and moments of silence. We owe them a vote in the House on commonsense, life-saving legislation that will prevent more families from experiencing their suffering."
Action on gun violence prevention took new urgency after the US's deadliest mass shooting, with 49 people dead and 53 injured on June 12 in Orlando. Senate Democrats introduced two bills — one that would prevent people on a terrorism no-fly list from getting their hands on guns and the other that would expand background checks for potential buyers. Both were voted down.
Senate Democrats joined their colleagues in the lower house last Wednesday as they chanted "No bill, no break" and stayed up through the night. Republicans did not cave to their demands however and managed to push through a spending bill that included a Zika virus funding measure but no legislation on gun control. Ryan officially adjourned the House at around 3:15pm ET, until 5 July.
But Democrats vowed to keep up the fight through the break.
"Your adjournment will not silence our voices," California Rep. Barbara Lee said in a statement Tuesday.
"We intend to use all of the tools at our disposal to force Republicans to bring these two bills — No Fly, No Buy and universal background checks — to the floor," a spokesman for Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island said on Wednesday.
Cicilline will join Rep. Jim Langevin at a public sit-in at the Providence Public Safety Complex at 3pm ET Wednesday.Vatican pulled Pope Francis medal because "Jesus" was misspelled.
Pope Francis exchanges gifts with European Parliament President Martin Schulz during a private audience at the Vatican on Oct. 11, 2013. (Photo: Pietro Naj-Oleari / EU/ HANDOUT EPA) Story Highlights Medals were struck in gold, silver, bronze by the Italian state mint
Vatican said it withdrew 6,000 of the flawed medals from sale
Four of the medals were bought before that happened
The Vatican has pulled back thousands of medals commemorating Pope Francis' ascension to the papacy because the name of Jesus is misspelled.
The medals, which have often been minted for a new pope and are bought by collectors worldwide, named the Christian savior as "Lesus" in an inscription on the edge.
The medals were struck in gold, silver and bronze by the Italian state mint before the mistake was noticed, according to the BBC. They went on sale Tuesday.
The Vatican said it withdrew 6,000 of the flawed medals from sale. But four of the medals were bought before that happened and could become valuable because of the error, according to the Telegraph newspaper.
The medals depict Pope Francis and a phrase in Latin that inspired him to become a priest: "Jesus therefore sees the tax collector, and since he sees by having mercy and by choosing, he says to him, 'follow me'." The "J" is that phrase appears as an "L" on the medal.
Social media users cracked jokes about this new religious figure, "Lesus" Christ. "I blame the Lesuits," said one tweet.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1g5Hz7rPresident Obama
Shall we set ourselves on fire at the news spat out by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life today that 18 percent of Americans recently polled believe that President Barack Obama is a Muslim? Shall we pour gasoline over our heads before torching ourselves because the number of those who think he’s a Muslim is up from 11 percent, recorded in March 2009, and up from 12 percent in March 2008, when the average American couldn’t spell his name let alone name his religion?
I’ve got a book of matches and a gallon can of gasoline here, if you want to go first.
You probably do because you probably have a higher opinion of your fellow citizens than I do. But before you strike that match, I’ve got some more bad news. The Pew poll’s other finding is that while 47 percent of Americans thought Obama was a Christian in 2008, 34 percent thought so this summer.
Maybe you’d like to drink some of that gasoline before you commence incineration.
It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that the percentage of Republicans who think that Obama is a follower of Allah has risen from 17 percent to 31 percent between March 2009 and August 2010. But who among you are prepared for the news that the percentage of Democrats who think the same of Obama has risen from 7 percent to 10 percent? Or that this falsehood is also gaining currency among independents! Yes, 10 percent of independents thought Obama kicked with that foot in March 2009. In August 2010, 18 percent held that mistaken view.
Don’t these people read newspapers or watch TV? As a matter of fact, many do. According to the poll, 60 percent (PDF) of those who believe Obama is a Muslim also told the pollsters that they learned it from the media. Seeing as I can recall no major or minor media report that presented proof that would convince any sentient creature over the age of 10 that Obama is a Muslim, I’m starting to feel better. The 18 percenters are imagining things. Non-media sources cited by the poll’s respondents include Obama’s behaviors or own words (11 percent), nonspecific things they’ve heard or read (7 percent), the Internet (7 percent), things heard or read during the presidential campaign (6 percent), Obama’s ancestry (4 percent), and so on.
Unfortunately, the percentage of poll respondents who said Obama is a Muslim and could also successfully define Islam was not on the list of questions. Nor was the question, “If a Muslim bit you on the ass, would you be able to identify his religion?” I’m guessing that the percentage of respondents who would answer yes to either of those questions would be low, as would the percentage who could accurately describe the tenets of faith observed by Muslims.
What we do know from the Pew survey is that beliefs about what religion Obama practices closely track the political assessment of him: About two-thirds of respondents who think Obama is a Muslim disapprove of the job he’s doing as president, while about two-thirds of respondents who believe Obama is a Christian approve of his performance.
I’d be more upset about the Pew poll if a Gallup Poll hadn’t also reported that 18 percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth or that only 18 percent of Americans believe all or most of what is published in the New York Times. We can count on stupidity, willful ignorance, and intellectual sloth to plague us 100 percent of the time. All we can do is fight the darkness with light.
That’s why I always carry matches.
Addendum, Aug. 20: Here’s Dave Weigel’s take.
******
Get lit! Send e-mail to [email protected] or bask in the sunshine of my Twitter feed. (E-mail may be quoted by name in “The Fray,” Slate’s readers’ forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a “Press Box” correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Muslim in the subject head of an e-mail message
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but it’s this high-altitude forest that may be home to an undiscovered population of Sumatran orangutans. These great apes – a different species from those in Borneo – are classified as critically endangered and have a total population of around 14,000.
Since Sumatran orangutans rarely, if ever, touch down from the trees, McCann and Munthe don’t expect to catch them on camera. Instead they hope to find orangutan nests, photograph them, and bring back the images for confirmation by experts.
The team also hopes a new army of camera traps will document the Sunda clouded leopard, dholes, the helmeted hornbill, the Sumatran striped rabbit and the Sumatran muntjac, a type of small deer that McCann describes as so rare as to be “ near-mythical”.
“There’s even a very slim possibility of finding Sumatran rhinoceros,” McCann said. “Last year we camped on a plateau at about 600 metres that went by the name of Rhinoceros Hill. Historically, there were rhinos in this region. When did the last one get poached out? Probably nobody knows.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Malayan tapir in the Hadabaun Hills caught on camera trap. Photograph: Greg McCann/Habitat ID
Pretty much every big mammal in Sumatra is threatened, but Sumatran rhinos have the terrible honour of being one of the rarest mammals on the planet: less than 100 survive today. And a subspecies found in Borneo is on the verge of total extinction.
Munthe said that in his explorations he has found rhino dung in the Hadabaun Hills. Confirming rhinos there would be a major boon to a species so close to vanishing.
Indeed, Hadabaun Hills remains a land so removed it’s full of rumours. Munthe said locals claim to run into a “large black monkey” in the hills. There is also talk of a mythical tribe of humans known as the Suke Mante in this area. Munthe was also told by a local that at the top of the mountain lives a “black-furred, orangutan-like creature walks on two legs”. Historically there have been numerous reports of an unidentified ape in Sumatra called the “orang pendek”, which is similar to an orangutan but smaller with brown-to-black fur and a penchant for walking on the ground.
Why aren’t scientists and conservationists seeking out these last holdouts? Greg McCann
But no one has brought back any real proof of his legendary animal – and many believe that even if such an animal ever existed it has likely been wiped out in Sumatra’s ecological catastrophe.
None of the Hadabaun Hills is formally protected. About half the area is considered community forest and the other has no status, according to McCann. On the ground, he said, it didn’t matter what was community-run and what remained without any formal status.
“It’s all under threat from agricultural encroachment, logging, road building, snaring – all the usual suspects.”
McCann and Munthe asked that the exact location of the Hadabaun Hills remain unpublished due to concerns that such information could lead to an increase in poachers. Munthe said he feared poachers were already entering this lost world.
“I have mentioned the Hadabuan Hills and its scarce animals to the forestry minister and the head of the district administration. Until now there is no help to protect [the Hadabaun Hills] from the government,” Munthe said.
Most of the world’s biggest conservation groups have a presence in Sumatra – such as WWF, WCS, and Conservation International – but none of them have explored this particular forest.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Palm oil plantations as viewed from the Hadabaun Hills. Biodiversity plunges in palm oil plantations as compared to rainforests. Photograph: Greg McCann/Habitat ID
“Funding for new conservation projects seems difficult to come by, and in the past the large NGOs poured their time and money into places like Gunung Leuser National Park and Kerinci National Park – and with good reason,” McCann explained. “Those places are so important, so magical, and they need urgent protection.”
But still McCann worries about a “curiosity crisis” in conservation today, pointing to the lack of interest in the Hadabaun Hills as an example.
“Why aren’t scientists and conservationists seeking out these last holdouts?” he asks, noting tantalisingly that Hadabaun Hills isn’t the only unexplored area of Sumatra.
“Sumatra is one of the last places where you can use Google Earth, zoom around on the map and wonder: ‘What might be lurking in there? It’s not a national park or a protected area. What’s in there?’ Nobody knows except the locals.”
But McCann’s organisation, Habitat ID, almost had to cancel the expedition due to a lack of funding. Instead these rogue conservationists have decided to press ahead by paying for most the trip out of pocket and scaling back initial plans. All this despite the fact that the team had already documented tapirs and tigers in Hadaban Hills.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Baby wild pigs feed in front of the camera trap in the Hadabuan Hills. Photograph: Greg McCann/Habitat ID
McCann said the team was close to securing funding for the expedition until the donor asked to see government data on Hadabaun Hills. But, of course, there is none.
“That’s the reason why we want to explore it – it’s an empty page for wildlife surveying,” said McCann.
Without more funding, the team is left self-funding the bulk of the trip and missing out on the potential of bringing more camera traps to increase their chance of documenting rare or even new species.
‘Insane’ camera trap video captures rare battle in the Amazon Read more
A struggle to secure funding is not new to McCann, who ran into the same issue when trying to document wildlife in Virachey National Park in Cambodia. McCann was able to prove that Virachey was home to many threatened mammals, including elephants, even though big conservation groups had largely abandoned the park.
“I think that money will only go where money is,” McCann said. “Few want to go it alone; it’s seen as being too risky … if another NGO is already working there and you can collaborate and share, then your chances of landing funding shoot up. So places that enjoy some level of NGO support will get more support, and ones that don’t will languish.”
But such shortsightedness means that exploratory expeditions have trouble getting off the ground and small NGOs like McCann’s – with far less overhead and often a larger penchant for risk-taking – struggle to find the funds to survive.
“We really had the wind taken out of our sails on this when we didn’t get the funding and it almost killed the project,” McCann said. But he is now turning to crowdfunding in a bid to raise some extra funds for more camera trapping on their trip.
In our age there are fewer and fewer places like Hadabuan Hills – newly named, wholly unexplored – yet that’s the draw for adventurers and conservationists like McCann and Munthe.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sunrise at the Hadabuan Hills. Photograph: Greg McCann/Habitat ID
“When you trek up into the inmost heart of the mountains like we will be doing, and in an untrodden area such as this, mysteries may reveal themselves,” McCann said.
It sounds like language out of another time, another age: but for all our hubris our little planet – third from the sun – remains full of mysteries. Most of the species on Earth have never been documented or named by scientists and there are places – even on an island like Sumatra which has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world – where every turn, every snapshot of a camera trap, could reveal a new world.Ingredients
1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1/4 cup baking cocoa
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon orange extract
1 tablespoon grated orange peel
10 drops yellow food coloring
6 drops red food coloring
FROSTING:
each) cream cheese, softened 3 packages (3 ounces) cream cheese, softened
5-3/4 cups confectioners' sugar
2 tablespoons milk
8 drops yellow food coloring
6 drops red food coloring
GLAZE:
3 ounces semisweet chocolate
1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
Candy corn for garnish
Directions
In a bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Combine flour, baking powder and salt; add alternately with milk to creamed mixture. Mix well. Combine cocoa, water and vanilla; stir in 2 cups cake batter. Pour into a greased and floured 9-in. round baking pan. Add orange extract, peel and food coloring to remaining batter. Pour into two greased and floured 9-in. round baking pans. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes or until cake tests done. Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks.
In a bowl, beat all frosting ingredients until smooth. Place one orange cake layer on a cake plate; spread with 1/2 cup frosting. Top with chocolate layer; spread with 1/2 cup frosting. Top with second orange layer. Frost the sides and top of each.Karachi: PCB chairman Shaharyar Khan has said that it could take legal recourse and seek compensation from the BCCI after the ICC ruled in favour of Pakistan in a dispute over the women's series which was not held in September-October in Dubai.
"The ICC had asked the BCCI to show the letters or any other documents with their external ministry to confirm it didn’t send its team to play Pakistan in the ICC women’s champions league in UAE on advice of its government," Shaharyar said.
"The ICC technical committee awarded points to our women’s team declaring the series as forfeited by India because the BCCI couldn’t show any document which confirmed they were stopped by their government from playing the series," he said.
The PCB chief said the ICC had told the BCCI to show any evidence to back their claim they couldn’t play Pakistan in a bilateral series due to government advice.
"The BCCI couldn’t show any document to the ICC to back their claim which is why the ICC committee awarded six points to Pakistan," he said.
The BCCI is not happy with the ICC decision which came after Pakistan said it was ready to host India for the league championship series in Dubai.
Shaharyar made it clear that the ICC decision against the BCCI had given confidence to the PCB.
"We now want the Indian board to provide the ICC with evidence that they have been told by their government to not play us in bilateral series despite a written MOU signed between the two boards in 2014 to play six such series between 2015 and 2022," he told the “Jang” newspaper.
"We were even ready to host our home series in Sri Lanka last January under the MOU but India said it didn’t get clearance from its external ministry."
The PCB chief said the board’s legal team had been told to prepare a proper paper on this which would be submitted by Pakistan at the next ICC meeting in Dubai in January.
"We will seek legal recourse against the BCCI via the ICC platform and also proper compensation for the many series they have refused to play against us and caused us heavy losses," he said.
India has not played Pakistan in a full bilateral series since 2007 when Pakistan went to India.
Shaharyar also said that if BCCI refused to also play Pakistan in the Champions Trophy group stage next year in June in England, the ICC would now have legal ground to take strict action against it.
He further said that due to India’s refusal to play Pakistan in a bilateral series Pakistan cricket had suffered a lot.
"We have lost revenue and don’t have the funds to invest in our club or domestic cricket," he said.
"We are already facing hardships due to other teams not touring Pakistan due to security concerns since 2009."
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.Federal charges expected to be filed today in DC reportedly would implicate his wife, former Alderman Sandi Jackson, resulting in tax fraud charges against her.
Sandi had been receiving a $5,000 per month check from the Jackson Jr campaign for consulting over the course of several years. CBS reports:
Jesse Jackson Jr. will plead guilty to one felony count of misuse of campaign funds and then let a federal judge determine his punishment, which according to the agreement could range from probation to five year in prison. Jackson’s deal calls for him to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars spent for things like travel and meals with a mistress and a $40,000 men’s Rolex watch he bought for himself. Jackson’s resignation from Congress was also part of the deal. But Jackson’s pleading guilty to using campaign funds for personal expenses could expose Sandi, his campaign manager, to tax-fraud charges. The congressman’s guilty plea says Sandi knew about improper purchases that apparently include breakfast snacks, cosmetic services, even beds purchased for campaign workers. Sandi Jackson is expected to accept responsibility for some things because, as the congressman’s campaign manager, she signed the tax returns. Both Jacksons could face penalties ranging from probation to jail time.
Full details of the plea deal, which also is said to include “significant jail time,” will be made known by Tuesday, at the latest. The filings in DC will not require court hearings by either Jackson Jr or his wife, Sandi.Advertisement Suited band of brothers stands up for unstoppable 6-year-old 'Danny Appreciation Day' in Bridgewater honors kindergartner Share Shares Copy Link Copy
When Danny Keefe was born, his parents were told he would be severely handicapped both physically and mentally due to a serious brain hemorrhage.Watch RepotBut the dapper little boy with the infectious smile and indomitable spirit defied those predictions, the Enterprise reported.The Mitchell Elementary School kindergartner is just like any other 6-year-old in every way but two, his grandfather Richard Osterman said.Danny speaks with difficulty due to childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and he wears a suit and tie every day by his own choosing.“CAS has not kept Danny down. He keeps up with his siblings as well as a host of friends both children and adults,” Osterman said.Danny, the official water coach for the Bridgewater Badgers Div. 5 Peewees, cuts quite a figure on the sidelines with his suit and fedora, like a miniature Tom Landry, Osterman said. And he’s forged an unbreakable bond with the boys on the team, his parents said.So, when the quarterback, Tommy Cooney, heard Danny was getting picked on because of the way he speaks, he took it upon himself to do something about it.The 11-year-old Williams Intermediate School fifth-grader decided to wear a suit to school just like Danny in a show of support for his young friend.“He’s such a good person. He doesn’t let it bother him. He goes on with his day. He’s a 6-year-old kid. We should all respect that,” said Tommy, whose father, Tom, is the team’s head coach.Tommy told his fellow Badgers about “Danny Appreciation Day” and they all thought it was a great idea, including Danny’s older brother Tim, 10, who plays on the team.On Wednesday, Nov. 20, more than 40 students from Mitchell and Williams crowded around the little boy with the winning personality in the Williams library cheering “Danny, Danny.”“This is the best day ever,” Danny said, beaming.Danny’s mother said Danny has regularly been teased at the playground and elsewhere. Kids have pulled his hat down and called him demeaning names.Many of the boys became emotional as they spoke about Danny getting picked on.Tim said his little brother is an inspiration.“Every day he comes home and says he doesn’t care what other people think of him. He only cares what he thinks of himself,” Tim said.Danny’s father, Mark Keefe, an assistant coach for the Badgers, said the head coach and older boys have taken Danny under their wing in a remarkable way. They let him run out onto the field with them and include him in all their activities.“He feels so loved and protected,” Danny’s mother, Jennifer Keefe, said.Jimmy Peterson, 11, put it this way: “The coach calls us a band of brothers. He’s one of us.”Nicholas Lambert, 10, said: “We’re all human and all the same. We’re all created equal.”Brett Jackson, 10, said: “Whenever I see the big, huge smile on his face, it makes my day. He keeps his head high.”Larry Kirlis, 10, said he likes Danny just the way he is. Larry has two siblings with special needs and has seen how much it hurts when people make fun of them.“Danny couldn’t be any better,” Larry said.Matt Giurleo, 11, said: “I don’t think he should be picked on because he’s different. Everyone’s different. He shouldn’t be picked on for who he is.”Danny and his twin sister, Emily, were born at 34 weeks and five days. Emily suffered no negative health consequences. But a week after he was born, Danny developed a fever.It turned out to be caused by a brain bleed. Danny’s doctors said he might not live and if he survived he’d never reach any developmental milestones. But the only one he’s missed has been speech.“A nurse took me aside and said, ‘Don’t let them limit him.’ And I’ve held that faith,” Jennifer Keefe said.Childhood apraxia of speech is a motor speech disorder in which a person knows what he wants to say but the brain has trouble coordinating the muscles to say the words.As a result, many people have difficulty understanding Danny. But, remarkably, his three siblings “magically understand every utterance,” their grandfather said.Jennifer Keefe said intensive speech therapy is the only treatment and has already made a big difference in Danny’s case.Wednesday, she stood with her hands on Tommy Cooney’s shoulders, her voice choked with emotion, as she thanked the Badgers.“Look at what happened from one person. You all have this in you. You can pay it forward. If you ever have the opportunity to stick up for someone or be their friend, you should do that,” she said.Danny’s parents said Mitchell has done a wonderful job working with any children who have reacted inappropriately to Danny, whether intentionally or inadvertently. They are very young and often don’t understand the situation, Mark Keefe said. It is a great opportunity to educate them.Mark Keefe told the boys they should be very proud of themselves.“This is all because of you guys. It has nothing to do with the adults. It’s all about a group of fifth-grade kids,” he told them.When Danny used to come home crying after being teased, his mother would hope his last thought at night wasn’t about being picked on.“With this act of kindness, I hope he thinks of that as he goes to sleep,” she said.The following students suited up for “Danny Appreciation Day”: Tommy Cooney, Matt Keefe, Tim Keefe, Emily Keefe, Jimmy Peterson, Nicholas Lambert, Brett Jackson, Nick Hogg, Devin O’Leary, Thatcher Abbassi, Larry Kirlis, Chris DeSantis, Brett Rosher, Brian Rosher, Matt Giurleo, JacobSpear, Max Compton, Vinny Forziati, Cade Chiocca, Liam Woods, Jason Revil, Brendan Rosher, Joseph Jones IV, Kyle Phillips, Riley Welch, Riley Manning, Nick Longo, Connor Chiocca, Aidan Brien, Jack Morgan, Jake Prisco, Ryan MacDermott, Jacob Lawson, Raul Sanjay, Bobby Ladue, Zack Whiting, Danny Doherty, Cameron Hogg, Andrew Johnson, Chris Hogg, Nick Brown, David Usher, Ben Hogg and Josh Hogg.It's come to my attention that many of the foreign goods we import into our country are made by foreigners who speak foreign languages and are foreign. It's come to my attention that many varieties of hummus and other vital bread schmears are made by Arabs, the group responsible for 9/11. Furthermore, it's come to my attention that the Chinese have a menacing death grip on America's pacifier, blankie, bunny and rattle supplies, and have thus established crushing domination of the entire non-pharmaceutical child sedative industry.
It's therefore time for Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Bill Frist and Peter King to work together to write the National Security Ethnic Profiling Save Our Children Act, which would prevent Muslims from buying port management firms, the Chinese from buying oil and mouth-toy companies, and the Norwegians from using their secret control of U.S fluoridation levels to sap our precious bodily fluids at the Winter Olympics.
In other words, what we need to protect our security and way of life is a broad-based, xenophobic Know Nothing campaign of dressed-up photo-op nativism to show foreigners we will no longer submit to their wily ways.
Never mind -- the nativist, isolationist mass hysteria is already here.
This Dubai port deal has unleashed a kind of collective mania we haven't seen in decades. First seized by the radio hatemonger Michael Savage, it's been embraced by reactionaries of left and right, exploited by Empire State panderers, and enabled by a bipartisan horde of politicians who don't have the guts to stand in front of a xenophobic tsunami.
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But let's be clear: the opposition to the acquisition by Dubai Ports World is completely bogus.
The deal would have no significant effect on port security. Regardless of who operates the ports, the Coast Guard still controls their physical security. The Customs Service still controls container security. The harbor patrols, the port authorities and the harbor police still do their jobs. Nearly every expert who actually knows something about port security says the ownership of the operating companies is the least of our concerns. "This kind of reaction is totally illogical," Philip Damas, research director of Drewry Shipping Consultants, told The Times. "The location of the headquarters of a company in the age of globalism is irrelevant."The streets of East London may not seem like an obvious place for cyber criminals to hang out, but a stroll down Cheapside at dusk offers a fantastic opportunity for anyone so inclined to peer into offices and extract confidential data from unsuspecting workers' computer screens.
Every year, companies invest large amounts of money in cyber security products that are designed to protect their critical computer systems from hackers. However, with so much effort focused on securing their 'virtual' windows, many of these companies forget that their physical windows are left wide open.
In London's Square Mile, it is possible to walk around and look through the windows of many high-profile organisations (including banks) and read information straight off workers' screens.
One corner, flanked by two different high profile banking institutions, has over 150 screens between them on the ground floor, facing the street and just a few metres from the window – half of which include the users’ nameplate above the workstation.
One might assume that the information visible on the screens is of no use to anyone, but these organisations are vulnerable to ‘walk-by’ data theft. Security experts claim that this data can be extremely useful to criminals carrying out so-called'socially engineered' attacks, which target people rather than machines.
During a short stroll through the City, I was able to see ‘log in’ boxes, emails, corporate database entry screens and numerous documents, all visible to the naked eye. While I did not attempt to capture detailed information, someone with malicious intentions, time and a zoom lens could potentially piece together the information needed to launch an attack against any of these organisations.
For example, after observing an employee for a period of time, a scammer could glean enough details about the individual’s life to strike up a conversation in a bar or a coffee shop, tricking the person into believing there is a relationship and fooling them into disclosing additional information.
Alternatively, a criminal could monitor, and then replicate, the typical emails received and read by the employee. They could then create and deploy a targeted phishing campaign to dupe the individual into treating the malicious message as benign and following the instructions.
If successful, the impact on the organisation involved could be catastrophic. The infamous RSA breach in 2011, which resulted in tens of millions of SecurID hardware tokens being compromised, is testament to the power of this type of attack method.
“Organisations exposing corporate information through an open window are perhaps more vulnerable than if they had a key logger installed at the back of the device," said David Liberatore, senior director of technical product management at security firm AppRiver.
"Just think of your own financial information on a screen when you're talking to a teller or a financial advisor – they know everything there is to know, from your PIN number to your address."
Liberatore said that, although it is human nature to want to sit at a window and look outside, an employee's window seat can quickly become a cyber criminal's window seat, and organisations that deal with sensitive information need to factor this risk into their office planning.
"Many organisations have become so focused on their virtual security, that physical practices are being ignored and that means the very information they’re trying to protect could be stolen by passers-by," he said.
Mike McLaughlin, senior penetration tester and technical team lead for First Base Technologies, added that the chances of a cyber criminal finding all the information they need to carry out an attack simply by looking at someone's screen are slim. However, this process could allow them to pick up little pieces of information that will ultimately contribute to a bigger picture.
For example, a network monitoring tool like the one in the picture below shows all of the devices on a corporate network (the text has been blurred out for security purposes). This could include passwords and configurations of devices on the network, which would be an "absolute goldmine" to an attacker, according to McLaughlin.
"If someone is entering a password for a networked device, you can look at their keyboard and you don't even need to see which keys they press, you just need to know which areas their fingers have been in, and with a bit of practice it's quite easy to figure out what passwords they use," he said.
"There are groups of criminals who hire people to go in as cleaners and plant bugs in buildings. People don't look at the cleaners, they don't even notice them, they're just part and parcel of the business, so the amount of information a cleaner would have is scary if they put their mind to it."
There are precautions that companies can take to protect themselves against these types of attacks. For example, there are shields that employees can put over their screens so that they are not visible from more than a few feet away, or from different angles.
What the study shows, however, is that many organisations – even those that have been trusted with our most sensitive data – are failing to take a holistic approach to security.Getty Images
The removal of $46 million in combined salary cap space from the Cowboys and Redskins has turned a pair of arch-rivals into partners. And there are indications that the partnership has not yet ended, notwithstanding Tuesday’s statement suggesting that the challenge to the cap penalty controversy is over.
The statement indicates that the two teams won’t appeal Special Master Stephen Burbank’s decision that the move can’t be attacked under the labor deal because the NFL expressly agreed to the cap reductions. But the statement doesn’t expressly state that the fight is over.
‘We pursued our salary cap claim pursuant to the CBA and we respect and will abide by the arbitrator’s decision to dismiss,” the two teams said. “We will continue to focus on our football teams and the 2012 season.”
Strongly implied in that statement is the notion that the franchises have folded their tents and abandoned the effort. Officially, however, neither the Redskins nor the Cowboys have responded to emails from PFT posing the simple question of whether the joint statement means that the matter has concluded.
Moreover, a source with knowledge of the situation tells PFT that the fight may not be over. Technically, that wouldn’t be inconsistent with Burbank’s decision, because he plainly stated at the end of his 12-page ruling that the teams “retain whatever remedies they may have against [the NFL] under contract and agency law.”
So until the Redskins or Cowboys say it’s completely over, it’s not completely over. And until it’s completely over, there’s a chance one or both teams will sue the NFL under theories like breach of contract and/or breach of fiduciary duty.
In other words, don’t put your popcorn away just yet.After years of speculation, Rockstar sends the first official word that GTAV is on its way.
Update: In what may or may not be a coincidence, careful internet observers noticed that Rockstar's announcement today coincides with the three-year anniversary of Jack Thompson's disbarment in the State of Florida. Thompson won his fame by suing Rockstar for selling "murder simulators" like Bully and GTA to minors, but his behavior in court belittling judges and defendants alike ended in his rights to argue in Florida courts being revoked in 2008. The effective date of Thompson's disbarment? October 25th. Well played, Rockstar.
Original Post: In 2001, Grand Theft Auto III sparked a revolution of open-world games and incited protests from groups saying it romanticized violence. The title catapulted Rockstar Games from a small shop in the U.K. to a worldwide brand. Follow-ups such as Vice City and San Andreas set in different cities sold extremely well, as did the first iteration on 7th generation consoles - GTAIV in 2008. After years of game journalists following parent company Take Two Interactive's shareholder meetings for any hint of a new game, Rockstar's website today shows the first official word of the hotly anticipated sequel.
Yep, just a logo. And a date for when we'll see a glimpse of the first official trailer on November 2nd, 2011. That's all we get, folks.
And yet, it's enough to get my blood pumping. Where will the game be set - back in Rockstar's version of New York Liberty City - or maybe a return to southern California in San Andreas? Personally, I'd love to see a GTA game set in Rockstar founders Dan and Sam Houser's hometown of London, England.
Obviously, we don't have much to go on here other than a new Grand Theft Auto logo. We don't have a release window or even know what platforms such a game will be on. My cash money's on the Wii U, but that's just me. I want to be able to take a cell phone call using that newfangled controller.
"Hey, Cousin!"
Source: RockstarLast week, we reported on a Japanese writing contest run by Bungaku Free Market and Shōsetsuka ni Narō that banned all submissions with plots about "traveling to alternate worlds" or "being reincarnated into other worlds." Now, taking a look at the results of another recent contest that didn't enforce a similar ban, the 4th "Net Novel Prize," makes this more understandable.
Of the 46 winning stories listed on the "Net Novel Prize" contest's website, 14 have "alternate world" directly in the title. Some examples are, "The Unparalleled Saint Salaryman and the Road to Surviving in an Alternate World," "Alternate World Station Café," "Alternate World Brothel Manager," "Item Collector in an Alternate World," "This Alternate World's Magical Language Looks Just Like Japanese," and "Doing My Best to Pet Fluffy Things in an Alternate World."
In fact, the 1st place Grand Prix prize, which included publication of the story and 1,000,000 yen (about $9925.80 USD), was won by a story about traveling to an alternate world titled, "The Chronicle of the Male Virgin Who Travels to the Alternate World Chiirem [cheat + harem] and Gains Healing Magic."
Plots about traveling to alternate worlds have been trending in anime based on light novels recently. Popular examples include Sword Art Online, KONOSUBA, Log Horizon, GATE, and, most recently, Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, which was just voted the top anime of Spring 2016 in a Japanese poll.
Source:Yaraon Blog“The utility’s glaring ineptitude with crisis management was noted right from the start of the Fukushima disaster. How and why could TEPCO have kept repeating the same blunders over and over?” (Asahi 7/31/2013)
On August 7, 2013 PM Abe Shinzo finally announced that the government had lost faith in Tepco’s ability to manage the ongoing crisis at Fukushima following months of media reports documenting dangerous radioactive water leaks. NHK News (8/6/13) commented, “Once again Tepco is one step behind.” And the following night it described Tepco’s efforts as “groping in the dark”. This explains why 94% of Japanese believe that the Fukushima accident has not been brought under control and why 31% want to abandon nuclear energy as soon as possible with an additional 54% supporting a gradual phase out. (Asahi 7/18/2013)
Abe was belatedly forced to state, “Rather than relying on Tokyo Electric, the government will take measures.” Two and a half years after the three meltdowns at Fukushima, Tepco has not come to grips with the problem of how to manage accumulations of contaminated water being used to cool the crippled reactors and the spread of that contamination to groundwater that flows through the plant site to the sea. It also seems to have made little progress in decommissioning the plant, a process that will take an estimated forty years and cost $11 billion, although the final price tag is expected to balloon. The ongoing leaks of massive amounts of radioactive water into the ocean demonstrate that the Fukushima crisis is far from over and that entrusting the clean-up to the plant operator was a colossal mistake because it left critical decisions up to the industry insiders who compromised nuclear safety before 3.11and subsequently mismanaged the crisis. Why, despite a cascade of media exposés about the water problem, did the government wait so long to intervene? And, why did intervention suddenly become so urgent?
PM Abe talking to Tepco employees
Why Intervention?
In short, damage control. Abe had to intervene and have the government take over because growing alarm about the ongoing nuclear crisis imperils his plans to quickly restart idled nuclear reactors and also casts a pall over Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics on which a decision is due in early September. The government needed to shift the narrative from Tepco’s incompetence to the government offering reassurances that it will now bring the situation under control; it has lots to prove.
The nuclear energy issue hangs over Abenomics, the eponymous program aimed at reviving the Japanese economy involving massive monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and an as yet amorphous growth strategy. Team Abe perceives presently idled nuclear energy capacity as a ‘cheap” alternative to imported fossils fuels and crucial to reviving the economy. The nuclear village of pro-nuclear advocates in industry, the bureaucracy and politics sees the reactors as “stranded” investment that needs to be rescued from anti-nuclear public opinion. Moreover, Abe also sees great potential in overseas nuclear power markets and needs reactor restarts to back his sales pitch.
Abe is a longstanding advocate of nuclear power and since assuming the premiership in December 2012 has made no bones about getting as many reactors online as fast as possible, although carefully stating that this is contingent on confirming operational safety. He purged his energy advisory team of anti-nuclear critics and brought back key pro-nuclear architects of Japan’s ambitious national energy strategy in 2010 that called for a significant expansion of Japan’s nuclear energy to 50% of electricity generating capacity by 2030. (Asahi 12/29/2012) In vocally and repeatedly backing reactor restarts, Abe is exerting political pressure on the new nuclear watchdog agency, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), to facilitate his agenda. During the 2013 Upper House election campaign policy debate, the LDP was the only party to oppose phasing out nuclear energy and sees its solitary position as a badge of responsibility; but on this issue principles owe much to financial interests.
Japan is deeply enmeshed in the global nuclear industrial complex and as such is banking on exports of nuclear power plants. Toshiba owns 87% of Westinghouse while Hitachi and Mitsubishi have tie-ups with GE and Areva meaning that Japanese firms are major players in nuclear energy. Abe has become an active pitchman for Japanese nuclear technology, but if Japan begins phasing out its nuclear reactors, potential clients might look elsewhere. Abe’s growth strategy calls for tripling infrastructure-oriented exports to $300 bn by 2020, and nuclear technology exports are key to achieving this target. Earlier this year Japan (with French companies) secured a long-term $22 billion contract with Turkey (a quake prone country). It has also signed a nuclear technology agreement with the United Arab Emirates and is eyeing sales to Brazil and Saudi Arabia. Negotiations are also ongoing with India to enable Japan to sell its technology there and Abe lobbied hard on behalf of Japan’s nuclear exporters at a June 2013 central European summit of the Visegrad countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) He also signed an agreement with France in June 2013 to deepen cooperation on nuclear exports. (The Diplomat 7/3/2013)
PM Abe Clinches $22 bn Nuclear Deal with Turkish PM Erdogan
But the Japanese public remains skeptical. A poll conducted by Jiji Press in June 2013 shows that 58.3% of Japanese do not support the export of Japan’s nuclear technologies and expertise while 24% are in favor. Even within the LDP, opponents (43.2) exceed supporters (40.4) of nuclear exports. (Japan Times 6/13/2013) The export sales drive is being ramped up even as 150,000 people remain displaced from their houses due to the Fukushima accident. Abe faces further opposition to his nuclear energy plans on the domestic front as his wife also opposes nuclear exports. She said, “It will be better to use part of the money spent on nuclear plants for the development of new energy and promote the sale of Japanese-born clean energy overseas.” (Asahi June 11, 2013)
Akie Abe Supports Anti-Nuclear Movement
Washington is also pressuring Japan to restart reactors. As we discuss below,
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-founder and CEO of an Irish company called Teamwork.com. I also go by the nickname “Topper”.
For those of you who never heard of us, we make three products: Teamwork Projects for getting work done, Teamwork Desk for support, and Teamwork Chat for collaboration.
The products are used by almost 400,000 companies all around the world, including some of the biggest companies in the world.
And we are doing over $12 million in annual sales. The beautiful thing about our products is that they all integrate seamlessly.
I’m not here to convince you to use our products (which are vastly superior to our competitors) or to brag (we have a long way to go). In fact, I want to do the opposite because I have a confession:
I am a terrible CEO. I’m a terrible CEO because I freakin love programming too much and I know I’m bloody good.
Here’s the thing: looking back now, we made just about every mistake in the book partly because my co-founder and I concentrated on product and features to the exclusion of everything else.
I’m going to walk you through our story in three parts, and list some of our biggest mistakes along the way. Hopefully, this will resonate with some of you and you can skip making these mistakes yourselves. I’m basically giving this talk to the younger me.
Part 1 – The Hamster Years
OK, back in 1999, when the <blink> tag was cool, I started a web design business called “Digital Crew” with a buddy Cormac.
Dan joined us the following year and he was the only other person I had ever met who also truly loved programming and had similar ambitions. Back then, we were naive web developers who thought three grand for a website was insane, and that we could each easily crank out four websites a week and make millions. You can’t. We didn’t.
Fast forward a few years, we transitioned to a web application development agency, built 100s of projects, and learned the hard way that consultancy sucks. Despite working 60 hours a week and having a great reputation, we felt like this hamster and we were broke. Cormac decided to move to Australia and Dan and I were depressed. We agreed that we were going to give it 12 months more or throw in the towel and “get a real job”.
Side note:
We had actually tried another product called cftagstore.com where we sold small software components to web developers. The market was too small and developers like us are very stingy. We made about $100,000 over five years. It helped pay the bills but was, in hindsight, a silly distraction.
Side note:
We also built an app for a local college that with their encouragement turned into a side business. For years, I hauled my ass all over Europe trying to convince colleges to buy this software. Enterprise sales is hard work and making the software isn’t fun. We eventually spun that out into a separate business and I personally got out of it. I think I have like 5% or something and these guys are doing well now. It’s fine, but not for me.
In early 2007, I took a good hard look at our consultancy and realised that part of the problem was that we didn’t have a good way to manage all the projects, and that we were being way too nice to customers. So, with nothing to lose, we doubled our prices and started actually charging our customers for all the extras and, shockingly, they had no problem with it. We actually started turning the consultancy around. It was then that we decided that the whiteboard in the corner of the office wasn’t a very good project management system, so we went in search of a good project management system.
I know you hear this all the time but we really did start Teamwork to scratch our own itch. Here’s what happened. We had heard of a few online project management apps and did some research to see which one might work for us. We used the leading product (that will remain nameless) for a while and were shocked that you couldn’t even set a due date or attach a file, so we couldn’t understand how it was so popular.
I emailed their support and asked if and when a due date feature might be coming. The response I got back was so curt and dismissive that it really pissed me off. I mean how can you run a business if you can’t prioritize your hundreds of tasks? Isn’t that the whole point? We also felt we were making better and more complex apps for our clients all the time.
One day, Dan and I met for coffee in the morning as usual, and I said, “Hey, Ted (we call each other Ted), I think there’s a gap in the market here and we could make something great and, you know, maybe treat our customers with respect.” He said “Ted, I’ve been thinking the exact same thing.” And that was the full extent of our market research.
Part 1 – Key Takeaways
Consultancy sucks – get out of it asap. If you want to be successful, you have to build products. Products make you money while you sleep. Consultancy does not.
Don’t target a small market!
Just my opinion – don’t sell software components to developers.
Consultancy-ware software is no fun to build or sell. Side note, it’s important to know what software world you are in. If you haven’t read everything ever written by Joel Spolsky, you need to leave.
If you are doing consultancy, try increasing your prices, say no to feature creep, and charge for the extras. They don’t mind, really.
Treat your customers like honored guests. Listen to their woes. Publish your roadmap.
Sometimes you’ve got to go with your gut.
Finding the time to work on Teamwork was difficult. After having the idea for weeks and making no progress, we finally decided that the only way this was going to get done was if we dedicate Fridays exclusively to it. No matter how much pressure was on, this was our priority. It was a great decision. Often we worked all weekend on it too, and slowly, over the course of three months, the product came together.
We were our ideal customer. We knew which features were lacking in the existing products out there and we knew exactly what we needed to build. We wanted to be able to come to work every day, open Teamwork, and see a prioritized list of tasks to work on, along with some time tracking and billing.
You’ll cringe at this – we did what comes naturally to us, we opened our code editors, started a new project and started hacking on code instead of designing the product screen by screen. We did this completely the wrong way. No specs. Hackedy hack hack. The only thing that saved us was our years of experience building apps for other people.
Please, don’t do this. Use Peldi’s Balsamiq and knock up a each screen and read Joel Spolsky’s great essays on Painless Functional Specs.
When we designed our second and third products, we did it right – we did our research, wrote up our specs, agreed on our MVP, designed every screen on paper, then designed every screen in detail.
Before we released Teamwork, we used our own product every day for two months. We filed away all the rough edges that made it cumbersome to work with on a daily basis. We’ve kept this up and still use our own products every single day and this is one of the reasons they are so strong – we fix the small issues. So, at least, we did that much right.
When it came time to pick a domain name, unfortunately the guy who owned Teamwork.com wanted $10 million, which was a little bit outside our $100 budget. So, in the end, we went with a terrible domain name – “teamworkpm.net”. Could it be worse? Captain Hindsight says we should have called it getteamwork.com
When it came to launching a product, we did everything wrong – we had no private beta, we did not consult potential customers, we did not put up a launch page, we did not build a launch mailing list, we did not send any emails about it, and we did not try to get PR.
After months of work, we launched Teamworkpm.net to zero fanfare on October 4th, 2007.
We barely put a link on our own website. We gave each other a high-five and went home to bed.
Why didn’t we try to get more attention? Looking back, I think the problem was that because we were perfectionist developers, we never felt our product was good enough to brag about. It was missing some big features that we wanted and not as polished as we would like. This was a huge mistake. It did work after all.
We did a slightly better job with the launch of Teamwork Desk last year, but still have a long way to go. We’re going to do everything right with the next product launch!
At MicroConf Barcelona last year, Rob’s talk on Positioning really hit home with me. In a saturated market, we were selling our product purely on features and we never had any decent positioning. We’re correcting this now, but it was a huge mistake: there has to be something about your product that makes it stand out. Saying “easiest to use”, “best”, or “most full-featured” won’t work. If I could do it again, I would A/B test different messages from the start to see what resonates.
It was hard work as Dan and I were the database designers, product designers, UI, backend and frontend engineers, marketing, sales, and support – all while holding down our full-time consultancy jobs to pay the bills. We kept our consultancy going to pay the bills, but we had no passion for it. All our dreams and aspirations were bundled up in thousands of lines of code. We kept hacking on the product all day Friday and every other spare moment we could find. Boring client work was done Monday to Thursday.
Instead of marketing our product, we did what came naturally – we kept working on features with the mantra that “if we build it they will come”. We naively thought that the best product will win. Now to some extent this is true, because project management is so critical to a business, a small percentage of customers will try every product on the market until they settle on the best one; so we did pick up some customers because we had important features like privacy, templates, and recurring tasks.
We did only three things well:
We built a great product.
We treated our customers like honored guests.
We took every suggestion onboard (sometimes implementing an idea within an hour and amazing our customer). We publish our product roadmap.
We completely failed to market our product because it was a skill that was outside our comfort zone.
Now, it wasn’t all bad when it comes to marketing, we did some engineering-based marketing.
We set up a referral scheme and we made an importer for our biggest competitor. Both have worked out well in the longer term.
The other thing we did well was publishing a monthly newsletter with feature updates consistently every month from the start. If nothing else, it gave us a push every month to get things done in time just so we had something for the newsletter. It also helps build trust and loyalty with our customers.
In our first month, despite doing zero marketing and being listed only in the bowels of Google, it was shocking to us that, somehow, we managed to bag three customers and earned a massive $191. We were on the way! As you can see, it was very, very, very slow growth, but eventually we were doing a couple of thousand a month.
We had some staff and we had offices to pay for, so we decided that we needed $30k MRR to pay all the bills and have a healthy buffer. It took us three years to get there.
As we slowly scaled to $30k MRR, we were able to dedicate two working days, then three working days, four working days, and so on to the side project. Our “pizza money” side project eventually started generating more money than our consultancy work, until the consultancy became just a thorn in our side.
In the end, we gifted our entire book of clients to another consultancy company we trusted. Our asking price was just that they keep our clients happy. We hand-held the transition by arranging meetings with our top clients to introduce the new owners of Digital Crew.
Thankfully, the guys there did a great job and this handover went really smoothly. To be honest, because we had lost interest in client work, I think our clients welcomed the changeover.
Once we were free of the shackles of consultancy, we cranked out the improvements, still focusing on features and support, and excluding everything else.
So, it took us three years to get to the point where we could fire our consultancy. It genuinely never even occurred to us to look for investment. It’s just not something that we’d ever really heard of way back then.
It’s annoying to me that so many developers nowadays seem to think they need funding to get a product off the ground. Here’s the thing… it has never been cheaper to make software. Our first dedicated server for Teamworkpm.net cost us €23,000 base plus hosting. Today, you get that for $100 a month.
Which brings me to another mistake – dedicated hosting and Hell Night.
August 2012: We used dedicated servers for performance and we had several beastly dedicated servers at a big hosting company on the East Coast. One night, I was just about to turn in when I noticed that Teamwork wasn’t loading.
Everything was down.
Panic set in. The hosting company had gone completely dark on us, Teamworkpm.net was down. Others websites I knew were also hosted with them were also offline. The worst thing was that I couldn’t get through on the phone; even our account rep wouldn’t answer his cell phone. I sat there feeling helpless with emails and tweets pouring in. I hit refresh maybe a thousand times over the next eight hours.
I stayed up all night answering angry customers, apologising to them and trying to contact the hosting company. We vowed never again, and over the next two months packed everything up and carefully moved all our customers over to AWS. It’s been a great decision for us.
We rode the long slow SaaS ramp of death until we hit $89,176.60 MRR in December 2011, 50 months after we launched. This would be over $1m in annual sales. We still had done very little marketing. We didn’t have a marketing person and our attempts were scattershot at best. We had our collective heads down building features, still thinking that features = customers.
Thankfully, these days, thanks to Twitter and blogs, we live in a world where the best product will at least get some traction. Our product really did grow by word of mouth and the occasional blog post that somebody would write about us or tweet about us.
Part 2 – Key Takeaways
There is never a better time to start working on your product than right now. Make time.
Pick a good domain name. It really matters.
Design the product right – Reach out to potential customers, design on paper, then mock it up.
Launch it right – put up a landing page, build a launch list, release an early beta.
Don’t compete on features alone; find your positioning.
Fire your day job and go “all-in” asap.
If possible, use your own software every day (eat-your-own-dog-food).
Don’t take funding. You’ll burn through the money and have a boss and, hey, it’s less fun.
AWS hosting for the win.
Be ultra serious about marketing from day one. Watch Watch Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact ‘s talk “ How to Negotiate the Long, Slow, SaaS Ramp of Death ”. It’s epic. TLDR: Try Everything, Test Everything.
Publish a monthly newsletter to your customers.
Part 3 – Growing Up
The single best business move we ever made was reaching out to the dude who owned Teamwork.com and over the course of a few years hassling him until he gave us a realistic price:
Dan tried in 2011, Alec sent us to DomainValue.com Single Word which estimated
$10 million. No, thanks.
In 2012, I tried again and got a PFO.
In 2013, I got a notion in the pub one night and offered $100k and got told “ Same lowball offer
So, I asked for a counter offer.
Alex countered with $675k.
I nearly wet myself with excitement.
I carefully worded our agreement, even pretending that we have a board.
This was almost all our cash reserves at the time.
So, did it make a difference or was it a waste of money? I think you already know the answer. Let’s have a look at the chart again.
You can clearly see the inflection point when we launched Teamwork.com. It was the best business move of my life.
Teamwork.com being a one word domain gave us instant credibility and we started getting bigger customers, more referrals, and being written about more. Everything accelerated and our vision for Teamwork.com changed because we now had a brand identify that we could build several products under.
This is embarrassing to admit. Two years ago, I went off to New York and worked on building a new product night and day for six months. In the end, we had a sexy new framework for future products and a cutting edge new product in Teamwork Desk. However, when I took my head out of the programming sand, I realised that things back in Ireland were a little bit of a mess – our culture was undefined, marketing was haphazard, we had process problems everywhere, and we hadn’t hired a single developer while I was gone.
Dan and I had been busy doing what we loved, building product, and we had left our company rudderless. Nobody in the company could tell you what our vision for the company was. It was there floating in my head somewhere, but not written anywhere.
Steli mentioned this yesterday – it’s uncomfortable…
I had a moment of clarity one day when I suddenly realized that all the problems with process, communication, direction, and vision are completely my fault. I wasn’t being a CEO.
I hadn’t communicated the vision for the company to the staff and got buy in from everyone. The quarterly meetings weren’t happening magically because, hey, you know I never set them up. We weren’t putting processes in place because I didn’t put a process in place, to… well… put processes in place.
It’s shocking to look up from the codebase and realise that you have 63 employees that need direction, and the direction has to come from you. We all suffer from imposter syndrome, you just have to get over it, down tools, and be the CEO. Being just a programmer at this scale is not good enough.
And here’s the thing – I’m convinced that had I stepped up earlier, we would have gotten to $12m in sales a hell of lot faster with less stress.
Everybody hates meetings. Especially us. But one essential meeting to which I recommend every company sticks is the quarterly review. Just four times a year, just get out of the office, sit down and identify your top five problems and what you are going to do to fix them. That’s it. Had we done that earlier, we would have recognised the hiring problem, the positioning problem, our marketing problems, our lack of vision, and issues around lack of process.
I think it’s a good idea to have these outside the office to reinforce that this is not everyday work.
As a newly-awakened CEO, the first thing I wanted to fix was getting us to have have quarterly meetings. These offsite meetings have become the heartbeat of the company.
At the first offsite, it was awkward and uncomfortable because all of this was new to us, and I guess that is just part of growing up as a company.
I remember nervously sharing my vision for the company and where we want to take it by 2020. It’s ambitious to say the least but we are on-track. Once I had buy in, we set about communicating this to the company. This is still an ongoing process. It’s the CEO’s job to reassert and drive this vision at every opportunity.
Looking back a big mistake was not hiring deliberately – we only hired somebody when they fell into our lap and seemed like a good fit, but we didn’t go looking for good people deliberately. For a long time, we didn’t even have a jobs page on our site. Today, this is our single biggest problem: finding great people is hard. It’s never too early to start the search.
Again, if we had actually stopped programming for a minute, we would have realised that hiring has become our biggest problem much sooner. A simple fix for this is to hire a HR manager as soon as you can afford to.
Culture is something that will happen to your company whether you like it or not: you can only choose to define it or you can let it evolve. For a long time we let it evolve.
In the last two years, we’ve taken the reins on this and established a happiness officer, had many more company events, allow sabbaticals, team weekends away, conference trips, publish all our values, onboard staff nicely, encourage people to lunch randomly together and put together our handbook.
We literally have a page in our handbook called “Don’t be a dick”.
I had a realization last year that all the stress people were encountering in the company is rooted in missing processes. For example, marketing and support didn’t know what the developers are working on. This wasn’t an issue when we had 15 people in the same area, but at 60+ staff spread over two floors we have to define a process for how the teams work together to decide on the next features to build and communicate progress. It is pretty easy in the end, once you realise that it’s needed.
I’ll give you another example. We’re in business seven years now and just last month we finally agreed our hiring process: we have three product teams now, so who gets first dibs on a great potential employee; who has final say on whether they should be hired or not; what tests must they do; how long is the trial; will we pay for visas; can they be remote or must they move to Ireland?
We are still figuring this stuff out. When we write it down, at least it provides a starting point for improvement. When we agree a new process at a meeting taking no longer than an hour, that ship has sailed for at least six months.
I don’t know why it took so long, but just six months ago we established a sales team, and already the effect has been monumental. After this conference, we are on our way to meet a huge enterprise customer. I have no excuse for not setting this up earlier so please learn from my mistakes.
It’s an important realization that the CEO doesn’t have to have all the answers and that it’s OK to admit this. I think not realising this was holding me back from stepping up and running the company properly.
In January this year, I brought Open Book Management to our company. Now all our staff can see exactly how much revenue the company is earning. It’s a ballsy move and not done lightly.
In addition to this, we’re implementing “The Great Game of Business” and, so far, it has worked really well. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a system for running the company where everyone in the company shares in the success of the company and is asked to think like an owner.
Every person in the company can see how well every other department is doing, and we are all working together to hit agreed targets. If the targets are hit every person has the potential to double or triple their wages.
So far, we’ve seen much better communication and collaboration between teams. It’s a huge experiment for us, and we don’t have all the answers yet, but my gut says this is going to work.
It took way too long, but we finally have a great marketing team who are trying and testing every channel to see what works. Gail Goodman‘s talk “How to Negotiate the Long, Slow, SaaS Ramp of Death” is inspiring. We have a long way to go to follow in Gail’s shoes and are humbled by her success.
This is one of the hardest things I have found growing the business. Dan & I can’t do everything any longer, even when we feel that we might do a better job, we have to trust staff to do it. This, for a developer CEO, is bloody hard but has to happen if you want to grow. Now, for example, when we put somebody in charge of HR, they are the God of HR and we trust them to use their best judgement; same goes for the product leads and support.
Part 3 – Key takeaways
Build your marketing team early. Try every channel. Test everything.
Be the CEO. Stop programming (all the time).
Hire deliberately. Hire a HR manager asap.
Hold Quarterly Meetings outside the Office. Identify the Top Challenges. Fix them.
Define your Vision for the Company. Repeat at every opportunity.
Establish Your Culture. Don’t let it establish itself.
Identify that your problems are rooted in missing processes and establish them one-by-one.
Establish a customer success sales team ASAP.
As CEO, you don’t have to have all the answers.
Try the Great Game of Business.
Trust others and Let Go.
So, here’s the thing: for any developer CEOs, you have to learn to trust others, stop coding every now and then, and think objectively about your business. Step up and be a real CEO, share your vision, put processes in place, fix the big problems… and you’ll get to over $10m in sales in a fraction of the time it took us.. because we did make every mistake in the book.
Finally, I’ll leave you with this: Be so good they can’t ignore you.
Last year, we gave away 55 free-for-life Teamwork Projects accounts at MicroConf Europe.
This year, we’ve released Teamwork for Startups where we give all Teamwork.com products away to startups for free, for one year.
And don’t forget to subscribe to our High Performance Blog for more productivity tips and collaboration resources for startups to corporations.Want these election updates emailed to you right when they’re published? Sign up here.
Every scientific poll we’ve encountered so far suggests that voters thought Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in Monday night’s debate. In fact, some of them showed her winning by a wide margin — wide enough to make it a good bet (though not a guarantee) that she’ll gain in horse-race polls against Trump over the next week or so.
But so far, we’ve seen just two polls released that tested Clinton’s standing against Trump after the debate. They have pretty good news for Clinton, but I’d recommend some caution until we get more data.
The first poll is from Morning Consult, which shows Clinton leading by 3 percentage points in a matchup that includes third-party candidates — that’s a 4-point swing toward Clinton from the 1-point Trump lead that Morning Consult showed before the debate. In a head-to-head matchup against Trump, Clinton leads by 4 points, up from a 2-point lead before the debate.
The other survey is from Echelon Insights, and it shows Clinton leading Trump by 5 percentage points. In theory, that would be consistent with a bounce for Clinton, since she led Trump by just 1 to 2 points overall before the debate, based on FiveThirtyEight’s projection. But it’s hard to know for sure because Echelon has surveyed the race only once before — just after the Republican convention, when they showed Clinton leading Trump by 1 point.
Apart from these polls, the only other data we have is from the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times and UPI/CVOTER national tracking polls, but I’d discourage people from paying very much attention to them. It’s nothing against the polls themselves — in fact, I’ve defended the USC/LA Times poll’s methodology in the past — it’s just a matter of timing. Each poll uses a 7-day field period, which means that only about one-seventh of their interviews were conducted after the debate. I’d wait a couple of days before making too much of these surveys — until they consist mostly of post-debate interviews.
There are other reasons to be cautious, too. Polls conducted over a one- or two-day period, like the Morning Consult and Echelon Insights polls, can suffer from low response rates, since the pollsters won’t have time to recontact voters who they missed the first time around. That could plausibly bias the poll toward whichever candidate has the most enthusiastic supporters at the time of the poll, making it less representative. Many traditional pollsters prefer their polls to be in the field for three or four days, and we won’t see any results from polls like those until Friday at the soonest.
Another complication is that it can be hard to separate voters’ reaction to the debate itself from their reaction to the media’s reaction to the debate. By that I mean: Clinton has had some tough news cycles lately, so getting some better headlines could help her, and that could plausibly also affect the polls. Or maybe not, since Trump has a knack for turning the news cycle on its head.
One last admonition: When evaluating a post-debate bounce, consider whether the poll was an outlier before. For instance, the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed Clinton ahead by 6 percentage points nationally, on the high end of her range heading into the debate. By contrast, the most recent Rasmussen Reports poll had Clinton trailing Trump by 5 points. Clinton is more likely to improve her numbers in the next Rasmussen poll than in the next NBC poll, but that could reflect reversion to the mean as much as a debate bounce.
Overall, there are some tentatively positive signs for Clinton — but not more than that, yet. At the moment, our polls-only model shows Clinton with a 58 percent chance of winning; polls-plus shows her with a 56 percent chance. But our forecast models don’t make any special assumptions about the debate, and they’ll take several days to catch up to whatever impact it has or hasn’t had. You can track the latest polls as they’re added to the model here.New York State is pressed for cash, and its governor is eyeing iTunes hungrily.
With the Dow having lost one-third of its value this year, New York expects taxes from Wall Street to fall short. Gov. David Paterson (D), the recent victim of a Saturday Night Live lampooning, wants to head off the expected $15.4 billion budget gap with a laundry list of new taxes and fees.
The 88 proposed hikes include expanded levies on clothing, taxis, movie tickets, and "digitally delivered entertainment services."
That last item, if passed, would make New York the newest state to impose a so-called "iTunes tax." Currently, 17 states and the District of Columbia have similar laws in place, according to CNET. Politicians in Massachusetts, Wyoming, and Washington are weighing their own bills.
Governor Paterson's plan calls for a 4 percent tax on music or movies downloaded within New York. The fee would hit at the time of purchase, much like sales taxes in brick-and-mortar stores.
The proposal doesn't target iTunes specifically, but Apple is America's largest music retailer – online or otherwise – and therefore will probably be the company sending the most cash into New York's coffers. Ebooks from Amazon and downloadable games from Valve could also generate revenue for New York, depending on the final wording of the law.
Apple did not respond to requests for a comment.It might sound like hyperbole, but Android has been one of the fastest-developed operating systems ever. In just five years, Google managed to push out 19 versions of Android (counting by API levels), and for a good amount of that time, the company averaged a release every two-and-a-half months. With such a rapid development cycle and a lack of a concrete design direction early on, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single part of Android that looked the same from one year to the next.
After doing all the research to make The History of Android possible, we thought it would be enlightening to focus on individual areas of Android and watch them change over the years. So we created this gallery after sifting through hundreds of screenshots.
Many of these early Google apps will never be seen functioning again. They rely on support from Google servers to function, and as the user base of early versions dies off, the server support dies, too. After we took these pictures, support for many of the apps was shut down. Starting them now just produces an error message.
For a more complete look at how Android got where it is today, check out the full History of Android article.
Ron Amadeo
Listing image by Aurich LawsonGOP Backed-Privatization Brings Rural America To Its Knees
This time of year, rolling west on I-40 in New Mexico toward Albuquerque, the fields are panoramic and golden. Bluebird sky seems to extend forever, interrupted only by the Sandia Mountains in the distance. Glance left, and endless tracts of land stretch as far as the eye can see, dotted with farm equipment or rundown properties. Billboards pock the landscape and often provide the only shade for long stretches at a time.
Twenty minutes south of the Pilot Travel Center in Moriarty, just off the interstate, is Estancia. You could point your car and get there without turning the wheel because it’s a straight shot down County Road 41. This is where the Torrance County Detention Facility is, and this is where an outsized portion of Estancia’s population was just laid off — all on the same day.
An hour southeast of Albuquerque, Estancia is home to 1,650 residents. A handful of streets intersect to form a tiny downtown area, with the prison three miles to the east. The county seat of Torrance County, Estancia is an agricultural hub and known for its vast pumpkin patches in the fall. Since 1990, farmers have co-existed with the ever-shifting population of the prison. Entrepreneurs have built small businesses to support it. The prison is the largest employer in Torrance County, and its employees have propped up the economy in Estancia for decades.
Declining Detainees = Declining Profits
The Torrance County Detention Facility was considered to be a model center by its operator, CoreCivic. Even so, shareholder profits take precedence. “Unfortunately, a declining detainee population, in general, has forced us to make difficult decisions in order to maximize utilization of our resources,” CoreCivic said in a statement. The facility has averaged housing 580 inmates, approximately 120 short of the number they say they need to stay open. Fewer ICE detainees at the border translated directly to a decline at the prison.
The closing of the prison is a hard lesson for the town of Estancia and Torrance County. Such a sparsely populated rural region in a relatively poor, sparsely inhabited state with a large Native American population means little leverage to negotiate. Shareholders will always win in these situations, where the parent corporation opens the purse strings to lobbyists regularly.
In 2016, CoreCivic spent just over $1 million lobbying for policies that would support maximum profits. In years past, they have spent upwards of $3.3 million on issues that span from law enforcement and crime to Native American affairs. In fact, CoreCivic has lobbied for privatization of BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) prisons regularly since 2004.
Rural towns such as Estancia will continue to find themselves on the losing end of privately operated prisons when they decide that more profits are to be found elsewhere. Corporations like CoreCivic can throw their weight around and make demands of rural towns who don’t have the sufficient tax and employment base to fight back.
Half The Budget…Gone
Recently on a Monday evening, local legislators convened with municipal leaders, county commissioners, school board members and concerned citizens. Estancia mayor Sylvia Chavez anchored the panel, along with her grandfather Bobby Chavez, mayor of neighboring town Willard and Moriarty mayor Ted Hart. Sylvia Chavez says Estancia will lose 60 percent of its tax revenue, along with $170,000 in annual utility payments — just like that — when the facility shutters.
In a statement released by Torrance County, the closure will have a negative impact of close to $700,000 annually and “roughly $300,000 in loss of taxes” for the County.
New Mexico has the lowest per capita property tax in the nation. Taxes are imposed on one-third of assessed value, typically between 80 and 100 percent of market value. As a state, it relies heavily on what’s called Gross Receipts Tax (GRT). These are taxes imposed on goods and services performed in-state. The GRT typically makes up a heavy portion of small towns’ budgets throughout New Mexico. A loss of 60 percent of annual GRT is absolutely devastating to a tiny town such as Estancia.
What this lost revenue means in practical terms is deep slashes to the public works, fire department and most painfully, the police department. Torrance County Sheriff Heath White estimates his budget will need to quadruple, and that hiring an additional eight people will be necessary to pick up the slack. Each hire comes at a cost of $150,000 when vehicles, benefits, training, and salaries are factored in.
“If one my deputies makes an arrest, I will pretty much lose that deputy for the rest of the shift,” White said in an interview with the Albuquerque Journal. “If I have another deputy make another arrest, I won’t have anyone on the streets.”
Bernalillo County detention center is the closest alternative to Torrance’s facility, roughly an hour’s drive, but it’s completely full. That means detainees will need to be transported to either Cibola or Santa Fe County. Transport will take at least six hours out of a ten-hour shift, says White. Since his budget is already determined for the year, they’ll either have to operate at a loss or wait to see if the County can come up with the extra funds for the additional staff they’ll need to hire.
Lost revenue coupled with an exodus of gainfully employed residents from this tiny town will also mean the closure of support businesses. Everything from restaurants to retail will be affected.
Profits Over People
Despite pandering extensively to rural voters during the campaign with promises that their voices will be heard, Donald Trump has shown his true colors time and again. His near-rabid frenzy to score a win — any win — for his young administration has taken obvious precedence over policy ramifications that would leave rural Americans out of luck. We’ve seen increasingly cruel attempts to strip rural residents of their healthcare, many of whom obtained coverage through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion.
Rural voters voted for change. Many did so out of frustration that their livelihoods have diminished over time. Others did so out of fear of a quickly changing world that’s become increasingly global. Many, whether they consciously acknowledged it or not, were trying to
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said.
And according to news reports he didn't specify and Business Insider could not locate, Russian lawmakers have so clearly manipulated Trump, American intelligence officials recorded Russians calling the president "pussyboy."
But while his followers are quick to share Garland's theories, many journalists find the speculation irresponsible and hilariously absurd.
His tweetstorms have frequently provoked mockery. "Time for some game theory" became a meme on December 12 before many people saw the original thread, as Twitter users skewered its schizophrenic leaps from topic to topic without much explanation.
He inspired a similar reaction when he declared he would be willing to "SPILL BLOOD" to protect America from Fox News, a tweet he acknowledged was "one of the more unhinged-sounding" of his recent posts.
"Sometimes there's a certain adrenaline element in just letting the clutch out and hitting the gas and going, 'All right, you sons of guns!'" he said.
Garland defended his bold pronouncements as part of a strategy to attract attention to Trump's ties to Russia and to criticize media outlets like Fox News.
"In a way, you're kind of setting your hair on fire and running around," Garland said. "And I'll be the first to tell you: I know it's not a way to preserve traditional credibility.
"That's part of something I'm doing with something like that. Like, 'Yeah I think this is so important, I don't care what you think about me.' Because Russia — they have nukes. This is a big deal. And if people are not paying attention to this — and you know, with [the tweetstorm] I was thinking cognitively, 'Yeah, looks like Fox is going to bite onto this, let's really let them have it. Let's let them have it in a visceral way: F--- you guys!' Because what they're doing is wrong."
Indeed, his passion has been misconstrued for inebriation. Suggestions that he was on cocaine irked Garland initially, and he told Business Insider he asked several lawyers if he had grounds to sue critics for libel. (They said he didn't.)
But Garland has come to embrace his haters.
"I've never done hard drugs in my life. I'm naturally wired this way," he said. "For all these people saying I do all this cocaine, it's like — when is someone going to offer me cocaine? I've never done it, but pass the coke, guys. Where's the blow here?"
He claimed his detractors are a combination of leftists and misguided journalists, while some were "Russians and bots" certainly programmed by malicious foreign actors to be used against people attempting to expose injustice.
"A great number of journalists who supposedly have gravitas want to tag me with very juvenile high-school-like taunts," Garland said. "I guess this is the culture on Twitter."
Asked specifically to whom he was referring, Garland wouldn't say.
"I'm not going to justify the beefs — I got two hours of sleep last night. Yeah, f--- them," he said.
'They'd have to shut down Twitter'
But critics felt that people like Garland were providing fuel to an increasingly hysterical center-left unable to come to grips with Hillary Clinton's loss last year.
Writing for Slate, journalist Sam Kriss described Garland as a "charlatan, a snake-oil salesman, peddling sleek gibberish to people who've never read a book without '… and how YOU can profit' in the subtitle; in any true meritocracy he'd be putting his strategic skills to work hawking trinkets by the roadside.
"It's strange, but not surprising, that so many people would sing the praises of Garland's masterpiece, because it is absolutely the worst piece of political writing ever inflicted on any public in human history," Kriss wrote.
(Garland described the article as "libelous," but also said it "made several family members nearly pee with laughter.")
Though Garland continues to post furiously, he said the increased scrutiny has made him think twice before tweeting.
"If I mess up now, I'm part of the problem, I'm fake news," Garland said. "It comes, for me, with a deeper sense of responsibility."
He's pleased with his role as one of the progenitors of the center-left threads, and sees his role online as someone who can prop up other nonmedia figures who have been inspired to thread.
Indeed, he told Business Insider that he was particularly proud he inspired fans to launch their first threads.
Last week, self-described student Steph Bello addressed a 30-tweet invective about the supposed failure of cable news to adequately cover the Russia story directly to Garland. Boosted by Garland's endorsement, the tweetstorm racked up thousands of retweets.
"This is becoming this group project," he said. "You get new voices out of that. It makes it an exciting time to be a user."
But that doesn't mean he intends to cede tweetstorming to others.
Asked about a scenario in which he stopped tweeting, Garland said it would be virtually impossible.
"They'd have to shut down Twitter," he replied.
This article has been updated to reflect that Garland considered suing journalist critics, not anonymous Twitter users.We all know how horribly slow the Tor network can be, and the reason for this is largely due to the lack of people running active relay nodes, which is currently done on a volunteer basis.
Outside of a desire to contribute to improved functioning and security of one of the best anonymity tools in existence, there isn’t much of an incentive for people to run Tor relays.
The problem many have been working on is how to compensate relay operators while retaining anonymity of those using Tor. And the solution may finally come from a new alternative digital currency that hopes to incentivize people into running Tor exit relays.
TorCoin was announced in response to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Tor challenge, which is an effort to increase the number of Tor relay nodes, and operates on the Bitcoin protocol. But instead of generating coins through proof of computation power as done with Bitcoin, TorCoins are generated based on how much bandwidth a Tor relay provides, which is referred to as “proof of bandwidth.”
The white paper details how the amount of bandwidth provided by each relay will be measured through a program called TorPath, which is paired with TorCoin. TorPath is a “secure bandwidth measurement mechanism that utilizes decentralized groups of ‘Assigntment Servers,’ extending Tor’s existing ‘Directory Servers,’ to assign each client a Tor circuit that is publicly verifiable, but privately addressable.”
TorPath then “signs” freshly minted TorCoins, which anyone can verify by checking the blockchain.
If TorCoin generates enough interest, relay operators will be able to sell their mined coins for other forms of currency in an altcoin exchange.
Development is being conducted by Yale researchers Mainak Ghosh, Miles Richardson, and Bryan Ford along with Rob Jansen from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Of course every novel technology is likely to have potential security flaws, and the developers of TorCoin outlined a few they are concerned about.
The most important issue when using Tor is remaining anonymous, and it’s one of the biggest concerns that the developers of the TorCoin and TorPath protocols have as well. Developers claim that the TorPath protocol guarantees “that no single relay knows any client’s entire circuit.” However, if clients or relays decide to collude, the developers admit that “they may be able to shrink the anonymity set to the set of honest relays and clients in the consensus group.”
Groups can have varying sizes, however, allowing clients to choose a desired balance between anonymity threshold and circuit assignment delay
Reads the white paper.
And providing that not “too many” participants in each group collude, the TorPath “random circuit selection mechanisms prevents colluding clients and relays from deterministically placing themselves in the same circuit.”
Our goal for this paper is to maintain at least the status-quo of anonymity in the Tor network. Currently, every Tor client uses a trusted group of ~7 “directory servers
To assign them to a circuit. Our implementation relies analogously on trusted “assignment servers” to assign clients to circuits. That’s the purpose of the TorPath assignment protocol,” said Richardson.
In fact, it provides better anonymity than the status-quo, because each node on the circuit only knows the IP address of its neighbors, rather than the current situation, where the client knows the IP of every relay on the circuit. So yes, this assignment protocol relies on trusted servers. But so does Tor in its current state.
Richardson admits that the team hasn’t fully considered some issues such as massive botnet forgery, but said they will be further addressed in future versions of the paper.
“The next step is developing a prototype, and/or a network simulation to run experiments,” said Richardson.
Others have voiced more general concerns such as whether it’s a good idea to use monetary compensation to increase Tor relays, citing the research paper “A Fine is a Price,” as an example of how it might worsen the situation.
Another open question for discussion — and according to Richardson, one of the most important questions — is: what will give TorCoin its value? Other than people who want to donate to Tor relays, who will purchase the coins, and will the altcoin generate enough interest to actually support trading?
What reason do people have to buy Dogecoin? Not much, beyond using it as a currency or speculating with it as an investment. I could see TorCoin working the same way
Said Richardson. It’s a great idea on paper, and offering incentives to relay operators seems like a reasonable solution to the lack of Tor relays. It really comes down to whether the technology can withstand collusion while retaining anonymity, attract enough participation, and maintain a high enough value to successfully be exchanged for alternative currencies – questions that can truly be tested only in a live environment.Hundreds of people spent hours on New Year's Eve protesting alleged cases of police misconduct. News4's Darcy Spencer spoke with participants about why they attended. (Published Thursday, Dec. 31, 2015)
Protesters aiming to highlight alleged cases of police misconduct demonstrated and blocked traffic in D.C. on New Year's Eve.
Hundreds of protesters chanting "black lives matter" and "stand up, fight back" gathered at 7 p.m. near the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station, at 7th and H streets NW. Demonstrators marched to 14th and U streets NW.
Participants said speaking out against police violence mattered more than celebrating 2016.
"The death of any human is more important than turning up or going to a party or anything," one young man said.
"This is more important than partying," another woman said. "This is something that people need, to make sacrifices to make sure the changes are made."
Police advised drivers to expect rolling road closures, and moved quickly to block roads as protesters marched, so there wasn't much of a traffic impact.
Stop Police Terror Project DC called on residents to participate in the march.
"We need everyone (yes everyone) to converge on 7th and H Streets NW at 7PM. We WILL NOT go in to a new year without demanding immediate justice in both cases!" the group posted on Facebook.
"We can no longer express our rage, disappointment, and fear alone or in silence. On the last day of the year you remain empowered to show your commitment to vigorously fighting for justice in 2016!"
The group is calling attention to two cases: the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a Cleveland police officer and the death of Sandra Bland in police custody in Texas. In both cases, grand juries recently decided not to indict the police officers involved.
Protesters said they would call for justice on behalf of Tamir and Bland, calling the lack of indictments "unacceptable but not surprising."
The planners said they're also committed to "demanding justice for victims of police brutality in DC, including Alonzo Smith, Jason Goolsby, and Ralphael Briscoe."
Smith died Nov. 1 after being taken into custody by private security guards at a Southeast D.C. apartment complex. His death has been ruled a homicide. Smith's mother, Beverly Smith, says she viewed her son's body at the medical examiner's office. "He had a broken neck, bruises on his chest, a swollen jaw," she said.
Goolsby, 18, was forcibly detained for almost two hours by D.C. police in October after he held an ATM vestibule door open for a white couple and their baby. A cellphone video posted on social media shows him face down on the sidewalk, screaming as two officers try to handcuff him. "I'm not resisting," he says. After he was released, Goolsby asked why he was stopped. The officer said a woman called and said he'd made her feel uncomfortable, Goolsby's attorney said.
In April 2011, Briscoe, 18, was fatally shot by police after they say he brandished a weapon. Police surveillance video showed Briscoe, a former track star, running from an unmarked D.C. police car filled with officers. Lawyers for the police department said the teen was seen carrying a gun, but Briscoe's family lawyer said what police interpreted as a weapon was simply his finger and his cellphone. A jury cleared the officers in his death.
Copyright Associated Press / NBC4 WashingtonTHE rich lister who controversially told young people to stop buying smashed avo brunches so they could afford to buy a home is selling his mega mansion.
Property developer Tim Gurner and wife Aimee are selling their spectacular Toorak mansion, with price hopes of $8.3-$9.1 million.
CoreLogic records show Gurner — who made headlines after becoming embroiled in the “smashed avo” debate earlier this year — and his wife have called the 1930s English-style residence home for three years.
The six-bedroom Christopher Doyle-designed house, which is in Ms Gurner’s name, last changed hands in 2014 for $5.3 million, according to CoreLogic.
Marshall White, Stonnington, director Marcus Chiminello is now selling the property via an expressions of interest campaign, closing September 19.
Mr Gurner controversially suggested young people needed to stop “buying smashed avocado for 19 bucks and four coffees at $4 each” if they wanted to own a home in a 60 Minutes interview in May.
“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for 19 bucks and four coffees at $4 each,” told the television show.
During the interview, which caused outrage, he also told millennials to get realistic about their expectations.
“There is no question we are at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high,” he said.
“They want to eat out every day, they want to travel to Europe every year. This generation is watching the Kardashians and thinking that’s normal. Thinking that owning a Bentley is normal, that owning a BMW is normal.”
Mr Gurner later hit back at criticism he had help to get into the property market., saying he had made a number of personal sacrifices to climb the property ladder.
“It was incredibly difficult,” he said.
“My first investment property was an apartment bought for $180k in St Kilda and I was fortunate enough to have my boss at the time approach me to renovate it while he fronted up the money.
“I spent every night on my hands and knees sanding back the floors, painting, renovating and working on the house. When we sold it, I used the small profits of $12,000 to purchase my next property and it all grew from there. The most important thing for me was just to get my foot in the door at the absolute base level, and work my way up from there.
“I sacrificed a huge amount through those years, working multiple jobs, seven days a week and I saved absolutely every penny that I could.”
Mr Gurner was ranked 157 on this year’s Financial Review Rich List. His company Gurner has 5700 apartments worth $3.8 billion under its belt across Victoria, NSW and Queensland, according to its website.
Mr Chiminello said the Gurners had “personalised” the home with a minor renovation and would be leaving it as a “ready to move in proposition”.
Set on a 1204sq m block and sprawling over three levels, the property was suited to families, the agent said: “You’re within walking distance to Scotch College, St Kevin’s, St Catherine’s in
a very quiet cul-de-sac.”
Visitors enter the home through a marble reception hall that flows into a fitted library and a vast living and dining area with a gas fireplace.
The adjoining kitchen features granite benches, a double Ilve oven and a butler’s pantry. This open-plan area opens out to a terrace.
Four of the home’s six bedrooms are upstairs. The fifth is basement level with living and rumpus rooms and a cellar. The sixth is in a separate guesthouse with a bathroom and kitchen.
The grounds also feature lush gardens and a heated pool and spa.
[email protected] wanted to build a deck that featured only Dimir cards. So if it doesn't have a Dimir watermark in it, I would deter from putting it in (There are a few exceptions as listed in the maybeboard). That' not to say I won't but I would like to keep the Dimir theme. The deck is to focus on the milling aspect of Dimir, either as a wincon itself, or use Lazav to smash face from copying a fattie. Many of the creatures have some form of evasion so Ciphering a Paranoid Delusions is very integral to the battleplan. Muddle the Mixture can be used to fetch out any of the other spells besides Psychic Strike is it much utility as it is a counterspell.
I would like to see if there are any better options that I'm missing out, particularly from the original Ravnica. I can also go a heavy Cipher route and have some fun, as this is meant to be a multiplayer kitchen table style deck.The MLB off-season is coming to a conclusion this week, as pitchers and catchers are set to report, and Spring Training games are just around the corner. This will give us our first look at some of the big new acquisitions in their new homes. We would like to figure out who won free agency, which we won’t actually know until the season is well underway. But we can speculate, and we will do that here:
Winner: Robinson Cano – Obviously the most sought after free agent this season, he demanded a historically large deal, 10 years and upwards of $200M, and got one. At age 31, his old team, the Yankees, were very hesitant to give him the long term deal that he desired. The gap was wide and nearly impossible to bridge, with the Yankees wary of the $189M luxury tax threshold. That’s when the Mariners jumped in and gave him the numbers he wanted. Most, if not all experts agree that the deal won’t be worth it over the term of 10 years, with his value doomed to diminish with age and a more pitcher-friendly home ballpark. But Cano got what he wanted, and won’t have to work another day in his life after he’s done raking in this dough.
Loser: Seattle Mariners – They locked up $240M over 10 years to Cano, which makes sense, considering he’s the top player in a premium position of second base. However, they bolstered their lineup around Cano, with Corey Hart, who’s missed the last season with an injury, and Logan Morrison, who has yet to hit his potential with the Marlins, which is saying something. With all the money they spent, they could have used it on more depth, as opposed to just spending most of their budget on one player. They are supposedly in on Nelson Cruz, which would probably get them out of the loser category, but as of now, they spent a lot of money on a little bit of improvement.
Winner: New York Yankees – Of course, the Yankees went on a spending spree. Last time they missed the playoffs, in 2008, they went and spent nearly $400M that off-season, and went on to win the World Series the following year. They missed the playoffs in 2013, and this year neared half a billion (with a B) in contracts signed during the winter. The notables include Masahiro Tanaka (7 years, $155M plus $20M posting fee), Jacoby Ellsbury (7 years, $153M), Brian McCann (5 years, $85M, option for 6/$100M), Carlos Beltran (3 years, $45M), and Hiroki Kuroda (1 year, $16M), along with a couple of smaller role-player acquisitions. It’s difficult not to improve when you go out and sign 4 of the top 6 free agents on the market (according to Yahoo! Sports’ Jeff Passan). They got who they wanted, and prevented others from getting those guys. Oh yeah, and they aren’t paying A-Rod $25M
Loser: New York Yankees – Due to their spending spree, the Yankees once again eclipsed the $189M luxury tax threshold, something they were looking to avoid. Looking away from that, they spent lots of money on older players. The youngest players in the starting lineup, McCann, Ellsbury, and Brett Gardiner, are all 30 years old. Despite addressing big issues, such as Robinson Cano’s departure, they still have many issues to deal with. Their infield is full of question marks, whether you look at Mark Teixeira and Derek Jeter returning from playing combined 32 games, Brian Roberts (missed 456 games the last 4 seasons) taking over for Robinson Cano’s departure, and the gap at third vacated by a platoon last year. The back end of the rotation includes a couple of players who haven’t started regularly in years, like Michael Pineda and David Phelps. Their bullpen includes David Robertson and a bunch of no-names. They have many issues that they didn’t quite cover.
Winner: Arizona Diamondbacks – Despite having a quieter off-season, the D-Backs made a couple of key trades, to improve their team subtly. The three-team deal between them, the White Sox, and the Angels landed them Mark Trumbo, a fearsome power hitter to protect MVP runner-up Paul Goldschmidt. They also got closer Addison Reed from the White Sox. Just yesterday, they signed innings-eater Bronson Arroyo for 2 years. None of these 3 are marquee names, but all of them are key pieces in improving this team. No one said you had to make large splashes in order to take a step ahead.
Loser: Cincinnati Reds – Another team with a quieter off-season, but they needed to make moves in order to gain back ground on the Cardinals and Pirates. They lost key players Shin-Soo Choo (Texas), Ryan Hannigan (Tampa Bay), and Bronson Arroyo (Arizona), and made too much noise not trading Brandon Phillips. To compensate for that loss, the Reds signed…well…not really anyone worth mentioning. They are calling up speed-demon Billy Hamilton to replace Choo in center-field. They are also considering putting flame-thrower Aroldis Chapman in the rotation. All of this will add up to the Reds missing the playoffs, and taking a step back in the NL Central.
Winner: Texas Rangers – The first big splash of the winter came in Texas, when Prince Fielder jumped into a swimming pool was traded for Ian Kinsler. The big guy will man first for the Rangers, while second base will be covered by top prospect of years past Jurickson Profar. Also coming to the Lone-Star State is Shin-Soo Choo, who will hit near the top of the order, and get on base for the big Texas bats to hit him home. Along with a few other smaller signings, the Rangers improved mightily and will put up a good fight against the A’s for the AL West.
Loser: Matt Kemp – With the emergence of Yasiel Puig in Tinseltown, the Dodgers’ outfield is now super-clogged with Puig, Andre Ethier, Carl Crawford, and Matt Kemp. With no DH spot to platoon to, and with multiple injuries hampering his performance significantly, Kemp is likely the choice to be left out. He’s owed $128M over the next 6 years, so his albatross contract is not one easily picked up by anyone with a budget. There have been rumors fluttering about, but nothing significant has arisen. As it stands, Kemp’s playing time would be diminished gradually until he proves his worth over the other 3 outfielders.
Winner: The Fans – Baseball season is right around the corner. When you go outside after dusting the ol’ glove off and start throwing the ball around, you’ll see what I mean.
AdvertisementsESPN college football insider Travis Haney thinks Mike Riley and Jim Mora did bang-up jobs coaching this year. Call Ted and me biased, but we tend to agree.
Haney ranked what he believed to be the 10 most underrated coaches in the nation in 2012, and a pair of Pac-12 coaches finished in his top five.
At No. 5 was Mora, who guided UCLA to a 9-4 season, a legitimate No. 1 finish in the Pac-12 South Division and a date with Baylor on Dec. 27 in the Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl in San Diego.
Writes Haney:
Here's what I know: When I visited the Rose Bowl in May for UCLA's spring game, I noticed a departure in negative energy, especially for the team's previously bogged-down offense. Those feelings transitioned to the season, too. The Bruins finished fourth in the Pac-12 -- just ahead of USC -- in scoring offense; that's serious progress. They might have a 2013 Heisman contender in quarterback Brett Hundley.
And coming in at No. 3 on Haney's list was Oregon State's Riley, who orchestrated one of the finest turnarounds in college football this year. After a 3-9 campaign last season left his seat on the toastier side, the 9-3 record this year has his fanny colder than a rainy Corvallis December day. Speaking of December, the Beavers are back in the postseason, where they'll face No. 23 Texas in the Valero Alamo Bowl on Dec. 29.
Notes Haney:
I remember Riley most this season for his ability to keep things light, like when he took the team to In-N-Out after the win at UCLA. It reminded me of postgame food stops on the bus in high school. Sometimes it's nice to see that somewhere the game still looks like a game. That's easier said than done when guys are sometimes coaching for their livelihoods under intense pressure, as Riley probably felt he was, heading into this season.
Haney's assessment also seems to run parallel with what folks on the Pac-12 blog think. In a poll last month, 31 percent said Riley should have been the Pac-12 coach of the year. That honor, of course, went to Stanford head coach David Shaw for the second consecutive season.Summary: Hewlett-Packard (HP) has filed several patents covering standard Continuous Delivery (CD) practices. You can help to have these patents revoked by providing ‘prior art’ examples on Stack Exchange.
On 1st March 2015 I discovered that in 2012 HP had filed a patent (WO2014027990) with the USPO for ‘Performance tests in a continuous deployment pipeline‘ (the patent was granted published in 2014). The exact search I used was https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?q=performance+testing++in+a+pipeline and the patent grabbed my attention almost immediately as it was around the 5th result (as I write this, it still is):
I immediately tweeted and @-mentioned Jez Humble (@jezhumble) and Dave Farley (@davefarley77), co-authors of the foundational book Continuous Delivery, to alert them (their book was published in 2010, two years before the HP patents were filed).
My friend and colleague Steve Smith (@agilestevesmith) quickly created a ‘prior art’ request on the Ask Patents Stack Exchange site to coordinate the collection of references to prior art, so that we have a coordinated place to document the many existing examples of running performance tests in a deployment pipeline prior to the patent being filed. This will help us to refute this patent (WO2014027990). As of today (6th March 2015) the Ask Patents page and various Twitter threads had contributions from several early proponents of CD including Chris Read, Dan North, Jez Humble, Dave Farley, Pat Kua, Andreas Grabner, Erik Doernenburg, and Martin Fowler (amongst others).
The plot thickens
As the “WTF?!” spread on Twitter, Marco Abis (@capotribu) pointed out that not only were the authors almost literally unknown anywhere else on the internet, but that the same HP authors had filed patents for many more standard CD practices:
Here is a screenshot of the search results as of 6th March:
For the record, here are the patent reference identifiers for these HP patents covering basic CD practices (alternate references given, and hyperlinks to the Ask Patents pages – I will update this page with links to new Ask Patent pages as they appear):
Prioritization of continuous deployment pipeline tests – US20150026121, WO2013165367A1, WO2013165367A8
Performance tests in a continuous deployment pipeline – WO2014027990A1
Continuous deployment of code changes – CN104067226A, WO2013115786A1
Monitor usable with continuous deployment – WO2014046672A1
Global feature library useable [sic] with continuous delivery – WO2014035410A1 (note the typo!)
Identifcation [sic] of a failed code change – CN104081359A, US20140372989, WO2013115797A1 (note the typo!)
Acquiring identification of an application lifecycle management entity associated with similar code – WO2014120139A1
There may of course be other patents filed by HP covering standard CD practices (see below, Okay, what can I do to help?)
WT-actual-F is HP doing?!
There are two explanations I can think of for what HP is doing here. Either the authors of these patents – collectively Adam SPEKTOR, Inbar SHANI, Yaron Burg, Amichai Nitsan, Sigal MAON, Ilan Shufer, Eli Mordechai, and Lior Manor, all of Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. – have been locked away in a cupboard for the last 10 years and have independently invented terms like ‘deployment pipeline’ and are filing what they believe to be genuine applications for true innovations (in which case, I kind of get it, as I think that deployment pipelines are awesome), or (the more likely explanation in my view) HP is patent trolling in a frankly stupid and disrespectful way.
So what’s the problem?
The ‘inventions’ in the HP patents have been practiced, implemented, and documented by advocates of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery for many years prior to 2012, particularly by people at ThoughtWorks but also by people from Atlassian, The Guardian, Dynatrace and many others (details in the Ask Patents page for WO2014027990A1).
For instance, here is extract from an article in Dr. Dobb’s (sadly now moribund) from February 2008 by Steve Haines called Continuous Integration and Performance Testing (examples use the first CI server, CruiseControl):
Now you can add performance tests into the continuous integration process. The most straightforward method is to create a new virtual project in CruiseControl, one that uses the same build script but executes a performance unit-testing target. The following shows the key changes you could make to a copy of Listing One’s project definition: <project name=”ant-junit-performance-unit-tests”>…<schedule interval=”600″><ant anthome=”apache-ant-1.6.5″buildfile=”projects/${project.name}/build.xml”target=”performance-unit-tests.execute” /></schedule><publishers> <onsuccess> <artifactspublisher dest=”artifacts/${project.name}” dir=”projects/ant-junit/profiling-reports”/> </onsuccess> … In this case, CruiseControl is configured to check for source updates every five minutes—because performance tests take longer to run, they cannot and should not be run as frequently. In a real-world application, checking hourly is more reasonable.
Not only does the article describe the concept of running performance tests as part of CI, but it also shows how; we are also shown how to collect the results, using JMeter:
Once integrated, you define a JMeter Ant task by adding the following to the Ant script: <taskdef name=”jmeter”classname=”org.programmerplanet.ant.taskdefs.jmeter.JMeterTask”/>
This is a clear example of prior art. For nearly 40 years Dr. Dobb’s Journal was one of the foremost software magazines in the world (I remember in the late 1990s tentatively reading my first Dr. Dobb’s articles on sorting algorithms and mutexes, and realising how relevant Dr. Dobb’s seemed). There is no excuse for the HP people for missing this kind of prior art when it was so readily available.
To me the patents filed by HP feel like a ‘land grab’ by a company that is struggling to be relevant in the world of Continuous Delivery, with old-skool application release automation (ARA) tools simply rebranded as ‘Continuous Delivery’ (incidentally, may the gods help anyone who pays for these soul-destroying HP tools).
Okay, so what can I do to help?
For each of the patents above we need examples of prior art before 2012: articles, blog posts, conference talks, book chapters, etc. If a patent does not have an Ask Patent page, please create an Ask Patents page (the easiest way to do this is via Google – search for the patent code). Then post the relevant details on the Ask Patents page for the specific patent.
You can also search for other patents from HP relating to CD – perhaps using a different author name (the patents above all relate to Inbar Shani only).
Together let us get the patents overturned through decent prior art details and stop this madness. From the start Continuous Delivery has been a practitioner- and community-led endeavour (with generous guidance from ThoughtWorks). CD is not the place for large behemoth corporations like HP to muscle in and take ownership. As Dan North puts it:
"Identification of a failed code change" in a build pipeline. As a patent. Really @HP? #getoffmylawn — Dan North (@tastapod) March 4, 2015
“Identification of a failed code change” in a build pipeline. As a patent. Really @HP? #getoffmylawn
Footnote
Thanks to everyone who helped to spread the word about this, in particular Steve Smith, Dan North, Marco Abis, Pushpak Singh, and all who have added prior art details to the Ask Patents page and contributed to the Twitter WTF stream.
Updates
Corrected ‘granted’ to ‘published’ in first main paragraph. (2015-03-08)The University of California, Los Angeles Graduate Student Association approved a resolution Wednesday calling those who do not support a pro-Palestine agenda “Islamophobic.”
“I really think that the whole bill was sort of a trap for the members,” one GSA representative told Campus Reform on condition of anonymity. “It was designed to put the Forum in a very awkward position, because if you vote against it you’re seen as being ‘for’ anti-Arabism and Islamophobia.”
“I find it incredibly cowardly... that a couple of grown anti-Israel adults needed an official resolution to vent their grievances towards me.”
The measure begins by listing various allegations of “anti-Arabism and Islamophobia,” some involving UCLA students and others gleaned from around the state—such as “offensive posters … portraying Palestinians, Muslims, the Muslim Student Association [MSA], and Students for Justice in Palestine [SJP] as terrorists” that appeared on several UC System campuses last year, and the “blacklisting” of UCLA students engaged in pro-Palestinian activism by an extremist website.
[RELATED: Anti-Semitic sentiments run rampant within University of California System]
While most of the list did not excite much debate, the final three claims raised some concerns because they ascribed Islamophobia to students who had merely expressed criticism of the SJP student group, condemning two students for “falsely accusing” Palestinian classmates of extremism in news articles and rebuking GSA President Milan Chatterjee simply for sharing one of the articles on social media.
The first article mentioned was a Daily Bruin op-ed from early February that originally referred to a “mock stabbing” demonstration by SJP during Palestine Awareness Week, but was later corrected to reflect that the group had actually conducted a “die-in,” though the author noted that the event glossed over the arguably-relevant issue of knife attacks against Israeli civilians.
The second article, published in the Daily Wire by Campus Reform correspondent Pardes Seleh, accuses SJP leaders of systematically harassing Jewish students on campus as part of a campaign against a “viewpoint neutrality” policy that Chatterjee had cited when denying GSA funding for a pro-Palestinian event. Chatterjee shared the article defending his actions on social media, earning himself a spot on the resolution’s list of Islamophobic incidents.
The resolution concludes by denying that its wording is an assault on free speech, saying, “Let it be understood that this resolution should not be interpreted or construed to infringe upon the First Amendment-protected free speech rights of GSA members, officials, and other student groups affiliated with UCLA and the Graduate Student Association.”
Noticing the contradiction, one representative proposed a motion, which eventually passed, striking the word “falsely” from the first two of the controversial items and removing the mention of Chatterjee altogether. The amended resolution passed overwhelmingly, after which the GSA Forum went into executive session to approve a motion of censure against Chatterjee that will be taken up at the next scheduled meeting.
“The fact that the word ‘falsely’ was removed from the resolution proves the accuracy in my Daily Wire article, because I had given evidence and factual statements as to why the SJP is an anti-Jewish organization,” Seleh told Campus Reform. “Passing the resolution implied that the GSA equates criticism directed at the SJP and terrorist groups as ‘Islamophobia,’” she added, explaining that she had simply outlined the ways in which SJP “endorses terrorist organizations such as Hamas” and demonstrates a general anti-Israel and anti-American bias.
“I find it incredibly cowardly and even hilarious that a couple
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verrais bien habiter un loft aux murs entièrement tapissés de carrés Hermès. Mais en porter un? Ma mère me l’a proposé en cadeau d’anniversaire, mais j’ai refusé : pas mon style, du tout. Mais là je pourrais bien avoir changé d’avis après avoir consulté le site J’aime mon carré. Qu’en pensez-vous?A Mississippi boy, worried about the Grinch stealing Christmas, decided to call 911 to fix the problem. (Published Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017)
A 5-year-old Mississippi boy called 911 to report that the Grinch was trying to steal Christmas.
The Clarion Ledger reports that it happened Saturday in the Jackson suburb of Byram. An officer went to TyLon Pittman's home to assure him that the green creature wouldn't take anyone's gifts.
TyLon had been watching videos online when he became alarmed about the Grinch. He told his mom, Teresa Pittman, that he dialed 911, but she says she didn't quite believe him until an officer knocked on the door.
The officer, Lauren Develle, says she grew up loving the character created by children's author Dr. Seuss.
TyLon says he has a plan in case the Grinch does appear: he says he will wrestle him and hold him until the police show up.
Police also gave TyLon a tour of the police station, where he got to lock a Grinch in a jail cell.
Copyright Associated Press / NBC 6 South FloridaSept 18 (Reuters) - International agencies and governments are fighting to contain the world's worst Ebola epidemic since the disease was identified in 1976. The fever, which causes external and internal bleeding, has killed at least, 2,630 people in West Africa. Here is a timeline of the main developments in the outbreak: March 22: Guinea confirms that a previously unidentified hemorrhagic fever, which killed over 50 people in its southeastern Forest Region, is Ebola. One study traces the suspected original source to a 2-year-old boy in the town of Gueckedou. Cases are also reported in the capital, Conakry. March 30: Liberia reports two Ebola cases; suspected cases are reported in Sierra Leone. April 1: Noting the spread, medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) warns it is "unprecedented," but a World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman calls it "relatively small still." April 4: A mob attacks an Ebola treatment center in southeastern Guinea. Healthcare workers in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia face growing hostility from fearful, suspicious local people, many of whom refuse to believe the disease exists. May 26: WHO confirms the first Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone. June 17: Liberia says Ebola has reached its capital, Monrovia. June 23: With deaths above 350, making the West African outbreak the worst Ebola epidemic on record, MSF says the outbreak is "out of control" and calls for massive resources. July 25: Nigeria, Africa's biggest economy, confirms its first Ebola case, a Liberian-American man who died in the commercial hub, Lagos, after traveling from Monrovia. July 29: Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, who was leading Sierra Leone's fight against the epidemic, dies of the virus. July 30: Liberia shuts schools and orders the quarantining of the worst-affected communities, using troops to enforce it. July 31: The U.S. Peace Corps withdraws all volunteers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, citing Ebola risks. Aug 2: An American missionary aid worker infected with Ebola in Liberia, Dr. Kent Brantly, is flown to Atlanta in the United States for treatment at Emory University Hospital. Aug 4: The World Bank announces up to $200 million in emergency assistance for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Aug 5: A second U.S. missionary infected with Ebola, Nancy Writebol, is flown from Liberia to the Atlanta hospital. Aug 8: WHO declares Ebola an "international public health emergency" but stops short of calling for a ban on international trade or travel. Aug 12: WHO says death toll from the outbreak has risen above 1,000, and approves use of unproven drugs or vaccines. A Spanish priest with Ebola dies in a Madrid hospital. Aug 14: WHO says reports of Ebola deaths and cases from the field "vastly underestimate" the scale of the outbreak. Aug 15: MSF compares the Ebola outbreak to "wartime," says it will take about six months to control. Aug 20: Liberian security forces in Monrovia fire live rounds and tear gas to disperse crowd trying to break out of Ebola quarantine. One teenager dies of gunshot wounds. Aug 21: The two American missionary aid workers treated in Atlanta are released from hospital free of the virus. They received an experimental therapy called ZMapp. Aug 24: Democratic Republic of Congo declares an Ebola outbreak in its northern Equateur province, apparently separate from the larger West African outbreak. An infected British medical worker is flown home from Sierra Leone for treatment. Aug 28: WHO puts the death toll at above 1,550, warns outbreak could infect more than 20,000 people. The U.N. health agency announces a strategic plan to fight the epidemic and says $490 million will be needed over the next six months. Aug 29: Senegal reports its first confirmed Ebola case. Aug 30: The World Food Program says it needs $70 million to feed 1.3 million people at risk in Ebola-quarantined areas. Sept 2: MSF President Joanne Liu tells U.N. members the world is "losing the battle" to contain the Ebola outbreak and slams "a global coalition of inaction." Sept 3: Pace of epidemic accelerates; deaths top 1,900. Officials say there were close to 400 deaths in the past week. A third U.S. missionary infected with Ebola, Dr. Rick Sacra of Boston, is flown out of Liberia for treatment at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. Sept. 5: WHO puts Ebola deaths in West Africa at more than 2,100 out of about 4,000 people thought to have been infected. The European Union pledges 140 million euros (US$180 million) toward the anti-Ebola campaign. Sept. 6: Scientists publish map of places most at risk of an Ebola outbreak, saying regions likely to be home to animals harboring the virus are more widespread than previously feared, particularly in West Africa. (To see the map, click on bit.ly/WOtGCc) Sept. 7: President Barack Obama says in an interview the United States needs to do more to help control Ebola to prevent it from becoming a global crisis that could threaten Americans. Sept. 8: Britain says it will send military and humanitarian experts to Sierra Leone to set up a treatment center, while the United States says it will send a 25-bed military field hospital to Liberia to care for health workers. A fourth Ebola patient will be flown to the United States for treatment, says Atlanta's Emory University Hospital. Sept. 9: WHO says the death toll jumped by almost 200 in a single day to at least 2,296 and is already likely to be higher. WHO says it has recorded 4,293 cases in five West African countries, but it did not have new figures for Liberia. Sept. 10: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledges $50 million to support emergency efforts to contain the disease. Sept. 11: Doctors treating Sacra at University of Nebraska Medical Center say he is showing "remarkable improvement" after receiving an infusion of plasma from U.S. Ebola survivor Brantly and an undisclosed experimental drug. Sept. 12: WHO says new Ebola cases in West Africa are growing faster than authorities can manage them and renews call for healthcare workers from around the world to go to region. Sept. 13: Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf appeals to Obama for urgent aid in tackling Ebola, saying that without it her country will lose the fight against the disease. Sept. 14: Johnson Sirleaf's office says she has dismissed 10 senior officials because they failed to heed a warning to return from overseas to help the government's fight against Ebola. Sept. 15: Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama calls for the easing of restrictions on West African nations fighting Ebola, saying "panic" measures have led to isolation and undermined the battle against the disease. Sept. 16: The United States promises to send 3,000 military engineers and medical personnel to West Africa to build treatment clinics and train healthcare workers to halt the spread of the disease. A senior WHO official says Ebola has killed 2,461 people, about half of the 4,985 people infected, a doubling of the death toll in the past month. Sept. 17: Johnson Sirleaf says she hopes Obama's decision to send troops to West Africa to battle the epidemic will spur other countries to help. MSF says a French nurse volunteering for the medical charity in Liberia has Ebola. It says seven of its local staff have the disease, and three of them have died. U.S. House of Representatives approves $88 million to help fight the outbreak. Sept. 18: The WHO updates its tally of Ebola's toll: 2,630 dead out of 5,357 infected. Eight bodies, including those of three journalists, are found after an attack on a team trying to educate local people in a remote region of Guinea about Ebola, the government says. The United Nations says it will create a special mission to combat Ebola, deploying staff in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. U.N. Security Council adopts a U.S.-drafted resolution calling on countries to lift travel and border restrictions. French President Francois Hollande says a military hospital will be deployed in the Forest Region of southeastern Guinea, where the virus was first detected in March. (Writing by Pascal Fletcher and Jonathan Oatis; Editing by Toni Reinhold)TAIPEI (REUTERS) - Tens of thousands of posts apparently from China have flooded Taiwan presidential election front runner Tsai Ing-wen's Facebook account, demanding that the island return to China - and her response on Wednesday (Nov 11) was to welcome the mainland's interest in democracy.
The surge in posts, nearing 70,000 by Wednesday, is all the more astonishing because Facebook is generally blocked in Communist Party-ruled China, although there are ways of getting around firewalls.
"I hope this rare new experience can let the 'new friend' see a more complete democracy, freedom and pluralism of Taiwan," Ms Tsai posted to contributors "from across the Strait", the narrow strip of water separating China and Taiwan.
"Welcome to the world of Facebook!"
China deems proudly democratic Taiwan a breakaway province to be taken back, by force if necessary, particularly if it makes moves towards formal independence.
Ms Tsai is the leader of Taiwan's opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which traditionally favours independence from China and is widely expected to win presidential and parliamentary elections in January.
The surge in posts, if indeed from China, underscores how much attention is being paid to the island and its relationship with China since a historic meeting between the two leaders at the weekend, the first since the Chinese civil war ended in 1949. Chinese state media praised the summit as a success on the road to eventual unification.
The posts, many written in simplified Chinese characters normally used on the mainland, did not appear to be machine-generated spam or an attack, said DPP spokesman Cheng Yun-peng. They seemed genuine, but the DPP had not verified their authenticity, he said.
One read: "...peaceful unification. One country, two systems. Break through the machinations and return to me Formosa", referring to the island by its former name.
Another one read: "Liar, DPP independence activists scram out of China soon."
There were as many posts defending Ms Tsai and the DPP as well, written in traditional Chinese characters used on the island.
One said "online pen wars" may give writers from China a sense of freedom. "But when we take our presidential vote to the ballot box, you will wake up from your daydream because this is democracy - and you don't have it," it said.
Chiang Kai-shek's ruling Nationalists fled to Taiwan after being defeated by Chinese Communists in 1949. The island has been self-ruled since. The Nationalists and the Communists agree there is "one China", but disagree on the interpretation.Spend 60 minutes in the same spot.
In 10 consecutive matches, capture zero flags.
Deploy 30 Sniper Shields.
Spend 60 cumulative minutes in the deployment screen.
In 10 consecutive matches, spend zero minutes as infantry.
Quit 10 Argonne matches before spawning.
As a Medic, perform no more than one heal in a single match.
As a Medic, in 10 consecutive matches, perform zero revives.
Cause 5 team suicides by deflecting friendly grenades.
Perform 3 team switches during a single match.
Let an enemy steal 3 vehicles you last spawned in.
Cause 5 team suicides by blocking SAA rounds.
As a Pilot, collide with 5 friendly planes.
Spend 10 matches in a locked squad of 1.
As a Support, ignore 50 Ammo requests.
As a Medic, ignore 50 Heal requests.
Spawn in a MAA on Amiens or Suez.
Deploy 30 mortars indoors.
Recieve 30 accidental deaths by barbed wire.
I noticed some of my teammates trying their utmost to complete them. So far I've witnessed the following..DICE, the sneaky devils, adding these gems without telling us.Anyone seen any others?FC Barcelona- Arguably the most successful football club in the world in the last decade with an incredible number of trophies to prove that fact. And that success is credited to some great players along with some of the best managers in the world that have been at the helm of the club over the years. Here we present to you the top 5 managers in the club’s history –
5) Frank Rijkaard
Rijkaard was a fans favorite as a player and also achieved success as a manager, including leading the club out of a trophy less slump. The Dutch International was the first Barcelona manager to win the Champions League – note Champions League, not European Cup. He also won two league titles and also introduced Lionel Messi to the first team. Rijkaard had a win percentage of 58.61%LANSING, Mich. — Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan issued a sweeping apology on Tuesday to the residents of Flint for a contaminated water supply. He pledged to promptly release his emails about the issue, and laid out more specifics than had previously been known about the state’s handling of the matter.
“I’m sorry, and I will fix it,” Mr. Snyder, a Republican, said in a State of the State address in which he took the unusual step of focusing on a painful issue that has consumed the state in recent weeks and has drawn condemnation from national politicians. “No citizen of this great state should endure this kind of catastrophe. Government failed you — federal, state and local leaders — by breaking the trust you place in us.”
Mr. Snyder, who has long boasted of advocating pragmatic solutions over casting blame, was uncharacteristically blunt, contrite and emphatic. “I’m sorry most of all that I let you down,” he said. “You deserve better. You deserve accountability. You deserve to know that the buck stops here with me. Most of all, you deserve to know the truth, and I have a responsibility to tell the truth.”
The scandal over the water in Flint has engulfed Mr. Snyder in the biggest crisis of his tenure and reverberated far beyond the state’s borders. In the last few days, it has drawn attention in the White House and prompted accusations that the state had ignored a health risk in a largely black city. Flint’s plight also emerged as an issue in Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate.Robert Roper isn’t a specialist in the study of Vladimir Nabokov or his fiction. In fact, he is himself principally a novelist, though one who has also published a study of Walt Whitman and a biography of legendary mountain climber Willi Unsoeld. Still, as Roper says in the introduction to “ Nabokov in America,” he has loved his subject’s sometimes controversial books for 50 years, “especially the ones written while he lived in the United States.” The most famous of these is, of course, “ Lolita ” (1955).
Today Nabokov’s early works, composed in his native Russian though later translated into English, tend to be respected rather than loved. “The Gift” (1938) has been called the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, but most readers — this one included — find it hard slogging. The late books, starting with “Ada” (1968), tend to be overly fancy and precious, self-reflexive exercises appealing only to the most ardent devotees. In effect, these lesser works are European, whether composed by a young exile fleeing the Russian Revolution or a world-famous candidate for the Nobel Prize (which he never won).
[Vladimir Nabokov's 'Original of Laura']
But the work of the roughly 20 years from 1940 to 1962 reveals, in Roper’s words, “the sheer flabbergasting Americanness of Nabokov’s transformation, the way he opened himself to ‘local influences’ ” once he arrived in this country at age 41 with his wife, Véra, and son, Dmitri. Before then, he’d been too much the aesthete, while “the American context... fed meaning and amplitude into fancy’s brew.” Nabokov’s finest work celebrates what his character Humbert Humbert calls “the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” that he and Lolita see by car.
“Nabokov in America” is consequently almost a geographical study, as its subtitle, “On the Road to ‘Lolita,’ ” implies: Roper emphasizes Nabokov’s travels, largely his summer excursions out West in pursuit of rare butterflies, but also his early sojourn in California, where he taught Russian and writing briefly at Stanford, and his lecture tour to the South in 1942, when he spoke at Spelman College and met W.E.B. Du Bois. All in all, as Roper calculates, during his 20 years in America, Nabokov traveled upwards of 200,000 miles by car. That said, Roper nonetheless lingers, as he must, on the crucial years in Ithaca, N.Y., where between 1948 and 1960 Nabokov taught European literature and produced nearly all his greatest works:
“He worked prodigiously at Cornell. While there, he wrote parts of ‘Lolita,’ ‘Pnin’ and ‘Speak, Memory,’ short stories, poetry, and translations of his own works and others’. He also composed his 1,895-page annotated translation of ‘Eugene Onegin,’ as well as an annotated translation of the Old Slavonic epic ‘The Song of Igor’s Campaign.’ In addition, he conceived and began work on ‘Pale Fire’ and ‘Ada,’ his ambitious novels of the sixties.”
That’s an extraordinary amount of research, note-taking and writing, but then Nabokov never attended faculty meetings or kept office hours.
Though essentially biographical, “Nabokov in America” is also a work of criticism. Roper neatly compares “Lolita’ to Indian captivity narratives, to aspects of “Moby-Dick” (zeroing in on the relationship of cabin boy Pip and Captain Ahab), and to the once-banned “Memoirs of Hecate County” by Nabokov’s friend, the critic Edmund Wilson. He also speculates about the possible influence of J.D. Salinger, one of the few contemporary American writers Nabokov was known to admire. As he observes:
“Nabokov’s emergence, its crucial stage, coincided exactly with Salinger’s. Eleven chapters of the future ‘Speak, Memory’ appeared in the New Yorker just in the years (1948-50) when Salinger was publishing ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish,’ ‘Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,’ ‘Just Before the War with the Eskimos,’ and ‘For Esmé — with Love and Squalor.’ ”
Roper then considers echoes of “The Catcher in the Rye,” in “Lolita,” especially its portrayal of Holden Caulfield’s little sister, Phoebe.
In seeking to illuminate Nabokov’s metamorphosis into an American writer, Roper also looks at how other creative Europeans such as filmmaker Billy Wilder managed this transition. Roper’s outstanding example is unexpected and absolutely right: Ayn Rand, his near contemporary. From a Jewish family similar to Véra’s, Rand was “a writer of different attainments but, like Nabokov, determined to write for the movies and in the fifties the author of a giant bestseller (‘Atlas Shrugged’). Rand was also from St. Petersburg, had also fled the Revolution, and her arrival in the United States began a period of intense self-education and a wholesale embrace of what she took for Americanism.”
In general, Roper’s observations are at their sharpest when he discusses “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” Humbert Humbert, he points out, studies little Dolores Haze as intensely as Nabokov studied insects. He emphasizes that the writer’s great theme isn’t sex per se, but “amorousness: the disposition to become obsessed, to fetishize a lover.” Calling attention to the “shrill note, wiggling, head thrown back, teeth biting lip,” he daringly wonders if Lolita might have experienced an orgasm while sprawled on Humbert Humbert’s lap. And in a particularly astute summary, he talks of the complicitousness one finds in Nabokov’s books:
“Nabokov was an intimate writer. His reticences, his formal estrangements, his denial of interest in any reality beyond the text all need to be measured against that. Maximum closeness: not the closeness of ostentatious empathy but the closeness of one mind addressing another in the most thrilling terms. He speaks into the ear, sometimes dripping a little poison. He contrives to have a reader identify intimately with a protagonist or narrator, but even that is not enough; the reader receives secret handshakes from the author himself, behind a narrator’s back.”
Those “secret handshakes” are particularly prevalent in “Pale Fire” (1962). That book, comprising a long poem by John Shade and a massive set of end notes by Professor Charles Kinbote, is perhaps the trickiest, or tricksiest, work of modern literature. “The poet Shade’s confessions in verse yield to the infinitely more self-revealing confessional of the mad, ever-burgeoning commentary, and meanwhile Nabokov and the reader exchange looks over Kinbote’s shoulder: so sad, he is, but so much fun! Such a shameless liar!” Liar? Or madman?
Most unexpectedly, Roper devotes considerable attention to Dmitri Nabokov, who was — during the period when his father was writing “Lolita” — the same age as the doomed nymphet. He suggests that the Nabokovs’ highly protective attitude toward their only child is a dark mirror to that of Humbert Humbert’s attempts to control and virtually imprison his step-daughter as a sex slave. Still, Roper doesn’t fully answer the question of why Nabokov wrote so often about “nymphets.” As Martin Amis has observed, “Of the nineteen fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls.”
“Nabokov in America” is rewarding on all counts, as biography, as photo album (there are many pictures of people, Western landscapes and motels) and as appreciative criticism. Not least, Roper even avoids the arch style so often adopted by critics faintly trying to emulate their inimitable subject.
Michael Dirda reviews books for The Washington Post on Thursdays.
For more books coverage, go to washingtonpost.com/books.Affiliate & Referral Links
So you’re lazy. Tired. Don’t know your skin type. Don’t have the time or energy to do research. I hear that.
Honestly, if my skin hadn’t gone crazy in my late-20s, I would not be into skincare at all.
This basic routine is not geared to any particular skin type. It’s literally one-routine-fits-all. I get that that’s not very kbeauty of me, but you’re not here for the full experience–you’re here because you need to get a foot in the door with as little money and energy wasted as possible. Cool, you’re welcome at this lunch table. Want to trade desserts?
I picked these products because they’re all reasonably priced (most are under $20), pleasantish to use, and they get good reviews from people with varying skin types. I’m not going for a perfect fit–that would take research and testing on your part; I’m going for those magical jeans from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. These products might not work the absolute very best for you, but they’re sort of in the middle ground and tend to work for most skin that isn’t super reactive. If you have lots of acne like me or very dry skin, you’ll probably want a more tailored routine (that said, I’ve tested all of these products at least briefly, and they worked really well for me). But if you’re just looking to get a start in kbeauty and have mild to moderate issues and you can throw a brick at your face without it reacting, boom, here’s some stuff.
Again, if your skin tends to react to products (get red, break out, or otherwise get angry) this ISN’T a routine you want to start. And as always, patch test (meaning try each product on a bit of your skin for awhile before slathering it on your whole face) before introducing a new product and don’t just throw everything on at once. In a perfect world, add, say, one new product per paycheck to make sure that you’re not going to end up with a skin situation that can’t be linked to one product that isn’t working for you. It happens a lot and “kbeauty made me break out” isn’t specific enough when asking for help on popular forums.
My criteria
needs steps that get skin properly clean
can’t cost more than $100
includes snail (it’s iconic, yo)
steps should dry quickly
routine shouldn’t leave skin sticky
oil cleansing should be included, but the oil needs to be fun to use
needs to include sunscreen, but sunscreen that doesn’t leave a white cast and doesn’t take ages to dry
should be easy to buy (not discontinued, not requiring a buying service, ideally using Amazon Prime)
Easy Korean Skincare Routine Shopping list
Oil Cleanser: Innisfree Apple Juicy Cleansing Oil
find it on: Amazon (Prime ships from the US; non-Prime sellers may be based in Korea) | eBay (some sellers may be based in Korea)
Ok, so the idea of cleaning your face with oil may not be very pleasant. But trust me, this is a massive game-changer and critical for your routine. This particular oil cleanser lasts for ages somehow, smells like sour apple candy, and emulsifies to rinse clean. It’s great for removing makeup and sunscreen–your pores will thank you.
find it on: Amazon (Prime ships from the US; non-Prime sellers may be based in Korea) | Memebox | eBay (some sellers may be based in Korea)
I’ve blown through my first tube of this cleanser, while more expensive cleansers have gathered dust. The pH level is low, it doesn’t irritate my notoriously picky skin, and it just works.
find it on: Amazon (Prime ships from the US; non-Prime sellers may be based in Korea) | eBay (some sellers may be based in Korea)
I wondered for a long time about whether this toner deserved its cult following–and then I tried it. It’s lightly moisturizing and has an ideal pH level for making skin really happy.
find it on: Amazon (Prime ships from the US; non-Prime sellers may be based in Korea) | eBay (some sellers may be based in Korea)
Ok, this is a kbeauty routine, so you need some snail. But maybe snail freaks you out? Enter Mizon’s hydrating essence/ampoule, which packs in the snail and a bunch of other hydrating ingredients minus the longer drying time of some other snail essences.
find it on: Amazon (Prime ships from the US; non-Prime sellers may be based in Korea) | Memebox
After Snow at Snow White and the Asian Pear raved about this cream it shot to prominence and has since earned a reputation as a light, but hydrating cream that can work for just about any skin type. This is an especially fabulous base for makeup imo.
find it on: Amazon (Prime ships from the US; some sellers may be in Japan) | eBay (some sellers may be in Japan)
[This product is not actually Korean–it’s made in Japan, but I really love it and think it works with the other products well.]
This shopping list doesn’t include any products labeled “anti-aging.” While the hydration bestowed by these products might make your skin look younger, most skincare really can’t live up to miracle claims, with a few exceptions. If you want to throw down and halt sun-related aging, you need a good daily sunscreen.
Now, I hear you over there mumbling that sunscreen is an icky, gross, white-cast disaster meant only for sunny days and the beach. Here’s the answer, the product that will open your eyes to a new world: this sunscreen is strong as hell, doesn’t leave a white cast, and it dries quickly. While you may think that the SPF 25 in your foundation is enough protection, it’s really not–you need to apply about 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon to your face and neck to get the coverage necessary to halt sun-related aging.
Several of my friends not super into skincare have tried this sunscreen and their reviews are positively glowing. I know people who stockpile tubes of this due to their obsession. Sunscreen: solved.
Easy Korean Skincare Morning Routine
Here’s how to put your products together into a morning and evening skincare routine. Notice that you don’t need an oil cleanser in the morning (it’s for removing makeup and sunscreen really well) and you obviously don’t need sunscreen at night.
1. Water-Soluble Cleanser: CosRX Low pH Good Morning Gel Cleanser
Mix this with water. Gently rub it on your face. Rinse it off really well. Cradle your face and tell it how cute it looks.
2. Toner: Mizon AHA BHA Daily Clean Toner
Pour a bit in your hand. “Paint” it on with a finger or two, all around your face. Let it dry. Do not rinse.
3. Essence/Ampoule: Mizon Snail Repair Intensive Ampoule
Squeeze about a dropper of this ampoule into the palm of your hand and “paint” it onto your face. Let it dry.
4. Cream: Beauty of Joseon Cream
Scoop an amount between the size of a peanut and almond into your palm and apply it in a thin layer.
5. Sunscreen: Bioré UV Aqua Rich Watery Essence Sunscreen SPF50+ PA++++
Squeeze out at least 1/4 of a teaspoon into your palm and slather this on your face, jawline, and neck. Allow it to dry before applying makeup. (I usually put on my shoes and check my purse while waiting for my sunscreen to dry.)
Easy Korean Skincare Evening Routine
1. Oil Cleanser: Innisfree Apple Juicy Cleansing Oil
Put about two squirts into your hand and then apply the oil to your dry, dirty face. Feel the nasty get loose. Add a bit of water to your face to emulsify the oil. Then add tons of water to rinse this clean.
2. Water-Soluble Cleanser: CosRX Low pH Good Morning Gel Cleanser
Mix this with water. Gently rub it on your face. Rinse it off really well (don’t miss your hairline).
3. Toner: Mizon AHA BHA Daily Clean Toner
Pour a bit in your hand. “Paint” it on with a finger or two, all around your face. Let it dry. Do not rinse.
4. Essence/Ampoule: Mizon Snail Repair Intensive Ampoule
Squeeze about a dropper of this ampoule into the palm of your hand and “paint” it onto your face. Let it dry.
5. Cream: Beauty of Joseon Cream
Scoop an amount between the size of a peanut and almond into your palm and apply it in a thin layer. Admire your cuteness.
Bonus: Sheet Masks!
If you want to add some masking to your life and don’t know where to start, I’ve got suggestions for fan favorites! I mention Taiwanese masks because they tend to be extremely good, affordable, and available. There are good kbeauty masks, but…honestly, not this good at this price imo.
Where to put them in your routine: it’s a safe bet to apply a sheet mask after toner and before things called essences and ampoules. For this routine, you’d slide your sheet mask in between the Mizon AHA BHA Daily Clean Toner and the Mizon Snail Repair Intensive Ampoule.
How often to use them: whenever you want, honestly. I do maybe one per week unless I’m really stepping up my game, but I know people with drier skin who mask twice per day.
How long to leave them on: however long feels comfortable tbh. I can tolerate them for about 30 minutes, but other people like leaving them on for an hour, as long as they stay wet. Give them at least 15 minutes, but let your skin and patience guide you.
These comfortable, thin Taiwanese masks with thin essence are perfect for my fairly hydrated skin that occasionally needs a moisture boost.
This Taiwanese brand is legit, beloved, cheap, and widely available. Seriously, just pick something that sounds nice; I’m not convinced that sheet mask do much for middle-of-the-road skin aside from offering a hydration boost, with a very few exceptions.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate and referral links. Clicking those links before you shop means that fan-b receives a small commission or discount code, which helps to support the blog. Please see my full disclosure for more information.The FIA is planning to conduct new research to find solutions that will help enforce track limits, with both new kerbs and electronic ideas being tested.
According to a report in AUTO+Medical, the international journal of motorsport medicine, Formula 1 race director Charlie Whiting has been working closely with FIA safety researchers to find ways to stop drivers ignoring the edges of a circuit.
The FIA’s safety director, Laurent Mekies, spoke at a presentation that was given to all F1 drivers at the US Grand Prix, and he explained that the governing body is trying to pair new kerbs with electronic measures to impose track limits.
Mekies said: “Track limits are easy to enforce from a sporting point of view, you put higher kerbs on the track and nobody goes over them, but this gives us safety concerns when the car hits the kerbs.
"So as a result, kerbs are getting thinner and thinner and lower and lower and we do eventually get issues with track limit management.
"What we are doing is to try to have a broad approach at this issue and look at how we could combine new kerb solutions with electronic solutions and see if a combination of these two things can help.”
It is understood the testing of new kerbs that offer increased resistance without compromising safety is already underway.
The FIA will also start to implement its “Race True” anti-doping education initiative in 2016. The programme will be introduced following news that in 2014, 3.6 per cent of the doping tests conducted by the FIA produced positive results.
Drivers competing in F1, the World Rally Championship, the World Endurance Championship, World RallyCross, the World Touring Car Championship, Formula E and European Formula 3 will receive anti-doping group training from next year.
The FIA’s head of medical affairs, Sandra Silveira Camargo, told AUTO+ Medical that ignorance of anti-doping rules was not an excuse for drivers.
She said: “It is essential for a driver to follow the anti-doping rules. Ignorance of those rules can lead to an ineligibility period of up to four years in motor sport and all sports.
“In spite of this extremely serious risk, many drivers do not know the anti-doping regulations well. The main reason for this alarming situation is the lack of knowledge of anti-doping.”
If the group training courses prove to be successful, the initiative is expected to expand to include more championships in the coming years.A new company called Clarian has announced that it will have a plug ‘n’ play home solar kit ready by next spring. The “Sunfish” is essentially a sun visor that you can hang over a sunny, south-facing window.
The device uses the company's 250 W micro-inverter to feed energy directly into your home through any standard outlet. You plug it into the wall, and in another convenient location you plug in a circuit monitor that uses software to sync the inverter to the monitor, reducing the amount of electricity you pull from the grid.
With a set of five panels (which will cost $4,000 in spring of 2011, but will likely drop to $3,000 in 2012) you can produce as much as 1800 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year — about enough to run a major appliance like a refrigerator. It may not sound like a lot, but when you consider that it makes solar generation a reality for under $4 grand, it could be a game-changer in quickly bringing more renewables onto the grid.
Right now to get in the solar game you need $30,000 to $40,000, an expense especially high in tough economic times and one that few households are able or willing to make. But Clarian doesn't believe solar should be an "all or nothing" scenario.
The more homes that have solar, the more stable becomes the grid, and 1800 kWh is nothing to sneeze at. The average home uses about 11,000 kWh per year, so that's a full 16 percent of a typical home's electricity usage.
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superheated metal beam cooled."My lieutenant said, "Hey, look up.' I looked up and the beam was -- it looked like an 'S.' I was like, 'I don't think that's good,'" Miles said. "One of the PennDOT guys came down and told us. He said, 'This is bad.' So as soon as he said it was bad, we realized what was happening."Grenesko and Miles were the ones under the bridge who put out the flames of the intensely hot and burning plastic pipes stockpiled for the bridge reconstruction project.Firefighters downplay -- but acknowledge -- how many of their ranks were at risk in the event the bridge collapsed."At the apex of the incident, as we were beginning to put water on it, if that span that may have collapsed, perhaps 20 firefighters, maybe 25," said Deputy Fire Chief Frank Large, who, with Fire Battalion Chief Robert Ciesielski, directed the firefighting efforts up on the bridge deck."That one could have lost some lives. We could be speaking differently at this time. But I really want to praise the men for doing a job well done.They did a great job," Ciesielski said.Get the WTAE Pittsburgh's Action News 4 AppCity firefighters involved in the effort are downplaying their heroism, crediting their teamwork, training, and leadership for quick action."We got very, very lucky. We got water on the fire quickly and kept that from happening. I'd rather be lucky than good, any day," Grenesko said. While firefighters downplay their heroism, their leaders give them credit."Some people would say you guys were pretty lucky, and I would say, no, our guys are pretty professional," Large said. "An old chief said to me once, 'You become a hero when you take the oath of this job.' It's kind of what we do.""I took this job for a reason. So, if something happens, something happens. But we do what we did and put it out," Miles said.Firefighters connected with workers under the bridge who got them to the fire via construction ladders and scaffolds."Without those two gentlemen, it would have been very difficult to navigate through those series of ladders and over the shielding that was installed under the bridge," Grenesko said.On the Liberty Bridge deck, they relayed water for 2,000 feet by connecting trucks and hoses. They then dropped hoses down to the firefighters fighting the flames below them."When the chief looked over and looked down and he saw me, he cracked a big old smile because he knew maybe this was going to be maybe a little easier than he thought," Grenesko said."I saw his face, it was very, I felt very comfortable knowing we have this fire under control quickly," Ciesielski said.While much of the public's attention was drawn to the large tarp that was burning at the bridge reconstruction site, it was the burning plastic that caused intense heat of up to 1,200 degrees. The pipes were 1.5 feet in diameter by 12 feet long and stacked several feet high. Firefighters said burning plastic produces intense heat and black smoke. "The guys did a tremendous job. It was a very challenging situation, a very unusual situation," Large said. "The system worked. What the citizens pay for, they got their money's worth on Friday."One of the most significant racecars ever, will be on show to the public for the forst time in England at Birmingham’s NEC during Autosport International on 10-13 January 2013. It stunned the crowds at the 2010 Chicago Auto Show, and it shocked the racing establishment.
Originally designed as a 2012 Indycar concept the Deltawing was certainly different, but then so is the man who dreamed it up, Ben Bowlby. The English designer was dubbed ‘the next Colin Champman’ by a British television documentary before he had even started to work full time in Motorsport. His last major project was the development of the Laurel Hill Aerodynamic Test Facility which literally turned wind tunnel testing inside out. His new car was striking to look at with a very narrow track at the front with a conventional width rear end. But there were no wings to be seen at all – indeed all of the downforce would be generated by the cars floor.
“We wanted to make a car that is twice as efficient in every way, it should use half the fuel, cost half as much, use half the engine power and weigh half as much yet still go as fast or even faster than a current Indycar” explained Bowlby at the cars launch.
But despite people like Peter Wight describing the car as “a work of genius” it proved to be far too radical for the seemingly conservative ICONIC group who would decide on which design to use for the 2012 Indycar season (they played it safe and plumped for a Dallara instead). When Indycar rejected Deltawing concept many thought that it would be the last time anyone would see the radical design. However the English designer was not keen to give up on the idea and continued to develop it.
There were thoughts of making a spec series based on the cars or possibly a new ‘open source’ racing formula with engineering freedom using the Deltawing as a base model. But Bowlby’s real target was hinted at in early 2011 when he sent Racecar Engineering the image below to illustrate an article
The closed cockpit and lights on the car could mean only one thing, a sportscar (or that Bowlby had replaced Lucius Fox as the head of Wayne Enterprises Applied Sciences). But it did not fit into any classification plus it was only a single seater. But at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2011 Bowlby appeared and it was announced that the DeltaWing would run as the 56th entry in the 2012 Le Mans 24 Hours, a slot reserved for innovative technology.
The new look Deltawing was not in the end a coupe, but an open two seater with the mandatory twin roll over structures found all open Le Mans cars. Further revisions included a smaller more faired in sidepod replacing the previous design which looked more like something borrowed off a Grumman A6-Intruder.
But getting an entry to Le Mans meant that the team actually had to build the car, and that meant that it would need a homologated chassis. Building one from scratch is fearsomely expensive so Bowlby decided to use an existing design. It just so happened that the disastrous Aston Martin AMR-ONE LMP1 project had just been abandoned and there were a number of abandoned tubs sat around at Prodrives HQ. It was perfect for the Deltawing. Whilst using the wider LMP tub would expand the middle of the car it would not drastically change the concept and it would reduce the crash test requirements. “The two-seater LMP1 tub is almost a drop-in fit to the DeltaWing concept. The 30 inch-wide front body work width is close to that of a two-seat sportscar FIA cockpit” Bowlby explained. The transmission and front suspension were the only other major areas where special development was required from a chassis point of view.
The EMCO built transmission weighs just 33kg and only has five speeds compared to the more conventional 6 speed transmissions used in other LMP cars. “The torque curve that we’re anticipating is very flat and we will take the weight advantage and reduce complexity. Running a five-speed and reverse keeps the gearbox light and small. We did spend a lot of time on the gearbox, which is one of the key elements.”Within the transmission, a torque-vectoring differential will be employed to maximize tire life and to fine-tune the DeltaWing’s balance.“First of all, the car does not need torque vectoring to make the car handle, or to get around a corner,” Bowlby clarified. “Our system is to improve handling through a system we call ‘efficient torque vectoring.’ We don’t use braking force with our system. We use planetary gears on either side of the differential. The external ring gears of the planetary sets are connected by a cross shaft and drop gear, such that we can turn the external ring gears of the planetary gears with an electric motor so create a differential of speed between the rear wheels, to a degree of our choosing, without altering the average speed of the pair. The differential speed (torque effect) will be controlled by a simple algorithm that will look at steering angle, lateral acceleration, and the path of the car.”The wheels and front suspension were a major challenge, for starters nobody makes wheels that are only four inches wide with a three stud pattern, well unless you want to use wheels from a Citroen 2CV, which would, we are informed by a grinning Bowlby, bolt right on (we are not sure if we believe him).As is the case with the wheels nobody makes a racing tyre to suit this rim size either, well that was the case until Michelin got involved with the project. The final DeltaWing front tyres are just 10/58-15, or less than 23 inches (58 cm) tall, and with a tread just four inches (10 cm) wide. By contrast, the 2011 Le Mans-winning Audi R18 TDI turbo-charged-diesel prototype utilized taller and wider front 36/71-18 tyres, approximately 28 inches (71 cm) tall with nearly 14 inches (36 cm) of tread width.The rears are less dramatic in size, because the DeltaWing is designed to race with 31/62-15 tyres while the average LMP2 rear tyre is sized at 37/71-18.Inside the tiny front wheels and tyres are specially developed brakes from PFC in the USA. The DeltaWing’s brake package was a collaborative effort between Performance Friction engineers and the Deltawing team with a very specific set of design criteria. The brake package includes Performance Friction’s Patented Continuous Fiber Carbon-Carbon Disc and pads along with forged aluminum monoblock ZR43 and ZR41 Zero Drag Calipers with patented pad retraction system. The ZR43 is popular with NASCAR teams running on super speedways like Daytona.“The front of the DeltaWing is extremely compact so we had to be very creative with the packaging of the design to ensure adequate performance over 24 hours, while keeping the component weights to a minimum. The car is unique in that 60 percent of the braking occurs at the rear wheels, but that doesn’t mean we could ignore the front” explains Bowlby.Aerodynamic development of the car was largely carried out at the Wind Shear full-scale tunnel in North Carolina, and in CFD. Unusually for Bowlby his own Laurel Hill facility was not used.The lightweight rapid design philosophy lead Bowlby directly to another leading engineering firms door, CRP technology. The unique design and construction of the Deltawing relies heavily on a cleaner aerodynamic shape that achieves a low drag coefficient while still creating enough downforce to turn competitive laptimes. This improvement requires less power to push the air at higher speeds, and improves the efficiency of the vehicle operation.Air filter used only on development carAerodynamic advantage was not the only goal of the DeltaWing team. Accelerating the car from low speed corners with only half the available power means the car can only weigh half as much, so an extreme weight loss program was key making the car work.
To compound the challenge, the timing was a very short 7 months from design to the first track test. So the team decided to use 3d printing technology together with the Windform high performance materials where applicable to shortcut the manufacturing time and save every bit of weight they could.
During this process, Laser Sintered Windform XT 2.0 was used not only in prototyping and testing, but in mission critical applications on the car during the 24 hours of lemans race, and continue to race at the Petit Le Mans, in the US. The DeltaWing team was able to move the bar for both racing and Additive Manufacturing applications forward.
Windform parts raced on car:
Bespoke electronics enclosures
Electrical breakout boxes
Transmission seal covers with integrated pressurized oil feed passages
Tow hook plinth
Windform parts used in prototyping, tooling & testing
Brake inlets and ducting
Air inlet ducting and filter enclosure
BLAT – Underbody extension flange ( 5 foot long bonded assembly)
The carbon fibre reinforced Windform XT 2.0 was used to construct the gearbox side covers: The DeltaWing utilized a non- “stressed member” engine and gearbox to reduce the structural requirements of the assembly as well as reducing the vibration loads introduced into the lightweight car.
The gearbox with integral bellhousing came in at a svelte 33kg, a fraction of the transmissions it shares the track with. Zack Eakin was the DeltaWing engineer responsible for the design of the gearbox and had this to say about the role Windform played in the design:
“Once we realized that we could use Windform XT as a race-able part at the elevated temperatures & pressures we run the gearbox oil at, it opened up a big possibility for us that would have been cost & time prohibitive otherwise. We went for a design that put the output seal on the halfshaft rather than around the outside of the Tripod joint which represents a big reduction in parasitic losses. But this design means that you have a seal that moves with suspension travel, a non-rotating CV Boot that will react the seal drag, and that you need to somehow get oil into the tripod cavity. Creating a metallic part that would orient the CV boot perpendicular to the average halfshaft angle, with integral oil drillings was a 5-Axis machining job that still would be heavier than what Windform gave us. With rapid prototyping technology we were able to make a very complicated geometry, keep gentle radius’s in the oil passages, and get rid of all unnecessary material without introducing great cost or lead time in the parts. We were able to bond the CV boots directly to the Windform, seal directly to them with an O-Ring, and run the part at temperatures as high as 135oC, and pressures over 1 bar gauge without any issues. Windform was a real homerun for us on these parts”
Zack also believes the electrical enclosures were another very good fit for RP technology “We designed a number of our own electrical controllers for things like the DRS & differential that we needed enclosures for. All an electrical enclosure needs to be is waterproof, durable, and have sufficient heat dissipation for the circuit it houses. We found that we couldn’t make an aluminum housing that was as light as a Windform one, let alone cost or time competitive. Often we would make a simple aluminum lid that the PCB would mount & heat sink to, which screwed into a windform box via some tiny threaded inserts.”
Windform XT 2.0 was the material mostly used for the manufacturing of parts as it represents the top level material for its mechanical & thermal characteristics. The use of 3d printing and Windform materials were fundamental to shorten the timing of car construction. In this case CRP Technology and CRP USA worked to support step by step the technical staff of the Delta Wing team in order to help them finding the best solution.
The first test
It turns! A few shakedown laps were conducted at Buttonwillow raceway, to prove the cars concept – it worked. But it was far from complete! A later test at Sebring also went well.
At Buttonwillow a generic RML 1.6 litre global race engine, note the aluminium cam cover visible above, but a bespoke engine would need to be constructed for the car.
Funding for the project and especially the engine came from a very unexpected source, Nissan. Darren Cox, now the firms motorsport boss, pushed for the company to back the project and supply a new engine via its long time collaborators RML.
The new engine was an incredibly lightweight (far lighter than any FIA-specification GRE unit) turbocharged inline 4 with direct injection. It ticked all the boxes and ran faultlessly out of the box. The car was ready for Le Mans.
At Le Mans
Quite correctly much curiosity surrounded the Deltawing since it was first announced. One of the questions they all asked was “will it steer?” the answer is yes, but how well will it steer was another question, with the car very capable in a straight line clocking up 306.9kph on the straight without having the correct gearing, pretty much as fast as any LMP2.
In the corners though it was the 29th fastest through the Porsche curves, and 45th fastest through the Ford chicane section. But that is not to say that the car cannot corner, the team were not trying for very fast laps when RCE did its timing, and the ACO had made it very clear to Bowlby that they did not want the car to lap faster than 3m45.
The team was forced to use wing mirrors on the car, though it had originally planned to use a Corvette style camera only. Using the mirrors adds 8% more drag according to Bowlby.
Despite the huge differences between the Deltawing and its base car the Aston Martin AMR-ONE, some things are retained such as the steering wheel and the driver control panel.
AFTER LE MANS
Le Mans did not end well for the DeltaWing team, but they would be back for more at Petit Le Mans, but it did not start well.
The accident in France was caused by a driver not being able to see the tiny black machine, and its profile compared to other cars is very obvious in the image above. To make the car more visible its roll hoops were painted a bright colour, but it did not work for everyone. Eventually the car was rebuilt and finished the 10 hour race North of Atlanta. That was going to be the end of the DeltaWing story, until the American Le Mans Series announced that the car could run the full season in 2013, and then NASCAR announced that in 2014 the car could continue as a LMP2 in the new unified North American Sportscar Championship, it will now be competing with Daytona Prototypes for the outright win at the 2014 Rolex 24, and it will later that year finally get to run at the track it was first designed for – Indianapolis.
Among the American exhibitors at the event, Aurora Bearing Company will showcase the DeltaWing project at Stand 8330 in Hall 8 during the 10-13 January 2013 event, having supplied rod end and spherical bearings for the project.
“Our involvement with DeltaWing has been incredibly rewarding, it’s been an honour to be part of such a significant race car project,” said John McCrory from Aurora Bearings. “Everywhere the car has gone, it’s turned heads, and we’re looking forward to showcasing the concept to fans at Autosport International.”
“DeltaWing is a perfect example of motorsport innovation, challenging the status quo and offering an alternative,” said Ian France, Autosport International Show Director. “It’s less than a year since it first appeared in public, and it’s really struck a chord with the motorsport community. We’re excited it will be a part of Autosport International 2013.”
DeltaWing will join a range of exciting new motorsport machinery at Birmingham’s NEC during Europe’s largest dedicated trade show. British manufacturer Radical will launch its newest supercar, the RXC at the show, along with the Sin 01 race car project.
With the opening two days dedicated to trade visitors, Autosport International tickets are available from £26, with discounts for group bookings.
To register call +44 (0)845 218 6012, or visit www.autosportinternational.comBy Lucy Piper
Sleep-wake disturbances are a persistent problem in people who have sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and one that is underestimated by patients, study data indicate.
"[O]ur data suggest that posttraumatic [sleep-wake disturbances] transform into a chronic state of disease in a majority of patients with TBI", say the researchers led by Lukas Imbach (University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland).
Yet the 31 participants with TBI of varying severity significantly underestimated levels of sleep need and excessive daytime sleepiness, making self-assessment an unreliable means of monitoring. This raises the question of whether all patients with TBI should be referred for sleep studies, the team comments.
Actigraphy assessment of the TBI patients showed that they still needed significantly more night-time sleep 18 months after injury than 42 healthy individuals, averaging 8.1 hours per 24 hours versus 7.1 hours, with no increase in daytime sleep.
The researchers explain in Neurology that this increased sleep need in the first 6 months after injury is likely to serve as a means of brain repair, but with no change occurring between 6 and 18 months, they suggest that TBI could also induce long-term damage to sleep-wake circuits in the brain.
This damage is likely to occur even in those with mild TBI, the team adds, finding that a significant association between TBI severity and sleep-wake disorders at 6 months was no longer evident 1 year on.
Objective measures of sleepiness revealed markedly diminished sleep latencies among TBI patients at 18 months, and significantly more patients in this group than among controls had chronic objective excessive daytime sleepiness, at 67% versus 19%.
By contrast, subjective measures of excessive daytime sleepiness revealed normal findings for the TBI patients, with no difference compared with controls but significant differences between objective and subjective measures for the patients.
Given that excessive daytime sleepiness is associated with public safety hazards such as car accidents, Imbach and colleagues propose that "if reasonable suspicion of posttraumatic [sleep-wake disturbances] occurs, patients with TBI should preferably be examined with objective sleep laboratory examinations rather than self-reported sleep measures".
And they believe that evidence from their study should be incorporated into future guidelines on the management of patients with TBI.
But in a related editorial, Brian Edlow (Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA) and Gert Jan Lammers (Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands) say that while the findings provide a basis for reconsidering the clinical management of chronic sleep-wake disturbances after TBI, more mechanistic and epidemiological data are needed and the link between abnormal sleep latency and impaired daytime performance needs to be firmly established first.
"Nevertheless, Imbach et al. make a compelling case that posttraumatic sleep-wake disorders may represent a silent epidemic", they conclude.
Licensed from medwireNews with permission from Springer Healthcare Ltd. ©Springer Healthcare Ltd. All rights reserved. Neither of these parties endorse or recommend any commercial products, services, or equipment.Bengaluru: Following in the footsteps of ride-hailing services Ola and Uber, food delivery start-up Swiggy is experimenting with surge pricing.
The food delivery firm is testing a new model in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, charging a delivery fee of ₹ 20 for orders placed on holidays, festivals and rainy days when fewer delivery staff are available. The fee will be passed on to the delivery staff, providing them an incentive to work on such days.
However, surge prices for ride-hailing services vary depending on supply and demand, while Swiggy charges a flat fee. Customers using the services of Uber Inc. and Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd) have to pay multiples of the basic fare when demand for cabs outstrips supply in a certain area.
Swiggy said the practice will soon be extended to all cities it operates in: Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
“It (surge) would be applicable on selective occasions like select national holidays, festivals and during days of excessive rains to incentivise the delivery executives. The surge fee received is passed on to the delivery executives," a company spokesperson said in an email response to queries.
This is not the first time that Swiggy is levying a delivery fee on consumers who are used to free delivery. In October last year, the company increased the minimum order value for free delivery from ₹ 150 to ₹ 250, with a delivery fee of ₹ 30 in a bid to cut losses and build a viable business model.
To be sure, Swiggy’s peers in the US such as Postmates and DoorDash charge a fee of $3-7 for each delivery. According to industry experts, the average order value in the US is around $20, significantly more than the average ₹ 300 in India. Consequently, delivery companies in India, which charge clients a commission of 10-20% of the order value, end up losing money on every delivery that costs upwards of ₹ 50.
An additional delivery fee, which is the norm in the US, will consequently help firms cover the delivery cost as well as add to the their bottom line, at a time when investors have slowed down investments, compelling start-ups to shift their focus from splurging on customer acquisition to unit economics and profitability.
Swiggy, however, maintained that the additional fee is passed on to the delivery personnel and does not add to the company’s revenue. “This is not a source of revenue for Swiggy. Surge will not add to the Swiggy bottom line. It acts as mechanism for enabling additional deliveries. Additionally, this is an incentive for the delivery executives," the spokesperson added.
Swiggy, owned by Bundl Technologies Pvt. Ltd, has so far raised at least ₹ 340 crore from Accel Partners, SAIF Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, among others.
The company competes with Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd, which entered the food delivery business in April last year. In an interview with Mint in December, Zomato co-founder Deepinder Goyal said it will invest $40 million in food-ordering over the next six months to capture a dominant share of the market in India and the UAE.
With Foodpanda India being forced to cut spending on discounts and advertising by its parent company and Tinyowl Technology Pvt. Ltd struggling to raise fresh capital, Swiggy and Zomato have pulled away from the rest of the pack.
A Foodpanda spokesperson said in an email response that it does not levy a surge fee, but charges a regular delivery fee for orders fulfilled through its own logistics fleet. An email sent to Zomato did not elicit a response.
Swiggy is also planning to set up kitchens jointly with restaurants as it looks for higher revenues. These kitchens will function as production units without dine-in facilities and cater to demand generated on Swiggy from surrounding localities, Mint reported on 2 December.DETROIT, MI -- Christina Hayes was at the final game of World Series last year. She watched the 2012 Tigers take their last breathe before falling to the San Francisco Giants in a depressing sweep. “It was painful. Sad. Like 'Ugh, we made it this far,' ” said Hayes before hopping onto a shuttle bus from Grosse Pointe to Comerica Park on Friday morning for the Tigers home opener. Opening Day for her marks the end of that agony and a new spring of hope. Hayes also attended the final 1984 game when the Tigers last won the World Series. “I want to do that again,” she said. “I think we need to finish what we started last year.” She joined about a dozen fans on the Detroit Bus Company shuttle, morning libations in hand, kicking off the unofficial holiday with a bumpy, boisterous ride through the city. The group shared a bottle opener and clinked thermoses filled with Bloody Marys, bottles of Heineken and hard cider and cans of Yuenling. They talked, cheered and laughed about the pickles soaking in their Bloody Marys and Mike Ilitch’s alleged toupee. “It’s tradition,” Hayes said. “It’s the beginning of spring. Spring doesn’t begin until Opening Day.” Hayes and her husband Kevin recently moved back home to the Detroit area after living for 17 years in Chicago, a block from Wrigley Field, where they never quite became full-fledged Cubs fans. The Grosse Pointe couple said the Opening Day party in Chicago is even more intense than it is in Detroit, but here, they said, people actually watch the game. Well, maybe not everyone. Amanda Marsack of Harrison Township and Jackie Guajardon of Wayne don’t have tickets to the game. They wore Tigers gear and swooned over Justin Verlander and Alex Avila, but they rode the shuttle Downtown with the sole intention of partying. A block-wide Greektown Opening Day celebration is their destination. “I think it’s like a holiday,” said Guajardon. “We took the day off. We didn’t go to work today.” They aren’t sure whether they’ll actually catch any of the game. “Hopefully I can see a TV somewhere,” Guajardon said. The group got off the bus outside the park and blended into the massive crowd of fans, ticket scalpers, T-shirt salesmen and dancing sandwich mascots with a band playing Sweet Home Alabama somewhere in the background. The Hayes weren’t sure where they’d head before or after the 1 p.m. game. “Sometimes, the best times are had when you don’t know what’s coming,” said Kevin Hayes, 41.
Follow Khalil AlHajal on Twitter @DetroitKhalil or on Facebook at Detroit Khalil. He can be reached at [email protected] or 313-643-0527.Senior Democratic lawmakers are due to speak at a march on April 15 ― the day when Americans’ tax returns are typically due ― to demand that President Donald Trump release his tax returns.
“The Tax March,” as the progressive groups organizing it have dubbed it, will begin with a rally and speeches at the U.S. Capitol, followed by a parade that passes the Trump International Hotel, as well as the FBI and IRS buildings. Over 100 smaller marches are due to take place in cities across the country.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee; Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee; and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) will join a host of faith, policy and grassroots leaders scheduled to speak on Trump’s continued lack of financial transparency.
“I am proud to join Americans across this country in holding Trump accountable for deceiving the American people and refusing to tell the truth about his financial entanglements and conflicts of interest,” Rep. Waters said in a statement announcing her participation. “He should have to face the consequences of trying to hide from the American public.”
A broad of array of liberal groups and labor unions are convening for the Tax March, including MoveOn.org, Public Citizen, Demos, Credo, the Working Families Party, the National Women’s Law Center and the American Federation of Teachers.
They also plan to address what they believe are the inequities of the current tax system.
“Donald Trump and his billionaire Cabinet are proposing even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy when what we need is a fairer system that allows our nation to meet the needs of its people,” Demos president Heather McGhee said in a statement.
Although the date of the march was chosen because it is usually Tax Day, this year individual tax returns are due on Tuesday, April 18. April 15 is a Saturday and the following Monday government workers have off for Emancipation Day, a Washington, D.C. holiday.
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters President Donald Trump holds a CEO town hall in Washington on April 4, 2017. He could be thinking of how he would feel if he had to release his tax returns.
It is extremely unlikely that a liberal protest march will prompt Trump to release his tax returns. The day’s actions are instead aimed at reminding the public of Trump’s historic lack of transparency at a time when the president is struggling politically.
Trump is the first president in four decades who has not released his tax returns or comparable financial information. The practice became a tradition when former President Richard Nixon released his returns after he was audited.
Critics have wondered if Trump has something to hide by refusing to disclose information about his finances, such as whether he is violating the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause prohibiting a president from receiving foreign gifts or payments. The opacity of Trump’s finances also makes it impossible to know whether he has a financial stake in pursuing certain policies.
White House officials insist that Trump has no plans to release the returns. Senior adviser Kellyanne Conway claimed in January that Trump’s election showed that the public does not care.
Congressional Republicans have voted down Democrats’ efforts to use obscure legal provisions to compel their disclosure.The Michigan and Michigan State football teams will do battle in the Big House this Saturday.
But the marching bands will be working together; during halftime, at least.
According to a Facebook post by the University of Michigan Marching Band, the Wolverines and Spartans will be collaborating for a special halftime performance titled "State of Michigan."
Little is known about the performance or what it will entail, but the band did offer one hint. Along with the post is a graphic of the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan. It seems entirely possible that one band could create each peninsula, or perhaps it will be a mixture of both bands creating both peninsulas.
Either way, it will be quite the sight under the lights at Michigan Stadium. Kickoff between the Wolverines (4-0) and Spartans (3-1) is set for 7:30 p.m. on ABC.I write this on Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection and hope in the Christian calendar, but such a bright promise looks a bit thin given what is going on in our world, our country: what looks like a mass outbreak of mental illness among our political class.
I say this because here is a group of people – journalists, politicians, and other Very Serious Persons – who have hated our new President from the get-go. He’s Hitler, he’s Mussolini, he’s Pepe the frog! He’s this, he’s that, he’s Our National Nightmare! And yet the minute he starts bombing foreigners he’s suddenly not so bad after all. Over at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, the CIA’s journalistic front man, says he’s “becoming a credible foreign policy leader.” Ruth Marcus opines that we’re witnessing “the normalization of Donald Trump.” Finally, she enthuses, “rationality is dawning” on the forty-fifth President! Among the liberal elite, the hosannas were well nigh universal. As Ann Coulter noted:
“Cable news hosts gushed, ‘Trump became president of the United States tonight!’ On MSNBC, Brian Williams called the bombing ‘beautiful’ three times in less than a minute. Sen. Lindsey Graham (one of the ‘women of the Senate,’ according to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) compared Trump to Reagan. The New York Times headlined an article, ‘On Syria Attack, Trump’s Heart Came First.’”
Fareed Zakaria’s joy over the bombing seemed to indicate that, for him, it was practically an erotic experience. And this weird bloodlust wasn’t limited to the liberal precincts of the commentariat – far from it. When we dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan, Kimberly Guilfoyle practically had an orgasm over at Fox News. Sitting there in her low cut red dress, her breasts heaving with passion, her lips parted, and an ecstatic smile plastered on her heavily made-up face, she hailed the bombing as if it were the climax – so to speak – of a pornographic movie: “America is back!” Oh, yeeeesssss!!!!
The craziness is pandemic, and it doesn’t only revolve around war-worship. The new sadism is flavored with the spice of paranoia. A major political party is now in the throes of a paranoid delusion that the Russians are in control of the US government, and one of their agents sits in the Oval Office, where he is addressed as “Mr. President.” And not only that, but someone who is invited to write for the New York Times and is considered a legitimate journalist is telling us that …. well, see for yourself.
Okay, Louise Mensch may be a bit of an outright lunatic, and yet we have no less than two congressional committees investigating this conspiracy theory, with the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and Rachel Maddow all doing their best to validate it. Paranoia used to be considered a form of mental illness: today it is regarded as just another ideology, and not a fringe phenomenon but the animating style and overriding preoccupation of what we used to call “liberalism” in this country.
So we have both sadism and paranoia as widespread symptoms of mental illness in our political class – and with these two usually come another unattractive personality trait: delusions of grandeur. This form of craziness often accompanies both sadism and paranoia, and we can see it manifested in the assumption that a country which is nearly bankrupt, and which hasn’t won a war since the end of World War II, can fix the world’s problems by dropping some bombs.
In Syria, for example, we have what is at least a six-sided war, involving the Syrian government, the Turks, the Kurds, the “moderate” Islamist rebels, al-Qaeda, and ISIS, and our political class stands up and cheers because President Trump launched 59 missiles at Syrian military base. The real effect is almost nil, although it does make the situation a bit worse, and yet with all the applause one would think we actually accomplished something. Oh, but we’re told that it “sent a message”! Like lobbing the MOAB into Afghanistan, it was a purely symbolic act.
Symbolic thinking is just another form of pathology, related to psychosis: when psychic pain precludes the perception of concretes, the mind resorts to pure symbolism, and this is also common in paranoiacs. A sick mind imputes meaning to unrelated phenomena, and letting go of this epistemological error is the road to recovery.
Over time, as the psychosis develops, a person experiencing mental illness begins to have hallucinations: the symbolic thinking manifests itself as images in the brain. As one former psychotic describes the process:
“Hallucinatory reality is analogous to dreaming in the same room where a television is on. The physical reality of the television is translated into the idiosyncratic symbols of the person’s dreaming and the person’s consciousness experiences the dream, not the television. In the same way, the themes and events of the individual’s personal world become projected into the symbolic hallucinations of the psychotic state and create a highly exaggerated symbolic framework that parallels the actual reality of the schizophrenic.”
Now imagine that the people on television are themselves psychotic: in “reporting” what they regard as the news, and the meaning of that news, they are projecting their own symbolic hallucinations. Yes, they are telling us about things that really happened – the Syria strike, the MOAB dropped on Afghanistan – but they are also creating a highly exaggerated framework, a “narrative,” that is absolutely unhinged.
Our society is experiencing an episode of what can only be called mass psychosis. Is it
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based on CIA records, Bush was not fully briefed by the CIA until April 8, 2006, about four years after the CIA tortured some detainees.
"CIA records state that when the president was briefed, he expressed discomfort with the 'image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on himself,' " the report reads.
The report also points to a document prepared in September 2006, the same month Bush publicly acknowledged the U.S. was holding detainees in secret prisons. It was intended as a Q&A to help the National Security Council principals deal with fallout of public disclosure. One question asked, "What role did the president play... Was he briefed on the interrogation techniques, and if so when?"
The answer: "President was not of course involved in CIA's day to day operations — including who should be held by CIA and how they should be questioned — these decisions are made or overseen by CIA directors."Time and again in recent years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has berated the West — and the U.S. more specifically — for having what it calls a Cold War mentality, a mindset that it said was detrimental to relations with China and undermined security in Asia. Fair enough, but according to a new video co-produced by China’s National Defense University (NDU) that was leaked late last month, a Cold War is exactly what the CCP needs, and contact with the West is a poison pill that must be avoided at all cost.
It’s admittedly hard to tell how many members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the CCP adhere to such views, but there is little doubt that 较量无声, or Silent Contest, has some appeal among the more extremist elements within the party, which itself in recent months has warned against the harmful influence of Western values and culture, and passed new regulations to counter their supposedly deleterious effects on Chinese society.
Besides NDU, the PLA General Staff Department and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences were involved in producing the documentary, in which a number of senior military officers from various departments are featured. General Liu Yazhou, the political commissar at National Defense University (his father in law was former president Li Xiannian, one of the so-called “eight immortals”), and Wang Xibin, president of NDU, are listed as supervisors for the project.
Interestingly, as recently as 2010, Liu was regarded as a potential reformist and voice of moderation within the PLA after he remarked that China must either reform its system U.S.-style or go the way of the Soviet Union. This apparent shift (we should note that Liu was promoted to general in July 2012) raises several questions about the existence, influence, and durability of hoped-for reformers within the PLA.
The 100-minute film, which was taken down from popular sites like Weibo soon after it was leaked, but which remains available on YouTube, takes a shot at pretty much everything Western, from U.S. think tanks — the Fulbright Fellowship, the Ford Foundation and the Carter Center are singled out — to electronic music and luxury brands, which are all elements of a plot to “brainwash” Chinese society and destroy China from within.
“The American elites … confidently believe that the best way to disorganize China is to work closely with it, allowing it to gradually become part of the U.S.-led international and political system,” Liu is quoted as saying.
The conspiracy also extends to Hong Kong, where the U.S. and British consulates are reportedly using their “unusually large” resources in the territory to infiltrate and destabilize China by influencing events such as the annual June 4 and July 1 rallies, the movement against national (“Chinese”) education, as well as Occupy Central.
Even military-to-military exchanges, a hallmark of improved ties between Washington and Beijing over the past year, are regarded in the movie not as a means to build confidence between the two competitors, but rather as part of an insidious plot to “disorganize China.” The undercurrent is that the U.S. “soft” strategy of engagement is potentially more dangerous than its military hardware.
One of the lessons that the Chinese are ostensibly expected to draw from the documentary, which can be regarded as a critique of China’s “open door policy,” is that contact with the West is nefarious. In fact, the film attributes the collapse of the Soviet Union and other closed societies in large part to a U.S.-led global conspiracy.
More tellingly, it claims that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not the precursor to the end the Cold War, as history books have informed us since the watershed event, but rather that the end of the Cold War caused the collapse of the USSR. The Cold War, and the closed, repressive, militarized, and pathologically paranoid system that it had engendered within the Soviet empire was therefore crucial to the survival of the USSR. The foundations of that system were slowly eroded via contact with the West, and once the USSR lost control over the public sphere, the whole building came crashing down.
To avoid a similar fate, the CCP must therefore ensure it retains a tight grip on every aspect of Chinese society.
If this is indeed the conclusion reached by CCP officials (at this point we must regard the documentary as part of the ongoing dialogue and jockeying for influence that is occurring within the CCP, and not as a policy statement), the ramifications of that shift could be far reaching. Not only could exchanges with the U.S. and other major Western powers suffer, but a country like Taiwan, which is often touted as a model for China and whose growing interactions with the Asian giant it is hoped will spark the flame of democratization, could also suffer the consequences. If Taiwan’s democracy and open society are regarded as a Western import and part of a U.S.-led plot to undermine China, the CCP could conclude that it is in its best interest to pre-empt Taiwan by destroying its liberal way of life, a process that some argue has already begun.
Not so long ago, Beijing’s main complaint with the U.S. was that it was stuck in time and unable to think beyond the strategies of the Cold War. Containment was bad. All Washington needed to do was open up to China and the relationship would flourish. For various reasons, the U.S. did just as prescribed. But now Beijing — or at least Silent Contest and its masterminds — warns the viewer that the ensuing exchanges are corrosive and threaten China’s very existence.
China cannot have it both ways. So which one will it be?Backing up an earlier rumor, zombies are returning to Call of Duty's online multiplayer as part of a "season pass" full of DLC that costs almost as much as Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare itself.
Correction: Activision has clarified that the zombies maps will be made available separately; a season pass is not required to get them. No price or launch date for them has been announced, but previous packs were about $15.
The original post follows.
The $49.99 season pass, announced through a GameStop press release, includes four packs of multiplayer maps and a bonus map, "Atlas Gorge," which is a remake of Pipeline from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
The release did not give a specific arrival date for Advanced Warfare's zombie maps. The first map pack is due to arrive on Xbox One in January, followed by other platforms later.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's official launch date is Tuesday, but Best Buy is opening a bunch of stores at midnight ET — tonight — to sell the game. That means 9 p.m. today on the west coast.Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said Friday he opposes an increase in the debt ceiling absent “significant reforms,” arguing that President Obama ended up negotiating during the 2011 fight over the debt ceiling despite Mr. Obama’s own previous pledges.
“I will tell you in 2011, the president said, on the debt ceiling — remember we had that big debt ceiling fight — he said I will not negotiate with a gun to my head,” Mr. Paul said on Fox News’ “Outnumbered” program. “You know what he did? He negotiated. So leverage works, but only if you’re steadfast, only if you’re courageous, and only if you say I’m willing to go through the deadline.”
The Treasury Department has warned Congress the U.S. risks defaulting on its loans if the debt ceiling is not raised by Nov. 3.
Mr. Paul, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate, argued there is plenty of tax revenue to pay interest on the debt, as well as for items like Social Security, Medicare and soldiers’ salaries, “and then that’s about it.”
“But then maybe we ought to have a debate on the 30 or 40 percent of whatever else is left that we don’t have enough money for,” he said.
Mr. Paul had been asked a bit earlier in the program about the prospects of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, who has reluctantly entered the race to replace Speaker John A. Boehner and is working to consolidate support among the House GOP conference.
“Whether or not he succeeds or not, the real question is: Are Republicans in Washington going to get a handle on spending?” Mr. Paul said. “I, frankly, would not raise the debt ceiling unless we have significant reforms.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.When the US supreme court struck down the federal definition of marriage as between a man and a woman in a historic ruling last year, it left open the question of the constitutionality of similar state laws and, with it, the door to a host of legal challenges.
Over the past few weeks, the momentum that kicked off with America's highest court's recognition of same-sex marriage in June has accelerated rapidly through the lower courts. The end of last year and beginning of 2014 have seen a series of favourable civil rights decisions by federal judges over challenges brought by gay and lesbian couples living in some of the 33 states with same-sex marriage bans, ruling them unconstitutional.
States that voluntarily embraced marriage equality tended to be clustered in the north and north-east, such as New York, Washington DC and Massachusetts. But since last year's ruling, court challenges are gathering pace in traditionally conservative states with voter-approved bans on same-sex marriage. Last week, Virginia became the first southern state ever to have its voter-approved prohibition on same-sex marriage overturned. The recent election of a Democratic governor and attorney general accelerated the moves there.
Change is happening so rapidly that gay rights advocates say they expect a wave of legal victories they hope will continue all the way to the supreme court.
The marriage project national director at Lambda Legal, Camilla Taylor, said: "We've reached a watershed where public officials feel ashamed of discriminating against people and are sensitive to the fact that they could go down in history as being on one side or the other of a struggle for civil rights."
According to Taylor, the "game changer" was the decision in United States v Windsor, the case of an octagenarian lesbian widow who sued to claim federal estate tax relief, which resulted in the supreme court striking down part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
Taylor said: "The Windsor decision added tremendous momentum. It's this feeling, this expectation of success for the plaintiff couples in these lawsuits. This is something that the courts take into account as well. That isn't to say we won't see a few outliers. I think the majority of court decisions will vindicate the gay and lesbian civil rights movement."
There are more than 20 federal cases charging ahead in which same-sex couples are challenging either their state's ban on same-sex marriage or a failure to recognise a legal marriage from another state. Still more are challenging related rights, such as adoption for same-sex couples.
Taylor said the rulings and the failure of public officials to defend what they describe as discriminatory laws show a consensus that will hold water when a case gets to the supreme court. She said: "The supreme court does not like to weigh in too early or take a position too far in advance of public opinion. It likes to sweep in the recalcitrant states on national consensus. And more and more we are seeing a national consensus. These rights are being vindicated in the north-east, in the heartlands, in the south-west and soon, they will be vindicated in the south."
In her ruling to strike down Virginia's same sex voter-approved marriage ban last week, Judge Arenda Wright Allen agreed with legal analysis by federal judges in Utah and Oklahoma, both conservative states – Oklahoma is known as the "buckle" of the Bible belt. All three rulings found that the bans violate the due process and equal protection clauses of the US constitution's 14th amendment.
Also last week, a judge in Kentucky ruled that the state must recognise legal same sex marriages performed in other states and in Nevada, the state attorney general, a Democrat, and its governor, a Republican, said they would no longer defend their state's same-sex marriage ban.
Both Utah and Oklahoma states are appealing, seeking to reinstate the ban. They have been joined by five religious groups, including Mormons, Catholics and evangelicals.
All of the courts that have been faced with the issue since June have ruled that state bans on same-sex marriage or failure to recognise a legal same-sex marriage from elsewhere is unconstitutional.
A professor of law at the University of California, Douglas NeJaime, said these "are all states that politically weren't going to move to same-sex marriage any time soon. The courts are forcing their hands. We seem to have all of the lower courts going in the one direction in saying that Windsor applies to these state laws so that the states have to recognise same-sex marriage."
Not including Utah and Oklahoma, 27 states still have constitutional prohibitions on same-sex marriage. Four more – Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wyoming – do not permit it through state laws.
Ken Connelly of Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal group that has defended traditional marriage across the US, took the opposite view. He said he expected the rulings in favour of same-sex marriage to be overturned on appeal.
He said: "We would say that each one of the courts misreads Windsor. No one can claim that there's anything unusual in Oklahoma's marriage laws or in Utah's marriage laws. Windsor affirmed the sovereignty of the states like New York or other states to define marriage as they see fit."Keep a Backup of Installed Packages
You might prefer to have a clean system on reinstall but sometimes it is nice to reinstall applications from a previous machine/setup. Keeping a backup list of packages will make this a snap. Just give your package manager a list of all the packages you want it to install and let it rip.
Here are the backup and restore methods for each of the major distros/package managers.
Debian / Ubuntu
Backup
dpkg --get-selections > installed-software.log
Restore
dpkg --set-selections < installed-software.log apt-get dselect-upgrade
Arch Linux
Backup
pacman -Qqe | grep -v "$(pacman -Qmq)" > pkglist
Restore
pacman -S $(cat pkglist)
Fedora
Backup
rpm -qa > installed-software.bak
Restore
yum -y install $(cat installed-software.bak)
Gentoo
Backup
cp /var/lib/portage/world installed-software.bak
Restore
cat installed-software.bak | xargs -n1 emerge -uv
OpenSuse
Backup
rpm -qa –queryformat ‘%{NAME} ‘ > installed-software.bak
RestoreSofia the First
This is one of my daughter’s “Big Three” shows (Sofia the First, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and Curious George). My Little Pony is a much better show than Sofia the First, but also centers around a ruling class of Alicorn Princesses and lowly earth-ponies who work the land. This concept that Orwell identified in Charles Dickens books is something I’ve noticed in plenty of other places. Another great example is Downton Abbey, a show so bewitching in it’s glorification of the aristocracy it once managed to turn you against a maid character who had aspirations beyond servitude, thinking she ought to keep her mouth shut about her “dreams” and appreciate the fact that she has a good job in a nice house with a kind family. Can’t she see how decent Lord Grantham is?? She should consider herself lucky!
Mike Dawson is the author of the graphic novels Freddie & Me and Troop 142, as well as the collection of short stories, Ace-Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms. His next graphic novel, Angie Bongiolatti, a story about socialism, sex, and Online Learning, will be published by Secret Acres in April of 2014.In an effort to get the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement ratified before a new president and Congress take over next year, the White House Council of Economic Advisors has warned that congressional failure to pass the 12-nation free trade deal means U.S. firms could lose out to China in the Japanese market, resulting in the loss of potential business and nearly 5 million jobs.
“In the absence of TPP, countries have already made it clear that they will move forward in negotiating their own trade agreements that exclude the United States. One such agreement is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a trade agreement that involves China, Japan and many of the dynamic and fast-growing economies of Asia, which could potentially fill the void left if Congress fails to pass TPP,” the council said in its latest report released Thursday.
“There are, conservatively, 35 goods-producing industries directly at risk of increased competitive pressure from China in the Japanese market if RCEP goes into effect. These 35 industries account for just under 10 percent of total U.S. exports of goods to Japan. (They) employ close to 5 million workers and maintain 162,000 business establishments in the U.S.,” the report added.
Of the industries labeled at risk, agriculture, food manufacturing, and fishing are expected to be hit especially hard without a TPP agreement. The council predicts that if the RCEP comes into force, it would probably lower Japanese tariffs on Chinese goods by between five and 10 percent while U.S. products would have tariffs nearly twice as high as Chinese products.
U.S. goods exported to Japan amounted to $62.4 billion last year.
The Council of Economic Advisors warning comes as President Barack Obama and pro-TPP business lobbies make a final push to get Congress to pass it during the lame duck session before a new president and Congress are inaugurated next year.
But other academic and government studies as well as a World Bank report predict TPP will provide few if any benefits to the American economy over the coming decades, and will likely mean job losses. Legal experts and Nobel Prize winning economists are also opposed to an investor-state dispute settlement provision in the TPP that makes it easier for U.S.-based foreign corporations to sue the American government if it passes laws they believe hurt their profits.
“Under this provision, the TPP would newly empower the U.S. subsidiaries of more than 9,500 Japanese and other TPP-nation firms to attack U.S., federal, state and local policies and government actions,” said Lori Wallach of the Washington-based consumer watchdog group Public Citizen in July.
With U.S. presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump opposed to the TPP, at least in its current form, and with key U.S. Senators also opposed and saying there will be no vote on the treaty during the lame duck session of Congress, the trade pact’s prospects in the U.S. remain murky.
TPP supporters hope Hillary Clinton will reverse her position if elected and push for renegotiation. But the final decision is with Congress, where media polls show incumbent pro-TPP Senators in key swing states lagging behind challengers who are opposed to the treaty.For the past five years, Massachusetts has mandated that insurers provide coverage for medical services related to the health of transgender people, including gender-affirming medical services. But it was not clear how well the mandate was working or whether people were able to access care now that services were covered. Were insurers covering the right services? What barriers were being encountered?
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation’s new program, the Health Equity Roundtable, set out to find answers to these questions by bringing together transgender men, transgender women, and transgender youth, along with parents, advocates, and clinicians to discuss the issues patients encounter in trying to access high-quality health services. Hosted by a well regarded local health center as a neutral convener, the roundtable drew a diverse group of transgender stakeholders who were eager to share their experiences about health care and health coverage. Thirty-three people participated in this first session, as well as two Harvard Pilgrim executives.
What we discovered are numerous areas in which the health care system in Greater Boston fails the needs of transgender individuals. The findings are highlighted in Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation’s new report on Transgender Health Care in Greater Boston.
Shortage Of Providers
The report identified a serious shortage of providers who can sensitively and competently provide care—even routine care, such as annual physicals or gynecological care—to transgender patients. All participants felt that health care professionals lacked even basic knowledge about trans health issues, and clinicians themselves reported a lack of training related to trans health across all professional disciplines.
It was often difficult for patients to get referrals to health care and mental health professionals competent to provide care, and even with referrals, patients reported that there were not enough skilled providers to provide care. Good primary care was not easy to find, even for patients who did not require medical services related to trans health. Many otherwise capable medical practices were not comfortable with or competent in providing care for trans patients, participants said.
Long Waits
Participants described long wait times to access doctors and other clinicians with experience in caring for transgender people. This issue was especially problematic for transgender children, who must begin puberty-blocking drugs within a few months of achieving certain growth milestones. With the wait to see a competent pediatric endocrinologist being potentially longer than a year, the inability to access care in a timely manner can have lifelong negative effects on the patient.
Difficult-To-Understand Coverage
Participants said it was often difficult and confusing to learn what was and was not covered by a particular insurance plan. Since services related to gender cross several medical specialties, information from insurers might be scattered and difficult to find. Getting approvals for care was often difficult, and it was not always clear when approvals were needed or from whom.
Accessing Quality Care
For parents, there were a number of issues that made getting care for their children difficult, including the fact that there were very few pediatric endocrinologists who were competent to provide assessments and care for children and adolescents. Some parents reported encountering clinicians who exhibited a lack of knowledge about gender in developing children. Bias and prejudice also emerged as powerful themes that could create an often hostile and anxiety-producing climate in the health care setting. Participants said they felt especially vulnerable in emergency rooms, which led to patients avoiding seeking care when needed. Transgender patients who were part of a racial or ethnic minority were seen as being at a significant disadvantage due to factors including racism, poverty, language barriers, and lack of social support.
Out-Of-Network Coverage
The report also found that there is a wide variation in health insurance coverage for transgender care and in how out-of-network coverage is managed. Out-of-network coverage was seen as especially important as currently there are only two surgeons in New England, located at Boston Medical Center, who provide gender-affirming genital surgical services, and currently those services are only available for transgender women (individuals transitioning from male to female.)
Need For More Robust Research And Training
Both providers and patients felt that there needed to be a great deal more training for health care professionals to improve the competency of services being provided. That training needs to begin in schools that train medical providers of all disciplines, participants agreed. Research also needs to be strengthened, to learn about specific health challenges that might emerge as transgender people age. For instance: What are the recommendations for treating cardiac disease for someone on long-term hormone therapy? What are the risks and benefits of different hormone dosing levels? What particular health issues can we expect to affect an aging trans person?
Rigid Diagnostic Coding
Lastly, the health care system’s dependence on binary coding in patient systems (that is, “Female” or “Male”) creates problems for people, especially when needed care does not line up neatly with clinical decision screens. For example, participants cited difficulty getting approved for pap tests or contraception if their gender marker was male in their medical record, a common problem for trans men who may not have opted for surgery. The lack of more flexible gender options also limits insurers’ and providers’ ability to track quality indicators, such as recommended screenings, clinician participants noted. Were trans men and women getting periodic screening at the same rates as other patients?
Seeking Positive Change For Transgender Patients
While other reports have explored access to coverage and bias in the health care available to transgender people, this is the first report that explores some of the “nuts and bolts” of providing care once access to health insurance is assured. In general, participants in the roundtable flagged training for providers both in school and afterwards, making coverage information clear and easy to find, removing barriers to getting referrals and timely appointments, and using dedicated care managers as important to improving the health care experience for transgendered people and their families. The report makes a number of recommendations for clinical services and insurers.
Harvard Pilgrim launched this Health Equity Roundtable program to help the organization and, more broadly, the health care industry tackle some of the important health disparities of our day. By coming together and talking face-to-face in a safe environment, we were able to ask questions and gather information from those individuals most directly impacted. We hope that by sharing this information with other health care professionals, we can begin to get a better understanding of the issues facing transgender patients, create positive change, and approach health equity for all.We now have an idea of just what Elon Musk's Boring Company is going to be for. Yes, it's to solve traffic, but it looks like it isn't meant just to be your usual tunnel for cars. In a new update today, the company asserts that it's actually building a tunnel that can also run the Hyperloop.
Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk is ready to conquer space, roads, roofs, and now even tunnels. What started out as a simple musing on Twitter has become a full-blown startup aptly named The Boring Company. Today, the company added an FAQ page to their website, which offers an abundance of new information about their specific goals.
The most notable announcement that was finally confirmed? The Hyperloop.
The FAQ explains that Musk's initial inspiration was: "to solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic." The solution is to go three-dimensional, which could be done using flying cars - an idea Musk doesn't think is very viable - or to go underground.
"The other option is to 'go down' and build tunnels," the website states, as these provide a fair amount of perks, including weatherproofing and the practically limitless layers of tunnels that could be built… much better than malfunctioning cars potentially plummeting from the sky.
But there is a problem. First, there's the cost. Second, existing tunnels can't support the Hyperloop pods. Musk's new company is out to fix this.
"Currently, tunnels are really expensive to dig, with some projects costing as much as $1 billion per mile. In order to make a tunnel network feasible, tunnelling costs must be reduced by a factor of more than 10," explains the new FAQ.
To make the tunnel more cost effective and efficient, its diameter is going to be less than 4 metres (14 feet) - whereas normal tunnels (one-lane road tunnels) are usually about 8.5 metres (28 feet) in diameter. To do this, Musk's tunnel company would use what it calls an "electric sled".
Musk's Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) - or Godot - is ready to start digging the first among these network of tunnels. However, as the TBM isn't even as fast as a snail yet, Musk is determined to find ways to make tunnel digging faster - "to defeat the snail in a race" by increasing the TBM's speed, which will also cut down costs.
Hyperloop Confirmed
So, there's now a place to start digging this tunnel under Los Angeles and a machine to do it. But what is this tunnel really meant for? At first, many thought Musk's tunnels would be like every other tunnel - except they would be longer and could potentially connect "LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood and Sherman Oaks," as Musk said in an Instagram post.
However, as mentioned above, more details have come to light.
Since the company's introduction, many have speculated that the tunnels' true purpose was to work in tandem with the Hyperloop. This is the real clincher here. It seems like The Boring Company isn't just going to be for cars.
"The electric skate can transport automobiles, goods, and/or people. And if one adds a vacuum shell, it is now a Hyperloop Pod which can travel at 600+ miles per hour [970 km/h]," the site explains.
The Hyperloop is another idea from Musk that is set to revolutionize transportation. It promises to connect individuals around the globe, making long-distance travel both speedy and remarkably affordable.
Initially discussed in 2013, the transport system would use a propulsion based on electromagnetism that could propel pods forward in vacuum-sealed steel tunnel at unprecedented speeds.
Cities in Europe, America, and the Middle East have expressed interest in adopting their own Hyperloop tracks, and study groups are at work making the concept a reality. While he doesn't have a company working directly on Hyperloop technology, Musk has been behind several initiatives to turn it into a reality. Now, with The Boring Company, Musk is building a platform to launch and test the various Hyperloop efforts he helped put into motion.
This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.Execution by beheading (decapitation).
Note : Some people may find the images on this page disturbing - they do not load automatically.
Contents.
Historical background.
Beheading with a sword or axe goes back a very long way in history, because like hanging, it was a cheap and practical method of execution in early times when a sword or an axe was always readily available.
The Greeks and the Romans considered beheading a less dishonourable and less painful form of execution than other methods in use at the time. The Roman Empire used beheading for its own citizens whilst crucifying others.
Beheading was widely used in Europe and Asia until the 20th century, but now is confined to Saudi Arabia, and Iran. One man was reportedly beheaded in Iran in 2003 – the first for many years. It remains a lawful method in Qatar and Yemen, although no executions by this method have been reported.
Beheading continued in Britain up to 1747 (see below) and was the standard method in Norway (abolished 1905), Sweden (up to 1903) and Denmark (last in 1892) and was used for some classes of prisoners in France (up until the introduction of the guillotine in 1792) and in Germany up to 1938. All the European countries that previously used beheading have now totally abolished the death penalty.
China also used it widely, until the communists came to power and replaced it with shooting in the 20th century. Japan too used beheading up to the end of the 19th century prior to turning to hanging.
Equipment for beheading.
There were two distinct forms of beheading - by the sword and by the axe. Where a person was to be decapitated with a sword, a block is not used and they are generally made to kneel down although they could, if short, be executed standing up, or even sitting in a chair. A typical European execution sword was 36-48 inches (900-1200 mm) long and 2 to 2-1/2 inches (50-65mm) wide with the handle being long enough for the executioner to use both hands to give maximum leverage. It weighed around 4 lbs. (2 Kg.)
Where an axe was the chosen implement, a wooden block, often shaped to accept the neck, was required. Two patterns of block were used, the high block, 18-24 inches (450-600 mm) high, where the prisoner knelt behind it and lent forward so that their neck rested on the top or lay on a bench with their neck over the block. The neck on a high block presented an easier target due to the head pointing slightly downwards, thus bringing the neck into prominence. It also meant that the axe was at a better angle at that point in the arc of the stroke to meet the neck full on.
The high block was favoured in later times in Britain and was standard in Germany up to the 1930's.
Some countries used a low block where the person lies full length and puts there neck over the small wooden block which is just a few inches high. This arrangement was used in Sweden. The low block presented the executioner with certain difficulties. The arc prescribed by the axe as he brought it down meant that the blade was at quite an angle to the prisoner's neck making it more difficult to sever the head with a single blow. Two patterns of axe were also used - the pattern used in Britain, which was developed from the traditional woodsman's axe, has a blade about one foot 8 inches (500 mm) high by 10 inches (250 mm) wide with a 5 foot (1525 mm) long handle. In Germany the axe was like a larger version of a butcher's cleaver, again the handle was long enough for the headsman to use both hands.
Beheading in Britain.
In Britain, beheading was used in Anglo Saxon times as a punishment for certain types of serious theft. It was reintroduced during the reign of William the Conqueror for the execution of Waltheof, Earl of Northumberland on the 31st of May 1076 on St. Giles Hill, near Winchester. Waltheof had been convicted of treason for taking part in the Revolt of the Earls against the King and was beheaded with a sword.
Beheading was confined to those of noble birth who were convicted of treason and was an alternative to the normal punishments for this crime. Men convicted of High Treason were condemned to hanged drawn and quartered and women to be burned at the stake. In the case of the nobility the monarch could vary these punishments to death by beheading. Beheading was both far less painful and considered far less dishonourable than these other methods. Several members of Royalty were beheaded, including Charles I, Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Grey. Many other Earls, Lords and Knights, including Sir Walter Raleigh, and even some bishops were executed thus.
The majority of English beheadings took place at the Tower of London. For a full listing of executions at the Tower click here. Seven were carried out in private within the grounds, of which five were of women. A further 86 men were decapitated on Tower Hill outside the walls of the Tower, where there stood a permanent scaffold from 1485. Only a very small number of beheadings were carried out elsewhere, as the Tower was the principal prison for traitors of high birth. It should be noted that treason often meant displeasing the monarch, rather than in any way betraying the country.
The spot indicated as "The site of the scaffold" on Tower Green which visitors can see today was not used for all of the 7 private beheadings although the plaque implies this.
Those beheaded in private on Tower Green were Lord Hastings in 1483, Anne Boleyn on the 19th of May 1536, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury on the 28th of May 1541, Catherine Howard and her Lady in Waiting, Jane, Viscountess Rochford on the 13th of February 1542, Lady Jane Grey on the 15th of February 1554 and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex on the 25th of February 1601.
At various times both the low block and the high block have been used. The axe was the normal implement of execution in Britain, although Anne Boleyn was beheaded with a sword (see below).
A replica of the scaffold used for the 1601 execution of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex has been constructed for exhibition in the Tower. The original was set up in the middle of the Parade Ground and was made of oak, some 4 feet high and having a 9 feet square platform (1.2 m high x 2.75 m square) with a waist high rail round it. The prisoner mounted it by a short flight of stairs and was not restrained throughout the execution as it was expected that people of noble birth would know how to behave at their executions! Devereux lay full length on the platform and placed his neck on the low block with his arms outstretched. It is recorded that three strokes of the axe were required to decapitate him. Straw was spread on the scaffold to absorb the blood.
The last female execution by beheading was that of 67 year old Lady Alice Lisle who was beheaded for treason at Winchester on the 2nd of September 1685 having been convicted of sheltering two traitors.
Beheading in public on Tower Hill was used when the government of the day wished to make an example of the traitor (or traitors). Double beheadings were rare, although not unknown, and were carried out in order of precedence of the victims, as occurred with the Jacobite Earls, Kilmarnock and Balmerino, executed in 1746 for treason after the battle of Culloden.
Simon Lord Lovatt became the last person to be beheaded on Tower Hill when he was executed for treason on April the 9th, 1747. The high block used for Lord Lovatt together with the axe were on display in the Tower. (see photo). It was normal for the executioner to pick up the severed head and display to the crowd proclaiming, "Behold the head of a traitor!"
The execution of Anne Boleyn.
29 year old Anne, (see portrait) Henry VIII's second wife, had been convicted on trumped up charges of adultery and treason and was thus sentenced to death by burning at the stake or beheading at the Kings pleasure. Fortunately for Anne, he chose the latter and perhaps through a pang of conscience imported a skilled headsman from Calais in France to ensure the execution was performed as humanely as possible. British hangmen normally got the job of beheading those condemned but were generally very poor at it due to the rarity of such sentences.
On the 19th May 1536, Anne was led to the Parade Ground within the Tower with an escort of 200 Yeoman of the Guard (Beefeaters). She was wearing a loose, ermine trimmed, grey damask robe over a red underskirt. Her hair was "up" covered with a white coif and a small black cap and she wore a cross on a gold chain at her waist
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Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida who ended his presidential bid after a string of disappointing finishes, is planning to meet with three of the remaining Republican candidates while they’re in Miami for the Republican debate on Thursday night.
Mr. Bush has plans to meet with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, an aide to Mr. Bush confirmed. The list’s glaring omission, of course, was Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Bush will meet with Mr. Rubio on Wednesday, and Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich on Thursday, the aide said. It was unclear whether Mr. Bush intended to make an endorsement before Tuesday’s winner-take-all primary in Florida.
As a candidate, Mr. Bush made taking on Mr. Trump, forcefully and repeatedly, a hallmark of his campaign, criticizing him for disparaging women, Hispanics and the disabled, and warning that he was insufficiently serious to be commander-in-chief.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, always seemed to hold Mr. Bush, and his dynastic family, in poor regard, attacking him from almost the first moment he entered the race. It was Mr. Trump’s two-word insult — dubbing Mr. Bush “low-energy” — that helped devastate Mr. Bush’s campaign, as voters parroted back the phrase and Mr. Bush, who in fact routinely held several free-wheeling events every day, was never able to fully shake the moniker.
The relationship between Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio is especially fraught. As governor of Florida, Mr. Bush helped mentor Mr. Rubio, then a charismatic, up-and-coming lawmaker, even bestowing on him a sword when he became speaker of the Florida House. But Mr. Bush’s team was livid when the young protégée entered the 2016 race, refusing to cede the Florida political world to Mr. Bush, in what many viewed as a betrayal.Cole has been unable to make an impact at Liverpool this season following Rodgers' appointment after spending last term on loan at French side Lille.
The midfielder has yet to start a Premier League game under Rodgers and was not involved when Liverpool won 3-0 at QPR on Sunday.
Redknapp handed Cole his professional debut at West Ham United and remains a big fan of the 31-year-old as he looks to improve his QPR squad.
"I've got a lot of time for Joe, as a player and a person, he's a good lad to have around your football club, a good player," said Redknapp.
"He's interesting me. I'd like to bring him here if we could. We'll see what happens.
"The deal would have to be right for the club. We couldn't do a deal with Liverpool with what his contract is at Liverpool. We'd have to try to find a way of doing a deal with Liverpool, if they're willing to let him go.
"I'll have to speak with Brendan, I'll have a chat with him when the time's right and see what he has to say.
"I haven't spoken to Joe, I'm not allowed to speak to Joe. Are you trying to get me banned by the FA?
"I haven't spoken to Joe for two years. I nearly took him to Tottenham a couple of years ago but he went to Liverpool, that was last time I spoke to Joe. He's a great lad."
The former Tottenham boss is battling to keep QPR in the Premier League and has reiterated his view that signing players in the January transfer window is not easy.
He added: "January is so difficult. It's a tough time to find players. We're in a desperate situation, but we'll see what happens this week.
"I've got a list of names, obviously. But getting them isn't easy and it's all about getting value. Attitude and ability are important for us. We need players who will come in and make an impact."Russia’s Defense Ministry stated that the U.S. State Department admitted that Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rebranded al-Qaida group in Syria, has and uses chemical weapon in Syria.
“The Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorist group (HTS), linked to Jabhat al-Nusra, which uses ‘small and heavy arms, improvised explosive devices, and chemical weapons’, operates in that province [Idlib]. This is the first official recognition by the State Department not simply of the presence, but, I emphasize, the use of chemical weapons by Jabhat al-Nusra terrorists in that part of Syria to commit terrorist attacks, about which we repeatedly warned,” Major General Igor Konashenkov, a spokesperson for the Russian Defense Ministry said.
Related
The use of chemical weapons in Khan Sheikhoun, a town in Idlib province, was previously blamed on the Syrian government and used to justify the launch of 59 tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airbase by the United States.
The official story surrounding the attacks in Khan Sheikhoun from the Russian Ministry of Defense follows that the Syrian air force bombed a weapons depot that contained stockpiled chemical weapons used by opposition forces that are heavily infiltrated by radical elements such as HTS.
Earlier in the conflict, an investigative report that followed the infamous 2013 East Ghouta chemical weapon attacks published in the London Review of Books suggested that top U.S. military and diplomatic officials under the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama knew that opposition forces, including Jabhat al-Nusra, had the ability to produce and deploy chemical weapons since at least 2013.
The use of chemical weapons in Ghouta led the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad to comply with international calls to relinquish Syria’s chemical weapon supplies. The U.S. State Department reported that this was a successful operation at the time of its completion in 2014.
The issue of chemical weapons in Syria remains a hot debate in the background surrounding the conflict at present, but Russian officials suggest that this admission by the U.S. State Department is a positive step forward.
Top photo | al-Qaida-linked fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham walk inside the Syrian village of Abu Dali in Idlib province, after a battle with Syrian troops, Sunday, Oct 8, 2017. (Ibaa News Agency, via AP)
© teleSURSteamboat Springs — Two men who vandalized the Ridge Trailhead on Emerald Mountain in 2015 have learned their crime really didn’t pay. — Two men who vandalized the Ridge Trailhead on Emerald Mountain in 2015 have learned their crime really didn't pay.
— Two men who vandalized the Ridge Trailhead on Emerald Mountain in 2015 have learned their crime really didn't pay.
The Routt County District Court on Friday ordered Charles C. Enger and Michael A. Jones to pay $114,030.16 for the extensive damage they caused to the trailhead.
Enger commandeered several pieces of heavy construction equipment stationed at the trailhead and drove a dozer into a brand new, $40,000 bathroom facility. A skid steer was also overturned at the parking area.
Enger told investigators Jones showed him how to use the equipment.
Jones said he only watched as Enger wreaked havoc on the public facilities.
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The mens' actions forced contractors to redo much of their work and delayed the trailhead opening to the public by several months.
The restitution they will have to pay will compensate the contractors for the work they had to redo.
In a press release, District Attorney Brett Barkey stated that "making crime victims who suffer financial loss whole again is a critical part of holding offenders accountable."
He noted the contractors were contractually obligated to redo the work that was damaged by the vandals.
The project was funded in part by Steamboat Springs lodging tax dollars.
Contractors who were just a day away from finishing the project arrived at the site on Sept. 10, 2015, sickened by the amount of vandalism they saw.
Investigators started eyeing Enger after they found him in the Routt County Jail after he was suspected of crashing his car on Routt County Road 129 while intoxicated.
He eventually told investigators he crashed shortly after causing the damage at the trailhead.
A Routt County Sheriff's Office Deputy linked Enger to the crime scene by matching a boot print at the trailhead to the boots Enger was wearing in jail.
Enger took a plea deal and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal mischief and felony criminal mischief.
He was sentenced to 90 days in Routt County Jail, 148 hours of public service and was ordered to write an apology letter.
Jones pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal mischief.
A judge found that Enger and Jones are jointly and severally liable for the full restitution amount, meaning if one of them does not pay, the other will still have to pay the full amount.
To reach Scott Franz, call 970-871-4210, email To reach Scott Franz, call 970-871-4210, email [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @ScottFranz10To reach Scott Franz, call 970-871-4210, email [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @ScottFranz10My wife and I were checking out of Lowe’s Home Improvement last night when at the check out we saw Jack and Sharon Osbourne on the cover of People Magazine’s July 2, 2012 issue. (Don’t ask me why People was in a home improvement store.) The teaser copy read:
Jack Osbourne’s Multiple Sclerosis. “I won’t Let My Son Die.” Exclusive Interview. Sharon and Jack Osbourne on the diagnosis that has the 26-year-old fighting to save his vision, his future and his life.
Here’s part of the story:
Jack Osbourne knew something was wrong last month when his vision was failing him.
“I couldn’t see anything in front of me,” Osbourne, 26, tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. But when he sought medical help for that problem, he received a shocking diagnosis.
Multiple sclerosis was to blame for his vision loss – 80 percent in his right eye. He’s now beginning medication and adopting a healthier diet regimen to help reduce symptoms of the disease, which attacks the brain and spinal cord and can affect vision, movement and cognition. And luckily, his vision has also improved. “It’s just one of those things you take as it comes,” says Jack. “It’s all about your outlook.”
Just weeks after receiving the news, Jack and his mother Sharon opened up in an emotional interview with PEOPLE at Jack’s parents’ home. Says Sharon: “The first thing Ozzy and I asked ourselves was, ‘What did we do wrong?’“
Despite the initial devastation, the entire Osbourne clan is determined to maintain positivity, especially Jack, who is optimistic about his prognosis. “My life is far from over,” he says.
Our hearts go out to Jack and the Osbourne family. MS is a devastating disease that incapacitates many lives.
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Trending: Ten Year Moratorium on All Immigration & Repatriation
Without taking anything from the Osbournes, let’s see how Ann Romney’s MS has been treated by the press. Her MS does not seem as severe as Jack’s. Even so, she has MS. Here’s how Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC (naturally) handled Ann Romney’s MS in an interview with her husband:
MITT ROMNEY: Yes, it’s the sport of dressage. Not many people are familiar with it, but something for which she has a passion, and frankly, her getting back on a horse after she was diagnosed with MS was able, she’s convinced, to help her regenerate her strength and renew that vigor.
O’DONNELL: Now, this is not in any way to make light of Ann Romney’s difficulty with MS, it’s obviously a very difficult thing to bear. And there are a lot of things you can do to try to deal with MS. But, come on, dressage does not appear in any of the more traditional courses of treatment.
So now Mr. O’Donnell gets to decide how Ann Romney wants to help deal with her MS? He’s not alone in ridiculing Ann Romney and her horse riding as therapy for her MS.Jack’s father, Ozzy Osbourne of the English band Black Sabbath, is worth around $90 million. Sharon is worth around $40 million. I suspect that they will do and spend what they believe is best for their son in order to help him through his ordeal.
What these journalistic sycophants really hate is that there are people out there who are better than they are. Of course, the ultimate goal in all of this is to keep Barack Obama in office so they can claim that they were king makers. My destroying Mitt and Ann Romney, they can argue that they were king destroyers.Buy Photo Steven Magruder as a corporal in a 1999 News-Leader file photo. (Photo: News-Leader file photo)Buy Photo
A former Springfield police officer was sentenced Thursday for possessing child pornography.
Steven Robert Magruder, 60, was sentenced to four years in federal prison without parole.
Magruder retired as a corporal from the Springfield Police Department in 2005. He worked part-time from 2006 to 2014 as a security officer for Ozarks Technical Community College and as a bailiff for the Greene County Circuit Court in 2013, according to a release from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of Missouri.
Magruder pleaded guilty in October.
A detective with the Jasper County Sheriff's Department identified Magruder's computer in 2013 as sharing child pornography over the Internet. The detective downloaded 12 videos of child pornography that Magruder was sharing over a 42-day period in early 2013, according to the release.
Officers seized Magruder's computer and found he'd been collecting child porn for the past year.
Read or Share this story: http://sgfnow.co/1GJU5niThis morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
Australia-US refugee swap deal appears to be faltering
Australia and Germany paying asylum seekers cash to return home
Australia-US refugee swap deal appears to be faltering
Accommodations for refugees at the Manus Island detention center in Papua New Guinea (Reuters)
A deal in November between President Barack Obama and Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to allow 1,250 refugees being held in Australia’s refugee centers to be resettled in the United States is proceeding slowly.
The refugees, from countries like Bangladesh and Nepal, are living in two “detention centers” on Pacific islands, one on Papua New Guinea’s (PNG’s) Manus Island, and one on the island nation of Nauru, under agreements that Australia reached with both countries. However, the United Nations and international refugee activists have condemned the refugee camps, saying that under international law, valid asylum seekers should be resettled on Australian soil. Australia has resisted that in order to discourage human trafficking of refugees to Australia.
Early in February, President Donald Trump called it “the worst deal ever,” but promised to honor the deal because he was bound by agreements made by the previous administration. He confirmed that the US will take in up to 1,250 of these refugees, after subjecting each of them to “extreme vetting.”
However, things have been going slowly, according to Australian officials. Although some preliminary screening has taken place, officials from the US Department of Homeland Security had not been authorized to start formally vetting applicants.
Australia’s Immigration and Border Protection secretary Mike Pezzullo says that he believes that the delay is only temporary:
As we’ve made clear, our colleagues in Homeland Security are not in a position yet to start their processes but they’ll certainly be able to conduct themselves in a very expedited fashion given the amount of preliminary work that’s been done.
There is another major wrinkle to this deal, and it was only revealed last week.
Last September, Turnbull announced that Australia would help the United States deal with its refugee problem by taking refugees from Costa Rica and resettling them in Australia. When the deal to resettle refugees from Australia in the United States was announced in November, Turnbull repeatedly denied that it was related to the Costa Rica deal.
So last week, that denial was suddenly abandoned, and this was apparently no surprise to anyone in Australia. Immigration minister Peter Dutton did a complete flip-flop and said that the government “wouldn’t take anyone until we had assurances that people are going to go off Nauru and Manus. We want an outcome in relation to Nauru and Manus.”
An opposition spokesman said, “I mean, look, everyone knew it was a deal, and last night Peter Dutton, playing politics as always, belled the cat when he made it clear that it was contingent that taking people from Costa Rica was contingent on America taking those from Manus and Nauru, so clearly this was a deal.” Australian Broadcasting and News.com (Australia)
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Australia and Germany paying asylum seekers cash to return home
Facing heavy international criticism from the United Nations and refugee activists, Australia has agreed to close down the two “detention centers” on Nauru and on Papua New Guinea’s (PNG’s) Manus Island by the end of the year.
Australia is encouraging refugees to return to their home countries voluntarily by taking up US$25,000 in cash, or to face deportation otherwise. Several dozen refugees have accepted the offer, according to reports.
Germany is also paying refugees to return to their home countries, but a lot less. Last year, Germany paid 54,000 asylum seekers cash to return home, for a total payout of €21.5 million ($22 million). This would appear to average out to about €400 per refugee.
Last month, Germany announced a “voluntary return” program to offer €1,200 ($1,275) to each asylum seeker to return home if their asylum applications are rejected. Last year, Germany received some 700,000 asylum requests, around 60% of which were successful. However, around 430,000 requests remained unanswered, many of which date back to 2015 or earlier. Reuters (14-Feb) and Deutsche-Welle (20-Jan) and Reuters and Economist
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, Papua New Guinea, PNG, Manus Island, Nauru. Mike Pezzullo, Costa Rica, Peter Dutton, Germany
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Receive daily World View columns by e-mailI can't add much about the character, but I do know something about his name... In 1993, I was working at LucasArts on a Star Wars game that called Dark Forces and we hired a young programmer named Winston Wolf (credits). Winston was / is one of the nicest, most unassuming persons you will ever meet, and a talented programmer. His role on the team was to build our tools for creating 3D interior environments, something that the games industry as a whole had very little experience with at the time and critical to our success.
We were big fans of Reservoir Dogs, so when Pulp Fiction was released, the entire team went to see it on opening day. We were all sitting in the movie watching when Jimmie opens the door and Harvey Keitel says "I'm Winston Wolf - I solve problems." We went nuts!
Afterward, we were talking about the amazing movie and marveled that Harvey Keitel's character had the same name as our tools programmer. Winston explained that that a few years before, he had been in LA at a party and had briefly met Quentin Tarantino, who at the time remarked that he really liked Winston's name. Winston had never spoken to Quentin since and had no idea that he ended up using his name until he saw Pulp Fiction that day with us.
And that's the story of where "The Wolf" got his name.In 2013, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden famously brought to light a series of classified US government spying programs. For the first time, the American people learned that the NSA was collecting millions of their phone calls and electronic communications—emails, Facebook messages, texts, browsing histories—all without a warrant.
Several of the programs Snowden revealed are authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act. The 2008 law was scheduled to sunset on December 31, but in a last-ditch effort Thursday, Congress extend its authority through January 19.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, believes that the authorization doesn’t really expire until April, leaving lawmakers several months to either reform or strengthen the provision. Hanging in the balance is the legal framework the government largely relies on to conduct mass surveillance of foreigners, and Americans who communicate with them. Which makes it all the more concerning that the fight over Section 702's future has taken place largely in the dark.
Swept Up
Section 702 is intended to allow intelligence officials to electronically surveil “persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States” without a warrant. The provision was crafted after the Bush administration’s secret warrantless surveillance program, dubbed Stellar Wind, was disclosed to The New York Times by whistleblower and former Department of Justice prosecutor Thomas Tamm in 2005.
'We’re having a debate where the intelligence agencies are refusing to provide any information to Congress about the effectiveness of this program.' Neema Singh Guliani, ACLU
The NSA collects hundreds of millions of video chats, instant messages, and emails under Section 702 by compelling companies like Facebook, AT&T, and Google to hand them over. The law also allows the FBI to search through the NSA’s databases without a warrant. Section 702 technically only authorizes intelligence agencies to collect information about foreign individuals, but citizens and permanent residents can easily get swept up by dragnet.
“Under the authority, the government can target anybody who has ‘foreign intelligence,’ that’s defined so broadly,” says Neema Singh Guliani, legislative council at the ACLU. “If you’re a reporter who reports on global affairs, or an activist who works on global affairs, you could be a target under 702. We don’t have exact clarity on who's been targeted.”
Which only begins to get at the difficulty any discussion about Section 702 runs into. Democrats, Libertarians, and privacy groups believe it violates the Fourth Amendment, while Republicans argue that limiting its powers would impede national security. But most proponents of the expiring law, along with its detractors, don't truly know how Section 702 works. No one, except those with the right security clearances, really understands how the law is used, how many Americans it affects, or how effective the programs it authorizes are at catching terrorists. The only individuals with a detailed understanding of Section 702's programs are those inside the US intelligence apparatus.
“We’re having a debate where the intelligence agencies are refusing to provide any information to Congress about the effectiveness of this program and the effect it has on people’s liberties,” says Guliani. “You have a case where you have this massive program, and in many respects Congress is being asked to vote on it blind.”
Blurry Snapshots
While the intelligence community does provide statistics about how many foreigners Section 702 programs target, intelligence officials have refused to provide civil liberties groups and lawmakers with statistics about how many Americans’ communications are vacuumed up into its massive surveillance apparatus.
“There are kind of nibbles or snapshots of how the program operates, but we don’t really have an overall picture of what the numbers are,” says Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Earlier this year, the NSA agreed to provide the public with some information about how many American citizens may be impacted, only to later walk back that promise. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats explained the about face by saying that it “remains infeasible” for the government to cite a meaningful number.
The NSA has also largely refused to provide concrete evidence of Section 702's efficacy. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees Section 702, is required to release some of its opinions, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence compiles a yearly transparency report. But civil liberties advocates say the intelligence community has still not done enough to justify Section 702’s programs.
“There’s been no meaningful assessment, no data-driven cost-benefit analysis,” says Sascha Meinrath, the founder of the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation and the founder of technology policy think tank X-Lab. “It’s a massive experiment with no checks, no scientific methodology. We have no idea if this is causing more harm than good, we have no way to know.”
One of the only extensive government analyses conducted of Section 702 is an often-cited 2014 report compiled by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency within the executive branch. It found that intelligence collected by Section 702 programs has been “valuable and effective in protecting the nation’s security.” The board also found “no evidence of intentional abuse,” but did recommend intelligence officials disclose more information.
Privacy advocates argue that the report is misleading, and its methodology opaque. “What we need is an actual enumeration of what’s happening, and transparency about the actual total costs, opportunity costs, the false positives and the false negatives,” says Meinrath.
In the Balance
Because outside legal experts don’t know exactly how Section 702 programs operate, it’s difficult to tell if they’re constitutional. Democratic senator Ron Wyden, a longtime critic of the NSA and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, believes that they create a “backdoor” to the Fourth Amendment, allowing law enforcement to search the communications of Americans without needing a warrant.
'It’s a massive experiment with no checks, no scientific methodology. We have no idea if this is causing more harm than good.' Sascha Meinrath, Open Technology Institute
Some reforms to the program have already been made in response to Fourth Amendment concerns; in April, the NSA halted one kind of surveillance authorized under Section 702, called “about” collection. It stopped amassing conversations concerning foreign targets, but that weren’t from the targets themselves. If two Americans discussed a known terrorist over text, for instance, they previously could get swept into the NSA’s database. The spy agency put the breaks on the program because it couldn’t stop accidentally collecting information belonging to Americans.
Section 702's opacity, though, makes it hard to know to what extent the remainder of its programs infringe on the rights of US citizens. “It impairs the ability of the courts to even determine if this is a run around of the Fourth Amendment or not,” says Crocker. Guliani agrees.“How can you assess the constitutionality of a program if you don’t know the effect it has on Americans?” she asks.
Opponents of Section 702 believe that if its programs were to be independently assessed, they would be found to be both expensive and ineffective. “Every time that one of these programs has been exposed, and really subjected to genuine independent scrutiny we find that they have three things in common,” says Patrick Eddington, a homeland security and civil liberties analyst at the Cato Institute, referring to previous programs like Stellar Wind. “One they’re constitutionally violative, two they’re ineffective—they don’t work—and number three, they cost you and me, the taxpayer, millions of dollars.”
The lack of definitive information about Section 702 hasn’t stopped Republicans from advocating for the law’s continuation. In November, representative Devin Nunes, who chairs the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, introduced a bill that would have reauthorized Section 702. In order to drum up support for it, his office circulated a two-page fear-mongering pamphlet to members of Congress. It said 702 was vital in apprehending terrorist Haji Iman, and in one version, in all red caps, declared “VOTE YES.”Your first name
Speaking in Homewood, PA on Friday, Bill Clinton criticized the “coal people” in West Virginia for supporting Donald Trump.
WATCH:
“We all know how [Hillary’s] opponent has done well down in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky,” the former president told the crowd at the Greater Pittsburgh Coliseum. “The coal people don’t like any of us [Democrats] anymore.”
Clinton added that “they all voted for me. I won twice, and they did well.”
“They blame the president when the sun doesn’t come up in the morning now.”
Since Clinton left office, West Virginia has overwhelmingly swung red.
In 1996, Clinton won 51.5 percent of the state’s popular vote, yet Barack Obama only carried 35.5 percent in the last election.
Kentucky has seen similar trends in recent elections, with Clinton earning 45.8 percent in 1996 and Obama earning 37.8 percent in 2012.
Follow Datoc on Twitter and FacebookAndroid Forums members have been wondering about TomTom for Android since November 2008. It’s time for that discussion to continue as TomTom execs have clearly implied the company is working on a TomTom Android application:
“We cannot ignore such a successful platform as Android. HTC is an important partner of ours and Android is becoming increasingly important too.”
Windows Mobile has had TomTom capabilities for some time now and the Apple iPhone TomTom app is the most recent addition to the stable. Symbian and BlackBerry users will have to wait a little longer, if not forever:
“We spent so much time producing the iPhone software and we were later on the scene than we wanted but the standard of the service and the quality of the satnav is what was most important to us.” “I do not question the opportunity that RIM might offer but we know that a satnav device needs to have a large touchscreen and voice commands to be able to work for turn-by-turn navigation. We come from a PDA background and we know what will work.”
This will be a GREAT story to follow – I know for a FACT that there are a LOT of Android owners out there craving TomTom integration. Right now Telenav leads the way in on-Android GPS navigation, but the introduction of TomTom for Android will be a welcomed alternative.
For a point of reference, here is a quick initial review of TomTom on the iPhone:
The TomTom iPhone App costs $100 and I would expect the Android price to be comparable. Clearly one of the more pricey apps on the Android Market, would that be worth it to you?• Riedewald can operate at centre-half, left-back or defensive midfield • Middlesbrough sign Britt Assombalonga from Forest in club record deal
Crystal Palace have completed the signing of Jairo Riedewald from Ajax for €9m (£7.9m), reuniting the Dutch international with his former manager in Amsterdam, Frank de Boer.
The player’s arrival will be confirmed on Tuesday by the London club before he flies to Hong Kong to join his new team-mates.
Wojciech Szczesny set to join Juventus from Arsenal for around £10m Read more
Riedewald can operate at centre-half, left-back or in defensive midfield and was handed his Ajax debut by De Boer in 2013. The 20-year-old has been capped three times and joins Ruben Loftus-Cheek, who has moved across the capital on a season‑long loan from Chelsea, as a new arrival at Selhurst Park this summer.
Further reinforcements are to follow with Palace, whose squad arrived on Monday in Hong Kong to compete in the Premier League trophy, having spoken to Porto over a move for Bruno Martins Indi.
However, Stoke City, with whom Martins Indi impressed last season on loan, will compete strongly for his signature and could yet be joined by West Bromwich Albion and West Ham United in pursuit of the 25-year-old Dutch defender. The player is with the Portuguese club on their pre-season tour of Mexico.
Palace, meanwhile, are one of a number of clubs exploring the possibility of taking the Arsenal defender Calum Chambers on loan for the season, potentially with a view to a permanent deal.
De Boer will seek to add a goalkeeper to his ranks having sanctioned Steve Mandanda’s return to Marseille last week, though a move for Barcelona’s Jasper Cillessen may prove overly complicated to complete. Palace are also seeking to add greater attacking depth with a backup for Christian Benteke a priority while Connor Wickham continues his rehabilitation from cruciate knee ligament damage.
Assombalonga joins Middlesbrough from Forest
Middlesbrough have announced a club record deal to sign Britt Assombalonga from Nottingham Forest.
The 24-year-old striker has joined Garry Monk’s Championship side despite an injury-hit three years at the City Ground. The fee is believed to be in the region of £14m.
Assombalonga is a proven goalscorer in the Championship, having scored 30 times in 47 league starts since signing for £5.5m in 2014. However, persistent injuries have held back his progress, with a serious knee injury ruling him out for much of the 2015-16 season, but he signed a new five-year deal last summer after proving his fitness.
Boro have been looking to strengthen their attacking options after managing only 27 goals in the Premier League last season and claimed they beat off competition from top-tier clubs to sign the striker.
“I can’t wait to meet the manager and get ready for next season. There’s a good feeling around the place. From the minute I walked in it felt right,” Assombalonga said. “I want to thank the Forest fans for being behind me, especially after my injury.
“They gave me a chance in the Championship and I want to say thanks to them and wish them all the best for the season.”
A Forest spokesman said on the club’s website: “Middlesbrough outbid various other clubs to sign Britt Assombalonga. As a club we felt that since the fee agreed met the buyout clause in his contract and he wanted to move it would be wrong to stand in his way.” PANickelodeon
Nickelodeon
Nickelodeon
Nickelodeon
Nickelodeon
Nickelodeon
is back! Narrated by creator Craig Bartlett, get your first look at Nickelodeon's upcoming TV movie event,, premiering Thursday 23rd November 2017 on Nickelodeon USA!:Set to premiere this Thanksgiving on Nickelodeon USA,will pick up where the original series ended, resolving unanswered questions and plot lines, including Arnold finally getting answers about the whereabouts of his missing parents! Also, via BuzzFeed It's been over a year since Nickelodeon first announced that beloved '90s cartoonwould be back with a brand-new TV movie.is set to premiere Nov. 23.And nowNews has an exclusive first look at all our favorite characters — in new costumes and set to go on a huge adventure!In the clip,creator Craig Bartlett explains the new looks (first shown at San Diego Comic-Con last year )......and says thatwill pick up just one year after the events of the original TV series finale, "The Journal." Remember? Arnold had just found a map in his dad's old journal that may lead him to his parents in the (fictional) country of San Lorenzo.So, in, Arnold and all his friends (who are FINALLY headed into the sixth grade) travel to Central America to get some answers.And that old map Arnold found? It plays a huge role in the movie. "That map's gonna play all the way through the story," Bartlett says in the video.Is Arnold about to meet the Green-Eyed People? Are his parents alive? WHAT IS GOING ON?!*BRAINY-WHEEZES*--Ends--Also, from E! News Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie Details Revealed: Get the Scoop on Your Favorite Football Head's ReturnYour favorite football head is returning to life thanks to Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie, Nickelodeon's revival of the classic animated series. In a new video, creator Craig Bartlett drops some info on what fans can expect from the new movie."For our characters, it's going to play like it's only been one or two years even though it's really been 15 or 20," Bartlett said.Hey Arnold ran from 1994-2004 on Nickelodeon and followed the exploits of the title character, his classmates, and his grandparents and the residents who lived in their boarding house. The series ended with the mystery of what happened to Arnold's parents. That plot is picked up in the new flick. Arnold and his classmates head to the jungles of South America to a made up country on a field trip."This is the movie I always wanted to make," Bartlett said.In Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie, Arnold is on his way to becoming a sixth grader and as a result the character (and his animated friends) got some updates. Take a look at the video above for the updated looks and why they made the changes. Even Gerald's hair got a tweak. But the biggest change might be for Phoebe."She always was sort of an ultra-nerd and we thought we'd make her look a little more put together. Phoebe's a little more confident now," Bartlett says.Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie is heading to Comic Con with the show's classic voices and new cast doing a panel. Plus Helga's shrine to Arnold will be there for photo ops.Nickelodeon is also bringing back Invader Zim and Rocko's Modern Life with new movies and there could be more down the line.At the 2017 ATX TV Festival, Chis Viscardi, the co-creator of The Adventures of Pete and Pete and current senior vice president of production and development, and animation at Nickelodeon Group, revealed more revivals are on the way."We feel it's really important to honor who made the show and who started the show, so we've had that opportunity," he said. "And a few others I can't talk about now," he said. "It's been a great process to work with them."--Ends--Compensation for «Soviet Occupation»? Not Before Vilnius and Klaipėda are Returned to Their Owners
The attempts by the governments of the Baltic states over the last twenty years to win reimbursement from Russia for the «damages» suffered during the «Soviet occupation» have culminated in a «memorandum of cooperation», which was signed in Riga on Nov. 5 by the justice ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
During the years that the former Soviet republics have been independent, these servants of the Baltic Themis were coached in how to make absurd demands of Russia. In 1940 all three republics voted in favor of joining the Union of Soviet
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of journalists competing for a wide audience by allowing them to bring to the reader or viewer’s mind the bigotry of some white voters without having to directly call them racist. As the scholars Barbara J Fields and Karen E Fields have shown in books such as Racecraft (2014), the US has a lot of sanitised euphemisms for racism.
The ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan also fits with the nostalgia that Hofstadter attributed to the original Populists, claiming that they were yearning for the return of a past that had never really existed. But Hofstadter was wrong in dismissing the original Populists as consumed by nostalgia. They were responding to real and harmful changes, just as is today’s white working class.
Dismissing the grievances of the original Populists, or today’s populists, helps to deprive the Western world of the opportunity to consider redress to the present predicament. The original Populists held and nurtured a real democratic promise, a promise inherent in a decades-long political mobilisation and establishment of a political party. They grasped some big and enduring social, political and economic problems, and they offered concrete, democratic ways to respond to concentration and distortion of political and economic power. There are lessons there for working people now.
Today, half a century after Hofstadter’s influential interpretation, scholars understand better that the Populist Party made revolutionary contributions to advancing democracy, and that it succeeded, however briefly, in building a political coalition of black and white farmers more than a century ago.
They came together in opposition to the unequal distribution of wealth and income, the unjust concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy, and the big-business corruption of government and government selling out to business. Many organisations, cooperatives, societies and unions, for example the Grange, the Knights of Labor and, most importantly, the Farmers’ Alliance (founded in Texas in 1875) preceded and led to the Populist Party. These were not necessarily small organisations. In Georgia alone, by 1890, the Farmers’ Alliance grew to 100,000. The Alliance disciplined and groomed legions of men and women who would eventually join the ranks of the Populist Party as organisers, supporters or office holders.
The Southern Farmers’ Alliance was a direct predecessor of the Populist Party. It called for the abolition of big banks, proposed their own alternative banking system, wanted the federal government to control credit and money, and fought for an increase in the supply of money in circulation by employing the free coinage of silver. The Alliance sought to break up monopolies, institute an eight-hour law for labour, and to turn railroad and telegraph lines over to the control of the government.
It’s important to remember the Farmers’ Alliance not because it preceded the Populist Party, but because it also makes so clear how the grievances that moved people to populism then, as now, are not the exclusive provenance of white men. Black men and women played a vital role in the Farmers’ Alliance, and the early part of the populist movement: they founded the Colored Farmers’ Alliance – whose members numbered 1.2 million in 1891 – to promote self-help, mutual aid and improved farming techniques. They organised a cotton-picker’s strike to protest working conditions and push for more pay. Their political activism, and the fusion of political parties that led to the Populist Party, makes it clear that Populists were not motivated by misplaced nostalgia for the agrarian past. Far from longing for slavery days, they were courageously engaged with the present while creatively looking to the future, motivated, to safeguard their ability to live a decent life.
Looking back, what is truly exceptional about the original Populist Party is not their later xenophobia, but their early achievement of perhaps the rarest, and most powerful of American political achievements: an alliance of working people across the colour line. Jim Crow was a direct response to Populism. If Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen bear a resemblance to figures from this history, it is not to leaders of the Populist Party. Rather, it is to ‘Pitchfork Ben’ Tillman of South Carolina or Furnifold Simmons of North Carolina, demagogic politicians who used the language of white supremacy to destroy the Populist Party and to stifle its democratic potential.
Our difficulties today are far removed from what the Populist Party tried to tackle. But their movement can nourish our imaginations. Their extraordinary political action rested not on crass talk and juvenile tweets, but on mobilisation, organisation on the state and local level, and on concrete proposals to improve people’s lives.Europe’s Muslim population is set to multiply even if migration comes to a complete halt, a new study has found. Meanwhile, high migration could result in around 75 million Muslims living in the EU, Norway, and Switzerland by 2050.
Editor's note: This story’s previous headline incorrectly stated that Europe’s Muslim population would triple by 2050, even in the case of “zero migration.” This is not the case, as such a tripling effect could only occur under a “high migration” scenario.
Read more
A revealing survey by Pew Research Center, ‘Europe’s Growing Muslim Population’, looks at the future of the 25.8 million Muslims currently residing in European countries. Citing a comprehensive swath of data, it is an attempt to see how the size of Europe’s Muslim population may change in the coming decades, depending on levels of migration.
All three scenarios – zero, moderate and high – considered by researchers produced a thought-provoking outcome: the number of Muslims in Europe will rise at any rate of migration, as they are younger and “have higher fertility (one child more per woman, on average) than other Europeans, mirroring a global pattern.”
Under a first, “zero migration” scenario, the Muslim population of Europe still would be expected to rise from the current level of 4.9 percent to 7.4 percent (roughly 36 million) by the year 2050 even “if all migration into Europe were to immediately and permanently stop.”
WATCH MORE: Mea Culpa! Under the Mask of Cologne. Local residents and refugees seek reconciliation at carnival
A second, “medium” migration scenario assumes that the flows of refugees stop, but “regular” migrants continue to come for reasons other than fleeing wars and instability. Under these conditions, Muslims could comprise 11.2 percent (59 million) of Europe’s population in 2050.
In a third, “high” migration scenario, the heavy influx of predominantly Muslim migrants recorded between 2014 and 2016 continues indefinitely. In this case, Muslims could make up 14 percent (75 million) of Europe’s population by 2050 – nearly triple the current figure.
Should that happen, several major European countries are expected to shoulder most of the burden. In Sweden, nearly a third of the population (4.5 million, or 30 percent) would be Muslims, whereas in Austria and Germany Muslims would represent up to 19 percent of the population.
Also, if high migration continues until 2050, Britain’s Muslim share will grow to 17.2 percent, Finland’s to 15 percent and Norway’s to 17 percent.
These four maps show estimated Muslim populations in Europe in 2016, and projections for 2050 in zero migration, medium migration and high migration scenarios: https://t.co/52uWlFfSJhpic.twitter.com/mcDbWjuB5d — Pew Research Religion (@PewReligion) November 29, 2017
“While Europe’s Muslim population is expected to grow in all three scenarios - and more than double in the medium and high migration scenarios – Europe’s non-Muslims, on the other hand, are projected to decline in total number in each scenario,” says the Pew report.
Interestingly, researchers noted that while Europe’s Muslim population is diverse, comprising Muslims born in Europe and in non-European countries, its self-identification still plays a role. “Levels of religious commitment and belief vary among Europe’s Muslim populations,” the report said.
Europe’s Muslim population is expected to grow in all three of the migration scenarios we modeled, while Europe’s non-Muslims are projected to decline in total number in each scenario https://t.co/iCiAB6ItXdpic.twitter.com/ZNK10XPvHL — Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) November 30, 2017
While some of those Muslims “would not describe Muslim identity as salient in their daily lives,” for others, Islamic identity “profoundly shapes their daily lives.” In the meantime, “not all children born to Muslim women will ultimately identify as Muslims, but children are generally more likely to adopt their parents’ religious identity than any other.”
From mid-2010 to mid-2016 alone, the share of Muslims in Europe rose more than 1 percentage point, from 3.8% to 4.9% (from 19.5M to 25.8M). By 2050, the share of the continent’s population that is Muslim could more than double, rising to 11.2% or more. https://t.co/bfMHf8B798pic.twitter.com/JVy3j0tkde — Pew Research Fact Tank (@FactTank) November 29, 2017
Researchers said it was difficult – if not impossible – to predict future migration levels. “Although none of these scenarios will play out exactly as projected, each provides a set of rough parameters from which to imagine other possible outcomes,” the study added.
There has been a heavy influx of migrants to Europe over the past two years, with Germany and Central European nations most affected, along with arrival points such as Italy and Greece.
READ MORE: No-go zones: Alt-right fantasy or new face of Europe?
The crisis gave rise to various far-right parties benefiting from popular fears of mass migration. In a bid to stem the flow of migrants, the EU undertook a major policy change, introducing tougher border controls and stricter eligibility criteria for new arrivals.
Previous polls suggested the majority of Europeans are wary of Muslim immigration. In August this year, Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation found that every fifth European citizen does not want Muslims as neighbors. A February study by the UK-based think tank Chatham House revealed that an average of 55 percent of people in 10 European countries “agreed that all further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped.”American diplomacy in the Ukraine crisis was summed up earlier this month by State Department senior official Victoria Neuland, a leading neocon: “F….k Europe.”
On Friday, Europe responded by brokering a sensible compromise to Ukraine’s increasingly dangerous crisis just as the army was about to intervene. If the pact holds, Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovich will relinquish some of his powers, a unity government will be formed, elections held, and jailed protestors freed. The fate of imprisoned nationalist leader, Yulia Timoshenko, remains unclear.
Here was an intelligent diplomatic solution to a crisis that might have led to a head-on clash between NATO and Russia, both nuclear powers.
But what if the European Union had not brokered this deal and the US hardline approach had been followed?
A basic rule of world affairs is careful what you threaten. Empty threats become loose cannons.
Last week, US President Barack Obama warned Russia to back off from strife-torn Ukraine or face “consequences.” American Raj: America... Eric Margolis Best Price: $2.56 Buy New $60.00 (as of 07:05 EST - Details)
“Consequences” has become a favorite threat of Hillary Clinton warlike Democrats. It is even overtaking Washington’s former favored threat of war, “all options are on the table.”
We last heard that tired threat over Syria, and look what happened: the White House almost blundered into a totally unnecessary war over Syria and had to be rescued by none other than Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Last week, more warlike threats. What if the wily Vlad Putin calls Obama’s bluff?
If the feeble sanctions threatened by Washington did not work, what then? Would the Obama administration nuke Moscow over Ukraine, a nation that 99.7% of all Americans could not find on a map if their lives depended on it. Would the US try to block Russia’s oil exports, as it does with Iran? Financial markets would go crazy. All over Ukraine?
Moscow believes Ukraine’s uprising is funded and fanned by the US and EU. The Kremlin fears the US is bent on tearing down the Russian Federation and eliminating it as a world power. Putin, the target of an intensifying hate campaign by western media, has said so often.
Last week, President Obama proclaimed his goal was to allow Ukrainians and Syrians to express their will through free elections. Very nice. Two cheers, Mister President.
But democracy and a free press can’t be selective. While western politicians and the increasingly state-guided US media wring their hands over Ukraine and Syria, we’ve seen the dictatorial regimes of Bahrain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – all three key US allies –oppressing their own rebellious people.
Egypt offers a particularly odious example. Its neo-fascist military junta crushed the nation’s first-ever democracy, killed over a thousand protestors, jailed many thousands more, and brought back torture and a savage police state. Eight journalists from al-Jazeera are in prison facing trial for the crime of reporting facts. Protestors are simply shot down in the street.
Washington continues to fund Egypt’s armed forces that crush dissent, and to back Bahrain’s royal family that hosts the US Fifth Fleet. To Putin’s discredit, he just welcomed Egypt’s military dictator to Moscow and showered War at the Top of the... Eric Margolis Best Price: $2.51 Buy New $3.49 (as of 08:45 EST - Details) praise on him.
Besides being hypocritical, Washington’s policy towards Russia is increasingly dangerous. Have we learned nothing from the diplomatic folly that led to World War I?
The US has steadily pushed its strategic influence to Russia’s borders in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This in spite of a promise to Mikhail Gorbachev by the George Bush Sr. administration not to do so in exchange for the Kremlin allowing the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Gorbachev kept his side of the pact; Washington did not.
Were he alive, the great statesman Bismarck would have been aghast at the west’s provocations of Russia, As tensions mount in Asia, and a real war between Japan and China grows more likely – a war that Japan would lose unless the US intervened – Washington increasingly needs the support of Moscow.
Instead, clumsy, amateur US foreign policy is antagonizing Russia and China at the same time. Bismarck taught us to divide our enemies and pit them against one another. It’s also worth remembering that intense US propaganda against the Soviet Union in the 1980’s, including Reagan’s infamous “Evil Empire,” led the Kremlin to believe a US nuclear attack was imminent. Here we go again.
Also recall that Vlad Putin is a judo expert. He well understands how to use an opponent’s weight and poor stance to parry his attack. Putin has so far been doing a successful job wrong-footing Washington. But this is a dangerous game. A few false moves and the result could be a direct clash between nuclear powers.
Fortunately, this dire threat appears to have been averted, at least for the time being, by the unity pact in Kiev. Europe, not Washington, is leading this laudable effort – as it should be.
The Best of Eric S. MargolisSAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp took the wraps off its newest “Xeon” server chip on Tuesday, seeking to capitalize on an explosion of Internet traffic sparked by Web-based cloud computing, social networking and growing smartphone and tablet computer use.
A woman takes a photo of ultrabooks at the Intel booth during the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada January 10, 2012. REUTERS/Steve Marcus
The company’s “Xeon E5-2600” family of processors delivers up to 80 percent better performance than previous platforms while consuming less energy, Diane Bryant, in charge of Intel’s data center business, told reporters.
It is designed to support the servers and workstations that handle what Intel estimates will be 33 percent annual growth of data traffic through 2015.
Intel has already shipped its new platform to a host of server manufacturers. It said several - including Hewlett-Packard Co, Dell Inc, IBM, Oracle Corp and Cisco Systems Inc - are expected to announce Xeon-based server platforms on Tuesday.
Smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices is also stepping up investments in enterprise processors. Last week, the perennial runner-up to Intel announced that it would buy micro-server player SeaMicro for $334 million, getting into an emergent, power-efficient server technology.
AMD has lost ground to Intel in the server market in past years but hopes SeaMicro can help its expansion into low-power solutions in massive data centers. But Intel executives said their own Xeon E5 platform can improve energy efficiency by more than 50 percent in some cases versus the previous generation.
“We did look at SeaMicro’s fabric technology. There are probably very few people they didn’t come to and shop their solution to,” Bryant said. “We were not impressed. We declined and very soon after our competitor acquired them.”
LAGGING, SCRAMBLING
Shares in Intel held steady at about $26.50 in afternoon trade, while AMD’s stock was down about 3 percent at $6.86.
While Intel lags Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics in selling processors for smartphones and tablets, Intel executives have pointed to their server business as key to capitalizing on fast growth in the mobile market.
The popularity of smartphones and other mobile gadgets has increased the need for massive computer centers that store data and feed email, videos and other information to those devices.
UBS expects spending on data centers to surge 49 percent this year, driven by the likes of Apple, Facebook and Google.
At Tuesday’s event, Intel trotted out a variety of clients to demonstrate how its new platform might be employed.
German automaker BMW said it was using Xeon-based servers to keep its luxury cars linked to the Internet.
“Soon we will have more than 10 million vehicles connected and that will lead us to 1 terabyte of data volume per day,” said Mario Muller, BMW vice president of IT infrastructure.ST. PETERSBURG
Northeast High School senior defensive lineman Leshawn Williams went down with a severe, yet seemingly routine knee injury in a football game Friday night.
Before the weekend was over, part of the 17-year-old's right leg had been amputated.
Bonita Copeland, Williams' mother, did not tell her son about the amputation until after the surgery.
"I don't think he's grasped it all yet," Copeland said. "He's still recovering. We're all still trying to understand it."
The 6-foot, 330-pound Williams was injured on a fourth-down defensive play late in the first half of Northeast's 42-30 victory at Clearwater High. The game was delayed almost half an hour while medical personnel tried to determine if he had a broken leg or ligament damage. He was eventually taken off the field on a stretcher and to All Children's Hospital Johns Hopkins Medicine at his mother's request. He was later moved to Bayfront Health St. Petersburg.
Copeland did not attend the game, but received a call soon after her son was injured.
"They put him on the phone with me and he told me he was in pain," said Copeland, 45.
"… When I first looked at it, it looked like he had an MCL injury. Every time he lifted his knee he had pain. Then you could see the blood clot in the back of his knee."
Williams had tweeted Saturday that he couldn't move his toes: "I never cried so much in life! Waiting on results! Cnt (sic) move my toes."
Doctors spent the weekend trying to re-establish circulation in Williams' lower leg, and the decision to amputate from just above the knee was made Sunday night.
Copeland questions the arrival time of paramedics. She said the wait was "somewhere between 20 to 30 minutes" at the field before he was finally transported to All Children's.
While football games do have certified trainers in attendance, it is not unusual for public school athletic events in Pinellas County to not have ambulances on site. Due to budget cuts in recent years, the district does not provide them. Schools, however, can pay to have ambulances at games, with the cost usually around $450.
"My biggest concern was the response time," Copeland said. "I think if the ambulance got there sooner they probably could've helped him. … What if somebody broke their neck and was laying down on the field? With my son, it was a freak accident and it could've been something worse.
"Even though my son lost his leg, I'm happy he's still here. But the sooner the response time, the better."
Dr. Koco Eaton, a St. Petersburg orthopedic surgeon, said considering the severity of the injury, response time may not have mattered.
"It sounds as if the blood vessels were just shredded," Eaton said. "I don't believe an hour would've made a difference. Now, if you would've said two or three hours, then maybe."
Larry Collins, an assistant professor in orthopedics and sports medicine at the University of South Florida, said blood clots can be a result of traumatic injury. But they are very rare, especially in an otherwise young and healthy athlete. Sometimes patients have an undiagnosed clotting disorder, making them more susceptible.
Collins, a physicians assistant, had not heard about the case, but said it reminded him of what's known as "compartment syndrome."
Compartments are groupings of muscles, nerves and blood vessels in the arms and legs. A traumatic injury to the leg can sometimes cause blood to fill up these compartments. Without quick surgical intervention to relieve the pressure caused by this bleeding, the muscle tissue can die.
At Monday afternoon's football practice, the first without Williams, Northeast players and coaches were somber. They signed a banner that read, ''Get Well Soon Leshawn," then first-year head coach Jeremy Frioud addressed the team.
"This was just freakish, awful luck," Frioud said. "But we're going to be there as a team to help.... The first thing (Williams) texted to us after this happened was 'play hard.' That's exactly what we're going to do."
The team will wear "69'' stickers — representing his jersey number — on the back of their helmets to honor Williams for the season's final two games. They will also give out 100 T-shirts with Williams' number on them before this week's home game against East Lake.
Senior free safety/running back Devin Bowers was still trying to cope with what had happened to one of his best friends.
"You hear that it's one thing, an MCL, then the next thing you hear he's going to lose his leg," Bowers said. "How do you go from something that can be fixed to losing your leg? It doesn't make sense."
Staff writers Bob Putnam and Jodie Tillman contributed to this report. Contact Rodney Page at page @tampabay.com. Follow @RodneyHomeTeam.Proposed ‘fair rebalancing’ deal would see some families receive extra two weeks of paid parental leave and a family tax benefit boost
Some families will receive two extra weeks of paid parental leave and increased fortnightly family tax benefit payments under a compromise proposed by the Turnbull government to pass other welfare cuts and childcare measures.
The government has rolled in changes to paid parental leave and family payments into an omnibus welfare bill that it will introduce on Wednesday.
At a press conference in Canberra the social services minister, Christian Porter, conceded the compromises “significantly reduce” savings but would fund improved childcare, a package previously blocked because it was linked to $3bn in family tax benefit cuts.
Nick Xenophon has given tentative support to changes to family tax benefits to pay for childcare improvements, but has signalled the compromise on paid parental leave has not gone far enough.
Labor said it would oppose the package, arguing it still inflicts a net cut to family benefits and will abolish the energy supplement which will impact pensioners.
Coalition releases childcare package compromise in bid to clear Senate – politics live Read more
Porter confirmed on ABC’s AM that, as Guardian Australia reported on Tuesday, the government will abolish the end-of-year supplements for family tax benefit B in stages but increase fortnightly payments for those on family tax benefit A by $20 a fortnight.
Porter conceded that hundreds of thousands of families would lose out from abolishing the end-of-year supplement, but said the savings would be reinvested to improve affordability of childcare.
On Wednesday Xenophon told ABC News Breakfast replacing the supplement with increased regular payments was “obviously a step in the right direction”. He acknowledged the government had improved the package, but stopped short of promising to pass it.
Porter announced that changes to paid parental leave, which would restrict the amount of taxpayer-funded leave parents with employer schemes can access, will only come into force nine months after a bill is passed, ensuring it won’t affect already pregnant mothers.
He said that 96,000 families with lower incomes who do not have generous employer schemes will get an extra two weeks of paid parental leave, worth an average of $1,300.
A further 68,000 families with employer schemes will no longer be able to access the current 18 weeks of taxpayer-funded paid parental leave. Instead, the government will only pay to top their employer schemes to a total of 20 weeks.
The Australian has reported those families will suffer an average loss of $5,600 and about 4,000 families will lose the entire $12,000 taxpayer-funded paid parental leave scheme.
Xenophon said he understood the paid parental leave changes would leave 60% of women better off and 40% worse off.
“We will still keep talking to the government about this, but at this stage we are not convinced but we will still keep talking,” he said.
Porter described the changes as a “fair rebalancing” between parents who are currently able to access the government scheme on top of employer schemes and those who only get the public scheme.
He confirmed that as a result of the paid parental leave changes, the government would save only $491m, down from the estimated $1.18bn between 2017 and 2020.
Labor shadow minister for social services, Jenny Macklin, said the omnibus welfare bill would cut paid parental leave, family tax benefits and the energy supplement, hurting millions of pensioners.
“If you’re a family on Family Tax Benefit Part A it will mean that you are around $200 a year per child worse off,” she said.
“If you’re receiving Family Tax Benefit Part B you’ll be around $350 a year worse off as a family.”
At a doorstop in Canberra, Pauline Hanson said the $700 a year per child supplement “needs to be reined back”.
“It is a lot of money to be handing out... When I was rearing my children we got $8 a week,” she said. “There was no childcare, I as mother had to look after my kids.”
“I know circumstances have changed, but... I believe in giving them a helping hand when you need a helping hand.”
The One Nation leader said Australia was about to hit $500bn in debt and had to rein in welfare payments which will hit $191bn by 2019-20 or the system would not be sustainable.
Asked why it had taken negotiation with the crossbench to achieve the changes, Porter insisted the government’s original position had been reasonable but it had to “deal with the landscape that exists”.
Porter said the omnibus bill was not sure to pass the Senate but the government had modified its proposal to “give it the best possible chance of success”.The Good Food Institute’s Milena Esherick spoke with Dominique to find out what it takes to drive positive change in the seafood industry.
M: You hold a master’s in marine biodiversity and conservation from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. How did your degree prepare you for your role as CEO of New Wave Foods?
D: My education helped me understand things from a holistic perspective, and it opened my eyes to the idea of using business as an opportunity for making positive change. In the past, I thought business was only for making money. But you can make a business that is profitable and benefits the planet.
M: Did you have an aha moment in graduate school that sparked your interest in becoming an entrepreneur for social good?
D: I was taking a class on algae, and at the same time the business school at UC San Diego ran a challenge on social entrepreneurship. I came up with the idea to teach schoolchildren about the wonders of algae through hands-on science and art. I didn’t win, but I got my feet wet, and I was able to take it to the next level and build a business aimed at inspiring a new generation of marine biologists.
M: What does your day-to-day work look like as CEO of New Wave Foods?
D: I juggle many things: business and brand development, marketing, identifying distributors and retailers, scaling production to meet demand, fundraising… My key focus is on getting our product to market.
M: What is the role of your co-founder, Michelle Wolf, in the company?
D: Michelle is the chief science officer. She focuses on product formulation and development. Her background is in materials science and engineering—understanding properties of different materials and how they interact. Michelle has a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. She understands the functional properties of plant ingredients, such as how certain foods combine at different temperatures.
M: How do you make shrimp from plants?
D: We use all plant-based ingredients to mimic the taste, texture, color, and nutritional profile of shrimp. We use soy for protein and red algae for flavor. Red algae are what shrimp eat in the wild, so they contribute to the flavor profile. We’re creating food out of food and using science to bring ingredients together.
M: How close are you to a finished product and wide distribution?
D: We are really close to a final product, and we’re collaborating with a number of food experts. We’ve created the perfect shrimp in the lab, but now we have to scale it for greater production. We are going to market first with popcorn shrimp. It’s pretty perfect, and popcorn shrimp is about one-third of the shrimp market. It looks really familiar to people. Our goal is to launch this product in six to 12 months. We’ll do a soft launch in California first. We’re also working on a cocktail shrimp.
M: How much will New Wave Foods' shrimp cost?
D: We will be competitive with other vegetarian seafood companies. Our goal is to be cheaper than seafood from the ocean.
M: Google currently buys your product and serves it in Google cafes for employees. What has been the reception?
D: It’s going very well! We’ve received great feedback. They’re really excited about the product and want to support it.
M: Why is Google interested in your product?
D: They care about sustainability and are actively trying to reduce the shrimp they serve because of the environmental issues and concerns about human slavery. They wanted a plant-based shrimp, but they couldn’t find a good product until they found New Wave Foods. More and more companies are concerned about the food they serve.
M: Can you say more about the issue of human slavery in shrimp farming?
D: The United States imports about 90 percent of shrimp from farms in Asia where people are forced into slavery. They work 14-hour days and have no money or resources to be able to leave. President Obama passed a ban on companies importing from farms that are known to use human slaves, but all shrimp from one bag of shrimp are not from the same farm. It’s very difficult to trace the origins of shrimp.
M: What are the environmental consequences of taking shrimp from the ocean?
D: The rate of seafood consumption is far more than the ocean can supply. This is why we are seeing an increase in fish farming. We can’t pull out of the ocean what we need. We are exploiting and depleting the world’s oceans.
To learn about early-stage food technology companies like New Wave Foods or to start your own good food company, visit GFI’s website for information and resources.
Dominique Barnes and Michelle Wolf co-founded New Wave Foods, a food technology company in Silicon Valley, with the mission to create sustainable, healthy, and delicious seafood. They create seafood that does not have to be taken from the ocean or imported from overseas farms known to use slave labor. Their first product is a popcorn shrimp made entirely from plants.Thank goodness Microsoft isn't suing everyone who hacks its Kinect (unlike some large console makers who shall remain unnamed), because we've seen some pretty awesome hacks recently.
The latest comes from my hometown of Tokyo, Japan. PARCO, a Shibuya department store, has set up a cyberspace simulator in honor of the manga/game/anime franchise Ghost in the Shell. This specific setup is actually in honor of the recent film, Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. Solid State Society, which was re-released in Japan this week in stereoscopic 3D.
The setup, created by Kayac Inc., puts you "right inside cyberspace." Using your body movement, you're able to interact with, and fly through, the virtual animated landscape. The picture is projected onto two huge walls, so you'll really feel like you're flying. The goal of the game is to "capture" the Tachikoma spider robot thing by smacking it (sweeping your arm down). And it's timed! AHHH!
If you happen to be hanging around my favorite city, you can go check out the booth yourself: it's on the fifth floor of PARCO in Shibuya, inside Monozoku at the S.A.C. Premium Shop. It'll be on display until April 19.
[BMCL via Engadget]
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*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
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Franny Gomez, who took over the Winnipeg culinary institution last year after the death of longtime owner Louis Mathez, said she's unsure whether she can afford to keep it running.
The extensive revitalization blueprints include the construction of a new hotel, a parkade, new office and retail space and a central meeting place over the next few years. There is no firm cost estimate on the massive project, but insiders say it will run well into the "hundreds of millions" of dollars.
The Wagon Wheel Lunch restaurant has operated out of the Norlyn Building since 1958, but it has to move out by March. That's when the Hargrave Street structure will meet with the wrecking ball as part of the downtown Winnipeg SHED (sports hospitality and entertainment district) plans.
Winnipeg's favourite clubhouse sandwich is on the endangered species list and could become extinct early in the new year.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 8/11/2011 (2667 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 8/11/2011 (2667 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Winnipeg's favourite clubhouse sandwich is on the endangered species list and could become extinct early in the new year.
The Wagon Wheel Lunch restaurant has operated out of the Norlyn Building since 1958, but it has to move out by March. That's when the Hargrave Street structure will meet with the wrecking ball as part of the downtown Winnipeg SHED (sports hospitality and entertainment district) plans.
WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREEPRESS archives Franny Gomez: Wagon Wheel proprietor
The extensive revitalization blueprints include the construction of a new hotel, a parkade, new office and retail space and a central meeting place over the next few years. There is no firm cost estimate on the massive project, but insiders say it will run well into the "hundreds of millions" of dollars.
Franny Gomez, who took over the Winnipeg culinary institution last year after the death of longtime owner Louis Mathez, said she's unsure whether she can afford to keep it running.
"I'm still undecided. Do I continue or do I just quit? I know (potential sites) out there are expensive. It's very hard to afford to move (the restaurant) somewhere else. I've been shopping around but I haven't found anything yet," she said
|
need careful managing at the start of his United career, having struggled when first joining the German club.
“He has been at Dortmund for three years,” said Gündogan, who is now at Manchester City. “The first two years were not so easy for him, to be honest. He’s a player who needs self-confidence, who needs to play every time and prove himself to get better and better. At this time we [Dortmund] were not so successful, so it was not easy for him to adapt. He had a few problems.
“But when you see how he played last year, it was really incredible. Maybe he was the most important player for us last year. If he can go on like this, he will have a big impact for Manchester United and a big plus. It’s difficult for us to beat them, of course, but I wish him the best and to stay healthy.”MyWish weekly update
Vladimir Tikhomirov Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 4, 2017
Hello everyone!
Here is weekly update for MyWish project.
Development status.
We have completed integration with Bancor (initially planned by 10-Dec). You can sell/buy our WISH token using the link below: https://app.bancor.network/communities/5a17518de17ffd0001b8ee6a/about Crowdsale contract development is ongoing. Back-end: 30% completed, Contract template: 40%, Design: 40% completed, Front-end: 10% completed. Ahead of Plan. Initial release date: 25th of December. WISH token integration. Release date: 25th of December. Task divided into two steps:
WISH payments for SmartContracts : Accepting WISH token as payment for contract creation (70% done)
ETH/BTC Payments : Exchanging ETH/BTC to WISH from exchanges for SmartContracts Payment (10% done).
Partnerships.
We understand that smart contracts needs to be implemented in many areas of our life and we are in contact with many potential partners:
German pension fund (https://www.mercer.com/) is in discussion with MyWish to use SmartContracts for pension payments in CryptoCurrencies for their clients in future. Earlier, we applied to labor ministries of different countries with the proposal to create an alternative labor contract based on a smart contract that would give more guarantees to the parties than the usual contract on the labor code. The Russian Ministry of Labor is not yet ready to introduce technological innovations, since the country’s crypto currency has not yet acquired state status. We expect a response from the ministries of other countries. Our offer to register pizza orders on the basis of smart contracts has impressed Dodo pizza. We are implementing a joint project with them in 2018. Currently, we are communicating with world-class fitness clubs about the introduction of smart contracts for the registration of season tickets and training with individual goals. Our proposal to implement smart contracts for registration of a music subscription is considered by the Spotify service and a number of similar companies.
Exchanges.
We understand the urgency to get WISH listed on major exchanges to benefit our investors. We have received various quotes from major exchanges. Decision to list on expensive exchanges will be taken only after WISH token Integration. Our primary aim is to complete Crowdfunding Contract and Wish token Integration.
MyWish team is in the process of submitting additional documents to exchanges like KuCoin, Cryptopia and Liqui to get listed soon.
Marketing
Team is working on the marketing strategies. MyWish will be actively promoting the SmartContracts in various social medias. SmartContract user engagement and contests will be major part of our campaign.
Weekly statistic: 1126 registered users (+28.8% since last week) and 300+ Contracts Deployed. We proud of this result.
Thank you all for support,
Vladimir.
Pizza contract: http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/11/16/mywish-200-created-contracts-500-users/
Bancor Network: https://app.bancor.network/communities/5a17518de17ffd0001b8ee6a/about
Etherdelta: https://etherdelta.com/#WISH-ETHFIFA 19 FIFA 18 FIFA 17 FIFA 16 FIFA 15 FIFA 14 FIFA 13 FIFA 12 FIFA 11 FIFA 10 FIFA 09 FIFA 08 FIFA 07 Feb 2019 22 21 14 11 07 04 Jan 2019 31 28 24 21 17 14 10 07 03 Dec 2018 27 20 17 13 03 Nov 2018 26 15 13 05 01 Oct 2018 29 25 23 22 18 15 11 09 04 01 Sep 2018 27 24 20 Aug 2018 21 Jul 2018 19 Sep 2018 12 06 Aug 2018 30 23 03 Jul 2018 26 19 Jun 2018 14 11 07 04 May 2018 31 28 24 22 17 14 10 08 03 Apr 2018 30 26 23 19 16 12 09 05 03 Mar 2018 29 26 22 19 15 12 08 05 01 Feb 2018 26 22 19 15 12 08 05 01 Jan 2018 29 25 22 18 15 11 08 04 02 Dec 2017 28 21 18 14 11 07 04 Nov 2017 30 27 23 20 16 13 06 02 Oct 2017 30 26 23 19 16 12 09 05 02 Sep 2017 28 25 21 18 Aug 2017 28 Sep 2017 20 18 13 11 07 04 Aug 2017 31 28 24 22 17 14 10 03 Jul 2017 31 27 24 20 17 13 10 06 03 Jun 2017 29 26 22 19 14 12 08 06 01 May 2017 29 25 22 18 15 11 08 04 02 Apr 2017 27 24 20 18 13 10 06 03 Mar 2017 30 27 23 20 16 13 09 06 02 Feb 2017 27 22 20 16 14 09 06 02 Jan 2017 30 26 23 19 17 16 12 09 05 03 Dec 2016 27 22 19 15 12 08 05 01 Nov 2016 28 24 21 17 14 10 07 03 Oct 2016 27 19 13 06 Sep 2016 29 20 Aug 2016 25 Sep 2016 22 14 08 01 Aug 2016 26 18 11 04 Jul 2016 28 21 14 07 Jun 2016 30 23 16 09 02 May 2016 26 19 12 05 Apr 2016 28 21 14 07 Mar 2016 31 24 17 10 03 Feb 2016 25 19 18 13 11 04 Jan 2016 28 21 14 07 Dec 2015 30 24 17 10 03 Nov 2015 26 19 12 06 Oct 2015 30 23 19 16 09 02 Sep 2015 25 21 Aug 2015 28 Sep 2015 10 04 01 Aug 2015 27 21 14 07 Jul 2015 31 24 16 10 03 Jun 2015 26 19 12 05 May 2015 29 22 15 08 01 Apr 2015 24 17 10 01 Mar 2015 27 20 13 10 06 Feb 2015 27 20 13 06 Jan 2015 30 28 26 23 16 09 02 Dec 2014 27 19 12 05 Nov 2014 28 26 21 14 07 Oct 2014 31 24 17 10 02 Sep 2014 26 23 18 Aug 2014 29 Sep 2014 19 12 05 Aug 2014 29 22 15 08 01 Jul 2014 25 20 18 Jun 2014 20 13 06 May 2014 30 23 16 09 02 Apr 2014 25 18 11 04 Mar 2014 28 21 14 07 Feb 2014 28 21 14 07 Jan 2014 31 24 17 10 03 Dec 2013 27 20 13 06 Nov 2013 29 22 15 08 01 Oct 2013 25 18 11 04 Sep 2013 27 20 Aug 2013 31 Sep 2013 20 13 06 Aug 2013 30 23 16 09 02 Jul 2013 26 19 12 05 Jun 2013 28 21 14 07 May 2013 31 24 17 10 03 Apr 2013 26 19 12 05 Mar 2013 28 22 15 08 04 01 Feb 2013 22 15 Aug 2012 31 Feb 2012 22 Aug 2011 30 Feb 2011 22 Aug 2010 30 Feb 2010 22 Aug 2009 30 Feb 2009 22 Aug 2008 30 Feb 2008 22 Aug 2007 30 Feb 2007 22 Aug 2006 30
Cookies help us improve our web content and deliver a personalized experience. By using this website, you agree to our use of cookies.Private Labels with CRF Identified through an unique number on bag
Instructions to consumer> look for the code with one of the letters at the end A, B, C,D
Best By will include the following dates 04.26.16 thru 04.26.18
All Codes are found on the Back of the Bag in the following location down the back seam, lower right hand corner
Brand Container
Size UPC What to look for Code Examples
Emerald Farms
Emerald Farms Cut Corn 40oz 3765403671 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA A
Emerald Farms Green Peas 40oz 3765403672 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA D
Emerald Farms Peas and Carrots 40oz 3765403673 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA C
Emerald Farms Mixed Vegetable 40oz 3765403670 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA E
Endico
Endico Cut Corn 40oz 0145916420 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA A
Endico Green Peas 40oz 0145916720 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA B
Endico
Endico Mixed Vegetables 40oz 0145916610 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA C
Endico Peas and Carrots 40oz 0145916730 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA D
Great Value
Great Value Cut Green Beans 12oz 7874205333 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By:
042318
A 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Mixed Vegetables 12oz 7874205334 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
B 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Peas & Carrots 12oz 7874205335 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
C 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Sweet Peas 12oz 7874205336 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
A 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Sweet Peas 26oz 7874210912 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
B 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Mixed Vegetables 26oz 7874210907 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
C 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Whole Kernel Golden Corn 12oz 7874205338 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
A 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Whole Kernel Golden Corn 26oz 7874210910 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
B 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value
Great Value Steamable Cut Green Beans 12oz 7874208363 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
C 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Steamable Mixed Vegetables 12oz 7874208026 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
A 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Steamable Sweet Corn 12oz 7874208024 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
B 23:02 Product of USA
Great Value Steamable Sweet Peas 12oz 7874208369 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
C 23:02 Product of USA
James Farm
James Farm Cut Corn 32oz 6069501044 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA A
James Farm Cut Green Beans 32oz 6069501004 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA B
James Farm Garden Peas 32oz 6069501000 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA C
James Farm Mixed Vegetables 32oz 6069501542 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA D
James Farm Peas & Carrots 40oz 6069501001 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA E
James Farm Whole Green Beans 32oz 6069501003 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA A
Kirkland Signature
Kirkland Signature Organic Stir-Fry 4lb 9661910114 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 B
USA/Holland/Ecuador
Certified Organic By WSDA
Price First
Price First Corn 16oz 7874211030 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
A 23:02 Product of USA
Price First Sweet Green Peas 16oz 7874211027 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best If Used By: 042318
E 23:02 Product of USA
Quirch
Quirch Baby Lima Beans 14oz 6507260150 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA A
Quirch Baby Lima Beans 32oz 6507260149 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA B
Quirch Corn 14oz 6507260136 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA C
Quirch Corn 32oz 6507260135 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA D
Quirch Mixed Vegetables 14oz 6507260130 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA E
Quirch Mixed Vegetables 32oz 6507260129 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA A
Quirch Peas & Carrots 16oz 6507260152 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA A
Quirch Peas & Carrots 32oz 6507260151 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA B
Quirch Sweet Peas 14oz 6507260140 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA C
Quirch Sweet Peas 32oz 6507260139 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA D
Season's Choice
Season's Choice Garden Fresh Sweet Peas 16oz 4149816429 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best Before: 032518 A
15:15
Product of USA
Season's Choice Seamed Mixed Vegetables 12oz 4149820284 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best Before: 032518 B
15:15
Product of USA
Season's Choice Super Sweet Whole Kernel Corn 16oz 4149816428 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best Before: 032518 A
15:15
Product of USA
Simply Nature
Simply Nature Organic Mixed Vegetables 16oz 4149829655 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA D
Simply Nature Organic Sweet Corn 16oz 4149829656 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Sell By: 012515
15:15
Product of USA E
True Goodness
True Goodness Organic Broccoli Florets 10oz 1373343097 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 042318
16:30 D
Product of USA
True Goodness Organic Chopped Spinach 10oz 1373343101 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 042318
16:30 D
Product of USA
True Goodness Organic Cut Green Beans 10oz 1373343095 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 042318
16:30 D
Product of USA
True Goodness Organic Mixed Vegetables 10oz 1373343096 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 042318
16:30 D
Product of USA
True Goodness Organic Peas 10oz 1373343100 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 042318
16:30 D
Product of USA
True Goodness Organic Peas & Shoestring Carrots 10oz 1373343104 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 042318
16:30 D
Product of USA
True Goodness Organic Petite Green Peas 10oz 1373343099 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 042318
16:30 D
Product of USA
True Goodness Organic White Sweet Corn 10oz 1373343098 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 042318
16:30 D
Product of USA
Wild Oats
Wild Oats Organic Broccoli Florets 10oz 4873700377 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 A
Product of USA
Wild Oats Organic Broccoli & Cauliflower 10oz 4873700711 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 B
Product of USA
Wild Oats Organic Chopped Kale 10oz 4873700379 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 C
Product of USA
Wild Oats Organic Chopped Spinach 10oz 4873700380 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 D
Product of USA
Wild Oats Organic Cut Green Beans 12oz 4873700713 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 A
Product of USA
Wild Oats Organic Diced Butternut Squash 10oz 4873700710 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 B
Product of USA
Wild Oats Organic Diced Sweet Potatoes 10oz 4873700709 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 C
Product of USA
Wild Oats Organic Mixed Vegetables 12oz 4873700715 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 D
Product of USA
Wild Oats Organic Sweet Corn 12oz 4873700714 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 A
Product of USA
Wild Oats Organic Sweet Peas 12oz 4873700712 Look for one of these letters (A,B,C,D, E) Best By: 040918
15:15 B
Product of USA
ExportOfficials will take a closer look at a proposed Albuquerque Sol stadium, as the city council has signed off on a $15,000 feasibility study.
The Sol have pitched a new stadium in Albuquerque as a way for the franchise to grow in a new league. Currently a member of the Premier Development League, the Sol have proposed building a new stadium that seats upwards of 10,000 fans, thus making membership in the USL more likely.
Discussions of the stadium are set to continue, as Albuqerque’s mayor and city council approved the allocation of $15,000 for a study on the project. More from the AP (Via the Santa Fe New Mexican):
A resolution approved by the City Council and signed by Mayor Richard Berry approves spending $15,000 on the feasibility study.
According to city officials, the Albuquerque Sol Football Club needs to own or be primary tenant of a 10,000-seat stadium to seek entry into the United Soccer League.
The Sol’s home matches are currently hosted at Ben Rios Field, which is part of St. Pius X High School. The franchise has been a member of the Premier Development League since 2014.
RELATED STORIES: Albuquerque Sol Pitching New StadiumMonday, December 10, 2018
Description: Barronelle Stutzman, the sole owner of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, Washington, has for her entire career served and employed people who identify as homosexual. Despite this, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Washington attorney general allege that she is guilty of unlawful discrimination because she acted consistent with her faith and declined to use her creative skills to design floral arrangements for the same-sex ceremony of a long-time customer, Robert Ingersoll, and another man, Curt Freed.
Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.
– Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing floral artist Barronelle Stutzman of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland filed their opening brief Tuesday with the Washington Supreme Court. The brief on behalf of Stutzman comes after the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the state high court’s previous ruling against her and ordered the Washington court to reconsider the case in light of theIn thecase, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Colorado’s decision to punish cake artist Jack Phillips for living and working consistently with his religious beliefs about marriage, just as Stutzman has also been trying to do while under legal attack by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson and the American Civil Liberties Union. The two sued Stutzman after she declined, because of her faith, to personally participate in, or design custom floral arrangements celebrating, the same-sex wedding of a customer she had served for nearly 10 years.“Barronelle serves all customers; she simply declines to celebrate or participate in sacred events that violate her deeply held beliefs,” said ADF Senior Vice President of U.S. Legal Division Kristen Waggoner, who argued on Stutzman’s behalf before the Washington Supreme Court in 2016. Waggoner also argued for Phillips before the U.S. Supreme Court.“Despite that, the state of Washington has been openly hostile toward Barronelle’s religious beliefs about marriage,” Waggoner explained. “It not only went after her business but also sued her in her personal capacity—putting all her personal assets, including her life savings, at risk. Rather than respecting her right to peacefully live out her faith, the government has targeted her because of her beliefs. Meanwhile, the state has applied its laws unevenly, choosing not to sue a coffeehouse owner who profanely berated and expelled customers for their Christian beliefs. In, the U.S. Supreme Court made it clear that government hostility toward people of faith has no place in our society. We are asking the Washington Supreme Court to affirm that in this case.”While Ferguson failed to prosecute the coffeehouse, Bedlam Coffee, he has steadfastly—and on his own initiative—pursued unprecedented measures to punish 74-year-old Stutzman. The ADF brief explains that the U.S. Supreme Court’sruling condemned those sorts of one-sided applications of the law against people of faith.After Ferguson obtained a trial court order allowing him to collect on Stutzman’s personal assets, he publicized a letter offering to settle the case for $2,001. In exchange, he demanded that Stutzman give up her religious and artistic freedom. Stutzman responded, “It’s about freedom, not money. I certainly don’t relish the idea of losing my business, my home and everything else that your lawsuit threatens to take from my family, but my freedom to honor God in doing what I do best is more important.”The Washington Supreme Court later ruled that Stutzman must pay penalties and attorneys’ fees for honoring her conscience. Rather than participate in a sacred event that violates her faith, Stutzman referred Rob Ingersoll, whom she considers a friend, to several other florists in the area. The two then discussed his wedding plans, they hugged, and Ingersoll left.As the ADF opening brief inandexplains, the state shouldn’t be allowed to crush Stutzman’s conscience. Instead, “there is a better resolution to this case—one that prohibits businesses from refusing to serve customers simply because of who they are, but that protects the conscience rights of people like Mrs. Stutzman who respectfully object to creating custom art for, or personally participating in, ceremonies that violate their religious beliefs. This path is the only one that preserves First Amendment freedoms and protects people with politically unpopular beliefs about important topics like marriage.”Microstructures like this one developed at Washington State University could be used in batteries, lightweight ultrastrong materials, catalytic converters, supercapacitors and biological scaffolds. Washington State University
The rapid rise of 3D printing has driven innovation in areas as diverse as manufacturing, bioengineering and food science. Now, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) have developed a method which can print metal structures with complex 3D architectures, controlling details down to the nanoscale and closely mimicking the architecture of natural bio-materials like wood and bone.
Their work is published in Science Advances.
While the printing of softer materials, like polymers, is more established, printing metals has been a formidable challenge for engineers. Existing techniques involve depositing powdered metal using powerful lasers, or depositing metal onto a polymer template and burning away the polymer scaffold.
Rahul Panat, who led the project, and his team instead used a technique which prints tiny microdroplets of water containing silver nanoparticles. As the droplets evaporate, the nanoparticles are left behind to form a metal structure, with precise control of the 3D shape. While this work only made use of silver nanoparticles, the technique could also be applied using other materials, such as ceramics or other metals.
After printing, the materials are heated to 200 °C causing the nanoparticles to fuse together, creating strong structures with features as small as 20 microns (around a third the width of a human hair). By controlling these heating conditions, the researchers could also control the size of pores in the material down to the nanometre scale.
This technique is likely to find other applications in batteries, supercapacitors and biological scaffolds.
“This technique can fill a lot of critical gaps for the realisation of these technologies,” Panet says.
The WSU team printed a variety of structures, including pillars and tiny accordion-like assemblies which were used as stretchable wires to connect micro-LEDs. This demonstrates the potential of this technique for making microelectronic devices, which could make their way into wearable or implantable electronics.
But the potential strength of these materials lies in the ability to control structure across several orders of magnitude, from the nanometre to the centimetre scale. This means that 3D lattices can be printed with hierarchical structure, meaning that the structural elements – the rods that connect the lattice – can themselves be made of lattices of even smaller rods. This hierarchy of structure is often seen in biological materials like bone, and can give a massive increase in the compressive strength of a material. In the future, we might see biological implants and artificial bones printed using this method, making them lighter and stronger than materials used today.ELIZABETH -- The gun charge against former Rutgers football star and NFL player Khaseem Greene stemming from a shooting outside an Elizabeth nightclub in December has been dismissed after it was revealed the accused gunman admitted he lied about Greene's involvement.
Greene, 28, of Elizabeth, was charged with unlawful possession of handgun after authorities said he handed a gun to the alleged shooter, Jason Sanders, outside the Allstar Night Club on Third Street in Elizabeth on Dec. 3.
Authorities said Sanders fired the handgun into the crowd, but no one was injured, and that security footage showed Greene passing Sanders the gun.
Court records show Sanders gave a voluntary statement when he was arrested on Dec. 30. He admitted to the shooting and said Greene had handed him the gun, authorities said. Greene was subsequently charged on Jan. 4 and indicted on May 9.
In several court appearances, Greene's lawyer, Joshua McMahon of Schiller McMahon in Westfield, sparred with state Superior Court Judge Robert Kirsch while alleging "misconduct" in how the Union County Prosecutor's Office and Elizabeth Police Department handled the case.
The prosecutor's office requested the charge be dropped and Kirsch dismissed it without prejudice on July 17, court records show.
McMahon now says the misconduct he was referring to is that Sanders recanted what he said about Greene the same day court records say he implicated him.
In an audio recording of Sanders' Dec. 30 interview provided by McMahon, Sanders told Elizabeth detectives he lied about Greene's involvement when pressed about whether he made that part up.
Sanders says, "If you put it like that, sir, then I lied."
"Okay, well you can recant at another time. Not tonight," one of the detectives responds. "When the prosecutor's office talks to you about your case you can say that wasn't Khaseem, I don't know what I was doing, but tonight this is an official statement. So you have every right as someone who is being charged with a crime to recant any part or all of your statement after your initial statement. Okay?"
McMahon said the conversation is proof that the prosecutor's office proceeded with indicting Greene despite Sanders admitting he lied.
A spokesman for the prosecutor's office said he could not comment on specific pieces of evidence while the case against Sanders remains pending.
Through a spokesperson, Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage and Elizabeth police department leaders declined to comment on the dismissal.
"The Prosecutor's Office and police department worked in concert to repeatedly perpetrate at least two lies to the judge who they sought the initial arrest warrant from, and the grand jurors who returned the indictment," McMahon said.
"Specifically, police and prosecutors, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, falsely stated Greene was visible on a surveillance video recording handing a gun to another man, who then fired the gun into a crowd; and, second, that the alleged shooter, Jason Sanders, a self-admitted liar and multi-convicted felon, gave a statement to police claiming Greene handed Sanders the gun."
According to court records, Sanders has been previously convicted of a slew of weapons charges in several incidents going back to the 90s, plus a robbery conviction in 1991 and a conviction for making terroristic threats in 1993. In 1998, he was sentenced to eight years in state prison on one of the weapons charges and was released in 2003.
The fact that Sanders recanted about Greene's involvement was never noted in any police report nor was it told to the grand jury, McMahon said.
Prosecutors also did not play the surveillance video for the grand jury, he said. McMahon said he believes prosecutors wanted Greene to admit to a crime he did not commit "in order to shield the office from civil liability."
McMahon said the charge has cost Greene his NFL career and that he intends to bring a civil rights action in federal court "to help the young man get back on his feet financially and, just as important to Khaseem, take steps to make sure that police and prosecutors who tragically rush to accuse innocent black men are held to account."
Greene, who played football for Elizabeth High School, spent five years at Rutgers, where he played two years at safety and two years at linebacker. He was also a two-time Big East Defensive Player of the Year (2011-12), and he co-captained the Rutgers team that won a share of the 2012 Big East title. He graduated from Rutgers as the most decorated defensive player in school history.
The Chicago Bears drafted Greene in the fourth round of the 2013 NFL draft. He played 25 games over two seasons but then was cut by the Bears.
Though he has not taken the field since, he was on the rosters of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Detroit Lions, and was signed in January to a futures contract by the Kansas City Chiefs, allowing him an off-season opportunity to compete for a roster spot in summer training camp.
The Chiefs, however, placed Greene on waivers on May 10 just hours after NJ Advance Media reported that he was indicted on the gun charge.
The Chiefs declined to comment about whether the dismissal of charges would change Greene's status with the team.
Former Elizabeth High football coach Chet Parlavecchio told NJ Advance Media he was "flabbergasted" when he heard of Greene's indictment.
"He's one of the greatest kids I've ever coached," Parlevecchio said previously. "He was a leader and everything you wish for in a football player. He was someone who was never in trouble in high school. When he was there, he was a gentleman for us. Never any trouble."
"Khaseem is a total class act who has never been in trouble, and when he is not playing ball, he is spending his time and money hosting free football camps and clinics for underprivileged kids in his hometown of Elizabeth," McMahon added. "My heart goes out to Khaseem over the toll this has taken on his career."
Sanders faces charges of illegal possession of a handgun as well as possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and second- and third-degree aggravated assault. He is being held on $100,000 bail.
Tom Haydon and Ryan Dunleavy contributed reporting to this story.
Jessica Remo may be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @JessicaRemoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.Two months after the season-opener in Dubai, action in the 24H SERIES powered by Hankook continues with the Hankook 12H MUG
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been incredibly clear on the framework that was agreed upon. … It was frankly much bolder than the path that we were headed down.”
But, Ayers added, “here’s my skepticism. They had already passed health care bills to repeal and replace Obamacare in both chambers multiple times and couldn’t get that done. So, while there is a great framework in place, that will continue to grow the booming economy thanks to the president’s policies, I would ask them that question.”
“Hear those answers from the speaker and, more importantly, from the majority leader,” Ayers urged.
Ayers was also pressed on why Trump and Pence have been unable to win over the “handful” of Republicans in Congress who have resisted the president’s agenda.
“Great question,” Ayers quipped. “It’s hard to do when they all maintain their committee chairmanships.”
“They’re all still committee chairmen,” he added after a pause. “There’s only one other option, and then let’s see if that option works.”
The 2018 midterms, Ayers said, will be a “referendum on the president’s policies.”
“Don’t we want to give all the upside of actually passing his policies? Because what all of us know and believe is that they’ll work,” he said. He called it a “suicide mission” to enter the midterms without having passed some of the major legislative priorities.
Ayers was pressed again on the inability to pass health care reform. He stressed that the problem was “two or three senators.”
“I’m not being passive-aggressive against Leader McConnell,” Ayers added. “Look, he delivered Judge [Neil] Gorsuch. That was transformational what he was willing to do; he had a plan and he executed it. We just have to have the same aggression and effort and focus on the rest of the [agenda].”
He called the Senate’s progress on judicial nominations “very good,” but he added it could be better and said the Senate should not recess with nominees still in the pipeline.
“Why would they ever recess?” he said.
And he praised the president for his criticism of NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem as a form of protest.
“Who would have ever said a couple years ago that a politician could take on the entire NFL and, in one week, win? But by my count, 183 players knelt on the national anthem nine days ago and 12 kneeled on Sunday,” he said. “Would that have happened if Hillary Clinton would have been president? No. You would have gone from 180 to everyone.”
As the meeting came to a close, one female attendee asked whether she understood Ayers’ message correctly, saying: “Are we all willing, in order to get the tax bill passed, to contact all the people we donate money to — which is a long list — and tell them the money stops coming if they don’t get something done!”
The room burst into applause.
“If there’s one exception to that, that’s the RNC,” Ayers added. “But yes.”Greenwood shoplifting suspect arrested
This post was updated on Sunday, Jan. 30.
A man suspected of shoplifting from the Washington State Liquor Store at 9218 Greenwood Ave. N. was arrested Thursday afternoon after an eight-block chase a store on North 85th Street on Thursday afternoon was arrested after a two-block chase.
Employees of the store in the 100 block of North 85th Street chased the man to 84th and Greenwood, where he was arrested in the parking lot next to Insurrection Apparel & Boots just before 4 p.m.
The store manager did not want the store identified. She said the man tried to steal something inexpensive, but employees retrieved the item from him while he was still in the store. But the man “kept circling,” the manager said, so they called police, and the man fled.
James sent us photos from the scene.
The blonde woman chased him toward the alley and the SPD car came from the left. Two more SPD cars came. A fire engine, a medic one truck and an ambulance also responded. I think the suspect needed medical attention and he was taken away in the ambulance.
PhinneyWood initially reported that the man had shoplifted from the Washington State Liquor Store at 9218 Greenwood Ave. N., because we’d received a report of a shoplifting incident at the liquor store around the same time, and an employee at the liquor store confirmed a shoplifting incident had taken place. Seattle Police did not return our phone call on Friday asking for more information.
Thanks to James for the tip and photo!
Comments
commentsfull access to the former communist archives, records of communist intelligence and secret service agents. Later, as a deputy Minister of Defence in the Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s government, he spearheaded in 2006 the liquidation of the Military Information Services (WSI), and became the chief of the newly restructured military counter-intelligence service until the fall of Kaczynski government. Official liquidation report, known as “Macierewicz’s Report”, was published on 16 February 2007. The long list of prominent names, former agents trained by Soviet GRU, was published.
- Dr. Wieslaw Binienda, F.ASCE, Professor, University of Akron, Ohio. Provided expert services to the Parliamentary Group for the Investigation of the Polish President plane crash. Professor and Chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Akron. His research interests include impact simulation, fracture and damage of materials with emphasis on advanced composites, explicit and implicit finite element analysis, smart materials, structural design as well as optimization, characterization and constitutive equation development for ceramics, metals and polymer matrix composites. Dr. Binienda serves as co-director of the Gas Turbine Testing Center at the University of Akron where he is responsible for impact, material and structural experiments. He was was elected n 2010 as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Aerospace Engineering. In 2004 Dr. Binienda received a prestigious NASA Award titled "T urning Goals Into Reality" for valuable contribution to Jet Engine Containment Concepts and Blade-Out Simulation Team and Exceptional Progress Toward Aviation Safety. I n 2007 Dr. Binienda was honoured with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Fellow in recognition for his research accomplishments. He is also a recipient of the College of Engineering Outstanding Researcher Award and The Louis A. Hill, Jr. Award of the University of Akron.
- Dr. Maria Szonert-Binienda, Esq., Libra Institute, Cleveland, Ohio. Attorney, a law graduate from the University of Warsaw, with post-graduate study in journalism, she also earned Juris Doctor and MBA degrees in the United States. Attorney Szonert-Binienda represents the Katyn 2010 Families Association in the Smolensk crash case in the United States. Dr. Szonert is the Founder and President of Libra Institute, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of understanding between the people of Poland and the United States. In February of 2011, Libra Institute partnered with Case Western Reserve School of Law in organizing an international symposium on the legal analysis of the Katyn crime. Subsequently, Libra Institute organized a conference on the Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and presented Expert Report from the Katyn Symposium to the US law makers. Currently Libra Institute cooperates with the US National Archives on the Katyn project to declassify and disclose to the public Katyn related documents in the possession of the US Federal Government. Dr. Szonert also serves as President of the Kresy-Siberia Foundation USA, a charitable organization dedicated to the research, remembrance and recognition of the Polish citizens repressed by the Soviet regime.
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The air crash of April 2010 instantly eliminated the majority of political and military leaders of the centre-conservative and Polish-sovereignty political lobby (the Law and Justice) - the very movement that stayed on guard of freshly gained independence of Poland and its close ties with NATO and European Union. The Smolensk disaster resulted in the immediate transfer of political power in Poland to parties hostile to that formation. The power take over was well-organized and happened within hours and days after the accident took place. The circumstances of the crash and the political scandals that surround its investigation - or rather the lack of it – have created major doubts as to the real causes of the crash.
Some Unanswered Questions
Why did the Polish Cabinet surrender all the inquiries to the Russian Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC), and rejected offers by NATO, the EU and various countries to aid in the investigation?
Why, starting from the first day of the investigation, the fuselage was chopped into small pieces; windows shattered and most of the vital evidence destroyed?
Why for almost two years were black boxes and the wreckage of the Polish Air Force One Airliner not returned to Poland, especially after the release of the final report by the IAC?
How could an almost 60 ton aircraft, after a crash from a very low altitude, disintegrate into thousands of unrecognizable pieces, and none of the 96 passengers survived?
Why were many bodies disintegrated to the point that they required DNA identification?
These, and many more unanswered questions are awaiting answers.
For further Information, contact :
Dr. Alex Jablonski [email protected] Tel: 613-820-1616
Dr. Bogdan Ga jewski [email protected] Tel: 613- 259-5015As part of the ongoing transition to the module system, CORBA and other Java EE modules won't be included in the default classpath from Java 9 onwards. These modules will still be included in the default distributions, but developers will have to include specific command line flags to be able to use them. The change will only affect non-modular applications targeting Java 9, as modular ones already need to explicitly indicate all the modules they depend on.
As explained in the The State of the Module System, the addition of modular capabilities to Java 9 won't force developers to use them straightaway, instead, a number of backwards-compatible options are being provided. One of these will allow the compilation of traditional, non-modular code in Java 9. For this to work, non-modular code will be added by the compiler to a special module called the "unnamed module", which by default exposes all the packages there contained and has no explicit dependencies.
Unfortunately, the fact that the unnamed module doesn't have any explicit dependencies imposes challenges to module resolution. In a modular Java application, the module being compiled will have an explicit list of needed dependencies. The compiler can use this information, together with the dependencies of the dependencies, to compute a graph that includes the transitive-closure of all modules needed directly or indirectly by the compiled module. Since the unnamed module doesn't indicate any dependencies, it cannot be used as a root to compute the module graph.
In order to fix this, Java 9 will have to use some default value as the root module when compiling code into the unnamed module. With the latest change, this default root module has been changed from java.se.ee to java.se, which means all the Java EE extensions are now unavailable by default. This change will help prevent clashes with application servers that include their own implementations of Java EE packages.Bayan Muna Representative Carlos Zarate moves for the measly budget, citing the supposed failure of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples to fulfill its mandate
Published 10:20 PM, September 12, 2017
MANILA, Philippines – It wasn't just the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) that saw its budget slashed to a mere P1,000 during House plenary debates on Tuesday, September 12.
The House of Representatives, during its debate on the proposed 2018 budget, allocated only P1,000 for the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) for 2018.
The move was prompted by Bayan Muna Representative Carlos Zarate, who said the commission has failed to defend the rights of the country's indigenous peoples.
"On the contrary, the NCIP even, directly or indirectly, facilitated in several instances the violation of the rights of the national minorities," said Zarate, a member of the Makabayan bloc, a group of progressive organizations in the House.
The NCIP was asking for a budget of over P1.1 billion for 2018.
"We had insisted on the reduction of the NCIP budget in response to the strong clamor of the Lumad and other national minorities, including those from the Sandugo, who are now here in the capital for the 'Lakbayan,'" said Zarate, whose motion was unopposed during plenary debates.
"More than 2,000 indigenous peoples are here in Metro Manila to echo their plight: the historic neglect of their national minorities, compounded with development aggression and counter-insurgency programs has resulted, and is resulting to ethnocide. They are resolute in the stand to abolish the NCIP and the scrapping of the inutile Indigenous Peoples Rights Act," he added.
The NCIP's 2018 budget is not yet final. After the House passes the budget on 3rd and final reading, it is transmitted to the Senate, which is also holding its own deliberations on the budget.
Should the two chambers' version differ, it will be settled through a bicameral conference committee, composed of representatives from the Senate and the House. (READ: Slides and Ladders: Understand the budget process) – Rappler.com“Basically to save on cab fare, they take up the offer of the guy” to drive them home, Browne said.
DeFerrari, a mother of three, denied Polanco was reaching under his seat when he was shot, saying “his hands were on the steering wheel” the whole time.
DeFerrari said Polanco was giving her and Rodriguez a ride home because they all live in LeFrak City in Queens.
The bartender said the shooting occurred after the cops in an unmarked car chased them when Polanco tried to maneuver around slow-moving traffic.
“They tried to run us off the road,” said DeFerrari, insisting she was sober at the time because she has two drunken-driving busts on her record.
“They were shouting obscenities and the driver was sticking his middle finger out at us,” she said. “Noel sped up to get away from the car. There were no sirens, just lights. I told Noel to stop the car, but we caught a clearing and took off.”
She said the unmarked car caught up and blocked their path. “All hell broke loose,” said DeFerrari. “They jumped out with rifles drawn. One guy had a handgun. They ran at us.”
DeFerrari said police later showed her a photo of Hamdy, whom she identified as the cop who shot her friend.
Police said Polanco was heading east on the parkway in his Honda Fit. The trio was near the 94th St. overpass in Queens when the speeding vehicle was spotted by two unmarked Emergency Service Unit vans.
“The car was weaving in and out, going between the vehicles,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. “They turned on their lights and tried to pull him over. He didn’t pull over.”
DeFerrari was terrified and told Polanco to slow down.
“Stop, the police are trying to pull you over,” the bartender told Polanco, according to Browne.
One of the ESU vehicles pulled in front of Polanco’s car and forced him to stop. Hamdy and another uniformed officer climbed out and approached the Honda from opposite sides of the vehicle.
“The bartender reports hearing police telling people to keep their hands up,” Browne said. “The last time she looked at the driver, (Polanco’s) hands were still on the wheel.”
DeFerrari told police she felt a mist on her face, which she quickly realized was the driver’s blood.
The detective who fired has been in harrowing situations before.
Hamdy and six other cops were accused in 2007 of beating and terrorizing a Queens couple. The city settled their claim for $235,000. In 2008, Hamdy and an officer were credited with convincing a Queens man to give up without a fight after he had attacked a man with a machete and hurled Molotov cocktails at cops.
At the Ice Lounge, investigators retrieved video footage, and Polanco’s co-worker, Oscar Zuniga, mourned his friend.
“I never saw him drink, I never saw him drunk,” Zuniga, 26, insisted. “He was a hard worker.”
Polanco’s mother was holed up in her apartment and planning another funeral.
“She just lost her son and husband, all in the last three months,” said family friend Tito Cordero. “She’s distraught.”
With Rich Schapiro, Matthew Lysiak, Joe Kemp, Erik Badia and Vera Chinese
[email protected]
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,000 ($78,000).
De Graaff explained how the proposals would affect candidates.
“Being an employee adds to the status of the Ph.D., so it makes you feel as though you are really part of the group rather than a product of the group,” he said. “As an employee, you feel like another brain rather than [just] another set of hands.”
He added that the move might also deter Ph.D. candidates from taking university positions, as it could make jobs in industry more attractive.
The issue was raised in the country’s House of Representatives last month, and several parties asked questions about the proposal. Bussemaker has three weeks to reply before potential further discussion and a decision on whether to proceed with the experiment.
The PNN believes that the pilot is an attempt to change the system permanently, de Graaff said.Brand & Martínez, exclusively on 89.3 KPCC, 89.1 KUOR and 90.3 KVLA, captures the spirit of the West in a conversational, informal, witty style and examines the cultural issues people are buzzing about. Hosted by Madeleine Brand and A Martínez, and produced by Kristen Muller, Steve Proffitt and Sanden Totten, the show includes regular segments like Weird L.A. - highlighting a person, place or thing that you've never heard about, but probably should; Parenting on the Edge - a weekly discussion on the challenges and pitfalls of raising kids; as well as regular contributors like Luke Burbank, Rico Gagliano, Brendan Newnam and John Moe to help dissect culture, technology and business news.
A recent video showed Mitt Romney stating that nearly half of Americans don't pay federal income taxes and believe they're entitled to government support.
His remarks highlighted what's been going on in politics for years, a widening divide between Republicans and Democrats over what role government should play.
Veteran journalist Hedrick Smith examines the roots of our current economic and political problems in his new book, "Who Stole the American Dream?"
On the roots of the U.S. becoming 'Two Americas'
"Real changes took place in America since the 1970s, and we've been having a lot of arguments about the middle class today. I think that we're looking for short-term fixes and I don't think that we're going to get a smart fix in this country until we understand the roots of the problems. Frankly, I found that the roots go back to the 1970s. And I hate to tell you, I learned a lot of stuff. And there's much more power in that history... under the Democrats and Jimmy Carter, big things took place before Ronald Reagan came into power."
On why 1978 heralded a key shift in America
"Seven years before [1978], a guy named Louis Powell wrote a memo two months before he served on the Supreme Court. He was concerned [about] what was happening to free enterprise, which he saw as under assault from the environmental movement and regulations that were brought, and he tried to rally business leaders.
Nixon thought that you had to control the excess of capitalism. But the political pressures from the middle class and average Americans was so strong that Nixon had to respond. I think we've forgotten how powerful the middle-class movements were in the 1960s and how closely political power of the middle class was linked in the prosperity and well-being of the middle class."
How lobbyists in Washington changed the culture in 1978
"Organized labor got snuffed out by lobbying. Business got the 401K program written into law. They got the ceiling on interest rates removed. And business rolled Jimmy Carter on the tax code. Carter had planned to eliminate tax loopholes for the wealthy, but in the end it did the exact opposite. The rich came off much better than the lower middle class. In other words, business showed its muscle. It was a game changer.
I remember talking to Arthur Levitt, the head of the American Stock Exchange. He said to me, business found out what it wanted, it got a taste of power and we were in a new era of lower taxes, a policy tilt that's favorable to business leadership and changes in the tax code that hurt the middle class. And that's been going on for the past 30 years."
On the effects on middle class in the 80's and 90's
"Part of what happened is that the liberal movements were successful and they got what they wanted, but the enforcement of legislation is much more complicated, so things ran out of steam. The labor movement became weakened by some of these same business interests."
Excerpt for Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith
Guest:
Hedrick Smith, author of the new book "Who Stole the American Dream?"By Ian Bush
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — It doesn’t get much more conspicuous than a new parking regulation enforcement tool that uses suction cups covered in bright yellow plastic to render your car windshield useless.
It’s the idea of a Philadelphia native who says the device — despite its appearance — is designed to be friendly to law violators and enforcers alike.
The appropriate response when seeing the Barnacle is ‘what the…?’
“The Barnacle definitely gets your attention,” says Kevin Dougherty, president of Ideas That Stick.
You can spot it covering the glass from more than a block away. What you can’t see is anything from the front seat of your car.
“It attaches to the windshield using commercial-grade suction cups that provide 750 lbs of force per suction cup. There is no brute force way of getting it off,” Dougherty explains.
The Barnacle is placed by a parking enforcement officer, but it’s removable by you — once you cover the cost of the violation.
“It’s got a motorist-release feature which allows people to pay over the phone and enter a code on the Barnacle keypad,” Dougherty says. “The device then automatically releases and the person drops it off within 24 hours to a predetermined location.”
The company run by the Drexel grad and former Marine launched the Barnacle this summer.
“It has a tamper and movement alarm that goes off if somebody’s messing with the device, or if they try to move the vehicle,” Dougherty says. “And it’s also GPS-enabled.”
What would happen if someone did try to circumvent the suction cups and remove it — would it crack the windshield?
“You’d need to be standing on the hood of your car to try it,” Dougherty says. “You’d be likely to remove the Barnacle and the windshield at the same time.”
For enforcers, the foldable, lightweight Barnacle is designed to be easy to store and transport and safer to slap on your car than a wheel boot, since it can be deployed from the curbside and not amid oncoming traffic.
The Barnacle is in use in Salt Lake City, Fort Lauderdale, and in Allentown, where Dougherty says the “forward-thinking” parking authority was the first to test the device.Man breaks into Turkey’s İncirlik air base, takes photos with Scarlett Johansson, US celebrities
ADANA
A man broke into the İncirlik air base in the southern Turkish province of Adana on Dec. 6 to take pictures with Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson and other celebrities, who were at the base for U.S. Chief of Staff Joseph Dunford’s USO Holiday Tour aimed at boosting U.S. soldiers’ morale.The young man shared a photo he took with Johansson on his social media account, saying he waited at the base after learning that Johansson was due to arrive at 7 a.m.“Scarlett noticed me while I was waiting for her to take a photo with her, and she later put her hand on my waist. After I requested, she hugged me. Life stopped for me at that moment,” he added.In addition to Johansson, the man also took pictures with actor Chris Evans and NBA star Ray Allen, also part of the annual tour.Olympic gold medalist Maya DiRado, mentalist/entertainer Jim Karol and music star Craig Campbell also accompanied Dunford in the visit to the base.HMV has called suppliers to an urgent meeting on Monday, the same day as the troubled entertainment chain is due to tell the City it has racked up first half losses of nearly £40m and its busy Christmas trading period has failed to provide the hoped-for bounce in sales.
One supplier told the Guardian it had stopped trading with the group in recent months rather than risk not getting paid if it encounters financial difficulties while others have asked for stringent terms such as payments in advance.
One music wholesaler said film studios and music labels, particularly Universal, were shouldering much of the credit risk to keep the business afloat. HMV, the last national music and DVD chain on the high street, has struggled in recent years hit by rising internet sales, downloads and competition from supermarkets.
The company has an estimated net debt of £134m and even higher liabilities in future rent commitments stretching to an average of five and a half years, according to its annual report. HMV, which faces a quarterly rent bill at the end of the month, had identified 40 stores for closure this year, but has so far reduced its shop numbers by just 29 to 256. Its problems have weighed on the group's share price which closed the week at 3.87p, valuing the company at £16m. Some analysts believe HMV cannot survive without a rights issue in the new year. Other industry sources speculated that Universal may intervene with a rescue offer for the business. Such a white knight deal would see HMV reunited with its former sister company EMI, the recorded music arm of which Universal agreed to acquire last month. HMV was spun out of EMI in 1998.
The 90-year-old retailer, famous for its Nipper the dog trademark, has been hammered by the recession as well as online and supermarket competition. At last count like-for-like sales were down 15% as demand for CDs and DVDs fell away.
HMV came close to collapse this year after the weak consumer environment coupled with the collapse in trade resulted in growing debts. To buy time chief executive Simon Fox sold off the Waterstone's chain, raising £53m. He is trying to recast the business as an entertainment group, selling concert tickets and hosting festivals and replacing some of the CD and DVD displays with technology products such as tablet computers and iPods. It has also moved into the £150m booming specialist headphones market endorsed by pop stars such as Dr Dre and Lady Gaga.
The retailer generates 40% of sales and the lion's share of its profits at Christmas but analysts do not expect the retailer to be able to make up the ground this year. This time last year HMV issued a heavy profits warning ahead of Christmas after trading came to a virtual standstill because of more than two weeks of heavy snowfall. Trading patterns this year are believed to have been more normal, but subdued.
Retail analyst Nick Bubb has pencilled in loss of £38m for six months to the end of October and thinks it would be lucky to even cancel that out at the full year stage. "Next week is seriously make or break for HMV: if it goes well and they can just about get to break-even for the year, then technology will have worked and they will have a story to take to new equity investors. If it goes badly, then the net debt position will be overwhelming and administration will loom next month."
"The key is how much profit, if any, they can make in the seasonally far more important second half," added Bubb. "Clearly, HMV will not survive unless it can raise new equity in the new-year, to cut its borrowings."Iowa Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley has been….in his words…..dropped from the conference committee charged with writing a final version of the giant tax cut bills which have passed the U.S. House and Senate.
Grassley is the current senior ranking member and past chair of the Senate Finance Committee.
@realDonaldTrump I'm the most Senior member of Senate Finance Comm I was dropped as Conferee So I won't be in front line fighting for what u and I believe to cut taxes — ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) December 7, 2017
In an early morning post on Twitter addressed to President Trump, Grassley implied he should have been part of the group writing the final bill.
"I'm the most Senior member of Senate Finance Comm I was dropped as Conferee So I won't be in front line fighting for what u and I believe to cut taxes" the tweet read.
According to an e-mail from Grassley press aide Michael Zona, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell informed Grassley he would not be on the conference committee before releasing a list of the conferees last night.
Zona said "no specific reason was given" why Grassley was not named to the panel.
He and the president have talked so much about getting tax reform done. -Grassley aide Michael Zona
Grassley won negative attention in local and national media in connection with the bill when he said eliminating the estate tax rewards those who save and invest rather than spend “every darn penny they have, whether it's on booze or women or movies.”
Zona explained why Grassley was reaching out to President Trump.
“Sen. Grassley was notifying the president that he wouldn’t be on the conference committee because he and the president have talked so much about getting tax reform done,” Zona wrote.For the thousands of us who use WhatsApp daily, nay hourly, the app has become a pseudo repository for our digital lives. It has addresses our friends texted us, meeting dates, social plans, important notices from our bosses or coworkers, pictures of our kids or relatives, cute audio blurbs from our loved ones, and so much more. Although the app has a search function, that isn't the optimal way to find a specific message: you may not remember the exact words used or you may simply be looking for a media file that can't be found using the search function.
Starring those important messages makes a lot of sense and I'm surprised I never thought how much this feature could be useful until I started using it in today's update. Version 2.12.337 of WhatsApp introduced the option, then was quickly followed by what must be a small bug fix in version 2.12.338.
In short, message starring works like you expect it to. Tap and hold on any message(s) and you'll see a new star icon in the app's toolbar. Tap that and a small star appears at the bottom of the message, next to the timestamp. To remove it, tap and hold again and you'll get a crossed star icon that takes care of it.
Starred messages are accessible from the app's overflow menu. They show up in a scrollable timeline with the sender's name, date, and the full content. That also applies to media files of all kinds: pictures, videos, and audio. You can unstar messages from this view too.
The feature was added to the iOS counterpart of WhatsApp about a month ago, so it's a little late coming to Android. But it seems to be working well even as a beta iteration. Until it graduates to the Play Store's stable version, you'll have to manually grab the APK in order to enjoy it.Emergency services were called to the building at around 3am when a large explosion was heard from its third floor. At least five children and several adults were inside at the time, said police, and an eight-year-old child who had suffered serious injuries later died in hospital.
"It could have ended much worse," said police spokesperson Thomas Fuxborg.
The incident has been given a preliminary classification of murder/manslaughter by authorities, who also said that individuals convicted of serious violent crimes were living in the residence.
Police have confirmed that one of the men convicted over a fatal shooting at a restaurant in the area last year was registered at the address. They are investigating revenge as a potential motive.
"We'll have to see if the motive is linked to that. Our theory is that it may be," said Fuxborg.
He confirmed that a forensic investigation had shown that the explosion was caused by a hand grenade.
"Someone was standing outside the apartment and threw a hand grenade through the window, into the living room. The boy was not part of the family registered at the address."
"This is abhorrent. From the outside it is impossible to know who is in the apartment. That it affects an eight-year-old completely innocent boy is despicable," he added.
No arrests had been made by 6pm.
A four-year-old girl died last year in a car explosion linked to ongoing gang wars in Gothenburg.
Amir Rostami, a leading authority on Sweden's organized crime groups, who is based at Stockholm University, told The Local after the restaurant shooting last year that organized crime remained a persistent problem in Sweden's second-biggest city.
"Today, the gang environment is… I don't want to exactly call it the Wild West, but something in that direction," he said.
"Some years ago, it used to be very strong groups controlling the criminal world, but today we've got more and a lot smaller groups fighting for control of their areas – and that has increased the number of conflicts we see between groups and individuals."Ms. McKay’s organization, one of several grass-roots groups that have taken a larger role in the debate on same-sex marriage since the election loss, also organized candlelight vigils around the state for Wednesday night. But more established gay rights groups like Equality California are using the hearing as a rallying point as well, having begun a television campaign on Tuesday with advertisements depicting the quest for same-sex marriage as part of a long-term civil rights campaign.
Supporters of Proposition 8, meanwhile, have taken a quieter tack. Frank Schubert, the campaign manager for Protect Marriage, the leading group behind the initiative, said supporters held a day of prayer on Sunday, asking that the justices “be granted wisdom and for our opponents to understand that our support of Proposition 8 is to affirm traditional marriage, not denigrate gays.”
Mr. Schubert also said his side had asked that supporters who choose to show up outside the courthouse on Thursday not provoke confrontations and not carry signs unless they bear positive language.
While the fall campaign was heated — and expensive, with each side spending more than $40 million — the hearing is bound to seem somewhat anticlimactic to many. The court will only hear oral arguments on Thursday, and has 90 days to come to a decision.
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And for all the passion surrounding the issue of same-sex marriage, the question before the court is one that may seem technical, even dry: Does the initiative approved by Californians merely amend the State Constitution or, as gay rights groups hope the court will rule, revise it?
Under California law, an amendment is a matter that the state’s longstanding initiative process deals with routinely. A revision, however, entails a fundamental change to the Constitution, and requires approval of either two-thirds of each house in the Legislature or a constitutional convention. That could be much harder to achieve than passage in a referendum.
What elevates the ban on same-sex marriage to the level of a fundamental rewriting of the Constitution, opponents of Proposition 8 argue, is that it denies a right — the ability to marry — that the California Supreme Court earlier last year called inalienable. To take away that right now, they argue, would violate federal and state constitutional guarantees of equal treatment.
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That court decision, in May, identified gay men and lesbians as a group that had historically suffered discrimination, and opened the door for some 18,000 same-sex couples to marry before Proposition 8 passed in November. The justices are also expected to rule on the validity of those marriages when they now decide the fate of the proposition.
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Kenneth W. Starr, dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law and a former federal appeals judge and United States solicitor general, will argue before the justices on behalf of the measure’s backers. In a brief, Mr. Starr said efforts to overturn Proposition 8 ignored “the will of the people” expressed in an “open, fair election.”
But Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said that if a measure limiting what he described as the fundamental rights of gay people could be adopted by voter-approved amendment, then “any right can be taken away from any group” through a ballot measure. Mr. Minter will be Mr. Starr’s opponent at the hearing.
Andrew P. Pugno, a lawyer working with Mr. Starr on the case, disagreed with the notion that Proposition 8 altered “some solidly entrenched right.” He also said the case could put to the test the state’s entire initiative process, which has been used in the past to legislate matters as varied as property tax rates and a ban on affirmative action.
“If the court strikes down Proposition 8,” Mr. Pugno said, “the initiative process itself is put into doubt.”
The case has also taken on some curious political ramifications. After initially saying his office would protect the measure, California’s attorney general, Jerry Brown, a potential candidate for governor in 2010, declared that he would be unable to argue in favor of it.
Instead, Mr. Brown filed a brief last year arguing against it. To rule in favor of the measure, the brief maintained, would be to say that the California Constitution’s “foundational guarantee of individual rights is no guarantee at all.”A guest post by Chebs Guevara
In an almost laughable online controversy that has gathered momentum in the last few weeks, Bahar Mustafa – Goldsmith’s Diversity Officer –has been subject to criticism, hostility, a petition calling for her removal and even demands for her to be arrested after tweeting familiar-to-many slogans such as “kill all white men” and requesting that the aforementioned (still alive) white men do not make their presence felt at meetings intended for women and non-binary people of colour.
So far, so standard – but it’s not just your usual opportunistic and unapologetic racists and misogynists that are taking this and running with it. Men on the left have also spied an opportunity to take a kick at the much-maligned “identity politics” of intersectionality – a word initially used by Kimberlé Crenshaw that describes the ways multiple oppressions can overlap and interact with one another – and all those that would dare to organise without their imposed ~solidarity.
As a trade union activist I will never understand how people can completely comprehend the need for workers to organise in a space free from employers, yet bristle at the prospect of other marginalised groups doing the equivalent. No matter how sound we find you as a white guy in Spoons at the weekend, your interests as a dominant group can and are likely to run contrary to those experiencing oppression on the grounds of gender and/or race who are seeking to reclaim power from this dominant group. The dynamics of a space that you feature in are likely to reproduce the inequalities we see in society at large. It’s basic stuff.
It is not only Bahar Mustafa’s integrity as an activist that has been called into question, but also her professionalism -ooooh! I could go into how helpful it is for activists to adhere to the PR-focused, HR-managed structures of corporate life but hopefully to most it’s head-bangingly obvious that this is a daft criticism founded on tone policing and respectability politics that can only weaken and co-opt the struggle. Again, for people who would love to relieve Bahar of her duties and her dignity at any opportunity –those who are invested in opposing the struggle she represents – this approach is unsurprising, however if you consider yourself on the left and are making the same arguments I’d suggest an urgent re-evaluation (or relocation, to the bin).
“Kill all white men” as an internet meme has not made white men more at risk of feminist vigilante violence. No sensible man would argue that he feels at risk of this. The purpose of throwaway slogans like it, as far as I can see, are to provide a little humour and distance when the truth of the situation is too dire to stand close to. Women are being killed by men, in terrifying numbers. When yet another example of the patriarchy custard pie-ing us arises, we can sigh and say “kill all men” and roll our eyes… or we can let ourselves be overcome on a routine basis by the everyday dehumanisation and death that we actually, literally face.
Now let’s address false equivalences. If you said “kill all women” that wouldn’t be funny – you’re right – because of what I have just explained. If a white women – like me – tweeted “kill all black men” that would also be unacceptable because of our privilege and complicity in a racist system which sees black men (and women and non-binary people) at increased risk of violence. These ideas are not alien to the left and to pretend otherwise is to be intentionally obtuse. When we say “eat the rich” we don’t get a barbecue started, and we understand that a rich person saying “starve the homeless” would have a significantly different vibe, leaving a much sourer taste than even a chargrilled David Cameron.
The usual left unity argument is that how are white men supposed to stand in solidarity with a movement which excludes them from events and even makes them the butt of a joke once in a while. Well if your solidarity is predicated on being made to feel comfortable in another’s struggle it is domination disguised as benevolence. Unity on the left should not depend on the marginalised compromising their safety, their self-care and their struggle. White people should feel uncomfortable in movements against racism. Men should feel uncomfortable in feminist spaces. Because only when you take this discomfort, analyse its origin and fully engage with your own feelings of entitlement can you ever contribute in a meaningful way. Only then will your life be potentially spared when we finally kill all white men.
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Follow us on Twitter @unsavourycabalThe Toronto real estate market just got a little more crowded — and a lot furrier. Cat condos, which provide shelter from the cold for Toronto’s feral cat population, will be distributed throughout the city in the next couple of weeks as part of a pilot project.
This partially finished cat condo will be placed either in a community garden or feral cat colony, to house anywhere between four and 10 cats and keep them safe from the cold ( TORONTO STREET CATS )
Because they’ll shelter more cats, the multi-unit plywood boxes, their interiors lined with Durofoam insulation, will hold in more heat than traditional cat shelters meant for one or two cats. “The condos have two levels and four units, so it’s like four apartments on two floors,” said Bill Howes, the shelter building coordinator for the organization behind the units, Toronto Street Cats. “They will accommodate anywhere from four to a maximum of 10 cats, depending on how good friends the cats are,” he said.
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Howes said four cat condo prototypes will be provided to large, high-needs feral cat colonies. Plans are in the works for a fifth to be installed at a High Park community garden that is having a problem with pests. “The cats pay for their board by fighting the rodents,” Howes said. Toronto Street Cats, an organization that spays and neuters feral cats and cares for their welfare, has built and distributed nearly 2,000 individual cat shelters since it was founded in 2010. But Howes said feral colony managers requested condos, since they might serve street cats better. Street Cats workers say they’ll build more if the prototype condos are successful. “Condos are a more permanent shelter, and so are less prone to vandalism or damage. They will house a number of cats, which allows the animals to share body heat in a combined space,” Howes said. “We have extremely harsh weather conditions, as we know from this winter, and we want to mitigate the circumstances by providing shelter for these cats,” Howes continued. “Otherwise they’ll find shelter, but they’ll end up under people’s porches or other places they’re not really wanted, and they’re more likely to be hurt.”
There are as many as 100,000 feral cats in Toronto, and Toronto Street Cats estimates that three out of every four stray kittens die within six months of being born. Howes said he hopes that cat condos, which cost about $100-$150 to build, will help change that. “We do it because we have a responsibility as a society to look after the animals that share our space with us,” he said.Draymond Green: 'I learn more from the WNBA'
You might know a thing or two about Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors. Perhaps you know that he has been labeled "the main voice of the team" (Stephen Curry's words) and "the team's heartbeat" (Steve Kerr's words) or that he wasn't chosen until the 35th pick in the 2012 draft.
But what you probably don't know is how he spends his free time: watching WNBA games. In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Green expressed his respect and appreciation for the women's game saying:
"In the NBA there's always a guy who is only around because he can jump. He doesn't have a clue about the fundamentals. I learn more from the WNBA. They know how to dribble, how to pivot, how to use the shot fake."
AP Photo/Ben Margot
This coming from a guy who finished second in defensive player of the year voting and finished seventh in MVP voting just a few short years after averaging only 13.4 minutes per game.
He just might be on to something.
(H/T SI Wire)
See something entertaining on social media that you think deserves to be shared? Let me know on Twitter @Tory_Barron.FBI Director James Comey now backs the CIA's assessment that Russia was trying to get Donald Trump elected through the hacks. | Getty FBI backs CIA findings that Russia tried to help Trump win election
FBI Director James Comey now concurs in a CIA assessment that Russian hackers meddled in the U.S. presidential election to sway the race toward President-elect Donald Trump, a U.S. official confirmed to POLITICO.
In a memo first reported by The Washington Post, CIA Director John Brennan told employees that the FBI, CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence are in harmony about Moscow’s motives.
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The message comes on the heels of a Post report last week that the FBI differed with the CIA o Russia’s motivation in launching a series of cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and other political operatives, exposing reams of internal documents and embarrassing emails.
Reportedly, the CIA expressed certainty that Russia was trying to use the hacks to get Trump elected, while the FBI believed the evidence was “fuzzy” and “ambiguous.”
Brennan’s note explained that he met with Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “earlier this week.”
“There is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election,” Brennan wrote in the message to the CIA workforce. “The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI.”
CIA and DNI spokespeople declined to comment.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.When Bic released its new pen, the company must have thought that it shattered through some sort of glass ceiling. A Bic pen just for her. It was perfect. It was pastel. It was the writing utensil that women had been dreaming of for years.
Before Bic released it’s feminine pen, women had no way of writing down their thoughts. Or let’s be honest. Recipes.
But now there’s a Bic Pen just for her. Thank the lord.
One Amazon review entitled “I’m Writing This From The Kitchen,” reads:
“Finally! For years I’ve had to rely on pencils, or at worst, a twig and some drops of my feminine blood to write down recipes (the only thing a lady should be writing ever). I had despaired of ever being able to write down said recipes in a permanent manner, though my men-folk assured me that I “shouldn’t worry yer pretty little head”. But, AT LAST! Bic, the great liberator, has released a womanly pen that my gentle baby hands can use without fear of unlady-like callouses and bruises. Thank you, Bic!”
Another reviewer writes:
“Misleading Reviews: I don’t understand all the 5 star reviews- this is the WORST eyeliner I have ever used! I can’t get it off for the life of me.”
ABC reports that the BIC Pen For Her has a thinner barrel “for a better handling for women.” It also has a colored plug that “matches ink color.” Which is important if you want your pen to make a fashion statement.
Another reviewer writes:
“My lovely girlfriend and I were on the rocks recently. She’s been trying to be independent and think for herself. So, I bought her these pens, and life changed instantly. Now, she’s making sandwiches constantly, using the pens to make lists of what deli meats I love. And no more “free-thinking” craziness. Yep, life is pretty sweet.”
Bic hasn’t apologized for the pens and there isn’t any plan at the moment to have them removed or changed. Bic’s spokeswoman Linda Kwong did say that the company always appreciates to hear customer feed back.
Kwong said:
“We appreciate hearing honest feedback from all of our consumers, whether it is regarding a promotion, advertising campaign, or product. As a global consumer products company, BIC wants to hear these important comments.”
What do you think about the Bic Pen For Her?Thomas Tamm just can’t catch a break.
Tamm, a former Justice Department lawyer, was troubled by the Bush Administration’s decision after 9/11 to monitor the phone calls and emails of Americans without obtaining a warrant. When his concerns were brushed off by the higher-ups at Justice, he exposed the warrantless domestic wiretapping program to The New York Times in 2004. Tamm’s brave act of whistleblowing cost him his job. He was hounded by the FBI until the government decided in 2011 to not prosecute him. Legal fees drove him into debt.
This week, we learned that Tamm’s troubles are far from over. In 2009, the District of Columbia Bar opened an ethics case into his conduct, but it only just recently initiated disciplinary proceedings against him. He is charged with violating his ethical duties as a lawyer by failing to report the wrongdoing to his superiors at Justice and by revealing the secrets of his client (the Justice Department) to the Times.
If the charges are substantiated, Tamm could be disbarred in DC. His license to practice law in Maryland, where he currently works as a public defender, would also be in jeopardy. This is another legal battle that could drag on for years.
The Project On Government Oversight has long supported Tamm. And in 2009, he was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-telling. The latest twist in his legal saga concerns us for at least two reasons. First, the charge that Tamm failed to report through proper channels seems rather weak in light of what is already known about his case. Tamm has long said that he did notify his supervisors about the suspicious surveillance program. He said they told him that it was “probably illegal” and pressured him to keep quiet.
Second, the DC Bar is setting a terrible precedent for its members who work for the federal government. The decision to bring ethics charges against Tamm creates an ethical dilemma for government lawyers who discover high-level misconduct at their agencies. How can a lawyer report illegal conduct to a superior when the superior either authorized or is participating in the conduct? While Tamm’s disclosure was protected under whistleblower laws, the DC Bar claims his legally protected whistleblowing violated ethics rules. If substantiated, this would create an enormous carve out in whistleblower protections, leaving government lawyers with few avenues to disclose wrongdoing.
Update: In March 2016, Thomas Tamm settled the District of Columbia attorney disciplinary matter by agreeing to a public censure [PDF] for revealing the confidences or secrets of a client—the Justice Department—to a New York Times reporter. In effect, this amounts to a public declaration that Tamm's conduct was improper without affecting his right to practice law in the District of Columbia.Londoners just elected Sadiq Khan as their mayor, the first Muslim mayor of any Western capital city. Paul Weston has some thoughts about what this milestone event means for the future of Britain.
The Innocence of Sadiq Khan
by Paul Weston
When the prevailing ethos of a country’s political and media class is one of insanity and/or national suicide, no one should be too surprised when what was once thought unthinkable becomes a sudden and shocking reality. A good example of this is the crowning of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London, which could be compared in terms of lunacy to the appointment of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as Chairman of the Friends of Israel Society.
I don’t necessarily think the smoothly urbane and thoroughly slippery Sadiq Khan is a potential leader of armed Islamic insurrection in London, but nor do I believe he is the benign and unthreatening sort of awfully-nice-Muslim-next-door-chappy that the BBC et. Al. would like us to believe. After all, if judged by the company Sadiq Khan has kept, he would appear to be yet another one of those Muslim politicians who say one thing to their Eloi English audience and quite another to their own community when well out of infidel earshot.
Consider the following: Mr Khan’s brother-in-law, Makbool Javaid, was a supporter of the terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun which became notorious for its September 2002 conference “The Magnificent 19” praising the September 11, 2001 attacks. Mr Javaid appeared alongside some of the country’s most infamous hate preachers, and in 1998 his name appeared on a fatwa calling for a “full-scale war of jihad” against Britain and the US.
Mr Khan’s brother-in-law went on to become head of Litigation Services at the Commission for Racial Equality… the further one looks down the multicultural rabbit hole of Britain, the more surreal the whole thing becomes. Mr Javaid is currently a partner at legal firm Simons Muirhead and Burton and lists amongst his
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an oddity for most teams. This is a passing league and most teams that have done anything the past decade have seem to pass the wall pretty well from to time to time.
We're there now. We're one of those teams. 27 points per game. 390 total yards per game. Less than 1 turnover per game. These are the numbers we should strive to get used to - this type of excellence is what we should expect with all these new offensive weapons.
7.) #Redskins/Division History. This just in: If the Redskins win these last two games, they will clinch the NFC East. 2012 then would mark their 14th division title in their 81 year history.
Here is the breakdown of Redskins division crowns over the years.
1932-1939 2 Division Titles
1940-1949 4 Division Titles
1950-1959 0 Division Titles
1960-1969 0 Division Titles
1970-1979 1 Division Titles
1980-1989 4 Division Titles
1990-1999 2 Division Titles
2000-2010 0 Division Titles
2010-2019???
What do you think is a realistic goal for the decade? We're already 0-2 in two years - the Eagles and the Giants both have won so far in the Oughts, and the Cowboys you know will want a few. So what's a realistic number? We're a young team. We're a good team. We have the Michael Jordan of football - and, by the way, he's young too. And - if you haven't heard - we're number 1 in the division right now. Can we break our record by securing a once unthinkable 5 of the next 8 division titles? What's your number?
I'll leave that to you, fellow fans. My number you wouldn't believe.Faces & Figures, a weekly feature of seattlepi.com’s Big Blog, aims to explore the culture of Seattle through photos accompanied with a thought, musing or quote from the people we encounter in our city. If you know an interesting person we should feature, let us know.
Mike Naiman grew up in the desert Southwest. So when he moved to Seattle decades ago he was immediately attracted to the water. Naiman now lives on the water, in a 38-foot mahogany boat he has been restoring. He found the boat advertised online after the previous owner abandoned the restoration project.
Living on Lake Union can be a wonderful, relaxing, and very Seattle way to exist in an urban setting. But for Naiman, who enjoys gardening, he missed being able to tend to his vegetable garden.
“One thing (maybe the only thing) I miss about living on land is gardening,” he posted recently on his Facebook Page.
Well he seems to have solved that problem by creating a floating garden. The tomatoes, bok choy, cucumbers, strawberries and other veggies were planted in an old fiberglass dinghy. Naiman created a space under the soil with wood and landscape fabric where he installed a small sump pump so the garden would not become flooded. It also has a floatation chamber in the bow and stern to help stay afloat even if it filled with water. It now bobs up and down in his protected marina.
The next step: Figuring out how to keep the geese away from the garden. Any suggestions are welcome.
Editor’s note: The author is a friend of Naiman’s and actually assisted him as he built the floating garden.
Visit seattlepi.com’s home page for more Seattle news. Contact Seattle photographer Joshua Trujillo at [email protected] or on Twitter as @joshtrujillo.I had an idea for a cool project, but for it to work well, I needed some large 7-segment displays…like 3-4 inches tall. Unfortunately, the only ones I could find for sale on-line were absurdly expensive. I remembered seeing several folks make their own 7-segment displays, so that inspired me to try my hand at making my own.
Others have made seven segment displays out of such things as:
In all of the above, the light doesn’t look as well diffused as I’d like. You can see the points of where the LEDs are, or obviously see that the elements are lit at the ends. Also, the shapes are often quite crude. I want something that looks more professional (without going to the extent of making custom castings).
My mind wandered while I was at work, and I made this note to myself with how I should make these:
If you can’t read my handwriting (I don’t blame you, I can’t either half the time), the elongated white hexagon says “Masked” in it, and the bullet points say this:
sanded
while/sil (didn’t have enough room to write silver)
black
The basic idea is that I’ll:
cut a square of acrylic 1 3/ 16 ” on a side cut off the 2 corners to make a hexagon sand all the surfaces to a matte finish (to diffuse the light best) mask off the display segment itself (we need somewhere for light to shine through) paint it white (to encourage internal reflection) paint it black (for contrast) peel off the mask add LEDs in the wide painted part (to reduce bright spots right at the LEDs)
I came up with this idea because it only required the tools (and materials) that I already had on hand:
1 / 4 inch acrylic (i.e. plexiglass)
/ inch acrylic (i.e. plexiglass) chop saw
hand sander
drill
Additionally, I ordered a bunch of 3mm LEDs from digikey.com. If I did it again, I might have selected slightly brighter LEDs, but these worked out OK.
A bit later, I decided to make a single quick-and-dirty prototype to make sure that the idea worked. Instead of messing with paint, I just used masking tape (for white) and electrical tape (for black):
I was pleased to find that it worked as well as I had hoped it would! (But of course, I didn’t take any photos of it lit up).
So, without any further ado, here’s the How-To:
Start with a nice, clear, unblemished piece of acrylic…
…And sand it to a matte finish. I used 220 grit sandpaper (because it’s what I had). It seemed to work well…I didn’t have to sand for too long, and it didn’t leave too many obvious scratch marks.
Next, cut strips 1 3/ 16 inches wide. As you can see, I clamped some wood to my chop saw as a stop to make it easier to consistently cut the same size. I test-cut a piece of wood to make sure the stop was in the right place. I used a somewhat fine-toothed blade to cut the acrylic, but it still managed to melt as it was cutting and leave stuff by the cut. Some melted plastic also stuck to the blade, but that didn’t seem to affect anything.
It was easy to pick the melted stuff off, and the resulting cut looked okay.
Leaving the stop where it is, cut each strip into several squares. The pieces will want to rotate into the blade, especially on a saw like mine where there’s a big gap in the fence. I tried to reduce this by holding the square in place with another piece of wood. Be very careful when doing this!!!
You should now have a bunch of (mostly) square pieces of acrylic.
Next, you’ll apply the mask to each piece. Put masking tape on one side of the square, and trim off the excess.
I printed out a pattern on some printing labels to make placing and cutting a consistent mask easier. You can use this link to download the label templates (in OpenOffice format) that I used. I printed them on Avery 8160 Address labels. Once you’ve peeled one off, trim the excess…
…And place it over the masking tape, trying to center it on the square. If your square isn’t perfect (e.g. one cut got pulled into the saw a bit), try putting that corner on the left in the photo below (because we’ll cut more of that corner off).
The masking tape is actually pretty important. I tried one piece without the masking tape, and found that the label doesn’t come off very well:
This part probably isn’t necessary, but sometimes I’m a perfectionist in odd ways. I sanded the edges of the squares to remove any saw marks. To do this, I clamped a few squares together, and went at it with my hand sander. A disk sander would have been a much better tool for this job.
Next step is to cut off the corners of the squares to create the hexagon shape we’re looking for. The lines on the labels I printed out are approximately where I want the cuts to be made. I created a jig to help with this step by gluing some strips of wood onto a board at a 45 degree angle. I can clamp this board onto my chop saw to easily hold the acrylic squares in the right position. I did hold the pieces in the jig by hand…again, be very careful! The chop saw can’t tell the difference between the acrylic and your finger!
Again, it’s probably unnecessary, but I decided to sand the newly-cut edges:
And now, you should have a nice collection of acrylic hexagons:
Now, you’ll need to cut around the mask and peel off the excess. I used an X-ACTO knife, but a utility knife or razor blade would work fine, too. Using a straightedge may help, but cutting freehand worked well for me.
We want to paint the exposed areas now. I didn’t want to waste time painting one side at a time and waiting for it to dry in between, so I hot-glued toothpicks to the mask (thanks for the idea, Jenna!)…
… then stuck the toothpicks into holes I drilled in a piece of wood.
First, a coat of white paint, then black after it dries. While I was doing the coat of black, I went ahead and painted the board that I will attach the segments to (and penciled in the edges of where I want the digits).
Once the paint is finally dry, remove the toothpicks, and drill the holes for the LEDs. The holes go in the edge of the hexagon that is most covered by paint (i.e. the edge where we cut less of the corner off the square). I’m using 3mm LEDs, so I need a hole at least that large. Unfortunately, I don’t have metric drill bits, so I settled for 1/ 8 th inch (7/ 64 th isn’t quite large enough). Some websites will recommend using a drill bit for ceramic/glass to get a clean hole. While a ceramic bit certainly works, it drills much more slowly, and I don’t think it produced a better hole than a standard bit. (Perhaps a ceramic bit prevents chipping if you drill all the way through?)
You don’t want to drill too deep, otherwise you’ll see a bright spot. I used a piece of masking tape on the bit so I could gauge depth. Also, you don’t want to drill too close to the end. Since these will be arranged together in a square, there won’t be quite enough room close to the corners. I drilled about 1/ 8 th inch from each end.
Now, you can peel off the masks and really get a sense of what the finished product will look like!
The next step is to get all the pieces attached to the backing board.
There are probably many ways to do this, but I decided to use contact cement to attach everything, so that drove the next step. Contact cement, as the name implies, adheres on contact. So, there’s not really any opportunity to move pieces around to fine tune them. This means that I needed a way to get the pieces perfectly positioned ahead of time. I did this by printing out the digit outlines (find my template linked here), and cutting holes in the template to align each piece. I also put clear tape over the template so that once a piece was in place, I could stick it to the template.
Once the pieces are in place, apply contact cement to both the segments and the backing board.
A quick note of warning…depending on the spray paint you use, the contact cement may cause the paint to bubble up. When I used a gloss black paint, I didn’t have this issue, but when I used a (cheap) flat black paint, there was a lot of bubbling when I applied the contact cement too thick. I tried placing it anyway, but it looked really bad, so I had to peel up many of the segments, scrape off the bubbled paint, re-paint (both white and black), and stick them down again (using a very thin layer of contact cement to avoid having to repeat a third time).
Once you’re happy with how the pieces are attached, drill holes in the backing board for the LED wires to go through, clean up the holes a bit with a blade, bend the LED leads, and hot-glue them in place.
You’ll want to paint over the hot glue, too, otherwise it will light up. I tried using spray paint (masking off the segments again), but it didn’t do a good job of getting into all the nooks & crannies. I ended up using a small paint brush and some acrylic paint.
Heat up the soldering iron! First step is to solder adjacent LEDs together (in series). I wanted a common-cathode display (for the MAX7219 LED display driver chip), so I also soldered all the cathodes (the short lead) for each segment together.
Finally, solder wires connecting the anodes (the long lead) of each segment in the same position together (e.g. all 3 top segments, all 3 middle segments, etc).
Wire it up and enjoy! (I’ll have a future post about using this display with the MAX7219 LED display driver chip and an ESP8266 microcontroller.)
It looks great in the dark, but in normal lighting, it’s difficult to see which segments are lit. I found that putting a few layers of red cellophane over it helps a lot!
Here it is in my final project (which will get its own writeup eventually…)!WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. forces launched raids in Libya and Somalia on Saturday following the deadly attack on a Nairobi shopping mall last month, capturing a top al Qaeda figure wanted for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, a U.S. official said.
Senior al Qaeda figure Anas al Liby was seized in the raid in Libya, but no militant was captured in the raid on the Somali town of Barawe, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Liby, believed to be 49, had been indicted in the United States for his alleged role in the East Africa embassy bombings that killed 224 people.
The U.S. government had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture, under the State Department's Rewards for Justice program.
The New York Times quoted a senior U.S. official as saying that a U.S. Navy SEAL team was believed to have killed a senior leader of al Shabaab in a raid on his seaside villa in Somalia but was forced to withdraw before that could be confirmed.
The paper said U.S. officials initially reported that the commandos had seized the Shabaab leader, but later backed off that account.
"The Barawe raid was planned a week and a half ago," the paper quoted an unnamed U.S. security official as saying.
"It was prompted by the Westgate attack," he added, referring to a militant assault on a Nairobi shopping mall two weeks ago in which at least 67 people were killed.
The Times quoted witnesses as saying that the firefight lasted more than an hour, with helicopters called in for air support.
The Times report quoted a spokesman for al Shabaab as saying that one of its fighters had been killed in an exchange of gunfire but that the group had beaten back the assault.
The paper said a senior Somali government official confirmed the raid, saying, "The attack was carried out by the American forces and the Somali government was pre-informed about the attack."
Earlier, al Shabaab militants said British and Turkish special forces had raided Barawe overnight, killing a rebel fighter, but that a British officer had also been killed and others wounded.
Britain's Defence Ministry said it was not aware of any such British involvement. A Turkish Foreign Ministry official also denied any Turkish part in such an action.
A Somali intelligence official said the target of the raid at Barawe was a Chechen commander, who had been wounded and his guard killed. Police said a total of seven people were killed.
(Reporting by Mark Hosenball, Phil Stewart, Warren Strobel and David Brunnstrom; Writing by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Peter Cooneyditing by Peter Cooney)As part of Ra I realised that I needed a character to become invisible. Since this requirement is coming up quite soon I decided to sit down and work out how this cloak of invisibility would work. I ran into some interesting problems. It turns out that becoming invisible is less than half of the problem.
I haven't written any more of Ra yet, so the cloak might not come into the story in the next chapter, or even at all. Even if it does appear, the cloak might not function as described below, and even if that's the case I probably won't spend a huge amount of time laboriously explaining the full mechanism behind it in the story. So, other than the fact that an invisibility cloak might appear in Ra in the future, this article contains no spoilers.
What you should already know
Here are two things that have already been established in the story. The chapter What You Don't Know covers this in detail.
Firstly, there is a special kind of mana called "chi" (the Greek letter Χ) which is given off whenever magic spells are carried out. Chi mana exists only in very small quantities. The universe is almost completely dark in the chi spectrum. Chi mana is also very weakly interacting. It passes through physical matter (including human bodies) with ease. They are most similar to real neutrinos, except that the universe is flooded with neutrinos whereas chi particles are very rare.
Secondly, there are special magic rings called "oracles". An oracle is enchanted so that when a chi particle passes its mouth, it is transmuted into a photon of visible light moving in the same direction. By holding an oracle up and looking through it, you can essentially "see magic". Augmented reality for mages.
A third fact revealed in other chapters (starting in Sufficiently Advanced Technology) is that there exist full-body magic shields. When using one, the wearer is enclosed by a surface set a few centimetres out from his or her skin, which can absorb physical attacks. Naturally, this closed "bubble" contains only a small amount of air, but this is a secondary problem.
Transparency in the visible spectrum
Invisibility cloak #1
Within the rules already described, it's quite easy to conceive of a magic shield ("cloak") whose surface is enchanted to function like an oracle. This would allow you to see magic in whatever direction you looked.
What is also easy to conceive of is an oracle which works in exactly the opposite fashion to a conventional oracle: it converts photons of visible light into invisible chi particles. Looking through such an oracle, you would see only perfect darkness.
Given these two developments, it's easy to devise a cloak of invisibility: Make a shield which operates like an "opposite oracle" on the way in, and like a conventional oracle on the way out.
Watch what happens when a photon of visible light passes through you while wearing this cloak:
The photon of visible light hits the surface of the cloak from the outside. The photon is converted to a chi particle which passes into the cloak interior. The chi particle hits the surface of your skin from the outside and passes into your body, unchanged. The chi particle hits the surface of your skin from the inside and passes out into the cloak interior, still unchanged. The chi particle hits the surface of the cloak from the inside. The chi particle is converted back into a photon of visible light which passes out into reality.
Thus, all the light falling on the cloak is eventually emitted in the same direction from the far side of the cloak, and what a person standing on the far side of you sees is exactly what they would expect to see if both you and the cloak were not there. The cloak and everything inside it is invisible!
Some additional assumptions have to be made here for this to work:
That the different visible wavelengths (colours) of photons can be put into a correspondence to different wavelengths of chi particles, and that this transformation can be reversed. If the chi particles are not of different "wavelengths", they must at least be able to differ from each other along some kind of usable spectrum (which, for the sake of argument, we shall refer to as "wavelengths" from here on). Otherwise, at point S when we receive a random chi particle, we have no way of knowing what colour of photon to turn it back into.
when we receive a random chi particle, we have no way of knowing what colour of photon to turn it back into. That the transformations at the cloak and at your skin occur instantaneously, or at least very quickly. Any kind of delay in propagation results in a curious "delay" effect whenever the "invisibility" cloak is moving. The background image projected forwards will be out of date, making it possible to tell where the cloak is, although it would admittedly be much more difficult to see than you just standing there.
That chi particles in flight move at the speed of light, or at least very quickly, for the same reason.
I'm going to go ahead and dismiss these issues for now because from a storytelling perspective I can just say "yes, this is all the case" quite easily without it being too implausible given what we already "know". There's one other issue which is much harder to crack.
You're blind while you're wearing the cloak! It's pitch black in there!
Visible light cannot enter the cloak from the outside: it is all converted into chi particles. You're invisible, but you also can't see out of the cloak.
This problem arises in other models of fictional invisibility too: for example, if you have your body chemistry somehow altered so that visible light passes through you, or are somehow "shifted out of phase with the universe".
Human vision works like this: a photon falls on your eyeball, your retina absorbs the photon, and a nerve impulse sends the image to your brain. If you can see, then a person standing behind your retina should at the very least notice a dark patch in mid-air where this absorption is taking place. Conversely, if you are invisible, then photons passing through your eyeball must pass through without being absorbed: thus, you cannot see.
Invisibility cloak #2
The solution to this problem is to modify our cloak so that it lets the light through as well as creating chi particles. Let's see what happens now:
The photon of visible light hits the surface of the cloak from the outside. The photon is left unchanged, but a chi particle is also generated. The photon and the chi particle hit the surface of your body - your retina, let's say. The photon is absorbed (and seen) but the chi passes through. The chi particle emerges unchanged from the back of your head. The chi particle hits the surface of the cloak from the inside and is converted back into a photon.
Great: you can see again. But you're not invisible anymore.
Firstly, when the photon hits your body it may be reflected (or re-emitted) instead of being absorbed. When the re-emitted photon arrives back at the cloak surface, it'll escape without a problem. You're now plainly visible again.
Worse, the cloak is a few centimetres thick. It's quite possible for an incoming photon to pass through the cloak and straight out again without passing through the wearer's body. In this case, see what happens:
The photon of visible light hits the surface of the cloak from the outside. The photon is left unchanged, but a chi particle is also generated. Both the photon of visible light and the chi particle hit the surface of the cloak from the inside. The chi particle is converted back into a photon while the original photon is unchanged. There are now two photons.
Your cloak of invisibility now not only leaves you completely visible but wraps your whole person in a few-centimetres-thick glowing shroud of amplified light!
Invisibility cloak #3
Let's make a second modification to our cloak. Make it so that visible light exiting the cloak is suppressed. Now, light rebounding off your brightly-coloured clothing doesn't escape, so you can't be seen. And let's look at the edge of the cloak:
Photon enters the cloak. Becomes a photon + chi particle. Photon and chi particle both exit the cloak. The photon is absorbed. The chi particle is converted to a photon identical to the original.
Great. We're now totally invisible - which is to say that we are transparent in the visible spectrum - but we can also see perfectly!
There's only one small drawback, which is that torches don't work. In fact, philosophically speaking, torches cannot work if you wish to remain invisible. A torchbeam, by definition, gives away your location! Invisibility means that light emitted by you - regardless of source - must not escape the cloak where it can be seen by hunters. A laser sight would have the same problem. Of course, if it's so dark that you need a torch, it's probably also so dark that a cloak of invisibility is of no particular use. So, this would be a good place to stop in most cases.
Transparency in the chi spectrum
Now let's consider a different problem. With cloak #3, you can't be seen if visible light falls on you. But what if there's a chi source nearby?
Chi particle enters the cloak. It passes through unaltered. Chi particle enters your body unaltered. Chi particle exits your body unaltered. Chi particle exits the cloak. It is converted into some sort of visible photon.
Oh, snap! All a hunter needs to do is put a significant chi source behind you (who are normally invisible) and when you walk in front of it you'll light up in brightly visible purple and orange! We need to reconfigure our shield again. But we can't modify the cloak exit transition, because that'll break our transparency in the visible spectrum. We have to do something to the cloak entry transition.
Invisibility cloak #4
Let's change our cloak entry transition so that it destroys incoming chi particles.
Chi particle enters the cloak. It is absorbed. Darkness. Darkness. Nothing exits the cloak.
What we now have is a cloak which is invisible as usual but whose interior is completely dark in the chi spectrum. If you walk in front of a chi source, you'll absorb all of it. The only way the hunter could see you is if the hunter is watching through an oracle of his or her own. Through the oracle, you would show up as a big dark shadow. At least we've made things harder.
Is this the best we can do? Can we be transparent in the entire visible spectrum and the entire chi spectrum simultaneously?
Invisibility cloak #5
Um, yes. But the solution suddenly becomes much less elegant.
The major problem is this:
The spectrum of visible and magical radiation falling on your cloak must be exactly the same as the spectrum of visible and magical radiation that leaves it. All of the information stored in this spectrum has to be retained in transit somehow.
But when visible light hits your skin, it's absorbed. This destroys some of the information.
That means that the information stored in the visible part of the spectrum has to be stored somewhere else in the spectrum while it's in transit through the cloak (and possibly your body), then restored.
The logical place to put this information is in a dedicated section of the chi spectrum.
But that means that the information previously stored in that dedicated section of the chi spectrum is destroyed instead.
Where do we put it? How can we find room?
There are several approaches available here, of differing levels of complexity. Here's one:
Take the entire original spectrum of both visible and magical radiation. Compress the spectrum horizontally so that the whole thing will fit just in the chi wavelengths. Store this compressed spectrum in the chi wavelengths as you'd expect, BUT also retain all of the original visible light information in the visible part of the spectrum. Notice how the new spectrum has two copies of the original visible light information. The new spectrum hits your body, and much of the visible part of the spectrum is absorbed (i.e. you can see it). No matter: we have a copy of this information encoded into the chi part. When the radiation exits the cloak, reverse this transformation. First, discard all the visible light, whether it's a photon that passed through unaltered, a photon emitted from a torch or simple darkness. Next, take the chi part of the spectrum and expand it to cover both the chi and visible parts of the spectrum as before.
The above solution assumes - dubiously - that there is infinite granularity in the range of possible chi wavelengths (or, if not, that the two transformations don't result in a noticeable loss of fidelity).
Another solution would involve no "compression" in the spectral information, but just moving all the wavelengths "up by one" so that they are no longer visible. This in turn requires that there are infinitely many available chi wavelengths, such that this wavelength shift can be carried out for incoming information of any wavelength.
Both of these alternatives require us to introduce some further assumptions about the nature of magic. As a writer of fiction, I'm able to wave my hands around as much as I like to justify these assumptions, but I'm sure you'd agree that there's a distinct loss of elegance the more I do this.
These solutions can be broadened to accommodate more forms of incoming radiation, with a commensurate increase in technological difficulty because of the extra compression required. For example, it would probably be desirable to be invisible in infrared as well.
Invisibility cloak #6
These solutions become more troublesome if we add more requirements. We've already established that, while wearing the cloak, you want to be able to see in the visible spectrum. What if you want to be able to see in the chi spectrum as well (i.e. by using a conventional oracle under the cloak, in the form of a monocle or similar)? Suddenly you have a requirement to let the chi spectrum through unaltered as well. It would presumably be possible to use a more advanced transformation to let a narrow band of chi mana through unaltered while storing all of the necessary information in side-bands. But if you want to be able to see the whole chi spectrum, you've run out of places to store this information.
Essentially, the problem becomes one of out-of-band signalling. You have a requirement to be able to observe and therefore absorb the entire spectrum of information falling on your cloak. But you also need to store all of that information unmodified somewhere so that it can be rebroadcast on the other side of your cloak. This means that you have to pick some sort of out-of-band signal to use: not chi particles, not visible light. One option might be radio, but now you're in a situation where any passing radio broadcast causes you to shine like a light, just like the chi source did! Another option is conventional electronic circuits. But in that situation you've not only sacrificed your lightweight magical shield for a physical object which you have to carry, you've also basically built real, fully non-magical thermoptic camouflage, making no use of the convenient chi phenomenon at all!
We can do better. The last solution is to add your selective "oracle" capability to the invisibility shield itself. This means that all the information you desire is crammed into the visible spectrum in some form at cloak entry, then safely discarded at cloak exit.
Conclusions
If you already have the literally magical technology that is necessary to become invisible, you are still going to have a hard time getting practical use out of it, because you have to be able to see.
I now have a reasonable idea of the level of skill and intelligence which is necessary for a fictional character to be able to construct each of these cloaks. For example, I know that none of them are completely impossible, which is something of a relief.
I eventually decided not to put any of the mathematics into this article because mathematically the major problem is just working out exactly what mathematical objects to use to represent the various things. I eventually decided that an incoming spectrum would probably be a function f mapping wavelengths λ to intensities, and that the spectrum would undergo some sort of transformation e.g. P, Q, R, S, T upon passing through the cloak in each direction and upon passing into and out of the human body and on being reflected. After that, the rest was actually quite boring, consisting of observations like "For transparency, we must have S ( P ( f )) = f for all f " and "If we want to be able to see, we must have P ( f ) = f " and so on. None of this actually helped me in my work very much.
This is also a classic example of a science fiction invented thing - in my case, magic - which, when taken all the way to its logical conclusion, quickly results in phenomena which are too complicated to be palatably explained to readers or used meaningfully in storytelling. I have the same problem with many other things, usually time travel. The writer has a duty to overthink things.
Once again, I can't guarantee which (if any) of the described magical cloak technologies will appear in future installments of Ra. Still, I hope this has been a vaguely interesting look at how I work.Greetings and salutations, all! The world of chiptune had a fairly hectic weekend, what with Superbyte happening in the UK, Freq.Fest.Norcal happening in…well, northern California, and MAGFest Classic happening in the beloved Mark Center Hilton in Alexandria, Virginia. While the chipfam was in high supply elsewhere, MAGClassic, being a much smaller event than the primary MAGFest event, had a much smaller attendance both of folks here from the blog (only myself, VP Swackhammer and our Art Czar Nate were in attendance) as well as space for actual performances by chiptune acts. That’s not a bad thing, of course – the VGM acts were face-melting, but this isn’t the VGM = WIN blog, so I figure you’re not here to hear about them.
As opposed to one of those sprawling post-event posts I’m known for, I thought I’d try something new and whip up a mix-tape here for you with my favorite song from each of the chip artists that came, so you can get a taste of what you missed and hopefully find some new favorites. In case you’re not familiar with these folks, I’ve included a small biography about each act.
Crunk Witch
Heartbeats in Hyperspace by Crunk Witch
Brandon and Hannah, a husband and wife duo, make music together from their home in Maine. It sounds like something out of a story book, right? Then I don’t know what story books you’ve been reading, because this one sounds like 80’s synthwave took a hit of dubstep and sat down to play some Famicom. These two are just as sweet as their jams, though, and it was amazing to have them travel down from the frozen northlands to come play.
Bandcamp | Facebook
Sam Mulligan & Hype$quad
Big Hand Band Van Man by Sam Mulligan
You know him, you love him – Sam Mulligan, longtime ChipWIN collaborator and literally The Whitest Kid You Know, is based out of Somerville, MA and tells stories with a Game Boy and a guitar – sometimes they’re hilarious, sometimes they hit a little close to home, but it’s never a dull (shark) party when he’s around.
Sam is, of course, one half of HYPE$QUAD, the dankest chiphop group this side of Morgantown, WV – which is where the other half of the team, Isabella AKA Janx, resides. HYPE$QUAD was also joined on stage by none other than Solarbear for a brand new death metal track, Donut Slayer.
Sam’s Bandcamp | HYPE$QUAD Bandcamp
Zantilla
Cack Salad (yummy, yummy) by Zantilla
Zantilla, AKA Adrian Shegstad is honestly better than we deserve as humans to have on our planet. You might remember hearing about this Floridian on our blog before, but in case you missed it, Zantilla is one of the greatest chiptune/progressive/funk acts out there. And I’ll fight you if you disagree. I’ll fight you IRL. Don’t think I won’t! COME AT ME BR-
Bandcamp
Professor Shyguy
Play It Loud! Year One K8B-COMP-01 by Professor Shyguy
Oh, Professor Shyguy. Such an adorable, unassuming little guy. This Nashville native quickly shatters any thoughts you might have about his ability to rock your face off when he whips out his NES guitar and full-on magical girl transforms into one of the hypest dudes to ever rock a Nintendo Power track jacket. This track here is actually a track he played at MAGClassic and said was unreleased – when I asked him about it, he said that while he’d submitted this track for the Kawaii 8 Bit compilation, he’s been working on refining it ever since. The more you know!
Bandcamp
Chipocrite
Wordplay by Chipocrite
One of my favorite acts, whether he be solo or with a band backing him up, Paul Weinsten, one of the Philly chip crew, once again came to rock the house with his guitar and his Game Boy. I’ve spoken at length about his music, so I’ll just go ahead and leave these here for you to check out at your leisure. Surprisingly, after all the years I’ve seen him perform, this is the first time I haven’t heard him play this song, which is why I made sure to include it here.
Bandcamp
Radlib
Alright look, I know I said I was making a mix-tape here, but I never said what I was mixing, right? Radlib is better experienced as a performance, regardless, and since this little chunk of history exists on the internet, I would be remiss not to share it. Radlib is the epic 90’s dance music project from Carl Peczynski with fat beats made on computers from the far-off year of 1998. While there hasn’t been too much new Radlib lately, I’ve gotten confirmation from the man himself that there will be a Radlib album dropping…sometime
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